The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Caribbean Bates Motel

Perhaps one of the longest sustained rants in literary history. Certainly an anti-dictatorial polemic which spares the reader nothing of the disadvantages of uncontrolled power - torture, arbitrary execution, sadism, and a general lack of good taste. Even if the dictator in question does love his mother.

The United States of course is the catalytic force for the dictatorial regime and its flaws. Well sort of, since one could hardly insist that previous governments were better in any discernible sense. Marquez implies that there is an underlying problem of unwillingness to be governed which would have led to the same state regardless of foreign meddling. The country resembles the Roman Empire in its declining years - the buck stops with local war lords who keep most of it and distribute the rest as loose change.

Perhaps the real culprit is mother. She was a peasant after all, with all the banal proclivities of the peasantry, “lamenting to anyone who wanted to listen to her that it was no good being the president's mama.” She encouraged the dictator to believe in “the miracle of having conceived him without recourse to any male and of having received in a dream the hermetical keys to his messianic destiny,” Of course she chooses not to acknowledge his grotesque sexual appetites when she sees him “wallowing in the fen of prosperity.” Poor boy never had any real discipline.

The problem presented by Marquez to the reader is that without extensive knowledge of Colombian (and more general Latin America) history, Autumn of the Patriarch reads, like an old Norse saga, as a endless series of awful lives, more awful assassinations and massacres, and dissipating palace intrigues. Perhaps that is how he perceives Colombian history in a nutshell: a repetitive cycle of corrupt generals who maintain a permanent state of incipient war and pervasive squalor. Not something for the tourist brochures then.

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A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel by Gaurav Suri
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

So Many Stories; So Little Point

A Certain Ambiguity is appropriately titled; it is highly ambiguous in both form and content. It starts as a Bildungsroman of a Stanford University student from India, fades into an Historical Mystery about the student’s mathematician grandfather, lapses occasionally into a rather unromantic Romance, and ends up commenting on the conflicting duties toward self, family and humanity. A substantial portion of the book is concerned with the axiomatic method as applied in mathematics, and a comparison of this method with that of religious faith. It also provides extended tutorials on the rigours of geometry and the mathematics of infinity.

So if you are interested in why Euclid’s fifth postulate is like Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis, this may be your thing. If not, it doesn’t have the necessary literary qualities to justify either its price or the investment in reading-time. Its observations are trivial where they are not tedious. Its suggestions - particularly about the similarity of religious faith and mathematical commitment - are not only wrong, they are dangerously stupid (See here for a refutation of the contention that scientific and religious faith are analogous: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Page after page of mathematical proofs and faux correspondence by philosophers ancient and modern constitute a travesty of narrative story-telling.

At one point the protagonist has an epiphany: “Maybe it’s because mathematics is not a spectator sport. You have to do it to appreciate it.” Perhaps this insight is worthwhile. Of course it also obviates the point of the book: An axiomatic contradiction which should have prevented its publication. If you have an interest in literary mathematics, I suggest a far superior alternative: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Paterson by William Carlos Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Riverrun Black & Thick

Paramus, Passaic... indeed Paterson: to New Yorkers these are names evoking suburban decline and decay, even when Williams wrote his poem in the late 1940’s. To commemorate a place like Paterson in a work which he knew would be compared to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake - the poetic story of the River Liffey as it makes its way through Dublin to the sea - is a bold artistic move, especially since Williams had no personal connection to force his hand. It just seemed to him a place in some way typical of America. And perhaps he was right. Paterson does seem an apt microcosm of the country.

Paterson was essentially founded by Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. His intention was to launch an industrial revolution, an antidote for the agrarian romanticism of people like Thomas Jefferson. And he succeeded. The old mill towns of Northern New Jersey blossomed in the early nineteenth century because he wanted them to. As did the later foundries, factories, refineries, and ports that one can see under a more or less permanent haze of pollution from the financial towers of downtown Manhattan.

More than being the genesis of American industrialism, Paterson is also the germ of corporate America. Prior to the American Revolution incorporation was a privilege granted only by parliament, and only for endeavours which were demonstrably in the public (read Crown) interests. Existing American law had no experience with corporations, their establishment, or their control. Thanks largely to Hamilton and his Society for the Employment of Useful Manufactures in Paterson, New Jersey became the go-to place for free-wheeling corporate entrepreneurs to get their bona fides for the asking from the state legislature. The subsequent history of governmental corruption in New Jersey is not an accidental or incidental consequence.

Paterson has always been a city of immigrants. In the nineteenth century they came from Northern Europe. In the twentieth, they came from the American South, and Latin America. More lately, they have arrived in what is a de-industrialised wasteland from Southern Asia and the Middle East. The place now has the largest Muslim community in America (And among other notable demographics, the largest Peruvian community as well). Hamilton’s original plan depended on a continuous flow of immigration for its execution. No one apparently gave much thought to the day that the tap might want to be turned off. The price of ambition is rarely paid by the ambitious.

So I think Williams’s intuition was correct. The name of the place itself suggests some sort of inter-generational continuity that Joyce would likely have made much of. Without the Patersons of America, the New York Cities, centres of finance and commerce not greasy toil, would never had been created. The fact that New Yorkers, or for that matter the rest of America, could care less could be part of his motivation for writing about it (unless I have missed some subtle parody). In any case, Williams’s concern and fondness for the place can only be considered quaint in a country whose obsession seems to be to forget its past lest the past make it look foolish. This is a country where...

“The language, the language
fails them
They do not know the words
or have not
the courage to use them   .”

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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Point of Myth?

I suppose if your taste runs to JRR Tolkien and Carlos Castaneda this would be a book for you. But mine doesn’t and this isn’t. I prefer James Joyce and Carl Jung. I understand Marquez’s metaphorical recapitulation of the history of Latin America, his articulation of the repetitiveness of human folly over generations, his recognition of the dangers of human inquiry and technological progress, his appreciation of the dialectical quality of things like ambition, masculine strength, sex, and family life. But I am still left unimpressed and unaffected by the result.

For me the various Jose Arcadia Buendia’s and their homophonic relatives are like Hobbits. They operate in the world in a permanent state of awed surprise - slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. They lack the ability for introspective reflection and so bumble from one crisis to the next but never confront the inimical content of themselves with any awareness. They'd rather be at home but only when they're away from it. Consequently there is no tension of development, of discovery, but merely the flatness of yet another unnecessary familial trial that leads nowhere except to further obsession and avoidable grief. After all, at least Joyce’s Bloom and Homer’s Ulysses have moments of personal insight or revelation. In contrast, Marquez’s JAB’s seem obstinately obtuse.

Like any other parabolic myth, One Hundred Years satisfies many interpretations, even contradictory ones: the world of the inquiring intellect vs. the world of the participative human being; personal ambition vs. communal duty; power and its conceits; the sources of tribal identity, etc. But for me these possibilities don’t lead to anything more meaningful than the opportunity presented by a telephone book to ring up any number of strangers. I find nothing ‘larger’ to which such things point. The various JAB’s are fatally fascinated solely by what presents itself in front of them. I think I would prefer the story of Marquez’s gypsy seer, Melquiades, who had “an Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things.” But Marquez doesn’t say anything else about what that might be.

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Last Exit to Brooklyn 
by 

Hubert Selby Jr., 

 

Gilbert Sorrentino (Editor)

 

A Society of Laws

The pomposity of the literary establishment in the 1960’s was as bad as it ever has been. I can recall my encounter, as a twenty year old, with Last Exit. But before I bought it, I got a copy of the New York Times review. ‘Another Grove Press porno piece,’ or something roughly equivalent is what I remember. So I ignored the book for the next 50 years. A big mistake, only to be excused by lack of experience. As Sam Goldwyn put it: “Don’t pay any attention to the critics; don’t even ignore them.”

The fact that the book rates on the filth scale at about the same level as a middling episode of Law & Order SVU, proves just how obsessed with limiting literary experience those who controlled the book trade really were. Narcissistic street boys, casual prostitutes, transsexuals with authentic feelings and thugs were people who couldn’t be taken seriously as people. Nor did their views about what constitutes human relationships, especially the language in which those relationships are described, have any place in literary fiction.

What amazes (and frightens) me is how much nothing has changed in the last half century except for a more general awareness of the under-culture of casual violence and criminality as a way of life. There is of course nothing new in its existence except its increasing publicity. So the world looks like its gone to hell in a hand basket. And the improved visibility of this world is used to justify everything from racism to evangelical revival; from the war on drugs to the war on immigrants. But it is bunk. Selby knew that a substantial portion, often the largest portion, of the ‘civilized world’ lives in uncivilized conditions. And so has it always been, even if the rather more civilized portion ignores it.

Membership in the under-culture is not a choice; it’s an adaptation to reality. The most significant component of that reality is law. It is the law that creates the under-culture of addicts, street sex workers, and petty thieves who mature into not so petty thieves. St. Paul, he whose mission was overthrowing the law, had it right when he quotes the law to his own advantage, “for sittest thou to judge me after the law, and commandest me to be smitten contrary to the law?” But Paul had one law on his side - Roman citizenship. There is no such loophole for those of the under-culture. The law applied to and in the under-culture is essentially arbitrary oppression by the strong of the less strong. In that situation, survival means knowing your place, sticking to your assigned role, and accepting your lack of relative strength.

The under-culture is a culture of victims who accept their status and act in implicit protest with as much malice as they can get away with. Hopelessness not love is the most powerful emotional force. Love presumes hope; it doesn’t create it. So the law of the under-culture is not the law of the jungle. In the jungle, there are adaptations of speed, size, coloring, and intelligence that give hope and consequently the opportunity for instinctive love. In the under-culture, hope is a lethal trait, a delusion that literally kills. 

Despite its grisly content, therefore, Last Exit is a book created out of empathy. Selby knew his characters, and he recognized their dilemma: adapt or die. Since the under-culture doesn’t change much from generation to generation, what he has to say is as important now as it was then. There are many, apparently an increasing number, who share much with Georgette, Shelby’s transvestite sacrificial figure, whose “life didnt revolve, but spun centrifugally, around stimulants, opiates, johns...”

Postscript: A comment by another GR reader provoked a realization by me that Selby had described a process of criminalization of minority groups that is more or less traditional in America. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

 

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s As If Reality Didn’t Exist

Here’s the problem: the more one studies quantum theory, the less one understands about it. Richard Feynman said that and no one has had the temerity to argue the point since. So Rovelli has written a short book whose purpose is not to elucidate the incomprehensible but to demonstrate that incomprehensibility in a comprehensible way. Why did he write it? I suspect that the answer is connected with the remark made by his colleague cited at the very beginning of the book: “It’s as if reality didn’t exist.”

Quantum theory is a peculiar sort of triumph for human intelligence. It is a humiliation for anyone who claims to know what reality means. If reality is constituted by the facts of quantum research - superposition, instantaneous action at a distance, the effects of observation, etc. - then all other facts are compromised. As Rovelli is keen to point out: after a century of scientific effort, quantum theory has never been proven wrong. In which case its results are more than confusing. These results contradict our experiential intuition, our logic, and the fundamental concept of truth.

So the old joke, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?,” takes on a tragic new meaning. Not only do our eyes lie. Everything everyone has reported about the world - except about quantum physics - has been false. Not just useful approximations, but false. This is not a matter of, for example, continuing to use the term sunrise when we all know this an ancient belief turned metaphor. It means nothing is continuous despite appearances. It means there are no things, only relations with no fixed components, only a scientific language with no clear referents outside itself, and a range of contrary interpretations about how to connect that scientific language with the words we use with each other.

This is intellectually humiliating no matter how spectacular the practical consequences of quantum research. Such research allows us to do things we simply don’t understand from the production of nuclear weapons to plant breeding. But whatever it is that lies behind the veil of the quantum equations, if anything, is as inaccessible now as it was when Plato wrote about his cave or Leibniz his monads. Could it be that this is the essential meaning of quantum physics, namely that the enterprise we call ‘thought’ is not what we presumed? Perhaps thought has nothing to do with appreciating reality, approaching truth, or understanding how things work.

Perhaps instead, thought is ‘merely’ the term we use for human cooperative effort full stop. Rovelli implies this in his highlighting of the group-think manner through which quantum physics emerged. Not just that of the 20th century scientists commonly associated with the science, but also their, often obscure, predecessors whose work they exploited. In other words, it is not the practical results which are important but the massive collaboration required to produce the ideas that have become common currency. And the fact that these ideas have turned the tables on their creators by going rogue, as it were, are a provocation by thought to yet more cooperative thought.

It’s a thought.

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Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Macavity’s Not There

In T.S. Eliot’s poem, Macavity: The Mystery Cat, the protagonist is an accomplished feline criminal who causes havoc and confusion but is always is out of sight when the sheriff arrives: “... when a crime’s discovered, Macavity’s not there.” In Durrenmatt’s play, Macavity is there, in a Swiss asylum, but he disappears into a psychotic mind, or rather three such minds, of the men identified as Newton, Einstein, and Möbius. Three nurses have been strangled - by those who apparently love them - with only the delusional husks of the perpetrators left behind. Like Macavity, these are “outwardly respectable” but really quite dangerous.

While all are mad, each is mad in a different way. Newton only pretends to be Newton; he is really, he believes, Einstein. The pretence is a courtesy to the one who believes he’s Einstein. Or perhaps the pretence is a pretence and he really believes he is Newton, or someone else. Möbius has visions and conversations with King Solomon. Einstein is a homicidal maniac. But Fraulein Doktor is in charge of everything, including identity: “It is I who decide who my patients think they are.”

A bit like Chesterton’s A Man Called Thursday, things are not what they seem. As an intimate and devotee of Carl Jung, Fraulein Doktor, is part of a symbolic subterfuge. The name of the place, Les Cerisiers, points to Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard as an inspiration. High intrigue, depth psychology, and murder mystery, all in the space of a theatrical hour. A piece hard to better for complex simplicity. To echo Eliot, “There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.”

Postscript: The Physicists addresses a similar ethical theme to Julien Benda’s classic, The Treason of the Intellectuals but with a rather different twist. It also might be considered a sort of riposte to Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game regarding the desirability of a ‘disengaged’ intelligentsia.

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The Origin of the Brunists by Robert Coover
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Left Behind

It was Grace that taught my heart to fear
And Grace my fear relieved-

The town of West Condon, “a mote on the fat belly of the American prairie,” like grace, is inescapable. It, like God, “is utterly remote from anything human.” The place traps its inhabitants, mainly underground, with no hope except in either religion or beer. Located in the approximate centre of the continent, the place is America in microcosm: a country of continuous competitive tension with one’s neighbors, one’s colleagues, often one’s family members, to survive - psychologically as well as physically. In youth, there is high school basketball and its compulsory competitive rituals which create common tribal lore and a minimal shared history. In adulthood, there is only the mine, a dark purgatorial realm in which status and power have nothing to do with the lessons of youth. The competition there is deadly real and unrelenting in ways never prepared for above ground. The men who go down the pits, and their families, live two parallel lives, one superficially conventional, the other hidden and mostly hideous.

The competition and alienation between the worlds defined by religion/beer and above/below are maintained until communal disaster - an explosion in Deepwater Number 9 - overcomes the American ideology of social independence, male machismo, and individual responsibility. Then the world becomes both sentimentally emotional and apocalyptically spiritual at a stroke. Mass death causes a halt in normal relationships. Acute feelings of vulnerability become common currency. The bars and the churches are the primary beneficiaries, where the currency gets spent. Grief and existential angst are mitigated in one; portents of the Second Coming are joyously anticipated in the other. Christian fundamentalists, psychics, numerologists, Tarot readers, spiritualists, gnostic pessimists and mystical optimists (but not Islamists, being unknown at that time in that place) unite against the demonic forces of ignorant indifference. Disaster, paradoxically, revives the American Dream of universal (or at least white), unlimited (or at least relative) salvation.

These are people “with sweeping world views that made cosmic events out of a casual gesture or a cloud’s idle passage.” Their response to collective tragedy is part of the legacy of pioneers in the American wilderness. The mine itself is a concrete reminder of the long-lost wilderness in its attractiveness to immigrants whose sons and daughters populate the place. Even more, the mine remains as wild, as volatile, and as unpredictable as the weather. The impending violence of the coal face is the frontier extended underground. It has an overwhelming power beyond their control that rules their lives. The mine is an avatar of the Old Testament Yahweh - arbitrary, decisive, and subject to no appeal. It is only right therefore that these people worry since “worry is the universal dread tempered by hope.”

But the commonality of worry does not imply a sharing of worry. Each West Condoner is on his own. The Italians, the Germans, the Slovaks, the Spanish, the Catholics, the Baptists consider each other inimical. Every group has its own racism, cults and loyalties; these are necessary for psychic as well as physical survival. Without them there is no protection from the Other. But when “God’s fist had closed on the mine-hive and shook it.” there is at least a show of community, of pulling together, a suspension of the tribal mistrust which lies just below the surface of American civility. The eponymous Bruno, raised from the dead after three days in the nether world and presiding over the establishment of his church a Pentecostal seven weeks later, is neither spiritual nor a competent mine worker. But he is close enough to being Christ (or, this is America after all, an alien from some other dimension) to serve as a symbol of solidarity... and of course as scapegoat.

The intersection of the saints and sinners in West Condon is Miller, the owner of the failing town’s failing newspaper. All he sees in Bruno is “a browbeaten child turned ego-centered adult psychopath.” Miller had escaped - to university, to the city, to a society of change - but was lured back by a big fish in small pond ‘opportunity.’ He has to remain civil with everyone to do his job, but his dual nationality, as it were, means that no one trusts him entirely. As the maker and breaker of self-images, as well as reputations, he has power. Miller is a game-player. He knows that all news is fake news to somebody - the mine owners, the wire service reporters, the local religious enthusiasts, the drunks and petty politicians. Reality is whatever spin he decides to create. All fear this power; but all feed it, hoping to share in it.

This makes Miller as trapped as anyone else. He belongs. People listen to his views. His identity has become what has been given to him by his fellow-citizens. And, because of his job and experience, he is the link to the rest of the world, a short of Charon who patrols the River Styx, attracting the attention of the world at large to this insular and debilitating place, and carrying it external views of itself. He becomes a political figure when he inadvertently creates a coalition of the saved and the damned and represents it to the world. The power of fake news.

I am surprised that I have found no one in literary circles who has twigged to the parallels with the rise of Donald Trump. If my guess is correct, the cultural conditions that Coover intuited in the 1960’s are precisely those that led 60 years later to the rise of the Deplorables - the largely uneducated ex-urban population, serving in fast-food peonage, inheritors of bad genes and worse teeth, hooked on booze or oxycodone, and one paycheck from utter penury - as a political force in the land. Coover saw the potential connection between the Evangelicals and this dis-enfranchised under-class: The New Heartland with deep roots in the settlement of the continent. The narrative doesn’t write itself, but when it does get written it is responded to enthusiastically.

The connection among the disparate inhabitants of this heartland is, of course, the extreme tendency to believe one’s own press as the only one that isn’t fake: “their canonical faith in their own private ways to truth.” In other political systems religious enthusiasts form minority parties, allowing participation in coalition governments. This is infeasible in America. Elsewhere in the world, the working poor might join communist or socialist parties. In America this is not an option. But the discovery of their commonality, essentially their insistence on the partiality and corruption of ‘the system,’ gives them, the immoderately pious and those left behind in the progress of capitalism, formidable political power. Each faction in this coalition recognises the irrationality of its alliance with the others. But as so many have pointed out during the era of Trumpism, ‘they don’t care.’ Messianism has never been a rational undertaking; and neither has popular insurrection.

It seems to me that Coover has continued the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and John dos Passos, among others, who understood the dynamics of discontent and resentment inherent in American society. The myth of an unlimited future - economic, political, sociological - inhibited taking this discontent and resentment seriously. Essentially that myth has now been debunked. The future looks as grim as the present. Call it the End Times or Revolution, religious ideology combined with economic desperation packs a punch. And the punch destroys much of current society. But ‘They don’t care.’ They have grace. God is with them. They are “victims of transcendence.”

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The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity 
by 

Slavoj Žižek

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jun 16, 2018  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: philosophy-theology, balkan 

Creative Betrayal

If confirmation of the merits of good philosophical thought were needed, this book is more than adequate to make the point conclusively. I find much of Zizek’s work somewhat tedious; but his arguments in The Puppet and the Dwarf are the equivalent of rapid-fire body blows to inane conservative pundits like Jordan Peterson (he of 12 Rules of Life fame. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and equally inane social theorists like Thomas Sowell (Intellectuals and Society.See:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) who make a living by peddling non-thought to non-thinkers, ideology for idiots.

Zizek calls his method ‘short-circuiting’, that is, bringing areas of thought which are usually insulated from one another into contact and watching the sparks fly. His stated intention is not to rubbish anyone’s point of view but to reveal a more inclusive picture of the world in which various points of view create something new, something bigger not just in the sense of explanation, but also in the sense of promoting human understanding and solidarity. He makes this operational by allowing people to become “aware of another - disturbing - side of something he or she knew all the time.” This is not tendentious indoctrination. I think it is as close as one can get to supervised self-education.

So for example Zizek self-identifies as an atheistic materialist. But he also has a profoundly poetic appreciation of religion, particularly Christianity, that rivals most theologians. By allowing these two currents of thought to touch, he transforms both. His central thesis captures the result: “My claim here is not merely that I am a materialist through and through, and that the subversive kernel of Christianity is accessible also to a materialist approach; my thesis is much stronger: this kernel is accessible only to a materialist approach—and vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience.” 

His intention is not to relativise Christianity but to make it real. For Zizek ‘going through’ the Christian experience doesn’t imply abandoning it as obsolete, but appreciating it for what it is. How else is one to understand his explanation of Christian love, for example, as an exception to any universal ethic, even the ethic of Christian love: “The underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal—it should retain the status of a byproduct, of something we get as an undeserved grace.” Love, or for that matter salvation, is not a reward; it is a consequence of things like respect, and care, and dedication. And not necessarily a consequence elicited from the direct object of our respect, care and dedication. Karl Barth, arguably the most important theologian of the 20th century, would agree wholeheartedly. 

So Zizek can cite G.K. Chesterton approvingly at length and conclude that “true love is precisely... forsaking the promise of Eternity itself for an imperfect individual.” The object of love cannot be an abstraction, even a divine abstraction; it must be a concrete person and it must include flaws, deficiencies, and irritations. Perfection cannot be loved. The God of Chesterton knew this. It is why even Christ loses his faith hanging on the cross. And as Carl Jung noticed in his book on Job, Yahweh had to have an audience, an imperfect human audience, to complete himself. Many theologians, as well as evangelical Christians could benefit immensely by contemplating this insight.

Having recently read Reza Aslan’s Zealot(https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), I am struck by its coincidence with Zizek’s identification of the central message of Christianity which he captures succinctly in his subtitle: “... the hidden perverse core of Christianity: if it is prohibited to eat from the Tree of Knowledge in Paradise, why did God put it there in the first place? Is it not that this was a part of His perverse strategy first to seduce Adam and Eve into the Fall, in order then to save them? That is to say: should one not apply Paul’s insight into how the prohibitive law creates sin to this very first prohibition also? ... Is Judas not therefore the ultimate hero of the New Testament, the one who was ready to lose his soul and accept eternal damnation so that the divine plan could be accomplished?... In all other religions, God demands that His followers remain faithful to Him - only Christ asked his followers to betray him in order to fulfill his mission.”

Zizek and Aslan agree. This paradoxical undermining of itself, an almost Stalinist compulsion to destroy conventional culture, the things, that is, which we believe but don’t take seriously, is the permanent messianism of Christianity. It makes Christianity dangerous. It created modernity by separating religion from politics. Perhaps it is also implicitly creating post-modernity by revealing the untenable consequences of that separation. 

The critic Harold Bloom has made his reputation on the idea of creative misinterpretation as not just the motive for literary but also for political development. Isn’t this how Christianity (and Judaism and Islam for that matter) was created? As Zizek claims “Paul also ‘betrayed’ Christ by not caring about his idiosyncrasies, by ruthlessly reducing him to the fundamentals, with no patience for his wisdom, miracles, and similar paraphernalia.” I think Zizek is following the same tradition of creative misinterpretation. If he’s not right, at least he’s interesting.

A Bad Man by Stanley Elkin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Vendibility

In that mysterious place between the conscious and unconscious, that murky reality after sleep but before waking, that long lonely road... well, from the Lower East Side of Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge to Williamsburg, there writes Stanley Elkin. A Bad Man is Elkin at his most outrageous and surreal best. A comedy of crime and punishment in which the latter literally fits the former like a suit of ill-made clothes.

Elkin’s prison is a “guilt factory” in which those who are resistant to the significance of their various immoralities are educated by a complex, perhaps incomprehensible, system of procedures and traditions to recover their lost humanity, including ill-fitting parodies of their civilian attire. Both the reader and the book’s characters are in the dark about why. “The oldest lifers are still learning. Not even the warden knows everything about it.” This is a slapstick version of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. Or, equally possible, a parody of Freudian psychotherapy. A master class, perhaps, in how to be goy; or how to be Jew, or that particular Jew, Jesus, who of course annoyed a great many people by performing a great many unauthorised and illegal favours for his friends.

Leo is the bad man in question. The son of a schiksa and an itinerant Jewish seller of schlock who spent his life trying to be the only Jew in town, Leo must learn that he is bad. “In this prison, in this small cell no bigger than the rooms where he had slept out his childhood, guilt came as hard as righteousness.” But so did identity. After all “As far as he knew he had never seen a Jew except for his father.” Is the guilt he is meant to have about being a criminal, or about being Jewish; or for that matter about not being Jewish enough? Life is complicated.

Leo’s climb out of the gutter had not not been without adverse consequences. Despite legitimate commercial success, he does a Bernie Madoff and scams, defrauds and cheats everyone he knows. Or perhaps, like Bernie, he was merely meeting customer expectations. Or were the rules rigged to begin with? In any case, rehabilitation beckons. Will Leo be able to welcome guilt into his heart? Will he earn an indistinctive prison uniform? Will he become just one of the gang of reforming inmates? Or will he set up a new Ponzi scheme inside the walls?

According to the warden, “Crime is a detail-evasion technique.” But Leo is certainly a detail man. He doesn’t avoid it, he cherishes it. So it’s an even bet on which way the prison will go. Especially since the warden lets him in on a trade secret: “civilization is forms.” Leo can only try to follow his father’s laconic advice: “Everything is vendible. It must be. That’s religion. Your father is a deeply religious man. He believes in vendibility.” So why not rules and regulations... and forms? As vendible as anything else one supposes.

A Bad Man provokes me to wonder what’s happening with Bernie Madoff in his North Carolina federal prison. Bernie’s 150 year sentence gives him plenty of room to set up some pretty snazzy deals. If I were warden there, I’d keep an eye on his prison-library withdrawals. Anything by Elkin should mean immediate solitary.

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Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession 
by 

Apostolos Doxiadis, 

 

Απόστολος Δοξιάδης

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jun 11, 2018  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: greek, philosophy-theology, science, mathematics 

Trust the Young

Number theory has nothing to do with the real world, unless you happen to be a number theorist. Then it is the real world; everything else is illusory. Number theory has no application to anything except... well, numbers. It eschews other branches of mathematics as pedestrian. Physics, engineering, and even geometry, although they use numbers, are simply diversions for the less talented, that is to say inferior, intellect. Mere calculation is trivial even if it is arduous and complex. Number theory’s only concern is with the relationship of numbers to each other. It seeks the hidden, often mysterious, connections that exist, and have always existed, among these most abstract of all ideas. Since numbers are eternal, infinite, and everywhere, they are easily taken for divine (For more on the significance and literary import of number theory, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

And who knows? Numbers may well be divine. Among other reasons because the fundamental logic of numbers is as elusive as the theology of God. Apparently, just like any other believers, mathematicians make an act of faith every time they form an hypothesis, attempt a proof, or demonstrate a theorem. The reason that faith is necessary is that when the foundations of mathematics are probed far enough, they are shown to be, not built on sand, but entirely absent. All of mathematics, including number theory, floats above an intellectual void known as Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Kurt Godel showed in the 1930’s that no logical system, of which basic arithmetic is one, can contain the axioms necessary to ensure its own reliability. The consequences of Godel’s discovery are even more profound for mathematics than the discovery of Quantum Uncertainty is for physics.

So Incompleteness raises some important issues which Doxiadis uses as the substrate of his story. If mathematics is suspect, what hope is there for any other science? Or for human thought in general? The Incompleteness Theorem seems to suggest that everything is relative, that intellectual discipline is a fraud, that science is some kind of con game which we pretend to take seriously. And yet, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and the check-out assistants in the supermarket continue to work away with numbers as if nothing were amiss. Is their apparent faith different from that of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Mormons who also create doctrines, liturgies, and ethics over an abyss empty of ultimate reason and without sufficient reasons they can articulate?

Uncle Petros introduces these issues implicitly in his concern with the so-called Goldbach Conjecture, an hypothesis first formulated by an 18th century mathematician: “Every number greater than 2 can be written as a sum of two primes.” When he started his career, Uncle Petros was unaware of the Conjecture’s relation to the Incompleteness Theorem since the latter had yet to be formulated. But he had a certain faith, not just in his own mathematical ability but, more importantly, in the power of mathematics to ultimately prove or disprove what was Goldbach’s intuitive guess. One could accurately call this ‘blind’ faith but not as a reproach and not in the manner of religious faith, which when it is blind is often dangerous.

The first difference between religious and mathematical faith, of course, is that mathematical hypotheses such as that of Goldbach are based on empirical observation; mathematics is very much an empirical discipline. Every specific number greater than two which has been analysed can be shown to be the sum of two primes. But such empirical proof is inadequate for mathematics no matter how often it is observed. There could be some number among the infinity of numbers for which this general rule doesn’t apply. Hence the importance of the Conjecture if it can be proven abstractly as an invariable condition for any number at all and not just specific numbers.

This is where the mathematician’s second difference with religious believers comes into play. Mathematical logic works backwards from an hypothesis to discover the logic by which the hypothesis can be derived from communally accepted axioms. This logic can be both positive - if X, then Y etc. - or it can be negative - if not X, then Y or not Y etc. This latter form is that of a logical reductio ad absurdam, a contradiction which both affirms and denies a conclusion. Almost everything about religious faith is subject to a reductio ad absurdam. For example the proposition to reject the religious claim that ‘God created everything’ is compatible with both the axioms ‘the world is inherently good’ and ‘there is tremendous evil in the world.’ Creation is both good and not good with or without a divine origin. Mathematicians would view such a theological conclusion therefore as meaningless.*

The final difference in matters of faith concerns the fundamental axioms and their status in mathematics and religion. The difference here is somewhat surprising. Theology relies on fixed axioms from which it the derives its conclusions. These axioms are given the status of revealed truth and are the dogmatic focus of religious faith. Mathematicians since Godel on the other hand know that the fundamental axioms of their science are somewhat arbitrary. Euclid’s axioms of three dimensional space, for example, can be replaced by the n-dimensional space of Riemannian geometry with no loss of logical rigor. Euclid is not proven wrong but merely shown to be a special case of the more general conditions of Riemann. 

This is an illustration as well of a crucial difference in method. Mathematics seeks to continuously extend the generality of its conclusions by discovering more and more inclusive axioms from which to work. Religious faith seeks to fix the axioms in order to preserve, limit and restrict doctrinal conclusions. Put another way: mathematics looks into the abyss of the Incompleteness Theorem and considers it an horizon to be striven toward painfully, incrementally, and with ho chance of complete success. This takes intellectual and, dare one say it, moral courage. The theologian looks into a similar abyss and considers that the horizon has arrived at his location. There is nothing to explore, nothing to find beyond the axioms which have been set by tradition. This sort of faith isn’t one of courage but stubbornness. It ramifies ‘conclusive’ conclusions because it takes its axioms for granted.

So the faith of the mathematician is not the faith of the religious believer. The faith required to attack the apparent intractability if the Goldbach Conjecture has nothing to do with the faith that proclaims One God or a religious ethic of forgiveness, or retribution, or community. The mathematician must have perseverance; the theologian merely persistence. The mathematician is concerned about expanding the world we know, the theologian with limiting what we know of the world. One requires genuine creative faith; the other futile insistence. Doxiadis quotes the 19th century mathematician, David Hilbert: “We must know, we shall know! In mathematics there is no ignorabimus!" Compare that with the commitment of religious faith by the first Christian theologian, Paul of Tarsus: “But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”**

Both mathematicians and theologians tend to be obsessives. Both types are probably born not made. But mathematicians reach their intellectual peak in their relative youth. The best theologians are usually old men. I suspect the reason for this has to do with the paradoxical character of experiential wisdom. Young mathematicians have an intuitive grasp of reality unsullied by too much knowledge of what others call the world; while old theologians have been pickled in cultural history and traditions of thought that distort much of reality. 

Uncle Petros himself tends to slide into quasi-theological reverie about mathematics in his dotage after suffering the slings and arrows of family as a failed mathematical prodigy, and especially after the publication of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. In a sense he has lost his faith in mathematics and replaced it with an entirely different kind of faithful resignation to cultural inevitability. This is why Petros loves chess: as in theology, its axioms are fixed, its rules invariably traditional.

It takes his nephew to help Uncle Petros understand that Godel freed mathematics from theological pretensions. There is no firm foundation for mathematics. Even David Hilbert thought there was but he was wrong; and so was Uncle Petros if he thought that firm intellectual foundations were necessary for his continuing commitment to mathematics. As Doxiadis has Alan Turing say, “Truth is not not always provable.” But this doesn’t invalidate mathematics or its method. Unlike theology, the commitment to mathematics is to an entirely unknown, and unnamed, future state of knowing. The content of that state is not, and cannot be, specified much less proven. Doxiadis compares it to being in love. 

This is an important message from a young mathematician to an old one about a very different sort of tradition and a very different sort of faith, one that does away with “attainable goals.” And it is a message that makes Doxiadis’s little book a lot bigger than its size.

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*Neil Gaiman, in his American Gods captures the character of the reductio in theology rather well: “I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.”

** For those who have forgotten their school Latin ‘ignorabimus’ is future tense: “we will be ignorant.” St. Paul, significantly, is concerned solely about the present but only in terms of the past in his exhortation.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Overly-Woke to Family Values

Jeanette Walls should not be alive. Her actuarial chance of surviving was close to zero in her Keystone Cops version of childhood. With two dipsy parents, one a violent drunk, the other a spaced-out avatar of Vishnu, she had experiences which the SAS would have had difficulty enduring. Severe scalding, scorpion bites, being thrown from a moving car, locked in the back of a truck for fourteen hours, incipient starvation, drowning, and mauling by a cheetah, not to mention numerous punctures, falls, fights, and a questionable diet - these were routine events before she turned eight years old. Medical care was for sissies according to dad. And according to mother “Fussing over children who cry only encourages them.”

Both mom and dad were fantasists, and therefore good story-tellers. Their poverty, instability, inability to create social relationships, they claimed, were a blessing. The children could grow up hardened to the world’s oppression. And boy was there a lot of that. Dad was paranoid about the FBI, the CIA, and all the other members of the police-gestapo who were out to get him. But, hey, the constant need to be ready to ‘skedaddle’ from any temporary home in some God-forsaken mining shanty town was an opportunity to see the country wasn’t it? An education in itself really. And dad’s get-rich-quick ideas for gold-mining were sure to pay off just as soon as he could get the necessary capital together at the Las Vegas craps tables.

Walls inherited her father’s story-telling gene. She writes with wit and humour about a deplorable life with incompetent and psychotic parents. I find this distressing. The issue is not one of an acceptably eccentric alternative life style, or of an odd upbringing being overcome, or of children loving their parents in tough circumstances. It’s patently about unnecessary and avoidable abuse. Walls’s wit and humour romanticize her life. The poignancy of her portrayal of the caring dad after he almost killed her yet again, with no apparent irony much less sarcasm, is typical: "’You don't have to worry anymore, baby,’ Dad said. ‘You're safe now.’” This makes her book popular. And it may provide a way for her to deal with the effects of her childhood. It will certainly make a good film. But the fact is that on her testimony her parents are criminally irresponsible people who are lucky they weren’t caught and prosecuted. If it were an episode of SVU, Benson would have nailed them.

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The Inland Sea 
by 

Donald Richie, 

 

Pico Iyer (Introduction)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jun 07, 2018  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: japanese, biography-biographical 

Creative Obituary for a Lost Culture

As an expatriate, I understand Richie’s feelings toward Japan. Paradoxically only a foreigner can appreciate what the native takes for granted. And those who are culturally changing aren’t in the position of a non-native to articulate or appreciate the changes they’re experiencing. Richie’s admiration for Japan is tempered by his recognition that the post-war ‘economic miracle’ of Japan already had had serious cultural consequences when he wrote in 1971. Almost an half century later, after the financial collapse of the Japanese economy in the 1990’s, it has become clear that if anything he underestimated the social consequences of rapid growth, urban migration, and the loss of traditional family and civic relationships.

But The Inland Sea is only nominally about Japan and its changing culture. It’s more enduring commentary is really about the author himself. Richie is an interesting and attractive character, whose responses to the people and places he encounters in Japan are wonderfully detailed biographical revelations. He is droll, charming, sensitive, discerning, exceptionally articulate, impatient with aesthetic flaw, tolerant of the dirt and muck of human toil, wonderfully opinionated, urbane but with a dislike of modern urbanity, and acutely self-aware. It is no stretch at all to interpret The Inland Sea as referring at least as much to Richie’s own internal psychic inventory as it is to that finger of the Pacific Ocean, its islands, and its people. Both, I find, are equally fascinating.

Richie’s prose reminds me of that of Patrick Leigh Fermor, in whom I find the same engaging ambiguity of objective place and subjective person. When Richie says, for example “Words make you visible in Japan. Until you speak, until you commit yourself to communication, you are not visible at all,” he simultaneously refers to himself and the country. He makes no secret of the congruity he finds between himself and Japan as the reason for his affection for the country: “Japan, then—to answer this perennial question—allows me to like myself because it agrees with me and I with it.” Of course he is projecting himself into the culture and interpreting what he finds there creatively. But why not? What better way is there to be able to understand, or to communicate, oneself than to project oneself onto the big screen of such a refined civilisation in order to investigate the result? And, of course, to mourn and to repent of one’s own mistakes.

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Strangely Wrong

I must suggest something blasphemously arrogant: Douglas Hofstadter has it wrong. My only justification for saying such an outrageous thing is that it doesn’t matter. Folk will go on taking Hofstadter seriously in any case. Nevertheless I have a valid objection which needs to be recorded. Enough, then, of self-referentiality.

Hofstadter’s teenage intuition got him started on the idea that there are degrees of souledness in the material world. Atoms (and presumably their constituent parts) have no souls; bacteria have very primitive, that is to say, very small souls; dogs have somewhat bigger souls; and human beings have much larger souls but even among those there is enormous variation and no logical upper limit to size. This of course is not an entirely novel intuition. It was shared by Ancient Greek philosophers, pre-industrial tribal groups, perhaps some Shinto sects, and St. Thomas Aquinas among others.

This idea of souledness is of course essentially a moral one. Hofstadter’s explicit intention is to provide a criterion by which he and his fellow human beings can decide how to act - in general the more soul, the more respect should be afforded to its bearer. Incidentally he is also developing a theory of consciousness, which is a correlate of soul.

But this is simply wrong. Hofstadter, from the very beginning of his exceptionally discursive argument, presumes that what he is doing is constructing a metric of souledness through which he can estimate the size of soul or degree of consciousness possessed by an entity.

This is, of course what scientists, and engineers, and husbands who are putting up curtains usually think they are doing when they measure something, namely determining what length, breadth, volume, color, texture, or other magnitude constitutes some entity of interest. The metric employed depends on the interest one has of course.

It is this interest one has, however, and not the molecule, or bridge, or curtain material, which ‘contains’ the result of any measurement. The choice of which metric to employ determines not how much of something is contained in an object but where that object sits in relation to other objects on the metric. The object is a property of the metric; the metric is definitely not a property of the object.

This distinction is crucial in light of Hofstadter’s fundamental motivation to provide a criteria for correct behaviour. The choice of metric is THE moral choice. The thing measured has no moral content at all - not people, not events, not inanimate objects. They are considered as moral (or tall, or wide, or disgusting) when we put them on the scale we have chosen.

The consequence is that Hofstader’s Strange Loop, the ‘I’ of consciousness, is not some objective entity, a logical ego which can be studied scientifically for its salient characteristics. This Strange Loop is literally a moral construction, a consequence of the very metric of souledness that Hofstader chooses. We, not just human beings but all that exists, have no soul whatsoever until someone like Hofstader, or Plato, or Thomas Aquinas comes along and sets up a criterion for assessing it. Then, hey voila, it’s there.

But it’s really not there as well. The mirage that Hofstadter writes about is that the things we measure have the characteristics that we measure. An innocuous self-delusion, except when it’s not. The metric he started with is the Strange Loop, hiding in plain sight, a ninja ego smirking behind his index finger with a Cheshire Cat grin. It was created when Hofstadter said it and someone else heard it. The Strange Loop is not ‘I’, it is ‘We’.

And so the Strange Loop exists in that very strange state we call language, being nowhere specific but lurking invisibly everywhere. This gives the Strange Loop the character of quantum uncertainty: it can be experienced and reflected upon, but never at the same time. Just like the metric of souledness, one of its many masks.

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Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Contextual Jesus

The textual religions of The Book - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - have a common problem. No matter how hard they try, they can’t stop their adherents from interpreting their foundational texts, often in diverse and incompatible ways. Among the interpretations are those which claim to be ‘fundamental’, that is not just logically essential to a coherent theology, but also historically the most primitive and therefore the most original and, presumably, the most authentic.

In the case of Christianity, the problem of interpretation spawned what has become known as the ‘search for the historical Jesus’. The idea behind this effort was that the ‘real’ Jesus was a figure whose ambiguities and ephemerality - and the resulting plethora of interpretations - could be resolved by some good old scientific research and rigorous reasoning. Turns out though that the historical Jesus is just as elusive as the theological Jesus. The effort was a failure.

Aslan takes a very different approach to the interpretive problem. He has little interest in the history of the individual called Jesus or in his theological attributes. What matters to Aslan is context: the politics, sociology, governmental administration and culture of the times before, during and after Jesus’s short life. Piecing together what we know about this context with the very limited historical knowledge of Jesus and the first theological interpretations of his life, Aslan creates a very readable, entertaining, and exceptionally coherent story about the man and his mission.

Believers, of course, don’t respond well to Aslan’s method. Their issue isn’t likely to be with Aslan’s exegesis, which is professional and generally inoffensive, but rather with the ease with which Aslan can explain so much of the theology and history of Jesus by reference to events, conditions, and motives that are entirely independent of him, his followers, and his opponents. That the story Aslan tells incorporates biblical contradictions, non-sequiturs, and sheer impossibilities into a coherent narrative better than most, is a threat to which believers may feel some considerable irritation.

The sharpest thorn under the dogmatic saddle is likely to be the picture Aslan creates of contemporary religious zealousness - or as we have come to call it, terrorism. The Roman territories of the Middle East - Syria, Judea, Galilee, Samaria - according to Aslan, are little different today than they were at the start of the Christian Era. A series of heavy-handed governmental regimes, self-serving religious establishments and radical religious sects are the main components of civil strife and violence - then and now. Only then it was the Jews not the Arabs who were passing the mantle of armed resistance from generation to generation.

Messianism was the theme of Judaic terror for decades, even centuries, from the Maccabees, seven or eight generations before Jesus, to Simon bar Kokbha, an equal interval after Jesus. Messianic terror became a family tradition. Messiahs, the saving leaders who claimed to be appointed by God, were thick on the ground. This was “... an era awash with messianic energy,” most of which was used to drive unofficial wars against anyone who held official power. The Romans called those infused with this energy ‘lestai’, bandits. And these bandits often “claimed to be agents of God’s retribution.” Osama bin Laden in the 20th century CE fits the profile of Judas the Zealot in the 1st century CE precisely.

Aslan doesn’t claim that Jesus was such a bandit. But the claims made about him by his followers constituted sedition to which the Romans were acutely sensitive. Messiahship is inherently revolutionary; it implies both a sectarian division (sheep and goats) and regime change (the kingdom of God). The complete destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, was a definitive response by the Romans to the seditious tendency in contemporary messianism. Jesus’s death was a minor historical prologue to this later attempt to rid the world entirely of the Jewish messianic menace, the first systematic Holocaust in Jewish history and a model for future Anti-Semites. The population was annihilated, expatriated, and dispersed into Greco-Roman culture. Judaism was demoted from most favored religion status to that of dangerous threat to empire.

This situation presented a problem for early followers of the Jew, Jesus. On the one hand their religious legitimacy depended on their Judaic legacy; on the other, this legacy had become anathema. Not unlike the situation of many Muslims today, one supposes, in Europe and North America. The texts of the Jewish scriptures themselves were enough to prove the violently destructive and irrational intent of this strange and ungrateful tribe. Its God is unpredictable, irascible, homicidal, and apparently insane.

It makes sense, therefore, that Paul, the international proselytizer for the new Jewish sect, should avoid almost all mention of Jesus’s Jewish life, including what he said and what he did. For Paul, Jesus lived, ate a dinner, died because he offended other Jews (not the Romans), and could be expected back momentarily in order to save mankind (but not the Jews; and not from the Romans). He tells us nothing else about him. It is Paul who transforms Jesus into the Christ, an entirely spiritualised Messiah, one who has plausible deniability about the disruption of political power. This is the beginning of the long Christian con.

Paul’s lack of historical detail, however, was worrying - politically as well as theologically. A more comprehensive alternative history, creating a non-Jewish identity among believers was essential. It is not incidental therefore that the gospels, the good news of the Christian Jesus, were written just as Judaism was being outlawed and its adherents oppressed. Today we call this sort of public/political re-positioning ‘spin’. And there can be little doubt that sophisticated spin is the primary content of the unique literary form of the gospel. Sophisticated because it seeks to do what seems impossible: to claim the historical legacy of Judaism, while simultaneously distancing itself from Jewish political history.

In this light, the most implausible and improbable biblical events become understandable - from the patent fables of Jesus’s infancy narratives, to the so-called messianic secret of Mark’s gospel, to the paradoxical violent non-violence of Jesus’s preaching. The gospels are a sort of press release, useful for both attracting a crowd but also making the crowd innocuous in the eyes of authority. They are meant explicitly to make it appear that this new Christian sect had no interest in earthly power. And the ruse worked; it took three centuries for the ‘religion of love’ to become the Christendom of arbitrary power, established hierarchy, and oppressive persecution. The power of fake news has always been an evangelical specialty

The modern world, that is the remnants of Christendom, has, by Aslan’s logic, assimilated the essential Anti-Semitism of the gospels as a matter of fundamental identity. Christians have always defined themselves as those who are not Jewish. This was an historic necessity which became a culture. The persistent Anti-Semitism of the Christian Church is an irrational fact of its cultural history until it is recognised that the fact isn’t irrational at all but an essential aspect, in a sense the fundamental aspect, of Christian doctrine. Without the primordial separation from the stigma of Judaism, Christianity wouldn’t have been allowed to exist.

Messianism always implies potential terror. But the enemy of Christians was never the Jews, it was Rome. Or, if one prefers, it was any civil government which felt threatened by the radical adherents of any Judaic-like messiah. Jews, and more recently that other group of spiritual Semites, Muslims, are the scapegoats necessary to divert attention from the de-stabilizing possibility of messianic theocracy inherent in Christianity.

In sum: a fascinating narrative with revelatory implications. What more could one ask from a religious story-teller.

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