His Master's Voice Read Online Free Page B
Author: Stanislaw Lem
use of the knowledge one possesses. I know that Chance fashioned us, put us together as we are—and what, am I to follow submissively all the directives drawn blindly in that endless lottery?
My principium humanitatis is curious in that if someone basically good wished to apply it to himself, he would be obliged—in keeping with the policy of "conquering one's own nature"—to do evil in order to affirm his human freedom. My doctrine therefore is not suited for general application; but I do not see why I have to provide humanity with an ethical panacea. Diversity, heterogeneity, is a given in mankind; thus Kant's declaration that the basis of individual actions could be made a general law means a varying violence done to people; in sacrificing the individual for a superior value—the culture—Kant dispenses injustice. But I am not saying that one is a man only to the extent that he is a self-chained monster. I have presented a purely private argument, my own strategy, which, however, has changed nothing in me. To this day my first reaction, upon hearing of someone's misfortune, is a spark of pleasure, and I no longer even attempt to stifle such twitches, because I know that I cannot reach the place where that mindless chuckle lives. But I respond with resistance and act contrary to myself, for the reason that I am able to do so.
Had I truly intended to write my own biography—which would have turned out to be, in comparison with the volumes on my shelf, an anti biography—there would have been no need for me to justify these confessions. But my object is different. The adventure I am to relate boils down to this: humanity came upon a thing that beings belonging to another race had sent out into the darkness of the stars. A situation, the first of its kind in history, important enough, one would think, to merit the divulging, in greater detail than convention allows, of who it was, exactly, who represented our side in that encounter. All the more since neither my genius nor my mathematics alone sufficed to prevent it from bearing poison fruit.
1
THE MASTER'S VOICE Project has an enormous literature, more extensive and diverse than ever had the Manhattan Project. Upon its public disclosure, America and the world were inundated with articles, treatises, and essays, so numerous that the bibliography alone is a tremendous tome, as thick as an encyclopedia. The official version is the Baloyne Report , which the American Library later published in ten million copies; but the essence of it appears in the eighth volume of the Encyclopedia Americana . And there have been books about the Project by others who held high positions in it, such as Rappaport's The First Interstellar Communication , Dill's Inside His Master's Voice , or Prothero's HMV: The Implications for Physics . This last work, authored by my late friend, is among the most accurate, though it really belongs more to the professional literature—professional meaning that the thing studied is clearly separated from the one who studies it.
There are too many historical treatises even to mention. The four-volume work of the historian of science William Angers, 749 Days: A Chronicle , is monumental. It amazed me with its meticulousness; Angers had got hold of all the former workers of the Project and done a compilation of their views. But I did not read his opus to the end—that seemed to me as impossible as reading a telephone book.
In a separate category are books not factual but interpretive, ranging from the philosophical and theological even to the psychiatric. The reading of such publications never fails to weary and annoy me. It is no coincidence, I am sure, that those who have the most to say about the Project are the ones who have had no direct contact with it.
Which is similar to the attitude physicists have regarding gravitation or electrons—as opposed to that of the "well-informed" who read popular science. The "well-informed" think they know
My principium humanitatis is curious in that if someone basically good wished to apply it to himself, he would be obliged—in keeping with the policy of "conquering one's own nature"—to do evil in order to affirm his human freedom. My doctrine therefore is not suited for general application; but I do not see why I have to provide humanity with an ethical panacea. Diversity, heterogeneity, is a given in mankind; thus Kant's declaration that the basis of individual actions could be made a general law means a varying violence done to people; in sacrificing the individual for a superior value—the culture—Kant dispenses injustice. But I am not saying that one is a man only to the extent that he is a self-chained monster. I have presented a purely private argument, my own strategy, which, however, has changed nothing in me. To this day my first reaction, upon hearing of someone's misfortune, is a spark of pleasure, and I no longer even attempt to stifle such twitches, because I know that I cannot reach the place where that mindless chuckle lives. But I respond with resistance and act contrary to myself, for the reason that I am able to do so.
Had I truly intended to write my own biography—which would have turned out to be, in comparison with the volumes on my shelf, an anti biography—there would have been no need for me to justify these confessions. But my object is different. The adventure I am to relate boils down to this: humanity came upon a thing that beings belonging to another race had sent out into the darkness of the stars. A situation, the first of its kind in history, important enough, one would think, to merit the divulging, in greater detail than convention allows, of who it was, exactly, who represented our side in that encounter. All the more since neither my genius nor my mathematics alone sufficed to prevent it from bearing poison fruit.
1
THE MASTER'S VOICE Project has an enormous literature, more extensive and diverse than ever had the Manhattan Project. Upon its public disclosure, America and the world were inundated with articles, treatises, and essays, so numerous that the bibliography alone is a tremendous tome, as thick as an encyclopedia. The official version is the Baloyne Report , which the American Library later published in ten million copies; but the essence of it appears in the eighth volume of the Encyclopedia Americana . And there have been books about the Project by others who held high positions in it, such as Rappaport's The First Interstellar Communication , Dill's Inside His Master's Voice , or Prothero's HMV: The Implications for Physics . This last work, authored by my late friend, is among the most accurate, though it really belongs more to the professional literature—professional meaning that the thing studied is clearly separated from the one who studies it.
There are too many historical treatises even to mention. The four-volume work of the historian of science William Angers, 749 Days: A Chronicle , is monumental. It amazed me with its meticulousness; Angers had got hold of all the former workers of the Project and done a compilation of their views. But I did not read his opus to the end—that seemed to me as impossible as reading a telephone book.
In a separate category are books not factual but interpretive, ranging from the philosophical and theological even to the psychiatric. The reading of such publications never fails to weary and annoy me. It is no coincidence, I am sure, that those who have the most to say about the Project are the ones who have had no direct contact with it.
Which is similar to the attitude physicists have regarding gravitation or electrons—as opposed to that of the "well-informed" who read popular science. The "well-informed" think they know
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