Bully for Darwin (Actually, Several Bullies for Darwin)

IN2001 I received a letter from a group that had learned that I was skeptical of modern evolutionary theory. They wanted to know if I would be willing to add my name to the statement mentioned previously in these pages: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutations and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” I was happy to respond in the affirmative, and a list with a hundred names was soon published. Most of the signers had doctoral degrees in science, with a handful having Ph.Ds. in fields that, while not part of the natural or life sciences, gave them a valuable and relevant perspective on the evolution question—e.g., engineering and mathematics. Today close to a thousand have signed this Dissent from Darwinism statement.5Its purpose is to show that there are serious scientists who question Darwin’s theory. I am confident, incidentally, that the number of names on the list only scratches the surface, since I know scientists who, while skeptical of modern Darwinism, have not signed the document because they are afraid of the consequences. The danger is far from imaginary. Immediately after the list became public, I received an email from the late Skip Evans of a pro-evolution lobbying group in the United States, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Evans was a militant atheist and defender of evolution. He wanted to clarify my motives for signing and inquired if I understood the kind of dangerous people with whom I was in contact. I knew too many good things about the scientists and scholars who had started the dissent list, and too much off-putting stuff about the pro-evolution NCSE, to be impressed by his warnings. However, I could imagine a scientist with little knowledge of either group being taken in by the NCSE’s well-poisoning campaign.

Since 2010 I have been on the advisory board of the German scholarly associationStudiengemeinschaft Wort und Wissen,and I have spoken twice (in 2009 and 2014) at their annual main conference. In the invitation letter to join their advisory board, they were considerate enough to warn me of a potential negative consequence. “In this connection we want to inform you that there is in Germany a very active group of confessing atheistic evolutionary biologists who carefully follow every move of our organization and who do not avoid ad hominem attacks,” the letter explained. “It is possible that as a member of the scientific advisory board you personally can become a target. You should take this into consideration when you think about your participation.” The group had no motivation to exaggerate about this. They were, after all, hoping I would join their advisory board. It was purely out of a sense of fair play that they warned me at all.

Their warning, of course, did not shock me, since I had long been a target of the evolutionary materialists. I have already mentioned several such examples in these pages. Here’s another: I applied for an assistant professorship in biochemistry in 1984 at Helsinki University of Technology (TKK). I later learned from the biochemistry professor who had recommended me for the position that in the meeting of the professors’ council where the hiring decision was made, one professor stood up and strongly opposed my nomination. A person so badly mistaken about biological origins cannot be a teacher in this university, he insisted. My former professor told me that he had to defend my application, telling the others in the meeting, “We are not here to discuss Leisola’s world-view but his competence in biochemistry.” Most of the other professors, he said, clearly felt uneasy in the situation and were looking at the walls.

 In 1987 I was a consultant for the Finnish Sugar company. (In 1989 the name was changed to Cultor.) I worked at the company first as a senior scientist, then as a department manager, and beginning in 1991, as a research director. Later I heard that another consultant of the company had advised the executive director not to hire me due to my questionable views on origins and my involvement in Christian student ministry.6

Wilder-Smith had similar stories to relate. He told me how a Professor Hoimar von Ditfurth tried to intimidate him by contacting universities where he had obtained his degrees to expose Wilder-Smith’s supposed deception. He was convinced that no one could get three doctoral degrees in such a short time and at the same time become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). Reading and Geneva confirmed the degrees, but the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) did not find any information in their files of such a person. Ditfurth wrote to Wilder-Smith that he had exposed his deceit. “You have not obtained a doctoral degree at ETH!” he wrote.

Wilder-Smith called ETH and they immediately found him in their records with his correct name. Ditfurth had misspelled Wilder-Smith’s name when he made the inquiry. ETH wrote a letter to Ditfurth and explained the situation. Next Ditfurth contacted the Royal Society of Chemistry inquiring into the authenticity of Wilder-Smith’s title of FRSC. The society was not impressed with the inquiry and did not even care to answer and passed the letter on to Wilder-Smith.

Ditfurth wasn’t the only evolutionist who tried to play this game. After an Oxford Union debate, Richard Dawkins let it be known that no one by the name of Wilder-Smith had studied at Oxford University and graduated from there.7In reality, Wilder-Smith had studied at Oxford from 1933 to 1935 and finalized his doctoral degree at Reading. If Dawkins had taken only a little care in his investigation of the matter, he might have discovered this.

 These incidents suggest how headlong some people can be in their efforts to discredit scientists skeptical of Darwinism.

And by the way, Dawkins wasn’t finished sliming Wilder-Smith. All the information concerning the debate between Dawkins and Wilder-Smith has been lost from Oxford Union’s files. When Dawkins was asked about the debate in May 2003, he admitted that the debate had taken place but then added, “Wilder-Smith I remember as a genial old buffoon... I am not interested in following up Wilder-Smith’s history. The man is too unimportant to waste time over... Wilder-Smith’s account lies somewhere between fantasy, lies, and paranoid delusion.”8Venomous much? The tirade is all the more shameful in light of this: Although Dawkins is a gifted writer and popularizer, Wilder-Smith’s lasting contributions in the field of experimental biology (see above) dwarf those of Richard Dawkins. (A review in the journalNatureof Dawkins’s career autobiography describes the man as a gifted “lyricist” but adds that “a curious stasis underlies his thought, with his view of the genome “grounded in 1970s assumptions.”9) Dawkins’ heavy-handed dismissal fits very well his style. Dawkins is, after all, the one who used these labels for evolution skeptics, including undergraduates: “little fool,” “pathetic little idiot,”10“ignorant,” “stupid,” “insane,” and “wicked.”11Sometimes the attacks go well beyond words. I am just now reading an official report12by a U.S. congressional subcommittee that investigated the treatment of evolutionary biologist Richard von Sternberg. (See Figure 8.2.) Sternberg has two doctoral degrees—one in evolutionary biology and another in theoretical biology. He worked in the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Institutes of Health and in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. He also was the editor-in-chief of a science journal published by the Smithsonian, theProceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. One of his responsibilities was to sort submitted papers and send them to two or three experts for peer review.

As is normally the case with peer-reviewed science journals, these reviews happen anonymously. The author does not know who the reviewers are and, based on their report, the editor makes a decision on publication. The decision may be acceptance, a call for minor or major corrections, or rejection.

Stephen Meyer submitted a paper, “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories,” which considered intelligent design as a possible explanation for the Cambrian explosion, a geological period in which a large number of basic animal body types (not just new species but whole new phyla) appeared abruptly. The three peer reviewers read the paper and unanimously favored its publication. Sternberg accepted the manuscript and it was published.

Then the persecution started.

The hue and cry went up: Science and religion had been mixed! If the paper wasn’t immediately retracted, the reputation of the world-renowned Smithsonian Institution would be forever tarnished! Together with the pro-evolution NCSE, the Smithsonian hatched a plan to destroy Sternberg’s career. As the congressional report details, in an early stage of this campaign, Sternberg’s friends were questioned and false rumors were spread both inside and outside the Smithsonian. The rumors grew so wild that finally a colleague of Sternberg sent Sternberg’scurriculum vitaeto members of the Smithsonian as a proof of his impressive record of scientific accomplishment. Meanwhile, those gunning for Sternberg insisted that the reviewers must have been know-nothing supporters of intelligent design. Sternberg’s religious motives were also questioned and his privileges narrowed. His keys were taken away, he was transferred to a much inferior office space, and he was denied access to scientific samples. The atmosphere became so hostile that Sternberg eventually decided to leave the Smithsonian.

At that point Sternberg’s professional career seemed all but ruined. Who would hire such a suspicious person? Two official investigations were made and all accusations were shown to be groundless and the rumors unfounded, but no one involved at the Smithsonian corrected the rumors or apologized. (Sternberg describes on his webpage the drama of those days.13) In the midst of these events, Sternberg came to Finland and faced similar turmoil. The email discussion I mentioned in Chapter 3, the one that unfolded on the university’s professor list, referred to the incident at the Smithsonian and it was one reason given for canceling the ID seminar.

Later I got a telephone call from one of Sternberg’s friends, who asked if I could offer Sternberg a job in my laboratory till the situation calmed down. I promised to take him onto my team, but he found another job in the United States.

This story places in a whole new light the charge that intelligent design researchers are not legitimate because they do not publish their work in peer-reviewed science journals. In fact, they have had several such articles published in peer-reviewed journals. But is it any wonder it doesn’t happen more often, given what happened to Richard Sternberg?14

Many science journals will under no condition publish a paper that explicitly makes a case for intelligent design. And many journal editors who might have considered doing so will think twice after seeing what Sternberg went through. This was undoubtedly a key reason why so much energy was poured into harassing Sternberg. Darwinists didn’t just want to punish him for heterodoxy. They wanted to make an example of him.

From: HERETIC

ONE SCIENTIST’S JOURNEY FROM DARWIN TO DESIGN

Matti Leisola

Jonathan Witttt

Taking Leave Of Darwin A Longtime Agnostic Discovers The Case For Design

Description

University professor Neil Thomas was a committed Darwinist and agnostic—until an investigation of evolutionary theory led him to a startling conclusion: “I had been conned!” As he studied the work of Darwin’s defenders, he found himself encountering tactics eerily similar to the methods of political brainwashing he had studied as a scholar. Thomas felt impelled to write a book as a sort of warning call to humanity: “Beware! You have been fooled!” The result is Taking Leave of Darwin, a wide-ranging history of the evolution debate. Thomas uncovers many formidable Darwin opponents that most people know nothing about, ably distills crucial objections raised early and late against Darwinism, and shows that those objections have been explained away but never effectively answered. Thomas’s deeply personal conclusion? Intelligent design is not only possible but, indeed, is presently the most reasonable explanation for the origin of life’s great diversity of forms.

**

PROLOGUE

WHAT IF CHARLES DARWIN GOT IT WRONG? WHAT IF ALL THE crises, alienations, and losses of faith we associate with the aftermath of the publication of The  Origin of Species1 had been triggered by a false prospectus? What if the latent but ever-present hostilities between science and religion of the last 160 years had been fomented by the equivalent of a “dodgy dossier”?

Like many others who “learned about” Darwin in school, I internalized his ascent-of-man narrative without demur, through what in retrospect seems like little more than a passive process of osmosis. By the second half of the twentieth century, Darwinism had become accepted as part and parcel of the mental furniture and indeed the fashionable thinking of the day, such that it would have seemed politically incorrect (and worse, un-hip) to challenge the truth-status of The Origin of Species. I must certainly have thought so since I recollect showing off my (superficial) knowledge of Darwinism to my first girlfriend, and doing so absolutely convinced that what I was saying was uncontestable.

To be sure, it had sometimes struck me that The Origin of Species contained some strange and counter-intuitive ideas, but I told myself that modern science is often counter-intuitive2 (remembering the vast indeterminacies thrown up by recent advances in quantum theory), and I gave the matter little further thought.  Since Darwin had been fêted by the scientific community for more than a century and a half, I deferred to what I imagined must be the properly peer-reviewed orthodoxy. Surely, I reasoned, any opposition to Darwin must be confined to the peripheral ranks of Biblical fundamentalists and young-earth creationists.

This complaisant (and complacent) stance was rather shaken when more recently I encountered some less easily disregarded opposition emerging from some of Darwin’s latter-day peers in the ranks of scientific academe. Collectively, these publications made me alive to the possibility that the grand story of evolution by natural selection was little more than a creation myth to satisfy the modern age; and I found it impossible to ignore the dispute as being a “merely academic” issue, for if there is one subject which has had huge, often convulsive implications for the generality of humankind, it is Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Any dispute concerning Darwin must necessarily have far-reaching implications beyond the guild of the biological sciences. It is not given to many to be able to muster the kind of equanimity shown by Charles  James Fox Bunbury (brother-in-law to nineteenth-century geologist Sir  Charles Lyell), who opined that, mortifying as the notion of human descent from jellyfish might be, “it will not make much difference practically”3; or to equal Dr.  Johnson’s priceless reaction to the notion held by an eccentric nobleman (Lord Monboddo) that man could be descended from apes: “Conjecture as to things useful, is good, but conjecture as to what would be useless to know, such as whether men went on all fours, is very idle.”4T he majority of our Victorian forbears certainly could not find it within themselves to be so philosophical about a theory of human evolution that projected them into “a suddenly mechanistic world without a mechanic,” to borrow a phrase used by  Noel Annan in his biography of Sir  Leslie Stephen (said to have lost his faith after reading Darwin).5 This sense of being cast adrift from the erstwhile reassurances of the Christian faith was at painful variance with the paradigm of a providentially directed cosmos which had prevailed throughout the Christian centuries up to 1859.

In addition, when Darwin discharged his famous Parthian shot twelve years after publication of The Origin of Species in the  Descent of Man (1871),6 with its notorious claim of humankind’s consanguinity with simian forbears, this amounted to a rather unambiguous demotion of humankind to a considerably lesser place in the scheme of things than its wonted pedestal just “a little lower than the angels,”7 a demotion later exacerbated by  Sigmund Freud’s conclusions about the “hominid” nature of our subconscious minds.

It struck me that if a group of tenured academics and other responsible scientists could no longer support the claims on which these devastating inferences depended, and on which the worldview of much of the West presently rests, then this was surely a matter of some existential moment. Such disquieting possibilities drove me to investigate for myself the dispute between pro- and contra-Darwin factions. I make no apology for having made the attempt to read my way into a subject for which I have no formal qualifications, since my researches have led me to the conviction that the subject is of too universal an import to be left entirely in the hands of subject specialists, some of whom exhibit an alarming degree of bias and intransigent parti pris unconducive to the dispassionate sifting of scientific evidence.

Few coming to this subject can of course claim to occupy that fabled Archimedean vantage point of “seeing things clearly, and seeing them whole,” and I make no such hyperbolic claim for myself. However, given the dismayingly sectarian nature of many evolution debates, it is a tedious but unavoidable necessity that I should add here at the outset that I have long been a non-theist and can at least give the assurance that the critique which follows will be based solely on rational criteria and principles.

The book is structured as follows. In the first chapter, I introduce the broad subject of how Charles Darwin and  Alfred Russel Wallace came to formulate their theory of evolution by natural selection.

The second chapter looks at Darwin’s intellectual formation from boyhood to maturity and the immediate reception of his Origin of Species with non-specialist British readers.

Chapter 3 turns to the mostly critical nineteenth-century reviews and receptions of The Origin of Species in the years and decades just after its publication, before Darwin had become the respected sage of his later years. The refreshing honesty of the early responses gives added clarity to the voices of dissent from Darwinism that were always present but which have become more insistent in recent decades. Those more recent responses are also covered in this chapter, together with the fraught issue of the fossil evidence marshalled to support Darwin’s claims (which is exiguous and has occasionally even been proven fraudulent). We then look at what is in effect Darwin’s companion volume to the Origin, namely The Descent of Man.

The fourth chapter considers those cosmological discoveries in the last half century with a bearing on the question of how the earth gained the unique supportive biosphere which enabled the evolution of plants, animals, and humans. Thereafter I unpack, and in some cases unmask, the frequently unacknowledged religious or anti-religious attitudes which have scarred the search for solidly based empirical findings for more than a century and a half.

In Chapter 5 I turn to the subject of what we can reasonably expect of the scientific method and what not to expect in the perennial quest to reveal the mysteries of life. In particular I question whether unrealistic expectations have led to questionable conclusions and issue an open invitation to subject specialists to reappraise the whole subject of natural selection as an evolutionary pathway.

In the final chapter I draw together threads from previous chapters to form a concluding synthesis. I round off the volume with some reflections on how researching and writing about this subject has brought me to a place I would have found surprising before I embarked on the project, especially regarding the intersection of science and religion. A short epilogue is also appended.

**

EPILOGUE 

WHEN MY WIFE AND I VISIT RURAL BRITTANY, ONE OF OUR FAVORITE ports of call is a lovely coastal church called St. Jean du Doigt (Saint John of the Finger), where the eponymous digit of the apostle is popularly supposed to be stored. For us this quaint belief adds to the unspoiled charm of the Breton countryside. Historically the medieval practice of collecting saints’ relics is now of course commonly regarded as a form of “pious fraud,” a means of buttressing the power and influence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. What struck me recently is that the instrumentalization of an unverifiable, non-evidence-based hypothesis to prop up today’s secular ideology presents a telling mirror image of the medieval practice. Given the secularizing volte-face experienced in post-Christian Europe, an important motive for giving such an easy pass to the quasi-magical notion of natural selection seems to be the desire to deter people from entertaining any notion of divine creation.

If anything, this modern form of hoodwinking seems less forgivable than its medieval variant, since it is so out of line with the values of our “age of the masses” (to borrow the title of Michael Biddiss’s classic), an age of universal suffrage and democracy where each individual has the right to make up his or her mind. To allow and abet a deception to be practiced upon people in the attempt to prevent them making up their own minds about something as fundamental as their preferred existential position in life is to my mind as misguided and paternalistic a practice as any perpetrated by the medieval Church.

It is now half a human lifetime since Michael Denton issued his decisive critique of modern evolutionary theory, and yet many biologists continue on, business as usual. School textbooks still purvey the same broadly Darwinian interpretation of life, including the presentation of “evidences” for evolution that have long since been discredited.1 Richard Dawkins was recently given a very easy ride by Mark Urban on BBC’s Newsnight program.2 And in the teeth of all empirical evidence to the contrary, contemporary Darwinism has become accepted as the most grown-up form of understanding of humankind’s existential status by the many who, I suspect, have had little time or opportunity to “fact check” the propositions they are buying into. For more and more people, this acceptance seems to be a wholly unexamined assumption.

However, not all have been so unenquiring or supine, and Richard Dawkins has even been stung to lament the fact that outsiders have presumed to question the assumptions of biology specialists whereas they disregard what goes on in other branches of science such as, say, quantum theory. The reason for this is of course (as he must surely know) that his particular discipline holds such vast implications for the existential situation of all men and women, for the very “ground of their being,” such that many quite rightly find it impossible to ignore. If nothing else has been achieved in this short volume, I hope, by presenting views which differ from current orthodoxy, to have given readers the chance to reflect with me on the many problematical facets of modern evolutionary theory, and to grapple with the possible implications of evidence that does not easily accord with materialism.

My own position, as a long-standing humanist with no allegiance to any revealed faith, remains that we each have to come to terms with an inscrutable universe in the best, and most morally accountable, way we can. Others should be free to come to their own conclusions on an issue in which there may be no unalloyed truth-bearers, only truth-seekers, in whose number I very much still count myself.

Taking Leave Of Darwin

A Longtime Agnostic Discovers The Case For Design

Neil Thomas

The Urbicide Of Palestine

 

The confidence the Jewish command in early April had in their capacity not only to take over, but also to cleanse the areas the UN had granted to the Jewish state, can be gauged from the way, immediately after operation  Nachshon, they turned their attention to the major urban centres of Palestine. These were systematically attacked throughout the rest of the month, as UN agents and British officials stood by and watched indifferently.

The offensive against the urban centres began with Tiberias. As soon as news of Deir Yassin and the massacre three days later (12 April) in the nearby village of Khirbat Nasr al-Din reached the large Palestinian population in the city, many fled. 11 The people were also petrified by the daily heavy bombardments by the Jewish forces situated in the hills overlooking this historic, ancient capital on the Sea of Galilee, where 6000 Jews and 5000 Arabs and their forbears had for centuries co-existed peacefully. British obstruction meant that the ALA had only managed to supply the city with a force of about thirty volunteers. These were no match for the Hagana forces, who rolled barrel bombs down from the hills and used loudspeakers to broadcast terrifying noises to frighten the population – an early version of the supersonic flights over Beirut in 1983 and Gaza in 2005, which human rights organisations have decried as criminal acts. Tiberias fell on 18 April. 12The British played a questionable role in the attack on Tiberias. At first they offered to protect the Palestinian residents, but soon urged them to negotiate a general evacuation of the town with the Jewish forces. King Abdullah of Jordan was more ‘practical’: he sent thirty trucks to help move women and children. In his memoirs he claimed he was convinced another Deir Yassin was about to occur. 13 British officers later professed to having had similar apprehensions, but documents showing heavy British pressure on the community’s leaders to leave do not reveal any great concern about an impending massacre. Some would say that the British thereby prevented Tiberias’ Arab residents from being massacred; others would argue that they collaborated with the expellers. The role of the British is much clearer, and far more negative, in the next chapters of Palestine’s urbicide, when Haifa and Jaffa were occupied.

The De-Arabisation of Haifa

As mentioned previously, operations in Haifa were retroactively approved and welcomed by the Consultancy, although not necessarily initiated by it. The early terrorization of the city’s Arab population the previous December had prompted many among the Palestinian elite to leave for their residences in Lebanon and Egypt until calm returned to their city. It is  hard to estimate how many fell within this category: most historians put the figure at around 15,000 to 20,000. 14On 12 January 1948, a local leader called Farid Sa’ad, the manager of the Arab Bank in Haifa, and a member of the local national committee, telegraphed Dr. Husayn Khalidi, the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, in despair: ‘It is good the Jews do not know the truth.’ 15 The ‘truth’ was that the urban elite in Palestine had collapsed after a month of heavy Jewish shelling and aggression. However, the Jews knew exactly what was going on. Indeed, the Consultancy was well aware that the rich and well-to-do had already left in December, that the Arab arms were not arriving, and the Arab governments did little beyond airing their inflammatory war rhetoric in all directions so as to hide their inaction and unwillingness to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians.

The departure of the affluent meant that between 55,000 and 60,000 Palestinians in Haifa were leaderless and, given the relatively small number of armed Arab volunteers in the town, at the mercy of the Jewish forces in April 1948. This was despite the presence of British troops in the city, who were theoretically responsible for the locals’ safety and well-being.

This phase of the Jewish operation around the city was given the ominous name of ‘Scissors’ (Misparayim), indicating both the idea of a pincer movement and of cutting the city off from its Palestinian hinterland. Haifa, like Tiberias, had been allocated in the UN plan to the Jewish state: leaving the only major port in the country in Jewish control was yet another manifestation of the unfair deal the Palestinians were offered in the UN peace proposal. The Jews wanted the port city but without the 75,000 Palestinians who lived there, and in April 1948, they achieved their objective.

As Palestine’s main port, Haifa was also the last station on the trail of the British pull-out. The British had been expected to stay until August, but in February 1948 they decided to bring the date of departure forward to May. Their troops were consequently present in great numbers and they still had the legal and, one could argue, moral authority to impose law and order in the city. Their conduct, as many British politicians were later to admit, forms one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the British Empire in the Middle East. 16 The Jewish campaign of terrorization, begun in December, included heavy shelling, sniper fire, rivers of ignited oil and fuel sent down the mountain-side, and detonated barrels of explosives, and went on for the first months of 1948, but it intensified in early April. On 18 April,  the day the Palestinians of Tiberias were put to flight, Major General Hugh Stockwell, the British commander of the Northern Sector seated in Haifa, summoned the Jewish authorities in the city to his office and informed them that in two days the British forces would be removed from locations in which they had been serving as a buffer zone between the two communities. This ‘buffer’ was the only obstacle preventing Jewish forces from a direct assault on, and takeover of, the Palestinian areas, where more than 50,000 people still resided. The road was wide open for the de-Arabisation of Haifa.

This task was given to the Carmeli Brigade, one of the top units of the Jewish army (there were brigades of ‘lesser quality’ such as Qiryati, made up of Arab Jews who were sent only on looting or less attractive ‘missions’; the definition of Qiryati as possessing a ‘lesser human quality’ can be found in the Israeli documents). 17 The 2000 Carmeli Brigade troops faced a poorly equipped army of 500 local and mainly Lebanese volunteers, who had inferior arms and limited ammunition, and certainly nothing to match the armoured cars and mortars on the Jewish side.

The removal of the British barrier meant Operation Scissors could be replaced by Operation ‘Cleansing the Leaven’ (bi‘ur hametz). The Hebrew term stands for total cleansing and refers to the Jewish religious practice of eliminating all traces of bread or flour from people’s homes on the eve of the Passover, since as these are forbidden during the days of the feast. Brutally appropriate, the cleansing of Haifa, in which the Palestinians were the bread and the flour, began on Passover’s eve, 21 April.

Stockwell, the British commander, knew in advance about the impending Jewish attack, and earlier that same day invited the ‘Palestinian leadership’ in the city for a consultation. He met with a group of four exhausted men, who became the Arab community’s leaders for the hour, as none of the positions they held officially prepared them for the crucial historic moment that unfolded in Stockwell’s office on that morning. Previous correspondence between them and Stockwell shows they trusted him as the keeper of law and order in the city. The British officer now advised them that it would be better for their people to leave the city, where they and most of their families had lived and worked ever since the mid-eighteenth century, when Haifa came to prominence as a modern town. Gradually, as they listened to Stockwell and their confidence in him faded, they realised that they would be unable to safeguard their community, and so they prepared for the worst: as the British would not protect them, they were  doomed to be expelled. They told Stockwell they wanted to leave in an organised manner. The Carmeli Brigade made sure they would leave in the midst of carnage and havoc. 18On their way to meet the British commander, the four men could already hear the Jewish loudspeakers urging the Palestinian women and children to leave before it was too late. In other parts of the town, loudspeakers delivered a diametrically opposing message from the town’s Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levi, a decent person by all accounts, who beseeched the people to stay and promised no harm would befall them. But it was Mordechai Maklef, the operation officer of the Carmeli Brigade, not Levi who called the shots. Maklef orchestrated the cleansing campaign, and the orders he issued to his troops were plain and simple: ‘Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.’ (He later became the Israeli army Chief of Staff.) 19When these orders were executed promptly within the 1.5 square kilometres where thousands of Haifa’s defenceless Palestinians were still residing, the shock and terror were such that, without packing any of their belongings or even knowing what they were doing, people began leaving en masse. In panic they headed towards the port where they hoped to find a ship or a boat to take them away from the city. As soon as they had fled, Jewish troops broke into and looted their houses.

When Golda Meir, one of the senior Zionist leaders, visited Haifa a few days later, she at first found it hard to suppress a feeling of horror when she entered homes where cooked food still stood on the tables, children had left toys and books on the floor, and life appeared to have frozen in an instant. Meir had come to Palestine from the US, where her family had fled in the wake of pogroms in Russia, and the sights she witnessed that day reminded her of the worst stories her family had told her about the Russian brutality against Jews decades earlier. 20 But this apparently left no lasting mark on her or her associates’ determination to continue with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In the early hours of dawn on 22 April, the people began streaming to the harbour. As the streets in that part of the city were already overcrowded with people seeking escape, the Arab community’s self-appointed leadership tried to instil some order into the chaotic scene. Loudspeakers could be heard, urging people to gather in the old marketplace next to the port, and seek shelter there until an orderly evacuation by sea could be  organised. ‘The Jews have occupied Stanton road and are on their way’, the loudspeakers blared.

The Carmeli Brigade’s war book, chronicling its actions in the war, shows little compunction about what followed thereafter. The brigade’s officers, aware that people had been advised to gather near the port’s gate, ordered their men to station three-inch mortars on the mountain slopes overlooking the market and the port – where the Rothschild Hospital stands today – and to bombard the gathering crowds below. The plan was to make sure people would have no second thoughts, and to guarantee that the flight would be in one direction only. Once the Palestinians were gathered in the marketplace – an architectural gem that dated back to the Ottoman period, covered with white arched canopies, but destroyed beyond recognition after the creation of the State of Israel – they were an easy target for the Jewish marksmen. 21Haifa’s market was less than one hundred yards from what was then the main gate to the port. When the shelling began, this was the natural destination for the panic-stricken Palestinians. The crowd now broke into the port, pushing aside the policemen who guarded the gate. Scores of people stormed the boats that were moored there, and began to flee the city. We can learn what happened next from the horrifying recollections of some of the survivors, published recently. Here is one of them:

Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers. 22

The scenes were so horrendous that when reports reached London, they spurred the British government into action as some officials, probably for the first time, began to realise the enormity of the disaster their inaction was creating in Palestine. The British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, was furious with Stockwell’s behaviour, but Field-Marshal Montgomery, the chief of the imperial staff and thus Stockwell’s boss, defended him. 23 The last communication between Haifa’s Palestinian leaders and Stockwell took the form of a letter that speaks volumes:

We feel distressed and profoundly aggrieved by the lack of sympathy on the part of the British Authorities to render aid to the wounded although they have been requested to do so. 24

 Safad is Next 25

By the time Haifa fell, only a few towns in Palestine were still free, among them Acre, Nazareth and Safad. The battle over Safad began in the middle of April and lasted until 1 May. This was not due to any stubborn resistance from the Palestinians or the ALA volunteers, although they did make a more serious effort here than elsewhere. Rather, tactical considerations directed the Jewish campaign first to the rural hinterland around Safad, and only then did they move on the town itself.

In Safad there were 9500 Arabs and 2400 Jews. Most of the Jews were Ultra-Orthodox and had no interest at all in Zionism, let alone in fighting their Arab neighbours. This, and the relatively gradual way the Jewish takeover developed, may have given the eleven members of the local national committee the illusion that they would fare better than other urban centres. The committee was a fairly representative body that included the town’s notables, ulama (religious dignitaries), merchants, landowners and ex-activists from the 1936 Revolt, of which Safad had been a major centre. 26 The false sense of security was reinforced by the relatively large presence of Arab volunteers in Safad, totaling more than 400, although only half of them were armed with rifles. Skirmishes in the town had begun in early January, triggered by an aggressive reconnaissance incursion by some Hagana members into the Palestinian neighbourhoods and market. A charismatic Syrian officer, Ihasn Qam Ulmaz, held the defences against repeated attacks by the Hagana’s commando unit, the Palmach.

At first, these Palmach attacks were sporadic and ineffective, as its units focused their actions on the rural area around the town. But once they were through with the villages in Safad’s vicinity (described later in this chapter) they could concentrate fully on the town itself, on 29 April 1948. Unfortunately for the people of Safad, at precisely the moment they needed him most, they lost the able Ulmaz. The volunteers army’s new commander in the Galilee, Adib Shishakly (to become one of Syria’s rulers in the 1950s) replaced him with one of the ALA’s more incompetent officers. However, it is doubtful whether even Ulmaz would have fared better in view of the imbalance of power: 1000 well-trained Palmach troops confronting 400 Arab volunteers, one of many local imbalances that show the falsity of the myth of a Jewish David facing an Arab Goliath in 1948. 27 The Palmach troops drove most of the people out, only allowing 100 old people to stay on, though not for long. On 5 June, Ben-Gurion noted dryly in his dairy: ‘Abraham Hanuki, from [Kibbutz] Ayelet Hashahar, told me that since there were only 100 old people left in Safad they were expelled to Lebanon.’ 28The Phantom City of Jerusalem

The urbicide did not skip Jerusalem, which quickly changed from the ‘Eternal City’, as a recent book by Salim Tamari puts it, into a ‘Phantom City’. 29 Jewish troops shelled, attacked and occupied the western Arab neighbourhoods in April 1948. Some of the richer Palestinian inhabitants of these more affluent sections had left town a few weeks before. The rest were expelled from houses that still testify to the architectural beauty of the neighbourhoods the Palestinian elite had started building outside the walls of the Old City by the end of the nineteenth century. In recent years some of these masterpieces have begun to disappear: real estate fervour, architectural eccentricism and constructors’ greed have combined to transform these elegant residential areas into streets of monstrous villas and extravagant palaces for rich American Jews who tend to flock to the city in their old age.

The British troops were still in Palestine when these areas were cleansed and occupied, but they remained aloof and did not intervene. Only in one area, Shaykh Jarrah – the first Palestinian neighborhood built outside the Old City’s walls, where the leading notable families such as the Husaynis, the Nashashibis and the Khalidis had their domicile – did a local British commander decide to step in.

The instruction to the Jewish forces was very clear in April 1948. ‘Occupy the neighbourhood and destroy all its houses.’ 30 The cleansing attack began on 24 April 1948 but was halted by the British before it could be fully implemented. We have vital testimony of what happened in Shaykh Jarrah from the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, Dr Husayn Khalidi, who lived there: his desperate telegrams to the Mufti were often intercepted by the Israeli intelligence and are kept in the Israeli archives. 31 Khalidi reports how the British commander’s troops saved the neighbourhood, with the exception of the 20 houses the Hagana succeeded in blowing up. This confrontational British stance here indicates how very different the fate of many Palestinians would have been had British troops elsewhere  intervened, as both the imperatives of the Mandatory charter and the terms of the UN partition resolution required them to do.

British inaction was the rule, however, as Khalidi’s frantic appeals highlight as regards the rest of the Jerusalemite neighbourhoods, especially in the western part of the city. These areas had come under repeated shelling from the first day of January and here, unlike in Shaykh Jarrah, the British played a truly diabolical role, as they disarmed the few Palestinian residents who had weapons, promising to protect the people against Jewish attacks, but then instantly reneged on that promise.

In one of his telegraphs in early January, Dr Khalidi reported to Al-Hajj Amin, in Cairo, how almost every day a crowd of angry citizens would demonstrate in front of his house seeking leadership and calling for help. Doctors in the crowd told Khalidi that the hospitals were overcrowded with the injured and that they were running out of shrouds to cover the dead bodies. There was total anarchy and people were in a state of panic.

But worse was to come. 32 A few days after the aborted attack on Shaykh Jarrah, with the help of the same three-inch mortar bombs used in Haifa, Palestinian Northern and Western Jerusalem were hammered by endless shelling. Only Shu’fat held on and refused to surrender. Qatamon fell in the last days of April. Itzhak Levy, the head of the Hagana intelligence in Jerusalem, recalls: ‘While the cleansing of Qatamon went on, pillage and robbery began. Soldiers and citizens took part in it. They broke into the houses and took from them furniture, clothing, electric equipment and food.’ 33

The entry of the Jordanian Arab Legion into the fighting changed the picture, and the cleansing operations were halted in the middle of May 1948. Some Jordanians were involved in the fighting before, as volunteers, and their contribution had helped slow down the Jewish advance, especially during the takeover of Qatamon, which involved intensive fighting with Jewish troops in the monastery of San Simon. But despite their heroic – in the description of Levy and his friends – attempt to defend the Palestinian neighbourhoods of the west, they failed. All in all, eight Palestinian neighbourhoods and thirty-nine villages were ethnically cleansed in the Greater Jerusalem area, their population transferred to the eastern part of the city. The villages are all gone today, but some of Jerusalem’s most beautiful houses are still standing, now inhabited by Jewish families who took them over immediately after their eviction – silent reminders of the tragic fate of the people who used to own them.

 Acre and Baysan

The urbicide continued into May with the occupation of Acre on the coast and Baysan in the east on 6 May 1948. In the beginning of May, Acre proved once again that it was not only Napoleon who found it hard to defeat it: despite severe overcrowding due to the huge influx of refugees from the neighbouring city of Haifa, heavy daily shelling by the Jewish forces failed to subdue the Crusader city. However, its exposed water supply ten kilometres to the north, from the Kabri springs, via an almost 200-year old aqueduct, proved its Achilles’ heel. During the siege typhoid germs were apparently injected into the water. Local emissaries of the International Red Cross reported this to their headquarters and left very little room for guessing whom they suspected: the Hagana. The Red Cross reports describe a sudden typhoid epidemic and, even with their guarded language, point to outside poisoning as the sole explanation for this outbreak. 34On 6 May 1948, in Acre’s Lebanese hospital, which belonged to the Red Cross, an emergency meeting was convened. Brigadier Beveridge, chief of the British medical services, Colonel Bonnet of the British army, Dr Maclean of the Medical Services, and Mr de Meuron, the Red Cross delegate in Palestine, met with city officials to discuss the seventy casualties the epidemic had already claimed. They concluded that the infection was undoubtedly water-borne, not due to crowded or unhygienic conditions, as the Hagana claimed. Tellingly, it had affected fifty-five British soldiers who were transferred to Port Said hospital in Egypt. ‘Nothing like that ever happened in Palestine,’ Brigadier Beveridge told de Meuron. The minute they had identified the aqueduct as the source, they switched to artesian wells and water from the agricultural station north of Acre. The refugees from Acre already in camps in the north were also examined in order to prevent the epidemic from spreading.

With their morale weakened by both the typhoid epidemic and the intensive shelling, residents heeded the call from loudspeakers that shouted at them: ‘Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the last man.’ 35 Lieutenant Petite, a French UN observer, reported that after the city fell into Jewish hands, there was widespread and systematic looting by the army, including furniture, clothes, and anything that might be useful to the new Jewish immigrants, and the removal of which might discourage the refugees’ return.

 A similar attempt to poison the water supply in Gaza on 27 May was foiled. The Egyptians caught two Jews, David Horin and David Mizrachi, trying to inject typhoid and dysentery viruses into Gaza’s wells. General Yadin reported the incident to Ben-Gurion, then Israel’s Prime Minister, who duly entered it in his diary, without comment. The two were later executed by the Egyptians without any official Israeli protestations. 36Ernest David Bergman, together with the Katzir brothers mentioned earlier, was part of a team working on Israel’s biological warfare capability set up by Ben-Gurion in the 1940s, euphemistically called the Science Corps of the Hagana. Ephraim Katzir was appointed its director in May 1948, when the outfit was renamed ‘HEMED’ (Sweetness, the acronym of Hayl Mada – the Science corps). It did not contribute in any major way to the 1948 campaigns but its early input was indicative of the unconventional aspirations the state of Israel would pursue in the future. 37

Roughly at the same time that Acre was occupied, the Golani Brigade seized the town of Baysan in Operation Gideon. As in Safad, after occupying several villages in the vicinity, they moved in on the town. The Jewish forces, with the successful takeovers of Haifa, Tiberias and Safad behind them, were confident and highly effective. Experienced now in mass evictions, they tried to force a swift departure in Baysan by issuing an ultimatum to the people to leave their homes within ten hours. The ultimatum was delivered to the ‘city notables’, namely a fraction of the local national committee. These notables declined and hastily tried to accumulate food stocks for a long siege; they organised some weapons, mainly two cannons brought in by volunteers, in order to repel the impending assault. Nahum Spigel, the commander of the Golani Brigade, wanted a swift offensive and to take a number of prisoners of war in order to exchange them for some Jewish prisoners the Jordanian forces had captured earlier in their successful bid for both the Jewish quarter in the Old City and the Zionist settlement of Gush Etzion. In fact, the Legion rescued the Gush Etzion settlers from the hands of angry Palestinian paramilitary groups that had attacked the isolated Jewish colony and the convoy that had come to save it. 38 (Today, Gush Etzion is a large Jewish settlement in the West Bank.) These settlers, together with the residents of the old Jewish quarter, were among the few Jewish POWs captured during the war. They were treated fairly and released soon after, unlike the thousands of Palestinians who were now, according to international law, citizens of the State of Israel, but on becoming prisoners were caged in pens.

 After heavy daily bombardments, including from the air, the local committee in Baysan decided to surrender. The body that took the decision consisted of the qadi, the local priest, the municipal secretary and the richest merchant in town. They met Palti Sela and his colleagues to discuss the terms of surrender (before the meeting, the members asked permission to travel to Nablus to discuss capitulation, but this was refused). On 11 May, the town passed into Jewish hands. Palti Sela remembered particularly the two pathetic old artillery guns that had been meant to protect Baysan: two French anti-air cannon from the First World War, antiquated weaponry representative of the overall level of the arms the Palestinians and the volunteers possessed, on the eve of the regular Arab armies’ entrance into Palestine.

Immediately after, Palti Sela and his colleagues were able to oversee the ‘orderly expulsion’ of the town’s people. Some were transferred to Nazareth – still a free Palestinian city in May, but not for much longer – some to Jenin, but the majority were driven across the nearby Jordan River onto the opposite bank. 39 Eyewitnesses remember the hordes of people from Baysan as particularly panic-stricken and cowed, hurriedly making their way in the direction of the Jordan River and from there inland to makeshift camps. While the Jewish troops were busy with other operations nearby, however, quite a few of them succeeded in returning; Baysan is very close to both the West Bank and the River Jordan and therefore slipping back unnoticed was relatively easy. They succeeded in staying on until mid-June when the Israeli army loaded the people at gunpoint onto trucks and drove them across the river once again.

The Ruination of Jaffa

Jaffa was the last city to be taken, on 13 May, two days before the end of the Mandate. Like so many of Palestine’s cities, it had a long history going back as far as the Bronze age, with an impressive Roman and Byzantine heritage. It was the Muslim commander, Umar Ibn al-‘Aas, who took the town in 632 and imbued it with its Arab character. The Greater Jaffa area included twenty-four villages and seventeen mosques; today one mosque survives, but not one of the villages is left standing.

On 13 May, 5000 Irgun and Hagana troops attacked the city as Arab volunteers headed by Michael al-Issa, a local Christian, tried to defend it.  Among them was an extraordinary unit of fifty Muslims from Bosnia as well as members of the second generation of the Templars, German colonists who had come in the mid-nineteenth century as religious missionaries and now decided to try and defend their colonies (other Templars in the Galilee surrendered without a fight, and were swiftly driven out of their two pretty colonies, Waldheim and Beit Lehem, west of Nazareth).

All in all, Jaffa enjoyed the largest defense force available to the Palestinians in any given locality: a total of 1500 volunteers confronted the 5000 Jewish troops. They survived a three-week siege and attack that began in the middle of April and ended in the middle of May. When Jaffa fell, its entire population of 50,000 was expelled with the ‘help’ of British mediation, meaning that their flight was less chaotic than in Haifa. Still, there were scenes reminiscent of the horrors that took place in the northern harbour of Haifa: people were literally pushed into the sea when the crowds tried to board the far-too-small fishing boats that would take them to Gaza, while Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion.

With the fall of Jaffa, the occupying Jewish forces had emptied and depopulated all the major cities and towns of Palestine. The vast majority of their inhabitants – of all classes, denominations and occupations – never saw their cities again, while the more politicised among them would come to play a formative role in the re-emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the form of the PLO, demanding first and foremost their right to return.

11. Filastin, 14 April 1948.

12. Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, pp. 107–8.

13. Ibid., p. 107.

14. See a summary in Flapan, The Birth of Israel, pp. 89–92.

15. This telegraph was intercepted by the Israeli intelligence and is quoted in Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 12 January 1948.

16. See Rees Williams, the Under Secretary of States statement to Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol. 461, p. 2050, 24 February 1950.

17. Arnan Azariahu, who was Israel Galili’s assistant, recalled that when the new Matkal was moved to Ramat Gan, Yigael Yadin demanded that the Qiryati people not be put in charge of protecting the site. Maqor Rishon, interview, 21 May 2006.

18. Walid Khalidi, ‘Selected Documents on the 1948 War’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 107, Vol. 27/3 (Spring 1998), pp. 60–105, uses the British as well as the Arab committee’s correspondence.

19. Hagana Archives, 69/72, 22 April 1948.

20. Central Zionist Archives, 45/2 Protocol.

21. Zadok Eshel (ed.), The Carmeli Brigade in the War of Independence, p. 147

22. Walid Khalidi, ‘Selected Documents on the 1948 War’.

23. Montgomery of Alamein, Memoirs, pp. 4534.

24. Walid Khalidi, ‘The Fall of Haifa’, Middle East Forum, XXXV, 10 (December 1959), letter by Khayat, Saad, Mu’ammar and Koussa from 21 April 1948.

25. The information on the Palestinian side is taken from Mustafa Abasi, Safad During the British Mandate Period: A Social and Political Study, Jerusalem: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2005 (Arabic); a version of it appeared as ‘The Battle for Safad in the War of 1948: A Revised Study, International Journal for Middle East Studies, 36 (2004), pp. 21–47.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 7 June 1948.

29. Salim Tamari, Jerusalem 1948.

30. The reconstruction of the orders was done by Itzhak Levy, the head of the Hagana intelligence in Jerusalem in 1948, in his book Jerusalem in the War of Independence, p. 207 (these interviews were later incorporated into the IDF archives).

31. Fourteen of these telegrams are quoted by Ben-Gurion in his diary, see Rivlin and Oren, The War of Independence, pp. 12, 14, 27, 63, 64, 112, 113, 134, 141, 156, 169, 170, 283.

32. Mentioned in Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 15 January 1948.

33. Levy, Jerusalem, p. 219.

34. Red Cross Archives, Geneva, Files G59/1/GC, G3/82 sent by the international Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegate de Meuron on 6–19 May 1948 describe a sudden typhoid epidemic.

35. All the information is based on the Red Cross sources and on Salman Abu Sitta, ‘Israel Biological and Chemical Weapons: Past and Present’, Between the Lines, 15–19 March 2003. Abu Sitta also quotes Sara Leibovitz-Dar’s article in Hadahsot, 13 August 1993, where she traces, from a clue from the historian Uri Milstein, ‘those who were responsible for the Acre operation, but who refused to answer her questions. She concluded her article by saying: ‘What was done then with deep conviction and zealotry is now concealed with shame’.

36. Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 27 May 1948.

37. Ibid., 31 January 1948 and his notes on the history of HEMED.

38. Levy, Jerusalem, p. 113, although he does accuse the Legion of joining earlier in attacks on those who had already surrendered. See pp. 109–12.

39. Interview with Sela (see chapter 2, note 31).

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Ilan Pappepe

Mahāsīhanāda Sutta - The Greater Discourse on the Lion’s Roar

 Attached to The Buddha on himself ...

MN12 

1. THUS HAVE I HEARD. On one occasion the Blessed One was living at Vesālī in the grove outside the city to the west.

2. Now on that occasion Sunakkhatta, son of the Licchavis, had recently left this Dhamma and Discipline. He was making this statement before the Vesālī assembly: “The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him, and when he teaches the Dhamma to anyone, it leads him when he practises it to the complete destruction of suffering.” 

3.Then, when it was morning, the venerable Sāriputta dressed, and taking his bowl and outer robe, went into Vesālī for alms. Then he heard Sunakkhatta, son of the Licchavis, making this statement before the Vesālī assembly. When he had wandered for alms in Vesālī and had returned from his almsround, after his meal he went to the Blessed One, and after paying homage to him, he sat down at one side and told the Blessed One what Sunakkhatta was saying.

4. [The Blessed One said:] “Sāriputta, the misguided man Sunakkhatta is angry and his words are spoken out of anger. Thinking to discredit the Tathāgata, he actually praises him; [69] for it is praise of the Tathāgata to say of him: ‘When he teaches the Dhamma to anyone, it leads him when he practises it to the complete destruction of suffering.’

5. “Sāriputta, this misguided man Sunakkhatta will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘That Blessed One is accomplished, fully enlightened, perfect in true knowledge and conduct, sublime, knower of worlds, incomparable leader of persons to be tamed, teacher of gods and humans, enlightened, blessed.’ 

6. “And he will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘That Blessed One enjoys the various kinds of supernormal power: having been one, he becomes many; having been many, he becomes one; he appears and vanishes; he goes unhindered through a wall, through an enclosure, through a mountain, as though through space; he dives in and out of the earth as though it were water; he walks on water without sinking as though it were earth; seated cross-legged, he travels in space like a bird; with his hand he touches and strokes the moon and sun so powerful and mighty; he wields bodily mastery even as far as the Brahma-world.’

7. “And he will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘With the divine ear element, which is purified and surpasses the human, that Blessed One hears both kinds of sounds, the heavenly and the human, those that are far as well as near.’

8. “And he will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘That Blessed One encompasses with his own mind the minds of other beings, other persons. He understands a mind affected by lust as affected by lust and a mind unaffected by lust as unaffected by lust; he understands a mind affected by hate as affected by hate and a mind unaffected by hate as unaffected by hate; he understands a mind affected by delusion as affected by delusion and a mind unaffected by delusion as unaffected by delusion; he understands a contracted mind as contracted and a distracted mind as distracted; he understands an exalted mind as exalted and an unexalted mind as unexalted; he understands a surpassed mind as surpassed and an unsurpassed mind as unsurpassed; he understands a concentrated mind as concentrated and an unconcentrated mind as unconcentrated; he understands a liberated mind as liberated and an unliberated mind as unliberated.’

 (TEN POWERS OF A TATHĀGATA)

9. “Sāriputta, the Tathāgata has these ten Tathāgata’s powers, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.181 What are the ten?

10. (1) “Here, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the possible as possible and the impossible as impossible. And that is a Tathāgata’s power that the Tathāgata has, by virtue of which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

11. (2) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the results of actions undertaken, past, future, and present, by way of possibilities and causes. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...18312. 

12. (3) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the ways leading to all destinations. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...18413.

13. (4) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the world with its many and different elements. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...

14. (5) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is how beings have different inclinations. That too is a Tathāgata’s power.... 

15. (6) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the disposition of the faculties of other beings, other persons. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...

16. (7) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the defilement, the cleansing, and the emergence in regard to the jhānas, liberations, concentrations, and attainments. That too is a Tathāgata’s power... 

17. (8) “Again, the Tathāgata recollects his manifold past lives, that is, one birth, two births...(as Sutta 4, §27)...Thus with their aspects and particulars he recollects his manifold past lives. That too is a Tathāgata’s power…

18. (9) “Again, with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, the Tathāgata sees beings passing away and reappearing, inferior and superior, fair and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate...(as Sutta 4, §29) …and he understands how beings pass on according to their actions. That too is a Tathāgata’s power…

19. (10) “Again, by realising for himself with direct knowledge, the Tathāgata here and now enters upon and abides in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints. That too is a Tathāgata’s power that the Tathāgata has, by virtue of which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

20. “The Tathāgata has these ten Tathāgata’s powers, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

21. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me: ‘The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him’—unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. Just as a bhikkhu possessed of virtue, concentration, and wisdom would here and now enjoy final knowledge, so it will happen in this case, I say, that unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. 

(FOUR KINDS OF INTREPIDITY)

22. “Sāriputta, the Tathāgata has these four kinds of intrepidity, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā. What are the four?

23. “Here, I see no ground on which any recluse or brahmin or god or Māra or Brahmā or anyone else at all in the world could, in accordance with the Dhamma, accuse me thus: ‘While you claim to be fully enlightened, you are not fully enlightened about these things.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

24. “I see no ground on which any recluse…or anyone at all could accuse me thus: ‘While you claim to be one who has destroyed the taints, you have not destroyed these taints.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

25. “I see no ground on which any recluse…or anyone at all could accuse me thus: ‘Those things called obstructions by you are not able to obstruct one who engages in them.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

26. “I see no ground on which any recluse…or anyone at all could accuse me thus: ‘When you teach the Dhamma to someone, it does not lead him when he practises it to the complete destruction of suffering.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

27. “A Tathāgata has these four kinds of intrepidity, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

28. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me…he will wind up in hell. 

(THE EIGHT ASSEMBLIES)

29. “Sāriputta, there are these eight assemblies. What are the eight? An assembly of nobles, an assembly of brahmins, an assembly of householders, an assembly of recluses, an assembly of gods of the heaven of the Four Great Kings, an assembly of gods of the heaven of the Thirty-three, an assembly of Māra’s retinue, an assembly of Brahmās. Possessing these four kinds of intrepidity, the Tathāgata approaches and enters these eight assemblies.

30. “I recall having approached many hundred assemblies of nobles…many hundred assemblies of brahmins…many hundred assemblies of householders…many hundred assemblies of recluses…many hundred assemblies of gods of the heaven of the Four Great Kings…many hundred assemblies of gods of the heaven of the Thirty-three…many hundred assemblies of Māra’s retinue…many hundred assemblies of Brahmās. And formerly I had sat with them there and talked with them and held conversations with them, yet I see no ground for thinking that fear or timidity might come upon me there. And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity. [73]31. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me…he will wind up in hell.

 (FOUR KINDS OF GENERATION)

32. “Sāriputta, there are these four kinds of generation. What are the four? Egg-born generation, womb-born generation, moisture-born generation, and spontaneous generation.

33. “What is egg-born generation? There are these beings born by breaking out of the shell of an egg; this is called egg-born generation. What is womb-born generation? There are these beings born by breaking out from the caul; this is called womb-born generation. What is moisture-born generation? There are these beings born in a rotten fish, in a rotten corpse, in rotten porridge, in a cesspit, or in a sewer; this is called moisture-born generation. What is spontaneous generation? There are gods and denizens of hell and certain human beings and some beings in the lower worlds; this is called spontaneous generation. These are the four kinds of generation.

34. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me…he will wind up in hell. 

(THE FIVE DESTINATIONS AND NIBBĀNA)

35. “Sāriputta, there are these five destinations. What are the five? Hell, the animal realm, the realm of ghosts, human beings, and gods.

 (1) “I understand hell, and the path and way leading to hell. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell.

(2) “I understand the animal realm, and the path and way leading to the animal realm. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in the animal realm.

(3) “I understand the realm of ghosts, and the path and way leading to the realm of ghosts. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in the realm of ghosts.

(4) “I understand human beings, and the path and way leading to the human world. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear among human beings.

(5) “I understand the gods, and the path and way leading to the world of the gods. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in a happy destination, in the heavenly world.

(6) “I understand Nibbāna, and the path and way leading to Nibbāna.  And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, by realising for himself with direct knowledge, here and now enter upon and abide in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints.

37. (1) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell.’ And then later on, with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, I see that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he has reappeared in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell, and is experiencing exclusively painful, racking, piercing feelings. Suppose there were a charcoal pit deeper than a man’s height full of glowing coals without flame or smoke; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same charcoal pit. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path, that he will come to this same charcoal pit’; and then later on he sees that he has fallen into that charcoal pit and is experiencing exclusively painful, racking, piercing feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…piercing feelings.

38. (2) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in the animal realm.’ And then later on, with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, I see that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he has reappeared in the animal realm and is experiencing painful, racking, piercing feelings. Suppose there were a cesspit deeper than a man’s height full of filth; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same cesspit. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same cesspit’; and then later on he sees that he has fallen into that cesspit and is experiencing painful, racking, piercing feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…piercing feelings.

39. (3) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in the realm of ghosts.’ And then later on…I see that…he has reappeared in the realm of ghosts and is experiencing much painful feeling. Suppose there were a tree growing on uneven ground with scanty foliage casting a dappled shadow; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same tree. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves… that he will come to this same tree’; and then later on he sees that he is sitting or lying in the shade of that tree experiencing much painful feeling. So too, by encompassing mind with mind …much painful feeling.

40. (4) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear among human beings.’ And then later on…I see that…he has reappeared among human beings and is experiencing much pleasant feeling. Suppose there were a tree growing on even ground with thick foliage casting a deep shade; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same tree. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same tree’; and then later on he sees that he is sitting or lying in the shade of that tree experiencing much pleasant feeling. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…much pleasant feeling. 

41. (5) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in a happy destination, in the heavenly world.’ And then later on…I see that…he has reappeared in a happy destination, in the heavenly world, and is experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. Suppose there were a mansion, and it had an upper chamber plastered within and without, shut off, secured by bars, with shuttered windows, and in it there was a couch spread with rugs, blankets, and sheets, with a deer-skin coverlet, with a canopy as well as crimson pillows for both [head and feet]; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same mansion. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same mansion’; and then later on he sees that he is sitting or lying in that upper chamber in that mansion experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…exclusively pleasant feelings.

42. (6) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that by realising for himself with direct knowledge, he here and now will enter upon and abide in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints.’ And then later on I see that by realising for himself with direct knowledge, he here and now enters upon and abides in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints, and is experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. Suppose there were a pond with clean, agreeable, cool water, transparent, with smooth banks, delightful, and nearby a dense wood; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only towards that same pond. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same pond’; and then later on he sees that he has plunged into the pond, bathed, drunk, and relieved all his distress, fatigue, and fever and has come out again and is sitting or lying in the wood [77] experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…exclusively pleasant feelings. These are the five destinations.

43. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me: ‘The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him’—unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. Just as a bhikkhu possessed of virtue, concentration, and wisdom would here and now enjoy final knowledge, so it will happen in this case, I say, that unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. 

(THE BODHISATTA’S AUSTERITIES)

44. “Sāriputta, I recall having lived a holy life possessing four factors. I have been an ascetic—a supreme ascetic; I have been coarse—supremely coarse; I have been scrupulous—supremely scrupulous; I have been secluded—supremely secluded.

45. “Such was my asceticism, Sāriputta, that I went naked, rejecting conventions, licking my hands, not coming when asked, not stopping when asked; I did not accept food brought or food specially made or an invitation to a meal; I received nothing from a pot, from a bowl, across a threshold, across a stick, across a pestle, from two eating together, from a pregnant woman, from a woman giving suck, from a woman in the midst of men, from where food was advertised to be distributed, from where a dog was waiting, from where flies were buzzing; I accepted no fish or meat, I drank no liquor, wine, or fermented brew. I kept to one house, to one morsel; I kept to two houses, to two morsels;…I kept to seven houses, to seven morsels. I lived on one saucerful a day, on two saucerfuls a day…on seven saucerfuls a day; I took food once a day, once every two days…once every seven days; thus even up to once every fortnight, I dwelt pursuing the practice of taking food at stated intervals. I was an eater of greens or millet or wild rice or hide-parings or moss or ricebran or rice-scum or sesamum flour or grass or cowdung. I lived on forest roots and fruits; I fed on fallen fruits. I clothed myself in hemp, in hemp-mixed cloth, in shrouds, in refuse rags, in tree bark, in antelope hide, in strips of antelope hide, in kusagrass fabric, in bark fabric, in wood-shavings fabric, in head-hair wool, in animal wool, in owls’ wings. I was one who pulled out hair and beard, pursuing the practice of pulling out hair and beard. I was one who stood continuously, rejecting seats. I was one who squatted continuously, devoted to maintaining the squatting position. I was one who used a mattress of spikes; I made a mattress of spikes my bed. I dwelt pursuing the practice of bathing in water three times daily including the evening. Thus in such a variety of ways I dwelt pursuing the practice of tormenting and mortifying the body. Such was my asceticism.

46. “Such was my coarseness, Sāriputta, that just as the bole of a tindukā tree, accumulating over the years, cakes and flakes off, so too, dust and dirt, accumulating over the years, caked off my body and flaked off. It never occurred to me: ‘Oh, let me rub this dust and dirt off with my hand, or let another rub this dust and dirt off with his hand’—it never occurred to me thus. Such was my coarseness.47. “Such was my scrupulousness, Sāriputta, that I was always mindful in stepping forwards and stepping backwards. I was full of pity even in regard to a drop of water thus: ‘Let me not hurt the tiny creatures in the crevices of the ground.’ Such was my scrupulousness.

48. “Such was my seclusion, Sāriputta, that I would plunge into some forest and dwell there. And when I saw a cowherd or a shepherd or someone gathering grass or sticks, or a woodsman, I would flee from grove to grove, from thicket to thicket, from hollow to hollow, from hillock to hillock. Why was that? So that they should not see me or I see them. Just as a forest-bred deer, on seeing human beings, flees from grove to grove, from thicket to thicket, from hollow to hollow, from hillock to hillock, so too, when I saw a cowherd or a shepherd…Such was my seclusion.

49. “I would go on all fours to the cow-pens when the cattle had gone out and the cowherd had left them, and I would feed on the dung of the young suckling calves. As long as my own excrement and urine lasted, I fed on my own excrement and urine. Such was my great practice of feeding on filth.

50. “I would plunge into some awe-inspiring grove and dwell there—a grove so awe-inspiring that it would make most of a man’s hairs stand up if he were not freed from lust. When those cold wintry nights came during the ‘eight-days period of snowfall, ’ I would dwell by night in the open and by day in the grove.194 In the last month of the hot season I would dwell by day in the open and by night in the grove. And there came to me spontaneously this stanza never heard before:

‘Chilled by night and scorched by day, 

Alone in awe-inspiring groves, 

Naked, no fire to sit beside, 

The sage yet pursues his quest.’ 

51. “I would make my bed in a charnel ground with the bones of the dead for a pillow. And cowherd boys came up and spat on me, urinated on me, threw dirt at me, and poked sticks into my ears. Yet I do not recall that I ever aroused an evil mind [of hate] against them. Such was my abiding in equanimity. 

52. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through food.’ They say: ‘Let us live on kola-fruits,’ and they eat kola-fruits, they eat kola-fruit powder, they drink kola-fruit water, and they make many kinds of kola-fruit concoctions. Now I recall having eaten a single kola-fruit a day. Sāriputta, you may think that the kola-fruit was bigger at that time, yet you should not regard it so: the kola-fruit was then at most the same size as now. Through feeding on a single kola-fruit a day, my body reached a state of extreme emaciation. Because of eating so little my limbs became like the jointed segments of vine stems or bamboo stems. Because of eating so little my backside became like a camel’s hoof. Because of eating so little the projections on my spine stood forth like corded beads. Because of eating so little my ribs jutted out as gaunt as the crazy rafters of an old roof-less barn. Because of eating so little the gleam of my eyes sank far down in their sockets, looking like a gleam of water that has sunk far down in a deep well. Because of eating so little my scalp shrivelled and withered as a green bitter gourd shrivels and withers in the wind and sun. Because of eating so little my belly skin adhered to my backbone; thus if I wanted to touch my belly skin I encountered my backbone, and if I wanted to touch my backbone I encountered my belly skin. Because of eating so little, if I wanted to defecate or urinate, I fell over on my face right there. Because of eating so little, if I tried to ease my body by rubbing my limbs with my hands, the hair, rotted at its roots, fell from my body as I rubbed.

53–55. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through food.’ They say: ‘Let us live on beans,’…‘Let us live on sesamum,’…‘Let us live on rice,’ and they eat rice, they eat rice powder, [81] they drink rice water, and they make many kinds of rice concoctions. Now I recall having eaten a single rice grain a day. Sāriputta, you may think that the rice grain was bigger at that time, yet you should not regard it so: the rice grain was then at most the same size as now. Through feeding on a single rice grain a day, my body reached a state of extreme emaciation. Because of eating so little…the hair, rotted at its roots, fell from my body as I rubbed.

56. “Yet, Sāriputta, by such conduct, by such practice, by such performance of austerities, I did not attain any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. Why was that? Because I did not attain that noble wisdom which when attained is noble and emancipating and leads the one who practises in accordance with it to the complete destruction of suffering.

57. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through the round of rebirths.’ But it is not easy to find a realm in the round that I have not already [82] passed through in this long journey, except for the gods of the Pure Abodes; and had I passed through the round as a god in the Pure Abodes, I would never have returned to this world.

58. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through [some particular kind of] rebirth.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of rebirth that I have not been reborn in already in this long journey, except for the gods of the Pure Abodes…

59. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through [some particular] abode.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of abode that I have not already dwelt in…except for the gods of the Pure Abodes…

60. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through sacrifice.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of sacrifice that has not already been offered up by me in this long journey, when I was either a head-anointed noble king or a well-to-do brahmin.

61. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes through fire-worship.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of fire that has not already been worshipped by me in this long journey, when I was either a head-anointed noble king or a well-to-do brahmin.

62. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘As long as this good man is still young, a black-haired young man endowed with the blessing of youth, in the prime of life, so long is he perfect in his lucid wisdom. But when this good man is old, aged, burdened with years, advanced in life, and come to the last stage, being eighty, ninety, or a hundred years old, then the lucidity of his wisdom is lost.’ But it should not be regarded so. I am now old, aged, burdened with years, advanced in life, and come to the last stage: my years have turned eighty. Now suppose that I had four disciples with a hundred years’ lifespan, perfect in mindfulness, retentiveness, memory, and lucidity of wisdom.197 Just as a skilled archer, trained, practised, and tested, could easily shoot a light arrow across the shadow of a palm tree, suppose that they were even to that extent perfect in mindfulness, retentiveness, [83] memory, and lucidity of wisdom. Suppose that they continuously asked me about the four foundations of mindfulness and that I answered them when asked and that they remembered each answer of mine and never asked a subsidiary question or paused except to eat, drink, consume food, taste, urinate, defecate, and rest in order to remove sleepiness and tiredness. Still the Tathāgata’s exposition of the Dhamma, his explanations of factors of the Dhamma, and his replies to questions would not yet come to an end, but meanwhile those four disciples of mine with their hundred years’ lifespan would have died at the end of those hundred years. Sāriputta, even if you have to carry me about on a bed, still there will be no change in the lucidity of the Tathāgata’s wisdom.

63. “Rightly speaking, were it to be said of anyone: ‘A being not subject to delusion has appeared in the world for the welfare and happiness of many, out of compassion for the world, for the good, welfare, and happiness of gods and humans,’ it is of me indeed that rightly speaking this should be said.”64. Now on that occasion the venerable Nāgasamāla was standing behind the Blessed One fanning him.198 Then he said to the Blessed One: “It is wonderful, venerable sir, it is marvellous! As I listened to this discourse on the Dhamma, the hairs of my body stood up. Venerable sir, what is the name of this discourse on the Dhamma?”“As to that, Nāgasamāla, you may remember this discourse on the Dhamma as ‘The Hair-Raising Discourse.’”

That is what the Blessed One said. The venerable Nāgasamāla was satisfied and delighted in the Blessed One’s words.

On intelligence & fools

 

Nothing tends to be more difficult than not pretending to understand.

If we do not analyze, we will not understand.
But let us not presume that we have understood just because we have analyzed.

Classifying is the first step toward understanding; persisting in classifying is the first step toward confusion.

The line between intelligence and stupidity is a shifting line.

To understand is finally to make fact after fact coincide with our own mystery.

In a fiery intelligence the materials are not fused in a new alloy; they are integrated into a new element.

To think against is more difficult than to act against.

Everything is trivial if the universe is not committed to a metaphysical adventure.

There are a thousand truths; error is one.

Refusing to admire is the mark of the beast.

Those who lament the narrowness of the environment in which they live long for events, neighbors, landscapes to give them the sensibility and intelligence which nature denied them.

Ideas tyrannize the man who has but few.

Someone who lacks vocabulary to analyze his ideas christens them intuitions.

The invention is invented once for all times.
The idea must be reinvented each time.

Men change ideas less than ideas change disguise.
Through the course of the centuries the same voices are in dialogue.

Imbecility changes the subject in each age so that it is not recognized.

Among ideas only the stupid ones are immortal.

Foolish ideas are immortal.
Each new generation invents them anew.

History inexorably punishes stupidity, but it does not necessarily reward intelligence.

The curve of man’s knowledge of himself ascends until the 17th century, declines gradually afterwards, in this century it finally plummets.

Stupidities spread at the speed of light.

The key event of this century is the demographic explosion of idiotic ideas.

An abrupt demographic expansion rejuvenates society and makes its stupidities recrudesce.

Demographic pressure makes people brutish.

A limited population produces fewer ordinary intelligences than a numerous population, but it can produce an equal or greater number of talents.
Great demographic densities are the breeding grounds of mediocrity.

Posterity is not the whole of future generations.
It is a small group of men with taste, a proper upbringing, and erudition, in each generation.

An intelligent touch can make the austerity imposed by poverty culminate in the perfection of taste.

Intelligence is the only art that can survive in any historical climate.

In spiritually arid centuries, the only man to realize that the century is dying from thirst is the man who still harnesses an underground spring.

Phrases are pebbles that the writer tosses into the reader’s soul.
The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond.

Genius is the capacity to make on our stiff, frozen imagination the impact that any book makes on a child’s imagination.

To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which a poet sang.

The ability to consume pornography is the distinctive characteristic of the imbecile.

Depravity always arouses the secret admiration of the imbecile.

When we say that words transfigure, the fool mistakenly thinks that they adulterate.

The philosopher is not the spokesman of his age, but an angel imprisoned in time.

To be right is just one more reason not to achieve any success.

An intelligent idea produces sensual pleasure.

The organ of pleasure is the intelligence.

It is impossible to convince the fool that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the rest of the animals.

Each new truth we learn teaches us to read a different way.

Fools worry about nothing but spelling and forget syntax.

The imbecile is betrayed less by what he says than by his diction.

The “common reader” is as rare as common sense.

A book does not educate someone who reads it to become educated.

The pleasant book does not attract the fool unless a pedantic interpretation vouches for it.

Contemporaries respect tedious books when they are pretentious and pedantic.
Posterity laughs at those crumbling idols, in order to venerate, of course, the analogous sham saints of their time.

Nobody scorns yesterday’s foolishness as much as today’s fool does.

Serious books do not instruct, but rather demand explanations.

Books are not tools of perfection but barricades against boredom.

To live with lucidity a simple, quiet, discreet life among intelligent books, loving a few beings.

For moving situations only clichés will do.
A stupid song expresses great pain better than a noble verse.
Intelligence is an activity of impassible beings.

The two wings of intelligence are erudition and love.

Wisdom consists in being moderate not out of horror of excess, but out of love for the limit.

Truth is the happiness of intelligence.

To demand that the intelligence abstain from judging mutilates its faculty of understanding.
It is in the value judgment that understanding culminates.

Everything that makes man feel that mystery envelops him makes him more intelligent.

An “explanation” consists in the end in assimilating a strange mystery to a familiar mystery.

Explanation implies, comprehension unfolds.
Explanation impoverishes, by identifying terms; comprehension enriches, by diversifying them.

Contemplated in light of our sorrow or our happiness, of our enthusiasm or our disdain, the world displays a texture so subtle, an essence so fine, that every intellectual vision, compared to that vision of the sentiments, barely seems like clever vulgarity.

Authentic intelligence spontaneously sees even the most humble fact of daily life in the light of the most general idea.

Our meditation should not consist of a theme proposed to our intelligence, but of an intellectual murmur accompanying our life.

Neither improvisation by itself, nor meditation by itself, achieves anything important.
In reality, the only thing of value is the spontaneous fruit of forgotten meditations.

The intelligent generalization should bear the decipherable imprint of the particular fact that gives rise to it.

Whoever does not simultaneously play upon the board of maximum generality and the board of maximum particularity knows nothing of the game of ideas.

To change thoughts repeatedly is not to evolve. To evolve is to develop the infinitude of the same thought.

Only he lives his life who observes it, thinks it, and says it; the rest let life live them.

“Life” (in emphatic quotation marks) is the consolation of those who do not know how to think.

“Escapism” is the imbecile’s favorite accusation to make.

A fool is someone who has opinions about the clichés of the day.

The experience of a man who “has lived a long life” can usually be reduced to a few trivial anecdotes with which he decorates an incurable stupidity.

Whoever takes pride in “having lived through a lot” should keep quiet so as not to prove to us that he has understood nothing.

Human stupidity is so monotonous that not even a long experience adds to our collection of stupidities.

The only certain patrimony after a few years is the load of stupidities that chance prevented us from committing.

The years do not deplume us of illusions but of stupidities.

Without economic concerns the fool dies from boredom.

No one is important for a long time without becoming a fool.

Life is an instrument of intelligence.

It is by means of intelligence that grace saves us from the worst disgraces.

When we understand what those who seemed to understand [really] understood, we are dumbfounded.

When we sail in oceans of stupidity, intelligence requires the aid of good taste.

Without an alert imagination intelligence runs aground.

Although we may have to yield to the torrent of collective stupidities dragging us along in its current, let us not allow ourselves to be dissolved in its mud.

A man is wise if he has no ambition for anything but lives as if he had an ambition for everything.

When the race of egoists absorbed in perfecting themselves dies out, nobody will be left to remind us that we have the duty to save our intelligence, even after we have lost all hope of saving our skin.

An intelligent man is one who maintains his intelligence at a temperature independent of his environment’s temperature.

To induce us to adopt them, stupid ideas adduce the immense public that shares them.

The distances between nations, social classes, cultures, and races, are a little thing.
The fault line runs between the plebeian mind and the patrician mind.

The crowd calls no actions intelligent except actions of the intellect in the service of instinct.

Man at times despairs with dignity, but it is rare for him to hope with intelligence.

The fool loses his hopes, never his illusions.

Man’s moment of greatest lucidity is when he doubts his doubt.

Our maturity must re-conquer its lucidity daily.

Layers of imbecility deposit themselves in the soul like sediment over the years.

The soul grows full of weeds unless the intelligence inspects it daily like a diligent gardener.

Let us try, as we grow older, to assume attitudes which our adolescence would have approved and to have ideas which it would not have understood.

Few ideas do not turn pale before a fixed glare.

Thought tends to be a response to an outrage rather than to a question.

Fools become indignant only with consequences.

Even the least foolish usually do not know the conditions of what they wish for and the consequences of what they admit.

To punish an idea, the gods condemn it to inspiring enthusiasm in the fool.

Let us not give stupid opinions the pleasure of scandalizing us.

The ironist mistrusts what he says without believing that the opposite is true.

A man is wise not so much because he says the truth but because he who knows the exact scope of what he says.
Because he does not believe he is saying anything more than what he is saying.

Wisdom consists in resigning oneself to the only thing possible without proclaiming it the only thing necessary.

Sometimes only humiliations leave ajar for humanity the gates of wisdom.

Resignation to error is the beginning of wisdom.

Life is a daily struggle against one’s own stupidity.

The first step of wisdom is to admit, with good humor, that our ideas have no reason to interest anybody.

When we accept our mediocrity with good humor, the disinterestedness with which we take joy in another’s intelligence almost makes us intelligent.

The quality of an intelligence depends less on what it understands than on what makes it smile.

Authentic intellectual seriousness does not frown, but rather smiles.

The serious man is just as idiotic as intelligence that is not serious.

To think that only important things matter is the menace of barbarism.

The arguments with which we justify our conduct are often dumber than our actual conduct.
It is more tolerable to watch men live than to hear them spout their opinions.

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give their opinions.

The majority of men have no right to give their opinion, but only to listen.

After the intelligent opinions have been excluded from the opinions of an age, what is left over is “public opinion.

To speak of a people’s “political maturity” is characteristic of immature intelligences.

As long as he is not so imprudent as to write, many a political man passes for intelligent.

Political activity ceases to tempt the intelligent writer, when he finally understands that there is no intelligent text that will succeed in ousting even a small-town mayor.

Ideologies are fictitious nautical charts, but on them, in the end, depends against which reefs one is shipwrecked.
If interests move us, stupidities guide us.

Modern man will never admit that a stupid idea shared by many is not respectable but merely dreadful.

The public is not convinced except by the conclusions of syllogisms of whose premises they are ignorant.

Anybody has the right to be stupid, but not to demand that we revere his stupidity.

There is no fool’s opinion that is not worth hearing, but also none that is worth respecting.

In the modern world the number of theories is increasing that are not worth the trouble to refute except with a shrug of the shoulders.

So that one does not live depressed among so many foolish opinions, it behooves one to remember at every moment that things obviously are what they are, no matter what the world’s opinion is.

There are no ideas that expand the intelligence, but there are ideas that shrink it.

The practical man wrinkles a perplexed brow when he hears intelligent ideas, trying to figure out whether he is hearing nonsense or insolence.

To maintain that “all ideas are respectable” is nothing but pompous nonsense.
Nevertheless, there is no opinion that the support of a sufficient number of imbeciles does not oblige one to put up with.
Let us not disguise our impotence as tolerance.

Cynicism is not a measure of astuteness but of impotence.

The great man’s errors are so painful for us because they give a fool the chance to correct them.

Stupidity is the angel that expels man from his momentary paradises.

An age is civilized if it does not reserve intelligence for professional work.

Modern education delivers intact minds to propaganda.

Formal instruction does not cure foolishness; it arms it.

Nothing is more superficial than intelligences that comprehend everything.

So long as we do not come across educated fools, education seems important.

There is an illiteracy of the soul which no diploma cures.

To educate man is to impede the “free expression of his personality.”

The idea of “the free development of personality” seems admirable as long as one does not meet an individual whose personality has developed freely.

My truth is the sum of what I am, not a simple summary of what I think.

From the slums of life one returns not wiser, but dirtier.

To think like our contemporaries is the prescription for prosperity and for stupidity.

The fool does not concede superiority except to one who exhibits idiotic refinements.

Whoever is curious about how to measure his stupidity should count the number of things that seem obvious to him.

What disconcerts us momentarily cures our stupidity.

The fool is disturbed not when they tell him that his ideas are false, but when they suggest that they have gone out of style.

The fool does not renounce an error unless it goes out of fashion.

The public does not begin to welcome an idea except when intelligent contemporaries begin to abandon it.
No light reaches the masses but that of dead stars.

Great stupidities do not come from the people.
First, they have seduced intelligent men.

We need people to contradict us in order to refine our ideas.

Nobody knows exactly what he wants as long as his adversary does not explain it to him.

In order to understand another’s idea it is necessary to think it as one’s own.

Intelligence consists not in handling intelligent ideas, but in handling any idea intelligently.

From the sum of all points of view does not emerge the object in relief, but confusion.

A confused idea attracts a fool like a flame attracts an insect.

Only the imbecile never feels like he is fighting on his enemies’ side.

Even the greatest fool experiences nights during which his defenses against the truth waver.

Making us feel intelligent is how nature notifies us that we are saying something stupid.

Wisdom comes down to not showing God how things should be done.

Wisdom comes down to never forgetting either the nothingness that man is, or the beauty that is at times born in his hands.

Prolixity is not an excess of words but a dearth of ideas.

The prejudices of other ages are incomprehensible to us when our own blind us.

Understanding tends to consist of falsifying what is apparently understood, by reducing it to terms that are supposedly intelligible because they agree with our prejudices at the moment.

The fool calls conclusions he does not understand “prejudices.”

The only intelligence without prejudices is one that knows which it has.

A man does not become stultified by his prejudices unless he believes they are conclusions.

Nothing is more unforgivable than voluntarily imprisoning ourselves in another’s convictions, when we should be trying to break through even the bars in the dungeon of our own intelligence.

To be young is to fear being thought stupid; to mature is to fear being stupid.

“Reconciling man to himself”—the most accurate definition of stupidity.

The distance between interlocutors of different generations is proportional to the stupidity of each interlocutor.

He who understands least is he who he stubbornly insists on understanding more than can be understood.

Thinking does not prepare one to live, nor does living prepare one to think.

Refusing to consider what disgusts us is the most serious limitation threatening us.

The idea of another only interests the fool when it touches on his own personal tribulations.

Great intellectual tasks are not accomplished by one who deliberately undertakes them, but by one who modestly seeks to resolve personal problems.

We usually share with our predecessors more opinions than ways of reaching them.

It is in the spontaneity of what I feel where I search for the coherence of what I think.

A truthful, upright intellectual life grabs out of our hands arts, letters, sciences, in order to prepare us to confront fate alone.

Upon each person depends whether his soul, deprived of its many pretensions by the years, is revealed as bitter spite or as humble resignation.

Happiness is the prickly flower of intelligent resignation.

Every intelligence reaches a point where it believes it is walking without advancing a step.

Nothing is more dangerous than to solve ephemeral problems with permanent solutions.

The “solutions” that puff contemporaries up with pride seem within a few years inconceivably stupid.

Man unleashes catastrophes when he insists on making coherent the contradictory evidences among which he lives.

“Solutions” are the ideologies of stupidity.

As a new problem is born out of a problem solved, wisdom consists not in solving problems but in taming them.

Intelligence consists not in finding solutions, but in not losing sight of the problems.

Intelligence hastens to solve problems which life has not even raised yet.
Wisdom is the art of stopping it.

Philosophy is the art of lucidly formulating problems.
Inventing solutions is not an occupation of serious intellects.

The fool exclaims that we are denying the problem when we show the falsity of his favorite solution.

In every age a minority lives today’s problems and a majority yesterday’s.

What was true yesterday is not always error today, as fools believe.
But what is true today can be error tomorrow, as fools forget.

A certain intellectual courtesy makes us prefer the ambiguous word. The univocal term subjects the universe to its arbitrary rigidity.

The authentic problem demands not that we solve it but that we try to live it.

Those who are partially wrong irritate us; those who are totally wrong amuse us.

Because he does not understand the objection that refutes him, the fool believes he has been proved right.

One usually does not reach conclusions except by ignoring objections.

Between intelligent adversaries there exists a secret sympathy, since we all owe our intelligence and our virtues to the virtues and intelligence of our enemy.

The most presumptuous wisdom stands ashamed before the soul drunk with love or hatred.

Triviality is the price of communication.

Wisdom, in this century, consists above all in knowing how to put up with vulgarity without becoming upset.

Intelligence, in certain ages, must dedicate itself merely to restoring definitions.

Intellectual combat is won not by throwing up barricades, but by courteously leaving the field open, so that the adversary’s stupidities only break each other's noses.

Intellectual boorishness is the defect that we least know how to avoid in this century.

Antipathy and sympathy are the primordial attitudes of intelligence.

Intelligence is guided not so much by ratiocination as by sympathies and aversions.

I trust less in the arguments of reason than in the antipathies of intelligence.

Even when it cannot be an act of reason, an option should be an act of the intelligence.
There are no compellingly demonstrable options, but there are stupid options.

What arouses our antipathy is always a lack of something.

To disagree is to assume a risk no one should assume but the mature and cautious conscience.
Sincerity protects against neither error nor foolishness.

Sincerity soon becomes an excuse for saying stupid things.

Once I believe I have mastered a truth, the argument which interests me is not the one which confirms it but the one which refutes it.

Intelligence should battle without respite against the sclerosis of its findings.

The senile sclerosis of intelligence does not consist in the inability to change ideas, but in the inability to change the level at which we have them.

Men disagree less because they think differently than because they do not think.

Nothing obliges the man who only meditates to debate every fool who argues.

Whoever insists on refuting idiotic arguments ends up doing so with stupid reasons.

Intelligent discussion should be limited to clarifying differences.

The intelligent man tends to fail because he does not dare to believe in the true extent of human stupidity.

The fool is scandalized and laughs when he notices that philosophers contradict each other.
It is difficult to make the fool understand that philosophy is precisely that: the art of contradicting each other without canceling each other out.

Compassion agrees, at times, to solutions which a certain intellectual sense of honor obliges it to reject.

There is something unforgivably vile in sacrificing even the most foolish of principles to the most noble of passions.

The professorial tone is not characteristic of one who knows, but of one who doubts.

We do not know anything perfectly except what we do not feel capable of teaching.

In finding out what an intelligent man said, it is customary only to listen to the fool who mimics him.

No thesis is expounded with clarity except when it manages to be expounded by an intelligent man who does not share it.

A valiant and daring thought is one that does not avoid the commonplace.

Tired of sliding down the comfortable slope of daring opinions, intelligence finally settles in the rocky terrain of commonplaces.

Nothing happens more frequently than that we feel we possess several ideas, because we only seize upon inadequate expressions of the same one.

When a commonplace impresses us, we believe we have an idea of our own.

Intelligence is strengthened by the eternal commonplaces. And it is weakened by those of its time and place.

One must appreciate commonplaces and despise fashionable places.

Once the intoxication of youth is over, only commonplaces appear to us to deserve careful examination.

Solitude is the laboratory where commonplaces are verified.

It is in reiterating the old commonplaces that the work of civilization, strictly speaking, consists.

The commonplaces of the Western tradition are the guidelines that do not deceive in the social sciences.

The traditional commonplace scandalizes modern man.
The most subversive book in our time would be a compendium of old proverbs.

I have no pretensions to originality: the commonplace, if it is old, will do for me.

In silent solitude only the soul capable of conquering in the most public disputes bears fruit.
The weakling begs for commotion.

Intelligence isolates; stupidity brings together.

An outlandish idea becomes ridiculous when several people share it.
Either one walks with everybody, or one walks alone.
One should never walk in a group.

Not intelligence but vanity reproaches “intellectual isolation.”

Dialogue does not consist of intelligences discussing with each other but of vanities confronting each other.

Dialogue with the imbecile poses difficulties: we never know where we harm him, when we scandalize him, [or] how we please him.

With somebody for whom certain terms must be defined one must speak of some other topic.

Agreement is eventually possible between intelligent men, because intelligence is a conviction they share.

Prejudices defend against stupid ideas.

The prejudice of not having prejudices is the most common one of all.

The modern world obliges us to refute foolish ideas, instead of silencing the fools.

Our denouncing the imbecile does not mean that we wish to get rid of him. We want diversity at any price.
But the charm of variety should not prevent us from judging correctly.

The silent presence of a fool is the catalyst that precipitates in a conversation all the stupidities of which the most intelligent speakers are capable.

The inferior man is always right in an argument, because the superior man has condescended to argue.

The calculations of intelligent men tend to fail because they forget the fool, those of fools because they forget the intelligent man.

I envy those who do not feel that they own only their stupidities.

The imbecile’s egoism is his neighbors’ safeguard.

Authentic superiority is intolerable for the fool.
Its simulacra, on the other hand, fascinate him.

The price intelligence charges its chosen ones is resignation to daily banality.

The ritualism of daily conversations mercifully hides from us just how basic the furnishings of the minds among which we live are.
To avoid any shocks, let us prevent our interlocutors from “elevating the debate.”

Truth is what the most intelligent man says.
(But nobody knows who the most intelligent man is.)

Nobody thinks seriously as long as originality matters to him.

Whoever believes he is original is just ignorant.

We reactionaries provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like daring avant-garde thinkers.

The most persuasive reason to renounce daring progressive opinions is the inevitability with which sooner or later the fool finally adopts them.

For the fool, obsolete opinion and erroneous opinion are synonymous expressions.

Intelligence is enabled to discover new truths by rediscovering old truths.

When respect for tradition dies out, society, in its incessant desire to renew itself, consumes itself in a frenzy.

Our spiritual inheritance is so opulent that today an astute fool has only to exploit it in order to seem more intelligent to a slow-witted fool than an intelligent man from yesterday.

Castaways more readily forgive the imprudent pilot who sinks the “ship” than the intelligent passenger who predicts its drift towards the reef.

The effectiveness of an intelligent action is so uncertain today that it is not worth the trouble to discipline our wildest fantasies.

Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope in a miracle.

In history it is wise to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans.

Because his carefully calculated expectations failed, the fool believes that the madness of our hopes has been mocked.

Reason, Progress, and Justice are the three theological virtues of the fool.

In every historical situation there always arises somebody to defend in the name of liberty, humanity, or justice, the stupid opinion.

“Historical necessity” is usually just a name for human stupidity.

“To have faith in man” does not reach the level of blasphemy; it is just one more bit of stupidity.

The cost of progress is calculated in fools.

In the end, what does modern man call “Progress”?
Whatever seems convenient to the fool.

Modern stupidities are more irritating than ancient stupidities because their proselytes seek to justify them in the name of reason.

Indoctrinating experts is notoriously easy.
The expert, in effect, attributes to every emphatic dictum the same authority as he attributes to the procedures he follows.

With the categories admitted by the modern mind we do not succeed in understanding anything but trifles.

Stupidity is the fuel of revolutions.

The future tense is the imbecile’s favorite tense.

Fools believe that humanity only now knows certain important things, when there is nothing important which humanity has not known since the beginning.

It is easier to make a man accept a new truth than to make him abandon the errors it refutes.

Knowing which reforms the world needs is the only unequivocal symptom of stupidity.

The caprices of his passions perhaps save man from the catastrophe toward which he is launched by the automatisms of his intelligence.

There is no worse foolishness than the truth in the mouth of a fool.

The South American intellectual, in order to feed himself, imports junk from the European market.

It is possible to inculcate in the contemporary bourgeois any stupid idea in the name of progress and to sell him any grotesque object in the name of art.

To discover the fool there is no better reagent than the word “medieval.”
He immediately sees red.

Marxism and psychoanalysis have been the two traps of the modern intelligence.

The subconscious fascinates the modern mentality.
Because there it can establish its favorite stupidities as irrefutable hypotheses.

For the fool, only those behaviors which conform to the latest fashionable theory in psychology are authentic.
The fool, upon observing himself, always views himself as corroborating experimentally whatever stupidity he presumes to be scientific.

Because he heard it said that religious propositions are metaphors, the fool thinks they are fictions.

To call himself cultivated, it is not enough for an individual to adorn his specialty with bits and pieces of other specialties.
Culture is not a group of special objects but a subject’s specific attitude.

It is fine to demand that the imbecile respect arts, letters, philosophy, the sciences, but let him respect them in silence.

When today we hear someone exclaim: “very civilized!” “very humane!”, there can be no doubt: we are dealing with abject stupidity.

The cultured man does not turn culture into a profession.

When a society’s intelligence becomes plebeian, literary criticism appears more lucid, albeit cruder.

Contemporary literature, in any period, is the worst enemy of culture.
The reader’s limited time is wasted by reading a thousand mediocre books that blunt his critical sense and impair his literary sensibility.

There are certain types of ignorance that enrich the mind and certain types of knowledge that impoverish it.

In a century where the media publish endless stupidities, the cultured man is defined not by what he knows but what he does not know.

The newspaper allots the modern citizen his morning stultification, the radio his afternoon stultification, the television his evening stultification. 

The abuse of the printing press is due to the scientific method and the expressionist aesthetic.
To the former because it allows any mediocre person to write a correct and useless monograph, and to the latter because it legitimizes the effusions of any fool.

An extensive card catalog, an imposing library, a serious university, produce today those avalanches of books that contain not one error nor one insight.

One could object to science that it easily falls into the hands of imbeciles, if religion’s case were not just as serious.

Where he is easy to refute, as in the natural sciences, the imbecile can be useful without being dangerous.
Where he is difficult to refute, as in the humanities, the imbecile is dangerous without being useful.

It does not appear that the humanities, in contrast to the natural sciences, reach a state of maturity where anything idiotic is automatically obvious.

Mechanization is stultifying because it makes man believe that he lives in an intelligible universe.

Stupidity appropriates what science invents with diabolical facility.

What ceases to be thought qualitatively so as to be thought quantitatively ceases to be thought significantly.

Whoever appeals to any science in order to justify his basic convictions inspires distrust of his honesty or his intelligence.

It is from a mistaken accentuation that the majority of the errors in our interpretation of the world proceed.

Authentic history is the transfiguration of the raw event by intelligence and imagination.

When the intellectual climate where something occurs is lacking in originality, the occurrence only has interest for those whom it concerns physically.

Nicolas Gomez Davila