The time machine and the handgun: The Men Who Murdered Mohammed, by Alfred Bester

 Calm down.  It'll be OK.  Alfred Bester is already dead, so a fatwa would be a silly exercise.  They'd need a time machine and a handgun to stop him, which is rather funny given the plot of the story.  Me?  CWRU and others are diggin' my grave as I type, but as a devotee of Socrates, (pronounced, "Soh-Crayts"), my motto is "hemlock before bullshit."  Note, vitally, that your reaction to the title of the story, and your expectation of violence in response says more than anything I am typing anyway.

In tenure veritas.  Academic freedom.  (Is that still a thing?  Let's find out, shall we?)

Now.  Let us step into the wayback machine, and consider a short story by Alfred Bester.  If you recognize the name for anything other than his writing, then at least you win those geek points!  On Babylon 5, the Psi-Cop, Bester, was named for the author.  A few years earlier, in a Simpsons episode, Martin Prince name-checked Bester in his campaign pledge to ensure that the school library would be stocked with the A-B-C's of science fiction.  Martin is aware of Bradbury, thank you very much.  Anyway, you are now aware of Alfred Bester, both the character and the author, and this morning, we consider a short story with an oh-so-scary title.  "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed."  Bester published the story in 1958, and he would not be allowed to publish it today.  We will consider an alternative, "The Men Who Murdered Jesus," with a time machine variation rather than either the crucifixion or those of y'all who keep saying I did it.  (Actually, I did!  And I would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for you meddling kids!)  Regardless, the mere title means that Bester could not publish this story in 2023.  Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding from a fatwa issued in response to The Satanic Verses, and decades later, they're still so frothing batshit about the book that a man rushed him on stage last year, nearly killed him, and cost him an eye.  Charlie Hebdo, the various go-arounds with South Park, and every other instance demonstrate quite clearly that we do not play by Kantian or Rawlsian rules.

Recall the Isabel Fall incident, in which a trans woman wrote a story called "I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter."  She used the phrase as the basis for a science fiction story, describing the feeling of dysphoria and the process of transitioning, as a way to express how each feels, being a trans woman.  Yet leftists never read the story.  They read the title, went into their own jihadist rage, forced a retraction of the story, spread batshit conspiracy theories about Fall, and engaged in so much cyber-bullying of a trans woman that she checked herself into a facility for suicidal ideation.  Because, you know, they had to protect trans people.  Imagine the coalition that would form between these people and original-formula jihadists over a story called "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed."  Have you read it?  Do you know what the story is?  No?  Well, the leftists who went after Isabel Fall did not know the plot of her short story either.  That didn't stop them.  Maybe we should read and consider, and not, you know, try to murder authors or drive them to suicide.  Just sayin'.

Anyway, let's have some fun.  Last weekend, I wrote about Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility, in which Gaspery-Jacques Roberts has to decide whether or not to let Olive Llewellyn die of a plague when he travels back in time to investigate some temporal anomalies.  He decides to trash his job and try to save her.  Now let's do this in reverse and consider the old trope of the time machine and the handgun.  What about going back in time and trying, not to save, but to kill?  The question is normally posed in reference to Hitler, because he is the most universally acknowledged figure of evil.  By body count, Stalin and Mao both had him beat, and both can be traced to Marx, who was not just wrong about everything, racist and anti-Semitic, but really did want his revolutions to be bloody.  Why is it that we don't ask the question about Marx?  Because leftists still love him.  Time machine and a handgun, do you kill Hitler?  Yes.

Marx?  Yes.  Then send in the cleaners, because holy shit, the body count, and holy shit, the evil.  Jew-boy, me, says Marx was worse, and it's not close.  Not close, at all.

What about Mohammed?

Oooooooooooh.

The title is a bit misleading, but let's get into this.  The story takes place, vaguely, around Unknown University, which is kind of like Pratchett's Unseen University, except that instead of wizards, the place is filled with mad scientists.  The story centers on Henry Hassel, who comes home one day to find his wife in the embrace of another man.  Instead of either responding rationally or even conventionally irrationally, he builds a time machine.  He goes back in time to kill her grandfather.  Upon returning (he'll be back!), he is furious to see the same sight of his wife in that embrace.  What does he do?  He keeps going back (I told you!), trying to make larger and larger changes in history, in attempt to make some difference, any difference in what he observes when he returns to his own time.  He tries killing George Washington, Christopher Columbus, teaching Marie Curie how to make a nuke, and among the many attempts he makes to create any effect, he tries... killing Mohammed.

Along the way, Hassel meets another time traveler engaged in similar and similarly futile endeavors.  They realize that they can no longer interact with the world as they become ghost-like.  The conclusion they draw is that time travel works differently than they had hoped.  You cannot change another person's past.  You can only move along your own timeline, so as you go back and forth, doing this kind of thing, all you do is destroy yourself.

Which is actually an interesting way to write about the philosophical question regarding an impossible act, as it addresses the concept of vengeance in the right way.  Vengeance quests are self-destructive.  Hassel is trying to enact vengeance, and all he does is destroy himself.  You cannot change the past, and vengeance quests, based on misguided ideas about the past, are inherently self-destructive.  It's a good story, and the right moral lesson.

Notice, though, "men," plural.  Both time travelers went back and killed Mohammed at different points in time.  The title of the story refers only to a throw-away exchange in which the confused time travelers dispute who really killed Mohammed because the second one couldn't have killed him if the first one did it first.  They then note that of the various killings of historical figures, they expected more of an effect from killing Mohammed.  Presumably, this would be because he did not merely found a country, but a religion with many followers.

And indeed, if you are upset about "colonialism," guess which religion spread precisely by "colonizing!"  Oops!  Are we not supposed to acknowledge that?

Anyway, ultimately, it was a throw-away line in a story about something else.

Several observations present themselves.  I have already observed that even though the killing of Mohammed is merely a throw-away exchange, the mere fact that it happens in the story, and that it is the title, means that the story could not be published today.  That is an important observation about the perversities of modern politics and society.  Yet let us consider the time machine/handgun question, applied to... Mohammed.  Yup, we're doing this.

Where'd I put that hemlock?  Ah, right there.  Lemme just squeeze a bit of lemon, and I'll be ready to go here for the rest of the post.  [Spritz...]  And we're ready!

I'm not Muslim.  By definition, that means I think the doctrines Mohammed spread were false.  See, that's definitional.  It follows logically if not tautologically.  Of course, there are many false ideas which are harmless, or which produce good outcomes as a side-effect.  If you believe some superstition which convinces you to commit to a life of charity and peace, then the superstitious nature of your belief has, as a side-effect, produced a good outcome.  If you have a hallucination of Jebuz, and that hallucination tells you to devote your life to building water sanitation units in poor countries, your hallucination may have been a hallucination, but it resulted in good.  As a rule, I favor truth, but I will acknowledge the good that resulted from your Jebuz hallucination.  That's consequentialism anyway.  "Rules" are more deontological.

The time machine/handgun question is the quintessential exercise in consequentialism.  It is deontologically forbidden, of course, but consequentially contested.

If you believe that Mohammed was a true prophet, then whatever murders were committed in the name of Islam are irrelevant (and not even really murders) because he bestowed divine truth.  If you do not believe that, though, this is a much more uncomfortable question, at least for multiculturalist-leftists, given history and body counts, and where the leftist will likely go, to find safer ground, is as follows.

Oh, yeah?!  Well what about Jesus?!

Not being Christian either, I'm fine tackling that one too.  Let's consider the time machine/handgun question for killing Baby Jesus!  This is actually quite interesting.  In fact, I would argue that it is a more interesting philosophical and historical question.

Body count?  Holy shit, have Christians killed a lot in the name of that religion!  They aren't doing much of it right now, but over the last two thousand years?  Wow, now that's a body count!  Y'all have really racked up the murders!  I mean, I know y'all had a lot more time than Hitler and the other big boys in the genocide game (to say nothing of your really impressive record in child molestation!), so we need to take that into consideration on the murderleaderboard, but seriously.  You motherfuckers killed a lot!  And that introduces the moral question of going back in time and stopping it all by murdering Baby Jesus with a Colt Peacemaker, yeee-HAW!!!!  What're you gonna do about it, throw myrrh at me?!

And if that doesn't work, we go Die Hard on this!  Ho-ho-ho, now I have a machine gun!  Merry fuckin' Christmas!

If we're being practical, isn't this a better way?  I mean, sure, we're good with money and pulling strings, but we're also the best mathematicians and physicists, which is clearer to demonstrate by our dominance in Nobels, so the easiest way to handle this problem is for us to invent a time machine, go back with a fuckin' machine gun, and spray the manger with so much led that he ain't never resurrectin'!  Isn't that simpler than manipulating the Romans?  I think you'll have to agree.

New plan!  Of course, you'll have to wait, and you probably won't remember, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'll note that I just did an extended riff on murdering Baby Jesus in the manger, incorporating a Die Hard reference for Christmas, some Western themes on the Colt Peacemaker, jokes about the Catholic Church and child molestation, anti-Semitic jokes, and I'll bet you're still stuck on the Muslim part.  Do you see the problem here?  Do you get it yet?

Moving on.

If we try to add up the bodies, even though the Christian world is much safer for me now, things don't look so good for Baby Jesus, do they?

Here's the stumper.  Better or worse than for Mohammed?  Unclunch the pearls, and ask the question.

Let's add a twist.  Objectively, it's better in the West.  Why?  The Enlightenment.  Why did the Enlightenment happen?  There are arguments to be made that without Christianity, it would not have happened.  (Spinoza was a Jew, though!)  As an interesting point of time and alternate history, Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series posited an alternate/parallel universe in which Christianity never took off, and consequently, there was no Enlightenment, no scientific revolution, nor anything like that.  It is plausible, given the history of scholarship in monasteries, the history of the Jesuits, and without belaboring the point, while there is a long history of tension between science and the Catholic Church in particular, it is nothing like the tension in the Islamic world.  Have fun reading about the history of science, if you like.

Would going back in time and killing Baby Jesus stop the Enlightenment, and thereby turn everything into the Gruenmarkt, from Stross's Merchant Princes series?  If so, killing Baby Jesus a harder question.  After all, the world is a better place for the Enlightenment, even though Christianity has a very bloody history.  Yet drawing that connection is historically challenging.

Can any similar case be made for Mohammed?  That is not as clear.  Unless you have hermetically sealed yourself out of some xenophobic looniness, you probably have at least Muslim associates and hopefully Muslim friends, but the question is the same for Christianity, and you have Christian friends, so don't get squirrelly on me now.  If you chuckled along to the image of John McLane in Die Hard IX: Call Off Christmas*, then this is just a bigger picture question.  Total consequentialist good versus total consequentialist bad.  I'm not convinced on Christianity, with the case really resting mostly on the Enlightenment.  Finding a similar counterbalancing set of empirical-historical effects and outcomes for Islam is harder.  Baby Jesus may or may not still be behind on the consequentialist scorecard, but if one applies the same process I am applying to that little shit, then how about Mohammed?

We can play this game for anyone, in principle.  Who survives the consequentialist analysis?  But of course the lesson from Bester's actual story is much more personal, and much more deontological than consequentialist.  Don't do that.  You wind up destroying yourself.  Henry Hassel destroyed himself, while accomplishing nothing.  Is that more Seneca than Kant?  Perhaps, but it was a good story nevertheless, and a nice answer to the time machine question, which is ultimately nothing more than a silly indulgence.

So, anyone upset by such frivolities similarly needs to learn the lesson that Henry Hassel had to learn the hard way.  Don't destroy yourself.

Right thinking, right action.

Mattias IA Eklundh, "Revenge of the Bambi Loving Terrorist," from Freak Guitar.

*Get it?  Alan Rickman?  Call off Christmas?  That shitty Robin Hood movie?  Fuck off, that was funny.