HEAVENLY FLUSHING
19th March 2003
Your claim ("In fact," February) that toilets tend to flush in E flat has been confirmed in at least one case. My father, who has perfect pitch, says he does indeed detect the faintest touch of E flat in his home loo. He adds that, in musical circles, E flat is traditionally thought of as the key of heaven, as in Mahler's 2nd and 8th symphonies.
Andrew Chesterman
Helsinki, Finland
DECELERATING LIGHT
4th April 2003
If objects with mass cannot exceed the speed of light (April) how could the universe at 380,000 years after the big bang have regions millions of light years apart? If all the energy was in "one place" at the big bang, why should objects with mass, created soon after, not be uniformly distributed?
AJ Kerron
Cockfosters, Barnet
RAND AND RORTY
25th March 2003
Does Simon Blackburn (April) realise that most of Rorty's arguments were presaged in the 1940s by Ayn Rand? Indeed, her 1979 book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology provided most of the observations offered by Blackburn, plus better explanations. If more academic thinkers could have broken free from Kant's box earlier they might have listened to her, and Rorty's tragic influence could have been short-circuited.
Larry Salzman
Washington, DC
IRRATIONAL ATHEISM
27th March 2003
Paul Broks (April) admits to being fond of irrationality. That's clear from his article. Not only does he support Wolverhampton Wanderers, a mild case, but he also mocks religious faith, a more serious example. His atheism is not far removed from a fundamentalist delusion: centring, as it does, on fixed beliefs held in the teeth of contrary evidence. I would not be surprised one day to open the front door and find Broks and Dawkins there, armed not with Bibles, but with their own patented anti-viral floppy discs of reason.
Norman Geary
Bangor, County Down
AMERICAN WAR MYTHS 1
3rd April 2003
William Hitchcock (April) levels the charge of myth-making against certain US historians. But he perpetuates a myth of his own. His argument that while "America lost 295,000 soldiers... Russia paid the almost unfathomable price of 25m lives" must be qualified by the fact that, of the latter, perhaps as many as half were non-Russians (in particular, Ukrainians and Belarussians).
Roman Wolczuk
Birmingham
AMERICAN WAR MYTHS 2
31st March 2003
William Hitchcock's claim that Stephen Ambrose and other American historians are responsible for the myth that "America won the second world war with little help from its allies" is fatuous. At least seven chapters of Ambrose's D-Day are about America's allies and their exploits on that day. And his book Pegasus Bridge is entirely about the exploits of D Company of the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry on that fateful morning of 6th June 1944. In any case, his main subject is the involvement of ordinary American soldiers in the latter stages of the second world war. To criticise him for not writing about Stalingrad is like criticising Antony Beevor for writing about the fall of Berlin instead of the Americans pinned down on Omaha beach in 1944. Hitchcock also accuses Ambrose of avoiding difficult subjects such as the internment of Japanese Americans or the firebombing of Japanese and German cities. But Ambrose did attack the US authorities over internment. He was also highly critical of the army over racial segregation. And Ambrose, unlike many other academics, vigorously opposed the war in Vietnam.
Steve Newman,
Stratford-upon-Avon
MIDDLE EAST DEMOCRACY 1
23rd March 2003
Arab tribal politics (April), incorporated into Islam at a very early date, are based on individual accountability. Each individual is responsible before God for every decision he or she makes. It follows that any "community" decision, to be valid, must be approved by the entire society. In the past when most communities were small, dissenting individuals could move on, and this worked well enough. But how this system, which is still strongly adhered to, can be adapted to the politics of nation states is unresolved. A starting point is surely Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia's reforms which aim to formalise this traditional system.
William and Fidelity Lancaster
Lyness, Orkney
MIDDLE EAST DEMOCRACY 2
7th April 2003
In your symposium about democracy in the middle east, it would have been relevant to mention Iran's aborted experience with democracy in the 1950s. Mohammed Mossadeq was elected as prime minister but, as he was hostile to western oil interests, was soon deposed in a coup concocted by the same countries that are invading Iraq today, ushering in years of autocratic rule by the Shah. What if one day in a democratic Iraq the citizens elect a populist leader with undesirable oil policies? Will the hawks gracefully accept the verdict of the Iraqi voters and just let it be?
Marwan Assaf
Beirut, Lebanon
TRAINING THE LEADERS
21st February 2003
The implied criticism (March) of the French system of political training through the ?cole nationale d'administration raises the old question as to how those who manage our lives are best selected. It is easy to ridicule the French ?narque system. But in Britain it is possible to be landed with a prime minister or secretary of state who emerges simply from inner party manoeuverings with no special gift for either government or wisdom. The huge complexities of modern life demand men and women of greater calibre than ever. The founding of a British political academy may soon be essential for the good government of our nation.
Ian Flintoff
London SW6
IN DEFENCE OF SPACEFLIGHT
22nd March 2003
Oliver Morton (Letters, April) accuses me of na?vety over the "arms into spaceships" argument I advanced (March). But it is precisely because the largest arms manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Boeing) also build the hardware for human spaceflight that the argument deserves to be taken seriously. It is true that at present civil space work accounts for a small fraction of the turnover of these companies (roughly 8.5 and 4.5 per cent for the two above). But this would change dramatically if we embark on a much more ambitious programme of space exploration. If and when contracts are placed for building human outposts on the moon and Mars, and for the transportation infrastructure linking them, the financial flows to the aerospace industry will come to rival those currently derived from the military. In such a situation, a switch of dependence may not be unthinkable. Most importantly, as the ultimate source of the funding will remain the same, and the same companies will benefit, those powerful interests which now impede disarmament will be satisfied. I do not claim that space exploration is a panacea, either for disarmament or for international co-operation, only that it can help move things in the right direction.
Ian Crawford
Birkbeck College, London
BILL HAMILTON
20th March 2003
Andrew Brown's portrait of the late Bill Hamilton (January) was in many respects unfair to him. I was Bill's partner during his last six years of life, and I would like to challenge the idea that towards the end of his life he became obsessed by eccentric and fascistic ideas that embarrassed his friends and colleagues. Bill's beliefs on eugenics, euthanasia, abortion, and the effects of natural selection on our species must be seen as part of his wider, pessimistic vision about the dangers presented to human health if modern medicine continues to develop without taking into account the environment in which we are still evolving. "What I want," he wrote, "is not to reject medicine and the use, sometimes, of its extreme measures, but rather to say that I believe we should go carefully. We should try to understand not just the mechanism by which our bodies work, but what might be described as the philosophy underlying that mechanism. I want us to understand the whole chain of our being, that which connects us to the rest of living nature, not just the alloys and welding of special links and how to fix these. Otherwise our attempts to change the world towards how we believe we wish it to be is almost certain to produce monsters."
This view derives from his theory of the role of parasites in the evolution of sex. But Bill also had serious reservations about the role of "the immensely powerful medical and pharmaceutical interests" in organ transplants, among other things. Bill believed that it was his duty as a scientist to warn about such things: "The transplant of pig organs to humans may indeed soon be endowing more years of life to millions... Those wonderful millions of immuno-suppressed human bodies are the prepared feather-beds for potentially vaster billions of virus bodies to lie in... Evolution is relentless, undirectional, caring not who it slays: these viruses, too, in a few years may be acquiring the capacity almost to end our species."
Had Brown looked with a less conventional eye at the reasons behind Bill's deep involvement in the polio vaccine theory of the origin of Aids, he would have found that it is not true, as the Wistar Institute now claims, that they used macaque monkeys' kidneys for the vaccine preparation. They never in fact revealed exactly how they did make the vaccine they gave to hundreds of thousands of people in a remote part of Africa. These people were treated as guinea pigs with a preparation the safety of which had not been properly tested. Brown would probably also be surprised, as I was, that after Bill's death so many original pools of the vaccine were found in freezers at western research institutes. Yet there is still no published result of the samples collected by Bill and his colleagues on his last mission to the Congo in January 2000 to collect faecal and urine samples from wild chimpanzees in the area where the suspect polio vaccine was delivered.
The theory of the link between the polio vaccine and Aids was quickly repudiated in the academic establishment immediately after Bill's death and even before the Royal Society meeting in September 2000 (which had been requested by Bill). The only exception was Matt Ridley, who wanted to know why Bill died and wrote a beautiful article (Prospect, June 2000) about the plausibility of the polio vaccine theory on the origins of Aids. A lot of questions raised in his article remain unsolved.
Finally, I am shocked by Brown's description of Bill's political ideas as close to fascism, a conclusion that Brown justifies by pointing to Bill's "love of nature, distrust of democracy and his pose of doomed heroic stoicism." Bill had a British belief in democracy. It is true he was a romantic spirit with a love of nature and an attraction for far frontiers. But he was not the macho man depicted in the drawing accompanying the article (even if the artist caught him uncannily well). Bill invited us to be less cowardly about death and to understand our nature "before trying to grasp inflexible dogmas about what is right."
Maria Luisa Bozzi
Turin, Italy
Send letters by post or e-mail info@prospect-magazine.co.uk
