História de Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Down the Peruvian Rabbit Hole

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, the book's English title, is not about reality nor is it biographical nor, as its Spanish title might suggest, is it a history. It is a novel that contradicts its own fictional intent by denying everything about itself. It's Jorge Luis Borges confessing that he didn't mean any of his Fictions. It's Paul of Tarsus repudiating all his repudiations of Judaism. In short, it's a story of paradox presented so the reader can't escape its presence as literature.

Alejandro Mayta never existed; and he never had a schoolboy relationship with the author. None of the various interviews conducted by the author is authentic because all of the subjects are also fictional. That they give inconsistent and contradictory responses about Mayta, his character, and his activities is down solely to the author's whimsy. The revolutionary events in which Mayta was involved never happened; nor did their aftermath as part of the history of Peru. After admitting these facts, the author then goes on to interview the 'real' Alejandro Mayta, who has no more existence than his first fictional incarnation.

The technique Vargas Llosa uses is not unlike that of Alice in Wonderland: absurdity asking for a suspension of judgment. In Alice, the reason is to demonstrate the illogicality of several linguistic theories disapproved of by Lewis Carrol. My guess is that Vargas Llosa has a similar intent in a Drink Me, Eat Me sequence that the reader is force-fed.

Much is mocked as absurd by Vargas Llosa, with about as much entertainment value, if substantially less comedy, as in Alice. Revolutionaries are rather dim-witted adolescents. Old revolutionaries are even more dim-witted and they lie even more than adolescents. Novelists can't distinguish between fact and fiction; and even if they can they prefer to lie as a matter of principle. Those on the bottom of the social ladder have been there for a very long time and are more or less habituated to a life of ugliness and filth. Revolution, particularly Marxist-inspired revolution, doesn't do much to change this condition, except to increase the general level of paranoia. Historians, like reporters, are little more than collectors of gossip.

Alejandro Mayta begins and ends in a garbage dump. In between is mostly metaphorical waste and disorder which increases progressively as the essential fact of modern Peruvian history. It is unclear if this is meant seriously or ironically by Vargas Llosa. If the former, then his tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the country's invasion by Cuban and Bolivian troops, who are repulsed by U.S. Marines, doesn't make sense. If the latter, then his constant realistic references to Peruvian racism, poverty and inequality don't make sense. The apparent intent is to sketch a sort of drear dystopia that somehow continues to function while its entire population slowly starves to death.

The one thing that is clear is that no one is content in Vargas Llosa's Peru. The ruling class is continuously threatened with homicide and a lack of decent coffee. The middle classes, particularly lawyers, can't continue living comfortably and are moving to Mexico. The poor, if they can, get off by bus to Venezuela; if they can't, they end up in a rapidly expanding Lima slum, probably in the cocaine trade. The mountain Indians live in a parallel universe buffered by coca leaves. The revolutionaries of the far right and the far left spend their time killing one another off in the shanty towns, mountains and jungles.

Some reviewers read Alejandro Mayta as a novel of hope. That it was written at all is, I suppose, a sign of such hope. A bit like planting a garden perhaps. But there is certainly nothing in the novel itself that suggests the possibility of a better future for any of its cast of characters. They are all doomed to remain down the rabbit hole forever.

Nonetheless, it is an awfully good read.

View all my reviews

The Arrow Impossibility Theorem by Amartya Sen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Why Nothing Works Right

The Nobel Prize-winning economist. Kenneth Arrow, died this past week. His famous Impossibility Theorem is, like many profound ideas, more talked about than understood. Sen's book is both a tribute to the man and an introduction this very disconcerting idea.

The Arrow Impossibility Theorem is arrived at through some tricky maths. But its conclusion is easy to state: In any group of people who have to reach a decision together but who have even slightly different preferences about where they want to end up, the decision they will reach is that which they all can accept but which none of them wants.

It applies to any group - electorates, markets, corporate boards, local councils, ad hoc committees, working parties, family meetings - wherever a choice among alternative courses of action is required. It applies even when, in fact especially when, members of the group are respectful and concerned about each other and the continued unity of the group. It is the default condition of all human deliberations.

The Theorem has been popularised as, among other things, the Abilene Paradox (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6... ) which is frequently mentioned but rarely explored by management consultants and experts in decision-theory. The full impact of its meaning has never really been appreciated either in the social sciences disciplines where it should be of paramount concern, or among the general public who deserve to know the inevitable consequences of decision-making in areas as diverse as democratic politics and corporate strategy.

The truth is that none of these decisions have any solid claim to representative rationality. The Theorem is not some quaint paradox that is of marginal importance to mathematicians. It is the WMD of collective choice, the granddaddy poisoner of political wells, the hydrogen bomb targetted on our pretensions of social rationality. The implications are profound, perhaps too profound to deal with. So the Theorem is largely ignored.

But we may have reached a point in both political and corporate life in which the Arrow Theorem can no longer be ignored. It is obvious, for example, that the national politics in the United States has cracked under just the kind of pressure Arrow predicted. Its principle electoral effect of dissatisfaction is growing. Frustration with democracy is intensifying. Acceptance of results wears increasingly thin as decisions disadvantage voters disproportionately.

The psychological effects are just as important. Continuous compromise promotes the sentiment of dictatorship, the strong man who can cut through messy democratic politics as the only real solution to the problem. Dictatorship can at least promise the satisfaction of some segment of society. Others may be tremendously disadvantaged but that's merely the price necessary to pay for coherence of action. It is to a sort of dictatorial sump that democratic attitudes deteriorate in a possibly inevitable progression.

In short, the Arrow Impossibility Theorem points to a fatal flaw in every form of social governance upon which we rely in civic and corporate life. It is a formulation of our social original sin. We are born into it without a choice. It sits in our somewhat smug society waiting for a chance to demonstrate its power. To date, no one has devised a convincing way to even mitigate its effects much less neutralise them. The least we can expect as the paradox bites deeper into social life is more vituperative party politics and more of Donald Trump.

Postscript: For a discussion of one promising approach to the Arrow problem see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

View all my reviews

Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Making Space

Quantum Gravity is the closest thing in Physics to a coherent explanation of the origin and fate of the universe - how it began, how it works, how it evolves. Quantum Gravity also has a pretty fair shot to reconcile the apparent paradoxes and contradictions involved in and between the theories of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Most recent scientific observations favour it over alternative theories as the way forward for Physics. But Quantum Gravity does fail to explain one important thing: meaning, including the meaning of the idea of Quantum Gravity.

According to the latest findings of empirical research in Quantum Mechanics, the fundamental constituents of the cosmos are fourteen or so 'quantum fields', the behaviour of which produces, more precisely constitutes, discrete particles of energy and matter. Despite the unintuitive character, and sometimes apparently paradoxical implications of Quantum Mechanics, every scientific test conceived and executed has confirmed its predictions. It is the biggest single scientific truth available at the moment.

Einstein's Theory of General Relativity states that Space and Time are not separate categories of existence but part of a composite Space-time. This may be tough to visualise but Quantum Mechanics makes the picture even less imaginable by portraying Space-time itself as a Quantum Field. Like other fields in Quantum Mechanics, it too is 'quantised', that is, composed of quanta, small indivisible bits. There is thus a smallest Space-time component which sets a definite lower limit not just on how small anything can be but also how densely compacted any material or energy can be. One implication, therefore, is that the mathematical horrors of General Relativity don't occur: the universe did not start as an infinitely dense 'point' at the Big Bang; nor do black holes consist of infinitely dense material.

At this point theoretical Physics starts to get properly spooky. Quantum Gravity considers Space, on its own, as a field. This field is theorised as composed of discrete 'threads', analogous to electromagnetic lines of force, which form 'nodes' when the threads intersect. The threads are conceived as 'loops' which then 'interweave' at the nodes. These nodes are the small, discrete bits of Quantum Space.

The most that can be said at this stage in scientific thought is that Space is somehow 'woven' by these discrete 'threads'. These are effectively, then, atoms of Space, upon which other quantum fields are somehow layered. Perhaps the most astounding aspect of the theory of Quantum Gravity is that Time disappears entirely as a basic component of the universe. Rather, Time is merely a manifestation of the underlying quantum gravitational field. Simple really!

In the world of Quantum Gravity, the principle of cause and effect no longer holds. Space, particles, quanta only exist when they interact. And they only interact probabilistically. Processes have starting points and end points. But a determinate connection between these points does not exist. Particles, quanta, fields interact but they do not cause 'future' states of particles, quanta, and fields because there is no determinate universal 'future'.

Therefore, there can be no sequence involving time. Time simply doesn't exist at the quantum level (happily perhaps because Special Relativity had already shown that time wasn't something anyone wanted to touch with a scientific barge pole). When the tortuously complex detail is put aside, it turns out the entire world is made of one 'Covariant Quantum Field', which includes Space as well as all the other fields of matter and energy layered onto it. Everything that happens in the universe emerges from this unified field.

Well not quite everything. The problem that Rovelli stays as far away from as he can is this: What the Covariant Quantum Field might not produce is Carlo Rovelli contemplating the Covariant Quantum Field. That is, nowhere in the theory is there an indication that anything like an idea, which is immaterial, can be produced. The only products of the field are material: space, energy or matter. None of these constitutes an idea. Nor do they collectively constitute the emotion that Rovelli clearly has about the Covariant Quantum Field. The issue is important to keep science from slipping into ideology, a pattern typical in modern science from Millsian economics to Darwinian biology to Nietzschean philosophy.

Rovelli implies that the Covariant Quantum Field does indeed generate ideas and emotions, at least indirectly, because it is the ultimate foundation of all that exists, including his brain and the readers'. There may be many rungs up the ladder from the field, to fundamental particle interactions, to non-quantum events, and ultimately to life, both human and otherwise. But the field, inevitably, is the ultimate source for all human behaviour, including human thought.

This argument would then include the thoughts of, say, Purpose and Success. Rovelli makes no attempt to explain the precise connections up the great chain of being from the 'sea foam' of the quantum fields to the grey matter of the human brain. But his implication is clear: We, our ideas, our actions, including the writing of a book about the Covariant Quantum Field are generated by the Covariant Quantum Field.

Although Rovelli's presentation is couched in terms of Quantum Gravity, it is precisely the same stand (and the same hubris) taken by generations of classical physicists who believed that the world ran exclusively on Newtonian laws - from atoms right up to professors of physics. It is called Reductionism: the claim that all of existence can be reduced to the laws, rules and observations of a single discipline. Judging by his incidental comments about the harmful effects of religion on science throughout the ages, it is immateriality that is his intended reductionist target. But this gets him into a bit of trouble. Ideas, in particular, don't fit easily into the theory. Any theory that claims universality ultimately has to deal with them.

Rovelli has his own intentions which are stated or implied in the book: to communicate facts and theories, to contribute to the prestige of his discipline, to express his poetic take on science, to establish science's superiority over other modes of inquiry. Finally, he is making a case that science is beneficial for the world; it is successful; it has value. None of these intentions are pure description. They are all ideas and they all involve what we commonly call purpose. And they all clearly have great emotional significance for Rovelli.

Where did these ideas, these purposes, and implicit criteria of success or value along with their emotional baggage come from? Who or what is responsible for them? How are they to be assimilated into political and social life? This book, according to the title, has a claim to defining reality. Any such claim needs more than mere disciplinary or even scientific justification. Physics cannot claim a privileged position. This is Scientism, the presumption the superiority of scientific authority in the description of the world.

One possibility is that Rovelli is being manipulated by Quantum Gravity to investigate itself, and the field is providing him the criteria for successful investigation at the same time. Unlikely as it is that the author would like such an interpretation, it's a logical possibility. Is there an alternative?

Could it be that purpose, intention, emotions are not a properties or implications of the field at all? Could it be that the Covariant Quantum Field has absolutely nothing to say about what is a criterion of better or worse, or of what constitutes success? To admit this possibility would mean that purpose and other ideas, like Quantum Gravity itself, are independent of the field. Such a possibility would require Rovelli's inclusion in the theory not merely as an observer who affects quantum results, but as an evaluator, a judge of the reasons for his inquiry in the first place, one who defines what a result is.

Purpose, for example, could well be what is called in Systems Theory an 'emergent property.' Such a property would not be a simple consequence of the behaviour of the field, neither logically nor physically. Emergent properties can't be predicted on the basis of the interactions in the field. Such an emergent property would fit with the random character of field interactions. But it would also 'transcend' these interactions. That is, some relations and interactions, like Purpose and Success, have the field as a necessary condition, but not as sufficient condition for their existence. Something else has to contribute.

Rovelli accepts the relativity involved in modern physics. But he doesn't like the relativity implied by differences in Purpose and Success, what might conveniently, if somewhat loosely, be called Politics, the process of the establishment of value. He considers particles but not people to be defined by their relationships. On the one hand he clearly detests religion for its dogmatic stance on truth and about what's important. On the other hand, he dislikes modern philosophy for its challenge to dogmatic claims to truth and about what's important. Only physical scientists, it seems for Rovelli, have the imaginative skill to understand the world and to express it adequately. This is not just a cosmology, it is a cosmological ideology.*

He is therefore ambiguous about what Quantum Gravity really means. He can only state rather tired cliches about the superiority of scientific method - science as exploring new ways of thinking; tireless scientific genius; religion, particularly monotheism, as an enemy to thought; philosophy as misleading nonsense. What he means by scientific method are the procedures and criteria he and his colleagues employ at the moment, whatever they are. But he doesn't want the philosophical arguments that justify his freedom applied generally. This he sees as 'relativism.' He wants the theory Quantum Gravity accepted by the public. But he doesn't want current theories to be taken literally, that is to be interpreted by non-scientists, as a description of the world. He wants us to rely on the experts to know what Quantum Gravity implies and to leave what it means alone.

In short, he wants power to realise his intentions. Ideologies are ideas that justify power. In this case, the power of physicists to establish the definition and boundaries of reality. Ideologies work by limiting the scope of what can be considered real and important, by prescribing what's valuable. The ideological import of the book is apparent in the title, and subtly confirmed in its content.

Is there space in Quantum Gravity for something else?

-----------------------------------------------

* An important clue to Rovelli's ideological intent is his inclusion of Shannon's Theory of Information to support the conjectures of Quantum Gravity. Written in 1948, this theory is hardly state of the art. However it does have a compatibility with Rovelli's point of view. It 'reduces' all of reality to bits of digital information. It is this theory which inspired the Beam Me Up Scottie of Star Trek as well as Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. It is also an idealised description of the totalitarian state in which all individuals are the information stored about them. Theories of this sort are not simply descriptions of the world. They transform easily and almost invisibly from method to ideology. Shannon's theory for example played a large part in the influence of Cybernetics in the 20 years following WWII. Cybernetics as an ideology deflected public and scientific attention away fro the discussion of ends, purpose, to the discussion of means, mainly the technology of industrial efficiency and war. See GR review of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Player Piano.

Contrast Shannon's reductionist's theory of information with that a semiotic theory of information. In Semiotics the unit of analysis is called a 'sign'. A sign is something that can be interpreted as having a meaning, which is something other than itself, and which is therefore able to communicate information to the one interpreting or decoding the sign. In Semiotics, words are signs, behaviour is a sign, anything with a potential meaning is a sign. So the Covariant Quantum Field is a sign. In fact a person is also a sign. Defined as a sign, a person is not 'decomposed' into bits, but taken as an entire human entity. This entity can, in fact insists upon, being interpreted and interpreting. It is not constituted by anything other than itself. Like quantum particles, a sign is always relative to other signs but not subordinate. Unlike quantum particles, the human sign can love. Perhaps Professor Rovelli might consider this sign as an alternative reality.

View all my reviews

 

Brothers and Keepers: A Memoir 
by 

John Edgar Wideman (Goodreads Author)

 

We Supposed to Die

Complicated family history can be wretched. If the complicated family history is that of a black American, it can well be unendurably tragic. John Edgar Wideman has such a family history: a brother sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1977; a son sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1986 (recently paroled); an uncle shot and killed in his own house. Being black in America exaggerates and accelerates all the typical problems of family life. And then adds a whole lot more.

Wideman writes as a man sitting on a knife-edge. How easily history could have been different. The slightest mis-calculation or mis-step or chance event and he could have been his brother locked up with no chance of release. While his brother broods continuously about what brought him to such a hopeless place, Wideman can only do the same and wonder at the consummate randomness of life in which there is no protection only the threat of the system.

His personal success in the system has produced, "A self no more or less in control than the countless other selves who each, for a time, seem to be running things."And even this tentative status is undermined in his conversations with his brother during the writing of the book. Not even his memories are secure. He is a man without a determinate history at all: " ...if his version of the past is real, then what's mine?" How honest is he really about his own life? How much of it has been wasted in not giving attention to that most important in it?

But Wideman is an artist. Every ounce of suffering and confusion and dissociation is used to produce something beautiful. He is a man, for example, who lives uneasily in two worlds. As a celebrated teacher and writer he has made it. But his siblings and extended family are where they always have been – largely struggling to maintain recognition of themselves as human beings. Wideman captures part of this state in his alternation between standard English and dialect. His prose in both is mesmerising. Each sets the other off as valuable and uniquely expressive.

This is a memoir which is hard to take. Not just because of its existential punch. The scenes of disintegration of the black community in Pittsburgh, of the rise of a compensatory drug culture, of the persistent and deep racism in the United States, of the expensive and counter-productive vindictiveness of the entire penal system were written forty years ago. 

The events themselves occurred twenty years before that. Yet they could have been written last week. Even after eight years of a black man as president, arguably the most intelligent and articulate in its history, America appears even more violently intent on maintaining the subjugation of its black population. 

Wideman's makes his purpose in writing clear, "I was trying to discover words to explain what was happening to black people." That he succeeds in this is beyond doubt. Only the effects of the words he has found are in question. They may not have been enough. His brother’s desperation in prison may sum the situation, "We see what's going down. We supposed to die."

The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What We All Lost

This is a short book, but also a long, if unwitting, epitaph; a heart-breaking celebration of a culture on the verge of its destruction.

The Jews of Eastern Europe - Poland, Lithuania, Russia and Romania - had the misfortune to have settled, usually by invitation, sometimes by coercion, in one of the most fought-over pieces of real estate on the planet. They were rarely under anyone's rule long enough to establish a political position or a collective voice or even recognition as human beings: "...fatherland for them is whatever country decides to conscript them."

Their culture was profoundly religious. "They are not rare visitors to God, they live with him...There is no other people that lives on such a footing with their God...They know that while they may be punished they will never be abandoned." The more his religious zeal is mocked, the more the Jew of Galicia and the Pale insists on an appearance that marks him out as 'God's Jew': untrimmed beard, scholarly intensity befitting the importance of the Torah, a second home in the prayer house, devotion to the rabbi who advises him and intercedes on his behalf. His culture does not run on money, of which there is little, but on prayer, of which there is an abundance. His is an economy of prayer lying under a layer of material poverty.

Isolated by law for centuries from the Christian inhabitants of these Christian countries, the Jews of Eastern Europe were also isolated by culture from the assimilated Jews of Germany and Western Europe. Despised by both Christians and Jews, they learned to despise themselves and their unique culture. They knew nothing of nationality, Jewish or otherwise. With no rights, only obligations, they yearned for escape, not from their culture but from their oppression. They wanted to escape to anywhere, as long as it was West.

But culture and oppression are linked in a sort of ecological dependence. Like the Native Americans, and the tribes of the Amazonian jungle, culture dissipates without the pressure of oppression and its provocation to resistance. To escape is to lose the need to resist, and therefore to assimilate into the culture which simply doesn't care about culture.

Religious indifference is a new sort of oppression which the emigrant Jew doesn't know how to deal with. Now he is despised because he is poor and merely strange. So he becomes part of a nation, to the benefit of neither the Jew nor the West:

"Anyone deserves the West who arrives with fresh energy to break up the deadly, antiseptic boredom of its civilisation, prepared to undergo the quarantine that we prescribe for immigrants. We do not realise that our whole life has become a quarantine, and that all our countries have become barracks and concentration camps, admittedly with all the modern conveniences. The immigrants - alas -do not assimilate too slowly, as they are accused of doing, but if anything much too quickly to our sorry way of living."

Wandering Jews learn French, Italian, and English (but not Spanish, Spain is not welcoming to Jews); they forget their native Yiddish. They do well because they work at it and they know how to 'read the country'. This is a skill honed by oppression. If they can get the necessary exit papers and if they can get into the quota, they go to America: "America signifies distance. America signifies freedom." Every Eastern Jew has a relative in America. In America he can still speak Yiddish, he thinks, just because of all the Jews there already!

In the preface to the 1937 edition, Roth notes the dismal fact that it is the German Jews who now must learn again to wander, either rounded up into ghettos or forced abroad like their Eastern brethren by the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. His apocalyptic final observation is, "There can be no European or European- Christian morality so long as the principle of 'noninvolvement' [by other countries in German anti-Semitism] is respected." "A chilly sort of family," he says, "this 'family of nations!'" Indeed, it was about to freeze solidly.

View all my reviews

Paranoia: A Novel by Victor Martinovich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Corporate Living

Oh, the challenge of being a Yuppie in Stalinesque Belarus: cell phones, and Marks & Spencer's, and macchiato and Lexus four-wheel drives; dominated by the KGB (MGB in Paranoia), dodgy electric circuits and Soviet-era quality architecture. It's like American Psycho but with the protagonist living in a two-room walk-up in the South Bronx. A certain tension is to be expected.

This is a land in which quasi-bohemian writers (of whom Anatoly Nevinsky, protagonist) and internet nerds confront the state security services. These are residents of the ultimate corporate, only lately Communist, state, which provides cradle to grave stability (repression), recognition (surveillance) and attentive care (harassment) for those who behave themselves (or don’t). Providing short-term, on-demand contract employment (no minimal hours) with the promise of the possibility of unlimited consumption of white goods, and cafe culture a la Casablanca 1942. A sort of pre-post-modernist idyll. Romania in 1988.

Much has been modernised since the clumsiness of the old Soviet republic. Even the KGB functions by creating a controlled advertising image rather than allowing the public to invent their possibly calumnious versions of the protectors of national morals. No more goons in leather coats. Just the laconic corporate slogan: "We see, we hear, we know" expressing the delicate combination of sensitivity and power in the central institution of Belarusian society. Google run by Trump.

"What's distinctive about the present epoch is that nowadays anti-utopias can be based entirely on factual material", says one of Martinovitch's characters. 1984 and Animal Farm had to be written by Orwell as impressionistic fantasies because documented facts about the Stalinist system were unavailable. But Martinovich paints from reality, in tones of concrete grey, a brutalist literature, therefore, with colourful splashes of BMW's and Audi A8's. Nothing needs to be hidden here. The game is played in the open. This is the definition of a free society, no?

It would be a mistake to consider Paranoia as merely an existential take on young adult life in present-day Belarus. It is that certainly. But the extremes Martinovich burlesques are facts of contemporary international, not just Belarusian, culture. Anatoly's daily life isn't much different from that of his peers in Europe or North America. Yes, clandestine sex is easier in New York City than in Minsk, but probably just as difficult for a struggling writer with limited resources in, say, Tokyo, and certainly in Jeddah. Like almost every young man of moderate education and minimal awareness, Anatoly tries to get on in a world he didn't make, falls in love with the wrong person, and doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut around authority figures. Anatoly could easily fit into Rupert Dreyfus's 2014 novel Spark, whose protagonist is a similar 'snowflake' who wanders into a collision with the British security services.

Do the maths: Take an Anthony not an Anatoly, let's say from Brooklyn rather than Minsk. Anthony-from-Brooklyn has no more job-choice than Anatoly-from-Minsk; he can work for City Bank or the government, the two biggest employers in New York City. And working for either one will throw Anthony-from-Brooklyn into the great panopticon of investigative vetting which will follow him the rest of his days. He will be continuously evaluated as to his team spirit, his ideological suitability, as he moves, perhaps, back and forth between the two employers (During my time in the military, something called 'adaptability polls' were used to assess just this; one's peers and superiors periodically forced ranked everyone in the cadre according to attitudinal traits considered relevant to loyal service; the results were used to determine promotion and references).

So Anthony-from-Brooklyn's career is then established. The paper-trail on which his reputation is recorded in corporate offices, and upon which his livelihood, his pension, and a large part of his identity hangs is who he is, his corporate identity. The fact that Anatoly’s equivalent records in Minsk are all in one place in the KGB archives hardly matters in the age of internet data-sharing. And if Anthony-from-Brooklyn happens to be Black, or Islamic, or just a mouthy white boy, he's just as likely to spend some time on Riker's Island as Anatoly is in KGB HQ detention cells. Anatoly and Anthony share much more than we might be willing to admit. For a start neither one is Republican.

What Martinovich describes are the essential features of life in the modern corporate world no matter what language is spoken or national political history. The corporation not the state rules. Constant vigilance over personnel and archival maintenance are essential to the smooth running of corporate interactions. The traditional concerns of bureaucracy are combined in this world with the tensions of security, both commercial and political. The result is a sort of permanent condition of high terror-alert, which of course is in itself terror. Neither torture nor physical threats are necessary to keep the peace. Instruments of control have been internalised: the fear of failure, of redundancy, of technological obsolescence, of inadequacy of either skills or, even more crucially, of will to succeed. Aspire or die. Dropping-out is a theoretical possibility but practically destructive to health and satisfying family life.

Belarus sounds like a horrid place to live. But not because of fear of imminent arrest, imprisonment, and exile. Belarus after all doesn't have a Siberian Gulag and has fewer incarcerations per head of population than the United States (554 vs. 715 per 100,000). The techniques of assuring political conformance are a bit subtler than in the old days. It's enough now to be able to wreck a career and make life an administrative nightmare among a relatively well-educated urbanised population. If you don't think the FBI and CIA write and store surveillance reports at a level of equivalent banality and triviality as those by the KGB in Paranoia, wake up and smell the ether (See that well known radical publication, The Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014...
578641993388259674).

No need any longer to prevent access to foreign luxuries in Belarus or anywhere else. Just make sure the right people, those who 'contribute', get them. And do keep the process through which contribution is defined a bit vague inside the corporate leadership of the KGB...and Citibank of course. Young people of the snowflake generation are so much easier to indoctrinate than the bourgeoisie ever were. Their feeling of entitlement is easier to exploit. Let the dissatisfied ones emigrate if they dare. Life out West isn't easy. And when they find out they need references, they'll be back. If not, there are others here who know how we work. Belarus is evidence that totalitarianism can absorb consumerist culture more smoothly than the reverse. It's the corporate way.

Having come of age during the Vietnam War and intense American nationalistic paranoia, I don't detect much difference between Anatoly's crime of "defamation of the Motherland" and the tag of "unpatriotic slacker, coward" I heard hurled at a friend who very sensibly headed North of 44 degrees 40 minutes in 1967. He, like a character in Anatoly's book, was dismissed from university for brash impoliteness to a professor with the sure and certain knowledge that he would be drafted and on his way to Cam Ranh Bay within months. La meme chose as far as I can see.

Conformity achieved through corporate incentive is far more effective than physical threat. Paranoia begins with an inversion of the biblical story of creation, "There was light, and then came darkness." The darkness he is referring to seems to be precisely the incentives that are the reality of everyone in Martinovich's Belarus. But not only there. We all suffer at least a bit from the same nagging suspicion that someone's out to get us. If not Vladimir, then Donald. So we play along. That, too, is the corporate way.

View all my reviews

 

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Continuing Struggle Against Civilisation

Black Earth is a remarkable re-interpretation of the Holocaust. Snyder goes beyond the statistical and sociological facts of mass murder in order to understand the underlying evil of the disaster. And he succeeds. His acute insights and narrative skills in the introductory chapter alone are worth the entire price of admission.

According to Snyder, Hitler's attempt to annihilate the Jews was not racially motivated nor was it concerned with religion as such. Hitler's intention was ecological and intellectual - to reverse the growing disequilibrium introduced to the planet by Jews as the carriers not of defective genetic material but of corrupt ideas.

To restore this ecological equilibrium, it was necessary to rid the world of the corrupting influence of Jewish ideas. The most important of these ideas is the distinction made by Jews between nature and morality. Morality is an invention of the Jewish mind which contradicts the laws of nature by limiting the strong through the collective power of the weak. Morality in all its insidious variants must be identified and rooted out.

Authentic politics, for example, must conform with the demands of nature, according to the chief political philosopher of the Reich, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt reasons that political power must be exercised only by the strong in their own interests (see for more on Schmitt: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... also the addendum below). Both Capitalist and Communist politics are divorced from nature because they have been conceived from Jewish distortions of natural law. The only authentic politics is one of persecution.

Nature is also political so that science is the study of how best to conform to the reality of nature. Reality is a world in which competition for survival - among nations not with nature - provides the only test of scientific or any other truth. Any scientific concepts which do not advance this competition are unnatural and, by definition, Jewish.

According to this view, therefore, Hitler was not irrationally or un-pragmatically hateful of Jews. He had a very clear rationality that was based on very reasonable presumptions and clear criteria of success, namely that it was indeed Jewish thinkers who had made the moral break with nature as attested in the Bible and other sacred scriptures.

Further, since it had been the self-confessed mission of the Jews, considered by them to be divinely mandated, to maintain this distinction between nature and morality, that is between the world and its creator, and to pass it down from generation to generation forever, the historical link to these ideas must be eliminated. QED: Jews must be destroyed.

Snyder's somewhat startling message is that Hitler viewed the Jews not as corrupters of civilisation but as the creators of civilisation. Civilisation itself, in its recognition of ideals like mutual respect and peace; in its encouragement of virtues like compassion and intellectual ambition, is the problem that the Third Reich was intended to solve. Jews in other words were not racially inferior; they had no race. Hence the term 'mongrels' which referred to the fundamentally un-natural position of Jews in the world. It was the absence of Jewish racial conscience and racial competitiveness that was their sin.

Whether or not you are persuaded by Snyder's rhetoric (as I am), you will not be able to forget its logic nor the challenge of its conclusions. The reason for continuing anti-Semitism, especially in the United States and in Europe, is precisely because of the continuing war against civilisation, the principles and aims of which are still those articulated by Hitler.

The implications for how one sees recent elections in the US and Europe are staggering. Trump, for example, is clearly pursuing the programme for the destruction of civilised society outlined by Hitler. Trusting in the robustness of American institutions to withstand this assault may be as pointless as it was in Germany in 1933.

Postscript

Another GR reader (see comments) alerted me to the similarity between the Nazi thesis about nature and that of the early 19th century Catholic philosopher, Joseph de Maistre. De Maistre's vision of life is certainly as bloody as that of the leaders of the Third Reich as summarised in this excerpt from his Soirees de Saint Petersbourg:

In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed! but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable, has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others: thus there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fishes of prey, quadrupeds of prey. There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself; he kills to adorn himself; he kills in order to attack and he kills to defend himself; he kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself; he kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him…from the lamb he tears its guts to make his harp resound… from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his skin to make a whip for his child—his table is covered with corpses…. And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all the others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man…. So is accomplished…the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.

Schmitt was a self-confessed admirer of de Maistre as a 'political realist', by which he meant one who knew how to distinguish between friends and enemies. Schmitt is de Maistre's equal in dismissing the 'sentimentality' of liberal ideas of human nature. Where he differs from de Maistre is his rejection (by silence) of providential action in the world. De Maistre considered the French Revolution a punishment by God for a European sinfulness for example.

Schmitt rejects this sort of theological meddling as unnatural. Schmitt had a new Darwinian foundation that was unavailable to de Maistre, and he made the most of it to justify the separation of politics and ethics. Or rather to create an ethic closer to the divine and, incidentally of course, supportive of genocide. It was God after all, operating through the laws of natural selection, who demanded the natural ascendancy of the strong. God has established the rule of survival of the fittest. It was man who broke that rule. Even God had been subtly naturalised by Schmitt. De Maistre had shown the way.

With Natural Law, you pick your desired outcome, and then work backwards to suitable premisses. Paul of Tarsus did it. Thomas Aquinas did it. De Maistre did it. And Schmitt did it. None of them liked the Jews very much. Seems like a pattern. See, for more on the perils of Natural Law: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... And for more on how it affects recent philosophical thinking see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

View all my reviews

East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" by Philippe Sands
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Unnatural Law

Philippe Sands offers a new theory of law packaged in a new literary genre in East West Street. Call them both 'phenomenological' or, perhaps less pretentiously, 'unnatural' because neither conforms with traditional presumptions in the law or literature. Both the theory and the genre break the rules. Specifically, the content of East West Street implies that the development of law is not a continuous rational process but a lumpy, messy confluence of emotion, sentiment and political in-fighting. From a literary perspective, this new theory demands a congruent mode of expression. Sands has therefore invented a novel, and initially somewhat disconcerting, combination of what might be called 'orthogonal forms', that is genres that are directed along distinct axes in literary space.

On the face of it, the three 'voices' of East West Street sit uneasily with each other. The personal memoir centred on the uncovering of details of the life of Sands's maternal grandfather, Leon, is just that: personal. On its own it would be of little obvious significance beyond Sands's own family. Similarly, the narrowly defined scope of his historical account of the Holocaust, limited mainly to the former Austrian city of Lviv in Galicia, is highly selective and contains little original scholarship or overall interpretation of the disaster. Finally, Sand’s legal commentary on the 1945 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials is schematic and almost exclusively focussed on only two men - Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin - the men who can be held most responsible, and given most credit, for the definition and successful prosecution of two of the specific charges made by the Court, namely Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide. This commentary is even further limited to the prosecution of one man, Hans Frank, the former Nazi Governor of Galicia.

The fact is that Philippe Sands is a leading practitioner of international law, a professor of law at University College London, the author of sixteen other books, writer of stage plays, and winner of numerous literary awards. This pedigree suggests that there is far more to East West Street than a light personal memoir, a fragmentary history and a sketchy commentary. The total is far more than the sum of its parts. The three parts - memoir, history, commentary – are clearly intended to fit together in a particular way. I believe they are meant to lead the reader to a specific point: an existential view of the law itself, quite beyond the issues of his family, the details of Galician atrocities and the prosecution of a single criminal. This view can only be revealed through this sort of innovative, even idiosyncratic, technique. The result is a quite substantive legal treatise but one that discusses the law in an intentionally oblique way and removes it from the constraints imposed by lawyerly expectations.

The use of a comparison, an historical point of departure, is illustrative of the theoretical problem that I think Sands is trying to work through in this combination of forms:

In the year 1209, the first major battle of the so-called Albigensian Crusade was underway at Beziers in the still independent Languedoc. The man in charge was the Abbot Arnaud Aimairic, a Cistercian monk sent by the pope to root out the Cathar heresy which had been developing in the region for the previous two centuries. The attacking troops found a melange of fighters as well as 20,000 or so Cathars and orthodox Catholic non-combatants in the town. The troops on the ground requested orders from HQ about how to deal with the confused situation. The abbot returned a decisive command: "Kill them all; let God sort it out" (Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius).

For this and other meritorious service, the abbot was rewarded with the bishopric of Narbonne by the pope. We in the modern world would almost universally consider the abbot, and the pope, guilty of war crimes. The fact that they, and their contemporaries, did not consider themselves criminals is down to a view of law which has been perennially fashionable, especially during the legal Renaissance of the period before and after the battle: so-called Natural Law Theory.

Natural Law is the idea that there is a 'foundation' for law which can be derived from an inherent, discernible rationality in human nature. Originally a Greek concept, Natural Law developed a Christian theological following that added the strength of divine revelation to support its premises of rationality. Anthropology and theology combined proved for many an unbeatable combination to guide the development of legal philosophy. For some it still does. It is this philosophy that would be defended most articulately by Thomas Aquinas later in the 13th century and delivered to present day legal minds in a number of variants. It is the implicit starting point for most discussions involving human rights and international law.

Natural Law might seem like a pretty solid idea at first glance. It claims that there is a definite rationality in law that can be deduced with some credibility, if not certainty, by analysing the needs of people and heeding the lessons of the past accumulated in ethical tradition and religious scripture. By comparing actual or proposed law with this standard of rational law, it is claimed a definitive critique is possible. Its conceit is that there is something intrinsic in the natural world that justifies and underpins the credibility as well as the direction of development of the law.

Like any rationalist thought, however, the conclusions reached in Natural Law depend primarily on the specific human needs one decides to recognise, and the nuance of the interpretation one might apply to precedents and holy writ. Both the needs and the interpretations are, of course, often, perhaps always, shaped by the desired conclusions of those doing the analysing and interpreting, usually those dominant in society.

To make this point just a bit sharper: Carl Schmitt, a leading Nazi theoretician (and Catholic), taking his intellectual lead from the English Thomas Hobbes, believed the primary human need was competitive survival of one's national group, one's Volk, in a world with limited resources. Schmitt considered Jews literally unnatural because they did not culturally accept this 'obvious' principle. The mere discussion of morality beyond this principle became immoral and was a sign of decadence in line with this starting point for Natural Law. Schmitt's logical conclusion based on the principles of Natural Law: Jews must be eliminated from society.*

So the conclusions of Natural Law applied at Beziers are quite in line with the morality (and interests) of those running the show. The killing of 20,000 or so people was unfortunate to be sure. But in the first instance, this was the consequence of acts committed in the furtherance of the summum bonum, the ultimate good, namely the salvation of souls. These acts were motivated, that is, in the furtherance of an unquestionably, for the participants, virtuous cause: the elimination of heretical beliefs which endanger the achievement of eternal life. Not much different then from the eternal success of the nation favoured by Schmitt.

Secondly, Natural Law has a lot to say about the means used to reach an obviously laudable goal. The primary intention of the pope's troops was the defeat of the armed Cathar resistors. This justified proportionate violence by the attackers. Given the conditions in the town, really the only proportionate means available was mass slaughter. Harm to the non-combatants was what we now call collateral damage, a secondary effect. Secondary effects are not morally decisive in Natural Law, and therefore may be conveniently ignored. And after all the harm done to the innocents would be more than compensated for by divine favour in death. In a sense the abbot was ensuring appropriate justice to all concerned - much like determining a judicial verdict on the roll of divinely inspired dice. As they used to say in computer programming: Garbage in, garbage out. It's all about where you begin.

Today, of course, both the abbot and the pope could be charged with, and probably successfully prosecuted for, Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide. The first because of the wanton disregard for the lives of non-combatants. The second because of the broader intention to eliminate from the Languedoc entirely by whatever means necessary those holding Cathar beliefs. And unlike most other laws, these two could be applied retroactively to the abbot and the pope even though they knew nothing of such laws.

A law-review type of cataloguing of previous cases and judgements from 1209 to 1945 would be unlikely to turn up any consistency in anthropological presumptions nor would it convince many, now or in 1945, of the validity of these two newly articulated crimes. To attempt therefore to connect the atrocities of Beziers with the atrocities of Lviv would yield nothing of legal significance. In a sense, this is where the disciplinary structure of professions breaks down. Some substantial discontinuity is involved that is not covered by the theory of Natural Law.

That Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide were not just unrecognised as criminal acts but commonplace before WWII is incontrovertible: the Belgians in The Congo, the Germans in Southwest Africa, the Turks in Armenian territory, the British in Australia, indeed the Americans on the Great Plains. All these acts had been committed in the living memory of at least some of those on the War Crimes Commission. Relatively liberal governments had been established in each of these offending countries decades before the acts were committed. Yet none of these, or many other, atrocious acts moved the world any closer to a definition of these crimes than had the siege of Beziers. Why not?

The professional criteria of acceptable argument, factual presentation, and continuity of judgment are established in any discipline for what Thomas Kuhn called 'normal science'. Normal science is constituted by routine professional thinking and procedures within a fixed paradigm, a theoretical framework, like Newtonian Physics or Bodily Flux in science and medicine. Or in the law, of established precedent and incremental, connected development. As long as theoretical anamolies - like Newtonian action at a distance or the mechanism of the spread of infection - are ignored, the profession chugs along quite happily, confident that some day anamolies will be resolved within the existing paradigm.

Getting from The Albigensian Crusade to World War II is not a matter of normal legal science, therefore. There is no continuous path of judgments and precedents that lead incrementally from one to the other, filling out the law, as it were, to the full extent of human need. There is a hiatus, a gap, a re-definition of need that must be explained by any complete theory of law. Hence Sands's somewhat bold literary move in not talking to the legal profession in legally acceptable language that is trapped 'within the box' of the dominant legal paradigm. Sands's is abnormal thinking, unnatural therefore to those acculturated to the strictly routine. But necessary to account for the gap.

The charges of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide did not exist in law before the Nuremberg War Trials. They did not come into being, however, because of some new analysis of human nature, or from an innovative interpretation of reason or the discovery of lost precedents, much less the latest biblical exegesis. They came about, on the contrary, because of the entirely non-rational, emotional involvement of individuals, typified by Lauterpacht and Lemkin, who had profoundly personal reasons for pursuing real justice for the crimes of the Holocaust. By real justice I mean in the first place the recognition of the character and severity of the crime committed. No degree of punishment or retribution can compensate for an inadequate description of the criminal act itself. The Holocaust is inadequately described as mass murder.

Sands’s technique for bringing this basic point into narrative focus is brilliant. He uses the city of Lviv as an emotional epicentre of the book. His grandfather Leon, as well as Lauterpacht and Lemkin, were all born and educated in the city and its environs before WWII. The families of all three men were all but wiped out in the Holocaust. Similarly, Hans Frank, the focus of Sands's commentary on the Nuremberg trials, was the Nazi Governor of Lviv and Galicia, and responsible for the 'round-up and disposal' of all Polish and Ukrainian Jews under his control to the death camps.

Sands triangulates on Lviv as the symbol of non-rational, familial affection and human attachment - emotion writ large no matter how unemotionally it is expressed. The emotion emanating from the city, therefore, is the motive force of his entire narrative. The title Itself comes from the road on which both Lauterpacht's and Lemkin's families lived and from which they were forcibly evicted.

Once expressed, these individual emotions find a place within Sands's technique not in an existing concept of law but in the "The community of nations.” This community is not just the group of victorious nations but the constituents of the organisation-in-formation, the United Nations. According to the formula created by Lauterpacht, this community “has in the past claimed and successfully asserted the right to intercede on behalf of the violated rights of man trampled upon by the State in a manner calculated to shock the moral sense of mankind."

This last phrase is from the 1945 International Bill of Rights of Man which was the public charter for the Nuremberg Court. It is noteworthy that it is a statement of social conscience not of anthropology or theology. It is not even a statement of philosophy such as Americans find reassuring in phrases like "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." Nor is it an allusion to historical inevitability such as both Americans and Marxists might use such as "When in the course of human events..." Rather, this phrase from the Declaration is an immediate, and acute, existential cry of outrage emanating from a revulsion about the activities of the Third Reich, a revulsion that has been shaped through experience and recognised generally as such around the world.

Natural Law theorists don't like this conclusion. It implies that the law has no foundation aside from human emotion and public sentiment, that law is 'merely' convention dictated by current mores. Such law has no guarantee except its acceptance, which might be only fleeting. What these theorists neglect is that the crimes in question would never have been 'discovered' much less prosecuted if it weren't for their origin in human emotion and socially formed conscience. We ultimately have no other guarantee except each other. This guarantee, however fragile, is not enhanced in any way by the theoretical opinions of a governing or intellectual elite, which are in any case likely to confirm the legality of whatever contemporary leadership there happens to be. This is just the case as had happened in 1930's Germany.

Sands then goes on to suggest another important aspect of the 'phenomenological unnaturalness' of the new laws employed at Nuremberg: the personal emotions and social conscience that originated and fostered these new concepts were subject to intense and reasonably open political argument leading up to the trials. The politics involved in these arguments are also non-rational even if markedly less emotionally charged. They certainly do not involve anything like analytical deduction from first principles, much less theological claims. Nor, surprisingly, do they depend very much on the personalities involved. There is a sort of objectivity inherent in the debate that in a sense 'purifies' the emotion and conscience thereby removing any trace of possible revenge from the intention to serve justice.

This last phrase might seem an idealistic exaggeration except that it is repeatedly implied in Sands's commentary on Lauterpacht's and Lemkin's roles in getting the two crimes into the Nuremberg indictments. Lauterpacht prevailed in getting Crimes Against Humanity accepted as a charge mainly because the Americans and Russians couldn't agree on the definition of 'atrocities' committed by the Nazis. Lauterpacht's concept and legal definition effectively synthesised the two views into an formula acceptable to both sides.

Furthermore, this synthesis had an effect that went beyond anything that could have been deduced from existing law. Because it included the German victims of persecution in Germany before the war, it was possible to prosecute for crimes committed in the 1930's, particularly but not solely against Jews. It was retroactive not because the acts involved were discovered to be eternally criminal, but because they were found politically indefensible at the time and should be prosecuted even though no law had been in force when the acts were committed.

The story of Lemkin's promotion of the concept of Genocide is also instructive. Lemkin was a scholar who had been assembling evidence in Stockholm about the Nazi grand strategy of annihilation from the 1930's onwards. He was convinced before many others that the incremental ratcheting-up of German persecution had blinded the world from the real intention and ultimate end of the German government. In Washington DC, he argued his case as early as 1941, largely ineffectually. This was due at least in part to his insistent manner and his apparent lack of any political sensitivity. Even Lauterpacht disagreed with him on almost everything except the imperative of justice.

Consequently, Genocide was not included on the Nuremberg indictments until late in the game. Ultimately it was included not because of, but despite, Lemkin's harassment of virtually every official he could access. It was therefore certainly not charm or personal charisma that swayed the judiciary panel. They recognised the need for Genocide as a defined crime in the light of justice not revenge, not even simply of politics. The wisdom of this decision has been vindicated repeatedly - in Rwanda, Serbia, Sudan and Liberia among other places.

I am not an expert in law of any kind, much less the arcana of international criminal law. Nonetheless my rubbing up against legal minds in university life suggests to me that Sands's portrayal of the trajectory of legal development through the confluence of personal emotion, social sentiment, and communal politics, leading to the articulation and prosecution of positive law does constitute an interesting and innovative new theory.

Why then would an acknowledged legal scholar not explicate formally the elements of this theory within the disciplinary genre if the profession? I suspect the answer is that he doesn't want to start or to continue an argument with other legal scholars. Phenomenological exposition in any area is risky because it transgresses disciplinary boundaries and generally causes only confusion if attempted among one's professional peers. It, therefore, doesn't often get very far, and can alienate those who might be subtly sympathetic.

Much more effective, then, to expose the elements of a new theory, without even calling it a new theory, among a non-professional audience. This is what I think Philippe Sands has done, and done exceptionally well indeed. For any infelicities in my interpretation of his intentions I can only apologise to him.

*For more on Schmitt and the origins of his legal philosophy see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

View all my reviews

The Killing Wind: A Chinese County's Descent Into Madness During the Cultural Revolution by Tan Hecheng
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bureaucratic Nightmares

Tan blames the official Chinese administrative Bureaucracy, because of its existence, its persistence, and its peculiar significance, for the lethal insanity of the Cultural Revolution . But I don't buy it.

Bureaucracy doesn't explain the emotional intensity, the physically violent ferocity, the sudden eruption and equally sudden cessation of what was essentially a gang culture among the various factions of the Red Guards.

Bureaucracy doesn't account for the holding of family grudges for decades and yet the failure to remember the civic horror of the destruction of virtually all institutional life immediately upon the return to somewhat normal living conditions.

Bureaucracy doesn't produce the evident hatred or the techniques of masochistic torture that millions of so-called 'black elements', former landed peasants and their children, endured.

Bureaucracy isn't instinctively on the lookout for the creation of a defenceless scapegoat in these 'black elements' as a response to obviously false rumours.

Bureaucracy, if anything, remembers, it doesn't forget. It likes things documented and in triplicate, and with clear authorisation by the rules stated in codes, and regulations, and statutes and precedents. Yet these are entirely absent in the execution of almost every aspect of the craziness of 1967.

Bureaucracy has an organisational solidity, a pyramidal stability that ensures the consistent transmission of orders and directives from the top of the pyramid to its foundations. This is not the way in which the Cultural Revolution, according to Tan's own account, was thrust upon the country from Mao. Communication with Beijing was not through 'proper channels' but via publicly broadcast directives which were interpreted in widely different, often contradictory, ways throughout the country.

The Bureaucracy was Mao's target, Tan says. Why would the Bureaucracy lead the effort to ensure its own destruction; and when that effort ultimately failed, proceed to business as usual as if no such effort had ever taken place? Why would it continue to promote the cult of Mao afterwards?

Almost as an aside, Tan says "The tragedy of China is that experience has accustomed our people to disaster and bloodshed, and even to apathy and forgetfulness." This is a heart-rending cry of cultural despair and the reader is brought almost to tears by Tan's twenty-year long crusade to overcome both apathy and forgetfulness among his countrymen, more than forty years after the events themselves. But how on earth can Bureaucracy be blamed for the inuredness of an entire nation to disaster and bloodshed. Surely Bureaucracy would provide the archival means for analysing, debating, and, in a sense, reliving these experiences however terrible.

Yet another incidental remark seems out of place to me. Tan thinks that "It's not death that's at issue, but how it happened and for what reason." I read this as the motivation for the book. He researches and writes, in other words, in order to understand. But not to achieve justice for either the dead or the still living who will soon be dead. His intention is not even to assist in creating a programme so that the horror can't happen again. Is there some sort of peculiar Chinese rationalism that finds it sufficient to merely understand in order to be at peace after such national trauma?

If the uncovering of the reasons (and by reasons I think he means individual motivations rather than institutional logic) for these deaths rather than the deaths themselves are what is most important to Tan, I must confess to being on a different moral planet. It seems to me that Tan wants to ensure that the deaths are recorded in history, as having occurred. But he also expresses himself as if he is writing into a particularly Chinese cultural sensitivity which prohibits him, and many of the subjects he has interviewed, from expressing personal outrage and desire for revenge at specific perpetrators. It seems as if it is more important to see the motivations of these criminals as a sort of cultural mistake that has to be recognised before any reforming or judicial action can be considered.

(I have the same sense of someone sitting on the writer’s shoulder, when reading Catholic theologians who are trying terribly hard to articulate a new theological idea without arousing the Vatican censors. It's as if the writer is not merely trying to find the least offensive formula, but also trying to disguise his own efforts at self-restraint)

This cultural reticence to blame and punish specific individuals for real criminal acts, combined with the quick facility to blame groups like the 'black elements' for obviously fictional cultural deviance, and summarily kill them on account of it, is deeply disturbing. Perhaps it is connected somehow to the Chinese penchant for giving poetic titles and slogans to often horrific social events: The Great Leap Forward, Smashing the Four Olds, Sweeping Away All Ox Demons and Snake Spirits, Rectifying The Class Ranks, or, one of the most disturbing, The Celestial Maiden Scattering Flowers for the use of dynamite to execute political class-enemies. Perhaps metaphor in Chinese both promotes and inhibits rationality.

A related mystery which Tan refers to but which he doesn't think needs explaining is the fundamental non-rationality of responses to the conditions at the time. He indicates, for example, that, "One of the key characteristics of the Cultural Revolution was constant reversals." The reversals he refers to range from policy directives from central government that contradicted each other from week to week, competing factional groups which were approved as orthodox one week and condemned as 'capitalist-roaders' the next, orders given at one level countermanded or cancelled at another level. Mob-rule is rarely logical. But the frequent shifts in direction of official Party policy were drastic and continuous. Yet people continued to respond to them until they were stopped by the army. Yet another consequence of metaphor?

This general attitude toward one's countrymen: socially deferential and reserved but simultaneously unconcerned about individual well-being, even death, combined with the capacity for violent and emotional arousal may well be a misconception on my part. The apathy that Tan criticises may be a preferred option if it is not. His nightmares about Bureaucracy run amok justify just about any coping strategy that is at hand.

In any case, for the moment I can find no better way to express my confusion. Tan's work is undoubtedly courageous and important. But it is courageous and important in ways that are beyond my ability to appreciate. One can only wish him and his fellows good luck… and great fortitude.

View all my reviews

Dancing with Dinosaurs: A Spirituality for the 21st Century by Mark Patrick Hederman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Lousy Lizards

If you want a compelling argument why not to be or become a Christian, much less a Roman Catholic, this is your book. Alternatively, it is a case study in how not to write a book, why some books should never be published, and what readers of any stripe at all should burn as cultural obscenities. It is this alternative that allows me to overcome my embarrassment and review the thing

Mark Patrick Hederman is Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery of Glenstal, the largest monastery in Ireland. A churchman therefore of some repute. I came to this book because it seemed to connect vaguely with my interest in the ecclesiastical origins of the modern corporation.

I had some hope of insight relevant to my interest when I read on page 14 that "Churches, banks, and multinationals are some of the modern breed of dinosaurs." Certainly one might expect some criticism of the Church then, some morsel of insight how the dinosaur-like status of the Church came about and what might be done about it. As it turns out: Not a chance in hell.

Part 1 is a wandering empirical stream of consciousness filled with a variety of factual asides that have no apparent connection with each other or to an overall argument. These include, among other gems: the precise date of St Valentine's Roman martyrdom (14 February 270 AD plus or minus a few years); the levels in 2010 of Irish exports and tax rates; the patent expiry dates for several products of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals; the annual turnover of RyanAir; and the fact that a character named Corrigan in an Irish novel is based on the American priest Phillip Berrigan who was a civil rights activist of some considerable fame.

None of these random facts is apparently meant to mean anything further. Hederman does however dwell with particular non-sequiturial relish on aspects of the former New York World Trade Center. The reader may be edified to know: the tonnage of steel in the World Trade Center (176,000 tons, metric or long tonnes is not specified); that a Boeing 707 wouldn't have had enough mass or fuel capacity to cause the WTC to collapse; that the Boeing 767, which did crash into the building, went into service 19 years before the 9/11 tragedy; and that the Japanese architect of the WTC suffered from vertigo. What any of these observations and factual assertions have to do with dinosaurs, ancient or modern, or spiritual existence is left entirely to the reader's imagination.

Part 2 begins with a poem entitled Snake, presumably an allusion to the lizard-descendants of the dinosaurs, by D. H. Lawrence. The action in the poem involves the eponymous beast disappearing into a hole in a wall. There is no attempt to explain either the relevance of the poem or its connection to the rest of the chapter.

Snake-hatred however is clear. Hederman doesn't like snakes because they are 'horizontal' creatures which are somehow antithetical to the 'vertical' resurrection humanity is called to. The historical process of evolution proves his point: Is it not the case that our lizard-like ancestors crawled and yet we walk? QED: evolution is toward not just the vertical but the ultimate vertical of resurrection. Teilhard Chardin, perhaps, with a phallic Omega Point!

Hederman is a great believer in the theory of evolution. But for him evolution is not a random Darwinian process of genetic trial and error. Rather, "Evolution occurs according the direction or intentionality towards which humanity strains." Yes, folks, we will ourselves to move up the evolutionary ladder. We wish for hands, and claws disappear. We developed beyond our primitive one-part, reptilian brain because, well.... we wanted poetry! Our three-part brain is one of the most convincing proofs of the Holy Trinity and a model of how God interacts with himself.

I'm making none of this up. Hederman may have read Henri Bergson sometime in his life and decided that Bergson's élan vitale was just the thing he needed for his apologetics. So he reifies this mysterious force, makes it subject to human direction, and simultaneously links it to the Trinity. What a thinker.

Part 3, The Church as Dinosaur, renewed my hope for some sort of rationality. But once again I was cruelly disappointed. Hederman continues his reptilian theme with a sizeable snake-bashing extract from the book of Revelation. Again no connection is made to the remainder of the text which is an extended potted history of the Catholic Church.

One expects to see the promised ecclesial dinosaur described at some point in this history. Again, no joy. While the various historical contingencies of ecclesial development and the Church's occasional lapses into total corruption are lightly mentioned, we are assured that “infallibility is the dogma in Roman Catholic theology which ensures the progress of the dinosaur along the right path." In other words, the Church can congratulate itself that it has found the doctrine through which it can rest easy about its corruption, both individual and organisational. Dear old dinosaur.

Part 4: God as Dinosaur. Yet another poem with no exegesis or explanation. Lots of pious stuff about the God of Love, which ignores any mention of the insane divine tyrant of older biblical texts as well as the aggrandising hubris of Paul of Tarsus, the first Christian author.

Hederman does, though, make an unusually bold, one might say rash, claim: "Before the dawn of consciousness we have been projecting our fantasies onto that screen we call God." Rash because he appears to make a connection between that very tendency and his own statements of belief. But not to worry because Catholics are apparently immune from the otherwise universal flaw of projection, protected as they are by the marvellous doctrine of infallibility.

Not that Christianity hasn't made mistakes. Sure it has; and Hederman, no doubt, is among the first to cast a righteous stone. His stone is well-formed and well-aimed: The big mistake Christianity has made is not to have stuck with its biblical guns and rejected the temptations of rational thought, especially that developed during the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas has a lot to answer for to Hederman, who apparently finds the ideal intellectual environment sometime around the death of Valentine (plus or minus a few years). I think Hederman would feel right at home amid the searching minds of evangelical West Texas.

Part 5: Some Dance Steps. Another unexplained poem, this one by Rainer Maria Rilke, leads off. But the narrative quickly returns to the, by this time, mortally-wounded serpent. We can get rid of its corpse as well as any residual serpent-in-us by believing in the doctrine of the Trinity. We dance with dinosaurs when we involve ourselves in the perichoresis, literally the dancing around each other, of the three persons of the Trinity.

Why we should want to dance with a dinosaur, or how cutting in to the Trinity is a spiritual achievement, have never been established anywhere in the text, but nonetheless both are presumed to be a good thing. The book actually has little to do with dinosaurs, either literal or figurative, secular or religious. And it has absolutely nothing to do with spirituality, that is, about the personal experience of transcendence. It's two obsessions are amateur herpetology and sterile religious formulas. If those turn you on, Hederman is your guy.

View all my reviews

 

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Life by the Numbers

Numbers are everywhere - Real, Natural, Imaginary, Perfect, Amicable, Abundant, Deficient, Triangular, Prime (including both Mersenne and Pernicious as well as Twins) to name a few. And they're all here in The Housekeeper and the Professor, which Ms. Ogawa wrote in 2007. The Professor is of mathematics and has amnesia; the housekeeper is devoted and has a son. This melange constitutes the cast of a charming story of mathematics and love, subjects with a connection that is less than obvious. But there is a connection and it is fundamental and profound.

For a mathematician, defined by intensity of temperament not level of education, numbers are not simply classified as 'kinds' or 'types'. They are living species with distinctive genetic characteristics, with real family resemblances and lasting relationships, indeed with personalities. Some are rare, some shy, some awkward, some maddeningly unpredictable. Some may be hidden in infinity, some are waiting, desperate to be identified, and some may even be the last of their line, but we can't be sure. The ultimate mathematical accolade afforded to any number is to give it a family name, a formula by which all its relatives can be identified, even those we haven't met yet.

Thus the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 10 equals 55. But that is just this number's first name, as it were. It's family name is n(n-1)/2+n. All the numbers, 1 to n, in this family are related to each other and have this name. The numbers themselves have always known this, we as thinking human beings who aren't numbers, took some considerable time to recognise the fact.

Numbers, as living things, of course interbreed. They may be members of different families simultaneously. Plotting out the sister and brothers and cousins and aunts and the in-laws of numerical familial relations is what keeps mathematicians up at night. There are so many interesting genetic modifications, so many hidden liaisons, so many queer numbers waiting, and proudly wanting, to be outed. And the discovery of new families increases the possible connections among all the families. There's no end to the fun.

But why is such an appreciation of numbers of significance in a piece of fiction about amnesia? I think the answer to this question is best found through a comparison: The American novelist, Nicole Krauss, published her first book, Man Walks Into a Room, in 2002. Her novel has the same premise as Ogawa's, namely the condition of amnesia in a man who has suffered severe trauma. Both books then explore the relationship between memory and feelings in the victim - on the residual emotional bonds the victim maintains from his past, as well as their ability to create new relationships of intimacy.

Ogawa's amnesiac is even more disabled than Krauss's because the Professor's condition is anterograde amnesia which inhibits the creation of any new memories. So his memory 'store' consists of his life up to his early 30's plus the last 80 minutes, which recycles like a CarCam with a 16GB memory card. The condition of Krauss's victim is merely retrograde, meaning historical memories only are affected. He has, as it were, started a new reel in the film of his life; the entirety of this reel is available to him.

It is clear from the beginning that Krauss's story is going to end tragically. Samson Greene, her protagonist, whose trauma erased his memory back to his adolescence, is an emotional goner. His wife is not merely a stranger to him, she also evokes not the least emotional response in him; nor do any of the mementoes, photographs and other trinkets of their life together.

It is possible in fact that Samson is permanently crippled emotionally. Loss of memory is the equivalent of a comprehensive loss of affection and affective ability. He, sadly for the reader, also has not the slightest inclination to re-kindle his marriage and considers himself none the worse for it. He is not cruel, merely ennuied; his strongest emotion is melancholy

Ogawa tells a very different story. Although her mathematics Professor has a blank memory from his early 30's, his emotions are still stirred by the son of his housekeeper with whom he immediately feels an intense relationship of care. Despite the fact that the Professor must re-create this relationship every day from scratch, it in fact deepens on the basis of the mathematical tutorial that he has undertaken with the boy and his mother. His memory is blank, yet he has some level of residual emotional instinct and his capacity for relationship to his past life still exists.

I think that it is only in comparison with each other that both these novels can be recognised as profound metaphysical statements, contradictory to each other, but self-verifying by the protagonists, perhaps even to their authors. If I am correct, the responses of readers will depend primarily on the fundamental presumptions they hold not just about life but about existence itself. Here's why:

Krauss presents a decidedly Aristotelian vision of the world. Samson Greene is a physical scientist. He is a materialist in the sense that he lives in a world of strict cause and effect. Memory is a necessary causal condition for Samson’s emotions. Everything must have a cause and all causes are material in character. So no memory, no emotion. The cause/effect chain in his brain has been interrupted. The result is not simply that he doesn’t recognise his wife, he doesn’t recognise himself. He has lost his identity. He cannot remember his own name. While he mildly regrets these facts, he feels nothing more about them.

Ogawa's Professor is Platonist rather than Aristotelian. He lives in a world of Platonic forms - the apotheosis of which are numbers - that are independent not only him but of the world itself. Numbers are "contained in the notebooks of God himself." In effect numbers are attributes of God: eternal, perfect, trustworthy, and, most significantly, uncreated. They are not part of any chain of cause and effect. Yet their reality mysteriously governs the world. They are unaffected by the Professor’s injury and therefore provide what is a spiritual continuity in a materially interrupted life. While these number-forms cannot compensate for the Professor’s material deficiency, they permit him to keep his identity, which for a Platonist is a spiritual not a material entity. Numbers also mediate his current, otherwise fleeting, relationships, which spiritual things as well.

Consequently, Krauss’s story is one of irretrievable tragedy. Irretrievable because the gap in causality can never be recovered. The gap is a hole into which Samson's existence has fallen. He continues to be in the world but as a fundamentally altered being. That same gap exists for the Professor, and is just as materially unrecoverable. But the number-forms maintain their influence and ‘remind’ his material body on a daily basis of their existence, and his. They evoke the Professor's emotions, particularly love, which are not materially but spiritually-grounded. The Professor is debilitated but his ontology, his mode of being, is what it has always been.

Samson suffers mildly but has no real grief. He is now something other than human. He will probably function adequately and be perceived as normal, if somewhat aloof, by the world at large. The Professor on the other hand, may be pitiable to some, like his sister-in-law, and he does suffer, often intensely. But he is not pitiable to his housekeeper and her son. Through practical love and instinctive respect, they adapt to his condition and learn to live in his Platonic world, to their benefit as well as his. In a small but important way, he has improved the world.

Toward the end of Ogawa's book she has the Professor write a formula as a insistent communication to his sister-in-law:

This formula is known as Euler's Identity after the 18th century Swiss mathematician. It has been called the most beautiful formula in mathematics. Its beauty lies in its synthesis of at least four fundamentally different mathematical universes: Transcendental, Imaginary, Natural, and Irrational numbers. Each of these mathematical families has a genetic character as distinct as, say, the genetics of an earthworm and a human being. On the face of it, they should have no family connections whatsoever. But this is precisely what Euler's Identity shows they do have. It is an unparalleled 'abduction,’ or intuitive leap that couldn't have been arrived at by logical deduction or empirical induction.

The significance of Euler's Identity in the book is reasonably clear: It is the Professor’s way of expressing the synthesis of the worlds that he, his sister-in-law, his housekeeper, and her son are living in. Each is included without being denied, just as each mathematical family is included without being negated or changed in the Identity. A brilliant literary as well as mathematical insight therefore.

I have no idea if Ogawa has ever read Krauss, or if she has whether she intended to write a fictional riposte to Krauss’s Aristotelian materialism. Regardless, the two books certainly help to demonstrate what I think is the essential point of the other: It makes a fundamental difference in our lives what implicit philosophy we assimilate or adopt, perhaps without any awareness of the event. Perhaps we are simply born into one tendency or another, without the possibility of choice.

In either case, I am an inveterate Platonist and, like the Professor, find numbers unaccountably comforting. Who knows, they might even help me through my increasingly deficient aged memory. So for me Ogawa has written something far more than a merely charming piece of fiction. She has, either intentionally or inadvertently, addressed a fundamental issue of human existence. Thank you Ms. Ogawa.

See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... for a discussion of the implications of these two books as a critique of science more generally.
See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... for another literary use of number theory.

View all my reviews