Zika, P.D. James, And How The World Will End

P.D. James wrote Children of Men, a story of the ending of humanity – not from nuclear winter or an asteroid, but because of unexplained loss of male fertility which did not come gradually but precipitously.  In the year called Omega, all sperm died.



A society of old people cannot grow food for themselves, generate energy, produce goods, or provide services.  There are fewer and fewer staff for convalescent and nursing homes.  There are no drugs for arthritis, high blood pressure, or mood disorders.  Hospitals close because of lack of doctors, drugs, and equipment.

As the period of infertility lengthens, few middle-aged people care to keep up parks and gardens which will soon return to the wild.  Recreation seems pointless.  Sex, now completely disassociated from procreation seems repetitive, and meaningless.  Schools are closed, playgrounds are left in disrepair.


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Suicide becomes not only tolerated but accepted.  Men and women in their eighties understandably do not want to die alone in cold, unlit shelters with little food, no solace, and no hope.

The old pathologies – crime, rape, murder, civil unrest, ethnic divisions, and social disharmony – decrease.  They are delinquencies of the young; but the State still grows more authoritarian because as resources dwindle and essential products become scarce, older people find theft and violent competitiveness necessary.  Old moral codes disappear, and to stave off social chaos and complete civil disorder, government’s role is reduced to law and order.

The world according to James does not end in a fiery Armageddon of mutual self-destruction.  There is no cataclysm, no existential event, no consequences of evil or disregard.   The world does not end, but slowly but surely humanity heads for extinction. 


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James focuses exclusively on the consequences of infertility.  As such Children of Men is a anti-primer of economics, demography, moral philosophy, political science, and history.   There are no regrets, no villains, no recrimination or vengeance.  Humanity through no fault of its own it without hope; and can do nothing to mitigate or reverse the infertility which has doomed it. 



James’ vision of humanity’s end is a generous and tolerant one.  The State despite its authoritarianism is not entirely brutal.  Men and women, despite complete hopelessness, do not lose their moral sense or Christian values and some organize to advocate for more more humane governance.

The novel ends with a Pyrrhic  hope – a woman does become pregnant, and the birth represents the changing of the guard and a new regime which will certainly revert to the old dysfunction of a fertile society – but it is a fascinating projection into a very possible future.

Why possible? The Zika virus is now spreading rapidly (2016).  While the principal vector is the mosquito, it can be passed through sexual transmission.  Within a relatively short time the virus will be everywhere.  Even in northern ecological zones, men and women infected in the tropics can pass the virus on to others through sexual contact.



The virus is particularly worrisome because of the genetic damage it causes in unborn children.  While diseases have become epidemic and have spread throughout the world before, Zika is of special interest because it seems to interrupt the normal reproductive cycle.  Children can be borne deformed, and if the virus mutates, it will become even more dangerous.

There is no reason to think, given the brief but fairly well understood evolution of the Zika virus, that it will attack male sperm.  Yet the epidemic makes one realize that such an existential virus could very well be evolving in an African rainforest.  Who ever said that male sperm were impervious to environmental assault? Why should they be any less susceptible to viral invasion than anything else?
 

                          www.midlandfertility.com

The Black Death decimated Europe.  Bubonic plague did not only kill its victim, but provoked the most horrible, painful, and unimaginable suffering.  Ebola is no different.  These viruses attack the human organism in unexpected and surprising ways.  If we have learned anything from them, it is that a new pestilence is just around the corner.  Why not one which attacks the human reproductive system.  One which is not devastating as the plague, but insidious and quietly destructive?


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The Hollywood version of the end of time is one in which mankind runs amok.  Once we know that the asteroid is on its way, then everything is fair game.  Moral order disappears, hedonism returns, intelligence counts for little, and tooth-and-claw survivalism replaces law and order.

Perhaps because her humanity has hope the world of England in 2021 does not disintegrate and holds on to its civility.  Perhaps she is commenting on that particular British civility which gave the world rationality, justice, and fair play. Perhaps she believes in an innate sense of morality which once understood, respected, and promoted cannot be easily jettisoned no matter what the circumstances. 

Or finally, perhaps God is in the mix, unwilling to let his people destroy each other – his prerogative.
James’ dystopia is all the more unsettling because of its ordinariness and the predictability of supply-and-demand consequences, the laws of demographics and the inevitably changing age pyramids, and the consequent scarcity of goods and services.  The weed-grown playgrounds, boarded-up schools, closed libraries, overgrown parks, empty thoroughfares are less frightening images of a desolate world than natural consequences of economic laws.

The Time Machine is the most chilling tale of the end of the world of any.  The Time Traveler stops in a declining civilization of the distant future, one in which capitalism’s worst excesses have forced the underclass underground.  The restive, regressed, animal-like Morlocks feed on the fey, defenseless race above.


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The Time Traveler, discouraged at what he sees, and understanding that whatever hope and promise the human race might have had in the 19th century has not only not been realized but been perverted, decides to continue on to an even  more remote future.  There he finds himself in a world of entropy.  The sun is pale and dim.  The ocean is flat and gray.  The landscape is featureless, smooth, and worn.  There is no sound, no movement, no wind, no warmth.

Wondering how the world will end has animated science fiction, Hollywood, religion, and popular lore.  Children of Men is the most compelling, however, because of its banality – ending not with a bang nor with T.S. Eliot’s whimper, but in accommodation, tradition, and conservatism.


And then there is Zika.  The world could indeed end as James envisaged; but it is unlikely that we would take things with such equanimity.

God's Cruelest Irony - Consigning Men To Lifelong Sexual Longing While Cutting Short The Wherewithal To Do Something About It

God’s cruelest irony was that he enabled male sexual potency, watched its sad and inevitable decline, but assured that men would nevertheless think of women all the time – in their dotage, in their wheelchairs, in the nursing home, and on their deathbeds.  

Bob like most men had been obsessed with sex since adolescence.  In his case well before, although when precocious Nancy Brierley had held his hand, walked with him into the woods behind the Country Club, and pulled his shorts down, he had no idea what was what, what to do, or what was up; and just stood there listening to the mocking birds and blue jays and wondering whether or not a ball hit off the fifth tee could make it this far into the pines.

Nancy Brierley was  his first lover, if you can count the fumbling and groping that she initiated in the dry leaves; but despite his surprise, his innocence, and his wonder, he never forgot it or her.
When he turned forty, he first began to think of age, longevity and sexual potency. “How many more years do I have?”, he asked himself before women would cease being attracted to him, when he would become background or wallpaper.  At the end of each decade he asked himself the same question – even though as he turned fifty he had an Angolan lover; and in his mid-sixties was still very sexually active.



Yet inevitably and assuredly by the time he had reached his seventieth birthday, he found himself alone, without sexual companionship, and with little likelihood of promise.  Although he had not lost interest in women, they had somehow lost interest in him.  Although all he could think of when he sat at the bar alongside the twenty-, thirty-, forty-, and even fifty-somethings sipping their margaritas, martinis and Scotch sours was sex, they never even noticed him, let alone acknowledged his presence.

He had finally passed the threshold he had dreaded all his life – the point of no sexual return, the abyss of sexual nothingness, the final and irrevocable passage.

Most of his friends were far more accommodating if not resigned.  They had accepted their fate and folded themselves into a life of predictability and error-less journey.  They sat in side-by-side beach chairs with their wives of many decades, played with grandchildren, took senior classes at the local library, and tended to their roses.

Unfortunately Bob could not let go of his sexual ambition; and despite his sags, lines, creakiness, bad vision, still felt that there were more women in his life.

There was Dolores from the gym, still pert at sixty, trim, fit, and proud of it; and Bob made a point of chatting her up on the rowing machines.  They both loved wine and travel, both adored Donald Trump and believed in his promise for America, and both were clearly lonely.

Dolores had been married for many decades but marriage never assuaged feeling of loneliness, anomie, and sexual futility.  Yet there was something especially futile and pointless about chatting up this matron, Bob confided.  The relationship could only end up as dry and shriveled as their aging sexual organs, so what was the point?  They both simply did not want to give up the idea of romantic sex – not love necessarily, but something physically and emotionally satisfying.

There are many kinds of love in the world, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, but never the same love twice – a romantic notion which described Bob’s early life.  He never forgot his first love, his first lover, and his first intimate companion – all the same person, this perfect, seemingly unattainable woman.  Nor did he never forgot his last love – a young woman thirty years his junior who overlooked his age and his creaks and crevasses, and found in him a patient, attentive, solicitous, and insatiable lover. 



The woman left him of course.  She had all the future in the world and so came to her senses one October.  For the first time in his life it was Bob who was left on the curb.

Yet he could never rid himself of his sexual memories.  How and why, he wondered, after a life of such diversity, cultural adventure, competition, innovation, and reward could he still be so obsessed by sex and by its loss? What did this say about him and his life?

As he re-read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and wondered if he had deceived himself as badly as Ivan and was as unprepared as he was for death, he put the book down, listened to the leaf-blower next door, and concluded that he had.  He had done little with his life, so dominated as it had been by women, cherchez la femme and the charade of deception that accompanied it. 

He shook his head to get rid of the nettling doubts.  “What will be will be”, he muttered, “and what was was.” No second guesses, no whimpering about lost opportunities, no sexual regrets.  A hand of cards was dealt at conception, and one had to play it, period.

Old age is neither for settling old debts or settling old scores.  Nor is it for recouping missed chances or profiting from wisdom and maturity.  It is a time of reconciliation between expectations and a bad hand.  Whatever else, the wife stood by me.  The children were dutiful.   Winters in St. Bart’s were restorative.  The Washington Post published one of my letters.

Except for the dreams, all would be in order and in its place.  How could God be so cruel, Bob thought, to give him, a bony remainder, imaginary sexual adventures that had long been out of reach?
“I have even forgotten what goes where”, Bob confided to me at the birthday party for one of his niece's children.

Bob’s was a life well-lived according to most accounts; and most people would be happy to have had his travel, his adventures, and his friendships.  Yet God and Fate saw to it that all he could think of in his declining years was sex – not sex had, but sex to come; and therein lay God’s irony and Bob’s frustrated demise.

Why Search For Intelligent Life In The Universe? We Could Use Some

The old Jewish joke is more relevant today than ever.  The more we observe about the state of the world, the more we long for dispassionate, disinterested, objective reason.  Surely when God gave Man the ability to reason he never expected him to abandon it so quickly; so perhaps we are judging too quickly.

Aquinas and Augustine were not only theologians but logicians; and felt that rationality was the foundation for belief.  Unless one pondered the imponderable – the debate about the nature of Christ, his relationship to the Father, and the role of the Holy Spirit continued for over two hundred years – a rational man would fall into idle worship.  One had to come to logical conclusions about divinity before fully committing to Christ.  The road to salvation begins with logic and ends with faith, these philosophers of the Early Church concluded.

In other words logic is important, necessary, and God-given but it is not a be-all and end-all.  It is a means to an end, but not the end itself.  The logical curve will always be asymptotic in matters of meaning.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment were rationalists to a man; but rationality was to be used for furthering an understanding the mysteries of God.  Logic alone had no purpose.  Logic in the pursuit of faith most certainly did.

With the advent of religious fundamentalism this logical paradigm has gotten upended.  Faith without reason comes first and foremost.   There is no reason to waste time on logical analysis of the geological record when the Bible is explicitly clear about creation.  There is no reason to debate secular law vs religious law when the Quran is abundantly  clear that the only law is God’s law.

On a far more mundane level, most of us use logic to a point then abandon it when it is convenient.  We marry the wrong people at the wrong time, draw conclusions based on idealism rather than objective analysis, see what we want to see at the scene of a crime, and ignore facts entirely when they threaten self-image.

Aeschylus understood the nature of destiny; and wrote of the tragic heroism of men who tried to defy it.  Shakespeare’s Histories are chronicles of the same, perpetual and repetitious events propelled by an unchanging human nature.  Shakespeare’s heroes, like those of the Greeks, understood as well as anyone – given the importance of family, court, legacy, and heritage – how history repeats itself to such a degree that both logic and free will are fictions.  Yet they did the most outrageous and illogical things to further their own ends.

Nietzsche understood that life was meaningless; and that the only validation of humanity was the absolute expression of indomitable will.  Logic and reason had no place within his cosmology.  Only Will.

Tolstoy’s theory of history debunked The Great Man Theory, and concluded that the Battle of Borodino had been lost not because of any illogical or ill-advised military stratagems, but because the Emperor had a cold and wasn’t thinking clearly.

In other words, there is really no reason at all to be upset by the seeming craziness of the world.  Logic may be unif0rm in application, but results always depend on first principles.  Vladimir Putin calculated correctly (logic) when he invaded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, the first steps to what he hopes will be a restoration of Russian Imperialism.   The West’s logic – such unprovoked assaults on territorial sovereignty always lead to sorry ends, geopolitical chaos, and social and economic instability – holds no water in Moscow. 

The West knows absolutely and unequivocally that theocracies always lead to the deprivation of civil and human rights, the rise of dictatorships and religious exploitation (logic); but ISIS and its supporters know that such theocracies are the only way to reshape society in the form which God originally intended.



For ghetto youths it is not illogical to perpetuate a street culture which defies white majority logic thus blocking a path to social prosperity; but creating an alternative moral universe makes sense  if you feel that there is no hope for a black man in a white world.

Donald Trump and his passionate followers are not crazy but angry, frustrated, and resentful – so much so, in fact, that they deliberately and purposefully discard the supposed logic which has gotten them no where.  So what if Trump has no reasoned opinions, no position papers, no well-delineated policy agendas.  Such items are unnecessary accouterments in an environment of resentment. 

We all have distorted images of ourselves and of others.  Rarely does one’s self-image correspond to what others see.  If we were logical, we would analyze our images in the mirror according to cultural norms of beauty – symmetrical face, regular features, full lips, bright smile, etc. – but to be able to walk out the door in the morning, we have to abandon all logic and objectivity.

The same goes for our views of others – most often wrong when it comes to personality and character.  No matter how we would all be better off if we used logic to assess ourselves and others, to base judgments of rational analysis, and to come to conclusions  only after thorough research and consideration, we cannot.

Which is why if indeed there is intelligent life in the universe, visitors from a superior and more highly-advanced civilization would look at the world as one big circus tent.  Hundreds of millions of people running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying most earnestly to act civilly, logically, and morally; but always doing otherwise.

Humanity is a side show of outrageous, vain attempts to be civilized when we were created first and foremost to reproduce.  God had a sense of humor – or at least a brilliant sense of irony – when he added intelligence to the human equation.  Lord knows that we have more than enough brain power to retain our supremacy over the rest of the animal kingdom; so it is quite natural that we use the excess restlessly.  We can never be satisfied with just eating, sleeping, and reproducing; and thus create drama, melodrama, and vaudeville.

It is always surprising to see how we are so intent on finding intelligent life in the universe, especially since our search is necessarily organized around principles of human behavior.  If there is indeed other life in the universe, given its infinitude, it will not resemble human life at all.  Notions of God aside, we are what we are because of accident.  It is perhaps the greatest human vanity to assume that all life emerged and developed the way it did on Earth.



If anything we hope that these super-aliens will be smarter than we are so that they can solve all our problems.  To be more logical, Dr. Spock-like in other words, more dispassionate, and less crazy.
Who knows? But if we are searching for an alien race is more intelligent that we are, God help us.