Swann's Way 
by 

Marcel Proust

 

Childhood Expectations

The Delphic maxim Nosce te ipsum, Know thyself, is the motivating force not only of Western philosophy and Christian theology but of much of Western literature. All of the volumes of In Search of Lost Time are an experiment in self-understanding, an experiment which incorporates something that is left out of much of modern science, particularly psychological science, namely the concept of purposefulness. 

Purposefulness is the capacity to consider purpose rather than the adoption of any specific purpose. It is a concept which is difficult to grasp, and to live with, since it easily deteriorates into some specific purpose through the sheer frustration with the unsettlement it provokes. The most startling characteristic of Swann’s Way is Proust’s dogged refusal to subvert purposefulness to purpose.

About 20 years ago I was asked to give a speech at a meeting of the Italian Bankers Association. At the dinner afterwards I was seated next to the chairman of the Banco Agricultura, a charming man of approximately seventy, who, as many Italian businessmen, had a very different social manner than most Northern Europeans. 

Instead of spending ten minutes on pleasantries leading to a more serious business conversation, the chairman reversed conventional priorities: after ten minutes of business-oriented chit-chat, he signalled an end to that portion of our conversation with the line “You know I think Freud had it entirely wrong.” 

A bit taken aback but intrigued by his change of tack I asked how so. “According to Freud, we all go through traumas when we are young that we have to live through for the rest of our lives.” He replied, and continued “My experience is completely different. I believe that we all make fundamental decisions about ourselves that we try to live up to for the rest of our lives.” He then went on to explain how he, a scientist by training, had ended up in banking as the correct expression of his childhood decision.

Clearly only the very rare, and probably incipiently psychotic, child would be able to take a such a decision about himself - to become a banker! So I was somewhat sceptical about the chairman’s rationale until I watched an instalment of the British ITV programme originally entitled 7-Plus (See postscript below; the final instalment is nigh). 

This programme followed the lives of a dozen or so Britons beginning at age seven at subsequent intervals of seven years (to my uncertain knowledge the next instalment should capture them at age 63). In the early years the children are clearly both inexperienced and inarticulate, as would be expected. Yet they make statements which are also clearly reflective of their later more experienced and more articulate selves. 

Some are uncanny: a seven-year-old Yorkshire lad herding cattle in his remote family farm, asked by the interviewer what he wants to do when he grows up replies “I want to know everything about het moon.” By his mid-thirties he had become a prominent astrophysicist. The association between most childhood statements and life-outcomes are far more subtle than this, but almost all correlate to such a degree that one can match young to old merely on the basis of what the children and adults say and do rather than their physical states.

The ITV programme is obviously anecdotal rather than scientific but I nevertheless I find it compelling. Alfred Whitehead observed that we are all born either Platonists or Aristotelians. As with religious faith, we cannot verify either position except by adopting it. Confirming evidence flows from the choice not vice versa. Proust knows this:

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradictions and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose its faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.

So where do these beliefs, not just Platonic and Aristotelian but all important beliefs, particularly about purpose, come from? Do we actually decide these beliefs in some sort of analysis and process of verification as rationalists suggest is ‘rational’? Or do they emerge incrementally from our actual experience in the world, shaping us through an appreciation of ‘the facts’ as empiricists insist? Is anyone really driving the bus at all?

For Proust, the impetus to action is vague and ambiguous intention not specific causal stimulus, not even the ‘future cause’ of a defined purpose; his cosmos is Platonic and idealistic rather than Aristotelian and material; his theology is that of a Bonaventure who finds infinite significance in small things, not of a Thomas Aquinas who looks to the cosmos for confirmation of the divine; for him the mind is better described by Jungian archetypes than Freudian phobias. 

There is also a profound twist in Proust’s apparent modernism. His intense romantic self-consciousness, the drive to understand oneself through feelings, leads to something unexpected and very post-modern: the recognition that the unconscious is indistinguishable from reality, a reality which is created. The realm of the particular and individual, those parts of the world with proper names like cities and people, can't be pinned down. We can't be sure where things begin and end, including ourselves. Our inability to distinguish the particular Kantian thing in itself from what we think of it can even make us ill as Marcel discovers in the book's final part. 

Even more profoundly, the Self, our consciousness combined with this reality, is indistinguishable from God. As God is infinite, and infinitely ‘beyond’ our ability to understand, so too the Self. That the Self is inherently unknowable except as a direction of search is a conclusion he reaches again and again in Swann’s Way. Every feeling is traced through memory until memory merely points further without a material reference. When memory stops at objects without recognising the transcendent reality, Marcel finds himself in error:

No doubt, by virtue of having permanently and indissolubly united so many different impressions in my mind, simply because they made me experience them at the same time, the Meseglise and Guermantes ways left me exposed, in later life, to much disillusionment and even to many mistakes. For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that person recalled to me a hedge of hawthorne in blossom.

This is also the eponymous Swann's fate. In attaching the 'signs' of an emotionally moving, indeed transformative, musical phrase (authored, significantly, by a resident not of Swann's Way but the other path, the Guermantes Way, in Combray) and a female figure in a Botticelli painting (Botticelli shared with Swann an ambivalence about commitment in relationship) to the person of Odette, Swann creates a false reality. The music indicates a distant ideal. Swann regards:

...musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadow, unknown, impenetrable to the human mind, but none the less perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance.

His compulsion to fill the void between these aesthetic ideals, which he recognises as divine, and his concrete situation with whatever is at hand is overpowering. The result is an apparently disastrous confusion and self-imposed delusion. Swann emerges in Proust's text as an avatar of Saint Augustine, knowing that he is over-valuing the object of his desire, yet unwilling to cease digging the spiritual pit in which he finds himself. The second half of the book, which is entirely third-party narrative, uses this tale of destruction as a sort of case study of the theory developed in the first, which is entirely introspective and associative. 

There are constant reminders throughout that the map which indicates the direction toward the ideal is not its territory. On a short coach trip during childhood with the local doctor, for example, Marcel recalls the comforting sight of three village church steeples. Why are they comforting? The scene is pastoral, at sunset, but minutely crafted analysis gives no clear reason for either the importance of the memory or the intensity of the feeling. Nevertheless there is something there, just out of sight, obscurely attractive just beyond the steeples. It is what lies beyond, behind this image that is the source of its power. His imagery of women is similarly and explicitly archetypal: 

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would creep up, white as a cloud, furtive, lustreless, suggesting an ancient actress who does not have to come on for a while, and watches the rest of the company for a moment from the auditorium in her ordinary clothes, keeping in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself.

Often he presents the naked image, leaving it without comment except that he considers it significant enough to write about. The evocation simply echoes in this example:

Here and there in the distance, in a landscape which in the failing light and saturated atmosphere resembled a seascape rather, a few solitary houses clinging to the lower slopes of a hill plunged in watery darkness shone out like little boats which have folded their sails and ride at anchor all night upon the sea.

Proust often uses grammar to make his point about the obscure reality of these ‘strange attractors’ as they are called in the modern theory of chaos. In describing a meadow by the River Vivonne in Combray:

For the buttercups grew past numbering in this spot where they had chosen for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, in whole companies, yellow as the yolk of eggs, and glowing with an added lustre, I felt, because being powerless to consummate with my palate the pleasures which the sight of them never failed to give me, I would let it accumulate as my eyes ranged over their golden expanse, until it became potent enough to produce an effect of absolute, purposeless beauty; and so it had been from my earliest childhood, when from the towpath I had stretched out my arms towards them before I could even properly spell their charming name - a name fit for the Prince in some fairy tale - immigrants, perhaps, from Asia centuries ago, but naturalised now for ever in the village, satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine and the water's edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the railway station, yet keeping none the less like some of our old paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the golden East.

The sheer length and complexity of the sentence, combined with the ambiguity of the referents of many of the pronouns, and the allusions to a mysterious Asian past, are components of his monumental experiment to express that which is just beyond the reach of expression. Its density is poetic, but it is not poetry. It is a new genre. In it Proust makes the search for the Platonic ideal visible by subverting literary habits but no so much as to make the text incomprehensible.

Life then for Marcel is a search in which habits may provide comfort, security, and facile communication, peace even, but inhibit discovery of what one is. By simply accepting our habitual responses to events as obvious or inevitable, we short-circuit the investigation of why and how they should be as they are. In particular this applies to habits of thought, methods, if you will, our ways of dealing with the emotional world. 

There is no essential method, not just for psychology but for thought in general. Both the Meseglise Way and the Guermantes Way are essential to one’s formation (to use a term from religious development). Proust’s implicit proposal is that there is an emotional epistemology which is the heart of human purposefulness, but that this epistemology excludes nothing. It ‘sweeps in’ everything it can using every approach it can imagine.

Proust’s implicit contention is that what is important in adult life is decided in early conscious life, which adult life then induces us to make unconscious - thus confirming the chairman of the Banco Agricultural and Freud (of whom Proust was ignorant) as well as the producers of ITV. But like the chairman and unlike Freud, Proust appreciated this as a positive necessity. For him human beings are creative idealists who become oriented to a certain configuration of not just how the world is but how it ought to be. 

Appreciating the source of this phenomenon is what he is about. Proust's ‘therapy’ is not Freudian since he seeks neither to neutralise the motivational effect of childhood ideals nor to subject these ideals to some sort of choice. His intention is to further articulate and explore what the ideals might be, indeed what we might be behind the veil of appearances. 

The ideals created in childhood are, after all, as the chairman said, what we actually are. But the ITV children suggest, contrary to the chairman's opinion, that these ideals are not deterministic. There are any number, perhaps an infinite number, of ways through which ideals may be interpreted and approached. Only afterwards can the creativity of the individual be discerned. This is the domain of choice and learning.

Nosce te ipsum does not imply, therefore, an analytic understanding of one's desires. But without some sort of reflective assessment, these desires, feelings, aversions remain unappreciated, as does consequently the Self in which they occur and which they constitute. These desires are created in youth not as specific neurotic fixations but as memories and responses to a vague, inarticulate presence, essence perhaps, which is just behind, just beyond what we perceive and what we can express. 

This knowledge is essential because without it we are liable to pursue ineffective paths; but it is also useless because it will bring us no closer to the real content of the ideal. Neither the past nor the Self can ever be found or recovered - "...houses, roads avenues, are as fugitive, alas, as the years." But they can be appreciated: 'Worldly' desires, those conventions of society, are forceful but sterile once achieved - love, social position, power, wealth - and do not really create that which ought to be because that which ought to be is irretrievable. 

For Proust, as for Augustine, each of us, is a Citizen Kane, pursuing an ideal we can know only faintly, often through inappropriate means. The Rosebud is our unique possession – or more properly a sign to its hidden meaning - and it is the only possession we need.

In his 1651 publication of The Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes makes an intentional mistranslation of Nosce te ipsum. ‘Read thyself’ is how he prefers the classic maxim in English. When we read, we are forced to interpret, to bring ourselves into the text. When our interpretation becomes a text, which it must if it is articulated, that too is subject to interpretation. And so on ad infinitum. 

As the philosopher Richard Rorty famously quipped: it’s interpretation all the way down. There is no terminal point of truth in a text, nor is there a true Self, just as there is no foundation in terms of first principles for thought. The post-modern position reckons our job as one of permanent interpretation, an un-ending search for the truth – about the world as well as ourselves. 

Hobbes had the insight that we are texts to be read and interpreted. Proust demonstrates how this is done. The fact that the horizon recedes at the same pace as it is approached doesn't invalidate the task. 

Goal-orientation, according to psychologists, therapists, and management consultants, is a desirable human trait. This is demonstrably false. Goal-orientation is a neurosis involving the fixation of purpose regardless of consequences. It implies a wilful rejection of the possibility of learning through experience.

The most vital experience is not about learning how to do something, technique; but learning about what is important to do, value. Loyalty to purpose is a betrayal of purposefulness, of what constitutes being human. This is a prevailing poison in modern society. Proust understood this toxin, and, without even giving it a name, formulated the cure. This, for me, is the real value of Swann's Way.

Postscript 26May19: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019...

World's Fair by E.L. Doctorow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hope Is Where You Find It

Doctorow's World's Fair is, for me, an important document touching on family history. My mother was 11 years old when she visited Flushing Meadows in 1939 and it influenced her life as significantly as it did Doctorow's. Both he and his avatar 'Edgar' were two years younger than my mother. New York City was (and of course largely still is) a city of immigrants and the children of immigrants. In other words it is a place of constant dislocation and dissolution. It doesn't so much melt into a pot as anneal on a blacksmith's iron. But the depression of the 1930's added a component of desperation to the lives of many that is the stage set in which his protagonist functions. For Edgar the Worlds Fair is not just a glimpse of other worlds, but rather, as for my mother, the symbol of a hope for a new world. It was almost an excuse to feel good. Edgar's father with his failing business sees it expressly as that, in almost the same words I am sure my mother quoted to me from my grandfather. The experiences that affected Edgar most deeply weren't the visions of new technologies or urban designs but the 'trivial' encounters like the archly vulgar sideshow 'Oscar the Amorous Octopus'. For my mother it was the bank of valves that released small amounts of unusual fragrances. The one that stuck in her mind was labelled, she found only after testing it, Human Gas.

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The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Woodsman Spare That Country

Bill Bryson is the stand-up comedian of travel writing. The Road to Little Dribbling is an update on his first act, Notes From a Small Island, of 20 years before. The style of loving sarcasm is the same. With the narrative sense of David Sedaris and the one-liner punch of Jackie Mason, he renews one's faith yet again in the raw wit and humour available in Britain and most importantly the British willingness to apply that wit and humour to themselves. It is impossible to read his explanation of things like the British road numbering system or post code designations without falling in a heap. The throw away lines like "The [ancient humanoid] Happisburgh people were not like modern humans. They weren’t even like John Prescott." demand to be read aloud to one's spouse or any sentient being you happen to be sitting next to on the bus. And make no mistake: Bryson is a Brit writing for the British.

Bryson and I have been channeling each other since we both fetched up in pre-Thatcherite Britain from America in the early 1970's when houses were cheap, plumbers were bolshie, post offices were in every village and the M25 was yet a distant dream. We share the overly sentimental opinion that Britain reached its peak of societal perfection sometime in 1975 because of these very things. Neither of us could bear to be separated from this island haven. So we found ourselves a couple of NHS nurses in anticipation of old age and settled into a routine of blissful exceptionality that was then afforded to Americans who were forgiven almost any social ineptitude simply because there weren't all that many of them around and they were moderately quaint in a colonial sort of way.

Both Bryson and I also delayed applying for British citizenship for about 40 years - I suspect because when we first arrived no one was particularly interested in how long we might stay or if we were employed or not. In my case a lovely woman knocked on my door my first week in the country to ask if I would like to be inscribed in the electoral roll. So never having been made to feel like an 'alien' as the Americans say, there didn't seem to be much point in formal citizenship. This was of course before the rise of terrorism...or Donald Trump.

And our appreciation of Britain follows a similar script: there may be decrepitude in Britain but this is somehow quaint, or at least limited in scope compared with the US. Britain's bucolic beauty is incomparable - never overwhelming but always profound. Britain, unlike the USA, layers its history rather than levelling everything to new foundations, a fact which is apparent whether one is roaming London streets or gazing over a Cotswolds vista. Nothing seems to entirely disappear: the Roman road has become a farm track; the 16th C toll road is now a quiet lane outside one's house, the 18th C post road is the a largely unused A road which has now been superseded by the motorway. Indeed it is a place wherein the centuries blent and blurred as Rupert Brooke claimed. And it is this physical continuity, which is a consequence of what Bryson calls ‘happy accidents’, that is most appreciated by Americans (well at least two of them) and least noticed by cradle-Brits.

Britain, like its former empire, is an largely unintentional place. It is this apparent un-intentionality that perhaps makes Britain British (or England English if the Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Irish object). As Bryson knows "The first principle of a British system is that it should only appear systematic." From common law to the common land parks of London, the entire culture is the result of fortuitous muddle rather than programme. Britons take this entirely for granted, but it continues to fascinate Bryson (and me).

The physical continuity available in Britain certainly fills a cultural lacuna of mine, having grown up in the New York City of Robert Moses, the primary characteristic of which was its periodic mass destruction throughout the 20th c. What worries Bryson is that the very unawareness by the British of this historical treasure is the most significant threat to its continued existence. Britain is, unintentionally but fortunately, a theme park of not just Western but Anglo-Asian, Anglo-African, Anglo-Caribbean and, perhaps disturbingly, Anglo-American culture.

Disturbing because it is a culture that is vulnerable to the kind of financial power that exists in the hands of modern day moguls who have the resources to destroy it systematically. In a sense it was only the lack of a Donald Trump (or a Robert Moses) which prevented the London Redevelopment Plan of the early 1970’s from destroying the history, as well as most of the charm, of the city. If anything this vulnerability is even more acute in small towns and in the countryside whose aesthetic ecology is always on a knife edge of development by Big Money which is behind the (now post-Brexit questionable) High Speed Rail Line between London and Birmingham and additional runways at either Gatwick or Heathrow. These are properly national not local issues in Britain. This is the serious point of Bryson's wonderfully entertaining book: Britain, especially physical Britain, is too precious to lose accidentally.

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The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Darkness of Democracy

When Donald Trump blasts "Make America Great Again", it may not be obvious that 'again' has a very specific historical reference: the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the day the United States lost its first war. This event opens The Sympathizer. The Donald cannot mention Vietnam; it is still too painful and embarrassing a topic in American politics even after more than 40 years. There was no attack on a US ship in the Tonkin Gulf, there were no dominoes waiting to fall, there were no oppressed freedom-loving people to defend. These were fabrications.

The Vietnam War in the US has the same emotional significance as the First World War to Germany during the Weimar Republic. It is a reminder of not just defeat, and government deceit but of purported betrayal by one's fellow countrymen - hippies, liberals, draft dodgers, inconstant politicians. The fact that Trump arranged to have himself exempted from being drafted into the Vietnam War - through equivalent fabrication - makes him even more emotionally dedicated to ensuring his own past disappears into that period when America believed itself not just courageous, and honest but competent, and above all exceptional among nations. His recent attack on former Vietnamese prisoner of war John McCain as a 'loser' was not so much personal as a metaphysical rejection of Trump's as well as the country's own history.

This novel is acutely prescient not only about the archetypal American/Trumpian neurosis, which it satirises so mercilessly, but also about the political effects of that neurosis. The conflict in Vietnam has become an historical metaphor for what is happening in American politics as I write this review. The route from Weimar to National Socialism in the Germany of the 1930's, as many have already noted, has much the same scenery as the rise of Trump. The similarity is not congenial to many Americans. Nguyen's staging of the problem of America in Vietnam is therefore brilliant. That he doesn't provide a happy dénouement is simply prudence not lack of imagination. Many others who have studied the problem reach a similar impasse.

For example, in 1943, two weeks before her death, the young philosopher Simone Weil wrote a short essay 'On the Abolition of All Political Parties'. In it she distinguishes the meaning and practice of political parties in continental Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world of America and Britain. Both types involve the passionate espousal of a point of view on the shape and content of the general good. Weil likes neither type - the British because, although it dissipates passions, the result is compromise which everyone can accept but no one really wants. The continental, because it enflames passions to the point where Jacobin ferocity puts "one party in power and all the others in jail". Frustration with the former naturally leads to the latter.

The slide from reason to controllable passion to Gnostic dictatorship in which each party accuses the other, not only of error but of the vile civil evil of treason is, Weil implies, inevitable. This she foresees is the real threat of and to democracy: the corruption of the souls and consciences of those who participate in party politics. It is difficult not to perceive in the recently held Republican National Convention precisely this slide from rational perception of one's personal interests to the ultimate demonisation of the other side as perverts, traitors and liars: "Hillary for Prison", "Hillary the Traitor of Benghazi".

The Sympathizer is in large part about Weil's inevitable slide into the abyss of party politics. The locus is not Cleveland (although much of the book takes place in America) and the protagonist is not American (but significantly European/Asian). Nevertheless the not-so-hidden force of the narrative is American culture and American military and political power in the character of the mysterious Claude. One clue to the metaphorical intent of the book is that Claude (and his intellectual avatar Hedd) is apparently the only proper name in the book. The other characters are either roles - the Captain, the General, the Auteur, the Parisian aunt, the crapulent major - or veiled descriptors in languages other than English - Man, Bon, Sofia Mori. What the named character of Claude promotes is simply the creation and the continuing passionate hatred and conflict between the two historical factions of Vietnamese before during and after the war. He plots and meddles and tortures and encourages strife endlessly, not for any obvious ideology or advantage but just because he can.

Claude is America and what America does - not just to others but to itself. Not until halfway through the book, despite several hints, does it become apparent that it is actually about representative democracy not Vietnam: "Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death." muses the spy-protagonist who is having a rather different kind of political awakening than he anticipated during his life in the West. The real question is how anyone can be politically represented. Neither liberal democracy nor the dictatorship of the proletariat makes a satisfactory solution to the problem. All politics fail from time to time. Perhaps not inevitably as Weil feared, but certainly when it comes under control by the Claudes of the world.

Donald Trump is the potentially fatal flaw in American representative democracy. Clearly Nguyen knew nothing of Trump's prospective rise to political fame as he wrote. But he didn't need to. Trump is a type, the dark side of America that lurks constantly in wait to mug the entire country, and as much of the rest of the world that is within reach. It is this dark side which is so obvious to non-Americans, especially non-European non-Americans. And it is this side which Nguyen describes with such horrible accuracy. A timely reminder therefore of the real danger we face.

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The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Darkness of Democracy

When Donald Trump blasts "Make America Great Again", it may not be obvious that 'again' has a very specific historical reference: the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the day the United States lost its first war. This event opens The Sympathizer. The Donald cannot mention Vietnam; it is still too painful and embarrassing a topic in American politics even after more than 40 years. There was no attack on a US ship in the Tonkin Gulf, there were no dominoes waiting to fall, there were no oppressed freedom-loving people to defend. These were fabrications.

The Vietnam War in the US has the same emotional significance as the First World War to Germany during the Weimar Republic. It is a reminder of not just defeat, and government deceit but of purported betrayal by one's fellow countrymen - hippies, liberals, draft dodgers, inconstant politicians. The fact that Trump arranged to have himself exempted from being drafted into the Vietnam War - through equivalent fabrication - makes him even more emotionally dedicated to ensuring his own past disappears into that period when America believed itself not just courageous, and honest but competent, and above all exceptional among nations. His recent attack on former Vietnamese prisoner of war John McCain as a 'loser' was not so much personal as a metaphysical rejection of Trump's as well as the country's own history.

This novel is acutely prescient not only about the archetypal American/Trumpian neurosis, which it satirises so mercilessly, but also about the political effects of that neurosis. The conflict in Vietnam has become an historical metaphor for what is happening in American politics as I write this review. The route from Weimar to National Socialism in the Germany of the 1930's, as many have already noted, has much the same scenery as the rise of Trump. The similarity is not congenial to many Americans. Nguyen's staging of the problem of America in Vietnam is therefore brilliant. That he doesn't provide a happy dénouement is simply prudence not lack of imagination. Many others who have studied the problem reach a similar impasse.

For example, in 1943, two weeks before her death, the young philosopher Simone Weil wrote a short essay 'On the Abolition of All Political Parties'. In it she distinguishes the meaning and practice of political parties in continental Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world of America and Britain. Both types involve the passionate espousal of a point of view on the shape and content of the general good. Weil likes neither type - the British because, although it dissipates passions, the result is compromise which everyone can accept but no one really wants. The continental, because it enflames passions to the point where Jacobin ferocity puts "one party in power and all the others in jail". Frustration with the former naturally leads to the latter.

The slide from reason to controllable passion to Gnostic dictatorship in which each party accuses the other, not only of error but of the vile civil evil of treason is, Weil implies, inevitable. This she foresees is the real threat of and to democracy: the corruption of the souls and consciences of those who participate in party politics. It is difficult not to perceive in the recently held Republican National Convention precisely this slide from rational perception of one's personal interests to the ultimate demonisation of the other side as perverts, traitors and liars: "Hillary for Prison", "Hillary the Traitor of Benghazi".

The Sympathizer is in large part about Weil's inevitable slide into the abyss of party politics. The locus is not Cleveland (although much of the book takes place in America) and the protagonist is not American (but significantly European/Asian). Nevertheless the not-so-hidden force of the narrative is American culture and American military and political power in the character of the mysterious Claude. One clue to the metaphorical intent of the book is that Claude (and his intellectual avatar Hedd) is apparently the only proper name in the book. The other characters are either roles - the Captain, the General, the Auteur, the Parisian aunt, the crapulent major - or veiled descriptors in languages other than English - Man, Bon, Sofia Mori. What the named character of Claude promotes is simply the creation and the continuing passionate hatred and conflict between the two historical factions of Vietnamese before during and after the war. He plots and meddles and tortures and encourages strife endlessly, not for any obvious ideology or advantage but just because he can.

Claude is America and what America does - not just to others but to itself. Not until halfway through the book, despite several hints, does it become apparent that it is actually about representative democracy not Vietnam: "Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death." muses the spy-protagonist who is having a rather different kind of political awakening than he anticipated during his life in the West. The real question is how anyone can be politically represented. Neither liberal democracy nor the dictatorship of the proletariat makes a satisfactory solution to the problem. All politics fail from time to time. Perhaps not inevitably as Weil feared, but certainly when it comes under control by the Claudes of the world.

Donald Trump is the potentially fatal flaw in American representative democracy. Clearly Nguyen knew nothing of Trump's prospective rise to political fame as he wrote. But he didn't need to. Trump is a type, the dark side of America that lurks constantly in wait to mug the entire country, and as much of the rest of the world that is within reach. It is this dark side which is so obvious to non-Americans, especially non-European non-Americans. And it is this side which Nguyen describes with such horrible accuracy. A timely reminder therefore of the real danger we face.

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The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays by Simon Leys
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Critical Reality

Two approximate descriptions of the indescribable Simon Leys: Harold Bloom without the arrogance or the Shakespearean idolatry; or Terry Eagleton with an understanding of Asian as well as continental culture. With the wit, erudition and style of both. The unique can't be categorised. And Leys is certainly that: a unique literary and social critic.

Fiction, in fact all writing, for Leys is depiction of reality as opposed to the expression of truth, which is an entirely different matter (science is after all fiction of a particular genre). Poetry as the apotheosis of fiction is the grasping of reality, the naming of what actually is. Literary criticism is the poetic uncovering of a reality that even the author of the work criticised may be unaware of. Since reality provides an infinite scope for story-telling, neither fiction nor its criticism has any obvious boundary and therefore leads to social commentary.

This view on the world produces lots of profoundly engaging judgements on European literature and the society that produces it: Balzac displays the aesthetic sense of a prosperous Caribbean pimp. Victor Hugo is a Trumpian (but endearing) figure of French literature. Malraux is essentially phony [sic]. The orientalist Edward Said is a Palestinian scholar with a huge chip on his shoulder. Roland Bathes bestows a new dignity upon the age-old activity of saying nothing at great length.

Leys's judgements of are perhaps even more interesting for Europeans who are novices in Chinese literature: the persistence in Chinese culture of spirituality within a landscape largely devoid of material ancient monuments, the self-expressiveness of writing per se as an artistic and quasi-sacred frame for literary content, the modernity of Confucian thought in its openness and adaptability, China itself as a sort of recipe for cosmic order with the main ingredient as a virtue ethics that could come from Thomas Aquinas, the lethally seductive charm of Zhou Enlai, Mao's complete lack of personal charisma, Communist literature as rhinoceros sausage.

Simon Leys died just short of two years ago. His legacy is profoundly rich.

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Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise by Carl E. Walter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How Goldman Sachs Captured China

It is difficult to overestimate the power of financial theory as a social ideology. This book is a demonstration of that remarkable power in the most unlikely political environment: China. Walter and Howie unravel the apparent mystery of how a Communist, indeed a Maoist, state has transformed itself into a capitalist society in the course of a single generation. Neither Lenin nor Mao conceived of any such evolution.

So where did the Chinese programme originate and what is the intellectual framework that provides such extraordinary cohesiveness during this profound social transition? Walter and Howie provide an answer which many will find surprising: "The New China of the 21st century is a creation of the Goldman Sachs and Linklaters & Paines of the world just as surely as the Cultural Revolution flowed from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book....if there is a single reason why the world is in awe of China's economic miracle today, it is because international bankers have worked so well to build its image so that minority stakes in its companies could be sold at high prices, with the Party and its friends and families profiting handsomely."

The authors also recognise however that even the power of international investment banks and corporate law firms on its own is insufficient to motivate over 1 billion people to accept this image without protest. What is needed is a theory, a theory which in itself is neither socialist or capitalist, a theory which purports to be an unbiased account of the way the world really is and provides coherent guidelines for coherent action. Enter modern financial theory. Based on the need by early 20th century robber barons in the US to provide a rational for their machinations to control transport and commodities, financial theory makes an ingenious play.

Unlike liberal economic theory and with complete disregard for the niceties of accounting, financial theory employs a specific and irrefutable criterion of value. This criterion is neither the market nor the result of any disciplined analysis of what the results of commercial transactions have been. Rather, for finance, value is a matter of expectations about the future, what I or you, or a CEO or a Politburo member thinks could happen over some indefinitely long period in the future.

You and I may not have the power to impose our view of the future on others but CEO's and Politburo members do. And in the name of financial rationality they do this as a matter of course in the modern world. It is finance which provides the mechanism for transforming political power into economic power.

The case of the China Mobile flotation, at the time the largest stock market entry ever undertaken is demonstrative: "The key point that stands out in the (China Mobile) transaction is that a subsidiary raised capital to acquire from its parent certain assets by leveraging the FUTURE VALUE of those same assets as if the entire entity - subsidiary plus parent assets - existed and operated as a real company. The value of the provincial assets, as far as the IPO goes, was based on projected estimates of their future profitability as part of a NOTIONAL company that was compared to the financial performance of EXISTING national telecomm companies operating elsewhere in the world." In other words, the authors continue: "The valuation of such assets was purely a matter of China's negotiating skills, flexible valuation methodologies employed by the investment banks, and demand in the international capital markets."

All this might seem vaguely familiar to economists and other corporate-watchers. It is precisely the corporate tactic of Enron, orchestrated by precisely the same bankers and lawyers. Even the accounting is similar: recognise results in excess of declared expectations, and bury disappointing results in subsidiary accounts. And just as with Enron, the bubble can continue to expand without limit...until it finally bursts. When it does be quite sure that Goldman Sachs has already shorted the entire Chinese economy.

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Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Christian Anti-Semitic Identity

Christians have perennially defined themselves as those not wanting to be Jews. As Nirenberg points out: "If Paul had converted to Christianity during the second century rather than the first he would have been declared a heretic" simply because he never denied his Judaism.

Christians, since the first gospel-writer called Mark, have developed the term 'Jew' quite independently of what actual Jews are, believe and do. The fewer Jews there are around - after the English expulsion and the Spanish Inquisition for example - the more the caricature of The Jew becomes an independent Christian cultural archetype that can be used on both sides of any political argument against the other:

Jews are Capitalists, Jews are Communists; Jews have no culture, Jewish culture is permanently threatening to Christianity; Jews are weak, Jews are incredibly obstinate and resilient; Judaism is legalistic ritual, Judaism has no ethical content. Jews, in short, represent whatever social problem happens to be current, for whatever faction proposing a solution.

Largely this is a consequence of the persistent promulgation by the (Catholic) Church of a theology of alienation. Unable to fundamentally distinguish itself from Judaism, except through its rejection by Judaism, Christianity has needed Judaism as a unifying symbol.

Not until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), with the recognition of its role in the Holocaust, did the church formally reject this theological symbol. One wonders to what degree this move rather than other liturgical changes contributes to the subsequent decline in institutional church participation.

Of greater social relevance perhaps, one also wonders to what degree the recent rise in European anti-Semitism is a cultural attempt to re-establish this lost symbol of Christian unity. Isn't it the Jews in Israel after all who are ultimately responsible for Muslim unrest, while they are simultaneously responsible for so much disruptively liberal social policy? The seeds need only a little watering by populist wannabes to sprout another round of good Christian hate.

Nirenberg’s message is that the The Jew is not a person; he is not a member of an ethnic or religious group; he is not even a ‘type’. The Jew is a perennial trope, a figure of speech, created and institutionalised in European Christianity. The Jew is what ‘we’ are not. This trope gets used, inserted into conversation and debate, in any number of situations to promote unrest and misdirect popular anger. Language has power. The semiotic linguistic process which the church began almost 2000 years ago is much harder to stop than it was to start.

Postscript 13May19: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news...

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The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life by Giorgio Agamben
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Medieval Hippies

Poverty in the modern world is perceived as a sin - either because poverty is 'enjoyed' at the expense of others (by recipients of public assistance), or because it is the result of a lack of ambition sufficient to mitigate it (by the ‘losers’ in capitalist society). In this regard, at least, the Christian message of 'blessed are the poor' has been entirely obliterated.

The modern evangelical prosperity gospel - God wants you to have all you might want materially - has turned the biblical message inside out as writers like Chris Lehmann in The Money Cult [ https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...] have shown so effectively. To recapture the virtuous character of poverty it is necessary to get beyond our contemporary rationalisation of wealth. And there is no better place to look for some really alternative thinking than the Franciscans of the 13th century.

The real point of Franciscan (and other contemporary movements') attitudes toward poverty was not simply mortification, that is, suffering. Such mortification as one might desire was available in monasticism, not to say in normal medieval life generally. Rather the larger goal was of living a way and form of life that involves removal of oneself completely from the protection and the restrictions of the law.

This ideal culminated in the Franciscan creation of a legal non-person without any rights whatsoever. This legal solution followed precisely the directive in the writings of Paul of Tarsus to abjure not just religious law but legal remedies in civil law as well. As Agamben notes about the early Franciscans:

"...the principle that remains immutable and non-negotiable for then from beginning to end can be summarized in these terms: what is in question , for the order as well as its founder, is the abdicatio omnis iuris ("abdication of every right"), that is, the possibility of human existence beyond the law....Franciscanism can be defined - and in this consists its novelty, even today unthought, and in the present conditions of society totally unthinkable - as the attempt to realize a human life and practice absolutely outside the determination of the law."

This is the ultimate conclusion of Pauline logic: non-persons had no legal standing and therefore could not demand redress through the law. Understanding of this position requires an appreciation of the profound distinction between the regula, or rule, and the law. The Rule of the Order, properly speaking, becomes indistinguishable from a mode of living. It is internalised, one might say institutionalised, routine. Through constant practice it becomes 'law written on the heart.'

But the rule is also externalised as the 'liturgy' of the day in work and prayer and mutual care. Differing from Jewish Talmudic rule, mainly in its brevity and absence of formal analysis, the monastic rule was based on a similar spiritual method: Faith creates the rule which then guides life which generates the rule. So an escape from law is an escape into instinctive obedience to the divine will. Frying pans and fires come to mind, but greater detail is best left to theologians.

Agamben makes the questionable claim that the rule is very different from the idea of law in Jewish law. Jewish law is a component of the pact, the covenant, with God, he says. The covenant is manifest in law and in behaviour that conforms to it. Monasticism, and especially the 'new' monasticism of the 13th C is, he believes, in direct conflict with this Judaic conception. I believe this is a (likely unintentional) slur on Judaic spirituality which has frequently been held as formulaic and 'pharisaic', that is, merely a matter of external form. I think it likely that Agamben is generalising the practices of assimilated Jews who to some extent imitated Christian ritualism. Certainly no such theory as Agamben's applies to pious Jews begging forgiveness from their creator, isolated against the bare wall of a cramped prayerhouse; or to Talmudic scholars concentrating on the hidden intention within the 613 divine commandments in a dismal ghetto shul!

In fact, I believe, the Franciscan motivation was not the possible deficiencies of Jewish ritual but the increasingly hierarchical, dogmatic, imperial, autocratic and legally driven Church of the 12th and 13th centuries. Part of this 'legalisation' of the Church was the standardisation of the sacraments including their exclusive provision through the clergy. The Liturgy of the Mass, for example, was re-established both dogmatically and legally. This central ritual of the Church had become far more a matter of public display and an affirmation of docile obedience than a spiritual act. In any case, the Mass is merely periodic and does not consume the entire continuous being of its participants.

The 'old' monastic rule of the Benedictines and their various reformed offshoots had been a failure in a specific sense. Although the Benedictine Rule had demanded strict poverty from its individual members, there was no such requirement for the monastic houses as such. As these establishments grew and prospered, they accumulated substantial wealth. Inevitably this wealth benefitted individual members - in proportion to their rank and station, to be sure, but nonetheless systematically. Individual members inevitably became corrupt, and whole monastic communities repeatedly had to be reformed. Individual ownership matters little when the entire group enjoys tremendous relative wealth. The Franciscan goal was to close this loophole in curtain wall of Christian poverty.

This Franciscan quest, as well as the wider poverty movement of the 13th century, was facilitated by the same explosive growth in law since the 11th century that had created a tighter legal structure of the Church. The Franciscans used the new vitality in legal thought to undermine a basic principle of established Church Law that was derived from Roman Law, namely that he who enjoys the benefit (usufructus) of an asset is the one who owns (has dominium over) that asset. According to this principle, if a group of friars got the benefit of, say, a building or a farm, they owned it without question no matter whose name was on the deed. Hence the Benedictine problem. So how could they get around this legal dead end?

Through the crafty use of a very rare exception to this principle of Roman Law, the so-called Peculium, by which agents took temporary control of another's property, the Franciscans, after a 100 year battle with the Roman Curia, achieved their goal. Their arguments in fact employed otherwise inscrutable texts from the Pauline epistles to establish scriptural precedents. The result was that the Franciscans were the first to successfully separate dominium from usufructus. This was a legal revolution.

The poverty-seeking Franciscans had fostered the creation of an institution that had the capacity to 'own', that is, to possess property as a legal person, but not to be owned by its members - or owned by anyone else, including its temporary agents. This new legal form was adopted not only by the Franciscans but by the Dominicans and the other mendicant orders as well.

We know this innovative institution as the corporation. The new religious orders were not only the first formally established corporate entities, they were also the first multi-nationals. Even today Benedictine houses are partnerships while friaries are established in an entirely different way with central world-wide management and corporate ownership of property.

The fame of this new form of entity spread rapidly throughout Christendom since Church law was universal law and the Roman Curia was the European Supreme Court. The dissemination of the corporate idea was not energised by the interests of Christian poverty, of course, but rather by the desire to subvert many of the lingering but inconvenient legal restrictions on sovereign power. In England, for example, it was successfully used by Henry VI to generate funds from Crown lands which, like Church assets, could not be 'alienated', that is, sold. He got Parliament to incorporate the Duchy of Lancaster, which he then asset-stripped with impunity.

From this, with some 19th century jiggery-pokery, emerged the modern corporation, with all its profound absurdities, absurdities that had been anticipated and successfully avoided by the Romans. From the point of view of Agamben's thesis, the most glaring of these absurdities is that the corporation is used not to promote poverty but to protect wealth.

Oh well, the hippies of the 1960's are now the retired CEO's of the corporate world. Nothing works out quite how it ought. Bugger.

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The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream by Chris Lehmann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Religionising Society

Like Harold Bloom (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and Terry Eagleton (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), Chris Lehmann identifies Gnosticism as the central belief of Americans, not just in terms of the theological rationalisations provided by the growing number of proponents of the uniquely American 'Prosperity Gospel', but also in terms adopted from this theology by the secular culture. It is this continuing path from religion to culture rather than any cultural influence on religion that Lehmann explores.

Lehmann's general thesis is that the religion of America is the abiding source of an evolving secular culture, it's elan vital. It is a mistake to believe, according to Lehmann, that religion has been progressively secularised since the 18th century. Rather, it is American culture that has been constantly shaped by the developments in American Christianity from Calvinist Puritanism, to Arminian Methodism, Emersonian Transcendentalism, Holistic Pentacostalism, Mormonism and finally today's evangelical mega-churches that preach the doctrine of holy wealth.

This evolution is (somewhat paradoxically) one of the increasing sanctification of the material world. The apparent contradiction between the Gnostic belief in the inherent evil of the created world and the striving to get ahead within it, is resolved by the American ethos of continuous self-recreation, itself an evolutionary process of incorporating more and more of the world into the boundaries of the self.

The world, as it were, becomes better the more it is subject to and the result of an individual will. Wealth becomes not just a Puritan sign of divine favour; it is reward expected for an implacable will. Wealth then becomes Mammon baptised and spiritualised. It doesn't simply change the way we live, it changes our being.

Money, in short, is grace. One empirical verification of this thesis is Donald Trump's otherwise unaccountable success among evangelicals. He is patently a man of grace.

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Telling the Bees by Peggy Hesketh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Futile Wisdom

Quite a read, right to the final paragraph. Combining a sensitive story with some classical philosophy and a compelling metaphor of honey bees and the mores of their hive, this is a masterpiece in a first novel. Hesketh, who I imagine is in her fifties, has captured what I think is a central aspect of what might be called the wisdom of age in someone considerably older than herself. The essence of this wisdom is that life is inherently chaotic. Even apparently insignificant actions, discoveries, mistakes, and omissions can have profound secondary effects which cannot be anticipated or mitigated. Our very striving for order creates complexity in our lives that is only revealed to the old. But this revelation is essentially tragic: there is nothing that can be done, no remedy offered, no amends possible. One's past is not only past, it is also only populated by the dead, the forgotten, the no longer extant. It is only with age that we can realise the complete lack of control that we have had over our lives. This realisation has meaning but not implication. There is nothing we can do with it. And this makes it all the more valuable.

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If This Is a Man • The Truce by Primo Levi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Idolatry of Power

Levi reports a recurrent dream that he and many others had in the camp: He is at home among close family and friends to whom he is speaking about his life in the camp; but no one is listening. A realisation perhaps that his experiences, the intensity of his suffering, are not merely inhuman but ultimately uncommunicable or at best inexpressible. No one who hasn't been present could appreciate the extent of loss of oneself, the reduction of a person to a consciousness of utter hopelessness, pure pain in its infinite variations of distress, hunger, exhaustion.

Nevertheless these two books are protests against this very hopelessness of the incomprehensible. In this they are paradoxical. How can his cool description of the atrocities that he endured do anything but provoke despair for humanity while simultaneously demanding admiration of Levi's immense personal humanity?

There is no heroism here - no one could willingly undergo such torture - but there is some sort of life-persistence (it cannot be accurately called courage) as pure as the pain that it accompanies. The fundamental instinct to survive as it confronts what is an absolute, opposing power, a universe composed of only these two essentials.

The camp becomes then a sort of theological enactment of the idolatry of power. Theological because absolute power is how God is defined in all Western religions; idolatrous because if this is so, the only response possible is relentless (and ultimately futile) participation in the hope of stealing the smallest bit of this power in order to survive.

The camp creates, or merely shows, an ontological reality from which there is no escape so long as power is the essence of being. Getting and keeping power is all there is. To refuse participation - if indeed that verb isn't too active a description of the act of withdrawal - is to become an unresponsive 'musselman', one merely awaiting death.

This is a system of enacted metaphysical nihilism. The title of the piece therefore becomes ironic. It could equally aptly be 'If This Is God'. Could it be that our idea of God as absolute power creates the idolatrous ideal of the deification of man through power; and through that ideal fosters the camp as its apotheosis?

Mankind as the object of infinite power to which submission (in form but not an impossible substance) is required. To become part of this society is to accept death; to refuse is to merely accept a quicker death. Which could be called more courageous?

If there is any hope within the hopelessness of the universe that Levi describes, and he makes this our universe if we can overcome the indifference of his dream-characters, can it be other than the rejection of the quest for power, the ability to coerce, by those who are without power as well as those who have it?

Of what use is Levi's witness unless we appreciate not just his condition in the camp but our own as trapped by a system of power that we impose and have imposed on us? What would the world be like if God were weak, weak to the point of complete passivity to human action? (This is, I suggest precisely the point of John Caputo's theology which is also reviewed on GR; see The Weakness of God: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

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Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street by Karen Ho
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Against Excellence

If you want to understand the source and the consequences of the rhetoric of modern finance, this is your book.

Ho is an anthropologist who lived and worked among the natives of Financeland and survived to tell about it. Her analysis is brilliant, her anecdotes are priceless, her insights are thrilling.

The way in which companies like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey create personalities, even for those who never work in finance much less who work for them, is remarkable. These are the real sources and defenders of modern American, and global, elitist culture.

The tool of this culture is language. Learning the language is inseparable from adopting the culture of self-proclaimed excellence. It is this central idea of inherent superiority that justifies both ambition - one owes it to one's talents and to the society which needs these talents - as well as the superior rewards that result.

The public ideology of this culture is economic, specifically financial, efficiency. And indeed this ideology is applied ruthlessly by the culture to itself. If you don't produce or if circumstances dictate, you are permanently expendable. Loyalty is at best a conditional virtue. Nevertheless the elite will always be in demand. Excellence is malleable and can readily find new ambitions with their own rewards.

The costs in terms of relationships like family and even the most liberal interpretation of personal integrity are enormous but simply inexpressible in the culture. A must read for any young person tempted by the popularised magic of Wall Street.

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Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Ideology of Corporate Finance

Around the turn of the 20th century the economic power of the world shifted from capitalists who made things to capitalists who made money. The source of the change was the mid-19th century discovery of limited liability and its rapid dissemination into the corporate legal systems of Europe and North America.

Limited liability, the obligation of corporate shareholders only for their investment in a company and not for further debts of the company, is the foundation of financial power. Ultimately it is what allowed the great robber barons - Frick, Carnegie, Rockefeller - to control enormous corporate resources with very little of their own money.

This sort of control demands some sort of ideology in order to justify itself to those who are essentially its victims. Marx of course wouldn't do. But neither would the theories of liberal economics that presume intense competition among numerous more or less equal adversaries. During the first twenty years or so of the 20th century, just such an ideology began to be formulated. The American economist, Irving Fischer, is its Karl Marx. This is the ideology is Corporate Finance

The point of the new ideology was to provide a socially acceptable rationale for the power exercised by financial interests: commercial banks, merchant banks, insurance companies, but mostly corporate executives of non-financial companies who could personally benefit more from making money than from making things, even if the companies they ran were run into the ground.

The ideology of Corporate Finance got an enormous boost in its credibility after WW II when it became 'mathematicised' as a pseudo-scientific exposition which neatly disguised its purpose. By the 1970's Corporate Finance had escaped from its academic hot house and began infecting all business with its message that economic well-being depended on the "efficiency of capital". And this of course depended entirely on the financial expertise which was only available to those intimately knowledgeable in the ideology.

Makers and Takers is a documentary of the latest triumphs of Corporate Finance. It is depressing reading. Corporate Finance has coopted the entire world, even the Chinese Communist Peoples Republic subscribes to its insane principles under the tutelage of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley [See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...].

It has become such a powerful mode of thinking that we no longer notice that it is just that, a way of thinking [See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...]. But it is a way of thinking which is explicitly and irrationally meant to benefit just that segment of society against which the electorate has recently rebelled in the USA and Britain. Perhaps there is hope after all.

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Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America by Terry Eagleton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Dangerous People

An outrageous book. Eagleton at his wittiest and most sardonic.

Only in comparison can we perceive our own insanities. British insanities do tend to be less malign and even less fundamental than the American sort, largely because the British laugh at themselves more readily. Put another way: Americans on the whole are more profound than their superficial silliness suggest. And that may not be a good thing.

Eagleton appreciates what Harold Bloom noted as the underlying Gnosticism of American metaphysical/materialist culture, its true religion (see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). For Americans, Eagleton writes,

"The will lies at the core of the self, which means that the self is what bestows meaning and value on things. But the self is also orthodox of material reality. So we too are part of what must be hammered into shape. We are clay in our own hands, awaiting the moment when we will transform ourselves into an artefact of great splendour. The self is always a work in progress. It is a kind of wilderness which must be cultivated, mixed with one's labour, before it can become meaningful. It is part of Puritan doctrine that human labour is what makes things real. Before we happened along, there was just chaos. Ceaseless activity is what keeps the world in existence. American optimism thus conceals a darker vision. It springs as much from a scepticism about material reality as from an affirmation of it. In themselves, Nature and the flesh are chaotic stuff. They are worthless until the spirit invests them with significance. It is labour that transforms Nature into meaning. And this always involves a degree of violence. Body and soul are both subject to belligerent onslaughts, along with the rain forests and terrorist strongholds."

Thus the American fantasy of omnipotence as well as immortality which Donald Trump has so successfully exploited. What his Evangelical supporters haven't twigged onto yet is that this fantasy isn't Christian but Gnostic just as Bloom argues and Eagleton describes. The myth of the self-made man is a also a Christian heresy (Pelagianism), recognised since the 4th century.

And, irony of ironies, the origin of Gnosticism is ultimately pagan and Persian, that is to say, Iranian. Its essential doctrine is the idea of human deification, the gradual transformation of mankind into a divine species. This doctrine is most clearly expressed in Mormonism but, as Bloom points out, it has been transmitted to every Christian sect in America. It even affects America’s atheism with a triumphant optimism of a liberal Utopia.

When everyone believes they are heading for deification, the currency of the divine seems doomed to drastic depreciation, dragging the rest of us into a maelstrom of metaphysical and material hyper-inflation. Trump is a visible manifestation of the phenomenon, a leader whose only talent is of unlimited confidence in his own divinity, the ultimate debasement of the spiritual dollar. As Eagleton notes: "People who are both powerful and dissatisfied are peculiarly dangerous." Their particular faith, held firmly but largely without awareness, is the source of American power and danger to the world.

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The Treason of the Intellectuals by Julien Benda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Century of Further Decline

Several days ago I posted a review of my re-reading of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. Re-entering that magical sphere, I recalled this piece by Julien Benda. Written two decades before The Glass Bead Game, Treason of The Intellectuals covers similar ground and makes the same point as Hesse: something has gone seriously awry with education and the uses of intellectual power. One can only observe that, if anything, the situation has become worse since Hesse and Benda wrote. So it seems sensible to revisit Treason to at least become more aware of the problem.

“Our age,” Benda says, referring to that generation of almost a century ago, “is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” Little did he comprehend how far that hatred might expand in depth and scope. From the nationalistic terrorism of the Middle East, to the nativist terrorism of the European and North American Right, every faction has its sociological and political experts, their intellectual privateers, as Hesse called them, from universities and ‘think tanks’. They all pretend to provide factual arguments for some point of view. Of course their main products are tendentious statements of half-truths and ‘alternative facts.’

The intellectuals who peddle this material are far more successful in worldly terms than those who merely engage in scholarly thought and reflection. The pedlars have a constituency, from this they enjoy celebrity, and from celebrity they derive wealth with which to peddle more intellectual junk. Bill O’Reilly and his former cohort at Fox News is a sterling example of the pseudo-intellectual pundit who has little interest in either truth or his fellowman.

Not that the political Right, or even politics generally, have a monopoly on intellectual hypocrisy. The business guru is arguably top of the heap when it comes to academic rubbish. Typically with a degree or two from one or another leading Business School and having written a carefully structured article, employing unverifiable ‘facts’ from six proprietary case studies, placed through contacts in the Harvard Business Review, the business intellectual is guaranteed a following, and more importantly, clients for his bold experiments in corporate organisation. He might expect $20,000 for an after dinner speech and countless numbers of highly paid consulting contracts.

Academia itself has created an ideology of ‘relevance’ that feeds the beast. At one point early in my career I was a member of an academic institute at the University of Pennsylvania. The institute was run by a brilliant man who had an explicit and compelling credo: ‘We are not here to address academic puzzles but to solve real social problems.’ What he meant by that in practice was that we would only do work if it was for someone else who was willing to pay us. This made sense to me at the time. Only as I matured did I realise that what we were doing was letting someone else - particularly if they had deep pockets - define what constituted a significant social problem. Commercialisation of our talents in research and analysis did not make us any more relevant, just richer.

That the lives of thousands of corporate employees might be thrown into turmoil, their livelihoods risked or lost, their human autonomy eliminated, hardly crosses the mind of the commercial academic or business ‘thought-leader’. His self-image and rationalisation is one of advancing knowledge and making the world an economically more efficient place. I know this because I had this self-image and made this rationalisation for a large part of my adult life and was considered normal by my colleagues. According to Benda I should receive no mercy: “Those who lead men to the conquest of material things have no need of justice and charity.” I can’t disagree.

The problem is not one of practice and professional error but one of ideals. Human beings have always been self-centred, careerist and often nasty. But they knew when they acted badly because of the professional standards of public intellectuals. “It may be said that, thanks to the ‘clerks’, humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good.” In today’s world intellectual vices have become virtues. Ambition is the essential mark of character for the university graduate. Winning is the only measure of success no matter how banal, or destructive, or painful to others the competition might be. “The cult if success [by which] I mean the teaching which says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value.” is now accepted as the norm.

The real damage done by a man like Trump is that he incites all around him to forget entirely that there are such things as ideals. He stimulates the passions of his supporters with the help of palace ‘clerks’ who know that he lies, misleads, and misdirects intentionally, not necessarily to hide or conceal, but because he wants it known that he can do those things with impunity. It appears that we have reached the level of ultimate intellectual treason. Could there possibly be anywhere deeper to go?


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On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There Is No Benign Power

If you think anarchism means approval of chaos, think again. Anarchism is merely the rejection of the idea that there is an entirely legitimate source for power (Greek = without origin). Whether ascribed ultimately to having its source in God, the gods, The People or genetic legacy, power will always and everywhere be abused by those who wield it. Therefore anarchism's central principle is that power must be continuously questioned and challenged to prove that it is not acting in its own interests.

Noam Chomsky has spent his life getting under the skin of powerful people - academics, politicians, corporate executives, civil servants, in short, The Establishment. Many don't like him as a consequence and do their best to make him out to be yesterday's news.

But Chomsky's profound message is more important today than ever: Never, never trust power, regardless of who holds it or of the political or economic system in which it is exercised; always call it to account by whatever means is available.

On Anarchism is a sort of thoughtful handbook to help you on your way.

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God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Can’t Touch Me

Despite its pretensions to the contrary, the Catholic Church is a typical, in fact the prototypical, large-scale corporate organisation: complicated, more than occasionally corrupt, and intensely resistant to reform of any sort. The Vatican is where organisational policy not just religious doctrine is made and enforced.

Sexual scandal makes better press, but it is in finance that the system of ecclesial government is most dramatically out of control. Posner's analysis shows that this condition is neither temporary or superficial but a result of the fundamental ethos of secrecy and the complete absence of even the most basic procedures for ensuring the integrity of accounts or the disposition of resources.

It might be supposed that the centralised power of the papacy would be sufficient to impose reform, at least within its direct reach inside the Vatican walls. Alas, dictatorship of any variety, including the religious, has some strange politics. Virtually any financial crime can be justified by anyone in the clerical hierarchy on the basis of protecting Mother Church's wealth, reputation, or the hierarchy itself.

It turns out that there is little agreement about the true economic interests of the Church not just among senior officials but within the bowels of the organisation. Consequently any attempt to implement procedures or controls on the movement of money, or even the recording of where it might be, is resisted as a matter of conscience and principle.

What Posner shows without explicit statement is that for at least the last two centuries, it has been in no one's interest to fix the situation. Large-scale money-laundering, currency manipulation, fraud by Individual clerics and their secular accomplices are all functional traits of an organisation intent on avoiding any external influences whatsoever.

In short, laxity in matters financial means freedom of action. The situation is not accidental or even incidental; it is purposeful and reflects what is really desired by the folk in charge. Although some token changes have been made - the employment of professional non-clerical managers, the belated association with international financial control organisations, the partial adoption of audited accounts - these are unlikely to have any lasting effect within an organisation that considers itself, as a matter of religious doctrine, to be beyond all rules.

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