Keep Your Shape by Robert Sheckley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Vocational Commitments

Animists believe that animals, plants, and even inert natural objects have souls. And who knows, they could be right. My mother claimed she could speak with the dead. One novel explanation for the existence of a soul-filled nature is provided in Sheckley’s bijou Aesopian fable of shape-adapting alien invaders who are enthralled by the diversity of earth’s species. Overwhelmed by the freedom to exercise their morphological talents, the invaders become trapped by their own ideals in suitable earthly forms.

View all my reviews

The Centaur by José Saramago
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hybrid Vigour?

It seems an historical constant that any religion which achieves societal dominance seeks to erase all residue of previous religions. Thus Christianity, upon reaching official status in the Roman Empire, set about destroying the literature of what it termed paganism and also coopted Greek and Roman temples into service as Christian churches. No doubt the pagan edifices had often been built on the sites of even more primitive places of worship in which had been stored documentation of even more primitive practices.

But the transformation of buildings and the elimination of competing scriptures don’t guarantee the suppression of long-held religious instincts and stories. The ancient theologies persist, mainly in myth and liturgical practice. And they re-emerge in often interesting ways if one knows where to look. I think Saramago‘s understanding of Christian doctrine suggested, correctly, the Centaur as a persistent avatar which continues in Christian thought.

A central problem of religious thought about Jesus among his followers is how the ‘nature’ of a human being can be combined with the very different ‘nature’ of an infinite God within the single entity of Christ. The official line is that he was ‘both fully God and fully man’ as it says in the creed. But this simple declaration hardly mitigates the inherent theological, not to say logical, tension it implies. How is it possible for the human, with its desires and incapacities, to co-exist with divine perfection?

Saramago turns in his story to the ancient Greeks in order to explore a problem which they had already articulated in the Centaur, a beast half-human (and consequently in some sense divine) and half-horse. The latter has instinct and urges but lacks an independent will; the former is intelligent but cannot act except through the formidable, and vulnerable, body of the horse. So the continued existence of the Centaur depends on a continuous series of compromises between its two natures.

One can of course consider the Centaur in purely secular terms, but the perennial issue remains the same: the uneasy compatibility of the rational and the instinctive as it exists in all human beings. It is a beast which is constantly hunted; but it is shy and afraid of discovery. And with good reason - it can easily be killed by those who misunderstand its actions and motives. Which is to say everyone, even itself.

View all my reviews

The Tale of the Unknown Island by José Saramago
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Inquiring

Real inquiry, all inquiry whether physical exploration or intellectual research, is necessarily blind, an act of faith in the unknown to reveal itself. Otherwise inquiry is merely repetition or review. So, paradoxically, there is no point to inquiry. The discovery which might result is per force entirely hidden and cannot be conceived in advance. Nor, therefore, can the obstacles which might be encountered, and consequently the eventual costs involved be assessed. Inquiry is, in other words, not just pointless, it is irrational since there are no criteria of success or profit or progress which can be applied to it. Unless of course one likes the people one is inquiring with. In which case one has already arrived at a conclusion. Saramago has condensed an entire philosophy of inquiry into a marvelous parabolic gem.

View all my reviews

Sales Pitch by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Escape Is Not Possible

Capitalism means advertising - persistent, intrusive, relentless advertising - and the equally persistent salesmen who follow in advertising’s wake. Death, taxes and advertising are consequently the nagging constants of modern life, particularly irritating when they all occur simultaneously, even when they occur in a world of technological bliss.

View all my reviews

The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lord of the Flies - With Guns

As a young man I attended a federal service academy in the United States for four years. So I identify with the conditions in the Peruvian equivalent that Vargas Llosa describes in excruciating detail. From the universal use of nicknames - half of them derogatory, the other half salacious - to the continuous, and often very creative, scheming to evade and outwit authority, to the intentional promotion of sadistic and vulgar brutality in the name of camaraderie, I find myself re-living the most painful, and painfully consequential, period of my life.

A rather disturbing transformation takes place in high-testosterone young males when confined together, voluntarily or not, and subjected to a highly regimented daily routine that is strictly enforced. Essentially they become amoral; every unregulated flaw, neurosis, or hiatus of maturity becomes exaggerated and enlarged in their resistance to a pervasive and arbitrary authority. And this regardless of their religious or ethical background. As Vargas Llosa has one of his characters muse about himself, “Sometimes he could go for several days following a routine that made all the decisions for him, gently nudging him into actions he hardly noted.” I think the reason for this sort of demonic spiritual ennui lies in the deprivation of not simply physical freedom, but - in the case of a military academy - the insistence upon the development of an attitude of extreme social dependence. The result is a kind of hypnosis.

“This place isn’t an Academy, it’s a prison,” says one of its officers. But not even prison puts the demand of spiritual conformity on its inmates, who are only expected to obey, not to admire, the violent ethos of their organization. In the military academy one becomes a stranger not only to one’s body as it is constantly stressed by activities that are meant to be tortuous, but also a stranger to one’s mind which is the real target of military indoctrination. As one of the officers in charge of the Peruvian academy exhorts his charges,“In the army, Cadets, you’ve got to have respect for symbols, damn it.” This process of ideological ‘formation’ continues for a full year without respite until one is expected to adopt the role of ‘formateur’, and do what was done to oneself, to others.

This intensive indoctrination, which is explicitly meant to dis-inhibit whatever ethical reservations one has about military service, is direct and unambiguous. For example: if any member of a unit screws up, all suffer. And all are informed why they suffer and who is to blame. The effect of collective guilt is invariable: the weakest in the unit, those who typically screw up, are persecuted by the group until they measure up or leave. If weakness is not found, it is fabricated in order to facilitate the system. Vargas Llosa knows the routine for creating a victim: “He was normal enough when he got here to the Academy, but you and the others gave him such a hard time you made an idiot out of him.”

Both the physical and psychological therapy are carried out by those who are only slightly older and more mature than those over whom one has charge. These ‘leaders’ have only recently undergone the same regime that they are expected to execute. The only training they receive is what they have undergone as victims one or two years previously. They believe, because they are taught, that it is their duty to become figures of unpredictable and sadistic authority to those subordinate to themselves.

Not infrequently, given a lack of experience, judgement, and conscience, their sadism becomes literal and is carried beyond the merely symbolic. And since there are severe restrictions on the access of adults (experienced officers) who could supervise the application of punishments to the barracks, it is not unusual for discipline to get grossly out of hand. As one of the protagonists points out: “The officers don’t know anything about what goes on in the barracks.” They are absentee warders who prefer not to know the details of barracks life lest they be held accountable. The lunatics do run the asylum.

Vargas Llosa captures this unique and uniquely primitive sociology of barely controlled violence so accurately that it gives me flashbacks. I have no idea whether conditions have altered very much in these institutions in recent decades. I doubt, though, that its essential intimidation and post-adolescent cruelty has been questioned. To eliminate these would be to abolish its core.

After a lifetime of experience in other business, academic and social institutions, I have encountered this kind of existence no where else. Its purpose remains a mystery to me since any practice of its mores outside its walls, even in the regular military, would be met with derision and resistance. During the VietNam war, my own epoch, young, ‘motivated’ West Point graduates were taught the limits of their academy ethos by ‘fragging’ in the field, that is, the killing of an officer by his own men. In The Time if the Hero, the inadvertent ‘escape’ of the academy mores threatens to destroy the entire Peruvian military. As the secret of its deptavity becomes public, the entire institution is compromised.

My experience suggests that the ‘outing’ of the military academy is a good thing. It deserves institutional criticism and castigation. I have never perceived that the experience of the military academy regime is in any way useful in building what is typically called character. The academy is an uncivilized existence which has no points of contact with family, business, or social life. Studies have shown that success during one’s academy training are entirely uncorrelated with one’s advancement in the service, much less one’s broader success or satisfaction in life. Rather, the reason that the sociology continues to exist, to the extent that it does, is that it has existed.

This is known as tradition, ‘we do it to them because it was done to us’. Tradition, from the Latin root tradere, a word connoting simultaneously ‘passing on’ and ‘betrayal’. Both Vargas Llosa and I have little doubt about which interpretation is more appropriate. Tradition is simply a rationalization for continuing abuse. I note with considerable dismay how many of my colleagues from those long-gone days support the kind of systematic political bullying of the current White House. Finally, they appear to believe, they have a Commander-in-Chief worthy of their own training and civic ideals. The effects of indoctrination are indeed penetrating and long-lived.

Vargas Llosa’s epigram from Jean-Paul Sartre neatly summarizes our common experience of the institution of the military academy and its consequences for the society that harbors it: “We play the part of heroes because we’re cowards, the part of saints because we’re wicked: we play the killer’s role because we’re dying to murder our fellow man: we play at being because we’re liars from the moment we’re born.” Perhaps the academy is, as Vargas Llosa implies in the way he presents his narrative alternately inside and outside its walls, merely a more intense, a concentrated version, as it were, of the male-dominated society that moulds it.

View all my reviews

 

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One Generation Away

I find it difficult to tell whether Atwood’s dystopian fantasies are meant as constructive social criticism or as sarcastic prophecy. Recent headlines suggest that her prophetic skills dominate, and with them her anticipatory sarcasm.

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the MeToo movement, for example, the British actress Joanna Lumley is reported to be fervently hoping that “not all men are bad” [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainm...]. As Spencer Tracey said in the 1955 film, Inherit the Wind, when told by the trial judge in the Scopes monkey case that he hoped that Tracey wasn’t mocking the court, “Your Honor has every right to hope.” So, no Joanna, it’s hard to find a good one; but please go on hoping.

I think it’s fair to say that there is little hope for males in Oryx and Crake. Certainly not for the protagonists of Jimmy/Snowman nor the eponymous Crake who are both thoroughly misogynistic from puberty onwards. They humiliate females in their fascination with kiddie-porn and their fantasy of women as either saints or incompetents. But the oblique references to male oppressors goes far beyond the characters of the story. If I interpret Atwood correctly, she includes Adam Smith, Moses, Freud, Darwin, Gandhi, and perhaps even the genetic scientists Watson and Crick as symbols of a male-dominated corporatocracy.

And she’s undoubtedly right: The XY genetic make-up is clearly defective. After all how does one otherwise explain the recent tragedy in Toronto in which ten people were killed and another fifteen seriously injured [https://www.thelily.com/who-are-incel...]? This insane atrocity was carried out by a so-called ‘incel’, that is, an involuntarily celibate male. His murderous grievance was against women because they found him sexually unattractive. His considered strategy for revenge was random homicide by motor vehicle. One such nut-case would be embarrassing for man-kind; but it is reported that more than 40,000 men subscribe to a Facebook account which promotes an Incel Movement.

Atwood’s anticipation of the Incels is remarkable. Crake is a Jim Jones-type of scientific genius who is responsible for a world-wide genetic make-over. Part of the Crakian genetic re-design for humanity - thereby creating the ‘children of Crake’ - is the ritualization of sexual activity so that males don’t feel bad when rejected by prospective female mates. Otherwise the world would continue to be plagued by “... the single man at the window, drinking himself into oblivion to the mournful strains of the tango. But such things could escalate into violence. Extreme emotions could be lethal. If I can’t have you nobody will, and so forth. Death could set in.”

As a solution, the losers in courtship rituals in Crake’s new world immediately lose all sexual desire - as well as their glowing blue penises - as soon as they receive the negative news. Men are pigs and are in need of fundamental reconstruction in other words - even by their own assessment.

Or more accurately, men are ‘pigoons’ according to Atwood’s story-line. Pigoons are one of the many new species created by modern genetic ‘splicing’. In this case: of pigs and raccoons. Other varieties include rakunks, snats, wolvogs, bobkittens, spoat/ giders, and rabbits that glow with the genes of jellyfish. These invasive and predatory animals are mis-attributed as the ‘Children of Oryx’. This is another misogynistic swipe since Oryx is an Asian girl sold into slavery who becomes both a porn-star and Jimmy’s feminine muse (a dig at Jung?) whenever he has enough booze to stimulate alcoholic hallucinations.

One might think that Atwood’s literary reach might have exceeded her intellectual grasp in conceiving such strange creatures as pigoons. But in today’s news appears the astounding announcement that pigs’ brains are now being kept alive outside their bodies [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetec...]. The scientists involved (apparently all of them men) believe that it is possible to repeat this remarkable feat with any mammal. And that, therefore, inter-species splicing is indeed feasible. Human immortality, some believe, is at hand. The children of Crake indeed: “... human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.”

It is not just their genes that are questionable. Male minds are philosophically harmful in their rationalization of male power as beneficial in an Invisible Hand sort of way. The benign logic of competitive personal ambition - for advancement, for reputation, for wealth, for making the world better - is a mere excuse for power-seeking. The male mind is warped in its essential isolationism: “He [Jimmy] wanted to be himself, alone, unique, self-created and self-sufficient.”

The quest for power ensures only one thing: an increase in the destructiveness of power. Another way of saying the same thing: an increase in power requires exploitation - of the environment, of animals, and of other people, particularly of women. Someone or something always loses in the competitive hormonal struggle. “Crake made the Great Emptiness,” say the men.

The zero-sum game in the male-dominated world is enshrined by the children of Crake in its creational mythology:

“Crake made the bones of the Children of Crake out of the coral on the beach, and then he made their flesh out of a mango. But the Children of Oryx hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself. Actually she laid two eggs: one full of animals and birds and fish, and the other one full of words. But the egg full of words hatched first, and the Children of Crake had already been created by then, and they’d eaten up all the words because they were hungry, and so there were no words left over when the second egg hatched out. And that is why the animals can’t talk.”

Crake, in other words, not only eliminated sexual rivalry, he also destroyed the possibility of intelligent conversation. Even Jimmy, his disciple and quondam advertising copywriter, recognizes the profundity of the loss: ‘“Hang on to the words,” he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”’

Crake’s debasing of language is actually part of an ideology: “The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment – the way it always was, Crake would have said – and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.” This ideology is, I think, the central theme of Oryx and Crake. It is an ideology of chaos, of irrational rationalistic inquiry and technological development, an ideology which conforms to the competitive, driven strangeness of masculine ‘nature’.

The latest headlines from California about Bill Cosby’s conviction make it difficult to disagree with Atwood at any point. [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...].

View all my reviews

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gentle Sarcasm; Sarcasm Nevertheless

It appears to be commonplace among many readers (and several film directors) to interpret this story as a paean to love based on its oft quoted closing “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." Rubbish. The story is patently sarcastic, gently so to be sure, which is part of its artistry, but sarcastic nonetheless. The only examples of love in the story are either obsessive fixation or guilty desire.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a somewhat elliptical re-telling of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Wilder signals this early on in his paraphrase of Shakespeare’s Gloucester: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods." [Wilder: “... to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day.”]. The story shares precisely the same theme as that of Lear: the intelligibility, or lack of it, of providential justice.

The story also shares with Lear a persistent ambivalence about where and how such justice might be perceived. Just as Shakespeare hints at, only to dismiss, the possibility of a benign rationality in Lear’s madness and Cordelia’s death, so Wilder has Brother Juniper searching without result for the divine intention behind six apparently random casualties (I include his own).

Where Wilder differs radically from Shakespeare is in his consistent sarcasm about his context: Spanish American culture, Peruvian colonial administration, the Catholic Church, and every one of his characters. Brother Juniper is his first target: “It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences, and he had long intended putting it there. What he had lacked hitherto was a laboratory.” High comedy or low sarcasm? Wilder then makes his opinion on Juniper’s project clear: “Everyone knew that he was working on some sort of memorial of the accident, and everyone was very helpful and misleading.” The narrative which follows, therefore, is meant to be taken tongue-in-cheek.

The Church suffers some of Wilder’s wittiest jibes. Referencing a work on sewers, he writes that the “...treatise on the laws of hydraulics was suppressed by the Inquisition as being too exciting.” The Archbishop of Peru, a harmless but ineffectual man, makes his entry as “... something in Lima that was wrapped up in yards of violet satin from which protruded a great dropsical head and two fat pearly hands.” Uncle Pio, the likable rogue of the piece “had been reduced for a time to making investigations for the Inquisition, but when he had seen several of his victims led off in hoods he felt that he might be involving himself in an institution whose movements were not evenly predictable.”

Spanish culture is presented by Wilder as a burlesque. The Viceroy, for example, “...had contrived to make exile endurable by building up a ceremonial so complicated that it could only be remembered by a society that had nothing else to think about.” Much is made of the degradation of the Spanish language from its pristine Castilian under the influence of native Peruvians. Only that art originating in the home country was worthy of admiration so that “Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort to establish in Peru the standards of the theatres in some heaven whither Calderón had preceded.”

Individual characters are all comically flawed. The abbess, who acts as a sort of central employment bureau, “... was one of those persons who have allowed their lives to be gnawed away because they have fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilization” (referring to her devotion to women’s equality). The prostitute, actress and aspiring socialite, La Perichole (apparently meaning half-breed bitch but untranslated by Wilder) participates in public ritual by holding a “candle in the penitential parades side by side with ladies who had nothing to regret but an outburst of temper and a furtive glance into Descartes.”

Even the victims themselves are treated with an implicit sarcasm. The Marquesa and Pepita die just after discovering their misdirected loyalties. Esteban, being persuaded to live without his brother, falls to his death the next morning. Uncle Pio and Jaime have no sort of conversion at all before they end up in the abyss. Not only is there no discernible pattern, there are no narrative implications of their deaths. They are all merely dead. And Brother Juniper is despised and killed because of his interest in their lives.

Thus it seems to me sentimental claptrap to interpret the story as endorsing the redemptive power of love. Wilder’s various references to love range from the sordid to the inappropriate. Why he would then cap his story with praise of an absent virtue is a mystery those who enjoy melodrama will have to explain. This is farce not tragedy.

Postscript: reality imitates fiction: https://youtu.be/QSU8GozlAKc

View all my reviews

 

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump by Michiko Kakutani
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Being Reasonable

Epistemology - learning what it means to be reasonable - has become fashionable once again. With any luck this might prove to be Donald Trump’s most important achievement: a backlash against the reality (largely his) of fake news. Unfortunately The Death of Truth is yet more fake news not a way to beat it.

More formally, epistemology is the study of how we know what we know, of what constitutes a fact, and logically therefore about what constitutes an anti-fact, that is a lie (see here for some explanation of epistemology and its current problems: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). It doesn’t take much epistemological analysis to determine that Trump lies, more or less continuously, about everything he encounters - events, people, issues, decisions, statements, whether these are politically relevant or not. These lies are endorsed and disseminated by tame media like Fox News and Breitbart which have their own commercial agenda. This much is obvious.

But what is much more difficult to establish is the epistemological structure, as it were, of the human beings who hear these lies, cheer them and act on them - in the way they vote; their behaviour toward opponents, and minorities; and in their expressed opinions about the rest of the world. The presumption of a book like Kakutani’s is that these people have been duped, and that by demonstrating that the motivation for their actions is a pack of lies, the era of Trumpian mendacity can be checked. Essentially, lack of discriminatory power brought about by inadequate education is Kakutani’s key issue. Therefore better analytical education, she believes, is the solution.

This presumption, and its purported solution is, however, in Kakutani’s own terms, wrong. The people who adhere to the Trumpian ideology know well that the President lies. They know that Fox and Breitbart have their own interests in these lies. They simply don’t care. The fact that Trump lies has about as much political import to them as the barometric pressure or the population of an ant colony. If photographic evidence shows that Trump’s inauguration had much smaller crowds than claimed, if numerous women have prima facie valid claims for sexual harassment despite his denial, if his closest advisors were obviously involved in relationships on his behalf with the Russians and nefarious others: it does not matter at all to the folk who support him. He has said this over and over again during his campaign and his presidency. And his supporters cheer him and themselves when he says it.

To observe, therefore, that Kakutani’s book is preaching to the choir is not a very profound insight. But it does reveal the essential flaw in her epistemological analysis. People, all people, have interests. Interests are what defines the things which are not only important but the things which can be and will be seen, heard, recognised, and generally allowed into one’s cognition. Interests are also the motivating force for reason; it is they, not some arbitrary logic like that proposed by Kakutani, which defines the reasonable. Kakutani, like many before her, tries desperately to separate what is factual from what is of interest; she aspires to be ‘objective’ in the way that facts and truth are established. For her, recognising interests is equivalent to the terrible heresy of “postmodernist relativism.” She doesn’t quite know what she means when she uses this term but she’s sure it’s the reason Trump is in the White House and Putin is in the Kremlin.

Paradoxically, one might think, this abhorrence of relativism is shared with Kakutani by Trump’s evangelical and conservative ideological supporters. They too want a firm epistemological foundation; and they believe they can get it by the articulation of one or more basic doctrines - the inerrancy of scripture, the necessity for complete personal freedom, the benefits of unlimited competition, the non-existence of something called society or any of a number of other ideological or religious premises. This establishment of fundamental premises is the only path available toward absolute, irrefutable, non-relative truth according to their way of thinking. And they’re right, that is the only way to be absolutely, positively, one hundred percent sure of what the truth is: define it beforehand. Otherwise one must simply muddle through with continuous nagging doubt, an uncomfortable and, one might say in our current culture, an unmanly state of mind.

But certainty and psychic ease come at a cost. Obviously diverse premises lead to diverse versions of what constitutes the truth, of facts, of signal versus noise. Evangelicals do not start with the same fundamental truths as economic neo-liberals, or radical nationalists. For the moment at least the competing versions of truth are not as important in American politics as the principle on which they all agree: Truth is fixed, certain, immutable, eternal and necessary for personal and social well-being. This is the basis of the populist alliance which Trump has created so skilfully. And Kakutani has decided that she will join it unwittingly using her own version of the truth.

It may not be obvious but this principle of absolute truth is in fact a religious concept. It is correlated with the explicitly Christian doctrinal idea of faith, that is to say the firm, ‘reasonable’ belief in eternal salvation. Faith is an epistemological principle invented by Paul of Tarsus as the foundational principle of his new religion of Christianity. This principle is arguably the most important contribution of Christianity to world culture. It provides a rationale for calming the apparent chaos of the world around us by simply removing large chunks of reality from our perception. If things don’t matter, they will not be perceived. If one is ‘tempted’ by distractions outside the realm of the doctrines of faith, one is urged to intensify one’s faith.

Intense faith is what the various components of the Trump alliance (and terrorists of all sorts) share. Trump’s lies are either irrelevant or they are contributing toward a greater good, of which even he may be unaware, according to Trumpists. Arguing against such a state of mind has never had much success for obvious reasons: the argument cannot be heard. Kakutani’s use of the principle of faith to undermine faith is consequently absurd.

So faith in absolute, invariable truth is the poison which creates and not the antidote which cures fake news. The only workable solution to the proliferation of fake news involves in the first instance the recognition of the interests represented by apparently unreasonable behaviour. Lack of apparent reason in someone else is indistinguishable from an inability in oneself to appreciate alien purpose when it is confronted. The idea of error is entirely dependent upon what one’s aims are. Ultimately, the effect of establishing the criteria of ‘objective’ truth is the exclusion of whole sets of human interests which then cannot be discussed politically. In other words, Kakutani’s solution is to intensify the problem we are experiencing at present.

I don’t know what the purpose of Trump supporters is. I suspect there are many, one of which, perhaps, is merely to be heard. This in itself could explain a great deal. I nonetheless do find them annoying because they don’t appear to consider it their responsibility to go beyond their pervasive nihilism and articulate what they’re really after. So there well could be an educational aspect to the situation because ostensibly unreasonable people may not have the ability to effectively articulate their reasons. If so, however, education in being able to listen articulately, especially among politicians, may be the most important parallel pedagogical task. Hearing the intentions of others, particularly others we abhor, is probably the most taxing political as well as social skill one can hope to develop. It is nevertheless the foundation of all epistemology. Kakutani has been listening to the wrong folk.

Postscript: Several people have written privately to me expressing an important issue with my review. What if, they remark, the purposes of some Trump supporters are morally unacceptable? Indeed, I have no doubt that this is the case, as it would be among any political group. One of the most important aspects of any political system, and the explicit purpose of the US party system, is the marginalisation of extreme and generally unacceptable purposes. The Trumpist alliance, I have no doubt, includes some, perhaps many, whom the vast majority of Americans would consider of questionable integrity. However, unless one is willing to conclude that half the American eiectorate has become politically insane (although a credible possibility), the bulk of Trump voters are expressing political views which while not extreme or evil have not been incorporated into political discussion. In fact it seems likely that the extremists have been attracted to the alliance of faith among disaffected voters and not the source of it. This doesn’t reduce the culpability of faith as an epistemological principle but rather makes it more urgent to make the consequences of this principle clear.

Postscript 17Sept2018: an interesting piece putting some context on the epistemological problem of Trump: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/americ...

View all my reviews

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Poetry of Old Age

A controversial interpretation of The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey: Certain lives matter more than others; some of those lives are Black; and they may even be annoying and useless. Nevertheless they matter more because they know what matters.

A less controversial interpretation of The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey: If poetry is the vigourous coercion of words to fit with reality, then the poetry of old age is the hardest to write, not because of too few words but because of too much reality. Old folk have too much memory; this overwhelms speech. There are simply too many connections that can’t be communicated to the young. The connections might make sense to others; but these others are all dead; and it wasn’t necessary to explain things to them in words anyway.

Just at the point when everything begins to make sense in life, when the world and one’s role in it are most coherent, when the interpretation of one’s past becomes honest, just then language becomes useless. This causes confusion, but only because it is a kind of divine revelation: words always got in the way. It was words that opened the way to trouble and hate and misery and death. The white man’s words, the bully’s words, the words of anyone in authority, have always mattered more - on the street, in the law, in your own head. But old age knows what matters: “God don’t care what they did to you. What he care about is what you did.” Words don’t matter.

There is only one thing that old people must do, properly or not: they die. “A man only got to do one thing to set him apart. A man only got to do one thing right,” says Ptolemy. This is part of the revelation that allows them to leave words behind. It’s the words that are important to abandon because money is words, reputation is words, promises and lies are words. So leaving words behind leaves all that and more. This may be frustrating for other people but it is liberating for those who know how to die well. This matters greatly.

View all my reviews

China in Ten Words by Yu Hua
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fishers of Memory

I recently commented to another GR reader that finding oneself in the writing of others about themselves may be the only viable form of ethical philosophy and religion in the modern world. China in Ten Words makes the case better than I ever could. For me the book is a sort of case study in listening carefully to the intended rather than the presumed meaning of the language we use.

I read Yu Hua’s Brothers several years ago. In it he clearly relies on his own experience of the Cultural Revolution and the beginnings of the subsequent transformation of China in order to capture the elusive spirit of a culture as well as a country. China in Ten Words does something similar but I find the autobiographical even more powerful than the fictional.

The book is a meditative memoir on a par with Montaigne’s Essays or Pascale’s Pensees. Its power, I think, derives from its astounding descriptive matter-of-factness. Yu’s childhood was spent in the cultural desolation of profound societal upheaval, the equivalent of a ten year long war of a national community with itself. This was a war begun without apparent provocation, and waged with no idea of what victory might mean. And it was literally total in that every man, woman and child were engaged in it. The weapons of this war in the first instance were those of language, from which violence was provoked and spread.

Yet, despite his horrific experiences - from witnessing non-judicial executions, to the persistent fear of denunciation, to the absence of almost all reading material - Yu, just like his fictional brothers, simply does not complain. He doesn’t even judge. He simply recounts in a manner which suggests that no other experiences could have been his. Nor would he want, apparently, any other experiences.

This is a remarkable stance to take. But it may be even more remarkable as a literary reflection of the entire Chinese nation. China, as it appears in Yu’s writing, is not simply long-suffering, it is accepting of its past suffering as an essential part of what it is. The implication seems to be that the Western ideas of mutual forgiveness and reconciliation are not relevant in a culture mature enough to accept itself and its past completely without regret or recrimination. No apologies, no Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, no apportionment of guilt or trials for crimes against humanity are necessary in such a society.

On the other hand, acceptance of the past does not mean resignation about the future. Yu doesn’t recognise causal connections in the manner of a European historian. Rather he registers discontinuities - abrupt, often unaccountable, changes in culture, politics, and direction like the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward - as normal, or at least typical. And although these discontinuities may need correcting from time to time, they are not themselves a problem. This seems to me a common marker of Chinese literature, possibly even of Chinese historiography. Tolerance of discontinuity is the secret weapon of Chinese culture.

‘Revolution’ is the political code word for this reality of discontinuity. Yu asks and answers his own question to this effect. “What is revolution? The answers I have heard take many forms. Revolution fills life with unknowables, and one’s fate can take an entirely different course overnight; some people soar high in the blink of an eye, and others just as quickly stumble into the deepest pit. In revolution the social ties that bind one person to another are formed and broken unpredictably, and today’s brother-in-arms may become tomorrow’s class enemy.” Sometimes, according to Yu, revolution is indistinguishable from thuggery. Truly the most remarkable thing about Chinese culture is its robustness in the face of more or less continuous disruption, and its ability to recover.

Yu identifies the incidents emanating from events in Tiannamen Square in 1989 as a discontinuity brought about by state-directed thuggery. The consequences of Tiannamen are mis-directed not for the reason a European might expect - for example suppression of democratic expression - but because the events at Tiannamen ultimately signaled creation of a crassly commercial, inhumane, and essentially un-Chinese state. Political revolution simply stopped - a perverse discontinuity. “Tiananmen, you could say, marked the watershed between two different conceptions of ‘the people’; or, to put it another way, it conducted an asset reshuffle, stripping away the original content and replacing it with something new.” He never uses the word ‘betrayal’ but a European in similar circumstances might have done.

Yu perceives the situation as discontinuous today as it was during the Cultural Revolution: “China today is a completely different story. So intense is the competition and so unbearable the pressure that, for many Chinese, survival is like war itself.” The discontinuity is simply overwhelming: “In the short space of thirty years, a China ruled by politics has transformed itself into a China where money is king.” Economically speaking, China has become hyper-Western. Popular discontent is greater now than when everyone was in the same sinking boat of the 1960’s and 1970’s: “Contradictions were not as acute then as they are now, when society simmers with rage.”

As a writer, Yu recognises, in what I take to be a Chinese way, that the flaw is not individual. Not even Mao was at fault, he implies, for the excesses perpetrated in his name from 1966 until his death in 1976. The problem lies, as it were, across all of society, in every layer of government and economic status. In philosophical terms, the problem is real but transcendent. And its locus is language itself. It is in language as it is spoken that the ideals of ‘the people’ and ‘leadership’ and even ‘writing’ have been transformed into cultural dead ends. The solution to the problem is not formal redefinition of these terms but the telling of new stories which create new contextual meanings for these terms and re-establish national cohesion as an ideal.

If I am right about Yu’s intentions, they are certainly relevant for every society on the planet. But it seems to me that if they can have traction anywhere, it’s likely to be in that society which is most open to the discontinuity called for. China, perhaps uniquely, has resisted confusing national purpose with the much more challenging idea of national purposefulness. The former tends toward fixity and archaic irrelevance; the latter toward that most elusive of all ethical ideals, the continuous re-evaluation of values. This is what China does very well indeed judging by history; and perhaps Chinese writers like Yu do best of all. As Yu says about himself, these writers are “fishers of memory.” I am touched by his metaphor and also pleasantly surprised to find it resonating in myself.

View all my reviews

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Compendium of Curmudgeonly Humour

Kurt Vonnegut is a curmudgeon. Curmudgeons are often misunderstood and taken for irascible pedants. On the contrary, they are anything but pedantic. Curmudgeons are introverts who are simply tired of adapting themselves to the demands of an extrovert world. They want to be left alone. Which is why they occasionally write or say nasty things to annoy people. The hope is that other people will then have something to talk about with each other and give the curmudgeon some peace.

A curmudgeon like Vonnegut is the opposite of a totalitarian. A curmudgeon knows the world around him and its imperfections through direct experience. But he is wary of turning his opinions, of which he has many, into policies. This is just as well because his opinions are anything but consistent. He has learned over the years that consistency is indeed the sign of a trivial mind which would like to impose order on a universe that is inherently chaotic.

Curmudgeons are male by definition because they fear the power of women and have no defences against it. Female power arises from the inherent male incompetence in things like communication and relationship-building. Sisterhood is a mystery which manifests to him as a hive-mind and he dares not mess with it. The curmudgeon knows he is deficient and relies on women to suffer frustration and annoyance in his presence. He is aware of this sufferance and, as a mark of respect, neither contradicts nor criticises his female companions. They in turn accept the deal as the best they are likely to get and desist from all attempts to improve him.

A curmudgeon is not without charm in certain situations, primarily those in which he is forced to respond to the opinions - usually political, but sometimes anthropological - of others, particularly blowhards and dilettantes. In such circumstances his remarks are likely intended not to convince but to undermine. He perceives this as healthy cynicism. The charm emanates from the fact that he doesn’t mind what anyone else thinks of him. The combination of the unexpected and the absence of obvious banality helps.

View all my reviews

 

My Country And My People 
by 

Lin Yutang

 

BlackOxford's review 

Apr 08, 2018  ·  edit

it was ok

bookshelves: chinese 

Speaking to the Dead

I acquired this book mistaking it for a recent analysis of Chinese society. So I was more than a little confused by the introductory Baroque paean to China. The flowery, wandering prose says nothing important except about the writer’s self consciousness. It is an extended throat clearing. 

The book, of course, is not about the China of Xi Jinping but of the somewhat lesser known Lin Sen. It describes a China of eighty years ago, a China which was oppressed, conquered, and in a state of political and economic disintegration. And it begins with a denunciation of what the world, the Western world at least, believed China to be: a permanently crippled place of chaos. To be reminded of that misconception is the obvious point of the book’s republication.

It is impossible for an outsider, at least this one, to identify the vestigial cultural tropes that might remain from 1935 in today’s China. Not many, I suspect, after the profound dislocations of the Japanese occupation, World War II, civil war, Maoism, famine, Communist persecution of tradition and religion, and an almost miraculous industrialisation. Certainly assessments like “the Chinese soul revolts against efficiency” are simply quaint. While the claim that “China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world” is true but in ways the author never could have imagined.

There’s another problem as well. The book is aimed to influence a reader who is absent in the twenty-first century - primarily the English Old China Hand, whose experience is that of the commercial colonial overlord. This type was educated in a particular style at Eton and Harrow. He was immersed in certain Western cultural references from Marcus Aurelius to Bertrand Russell. It is these references, with the occasional allusion to American practicality (and the lack of culture represented by the boxer, Jack Dempsey), that Lin uses to make his points about ‘common humanity’ and the uniqueness of Chinese culture. By making these references he is establishing his bona fides. But neither the social class nor the colonial type exist any longer. Lin is speaking to as well as of the dead.

Lin’s descriptions of the regional differences of China are often racist to modern sensibilities. How else can this typical sort of evaluation be considered? “Down the south-east coast, south of the Yangtse, one meets a different type, inured to ease and culture and sophistication, mentally developed but physically retrograde, loving their poetry and their comforts, sleek undergrown men and slim neurasthenic women, fed on birds’-nest soup and lotus seeds, shrewd in business, gifted in belles-lettres, and cowardly in war, ready to roll on the ground and cry for mamma before the lifted fist descends, offsprings of the cultured Chinese families who crossed the Yangtse with their books and paintings during the end of the Ch’in Dynasty, when China was overrun by barbaric invaders.” Is this anything but regional profiling to serve some unstated purpose?

Lin’s more general historical, political and aesthetic prejudices are obvious and persistent. He presents caricatures rather than characters of contemporary Chinese leaders like Chiang Kaishek. Mao, as far as I can tell isn’t even mentioned, despite the fact that he had already established a break-away republic at the time of original publication. The purported virtues of the Chinese people like ‘mellowness’ and ‘conservatism’ are farcical given subsequent history.

I suppose My Country and My People could serve as a case study for what colonial oppression does to the intellectual layer of a society. Lin had been in a certain sense conned into his role as explicator of Chinese culture to the West. On the one hand he has his Chinese heritage; on the other he has his Western education. So he has some street cred on both sides. But what he writes is apologetic tripe which is largely fictional and doesn’t offend the dominant powers. Ultimately it’s insulting to everyone.

Postscript: it is interesting to compare this book with a more recent assessment of Chinese culture. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

A Good School by Richard Yates
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Trivial Memoir

A Good School is an autobiographical novel of adolescence. It is clearly located in the Avon Farms School (as the Dorset Academy) near Hartford, Connecticut between 1941 and 1944. Perhaps, if it had been written closer to the time rather than 35 years later, it could be considered a period piece. As it is, its language and concerns - largely adolescence and associated neuroses - don’t correspond with its time. The 1960’s created a decisive break in style and subject matter to which Yates obviously had succumbed, and with incongruous results.

Perhaps the most appropriate comparison is with Louis Auchincloss’s The Rector of Justin, written in the early 1960’s and based on his experience in The Groton School in the 1930’s. Both books treat of the culture and unique sociology of New England private schools. The class structure, bullying, teenage angst, loneliness, and homoerotic tension among the students; and the political and sexual intrigue among the teachers are common to both books. And both Yates and Auchincloss use the more or less permanent financial crises of these schools as a thread to hold the narratives together.

The principle difference between the two books is that while the The Rector of Justin has a substantial plot and moral significance beyond the details of private school existence, A Good School is at best a fictionalised memoir. This latter book has a fundamental technical flaw: there is no real central character who must grapple with a significant issue. The titles, I suppose, are telling. Auchincloss has a protagonist; Yates has a venue. Given that focus, all Yates can do is recount anecdotes, most often of minor sexual perversion, and string them together in a barely perceptible narrative progression. The book has no depth, no import as a consequence. By 1978, the world had already had its fill 0f adolescent sexual awakening with novels like Catcher in the Rye, Portnoy’s Complaint and Franny and Zooey among so many others. A Good School adds nothing to the genre, nor to an appreciation of the condition.

The comparison becomes even more unfavourable for Yates when the similar point of the stories is recognised. Yates has his primary character summarise the situation at the school when he has him say “I mean everything’s over anyway, isn’t it?” Auchincloss poses a similar question about his school’s future. But what is ‘over’ in each is very different. For Yates it is merely the life of the school - regrettable as a matter of sentiment for its students but otherwise unworthy of note. For Auchincloss what is passing is an era of old wealth, personal character and character-building institutions. A new culture is being formed that is grounded in rapaciously competitive advancement rather than individual development. It clear to me which of these is the more interesting and revealing commentary on mid-century America.

Postscript: Another novel concerned with the more recent culture of New England private schools can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

View all my reviews

The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Meritocracy and Its Discontents

The problem with the idea of excellence is that someone has to define it. And those with power tend to define it to suit themselves and their progeny. Aristocracy therefore becomes the natural order of society. And so long as there is someone lower down on the social scale than oneself, aristocracy can be generally satisfying. But beware the wrath of those who become conscious that there is no one left to despise. They could rally around the most unlikely leaders to redress their unrecognised grievances. No, that can’t be right. Surely that can’t happen in modern democratic society which celebrates competitive excellence... Or so we thought.

“We are at war with ourselves in the greatest calamity our nation has ever faced. We kill each other in deals gone wrong, in a black market of drugs plied in the shadow of our abandoned cathedrals... What we do now is eat.” Collins nailed it in 2001. While everyone else was worried about the dotcom crash, he saw the crash of a country. And he predicted how the country would react: by punishing itself. “There’s an indignation in this country at what has happened to us. We need to exact a brutalising punishment, indiscriminate and horrific, upon ourselves. We like to see ourselves mutilated. It’s part of our psychosis of dismemberment, deregulation, downsizing, cutting things.”

What a shame that these losers in the global game didn’t wake up to the politics and economics of their situation when something could have been done about them. When their rivers burst into flame from the petroleum waste dumped into them; when their factories pushed out waste into the air and the ground; when their rural tranquility was invaded by fast food outlets, shopping malls, and box stores, these were not symptoms of wealth but of profligate inefficiency and political indifference. They realised this when the only option left was to destroy the system that let it happen. So they did just that. And they feel proud of it, even if their own condition hasn’t improved at all. At least for the moment they can feel the thrill of power, however illusory.

“It’s not hard to find casualties, what’s hard is to get people to admit they are casualties. It’s hard to get them to admit there’s a war going on.” The war these people have is with the aristocrats who run the businesses and the agencies of government. But the war they want is with the people they feel entitled to despise. They want a scapegoat not an adversary. Mobs like scapegoats; they’re surer targets than men in suits or other men with guns. And scapegoats make good press. They unify the disunited like nothing else. Scapegoats restore the illusion of power to those who think they deserve it but leave those in control untouched. This is part of the national character not an occasional aberration: “It’s maybe the greatest secret we possess as a nation, our sense of alienation from everyone else around us, our ability to have no sympathy, no empathy for others’ suffering, a decentralised philosophy of individual will, a culpability that always lands back on each of us.”

The meritocracy is grounded on formalised education. No education, then no test results; no test results, then no political traction; no political power, then the extra-political will have to do: “The political was eclipsed in our America. What you usually saw was the image of a man waving a gun, screaming at police, a bullhorn in the hand of a negotiator behind a squad car, a crack SWAT team angling for a shot, and then the sudden eruption of gunfire, the slumped potato-sack body in a pool of his own blood as the SWAT team, dressed in fatigues and visors, showed themselves from alleyways and doorways and rooftops.” The powerful are confirmed in their presumptions to power.

The irony of course is that the powerful don’t feel themselves powerful. The meritocracy is itself strictly hierarchical. Those meritoriously inferior are subject to the meritoriously superior. They do have the occasional recognition of their position as ‘the keepers of truth’, that is as the arbiters of reality for those who have no place at all in the hierarchy. These are the American untouchables, the trailer trash and migrant workers who lack not just educational credentials but also even an understanding of how entitlement is created. Perhaps their ignorance is a blessing. Pity more the poor striver at the bottom of the meritocratic pile who knows the score but can’t pass the tests.

“All we could do was wait for the cowboy Reagan to come and deliver us. But that was all in the future, beyond our scope of understanding.” And Reagan begat the Bushes, who begat 45, each of whom defined excellence to suit themselves and their progeny. Hence the plaintive cry which forms the theme of the book: “Oh God, it’s hard work dispensing with our history.” The fictional mystery centres on an ‘ancestral farm’, clearly a metaphor for the country itself which hides so much of its past through obfuscating myth.

In scanning the reviews, I see that one of the meritorious strivers commented “What right does an Irishman have to call America a failure?” That was in 2012. She probably hadn’t even heard of Donald Trump. Collins could see what she couldn’t and it frightened him. “What we’re doing is creating a culture of psychopaths, plain and simple,“ he writes. Perhaps the Irish have seen it all before; or at least they maintain an historical sense absent in America.

View all my reviews

Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reasons of the Heart

Giving unto Caesar is considered by most Christians to be a strict requirement of citizenship. From the payment of taxes to the offering of one’s life in patriotic war, one is expected to conform as a Christian duty. Established government appears to be divinely sanctioned by the biblical command. After all, Christianity stands for orderliness in the universe. Social chaos is by definition evil. And isn’t salvation a purely personal matter?

Martin Luther, for example, divided the world cleanly in two. In his interpretation the spiritual had nothing at all to do with the political. Modern Evangelicals still view existing law as God-given, unless of course they take offence at it. But mostly, middle-class Christians simply accept the inevitability of government and its policies and they adopt an attitude of impotent indifference to the resulting suffering - usually by the less well-off and non-Christians. Commonly they claim to do so in the name of Christianity itself.

So it was in Salazar’s Portugal during the 1930’s, as it was in most of contemporary Europe. Fear and hypocrisy combined to create political acceptance, even among those who found its oppressive fascism most distasteful. And so is it now in Trumpist America. Christianity seems to have a natural affinity with monarchs, dictators, and anyone else who can consolidate power in its, Christianity’s, interest. Occasionally however someone, usually a non-Christian, provokes the dormant conscience of the Christian psyche. Pereira Maintains is the story of such a provocation, and its consequences.

Christian conscience can be a strange thing. The eponymous Pereira feels uncomfortable with the political condition of his country and “... he wanted to repent but didn’t know what he had to repent of, he only felt a yearning for repentance as such, surely that’s what he meant, or perhaps (who knows?) he simply liked the idea of repentance.” Repentance, like salvation, is a personal thing without social implications. The resolution of Pereira’s discomfort, he thinks, is confession and counsel. Political involvement is unthinkable.

Pereira is drawn to memory, mainly the reminiscence of his deceased wife. But more generally he is motivated by the memory of how things used to be, the familiar orderliness of past life. Unable to live in the past, he ignores the reality of the present except within the limited sphere of his own ego - his digestion (poor), the weather (hot), his job as a journalist (satisfying), the maintenance of his social isolation from potential threats (mainly the government and its network of informers).

Pereira fervently believes in and desires the resurrection of his soul but not his body. The later, of course, is inherently social and dependent upon other human beings. This is hardly an orthodox opinion but it is necessary in order to maintain his detachment from the world. What he finds, however, is that the slightest human contact is political. It can’t be helped. His soul is part of a “confederation” over which he has no real control and whose connections are matters of the collective heart not the individual will. Even mere translation of long dead authors establishes such a bond that is politically dangerous.

The entire story is told in the form of a judicial deposition or police interrogation report as suggested by the title. It is a narrative prepared by an intermediary, ready perhaps for confirmation by the person who has been questioned. The central point of this narrative is stated early on: “Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.” What’s wanting then is only a signature admitting this crime of recognition.

View all my reviews

Introducing Time: A Graphic Guide by Craig Callender
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Difficult No Matter How You Do It

This is an outstanding summary of the scientific and philosophical views about time over the last 150 years. It is indeed and excellent introduction, particularly in its identification of the principle names which can be consulted for more detailed explanations. What it doesn’t do is make it any less arduous to understand what various theories mean. Time is simply enigmatic even when its enigmas are accounted for by a clever thinker. So, no short-cuts, therefore, to stretching one’s thinking beyond its comfort zone.



View all my reviews

 

Ratner's Star 
by 

Don DeLillo

 

BlackOxford's review 

Apr 01, 2018  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: american, science, philosophy-theology, favourites, epistemology-language 

Avoiding Cosmic Fake News 

Every community of human beings has its own way of thinking about things, its rules for connecting words and experiences. These rules constitute the community’s epistemology. Epistemology determines who to believe, what is valid and true, and ‘what counts’ in the language of the community - astronomy and simulation are ‘in’ among scientists, for example, and astrology and augury are out. To some degree a community’s epistemology depends on its technology - including its language - and the range of what can be detected and named by it. How events are recorded by technology often determines what is considered as a fact, a fiction, a random noise, or nothing at all. 

When technology becomes developed enough to be used to investigate both the very small as well as the very large - as in quantum or astrophysics - it divorces human perception from direct contact with events. Our immediate experience is of the technology not events. Epistemology then becomes about the technology as much as the events it records. Can the technology be trusted? Is what we perceive through it real? Could it be that what we experience in the very small and very large is simply ourselves, that the technology is actually a mirror reflecting an image of the people who created it?

The community investigating Ratner’s Star, Field Experiment Number One, resembles that of organisations like the Santa Fe Institute, or the Rand Corporation and other so-called ‘think tanks’ and ‘skunk works’ in which highly educated people of various academic stripes consider issues of deep import. At least they presume the issues addressed are important because their collective epistemology says they are. They have faith in their technology - in the case of Field Experiment Number One, a new type of synthesis-telescopic array and an enormously powerful computer, the Space Brain - to deliver the scientific facts upon which the community can deliberate.

Most members of this community are savants in some abstruse field of inquiry... and they are clearly mad. Some may be genetically deficient and ‘on the spectrum’. Others are suffering from the stress induced by the difficult problems they are asked to address. But mostly they are mad because of the ultimate futility of their work. After all, every problem they solve creates new problems at an exponential rate - an epistemological paradox implying that scientific progress increases uncertainty about the world. It’s enough to drive any serious scientist crazy.

Billy, the fourteen year old protagonist and maths genius, meets community members in a series of down-the-rabbit-hole, Alice in Wonderland encounters while he literally explores the depths of Field Experiment Number One. It is clear that the epistemology of the the place is rather more flexible than that of conventional academia. The staff includes thirty-two Nobel prize-winners in diverse fields. But beyond this are also ‘alternative physicists’, aboriginal dreamers, a name-shaman and the occasional visiting Kabbala-reading rabbi, among others. No member of any of these ‘disciplines’ pays much attention to the epistemological opinions of the others. The result is a sort of liberality of method within a group of decided dogmatists. What constitutes ‘science’ is a matter of formal but unresolved debate within the community. So truth floats like pollen in the wind, fertilising a variety of considered conclusions.

Billy’s job is to make some sense of a message apparently received from a planetary satellite of Ratner’s Star. As a mathematician, Billy could care less about epistemology. He has no interest in how the binary-coded message got to him or what processes intervened between the distant solar system and the gigantic Space Brain maintained by the community. His data is only the readable version of the purported message which has been produced by Space Brain. 

All Billy cares about is identifying any pattern contained in the message, its mathematical significance. Whether the numbers it contains have names other than the ones he knows, is an absurd irrelevance; only their general relationship with each other matters. Numbers, he believes, define each other entirely and give each other their unique identities. Their ultimate source and their connections to anything else in the universe is a metaphysical issue outside his area of interest.

Billy is still young enough to learn however. And he does. He hears and remembers the detail of all the advice he receives no matter how trivial or looney. He encounters the full range of scientific, philosophical and religious opinion face to face, as it were, and at its grittiest from very smart people. And some of the grittiest grit is provided by the eponymous Ratner himself who has turned from scientist to mystic during his life-long search for knowledge. His near-death bed testimony, given to the community’s assembled Nobel laureates through Billy’s intermediation, is unambiguous: en-sof, the “G-dash-D” with no name, the origin and end which is beyond language and number, is that for which they all have been looking. No one, including Billy, pays much attention to the old bat.

Billy’s learning appears to inhibit his enthusiasm for the project. He loses interest, gets depressed, sleeps a great deal, thinks about sex in a decidedly adolescent way, and avoids intellectual activity whenever possible. He is maturing. That is, he is going mad as well. But he receives a sort of therapy from an unexpected source, a hack journalist who turns to fiction-writing in order to avoid the “danger of the threat of belief,” a phrase which seems to sum up the whole of DeLillo’s novel. Belief, that is to say fixity of opinion about how words connect to experience, is as much a problem for scientists as it is for religious fanatics. Or, for that matter, as much as it is for an obsessive person who calls her obsession love.

The truth isn’t ‘out there’ as they say in the X Files; it’s not even ‘in here’ as some psychotherapeutic types have it. The truth is something that’s shared. Like all narrative, it’s communal property or it doesn’t exist. And, also like all narrative, it is both eternal as it is passed along, and temporary as it is surpassed by other more pressing or compelling narrative. Truth isn’t static; it moves. It is propelled by literature at every stage of its existence. Reading and writing is therefore an excellent way to say sane, especially if the writing is as elegant and varied as that provided by DeLillo.

Postscript: it seems to me that Ratner’s Star is the fictional equivalent of a decidedly philosophical work: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3.... I think the fiction is far more effective. Another novel with a similar theme by C.S. Forster, written over a century ago: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... Stanislaw Lem also an almost identical theme 25 years prior to Delillo: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...