One Human Minute

I

This book presents what all the people in the world are doing, at the same time, in the course of one minute. So says the Introduction. That no one thought of it sooner is surprising. It was simply begging to be written after The First Three Minutes, The Cosmologist’s Second, and the Guinness Book of World Records, especially since they were best sellers (nothing excites publishers and authors today more than a book no one has to read but everyone needs to have). After those books, the idea was ready and waiting, lying in the street, needing only to be picked up. It would be interesting to know if “J. Johnson and S. Johnson” are man and wife, brothers, or just a pseudonym. I would like to see a photograph of these Johnsons. It is hard to explain why, but sometimes an author’s appearance provides a key to a book. For me, at least, that has happened more than once. If a text is unconventional, reading it requires that one take a special approach. An author’s face can then shed much light. My guess, though, is that the Johnsons do not exist, and that the “S.” in front of the second Johnson is an allusion to Samuel Johnson. But, then again, perhaps that is not important.

Publishers, as everyone knows, fear nothing so much as the publication of a book, since, according to Lem’s Law, “No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn’t understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets" — owing to general lack of time, the oversupply of books, and the perfection of advertising. The ad as the New Utopia is currently a cult phenomenon. We watch the dreadful or boring things on television, because (as public-opinion research has shown) after the sight of prattling politicians, bloody corpses strewn about various parts of the globe for various reasons, and dramatizations in which one cannot tell what is going on because they are never-ending serials (not only do we forget what we read, we also forget what we see), the commercials are a blessed relief. Only in them does paradise still exist. There are beautiful women, handsome men — all mature — and happy children, and the elderly have intelligence in their eyes and generally wear glasses. To be kept in constant delight they need only pudding in a new container, lemonade made from real water, a foot antiperspirant, violet-scented toilet paper, or a kitchen cabinet about which nothing is extraordinary but the price. The joy in the eyes of the stylish beauty as she beholds a roll of toilet paper or opens a cupboard like a treasure chest is transmitted instantly to everyone. In that empathy there also may be envy and even a little irritation, because everyone knows he could never experience ecstasy by drinking that lemonade or using that toilet paper. Everyone knows that this Arcadia is inaccessible, but its glow is effective nevertheless.

Anyway, it was clear to me from the start that advertising, as it improves in the merchandising struggle for existence, will enslave us not through the better quality of the goods it promotes but as a result of the ever-worsening quality of the world. After the death of God, of high ideals, of honor, of altruism, what is left to us in our overcrowded cities, under acid rains, but the ecstasy of these men and women of the ads as they announce crackers, puddings, and spreads like the coming of the Heavenly Kingdom? Because advertising, with monstrous effectiveness, attributes perfection to everything — and so to books, to every book — a person is beguiled by twenty thousand Miss Universes at once and, unable to decide, lingers unfulfilled in amorous readiness like a sheep in a stupor. So it is with everything. Cable television, broadcasting forty programs at once, produces in the viewer the feeling that, since there are so many, others must be better than the one he has on, so he jumps from program to program like a flea on a hot stove, proof that technological progress produces new heights of frustration. Although no one said it in so many words, we were promised the world, everything — if not to possess, at least to look at and touch. And literature (is it not but an echo of the world, its likeness and its commentary?) fell into the same trap. Why should I read about what particular individuals of different or the same sex say before going to bed, if there is no mention of the thousands of other, perhaps much more interesting people who do more imaginative things? There had to be a book, then, about what Everybody Else was doing, so that we would be tormented no longer by the doubt that we were reading nonsense while the Important Things were taking place Elsewhere.

The Guinness Book was a best seller because it presented nothing but exceptional things, with a guarantee of authenticity. This panopticon of records had, however, a serious drawback: it was soon obsolete. No sooner had some fellow eaten forty pounds of peaches complete with pits than another not only ate more, but died immediately after from a volvulus, which gave the new record a dismal piquancy. While it is untrue that there is no such thing as mental illness, that it was invented by psychiatrists to torment their patients and squeeze money out of them, it is true that normal people do far madder things than the insane. The difference is that the madman does what he does disinterestedly, whereas the normal person does it for fame, because fame can be converted into cash. Of course, some are satisfied with fame alone, so the matter is unclear. In any case, the still-surviving subspecies of intellectuals scorned this whole collection of records, and in polite society it was no distinction to remember how many miles someone on all fours could push a nutmeg with his nose painted lavender.

So a book had to be conceived that resembled the Guinness volume, was serious enough not to be dismissed with a shrug (like The First Three Minutes), but at the same time was not abstract, not loaded with theories about bosons and quarks. The writing of such a book — an honest, uncontrived book about everything at once, a book that would overshadow all others — seemed a total impossibility. Even I could not imagine the sort of book it would be. To the publishers I simply suggested writing a book that at worst would be the perfect antithesis of its advertising claims; but the idea did not take. Although the work I had in mind might have attracted readers, since the most important thing today is setting records, and the world’s worst novel would have been a record, it was quite possible that even if I had succeeded, no one would have noticed.

How sorry I am not to have hit upon the better idea that gave birth to One Human Minute. Apparently, the publisher does not even have a branch on the Moon; “Moon Publishers,” I am told, is only an advertising ploy. To avoid being called dishonest, the editor sent to the Moon, in a container on one of the Columbia shuttle flights, a copy of the manuscript and a small computer reader. If anyone challenged him, he could prove that part of the publishing operation actually did take place on the Moon, because the computer on the Mare Imbrium read the manuscript over and over. Perhaps it read without thinking, but that didn’t matter: people in publishing houses on Earth generally read manuscripts the same way.

I should not have struck a satirical note at the beginning of my review, because there is nothing funny about this book. You may feel indignation; you may take it as an affront to the entire human race, aimed so skillfully that it is irrefutable, containing nothing but verified facts; you may console yourself that at least no one can possibly make a film or a television series out of it — but it will definitely be worthwhile to think about it, though your conclusions will not be pleasant.

The book is unmistakably authentic and fantastic — if, like me, you take “fantastic” to mean that which goes beyond the limit of our conceptions. Not everyone will agree with me, but I remain convinced that the poverty of today’s fantasy and science fiction lies in the fact that there is too little of the fantastic in it, in contrast to the reality that surrounds us. Thus, for example, it turns out that a person with his brain cut in two (there have been many such operations, especially on epileptics) both is and is not one individual. It happens that such a person, who appears completely normal, cannot put on trousers, because his right hand pulls them up while his left lowers them; or that he will embrace his wife with one arm while pushing her away with the other. It has been shown that in certain cases the right hemisphere of the brain does not know what the left sees and thinks; so it had to be acknowledged that the splitting of consciousness and even of personality had been achieved, that, in other words, two people existed in one body. But other experiments showed no such thing — not even that sometimes the individual would be single and sometimes double. The hypothesis that there were one and a half individuals, or two and something, also fell apart. This is no joke; the question of how many minds reside in such a person appears to have no answer, and this, indeed, is both real and fantastic. In this and only in this sense is One Human Minute fantastic.

Although each of us knows that on Earth all the seasons of the year, all climates, and all hours of the day and night exist together at every moment, we generally do not think about it. This commonplace, which every elementary-school student knows, or should know, somehow lies outside our awareness — perhaps because we do not know what to do with such an awareness. Every night, electrons, forced to lick the screens of our television sets with frenzied speed, show us the world chopped up and crammed into the Latest News, so we can learn what happened in China, in Scotland, in Italy, at the bottom of the sea, on Antarctica, and we believe that in fifteen minutes we have seen what has been going on in the whole world. Of course, we have not. The news cameras pierce the terrestrial globe in a few places: there, where an Important Politician descends the steps of his plane and with false sincerity shakes the hands of other Important Politicians; there, where a train has derailed — but not just any derailment will do, only one with cars twisted into spaghetti and people extracted piece by piece, because there are already too many minor catastrophes. In a word, the mass media skip everything that is not quintuplets, a coup d’état (best if accompanied by a respectable massacre), a papal visit, or a royal pregnancy. The gigantic, five-billion-human backdrop of these events exists for certain, and anybody who was asked would say, yes, of course he knows that millions of others exist; if he thinks about it, he might even arrive at the fact that with every breath he takes, so many children are born and so many people die. It is, nevertheless, a vague knowledge, no less abstract than the knowledge that, as I write this, an American probe stands immobile in the pale sun on Mars, and that on the Moon lie the wrecks of a couple of vehicles. The knowledge counts for nothing if it can be touched with a word but not experienced. One can experience only a microscopic droplet out of the sea of human destinies that surrounds us. In this respect a human being is not unlike an amoeba swimming in a drop of water, whose boundaries seem to be the boundaries of the world. The main difference, I would say, is not our intellectual superiority to the protozoon but the latter’s immortality: instead of dying it divides, thereby becoming its own, increasingly numerous family.

So the task the authors of One Human Minute set themselves did not look plausible. In effect, were I to tell someone who has not yet seen the book that it contains few words, that it is filled with tables of statistics and columns of numbers, he would look upon the undertaking as a flop, even as insanity. Because what can be done with hundreds of pages of statistics? What images, emotions, and experiences can thousands of numbers evoke in our heads? If the book did not exist, if it were not lying on my desk, I would say the concept was original, even striking, but unrealizable, like the idea that reading the Paris and New York telephone books would tell you something about the inhabitants of those cities. If One Human Minute were not here in front of me, I would believe it to be as unreadable as a list of telephone numbers or an almanac.

Consequently, the idea — to show sixty seconds in the lives of all the human beings who coexist with me — had to be worked out as if it were a plan for a major campaign. The original concept, though important, was not enough to ensure success. The best strategist is not the one who knows he must take the enemy by surprise, but the one who knows how to do it.

What transpires on Earth even during a single second, there is no way of knowing. In the face of such phenomena, the microscopic capacity of human consciousness is revealed — our consciousness, that boundless spirit which we claim sets us apart from the animals, those intellectual paupers capable of perceiving only their immediate surroundings. How my dog frets each time he sees me packing my suitcase, and how sorry I am that I cannot explain to him that there is no need for his dejection, for the whimpers that accompany me to the front gate. There is no way to tell him that I’ll be back tomorrow; with each parting he suffers the same martyrdom. But with us, it would seem, matters are quite different. We know what is, what can be; what we do not know, we can find out.

That is the consensus. Meanwhile, the modern world shows us at every step that consciousness is a very short blanket: it will cover a tiny bit but no more, and the problems we keep having with the world are more painful than a dog’s. Not possessing the gift of reflection, a dog does not know that he does not know, and does not understand that he understands nothing; we, on the other hand, are aware of both. If we behave otherwise, it is from stupidity, or else from self-deception, to preserve our peace of mind. You can have sympathy for one person, possibly for four, but eight hundred thousand is impossible. The numbers that we employ in such circumstances are cunning artificial limbs. They are like the cane a blind man uses; tapping the sidewalk keeps him from bumping into a wall, but no one will claim that with this cane he sees the whole richness of the world, or even the small fragment of it on his own street. So what are we to do with this poor, narrow consciousness of ours, to make it encompass what it cannot? What had to be done to present the one pan-human minute?

You will not learn everything at once, dear reader, but, glancing first at the table of contents and then at the respective headings, you will learn things that will take your breath away. A landscape composed not of mountains, rivers, and fields but of billions of human bodies will flash before you, as on a dark, stormy night a normal landscape is revealed when a flash of lightning rends the murk and you glimpse, for a fraction of a second, a vastness stretching toward all horizons. Though darkness sets in again, that image has now entered your memory, and you will not get rid of it. One can understand the visual part of this comparison, for who has not experienced a storm at night? But how can the world revealed by lightning be equated to a thousand statistical tables?

The device that the authors used is simple: the method of successive approximations. To demonstrate, let us take first, out of the two hundred chapters, the one devoted to death — or, rather, to dying.

Since humanity numbers nearly five billion, it stands to reason that thousands die every minute. No revelation, that. Nevertheless, our narrow comprehension bumps into the figures here as if into a wall. This is easy to see, because the words “simultaneously nineteen thousand people die” carry not one iota more emotional weight than the knowledge that nine hundred thousand are dying. Be it a million, be it ten million, the reaction will always be the same: a slightly frightened and vaguely alarmed “Oh.” We now find ourselves in a wilderness of abstract expressions; they mean something, but that meaning cannot be perceived, felt, experienced in the same way as the news of an uncle’s heart attack. Learning of the Uncle’s heart attack produces a greater impression on us.

But this chapter ushers you into dying for forty-eight pages. First come the data summaries, then the breakdown into specifics. In this way, you look first at the whole subject of death as through the weak lens of a microscope, then you examine sections in ever-increasing closeness as if using stronger and stronger lenses. First come natural deaths, in one category, then those caused by other people, in a separate category, then accidental deaths, acts of God, and so on. You learn how many people die per minute from police torture, and how many at the hands of those without government authorization; what the normal curve of tortures is over sixty seconds and their geographic distribution; what instruments are used in this unit of time, again with a breakdown into parts of the world and then by nation. You learn that when you take your dog for a walk, or while you are looking for your slippers, talking to your wife, falling asleep, or reading the paper, a thousand other people are howling and twisting in agony every consecutive minute of every twenty-four hours, day and night, every week, month, and year. You will not hear their cries but you will now know that it is continual, because the statistics prove it. You learn how many people die per minute by error, drinking poison instead of a harmless beverage. Again, the statistics take into account every type of poisoning: weedkillers, acids, bases — and also how many deaths are the result of mistakes by drivers, doctors, mothers, nurses, and so on. How many newborns — a separate heading — are killed by their mothers just after birth, either on purpose or through carelessness: some infants are suffocated by a pillow; others fall into a privy hole, as when a mother, feeling pressure, thought it was a bowel movement, either through inexperience or mental retardation or because she was under the influence of drugs when the labor began; and each of these variants has further breakdowns. On the next page are newborns who die through no one’s fault because they are monsters incapable of surviving, or because they are strangled by the umbilical cord, or because they fall victim to placenta previa or some other abnormality; again, I am not mentioning everything. Suicides take up a lot of space. Today there are far more ways of depriving oneself of life than in the past, and hanging has fallen to sixth place in the statistics. Moreover, the frequency-distribution table for new methods of suicide indicates that there has been an increase in methods since best-selling manuals have come out with instructions on making death swift and certain — unless someone wants to go slowly, which also happens. You can even learn, patient reader, what the correlation is between the size of the editions of these how-to suicide books and the normal curve of successful suicides. In the old days, when people were amateurs at it, more suicide attempts could be foiled.

Next, obviously, come deaths from cancer, from heart attacks, from the science of medicine, from the four hundred most important diseases; then come accidents, such as automobile collisions, death from falling trees, walls, bricks, from being run over by a train, from meteors even. Whether it is comforting to know that casualties from falling meteors are rare, I am not sure. As far as I can remember, 0.0000001 person per minute dies that way. Obviously, the Johnsons did solid work. In order to present the scope of death more accurately, they applied the so-called cross-reference, or diagonal method. Some tables will tell you from what group of causes people die; others, in what ways they die from a single cause — for example, electric shock. This method brings into relief the extraordinary wealth of our deaths. Death occurs most frequently from contact with an improperly grounded appliance, less often in the tub, and least often while urinating off a pedestrian bridge onto high-tension wires, this being only a fractional number per minute. In a footnote the conscientious Johnsons inform us that it is impossible to separate those who are killed deliberately by electric shock while under torture from those killed inadvertently when a little too much current is used.

There are also statistics on the means by which the living dispose of the dead, from funerals with cosmetic corpses, choirs, flowers, and religious pomp, to simpler and cheaper methods. We have many headings here, because, as it turns out, in the highly civilized countries more corpses are stuffed into bags with a stone — or cemented by their feet into old buckets, or cut up naked into pieces — and thrown into clay pits and lakes than in the Third World countries; more, too (another heading), are wrapped up in old newspapers or bloody rags and left in garbage dumps. The less well off are unacquainted with some of the ways of disposing of remains. Obviously, the information has yet to reach them, along with financial aid from the developed nations.

On the other hand, in poor countries more newborns are eaten by rats. These data appear on another page, but the reader will find a footnote directing him to the place, lest he miss them. And if he wants to take the book in small doses, he will find everything in the alphabetical index.

One cannot maintain for long that these are dry, boring figures that say nothing. One begins to wonder morbidly how many other ways people are dying every minute one reads, and the fingers turning the pages become moist. It is sweat, of course; it can hardly be blood.

Death by starvation (there had to be a separate table for it, with a breakdown by age; most who starve to death are children) carries a footnote telling us that it is only valid for the year of publication, since the numbers increase rapidly and in arithmetical progression. Death from overeating happens, too, of course, but is 119,000 times rarer. These data contain an element of exhibitionism and an element of blackmail.

I intended only to glance at this chapter, but then read as if compelled, like someone who peels the bandage off his bleeding wound to look, or who probes the cavity in his aching tooth with a toothpick: it hurts, but it is hard to stop. The figures are like a tasteless, odorless drug that seeps into the brain. And yet I have not mentioned — and have no intention of listing — the data on marasmus, senility, lameness, degeneration of organs, for then I would be quoting the book, whereas my task is only to review it.

Actually, the columns of figures arranged in tabular form for all types of deaths — those bodies of children, old people, women, and newborns of all nations and races, bodies present in spirit behind the numbers — are not the most sensational part of the book. Having written that sentence, I ask myself if I am being honest, and I repeat: no, they are not the most sensational. The enormity of all this human dying is a little like one’s own death: it is anticipated, but only generally and vaguely, the way we comprehend the inevitability of our own end, though we do not know the form that it will take.

The real immensity of flesh-and-blood life manifests itself on the very first page. The facts are indisputable. One might indeed entertain doubts about the accuracy of the data in the chapter on dying: they are based on averages, after all, and it is hard to believe that the taxonomy and etiology of the deaths were rendered with complete exactitude. But the honest authors do not conceal from us the possible statistical deviations. Their Introduction thoroughly describes the methods of calculation and even includes references to the computer programs employed. Though the methods allow for standard deviations, the latter have no importance for the reader — what difference does it really make if 7,800 newborns die per minute or 8,100? Besides, these deviations are insignificant because they tend to cancel one another out. The number of births is indeed not uniform for all times of the year and day; but since on Earth all times of the day, night, and year simultaneously coexist, the sum of stillbirths remains constant. Some columns, however, contain data arrived at by indirect inference. For example, neither the police nor private murderers — whether professional or amateur (not counting the ideological variety) — publish statistics on the effectiveness of their work. The error in magnitude here can be considerable.

On the other hand, the statistics of Chapter One are beyond reproach. They tell how many people there are — and thus how many living human bodies — in each minute of the 525,600 minutes of the year. How many bodies means: the amount of muscle, bone, bile, blood, saliva, cerebrospinal fluid, excrement, and so on. Naturally, when the thing to be visualized is of a very great order of magnitude, a popularizer readily resorts to comparative imagery. The Johnsons do the same. So, were all humanity taken and crowded together in one place, it would occupy three hundred billion liters, or a little less than a third of a cubic kilometer. It sounds like a lot. Yet the world’s oceans hold 1,285 million cubic kilometers of water, so if all humanity — those five billion bodies — were cast into the ocean, the water level would rise less than a hundredth of a millimeter. A single splash, and Earth would be forever unpopulated.

Games of this sort with statistics can rightly be called cheap. They may be meant as a reminder that we — who with the might of our industry poisoned the air, the soil, the seas, who turned jungles into deserts, who exterminated countless species of animals and plants that had lived for hundreds of millions of years, who reached other planets, and who altered even the albedo of the Earth, thereby revealing our presence to cosmic observers — could disappear so easily and without a trace. However, I was not impressed. Nor was I impressed by the calculation that 24.9 billion liters of blood could be poured from all mankind and it would not make a Red Sea, not even a lake.

After this, under an epigraph from T. S. Eliot saying that existence is “birth, and copulation, and death,” come new figures. Every minute, 34.2 million men and women copulate. Only 5.7 percent of all intercourse results in fertilization, but the combined ejaculate, at a volume of forty-five thousand liters a minute, contains 1,990 billion (with deviations in the last decimal place) living spermatozoa. The same number of female eggs could be fertilized sixty times an hour with a minimal ratio of one spermatozoon to one egg, in which impossible case three million children would be conceived per second. But this, too, is only a statistical manipulation.

Pornography and our modern life style have accustomed us to the forms of sexual life. You would think that there was nothing left to reveal, nothing to show that would shock. But, presented in statistics, it comes as a surprise. Never mind the game of comparisons which is put to use again: for instance, the stream of sperm, forty-three tons of it, discharged into vaginas per minute — its 430,000 hectoliters is compared with the 37,850 hectoliters of boiling water produced at each eruption of the largest geyser in the world (at Yellowstone). The geyser of sperm is 11.3 times more abundant and shoots without intermission. The image is not obscene. A person can be aroused sexually only within a certain range of magnitudes. Acts of copulation, when shown in great reduction or great enlargement, do not elicit any sexual response. Arousal, an inborn reaction, occurs as a reflex in certain centers in the brain, and does not manifest itself in conditions that exceed visual norms. Sexual acts seen in reduced dimensions leave us cold, for they show creatures the size of ants.

Magnification, on the other hand, arouses disgust, because the smoothest skin of the most beautiful woman will then look like a porous, pale surface from which protrude hairs as thick as fangs, while a sticky, glistening grease oozes from the ducts of the sebaceous glands.

The surprise I spoke of has a different cause. Humanity pumps 53.4 billion liters of blood per minute, but that red river is not surprising; it must flow to sustain life. At the same time, humanity’s male organs eject forty-three tons of semen, and the point is that though each ejaculation is also an ordinary physiological act, for the individual it is irregular, intimate, not overly frequent, and even not necessary. Besides, there are millions of old people, children, voluntary and involuntary celibates, sick people, and so forth. And yet that white stream flows with the same constancy as the red river system. The irregularity disappears when the statistics take in the whole Earth, and that is what surprises. People sit down to tables set for dinner, look for refuse in garbage dumps, pray in chapels, mosques, and churches, fly in planes, ride in cars, sit in submarines carrying nuclear missiles, debate in parliaments; billions sleep, funeral processions walk through cemeteries, bombs explode, doctors bend over operating tables, thousands of college professors simultaneously enter their classrooms, theater curtains lift and drop, floods swallow fields and houses, wars are waged, bulldozers on battlefields push uniformed corpses into ditches; it thunders and lightnings, it is night, day, dawn, twilight; but no matter what happens that forty-three-ton impregnating stream of sperm flows without stop, and the law of large numbers guarantees that it will be as constant as the sum of solar energy striking Earth. There is something mechanical about this, inexorable, and animallike. How can one come to terms with an image of humanity copulating relentlessly through all the cataclysms that befall it, or that it has brought upon itself?

Well, there you have it. Keep in mind that it is impossible to summarize a book that reduces human affairs to a minimum — that is, to numbers (there is no more radical method of cramming phenomena together). The book itself is an extract, an extreme abbreviation of humanity. In a review one cannot even touch on the most remarkable chapters. Mental illnesses: it turns out that today there are more lunatics in any given minute than all the people who lived on Earth for the last several dozen generations. It is as if all of previous humanity consisted, today, of madmen. Tumors — in my first medical work thirty-five years ago I called them a “somatic insanity,” in that they are a suicidal turning of the body upon itself — are an exception to life’s rule, an error in its dynamics, but that exception, expressed in the statistics, is an enormous Moloch. The mass of cancerous tissue, calculated per minute, is a testimony to the blindness of the processes that called us into existence. A few pages farther on are matters even more dreary. I pass over in silence the chapters on acts of violence, rape, sexual perversion, bizarre cults and organizations. The picture of what people do to people, to humiliate them, degrade them, exploit them, whether in sickness, in health, in old age, in childhood, in disability — and this incessantly, every minute — can stun even a confirmed misanthrope who thought he had heard of every human baseness. But enough of this.

Was this book necessary? A member of the French Academy, writing in Le Monde, said that it was inevitable, it had to appear. This civilization of ours, he wrote, which measures everything, counts everything, evaluates everything, weighs everything, which breaks every commandment and prohibition, desires to know all. But the more populous it becomes, the less intelligible it is to itself. It throws itself with the most fury at whatever continues to resist it. There was nothing strange, therefore, in its wanting to have its own portrait, a faithful portrait, such as never existed, and an objective one — objectivity being the order of the day. So in the cause of modern technology it took a photograph like those done with a reporter’s flash camera: without touch-ups.

The old gentleman dodged the question about the need for One Human Minute, saying that it appeared because, as the product of its time, it had to appear. The question, however, remains. I would substitute for it another, more modest question: Does this book truly show all of humanity? The statistical tables are a keyhole, and the reader, a Peeping Tom, spies on the huge naked body of humanity busy about its everyday affairs. But through a keyhole not everything can be seen at once. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the observer stands eye to eye, as it were, not merely with his own species but with its fate. One has to admit that One Human Minute contains a great deal of impressive anthropological data in the chapters on culture, beliefs, rituals, and customs, because, although these are numerical agglomerations (or maybe for precisely that reason), they demonstrate the astonishing diversity of people who are, after all, identical in their anatomy and physiology. It is curious that the number of languages people employ cannot be calculated. No one knows precisely how many there are; all we know is that there are over four thousand. Even the specialists have not identified all of them. The fact that some small ethnic groups take their languages with them when they die out makes the matter even more difficult to settle. On top of that, linguists are not in agreement about the status of certain languages, considered by some to be dialects, by others separate taxonomic entities. Few are the cases, however, where the Johnsons admit defeat in the conversion of all data to events per minute. Yet it is just in such cases that one feels — at least I felt — a kind of relief. This is a matter with philosophical roots.

In an elite German literary periodical I came across a review of One Human Minute written by an angry humanist. The book makes a monster out of mankind, he said, because it has built a mountain of meat from bodies, blood, and sweat (the measurements include, beyond excrement and menstrual bleeding, various kinds of sweat, since sweat from fear is different from sweat from hard work), but it has amputated the heads. One cannot equate the life of the mind with the number of books and newspapers that people read, or of the words they utter per minute (an astronomical number). Comparing theater-attendance and television-audience figures with the constants of death, ejaculation, etc., is not just misleading but a gross error. Neither orgasm nor death is exclusively and specifically human. What is more, they are largely physiological in character.

On the other hand, data that are specifically human, such as matters of intellect, are not exhausted, but neither are they explained by the size of the editions of philosophical journals or works. It is as if someone were to try to measure the heat of passion with a thermometer, or to put, under the heading “Acts,” both sex acts and acts of faith. This categorical chaos is no accident, for the authors’ intention was precisely to shock the reader with a satire made of statistics — to degrade us all under a hail of figures. To be a person means, first of all, to have a life of the spirit, and not an anatomy subject to addition, division, and multiplication. The very fact that the life of the spirit cannot be measured and put in statistical form refutes the authors’ claim to have produced a portrait of humanity. In this bookkeeper’s breakdown of billions of people into functional pieces to fit under headings, one sees the efficiency of a pathologist dissecting a corpse. Perhaps there is even malice. Indeed, among the thousands of index entries there is nothing at all resembling “human dignity."

Another critic also struck at the philosophical roots I mentioned. I have the impression (I say this parenthetically) that One Human Minute threw the intellectuals into confusion. They felt that they had the right to ignore such products of mass culture as the Guinness Book, but One Human Minute confounded them. For the Johnsons — whether they are cautious or only cunning — raised their work to a much higher level with a methodical, scholarly introduction. They anticipated many objections, citing contemporary thinkers who call truth the prime value in society. If that is so, then all truth, even the most depressing, is permissible and even necessary.

The critic-philosopher put his foot in the stirrup held by the Johnsons and mounted that high horse. First he praised them, then found fault with them. We have been treated — he wrote in Encounter — almost literally the way Dostoevsky feared in his Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky believed that we were threatened by scientifically proven determinism, which would toss the sovereignty of the individual — with its free will — onto the garbage heap when science became capable of predicting every decision and every emotion like the movements of a mechanical switch. He saw no alternative, no escape from the cruel predictability that would deprive us of our freedom, except madness. His Underground Man was prepared to lose his mind, so that, released by madness, it would not succumb to triumphant determinism.

But now that flimsy determinism of the nineteenth-century rationalists has collapsed and will rise no more; it was replaced, with unexpected success, by probability theory and statistics. The fates of individuals are as unpredictable as the paths of individual particles of gas, but from the great number of both emerge laws that pertain to all together, though the laws are not concerned with individual molecules or persons. After the fall of determinism, therefore, science executed a circling maneuver and attacked the Underground Man from another side.

Unfortunately, it is untrue that there is no hint of humanity’s spiritual life in One Human Minute. Locking up that life inside the head, so that it will manifest itself only in words, is an understandable habit of professional literati and other intellectuals, who constitute (the book informs us) a microscopic particle, a millionth, of humanity. The life of the spirit is displayed, by 99 percent of people, through actions that are measurable to the highest degree, and it would be a mistake to assume high-mindedly that psychopaths, murderers, and pimps have any less psyche than water carriers, merchants, and weavers.

So one cannot accuse the authors of misanthropy; at the most, one can point to the limitations inherent in their method. The originality of One Human Minute lies in its being not a statistical compilation of information about what has taken place, like an ordinary almanac, but rather synchronous with the human world, like a computer of the type that we say works in real time, a device tracking phenomena as they occur.

Having thus crowned the authors, the critic from Encounter proceeded to trim the laurels he had bestowed as he took up the Introduction. The demand for truth, which the Johnsons wave like a banner in order to defend One Human Minute against charges of obscenity, sounds fine but is unworkable in practice. The book does not contain “everything about the human being,” because that is impossible. The largest libraries in the world do not contain “everything.” The quantity of anthropological data discovered by scientists now exceeds any individual’s ability to assimilate it. The division of labor, including intellectual labor, begun thirty thousand years ago in the Paleolithic, has become an irreversible phenomenon, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is, after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with, because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue. A logocracy of quarreling experts might be no better than the rule of the mediocrities to which we are subject. The declining intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world. Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who are least bothered by this who strive for power. It is no accident that in the chapter on mental ability in One Human Minute there is no I.Q. information for eminent statesmen. Even the ubiquitous Johnsons were not able to subject those people to intelligence tests.

My view of this book is undramatic. One can approach it in a thousand ways, as this article shows. In my opinion, the book is neither a malicious satire nor the honest truth; not a caricature and not a mirror. The asymmetry of One Human Minute, its inclusion of incomparably more shameful human evil than manifestations of good, and more of the misery of our existence than its beauty, I attribute neither to the authors’ intention nor to their method. Only those who still cherish illusions on the subject of Man can be depressed by the book. The asymmetry of good and evil would probably even lend itself to a numerical comparison, though the Johnsons somehow did not think of it. The chapters on vice, felony, fraud, theft, blackmail, and computer crime[1] are far more extensive than the chapters devoted to “good deeds.” The authors did not compare such numbers in one table, and that is a pity. It would have shown clearly how much more extensive evil is than good. Fewer are the ways of helping people than of harming them; it is the nature of things, not a consequence of the statistical method. Our world does not stand halfway between heaven and hell; it seems much closer to hell. Free of illusions in this respect — for some time now — I was not shocked by this book.

II

The second edition of One Human Minute has been expanded by its publisher to include several new chapters; therefore, a fresh discussion is in order.

This time, the book opens with a picture of the world as mankind’s habitation. Such data can be found in any encyclopedia, but when they are converted to per-minute quantities, they undeniably produce a greater impression than do the dry, abstract entries in a reference book. It is indeed curious to realize that there is always a storm raging somewhere on Earth, and that the number of lightning bolts is constant: six thousand per minute. One hundred strike every second, and that means perpetually, month after month and century after century. We also learn here that the Earth covers 1,800 kilometers in the course of a minute of orbiting the Sun. In the same short interval of time, the combined weight of the cosmic “debris” falling constantly on the Earth’s surface amounts to thousands of tons. At the same time, our planet loses a considerable amount of its atmosphere, which, stirred by the movements of barometric high and lows, by cyclones and tradewinds, and also heated by the sun, creates its own “tail” stretching for many thousands of miles; the Earth loses, as a result, an enormous quantity of gas. New gases, however, constantly escape from the Earth’s depths; the oceans also emit them, partly as water vapor; and so on. The book, then, commences in the style of popular science. The figures reveal at once the vastness of the planet in relation to its inhabitants and the incredible minuteness of the planet in relation to the universe. But it is all, as I said, a laborious extract of natural-history textbooks.

Some of the chapters previously described have been enlarged by the authors with data now of a humorous, now of a macabre cast. Man as executioner, oppressor, and killer of his own species was presented to us in the first edition. Now we see what a predator he is, or, if you will, what a parasite of the entire biosphere — that is, the animal and plant kingdoms. Almost nobody sitting down to a steak or chop feels any pang of conscience; we do not even think that in our complicity with the butchers we are like one who aids a killer in the disposal of the victim’s remains. In order that the thought should never come to mind and interfere with our consumption of tasty morsels, all languages — without exception — have created a separate vocabulary which gives us special consideration. We pass away; animals can only die. And, of course, every dictionary of hunting jargon unfailingly exonerates all that is synonymous, in every legal language, with premeditated murder, since a hunter goes into the woods with a loaded weapon for the express purpose of killing. One Human Minute goes to the heart of the matter, cutting through these pharisaical subtleties of our vocabulary, for it gives not the names but the numbers of the victims. Every minute, it turns out, mountains of animal corpses fall at our hands, and the same mountains of corpses, in the form of roasts, are chewed by several billion human teeth per minute. These are like images from Gulliver’s travels to Brobdingnag, where a lady giant’s enticing smile might be a scene out of Jaws, with the shark opening its monstrous mouth. As we know, the brain of a live monkey eaten raw from the opened skull with a spoon is a sophisticated Chinese delicacy; and though it is unlikely that the quantity of brains consumed per minute in this way could have been established with much accuracy, one does find the figure under the heading “Exotic Dishes."

To the eternally shooting geyser of semen this edition has added the river of milk that flows from the breasts of women all over the world into the mouths of infants.

The human disfigurations that are set apart in a separate chapter — no doubt for more powerful effect — are a silent, natural expression of our fate. It is as if whoever set up this table — these armies of the blind and deaf, these millions of bodies deformed from birth and by their very number proving how little Nature truly cares about the individual human being (yet in all religions and nearly all philosophical systems we try so hard to preserve the human dignity of the individual), and these separately (pedantically) enumerated infirmities of old age — it is as if the author of this table wanted to compare the aged with rusting wrecks or derelict machines, which, 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 of “bionic dolls,” because there were various artificial females — complete with built-in tape recorders, so that with various cassettes they could express themselves charmingly or obscenely, according to taste — but almost no male dolls for sale. The situation has improved to a point where equality of the sexes has nearly been achieved. The dolls, battery-powered and self-charging, and therefore portable, work so well that they can actually pair up and dispense with living partners altogether. Ridiculous. But the hunger for sexual experience does seem to be insatiable in affluent nations of the “permissive” type. It turns out that they spend more on lingerie, gowns, cosmetics, wigs, and perfumes for these artificial partners — per minute — than the countries of the Third World spend on all their clothing essentials.

Data that could not be established or even statistically approximated, such as how many women are raped per minute, are presented, with scrupulous qualifications, as conjectures: the experts of this sad phenomenon maintain that the majority of rape victims hide their shame in silence. Since, however, no one of either sex today need be ashamed of homosexuality or conceal it, One Human Minute presents their several-million-strong ranks with great numerical precision.

As we leaf through this thick volume — thicker than the first edition — we encounter, from time to time, data that tell us that we live in an era where the flowering of art is barely distinguishable from its demise. The rules and boundaries that distinguish art from what cannot be art have eroded completely and disappeared. Thus, on the one hand, more works of art are being created in the world than cars, planes, tractors, locomotives, and ships combined. On the other hand, that great volume is lost, as it were, in the still greater volume of objects that have no use whatever. For me these numbers gave rise to black thoughts. First, the world of art has been shattered once and for all, and no art lover can piece things together again, even if he is only interested in one area, like painting or sculpture. One might think that the technology of communication had advanced for the express purpose of revealing to us the microscopic capacity of the human brain. What good is it if everything that is beautiful lies at our disposal, and can even be called up on the screen of a home computer, if we are — again — like a child facing the ocean with a spoon? And, as I glanced at the tables of how many different kinds of “works of art” are made per minute (and of what materials), I was saddened by the banality of those works. If archaeologists in the distant future make excavations to learn what kind of graphic art was produced in our era, they will find nothing. They will not be able to distinguish our everyday garbage and litter from our “works of art,” because often there is no objective difference between them. That a can of Campbell’s tomato soup is a work of art is the result of its being put on exhibit, but when it lies in some dump no one will ever gaze upon it in aesthetic rapture like an archaeologist contemplating the vase or marble goddess he has recovered from the Greek silt. One might conclude that the real intention of the authors of One Human Minute was not to give us a frozen moment of the human world, a cross section cut with a gigantic knife, but instead to bury us beneath an avalanche of numbers proving how close we have come to the anecdote about the flies (a pair of flies, after one season of unchecked proliferation, will cover the oceans and the earth with a layer of insects half a mile deep).

Again we have the dilemma on which the first critics of this book broke their teeth. Is the terrible predominance of evil over good, of malice over loving kindness, of stupidity over intelligence, the true balance sheet of the human world? Or is it the result, in part, of the computers and the statistical viewpoint?

It is easier to give the tonnage per minute that the sex industry produces — the mountains of genital appliances, photographs, special clothing, chains, whips, and other accessories that facilitate the application of our reproductive physiology to perverted practices — than to measure, weigh, or simply observe human love in its nontechnological manifestations. Surely, when people love one another — and it is hard to doubt that there are hundreds of millions who do — when they remain faithful to their erotic or parental feelings, there is no measure, no apparatus, that can record that and grind it in the statistical mill. With sadomasochism, on the other hand, with rape, murder, or any perversion, there are no such difficulties: statistical theory is at our service.

The industrialization of emotion in all its aspects — say the indignant critics of One Human Minute — is an utter impossibility. There cannot be, nor ever will be, devices, harnesses, salves, aphrodisiacs, or any sort of “meters” to abet or measure filial or maternal love; no thermometers to gauge the heat of lovers’ passions. That their temperature is sometimes fatally high, we learn only indirectly from the statistics on suicides resulting from unrequited love. Such love is out of fashion in the modern world, and any writer who devotes his works to love alone will not make it into the literary Parnassus.

There is no denying the merit of such arguments as these; the trouble is that without the backing of facts and figures they remain generalities. The publishers of One Human Minute failed not only to establish the I.Q. of politicians; they were also unable to include a register of the sins confessed per minute in the Catholic confessional, or of those acts of kindness whose authors wished to remain anonymous. And so the argument over the precise degree of objectivity or subjectivity of this book cannot be settled.

With the help of the alphabetical index, anyone who seeks an answer to a particular question can easily locate the relevant data. It is true that the conclusions drawn from data combined in this way are far from unequivocal. Even today, five billion human brains process less information per minute than do computers in the same time; computers make possible the solution of problems and the execution of tasks otherwise beyond reach.

Automated telephone communication on a global scale is a splendid thing, no question. But it did produce a by-product — numerically not insignificant — that is, telephone sex. In the last few years, agencies offering such services have mushroomed. You have but to pick up the receiver, dial, and give your credit-card number in order to avail yourself of your favorite variety of conversational lewdness — copulating in words, so to speak — with an Australian, say, while you sit in Ontario. But, then, no one can deny that the split between technological progress and moral progress has taken place and is irreversible — impossible though it may be to establish the date of this separation, which marks the collapse of our nineteenth-century faith in the collective march into the happy future. Technological solutions to one’s desires can serve evil as well as good. But goodness, again, is not measurable, and sometimes it happens that neither concept can be pinned down. In One Human Minute, for example, we learn how many scientific works are published every minute, and also how very little of his own field a scientist can assimilate, even superficially. There is more and more information that he ought to be aware of but that exceeds his physiological capacity of absorption. Today only supercomputers know everything in every field.

Looking under the proper heading, one learns what computers — which seem to be changing from assistants to managers of our civilization — can accomplish in one minute. Models of the newest generation can perform nearly a billion logical operations in that interval. But a fragmentary look will not tell us what is really going on in science. Perhaps for that reason — or to give the book greater weight, without diminishing its readability — an extensive afterword was included, in addition to the commentaries introducing each chapter to the reader. This is actually an essay presenting the methods of calculation employed in One Human Minute. In more than one case they smack of detective work, almost in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes. But the infallibility of Holmes’s famous deductions, which he was able to make from an old hat, a forgotten pipe, a cane, or a watch, re-creating from them the unknown owner’s appearance, station in life, and character traits — for example, that the person had recently fallen on hard times — all that brilliant detection was due to the assistance given to Holmes secretly by the author. But countless parodies have since ridiculed that “classic deduction,” showing how from the same clues one might construct many logically tight but mutually exclusive hypotheses. No brilliant detective-statistician was in a position, however, to bring forth this book singlehandedly, nor could a large team of mathematicians have done it; computers were needed. A great deal of the work was done mechanically, that is, by converting known and accessible data to the unit of time indicated in the title. When data were unavailable, they had to be arrived at in a roundabout way, by searching for correlations (there is a high positive correlation, for example, between an accident at a power station that cuts current to a big city or area of a country and the number of children born roughly nine months later). Where we are dealing with single phenomena (and it was precisely with these that Sherlock Holmes grappled), the well-chewed mouthpiece of a pipe might testify to the smoker’s strong jaws and his attachment to that pipe and no other, though he has a large collection, or it might simply be the result of a nervous tic, or, finally, the pipe might not be his property at all — he might have found it, stuck it into his pocket, then got himself murdered, in which case the pipe would be a red herring.

Five billion people, on the other hand, is a big enough aggregate to be governed by the laws of large numbers. Nothing is simpler than predicting the number of automobile accidents under specific weather conditions and a given volume of traffic. But how do we arrive at the number of accidents (say, per minute) that did not take place but were “close calls"? Or, as someone said more pointedly, how do we calculate the danger of driving, given the fact that heavy metropolitan traffic represents the sum of miraculously averted crashes? We can, it turns out, although only the accidents that actually take place leave behind evidence in the form of dented cars and sometimes corpses. Between the “unrealized collisions” and the collisions that do occur, with the number of dead and injured, with the frequency according to road surface and quantity of vehicles, there exist definite mathematical ratios, and one can make use of them. This is still a relatively simple matter.

Some calculations were merely tedious and complicated, but did not require any special ingenuity on the part of the programmers. There was the amusing idea of comparing the global circulation of money with the circulation of red corpuscles, except that money does not pass from vessel to vessel but from hand to hand, and does not even physically participate in the transaction, because it consists of electronic impulses that change the balances in bank accounts. Despite bank confidentiality, a team of One Human Minute researchers secured the global payments-per-minute figures. By way of illustration, a small map of the Earth was put above the statistics, the “flow of currency” resembling the lines on a meteorological map. It is evident that considerable effort was put into imagery in this new edition, for often such data do not easily lend themselves to visualization. One could say that One Human Minute became a reality thanks to the collaboration of the publisher’s computers and the computers of nearly the entire world, and humanity was the raw material they processed.

Formerly, when a central data bank of drivers with traffic violations did not exist, one could not obtain the necessary information with such wonderful precision. The number of people who travel by plane per minute can easily be established from the statistics on the utilization of passenger seats for all the airlines, information that is readily available. Corporate secrecy and the confidentiality of the medical (or legal) profession presented obstacles. There was also the problem of the “guesstimate” or “dark number": of incidents that happened, for example, but were not made public (as in the case of rape). Yet these numbers are not pulled out of a hat; in every area, whether hidden alcoholism, perversion, surgical blunders, or engineering mistakes, they merely vary according to the various indirect methods of calculation. But to learn how the seemingly impossible was accomplished, the reader must read the afterword himself.

The new edition also has a new introduction. It is odd. Its author is unquestionably an intellectual who wished to remain anonymous; instead of praising One Human Minute, he speaks of it critically and ironically, making one suspect that he considers this numerical fruit of computers collaborating with computers, under human management, to be like the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

He advises against reading the book page by page, for that would be like reading an encyclopedia in alphabetical order — it would only make the reader’s head swim. Moreover, he says that he himself, as a reader, was “bullied” by One Human Minute. In his opinion, “Everything has always happened at once,” because the ineffable sum of all humanity’s experience is, for every historical instant — for every minute or second — a quantity that is constant. The reasons for the cares, joys, and sorrows may change radically, but they do not affect that existential sum. That is the Constant. And even if it shows historical fluctuation, there is no way to discover when an increase in misery takes place and a decrease in pleasure, or vice versa. But the book is valuable as a background enabling us to understand what the mass media are telling us as they advance technologically and carry more and more trivia. The image of the book’s “ideal reader” is ridiculous; according to the author of the Introduction, such a reader would study it bit by bit, to the exclusion of all else, attempting to glimpse the human reality behind the numbers. The example the author uses to illustrate his ideal reader is ironic; the manipulating of figures almost caricatures the method that gave rise to the whole volume. This ideal reader, having the best of intentions, will power, imagination, and loads of free time, does nothing his whole life long (apart from catching a few hours’ sleep) except study what is taking place, at that moment, among his fellow creatures. Devoting thirty seconds to each living person for eighteen hours a day for fifty years, he will be able to contemplate thirty-six million people, but that is not even one two-hundredth of his contemporaries. He will not have time to consider the remaining 199/200 of humanity even if he does nothing else until his dying breath, even if he considers while he eats, drinks, and undresses for bed. This example demonstrates that in reality we can know almost nothing of human fortunes beyond what is given by the statistical data.

The editors, I’m sure, allowed such a skeptical and agnostic introduction, knowing that they had a best seller, because with best sellers condemnation as well as praise increases sales. A cynical observation, perhaps, but true.

Naturally, pirate editions and imitations of One Human Minute have appeared. It will be amusing and fitting if the next edition includes phenomena of this sort under the headings “Intellectual Theft” and “Counterfeiting of Information"; the once-innocent appearance of a best seller now produces a train of imitators — a pack of jackals and hyenas following a lion. Meanwhile, computer crime has moved from fantasy into reality. A bank can indeed be robbed by remote control, with electronic impulses that break or fool security codes, much as a safecracker uses a skeleton key, crowbar, or carborundum saw. Presumably, banks suffer serious losses in this way, but here One Human Minute is silent, because — again, presumably — the world of High Finance does not want to make such losses public, fearing to expose this new Achilles’ heel: the electronic sabotage of automated bookkeeping. Therefore there is no heading in the book for computer crime, but it is bound to show up sooner or later, in a future edition.

Since the copyright covers the title of the book but not the idea that gave birth to it, one can now find, in the bookstores, The World Now, What’s Happening, Fantastic Reality/Real Fantasy — which have slightly modified figures in the decimal places, so that the publisher of One Human Minute would have difficulty in court in the event of a plagiarism suit. All these imitations, of course, are cut from the same cloth; only once, as I was turning the pages of one of them, did I come upon an introduction that was rather original. The mass media, it said, are never completely objective. In fact, the pattern is like this: the worse the news in the local press, the more freedom there is and the better conditions are in the society that prints it. If journalists are wringing their hands, tearing their hair, predicting the end, and bewailing imminent ruin, then the streets are rivers of glistening cars, the store windows are packed with delicacies, everyone walks around tanned and rosy-cheeked, and a handcuffed wretch brought to prison at gunpoint is harder to find than a diamond in the gutter. And vice versa: where prisons are overcrowded, where gloom and fear prevail, where poverty is terrible, one usually reads — in the papers — news that is cheerful, uplifting, determinedly joyous (telling you that you had better participate in the general happiness), and syrupy press releases paint life in rainbow colors (except that it is a rainbow that will shine — but not just yet). This introduction claims an important role for One Human Minute and its imitators: to supply the complete truth.

The original One Human Minute is supposed to be computerized, so that one can call it up on one’s home computer. But most people will prefer the volume on the shelf. And so the book, styling itself “all books in one,” will increase the mass of printed paper. In it you can find out how many trees fall per minute to saw and ax all over the world. Forests are turned into paper to make newspapers that call for the forests to be saved. But that piece of information is not in One Human Minute. You have to figure it out yourself.

III

Now One Human Minute has indeed been computerized, but not in the way I imagined. The fact is, the contents of the book were becoming, slowly but surely, anachronistic. The number of people in the world keeps increasing; new catastrophes and calamities are added to the old ones; new means of production create different articles for daily consumption. Therefore, as in the case of yearly almanacs, it came time to revise the book — or rather, to recalculate it from scratch. But a character appeared, even cleverer than the Johnsons; he decided to put a perpetual One Human Minute on the market — valid from year to year — like a perpetual calendar! In an era of pocket calculators, electronic chessplayers, and a host of similar devices claiming to embody “artificial intelligence” (which has not been attained yet but someday, no doubt, will be), when you can buy even a pocket translator to carry on simple conversations in a foreign language, it was possible to make an electronic version of this book, avoiding the need for continual corrections and new editions.

The year is entered, the subject code selected from the menu. Also, one can move both forward and backward in time. Naturally, seeing that the machine can show how many children were born thirty years ago, and how many three hundred years ago, a person is tempted to give it a tougher problem: how many people watched television when Columbus discovered America? The machine is not that stupid, however, and is not taken in. The answer that appears in the little window is “0.” We are soon convinced that the past has all been entered in the memory of this new, microcomputerized version of One Human Minute. But it is more interesting to use it to look at the future. You cannot jump more than one hundred years forward: when you try, you get an “E” in the little window, signaling overload, as in any ordinary calculator. Future data are extrapolations, derived from such weighty mathematics that I wouldn’t dream of going into it. The only thing certain is that all the data are uncertain, like any statement about the future. But since The Perpetual Human Minute is really not a book, the book reviewer has no further obligation to it; there remains for him only this parting, possibly profound remark:

In the Holy Scriptures it is said that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. Paraphrasing for our earthly use, we can observe that in the beginning was a computer, which brought forth this book, which became a computer again. An accident, perhaps, a superficial analogy — but I am afraid that it is not.