"Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

though slowly disintegrating, preserve for a while their original contours.
Even medical procedures intended to maintain and save life are shown in their
consequences in the chapter on disfigurations. There are mobs of armless and legless people after
amputations; and radical surgery, the prevailing method of fighting cancer, now bestows upon the
world, every minute, so many women with mastectomies, so many of both sexes sterilized, or
with portions of intestines and stomachs removed. It is hard to run one's eyes all the way down
these columns of figures.
I am not alone in suspecting that the editors wished to intensify the "impact" of a book
that, after all, like any thick volume of statistics, hardly makes for easy reading. The new chapters
serve just this purpose, especially the highlighting of the figures dealing with children. Before,
this subject was scattered under different headings, but now it has been decided to pull it together
for easier viewing. The effect is nightmarish. The question again arises whether such information
should be set forth in so cold and dry a manner, since the reader can react only with impotent
grief, horror, and depression.
For a number of years now in the illustrated magazines of the wealthy nations there have
appeared, fairly frequently, large ads showing photographs of a small child, usually swarthy and
dark-haired; the charitable organization sponsoring the ad requests donations to save such
children from starvation. And, again, we learn from the brutally accurate statistics that the
number of children saved in this manner, compared with the number left to their fate, is a drop in
the ocean. One might say that great moral wisdom lies in the statement from the old Mosaic law:
"He who saves the life of one human being saves the world." Perhaps, but that sort of
commentary is absent from One Hitman Minute.
Since statistics give averages -- often amusing us with facts like "Every husband is
unfaithful 2.67 times a year" -- and one of the qualities that distinguish our species from all others
is the enormous range of life styles (luxury and poverty, for example, both equally unmerited),
the book uses the so-called diagonal method along with print of different colors to dramatize just
this range of fortunes. The commentary distinguishes the text from the Guinness Book: the latter
focuses on the oddities of human behavior, on senseless stunts, whereas here the object is to
contrast the affluent consumer societies, with their constantly increasing wealth, with those
societies headed toward disaster. There are many comparisons -- the energy used per minute per
person in wealthy as opposed to poor countries, for example, which gives a clear picture of the
ruinous poverty where dried dung or wood serves as fuel. One Human Minute goes beyond the
boundary of its title here, providing other figures: for example, the forests in poor countries, cut
down much faster than Nature can replace them, will revert to wasteland.
The financial side of things has also been given more space. It is not a trivial matter to
learn the price tag of humanity's religious beliefs (again, compared -- maliciously -- with the cost
of arms). The treatment of church collections, tithes, and contributions as capital investments per
minute, interest on which is to be paid out in the hereafter, speaks for itself. The commentary on
these statistics disclaims any intention of scoffing, the issue being only the cost of maintaining
religious institutions, a cost that is measurable whether or not "otherworldly dividends" are paid.
(Added to the cost: the upkeep and overhead of cloistered orders, missions, and training for
clergy of all faiths.) In a word, we learn how much humanity spends to "maintain good relations
with the Lord."
The sections on sexuality have also been revised and enlarged. An introductory comment
explains what changes have occurred since the first edition of One Human Minute. In those few
years the sex industry grew exponentially; most of the previous edition's figures were therefore
out of date. A veritable panopticon opens up before us here, with astonishing descriptions and
numbers. Descriptions are needed, because for anyone unacquainted with the products in this
branch of consumer industry, the terms alone will be completely unintelligible. As a satirist of the
women's movement remarked not very long ago, women were discriminated against in the matter