Turing, Suffering and Dying In Uncivil Society

ALAN TURING COMMITTED SUICIDE in 1954, two years after being castrated by the unenlightened British government, having been convicted of homosexuality, which in those days was illegal throughout Europe and North America. Now that we have established that Europe and North America were uncivilized in the nineteen fifties, we turn to the question: are they civilized today? Turing's suicide cannot be indisputably attributed to his having had his nuts forcibly removed by toxic chemicals; it may be that he would have done the tragic deed anyway; after all, he was a genius, and as they say about geniuses, they are often emotionally unstable. Yet when we consider how unlikely it is that a person can be castrated without experiencing a tremendous amount of psychological torment of various sorts, we are tempted to arrive at the conclusion that the great computer scientist suffered in agony for a couple of years, then ended it. Turing was not famous at the time of his death; he avoided publicity, but Einstein, who was still alive when Turing died, although perhaps unaware of all the circumstances associated with Turing, was absolutely aware of the fact that he lived in an uncivilized western civilization, having fled NAZI Germany to the wild wild west of Princeton. Alan Turing single handedly deciphered the supposedly indecipherable enigma code, which the Germans were using to hide their wartime communications from the Allies. He thus either castrated two years off World War Two, or, he won it outright for the allies, depending upon the historian consulted. Churchill called Turing the greatest war hero nobody knew about. After the war, Turing invented computers, by developing the system of using a programming code, based upon ones and zeros, off and on switches, to issue instructions to the machines. He also predicted, in a famous essay, that computers would become artificially intelligent by the end of the twentieth century, and would have their way with humanity. In this, hew was only slightly too ambitious in his time line. All this pales in comparison to the fact that he made love to other men, and was caught, prosecuted, and murdered. That's how we, the uncivilized, tend to treat great people, from Jesus on throughout history. Welcome to the jungle. Is western civilization still uncivilized? You had better bet your bottom dollar that it indeed is.