A Visitor from the Future
Posted in Personal Stuff by John E. Pannell on November 8th, 2006 at 4:32 am “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
– George Santayana
This post has absolutely nothing to do with patch collecting, rather it’s about something that was shared with me earlier this morning. Someone pointed me to the blog of Dan Simmons, a science-fiction author whose work I have not read until now. Back in April 2006 he posted a letter on his blog in the form of a short story.
Those who know me, know I like speculative fiction even though I’ve read less of it than I’d care to admit. Some of it is pulp fiction trash, other works are very thought provoking. This post by Mr. Simmons falls in that latter group.
He writes:
…You were a philosophy major or minor at that podunk little college you went to long ago, said the Time Traveler. “Do you remember what Category Error is?
It rang a bell. But I was too irritated at hearing my alma mater being called a “podunk little college to be able to concentrate fully.
“ll tell you what it is, said the Time Traveler. “In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management, Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means.”
I waited. Finally I said firmly, “You can’t go to war with a religion. Or, I mean . . . sure, you could . . . the Crusades and all that . . . but it would be wrong.”
The Time Traveler sipped his Scotch and looked at me. He said, “Let me give you an analogy . . .”
God, I hated and distrusted analogies. I said nothing.
“Let’s imagine,” said the Time Traveler, “that on December eighth, Nineteen forty-one, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress and asked them to declare war on aviation.”
“That’s absurd,” I said.
“Is it?” asked the Time Traveler. The American battleships, cruisers, harbor installations, Army barracks, and airfields at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in Hawaii were all struck by Japanese aircraft. Imagine if the next day Roosevelt had declared war on aviation . . . threatening to wipe it out wherever we found it. Committing all the resources of the United States of America to defeating aviation, so help us God.
“That’s just stupid”, I said. If I’d ever been afraid of this Time Traveler, I wasn’t now. He was obviously a mental defective. “The planes, the Japanese planes,” I said, “were just a method of attack . . . a means . . . it wasn’t aviation that attacked us at Pearl Harbor, but the Empire of Japan. We declared war on Japan and a few days later its ally, Germany, lived up to its treaty with the Japanese and declared war on us. If we’d declared war on aviation, on goddamned airplanes rather than the empire and ideology that launched them, we’d never have . . .
I stopped. What had he called it? Category Error. Making the problem unsolvable through your inability “ or fear “ of defining it correctly…
Do I have your attention yet? The rest of his message can be read at http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm. I strongly encourage you all to do so. Even if you disagree with his premise — especially if you disagree — it’s an interesting look into what the future could bring.
There has been a lot of traffic on this page recently. Should this page be inaccessible, you can find Google’s cache of it here: http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:Qu5wMpEIpkYJ:www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm
As Santayana said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
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