The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives by Stephen Thomas Ziliak
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Why Statistics (and Economics) Are So Unpleasant

Recently in another GR review I made a remark about the absence of a coherent aesthetic in statistics. In response I received several messages criticising my choice of words. ‘What does aesthetics have to do with the practical use of statistical analysis,’ was the polite form of the question. The answer is ‘quite a bit really.’ In fact it is the lack of aesthetic coherence which makes statistical analysis so dangerous as well as wrong. McCloskey’s book, by demonstrating the utter arbitrariness of statistics, gives part of problem from the point of view of economics. But the issue is actually more profound than she sets out.

Many years ago I had a teacher, Russell Ackoff, at the University of Pennsylvania. Early in his career he had written a textbook called Scientific Method: Optimizing Applied Research Decisions. In it he laconically criticised social scientists for using tests of statistical significance which were unrelated to the cost of error in their analysis. His point was obvious to all but statisticians: tiny errors affect consequential decisions far more than large errors affect trivial ones. If you don’t know what the consequences of being wrong are, you can’t conduct responsible statistical analysis.

No one paid much attention to Ackoff in 1962. And I doubt whether many have paid much attention to McCloskey since her book’s publication in 2008. One possible reason for the lack of impact is that both Ackoff and McCloskey present statistical method as an economic issue. While the issue is indeed in part economic it is not one that the discipline of economics chooses to address. To do so would undermine most of the empirical research by the discipline for the last century. Besides any kind of cost benefit analysis of statistics has to be carried out through the same statistical techniques that are being held to account by those who are most invested in them. Prospects for a breakthrough have always been slim therefore.

A fundamental term in all economics is ‘value.’ Classical economics derives value from what it calls preferences, typically expressed in terms of what it calls ‘utility’ (a transparently aesthetic concept), or in the case of business, ‘profit’ (less obviously so, but also an aesthetic idea). In order to make its scholastic logic work, it fixes preferences and its derived factors as some sort of divinely revealed and protected order of things, regardless of the obvious fact that preferences change continuously and no one actually has any definite idea of what constitutes corporate profits.

In fact ‘value’ is actually not fundamentally an economic concept but an aesthetic one. That is to say economic value is a sub-species of the aesthetic. More specifically, value is a criterion of aesthetic choice as it is employed in economics. An ‘aesthetic’ is the more general term for such a criterion and applies not just to economics but to all choices of consequence. An aesthetic is more than a preference, it is a rule of choice about what is more important, more desirable, more inherently valuable. It is also articulated to some degree, not necessarily by the one employing it, not merely a response to the presentation of alternative courses of action. And through its articulation an aesthetic evolves continuously.

From an aesthetic perspective, therefore, the statistical problem of economics is no longer one of some sort of complex, quite likely impossible, cost/benefit analysis. Rather it is one of aesthetic compatibility - or lack of it. This is easy to understand without complex analysis about the significance of significance tests or the costs of being wrong. Only the most elementary understanding of what statistics are is necessary.

A statistic is a partial description of some set of numbers, usually the result of some sort of social science observation or experiment. I say ‘partial’ because there are an infinite number of statistics that might be used to describe any such set of numbers. When it is used to judge, that is to evaluate, a set of numbers, a statistic is an aesthetic.

The most common statistic is the mean, or average, of the set. The mean is what is called the first order statistic. The second order statistic is that of the standard deviation, or variance, of the spread within the set of numbers. The greater the variance, the less certainty there is about the mean of the set. Much of statistical analysis is directed toward establishing just how certain, how significant, a given statistic is.

But it is crucial to recognise that the mean and the variance are only two possible statistics. Many others may be relevant to a meaningful description of the set of numbers. The third order statistic, called skew, for example captures the prevalence of the extremes in the set. Skew is highly relevant for estimating things like ‘worst case’ conditions, what happens if things really go wrong. The fourth order static is that of heteroskedasticity, not something one reads about on the back of a box of cereal but important for understanding how the numbers in the set might defined in each other.

There are fifth, sixth, seventh, and higher order statistics, each giving slightly more information about the set of numbers in hand. And each of potential relevance in arriving at a decision about what to do. The mean expected return on a business venture for example might be very high. Its variance might be low as well so it looks like a winner. But if its downside extreme, its skew, could bankrupt the whole company, perhaps it’s not such a good idea.

And that’s the nub of the aesthetic problem in statistics: how much mean is worth how much variance, is worth how much skew, etc., etc.? There certainly is no rational, objective, universal answer, no criterion for equating various statistics. Nor even is there a criterion, a rule of judgement, for establishing which descriptive statistics are relevant at all. Each order statistic is a distinct aesthetic which is completely independent of and contrary to every other statistic. Nothing in the science of statistics suggests even the possibility that these contrary aesthetics are theoretically or practically reconcilable. And no statistician nor economist has ever been bold enough to propose that there might be such a reconciliation. They choose instead to duck the issue completely.

Furthermore, from my own experience I can attest that any attempt to establish subjective preferences for ‘trading off’ the various statistics against each other, in the manner of a utility function for example, is doomed to failure. Not only do people not experience life (including business) in terms of statistical categories, any such preferences are altered as soon as they are articulated. The end result is contradictory and nonsensical. No one recognises much less believes the resulting aesthetic.

In short, the insignificance of statistical significance can be most effectively demonstrated not by the fact the measures of significance are unrelated to the cost of error but by the fact that the statistics used in analysis have no significance to each other. I challenge any statistician or economist to show that this conclusion is unwarranted. Nevertheless I defer to Deirdre if she insists in making the case for cost.

Postscript: The approach outlined above is, I believe, also one that is compatible with the growing trend called Behavioural Economics. Traditional or Classical Economics starts out from a set of first principles and then logically derives its conclusions as virtual economic ‘laws.’ One law for example is that consumers and corporate executives are ‘rational’, that is, they act according to the implications of first principles. If they are empirically observed not to act this way, they are irrational and will eventually be forced to conform to rational norms or they will be economically punished.

This method of traditional economics has a marked resemblance to medieval scholastic method. It is not rational but rationalistic. It presumes the validity of its own analysis and has no real way of testing itself or learning. Behavioural Economics is equivalent to the Baconian revolution in medieval thought. It seeks first the way in which people conduct themselves economically, and then posits the question ‘Why.’ In other words, Behavioural Economics, presumes that there is a possibly undisclosed rationale, a purpose, and then tries to articulate what that purpose might be.

It is perhaps in the area of Financial Economics that the use of statistics is most abused and most dangerous. One consequence was the financial crash of 2008, created directly by the use of statistical models using fundamentally incompatible aesthetics. As far as I am aware many people are still paid a great deal of money to continue doing the same thing. This behaviour is driven by the aesthetic of the Goldman Sachs’s of the world, who have persuaded many more that they’re acting in their interests. They don’t.

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Measurement and Meaning in Economics: The Essential Deirdre McCloskey by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Bourgeois Aesthetic

McCloskey’s book is a collection of her previously published papers in a variety of professional journals. It contains no new theoretical or empirical thinking, but it does demonstrate the trajectory of her thought over the last four decades. Most significantly for the argument I want to make here, the book shows a discontinuity in her thought which is both regrettable and avoidable. Regrettable because it makes much of her analysis irrelevant to economists. Avoidable because her journey from economic positivism to the literature of economics needs only a few more steps to have an impact on the discipline and the world.

The first half of Measurement and Meaning is substantially that of conventional economic analysis of issues like growth, interest rates, and risk. The techniques, dominantly statistical, employed in these papers are largely methodologically repudiated by McCloskey in her 2008 The Cult of Statistical Significance. The second half of the book falls under the heading of Meaning and summarises McCloskey’s arguments for what she calls Rhetorical or Story-telling Economics.

The trajectory of her work is clearly from the scientific toward the aesthetic. I think I understand her impulse. Economics, like other social sciences, has been plagued by scientism, the attempt to establish a fixed method as the sole source of truth. McCloskey wants to establish the validity of other methods as well. She claims she doesn’t want to supplant classical economic method but to enhance it through the introduction of literary-like techniques of rhetorical analysis. She wants to make economists conscious of their habitual choices.

I would like to do the same thing with McCloskey. The problem she has is that her story, and it is such, about Rhetorical Economics is just another story set against the story of what those who call themselves economists have been telling themselves, and the rest of us, for at least a century. The two stories are contraries. Except for her exhortation to get better at writing professional papers, and to read more novels, the stories have no point of intersection. The result is that each story has its own incommensurable criterion of importance and validity and there is absolutely no intelligent way to choose between the two.

But I believe there is a way to tell a unified story which includes those of McCloskey and of Classical Economics. It starts by recognising that the heart of traditional economics is precisely what McCloskey is promoting: aesthetics. She has claimed that her purpose is to make economists more aware of what they are doing. I think that purpose is laudable and correct. But to do that effectively she first has to ‘make her colleagues right,’ that is, show them the aesthetic judgements they make now and how these judgements are appropriate within some limits, and what other judgements are possible.

I think an effective way to show this is by a serious consideration of measurement itself. While McCloskey’s shift from classical to rhetorical economics seems to imply a reduction in the role of quantitative measurement, I believe just the opposite to be the case. Measurement is an aesthetic not a scientific, much less a merely technical, activity. It is not only economists or other social scientists who do not recognise this; scientists of all sorts get themselves into tight spots and dead ends as well.

Measurement is one of the few activities that every person on the planet has some experience of, and therefore has an implicit theory, or prejudice, of what measurement means and how it works. The most common theory, somewhat formally stated, goes something like this: Measurement is the more or less precise observation of the properties of an object, event or phenomenon; it usually involves assignment of numerical values to these properties, the accuracy of which can be determined by the comparison of multiple observations against each other; variation at increasingly precise levels of observation in the numerical values thus obtained is the primary indication of measurement error.

Every part of the above paragraph is either wrong or misleading however. It is only when measurement itself is considered in very restricted circumstances - like measuring for the drapes in the sitting room or estimating the cubic yards of top soil required for the garden - does that description capture what is going on in the process. From a philosophical perspective, which McCloskey advocates insistently, measurement is somewhat more involved... and interesting. It is an activity which touches the limits of both language and mathematics. It is also a metaphysical and an ethical challenge.*

Below is an outline of an alternative ‘aesthetic’ theory of measurement which I think captures both Classical and Rhetorical motivations within it. There are further implications that can be drawn from this theory but I think it is sufficient as stated to demonstrate the point at issue: Classical Economics is already an aesthetic activity. However it is a somewhat cramped and limited activity because it does not focus on the main source of aesthetic error, namely the choice of the aesthetic criterion itself.

There are a number of points in Measurement and Meaning at which the aesthetic theory of measurement agrees with but redirects McCloskey’s conclusions. For example, she addresses the problem of economic modeling in her later work. She feels such modeling is often misdirected. But what she doesn’t realize is that it is misdirected precisely because the primary judgement being made in an economic model is not the relationship among its ‘variables’ but it’s aesthetic, its criterion of what’s important. For example, models of economic risk typically use the statistic of variance as their aesthetic. This is not necessarily wrong but it is almost always ill-considered.

The only rationale for using variance and not some other statistic, its story, is one of mathematical convenience. Variance has certain properties which allow it to be used in calculations. It does not express the experience of anyone, economists included. This is not to say that one’s keys are never to be found under the lamp post at night because there is light there; but it is nonetheless unlikely.

The economist Nassim Taleb has made a rather good living selling books about the fact that what people really experience is the threat of extreme not merely variable events - the so-called third order statistic, or skew. In fact it is clear that the portfolio models used in Financial Economics which used the second order statistic of variance as their aesthetic were the dominant reason for the financial crisis of 2008. Their error was not on the metric it was of the metric, always a far more significant mistake.

McCloskey actually proposes an aesthetic at one point. She expresses this as ‘buying behaviour,’ or what can be called a Bourgeois Aesthetic, and suggests that it is a function of what she terms, somewhat inelegantly, the Profane and Solidarity. Her point is that there is a rather admirable combination of classical virtues - Courage, Prudence, Justice, Love, and Temperance - which are actually used by people in their economic activity. This proposal is brilliant, not necessarily because her aesthetic is correct, but because it combines the influences of culture and individual preference in a single proposal. The professional risk she takes in formulating this aesthetic will provoke others to improve or challenge it.**

This last point is crucial. Aesthetics can only be improved when they are articulated and discussed. Classical Economics does an outstanding job at articulating economic aesthetics. But it is woefully inadequate in discussing these aesthetics among those who are most affected by the choices they imply. The power of classical economic aesthetics is enormous because they are so precisely specified. But the errors they incorporate are also immense. This, I think, is a summary of the battle McCloskey is waging.

The most important stories that have to be told in Rhetorical Economics are not about the complex dynamic relationships among economic entities - consumers, businesses, and governments. Rather they are the stories about which aesthetics should be considered in economics at all, what the criteria of advance, improvement, development ought to be. This is a matter for economists but not only for economists. The stories that have to be told are not technical, they are human, and they are, therefore, essentially political. This is what I think McCloskey is missing in both measurement and meaning.

* See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... for a more detailed discussion of the aesthetics of mathematics.
**McCloskey’s aesthetic is remarkably similar to that of George Birkhoff in his book Aesthetic Measure. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

An Outline Aesthetic Theory of Measurement

1. Measurement is not the quantification of the properties of an object, event or phenomenon. Nothing has the property of being, say, 1 yard square. Such a designation runs into all sorts of philosophical problems having to do with human sensory perceptions and the epistemological difficulties of determining the inherent properties of what Kant called “the thing in itself.”
2. Rather measurement is the establishment of the position of a thing, event or phenomenon, on a scale. The thing is a property of the scale, not vice versa. When we measure we are ordering things on a scale not determining the properties of a thing. This is the primary Ontological Principle of measurement
3. The scale used in measurement is called a metric, and can have a variety of properties. Metrics, unlike other things, can have properties because they are mathematically defined to have them. Metrics, like all numbers, have a unique mode of existence. We do not ‘find’ metrics in the natural world, we create them. They are both imaginary and incontrovertibly real at the same time. GDP is a metric, economic utility can be a metric if it is specified mathematically, price and costs are metrics.
4. Metrics are expressed in terms of a numeraire, that is a unit of measurement like feet, dollars, utiles, but these should no be confused with the nature of the metric itself which is purely mathematical. For example, the metric of price is one of constant proportions: $2 is exactly twice $1 and half of $4. But $4 of income may not be twice as many utiles as $2. The metric of utility recognizes what economists call declining marginal utility.
5. A metric is what economists call an aesthetic, the more general term used for a criterion for judging value, worth, importance etc. GDP, for example, is an aesthetic that treats increases as beneficial. Unlike utility, benefit is directly proportionate to the ‘place’ an economy is placed on that metric. Such a metric is not required by any scientific or moral method, but it is an aesthetic choice, the most fundamental choice that all economists make. The choice of metric is a work of art.
6. The error in choosing an aesthetic is always greater than the error of measurement on or within an aesthetic. The aesthetic of GDP for example is not necessarily correlated with a metric of ‘National Happiness.’ As GDP increases, National Happiness could conceivably decrease due to pollution, and other environmental degradation. A 1% error in the measurement of GDP (that is enough to make it useless for policy-making purposes) would be far less significant than the error of choosing GDP over the National Happiness measure, for example.
7. An aesthetic itself has a value, that is, is better or worse, depending on how effective it is in expressing the experience of a population. To the degree that an aesthetic is accepted politically as such an expression, it is more or less verified for that population for the purposes of the issues at hand. This can be called the Ethical Principle of the aesthetic. The art of the economic aesthetic is, like all aesthetics, social. In a sense the aesthetic is ‘true’ to the degree it represents the sentiment of a population.
8. The Ethical Principle of the aesthetic implies that its choice can neither be objective nor subjective, only communal. Any attempt to restrict the politics of a community in its choice of aesthetic is the primary source of aesthetic error. The only way in which contrary aesthetics can be reconciled within any community is the the discovery of a synthetic or ‘larger’ aesthetic that recognises the conditions in which these ‘lesser’ aesthetics are relevant. Thus, for example, measurement with a everyday yardstick is perfectly sensible so long as what is measured is not too small or too fast, in which case quantum measures are necessary. This is the Political Principle of measurement.

For a somewhat less axiomatic exposition of this theory see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tongue Firmly in Cheek
Or
The Mormons Are Right
Or
Evolution Is So Yesterday
Or
The Problems of Prayers Answered
Or
Too Much Good News Is Hard to Take
Or
It Could have Turned Out So Different; But It Didn’t
Or
All Thoughts and Feelings Are Algorithms; Except This One
Or
Fiction Is Our Fundamental Technology; Just Ask Donald Trump
Or
The Vital Uncertainty: We Can Have Meaning Or Power in Life But Not Both Together

As with his previous book Sapiens, Harari tells a story in Homo Deus that is too disconcerting to summarise, and too captivating to ignore. It is simultaneously arrogant and self-debasing; stimulating and depressing. I can therefore only comment on it by suggesting a series of alternative subtitles. Those noted above only scratch the surface of possibilities. It is the last however that I find most insightful and inspiring to further thought. Perhaps an addendum to this review will be necessary at some point.

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Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Alien Perversity

A short story that is meant to be maximally disgusting. Humans used as living incubators for 9 foot tall centipedes is only the start. These intelligent insects are part of the human household. They hold and caress adults and infants as they enjoy their warmth. They supply humans with a nourishing, intoxicating food, their own infertile eggs. They choose when and with whom to implant their grubs in the human body. If not handled in exactly the correct manner, birth is lethal for the host who is eaten from the inside out. So a sort of compilation of the most distressing of perversions: paedophilia, beastiality, cannibalism, sadism, and sexual slavery. Sci-fi but more Un Chien Andalou than Star Trek. Most certainly an unforgettable read.

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Aesthetic Measure by George David Birkhoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rapped Up & Hopping Out

Recently someone mentioned to me that he found rap and hip-hop music to be less than to his taste. I asked what he meant. “Well,” he said, “I just don’t like it.” This is about as seriously as most people, I suspect, take the issue of aesthetics, as if it were a trivial consideration that has to do with unchallengeable preferences about art or what handbag goes with which shoes.

An aesthetic is a criterion, a standard by which we assign something (or someone) a significance, importance or value. “I don’t like rap music.” isn’t an aesthetic, it’s a judgement which is the consequence of an aesthetic, a judgement which is typically completely unaware of the criterion on which it is based. This sort of unconscious and unconsidered judgement is usually a matter of habit.

There are several problems with aesthetic habit. First since the criterion in play is never stated, it’s not possible to learn, to improve one’s aesthetic choices. The different aesthetic of the rapper, and there is one, remains as invisible as one’s own. The judgement about rap, or anything else, is then merely a prejudice. Second, this lack of awareness makes all aesthetics appear as absolutes, unfounded preferences, which we each have a right to maintain simply because there is no way to compare them.

It is this second problem, really a fundamental political problem, which creates an urgency about aesthetics. If our aesthetic criteria are hidden, they cannot be compared. This creates unresolvable conflict. More importantly it prevents the discovery of criteria which are more encompassing than the ones we already have. Such ‘synthetic’ criteria are real and discoverable and in a very practical sense incorporate apparently conflicting criteria into one that is more general, while simultaneously maintaining the integrity of the less general.

There are examples of this sort of aesthetic synthesis everywhere if one chooses to look for them. In physics, for example, the (sensory) aesthetic of relativity - time/space conflation - doesn’t make the (mystical) aesthetic of Newtonian Physics -instantaneous action at a distance - wrong, it simply shows where it is appropriate, namely for things that are not very small or very fast.*

The mathematical expression known as EuIer’s Identity is a spectacularly elegant example of the synthesis of at least four apparently incommensurable numerical universes into a coherent whole driven by a very specific mathematical aesthetic (pattern). In my own field of Christian theology, there are countless examples of this sort of aesthetic synthesis - for example in the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception which reconciles the apparently contradictory doctrines of Original Sin and the Incarnation (the aesthetic is clearly one of hidden consistency).

I have also experienced the power of aesthetic synthesis throughout my career in business. Typically, for example, in any large company, the senior executives don’t share a criterion of value. The marketing manager knows that everything depends on market share (a competitive aesthetic): If we increase share, we can spread our fixed costs and thereby compete more effectively. And the way to increase share is to invest in advertising and an expanded sales force. Meanwhile, the operations manager knows that the way to be cost effective is to invest in the latest technology (a reputational aesthetic): This will lower unit cost and allow us to ‘buy’ market share with lower prices. These are fundamentally incompatible and cause endless fruitless argument.

It might appear that this sort of practical issue is merely a technical economic problem. After all, isn’t the overall criterion of a business ‘profit’? Shouldn’t the chief executive make his decision based on this aesthetic? Perhaps... if the chief executive could get a consensus on what constitutes profit. Economists (an aesthetic of efficiency) have a very different aesthetic of profit than Accountants (an aesthetic of orderliness), who have little time for the aesthetic of Financial Theorists (a mathematical aesthetic of beauty believe it or not), who don’t necessarily agree with the range of criteria of shareholders from pension funds to pensioners (quite possibly an aesthetic of predictable stability). In fact I have never encountered a CEO who treated profit, however it was defined in the company, as anything but a constraint within which he or she had to establish their own aesthetic. In any case the chief executive still has to cope with the radical conflict between marketing and operations.

My experience is that it is possible to find a synthetic criterion that brings together these sorts of seemingly contrary criteria of value. But the essential ingredients for such a synthesis is the articulation of the hidden aesthetics which have become habitual and therefore inhibiting to consensus, or even to reasonable discussion. I have witnessed transformations in groups of senior executives through the courageous expression of aesthetics like: ‘we’ll know how well we’re doing by monitoring revenues from new products’ (an aesthetic of innovation); or ‘our real corporate duty right now is to ensure people don’t start killing each other in the streets’ (an aesthetic of urgent social care); and ‘our real measure of success is not return on assets but the amount of assets we share with the government.’ (a cooperative aesthetic). Each of these is situation-specific, somewhat emotional, not the least obvious, in need of much further articulation, impermanent and yet very effective in generating a new shared aesthetic consensus.

This is why Aesthetic Measure is important. It is a rather Quixotic but exciting attempt to formulate a universal criterion for aesthetic choice (certainly less Quixotic but more exciting than say economic utility) . It is also risky, because like any such formulation it opens up the possibility of criticism, even mockery. While fundamentally flawed, however, Aesthetic Measure is not a book, or an effort, to be mocked.

Like Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica or Fred Hoyle’s Evolution From Space, George Birkhoff’s Aesthetic Measure is a heroic failure. By trying to do what can’t be done - create a universal measure of value - it points a way toward progress by pinpointing something of vital importance: The more articulate we become about what we like, the more what we like can be appreciated by others; and the more that what we like is appreciated, the greater the chance that we can enlarge our appreciation.

The goal of Aesthetic Measure is the formulation of a universal criterion of aesthetic value, a standard that can be used to compare the importance, worth, and intrinsic beauty among diverse objects. That it fails is its most important contribution to understanding what aesthetics is about and how the way in which we make judgements of value can be improved.

Birkhoff proposes a very specific and concise formulation for his universal standard: M=O/C, where M is the aesthetic measure, O is composed of the various ‘formal’ elements of order (like repetition, rhyme, sequence, balance, etc., in poetry or music), and C is the complexity of the object being evaluated, for example the number of notes in a melodic score or syllables in a poem. What the equation implies is that ‘better’ is that which employs less to do more. Birkhoff then applies it in a wide range of objects from mathematical polygons, to Chinese vases, with an appendix that touches even on architecture.

This odd looking equation may be misguided and wrong, but it is not nonsensical. It is a very personal statement that summarises Birkhoff’s own experience as it stood at the time he wrote the book. It is the product of a life, one of whose main concerns was the aesthetic, trying to understand itself. In isolation, Birkhoff's aesthetic formula is indefensible. Anyone could formulate an alternative. Many have.

But that is exactly the strength of an expression like Birkhoff's aesthetic measure: it provokes a response which must be at least as articulate in order to be effective. It brings the aesthetic into the realm of conversation and discussion. It has power. The more articulate, the more powerful. Sometimes because it captures what others are trying to express as well. But always because it demands a response. I feel a degree of sympathy for Birkhoff’s measure but its real significance for me is that I feel like I want to modify it: Precisely its point.

The bulk of Aesthetic Measure is taken up with an explanation of why Birkhoff believes his particular formulation is both appropriate as well as better than others that he has considered. The construction of the measure, therefore, has not been in any way arbitrary.** It is not whimsical. It's very existence is a challenge to anyone who disagrees to come up with something better. But that something better must include Birkhoff's as a special case. There can be no 'best' except temporarily until a more inclusive measure is proposed.

I don't know what the aesthetic of modern rappers is, but (I extemporise!) it might be something like a repetitive iambic hexameter that uses the form to explore the variations on contemporary romantic engagement. If so, it's not all that distant from a Shakespearean sonnet. Birkhoff's aesthetic measure could be applied both to rap as well as sonnets. While I'm not willing to risk an evaluation of each genre on that measure, I submit that it is at least possible to do so if one had a serious interest in the matter. ***

Thanks to Birkhoff, therefore, we progress somewhat beyond the dead end of "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like."

* I don’t think an explanation of Newton’s mystical tendency is needed given his religious, alchemical, and other occult interests. However my use of ‘sensory’ for Einstein’s aesthetic might seem strange given the apparently counter-intuitive intellectual demands of Relativity. Nevertheless Einstein himself was keen to explain both his special and general theories in terms of sensory reality - acceleration as indistinguishable from gravity, the perception of bursts of light at different points in a moving train, etc.

** It should be clear at this point that measurement of any kind - social, scientific, commercial - is itself an essentially aesthetic activity. The choice of a metric is the operationalisation of an aesthetic. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

*** An interesting synthesis of two aesthetics - from maths and music - is discussed at length here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Art of Judgment: A Study of Policy Making by Geoffrey Vickers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Aesthetics of Bossiness

Geoffrey Vickers was one of the great thinkers about management in the 20th century. Having left Oxford without a degree in order to enlist, he received the Victoria Cross in WWI, played a key organisational role during WWII, was a senior British civil servant and an advisor to business in Europe and North America,

I met Vickers in 1978 when he spent some time with the Social Systems Science Center at the Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania. He had developed, quite independent of any academic affiliation, a remarkable theory of decision-making which is presented in the Art of Judgement.

The essential concept of this theory is that of ‘appreciation’, by which he means the ability to understand the real intent, the purpose, of those with whom one works or negotiates. These intentions are more frequently than not unstated. They may even be unconscious on the part of the people involved. Nevertheless such intentions can be discerned and, as it were, brought to the surface to be discussed, and possibly altered.

For Vickers, there are two sorts of managerial decisions: operational decisions that cover the routine tasks, emergencies, and foul-ups that occur in any organisation; and policy decisions which are those that concern the criteria set for operational decision-making. It is these latter decisions in which appreciation is of critical importance.

Vickers recognises, and makes his recognition explicit in the title, that appreciation is an aesthetic activity. That is, it has to do with the choice of the standard by which success, improvement, in short, value is to be measured. Once this criterion is established within a business in its various components, most operational decisions are obvious. When such a criterion is absent, chaos tends to reign.

Establishing a unified criterion of value is not an easy task. I can certainly attest to the almost pathological drive in corporate boardrooms to avoid the articulation much less the discussion of what such criteria might be. Mission statements, strategies, action plans, all tend to become irrelevant when an accountant, or financial theorist establishes some arbitrary criterion by fiat - especially when people then get paid on the basis of it. Enron is the classic example of a company run into the ground by unchallenged measures of value.

Having said that, the world of business and governmental organisation is still catching up with Vickers’s thought. Since he wasn’t an academic he left no ‘school’ to publicise and develop his ideas. Since he was never the chief executive of a large company, he carried little weight with the big publishers of business wisdom. And, I suspect, since he was English, he was too reserved and self-effacing to promote his work. Some of us however remember his genius. Others can discover it still in the Art of Judgment.

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Bruno's Dream 
by 

Iris Murdoch

 

Now is the Season of Our Discount Tents

Bruno’s Dream is a Shakespearean comedic send up of old age and death. If the Desert Island Disks choice were between Lear and Measure for Measure, I’d go for the Duke not the King. So, I think, would Murdoch. Less pomposity; more grit.

Bruno is in any case Shakespearean as a character. In his eighties, he is not simply a failure, he is an epic failure (as my 11 year old granddaughter would express it). Every one of his important relationships are bust because of, he thinks, trivial faux pas. Like the affair with the gold digger, and the unfortunate racial slur about his daughter-in-law. He’s understanding about those affected who just don’t get what is going on: “Of course they all caused him pain, all the time, they just could not help it.” His regrets are merely that things are past, not that they happened, “The women were all young while he aged like Tithonus” (referencing Midsummer Night’s Dream) No reason for despair though. Better communication can fix things up just fine.

The detail of aged concerns is priceless in Murdoch’s descriptions. For example in Bruno’s preparations for his trip to the toilet: 

“Of course it wasn’t absolutely necessary to put on the dressing gown now that it wasn’t winter any more, but it represented a challenge. It was quite easy, really. The left hand held the bed post while the right lifted down the dressing gown and with the same movement slid itself a little into the right sleeve. The right hand lifted on high, the sleeve runs down the arm. Then the right hand rests flat against the door a little above shoulder height, while the left leaves the bed post and darts into the left-arm hole. If the left is not quick enough the dressing gown falls away toward the floor, hanging from the right shoulder. It then has to be slowly relinquished and left lying. There was no getting anything up off the floor.”

My own routine for putting on trousers in the morning is similar.

Bruno’s only interests are stamps and spiders, and he smells, but he has one great end of life desire, “when you’re my age there’s not much left except you want to be loved.” The mystical Puck-like Nigel, who “exists to be imposed upon” is Bruno’s primary caretaker. Nigel is more or less mad but is the only person who is unselfishly devoted to Bruno. Nigel is twin to Will, a handyman/pornographer/actor (‘How absolute the knave is!’ he quotes of himself from Hamlet). The stage is set therefore for some Comedy of Errors, farcical confusion. 

Adelaide, the housekeeper, is cousin to the twins and lover of the caddish Danby, Bruno’s son-in-law. Danby is heir presumptive unless Miles, Bruno’s son and unsuccessful poet and middling civil servant, becomes un-estranged. Miles’s wife Diana, the bored middle class housewife, completes the cast. All the characters have “... somehow missed the bus of life.”The plot has its own momentum from this set of relationships. 

For Nigel ”real worship involves waiting.” For everyone else there is ritual - in love affairs, personal confession, marital deception, curmudgeonly ire, apology, the resentful anger of loved spurned, all the little set piece battles of English mores. All these rituals are played out in the face of death, imminent or not. “Death contradicts ownership and self. If only one knew that all along,” says one of the cast. And yet "It was a mere convention after all that one ought to be on good terms with one's son or father. Sons and fathers were individuals and should be paid the compliment of being treated as such. Why should they not have the privilege, possessed by other and unrelated persons, of drifting painlessly apart?" If ritual is what constitutes love, can it bring any consolation at all when death is taken seriously?

Ritual and duty have an odd relationship. Duties demand ritual - the male works, the female keeps house; religious obligations are fulfilled through liturgical group actions; condolences are offered through rote ceremonies and phrases; seasonal gifts are exchanged. But it’s as if ritual is required to undermine ritual when duties are to be ignored - the seduction/flirtation game; the routines of civil religion; the legal rituals of divorce. Is love a duty? A mere duty? Does ritual promote or destroy love? My take on Murdoch is that this is her point in Bruno’s Dream. She has some interesting suggestions.

 

When Bad Things Happen to Good People 
by 

Harold S. Kushner

 

Yet Another Anti-Semitic Trope

Recently another GR reader (whom I happen to know - a good Catholic boy at Oxford who’s trying really hard to demonstrate his faithful fervour) criticised Rabbi Kushner’s theodicy and called the contents of his well-known book “insulting to God” and “bad theology.” It is of course neither. In addition to being a highly edifying personal story about the suffering and death of his young son, it also has broader cultural significance in demonstrating the struggle that many have with the residue of our Western philosophical past.

Kushner, in his family’s crisis, was confronted by a dilemma for both his faith and his ethical principles. In simplistic terms the dilemma is this: if God has the regard theologians claim he has for his creation, he must not be able to help it to reduce its suffering in every circumstance; or if he is able to relieve suffering and doesn’t, then he must not be all that benign. Kushner comes down on the side of divine benignity rather than divine power. This seems to me not only comforting but theologically satisfying.

Ultimately Kushner, like many of us, was wrestling not with Judaic theological but with Greek philosophical ideas about God. The concepts of divine perfection - omniscience, omnipotence, etc. - are derived largely from the 3rd century BCE Stoics. These ideas were imported into Christianity in the Platonic interpretations of early Christians like Augustine and the latter Aristotelian ‘synthesis’ of medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas. Similar roles were played in the Hellenisation of Judaism by Philo of Alexandria and Maimonides. The Arabic scholars al-Farabi and Avicenna introduced Greek thought into Islam as early as the late 10th century.

Nowhere in Jewish. Islamic or Christian scriptures do these Greek ideas of divine perfection appear. God is unknowable. The best human beings can do is ascribe him attributes (names) which constitute praise rather than description. There is overwhelming biblical witness in the Old Testament to God’s lack of perfection in the Greek sense: he has regrets from time to time; he clearly does not know the minds of his people; he craves reassurance; he rages and performs rash acts; he breaks promises. He is, in other words, deficient in every Greek virtue. And his power, although beyond the human, is not infinite. The Hebrew God simply doesn’t fit the philosophical mould.

In the New Testament the situation becomes downright scandalous: Jesus demonstrates that he can heal the lame, the blind, and the sick at will. But only to make a point, and not out of loving concern. Claiming sole power to solve all human problems, he needs to be cajoled into using it and then he does so often only grudgingly. Jesus, and his promoter Paul, are entirely wrong in their prediction of an imminent end of the world. The latter even appears to disenfranchise God by insisting, with no authority whatsoever, that the ‘eternal‘ covenant established by God was abrogated and that henceforth all power, infinite or not, is in the hands of Christ. Hardly an endorsement for Greek perfectionism.

Kushner’s issue therefore is, and should be, one that is of concern to all monotheist adherents. Respect for the man’s humanity alone demands a sympathetic understanding of what he is attempting in his book. But beyond that lies his courageous accomplishment in recognising that the logic that created his dilemma is neither Hebrew nor Christian but pagan and may be dispensed with as a source of unnecessary confusion and unwarranted pain in authentic Judaic thought. God is far too complex and strange to be captured definitively by words and an ancient dialectical rhetoric.

The untoward influence of Greek philosophy on Judaeo-Christian theology has been recognised and repeatedly documented over the last century. Only in the last 20 years, however, has a positive theology which avoids the Greek presumptions been forthcoming. I find the most compelling of these to be that of the Weakness of God whose principle champion is John Caputo. 

Caputo‘ s theology rejects the fundamental concept of directive divine power and its very un-Christian glorification. His theology is certainly not insulting and provides a rather effective remedy for ridding the theological world of those who consider themselves coercive instruments of God. It also affirms Kushner in his very difficult theological choices.

So Kushner is neither insulting to God nor bad at theology. Rather he provides a human and humane opening to reconsider some very questionable presumptions that have wormed their way into moral thought. The ‘imperfection’ of God is not a flaw at all but an acknowledgement that, as the 11th century theologian, Anselm of Canterbury, put it, “whatever we think God is, he is not that.”


Postscript: it occurs to me that the power of ancient, or really any fixed, philosophy to cause human misery might need a more vivid example for some. Greek ‘perfectionist’ philosophy, for example, also considered the circle to be a ‘perfect form’. Consequently for centuries astronomical researchers refused to consider any other trajectory for the planets around the sun. Not until Johannes Kepler discovered elliptical orbits by dropping this perfectionist presumption could the science of astrophysics progress. Theology unfortunately is more tenacious about its least defensible ideas.

Post-Postscript: The GR reader who attacked Kushner has opted to delete our entire exchange. I think it’s appropriate to repeat my summary of that exchange here: 

You have attacked Rabbi Kushner for “insulting God.” You then repeated this accusation in further comments.
This is the precise formula used by all fundamentalists - militant Islamicists, radical Buddhists, and American Evangelicals - to characterise their targets.
But God does not need defending from anyone, especially not from people like Rabbi Kushner. It is people like Rabbi Kushner who desperately need defending from those who claim inside knowledge about God, such as yourself.
Given the unsavoury and thinly veiled anti-Semitic character of your remarks, I have little doubt that you and your co-religionists would slip once again into active persecution if you only had the political power to do so.
So why not cut it out and recognise that your personal divine revelation is merely a justification for uninformed and irrational prejudice?

Post-Postscript: the issue of divine power is one that has plagued Christian thought ever since it adopted Greek philosophy. Very few have dared mess with the disastrous mistake. See here for one who has: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Concluding by Henry Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Master of Similes

Henry Green’s versatility as a stylist is astounding. His first book, Living, is a 1920’s experiment in Midlands dialect. Caught, written during WWII, on the other hand, is a stream of consciousness, neologistic piece to rival Joyce. Concluding is something else altogether: a post-war tale of bureaucratic Britain told through a sequence of similes that are sprinkled like poppies in the herbaceous borders of an English country house that has been turned into a state-owned St. Trinian’s.

This English garden simile is, I hope, apt. Azaleas “sway their sweetness forwards, back, in silent church bells to the morning.” The branches of a fallen beech tree “that hung before him bent to the tide, like seaweed in the ocean.” A young girl lies half hidden under a tree which has toppled over “in the fallen world of birds, buried there like a piece of tusk burnished by shifting sands.” And rhododendrons have “flowers the colour of blood, and the colour of the flesh of bathers in open air in sunless country.”

Concerned about gardening, Green has an understandable obsession with the weather: The summer sun appears through the clouds “like a woman letting down her mass of hair from a white towel in which she had bound it.” And then almost immediately the flowers are hidden as the fog, “redescending, blanketed these off again; as it might be white curtains, drawn by someone out of sight, over a palace bedroom window...” In the mansion kitchen of the now state-run country pile, the sun pours in “like soda-water through transparent milk.” Not yet done with its influence, that same sun has a certain invasive fluidity, “like a depth of warm water that turned the man’s brown city outfit to a drowned man’s clothes.” The sunlight moves “across his pig’s flanks like pink and cream snails.”

And similes are not just the literary currency of the natural world; they allow Nature to intrude upon Civilisation. Two old men “moved like slow, suiciding moles in the half light.” One of them feels the rising curiosity of an old woman “like the smell of a fox that has just slunk by, back of some bushes.” A middle aged woman kisses her lover “fastening her mouth on his as though she were an octopus that had lost its arms to the propellers of a tug.” The girl under the beech tree has “heavy hair a colour of rust over a tide-washed stovepipe on a shore.” The teaching staff of the institution consider “our main function, [is] that of spinning like tops on our own axis.”

Continuing the nature in mankind theme, birdsong is a favourite of Green. A girl’s young school mates titter about her “like birds at long awaited dusk in trees down by the beach.” Later “their talking was a twitter of a thousand starlings.” When in assembly they have an “outburst of talk as of starlings moving between clumps of reeds to roost.”

The found girl doesn’t merely bathe after her ordeal but stretches out in her tub “like the roots of a gross water lily which had flowered to her floating head and hands.” She herself feels “as though she were bathing by floodlight in the night steaming lake, beech shadowed, mystically warmed.” And so on, and so on.

Green also makes an interesting similetic innovation: a ‘sounds-like’ simile. Mr. Rock, the aged pensioner, is hard of hearing. So he, in a manner my wife says I mimic on a daily basis, mis-hears and repeats phrases. “Spoiled the peace and quiet...” becomes in Rock-speak “Pooled the diet?” The question “You mean the weather?” Is transformed into “Did you say ‘end of her tether?’” “You and your sort” becomes “Lose the fort.” Which then gets echoed back from another curmudgeon as ‘Booze the port.” I can personally attest to the inaccuracy of consonants in the hearing of the aged. Everything sounds like something else, often comically so.

There is one other aspect of Concluding that also suggests Green’s intentions. The story is permeated by sexual frustration and a consequent social morass of sexual innuendo and suspicion. The disappearance of two girls is linked by rumour to every male character. The senior girls are portrayed as Lolitas out to exploit all the available men. There are intimations of rampant lesbianism - among the girls as well as between the two women who run the school, one of whom attempts to seduce the 76 year old Rock. Rock’s grand-daughter has sex with her boyfriend in the place where one of the girls is found.

Building on this sexual theme, one of the more enigmatic phrases that pops up is “Who is there furnicates besides his goose?” This is but one of the offences against what the state-bureaucrats call “The odious deviations from what is usual.” Is it too much to infer that this sex is the binding simile of the entire narrative? Something like ‘The State we are creating is like a state of suppressed sexual rage and fear.’ Speculative at best; but perhaps that’s what good novels are meant to do - provoke speculation.

I don’t think, therefore, that this density of similetic prose in Concluding is incidental or an idle stylistic affectation. It is meant to do work. Green is using it to make a point, to create an effect. The story of Concluding is a comedic attack on bureaucratic Britain, or at least Green’s idea of where the welfare state was headed: a proceduralised set of institutional rules which are used by skilful state employees to avoid responsibility and keep themselves in power, a somewhat more benign 1984. The literary problem of how to make believable a world that is not yet entirely arrived but that only threatens is significant. The reader must feel it to be possible. One of his characters states the problem directly, “You know, sometimes I feel as if I’d something in my head and I simply can’t get out the words.”

I have no external proof but I believe that Green addressed this literary problem using the linguistic theory of ‘expressives’ developed by the American pragmatist philosopher C. I. Lewis. The academic explanation of this theory is complicated. But the common-sense version isn’t. Put simply the theory is that all language is self-referential; words only refer to and are defined by other words; the connection between words and things is not just tenuous but impossible to establish reliably.*

Philosophical readers will recognise this as an issue of epistemology, that discipline which inquires about how we can know what we think we know: who to trust; what to believe; what constitutes something ‘real’. The ability to distinguish rumour, fables, lies, and suppositions from facts is one which we can all appreciate in the age of Trump and his fake news.

Green establishes the epistemological theme in the search for the whereabouts of a missing girl and in the uncertainty about the decision that Mr. Rock must make about his future. But he also employs Lewis’s insight that the self-referentiality of words isn’t a circular trap but in fact offers the possibility of a helical advance in understanding the world.

Words are the only thing we can connect to other words but we can make many, perhaps an infinite number of, connections among words. And every time we add a connection we move ‘upward’ not just round and round, getting more accurately expressive as we go. T.S. Eliot makes just this point in his poem Ash Wednesday when he uses the trope of the spiral staircase.

Lewis specifically cites simile as the figure of speech most effective for addressing the epistemological issue of writing, especially the writing of fiction. If I am correct in my guess, Green has used Lewis’s theory of expressives as his primary literary device in Concluding in order to accomplish his objective of making the book a credibly imminent, or at least impending, picture of British society. For him, despite the unremitting sunshine diffused throughout the book “Everyone was frozen in the high summer of the State.” To melt his audience Green had to orient them with as many similetic cues as he could. And he does.

*A good introduction to this theory is provided in ‘C. I. Lewis: Similetic Certitude and Epistemic Assimilation’ by SANDRA B. ROSENTHAL, The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 3 (FALL, 1976), pp. 55-63

Postscript: the following piece on Karl Jaspers appeared in my feed today. Jaspers’s theory of ‘ciphers’ is remarkably similar to Lewis’s ‘expressives’ in its attempt to deal with the Kantian problem of the disjunction of language and reality.

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Homo Faber by Max Frisch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Swiss Heart of Darkness

An engineer with an engineering outlook on life, the eponymous Homo (Walter) Faber believes in the randomness of existence. But he fails to recognise that such randomness is equivalent to a kind of cosmic spontaneity. And that such spontaneity implies some sort of spirit. He insists on the absolute disjunction between spirit and matter. The former is emotional, sentimental and soft. The latter is masculine and what constitutes reality, what can be measured, assembled and disassembled, and kicked with one’s foot. “Technology instead of mysticism,” is how he puts it.

That there should be any sort of continuity between physical matter and emotional spirit is not a consideration for Walter. Art bores him; ancient ruins are merely old. Consequently, neither does he comprehend the possibility of love. If strictly random materiality is all that exists, casual affection can be a fact, but certainly not self-less love. A silent declaration sums him up:

“Caresses in the evening, yes, but I can’t stand caresses in the morning, and frankly more than three or four days with one woman has always been for me the beginning of dissimulation, no man can stand feelings in the morning. I’d rather wash dishes!”

Homo Faber, true to his name, is above all practical, a maker, a fixer, at least in those aspects of life he regards as real. He can repair things like automobiles, turbines, and electric shavers. He knows the theories of cybernetics, plumbing, and electricity. He knows his way around the engine room of a ship.

But Walter is aesthetically and emotionally dead to most of the world around him. While a companion quietly appreciates a tropical sunset, Walter’s only thought is sarcastic: “Herbert stood there, still experiencing.” And he can neither commit to, nor abandon his married girlfriend. He can’t decide what relationship he wants with a young girl who is, unknown to them both, his daughter. He even dithers repeatedly about where he intends to go and why.

Walter records everything from Mayan ruins to the harbour of New York with the latest high-tech cameras, but he doesn’t know why, and he has no use for the results. He has had exactly one one friend in his life, whom he hasn’t seen in 20 years. And the daughter he knew nothing about had been raised by this one friend, who had married her mother. The friend is found, by a series of improbable coincidences, dead by suicide in a remote Central American jungle. Equally improbably, Walter encounters the daughter on his voyage home to Europe.

Faber‘s monadic existence he finds not in the least unpleasant. He has freedom - to travel, to think, to meet others - that any sort of close relationship would impede. But the encounter with his daughter disturbs his equilibrium. Although only fifty, he feels suddenly old, tired, irrelevant in her presence. But the discovery that she is quite possibly his daughter is understandably even more de-stabilising. The order of his existence is torn apart, its logic made nonsensical.

The possibility that Walter has had sex with his daughter is the ultimate dislocation. The mother’s question is precisely the reader’s: “How far did you go with the child?” Randomness must be accompanied by something of the spirit and not a small degree of love for his life to retain any coherence whatsoever.

Frisch has more than a touch of Patricia Highsmith: of Studebaker and Nash automobiles, transatlantic sea voyages, post-war Mediterranean exoticism, as well as of her sexual ambiguity, incipient incest and public homosexuality. He has produced a period piece to rival even hers.

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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amends for a Guilty Generation

I share a generation with Karen Armstrong. We are baby-boomers. As such we also share a responsibility for the world as it currently exists. It is we who fought and subsequently ran the most destructive wars in history; we who pursued our personal economic success regardless of the cost to society; we who believed in the pursuit of ideals for making the world better, watched as it became less and less habitable; and we, those who happened to be Catholic anyway, who contributed to the destruction of the institutional credibility of the Church in which were brought up. Only this last would I, and possibly Armstrong, classify as an achievement.

Not that I regret my Catholic upbringing; nor does she. Catholic education in the 1950’s and early 1960’s was well-run, thorough, and remarkably consistent across national borders. It was conducted largely by women who dedicated themselves for little compensation and less recognition to children whose parents could not have afforded such pedagogical competence anywhere else. I have no doubt that we survived and prospered in life because of the discipline and habits of work those women instilled in us.

And they didn’t just teach academic and practical skills. The environment of the Catholic classroom was unremittingly moral. Virtue was more important than intelligence. Conscience was more compelling than law. I don’t think any of us could have known how distinctive this form of education is. How could we? Until, of course, we left it. And even today, after a longish life in business and academia, I find the world at large somewhat strange, precisely because it doesn’t share the ideals of virtue and conscience that I absorbed during 12 years of not just education, but of what religious communities call ‘formation’, the process of creation of responsible human beings.

But my gratitude to the Catholic Church for what they provided is tempered by a recognition. The institutional system that economically permitted this level of public service was founded on an abhorrent form of spiritual subjugation. The women who voluntarily devoted themselves so totally to my future welfare were actually subtly and insidiously exploited by men whose only rationale was that such subjugation was God’s will. The harm that this regime did to the women who accepted it was profound, as Armstrong reports in The Spiral Staircase and in her first book, Through the Narrow Gate. This harm, tempered and cooked in the young lives of their students, also takes a lifetime to live through.

Many of these women, like Armstrong, came to recognise the reality of what they had considered their divine calling - a way, certainly, to honourably avoid the oppressions of traditional Catholic marriage while pursuing an admirable profession; but also achieved at the cost of personal emotional stagnation and, often, the experience and repression of enormous rage. The consequences for their charges included not just a refined physical brutality but also a level of spiritual intimidation which clearly emanated from a projection of their own dissatisfactions.

Mortal sin is the dread of the Catholic child. It cuts him off entirely from communion with not just God but also with the rest of the Catholic community. If in such a state, he becomes a pariah in his own mind. He is told there is only one therapy, humiliating conversation with a man who alone has the divinely ordained power to repair this terrible condition. To be charged with an offense considered mortally serious is therefore of utmost impact. Hell is a compelling motivation to an eight year old.

Sex was frequently the matter involved but not solely so. Mortal sin, we were instructed, included: not completing one’s homework assignments properly (as this constituted the grave offense of not fulfilling one’s station in life); failure to carry-out the most trivial of religious rituals, like prayer before meals (thus demonstrating a profound disregard of divine beneficence); and disloyalty or disobedience to any member of the clergy, even regarding matters of some questionable virtue like commercial activities during school hours (a favourite was the collection of flower sets in the large cemetery for sale back to the local florists - for the African missions of course - which was to be kept secret from one’s parents).

It is a cliche to blame the dramatic decline of both ‘vocations’ to religious communities and Catholic liturgical devotion, to the changes instituted by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960’s. My experience is that these changes merely allowed reflection on what Catholic religious practice had become, especially among religious congregations: an unthinking acknowledgement of obedience to authority as the only essential virtue. When the centrality of obedience was moved ever so slightly off-centre, the entire church-edifice trembled in eccentric, erratic movement. The structure of compulsion revealed itself and my generation fled from it in considerable confusion but intent on forgetting it. If only it had been that easy.

The spiritual abuse visited on the children was ingrained. But that was only an echo of the heavy-weight persecution visited on our teachers. Armstrong, herself preparing for life as a teaching sister, recounts many of the techniques used, and alludes to many more. They are often ghastly and senseless, but always justified as necessary for a closer union with God. It wasn’t enough to accept humiliation and degradation; one was expected to want it. Once seen for what these techniques were - methods of control by power - it is remarkable that an even greater number of religious congregations weren’t dissolved and churches closed.

The doctrinal certainty of the Catholic Church in its own ‘perfection’, which persists still, is the source of the delusions of my teachers as well as most of the continuing institutional problems of the Catholic Church. Paedophilia, misogyny, financial misconduct, organisational cover-up, and impermeability to administrative reform are all promoted and protected by the lingering idea of the societas perfecta., the self-proclaimed principle that the Church has everything it needs within itself for redemption. But of course it doesn’t.

Like any organisation the Catholic Church is prone to error. It needs to be criticised by those who can see it more clearly from the outside. To admit this however would be to admit its dependence on the world, something it dare not do. So it trundles on, effectively persecuting itself - first its clergy, then its congregations and most importantly its children, who have no defense against whatever visions of Hell are being used at the moment to enforce conformity. It’s self-image is as a religion of love. Many of us however experienced it as a religion of utmost fear... and even hatred.

Today the convent which housed the nuns who taught me is a police station. Karen Armstrong’s house of studies has become a graduate college of the University of Oxford.* The recycling of the buildings is somewhat easier than the recovery of the Spirit, the story of which Armstrong so movingly tells through her metaphor of the struggle up The Spiral Staircase. In it she is making amends, however incrementally, for the harm our generation has wrought in the world. Not as penance but as liberation.

* Coincidentally, my near neighbour in our small Cotswold village is an administrator of the charitable trust established with the proceeds of the sale of this building to Linacre College and the dissolution of the convent. My step daughter did her post-graduate work in this same location. Less than six degrees of separation, clearly.

Postscript: This piece, which demonstrates that the drive for Power is institutionalised to such a degree in the Catholic Church that even its leader can not mitigate it, appeared just after I posted the review: https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/12/2...

Post-post script: I have just seen the remarkable German film, Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross), the story of a 14 year old girl brought up in an ultra-Catholic family of the 21st century, but summarising much of what was global Catholicism in the middle of the 20th century. I highly recommend it for therapeutic as well as artistic reasons.

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The Bell by Iris Murdoch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Interrupting Routine

I work as tutor and librarian at Blackfriars Hall Oxford, the smallest and most medieval of the University of Oxford colleges and also a Dominican priory. A few years ago Blackfriars acquired a bell to call the friars to prayer. The sound of the bell does indeed create a definite atmosphere in the place; as also does its timing since it rings, like its larger fellow at Christ Church College, according to solar time - about six minutes behind GMT. The midday call to the Angelus therefore is somewhat disconcerting for passers by who nervously check their watches. I have come to believe that this slight disruption, this interruption, is precisely the bell’s function, intended or not. Paradoxically: a routine that interrupts routine. One way to interpret Murdoch’s novel is as just such an interruption in the lives of its characters.

A.S. Byatt in her introduction calls The Bell Murdoch’s first ‘English’ novel. And it certainly creates a distinctive atmosphere, one so dense, thick, and humid in the Summer heat that it feels like green cotton wool - simultaneously inhibiting and cushioning movement. The characters, mostly middle class professionals, each might have ‘issues’; but all are nevertheless cradled in the social solidity of a 1950’s bourgeois English culture that hopes against hope that it will remain 1939 forever. They live in an existential routine that seems fixed; they are stuck... largely with themselves.

People ‘get on’ as if on a trajectory with the defined and relatively narrow limits of Oxbridge graduates in a post-war world they find alien and confusing. Their individual worries, however, don’t inhibit their confidence, material or spiritual, in being English. They are, of course, completely unaware of this. How could it be otherwise? But their Englishness is the necessarily unstated subject of the book. The narrator would only spoil the narrative if she gave the game away; introspection is not to be encouraged, “A belief in Original Sin should not lead us to probe the filth of our minds.” Irony is after all English group therapy.

Opening with a very civilised adultery, leading to an even more civilised reconciliation for which the outgoing lover provides transportation to the railway station, there is no conflict which can’t be solved if one just has the patience to wait it out. And for heavens sake keep one’s mouth shut. Intimate communication is far too perilous a venture. Much preferable to rely on one’s friends to buoy one up without making a fuss, usually with a little G&T, or possibly even a bit of evening Compline before bed.

The High Church tradition, the antithesis of her Irish Presbyterian background, is something Murdoch became intimately familiar with in Oxford. Her College, Somerville, is just past the end of St. Giles’, a street along which John Henry Newman started his career as an Anglican vicar at one end and wound up a Catholic Cardinal at the other. Halfway along, and touching Blackfriars, is Pusey House, named for Newman’s colleague in the liturgical revival of Anglicanism (the Oxford Movement in fact). Pusey House is often more Catholic than the local Catholic churches since it can both anticipate the introduction of new ritual or revert to ancient practices without consulting the Vatican (Pusey House also has the best collection of Vatican documents in Oxford).

Some consider High Anglicanism to be a mimicry of Catholicism. It’s not. It is true English Catholicism, or better said, Catholicism in the English mode. Many Oxford colleges conduct Evensong and Compline services daily during term, using English Plainsong or Gregorian chant according to preference. These are sensually pleasing, one might call them erotic, events. They employ all the smells and bells of Catholic ritual but also emit a vaguely camp rebelliousness - directed at both Low Church Anglicans as well as the straight-laced (historically Irish) Catholic masses.

This Anglo-Catholicism provides a great deal of the dark green, cotton wool, comfort of The Bell. The enclosed convent of Anglican nuns in Imber is not an antithesis to the repressed erotic desires of the characters who fetch up together across the lake in a half-derelict country pile of Imber Court; it is a spiritual celebration of the erotic (One is reminded of Teresa of Avila and her swooning for Christ, her Spouse). I know of at least three similar communities within 15 minutes drive of Oxford. And I lived in one of these while I wrote my doctoral dissertation.*

This kind of community is not a place to escape desire but a place in which desire can be explored in a way that is uniquely English: through patient ritual, agricultural and industrial as well as religious. As the medieval philosophers taught: through practice one can act one’s way into a moral life. “The great thing about a dog” says one of the residents “is that it can be trained to love you.” And not just dogs. Humans too can be taught to love trough practice; but not through conversation, idle or therapeutic. So, “Meals were taken in silence at Imber.”

In a sense, therefore, sex is as much a religious practice in Anglo-Catholicism as it is in the Buddhism of the Kama Sutra. It needn’t be advertised as such, that would require talk which would compromise the effort fatally. But Murdoch makes the equivalence explicit in her description of the psychic state of her main character, a homosexual: “...in some curious way the emotion which fed both [his religious feeling and homosexual orientation] arose deeply from the same source.”

English resourcefulness is to be found in this dance of sex and religion, which is carried out as much to the rhythm of an English country house as of a Benedictine convent. The mustiness of each is additive: “There was a stale smell, like the smell of old bread, the smell of an institution.” A concise summary really of the English Baroque. Everything is surface, but brightly lighted surface so that nothing is actually hidden, “All the electric lights were so bright at Imber.”

The inhabitants are essentially misfits, and are recruited as such, “people... who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely...” Each of these defective characters has a place, a duty really, in the overall choreography of an operatic ballet in Imber Court, a definite role that fits snugly into an overall ensemble.

Dora is the dim beauty, the soprano of the piece. She has no comprehension of religion and only the most instrumentally sterile view of sex; but she is not malicious, “That she had no memory made her generous.” She is a central figure, a sort of goddess of creation (and of course therefore sex), who tends to get lost in Murdoch’s narrative turbulence. Paul, Dora’s husband, is the operatic baritone, for whom neither sex nor religion is about passion but domesticity. He desires Dora as housekeeper and mother for his children; and religion is part of an ordered family bliss. His lust, such as it is, is paterfamilial and conventional not perverse.

The director/producer is Mrs. Mark (married to Mr. Mrs. Mark), a somewhat beefy person in long skirts, with “well-developed calves.” She is a type of English proto-hippie perhaps, an evangelical Mrs Danvers, living a life of gentile, procedural poverty on someone else’s dime, never without a ‘cause’. Without her, neither sex nor religion could flourish at Imber. She is the liturgical and social hub, the enforcer of strict adherence to the rubrics, “It’s not like a hotel and we do expect our guests to fit in – and I think that’s what they like best too,” she politely commands. She also ensures that conversation never becomes intrusive, “That’s another little religious rule that we try to follow. No gossip.” What takes place outside Imber, remains outside Imber.

Mrs. Mark is the agent of Michael Meade, the somewhat reluctant leader, whose family estate Imber Court is. In subsequent decades Michael would have been identified as the ‘cult leader’ of the residents, not as sinister as Jim Jones or as commercial as Werner Erhard perhaps but still of some unaccountably charismatic incompetence. Michael has been inspired by the Abbess of the Benedictine convent to ‘minister’ to folk who are neither clerical nor secular but what now might be called ‘seekers’. He is a homosexual.

Catherine is the mezzo-soprano and, innovatively, the prima ballerina of the piece who is immediately identified by Dora as a rival. Catherine is imminently to become a postulant in the convent; or, as her twin brother perceives the situation, to be swallowed alive by the institutional monster of religious passion. Toby, Catherine’s male sexual counterpart, is the the pious, virginal counter-tenor. He is the unsure novice, spiritually as well as sexually unformed.

The eponymous bell constitutes what Alfred Hitchcock called the McGuffin - a motivating force whose function is to set the narrative in motion but that remains invisible. Essential therefore, although apparently trivial. It is Dora and Toby, at ends of the sexual/spiritual spectrum, who release the bell from the primal waters in which it has been hidden. Driven by the ‘event’ of the bell, the characters carom around the confines of Imber Court, impelling each other to acts of spiritual lust and material folly in a marvellously English way. And of course interrupting their lives profoundly, not just for them but for all of Murdoch’s generation.


* In fact this form of Anglo-Catholic lay community was inspired by the so-called Distributist Movement of the 1920’s and 30’s. This was a Catholic attempt, promoted by the likes of GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, to find a ‘middle way’ between Capitalism and Communism. It’s ideal was a sort of medieval economy dominated by small agricultural producers who owned and worked their own land. A few of Distributism’s ideological remnants still exist in Britain, Canada and Australia.

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When All the Days Have Gone by Lars Boye Jerlach
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Never-ending Recurrence

A Danish gravedigger, from Hamlet perhaps; a sailor, apparently from the disastrous Franklin expedition to the far North of Canada in 1848; a girlish apparition, who provides some continuity between the two; and several opinionated cats and birds - Jerlach has once again assembled an enigmatic cast in a sort of metempsychotic fantasy.

Time is stretched, distorted, and turned inside out. Maelstroms and terrestial sinkholes act like astronomical black holes to permit time travel. Characters therefore have a sort of eternal Platonic existence. They are their (our?) collective past, bound up in little packages of anonymous thought and feeling that are passed mysteriously from generation to generation. Thus we necessarily become our forebears in a way that is more than genetic. The days never do end until thought and feeling cease entirely. Do I detect a Jungian tendency?

My first thoughts were that the book needed a better English editor. The vocabulary is frequently archaic or arcane, and some usages less than idiomatic. But eventually it became clear that these were part of the 19th century flavour that was intended. Coleridge plays a big part, as does Poe, Scandinavian myth, and perhaps even Mark Twain, Charles Dodgson and Thomas Aquinas (as Brother Thommen OP!). The names Ambrosius and Veronica point to Augustine but perhaps that’s only in my head. As the story settles into my unconscious, I’m quite sure many more literary allusions will become clearer.

Jerlach is discursive, allusive, erudite, and great fun. Reading him is like being inside Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, unexpected connections across various dimensions pop up continuously. A literary sleigh-ride.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Choose Your Fictions Carefully

There are far too many fascinating assertions in this book to even mention. But for me the most fascinating is Harari’s idea of the Cognitive Revolution which took place about 70,000 years ago. "We might call it the Tree of Knowledge mutation. Why did it occur in Sapiens DNA rather than in that of Neanderthals? It was a matter of pure chance, as far as we can tell. But it’s more important to understand the consequences of the Tree of Knowledge mutation than its causes."

It is this mysterious, and as yet unexplained, change in human genetics that he pinpoints as the primary reason for the ultimate success of the species Homo Sapiens in competition not just with established flora and fauna but with other human forms. Interestingly, Harari’s argument also establishes the anthropological foundations for literary post-modernism.

To over-simplify, but not by much, the Cognitive Revolution of Sapiens is precisely the ability to tell, and eventually read and write, stories, that is, fictional narratives which are interesting, entertaining, and above all convincing. This ability, an evolutionary enigma because it does not give obviously immediate advantage, underlies human ability to organize beyond very small units, to cooperate in matters of survival, and to prevail against competing species which are stronger, quicker, better adapted to the environment, able to speak in a more varied manner, and even more clever.

These narratives, according to the narrative told by Harari, begin in gossip, talk among ourselves about ourselves, which is a behaviour that is now as far as anyone knows unique to Homo Sapiens, and may even have even been unique among others of the genus Homo. Gossip leads to shared tales about common experiences, ancestors, and problems. These tales evolve into myths which are widely shared and identify large groups as ‘us’. "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings."

Such tales incrementally employ an increasing lexicon of fictional, that is to say abstract, ideas. It is these ideas which allow the ultimate success of Sapiens, not necessarily because of their pragmatic qualities, but because, whatever they are, they are shared:

“Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined. When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links. While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail’s pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other ever seen on earth.”

As modern existential and linguistic philosophers have thought for some time, these ideas - scientific, religious, technological, social, legal - are fundamental fictions that become progressively indistinguishable from the ‘natural’ world which is apart from the imagined world of language. As Harari states what is a reiteration of this philosophical conclusion:

“Three main factors prevent people from realising that the order organising their lives exists only in their imagination:... a. The imagined order is embedded in the material world... b. The imagined order shapes our desires... c. The imagined order is inter-subjective.”

It is this invisibility of these linguistic fictions which constitute daily life that is both the greatest strength and greatest flaw of our species. We are able to organise ourselves, because of them, to travel to the Moon. We are also able to believe a half dozen untruths before breakfast. The internet is perhaps the best example of the paradox of our fraught existence since it promotes both cooperation and mass deceit.

For me the implications are clear: 1) literature is the only hope for the world. Fiction - novels, fairy tales, fantasies, and lots of 'em - are the only means to get a grip on reality. Reading lots of fiction developes the aesthetic sense. And it is only through aesthetics that one can decide what is important and how to deal with what is important. 2) It is also clear to me that novels cultivated our species genetically over millennia for this very reason - to get us better at reading them.

Postscript: For a rather plausible opposing view to Harari’s, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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