Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton by Rob Iliffe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Who Is God?

Isaac Newton took his religion as seriously as he took his science. His was a dangerous time in English history when bowing one’s head at the name of Jesus or using a bit of incense could have dire consequences for one’s prospects. It was just these sorts of liturgical trivialities that provoked the Puritan exodus to the New World and split the country between parliamentary and royalist factions in the seventeenth century.

But Newton wasn’t much bothered by liturgical ritual. As in his science, he penetrated to the core of his subject: Christian doctrine and traditions of belief. He found these grossly inadequate, deformed from their biblical purity by an institutional church which used them to further its own power. This sort of dissent would be more than career limiting if made public. It was heresy for which the established precedent provided death as a reward.

Newton’s primary target was in fact the central doctrine of Christianity, that of the Holy Trinity. This doctrine claims not only the divinity of Christ but also his equivalence to God the Father in terms of unlimited power, eternal existence, and universal presence in the world. Newton’s detailed biblical exegesis and historical research had convinced him that this central doctrine was a pernicious lie, the principle source of which was the fourth century church leaders who had led the charge against the man Arius, whom they proclaimed an arch-heretic.

As demonstrated in the doctrine of the Trinity, Christianity is anything but a ‘simple’ religion. The amount of ink spilt trying to formulate the separate but unified Divine Persons of the Christian God is incalculable. The fact that the church considers the Trinity a ‘mystery’ even to itself, hasn’t stopped its theologians from continually reinterpreting and reformulating the doctrine generation after generation with no improvement in its intelligibility.

It is this obscure nature of the doctrine that most upset Newton in Iliffe’s account. Obscurity meant uncertainty. Uncertainty meant lack of rigorous thought, which implied obfuscation with intent. In a sense the doctrine of the Trinity destroys the credibility of language, and not just ordinary language but also the language of mathematics which provides the best description we are able to construct about the world. The Trinity, in other words, is a trick played on the ignorant and an insult to the educated. If it cannot be expressed adequately in language, even if only approximately, then it cannot be.

If Newton’s trinitarian cat had been let out of the bag during his lifetime, some of his greatest works would likely never had been written, his grave would not be revered in Westminster Abbey, and his reputation as the greatest scientist of the seventeenth century would have been fatally compromised. Despite his rather fervent, if rationalistic, theism, he would have lost not just his position at Cambridge, but also his credibility within respectable scientific society. He would have become, in short, an outcaste.

So with such high stakes, the central historical question is why would Newton pursue such an apparently arcane and purely metaphysical investigation? Surprisingly, in the first instance, he had a distinct suspicion of human imagination. He distrusted flights of intellectual fancy which were not verifiable by observation. And that which formed the empirical foundation for religion was Scripture. If theological assertions could not be correlated with scriptural texts, they were likely, he believed, to be as reliable as the mountain of other scholastic imaginings about the nature of the world and its Creator. For Newton even metaphysics was an empirical discipline.

Second, he took the scriptural dictum of human beings created in the image of God quite seriously. This description worked two ways: people shared God-like powers; but God also had characteristics analogous to those of people. One of these characteristics is some sort of psychological identity which persists despite changing circumstances. This similarity between God and human beings was necessary, among other reasons, for divine communication, revelation, to take place at all - a rather prescient observation that would be the subject of great debate among theologians in the twentieth century. It is this anthropological analogy which seems to have led him to first question the validity of the Christian Trinity.

So Newton’s theology may be seen, although Iliffe doesn’t conclude this, as a statement of the rationality of the universe as a necessary condition for the impetus to investigation, and not merely for the production of reliable results from such investigation. My interpretation is that the issue of the Trinity is raised because it potentially inhibits on a metaphysical level precisely what Newton was devoting his life to - the uncovering of pre-existing, intelligible order in the universe. He believed this order was a result of a design by a Being that was comprehensible, even if not entirely understood, by the human mind. And whatever else the Trinity might be, it was not comprehensible; it was a surd, a block to the ultimate order of reality, and therefore not part of that reality.

This line of thinking, if I am correct, is both novel and powerful. What Newton has done is supply a very cogent explanation for what, at the time was called Socinianism, the anti-trinitarian heresy that arose during the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. The implications of Socinian theology are profound, touching on almost every aspect of established Christian metaphysics from the nature of creation to the need for and means of its salvation. In a sense Newton anticipated what Immanuel Kant was to do a century later in his ‘transcendental deduction’. By inferring what must be true in metaphysics from what can be observed physically, specifically its intelligibility, Newton concludes the impossibility of the Trinitarian doctrine. The doctrine was, at best, the product of inflamed religious imagination, and at worst purposeful obfuscation perpetrated even by the Church of England. This was explosive thinking and it is little wonder that he kept his mouth shut about it.

Iliffe concedes that “Newton’s descent into heterodoxy is shrouded in an archival fog.” There simply is no documentation that proves when and why the man came to his rejection of this essential doctrine. But reject it he did as he made clear in subsequent notes and unpublished papers. The publicly visible face of this rejection was an increasingly vehement attack on the institution he credited with its imaginative invention, the Roman Church. Newton’s general philosophy, despite his impatience and acerbic character was one of tolerance, not just in science but in theological views. But when it came to Roman Catholicism, he drew the line. For whatever misguided reason, evil or not, this institution had created a doctrine which had the potential to destroy not only his life’s work but all of science as it was emerging from its scholastic lethargy. Iliffe’s title therefore is inspired: indeed he was a priest of nature.

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The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Hypocrisy in Action

In my email today I received an invitation from a group called Developing a Christian Mind [DCM] to one of their programmes in Oxford entitled Seeking Wisdom. I am assured that essential issues relating to the “Humanities, Medical Sciences, Natural Sciences, Philosophy and Theology, and Social Sciences” will be addressed over a two day weekend by well-known academics. I will be informed, specifically, “How postgraduates, postdocs, and academics at the University of Oxford can approach their academic disciplines as Christians and what it means to respond to a Christian vocation and to honour God in university life?”

Such an invitation is not unusual. Oxford is a superficially religious place. Every college has its own chapel in which services, typically sung in English plain chant, are held several times a week if not daily. Every Christian, Jewish and Islamic denomination has their own ‘outreach’ to the ever-stressed student population and offers some sort of comfort that another kind of life which is neither meritocratic nor economically constrained is possible if not imminent. Most students aren’t bothered with this spiritual marketing and consider the vaguely medieval spirituality of the place as a sort of background aesthetic radiation left over from the thirteenth century. It goes with the architecture.

But some respond positively, even enthusiastically, to the aesthetic and ‘find themselves’, at least temporarily, in a personal religious awakening. These are the students, I imagine, who sign up for things like Developing a Christian Mind. But what is it, I ask myself, do they think constitutes a Christian Mind? Or I suppose the question should be what do the organizers think constitutes a Christian Mind.

The programme brochure provides some clues. In the Humanities ‘stream’ a Christian Mind is apparently formed through discussion of musicology and the reading of “inspirational poetry”. In the Medical Sciences, Christian wisdom is to be found in those parts of the gospels which advocate “personalized, precision medicine”(!). There is little to say, on the other hand, about Christianity and the Natural Sciences except for a short session on evolution. It is in the Social Sciences that the organizers believe that Christianity has most to impart to their audience. Christian ethics, of course, rates top billing, followed by discussions about treating others respectfully even when they disagree. All seemingly innocuous stuff.

So it is clear that the academics who are orchestrating and presenting the programme have a view on what kind of Christianity they are talking about. I would classify this as one of a rather moderate, soft, and inviting Anglicanism, an undogmatic Christianity of good fellowship and courteous discussion. The real purpose of the weekend, it appears to me, is to keep the students connected to the Anglican substrate of English society by implying that whatever it is they are studying is not incompatible with Christian belief. Hardly a fundamentalist hard sell therefore.

But is it honest? Certainly not according to Catherine Nixey’s account of the Christianity of the late classical period which did its utmost to destroy all traces of scientific and artistic accomplishment resulting from Greek and Roman civilization. And Nixey is somewhat sympathetic to the Christian position. Her narrative history hardly mentions the thesis of Edward Gibbon that Christian belief itself was the source of terminal decline of the classical world. She concentrates only on the systematic, savage, and unrelenting war that Christian activists waged on civil and intellectual society from the second through the sixth century.

This war was lead by fanatics who are functionally indistinguishable from today’s ISIS and Taliban. Augustine of Hippo, for example, the most prominent Latin churchman and theologian of his day, was unequivocal in his insistence that any resistance to forcible conversion to Christianity justified torture and even death. John Chrysostom, Augustine’s counterpart in the Eastern Christian Church, was equally radical in his denunciation of all non-Christians, particularly Jews, as less than human and subject to any penalties which could be devised by the state to force their submission, or face the ultimate punishment.

The Christianisation of the Roman state had a marked anti-intellectual component. Classical scientific as well as literary texts were destroyed systematically as a matter of policy from the fourth century onwards. The great library of Alexandria with its 700,000 volumes was destroyed by a Christian mob under the direction of the local bishop. The Athenian Academy, founded by Socrates, was progressively persecuted and finally banned by the emperor at the urging of zealous Christians. Thought itself was subject to the approval of ecclesiastical authorities like the biblicist Jerome who considered any disagreement with his own exegetical opinion as heresy, punishable in the usual way - by death.

Nixey tries to soften the blow of originary Christian anti-intellectualism by alluding to the perennial myth of the ‘saving’ of Western civilization within Christian monasteries during the disintegration of the empire and the so-called dark ages. Perhaps, but it is clear that any such salvation was largely incidental and accidental. Christianity destroyed far more than it preserved in its willful ascendancy to power. Christianity was the first religion to claim to know the entire truth of existence (it still does) and to insist that its truth is superior not just to the truth as perceived by others, but also superior to human life itself.

The fact that a very significant strain of Christianity continues to resist the results of intellectual activity - in evolutionary research, in sexual development, in human rights - around the world is not an aberration but a norm. Even here in Oxford, until recently, the hold of the Anglican Church on the curriculum of study and the mores of the intellectual life has been largely stifling. This is not to say that religiously minded folk in Oxford or elsewhere cannot have academic integrity. But it does signal for me that the proselytizers like those of DCM are at least practicing a conscious deceit in pretending they know what they mean by a Christian Mind, and that, whatever a Christian Mind is, it has some sort of material or spiritual superiority over the minds the rest of us might possess.

As far as the historical merit of Nixey’s narrative goes, I can only cite the perennial Oxford maxim: rely on the original texts. Nixey writes well but not necessarily with good professional judgment. Many of the historical characters she uses are of marginal importance and, despite the sub-title, Nixey doesn’t seem to quite know where she stands on the matter of Christian culpability. The book gives more than a hint that it was written in fits and starts by a part time author who loves her subject but can’t yet make a living out of it. Nonetheless, the DCM people would certainly benefit from a read if only to dampen their ardour for the arrogant fantasies they have concocted about the composition of the Christian Mind.

Postscript: Shortly after finishing the above review I received yet another invitation, this from my own Blackfriars Hall in conjunction with its American counterpart in Washington DC to attend a conference on Catholic Truth in the Contemporary World. So I now can look forward to some appropriate content for my Christian Mind. How exciting.

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Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

All Women Marry Beneath Themselves

Like the Shakers, the Beguine movement was an attempt to provide some institutional respite for women in a world dominated by men, their narcissistic violence, and chronically inadequate women’s toilet facilities. The Begijnhof in Amsterdam is a vestige of this movement, which is probably no less necessary today than it was in medieval society.

Gerry is a boor and a functional alcoholic. Stella is spiritually-minded and feels dis-valued. They have reached that stage in their marriage in which a gentle sniping and comforting ritual is as intimate as it gets. Both self-medicate to relieve disappointment with their lives: he with booze; she with an idea of escape into a refuge like the Beguines. Both want a different life. She is obviously the more competent at living.

As an intact antique city, Amsterdam evokes not just the past but specific memories for Gerry and Stella. “There was a time when Stella and he were congruent,” muses Gerry. Especially when they shared a trauma to which they both had to adapt. Is there anything more than that stale shared past to keep them together?

On the other hand, “What was love but a lifetime of conversations. And silences. Knowing when to be silent. Above all, knowing when to laugh.” Could there actually be more to look forward to in old age than this? Perhaps this is the implication of MacLaverty’s references to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying - it’s all more than a little neurotic but somehow it works.

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The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Science Imitating Art

Jackson’s story was published in 1948. At the time, and since, it has been praised as insightful and criticised as obscure. But almost 20 years later, the French philosopher, Rene Girard, produced a theory which has a remarkable congruence with its theme and, I think, provides the best explanation of what Jackson was getting at in The Lottery.

Girard argued that our individual desires are never the product of some inner longing but always rather of the imitation of others. We want what other people want. This he called ‘mimetic desire’ and Girard went on to explore the implications of this insight for the next half century.

Mimetic desire, according to Girard, has a predictable trajectory that is familiar to advertising executives around the world. One person wants what another has, just because the other has it. This attracts the desire of others in a sort of exponential wave of wanting.

But widespread wanting of anything means, first, a shortage of that commodity, and consequently the mutual antagonism of all those who share the same desire. Girard’s contention is that this incipient hostility threatens to create a sort of Hobbesian world, a non-society, in which no cooperative or coordinated action, including effective government, can be established.

Human beings, Girard believed, deal with this situation unconsciously and instinctively by the mechanism of ‘scape-goating’, through which a group identifies one of its own members as the cause of its mimetic tension. This individual is both sacred and an object of communal hatred. The elimination of this individual is therefore not just necessary for the welfare of the community, but also forms the basis of religious practice in which the role of the scape-goat is transformed into a noble duty.

Girard goes even further in his later work to claim that the ritual establishment of the scape-goat is the most primitive form of representation, and consequently of language, that human beings have demonstrated. In a sense the essential foundation for human power in the world is religious violence which victimizes random members or groups in modern society.

Whether or not one agrees with Girard’s anthropology, and there is a substantial body of evidence to recommend it, his literary usefulness is demonstrated by the application of his theory to The Lottery. The theory explains, among other things the liturgical character of the story; its origins in a distant past; its particular relevance to a relatively isolated agricultural community; and its connection to a paternalistic hierarchy whose continued existence depends on the ritual.

As far as I am aware, Girard did not read The Lottery; but since he was in America at the time he might have done. In any case, it is certainly remarkable that an author of fiction like Jackson could have written such a tight short story which captures so much of subsequent academic work. Thus demonstrating, if demonstration were needed, the tremendous importance of fiction to cultural life.

For an introduction to Girard’s work see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Pigeon by Patrick Süskind
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What Passes For Success

“He was not a man of action. He was a man of resignation.” And consequently, he was also a man of strict routine, of rigid habit, of acute sensitivity to any deviation from the expected. Suskind’s anti-protagonist is also emotional; he suffers anger and fear, and resentments.

But these emotions are provoked only by events, mostly trivial except to him, not by memory or positive desire of any sort. He wants nothing other than what he has, especially when the little he has is threatened.

Until the moment of self-recognition, the moment when his whole life is explained in an instant as one trapped in childhood trauma: “... you’re a child, you only dreamed that you had grown up to be a disgusting old guard in Paris, but you’re a child and you’re sitting in the cellar of your parents’ house, and outside is war, and you’re trapped, buried, forgotten. Why don’t they come? Why don’t they rescue me? Why is it so deathly still? Where are the other people? My God, where are the other people? I simply cannot live without other people!”

Learning how to survive without other people had become not just a necessary tactic but an end in itself. The Dutch build more polders, perhaps simply because they can; South Americans have revolutions because they know how; Americans arm teachers with guns because... well just because. To what degree do all of us find ourselves similarly trapped by the successful tactics of youth?

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Every Fifteen Minutes by Lisa Scottoline
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The World Is Probably Out To Get You

Lisa Scottoline knows how to write a satisfying mystery. Just the right mix of prosaic detail, humour, and pace.

There is a downside however: sociopathy is revealed as potentially everywhere, in your spouse, your colleagues, your friends, and (if you’re a shrink) your clients.

So, if you aren’t already a bit mentally unstable, Every Fifteen Minutes may push you over the edge of paranoia. If you feel really comfortable with the idea of essential human goodness, then read on. Keep in mind, though, that you won’t emerge from the experience unscathed.

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Number and Numbers by Alain Badiou
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

French Arithmetic

There is always something of the tongue-in-cheek about French philosophy. An ironical tone as if communicating to a colleague over your shoulder about whom the reader should have known but doesn’t. As if the writer is making history, perhaps, and giving the reader a privileged seat before the prizes are handed out.

What seems like hot air may only be heavy breathing.

Badiou considers that numbers dominate our lives. Not just in economics where numbers are obviously important, but in everything from medicine to culture. They constitute our practical existence. What is counted counts. And yet most of us feel alienated from numbers. Mathematics is arcane wisdom and aside from making change for the purchase of a newspaper or a restaurant tip, we have no interest in these numbers. But Badiou thinks we should: “if we don’t know what a number is,... we don’t know what we are.”

Fair enough.

So, Badiou is on a quest - to overcome “the despotism of number,” to correct the condition that “we have at our disposal no recent, active idea of what number is,” to create “a second modernity,” the route to which “... constrains thought to return to zero, the infinite, and the One. A total dissipation of the One, an ontological decision as to the being of the void and that which marks it, proliferation without measure of infinities: these are the parameters of such a passage. The amputation of the One delivers us to the unicity of the void and to the dissemination of the infinite.”

Who knew?

What motivates Badiou is that the leading lights of 19th century mathematics - Dedekind, Cantor, Frege and Peano - couldn’t come up with a theory that included all the various kinds of numbers - natural, real, integers, rational, ordinal, etc. Each used a distinct but incomplete method - axiomatics, set theory, logic, etc. But the result has been disappointing: “The thinkers of number have only in fact been able to demonstrate how the intellectual procedure that conducts us to each species of ‘number’ leaves number per se languishing in the shadow of its name.”

I can’t help but feel deep sympathy for such numerical languish. One is reminded daily of the numbers who suffer but never of the suffering numbers!

Some of the ideas of these mathematicians are arresting. For example, Frege’s definition of Zero as that which “is not identical with itself.” Since by definition something not identical to itself does not exist, voila Zero appears. Even more remarkable, Frege goes on to define "One as the number that belongs to the concept ‘identical to Zero’". Which makes perfect sense since Zero is not identical to itself.

Confused yet?

Nevertheless there are also some enlightening observations. For example, Badiou recognises that the Russell Paradox* which blew Frege’s logical boat out of the water has a profound implication: “It is impossible, says the ‘paradox,’ to accord to language and to the concept the right to legislate without limit over existence.” In other words, the map of language is not the territory of reality, even when the language is extremely precise.

Dedekind takes a very different approach. For him the issue is not building up a number system but selecting from an already established infinite set so that the unit of analysis, as it were, is “not ‘a’ number, but N, the simply infinite ‘system’ of numbers.” **Using this tack, Dedekind is able to show that when it comes to infinite numbers, the Euclidean maxim that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts is in fact bunk. Unfortunately for Dedekind, he uses a variant of the Cartesian ‘cogito’ or ego which is outside the infinite system it hypothesises and so ends up in a paradox similar to that of Frege.

It is in discussing Peano that Badiou gets up a head of intellectual steam and plies into his real foe - language-based philosophy: “We see here, as if in the pangs of its birth, the real origin of that which Lyotard calls the ‘linguistic turn’ in western philosophy, and which I call the reign of the great modern sophistry: if it is true that mathematics, the highest expression of pure thought, in the final analysis consists of nothing but syntactical apparatuses, grammars of signs, then a fortiori all thought is under the constitutive rule of language.”

Yup. And if it’s the case with mathematics, what chance does even the French language have for claiming precision in representing reality? I feel Badiou’s pain. And I understand why he quickly exits that field of battle in order to engage his remaining Mathematicians, who are at least gentlemen in their ignorance of linguistics.

Cantor was also concerned with the infinite, but with the infinite in a grain of sand rather than the whole beach. His insight was that any subset of real numbers, no matter how limited, was also infinite. Put another way, no matter how precisely two numbers might be expressed, there is always a number between them. This leads to the counter-intuitive conclusion that there are more parts to any set than there are elements. I can’t follow Badiou’s digressive criticism of Cantor but it appears to be summarised in the phrase “We do not want to count; we want to think counting,” and somehow this has to do has to do with cats.

Eventually Badiou comes to rest on a concept he believes addresses all the various issues of what numbers really are. They are, he believes ‘surreal.’ Not being a mathematician, Surreal Numbers are new to me despite the fact they have been around for some time. From what I understand in Badiou’s presentation (not that much), I am sympathetic to the general idea. The concept is presented, appropriately enough, not in a professional paper but in a novel from 1974, Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned on to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness, which begins “In the beginning everything was void, and J.H.W.H. Conway began to create numbers. Conway said, ‘Let there be two rules which bring forth all numbers large and small...’”

And on it goes. The two rules, the syntax of/for surreal numbers, are enough to generate almost all the sorts of numbers Badiou is worried about. There is of course one small problem: these two rules are the apotheosis of Lyotard’s ‘linguistic turn;’ they are the fundamental grammar of what Badiou considers a coherent mathematics. And indeed they do mean that all thought is ‘under the constitutive rule of language.’ It seems we had already arrived at the destination before we departed on the journey. As I said: French philosophical irony.

See here for a more or less parallel argument: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

*Regarding the membership of the set of all sets with itself.

** This he calls “secularisation of the infinite,” a lovely Badiouan flourish.

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Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Corporate Occupation

From time to time Georges Simenon has been either accused of collaboration or praised for his resistance during the German occupation of France in WWII. Dirty Snow suggests that a substantial middle ground, which might be called ‘exploitative participation’, exists and could just be closer to the truth. This region is inhabited by many, particularly those of the permanent underclass who perceive occupation as another not terribly significant fact of life to be dealt with by the usual means: crime.

Or more precisely, purposeless criminality. For the protagonist, Frank, military occupation simply means increased opportunity. Murder, in particular, is less problematic than during peacetime and one simply yearns to test one’s mettle in such a permissive atmosphere. In fact, all relationships are worth less to Frank than they might have been otherwise - with the naive girl who lives across the landing, with the newly recruited prostitutes in his mother’s brothel, with his felonious pals. All are expendable.

But aside from the momentary thrill of conquest, none of Frank’s actions are meant to advance any objective. He already lives well with no financial concerns and no real worry about punishment. He’s on the way up in the underworld society, which itself is entirely nihilistic: "Everyone has something on everyone else, so that everyone, on closer view, has something to feel guilty about. In other words, the only reason you don’t betray other people is for fear of being betrayed by them.” The skill, therefore, is to be the first to betray.

On second or third thought, could it be that most of us occupy this middle ground of exploitative participation in the corporate society which itself acts as an occupational force in our midst? Getting on for the sake of getting on. Acting for the thrill of reputational advance. Murder and other illegalities may be off limits, but betrayal in the corporate world comes just as easily as it does for Frank in occupied territory. Frank may merely be the apotheosis of the good corporate citizen.

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A Personal Matter 
by 

Kenzaburō Ōe, 

 

John Nathan (Translator)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Feb 14, 2018  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: japanese 

Not in the Travel Brochures

Nothing about Japan, neither its culture nor its institutions, not to say its people, is portrayed with any sympathy in A Personal Matter. The tragedy of a grotesquely deformed child, while disconcerting and disruptive to everyone concerned - family, hospital staff, employer - is no more than that. “They were glimpsing an infinitesimal crack in the flat surface of everyday life and the sight filled them with innocent awe.”

The universal desire seems to be for escape, not just from one’s circumstances, or from the constraints of modern living, but from organic life itself. Everything about the human body is disgusting - from the description of female genitalia directly after birth, to the forced vomiting of the residue of a bottle of Scotch, to the ‘brain hernia’ of the child. Sex is either rape or routine self-indulgence. Eating is of the coarsest fast food. Sleep is a time of nightmares. Social relations are either violent or exploitative. Kindness is unknown.

All the characters are vaguely inhuman as well as inhumane. Bird, the protagonist, wanders the streets aimlessly and gets into fistfights while his wife is in labour. His ex-girlfriend, Himiko, when not having sex with strangers, meditates all day on a ramifying quantum universe, and drives her MG sports car around all night, equally aimlessly. The father-law-law, hearing of his deformed grandson’s birth, provides Bird with a bottle of whisky, knowing he is an alcoholic. The mother-in-law refuses even to make eye contact with Bird. Bird’s wife is a mere cypher of maternal concern.

The depth of thought, or lack of it, provoked by the situation is startling: “Does a vegetable suffer?” The child, at most, is a medical case study and interesting autopsy. At a time, one would expect, of intense grief, Bird’s principle worry is about himself: “Bird was terrified of being responsible for any mishap in the world of present time.” Kenzaburo seems to be locating the tragedy not with the infant but with the entire society in which the infant happens to appear.

So obviously this is not about A Personal Matter at all. The irony clearly is meant to enmesh all of Japanese life in this single incident. Can the redemptive decision of an individual make any difference? Beyond that it seems to me impossible for a non-Japanese to comment. Not a book, therefore, likely to be suggested reading by the Japanese Tourist Agency.

 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 
by 

Mark Haddon

 

Coping With Conscience

My 34 year old daughter is severely autistic, and has been since she was seven. No one knows why and the condition has never varied in its intensity. So she is stuck in time. She knows this and vaguely resents it somewhat but gets on with things as best she can.

Each case of autism is probably unique. My daughter has no facility with numbers or memory but she does with space. As far as I can tell any enclosed space appears to her as a kind of filing system which she can decipher almost instantly. When she was twelve I brought her into a cavernous Virgin megastore to get a particular CD. She had never been in the place before, but after standing in the doorway for three or four seconds, she walked immediately to the correct aisle and bin and picked out the desired CD without any hesitation.

I have a theory, probably rubbish, that autistic people perceive the world as it actually is or, more precisely, within strictly limited categories that might be called ‘natural’, somewhat in the vein of Kantian transcendentals - space, time, numbers, etc. Most, like my daughter and Christopher, the protagonist of The Curious Incident, have no facility with purely linguistic manipulation - metaphor, lying, irony, jokes, complex allusion, actually fiction of any sort. The world is not just literal, it exists in a way that ensures words are always subservient to things and without imagination that it could be any other way. 

In my experience autistic people tend to become upset when non-autistic people attempt to reverse the priority by making things subservient to words. This makes the autistic person confused, anxious, and often angry. They appear resentful that such liberties can be taken with what is so obviously reality. In effect, the autistic life is devoted to truth as what is actually ‘there’, stripped of all emotional, figurative, and cultural content. 

This makes autistic people often difficult to live with. They insist and they persist about things which appear trivial to others. They nag and needle until they obtain recognition. In those areas that interest them, they are capable of splitting the finest hairs to avoid abandoning their perceptions of the world. They may on occasion conform in order to gain a point but they never really give in. They are stalwart in being, simply, themselves. Adaptation occurs elsewhere, not in them.

It is, therefore, probably impossible for non-autistic people to live without tension among autistic people. The latter are maddening in the solidity of their selves. They are, in a sense, elemental, for all we know formed in the intense energy of a star in some distant galaxy. Fortunately, the fact that most of us cannot understand their elemental force is not something that worries them very much. Their emotional reactions may be intense but these attenuate rapidly, leaving little damaging residue. 

Ultimately, perhaps, autistic people are the conscience of the world. And conscience is always troublesome, not because it threatens to judge but because it reveals.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives by Elizabeth S. Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Newest Industrial State

The world we live in is neither capitalist nor socialist but corporate. This world conforms to none of the theories of economics or politics that are commonly used to justify corporate action or government policy. The corporate economy combines the hierarchical bureaucracy of extreme communism with the ideological force of extreme free enterprise to create a culture which now rules the planet. John Kenneth Galbraith predicted a half century ago in his The New Industrial State what we now experience in daily life. No one paid much attention. Not enough people had yet felt the pain. More do now; perhaps enough will be moved by Elizabeth Anderson’s analysis.

Accountability for this de facto government is vague. Yet the corporation establishes the regime in which we live. Most of the daily lives of most people in most regions of the world are spent in the service of the corporation and are subject to its particular form of carrot and stick brutality. The illusion that such subjugation is voluntary is part of the corporation’s governmental power. A small minority of corporate employees may be able to move advantageously from one corporate employer to another. But the vast majority are simply stuck with the corporate regime as ‘the way things are.’

Outside of employment, the corporation dominates our existence far more thoroughly than any elected government. Corporate legislative lobbying is the tip of an iceberg of highly technical international standards and agreements that determine what will be done where and to what level of personal and ecological safety. We might object to corporate funding of political campaigns but it is the hidden non-legislative commitments made by government acquiescence to ‘corporate expertise’ that creates the real clout for corporate control over markets from food to high-tech components.

Elizabeth Anderson is a political philosopher and one of the few social critics who has recognized the modern economy, society, and government for what it is: life totally controlled by the singular institution of the corporation. She reminds us that it was not always so. Neither Marx nor Adam Smith knew anything about the corporation. Its institutional growth was promoted as a means to eliminate monopoly and its attendant inequities. According to liberal theory, the corporation is a mere way station to perfect markets. Yet it is in fact an intentional suspension of market forces that has ‘internalized’ decision-making permanently within itself.

The issues of globalization, immigration, trade pacts, ecological destruction, and the nature of liberal democracy itself, are all subsidiary to the issue of the corporation. Yet the corporation controls the discussion, not just in annual jamborees like Davos, but through the literally thousands of meetings, fora, and working groups that constitute normal corporate life. What Anderson offers in these lectures and her responses to their critics is away to begin talking about this form of private corporate government and how to bring it to heel.

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Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Really Tough Love

Yates has a reputation as a chronicler of the smug years of post-WWII America. Perhaps. But as an artist, he is much more than a period sociologist. Yates’s understanding of the folie a deux which we call marriage is profound. The reasons two people find each other attractive are buried in experiences of which neither is conscious much less rationally able to think about.

To call such attraction love is euphemistic. It may be, at best, an attempt to redeem or complete oneself that might eventually develop into love but only if the underlying reasons are resolved sufficiently and replaced. Subsequent decisions to bring children into such an indeterminate situation are likely based on equally fatuous thinking. It seems amazing therefore that the survival rates of marriage are as high as they are and that more of us are not functionally psychotic.

Yates raises the perennial if not eternal question of the nature and implications of commitment. I recall the distinction made when I was in the services between making a contribution and making a commitment: in one’s breakfast of bacon and eggs, the chicken has made a contribution; the pig is decisively committed. Does this anecdote express the reality or essential ethics of commitment? Are the reasons for making commitments, misguided or not, relevant to a continuation of a commitment? Do changed circumstances, including improved awareness of motives, abrogate the demands of previous commitments? Can 'Til death us do part' be anything more than irrational optimism and encouragement?

Personal sovereignty is analogous to national sovereignty. The implication would seem to be that treaties, contracts, agreements are never unconditional, never intended as eternal. There may be consequences of non-compliance with any of these, but acceptance of consequences is part of sovereignty - the share out of community property, loss of mutual friends, increased psychological and social tensions; and of course the fate of the next generation. The calculus of contract-termination may be complex but doesn't seem to imply any absolute moral constraints. On the other hand, can what we believe to be considered judgment be anything more than hapless struggle?

The alternative to withdrawal of commitment is what seems to fascinate Yates. We try to ‘work things out.’ In order to deny, or at least delay, the possibility of broken commitment, we tell each other stories. Stories about the past and how we arrived at the present could prove therapeutic by uncovering unconscious reasons and reasoning. But we tell stories about the future instead, about alternatives lives - in exotic locations, doing interesting work, with stimulating friends and colleagues. The stories promote hope but little else.

We hope these ‘ideals’ can compensate for any originating defects. But it’s likely that Yates is correct: these ideals simply reinforce the power of the neuroses already in play. A new script perhaps but the same denouement. There is no way to anticipate the psychological baggage we take on with our partner. The piper will be paid. Pain is inevitable. The issue is who pays and when. Unambiguously happy endings are not within the range of the possible.

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Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

No Surrender

Whenever I’m in danger of feeling smugly self-satisfied or, on alternate days, resentfully dissatisfied about my place in the world, James Baldwin is always on hand as a corrective. His prose is hypnotic as it allows entry into the lives of people one does not know. His minimalist descriptions are perfect in their evocation of a timeless space. The relationships he characterizes are simply true; one can feel oneself part of them. And the real condition of being alive in the world is revealed for what it is: suffering, of which I have experienced slightly more than some but vastly less than most of the world.

In Baldwin, everyone suffers. They suffer because the are poor, because they are displaced, because of young mistakes, because of ambitions denied, but mostly because there is no hope. The world never gets any better from the moment his stories commence. Life is like the Manhattan schist boulder in the lot across the street from his starting location - eternally the same, immovable, dangerous for children and for the people who literally as well as figuratively work beneath it. A mountainous rock of despair.

The best possible outcome for everyone is a sort of tedious, grinding equilibrium that avoids imminent disaster or death. But the life that remains is one of constant fear, conflict, injustice and uncertainty. Only the will to survive sustains it - not family, not the community, not the ‘authorities’, certainly not the larger society that barely recognizes such a life. One lives in the midst of an undefined threat, an incessant hum of racial hatred ready to turn into a thunder-clap of annihilation at the slightest misstep. Yet those who suffer do not despair.

What is the secret? How do they persist? How much inherent strength does it take to reject both suicide and murder in response to the mountain of despair? One strategy seems to be a sort of immanent metaphysics expressed in the pentecostalist church and its customs. Pentecostalism is Christian in vocabulary, but it is gnostic in belief. It is a refuge for the thinking oppressed. The world is evil and must be resisted. Home is elsewhere and can be glimpsed only in ecstatic transport. While waiting for its indefinite arrival, preservation of the spark of special wisdom must be encouraged. The world must be destroyed entirely in order for it to be saved.

Gnosticism provides a solid explanation for the world and the suffering one experiences and sees in others. But it also fosters a fundamental suspicion of oneself - not just of one’s motives, but of one’s entire being. If all which is visible is evil, then the self, the most personally visible thing of all, is untrustworthy. Gnosticism demands the surrender of one’s body to the malicious, malignant Demi-god who created this world of exile; and the surrender of one’s intellect to the corruption of the original sin, committed so long ago no one remembers what it was, but which is passed on genetically and stops us from thinking right thoughts ever since.

Gnostic expression is stilted: ‘Praise the Lord’, ‘Shout Amen’, ‘Feel the arms of Jesus’. It is formulaic in order to purify speech from its inherent flaws. It clears the mind of thought and reason which have no means to realize themselves even if they weren’t already part of the evil that surrounds us. To be able to transport oneself into gnostic bliss is enough rational comfort. It is resistance without appearing to resist; it is escape while still behind the bars; it is the promised land without leaving home; it is intoxication without the hangover.

But Gnosticism is not good enough for Baldwin. He won’t have it. And he won’t take the other available ways to dull the pain of reality: booze, drugs, violence, sexual domination. Instead he writes. And what he writes shares the pain. It doesn’t rationalize or reduce the pain, but it spreads it so we all can know about it. In order that, perhaps, something different may grow out of it.

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The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey Robin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Cultural Criticism Is a Tricky Business

Corey Robin’s essay on contemporary conservatism was published in 2011, five years before Pankaj Mishra’s The Age of Anger (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). The Reactionary Mind covers much of the same ground at a time when the contours of that ground were less clear than they have become. And, unlike the later books, it was written more for academic consumption than a popular or general literary audience. It is also a better book, quite an achievement given the merits of Mishra’s and Lilla’s obvious skills as writers and social observers.

Unlike Mishra and Lilla, Robin’s analysis starts not with a judgment of a prevailing sentiment of the times - nostalgia for Lilla; ressentiment for Mishra - but with a timeless philosophical and sociological issue: power. For Robin, the perennial source of reactionary conservatism is the concern of those in power to maintain that power. He neatly encapsulates his entire thesis in a single phrase: “Conservatism is about power besieged and power protected.”

According to Robin’s line of argument, there is nothing new about today’s political situation - particularly, neither nostalgia nor ressentinent - which makes our current reactionary politics different except the identities of those who feel threatened by the extension of emancipatory freedom, and by implication, equality. The most intense critics of the ancien regime, whatever that happens to be, are present conservatives. He cites Burke and Maistre at length to make his point that conservative sentiment neither yearns for past glory nor resents the power lost through incompetence. That conservative fear should now be directed toward immigrants and atheists is not qualitatively different from that shown by the less recent immigrants and atheists of the 19th century towards their newly arriving God-fearing neighbors. What goes around comes around.

Robin shows up the analytic flaw in both Mishra and Lilla: post hoc ergo propter hoc. Nostalgia and anger may well be emotional symptoms of our times. But are they causes or effects? Do they provoke the sort of social and political reactions one can observe around the world or are they simply correlates of a more fundamental phenomenon? Robin contends that the conservative creed is “Submission [by the inferior classes] is their first duty, agency the prerogative of the elite.” Lilla’s commentary on Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Submission [i.e. Islam] is in fact a literal confirmation of this thesis. Islamic fundamentalism hardly differs from its Christian evangelical counterparts. All have the same intention to re-establish absolute authority in society, and this means God. Whether God is a nostalgic fiction or a wrathful enforcer is not an essential difference.

The issue of nostalgic, fearful chickens vs. submissive, un-emancipated eggs is not a trivial one. For example, it appears that much of the reactionary momentum in the world is generated not by the rich and powerful but by the threatened lower middle class who feel they no longer can count on the dreams of infinite advance they once had. Is the evident populism of their politics the result of manipulation by the same elite who orchestrated their current condition or a spontaneous eruption of ‘we’re fed up and we’re not going to take it anymore.’? The situation seems similar to that of the South African Boers after the British conquest. The subjugators had become subjugated, their real power already eliminated. Yet their feelings of righteous indignation and cultural threat create both nostalgia and anger for power past and lost. Emotion was the residue but residue with motive force.

Robin’s analysis is intellectually fruitful in a number of ways. First, it gets behind the reactionary rhetoric:

“Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and liberty - or a wariness of change, or a belief in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue... Neither is a conservative a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force - the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere.”

This last phrase, ‘the private sphere,’ is important. The current reactionary is aware that the legal, public war is lost. What’s left is populist guerrilla fighting outside of the normal channels of legislation and law enforcement. Hence the importance of the Twitter-sphere for Donald Trump, who recognised both the problem and the solution. There a good case to be made that Robin predicted Trump.

Robin also recognises that ultimately reactionary conservatism is an aesthetic judgment not an ideological belief. For the conservative, the world is threatened with brutality, ugliness, and lack of order by the inclusion of those who are presently or until recently excluded from cultural influence. These latter are barbarians, not essentially because of race or ethnicity or economic status but because their very presence undermines the appearance of power in society - law, authority, entitlement. Their factual impact is of little concern; they make the system look bad. Immigrants, for example, may contribute far more economically than they cost to assimilate. But this is irrelevant. What matters is that they are aesthetically disruptive - on the streets, in the news, and especially in the conservative psyche.

The situation is further complicated by the symbolic significance of power to those that do not have it but admire it. Robin cites Edmund Burke: “When Burke [says] ... that the ‘great object’ of the [French] Revolution is to ‘root out that thing called the Aristocrat or Nobleman or Gentleman’ he is not simply referring to the power of the nobility, he is also referring to the distinction that power brings to the world.” This might imply the possibility of one day holding the power one sees. But, more likely given the obvious probabilities of life, it means something much more attainable - giving power to those who should have it, conservative politicians surely, but also the police, the military, authoritarian religious leaders and the very wealthy in society who have proven their worth. These elites are trustworthy surrogates not enemies of the already oppressed.

Robin quotes an essay by the ultra-conservative Liberty Fund: “To obey a real superior... is one of the most important of all virtues - a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of any thing great and lasting.” The love of a certain order is enough to grant the monopoly of power to others in order to achieve it. Hierarchy is order. And as Dr Johnson said, “Order cannot be had except by subordination.” Coercion is the product of one’s sense of beauty. How remarkable is that for an interesting conclusion?

Yet another aesthetic paradox is noted by Robin: the conservative aesthetic is one of ‘maintaining excellence.’ This is the creed of those upwardly mobile middle class people who have been successful in the meritocratic process of test-taking, degree-acquisition, and corporate advancement. These people are the current holders of power, at least the power visible to most of us in government, business, and academia. They have emerged by and large from the parts of society which have benefitted most from racial and social emancipation - second and third generation immigrants, working class children given access to higher education, racial minorities given enough opportunity to demonstrate they know how to play the game well.

These people are therefore ‘natural’ liberals, but only so long as the basis of their power is recognised as legitimate and enduring. They are in a sense conservative liberals for whom the meritocratic structure is as sacred as that of historical nobility or bonded serfdom and slavery. So today’s reactionaries are a species of anti-anti-liberal who feel themselves in need of emancipation.

Robin is a tad less elegantly suave than Lilla; he is not as consummately cosmopolitan as Mishra. But he is a more thorough and careful thinker. I have no doubt that among the three I would take Robin’s book to the desert island.

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The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sentimental Rage?

Mark Lilla published The Shipwrecked Mind just four months before Pankaj Mishra published his views on the state of the world in The Age of Anger (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Near enough to call them contemporaneous. Both are first-rate intellects and intellectual writers. So I find the differences in their conclusions at least as interesting as their individual analyses.

Lilla presents his point succinctly: “Hopes can be disappointed. Nostalgia is irrefutable.” Nostalgia, the sentimental longing for a previous state of affairs, is his key for understanding the global reactionary trend in popular culture and politics. Historically, he traces such reaction to the residual but continuing trauma of the French Revolution and documents his case through some extremely interesting intellectual biographies.

Mishra has a different starting point. He sees “ressentiment as the defining feature of a world... where the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status, and property ownership.” He has his own historical rationale for this feeling, what he calls the failure of the principle of “historic inevitability,” that is the dissipation of the comfort provided by the dominant ideologies of the 20th century. Confidence in historic inevitability was the foundation of not just Marxism, but also of the liberal and neo-liberal believers in free market progress. It is generally recognised that this confidence was misplaced, he says. Hence the unfocused but pervasive disillusion.

Nostalgia or ressentiment? Are they the same thing? Are they complementary sides of a coin? Both appear to be plausible elements of political reaction. Are they cumulative, like allergic reactions?

One might expect nostalgia to be a condition of the old. Surprisingly it isn’t. It is often the young who long for the return of a fictional past which never existed but offers a life without the tedious concerns of the present. The Lord of the Rings is successful not because it is an edifying narrative of unexpected challenge and courageous response (or any kind of coherent narrative) but because it is a rambling description of an ur-world of simple motivations and temptations in which good and evil are entirely distinct and adventure abounds.

The old know better than the young that cultural memory is selective, and like memory of childbirth, tends to obscure the worst bits and present them as quaint. The old have heard the stories before, and their counter-stories. A certain skepticism is inevitable but the principle emotion is one of fatigue. One loses the energy to either object or even to acquiesce. The young will learn eventually without the advice of the old. It has always been so.

So reactionary nostalgia tends to be a young person’s game. I’m not so sure the same holds for the anger of ressentiment. Ressentiment requires disappointment in order to exist, and therefore experience, probably consistently bad experience. Ressentiment does not rely on some fictional account of the old days or of a golden age. Ressentiment has no such memories. The fact that others might is reason enough for the anger.

This is not to say that a coalition, either cultural or political, between the nostalgic and the resentful is not possible. Dissatisfaction attracts the dissatisfied. But the stability of such a coalition must be suspect. Young nostalgia is likely to tire quickly of angry whining. And anger generally has little tolerance for the optimism inherent in nostalgic fiction. Without some other unifying complaint, it is therefore unlike that the young and old can stick it with one another.

Ultimately therefore reaction is not a long-term winner in the wars of either culture or politics. It doesn’t know what it wants: yesterday or an overturning of yesterday? Regardless of the source of its existential reality, reactionary dissatisfaction is neurotic. It desires the achievement of the impossible: something not just past but never having existed, a sort of negative ideal. This is only likely to increase the dissatisfactions experienced.

Both Mishra and Lilla have important things to say. What they each have to say may be even more important in the context of the other.

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Royce's Mature Philosophy Of Religion by Frank M. Oppenheim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Taming Impossibility

What is the appropriate name for a person who solves a problem several generations before anyone realises there is such a problem? Prophet? Genius? Failure? Possibly all three? Josiah Royce was one such person. He anticipated the discovery of a fundamental contradiction in virtually every element of social interaction which wouldn’t be precisely formulated for 60 years after he identified it, and which constitutes an intellectual challenge that no one else has successfully addressed.

The first to articulate the problem was the Nobel economist Kenneth Arrow in 1950. The so-called Arrow Impossibility Theorem revealed a fundamental flaw in theories of business, economics, organisation and the democratic state. All of these involve collective decision-making, that is choice by some group of individuals. The presumption most of us make is that through discussion and compromise, it is generally possible to arrive at some sort of agreement that works for everyone, perhaps one that might even be superior to anything preferred by any of the individuals involved.

What Arrow demonstrated with very precise logic is that such group decisions under almost all circumstances work out very differently than expected. Except with the rarest of luck, the standard result of group decisions will be that which all the members of the group can accept but which none of them actually wants. Since Arrow published his findings many other mathematicians, logicians, and social scientists have confirmed and expanded his work. It is now the elephant in the room of social theory. Few talk about the Arrow Theorem because no one knows what to do about it. Or rather, no one but Josiah Royce. [see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....]

The implications of Arrow are disconcerting. For a start, there is, and can be, no ‘social utility function,’ that is, a means of calculating an outcome in which everyone is better off. This is called Pareto Optimality by economists; but Pareto Optimality does not exist. Therefore every proposal approved by say, congress, or the cooperative apartment board, or the jury at a murder trial, will produce a situation that is unsatisfactory to everyone, even for those who voted in favour of the proposal. More generally from a political point of view, it means that talk of the national interest, or the good of the community, or the collective value is bunk, clap-trap, hot air.

Arrow touches everything that is even vaguely political not just formal electoral politics. In any situation in which the participants have even slightly different views based on experience or personal preferences, the Arrow stalemate will prevail. In a business board meeting, for example, the differences in perspectives of, say, the Operations manager from the Marketing manager, from the Financial director will virtually guarantee that the choice among alternative courses of action will be inferior to any one of the individual views expressed. [see: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...]

The consequences of Arrow are hard to digest. Surely with good will and the exercise of some reason there must be a way through such an apparent impasse. But there isn’t. In fact empirical studies have shown that the problem often gets worse when the participants in a decision want to maintain civil relations with each other. In any case the proof of Arrow is all around us continuously, from the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, to the results of the Global War on Terror (or Drugs), to the latest business strategy fiasco by a BlackBerry or the introduction of a New Coke or the hyped arrival of the Microsoft Zune (don’t remember that one? Exactly). Group decisions aren’t occasionally bad; according to Arrow bad is the best that can be hoped for.

The problems with group decision-making, especially in electoral politics, it that frequently promotes the feeling of acceptance for dictatorship, for a leader who can cut through waffle and debilitating compromise and do the right thing, even if he or she is a bit of a bully. The issue with dictators, of course, is that unless they possess draconian powers of coercion, no one is likely to cooperate with them. Government agencies are likely to stonewall, business subordinates can subtilely sabotage, rivals will pounce on the resultant bad press. Royce anticipated the dictatorial response: “... the will of an individual or a group that prefers itself can breed cooperation only by stifling interest in any true community.” In other words, dictatorship destroys the community it infects.

So the fact that Arrow is of critical social import is unquestionable. But the fact that no modern social theorist or mathematician or philosopher has any suggestion at all about how to deal with it is also unquestionable. So, despite its importance, Arrow is generally ignored. The Arrow Theorem is the common cold of organisational disfunction, a pervasive, long-lived virus that makes HIV look tame. The symptoms can be masked but the pathogen seems untouchable.

Josiah Royce addressed just this problem of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem in much of his work. Royce developed the idea he frequently referred to as the Beloved Community, a group of indeterminate size, composed of individuals with a very specific relationship to each other. The major portion of Oppenheim’s book is devoted to explicating this relationship and, without ever mentioning Arrow, suggesting how this relationship works to solve The Impossibility Theorem.

For Royce, community is a “conscious spiritual whole of life” which is formed when “the interests of the self lead it to accept any part of an item of the same past or the same future which another self accepts as its own.” This may sound mystical but Royce disliked mystics. It is decidedly spiritual and implicitly points to Arrow as a spiritual problem which is necessarily solved only by the spirit. Spirit for Royce is not something otherworldly but a commonplace of the everyday world of life, work and survival.

Emphasizing this routine nature of spirit, Oppenheim uses what Royce calls ‘membership’, or the epsilon-relation, as his focal point. The epsilon-relation is the locus of the spirit. Surprisingly, Oppenheim does not mention the likely inspiration for the epsilon-relation, namely the Christian doctrine of the trinitariam nature of God. In this doctrine, God is conceived as three distinct persons, each with a definite personality; yet each of these persons completely contains the whole of the personalities of the other two. Thus the Trinity is the extreme ideal of community in which the independent interests of each member are never denied but which nevertheless are conceived as including the interests of the other members.

Royce conceived of the epsilon-relation as potentially universal. It must remain, as it were, open-ended in its human form in order to exist at all. Its nature is inclusion. This is expressed in traditional religious terminology as ‘atonement’, that is the unification of those already in the epsilon-relation with those who are not yet. The epsilon-relation is called spiritual because it is a relation. It both is and is not a property of the human beings who are related through it. That is, it has an existence which is independent of its members; it transcends them and they are bound together through it, thus retaining their own independence within the community.

The epsilon-relation is not transitive. That is, the fact that x has and epsilon-relation with y, and y has an epsilon-relation with z, does not imply that x has an epsilon-relation with z. All epsilon-relations are, at it were, mediated by the community not by any of its members individually. The community lives. It needs its members in order to live but its life is not theirs. Its interests includes theirs but they are not theirs. The community is the locus of the spirit and it is the spirit which unites the members to form the community. The spirit is in a position of the ‘ideal observer’ of the community. The members need to acknowledge the existence of this presence in order to be ‘opened’ by it to the other members. The reality may be difficult to conceive, but its logic is simple and straightforward.

Each member of the community has what Royce calls their ‘cause’. This is the more or less articulate point of their life as they understand it. There are no wrong causes, although there may be many ineffectual, inappropriate, or obsessively destructive ways in which one’s cause is pursued. Usually these are the consequence of the stifling of causes either by self-censorship or social inhibition. Causes become stale and neurotic if they are not expressed and developed in concert with others. All causes of any consequence demand the cooperation and support of other people, who also have causes, if they are to be achieved to any significant degree. By sheer enlightened self-interest, it is clear that the causes of others are relevant to the achievement of one’s own.

Causes are the result of interpretation - of individual history, of personal experience, of assimilated social norms, and of previous interpretations - by members of the community. That is, causes do not appear from some outer or inner space without reason. The complexity of their origins may defeat any analytic explanation, but the one thing we know for sure about causes is they are modified by further interpretation. And the interpretation that is possible within a community held together by the epsilon relation has a particular character: it seeks the bigger cause. That is, it searches for a cause which includes one’s own as well as that of other members, without diminishment of any of them.

It is essential to keep in mind that a cause is an interpretation, not some unassailable fact of the universe. For Royce there are no unassailable facts in any case, just a series of progressive interpretations of an ideal called the truth. The end point of the process of truth-seeking is what is conveniently called God, but it could with equal accuracy be called the final universal community. The process of progressively inclusive interpretation can be seen clearly in science in which, for example, Newtonian physics is not proven wrong by Relativity physics, but included in it as a special case in which things are neither too big nor too fast. Interpretation of causes is therefore not a matter of compromise or bowlderisation but of imaginative expansion.

The effect of community therefore is not the change of individual causes but their transformation. There is a fundamental philosophical difference between what has become known in management theory as ‘alignment’ and the synoptic vision created by a well-functioning community. The former tries a variety of mechanisms to fit round pegs into various oddly-shaped holes. The result is what Arrow predicts: universal dissatisfaction. The job of community is to ‘make everyone right’ that is to demonstrate how causes are linked, inter-related and dependent upon one another. In doing so new causes are discovered, invented really, which are manifestations of the spiritual unity already accomplished through the epsilon-relation.

As Oppenheim points out, “For Royce a genuine community is not primarily an object of contemplation but a doer of deeds, a seeker and achiever of ends.” Quite apart from the achievements by the community as a whole, however, the most basic achievement is the discovery by individual members of his or her identity as a meaningful self. This is not some form of fixed tribal identity which has its existence in the denial of belonging somewhere else; it is an identity which is both positive and constantly shifting as the interests of the community and its members become more articulate and respond to new members and new conditions. Possible courses of action multiply as fast as the issues to which they are attached. Imagination inspired by hope is what the epsilon-relation provides.

Royce’s concept of community doesn’t fit easily with any other sociological, managerial, or political theories. This doesn’t make it wrong, merely unpopular. Nonetheless there have been a string of rather brave academics and organisational practitioners who have done significant work to make his idea of spirit a reality. The philosopher C. West Churchman reflected the need for Roycean inclusion in his ‘sweeping in’ epistemology. Russell Ackoff spent a lifetime employing his Royce-derived idea of ‘idealization’ as a way to create effective epsilon-relations in business and government. The philosopher and political theorist Mary Parker Follett developed radically innovative organisational and political theories based on the concept of transformational leadership.

Perhaps it is inevitable that the ideas of a prophetic genius like Royce should find their place only in the margins of modern life. Not failures exactly but neither promoting a sustained social revolution. And perhaps that is as it should be. Only as long as Royce’s community remains outside the mainstream of thinking does it have a chance to escape cooptation, distortion and diminishment. As things stand, his idea of community acts as a beacon of hope that Arrow is not an inevitable fate for us all.

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