Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

On Genies and Bottles

In 1956, the novelist and scientist, C. P. Snow wrote an article entitled The Two Cultures. The cultures he had in mind were science and the humanities. Each, he claimed, had its own specialised vocabulary, its own criteria for acceptable thought, and its own unspoken beliefs about ‘the way the world really is’. Communication between members of the two cultures were, he concluded, in such a parlous state that the fate of human society was threatened. Essentially he believed that the problems created by scientific and technological advance couldn’t make their way profitably into general, particularly political, discourse.

Lanier’s little book is a confirmation of Snow’s thesis. Written by a computer scientist who is paid by Microsoft to think profound thoughts about the future, the book stinks. Lanier seems to have learned to write by editing copy for get-rich-quick schemes, never quite getting to any point he wants to make before teasing the reader with promises of secret and powerful truths. But when the reveal comes, the emperor still has all his clothes. The book is largely a collection of opinions and personal anecdotes, which are inadequate to even spark debate much less inform decisions. It is repetitive, badly edited, long-winded and stylistically puerile. Computer scientists, apparently, have a hard time communicating with the rest of us.

Lanier doesn’t like the behavioural effects brought about by social media: addiction, trolling, vulnerability to bullies, identity theft, fake news, and inane competitiveness, etc. Anyone who has ever been on line, that is, most of us, is familiar with the catalogue of abuses. Lanier would like all of us to follow his example and dump our affection for Facebook, and Twitter, and Google (and presumably GoodReads) and go back to using modern communications and computer technology the way it should be used (avoiding what he calls BUMMERs - don’t ask, they aren’t well-defined). I won’t repeat the elements of his rant which bites the hand that feeds him. A parallel argument may serve to demonstrate the nonsensical futility of Lanier’s thinking:

SELL YOUR AUTOMOBILE TO IMPROVE YOUR QUALITY OF LIFE: The automobile is the bane of modern society. It’s invention and development is the cause of global physical degradation of the environment and increasing moral laxness. Besides, by having one you're only making Henry Ford and his cronies wealthier. Without the automobile, there would be no traffic accidents, no uninsured motorists, no need for automobile insurance at all. The elimination of the automobile would stop the uncontrolled growth of suburbs, improve substantially the quality of life in cities, and increase employment in the agricultural sector. Public transportation will become politically important once again. On a personal level, the sale of your car will promote walking and associated benefits like physical well-being and psychological relaxation. Road rage will be a thing of the past. Disposable income will rise dramatically.

Who could argue with the logic? But then again who would act on it? I acquired the book because I have already exited most of my social accounts (except GR). I suppose I wanted confirmation that I did the right thing, that I was sensible and wasn’t simply reacting emotionally to Zuckerberg’s inane testimony in Congress and the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. I was terribly disappointed. I’m glad I got rid of FB, Twitter, and other minor apps; but if I hadn’t, Lanier wouldn’t have convinced me to do so. Social media shares much with religion - you either get it or you don’t. And reason has very little to do with conversion or apostasy in faith or technology. The old know this; the young don’t care; and those in between are too busy to worry about it. Somewhere in there, Lanier sees a market. Perhaps Snow got it wrong and there is a segment between science and the humanities that is attracted to bad writing and bad science. If so, Lanier has it nailed.

An apologetic postscript 4Aug18: see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Dead Past by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Happy goldfish bowl to you”

Asimov was remarkably prescient as both an intellect and a writer. The Dead Past demonstrates the reasons why on both counts.

Published in 1956, The Dead Past is concerned about the loss of privacy through modern technology long before home computers, digital surveillance, and governmental obsession with counter terrorism. He understood exactly what was at stake if our lives were to become ‘transparent’ to others. And he understood the moral issues involved - not just those of personal integrity, but the more general ones of the ethical limits to human curiosity. The central question he raises is whether or not there is ever reason for the suppression of scientific knowledge.

In 2013, Dave Eggers published his novel, The Circle (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), which covers the same ground as Asimov’s story. Set in a Microsoft-like high-tech ‘campus’, the employees are expected to submit to a regime of ‘total transparency’ as a condition of employment. They and their families are monitored continuously. Privacy, and therefore secrecy, including the secrecy required for lies and deceit, are, as in The Dead Past eliminated. And Eggers describes precisely the effects that Asimov suggested almost six decades previously - essentially the breakdown of familial and civil relationships under the strain of ‘truth’ revealed through technology.

As is typical of much of Asimov, there is also a complex background against which his moral tale is played out. The clash of culture between scientific and literate academics, the increasing funding and control of research by government, the compartmentalization of knowledge required by modern industry, fake news, and the questionable ethics of research are all topics Asimov touches in this short piece. Each of these became publicly acknowledged in politics often only substantially after Asimov raised them.

If a mark of the writer’s art is its continuing relevance to humanity long after the particular conditions in which it was conceived have faded, Asimov’s work has proven itself to be of the first rank. He only gets better, it seems, as technology and its implications move on.

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Quantum Mechanics and Literature: An Analysis of El Túnel by Ernesto Sábato by Paul Halpern
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Novel of Profound Uncertainty?

In The Tunnel, Ernesto Sabato has a mysogonistic, puerile, obsessive, apparently psychopathic murderer tell the reader his every thought about a folie a deux with his victim and its rationale. My first time through The Tunnel left me bewildered. Of what literary rather than ideological merit is this work? For whose edification or amusement is it meant? My original conclusion: It’s a difficult book to be interested in much less like.

But I picked up on a hint by another GR reader and found that Sabato was a scientist before he was a writer and had incorporated quantum physics in The Tunnel as a sort of hidden metaphor. Indeed there is a short book by Halpern and Carpenter which outlines the way in which the metaphor is meant to work at key points in the book (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quantum-Mech...).

This led me back into The Tunnel for another look. Halpern and Carpenter suggest that Sabato followed Borges in his interest in the ‘labyrinthine’ character of history through which the world changes direction at critical nodes. They also point out Borges allusions to alternative and even parallel universes that were of interest to Sabato. They contend that Sabato builds on these Borgian tropes to create scenes of discontinuous time in his story.

Maybe so. But I find the argument of Halpern and Carpenter to be somewhat tenuous. But even stipulating their observations, I don’t see the point. The metaphor, if there, is certainly not central to this tale of murder and psychopathy. Of course there are always alternative trajectories for any story, or for any historical reality. But the idea of using the ‘collapse of the quantum wavefront’ as the signal for a decisive turning point seems to me trivial and fatuous.

True, the protagonist, Juan Pablo, is continuously analysing his situation in terms of alternative possibilities, as in this internal monologue:

“I constructed an endless series of variations. In one I was talkative, witty (something in fact I never am); in another I was taciturn; in still another, sunny and smiling. At times, though it seems incredible, I answered rudely, even with ill-concealed rage. It happened (in some of these imaginary meetings) that our exchange broke off abruptly because of an absurd irritability on my part, or because I rebuked her, almost crudely, for some comment I found pointless or ill-thought-out.”

But this is a symptom of madness not a symbol of impending quantum resolution. Even the speaker recognises that “this damned compulsion to justify everything I do,” isn’t normal

Consequently it seems to me that the metaphor of quantum physics does nothing to explicate Sabato’s very dark story. Juan Pablo is a misanthrope without any mitigating, not to say redeeming, features. The Tunnel, therefore, doesn’t get any more interesting with a possible metaphorical foundation. Unless of course sabato’s intention was simply to create a sort of quantum uncertainty about this very foundation. In any case: not terribly stimulating.

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Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gone Where the Woodbine Twineth

Quantum theory has some strange implications, one of which is the existence of parallel universes.* If physical reality does bifurcate at every quantum event, creating an infinite number of alternative realities, what happens to consciousness? Does it split as well, implying that twin minds exist in parallel but isolated states? Or does consciousness continue on a single trajectory, thus maintaining the presumed uniqueness of the individual personality? Could consciousness migrate from one trajectory to another, inhabiting perhaps several alternative worlds, or bodies, in the course of its existence? And what are the moral responsibilities of a conscious mind which finds itself in radically different social environments? These questions are important, especially if you are Heinlein’s protagonist Alex, a priggish, religious fundamentalist and racist but who still possesses enough nineteenth century pluck and grit to confront cosmic uncertainty head on.

Or rather these would be important issues if Alex, the fundamentalist, had the leisure to ponder them. As it is, mostly he has enough trouble surviving from day to day. The experience of being thrust from one version of reality to another is a fact that a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture just doesn’t cover. Not unless the Christian God is as playfully sadistic as he is reportedly bloodthirsty. Perhaps the old Norse Loki, the pesky divine practical joker, is actually behind such apparent irrationality. This is the god of changing rules; just when you think you know the way the world works from a moral perspective, Loki pulls the rug out.

But wait, scripture does cover even this. The story of Job in the Old Testament does, after all, describe a Loki-like Yahweh who thinks it a fine thing to move the moral goal posts as well as physical laws of his creation on a whim... or a wager. “Yahweh rolls loaded dice with His universe... to deceive His creatures,” according to Heinlein’s most reliable celestial authority, Rahab the biblical whore of Canaan. Even the material uncertainty of bifurcating quantum universes is then multiplied by the moral uncertainty that a Loki/Jehova suspends or even directs quantum effects willy nilly depending on his mood and latest conversation - a bit like an omnipotent Donald Trump, for example. This theological explanation accounts for much more than the contradictory results of quantum science. Who could expect an omnipotent deity to be constrained to maintaining the consistency of physical or moral laws? If God did not demonstrate his arbitrariness from time to time how would we, or he, know he was God?

The ultimate divine lark is the long awaited Apocalypse, the Last Trump (the pun unintended by Heinlein of course), the End of Days. Turns out it’s a bureaucratic fiasco that should have been organised by Disney World rather than the archangels Gabriel and Michael. Archangels don’t know nothin’ ‘bout human needs like plumbing and sanitary facilities. As Alex realises, “A saved soul in Heaven occupies much the position of a blackamoor in Arkansas. And it's the angels who really rub your nose in it. I never met an angel I liked.” The last thing the resident angels want is a horde of wet back migrant human beings creating disorder in the heavenly precincts. So the Saved only get to ride in the back of the bus in the Divine Transportation System. Bit of a let down really, suggesting less than a strong ethic of biblical Truth In Advertising.

Quite apart from the smug hostility of the natives, Heaven is a bust: no industry, so nothing creative or interesting to do; no horticulture, so no natural beauty or development; and no public libraries at all, so no intellectual stimulation. And to top it off, the others who have been saved - like for instance former wives - are not people you like to spend dinner with much less eternity. The Christian idea of the Holy Trinity, it turns out, is absolutely true. But its real function is simply to provide an audience for the Divine Jokester, a sort of in-house mutual appreciation society or Magic Circle which lives to laugh, mostly at the consternation they can cause among human beings.

It’s all a scam of course, Heaven, that is. The Other Place is where you want to be: A rather nice planet with “No snakes. No cockroaches. No chiggers. No poison ivy. No tax collectors. No rats. No cancer. No preachers. Only two lawyers.” And the people you’d much rather be with. They even take American Express. The whole divine justice thing is the ultimate switcheroo, therefore. What japes! The basic motive force of the universe revealed: divine high spirits. No wonder we’re all confused, as Alex says, “On reflection. I realized that I was in exactly the same predicament as every other human being alive: We don't know who we are, or where we came from, or why we are here. My dilemma was merely fresher, not different.” And no wonder that many of us feel put upon because of, “The delusion that the whole world is a conspiracy. Only it's not a delusion.” As Alex concludes, “Paranoia is the only rational approach to a conspiracy world.”

So next time you get irritated with the obstinate stupidity of a believer, just remember that they’re suffering too. Theology may provide a more coherent theory than quantum mechanics. But belief in infinite and arbitrary divine power comes at a price: profound fear of its arbitrary exercise (“Thy will be done...”). As Alex finally realizes, “A man who is happy at home doesn't lie awake nights worrying about the hereafter.”

* See: https://www.space.com/32728-parallel-...

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Precarious Japan by Anne Allison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Pressures of Precarity In a Land Of Lost Hope

Before reading this book I had never encountered the word ‘precarity’. Precarious, yes; precariousness, of course; but precarity hit me not only as a linguistic novelty but an entirely new social condition, a ‘thing’ as popular culture has it, that I have known about sub-consciously but never bothered to articulate. Once identified this condition is obvious and disturbing. I take it from Allison’s text that the term is commonplace among sociologists and therefore will creep, or seep, into popular and political consciousness. So it seems to me likely precarity could well become a central political issue common to all democracies.

According to Allison, “Japan is becoming a place where hope has become a privilege of the socioeconomically secure. For the rest of them— the widening pool of “losers”—even the wherewithal to imagine a different there and then beyond the precarious here and now stretches thin.” This is the existential condition of the “precariat” who have replaced the 19th century proletariat. This precarious proletariat has lost even the hope of improvement in their condition: “This social and human garbage pit is precarity. And, as the sensory nature of precarious living, it is pain and unease. Life that doesn’t measure up: a future, and everydayness, as secure as a black box.”

The fact that precarity is an issue in Japan reflects something important about Japanese culture for consideration by the rest of the world. The intensity and rapidity with which the phenomenon of precarity has swept through the country make it a sort of canary in the mineshaft of 21st century global capitalism. The effects of precarity are also more visible in Japan because the country’s post-war economic policies, corporate structure, and social cohesion had more or less eliminated it before the 1990’s and the bursting of the country’s property bubble. Japan started the process of increasing precarity from an apparently solid and stable familial and civil society. The lesser social cohesion in countries like the USA therefore seem even more vulnerable to its effects.

Precarity brings together a number of social and economic conditions: the increasingly disproportionate distribution of income and wealth around the world, the growth in under employment among the educated and unemployment among those with minimal education, the sharp rise in zero-hours contracts for relatively unskilled work in the internet economy, the increasing pressure on national welfare provision brought about by an aging population and international tax competition, and the dominance of self-employment in some high-tech sectors (the “cognitariat” as a sort of intelligentsia among the precarious proletariat). These issues are a far more concrete focus for the vaguely defined populism so obvious in Europe and North America. And they affect not just the certifiably impoverished but also those of what used to be called the middle class - enough of the population in most countries to form a substantial electoral coalition.

I look forward to what the currently shapeless rhetoric of the British Labour Party and the American Democrats might become if either group can find the courage, as well as the language, to form a coalition of the precarious. Allison quotes the sociologist Lee Edelman on what he calls the demise of “reproductive futurism... the notion that hard work today yields a better tomorrow: the modernist in progress staked on the child as the obligatory token of futurity.” This is the global version of the American Dream, which if it can’t be recovered, doesn’t augur well for the future of democracy, perhaps even of responsible government.

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I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Prophecies of the Non-Organization Man

On an early Spring camping trip to Seeley Lake in Montana about twenty years ago, I took my canoe out before the morning mist had cleared. The sun was bright above me but visibility was only about ten yards at water level. Out of the still-calm water just ahead of the boat, a fish leaped. Before the fish had hit the water again, a bald eagle swept in and attacked it with both talons. But as the eagle struggled to rise with the fish, in through the fog dived a much larger golden eagle. Clearly panicked the bald eagle released his catch to the golden eagle and both flew straight up out of sight

My response was one of uncomprehending immobility. Had the last three of four seconds actually happened the way I perceived them? If so, what did the event mean? The second question came hard on the first. In fact the second question is what gave significance to the first. If the event had no import then it didn’t matter whether the fish and the eagles, and the mist and the watery sun were elements of a dream or reality. But if it were real, it was so unexpected, so improbable, so utterly personal that it seemed to demand an explanation beyond the biological imperatives of hunger and predation.

So the event became for me not a sign from the Great Sprit or an omen but a permanent, if not continuous, object of meditation. As such it is a focus of interpretation and re-interpretation. Most of these interpretations are fanciful but occasionally one will hit on an aspect of my personality with surprising sharpness and even harshness. I don’t think it is rash to call this sort of interpretation a revelation. And I don’t think it’s projective hubris to suggest that this is congruent with much of religious revelation which relies on natural symbols to communicate spiritual truths.

The difference between my revelation and that of religion is that I know that my interpretation applies to me. Others may find my revelation about myself to be useful in their own self-interpretation. But neither I nor they can make any credible claim to its universality, its stability, or therefore its truth, other than as a comforting, or disturbing, or simply surprising personal surmise. The steps from personal insight to communal recognition to general truth to religious doctrine are ones of pure and increasing power; they involve coercion at the most fundamental human level, that of language.

The enforcement of revelatory interpretation does not merely mean the promulgation of a definitive interpretation but also the fixation of every word and verbalized idea in such an interpretation. Doctrine demands the control over language and the authoritative designation of who are entitled to define its components. Since language is circular - words are defined only by other words - religious power is necessarily exercised through language, all of it, not just that used to formulate ‘sacred’ revelation. The Religions of the Book - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - therefore are not mainly concerned with things spiritual but with things linguistic. Doctrine pretends to specify what to believe; but it really controls how to speak.

Philip K Dick was in permanent rebellion from his childhood against the high-jacking of language by religion -secular as well as spiritual. He knew from his own experience not only how entirely subjective the interpretations of events are, but more importantly how it was possible to manipulate others through manipulation of language. His favourite way to demonstrate how manipulation works was solipsism: the establishment of the questionability of the existence of minds other than one’s own. Solipsism. of course, is refuted by the very use of language itself since language presumes and is dependent upon more than one isolated mind.

But this solipsistic contradiction isn’t something that bothered Dick. His object wasn’t to deny other minds but to undermine the power that controlled other minds through religious language. He came to maturity at the time of the Red Scare and the McCarthy Committee on Unamerican Activities, the civil religion of the USA at the time. He was a member of a burgeoning consumer society in which the collectivist ethic of the corporate Organization Man of William Whyte was dominant and demanded a certain kind of public liturgy. He was a talented writer who, he felt with good reason, was denied entry into ‘mainstream’ literature because of arbitrary boundaries of genre, a sort of literary religious sectarianism. For Dick, solipsism was a therapeutic technique not a philosophical position. He knew it’s power because he experienced its effects constantly.

So Dick was a powerful writer; he was also neurotic, often obnoxious, an obsessive devotee of I Ching and a member of the 1950’s avant garde of California hippiedom. But he knew the difference between being powerful and wanting power. Unlike an L. Ron Hubbard, or a Jim Jones, or even a Richard Nixon (all his contemporaries), Dick never succumbed to the temptation of turning personal insight into a movement like Scientology, or a cult like the People’s Temple, or a political ideology like gun-toting, race-baiting, Orange County Republicanism. He plugged on resolutely with his strategy of literary solipsism. He applied it to the emerging drug culture of Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary; and he even applied it to himself in his flirtation with Christianity. By keeping himself uncertain, through his writing, of the existence of other minds, he avoided the trap of power-seeking.

Carrère correctly identifies Dick’s central theme. It’s there in the title of his biography, although he never mentions the word. Essentially Dick has one consistent message in two parts: ‘You can’t know me and I can’t know you; so how about we stop projecting thoughts, motivations and intentions because they’re almost always wrong. And by the way, you’re not as autonomous as you think you are.’ This is prophecy in the best sense of the Old Testament - not prediction but assessment of the contemporary condition. It occurs in one way or another in almost all Dick’s work. In fact one way to look at his work is as a progressive articulation of this fundamental revelation. The genre of science fiction is ideal for Dick’s purpose because it can effectively undermine religious symbols which sit on the edge of consciousness while remaining definitively outside religious controversy, an especially important camouflage in a country as self-consciously religious as America.

But despite Carrere’s accuracy in identifying the essence of Dick’s technique, I think he does Dick an injustice in portraying Dick’s ‘mission’ as a product of his neuroses and somewhat unconventional family life. No doubt Dick appears driven to certain modes of expression that originally appeared in his childhood. But one can more fittingly describe this as consistency of vocation than working out of childhood trauma. Dick used the most intimate scraps of his relationships in the service of his main theme - something that understandably annoyed spouses and friends to the point of hatred. But what else could such a modern mystic - a functional misfit in any society - use as his raw material except his own relationships? And could he ever even approach that elusive horizon called reality without making them bigger, more serious, more dramatic than they appeared to others? Solipsism, after all, is a somewhat lonely business. It’s bound to be mis-interpreted.

Nonetheless, Carrere ‘gets’ Dick when he comments “Some people charm snakes; Phil Dick charmed ideas. He made them mean whatever he wanted them to mean, then, having done that, got them to mean the exact opposite.” In so doing he revealed the “perfidious betrayal or to the falsely familiar.” And for many, including me, he still does. It is not an absence of talent that prevented Dick from creating attractive and admirable heroes and heroines. He avoided such characters because they created the possibility for the establishment of cultic power. Like my experience of the events on Seeley Lake - a situation which certainly would have qualified as Phildickean in the 60’s - all Dick’s characters and situations are surprising, evocative, even bizarre; but they are never quite stable in their meaning. They tend to float and alight on various interpretations depending on the mood of the reader on a particular day. I like this technique as an excuse for meditative reverie. For this I am grateful.

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Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bumbling Towards Hell

None of us is ever prepared for what is happening in our lives; nor are the choices presented to us - political, personal, spiritual - ones that we formulate. We move randomly, provoked by half-formed dreams and aspirations; but it simply isn’t possible to foresee the consequences of each move. So we react, with even less reason than immediate desire, to circumstances as they unfold. We call the result a life, or career, or accomplishment, but it is really only a series of unplanned revolutions in our experience, our preferences, our prejudices, our politics and the way in which we harm other people. Thus one of Vargas Llosa’s main characters can say. “People change here... never things.”

The Peru of Vargas Llosa is perhaps exceptional in this regard. It is a place of ingrained racial tension - among the Spanish, the Mountain Indians, the Jungle Indians, the Blacks, the mixed race untouchables - which insures that no politics can be stable. Consequently everyone is “... in revolt against his skin, against his class, against himself, against Peru.” It is a place of domination by the Catholic Church through which personal advancement is controlled. It is a place of profoundly respected, and expected, machismo in which women have no voice and are presumed to submit in everything from sex to financial dependence. It is not therefore a happy place in which to seek one’s future. Everyone is disappointed, especially those who achieve what they believed they wanted. And revolution is more or less a way of life - personally as well as politically.

The eponymous conversations take place in a bar, a working man's dive in Lima called the Cathedral. They tell the history of a group of boyhood friends and their families as well as that of Peru. This is a history of haplessness and failed dreams - about love, about vocation, about familial loyalty, about doing the right thing - largely because each dream interferes with the others. Love confronts loyalty and leads to a politics of hate; pursuing one’s calling demands giving up whatever doing the right thing means. Dreams become nothing more than a residue of regret and fragmented, sentimental memories. As one character describes another, “You seem to have stopped living when you were eighteen years old.”

The literary technique of cutting abruptly from the personal conversation to the national history - and frequently inter-leaving up to four other conversations - can be disconcerting initially but as it becomes familiar it serves to amplify the ironies of the situation to the point of desperate sarcasm. The conflicts and incompatibilities of needs, wants, emotions become stark and obvious. As do the various forms of complicity in coercion and torture in contemporary Peruvian society.

Otherwise relatively innocuous people are drawn into a web of systematic oppression of their compatriots. The life-choice seems limited to being either oppressed or oppressor. A neutral position doesn’t exist. “Doubts were fatal,” A young idealist says, “...they paralyze you and you can’t do anything, ...[S]pending your life digging around, would that be right? torturing yourself, would that be a lie? instead of acting?” But acting, even with good intentions, means acting against others, “And in this country a person who doesn’t fuck himself up fucks up other people.” Tyrants or reformers, it doesn’t matter; all act the same with power. Power isn’t simply correlated with evil; power is the evil which is everywhere and nowhere. It transforms those who merely seek it into carriers of a morbid infection.

Unsurprisingly nothing goes the way it should for anyone, neither for those in charge nor those oppressed by those in charge. No one is reliable, even oneself; everyone evolves into a parasite on their family, friends, associates, and their own past. A transcendent demonic presence seems to infect the entire country. Indeed, the people change but things never do. This is normality in Vargas Llosa’s Peru, a profoundly hopeless normality about which nothing can be done. Santiago, the protagonist, is obsessed by the mysterious force behind his and everyone else’s failure: “All the doors open, he thinks, at what moment and why did they begin to close?”

Ambrosio, the black chauffeur of Santiago’s family, is a Horatio-like interlocutor in conversation with Santiago as Hamlet. They each reveal the facts that the other never knew about both their families’ roles in the country’s continuing misery. Santiago can only drop more deeply into despair and spiritual ennui; he is traumatized: “My whole life spent doing things without believing, my whole life spent pretending....And my whole life spent wanting to believe in something, ... And my whole life a lie, I don’t believe in anything... APRA [the Leftist Party] is the solution, religion is the solution, Communism is the solution, and believing it. Then life would become organized all by itself and you wouldn’t feel empty anymore.” Looking to fill a spiritual, social and political flaw with anything at hand seemed the only strategy.

Echoes of Trump’s America or Berlusconi’s Italy or Erdogan’s Turkey or Putin’s Russia? The political sensibilities of Vargas Llosa’s Peru seem to have become a worldwide phenomenon. Racism, unarticulated class warfare, the cooperation of religion in the service of power, seem to be the coming norms. It is difficult not to adopt Santiago’s mood of despair. Religious belief cannot create solidarity; neither can global consumerism. When did all the doors begin to close and why? Can they ever be opened again?

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Newly Discovered Gnostic Writings: A preliminary survey of the Nag Hammadi find by W.C. Van Unnik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How the Ancients Get Their Revenge

I found this book amid a pile of junk I have been meaning to dispose of for years. It is old, probably outdated by two or three generations of scholarship, and an example of a lost genre of serious popular exegesis. Nevertheless, this introduction to the Nag Hammadi documents is in some sense timeless and , I think, shows us important things about ourselves and our cultural condition.

Gnosticism is not easily defined from a doctrinal point of view. There are dozens of ancient variants that have been mixed with spiritual beliefs and practices from Persia, the Middle East, and the Roman and Greek empires. Consequently is difficult to talk about Gnosticism as more than a tendency in religious thought.

The Gnostic tendency is particularly evident in Christianity, both ancient and modern. In part this is due to the contemporaneous spread of Christian and Gnostic teaching in the first centuries of the Christian Era. But, more importantly, I think the ease with which the Gnostic impulse penetrated Christian thinking is a consequence of a fundamental epistemological problem of Christianity itself. In a sense Christianity needs, and continues to need, Gnosticism as its intellectual foundation. This makes Gnosticism the ‘go to’ retreat whenever Christianity is pressed by widespread intellectual criticism.

Paul of Tarsus is the inventor of Christianity as a distinct religion. His central innovation was the separation of his religion from both traditional rituals and genetics. His religion was open to all regardless of culture or parentage; it was ‘universal’. Participation in his religion required only one thing: what he called pistis, or faith. Specifically, faith in Jesus Christ as the redeemer, the bringer of salvation to the cosmos. This was a religion of ideas not blood or actions; of what was ‘in your head’ not in your genes or your ethics.

But Paul had never met Jesus. He was taught about his life and teachings by others who, judging by the multiplicity of writings available at the time, had different interpretations of these teachings. Some of these writings would, after several centuries, be deemed ‘canonical’, that is, official. The rest would be termed ‘apocryphal’, meaning not that they were false (they were in fact often cited by the Church Fathers from the 2nd century onwards) but that they weren’t definitive. The Nag Hammadi collection is one of apocrypha, some of which echoes the canonical New Testament but much of which is distinctively different in tone and intent.

In any case, Paul has almost nothing to say about either the life of Jesus or the actual content of what was to be believed about him as a real historical person. And nothing in contemporary Judaism suggested the need for cosmic redemption. At most, therefore, Paul depicts a sort of abstract cipher, a symbol that represents the Jesus who lived and preached, and died a horrible death. To this cipher Paul attributes characteristics that are simply absent from the so-called synoptic gospels which purport to document Jesus’s life. The details of that life, as well as its preaching, and its death are of no concern to Paul, who refers to ‘the gospel of Christ’ as if it were already known through someone else’s narrative. From a practical perspective, faith must be placed in one or some of these narratives. Paul had to do this and so do his followers; but he’s not letting on which ones are worthy of belief. It’s as if he is entirely unconcerned about any verifiable facts about Jesus as long as his slogans about Christ’s redemptive role are accepted and repeated as evidence of faith.

Enter the Gnostic environment into which teaching about Jesus is presented and interpreted. The common and binding principle among the variety of Gnostic beliefs is that knowledge, gnosis in Greek, is the key to personal salvation. The knowledge referred to is a primal understanding of the nature of the universe, an understanding which we have lost because of the corruption brought about by human desire and sin. Clearly Paul’s Christianity claims to have this required knowledge. It is the object of his faith, the knowledge of the God-man, Jesus Christ, which frees the world from desire and sin. Gnosticism has a ready-made explanation for why the world is in need of redemption and how that redemption is made possible through Christ. It is the perfect background story for the Pauline proclamation.

But the how and why of redemption and salvation has as many variants as the Gnostic imagination can supply. It is clear, therefore, that early Christianity was at least as diverse as present day Christianity. Valentius, a leading Gnostic of the time, had a good shot at becoming the bishop of Rome for example. Paul’s abstract savior is simply inadequate for whatever human need is met by religion. Religious substance was supplied by the Gnostic ideas already in circulation: the hidden messages contained in the parables of Jesus, the eternal fixity of the elements of true knowledge, the transformational power of words (as in the sacraments), the superiority of the spiritual over the physical, the need to escape from the temptations and snares of the material universe, the idea of a heaven ‘up there’, beyond the stars as our real home. All these are Gnostic in origin and are very different from the theme of love presented by the Jesus of the canonical gospels (and, incidentally, commonplace within the rabbinical Judaism of the day). But they fit nicely with Paul’s more abstract pronouncements (presuming, possibly incorrectly, that Paul himself wasn’t already influenced by Gnostic teaching; I believe on the evidence of his attested letters that he had been).

The Nag Hammadi writings, discovered only in the late 1940’s, are examples of the variations in Christian thought that were prevalent from the 2nd century onward. They follow on rather neatly from the last canonical gospel, that of John, in their spiritualized content and their Gnostic flavor. They are ‘syncretistic’ not only in the sense that the collection incorporates the scriptures of a number of Christian communities, but also because each of the documents discovered shows the blending of Christian thought and Gnostic cosmology, the beginnings of which can be detected in John’s gospel. The several dozen papyri demonstrate just how inextricably interwoven the Christianity and Gnosticism have always been. The latter provides the epistemological rational for the former. It says why faith is necessary as well as sufficient.

There is nonetheless an issue: Gnosticism presents a problem for authority in its diversity of opinion and in its poor regard for earthly structures, even ecclesiastical ones. The developing church hierarchy of the first four centuries could only maintain its authority by severely limiting the variety of Gnostic belief. However the traditional argument that ‘orthodox’ belief triumphed over ‘heretical’ or other extrinsic ideas is belied in the first instance by the more or less wholesale importation of Greek philosophy - initially Platonic eventually Aristotelian - into Christian theology, and further by the continuing influence of Gnosticism throughout the subsequent history of Christianity. Gnosticism was not suppressed, it was normalized within the Church. From the Manichaeans to the Mormons, Gnosticism has lived just below the surface, providing the substantive foundations of Christian liturgy and worship; and for its not infrequent fragmentation (the Cathars and Calvinists as well as the American Puritans spring immediately to mind).

Harold Bloom in his classic The American Religion, has shown to what degree the Gnostic tendency is alive and well. Its subordination of the material environment to human progress in re-joining the divine source, its perception of the inherent evil of those who are not privy to the secrets of salvation, its mythology of the triumph of the cognoscenti, can be observed in most nominally Christian countries, but especially in America where the Gnostic tendency has become a national distinguishing characteristic. And the tendency goes beyond formal religion. It includes the literature and culture of self-help and self-improvement which peddles the ‘secrets’ of sexual and business success. It includes a definite sort of obdurate anti-intellectualism such as that described by Kurt Andersen in his Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History. It includes a deformed attitude of equality captured in John dos Passos’s comment that “Americans feel that there neighbors do not have the right to know more than they do.” It also includes a certain style of politics, one in which the demonization of one’s opponents is essential in order to protect the truth of the mythology which is used to sustain existing structures of power.

Philologists, archaeologists, and biblical scholars are still studying the Nag Hammadi collection more than 70 years after it was unearthed. Remarkably, it seems to me, these documents have as much to reveal about how life is lived today as how it was lived in the 2nd century. This short introduction, published in 1960, is still readable and eminently relevant. I recommend it to those who don’t find conventional explanation for the state of the world very satisfying.

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Dead I Well May Be by Adrian McKinty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Illegals Across 110th Street

Thanks to Adrian McKinty I now know that it is possible to walk across the George Washington Bridge in New York City. This is somewhat interesting. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to imagine a reason why anyone would do it. And this about sums up my experience of Dead I May Well Be: interesting but pointless.

Michael, the hard Ulsterman, born to fight on Belfast streets, trained by the British Army to do his fighting with more than fists, and honed to a revengeful edge by a short, sharp stint in a Mexican prison, is a murderous loner. Incongruously, he reads The Economist and War and Peace and makes various classical and biblical references, frequently just before eliminating yet another nefarious colleague.

The Count of Monte Cristo was less effective than Michael in dealing with those who betrayed him. But despite his vulnerability - as an illegal alien, as a white man in Harlem, as a serial murderer in the Tri-State area - he seems always to attract a protector, someone as lethal as he is but higher up the criminal food chain, just in the nick of time. Michael is an Irish drunk at least; but he could be psychopathic as well. In any case, neither the drink nor his mental illness adversely affects his trigger-finger, which never hesitates.

I understand that the book has been made as a film. Given that it is written as a script, with just the right flashbacks and sexual cuts, I’m not the least surprised. The story itself is a sequence of sometimes exotic, always remorseless acts of violence. I had suspected initially that McKinty was trying to demonstrate the differences in the criminal cultures of Europe and America. But as the tale progresses it is clear that there is no point to the repeated violence, except to repeat the violence.

There does seem to be a hint of social commentary dropped occasionally between the lines about the gang warfare on Upper West side of Manhattan. “For as exciting as the Mob story was in New York in the early nineties, the grander narrative wasn’t their decline, their collapse, their self-immolation. No, the big story was the drug-addled slaughter taking place nightly in Harlem and the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy. The big story was who was moving into the vacuum created by the decline and fall of the Mafia.” Who knew that the Irish replaced the Italians and were in turn replaced by the Dominicans as the creme de la crime in NYC? But as I said, while this is mildly interesting, it is essentially pointless.

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Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There Is Another Way

Is the self-aware, socially-oriented, language-using, persistently interpretive faculty that we call the human mind a product of the evolution of random chemical, biological and quantum physical processes, or is it the result of an act of a divine being? This is the intellectual choice as it is presented in popular debate: religion or science. But suppose that neither religion nor science can account for the facts as we known them. Suppose that the intransigence of the human mind to explanation by psychophysical reduction or by ‘intelligent design’ are both fundamentally defective. Is there a reasonable alternative programme of investigation?

Thomas Nagel believes that there is. And he makes a good case. Nagel, who is an eminent philosopher of science considers that religious opposition to reductionist science has done human thought a service by correctly identifying flaws in current scientific arguments which would be unrecognised without that opposition. It appears, in Nagel’s view, that religious belief is provoking a new kind of Enlightenment, an exposure of the pretensions and contradictions of a dominant but inadequate mode of thinking. Whether he us right or not is far less interesting to me than the novelty of the argument. It is both refreshing and revealing.

The premise of Nagel’s approach is that what we call ‘mind’ is not an incidental by-product of the emergence and development of life but the central event of existence. That is to say that not just living things but all existing things are directed by purpose. This is called teleology and involves a very different analysis of the way the universe actually is, its ‘order’, than the standard categories of cause and effect. The teleological presumption is that the universe and all its components develop not like billiard balls bouncing off each other until they fall into a pocket but like the human imagination which continuously explores, interprets and integrates itself with the cosmos.

Teleology is not a new idea. Aristotle considered it an important method of analysis. But since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, teleology has been ignored as a general explanatory idea except in theological circles. Only by a few scientist-theologians has the teleological tradition been taken at all seriously. One of these, the Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, identified the creation of what he called the noösphere, the environment of the spirit, as the purposeful objective of cosmic development. For his innovative and elegantly beautiful thought he was, of course, shunned by his fellow scientists and condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church.

Teleology on the scale of the universe is not easy to keep separate from religious belief. It nevertheless does not imply a religious orientation. This is what got Teilhard into trouble with his ecclesiastical superiors (and long before him, Spinoza and Joachim of Flores among others). On the other hand the dominant conception, ideology really, of universal cause and effect is held by many scientists with what amounts to religious fervour. Nagel does a good job of navigating between the Scylla of fundamentalist doctrine and the Charybdis of scientistic ideology. It is a fascinating journey that any intelligent mind would benefit by taking. One can only hope that Nagel has a better reception than Teilhard among such minds.

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The 7th Function of Language by Laurent Binet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

He’s Not the Messiah; He’s a Naughty Boy

Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the surrealist English television and film troupe, famous for among other things the hysterically funny Life of Brian, was the new wave of British comedy in the 1970’s. The focus of Monty Python’s humor was not so much human behaviour as it was the very meaning of meaning to human beings - its relativity, its conventionality, and its inherent absurdity.

Roland Barthes, the motivator of the action in The 7th Function of Language, was the French equivalent of Monty Python during the 1970’s. With considerably more seriousness, and considerably less screen time, Barthes nevertheless had the same function in life as Monty Python: ripping the guts out of language and its implicit pretensions to power. He loved his mother (dead), Mao Zedong (a French intellectual conceit), and young men (many). He was, still is, largely incomprehensible to those outside his intellectual cult. Very similar to the devotees of Monty Python therefore.

Many found, still find, Monty Python offensive. But because Barthes, an established name in French literature and linguistic philosophy, was the antithesis of a comedian, many found, still find, him merely vacuous. As the Belgian critic and sinologist, Simon Leys, put it, "Barthes has contrived—amazingly—to bestow an entirely new dignity upon the age-old activity, so long unjustly disparaged, of saying nothing at great length." As, of course, did Monty Python. Saying nothing, that is, can be very entertaining. The Belgians have a chip on their national shoulder about France, and an entirely different sense of humour. The important thing to keep in mind is that Barthes is no less a joke than Monty Python. Who said the French aren't more droll than the English? The issue is whether the joke is sick or not.

The death of an abstruse and somewhat annoying French academic like Roland Barthes presents no obviously compelling theme for a novel. Except, of course, that what any novel is about is meaning, and what meaning might mean in specific circumstances. Obvious really, once stated, but still a challenging literary venture. Especially when there are very few laughs at all to be had in French philosophy. But sarcasm is a form of comedy as well. And is there anything funnier than the meaning of a life which denies meaning?

Both Monty Python and Barthes use death to great advantage as the ultimate denial of meaning. Laurent Binet turns this philosophical/comedic trope on its head by using Barthes death in 1980 (struck down by a laundry van at a Parisian crosswalk) as an event, a ‘sign’ in semiotic terms, of infinite interpretability. As it is in many mystery novels, death is the motivation of a search for meaning. The apparent triviality of the circumstances of this death in comparison with the ostensible importance of the life whose end it meant is what drives the protagonist’s, Police Superintendent Bayard’s, search for its meaning... if any exists.

So, an intellectual mystery in the mode of Umberto Eco. Nothing is what it seems because it can seem to be so many, often contradictory, things. “Man is an interpreting machine and, with a little imagination, he sees signs everywhere,” says the narrator. And Bayard is warned about his quest by an academic colleague of Barthes, “Don’t forget that one interpretation never exhausts the sign, and that polysemy is a bottomless well where we can hear an infinite number of echoes: a word’s meaning never runs dry. And the same’s true even for a letter, you see.”

If you’ve ever been into Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Bernard-Henri Levy or other giants of modern French comedy - sorry, philosophy - or if you want an explanation of how Francois Mitterrand (or perhaps even Trump) became president , then this is your cuppa. Alternately, there is always Philip K Dick... with alternate pages from Agatha Christie.

Bjorn Borg as the Messiah, Wimbledon 1980
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