Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read More for Mental Health

The literal translation of the German title of Auto da Fe is The Blinding, or perhaps more idiomatically, The Deception. The question this latter raises is: Who is deceiving whom? The unrelenting comic irony suggests that everyone is deceiving not only everyone else, but also themselves. All the characters are mad to some degree, and Kafkaesque to the extent that they emerge out of a somewhat hostile, vaguely Eastern European world in which they are striving to survive but about which they have little understanding. Each pursues his chosen 'ism' - idealism, materialism, hedonism, aspirationalism - with relentless determination and in determined secrecy since none are comprehensible to the others.

Peter Kien, the central figure, is a pseudo-academic recluse whose self-identity is defined as the precise opposite of his bother George. Brother George is a celebrated gynaecologist turned psychiatrist who, therefore, (thinks he) knows everything there is to know about women. Peter knows absolutely nothing about other people much less women. He knows only books, particularly books written in the Chinese language which he has never heard spoken, and most particularly books written by Confucius, with whom he has frequent intimate conversations and intellectual arguments. Without advice or consultation Peter marries his housekeeper. What could possibly go wrong?

Mutual connubial disappointment of course ensues. She wants sex and furniture; he wants silence and books. He feigns blindness; she, an affair. He mounts an insurrection, rousing his army of books to fever-pitch against the woman and the furniture, except, understandably enough, for the pacifist Buddhist tomes and the French volumes which decline to fight over a mere woman. The English participate grudgingly since the impetus for war had come from the racially inferior Chinese. Before overt hostilities can begin, Peter, this Napoleon de la bibliotheque, betrayed by a treacherous library ladder, has crashed to the carpeted floor, bleary and bleeding.

Peter, his brother George, his wife, the porter of his apartment block, the dwarf who is out to cheat him, even the salesman with whom the wife seeks an affair, all 'live in their heads'. The realities they perceive, or rather define, are patently delusional, in that for each to achieve their desired state the world would have to be different than it is. It would have to conform with Confucian aphorisms, or the advice of a demented mother, or the speculations of economic and business pundits. Each character has his own ideological touchstone which he values above all else, including actual personal well-being.

All actual experience is rationalised through the fateful filters adopted by each. Peter articulates the general philosophy: "Esse percipe, to be is to be perceived. What I do not perceive does not exist." Having established this premise, one's strategy becomes clear. Peter simply removes his wife from his perception by not seeing her: "Blindness is a weapon against time and space...The dominating principle of the universe is blindness...It permits the truncation of time when time in unendurable." Having become blind to his wife, he then discovers that he cannot become deaf to her, thus suggesting a strategic flaw which he cannot comprehend.

One class of books Peter finds objectionable: novels.

"Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much more completely dies he crack open the personality of his victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State."

This is Canetti's skeleton key. Writing during the ascendancy of fascist and communist totalitarianism in the 1930's, fiction is the only effective tool for overcoming the insanity of ideological logics. The insanity is in our heads not in the world. Peter dislikes novels because he knows how they work, and he is implicitly a believer in totalitarian culture.

The tone of Auto da Fe is somewhat dismal, despite its comedic flow, because the human condition Canetti describes is somewhat dismal. Our devotion to ideology is a chronic issue which becomes more evident as democratic politics becomes more visible and, as recently, more radical. The tendency appears to be to blame the 'system', to look for procedural and regulatory solutions. Canetti suggests that these solutions won't get us very far.

Returning to the original German title, 'blinding' is a synonym in mystical Kabbalism for the 'making and breaking of vessels.' These vessels refer both to language and to the human beings who employ it, often unwittingly, to deceive themselves. The mystical tenor of Auto da Fe fits well with a Kabbalist interpretation, as does its denouement when we persist in our linguistic errors. We may indeed be better off reading more fiction.

Postscript: the following appeared in my feed. Reading is indeed both a submissive and subversive activity. It is also dangerous since its effects are subtle and incalculable. Nevertheless restricting reading is always a greater disaster. https://aeon.co/essays/how-books-can-...

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Player Piano 
by 

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 

The Cybernetic Script

One of the most important but least discussed consequences of WWII is an ideology. It is way of thinking that unites the political left and right, and even transcends the ideologies of Capitalism and Marxism with their apparent conflicts about the nature of human beings and their politics. It is an ideology that became and remains the dominant intellectual force in the world in my lifetime. This ideology goes by a name that is only occasionally used today and is probably recognised only by specialist professionals old enough to remember it: Cybernetics.

Cybernetics is the unnamed central character in Player Piano, where it goes incognito as 'know how' developed during the war. As a scientific discipline, cybernetics is about control. Its vocabulary has largely been assimilated into general usage - systems, feedback loops, requisite variety, algorithms. sustainability. In the year that Vonnegut was writing Player Piano (1951), cybernetics was the fashionable inter-disciplinary buzzword in fields as diverse as hormonal medicine, national government, industrial economics and computer design (not to mention player pianos). And of course, in Vonnegut's obvious subject: Robotics. The big names in the social sciences of the day - von Neumann, Ashby, Weiner, Bateson, Deming, Beer, to name just a few - all had cybernetic connections through the war-effort.

Vonnegut's prescience about the effects of cybernetic thinking for things like automated factories, computer-assisted design, self-driven cars, voice-recognition and expert systems are at least as good as anyone involved in the discipline at the time. But Vonnegut's real talent isn't predictive, it's prophetic. And his insights aren't about science, they are about ideology. He saw beneath the breathless press and stunning technological advances produced through cybernetics to how cybernetics was being used shape the manner in which human beings were to live with each other, whether they were conscious of this or not.

Cybernetics was always more than a discipline or method, or even a manner of thinking. Through general, tacit, but very real agreement on the issues of importance to be addressed, the only issues, cybernetics became an ideology, a framework, a rationale, most crucially a rationalisation of the exercise of power by the people who had power. These are the people Vonnegut identifies as the 'elite', technical managers and their distant superiors who tend the complex cybernetic control mechanisms.

But Vonnegut is far too perceptive to categorise the world simply into managers and those they manage. There is a reason why the very senior managers in Player Piano are kept vaguely in the background. They are the only people not subject to cybernetic demands. The only thing that cybernetics cannot be used for is the decision about what constitutes a successful result of the processes involved, about how to measure value. Player Piano was born in a world of the McCarthy hearings (alluded to in the phrase 'fellow travellers'), the most blatant attempt to institutionalise the definition of success until recent times.

Success is defined elsewhere than by the factory managers in Player Piano, in the higher reaches of corporate management, beyond the pay grade of a Proteus and his colleagues in Ilium (incidentally the Latin for guts, including the highly vulnerable testicles; as well as another name for Troy, of the treacherous horse). And however value is defined, it is not a process or a result to be tampered with in Vonnegut's world at the level of mere management professionals.

A successful result of a cybernetic process might be defined in terms of efficiency, or speed, or innovation, or profit, consumer satisfaction, or literally anything the human mind might conjure. Whatever it is, it is hard wired into the little tape loops that run each machine in Ilium's massive factories. But nothing within the discipline of cybernetics gave a clue as to which of these measures of success was appropriate, or best, or acceptable. 

This is the lynchpin of Vonnegut's narrative. It is not mere Luddite sabotage of the machines that is the threat to Ilium's stability but rather changes to the criteria embedded in the tapes and the authority that creates them. It is the control boxes that must be kept locked and secure. These are the tabernacles in which the secret decisions about what constitutes value are hidden and from which these decisions invisibly control both the machines and the factory managers. It is these tiny sanctuaries not the gigantic integrated chains of machines that are the driving force of Vonnegut's fiction.

Except that this situation wasn't, and isn't, only a fiction. The separation of the management of cybernetically controlled systems and the choice of their criteria of success, that is to say, their value, is the core of cybernetics as an ideology. In both Player Piano and in the world as it has evolved, this separation has largely come to pass. Politically, this has gone largely unnoticed by those most affected by the ideology. Until of course very recently as demonstrated in the dramatic political events in Europe, North America, India, and, I think, even China

A key part of Vonnegut's narrative is the separation of what would come to be called the 99% from the corporate managerial class. The most interesting part of the script is the malaise that affects the 99%-ers. This malaise is spiritual rather than material. Although unemployed, the plebs are not homeless or starving. 

But since the removal of the corporate ladder, which had given apparent purpose to life and by which they might have advanced (a central element of the post-war American Dream), they are dissatisfied and unruly. The most hopeful aspect of Player Piano is that they don't seem to want the corporate ladder back!

As a prophet not a forecaster, Vonnegut got some things wrong. What he mainly got wrong was the precise mode in which the cybernetic ideology was to play out. He reckoned, along with many philosophers and social scientists of the time, that the managerial elite would dominate through their control of manufacturing and transport. This is how the Robber Barons in the late 19th century and the Russian soviets had already done it.

What no one, literally no one, at the time anticipated was that even the manufacturing elite wouldn't be high enough up the cybernetic food chain to set the criteria for success. This would be left to the even more remote Captains of Finance not the contemporary Lords of Industry. Given that neither Karl Marx nor Frederik Hayek saw that one coming, we might want to overlook Vonnegut's slip.

Vonnegut couldn't see the impending shift because Finance in America, as everywhere else, was still Capitalist Finance in 1951. Not for a decade did cybernetics under a new heading of Corporate Finance, as a real discipline and an ideology, become identifiable as a visible intellectual force. And not for yet another decade was this force great enough to shift corporate power decisively from the capitalists who make things to the capitalists who finance things. 

It is unarguable that today it is the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley rather than General Motors or General Electric that dominate the world economy and a large portion of its social ambitions as well. The transition is complete. Same cybernetic ideology, just a different cast of corporate characters. And Vonnegut wrote the script. Unfortunately Trump not Proteus is leading the revolution.

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And just when you thought it's safe to drink the Kool-Aid:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-jobs...

Spark by Rupert Dreyfus
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sarcasm Squared

What do you call sarcasm about sarcasm? Could it be sardony? If so Spark is way up there on the spectrum "irony, sarcasm, satire, sardony.” How far is it possible to send up yourself?

Spark is the self-proclaimed voice of the Y-bother generation. These are the millennial 'snowflakes' who feel betrayed and abandoned by the world but maintain an attitude of romantic love worthy of Byron. Because their metier is sarcasm, they present a real problem to the writer who wants to rub them up a bit.

For example, it is reported recently by the Wall Street Journal that many Y-bothers are jumping ship from Big Finance in London and New York. At first glance they might look a principled lot. But it is cash not ethics that matters. They are dissatisfied with the bonuses which don't allow the life style they expect. How do you get sarcastic in the face of such sarcasm?

The central theme of Spark is the repeated refrain of "our rubbish lives". Included is a manifesto of Y-bothersomness that covers gripes from the demand to participate in the phony (Salinger?) corporate rat-race to the bullshit (Vonnegut?) dictatorship of electricity metres. The disappearance of affordable yuppie city-accommodation sits somewhere in the middle (Lanchester?).

The irony at the low end of the spectrum can get lost in the whinging sardonic frequencies of the upper end. The protagonist is a computer-geek working, but not very hard, in a banking giant. For the moment he's travelling third class on the corporate gravy train. But his prospects? Well he gets offered promotion the first day on the job.

According to social science pundits, this is precisely the guy who has won in the globalisation stakes, the one who has beaten the bloke on the provincial assembly line into a pulp. Wasn't he the one voted against by Brexit and Trump supporters? Yet he too thinks the world is stacked against him. Someone seems to have driven a wedge between folk who have an awfully lot in common.

Y-bothers are hacktivists. That is, they dream about a social system that looks like the internet in which there are no adult responsibilities, no fixed identities, and lots of money in game-playing. They hang out on the internet waiting for the revolution until...well in Spark's case until he gets shot in the gut by the Counterterrorism Unit. From irony to sardony in one narrative jump.

A combination of The Young Ones, The Big Bang Theory, Live Free or Die Hard, and any one of a dozen rom-coms. Amusing but not meant to be taken seriously. When’s the last time you saw a digi-nerd using a Polaroid camera after all? I presume the three or four plot-recaps in what is a shortish book is more than an aid for those readers who might get lost in a toilet stall.

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Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hacking the Central Banks

If there is only time to read one book about Bitcoin, this should be the one.

Bitcoin is not just a practical technology, it is also a philosophy and an economic ideology. Popper gives a reasonable nod to all three (Arguably it is the last which has proven essential in its initial successes but which has now run out of steam). But like all philosophies it has a problem.

As a self contained system Bitcoin is a masterwork of self-verifying logic. This logic is an ingenious combination of Kantian analysis (the blockchain is a giant double-entry ledger which automatically identifies errors) and Hegelian dialectics (any blockchain can only be integrated into the system through competitive trial and error toward the solution of a mathematical problem) and Lockean consensus (if there is disagreement about who wins in block competition, the consensus within the network rules). There is even a nod to Leibnizian monadology (the encryption of the blockchain allows an extreme compression of the entire ledger so that it an be stored simultaneously throughout the network of Bitcoin users). This combination of four philosophical solutions to the problem of integrity makes Bitcoin itself (but not necessarily its software) tamper-proof.

Economically this means perfect efficiency: zero fraud, virtually no transaction cost, and almost instantaneous execution of transactions (well, ten minutes). Ideologically, libertarians see this as a way to become independent of central banks which may be tempted either to debase the currency (the maximum Bitcoin supply is 21 million, an amount which will be approached only asymptotically at a predictable rate) or to control where and when it can be used (there is no effective way to control cross-border flows of Bitcoin since they never leave the ledger).

The problem arises not within the system but in the relation of the system to any other monetary system. This connection inevitably involves brokers and dealers and exchanges and traders which are not covered, as it were, by the Bitcoin guarantee of integrity or insulation from outside authority.

So to the extent Bitcoin is accepted as a convention it is indeed significant. But getting into it or out of it is fraught with the same dangers, inefficiencies, and regulatory arbitrariness as any other currency. And as long as governments don't accept Bitcoin in payment of taxes (which makes fiat currency currency), Bitcoin is a monetary sideshow mostly of interest to the underworld (not necessarily criminal) which is forced to hack the currently dominant monetary system to survive. This alone is likely to be sufficient to ensure Bitcoin a place in economic and social history.

Postscript: After posting this review, this one day conference at MIT was announced. The technology is clearly advancing way beyond Bitcoin. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/60...

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The Somnambulist's Dreams by Lars Boye Jerlach
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Apocalyptic for the 21st Century

I spent several years of my young adult life serving on what were then called Ocean Stations in the mid-North Atlantic. Bouncing around on small ships which were meant to act as electronic beacons, floating lighthouses really, for overflying aircraft, we spent four or five weeks every two months at sea. The only way to stay sane, for many of us, was to bring a library of books and music along on each patrol. So Jerlach's setting in Somnabulist's Dreams of an isolated lighthouse and its keeper, with a fixed routine of watch-taking and daily living, feels very familiar.

The difference between Jerlach's lighthouse keeper and me is that his diversion in isolation comes not directly from literature and song but indirectly through the dream diary of one of his 19th century predecessors, one Enoch Soule. Enoch has recorded a series of remarkably precise prophetic, or more accurately apocalyptic, dreams involving figures as diverse as the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and Jerlach's fellow Dane Karen Blixen (to name any more would spoil the fun of discovery).

I say apocalyptic rather than prophetic because the name of Jerlach's protagonist-once-removed, Enoch, is an explicit reference to the Judaic patriarch, author of the apocryphal (non-canonical) Book of Enoch. At one point a dream-Magritte addresses Enoch in the form of a raven as "the man who apparently didn't die," a reference to the legend that he was taken bodily to heaven by God.

An important section of the biblical Book of Enoch recounts a series of dreams involving the history of Israel. Most of these are not prophecies in the sense of foretelling future events, but rather reinterpretations of historical events in terms of the ultimate destiny of Israel. This is the characteristic of that particular genre called apocalyptic, an eschatological interpretation pointing to final triumph from the midst of apparent disaster.

Frequently Jerlach's lighthouse keeper reads that "nothing is what it seems" in the dream diaries. Animals speak, dreams overlap and interweave, their meanings are never quite clear. This is also the biblical Enoch's technique. For him animals represent people, people represent angels, and the interaction between the two is as enigmatic as in the most obscure of biblical writing. There is an intoxicating overload of possible intention and signification in both sets of dreams (not surprising then that Soule, Enoch's surname, is the first person singular of the French verb 'to induce drunkenness').

For the lighthouse keeper and Enoch Soule, Enoch's dreams are prophetic. They are about the future and people and events of which neither the keeper nor Soule have any knowledge or interest. For them therefore the dreams are confusing rather than revelatory. They are in no position to understand what the dreams or the found-text might mean.

But for us, the readers of Jerlach's book, the dreams are definitive interpretations of the literary and historical events described. They are events of the past that are familiar, at least to some degree, to the reader. Often they are literally terminal, that is, about approaching or recent death. They are always about that present moment and that precise place. There is no future, only 'now'; there is no place other than 'here'. Jerlach presents them as definitively revelatory. That is their meaning, their last meaning.

This brilliant apocalyptic play by Jerlach makes the reader part of the narrative, in fact, the ultimate narrator of the book. It is the reader who puts the final meaning on each event, a meaning which cannot be gainsaid. A remarkable use of the apocalyptic genre for the 21st century.

I feel somewhat nostalgic about my former life at sea, primarily because it did indeed allow the regular reading-leisure to consider many apocalyptic meanings, as well as the meaning of apocalyptic.

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Independent People 
by 

Halldór Laxness, 

 

James Anderson Thompson (Translator)

 

Better Red Than Dead

Entering into Independent People with no introduction, one could be forgiven for thinking it a merely charming review of early 20th century Icelandic culture, an update of the sagas and a chronicle of the rugged life of the North. Laxness apparently promotes this in his opening paragraphs with his references to local legends of Norse colonisers, Celtic demons, and the various Icelandic myths of national origin. He describes a timeless scene, “...the centuries lie side by side in unequally overgrown paths cut by the horses of the past..."

But Laxness is not unlike the late US Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, generally acknowledged as the most powerful congressman of his day. When asked by a reporter his view about a particular issue, he responded "Aw shucks, I'm just a country boy; I don't know nuthin' about politics."

Laxness uses just this tone of rural naïveté to superb dramatic effect. Independent People is an acknowledged masterpiece. It helped Laxness win the Nobel Prize. Yet it presents itself in a dead pan Thurmondesque way that offers no clue about the book's subtlety or profundity. The first hint comes when Icelandic timelessness is suggested as other than desirable. The tradition alluded to is interminable rather than merely long. “...[F]or a thousand years they have imagined that they would rise above penury..."

The title, it turns out, is of course ironic, indeed only the tip of an iceberg of irony. The independence of the people involved - sheep crofters in the 'up-country' moorlands of Iceland - is imaginary. Debt and drudgery is what they can look forward to. Add to this the irony of even poetry being used to justify virtual enslavement rather than to commemorate freedom - the male protagonist/poet himself is an ignorant bully - and what is presented is a profoundly self-deceptive culture. This is the generalizable subject of the book: the social illusions that we adopt without awareness or, consequently, recourse.

Laxness describes a destructive yet self-satisfied Icelandic culture in remarkable and absorbing detail. The life of moorland crofters is brutal, tedious and lonely, especially for the women who have fewer chances for social interaction and, of course, must tend the menfolk as well as share in their heavy labour.

These country folk survive physically, if they do, on 'refuse fish', rye biscuits, and oatmeal. For some reason sugar and coffee is in plentiful supply but neither milk nor meat, even mutton, is not to be had except on the large estates or in the cities. And, whether for religious or economic reasons, neither spirits nor beer are generally available (something particularly odd for a sea-faring nation). Coffee, consumed in obviously unhealthy quantities, is the stimulant and social lubricant of choice.

The crofters survive socially on an infrequent diet of seasonal gossip, rumour and hearsay; and follow an agricultural routine dictated by shibboleths and superstition: "This land will not betray its flocks...Where the sheep lives, there lives man.... Independence is better than meat." Conformity of opinion could hardly be greater in a totalitarian state but each perceives himself as wisely free in assimilating these treasures of conventional wisdom.

Despite the prevailing poverty, aesthetics is a central issue among the men. Poetry is an art form that requires no resources except thought, not even paper since the oral tradition is taught from birth. However, the issues are of form not content. What arrangement of metre and rhyme is best? Independence in this domain means adopting an opinion without reasons other than personal preference and proclaiming it vehemently.

Children are plentiful but die off readily for all the usual reasons of malnourishment, disease, and accident. Those who survive often leave by taking up the sea, usually never to be heard from again because living in “...a land even more remote, America, which is further than death." This is considered a normal if not inevitable state of affairs for those who are truly independent.

The social structure is curiously egalitarian; class distinctions are grounded on wealth not birth. Hereditary wealth isn't institutionalised into permanent titles of nobility. Nonetheless there is a medieval system of obligation formalised through debt-relations to the large land-owners who hold mortgages, augment cash flows in bad times, and administer the markets for sheep and fish. In theory the smallholders are able to drive their sheep over the moors for days to get a better price. But of course they ‘choose’ to deal with the local merchant at a severe discount because its more convenient.

The church is tolerated as an inevitable burden which would clearly go unsupported and unattended if not for a national mandate. Its social role is the solemnisation of life events - birth, death, marriage - but weekly gatherings are infeasible given distances and the intensity of agrarian work schedules. The connection between their ‘rates’ and the cost of the local pastor is not one they seem to make.

It is not religion, therefore, that creates social cohesion. What religious awareness there is seems a mixture of Lutheran piety, pagan habit, and residual anti-papal sentiment. Rather, the core of Icelandic identity is portrayed as centred on the idea of independence, a condition universally valued in the country and gradually revealed as an ideology. "Independence is the most important thing of all in life." the newly wed husband says to his wife with obvious irony as she commences her virtual slavery in their croft on the moors.

The ideology of independence, no matter how contradictory to experience, is shared because it meets everyone's needs. It gives the impoverished crofters some vague hope of improvement as well as an ideal for which their suffering may be justified. It gives the gentry a rationale for their success and an image to be admired and emulated by the striving crofters. It gives the city-born local lady of the manor a reason to live in the bleakness of the Icelandic outback. Mainly the ideology of independence ensures social peace while encouraging maximum productive and exploitative effort by all concerned. Independence is, therefore, a pyrrhic reward since even "Elves are much happier than men."

The continuing tales of the protagonist’s search for independence hardly lead to a surprising denouement. The ideology of independence is a chimera, a monster hybrid of myth, illusion, stubbornness, and ignorance. In the form Laxness gives it, independence is a decadent form of patriotism that consumes not just its adherents but their families and children as well. 

When taken seriously, this book is not easy to take at all by those who adopt a similar idolatry of abstract formulae. Laxness was a socialist who was not only creating an artistic work, he was also justifying the emerging politics of Iceland after WW II. For this he was condemned by the FBI as a Communist agitator and, despite his Nobel award was banned from the United States. One suspects the real reason for the ban was that by portraying the Icelandic ideology of independence Laxness was just a little to accurate in describing its American variant.

Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 by Yang Jisheng
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Beware Law Written in the Heart

The quantity of unintended human misery is near enough infinite. But the quantity of misery experienced by the Chinese nation intentionally through its own government's policies is of a higher cardinal order of infinity altogether. The capacity of the Chinese to endure what they have seems only matched by their capacity to forget it. It appears that nothing about China can be exaggerated. Its suffering, its resilience, its insanity, and its resistance to self-analysis, all defy measured description.

I had just entered American high school in 1961. Everyone was concerned about the Bay of Pigs invasion, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the formation of OPEC, and the big Russian hydrogen bomb. No one who was known to me knew, much less cared, that somewhere around 45 million Chinese were dead or dying of starvation. China existed effectively in a universe beyond my event horizon, a situation almost unthinkable in a world of Twitter, Google Earth, and Feedly.

So to read Tombstone is shocking in two ways. First because it documents the famine planned by Mao Zedong for purely personal political reasons. Second because this was an event carried out in secret - not just kept from the rest of the world, but, more remarkably, kept from the Chinese themselves, despite the overwhelming physical evidence visible to everyone.

The research findings made by the author, whose father died of starvation in front of him, were even a surprise to him. He hadn't known, or at least couldn't accept the possibility, that his fellow countrymen of his own government, a government dedicated to socialist principles of human welfare, could intentionally do what they so obviously did: sacrifice not just the interests but the lives of an entire population to maintain the position of one man. At least Stalin had the politesse to terrorise and exterminate mainly those who might resist. Mao was not in the least selective.

My questions approaching Tombstone, therefore, are I suppose naively anthropological. Are the phenomena it describes, and describes well in terms of experiences as well as policies, simply human? That is, could any nation fall into the chasm of destruction that was the old Communist China given its circumstances and the randomness of politics; or was there something in Chinese culture itself, a fatal flaw, that was exploited by the Communist leadership? If what has gone on is a risk to/of humanity in general, why is its reality still resisted by the Chinese? If there is something peculiarly Chinese, in terms of history or culture, that has created such horror, how can it possibly be avoided as the central constitutional issue in today's China?

The answers Yang gives, I think, are reasonably clear, however nuanced his presentation. Certainly the imperial tradition and Confucian values of respect for authority promoted a level of receptivity to Maoist direction. But it was his description of a pervasive, highly spiritual, and apparently irrepressible, Chinese idealism which, it seems to me, energised the propaganda machine and motivated the Party at grassroots levels. This inveterate, irrepressible idealism, paradoxically, stands out as the most significant factor in sustaining such a murderous regime.

This is an unexpected conclusion, but one which introduces some comprehensibility to events. It is not a flaw in Chinese culture, but a virtue very much appreciated in the West, that was the lever used to move an entire society. And it seems to be the same lever used in subsequent shifts - from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution and into a Socialism With Chinese Characteristics.

That the Chinese are a people exceptionally willing to sacrifice themselves, even unto death, is certainly not how the Chinese are perceived through most Western media. Recent books like Paul Midler's Poorly Made in China, Evan Osnos's Age of Ambition, or Leslie Chang's Factory Girls describe a society of grasping individualism that appears to want to emulate the consumerist and entirely materialist mores of the West. It is, according to these accounts and many others, a society in which deceit, fraud (legal and not) and the exploitation of foreigners as well as other Chinese is routine. Principled living, much less idealism, hardly features.

But Yang gives things away that he may not even be aware of, and that those who are not part of Chinese society may not perceive as central to Chinese character because they are so much what we in the West perceive ourselves to be. There is a certain fear about China but that fear originates in a similarity too close to the bone to admit. This similarity is buried beneath differences in language, history and politics. Yet Yang alludes to it throughout. I shall attempt to put this similarity succinctly, even if inadequately.

An abiding ideal in Western culture, stated by all its principal religions, traditions and ancient philosophies, is 'the law written in the heart', that is, the assimilation of spiritual values so completely that codification and enforcement of formal restrictions is unnecessary. Individuals in such a state act correctly because they are aware of both the criteria of correct action and the beneficial effects of following those criteria. As I have shown elsewhere (see GR review of Giorgio Agamben's The Highest Poverty), this is the goal not only of Western monasticism but its derivative, the most important conceptual export from Europe to Asia in modern times: the idea of the civil corporation.

This ideal is embedded in European literature. Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans (and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, whoever he may be), Jeremiah and Ezekiel in their announcements of a new form of covenant, the Greek Stoic philosophers with their concept of natural law, the Roman Cicero in his raising of this natural law above legal statutes, even the injunction of the Quran that says, "This is the Nature of God on which he has formed and moulded the Nature of man. The understanding of this Nature constitutes right religion.", all speak of this internalised ethical as well as religious framework.

What all these texts are describing is the ideal society which is hidden in the heart of all men. 'Revealed' is how it is put in religious terms; 'known instinctively and universally' are the terms preferred by philosophy. The specific content of this ideal is not nearly as important as its presumed existence as a common moral 'core' of humanity.

Such an ideal is not just shared with Chinese culture. It is arguable, given the otherwise inexplicable mass cultural adaptations in China during the last 70 years, that this ideal is the central spiritual impulse of the entire Chinese nation. The Chinese have achieved what the West has perennially sought but failed to achieve - a social system controlled not by law but by common sentiment.

The strangeness of China in Western eyes - its 'adaptable' legal system, its willingness to conform to the party line, its creation of an economic system which is neither capitalist nor Marxist, its capacity for living with paradox - may well be down to the inability of those eyes to see how fundamentally they have abandoned this ideal as too difficult to achieve. Impossible for us, therefore it can't exist.

But it does exist in what its citizens consider a far more advanced society. It also gives the lie to the presumption, Freudian as well as Christian, that monotheism is essential to such internalised morality (pace to the American sociologist Philip Rieff who formulated the hypothesis)..

Clearly I do the Chinese nation, Yang’s book, and particularly those sacrificed during The Great Leap Forward, an injustice in this identification of an apparently unbounded spiritual idealism as the motive force of Chinese culture. For this I can only offer an apology; but I also remain in a way unrepentant. China is too vast - culturally as well as geographically - to comprehend. Such as I can only make a guess as to its meaning in anticipation of more, immensely more, reading and thinking.

But if I am only even partly correct, China raises an issue about the foundations of Western culture. Despite our long-standing lip service to the ideal of ‘law written in the heart’, are we really prepared for its consequences? Law in the heart tends not to be subject to effective criticism or adaptation to circumstances. It cannot be discussed because it is the foundation for all discussion. Its very hiddeness makes it dangerous. It may not be law at all, merely prejudice - literally premature judgement.

Hidden, secret law can obviously cause immense pain and harm. To the degree we have already approached this ideal in our overwhelmingly corporate lives, we too in the West have induced similar pain and harm - with somewhat less 'success' than the Chinese, for the moment. We still treasure it even though we may believe it to be infeasible. Our smug non-chalance may be just the opening needed for Trumpian blathering to undermine Western society as completely as Mao's demagoguery.

Yang quite sensibly prefers to substitute a ’tombstone in the heart’ as an alternative ideal. I am inclined to agree. Perhaps we might be able to find such an alternative for our corporate ideal.

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An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Qoholeth Updated (The Wisdom of Winter Looks Foolish in May)

None of us is born knowing what we want. We are taught what we want by other people. We do not choose these other people from whom we learn; they just happen. Our parents also just happen but in general we feel it is necessary to unlearn whatever it is they've taught us to want, especially if it involves "an unimportant-looking family publicly raising its collective voice against the vast skepticism [sic] and apathy of life."

Learning from strangers is frequently regretted in later life but always welcomed as it occurs. What we learn from strangers, what we are taught to want, is what has been identified since ancient times as vanity. Vanity is not only the pleasure we get from gazing at our image in a mirror (although that, too, particularly among Dreiser's women). It is "that old mass yearning for a likeness" as Dreiser has it. Vanity is the compulsion to see what we want ourselves to be in other people and to imitate them however that is possible.

Vanity is the theme of Dreiser's masterpiece, a theme that never loses its relevance or painful personal intimacy. As the ancient writer of the book of Ecclesiastes knew so clearly: inevitably everything is vanity. Also, inevitably, given that it is the core of human existence, pointing it out has little effect; that too is an exercise in vanity.

Dreiser's genius is his ability to track the life-long path of vanity in its toe-curling detail. From our embarrassment about parental idiosyncrasies to our growing faux-wisdom about what is important in life and the meaning of success, his step by step descriptions of the way we are enticed into preferences that we believe are matters of an independent and considered free will are astounding, and disconcerting.

Disconcerting because it is, I think, impossible not to identify at some point in his life with the protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, as he stumbles into a life not his own, yet clung to all the more for that very reason. We in the modern world are expected to honour our own histories. It is "What got us here; what makes us who we are." Wishing any other life would be the secular equivalent of sin, a repudiation of our own independent existence. To have Dreiser articulate the truth that our formation as human beings is a random development is not just uncomfortable, it rocks the foundations of personality.

One might think that experience alone should be enough to alert us, at least eventually, to the hubris of our attitude of self-createdness. But experience never repeats itself. Our experience of youth is not relevant to our experience of adulthood or middle-age. Semper aliquid novum ex Africa is how the Romans put it: There are always new things coming out of Africa. For them Africa, surprisingly to modern minds, represented the future, for which they, and we, are permanently unprepared by experience.

So Clyde is in fact incapable of learning from one stage of life to another. All he can do is reinforce persistent prejudices and abiding fears. He digs himself progressively deeper into his non-life with increasing fervour. This is because Clyde's form of vanity, adopted in youth and refined with maturity, is ambition.

Ambition is not just desire for that which others possess; it is the desire for what others have because they have it. As such it is insatiable, the crack-cocaine of vanity. And it is the most socially acceptable, in fact encouraged, form of vanity. To top it all, ambition provokes ambition in others. The result is as Thomas Hobbes imagined in the 16th century - a constant war of all against each other, waged without quarter.

The tragedy that Dreiser narrates is not the mistakes and false moves that Clyde Griffiths, or we, make as human beings. It is the inevitability of the un-freedom inherent in ambition, that particularly American virtue. Paradoxically, it is the source of the scepticism and apathy that Dreiser was so concerned about. Scepticism is the suspicion that others merely want what we have. Apathy is the lack of interest in what might be important other than what others have. These are very American tragedies indeed.

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The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Assisted Living

It was that Jewish heretic Paul of Tarsus who gave us the idea that we are not in charge of our lives but are merely responsible for them to God who owns us. It was the English philosopher John Locke, a heretic to Pauline Calvinism, who casually pointed out that in fact our lives are the only thing we do have complete charge over, the only thing every one of us owns and can dispose of. And it was Albert Camus, a heretic to any and all sources of power, who took Locke entirely seriously by pointing out that how we dispose of life is the central issue of not just life but philosophy. The result is Sisyphus.

The followers of previous heretics - evangelical Christians, PC and wet liberals - don't like Camus. But they can't fault his conclusions. They may not approve of his marketing of suicide as a universally available option for disposing of life, but these are the same people who don't approve of gay sex or the discussion of religion in public. So hardly credible. Clearly Camus's analysis includes both Paul's and Locke's as special cases, and is therefore superior to them both.

Camus doesn't advocate suicide; he does advocate its importance to life and thought. Without it we are dead, as it were, all but physically. Habit and chance rule. Life is not inherently absurd but becomes so when death, specifically self-inflicted death, is not on the table. Evasions - illusion, after-life, hope, consuming, power, sex, reputation - become the norm that is socially enforced. Eliminating evasions is what Camus is trying to do.

There is rarely a page in Sisyphus without a phrase to savour and as memorable as anything in Montaigne. Just for openers:

p2: "I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument."

p3: "Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined."

p4: "A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world."

So even if the logic gets you down, you have some rather sustaining prose to exchange with the spouse or functional equivalent over breakfast.

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God's Grace by Bernard Malamud
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Starting From Scratch(ing)

“There is no Man without his Other.” This aphorism of the American philosopher Edgar A. Singer could be the theme (or running joke) of Bernard Malamud’s last novel. Malamud’s technique involves setting up a series of problematic situations in what is essentially a new Genesis as, effectively, a test of Singer’s maxim.

Adonai, HaShem, the Lord, the Creator allows mankind to annihilate itself in a brief but comprehensively decisive nuclear war. The divine intention was the entire eradication of mankind and all other animal life. But divine attention to detail was not all it should have been. Because he is in a deep submersible somewhere under the Pacific Ocean, the interestingly named Calvin Cohn, former rabbinical student turned scientist, son and grandson of a rabbi, accidentally survives.

This unauthorised Noah pleads for life with HaShem who is unsympathetic but fails to take further immediate action except to allow Calvin to drift to a tropical island. This divine indecisiveness produces yet another worry: “On good days Cohn told himself stories, saying the Lord would let him live if he spoke the right words. Or lived the right life. But how was that possible without another human life around?” Thus endeth the first day with the first question.

Turns out there is Another. But it’s a chimpanzee, a rather talented chimpanzee to be sure, but still and all an ape. Can a human-chimp duo constitute a life for either? Particularly if the chimp has been brought up Christian and the man a pious Jew. Can such a mixed family survive the strain of such cultural diversity? There are of course limits to inter-species communication, certainly physical, probably emotional and possibly mental. Nonetheless communication does take place. Is it enough for either party? Thus endeth the second day.

But just as the reader expects a linguistic breakthrough twixt man and beast, his mind is boggled by HaShem’s sense of humour in his operation of the devastated world. The Creator/Destroyer (blessed be his name) has also ‘forgotten’ to destroy a 500 lb. gorilla (the only authentic cliché, I think, in the book). The gorilla has an ear for devotional Yiddish music and so is attracted to the cosy island cave of chimp and man. Three is an awkward problem of course: the perpetual threat of jealousy, or two against one for starters. Does this new social melange inhibit meaningful bonding? Thus endeth day three.

So Buz the chimp, and George the gorilla, and Calvin the human settle down and try to find a social equilibrium. But, another surprise: before the nuclear oven, Buz’s scientist-keeper had fit him up with an artificial larynx. He can talk, with a heavy German accent and a limited vocabulary and no capacity for metaphor, but certainly sufficient to disturb the silence over the breakfast table. Trouble is, the table-talk is, if not intentionally anti-Semitic, then certainly biased toward the New Testament. And yet another, more fundamental problem pops up: if the chimp can use language so facilely, just what distinguishes homo sapiens in the order of creation? Thus endeth the fourth day.

Having suffered trauma as a youngster at the hands of a research scientist, George the gorilla is shy of intimacy. In any case Buz the chimp doesn’t like the “fot, smelly onimal”. George becomes even more skittish with the discovery of a troupe of five more chimps, with no human language ability of course, but Buz takes the role of translator. The situation is now highly complicated indeed. Economics quickly becomes the most pressing issue: How can the food resources of the island be shared and preserved with the growing population? Thus endeth the fifth day.

As the social organisation of the island becomes more stable, Calvin proceeds first with a Passover Seder and then a school(tree) to instruct the other primates, primarily in biblical lore but not neglecting science, particularly Darwinian and Freudian theory. This is where things get….well, weird in the extreme. Calvin decides that it’s his duty to mate with one of the newly mature chimps, Mary Madelyn, in order to speed up the evolutionary re-development of the world. The resulting offspring, a female, is of course chimp not human according to halachic law. But would the chimps see things the same way, particularly since they had in the meantime learned the joy of inter-species homicide with a group of newly arrived baboons? Thus endeth the sixth day.

On the seventh day Calvin rested. And who could blame him? It does not end well for Calvin of course. How could it? He must be sacrificed like Isaac. Or is it like Christ? The new creation goes on without him. Only George the gorilla is there to recite Kadesh, the prayer for the dead.

I cannot do more in understanding, much less interpreting, this novel. Is it a complex allegory of Jewish-Christian relations? Or a gnostic parable of inherent evil in creation? A post-modernist commentary on language or animal rights? Or merely an old man’s parting Jewish joke? Certainly it has similarities with fiction created decades in the future. One thinks particularly of James Morrow and his Blameless in Abaddon and Towing Jehovah. There are even possible echoes in China Mieville’s Embassytown. But ultimately God’s Grace is…well God’s Grace, whatever that may be.

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Postscript: A kind GR reader has pointed toward the solution, as far as I'm concerned definitive, here:
http://politicsandculture.org/2010/04...

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Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How the World Feels

Identifying the fictions in which we live is an awkward matter, mainly because it involves creating an alternative fiction. And comparing the merits of competing stories is tricky. Each story carries with it its own criterion of verification and presents its facts accordingly: Jews are responsible for our financial problems; look at all the Jewish names in banking. Muslims are educated to hate us; proven by the Q’uran. Immigrants undermine society; drugs come from the same places they do.

‘Fact-checking’ these sorts of narratives is unproductive. The problem isn’t one of falsehood but of incompleteness. One way to judge such a narrative therefore is its inclusion of more facts than its competitors. Particularly telling is the inclusion of apparently contradictory facts which are otherwise unexplained: The Jewish names on the door might front largely Christian organizations. The Bible is as casually and inhumanely brutal as anything in the Q’uran. Immigrants and drugs come from the places that have been impoverished through globalization.

Mishra’s technique for creating a more ‘inclusive’ narrative is to start with an aesthetic judgement rather than a thesis: “... ressentiment as the defining feature of a world... where the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status, and property ownership.” He then lets rip on a journey through culture and its present discontents, drawing in as many facts as he can handle, and that’s quite a few. He considers himself a “stepchild of the West” as well as an Asian. Only a few are likely to have his breadth of cultural experience, so his choice of ressentiment as the key to global sentiment seems inspired to me.

Mishra’s opinion is that this pervasive feeling of disappointment and fear is the result of the collapse in the principle of “historic inevitability” that was the foundation of not just Marxism, but also of the liberal and neo-liberal believers in free market progress. Both socialism and capitalism have created societies in which material advantage has been offset by enormous economic, racial, and sexual inequities. What young, thinking, even vaguely aware, person could avoid the conclusion that those in charge are either frauds or crooks? The road to both ISIS and the Alt-right are paved with thwarted idealism. Contingency not fate rules the world.

It is the young especially who perceive the absurd gap between any ideology that suggests it knows the destination of human society and the obvious mess of reality. Neither proletarian nor consumer utopia has ever been in sight; the Second Coming has been unconscionably delayed. And if the narratives of ideology as well as religion are bust, then “Nothing less than this [Enlightenment] sense of expectation, central to modern political and economic thinking, has gone missing today, especially among those who have themselves never had it so good.” Neither body nor spirit provides a foothold for supporting intelligent life. A sort of negative idealism, a rampant nihilism, beckons. Mishra quotes Walter Benjamin for effect: the self alienation of humankind “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

Could there be a better confirmation of this claim than Trump, a man who fits Benjamin’s description exactly (although elected only after Age of Anger was already with the publisher)? If not, then it is essential to recognise Trump not as anomaly but as epitome. He is what we have become, in all his vileness. He is a symbol, one hopes not of the moral standards of modern society, but certainly of the existential deficiency of all of our conventional political and cultural narratives. As surely as Kant, Trump deserves the title of der alles Zermalmender, the All-destroyer.

It is fatuous to think that some sort of familiar normality will return with Trump’s departure, no matter when that takes place. The myths of the past - American democracy, indeed liberal democracy, as a natural end-state; increasingly rational international cooperation in the furtherance of mutual interest; the universality of human interests themselves; the possibility of global rule of common law - are no longer tenable and not worth the treaties they’re written in.

Ressentiment is a symptom of despair among populations who still long for the comforts these myths provide. Their loss makes us all sick, although it is generally the young (and the psychotic) who act out most readily. It is the young (and the psychotic) who first spot how facile and self-satisfied these myths are. The rest of us resist like the Boers resisted in South Africa, by doubling down on the myths. Hence the apparent paradox of simultaneously increasing secularisation and religious fundamentalism - in Alabama, and Moscow, as well as Aleppo; the economic dissatisfaction among those who are the wealthiest on the planet; the drive to roll back democratic institutions by those democratically elected to safeguard them.

Can we exist as cognitively gifted social animals without myths? Highly unlikely. Can we find better ones? Possibly, if we can only get past the kind of either/or dualisms that infest so much of our culture and are embedded in our institutions: Christianity defines itself essentially as ‘not-Jewish’; the monotheistic God is most fundamentally not his creation; the rational is that which is logical rather than that which is important; will, desire, and faith are personal possessions and not communally owned; European institutions (one thinks of the modern corporation) have proven themselves superior by their proliferation; wrongs must be righted, if necessary by employing more wrongs.

The Age of Anger is far too rich with historical, literary, and cultural facts to summarise easily. Its conclusions are less than precise and directive. But I find this both consistent and convincing rather than a flaw. It is a narrative which denies its own definitiveness and begs for additions and modifications and reversals. Perhaps it is a model for the kind of myth we now need to keep us from exterminating one another.

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Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate by William Nicholls
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loving Hatred?

The theological self-image of Christianity is love. The official ethic of Christianity, particularly regarding Judaism, is persistent and systematic hatred. Although this dissonance has at least been recognised in the decades since the Holocaust, the centuries of Christian Anti-Semitic doctrine remain in both ecclesiastical and secularised form in Western culture. This was Nicholls original thesis when Christian Anti-Semitism was first published in 1963 and stands equally relevant through subsequent editions.

The magnitude of Christian hatred of Judaism cannot be mitigated by a few papal conciliatory words or grass roots ecumenical discussions. Anti-Semitism is embedded in both the founding documents of Christianity and in its institutions. From these it has penetrated European culture and spread globally as that culture has gained influence. But as Nicholls point out, Anti-Semitism has morphed from a doctrinal to a political prejudice: "When they [European Christians] abandoned the religion of their upbringing, they retained its prejudices."

Christianity has always had a difficult time establishing itself as something other than a mere Jewish heresy. To do so it had to contend that the eternal promises to Israel by its God were abrogated by Jewish callousness, a patently preposterous and self-contradictory claim.

The French Revolution is the event which turned this doctrine of 'supercession' into a political tool. For countless generations Jews had been excluded and forced into a separate social existence. Yet the Enlightenment philosophers blamed the Jews themselves for this condition and therefore branded them as of suspect suitability for true citizenship. Equally preposterous and self-contradictory. But just as potent. A Christianity not just of the heart but of the parliamentary debating chamber.

The stakes today are as high as they have ever been regarding Anti-Semitism - for Christians as well as Jews. Historic revisionism, which denies the Holocaust for what it was, periodically raises its head especially in places like Poland and Ukraine, is a continuing threat. Jew-hatred posing as Anti-Israeli politics and terrorism is more common now than in the 1960's.

But the crisis for Christianity also persists. If 2000 years of official and unofficial Anti-Semitism is a fact, what does that fact imply for the truth as well as the legitimacy of Christianity and the culture it spawned? This is also a question provoked by Nicholl's analysis. And for me it is the more fundamental one. Unsurprisingly, few seem willing to entertain it seriously.

Postscript: for more on the reasons for Christian anti-semitism, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript 13May19, on the latest manifestations: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news...

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Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fantastic Conjunctivitis

Wolfe is most often compared to Tolkien and Lewis. However this is regurgitation of marketing hype. There is little in terms of style or symbology to link Wolfe with either. Aside from the genre of fantasy and a clear talent for creative world-building, Wolfe dwells in a very different universe, a universe not all that dissimilar from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy.

The physical environment of Wolfe's city of Nessus could easily fit into Peake's Gormenghast Castle and vice-versa: A vast, half-ruined, place, unknown except locally to its inhabitants. A gothic labyrinth that harbours all manner of surprises and threats.

Both sets of works play off a background of ancient but incomprehensible tradition that establishes the rigid conditions from which the protagonist must escape. Unlike Severian, Titus knows his forebears, but this difference makes no difference to the comprehensive social discipline and constraint applied to both of them.

Both Titus in Peake and Severian in Wolfe are sympathetic characters who struggle against the bonds of convention to capture some sort of independent identity. Both have only a vague notion of what lies outside the boundaries of the city/castle but they yearn toward it with a clearly erotic drive.

Many of the other characters also are inter-changeable. The Chief Archivist and his assistant in Wolfe could be copies of Peake's Barquentine and the villainous Steerpike. Bellgrove in Peake could be one of Wolfe's Masters.

Peake wrote Gormenghast between 1946 and 1959. It inspired several other works, most notably China Mieville's 2000 steampunk fantasy Perdido Street Station. Wolfe's three (or four) books were written between 1980 and 1983. I have been unable to find any mention of Peake (who died in 1968) by Wolfe or in critical analyses of his work. In a 2014 interview with Wolfe specifically about writers who had influenced him, he makes no mention of Peake (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/52...).

So an interesting case of parallel inspiration or a demonstration of the anxiety of influence? Any views are welcome.

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Christian Anti Semitism and Paul's Theology by Sidney G. Hall III
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Apology or Apologia, It's a Mess

Last week, for the first time, I met a GR nut-job. A self-described psychologist, I found out after accepting a friend request, he was reading a book by the American fascist David Duke. My new-found friend was posting a sort of progressive review of this book, quoting liberally as he went about the evils perpetrated by US Jews and helpfully adding pictures of many of the culprits that he had found on the internet. I challenged him several times about both his interest in Duke and his use of the term 'Jewish question' in his GR comments. He saw nothing wrong or inappropriate about his activities in response to fairly gentle chiding by me. So after 'de-friending' him, I thought it might be a suitable time to put some relevant reviews on the site. Hence this review.

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The earliest Christian scriptures, by as much as half a century, are those of Paul of Tarsus, a Jewish Pharisee or strict observer, who felt called to spread the message that he interpreted as Jesus’s to the non-Jews of the Roman Empire. Following the classical rules of rhetoric, Paul liked to adapt his message to his audience. So the Greeks got a piece on the Unknown God, and the diaspora Jews were treated to biblical references. But quite unlike either Jesus, his family, or any of the original twelve followers, Paul, never having met Jesus, rejected Judaism when it got in the way of his interpretations of the meaning of Jesus. The vehemence with which he did so infiltrated not just the Gospels (certainly in that of his man Luke but in all the others as well) but also the subsequent doctrinal and social attitude towards Judaism throughout the entire history of Christianity. Hence the centrality of Hall’s work.

Hall recognises the fundamental and long-standing scandal of Anti-Semitism in Christianity. That it has existed, still exists, and that its existence is promoted by the Gospels, Church Fathers, theologians ancient and modern, and leads directly to the theoreticians of the Third Reich and beyond is not in doubt. What Hall proposes, however, is that this persistent Anti-Semitic strain in Christianity is the result of a misinterpretation of (but definitely not by) Paul. That what Paul really meant did not call for either the theology nor the ethics of Anti-Semitism which have become endemic to Christian culture.

In other words, Hall wants a reason to stay Christian. He can’t in conscience do that given perennial Christian behaviour. So he must find a cause for this behaviour that still supplies some sort of credibility to Christian origins. Consequently, although disguised as a sort of apology to Jews for centuries of debasement and persecution by Christians, his book is actually an apologia, a justification, for why he, Hall, minister of Christian religion, does not chuck his vocation, his living, and a large part of his culture in the waste bin. The book seeks, more positively, to attribute the hate, horror, and death of Jews at the hands of Christians to an unfortunate but correctable misunderstanding.

According to Hall, it is a myth that it was Paul’s intention to make a disruptive distinction between, traditional Judaism and Christianity. The evidence he provides is Paul’s self-confessed Judaism (for example in his Epistle to the Romans). However, both the context and the substance of Paul’s letter shows his identification as Jewish is made in order first to ingratiate himself in typical Pauline style and then to use his very Judaism as sufficient authority to re-interpret it in a hostile way. Paul’s ‘cosmic dream’ is patently clear: to replace the Torah, the Jewish Law, by Christ, that is to say, Paul's law.

Hall then proceeds to the logically and theologically incomprehensible Epistle to the Galatians. In it Paul simultaneously confirms the eternal Judaic covenant of the scriptures and condemns it as partisan and obsolescent. Paul’s analogy of Hagar and Sarah, in which he attempts, grotesquely, to claim that his followers are the true Jews, is denied by Hall for what it patently is, a bald-faced usurpation of the covenant. Paul’s explicit target in this letter were the ‘Judaizers’, those who still clung to Jewish ritual, those who would not submit to his theologically outrageous claims for a uniquely correct interpretation. Egalitarian, in some sense, Paul may have been in the dismissal of Jewish tradition, but only at the cost of an imperious religious tyranny.

And it is this tyranny which has survived in both doctrine and ecclesiastical organisation ever since Paul. Unity in Christianity has always meant doctrinal submission to a credal formula approved by a singular authority - the emperor, the pope, the reformer, the charismatic leader - and has scant connection with the realities of daily life. This is the Christian way, a metaphysical conformity of belief rather than a practical adherence to norms of relationship. Law is not abolished as Paul circuitously claims. It is self-evidently replaced, as anyone who has ever glanced at the volumes of the Code of Canon Law knows. As such this new law will always find its source in Paul and its target in Jews.

As an apology, this book is insipid. As an apologia, it is merely another attempt to square the circle of Christian belief in the inferiority of Jews. It fails on both counts. The 'law written on the heart' was an ideal of early rabbinic Judaism, not something unique in the teaching of Jesus. In any case that teaching has been betrayed consistently by the very institutions that pretend to act in his name. If a mistake has been made, it’s likely lie a bit closer to the bone and to be a bit harder to correct than Hall believes.

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

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Fever and Spear by Javier Marías
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not Smiley's People

Four themes in different keys. The question is whether there is harmony or discord.

Opening with an over-scrupulous Proustian introduction, the protagonist, Deza, considers the disintegration of his marriage. He tries to formulate a theory of the case, to name the cause, as it were. He declares that "things only exist once they have been named." But names, particularly proper names, are an issue for him. Deza is variously Jaime, Jacobo, Jacques, and Jack depending on the company he keeps. The reader is forewarned that "A very thin line separates facts from imaginings...because imaginings are already facts." It's not a surprise therefore that Deza muses “...no one should trust me either."

Deza observes himself (apparently) rather critically, but he also has the capacity for prophetic judgement of others. Thus his Holmesian ability to suss out the bona fides of a variety of people for the mysterious figure of Tupra who is the central pillar of the second theme. Tupra's business interests aren't at all clear to Deza but not obviously shady enough to scare the latter off. Sherlock without the integrity.

The third story is a mystery involving the disappearance of a (real) Spanish Communist and the assassination of Deza's uncle during the Spanish Civil War. These events are also linked to the unexplained betrayal of his father in Franco Spain. Much is made of the connection with the James Bond figure of Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love, in which book there appear to be significant references to at least the first event.

Finally, there is the tale of Wheeler, the emeritus Oxford don, who, like a character out of Le Carre's Smiley's People, is an old hand in the British Secret Service. Wheeler also has some problems with name-stability. He, too, has had some vague involvement with the Spanish Civil War but on whose side and to accomplish what end?

The title comes from a comment half-way through made by Deza in an attempt to explain his father's betrayal. "How can I not know today your face tomorrow...?" he says. In other words: Isn't the real character of a person obvious long before he acts? Shouldn't one be able to see betrayal before any overt act to betray? One might assume therefore that this is the central theme that brings the four complex threads together.

But Marias then throws a rather hefty body blow to the reader who might be struggling with his complexity. "There is nothing worse than looking for a meaning or believing there is one." Deza says about two-thirds through. Not all that encouraging is it?

Clearly Marias is an accomplished stylist. This shows even in translation. He can roam from Proustian meditation to Bond-like adventure. But the shifts can become somewhat disconcerting and ultimately even tedious.

Definitely Schoenberg rather than Elgar.

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The Meaning of God in Human Experience by William Ernest Hocking
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Philosophy of Thinking Bigger

Prompted by the recent publication of John Kaag's American Philosophy, I decided to revisit Ernest Hocking after an absence of several decades. He had been an old friend. On re-reading him, however, I find myself in a position similar to that of Mark Twain and his father. It is indeed amazing how much Hocking has learned over the years.

The Meaning of God is not a work of theology. It is a study of religion. The difference is decisive because it means that Hocking's concern is with experience - feelings, and opinions as well as other perceptions - not with theory or rationalisation of religious belief.

Religious experiences don't occur primarily in the confines of ecclesial space or liturgical ritual. They are commonplace and part of daily routine, although often classified as something else, usually to protect ourselves from accusations of religious prejudice. Our secularised society prefers the fiction that religious sentiments are strictly private. They, of course, are not.

One of the most obvious examples of public religion is politics. "The religious loyalties of men have contained the secret of political loyalty as of other death-involving loyalties." This is what Hocking claims. One has only to recall the evangelical fervour of the recent American elections, even among the irreligious, to confirm Hocking's proposition.

Politics, like religion, is at the intersection of feeling and idea. Except through an idea, feeling cannot express itself in a socially productive way. "Few feelings are not improved by public reflection." Mere feeling is mute. Reflection demands a medium for the expression of feelings. This medium is called an idea. Ideas are what we think with, not what we think of.

Making connections among ideas is what we call reasoning. There is a particular kind of reasoning (C. S. Pierce called it 'abduction’ to distinguish it from deduction and induction) that seeks to include more and more feelings and opinions within the ideas being discussed politically.

Ultimately this approach to thought came to be called Systems Theory, which is an important practical as well as epistemological method in many modern disciplines. The essence of this method is: where there is disagreement about actions or priorities to solve a problem, try to formulate an idea of the larger system in which this problem occurs. [cf. Ackoff, Russell Lincoln. 1974. Redesigning the Future: A Systems Approach to Societal Problems. New York ; London: Wiley-Interscience. and Vickers, Geoffrey. 2001. Value Systems and Social Process. London: Routledge.]

There is also a theological implication of this approach to thought. The idea that has traditionally been used for thinking about the most comprehensive system, that includes all other systems and their feelings without residue, is God. As Hocking puts it rather laconically, "Men may lose their gods and still have God left...the displacement of old ideas by new does not imply the essential falsity of the old."

Fancy that, a politics aimed at making everyone right. Quite an achievement. Perhaps the time has come to reconsider Hocking and his religion.

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