Re-Thinking Time at the Interface of Physics and Philosophy: The Forgotten Present by Albrecht von Müller
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Time Is Too Precious

This volume of essays about the philosophy of time is a lovely example of the problems created by professional thinkers when they have very little important to say but considerably more academic ambition. They prattle aimlessly; they write horribly; they obscure in order to hide their banality; and they boor the reader, and undoubtedly each other, to tears. With little grasp of grammar much less style, these authors seem to communicate through neo-logistic acronyms and baroque circumlocutions. They love to be ‘radical’ and ‘innovative’ and ‘fundamental’ but they have difficulty in describing what they are radical and innovative and fundamental about; so they puff. They can neither summarise nor explain their ideas in a discernibly logical way. They appear incapable of argument; rather, they expostulate. In short, they are actually uneducated. Their real skill is in playground games with arcane rules not thought. The result is... well, a waste of time.

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The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe by Julian Barbour
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Plato Rules OK?

I suspect that most of us have thought at some point about the mystery of time. But very few have considered seriously what it might be. And only a handful, perhaps, could explain in a comprehensible way how time is constructed. And, I’m sure, there are less than a handful who with any plausibility deny its existence entirely - Julian Barbour is one of these. And he makes an interesting case.

According to Barbour, time is a constructive illusion, a concept without any extra-linguistic existence. We use it like a ‘god of the gaps’ to explain that for which we have no other theory. The illusion is the sensory equivalent of a flat earth or the appearance of instantaneous gravitational action at a distance. What we experience, or name as experience, is our interpretation of various states of entropy, a measure of the disorder of the cosmos.

Time then is really the feeling of progression from states of lower to states of higher entropy, from relative order to disorder. Such a concept might seem a scientific splitting of hairs, except that it has a profound Implication: the ‘direction’ of time depends on what ‘side’ of successive entropy states one happens to be. Successive states might be ‘before’ or ‘after’ each other depending on the perspective of the conscious being involved. Since the past is always the domain of lesser entropy, time, the gradient of entropy, can run in opposite directions simultaneously. The past is a conjecture, a supposition made on the basis of incomplete information, not a fact.

Barbour believes that there are evolutionary reasons for our creation of the idea of time. We are programmed to detect ‘records’, sequences of entropic states, at the expense of other perceptual sensitivities. We are able to manipulate, really order, these records through consciousness to great effect in finding food, establishing social structures, in ‘anticipating’ consequences. In short, time is a survival tactic, an expediency which may no longer be expedient. What it is not is a physical reality.

Perhaps the principle reason I am attracted to Barbour’s theory (in addition to its sheer provocation) is that it vindicates much of Platonic thinking. Plato’s ‘forms’ for example have a credibility inside a timeless universe which had been lost in the methods of Aristotelian science. Instants, what Barbour calls Nows, are things. Space and time are not more fundamental than things, in which things mysteriously float; they are part of the ‘configuration’ of things as they exist. This highly technical term of configuration seems remarkably similar, if not equivalent, to the Platonic ‘eternal ideas’.

The End of Time is challenging, but not because Barbour’s exposition is flawed or interrupted by technical scientific and mathematical proof texts. It is challenging because it reveals the depth of presumption about the world that we carry around with us nonchalantly. Exposing these unwarranted presumptions is often a matter of confronting not just common sense but an entire culture of thought that has worked reasonably well. In a sense, what Barbour is doing is equivalent to Luther’s nailing of his theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. Neither Luther nor Barbour could have a clear idea of the consequences. Nevertheless, they’re bound to be exciting.

Postscript: for a good short summary of much of Barbour see: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rrW7y...

To see how badly the subject can be written about, consult this academic text on time. Its lack of literary skill, I’ll wager, is matched by its opaqueness of thought: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Wasp Factory 
by 

Iain Banks

 

Highland Porn

Lord of the Flies meets American Psycho on the Moray Firth. Frank, a teenage lad with no official record of his existence, lives with his father in an isolated dune land cottage. He spends his time killing birds and other small animals. Occasionally he kills people. His principle hobby is bomb-making, at which he excels. Frank’s half-brother Eric is on the run from a psych-ward. While on the lam he kills and eats dogs. Even Frank considers Eric nuts. But blood is blood, even if it’s diluted and most of it has been spilled. Their father, Angus, lives in a lost world of sixties hippiedom with a basement full of decaying, and therefore dangerous, Army surplus cordite. The biker-mother, Agnes, hasn’t been seen for years.

Frank is a narcissist, but he’s honest about it: “At least I admit that it’s all to boost my ego, restore my pride and give me pleasure, not to save the country or uphold justice or honour the dead.” He is also superstitious in the manner of an athlete or a soldier who believes certain ritual behaviors are necessary for success, even survival. He is exceptionally self-aware of his physical and mental states. An initially undisclosed handicap inhibits friendships, except with others equivalently deformed. In America, with the right weapons, Frank would certainly have wiped out half his high school class.

The wasp factory itself is a combination Tarot/Ouija which gives advice in a manner worthy of Poe or Lovecraft. Frank wants to know the best way to defend himself from Eric. In a family like his, tensions go deep. How these tensions get resolved can’t be described as conventional. Except perhaps as conventional ghoul-porn. 

Nothing edifying here, folks. Move along briskly. Three hours or so I won’t get back.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Faith or Madness?

I find it possible to read Frankenstein in Baghdad with or without irony. It flows just as well either way - as an edifying symbolic story of courage and the will to survive in modern Iraqi reality; or as the precise opposite, a condemnation of the symbols which constitute that reality.

Saadawi uses an established literary reference to create this ambiguity - the monster formed by chaos. Saadawi’s monster is assembled and refreshed from the body parts of bomb victims. It is enlivened by prayers directed to St George - as it happens the patron of England, a ‘coalition partner’ in the Iraqi occupation. Similar ironies pop up and annihilate each other like particles of matter and anti-matter throughout the text.

Saadawi’s story takes place amid the profound spiritual as well as social dislocation of war. The monster of Frankenstein, the man constructed by man out of decaying remnants from the past, is the perfect trope for representing the reconstruction of civilization. Just as compelling, Shelley’s story of the monster has its roots in the Eastern European Jewish legend of the Golem, a creature formed through mystical prayer whose function is the protection of the community during just such a period of extreme stress.

The principle plot device used by Saadawi, therefore, is that of miracle-working. A classical example of the genre is the Book of Signs in the Gospel of John. The allusion seems apt since the Frankenstein character Saadawi portrays is a combination of a devout Christian woman and a superstitious junk dealer living next door in ‘the Jewish house’.

Like Saadawi’s story, John’s gospel uses the factual and the mystical interchangeably in order to connect a new appreciation of the world with a past that seems to have lost its relevance. Another fleeting irony: John’s gospel is the most anti-Semitic of the four Christian narratives of Jesus; it was written after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the Jewish house is a ruin.

The Book of Signs demonstrates how the technique of writing about miracles works. It contains reports on each of seven miracles performed by Jesus. All of these miracles can be interpreted either as factual or allegorical, or, in fact, as both simultaneously. For example, the first, and probably best known, miracle of the changing of water into wine at the wedding of Cana can be taken literally as testimony about the transformation of a physical substance. On the other hand some exegetes believe it is not the account of an event but primarily represents a symbolic claim by Jesus to be himself the new wine which will nourish the world. The symbolism further suggests Jesus as the new Moses, who changed the water of the Nile to blood. Which interpretation is the more accurate? Or more important? Or more faithful? Or, for that matter, more superstitious?

Miracles are the presumed suspension of the physical laws of the universe by divine action. But, as in the Golem and Shelley’s and Saadawi’s monsters, they are theologically problematic - not just because of their literary functions but also because their mere possibility is a scandal for religious faith. On the one hand, miracles are seen as evidence of God’s power; on the other hand, they are equally clear evidence of God’s profound arbitrariness. If miracles do occur, they are the result of actions by a patently capricious deity who has the power to relieve the suffering of creation but generally chooses to permit, and even cause, such suffering. Miracles therefore tend to get out of hand conceptually.

Miracles also demonstrate the rather tenuous link between faithful devotion and divine assistance. Some of John’s miracles, for example, depend on very specific faith in Jesus’s abilities; others on faith in a more transcendental and abstract divine power; and others have no connection with faith whatsoever but are apparently random demonstrations of divine whimsy. Therefore, even believers may not want to press miracles too seriously as factual events, as more than allegorical. St. Paul himself counsels against looking for signs as proof of divine action. Saadawi’s female protagonist has her prayer miraculously answered after decades of fervent prayer but in an obviously distorted and unexpected way.

So Frankenstein in Baghdad can be read as a tale of the power of religious faith in a time of profound disruption; and simultaneously as a story of the self deception in which everyone involved in war participates. It is a literary optical illusion which captures the essential ambiguity created by human violence in its obscene destructiveness and its bizarre creativity. Religion is part of the problem as well as the solution to conflict. It is necessary to survive but at a cost. Religious belief persists but it is itself transformed as its benign and malicious effects are actualized.

It appears, then, that Sophocles was correct: ‘evil appears as good in the minds of those whom the gods lead to destruction’. The same might be said of miracles, which can be, equally, symptoms of human madness or transcendental faith.

Postscript: For more on the problematic theology of miracles, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge by Marcus du Sautoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stories For the Widening Gaps

I was educated in the school of anti-reductionism. That is, I was taught that knowledge of how the fundamental particles of the universe work would not help me understand what I might choose for dinner. I did take university courses in physics and chemistry, but the deterministic implications of science, those which suggested the fictional character of things like purpose and choice and free will, were never allowed to surface fully. It turns out that my views may simply be the result of never having encountered a literate reductionist. Marcus du Sautoy is such a literate reductionist. And I am tempted to rebel at an advanced age against my upbringing.

The classic objection to scientific reductionism - the idea that the world works strictly according to fixed laws of cause and effect - is that it can’t explain science and other apparently purposeful activities. But it turns out that there are good scientific reasons for this. The complexities of scientific thought, actually any thought, are so great that although its physics are deterministic - in the manner of billiard balls on green felt - its trajectory cannot be predicted. We cannot know either the starting point of the billiard balls or their random quantum connections.

It is this complexity, not any extraneous properties like spirit, or intelligence, or God, that leads, deterministically, to our stories about some substances other than energy and matter as important to human life. Properties that appear ‘emergent’ are simply those whose complexity we cannot (yet) penetrate. Our narratives of human motivation, character, and responsibility merely fill in the explanatory and predictive gaps created by this emergent complexity.

Interestingly, these gaps increase as science progresses. More knowledge about the world increases our understanding of its complexity even as we simplify our theoretical descriptions. Every scientific advance multiplies the number of unsolved scientific problems. What du Sautoy (and Donald Rumsfeld) calls the known unknowns blossom exponentially. But rather than project philosophical or theological narratives into these expanding gaps, we can only throw more science. The narratives that science supplies may be less literate but they are certainly more compelling. Human thought, it appears, becomes simultaneously more inclusive and less certain but yet more confident as it develops.

I admire this implication. It is a humbling observation that we are not exempt from the materiality of the rest of the universe. The exceptionalism of humanity in its own mind has been the cause of much misery. Everything we know is uncertain. Kant, it appears has been vindicated - we can never even hope to know the universe as it is. Yet we can have confidence in our scientific narratives because... well because they provide something for which to hope. This hope is not one of personal salvation, or the coming of some other universe but one of realizing human harmony with the universe as it exists. This, I think, is the principle ethical content of modern physics: that there is an inescapable necessity to conform, even when we believe we are rebelling.

Traditionally, ethics have been grounded in one’s view of anthropology. Some believe that appropriate human behaviour can be deduced from the necessities for survival; others that there are divinely mandated rules for conduct. What du Sautoy’s scientific narrative suggests is that this anthropological view is arbitrary in terms of both its level of analysis as well as its presumptions about what it means to be human. Why not a ‘fundamental particulate’ ethics? And why not a complete abrogation of any fixed, final definition of what these fundamental particles might be? This approach would suggest that the search for what it means to be human is the real ethical task, a task which should never result in dogma that is purported to be certain.

It could be that my sympathy for du Sautoy’s account is prompted by his own sympathy for Plato over Aristotle - an attitude roughly equivalent to a psycho-analyst preferring Jung to Freud. Du Sautoy quotes Werner Heisenberg approvingly: ‘Modern physics has definitely decided in favour of Plato. In fact, the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.’ So then, science, art and philosophy appear as random variants of the same deterministic trajectory. We can’t seem to stop ourselves from doing the same thing - telling stories - in different ways.

All sorts of criteria for verifying science - or for preferring Plato over Aristotle - have been used historically: simplicity, elegance, statistical correlation, logical implication, and tradition, among many others. The criteria are as unstable as the results of science itself, and they vary among disciplines and are differentially favoured by individual scientists within disciplines. It doesn’t take much insight to recognize what du Sautoy admits: the criteria of scientific analysis are unavoidably aesthetic; they correspond to what we find beautiful. Beauty may be correlated with things like usefulness and consistency in evolutionary terms but it nevertheless stands alone as the proximate cause of scientific action.

So the stories we tell ourselves are better or worse not by any objective standard but by the inherent arbitrariness and subjectivity of our appreciation of what constitutes the beautiful. Our nervous systems are even apparently constructed so as to provide illusions when confronted with incoherence. Having said that, it is clear that beauty is not entirely arbitrary or subjective. Beauty is something we are taught, like language. It may appear that certain forms or ideas are ‘obviously’ more beautiful than others but only because there is no challenge to them within our social group.

Science, it seems, is the evolved social institution in which just this debate about aesthetic criteria must take place. And the historical narrative of science is one of continuous instability, a story of changing fashion and taste. This, not some fixed standard, is what we mean by ‘reason’ - intense but non-violent argument about how to argue. The content of reason, its meaning, varies more or less continuously. Any attempt to halt the evolution of reason - by religious authority or governmental dictate - will therefore ultimately fail as unreasonable.

Could it be that the narratives of continuity that we tell ourselves - of personality, of memory, of culture, of history - are mere gap-filling? Having disposed of God as the explanation for what we find inexplicable, we seem to rely even more heavily on stories about ourselves - psychological, behavioural, even spiritual stories that have the same function as the old fashioned religious narratives: providing comforting continuity. These stories may be put forward as scientific but are they anything but pseudo-science in their insistence as being ‘truthful’ given that they cannot account for the fundamental discontinuities of our existence? Scientific determinism, therefore, has an unexpected effect - it opens the world to change, innovation, surprise, even opportunity, particularly the opportunity to create new stories.

I feel a certain satisfaction in the uncertainty created by this conclusion. And it gives me some comfort as well. In a way, it seems to me, recent science frees story telling, and therefore all of literature, from the stigma of ‘fiction’. What is the distinguishing mark of science other than its unconstrained swapping of stories? The fact that we can’t know anything definitively, neither the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle of unit size, nor the character of a photon, means, perhaps, that we have evolved randomly precisely in order to produce and exchange fictions. Jorge Luis Borges would probably be pleased. And Adam Levin in his novel of spiritual determinism, The Instructions, provides a rather apt summary of the situation: “It is good to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether you do justice or not.”

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A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How To Be Charming

An old saw, from some unknown source buried in my sub-conscious, has it that ‘Charm is that personal characteristic which generates the response ‘Yes’ before a request is even made.’ Towles’s Count Rostov is the epitome of a man with this kind of charm. Rostov even charms the KGB into letting him live, in reduced but habitable circumstances, within the confines of the best hotel in Moscow. From there he continues for decades to charm the staff, the guests, and the wider world of smugglers, petty criminals, and exploiters of loopholes in Soviet society. Charm, however much it is a bourgeois virtue, certainly has survival value even in the most ardent of socialisms.

Towles’s literary achievement is the sustained capturing of charm throughout his novel. Rostov’s character is genuinely sensitive, polite, urbanely witty, composed and empathetic. A man of taste and refined judgment, he is able, with the assistance of his raft of friendly natives, to ‘make do’ on his urban island as well as any Robinson Crusoe - to eat well, dress well, and to maintain a modicum of civilised decorum. Charm, it must be said, is an eminently practical virtue which includes a certain degree of instinctive cleverness. Think of a Samurai who has an intimate knowledge of both Montaigne’s essays and the secrets of French haute cuisine.

Charm does not arise from an attempt to be charming. It is clear that Rostov’s Being is enervated by a sort of Leibnizian optimism that the world he inhabits is the best of all possible worlds. He is not a Pollyanna but a realist who, either by training or breeding, appreciates the manifold beauty of things around him and the opportunity provided by changing circumstances. He is, in short, content with himself. This is his strength and the source of his confident attentiveness. Charm, it seems, is also a spiritual quality that allows one to maintain a vision of those things which are essential versus those which are not.

Charm abhors snobbery in any of its forms - based on rank or position, on ideological convention, on education, background, or prospects. Charm admires and is excited by the authentic, that which is satisfying for being precisely what it is - soup, children, birds, bureaucrats, expensive restaurants, as well as less expensive restaurants. The rest is beneath consideration. Charm is an aesthetic that filters the world as well as shaping its possessor. What is seen, heard, and felt is not raw but pre-processed, as it were, to conform with the needs of charm itself. It is a type of positive psychological feedback loop: charm begets charming experience which promotes charm, in a manner described by the virtue ethics of Thomas Aquinas.

Charm is in some sense grounded in proper behaviour. Thus it has a certain reverence for tradition, ritual, and the conventional formalities of life. But when confronted with breaches in expected behaviour, charm does not censure, it considers the reasons and possible benefits of not just an exception to the rule but of the rejecting the rule entirely in order to promote a superior social harmony. Such adaptation is not a symptom of a lack of principle but a recognition, as it were, that the Sabbath was made for man. That is, charm has a profound egalitarian element that seeks to grease all the wheels of social intercourse. Charm has sociological import.

Quite apart from anything else therefore, A Gentleman In Moscow, is an instruction manual on a particular manner in which life can be lived, even if life presents serious adversity, even if there are no allies to provide comfort in that adversity. It is consequently edifying as well as entertaining - in short, charming.

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Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity by Loren R. Graham
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

A Badly Hidden Agenda

Professional mathematical competence has no obvious link to religious conviction; nor does religious conviction often depend on scientific analyses. Nonetheless, at the turn of the twentieth century, a crisis in worldwide Christian theology and in mathematics was brought about, at least in part, by advances in mathematical set theory. These advances shed new light on what had been a persistent mathematical surd and a traditional theological meme - the concept of infinity.

Naming Infinity purports to tell a story about the interaction of theology and mathematics at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, it is a subtle polemic masquerading as a history of science. The implicit purpose of the book appears to be the promotion of a rather nasty intellectual and political prejudice. Graham and Kantor are pros in providing extraneous and excessive biographical detail, but fairly light on comprehensible mathematical explanation. Worse, they have very little understanding of theology and no comprehension of the sociology of organizations that is relevant to their principle narrative.

In the eleventh century, a theologian and philosopher, Anselm of Canterbury, inspired by the pagan philosopher Plotinus, formulated a somewhat novel argument for the existence of God. Instead of making assertions about reality and then trying to demonstrate that these assertions imply a divine being, Anselm took a different approach. He simply defined God as “that which nothing greater can be thought.” That’s it, a neatly concise statement. This came to be called the Ontological Argument because it has to do with the necessary existence of God as a concept.

The Ontological Argument has fascinated philosophers ever since Anselm’s formulation. The range of opinions about its validity is extreme - from those who find it completely meaningless to those who believe it to be brilliantly definitive. But not one of Anselm’s opponents or defenders would ever seriously contend that Anselm believed he was creating God through his definition; he was merely providing a positive specification. Anselm was a philosophical Realist who considered the connection between words and things - metaphysics in modern language - were problematic but subject to analysis and improvement.

The authors of Naming Infinity make a brief derogatory reference to Anselm using a jocular comment by a nineteenth century philosopher. But they simply ignore the fact that the Russian mathematicians at the centre of their story, also inspired by Plotinus, followed Anselm in his philosophical realism. Rather Graham and Kantor choose to make the absurd claim that these respected scientists were devotees of a mystical cult which sanctioned ‘naming’ as a virtually magical act which conjured up the reality from the name. The Russian mathematicians, they contend, considered they were making God as well as numbers real by their linguistic representation. At best this is a pathetic misinterpretation; at worst it is a purposeful slander of a group of mathematical realists, as well as a group of mystically-minded monks with whom they were associated

Graham and Kantor supply no credible evidence for their contentions. They claim, for example, that the Russians were motivated by an offhand quip of the mathematician Georg Cantor, the inventor of set theory. Cantor had remarked that by naming mathematical sets he created them. However it’s highly unlikely that Cantor intended the remark in the way presented by the authors, and certain that the Russians, through their own denials, didn’t interpret it to mean what the authors suggest.

Graham and Kantor also use the Russians’ religious links to the so-called Name Worshippers in the Orthodox Church, whom they think believe in the mystically creative power of the divine name, to accuse the mathematicians of some sort of spiritual black magic. The implication made by the authors is that the mathematicians had compromised their science through their religious beliefs This is simply untrue and a fundamental distortion of the mystical practices involved, which are very similar to other Christian as well as Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist forms of prayer. These forms, although clearly mystical, are not considered by any faith-group of which I am aware to be generative of reality in the sense used by the authors. Even at their most radical, for example in the Zohar of medieval Judaism, they are merely poetic interpretations of what is considered a pre-existing metaphysical reality.

Finally, the authors dwell on the condemnation of the so-called Name Worshippers by the Orthodox hierarchy as evidence of the superstitious character of both the mystical practitioners and the mathematicians. This is simply absurd and demonstrates the authors’ lack of understanding of both theology and hierarchical organizations like the Orthodox Church. What the members of this sect, largely Russian monks resident on Mt. Athos in Greece, threatened was not the introduction of magic into Christian practice, but like all mystics, the authority of the Orthodox hierarchy and, eventually, the Soviet state. Because mysticism is an entirely subjective experience which is usually independent of credal or doctrinal assertions, it is literally beyond the reach of authority seeking to maintain orthodoxy. All mystical practices are therefore considered suspect by religious hierarchies.

The only plausible reason I can surmise for Graham and Kantor’s contentions is that the authors are themselves hard and fast nominalists. For nominalists, all use of language, including mathematical and religious language, is a kind of creative fiction. The elements of nominalist fictions are presumed to be ‘real’ to the extent they are useful in inquiry. But they have have no more ontological status than any other fiction. Nominalists solve the metaphysical issues of the connection between words and things by simply ignoring these issues. The authors obviously have a gripe with philosophical realism that they don’t make clear at any point in their exposition. But it is an opposition to philosophical realism which constitutes their main agenda, and fatally undermines the credibility and wider usefulness of their narrative. Their conflation of philosophical realism with a sort of primitive theological idolatry through their nominalistic presumptions is inexcusable.

The debate between nominalism and realism is perennial and has taken place for centuries with no clear intellectual outcome, in either theology or mathematics. Who knows, we each may be born with a dominate gene that determines our preferences. But what is certain is that nominalism is the option of choice for those with dictatorial ambitions from Pericles to Trump. Nominalism implies that, lacking any reliable connection between words and things, language means what authority says it means. Orwell’s novel 1984 represents a nominalist paradise in which meaning is a coercive tool employed by those in power who want to stay in power. When Margaret Thatcher claimed that there was no such thing as society, when Trump denies any knowledge of fascist support, they are using rhetorical tactics typical of philosophical nominalism.

So, the Orthodox Church, and the Soviet state, condemned the Name Worshippers for precisely the same reason that the Roman Catholic Church was simultaneously condemning the so-called heresy of Modernism, and during the same period when the American Fundamentalists were criticizing the loss of ‘correct’ belief among liberal Protestant churches. Yet Graham and Kantor fail to see these wider connections. In every one of these cases the maintenance of hierarchical, nominalistic control over language was the primary objective. The issue in these cases is not the literalness of the interpretation of creeds and doctrinal pronouncements - subjective meaning of such things is not public - but the formulae of words themselves and their ‘correct’ use in public ritual and liturgy. The exercise of church authority is a tribal rather than a spiritual event which re-establishes both tribal membership and the submission of members to the leaders of the religious group.

By turning infinity into an analyzable component of the mathematical repertoire, set theory undermined mathematical certainty about its own foundations. By demonstrating that there were many different kinds of infinity, and in a sense therefore ‘taming’ the traditionally dominant concept of the divine, set theory also compromised an implicit presumption of Anselm’s Ontological Argument - perhaps there is no limit to that which could be thought by the human mind; perhaps there were an infinity of conceivable infinities, and therefore deities; or none at all. Over a century later, neither mathematics nor theology has recovered from the paradoxical shocks to their traditional foundations. And the problematic ontological status of both God and numbers shows no prospect of being settled.

The intellectual and spiritual drama sparked by set theory is, therefore, a worthwhile subject of historical and philosophical research. And there has been little written about the mutual implications of crises in mathematics and theology. The mere simultaneity of their crises is sufficient to justify inquiry. But Naming Infinity does not make a contribution to documenting this drama. It is tendentious, mis-guided, and simply wrong. One can only hope for further effort to fill the considerable hole left unfilled by this book.

A Digression on Systems Theory

There is a sense in which naming is a creative act, but which doesn’t involve any magical bringing into existence. For example, the selection of any arbitrary segment of the infinite Continuum (that is the set of all numbers) results in an infinite set which can be named. That set is identifiable by the name. The selection, of course, does not bring the set into existence, it merely distinguishes it from the rest of the Continuum. The selection, nevertheless, is aesthetically creative; it creates a ‘form’. It also establishes the selected set as a newly discovered whole which can be described and analysed to determine its unique properties. This kind of selection is the basis of what would eventually be called Systems Theory, the analytic/aesthetic discipline of studying parts and wholes simultaneously.


Postscript: for an interesting fictional account of the relevance of advances in mathematics to American fundamentalism see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... For an analysis of the metaphysical import of the Jewish mystical language of Kabbalah, see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bảo Ninh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Future Lied To Us

A reminiscence, rather than a memoir, tumbling between the time before war, eleven years of brutal fighting, and then its aftermath. Shifting from first to third person, with the occasional second person letter, the story is as unstructured as the lives involved. And none of it is politically correct: “No. The ones who loved war were not the young men, but the others like the politicians, middle-aged men with fat bellies and short legs. Not the ordinary people. The recent years of war had brought enough suffering and pain to last them a thousand years.”

At its simplest, this story is the universal one of the common soldier: an inexperienced young man dislocated from a normal life, and exposed to the horror of having to kill and watching others killed, seemingly endlessly. Inevitably he loses not only his civilized existence but his identity. Using drugs when he can find them and pure grit when he can’t, he manages to survive. But for what? His peace is as a worn out alcoholic, all his family, friends, and comrades dead. Unable to sustain any sort of intimate relationship, all he can do is remember. “This kind of peace? In this kind of peace it seems people have unmasked themselves and revealed their true, horrible selves. So much blood, so many lives were sacrificed for what?” His memory, particularly his memory of his own expectations, is the source of his malaise.

He writes as a form of therapy, to rid himself of the devils, his memories, that now constitute his personality. All he has is these devils, these ghosts, who appear in flashbacks, spontaneous violence, recurrent dreams of disaster and a depressive lethargy. Only by writing about them can he exorcise their power. He has been told by others who have been in his position, “After this hard-won victory fighters like you, Kien, will never be normal again. You won’t even speak with your normal voice, in the normal way again.”

So his challenge is to find a new voice, actually an entirely new personality represented by such a voice. Some voice other than “The way you speak in hell.” Incrementally he is able to find himself without forgetting what he has seen: “The tragedies of the war years have bequeathed to my soul the spiritual strength that allows me to escape the infinite present. The little trust and will to live that remains stems not from my illusions but from the power of my recall.” He realises that there is something within him waiting to be made visible: “There is a force at work in him that he cannot resist, as though it opposes every orthodox attitude taught him and it is now his task to expose the realities of war and to tear aside conventional images.”

This force reveals hard truths known to every common soldier in every war of history: “What remained was sorrow, the immense sorrow, the sorrow of having survived. The sorrow of war.” The only real result is sorrow, “Justice may have won, but cruelty, death and inhuman violence had also won... Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever.”

And yet despite the unequal balance of cost and benefit, there is something else, a “spiritual beauty in the horrors of conflict,” without which “the war would have been another brutal, sadistic exercise.” Throughout his story Bao Ninh weaves a sort of lyrical spirituality which would be an obscenity if written by anyone who hadn’t been through the grinding mill of virtually the entire American War in Vietnam. “He saw his life as a river with himself standing unsteadily at the peak of a tall hill, silently watching his life ebb from him, saying farewell to himself. The flow of his life focused and refocused and each moment of that stream was recalled, each event, each memory was a drop of water in his nameless, ageless river.”

Eventually he emerges from the nihilism of his despair in the reading of his manuscript by another who, through it, feels he knows the author: “His spirit had not been eroded by a cloudy memory. He could feel happy that his soul would find solace in the fountain of sentiments from his youth. He returned time and time again to his love, his friendship, his comradeship, those human bonds which had all helped us overcome the thousand sufferings of the war.”

Memory had become more than sorrow; it also carried the joy of his youth - for the reader of his life if not for him. The future had lied but it did not destroy the past - for the reader who is in the present. Could it be that the only way that any life makes sense is after it’s over - and interpreted by someone else?

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Battle of APp Bac by Neil Sheehan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Willful Ignorance

Military officers are trained in the deformed entrepreneurialism of American football, a game of rigid rules, set plays and clear criteria of success. You take your shot when the opponent blinks. What matters, the decisive differential between teams, it is taught, is the will to win. Leadership ability is proportionate to the commitment to overcome all obstacles in order to score touchdowns. Not winning is a symptom of insufficient zeal. This is my experience as a regular officer in the US military during the 1960’s and it is Neil Sheehan’s experience of Vietnam in 1962.

As a result, the response of military commanders to difficulties - either combat or strategic - is to dig the hole they’re in deeper, to commit more 'assets' (mainly teenaged boys) to danger of death, thus demonstrating one's resolve. Enthusiastic encouragement of one's subordinates turns to petulant insistence and then to threatening bullying depending on the intensity of circumstances and one’s place in the chain of command. The Battle of Ap Bac is an instance typical of all subsequent military involvement in Vietnam - a cunning plan for zealous defeat.

After the Battle of Ap Bac there was nothing else for the American military to learn about fighting the Viet Cong. All of the next eleven years was contained in the one day of intense conflict. But they learned nothing - nothing about the skill of their adversary, nothing about the fatally destructive politics of South Vietnam, nothing about pervasive sympathy in the countryside for the Viet Cong, nothing about how much the Americans were despised by their nominal allies, nothing about the vulnerability of high-technology to clever necessity.

Military technology - not just its weapons but also its organisation and culture - is a delicate ecology. Small changes are not possible to make without disrupting the functioning of the whole. Learning at the coal face, as it were, isn’t recognized as such up the line until the will to win is proven to be inadequate to the task at hand. This requires incremental progression of ‘ground-truth’ at an agonizing pace toward the top of the heap. By the time ‘authority’ is reached, of course, whatever there was to be learned is obsolete.

So the Americans learned nothing from their French predecessors; nor anything relevant from their own experience for subsequent adventures in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Collective military stupidity seems only exceeded by the collective political stupidity of American government, which believes it can actually direct power effectively. The military class-structure preys on the individual stupidity of prospective grunts who believe that camaraderie and personal loyalty extend to their officers. This is perhaps true as an exception but not the rule. Common soldiers are the football; everyone wants a piece of them. This is widely known but ignored. Willful ignorance is the name of the game.

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Dispatches by Michael Herr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

War is Forever

Evil is not an absence of the good as proposed by theologians. It is a positive force precisely proportionate to the coercive technological power employed. Power kills people; people don’t kill people; technology does. War is unlimited power; or power limited only by the technology available but certainly not by morality, that is to say, people. Herr saw this at close quarters: “Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” No one who had power understood that the technological machine was impotent to achieve anything other than coercion and its logical extreme, death: “They killed a lot of Communists, but that was all they did, because the number of Communist dead meant nothing, changed nothing.”

The opposite of war is not peace but justice, the access to judgments of equity that mitigate coercion. Essentially war is unfairness made the norm, “a psychotic vaudeville.” War is unfair because there is no human recourse to the random exercise of power. The unfairness of war affects everyone even those, especially those, exercising the power. The further out on the tendrils of power, as these tendrils encounter victims, the more unfairness, the more coercion, exists. At that zero-distance, coercion is unremittingly ugly:“Disgust doesn’t begin to describe what they made me feel, they threw people out of helicopters, tied people up and put the dogs on them. Brutality was just a word in my mouth before that.” Is there any other word than de-humanization? “‘Well, you know what we do to animals . . . kill ’em and hurt ’em and beat on ’em so’s we can train ’em. Shit, we don’t treat the Dinks no different than that,’” says one young soldier with neither apparent irony nor shame.

Those with less power merely die; those with more power often die but all - those exercising power and those upon whom it is exercised - suffer a lifetime of an absence of recourse to power, a bodily reaction to coercion. Who can judge who is most defiled, the soldier coerced by his superiors or the soldier’s victim coerced by him? All suffer through either grief or memory. Herr knows this: “Varieties of religious experience, good news and bad news; a lot of men found their compassion in the war, some found it and couldn’t live with it, war-washed shutdown of feeling, like who gives a fuck. People retreated into positions of hard irony, cynicism, despair, some saw the action and declared for it, only heavy killing could make them feel so alive... Every time there was combat you had a licence to go maniac, everyone snapped over the line at least once there and nobody noticed, they hardly noticed if you forgot to snap back again.”

The effects of the unfairness of war are cumulative and gestational. They ripen and metastasize : “And some just went insane, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that had been waiting there in trust for them for eighteen or twenty-five or fifty years... it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes... They’d say (I’d ask) that they didn’t remember their dreams either when they were in the zone, but on R& R or in the hospital their dreaming would be constant, open, violent and clear,”

Despite the unfairness of all wars, each war is qualitatively different. This one changed an entire country, the one with the most power. Nothing, everyone learned, could be trusted: from government, from media, from experts, from one’s neighbor. The military was the exception because it could be trusted for consistent incompetence and deceit: “...the [Marine] Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans.” This was a new, highly infectious disease that evolved in the jungles and rice fields and was imported in a dormant state on the flights home: “A despair set in among members of the battalion that the older ones, the veterans of two other wars, had never seen before.” This was the war from which that country has never recovered, and perhaps never will. It sanctioned death as unimportant by turning it into a measure of progress: “... they talked as though killing a man was nothing more than depriving him of his vigour.” And for those leaders not at the far ends of power but at its source, power became an idol demanding sacred acts through which they would achieve salvation: “They believed that God was going to thank them for it.”

There is good reason to believe that the country’s present psychosis is its refusal to recognize the injustice it has imposed on the world: “Years of thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterwards you can’t handle the experience.” I don’t know if Herr is a spiritual person but he provides some splendid spiritual advice: “Going crazy was built into the tour, the best you could hope for was that it didn’t happen around you, the kind of crazy that made men empty clips into strangers or fix grenades on latrine doors. That was really crazy; anything less was almost standard, as standard as the vague prolonged stares and involuntary smiles, common as ponchos or 16s or any other piece of war issue. If you wanted someone to know you’d gone insane you really had to sound off like you had a pair, ‘Scream a lot, and all the time.’”

No ideal was left unmolested. No injustice was left un-trivialized. No confession of guilt was ever offered without rationalization. Perhaps this is a national characteristic - to hide profound immorality behind a shield of up-beat concern: “It was a characteristic of a lot of Americans in Vietnam to have no idea of when they were being obscene.” But injustice will not lie quiet. The effects of war are genetic; they are passed on as a dismal legacy of power and its unfairness. The country tried to forget and dug itself deeper, coerced itself, into violence that it now performs on itself at the armed hands of its children to the consternation of their parents. The country does seem to be screaming now. But no one is really listening. No one cares if they annihilate themselves in their undeclared civil war. If only they would tweet about it less.

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