Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (13 page)

Point: The existence of a high degree of intelligence has no correlation whatever with
specific
learning abilities.

The chief statistician for one of America's greatest public utilities once took a series of aptitude tests, to aid psychologists who were trying to calibrate their tests in terms of aptitudes-shown vs. success in fields of work. That is, what aptitudes does an individual who succeeds as an engineer show? A banker? A research chemist? Or, in the case under test, a statistician.

One aptitude he lacked with almost incredible completeness was any sense of spatial geometry. Given a wooden cube, which had been sawed up into nine wiggly, irregular blocks, and asked to assemble the scattered pieces—after forty-five minutes of futile trying, they gave up. Most people need about three minutes; mechanical engineers usually succeed in about forty-five seconds.

Both the psychologists and the statistician were fascinated by this remarkable lack of solid-geometry insight, and agreed to try a teaching program. Over the course of a week or so, the statistician laboriously practiced assembling the wiggly blocks, until he finally was able to do it in about five minutes.

Then they gave him an exactly similar collection of wiggly blocks, but only one-half the size he'd practiced with.

At the end of thirty unsuccessful minutes, he went back to being one of the country's greatest statisticians, and they went back to aptitude testing.

Intelligence has nothing whatever to do with
specific
learning ability.

A specific learning ability can be bred into a genetic line, given time enough, selective breeding, and a reasonable mutability of the organisms being bred. (That's why dogs now understand speech-symbols.)

Some human individuals can't learn to be civilized. Genetics being a statistical thing, the son of five generations of highly civilized men may happen to miss the gene-pattern required, while the son of twenty generations of barbarian warriors shows up with it.

The essence of a learning-ability is, it seems to me, a built-in genetic ability to
enjoy
a specific activity. The Lamb can
enjoy
eating grass—and, incidentally, gets nourished thereby. If we could somehow make a Lion
enjoy
eating grass, he would happily chew away at grass, worried only by the extremely inefficient job his carnivore-style teeth did on chewing the stuff. (He would starve to death, of course, but he'd starve happily.)

The scholar
enjoys
studying. The athlete
enjoys
physical acitivity. The two are mutually exclusive only to the extent that both require time, so we find both scholarly athletes, scholarly nonathletes, and athletic nonscholars.

The trouble with the Barbarian is that he specifically enjoys fighting, and specifically hates working for a living. To him, working for a living is dishonorable, unmanly, slavery—anathema. He can enjoy fighting, though he is fully aware that it has a high probability of killing him. (Remember that a nuclear physicist deeply enjoys working with materials that he is acutely aware can kill him. The chemist continues to do research on materials that he knows are extremely explosive, enormously poisonous, or viciously corrosive. Risk stops neither the citizen nor the barbarian.)

The Barbarian can fight for a living, in any variant of the concept of "fight." These include actual paid-mercenary action, fight-and-loot—which he prefers, of course—or through stealing, swindling, blackmailing, extortion, et cetera. He would, by reason of that general mechanism, rather rape a woman than earn her love, rather seduce her by false promises than marry her—because the latter is a form of slavery, in his opinion. He could not
enjoy
her love—but would delight in his conquest of her. (And don't pity the Barbarian woman; she agrees in full!)

Now history has some six thousand years of records showing the essential pattern of Barbarian behavior. It's quite consistent, whether you study pre-Hellenistic Greek Barbarians as seen by more nearly civilized early Egypt, Mongols as seen by civilized Chinese a thousand years ago, or the problem in central Africa today.

The Barbarian is born with the characteristic that he
can not work for a living.
He
can't
lie down with the Citizen, and cooperate in a constructive, cooperative, eight-hours-a-day building operation. He
can't
—no more than the Lion can live if he lies down with the Lamb.

After the Harlem riots, one Negro rioter said to a newspaper reporter, "They're killing us psychologically, damn it! They're killing us slow! If they're going to kill me, I'd rather they did it with a bullet!"

He was speaking the exact truth. The city-culture is killing them—the Barbarians—psychologically. It must; it cannot live with them, and they cannot live with it. And the Barbarian would rather die by a bullet; he doesn't mind the risk of fighting, any more than the dedicated scientist minds the risk of riding a rocket into orbit.

That rioter who'd rather die by a bullet wasn't saying that because he was a Negro; he was speaking for all the Barbarian rioters, black and white, Jew, Christian, Mohammedan, or Buddhist, in all civilized lands everywhere. He
thought
he was talking about Negroes, when he said "They're killing
us
. . ."—but remember that only a minute percentage of Negroes were actually involved in the rioting, while very considerable numbers of whites joined in the spree of Barbarian-style looting, fighting, and destruction.

I have a little parlor game I like to play on people; you can try it yourself, if you don't mind losing a few friends. It's called "You be Dictator." It's quite simple; you simply say to your victim, "You've just been appointed Absolute Tyrant Dictator of the Earth. Now tell me—what do you do about this problem . . ." and name the problem he's sure he knows the answer to.

Like, "Now you're Dictator—
you
solve the problem of what to do with the Barbarians in our city-civilized culture!"

The thing that makes it so deadly a problem is that some of those Barbarians the city-culture
must
kill either psychologically or physically, will be the sons—and daughters—of your own officers and administrators.

The trouble of the Barbarian in the city-culture stems from the fact that they are a race-within-any-and-every-race.

One of the major reasons the Negro people are having so much trouble gaining acceptance is, simply, that the Negroes are not doing an adequate job of disciplining their own people, themselves.

There are three possible forms of discipline in the Universe; any individual or group has a choice of which of the three he will choose—but there is absolutely no escape from the necessity of choosing. Discipline you will get, whether you like it or not; your choice is which form of discipline you want, not whether you'll accept it or not.

There's Universe Discipline. If Baby sticks his hand in the boiling water—that's what he gets. Or, if he crawls out the fifth-story window. Or, if an African tribesman, convinced that his magic charm makes rifle bullets turn to water—he gets Universe Discipline.

Then there's Other-People Discipline. That's what Baby gets when Mama slaps its hand away as it reaches for the boiling water, or grabs Baby as he starts out the window. Or what the tribesman gets if he's arrested and jailed before he gets a chance to charge the machine gun.

Then there's Self-Discipline. Which is what you use when you get tired of getting your hand burned by the scalding water, and also get tired of having people slap it away from what you want to reach. It's what you achieve when you recognize that the magical charms won't work, and charging machine guns won't give you even a chance of surviving the fighting, and, somehow, learn to enjoy working your way up to having your own machine guns.

The disappointing part about Self-Discipline is that, when you finally achieve what you set out for, you find your wants have changed, and your achievement is, somehow, unimportant. Like the kid who, at age ten, promised himself that, when he grew up and had all the money in his pocket that adults had, he was going to have an ice cream soda and a bag of popcorn every time he wanted one, by gosh.

Well . . . in a sense, he does. He just doesn't seem to want five sodas and fifteen bags of popcorn a day now that he's grown up.

So by the time the African tribesmen grow up to the Self-Disciplined civilization level of producing their own precision machine tools to produce precision machine guns, and the high-level chemical industry necessary to produce the metals and the explosives required to earn their own machine guns . . . they'll be disappointed. They'll be all equipped with a high-level military technology—and no desire, any more, to use it. They'll be citizens, and citizens, unlike Barbarians, just don't enjoy fighting.

The Barbarian's inevitable and highly suicidal error is to think that, because the citizen obviously hates fighting, the citizen must be unable to fight well.

So . . . there you are, Absolute Tyrant Dictator of the world.

How are you going to make the Barbarians in your city-cultures learn to enjoy discipline—and choose Self-Discipline?

But remember—the true Barbarian
can't
learn that—any more than the Lion can learn to lie down with the Lamb.

Oh, by the way—heroin and cocaine may be very useful to your program. They'll keep a Barbarian happy with delusions and illusions. If you just see to it he has an ample supply, he will cause you very little trouble. It has the advantage, moreover, of killing him both psychologically and physically, without arousing any protest on his part.

But you're the Dictator!

What's your brilliant solution to the problem of the born Barbarian in your own family . . . ?

(A
reader replies:)

Dear Mr. Campbell:

I agree with your January editorial, but it won't do the people it's aimed at any good.

Since you contend that the Barbarian is a genetic type, it must also be true that the "social-liberal" is a genetic type—he
enjoys
fooling with Barbarians, just as physicists and chemists enjoy fooling with dangerous materials. The Barbarian can't learn to like working constructively, and the "social-liberal" can't learn that the Barbarian is a hopeless case.

Therefore the "social-liberal" will keep banging his head against the brick wall of the Barbarian's character until something gives—either the liberal's skull, or society's patience with the Barbarian.

When society becomes sufficiently impatient with the Barbarian for his brutality toward the citizen-social-liberal, the Barbarian will simply have to go—whether through spontaneous actions of mass emotion, or through the passage of new laws, written or unwritten, making it a crime to be a Barbarian.

R.H.R

Atlanta, Georgia

That isn't the way history has answered that problem. What has happened—Roman Empire for example—is that the Barbarians take over the civilization, squander the accumulated wealth for a few generations, then amuse themselves fighting among the ruins. This kills off the soft-headed Citizen type that produces the social-liberals, a large percentage of the pure barbarians, and the hard-headed citizen types that—as post-graduate barbarians—can out-fight, out-organize, and out-think the barbarians regain control and start rebuilding.

That full cycle, in its pure form, doesn't often get a chance to manifest itself; usually citizen-dominated surrounding cultures step in when the barbarian induced anarchy disintegrates the culture. Rome demonstrated the full cycle, because there weren't any rival nearby citizen-cultures extant at that time.

The fully developed Citizen actually seems to be every bit as hard-headed, ruthless, and dangerous a fighter as any barbarian
—
he just uses his ruthless determination wisely instead of egocentrically.

I write this a month after
Challenger
went down. It is still no easy thing to write about. One thing is plain: no one knew better than the Seven that exploring new frontiers can never be risk-free; and if you had asked them, on that cold January morning, whether we should cancel the manned space program in the event that
Challenger
was lost with all hands, they would have thought you mad. They of all understood that we must continue.

The careful text books measure
(Let all who build beware!)
The load, the shock, the pressure
Material can bear.
So, when the buckled girder
Lets down the grinding span,
The blame of loss, or murder,
 Is laid upon the man.
Not on the Stuff—the Man!
 

But in our daily dealing
With stone and steel, we find
The Gods have no such feeling
Of justice toward mankind.
To no set gauge they make us,—
For no laid course prepare—
And presently overtake us
With loads we cannot bear.
Too merciless to bear.
 

The prudent text-books give it
In tables at the end—
The stress that shears a rivet
Or makes a tie-bar bend—
What traffic wrecks macadam—
What concrete should endure—
But we, poor Sons of Adam,
Have no such literature,
To warn us or make sure!
 

We hold all Earth to plunder—
All Time and Space as well—
Too wonder-stale to wonder
At each new miracle;
Till, in the mid-illusion
Of Godhead 'neath our hand,
Falls multiple confusion
On all we did or planned.
The mighty works we planned.
 

We only of Creation
(Oh, luckier bridge and rail!)
Abide the twin-damnation—
To fail and know we fail.
Yet we—by which sole token
We know we once were Gods—
Take shame in being broken
However great the odds—
The Burden or the Odds.
 

Oh, veiled and secret Power
Whose paths we seek in vain,
Be with us in our hour
Of overthrow and pain;
That we—by which sure token
We know thy ways are true—
Inspite of being broken,
Because of being broken,
May rise and build anew.
Stand up and build anew!