Snow by Orhan Pamuk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An Aorist Country

Religion is rarely about dogma or belief and almost always about membership in a group and the feeling of belonging it creates. Snow is an absurdist novel about religion as community and its communal conflicts.

The protagonist, Ka, is a sort of thirty-something adolescent who finds himself in a blizzard, in love, in a state ruled by paranoia, and in the midst of a local revolution begun by a provincial theatre-group (remarkably like a Turkish version of Heinrich Boll's Clown). This constitutes his isolated but very god-like, omniscient community: "In Kars everyone always knows about everything that’s going on."

But Kars, situated as it is in Eastern Turkey, is hardly a single community. Its history is Russian, and Iranian, and Ottoman, and even a bit of English. Its inhabitants are Kurds, and Armenians, and Georgians and Azeris as well as Turks. And even among the ethnic Turks there are as many communities as there are distinctive interpretations of Islam.

Each of these communities, according to their members, is created by God. Various physical aspects of the Karsian world evoke God for the various communities. For example, “Snow reminds Ka of God!” Particularly its silence. But this is his community; mainly because after living as an emigre in Germany for so many years, he has no other. In Kars, he finds solace mainly because he has discovered empathy "with someone weaker than himself," namely the poor, uneducated, confused provincial Turkish folk. But that isn't how the locals see things.

The locals have a variety of religious communities from which to choose, ranging from radical Islam to secularist atheism. This latter term is not one of belief but of membership: "...that word doesn’t refer to people who don’t believe in God: it refers to the lonely ones, the people whom the gods have abandoned." That is, those who have no community.

Most of the local communities have a common enemy - the state. The state, since the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, has attempted to replace rather than include local communities within itself. But it is merely a source of what we have come to know in the age of Trump as 'fake news.' Moreover, also as in the Trumpian vein, the state is an aspiring religion, with the sovereign power that all other religions would like to have. It uses this power and legal violence to present a binary choice to the population: ‘My Fatherland or My Headscarf.’

The intractable conflict created by this situation isn't new in Turkey (nor for that matter in America). It existed even in the Empire. In part Pamuk expresses this through constant historical flashbacks and frequent narrative references like 'later I found out' or 'eventually we learned.' But he also captures the repetitive character of Turkish life through an ingenious literary technique that probably can't be rendered exactly in English.

Like Classical Greek, Turkish has a verb form, the Aorist or Habitual, which, although expressed in English, isn't explicit. The Aorist aspect is one of timeless repetition. It connotes past and future as well as present. The sense of the Aorist can be shown most simply in the crude English expression 'shit happens.' It doesn't just happen now; it has always happened and it always will. Turkey is the ancient, empoverished, embattled city of Kars, writ large, with its "endless wars, rebellions, massacres and atrocities." Shit just keeps happening.

The American version hasn't been written yet but it's long overdue.

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The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Very Refuse of Thy Deeds

The ethical principles of justice and charity are the enduring legacy of Judaism. Through countless generations of the Jewish community, they have been transmitted to Christianity and Islam, and through them to the world, as the essential foundations of what most of us can agree is civilized society.

Yalom recognizes this Judaic contribution to human existence. He also recognizes that without the cultic and social loyalty of Jews throughout the centuries, such a contribution would not have survived as more than the short-lived refuse of tribal convention. It is the perennial insistence, one might say obstinance, of the community that has been necessary to provide "a light to the Gentiles."

Yalom also recognizes the philosophical problem created by the success of the Jewish community. His tale, in fact, follows two threads of this problem. The first thread is represented by the life of Baruch Spinoza, a 17th century Jewish philosopher. Spinoza accepted the ethical demands of justice and charity but rejected their cultic and social matrix. Consequently he was excommunicated, one might say unjustly and certainly with little indication of charity, from the Jewish community. This is the philosophical problem presented by an ethical community: must it be willing to contradict it own teaching in order to ensure its ability to teach?

The second thread is also connected with the success of the Jewish community. This success has always been achieved in the face of enormous historical forces aimed at destroying Judaism and its contributions - most recently the insanity of European fascism. Yalom uses a fictionalised biography of the leading Nazi theorist, Alfred Rosenberg, as his protagonist to make a point: an important reason for anti-Semitism is the very survival of Judaism, both as a religious community and as a dominant component of European culture. In Yalom's narrative Rosenberg's virulent anti-Semitism is made problematic by the attested devotion of the German poet and national symbol, Johann von Goethe to the Jew, Spinoza. Goethe as well as Rosenberg are themselves the product of Jewish culture.

These two issues are the components of the eponymous Spinoza Problem as presented by Yalom. On the one hand the Jewish community is a necessary condition for achieving what it has accomplished - a relatively civilised society. On the other hand this same community attracts destruction from within and without itself because of what it has achieved. Yalom does an outstanding job of articulating this problem, actually a paradox, as the existential condition of Judaism. He subtly compares this 'Jewish problem' with a parallel problem in the psychiatric community: are there neuroses, for example the fanatical anti-Semitism of an Alfred Rosenberg, which should be 'excommunicated' as beyond hope of correction?

What Yalom is not so good at appreciating is the theological significance of the problem - from psychiatric as well as Jewish perspectives. He makes it clear through comments by his narrator that for him theology is equivalent to superstition, that the scientific attitude of men like Spinoza and his successors in the Enlightenment (especially Kant) make theology not only silly but dangerous. Theology, for Yalom, is the creating of God in the image of man, and should be stopped because it then tries to impose this image as true. Psycho-analysis is the alternative to superstition and as such is a rational substitute for theology.

Yalom obviously has a point. Theology has as often as not been used to justify whatever structure of power happens to be in place - males, believers, monarchists, democrats, fascists, clerics and other assorted bullies from the era of Socrates to the era of Trump. But then the same could be said of much of psychology and sociology, not to mention the hard science directed toward commercial or military superiority. All human inquiry, not just theology, is affected by what is perceived as human interests. There is no disinterested inquiry, nor should there be in a world that has problems to solve.

Yalom misses this point, although it is implicit in his formulation of the novelistic situation. Justice and charity, even supposing we can agree on a single definition of what they might be, are incommensurable on the face of it. This is a fundamental problem. The two criteria (or virtues, or values) are contrary, although not necessarily contradictory, aspects of what philosophers call the Good. As such there is no rational way to make a 'trade-off' between these two criteria of the Good in any real situation. Until the two terns can be somehow reconciled, justice and charity remain abstract and ethically sterile.

The role of theology is precisely to create such a reconciliation between contrary Goods. It does this not by creating an image of God in human form, but by probing for a 'bigger' criterion of the Good which includes both justice and charity, in the manner say that Relativity Physics includes Newtonian Physics as a special case, or the way in which Euler's Theorem unifies radically different universes of numbers in mathematics.

The image that theology creates, therefore, is not of humanity writ cosmically large, but of individual human beings unified with each other in community. The greater the number of people involved, the more difficult the problem of unification, and the closer one comes to that unachievable asymptote, theologically termed 'God'. The problem being addressed in theology is precisely that raised as paradox by Yalom: the status of the individual in a community and the status of a community in a larger community.

Theology, done right, doesn't attempt to be interest-free but interest-inclusive. The image created by theological investigation is also, therefore, not that of any random or arbitrary human being but the specific human being called by Emmanuel Levinas the Other. This Other, whether a person or another community, is the principal locus of divine revelation and, consequently, of the concrete meaning of justice and charity. More theology, more sweeping up of the refuse that is humanity, not less, is the solution to the Spinoza Problem.

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The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin D. Yalom
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cancer Cures Neurosis

An episode of the British sci-fi comedy, Red Dwarf, has a disturbing female character with a heavy Germanic accent proclaiming, "Schopenhauer was rrrright: Without pain, life has no meaning. I am about to give your life meaning." This is more or less the central theme of Yalom's novel.

Like Robertson Davies' Manticore, The Schopenhauer Cure follows a series of psycho-analytic therapy sessions, interspersed with background material. But Yalom uses group not individual therapy as the binding story-line. And Instead of the Jungian technique of Davies, inserts the highly unlikely character of the German 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer as a model for psychological investigation and treatment.

Unlikely because, although Schopenhauer certainly inspired subsequent doctors of the mind through his philosophy, he himself was without question a neurotic of the first order. He had no stable relationships, male or female. He was alienated from his suicidal father, his emotionally distant mother, and his spinster sister for decades before each of them died without concern on his part. He spent his entire adult life in a sort of normalized isolation dominated by an abiding obsession with death.

On the other hand, Schopenhauer was not an unhappy person. Or to put it more aptly in terms of his philosophy, he experienced less pain than he might have, had he not learned to recognise the futility of his desires - material, social, professional, but especially sexual.

Schopenhauer's self-prescribed psycho-therapy involved training himself insistently that such desires could never actually be achieved, or more accurately that such desires once sated would merely be replaced by others, and so on ad infinitum as well as ad nauseum. So he adopted the life of a hermetic recluse - on the streets of 19th century Frankfurt rather than the deserts of 4th century Syria.

Yalom's motivating character, Philip, is a devotee of Schopenhauer's philosophy, who in a Luther-like attempt to heal himself by diagnosing his own as the world's problem, crashes an established therapy group in order to fulfill his training requirements as... a psycho-therapist!

So a person who is happily convinced that a primary source of pain is attachment to human relationships involves himself in a therapeutic group, the function of which is to intensify human relationships among its members. What could go wrong?

In fact the situation provokes some rather interesting insights by all concerned, including the reader. Without doubt, for example, Yalom's group, both individually and collectively, is improved by the insertion of the Schopenhaurian take on life, no matter how dismal it might appear. Every member of the group perceives an important contribution is made by Philip, although none understands precisely why or how.

More significantly the confrontation between two opposed views of the world pointedly raises the issue of what constitutes the success of a psycho-therapeutic process. What are the criteria of psychological or emotional 'healing'? Is it personal contentment? A feeling of acceptance within a group? Reduced compulsivity? Increased social skills? All or none of the above? It isn't at all clear that members of the group share the same criterion of success to begin with but Philip's arrival formalizes the issue, at least for the therapist-in-charge.

The therapist-in-charge dies with his boots on (from cancer), so we don't get his view on the issue. The only one to get the short end of the therapeutic stick, however, is poor Philip. 'Reconnected' to his desiring self, he suffers the pain and anxiety of human relationships once again. Is 'meaning' worth the price? By whose standard?

Postscript: Tomorrow is the anniversary of Schopenhauer's death. It seems more appropriate to celebrate his death than his birth. So here's to the inimitable Arthur for whom one of my sons is named.

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The Clown by Heinrich Böll
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Era of Prostitution

Hans, the clown in question, is a petulant, socially awkward, articulate, but persistently sarcastic figure who identifies with both the Germanic Siegfried and the Jewish Christ. Although Protestant, he knows more about Catholic ritual and attitudes than most Catholics. He abhors clerics and their rituals when they pretend to more than aesthetic importance

Hans is an artist who lives for the aesthetics of his craft, which is grounded in the observation of the details of everyday life, the conventions that no one notices but which dominate human existence. "I am a clown," he says, "I collect moments." First he makes these hidden conventions visible, then he subverts them through mockery. He can't help it; this is what he has to do. He calls this his Niebelungen Complex.

As a sort of pronto-hippie, Hans rails against hypocrisy - in the state which ignores the unforgivable crimes of its citizens, of the church which has become a procedural machine concerned with politics rather than love, of the family which prefers conformity to creative expression by its members. He can't condemn however, merely marvel at the ability of his friends and family to deceive themselves. Everything in Germany - culture, politics, meaning - is prostituted - to the Americans, to TV commercialism, to insincere charitable drives.

Injury and emotional trauma force Hans into penury. No one he knows can or will help. He does the only thing possible for someone who finds himself an alien in his own land. At "the age less than thirty" he becomes Christ in the make-up of a clown miming the absurdity of everyday life on the steps of Bonn Central Station. Vox clamans in deserto so to speak.

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Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H.R. McMaster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Presidential Psycho-drama of Fear

War originates from psychosis. If not in individuals then certainly in groups. Particularly in groups of men in which each individual attempts to establish his will as dominant. Each fears failure and loss of affection, and yet the will to dominate causes failure and loss of affection, thus increasing fear. This is McMaster's story about the prosecution of the Vietnam War from start to finish by the American government. It is a compelling story, made more so by the fact it was written by a career officer on active duty.

McMaster does have an axe to grind, but it is one that is sharp to begin with. His thesis is that the exclusion of the military leadership from decision-making by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, led to incoherent and contradictory actions that were compounded as the war progressed. In short his argument is that "The intellectual foundation for deepening American involvement in Vietnam had been laid without the participation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

That this thesis is historically important is self-evident. But McMaster also conveys another message, perhaps inadvertently, which is relevant for more than historical reasons, namely that deceit and duplicity have been embedded in the Executive Branch of the government of the United States long before Donald Trump made them so apparent through his political inexperience.

McMaster shows, as have others, that lying to the press and the public about Vietnam was routine for every administration from Eisenhower through Nixon. However this propagandistic lying was the tip of an iceberg of duplicity. All the key players - the President, his staff, successive ambassadorial and military leadership teams in Vietnam, the Secretary of Defence, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and virtually every executive agency involved in the war severally and collectively lied to each other consistently as a matter of policy.

This deeply ingrained duplicity is documented repeatedly in McMasters' research of minutes, messages and statements made by the senior members of each department. This is more than merely disfuntion. Persistence suggests something systematic, a self-defeating but self-inflicted group-inability to perceive or act on reality.

Largely there are institutionalised motivations for this continuing inability to cope with the existential situation. The self-interested departmental rivalries among the military and intellectual arrogance by the civilians running the Department of Defence for example seem endemic. And not just during the Vietnam era. Certainly the dissonance between domestic political and international military objectives continued to be problematic during US involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.

However, what McMaster demonstrates without ever making the point explicit is that the systematic deceit by the administration is not something of narrow historical relevance to the war in Vietnam, or even to the wider issue of the organisational effectiveness of the executive branch. The central problem arises from attempting to successfully wage any sort of limited but extended warfare in a democratic society. Essentially: it can't be done successfully. It is a psychotic symptom to act as if this were not the case.

American democracy is established on the idea of separation of powers. In itself this concept promotes tension and duplicity, particularly between the President and members of Congress who, as has been shown recently, have no necessary commonality of interests. The next election looms over all decisions.

This separation of powers is also a political fact within the executive branch in which personal ambitions, professional experiences, and abiding animosities and friendships dominate policy-making. It is not just Trump who has had problems with staff rivalries, embarrassing leaks and dissident agents. Only Trump's inexperience allows these to become as public as they have done.

In such an environment deceit becomes a necessity for the creation of almost any policy from war, to welfare, to justice. Perhaps this is true for all forms of government. But the motivating factor which seems to be unique to democracy is fear by the man at the top. A common trait that seems to run from Kennedy, through Johnson and Nixon to Trump is fear, fear of failure, of rejection, of being found to be inadequate, in a real sense of loss of love. Presidents, it seems, are very insecure people. They appear ready to turn psychotic at any moment.

This fear is, I think, an inherent part of democratic politics, which are never stable and which don't provide an effective means for the Executive to reduce them. He can't imprison or execute his foes; he can't form a reliable alliance with legislative politicians; he can't be explicit about his goals lest he be held politically to account; he can't even get rid of his own people without the risk of them spilling the beans on his real actions and motivations.

One of the democratic leader's, and his minions', few options therefore is to lie. Lying, even when it is unnecessary and irrational becomes the norm. This is the bleak message I take from McMaster. He may be right. Let's see how much truth-telling he engages in as Trump's National Security Advisor.

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Cat's Eye 
by 

Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author)

 

Pity-wanting Pain

Reading Cat's Eye is like watching a film, only with smells, and taste, and touch in addition to cinematic sight and sound. Its heroine, Elaine, has all these 'outward wits' which Atwood captures magnificently. But, although Elaine is an artist, she has almost nothing of the 'inward wits' of communal sense, imagination, fantasy, estimation or memory.

The story is three dimensional: the North/South dimension of her life with her parents who migrate every year from Toronto to the Laurentians on biological field trips; the East/West dimension of her independent life which stretches from Toronto to Vancouver; and the temporal dimension of her own maturation.

Periodically the three dimensions collapse into moments of insight and clarity that progress from childhood with age: boys are noisy and messy but essentially uncomplicated; girls are generally hateful even, especially, when they are friends; young men are superficial and boring; older men are duplicitous and domineering; motherhood is a schlep; marriage is a continuous losing battle; feminist sisterhood isn't to be trusted; art is largely pretense and scam and dates rather quickly.

Elaine's life is a tale of haplessness, of lurching from one emotional trauma to the next. There are no plans, no goals, no passions. She falls into art as she falls into bed with unsuitable men. The step by step development of her life is told is Proustian detail but without the introspective analysis. Every action is compulsive with no apparent rationale.

She knows this and learns from her traumatic experiences, but only those lessons that are relevant to the past, not to new situations. Every insight is obsolete as soon as she arrives at it. Her past persists in her feelings and her art, both inadequate for the world she inhabits now. She realizes that her life is a ruin, with no obvious cause for its ruination.

So Elaine lives in pain. "Pain is important but only certain kinds of it: the pain of women but not the pain of men. Telling about pain is called sharing." Among her feminist friends at least. She prefers men, even her ex-husband, to this therapeutic band. "There's not much time left, for us to become what we intended," she says, as if she actually had an intention. Perhaps this is the source of her pain. "Potential," she says, "has a shelf life." But Atwood isn't saying what the source of her apathetic trajectory might be. She let's the reader make her own diagnosis.

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Love the One You're With

Most of Vonnegut's enduring tropes start life in Sirens :
- Time and its distortions
- Places like Newport and Indianapolis
- People such as Rumfoord and Ben and Sylvia
- The planet Tralfamadore and its inhabitants
- And of course the Volunteer Fire Department

What holds these oddities together is what holds everything of Vonnegut together, an ethical theology. His sci-fi is a way of displacing talk about God just enough to do some serious thinking. And he may indeed have inspired a new generation of thinkers about God as a consequence.

Vonnegut's Church of God the Utterly Indifferent follows a teaching remarkably like a Christian theology developed almost 40 years after Vonnegut's novel. This theology of the Weakness of God rejects the idea of God as the all-powerful fixer of the universe. And it rejects the idea that power flows downhill, as it were, from the divine source to spiritual and secular leaders. Its ethical import is that all of us are engaged in a search for God, and that the only help we have in this search comes from our fellow human beings.

This is essentially Vonnegut's Titanic Theology. “The two chief teachings of this religion are these: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God." God does not interfere in human affairs; he is what in traditional theology is called 'apathetic'. He is not affected one iota by human action. In short "God Does Not Care." Whatever morality there is in human life comes not from His interests or the possible benefits from pleasing Him, but from the necessity for the community life of human beings.

So the ethic of Vonnegut's theology is direct and clear. There is only one commandment: "These words will be written on that flag in gold letters on a blue field: Take Care of the People, and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself." This mandate requires no complicated exegesis or commentary. Nevertheless it's profundity takes a while to sink in: “It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

In a world ruled by such an ethos there is the possibility of pain, but of a particular sort: “The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody,” she said, “would be to not be used for anything by anybody.” So-called ‘Weakness Theologians’ like John Caputo are apt to agree: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

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