Authors: Stanislaw Lem
Under the stern rule of Ronder Ischiolis a stop was put to this granting of supplementary living footage, and legs were even confiscated from people found guilty of infractions; he apparently intended to do away with all extremities and organs save those indispensable for life, and also to introduce microminiaturization, for smaller and smaller homes were being built; but Bzugis Thumn, who assumed power after Ischiolis, rescinded these directives and even allowed the tail, under the pretext that with its tassel one could sweep one’s dwelling. Then, in the reign of Gondel Gwana, you had the so-called backwing deviationalists, who augmented their extremities illegally, and in the next phase of repressive regimes there appeared again—or rather, were concealed—tonguenails and other protest organelles. Oscillations of this type were still going on when I arrived at Dichotica. Things which one would never be allowed to realize in the flesh found expression in “pornobiotic” literature, underground writings which numbered among the many forbidden books contained here in the monastic library. I leafed through, for example, a manifesto calling for a vampook, which was supposed to walk about on its hair; also, the creation of another anonymous author—a thapostulary, which would float through the air like a blimp.
Having thus formed a rough idea of the planet’s history, I acquainted myself with its current scientific literature; the primary research-and-development agency now is COPROSOPS (Commission for the Coordination of Projects re Soma and Psyche). The brother librarian was kind enough to let me look at the most recent publications of this agency. Thus for example body eng. Dergard Nonk is the originator of a prototype bearing the temporary name of polymonoid or scattermind. Prof. Dr. Sr. eng. Dband Rabor, who heads a large research team, is working on a bold, even controversial design for what he calls an omnius—this is to be a functional system of channels operative in three respects: communicational, navigational, and official. I was also able to familiarize myself with the projective-futurological works of Dichotican body experts; I came away with the impression that automorphosis, as a whole, had reached a dead end in its development, though the specialists in the field were trying to overcome stagnation; an article by Prof. Gagbert Grauz, director of COPROSOPS, in the monthly
Body Illustrated
concluded with the words, “How can one
not
transform oneself, when one
can
?”
After all this arduous studying I was so exhausted, that upon returning the last pile of books to the library I did nothing for an entire week but sun myself in the furniture grove.
I asked the prior what he thought of the biotic situation. In his opinion a return to human forms was no longer possible for the Dichoticans, they had strayed too far from them. These forms aroused, due to many centuries of indoctrination, such prejudices and such general revulsion, that even they—the robots—were obliged, when appearing in public places, to cover themselves completely, every inch. I asked him then—we were alone in the refectory after dinner—what sense there was, within this sort of civilization, to monastic work and faith?
The prior smiled at me with his voice.
“Yes, I was expecting that question,” he said, “and shall give you two answers to it, one vulgar, and one more subtle. Duism, first, amounts to ‘six of one, half-dozen the other.’ For God is so deep a mystery, that one can have no certainty even as to the question of His existence. And therefore either He is, or He is not; from this derives the etymological root of the name of our religion. And now a second time, but more profoundly: God-Certainty is not a perfect mystery, seeing that one can pin Him down and limit Him totally in this respect at least: that He Exists. The guarantee of His existence represents an oasis, a place of rest, an easy chair for the spirit, and it is precisely in volumes of religious history that you will find, above all else, a constant, age-old, desperate, all-out effort of the mind, bordering on insanity, to accumulate arguments and proofs for His existence and, when those inevitably crumble, to take the bits and chips and raise them up anew. We did not burden you with the relating of our theological tomes, but if you looked in them you would discern those subsequent stages in the natural development of faith that are as yet unknown to younger civilizations. The phase of dogma does not break off suddenly, but passes from a closed system to an open system, since that which has been set down becomes, dialectically, by the dogma of the infallibility of the head of the Church—the dogma of the necessary fallibility of all thought in matters of faith, put succinctly thus: ‘Nothing which can be articulated Here has any bearing on what abides There.’ This leads to a further raising of the level of abstraction: kindly note that the distance between God and reason increases with the passage of time—everywhere, always!
“According to ancient revelation God constantly interfered in everything, the righteous He bundled off to heaven, the wicked He doused with fire and brimstone, you could find Him sitting behind any old bush; it was only later that the withdrawal began, God lost His visibility, His human shape, His beard, the audio-visual aids of miracles disappeared, so did the classroom demonstrations of transplanting demons into goats, so did the visitations of angel-examiners; faith, in a word, had dispensed with circus metaphysics; thus from the realm of the senses it moved into the realm of abstractions. Nor then was there any shortage of proofs of His existence, of sanctions expressed in the language of higher algebra, of even more esoteric hermeneutics. These abstractions eventually reach the point at which God is pronounced dead, in order to achieve that cold, iron, devastating peace which belongs to the living when those most loved have forsaken them forever.
“The manifesto of the death of God is, then, the next maneuver, intended—however brutally—to spare us further metaphysical fatigue. To wit, we are alone and do either what we like, or that to which future discoveries will lead us. But Duism has gone beyond this; in it, you believe by doubting and you doubt by believing; yet this state too is not the final one. According to some of the Prognosticant brothers, the evolutions and revolutions or, if you prefer, the turnings and upturnings of faith do not follow the exact same course throughout the Universe, and there are civilizations, powerful and great, that are attempting to organize an entire Cosmogony in the context of an anti-God provocation. According to this hypothesis there exist peoples among the stars who seek to break the terrible silence of God by throwing Him the challenge, that is, the threat of COSMICIDE: their idea is to have the whole Universe converge at a single point and be consumed in the fires of that final spasm; they wish, as it were, by tipping God’s work from its foundations, to force Him into making some response; though we have no definite knowledge of this, from the psychological standpoint such a design does seem possible to me. Possible and at the same time futile; for engaging in an antimatter crusade against the Lord hardly seems a sensible way to open a dialogue with Him.”
I couldn’t refrain from observing that Duism, as I saw it, was actually agnosticism or perhaps “atheism not absolutely certain of itself,” or else a constant wavering between the poles of
is
and
isn’t.
And even if it did contain a shred of faith, still, what purpose was served by the monastic life? Who, if anyone, benefited from this staying put in catacombs?
“Too many questions at once!” said Father Darg. “Have patience. And what exactly, in your opinion, should we be doing?”
“What do you mean? There’s always missionary work…”
“Then you still understand nothing! You are as far from me now as you were at the moment of your first appearance!” the prior said with sorrow. “So you think we ought to occupy ourselves with the spreading of the faith? With missionary work? To evangelize? Make converts?”
“And you, Father, do not? How is that possible? Has this not been your mission throughout the ages?” I asked, astonished.
“On Dichotica,” said the prior, “a million things are possible, things of which you have no knowledge. In one simple step we can erase the contents of a person’s memory and feed into that thereby vacant mind a new, synthetic memory, such that it will appear to the subject that he has lived what he has not, experienced what he has not; in short, we can make him Someone Other than he was before the operation. We can change character and personality, transform lecherous brutes into mild samaritans and vice versa; atheists into saints and ascetics into sensualists; we can dull the wise, and the dull turn into geniuses; you must realize that all of this is very easy and nothing MATERIAL stands in the way of such conversions. And now give close heed to what I tell you.
“Yielding to the arguments of our preachers, a hidebound atheist might believe. Let us suppose that such silver-tongued emissaries from our order do convert various persons. The end state of these missionary measures would be such, that as a result of the changes taken place in those minds people who previously did not believe would now believe. This is clear, I think?”
I nodded.
“Good. And now observe that those persons will in matters of faith entertain new convictions, since by providing them with information through the medium of inspired words and evangelistic gestures we have in a certain manner influenced their brains. Now this end state—of brains infused with ardent faith and the longing for God—may be achieved a million times more quickly, and more reliably too, by the application of a suitably selected range of biotic agents. Why then should we proselytize in the old-fashioned way, through persuasion, sermons, lectures, exhortations, when we have more modern means at our disposal?”
“Surely you aren’t serious, Father!” I cried. “That would be—well—unethical!”
The prior shrugged.
“You speak thus, for you are a child of another age. No doubt you think that we would act coercively, by the underhanded tactic of ‘cryptoconversion,’ secretly sowing some sort of chemical or using certain waves or vibrations to reshape the mind. But it is not that way at all! At one time disputes would take place between believers and nonbelievers, and the only instrument, the only weapon used then was the verbal force of the argument of either side (I am not speaking of those ‘disputes’ in which the argument consisted of the stake, the block or the rack). Nowadays an analogous dispute would take place with technological methods of argumentation. We would act with instruments of conversion, and our hardened opponents would counter with methods designed to pattern us after
their
ideal, or at least to make themselves impervious to that form of evangelization. For either side the chance of winning would depend on the effectiveness of the technology employed, just as—long ago—the chance of victory in a dispute depended on the effectiveness of one’s verbal address. For conversion is nothing more or less than the conveying of faith-compelling information.”
“Even so,” I insisted, “such conversion wouldn’t be authentic! After all, a drug that produces the thirst for faith, the craving for God, falsifies the mind; it doesn’t appeal to the will, but enslaves it, violates it!”
“You forget where you are and to whom you speak,” replied the prior. “For six hundred years there has been among us not a single ‘natural’ mind. Thus it is impossible, among us, to distinguish between a thought spontaneous and a thought imposed, since no one need secretly impose a thought on anyone else, in order to convince him. What
is
imposed is something which comes first and at the same time has finality: the brain!”
“But that imposed brain too possesses an integrity of logic!” I said.
“True. Nevertheless the equating of bygone and current disputes about God would cease to have foundation only if, in support of faith, there existed a proof logically incontrovertible, forcing the mind to accept its conclusion with a power equal to that wielded by mathematics. Yet according to our theodicy no such proof can exist. Thus it is that the history of religion knows apostasies and heresies, but analogous defections are not encountered in the history of mathematics, for no one ever protested the fact that there is one way only to add unity to unity and that the outcome of that operation is the number two. But God you cannot demonstrate with mathematics. I will tell you of something that happened two hundred years ago.
“A certain Computer priest came into conflict with a computer nonbeliever. The latter, being a newer model, had at its disposal means of informational operation unknown to our good Father. So it listened patiently to all his proofs and said: ‘You have informed me, and now I shall inform you, which will not take long—let us then wait that bare millionth of a second for your transfiguration!’ Whereupon in one remote-control flash it informed our priest so thoroughly, that he lost his faith. What say you now?”
“Well, if that was not an act of violation, I don’t know what is!” I exclaimed. “Among us this sort of thing is called mind manipulation.”
“Mind manipulation,” said Father Darg, “means the placing of invisible chains on the spirit in the same way that one can place them visibly on the body. Thoughts are like handwritten letters, and the manipulation of thought is like seizing the hand to make it put down other symbols. This is obvious coercion. But that computer did not act thus. Every proof must be built on facts; to convince by discussion, then, means simply to introduce—through words uttered—facts into the mind of the opponent. The computer did precisely this, though not with words. Therefore from the informational point of view it proceeded no differently than the ordinary debater of the past, the only difference being in the manner of transmission. It was able to do what it did, having the power to see the mind of our priest through and through. Imagine two chess players, one who can see only the board and the pieces, and one who in addition observes the thoughts of his adversary. The second will unfailingly beat the first, though without doing him violence in any way. What do you think we did with our father when he returned to us?”
“I suppose you fixed him, so that he could believe again…” I said, uncertain.