What Do Men Want? - Not The Fountain Of Youth, But A Young Lover

 Herman, Abe, and Art were lamenting their lost youth – not the days of their youth gone by but the fact that the young women who had loved them in their later years had long gone.

“She was wonderful”, said Abe, “a real gem.  An early Christmas present.  An unforgettable charm”. 



Laura had been thirty-two when they met, Abe sixty-four, stretching the May-December relationship to its outer limits.  Abe was reaching the end of his sexual shelf life, and she was in full bloom.  He had been surprised that such a woman had any interest in him at all.  Yes, he still had much of his hair, was in good health and good physical condition, but as his doctor had advised him, ‘Numbers don’t lie’.  

In other words it was about time that he began to look more seriously at his end-of-life priorities.  Even the best actuarial estimates gave him only relatively few more years, so he had better turn his attention to more important matters.

“Why bother”, Dr. Kaplan had said when he first heard the news. “What will she give you that God won’t?”

It was obvious that Kaplan had never strayed from his marriage of forty years, let alone with a younger woman.  Those who had been more adventurous or fortunate knew that they had been extremely lucky.  No one wanted to relive their youth – who would want to repeat the adolescent bumbling, the adult mistakes, missed opportunities, and downright shameful episodes of the past? Better done, gone, and forgotten than sifting through the discards to see if there was anything worth retrieving, anything worth  a second look.

In Abe’s case, his life had been satisfactory enough – a successful career on K Street, a good marriage, well-placed and respectful children.  He never saw cause to wish the genetic cards his son and daughter had been dealt had come from a different deck, or to have chosen a more beautiful wife; or even to have had more affairs.  At 70 he was sitting pretty, atop a considerable retirement fund and investment properties, a home in Boca Raton, and good friends. 

Yet everything in his life seemed predictable, tired, and worn.  A life of no regrets did not mean a life with a happy ending.  Encroaching old age was ugly, dispiriting, and frightening.  He did not envy the young people around him.  He had had his day and it was their time.  Nor did he wish that there were some wormhole through which he could be sucked into the past.  

Youth was overrated, especially when one saw the depressing consequences of disappointments, un-achieved success, illness, bad choices, and bad luck.  The years took their toll, and since one could neither go back and fix them, what was the inherent, innate value of youth anyway?  Little more than a stop along the way. 

Konstantin Levin, a major character in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina saw great irony in God’s having created man - an intelligent, creative, insightful, intuitive, and enterprising being – allowed him to live for a scant few decades, then consign him for all eternity in the cold hard ground of the steppes.  If there was no point to life, reasoned Abe, then there was certainly no point to youth.  Other than reproduction and carrying capacity of course.  On an existential plane, youth was wasted on everyone.



Laura Peterson came into Abe’s life unexpectedly, a work meeting, drinks, a conference in Cairo; dinners, and finally sex.  The scenario was not new to Abe.  He had always had affairs, but because of circumstances, they were all ‘commensurate’.  The women were like him all professionals, travelers, within a few years of age, happily loosed from the fetters of marriage or partnership.  There was nothing remarkable or particularly interesting in these short-term relationships.  They were almost de rigueur, part of the business traveler’s benefit package, a no-strings-attached rider to one’s contract.

Abe’s love affair with Laura, however, defied the actuarial odds and the lottery.  An old man was not supposed win big.  He was designed to lie down and take it easy or die in his traces, not get back in the saddle.  He knew that eventually she would give up on him for a more expected life; and more importantly would no longer be able to overlook his stoop, his ailing hip, his older children, and his futurelessness.  

Since Abe had as little enthusiasm for the future as the past, and since consequently the present was the only tasty morsel in the buffet, he gorged himself.  His affair with Laura Petersen was right out of a ladies’ library romantic novel.

"Shh," he said, pulling her up so they were face-to-face again. He slid his hands between her legs, positioning fingers and thumb the way she'd taught him. Except that wasn't right. She hadn't taught him. They'd figured it out together, how to make her come. He nuzzled against her, his lips on her neck, nibbling and kissing his way up to her earlobe, where she'd always been ticklish. "Ooh," she whispered. "Ooh! Oh, oh, oh," she sighed, as he worked his fingers against the slick seam . . . and then she forgot to pose, forgot about trying to look good, and lost herself inside her own pleasure. Andy watched her squeeze her eyes shut as she clamped her thighs against his wrist and snapped her hips up, once, twice, three times before she froze, all the muscles in her thighs and belly and bottom tense and quivering, and he felt her contract against his fingers (Jennifer Weiner, Who Do You Love?)

He wished he could have felt instead like Cormac McCarthy:

Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different (The Road)

The problem is that with Abe, like all older men in an affair with a younger woman, it was the pulp fiction that said it all.   There were no existential thoughts, no God, no kindness and compassion, just adolescent wet dreams.  The rotten prose captured the pure physical responsiveness of the sex act; and that was all that mattered.  It was the only reliving of the past that made any sense.  It wasn’t reliving a particular event or recreating a circumstance – staying in a familiar hotel, eating in our restaurant – it was playing the part of a youth as an old man, and voila la difference.

Phillip Roth’s character, Coleman Silk, says in The Human Stain, describing his affair with a woman half his age,  “Granted, she's not my first love. Granted, she's not my great love. But she is sure as hell my last love. Doesn't that count for something?” Abe was Coleman Silk.  “It’s all about the sex, isn’t it?”, asks Silk’s friend; but although Silk denies it and criticizes his much younger friend of his own romantic notions and unfilled sexual demands, it is indeed about the sex.  The book has a happy ending only in that Coleman Silk dies without ever having to give up his woman.  His last memories are of her body.



“Too soon old, too late schmart”, said Herman after hearing Abe’s story.  “You’ll never learn.  The putz is not the way to figure things out.”

“Who says I’m trying?”, said Abe.

When Natural Reproduction Ends - Genetic Choice Replaces Gender Reveal In The Post-Human Generation

Ours will be the last recognizable, old-fashioned human generation – a human race unchanged since the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  Soon genetic engineering and symbiotic interface with the computer will alter this living fossil and render it recognizable only to paleontologists who will look upon it as today’s scientists look at Neanderthals, apes, and dinosaurs.  Slow, progressive Darwinian evolution will be a thing of the past.  Radical, immediate, revolutionary change will be the new algorithm.

Since the human genome was completely sequenced, the identification of specific gene configurations linked to human characteristics and behavior has become routine; and the engineering of some of those sequences to modify or eliminate them has proceeded quickly.  It will not be long before all genetic sequences will have been identified, codified, sorted and catalogued, and available for modification. 

Natural reproduction will be a thing of the past.  Leaving such an important decisions to chance when selective certainty is a reality would be folly. Within only a few years, parents will be able to select the child they want and not be held to any racial, intellectual, or physical constraints of traditional reproduction. 

The DNA of the most intelligent, the most beautiful, and the most athletic men and women alive today, and that harvested from the genetic material of those who have died will be available to all. 

In short, the guesswork will be taken out of reproduction, the stakes will never be higher and classical free market principles of supply and demand will include humanity's most precious commodity -selective fertility. 

Naysayers are already protesting biogenetic laboratories. The outcry is already loud and insistent.  Artificial reproductive choice is  a clear distortion if not perversion of God’s will.  Once parents can choose from a catalog and pick the child they want, the human race will become little more than Barbie clones and Hollywood automatons.

Yet such selectivity is already happening.  The market for high-quality eggs is booming.  The ova of women of breeding, beauty, and intelligence go for a premium, and the same prices are paid for the sperm of aristocratic, handsome, intelligent men from Yale. 

Genetic defects are weeded out before in vitro fertilization, and expectant couples can be sure of desirable results. Some DNA of the 'natural' parents can be combined with imported material - only that which will add to and not detract from that donated - and the product is assured within a high degree of probability to be what was expected. 

That is now, so it is easy to imagine how easily prospective parents would opt for even more aggressive and satisfying genetic recombination. 

Post-human reproduction will not only be a matter of personal beauty, intelligence, artistic ability, or physical prowess but will enable us to more easily adapt to a changing environment. The second important implication of this rapid evolution will be Man’s complete control of his environment.  No amount of global warming, Ice Age cooling, or variant climate change will be of any consequence.  

Just as agriculturalists are genetically modifying plants to be resistant to drought, pests, and soil depletion; so will human engineers be able to modify our genome to adapt to current environmental conditions.   Cities will not have to be changed to accommodate global warming.  Human beings will change. 

The ability to thrive in water, to breathe different compositions of air, and to live well in either colder or warmer climates will be easily programmed.  Environmentalism will die as a movement, and human modification will be the focus of all attention.  The alterations are infinite. 

On a recent BBC World Service program, a group of space scientists were gathered to discuss these and other aspects of the post-human era.  “What about the human soul”, the moderator asked, wondering whether or not these post-humans would still be human.   

None of the participants were particularly troubled by the question, since they all had assumed that the soul was no more than the particular configurations of DNA which resulted in varying degrees of insight, intelligence, creativity, and sensitivity.  Post-humans will be no different, they all agreed.  Only their individual genomes will have been altered to produce a very different human reality – in other words a different human soul.

“What about God?” would have been the next question had time remained; and indeed the subject is essential.  Religious conservatives will certainly object not only to tampering with God’s creation but playing God; but equally faithful but less doctrinaire believers will only conclude that God’s hand is miraculous and all-powerful.  Everything that happens on Earth or anywhere in the universe was caused by him.  He simply set the ball rolling.

Secularists will be the least distressed.  There is no God to be offended.  Evolution, whether happening the old way or the new, is simply a neutral, value-free progression from past to present.  There is no purpose to evolution, and the only reality is change.  The concept of  anicca - impermanence is an undeniable and inescapable fact of human existence from which nothing that belongs to this earth is ever free – has long been at the heart  of Buddhism.

On a more practical level, such assisted reproduction will eliminate unwanted babies. Women will opt for voluntary sterilization, male serial sexuality for so long criticized as misogynist at best and socially irresponsible at worst will be freed from artificial social constriction, and insular communities - such as inner cities which have never been able to refresh the gene pool, will finally be able to reach out beyond restrictive covenants. The children of the ghetto can be of greater intelligence, beauty, and ability than those destined to finish their lives there. 

The Law Of Unexpected Consequences will certainly have its day.  As much men might dream of a mating pool of stunningly beautiful blonde, blue-eyed women, would this be too much of a good thing? It certainly would be a great thing to have America filled with Einstein quality geniuses, its museums and art galleries filled with new Rembrandts and Picassos.  Tinkering with the unknown leads to more unknown, of course, but the genie is out of the bottle.  There is no putting it back, and the post-human revolution is upon us. 

An ancillary aspect of the revolution is the ultimate mind-computer interface.  Already the electronic patterns of thought are being deciphered, brain implants already common, and once the system is complete, every human being will have access to all the world's information and will be able to manipulate it at will. 

Engineers, currently working on a mind-machine interface will soon be able to seamlessly and completely link the human mind with the electronic circuitry of the computer thus creating a purely virtual world in which individuals will be able to instantaneously have access to all the world’s information, images, and experiences; to manipulate them at will,  and to create worlds of their own choosing. 

Artificial Intelligence, now just an important, revolutionary interface with human agents, will soon be completely integrated within the human brain.  Virtuality will not simply change the means of perception; it will define a completely new way of thinking - an unlimited, unimpeded, infinite intellectual and sentient world. 

Genetically engineered human beings, living in a perfectly virtual world where physical reality is meaningless and irrelevant, will be of a new race, a post-human race.

Pink bonnets and blue blankets, gender reveal parties, and the old saws of masculine and feminine will be footnotes to history.  There will be nothing similar between the human and the post-human.  Everything must go, fire sale for the irrelevant, the hand-me-downs, and the tried-and-true.  Darwin never anticipated such an abrupt, technologically mediated change in the evolutionary algorithm, but then again, how he could he have? 

There will be new Darwins in a hundred years who will discern patterns in the post-human ways of life, reproduction, survival, death, and prosperity, and will write about them.  Until then, there is more reality in the old Marvel comic books than what's coming down the pike. 

The False Premise Of Cultural Equivalence - Some Cultures Are Simply Better Than Others

Myrna Levitt was one of many American progressives who loved living in the city.  It was ethnically and racially diverse and gave her a sense of rightness and social responsibility.  She had fought long and hard for inclusion, tolerance, and good will to men, and here in her quarter of the the city, she saw that her efforts had paid off. 

Until the day when the peace and security of the multicultural idyll broke, and swarms of black teenagers descended into her neighborhood from across the river and trashed it. Store windows smashed, cars set on fire, trash bins overturned, and street signs pulled down. 

There was no reason for such mayhem - it was not George Floyd Day or a BLM protest.  It was just because they could - cell phones, perfume, electronics, high-end clothes were theirs for the asking. Police were under restraint - the City Council had recently passed a Juneteenth Resolution acknowledging persistent racism and white supremacy, and instructed the police to show tolerance for what was considered a legitimate cry for justice. 

 

The protests of these young black men was not unlike any other revolutionary protest, said progressives.  When a restrained reply to white oppression failed to release the ties that bound them, more aggressive, demonstrative measures were called for. 

The inner city had long been lionized by progressives.  Despite its social dysfunction - absent fathers, high rates of incarceration, drug trafficking, prostitution, and racketeering - black communities were lauded as naturally expressive social units descended from a noble African tribal culture; and that any disruption in this harmonious, sensitive, and environmentally in-tune sensitivity was merely temporary and the result of persistent racism.  

The reality was anything but harmonious and sensitive.  Assault, rape, murder, and larceny were hallmarks of the black community which lagged far behind white, Asian, and Latino populations in positive indicators.  Levels of educational proficiency, social mobility, professional and economic success, viable families, and contribution to the commonweal were at the lowest levels on any measured scale.  The culture of the black community - fatherless children, serial sex, dependency, entitlement, and anti-social behavior - was antithetical to historically successful societies. 

Cato the Elder, the Roman educator responsible for the education of the young, future leaders of the empire, wrote triptychs, codes of behavior which were to be the model not only for senators and members of the royal court, but for all Romans.  Cato stressed honor, discipline, courage, respect, compassion, tolerance, and patriotism along with more traditional elements of an education.  He understood that a moral ethos was the center of any successful civilization. 

No successful civilization has been without this core ethos.  Those that have honored and encouraged it most have been Japan and China.  Confucian and Shinto principles of right action are still deeply rooted in Chinese and Japanese cultures and provide the fulcrum for all public and private activities.  Despite the radical and remarkably rapid Westernization of these societies, these principles have never been altered. 

These Asian cultures are thousands of years old and were built on highly structured societies.  They were definitely hierarchical, imperial, and dynastic; but the core principles of the culture were universal. 

India is no different.  It, like China and Japan, is thousands of years old, and its Hindu principles of right behavior are persistent and universal within a modernization which parallels that of China.  While it focuses more on the individual and his path to spiritual salvation and less on community and social solidarity, it still is a culture with deeply-rooted ethnical, moral, and religious principles. 

African culture never had this predominant, extensive high civilization. The Gao and Ghana empires were territorial and left nothing behind.  The culture of the continent in many respects never progressed past the modalities of the earliest human settlements, and those of the diaspora are legatees of that history. Even more telling, the slave trade valued the most basic human traits - physical strength and fertility - and cared little for any of the more mature and subtle aspects of human development. 

The culture of the New World African diaspora would never emerge from this legacy; and while individuals would certainly emerge and prosper - i.e. accept, incorporate, and champion the ideals of the majority culture - most would not. 

It is no surprise that Jews in America not only prospered but contributed disproportionately to the culture, society, and the economy.  The poorest Jews in the New York City ghettos insisted on learning, education and excellence. Chinese immigrants were no different and the best, most elite public schools were filled with Chinese students.  Harvard recently lost a Supreme Court case for discriminating against highly qualified Chinese students to make way for affirmative action blacks. 

Culture - not money - was the engine of success for these groups, and both quickly made their way out of the ghetto into the mainstream and then to the very top of American society. 

In short and in other words, America is fighting a culture war not a racial one, and unless progressives - those who have repeatedly and deliberately insisted that black, diaspora, inner city culture is the equal to all others - realize and accept the reality, the inner city is doomed to yet another generation of malfunction. 

Europe is no different.  Liberals in Western Europe insisted that all cultures were equal and all have a place alongside traditional white European society.  As a result, immigration to Muslims from Africa and the Middle East was not only tolerated but encouraged.  In a short space of time, these immigrants formed their own tight, culturally sealed, radically religious communities and refused assimilation. 

With few exceptions Muslim culture has lagged far behind all others. Muslims in India, for example, have always been at the bottom of all socio-economic indicators.  In Malaysia where Chinese, Indian, and native Malay populations are almost equally divided, the Muslim Malays have always been far behind every other ethnic group. 

Muslims throughout the rest of the world have similarly low academic and social performance.  In some countries like Turkey where thanks to Ataturk's secularization, fundamentalist Islam is less prevalent, performance is more Western; but the eastern half of the country, profoundly Muslim lags far behind. 

Europe is now in crisis mode and conservative governments which have vowed to reject illegal immigrants and to deport those who refuse to adhere to majority cultural norms are taking power throughout the region.  

Finally politicians are facing reality and stating it - Western culture and civilization is superior to that of Muslim Africa and the Middle East, and they will do everything to protect it. 

American progressives have dismissed the idea of cultural superiority and have rejected America's European heritage as racist and colonialist.  As a result the core values which have been at the center of European civilization since ancient Greece and Rome are also being rejected.  

America has become a morally adrift place, one in which diversity has replaced centrality, where anything goes has replaced a foundational ethos.  It cannot end well. 

The conservative government of Donald Trump - like those now of Europe and Latin America - is beginning to roll back the extreme measures of the Left which have fragmented and divided the country; but until the population at large - not just the conservative half - endorses the essential principle that culture matters and that some cultures are indeed better than others, divisions and cultural disunity will continue.