Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Gonçalo M. Tavares
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trumping Trump

If Tavares were to have published Learning to Pray in 2016 rather than 2007 he would have been successfully sued by Donald Trump for slander and invasion of privacy. Or possibly hired as Trump's campaign manager. Who knows, perhaps he was even the inspiration for Trump's presidential aspirations, a sort of anticipatory biography of 'alternative facts'.

Tavares' protagonist, Lenz Buchmann, lives in a world created by his father and described by Thomas Hobbes, a world of barely contained brutal competition and animosity. It is a world motivated and glued together by fear of each for each other. To Lenz there is no question that the world really is this way because it responds to him with the same hostility as he to it. His father's dictum is his lifelong guide: "Doing what we want, that is the first level; the second is making other people want what we want." There are only two forms of action relevant to executing this advice, defence and attack. The latter is always the more successful.

Lenz doesn't just recognise the world as Hobbesian, however. His aspiration is to be, not to be part of, the Leviathan, the force that keeps the heaving hostile mass in order, his order. To induce fear but never to fear. He is this sovereign whale domestically, of course, and also in his profession as a surgeon, where he metes out humiliation or approbation, happiness or tragedy. Or, more metaphysically, he is creating the Kingdom.

Lenz is conventionally virtuous because virtue pays not because it is virtuous. He similarly tolerates social and religious ritual because it creates a communal mood appropriate to an occasion, and assigns roles which individuals can play predictably as positions of leadership, respect, and influence, not because ritual has any demonstrative meaning. This vulgar pragmatism he calls competence, "organic craftsmanship", rational technique: "All actions are good as long as they meet their objective."

Technique is the opposite of nature; indeed, its sworn enemy. Technique is laudably unnatural. Nature experiments with the most effective ways to deceive and to seduce bodily organs to "change sides", to give up on the body. Technique attacks nature to mitigate and correct its irrationality. Effective technique is also the sign of people who make things, who contribute, who build, and whose duty it is to protect the things which they make, contribute and build.

Lenz has an epiphany in his maturity. His ambition to become Leviathan can't be realised in his somewhat restricted role as surgeon. For real clout, he needs a bigger stage, a political one. And politics too is a matter of proper technique, that "of joining men and separating them." He becomes a successful Babbitt. The illusion of community created by Party politics became his milieu to manipulate as effectively and decisively as he had dealt with a defective kidney.

[Excursus: Any resemblance to Donald Trump is unintended and purely coincidental of course. The comments of the protagonist that "the price of anarchy has fallen in recent years" and "everyone wanted security, but first they wanted to feel more threatened" and his reputation as "an out and out crook" notwithstanding.]

There is a school of moral thought called Virtue Ethics which teaches that we take on the attitudes and dispositions of the positions and rituals we perform. Practice virtue and you become more virtuous. The process also works in reverse: the practice of evil facilitates increased evil. Lenz becomes an exemplar of this phenomenon.

At one point during Lenz's accumulation of political power, he recognises a paradox however. The more power one has, the less clearly defined are his adversaries, and the more it is possible that the enemy is neither in front or behind but lies where Lenz remembers from his childhood. The real threat lies "below", in this memory, in the very earth one walks on. As an adult this below is not in the earth but within the depths of oneself, below one's own consciousness, hidden but active and awaiting opportunity.

A Faustian Lenz begins to take on traits of a Dorian Grey. Publicly he is sane and in control, but his increasingly debilitating headaches and fetishistic urges begin to dominate his inner portrait, his private self, which has become notably homicidal. Nature has arrived. But as a retro-virus, looking like the cells it attacks. Cleverer than any technique, the brain cancer progressively takes charge, with its own homicidal objective. The body spits on itself.

Here's the question: would even incipient death provoke Donald Trump to forego his ethos, to do something with no technique at all? Does he in fact pray or negotiate by the numbers with God?

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