Out of My Mind (11 page)

We've tried to use science by having government direct scientific study toward improving life for humans. Things seldom work out when government gets involved and tries to direct science to solve a specific problem. The first thing a government agency does is lay out a set of standards by which a department will work. Science doesn't work within a set of standards. Discovery is outside the boundaries of standards and, if you force scientists to work within boundaries, they seldom make discoveries.

When government gets its hands on science, it wants practical results. This practice can attract an inferior group of scientists and, first thing you know, government has science making weapons.

The other problem with science and government is that, inevitably, the scientists are subservient to the politicians. The interests of the two groups are different, and if politicians' interests are forced on scientists, it doesn't work.

Scientists ought to be given the money they need and left in a corner by themselves to work without interference or direction from anyone.
They should not be given an agenda they're expected to follow. Given a free hand, scientists will usually do the right thing.

With the new Supreme Court–approved voucher system that will pay tuition to private schools, there will be a proliferation of new institutions starting up to get in on the tax money being handed out to religious schools.

While the majority of existing parochial schools are Catholic, a good number are Jewish and Islamic. The religion of the Muslims is the fastest growing in the United States. It is likely that the new schools will be associated with less well known religions or the growing ones interested in having government help to promote their creeds.

I met a man with the name of Charles Ausseldorfer who told me he's opening a school for the children of atheists. He doesn't call the children atheists because he says they're too young to know what they believe.

Mr. Ausseldorfer told me his school will be called the Atheist Academy and he looks forward to the help he'll be getting from American taxpayers.

Mr. Ausseldorfer, 54, a former stock market analyst who became disenchanted with Wall Street—but not until he'd made a lot of money—said he'd bought an abandoned factory on the outskirts of a Midwestern city. I told him I'd like to take a camera crew out to get pictures of the school, but he asked that the exact location of the Atheist Academy not be revealed yet. Contractors are dividing the old brick building into twelve classrooms and one larger meeting room with a stage for lectures, he said.

Tuition for the Atheist Academy will be $5,000, approximately half of which will come from tax money provided through the school voucher program. The school's motto will be Tom Paine's famous statement: “My country is the world, my religion is to do good and all men are my brothers.”

Mr. Ausseldorfer was a charming conversationalist but I told him I object as much to having my tax money go to a school teaching atheism as to one teaching Catholicism, Islam or Buddhism.

“Each school day,” he told me, “will begin with students reciting the Pledge of Allegiance without the words ‘under God.'” We'll make it clear to our students that God is none of the government's business and the government is none of God's business.”

Mr. Ausseldorfer said he hopes to have an athletic program.

“We'll play schools with whom we can compete . . . smaller schools representing some of the fringe religions like the Latter Day Saints and the Unitarians.

“It will be an interesting experiment,” Mr. Ausseldorfer said, “to see if our football team can beat any of the teams whose players pray to God to win.”

I asked whether school attendance will be restricted to atheists or the children of atheists.

“Absolutely not,” Mr. Ausseldorfer said. “We'll take agnostic kids, Jewish kids, Baptists, Muslims, Buddhists, Presbyterians. Like the Catholic schools, we'll try to get children to see things our way. With those tax dollars, we're going to promote logic, reason and good sense. We will teach courses in all the religions of the world, as well as courses in the Bible and the Koran. We hope that studying them will expose them.”

I questioned him about whether atheism would qualify as a religion.

“The voucher system is not restricted to religious schools, even though 97 percent of the schools getting the money are (religious),” he said. “It will be no different than the government paying tuition for a Catholic, a Jewish or a Muslim school.”

I asked Mr. Ausseldorfer if he thought many church-going Americans would object to paying to support a school whose mission was to promote the idea among children that there is no God.

“They may object,” Mr. Ausseldorfer admitted, “but no more than atheists object to having tax money pay for a Catholic or a Muslim school.”

You understand of course, that Charley Ausseldorfer is fictitious.

Just when it seemed as though the people who make war had invented every possible device with which to kill people, we're faced with a strange new weapon that is not a device but a method—terrorism.

We thought we'd found the ultimate way to kill with the nuclear bomb. Now we've come up with an even more terrible form of warfare. Terrorism is a new way to kill. There have been isolated incidents in the past 20 years but the newness of it is the willingness of terrorists to die for their cause. Before, the enemy was as interested in survival as its victims. There were things each side knew the other would not do in combat because of some immutable law of self-preservation. The only time that unwritten law had been broken was when Japanese kamikaze pilots willingly died for their God and their country.

Soldiers have been finding new ways to kill each other since the beginning of recorded history. They were probably finding ways before that, too. The early wars between armies in ancient Greece were clumsy battles. The front line of an attacking force was made up of men in horse-drawn, armored chariots. As the two forces clashed, hand-tohand battles were fought by soldiers behind the chariots who carried the latest tools of war-battle axes, swords, shields, spears, dart throwers and bows. Those weapons must have evoked the same fear terrorism evokes in us today.

Somewhere around 1200, the evil Mongolian Genghis Khan put his troops on horseback. This enabled him to conquer the entire known world.

When Genghis Khan got to China, he was temporarily slowed by Chinese fortifications and soldiers who were more intelligent than his troops. To defeat them, Khan adopted a new tactic that made use of the Chinese soldiers' reverence for family. He captured thousands of women, children and old men, and then, when his troops advanced, Khan forced the captives to walk in front of his soldiers. This provided a phalanx that could only be penetrated if the Chinese chose to kill their own.

Around the same time, the Chinese invented gunpowder but used it more for firecrackers than in weapons. They were ineffective against Khan's ruthless advance and as many as 18 million Chinese, a substantial percentage of the number of people living then, were killed.

There was relatively little progress made in ways to kill people for hundreds of years after explosion-propelled missiles were invented. The Civil War wasn't fought with weapons much different from anything invented hundreds of years before.

In World War I, the armored tank struck fear into the hearts of infantrymen, but the tank turned out to be a paper tiger, as often a crematorium for its crew as an offensive aid to the infantry.

The Germans were the first to use a chemical weapon when they released mustard gas in World War I in front of a wind that wafted it toward French lines. The gas sickened some French soldiers but its course was so unpredictable that it was ineffective. It could drift in the wrong direction.

Aircraft were used in combat for the first time in World War I. A German plane and one zeppelin dropped small bombs on England but neither was capable of carrying anything large enough to do serious damage. Air action was limited to the romantic dogfights between men like the Luftwaffe's legendary Red Baron Von Richthofen and American ace Eddie Rickenbacker.

War came of age in World War II, when aircraft capable of carrying tons of bombs could destroy whole cities. Even high-explosive bombs turned out to be a relatively inefficient method of mass destruction once the United States developed nuclear weapons and dropped two on Japan.

When men were reluctant to die in the process of killing, it was possible to understand war. The newest threat to civilization—terrorism—is as frightening as any of its predecessors. And it won't be the last.

When you have an enemy, as we have in the Muslim terrorists, who would gladly wipe you off the face of the earth, it's difficult to continue believing that all men are created equal. Not the same, certainly.

It would appear to us as though there was something basically evil about this enemy, but you can bet the terrorists don't think of themselves as evil. They're certain that they are serving God. Religion does amazing things to people.

It is my not totally baked opinion that almost no one does something bad knowing and believing that they are bad for doing it. The petty thief rationalizes his thievery by thinking that the person from whom he's stealing has plenty of money and probably didn't make it honestly anyway. Not that long ago in this country, slavery was accepted by tens of thousands of decent Southerners who were able to make themselves believe they were doing their black servants a favor by providing them with food and shelter.

One of the questions that comes to my mind most often is whether human character has improved as much as civilization has progressed technologically. Inventions have enabled those of us alive today to live vastly more comfortable lives than our ancestors. We're able to carry heavy loads, farm the fields and travel now that we have wheels and the engines to make them roll. Has there been a similar improvement in our ability to reason and think?

I'm inclined to say yes, but then something happens that makes me doubt that conclusion. The people of Massachusetts today would not stand for hanging women accused of witchcraft, but how do we explain the thinking and actions of the terrorists who killed nearly 3,000 people with one, deliberate act? They're part of our same human race.

Is it possible that people in some parts of the world have progressed less than the people in other parts? Darwin is lurking here somewhere. He said that each living thing has to compete and owes its place in life to where it falls in competition with other individuals of its species. That must be as true of nations as of individuals—and the Arab world
has not fared well in the competition. Because Americans have done so much better in providing ourselves with the good things of life than they have, some Arab nations resent us. “Resent” isn't strong enough. They hate us.

It seems probable that people in one part of the world grow up with forces on their character that change them in basic ways that people living elsewhere do not experience. Eskimos, who grow up in a cold, sometimes dark place, inevitably develop, over the generations, into a people somewhat different from humans who spend their lives on a warm Pacific island or in a large city.

The people of the Middle East have not done nearly as much for themselves as people living on other parts of the earth have done for themselves. They don't make much of anything. They don't grow much. They don't produce any substantial amount of art or literature good enough to be recognized by the rest of the world. Economists have a theory that they have been spoiled by a glut of easy-money oil. However, if that were true, Americans, with our vast country, rich in so many natural resources, would be lazy, too.

A great deal of the early progress made by mankind in such intellectual areas as language, astronomy and mathematics was made in the Middle East, and it's difficult to understand how the people of the region regressed from there to where they are today.

My old college roommate, Bob Ruthman, called me last week. He had just read something I had written. He says I'm not as funny as I used to be.

Tom Wyman, a former president of CBS whom I knew more as a boss than as a friend, dropped his membership in the Augusta National Golf Club because the club has persisted in refusing to admit women as members.

The chairman of the club, Hootie Johnson, has been dumb and pigheaded about this. He says they do not admit women and they are not going to change that policy. Wanna bet, Hootie?

The word “club” suggests exclusivity and the reasons for any club excluding people for one reason or another are often valid. When I was young, there were Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, a YMCA and a YWCA. The Knights of Columbus probably wouldn't want a lot of Presbyterians, Jews or Muslims applying because it's a Catholic organization. That's defensible. NOW, the National Organization for Women, has only about 10 percent men as members.

A group of men together has a different character about it than one that includes women. There is an undeniable camaraderie among a collection of men in a locker room that would not exist if there were women present. It isn't just a matter of getting caught with their towels down.

Men behave differently in the presence of each other than they do when women are there. I could not begin to say why, even if I knew. It's not only different, but the atmosphere, for that brief time, is often better. I should think the same thing is true about a group of women who gather for bridge or to elect a candidate to office. I can't speak about a women's locker room.

There are good things about exclusive clubs. However, the advantages are outweighed by the necessity of doing something about the bad deal women have gotten over the years as a result of men's discriminatory treatment. One of the things that can be done is to break down the barriers for entry into previously all-male organizations.