Automata And Idiomata

     On occasion I receive compliments for my facility with the English language. It’s a heartwarming thing, as the use and manipulation of symbols of all kinds has been my greatest asset lifelong. At such times I try to exhibit a modicum of modesty by reminding my admirer(s) that English is by far the world’s largest and most complex language. Its vocabulary is well over 2,000,000 words in size. I doubt I have the use of even five percent of that total. Then there’s English grammar and syntax, which we who speak it seldom reflect on, but which are as complex as any rule-based system ever devised.

     But all that, as overwhelming as it can seem, pales in importance before the extent to which communication in English depends upon the mastery of idioms.

     Idiom is a thing generally if vaguely understood. As idioms fly freely in our discourse, we must have both a sense for them and adequate skill at using them. Yet the sheer volume of idioms in even formal communications eludes most ordinary English speakers… until someone like your humble Curmudgeon comes along and points each of them out.

     No, this isn’t a dithyramb to the idiom or the services idioms render to us. It’s a reflection on peace and its requirements.

* * *

     Among the things that have kept peoples apart over the centuries, unintelligibility ranks high. Different countries have different languages. Within those languages they have different idioms. Until very recently, a traveler in a land where his native tongue isn’t spoken had to proceed with great caution. He could trip and fall over an idiom that a technical knowledge of the local tongue could not translate accurately.

     However, owing to the Anglo-American dominance of three key activities – finance, aviation, and computing – English, approximately of the American variety, has become the de facto international language. This is especially fortunate for Americans, who are well known to be unlikely to master a foreign language well enough to speak it fluently. It’s also fortunate for visitors to America from other lands, though they are often surprised at some of our abuses of our own tongue.

     But today, we have access to programs of remarkable power that can translate between any two of the world’s major languages. Google’s free Translate website, in particular, has been a great help to me, and no doubt to others as well. And of course pioneers in artificial intelligence have made great strides in programming their Large Language Models to do much the same.

     Yet beyond all that lies a problem domain that no one had dared to tackle until very recently: the real-time, multi-person, multi-language exchange. Imagine two hundred persons, each of whom speaks a language shared by none of the others, sitting together in a room and trying to converse. Imagine the complexity involved in arranging for mutual comprehensibility. Every utterance by any member of the group would need to be translated 199 times, immediately. Imagine the computing power it would consume.

     That is X, formerly known as Twitter. Persons from every currently spoken language make use of it. Time was, they’d have had no chance of communicating fluidly and comprehensibly with persons of other lands. No longer.

* * *

     AI translation services have matured greatly these past few years. However, AI programs are computing-power gluttons. Massive arrays of CPUs, memory, and storage devices are required for use by a single powerful AI. That’s one of the stiffest limitations on the application of AI programs at this time. Another, infrequently discussed, is the burden the idiomatic nature of human communication puts on such a program, for as I noted earlier, idioms defy straightforward translation.

     Enter Elon Musk. On his own initiative, Musk has dedicated a large fraction of the capabilities of his pet AI, Grok, to providing for the translation of tweets from any known language to any other – idioms and all. Thus, X users can talk to other X users without concern for language barriers. Considering the volume of traffic that flows through X, the processing power required by that application is mind-boggling. Yet Musk has made that translation service free to all X users.

     The enormity of this development defies description. People of widely separated lands are talking to one another, understanding one another, and discovering that they have little or nothing to fear from one another. They’re making friends with persons of nations whose governments are at war with their own. And they’re drawing the implications… no doubt much to their rulers’ dismay.

     It’s not peoples that fight wars. It’s governments – States. Those entities must induce their subjects to fight, for rulers don’t fight in the armies they dispatch. That requires propaganda to make “the enemy” appear evil, even inhuman.

     But fluid communication among the common peoples of nations defeats such propaganda. The State cannot “other the Other” if “the Other” is too plainly just like oneself. That vitiates the war effort at home. States resolved upon enmity toward others will have to deny their people access to X, lest they lose their grip.

     Elon Musk has been hailed for his enterprises SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, and Neuralink, and deservedly so. But his greatest contribution to Mankind may lie in his use of his xAI firm to provide real-time translation services to X’s users. This is the route to peace… and possibly, if I may fantasize for a moment, to the end of that ravenous and wholly destructive institution we call the State.

     Thank you, Elon.

For Armistice Day

     [I first posted this in 2013, when it appeared to me that the world was hurtling toward Armageddon. We survived; we eventually shook off the Obamunists and the Bidenites. The terrors that ravaged the Old World did not visit us. We found a peacemaker and raised him to the Oval Office. For a while, things looked, if not good, at least bearable.
     But what are Mankind’s prospects, really? Given the currents of hostility, avarice, and lust for power plainly visible throughout the world, how do things look to you today? – FWP]

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     World War I remains the greatest man-made tragedy in all of history: a brutal, pointless, utterly avoidable conflagration that ended a century of peace and destroyed the optimism and confidence that had created the modern free world. Twenty million died during the war proper, including most of the young men of France and Germany. Twenty million more died in the influenza plague that followed.

     Fixated on symbolism, the Allied Powers demanded that the Germans sign the armistice agreement at exactly eleven o'clock on November 11, 1918: The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. One year later, the Treaty of Versailles that supposedly ended the war and established peace proved to be, in the words of General Ferdinand Foch, "an armistice for twenty years." Perhaps it's for the best that no one remembers the "Great War" as a thing of patriotic glory.

     Which is why, on this Armistice Day in the year of Our Lord 2025, I've decided to memorialize it with a poem few can bear to read, and those who’ve read it can hardly bear to remember:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

-- Wilfred Owen, 1918 --

     Pray for peace.

Backing Away

     Beware: I’m furious. I’m about to launch a “rant.” It might turn ugly. All the same, I’m not going to hold anything back. Consider yourselves forewarned, Gentle Readers.

     Large-scale conflicts all have the same genesis: the politicization of some idea or practice. I’ve said this. So has my beloved colleague Linda Fox. We gave the subject our best, but too few of you have taken it to heart. A saddening percentage of you have adopted politicization tactics, not understanding that it will make you indistinguishable from the Left.

     As I’ve made it a working assumption that the politicization of an issue will bring conflict, I’ve been trying to stay clear of such things. Another working assumption is that he who politicizes knows what he’s doing; therefore he seeks the conflict it will bring. And we have no more room for conflict in this conflict-ridden age.

     So I’m distancing myself from politics and political advocacy.

     What? That distresses you? Come on! Surely you don’t read my interminable tirades just to get your glands in a lather. Who needs the agita? I’d rather believe that I’ve made you feel better. I intend to set my fingers to these BLEEP!ing keys with only that in mind henceforward.

     Feel better, Gentle Reader. Feel at ease, at peace. “Peace on Earth and good will toward men,” as the angels sang to the shepherds at Bethlehem. To get that precious feeling, you must back away from anything and everything that’s been politicized. Make all things private, as they were before that noxious nonsense that’s called The State started throwing its weight around.

     Even if you can only do so for yourself, think and act as if no such lunacy as some people ordering others around (and jailing or killing them for disobedience) had ever arisen among us.

---

     Ten years ago, I wrote:

     Virtually every op-ed writer currently blathering has chosen to align himself with some political ideology. Virtually all such persons routinely cheerlead for one or the other of the two major political parties. They might well be sincere in their convictions. They might well be benevolently inclined toward the rest of us: they might sincerely believe that the political agendas they promote and support would be for the best, and that once they’re in place, we would all be as happy as kings.
     It doesn’t matter. They’re pushing politics – the pursuit of power over others – as the cure for everything that ails us. Even those who argue solely for the repeal of this or that oppressive law are pushing politics.

     I was echoing another brilliant thinker and writer:

     This must be said: There are too many "great" men in the world — legislators, organizers, do-gooders, leaders of the people, fathers of nations, and so on, and so on. Too many persons place themselves above mankind; they make a career of organizing it, patronizing it, and ruling it.
     Now someone will say: "You yourself are doing this very thing."
     True. But it must be admitted that I act in an entirely different sense; if I have joined the ranks of the reformers, it is solely for the purpose of persuading them to leave people alone. I do not look upon people as Vancauson looked upon his automaton. Rather, just as the physiologist accepts the human body as it is, so do I accept people as they are. I desire only to study and admire.

     “Great men.” Have you reflected on the inanity of that phrase lately? What qualifies a man as “great?” Is it personal achievement, or is it the ascent to political power? Time was, we honored the first sort; we endured the second, as men have done since States first emerged to bedevil us. Today it’s rather the reverse.

     George Herron had something to say about that:

     The possession of power over others is inherently destructive both to the possessor of power and to those over whom it is exercised. And the great man of the future, in distinction from the great man of the past, is he who will seek to create power in people, and not gain power over them. The great man of the future is he who will refuse to be great at all, in the historic sense; he is the man who will literally lose himself, who will altogether diffuse himself in the life of humanity.

     That is greatness. That is humility: the great and underappreciated Christian virtue. It’s required that a man be humble, if he is to submit himself to the will of God. And damned near no one for whom the trumpets sound their fanfares exemplifies or exercises it.

     I shan’t claim to be an exemplar of humility. I know better. My tendency to think myself superior to others has caused me most of the grief I’ve known. That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate its importance; rather the reverse. It’s one of the hardest-learned of all my lessons.

     Paradoxically, for Smith to tell Jones to “be humble” usually has the opposite effect. It produces anger, even fury. Imagine telling any of today’s “great men” that they should be humble. What sort of response would you expect? “Guards! Throw this person down the steps. Make it hurt.”

     Time was, it was actually a crime to tell a “great man” to be humble. It was called lèse-majesté. It could get the offender summarily beheaded. Don’t take my word for it; look it up. Look into the history of monarchy; you’ll find it.

     Tells you something about the relationship of humility to “greatness,” doesn’t it?

     Draw the BLEEP!ing moral.

---

     I’ve known a genuinely great man. He was my friend, for a time. He’s passed away, one of the most painful losses of my life... and indeed, one of the greatest recent losses of this world, though the world be unaware of it. Yet his greatness went unrecognized by nearly everyone. That’s as he would have wanted it, too.

     He didn’t care what others were doing. He didn’t care what others said or thought. He simply lived, loved, worked, and created. He made a specialty out of the employment of “obsolete” technologies to build useful, even innovative things. He joked that his mantra should be “There has to be a harder way to do this.” Really, I attach more importance to something else he said once:

     “I have my wife and my mountain. What else does anyone need?”

     As far as I know, he had no political involvements, beyond talking to me – and I’ve often regretted the time we wasted on political subjects. He wanted nothing but to create, to build, and to be left alone with the woman he loved and the few men he held as friends. By dint of great intellect, great imagination, and great labors, he got his wish.

---

     I could go on, but I’ll spare you. I’d originally had a specific example in mind of how the politicization of some phenomenon – i.e., turning it into an “issue” that requires mass approval or disapproval – destroys our peace, but I’m worn out. I suppose I’m sparing myself, too.

     I wish you peace. It’s rare and precious today, like freedom. But they’re complementary assets; each, once achieved, brings the other. Their common prerequisite is the abjuration of all political involvement, however well-intended. The implications are for you to draw.

     Happy Hallowe’en. Feel free to leave the candy corn for me. I like it.

Faster! Faster!

     Alice could never quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying “Faster! Faster!” but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had not breath left to say so.
     The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. “I wonder if all the things move along with us?” thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, “Faster! Faster! Don’t try to talk!”
     Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried “Faster! Faster!” and dragged her along. “Are we nearly there?” Alice managed to pant out at last.
     “Nearly there?” the Queen repeated. “Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster!”

     [Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass]

     He whom children of the past century know as “Lewis Carroll” was born in 1832 as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He was the son of an Anglican cleric, and rather religious himself. He was eventually made a deacon of the Church of England, and on several occasions expressed a profound Christian faith. Consider as an example this statement, made not long before his death, in response to a friend’s inquiry about his beliefs:

     I believe that when you and I come to lie down for the last time, if only we can keep firm hold of the great truths Christ taught us—our own utter worthlessness and His infinite worth; and that He has brought us back to our one Father, and made us His brethren, and so brethren to one another—we shall have all we need to guide us through the shadows. Most assuredly I accept to the full the doctrines you refer to—that Christ died to save us, that we have no other way of salvation open to us but through His death, and that it is by faith in Him, and through no merit of ours, that we are reconciled to God; and most assuredly I can cordially say, "I owe all to Him who loved me, and died on the Cross of Calvary." [From Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll]

     It is possible that much of Carroll’s “children’s fiction” was allegorical in nature. However, he never said or wrote any explicit statement to that effect. Here’s the closest I can find:

     As to the meaning of the Snark [he wrote to a friend in America], I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book. The best that I've seen is by a lady (she published it in a letter to a newspaper), that the whole book is an allegory on the search after happiness. I think this fits in beautifully in many ways—particularly about the bathing-machines: when the people get weary of life, and can't find happiness in towns or in books, then they rush off to the seaside, to see what bathing-machines will do for them. [Ibid.]

     For my part, the Red Queen’s Race in the snippet from Through The Looking-Glass speaks powerfully about haste and bustle: in particular, their tendency to become ends in themselves, rather than occasionally employed means to some unusually urgent end.

     Many Americans of our time seem addicted to haste. Faster! Faster! This is critical! I need it by Friday! It has to be turned in by three! How can you just sit there staring at your cubicle wall? Faster! Faster!

     Well, Gentle Reader? How’s your Haste Quotient (HQ) this fine Tuesday morning? Checked your pulse lately? How about your blood pressure?

     I thought not.

---

     Hello, friends. My name is Fran, and I’m a haste addict.

     Among my greatest personal failings is this one: If I can’t see the end of an undertaking to be near and clear, I am powerfully inhibited against addressing it. It doesn’t matter whether the desire is at all reasonable. If I can’t envision the completion of the project at some time in the proximate future, I struggle to begin.

     Most of the people who’ve known me professionally would find that difficult to believe. My reputation was and is for getting it done – whatever “it” might be – a day early. In all my years I never missed a deadline to which I’d agreed beforehand...and on at least one occasion it came damned close to killing me.

     I’m not telling you this because it’s unique or exceptional, but the reverse: it’s become endemic among contemporary Americans. No, not everyone is quite as deep in the disease as I am. Some are better off; a pitiful few are worse. However, the majority of us suffer from it. The characteristics of the malady are uniform: the sense of time pressure, the race against the clock, urging us to ever greater haste in many if not most of the efforts we address each day.

     Even today, though I’m retired nearly a year, I still feel the seconds ticking away no matter what my current task might be. It takes an extraordinary conscious effort to slow down, to remind myself that there are no deadlines any longer, and an even greater effort to enforce a less lethal pace upon myself.

     However, that’s not the worst of it. The worst is the reluctance to start an extended project, knowing that I’ll feel myself to be in a Red Queen’s Race from the moment I begin.

---

     I remember reading, many years ago, a statement by a columnist in Car and Driver to the effect that civilization depends upon speed. In one sense, this is irrefutable. The speed with which we can produce or acquire the necessities of life determines whether we shall have any leisure. The speed with which we can produce or acquire the optional satisfactions and luxuries we seek determines the magnitude of what we usually call our prosperity. In those contexts, speed varies inversely with the prices of the things we need or want.

     But to enforce haste upon oneself – to demand that one operate at a high tempo – involves a price of its own. If it becomes habitual, the price can exceed any good one might purchase with it.

     “The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long,” wrote Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. In truth, that’s nowhere near the worst it can get; if pressed to flare beyond a certain brightness, the flame will burn itself out. This is no less true of men than of candlewicks.

---

     You might think this is mainly, perhaps even entirely, about haste at work. It certainly has application to the working world, where supervisors always seem to be trying to get their subordinates to go faster. But it also has application to one’s private, personal undertakings.

     Part of the reason I value my faith so greatly is its emphasis on peace. Peace might just be the most misunderstood of all the things we seek. Novelist Jo Walton made a particularly pointed observation about it some years ago, in reference to a specimen of warfare and the somewhat naive “peace” activists who were railing against it:

     “Peace means something different from ‘not fighting.’ Those aren’t peace advocates, they’re ‘stop fighting’ advocates. Peace is an active and complex thing and sometimes fighting is part of what it takes to get it.”

     The secular condition we call peace has a dynamic character. It’s not something one can acquire once and fondle unendingly; like love, it must be perpetually remade, made new. The reasons are far beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that it is in the nature of existence under the veil of Time that peace must be continuously maintained and renewed by individuals, families, communities, and nations.

     But secular peace is not the only kind, nor is it the most important. When in the Gospel According to John Christ says to His Apostles:

     Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. [John 14:27]

     ...clearly He is not speaking of “peace” as the diplomats mean it (“a state of tension falling short of actual armed conflict”), but of peace of the mind, heart, and soul. Moreover, it should be clear that the only agency capable of depriving us of that peace is ourselves.

     The prevailing tendency to train oneself, or to flog others, to perpetual haste forecloses access to that sort of peace. It might be the worst of the superficially non-violent things any man has ever done, whether to another or to himself.

---

     This is not an absolute or unconditional broadside against haste per se. Rather, it’s an exhortation to pace: the appropriate pace for the matter at hand. If haste is genuinely justified – by your judgment, no one else’s! – then make haste, but be aware of both the necessity, the reason for it, and the expiration thereof. At other times and in other circumstances, languidness or even stillness will serve you better. You’ll enjoy life more and will probably live longer. You’ll be more pleasant company as well.

     No matter your age or your station in life, if you have the sort of penchant for perpetual haste from which I suffer, this might prove to be the most important thing you’ll ever read. Don’t let not being able to see the finish line deter you from starting. Don’t let a need to see the finish line drive you to unnecessary, destructive haste. Perhaps most important of all, don’t take any guff from anyone else about your choices in such matters. It’s the sort of advice I wish someone had given to me when I was younger and could really profit from it.

     To those who are otherwise inclined – and especially to those who think they can profit by accelerating others! – I commend the late J. G. Ballard’s short story “Chronopolis,” about a society in which the pendulum has swung radically in the opposite direction and timepieces of the sort we use have been outlawed. Note in particular this snippet thereof:

     “Why is it against the law to have a clock?”
     Stacey tossed a piece of chalk from one hand to the other.
     “Is it against the law?”
     Conrad nodded. “There’s an old notice in the police station offering a bounty of one hundred pounds for every clock or wristwatch brought in. I saw it yesterday. The sergeant said it was still in force.”
     Stacey raised his eyebrows mockingly. “You’ll make a million. Thinking of going into business?”
     Conrad ignored this. “It’s against the law to have a gun because you might shoot someone. But how can you hurt anybody with a clock?”
     “Isn’t it obvious? You can time him, know exactly how long it takes him to do something.”
     “Well?”
     “Then you can make him do it faster.”

     May God bless and keep you all. And may the shade of Frederick Taylor forever repent of his sins against frail, frightened, irremediably weary working men.