MEDICINE IS NOT AN ADVANCED SCIENCE

 

After hundreds of years of advances, medicine is good at fixing simple problems-- cuts, bone breaks, infections, some diseases-- but unreliable in the long run.

 

Most of its cures, both for nagging and life-threatening problems, are temporary fixes. Medicine can give temporary relief for colds, sinus, respiratory and digestive problems; but not keeping these from coming back again. There are pharmaceuticals for almost everything, which work some of the time (enough to pass a statistical significance test), but full of side-effects, drug interactions, and dosage issues. Once you start treatment for a condition, there is rarely an end to it. Everyone's personal medical history is a series of readjustments that may or may not work, to varying degrees and lengths of time.

 

Medicine is not an advanced science by the standards of physics, mathematics, chemistry, and engineering. Principles of physics hold almost without exception--- (i.e. specifying the environment in which they work, for instance on the earth; leaving aside conceptually outlying areas like the beginning and end of the universe.) Math is reliable, precise, and capable of dealing with high dimensions of complexity. Engineering is good at constructing machines that work reliably over a long period of time (like turning on or off a light switch); when they break down, it is easily traceable to defects in materials.

 

There is nothing in medicine equivalent to turning on a light switch or the ignition of your car. Medicine is moderately effective in alleviating ailments once they happen. But:  it can't stop them from happening in the first place. It can't stop them from happening again. It can't stop the cascade of one problem after another. Undergoing multiple procedures, operations and hospitalizations are a sign of impending death. Advanced medicine is good at keeping you alive when you are sick, until it isn't.

 

Even in the midst of life, medicine is poor at predicting when something bad will start. Why you get cancer in the first place, and why at that particular age. Most serious problems come out of the blue. They may have low probability, but the statistical distribution covers up ignorance over why they happen when.

 

No wonder many people still hold beliefs about God's mysterious plan, destiny, bad luck, call it what you will. Saints continue to be recognized in the scientific age, mostly on the basis of a medical miracle-- attested by a medical doctor who stated that the patient was in hopeless condition before they called on the aid of a holy person. Such events are not surprising, given the iffy record of medical prognosis.

 

In its defense, medicine is playing in a harder field than physics and engineering. Those deal with closed systems, where strong causal procsses are set up to operate without interference from the environment. Experiments in physics and chemistry were designed to isolate a specific process in a laboratory situation where the rest of the world is excluded. Engineering creates machines shielded from anything extraneous getting into its engine, its plumbing or wiring. Medicine deals with living bodies open to the external environment: germs and viruses (with their evolutionary pattern of parasitism); physical stresses, collisions, falls, aging body parts; social, psychological and emotional stresses, all coursing through the brain, nerves, muscles, tissues and organs. It adds up to multiple causes, most of them weak in themselves, impinging from an unpredictable external environment, and interacting in complicated ways inside the body's internal environment.

 

And the body itself is far from being a linear causal sequence like electric lighting or an automobile engine. Instead, it is like an orchestra of string instruments, harmonizing well when opposite processes balance each other out, and subject to far-reaching effects once it gets out of balance.

 

All of which suggests future medicine can keep on making incremental advances. But it is implausible that it will ever make people healthy forever (or past age 100, whichever comes first); or head off when serious illnesses will start within the life span.

WORLD HISTORY UPDATED: WEBER, MARX, AND FUTURE TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

 

Max Weber's great contribution to the sociology of world history was the transition from kinship-based organization to bureaucracy. From the earliest human tribes up through the medieval period, societies were organized around families and clans-- which is to say, by kinship (including pseudo-kinship of ethnic groups claiming to descend from mythological ancestors). In such societies, politics was marriage politics. Individual love or lust were secondary, if allowed at all; marriages were the fundamental tie that determined political alliances as well as property inheritance, too important to be left to personal feelings of individuals. There would come a great change in personal life -- call it the love revolution -- when the era of kinship politics gives way to another form of organization.

 

The second type of organization was bureaucracy. Although the term now is pejorative, Weber used it to point out the key features of organization not based on familistic connections. Bureaucracy is impersonal organization, administered by abstract rules that apply to everyone. It is a literate society where rules and laws are written down: a society of record-keeping. It is the administrative state that keeps track of everyone and everything -- the world of censuses, dossiers, identity numbers, passports, licenses, school grades and everything else (not to mention budgets and business inventories).

 

Bureaucracy is often defined as "meritocratic".  This is true at least in the negative sense that personnel are chosen, not by family background, but by impersonal criteria such as examinations and performance evaluations. As we know from a couple of centuries of experience, bureaucracies are not necessarily the most efficient way of doing things; and records such as educational degrees are not the same as being the best at a job. But the great virtue of bureaucracy is as a safeguard against lapsing  back into nepotism. The coming of bureaucracy was thus a liberal or modernizing approach to social life.

 

Bureaucracy is the epoch-making transition in the history of the state towards centralization. In the familistic era, conquests and astute marriage politics could expand into far-spread empires. But these were also prone to disintegrate into feudalism, as locally dominant families consolidated control. To counter this tendency, monarchies tried to replace local aristocrats with their own administrators, chosen for their abilities at record-keeping, logistics and finance, and whose loyalty could be assured by moving them around and hiring or firing them for performance. Thus arose the distinction between aristocrats and the "middle class", who henceforth would become the prime movers of social change.

 

Regions where centralizing bureaucracy took hold underwent a change in social identity: the ideal of a state whose boundaries contained a unified people, and hence the ideology of nationalism. It was originally a liberal idea, replacing the cosmopolitan marriage politics of aristocrats and court favorites. Nationalism also implied that local ethnic groups (reflecting family ancestry) were merged into one national identity-- we are all Englishmen (as Shakespeare proclaimed), all Frenchmen (as the 1789 Revolution proclaimed).

 

And since bureaucratic ideology of non-hereditary "merit" and formal equality before the law applied to everyone, centralization and nationalism inspired revolutionary movements. Revolutions start by mobilizing mass enthusiasm, and demanding some form of democracy-- rule by the people through representative government. Like all ideals, initial enthusiasm gives way to organizational realities, and tends to slide back into rule by bureaucracy -- in the name of the people but in practice rule by officials, elected and unelected. Democratic revolutions have never been the end of history, but staging grounds for an endless struggle among political movements. And thus bureaucracy gives rise to that now-pervasive modern phenomenon, social movements for protest and change.

 

Class conflict

 

At this point Marxism enters the picture. This is the emergence of class conflict, focused no longer against hereditary aristocrats, but on the taken for granted working class, servants, poor people, the repressed, exploited or otherwise underdogs of the population. From this matrix would come all sorts of movements of rebellion and protests, flowing in an apparently inexhaustible sequence of social identities, diversities, and inclusions. Karl Marx is emblematic of a spectrum of protest movements organized by a similar process of mobilization.

 

Marxism in the narrow sense did not itself have a good track record at predicting the future of revoutions. With its focus on factory workers, it failed to foresee that most revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries would be revolutions of nationalism. Most unexpected of all were the Fascist revolutions, a combination of nationalism with populist ideology of representing forgotten or oppressed peoples, a right-wing version of Marxist revolution. The successful Marxist revolutions came not from industrial strikes but state breakdown in costly or lost wars -- Russia, China, and the colonial empires. But these too did not prove to be the end of history, and by the turn of the 21st century underwent another round of revolutions, including anti-communist ones.

 

Another mixture not anticipated by Marxists was capitalist democracy. This is a compromise between private property and all-out socialism-- the welfare state based on taxation. Welfare states are necessarily bureaucratic, with all the rules and record-keeping involved in administering services, deciding eligibility, and handing out payments --- mirrored as well in private insurance coverage, as we all experience around medical bills. All this is a constant source of political squabbling that makes democracy less than utopian. In short, capitalist democracy is a blend of those two big ingredients, bureaucracy and class conflict.

 

Where does technology come in?

 

There is a much simpler (not to say simplistic) theory of history, called technological progress.

 

This has gone on in an endless series since the earliest proto-humans discovered fire, tools, hunting, fishing, and edible wild plants. Then came how to plant your own garden, build shelters, homes, burial places and monuments. Herding and breeding animals provided a new source of power, while innovations in metallurgy and weaponry brought military power, adding massed human muscles to create large-scale agriculture, irrigation canals, pyramids, the Great Wall, built by slave labor and its equivalents. The result was what we call ancient civilizations. History took a new direction when human and animal power were supplemented and then replaced by new sources of inanimate energy, even during the so-called stagnant Middle Ages-- wind and water mills, gears and crankshafts, pipe organs and mechanical clocks. The industrial revolution added power from steam, coal, oil, and eventually electricity.

 

The innovativeness of modern capitalism

 

But technological innovation does not just happen by itself, not without a sociological component. The pace of innovation was deliberately accelerated by the combination of bureaucracy and capitalism. Bureaucracy because keeping records and calculations led to systematic breeding of crops and animals, an acceleration of agricultural capitalism at the same time steam engines and factory machinery were being developed. A more calculating form of capitalism came to dominate, as bigger companies added research departments or were started by scientists and engineers. Economics was invented, having new processes to calculate when banking turned into financial markets where investors calculate which profitable developments were likely to happen in the future.

 

As Schumpeter emphasized, always-expanding modern capitalism takes off when finances become the control center of capitalist markets. The entwining of finance and industry became the driving force of technological innovation. In the modern era, technological progress does not stand on its own; it is a social invention.

 

The digital age

 

This is where we are now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century. The rapidly moving front of computerization-- the personal computer, the Internet, smart phone, AI-- is familiar in the following respect: they are all forms of high-tech capitalism, fundamentally no different from the technological, organizational, and financial innovations of John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. The digital age is the financial-industrial complex in spades. The financial maneuvers of high tech innovators like Gates, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, Altman et al. show that the linkage between finance capitalism and the high-tech cutting edge is tighter then ever. It is hard to imagine how this would change in the future.

 

The big issues in the future of technology are sociological. The central controversy from here on out will be the threat by high tech to eliminate jobs of a substantial portion of the labor force.

 

The optimistic argument is that technological innovation has eliminated jobs in the past, but new jobs have always emerged. The argument relies heavily on the historical period of the industrial revolution in the 1800s and early 1900s, as factory machines replaced manual labor; but each mechanical innovation was compensated by expansion of white-collar workers, administrators, and professionals. The difference is that AI is now taking away jobs not only of low-level clerical workers, but managers, scientists, and programmers in the AI industry itself. AI is now being trained to shadow the daily work of the middle class elite, in effect making them train non-human replacements for themselves.

 

Cheerleaders for AI and robotization declare it's wonderful; everyone will have more leisure, machines will do all the work. Technological innovation will create new products for people to buy, a future of yet unimagined luxury.

 

This ignores a fundamental fact about the capitalist economy: profit depends on selling your product. If customers with money don't exist, it doesn't matter how great your product is, if no one can buy it. The prospects of putting 50% or eventually 80% of the population out of work would create a depression far deeper than the one beginning in 1929 that reached 25% unemployment.

 

For the near-term future, a saving grace would be if it turns out that AI isn't that good at doing human jobs. In recent years, introducing computerization has created jobs for humans trouble-shooting automated systems that don't work well. This may be especially true for Large Language Models; not a human-like intelligence at all but a statistical memory bank which estimates which words tend to follow from other words. This is a far cry from the psychology of human intelligence that children grow up learning how to navigate with all their bodily senses in the world of other persons and things -- and what gives us what we call common sense.

 

Not to say that AI taking a different route than LLM might not eventually be better. If and when that happens, we are back in a mega-Marxian crisis-- the reserve army of the white-collar unemployed, demanding government intervention if not socialist revolution.

 

Ironically, this means future government will continue the trend towards ultra-bureaucratization. Politics will focus on doling out tax money from the few surviving mega-capitalists so that the masses can buy their products and keep their businesses from bankruptcy. Politics in democracies will be an ongoing tug-of-war  over how much will be doled out by the equivalent of depression-era bread lines and soup kitchens.

 

To further the irony, it will mean that the master trend of modern history is bureaucratization. The essence of bureaucracy is written rules and records, which is what computers do-- following rules to process information, the programmed rules-based based manipulation of memory stores. An AI-managed world would be omnipresent bureaucracy.

 

Plus climate change

 

Any discussion of the future needs to factor in the other big crisis already in our midst: climate change. It will go on at the same time as technological unemployment of the labor force. How will the two crises interact?

 

One point of connection: the root cause of climate change is the same as the cause of high-tech displacing the labor force, the capitalist economy.

 

Why has global warming accelerated so much since the 1950s? Because world population has grown from about 2.2 billion to 8.3 billion, about four times as large. Why did it grow so much? Because economic prosperity has increased, improving health and food conditions, and accelerating a trend that began in the countries that first went through the industrial revolution. In the US alone, population went from 140 million in 1950 to 340 million today. During that period, the population of South Asia (India, Pakistan etc.) went from 430 million to 1.8 billion; China from 590 million to 1.4 billion; Africa from 200 million to 1.6 billion.

 

And throughout the world, economic growth has raised the standard of living. Almost everywhere people have been consuming more, buying the products and imitating the lifestyle of the most prosperous Western countries, and taking over production for world markets. With aspirations spurred on by global communication via the film industry, TV and the Internet, world-wide consumption has rocketed, increasing the energy spent on transportation, air travel, automobiles, construction and infrastructure.

 

Multiply population expanding by a factor of 4 by consumption increasing at a similar rate, and the result is global warming.

 

The solution is obvious, if unwelcome. If population were to return to early 20th century levels, global warming would slow down. Consumption of energy might still be high; but a large enough decline in population would eventually bring global warming to a halt, or even reverse it.

 

Below-replacement fertility

 

There is already a move in this direction. Since 2000, in one country after another, the fertility rate has fallen below replacement. In many European countries, the number of children born per woman has fallen below the 2.1 level for stable population -- in Italy and the Mediterranean countries, down to 1.3. In the US it dropped to 1.6; in Japan to 1.3; in China a precipitous fall to 1.0.

 

If fertility rate keeps on dropping to 1.0 per woman, world population would be cut in half. And population decline would concatenate in the following generations. Two generations from now population would be down to one-quarter what it is now (for the US, roughly from 300 million to 150 million to 75 million). *

 

* This simplified calculation does not take account of rising life expectancy. But life expectancy is rising at a much slower rate than the declining rate of fertility; given current trends, population decline starting about 30 years from now is inevitable. In France, where fertility is 1.5 and heading downwards, a recent projection is that total population will peak before 2040, and that by 2070 the population of childbearing age will be cut in half. The population of any particular country also depends on migration in and out; this is a political process that we will look at below.

 

Economists and financial investors blanche at the possibility of a shrinking population. Capitalism thrives on growth. Investors invest on prospects of further growth. When any product sector shrinks, capital flees. Consider also that the amount of money itself is multiplied by booms in investment markets. For the past century, money no longer represents any fixed material value like gold; it has a purely sociological reality, consisting of promises to pay. Valuations based on the price of stocks, credit available, or debts payable hold up as long as the amount of financial exchange continues high. The amount of money at any particular time exists in collective psychology, the confidence of investors and consumers (e.g. credit-card borrowers) holds up.

 

A declining population is the formula for a feedback cycle of economic depression: falling consumption, falling investment, falling profit, falling employment.

 

Thus the one clearly feasible solution to global warming is anathema to economists, capitalists, and policy makers.

 

Three big questions remain in the scenario

 

[1] How will population decline interact with job displacement by robotization and AI?

 

In all likelihood, massive technologically-driven unemployment would make people even less likely to want to have children, or to be able to afford them. Huge population decline could come even sooner than two generations, depending on when fully effective AI and robots arrive.

 

[2] Would socialism help solve either of these problems? It would force the remaining rich people to share their wealth, in order to keep the rest of the people alive and consuming. Would socialism be good or bad for population decline? These may be the horns of a dilemma.

 

[3] Both the negative effect of global warming and the negative effect of below-replacement fertility will happen unevenly. Countries less penetrated by AI would be able to keep up their population levels better. These economically-lagging countries might however be the ones most subject to extreme heat, drought, or low-lying areas subject to rising ocean levels.

 

The result would be that pressure for global migration would increase-- from countries worst-hit by global warming to those less hit by it. In conjunction with national concerns for maintaining the home country's cultural identity, this would increase political struggles over closed borders and immigration policy.

 

The caveat here is that the traditionally rich countries (the most technologically advanced) would also be those whose population is most displaced into unemployment, and whose economic depression would be the worst. This would make them less attractive as a destination for migrants.

 

This is as far as sociological prediction, as of today's conditions, can go. We have three crises ahead through the remainder of the 21st century, plus a series of complexities that give rise to a range of specific scenarios for different countries. This is what a theory looks like where multiple causal processes (below-replacement fertility, economic investment and consumption, technologically driven unemployment, political movements such as nationalism and socialism) interact.

 

And the interactional flow chart will be strongly affected by which processes are much faster than others. At present, fertility decline is speeding along in many parts of the world; although Africa still has a very high birth rate around 4.0. When AI will really rampage through employment is anyone's guess. Global warming moves at a slower pace, with the crisis point around the year 2100.

 

One thing is certain. No realistic view of the future will emerge as long as each issue is treated in isolation from the others. Can we find a combination of conditions that offers better possibilities? Some scenarios may offer hope.

 

WAR AND ABSURDITY: CATCH-22 IS REALITY

 

Catch-22 is the most serious funny book ever written.

It is a completely serious account of what combat is like, and the reactions of war-fighters (in this case bomber crews) to being repeatedly sent out expecting they will eventually be killed. It is also an accurate, if satirically exaggerated, account of the black market economy and evasion of bureaucratic rules that happens in prolonged periods of stalemate on remote military bases.

 

It is hilariously funny describing self-contradicting loops, endlessly repeating, while everyone knows that's what they are doing. The seriousness and the funny-ness blend together because that is the psychological reaction of troops under that kind of inescapable stress-- plunging into absurdity as a necessary form of gallows humour. Mark de Rond's Doctors at War is a serious description of the same dilemma at a forward military hospital during the Afghanistan war. Catch-22 carries it to the point of hallucination.

 

Other funny books are nowhere near this kind of seriousness. P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are loveably silly. Evelyn Waugh has real-life prototypes but their absurdities and personal atrocities are relieved by picturesquely outrageous characters and turns of plot. Action-adventure movies of the Indiana Jones type use a steady stream of humor so that what would be real-life sadism and carnage are just slapstick. Tristram Shandy is about loveable eccentrics, told by an endlessly digressive narrator, a nice version of Catch-22. Don Quixote is a bitter-sweet satire, but nothing really horrible happens. Lots of serious novels are enlivened by social satire or the author's sarcastic tone, but one seldom laughs out loud reading Thackeray, Trollope, or Hemingway. Catch-22 makes laugh-out-loud scenes out of the worst realities.

 

The plot, to the extent it has one, is that the Colonel in charge of a bomber group keeps raising the number of missions that his men must fly before they are eligible to be sent home. At first it's 25 missions, than 30, then 40, then 50, 55, 60. Yossarian, a Captain whose job is bombadier-- he sits in the nose of the plane, steers it to its target, and drops the bombs-- meets each required number of missions, only to find that he now has to fly more. Eventually he realizes that his glory-seeking commanding officer will never let him reach the quota, and that he going to die like other men he has seen killed around him.

 

The book starts out plunged into the absurdities that Yossarian protests against and engages in to get out of flying more missions, like staying in the hospital wearing a bathrobe. It is well into the middle of the book before we find out what Yossarian has been going through on his bombing missions. The book jumps back-and-forth in time, like Proust's  À la recherche du temps perdu, another novel more concerned with psychology than sequence -- but in this case obsessed with the horrific effects of memory and anticipation. 

 

         "Heavy flack was everywhere! He had been lulled, lured and trapped, and there was nothing he could do but sit there like an idiot and watch the ugly black puffs smashing up to kill him. There was nothing he could do until the bombs dropped but look into the bomsight, where the fine cross-hairs were glued magnetically over the target exactly where he had placed them. He was trembing steadily as the plane crept ahead. He could hear the hollow boom-boom-boom-boom of the flak pounding all around him in over-lapping measures of four, the sharp, piercing crack! of a single shell exploding very close by. His head was bursting with a thousand dissonant impulses as he prayed for the bombs to drop. He wanted to sob. The engines droned on monotonously like a fat, lazy fly. At last the indices on the bombsight crossed, tripping away the eight 500-pounders one after the other. The plane lurched upward buoyantly with the lightened load. Yossarian bent away from the bombsight crookedly to watch the indicator on his left. When the pointer touched zero, he closed the bomb bay doors, and, over the intercom, at the very top of his voice, shrieked:

         'Turn right hard!'

         McWatt responded instantly. With a grinding howl of engines, he flipped the plane over on one wing and wrung it around remorselessly in a screaming turn away from the twin spires of flak Yossarian had spied stabbing toward them. Then Yossarian had McWatt climb and keep climbing higher and higher until they tore free finally into a calm, diamond-blue sky that was sunny and pure everywhere and laced in the distance with long white veils of tenuous fluff. The wind strummed soothingly against the cylindrical panes of the windows, and he relaxed exultantly only until they picked up speed again and then turned McWatt left and plunged him right back down, noticing with a transitory spasm of elation mushrooming clusters of flak leaping open high above him and back over his shoulder to the right, exactly where he could have been if he had not turned left and dived...

         "The plane zoomed upward again in a climb that was swift and straining, until he leveled it out with another harsh shout at McWatt and wrenched it around once more in a roaring, merciless forty-five-degree turn that sucked his insides out in one enervating sniff and left him floating fleshless in mid-air until he leveled McWatt out again just long enough to hurl him back to the right and then down into a screeching dive. Through endless blobs of ghostly black smoke he sped, the hanging smut wafting against the smooth plexiglass nose of the ship like an evil, damp, sooty vapor against his cheeks. His heart was hammering again in arching terror as he hurtled upward and downward through the blind gangs of flak charging murderously into the sky at him, then sagging inertly. Sweat gushed from his neck in torrents and poured down over his chest and waist with the feeling of warm slime. He was vaguely aware for an instant that the planes in his formation were no longer there, and then he was aware only of himself. His throat hurt with a raw slash from the strangling intensity with which he shrieked each command to McWatt. The engines rose to a deafening, agonized, undulating bellow each time McWatt changed direction. And far out in front the bursts of flak were still swarming into the sky from new batteries of guns poking around for accurate altitude as they waited sadistically for him to fly into range.

         The plane was slammed again with another loud, jarring explosion that almost rocked it over on its back, and the nose filled immediately with sweet clouds of blue smoke. Something was on fire! ...  and suddenly, miraculously, they were out of range. The flak ended. The guns stopped booming at them. And they were alive.

         Behind him, men were dying. Strung out for miles in a stricken, tortuous, squirming line, the other flights of planes were making the same hazardous journey over the target, threading their swift way through the swollen masses of new and old bursts of flak like rats racing in a pack through their own droppings. One was on fire, and flapped lamely off by itself, billowing gigantically like a monstrous blood-red star. As Yossarian watched, the burning plane floated over on its side and began spiraling down slowly in wide, tremulous, narrowing circles, its huge flaming burden blazing orange and flaring out in back like a long, swirling cape of fire and smoke. There were parachutes, one, two, three... four, and then the plane gyrated into a spin and fell the rest of the way to the ground, fluttering insensibly inside its vivid pyre like a shred of colored tissue paper. One whole flight of planes from another squadron had been blasted apart.

         Yossarian sighed barrenly, his day's work done. He was listless and sticky..."  [168-73]

 

Another hundred pages along, Yossarian is standing naked in a formation to receive a Distinguished Flying Cross medal from the commanding general.

 

         "'Why isn't he wearing clothes?' General Dreedle demanded of Colonel Cathcart.

         'Why isn't he wearing clothes?' Colonel Cathcart demanded of Colonel Korn.

         'Why isn't he wearing clothes?' Colonel Korn demanded of Captain Wren.

         'A man was killed in his plane over Avignon last week and bled all over him,' Captain Wren replied. 'He swears he's never going to wear a uniform again.'

         'A man was killed in his plane over Avignon last week and bled all over him,' Colonel Korn reported directly to General Dreedle. 'His uniform hasn't come back from the laundry yet.'

         'Where are his other uniforms?'

         'They're in the laundry too.'

         'What about his underwear?' General Dreedle demanded.

         'All his underwear's in the laundry, too,' answered Colonel Korn.

         'That sounds like a lot of crap to me,' General Dreedle declared.

         'It is a lot of crap,' Yossarian said."  [250-51]

        

The style is like the joke about a man with a banana in his ear. Another man says, "You have a banana in your ear."

         "What?"

         "You have a banana in your ear!"

         "What?"

         "YOU HAVE A BANANA IN YOUR EAR!!"

         "You'll have to speak louder. I have a banana in my ear."

 

Each chapter title is the name of an officer (e.g. LIEUTENANT SCHEISSKOPF). It begins with a character sketch that morphs into a conundrum.  MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR is about a man from a family named Major who named him Major Major Major. When he enlisted in the air force, this made trouble because he seemly outranked the officers who were in charge of training. This was serious because Catch-22 says you always must obey your superior officer, no matter what. The answer to the conundrum, higher-ups decided, was to give him the rank of Major. As Major Major Major Major, he was given an office but nothing in particular to do. Outranking his subordinates, all their reports to higher up went through him for his signature. Bored, he started signing official documents 'Washington Irving', which got them rejected higher up and sent back for additional signatures along the chain. Out of sheer embarrassment, Major Major ordered his sergeant to tell everyone who wanted to see him that he was not seeing anyone while he was in except when he was out. "I want to see Major Major." "You can't see him now." "When can I get in to see him?' "When he's not here."

 

Two other characters who frequently reappear are involved in running the black market economy. Major _____ de Coverly (no one knows his first name), is a white-haired old patriarch with a craggy face who everyone defers to, and no one knows exactly what his duties are. Major _____ de Coverly is always flying around renting apartments in liberated cities like Rome for rest leave, separate quarters for officers and enlisted men in the rank-segregated structure of the military. These quarters are well-stocked with food and drink, and are brothels, staffed by money-seeking Italian women, often accompanied by their penurious families. This leads to further banana-in-ear conundrums, like the young officer who falls in love with a prostitute and tells her he wants to marry her. She refuses because no one would marry her, since she a prostitute.

 

Milo Minderbinder is the officer in charge of mess hall. He is always flying around the Mediterranean, buying and selling food, licquor, and anything else that is for sale. He buys eggs in Malta at 7 cents each, and sells them to squadron mess halls for 4 cents. After many mentions of this paradox, we find that Milo Minderbinder is repeatedly buying things, selling them to someone else, then buying them back. Why make it so complicated? Because Milo makes money as a middle-man, taking a cut out of each transaction, the more transactions the better. He offers a deal to the officers in charge of the air bases, getting carte blanche for his operations. "Everyone gets a cut," he assures them confidentially.

 

The extent of Milo Minderbinder's and Major _____ de Coverly's operations is a fantasy extreme. But there are many realistic accounts of  backstage dealings in war zones. One example is James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, by a college professor assigned to paper-work duties by the Navy in 1942-43, traveling all over the islands that were staging areas for brief, intense battles but mostly consisted of waiting for something to happen. A cleaned-up version became the Broadway musical and film, South Pacific. The patterns are the same: Right at the outset, we meet Bloody Mary, a native woman who sells souvenirs for the sailors to send back home; and Luther Billis, a fast-talking sailor who bends the rules, supplies luxuries and can provide anything for a price. Off duty, officers and enlisted men are segregated; and since the only women available on base are nurses, they are made off limits by giving them officer rank. Early on in the musical, we get this number, "There is Nothin' Like a Dame"

 

         We got sunlight on the sands,

         We got moonlight on the sea,

         We got mangoes and bananas

         You can pick right off a tree,

         We got volleyball and ping-pong

         And a lot of dandy games--

         What ain't we got?

         We ain't got dames!

 

         We feel restless, we feel blue,

         We feel lonely and, in brief,

         We feel every king of feelin'

         But the feelin' of relief.

         We feel hungry as the wolf felt

         When he met Red Riding Hood--

         What don't we feel?

         We don't feel good!

 

         There are no books like a dame

         And nothin' looks like a dame.

         There are no drinks like a dame,

         Nothin' thinks like a dame

         Or attracts like a dame,

         There ain't a thing that's wrong with

                  any man here,

         That can't be cured by puttin' him near

         A girly, womanly, female, feminine dame!

 

This plays out guardedly in the plot. All the women, wives and daughters of the French settlers, have been sent to a nearby island, which is off limits to anyone but officers. Lt. Cable, the young romantic hero, is talked into requisitioning a boat by Billis to go to Bali Hai, where he falls in love with a beautiful young native girl. Why are the women sent away? Michener gives the answer: the horny atmosphere of the naval base is rife with rape. The other love story of the musical, between Nurse Nelly and a handsome French planter, is much more sinister in Michener: a nurse out driving in a jeep is liable to get ambushed, dragged into the bushes, and raped by low-ranking sailors. There is a class war going on between the ranks; strongly apparent in other eyewitness accounts such as Norman Mailer's WWII novel The Naked and the Dead; and James Jones' From Here to Eternity (which also includes a soldier falling in love with a prostitute.) Class war reached its peak in the Vietnam War, when unpopular officers were getting "fragged" by grenades thrown into their tents by their own men. (James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam.)

 

In Catch-22, sexual privilege and rank-hostility are more over-the-top:

 

         "General Dreedle is always accompanied by his nurse, who was as delectable a piece of ass as anyone who saw her had ever laid eyes on... 'You should see her naked,' General Dreedle chortled with croup relish, while his nurse stood smiling proudly right at his shoulder. "Back at Wing she's got a uniform in my room made of purple silk that's so tight her nipples stand out like bing cherries. Milo got me the fabric.' ...

          A few pages later, we find General Dreedle and nurse in the briefing room when a major goes on monotonously describing for the assembled airmen what batteries of flak they will encounter over Avignon. Yossarian

"... moaned in deep despair that he might never see again this lovely woman to whom he had never spoken a word and whom he now loved so pathetically. He licked his parched, thirsting lips with a sticky tongue and moaned in misery, loudly enough this time to attract the startled, searching glances of the men sitting around him on the rows of crude wooden benches in their chocolate-coloured coveralls and stiched white parachute harnesses...

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' Yossarian moaned a fourth time, this time loudly enough for everyone to hear him distinctly.

         'Are you crazy?' Nately hissed vehemently. 'You'll get into trouble.'

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' Dunbar answered Yossarian from the opposite end of the room.

         Nately recognized Dunbar's voice. The situation was getting out of control, and he turned away with a small moan. 'Ooh.'

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' Dunbar moaned back at them.

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' Nately moaned out loud in exasperation when he realized he had just moaned.

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' Dunbar moaned back at him again.

         'Ooooooooooooooooh,' someone entirely new chimed in from another section of the room, and Nately's hair stood on end.

         Yossarian and Dunbar both replied while Nately cringed and hunted about furtively for some hole in which to hide and take Yossarian with him. A sprinkling of people were smothering laughter. An elfin impulse possessed Nately and he moaned intentionally the next time there was a lull. Another new voice answered. The flavor of disobedience was tittilating. An eerie hubbub of voices was rising. Feet were scuffled, and things began to drop from people's fingers-- pencils, computers, map cases, clattering steel flak helmets. A number of men who were not moaning were now giggling openly, and there was no telling how far the unorganized insurrection of moaning might have gone if General Dreedle himself had not come forward to quell it...

         'That will be all, men,' he ordered tersely, his eyes glaring with disapproval and his square jaw firm, and that's all there was. 'I run a fighting outfit,' he told them sternly, when the room had grown absolutely quiet and the men on the benches were cowering sheepishly, 'and there'll be no more moaning in this group as long as I'm in command. Is that clear?'

         It was clear to everybody but Major Danby, who was still concentrating on his wrist watch and counting down the seconds aloud: '...four...three...two...one...time!' called out Major Danby, and raised his eyes triumphantly to discover that no one had been listening to him and that he would have to begin all over again. 'Ooooh,' he moaned in frustration.

         'What was that?' roared General Dreedle incredulously, and whirled around in a murderous rage upon Major Danby, who staggered back in terrified confusion and began to quail and perspire. 'Who is this man?'

         'M-major Danby, sir,' Colonel Cathcart stammered. 'My group operations officer.'

         'Take him out and shoot him,' ordered General Dreedle.

         'S-sir?'

         "I said take him out and shoot him. Can't you hear?'

         'Yes, sir!' Colonel Cathcart responded smartly, swallowing hard, and turned in a brisk manner to his chauffeur and meterologist. 'Take Major Danby out and shoot him.'

         'S-sir?' his chauffer and meterologist stammered. 'I said take Major Danby out and shoot him,' Colonel Cathcart snapped. 'Can't you hear?'

         The two young lieutenants nodded lumpishly and gaped at each other in stunned and flaccid reluctance, each waiting for the other to initiate the procedure of taking Major Danby outside and shooting him. Neither had ever taken Major Danby out and shot him before."

 

It turns out nobody in the room full of air force personnel carries a gun, and General Dreedle finally calms down: "You mean I can't shoot anyone I want to?"  [252-55]  It is not hard to recognize a parody of General Patton, who had gotten in trouble in the Sicily campaign by slapping a soldier who was crying in a hospital.

 

There are other parodies in the book. Captain Black, furious that Colonel Cathcart has appointed Major Major squadron commander instead of himself, spreads the rumor that Major Major is a Communist, since no one knows anything about him. Captain Black starts a loyalty oath campaign, requiring everyone who wants to draw their combat equipment must sign a loyalty oath, or even to get food in the mess hall. Rival officers join in a contest over who can demand the most loyalty oaths, esclating to huge piles of documents. The loyalty oath campaign finally collapses when crusty old Major___ de Coverly bluntly crushes it. (Senator Joe McCarthy vs. President Eisenhower)

 

Reading Catch-22 gets you into the habit of digressing. Going back to military zone black markets, there is a similarity between the Italian campaign and the South Pacific war described by Michener-- and for that matter, the Vietnam war, where the black market was so bad that South Vietnamese (ARVN) troops sold off massive amounts of American armaments and foreign aid to the Viet Cong guerrillas. (Subject of two exposé novels: Graham Greene's The Quiet American, and Eugene Burdick and William Lederer's The Ugly American.) The common denominator is that these were war zones with massive logistics and administrative areas far from the front, where progress of the war felt stagnant and military discipline shattered. 

 

Italy was the sideshow, the forgotten front of the Second World War. Upstaged by the blitzkreig and Churchill; Rommel and Montgomery in North Africa, Stalingrad, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge; Pearl Harbor, MacArthur in the Philipines, the marines on Iwo Jima, the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After Patton's successful campaign in Sicily in 1943, the landing on the mainland turned into a long, stalemated winter front until Rome was liberated in June 1944; and another long slog northward, while the air force bombed German logistics, never breaking through into the heavily populated Po Valley until April 1945, when the war was all but over in Berlin. It is during this period that the author of Catch-22, Joseph Heller, was a bombadier. The repeated references in the book to the deadly anti-aircraft defenses of Bologna date it as taking place during the last 12 months of the war. It must have seemed especially debilitating when breakthroughs were taking place everywhere but here.

 

Rear-area black markets have remained part of the military through the present. The so-called "Fat Leonard" scandal made a stir in California naval bases in the mid-2020s, about a procurement manager for the Pacific Fleet supplying shore leaves and officers' clubs, including with prostitutes. (I omit consideration here of military procurement scandals in Ukraine during its long stalemated war with Russia.)

 

Looming above it all, remains the ultimate real life Catch-22.  War is full of absurdities. But wars seems inescapable, even if only defending against aggressors, evil regimes, and nuclear threat. And inescapably symmetrical, since the other side sees us the other way around. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.