Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • May 7, 2014 Is this our new future? Honore de Balzac was a cynic, not a skeptic. Consider- ing current events, he was probably right twice. Balzac (1799 to 1851) was a skeptic because he had reservations about human goodness. The least common denominator of Balzac’s literary characters is that most of them will do absolutely anything for money, and that the comparative handful of people who are more good than bad are routinely betrayed and exploited by the baddies, who are generally more greedy than spontaneously evil. In recent months, we were jolted by a public official who carried off fistfuls of quarters from parking meters to the reported tune of $480,000. Since he agreed to make restitu- tion to stay out of the slammer, he probably did not need the money. Balzac material! More recently, we had an employee of an institution that benefits the public steal $40,000, apparently over a period of a year or more, and not due to any obvious personal financial crisis. The money, it appears, was simply there in front of her. It was not her money, but it was, after all, money. This is pure Balzac. Rumor has it that the three people who deleted a total of $60,000 from accounts in a bank where they worked and sluiced the money into their own accounts have made restitution and will not be going behind bars if they never do it again. I approve. I knew and liked all three of them, and was stunned by what happened. No blood was spilled, nobody lost the house -- at least I hope not -- and jail time would not have been appropriate. But they should not have done what they did. This was more Balzac, though less extreme than the stories about what the French call “inheri- tance powder” --arsenic -- or total impoverishment. Corny as it sounds, embezzlers only hurt themselves. It was not a homicide case, but it was a Balzac case. Another case: A man who appeared to be sincere in his affection for kids and his love of amateur athletics report- edly swindled a substantial amount of money from the trea- sury of the teams’ coffers where he was treasurer. When the word broke, some people who knew him felt sorry for him, or at least for his family. He certainly did less harm than the kid in the same school district who was arrested twice for selling heroin, but this was not the right thing to do. Balzac’s admirer, rival, and friend, Victor Hugo, is still holding the stage with the latest production of “Les Mis- erables.” Hugo’s hero, Jean Valjean, is sentenced to hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread and spends the rest of his life getting back on track by helping people. Hugo was a Romantic and a believing Catholic, though his practice of Catholicism was somewhat challenged at times in his long, robust life. Balzac said that he was not a Catholic but he believed in God and angels and he described himself as a Swedenbor- gian, a member of a sect that believed in interaction with the Next World through visions and spirit travel. Balzac originated a quote later paraphrased by Ernest Renan: If the common run of humanity ever lost faith in eternal reward for goodness and eternal punishment for evil, noth- ing would be able to save humanity from complete moral degradation. Hugo and Balzac both believed in religious values, which they saw as important to a just society. Just after Balzac died, and while Hugo was still flourishing, first Marx and then Darwin tried to cure humanity of its fear of the afterlife. Marx, perhaps without knowing it, blasphe- mously proclaimed himself a secular Messiah. People who knew him said so at the time. Darwin decided that feeding and breeding had produced humanity and that all religious beliefs were pointless. Rudolf Virchow in Prussia and Louis Pasteur in France, both research scientists rather than theoretical naturalists like Darwin, shot his theory full of holes. Darwin never explained the origin of life, and his continuators still try and fail. The last PBS show I saw about two years ago got as far as Stephen Bastian in the 1920s and Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did in the 1950s: dead end at amino acids that are manifestly not alive and cannot reproduce. PBS hailed this latest repetition as a breakthrough. It was not. In 1854, Rudolf Virchow, even before Pasteur’s demon- strations in 1863 inspired by Darwin’s “Original of Spe- cies” in 1858, said bluntly that all cells come from other cells. There was no evidence that life could be created by sterile matter. Virchow did not believe in “pure” races and said Nean- derthals were rough-looking humans, not ape-men or the missing link. Perhaps embarrassingly, the Neanderthals, as Virchow predicted, were partial ancestors of modern people. DNA has since proved Virchow was right and it was Virchow and Pasteur, rather than Darwin, who reformed public health and led to antiseptic surgery and the cure of many contagious diseases. Darwin’s theory was amply racist in human terms and caught on like wildfire until the Holocaust showed how tragically dangerous it was to lump human beings together based purely on ancestry and justify the destruction of those who supposedly failed to fit in. Nobody today, I think, sees Marxism as genetic. There are few fans of Darwin in Israel, and far fewer than one might think in France, Germany, or Poland, which were Ground Zero for the impact Darwin’s work had on politics. The eclipse of Darwinism is one of the best-kept secrets in the Anglo-Saxon world as is another phenomenon: people who die and see themselves from the outside before they are brought back by electric shock or spontaneous revival. A Dutch researcher named Pim van Loven counted 135,000 reported cases of the near death experience at the turn of the 21 st century and an online registry turns up several cases on the average day. Published authors on the topic have included a neurosurgeon and a cardiologist. Some survivors describe seeing deceased relatives. Others describe an afterlife right out of Revelation. When suppos- edly “dead,” many people described conversations among the medical staff and even some of the blunders that almost prevented their own resuscitation. One woman described seeing a black shoe on the hospital ledge when she was “outside.” An intrepid nurse found the shoe. The eclipse of Darwinism has left us back in the world of Hugo and Balzac: Observed facts no longer give aid and comfort to outright denial, but rather suggest that some sort of belief system is intellectually mandatory. The world, however, is slow to catch on. The Warren Commission, faced with a possible war with the Soviet Union if the Soviets murdered John Kennedy, bluntly told us that one lone nut with a junk rifle assassinated the presi- dent. A dozen years later, as the threat of war had receded, the House Select Committee on the Kennedy Assassina- tion reported that, based on a better analysis, two sepa- rate gunmen had fired. That was in 1975 and while “two gunmen” clearly indicates a conspiracy, the official posi- tion generally is one man. Six-page banner headlines warned of a war with Japan in 1941 starting seven days before the Pearl Harbor attack. Few people have been encouraged to look at these news- papers. Peral Harbor survivors are always quoted talking about how surprised they were -- except that most of the survivors I myself have interviewed said that they believed they had been set up, and were still seething how they almost got killed and some of their buddies died without a chance to fight back. I recently got back in touch with my cousin Hank, who spent two years fighting in the Pacific, and he said the consensus was fairly general among his shipmates that the White House knew about the forthcom- ing “sneak attack” in advance and never warned the fleet. Quotes such as these, like the second gunmanin Dallas and the biochemical mistakes in Darwin, are dropped down the Memory Hole because many editors were trained by editors who were themselves trained by editors who were taught to write for people with a Fifth Grade education, no knowl- edge of history beyond Flag Day oratory, and no disure to have to think. Writing for a newspapetr like this one, where the typical reader is very likely to be a professional or a college graduate with one or more degrees, is an enviable experience to any journalist. Reading beyond the newsprint: Balzac is back. So is the problem that Balzac discussed most prominently in his work -- the awful things people will do for money even when they really do not need they money but simple want to have it. Victor Hugo’s more celebrated message was that sending someone to prison for stealing a loaf of bread and then stimatizing him for life is cruel and unusual. Point well taken. Crimes where no blood is spilled can morally be covered by restitution rather than incarceration. But Balzac’s point is also important. Witness at a safe distance the chaos in some societies were dishonesty is so endemic that nobody trusts anybody outside the immediate family -- if there. If we cannot trust the people around us not to steal money set aside for the general good, or set aside for personal savings and safety, how can we operate a just and honest society? Letters to the Editor May is Eyeglass Recycling Month Dear Editor: For over 90 years, Lions Clubs across the United States have dedicated themselves to the preservation of sight and the prevention of blindness. As part of this initiative, May is Eyeglass Recycling Month. The Midland Park Lions Club collects used eyeglasses in two locations: at the Mid- land Park Library at 250 Godwin Avenue and in a Lions Eyeglass Box located in front of Le Chein at 26 Central Avenue. Residents are urged to deposit any used or unwanted eye- glasses at either of these two locations. The Midland Park Lions will collect these used eyeglasses and will arrange Girl Scout Troop (continued from page 6) blocks from the Larkin House, and received generous sup- port. The girls painted and personalized the hive boxes. They also put out a brochure that explains the problem: “Imagine you lived in a big building with many people and then, out of the blue, everyone disappeared. Well that is what is hap- pening to the honeybees. Honeybees are endangered due to the Colony Collapse Disorder. This is when a large group of honeybees disappear from the colony. The reason is still unconfirmed. “Honey bee pollination is responsible for more than $15 billion in crop value each year! Honey bees are responsible transportation to the Lions Eyeglass Recycling Center in Trenton. Any type of eyewear, from regular glasses to bifocals, trifocals, sunglasses, progressive lenses, and tinted lenses are accepted and will be cleaned, repaired, and put to good use by someone who will now be able to see clearly -- prob- ably for the first time in his or her life. Please do not throw away used eyeglasses; deposit them in a Lions Club’s eye- glass recycling box so others can see. John L. “Jack” Romano, President Midland Park Lions Club Midland Park for 80 percent of the fruit, seed, and vegetable crops that you eat. You think that with all that work they would get tired, but the honey bee never sleeps! “Albert Einstein was quoted as saying: ‘If the bee disap- pears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years to live.’” Schluger, the beekeeper who volunteered to help out, intends to use the hives at the Larkin House to explain the importance of bees in crop and flower pollination. The girls thanked the Jan Fence Company for donating and installing the fencing and Schluger for his experienced advice with the bees and the installation of the hives. “I think this was a great idea,” said Rudy Boonstra, a member of the Wyckoff Township Committee. Everybody knows how important bees are to the environment and it’s good for the town and good for the Girl scouts to get involved -- I think it’s fantastic.”