The Brunist Day of Wrath by Robert Coover
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Keeping Faith

The Brunist Day of Wrath is much larger than its predecessor, The Origin of the Brunists; it is also more theological, more ethnically tense, and (if this is possible) more desperate and more pessimistic. Perhaps all this reflects the progression of the USA from the publication of Origin in 1967 to that of Day of Wrath in 2014. Almost three generations is enough to change any country fundamentally. Or, given that it has been a somewhat stressful period for Uncle Sam, a long enough period to anneal the country into its terminal form.

The locus of the Day of Wrath, West Condon, has not fared well since the Brunists left at the end of Origin five years previously. The deep mines have closed. The strip mines that replaced them use machines not men to make their money. The flat mid-western countryside looks like it’s been tilled by a race of giant, incompetent farmers. The various remaining Christian churches are mouldering tribal enclaves whose members have lost hope if not faith. The Presbyterian minister has lost both, as well as his marbles.

And to top it off, the Brunists have sneaked back in. The folk of the town don’t like this, but other than bad memories and worse consciences about their expulsion, they really don’t know why. For the Brunists, West Condon is Jerusalem, the place of their originary revelation. For the residents, however, the divine is what they have in hand: “faith was always more an occupational convenience than mission.” And they intend to keep their faith. Yet another desolate place made even more desolate, therefore, by the mysteries of the human mind and spirit.

There is a recent theory that the first European immigrants to America passed on a sort of gullibility gene to their descendants that makes them acutely susceptible to things like advertising, propaganda, and religious cults. It was this trait, the theory goes, which induced them to leave the devils they were told about by promoters, ideologues, and co-religionists for the promise of a devil-free world in North America. In which case the American Dream is a neurosis which becomes a nightmare when slogans, party lines, and doctrines clash, as they inexorably must do. Perhaps West Condon is a sort of case study of the phenomenon. Certainly this is not too extreme an interpretation of Coover.

And therein, I think, lies the central paradox of American life captured by Coover. Herman Melville (The Confidence Man), Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Celestial Railroad) and Mark Twain (The War Prayer) all point to the well-established trait of gullibility but not to its source. H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds) and Lyndon Johnson (The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) exploited the trait but didn't care to explain it. This is where Coover comes into his own, even before the emergence of Trump as the preeminent symbol of the national condition created by both nature and nurture.

Lacking common culture, the binding national force in America is economics. What is shared is neither history nor national ambition but a vague potential and desire for getting ahead. Efficiency - of production, of consumption, of life itself - is consequently the default criterion of success according to accepted economic theory. And efficiency can only be established through competition - among companies, between individuals, and in the great marketplace of ideas - including most significantly religious ideas. Efficiency implies that the less efficient - companies, people and ideas - cannot, should not, prosper. Their fate is to serve those who do; or die out. Competitive faith is as hard a regime in the 21st century as it was in the 16th or in the 1st, when it was first mooted.

In this sense at least, America is a truly Christian country, a country of faith. Intensity of belief is what matters - ultimately in oneself if one is sufficiently jaded by doctrinal religion (or in oneself as God in the doctrines of the Prosperity Gospel and Mormonism). This culture has no interest in genetics or background (except, of course, if one is of African origin, but there are none of these in West Condon). Faith, loyalty, boosterism, team playing, enthusiastic fealty to one’s beliefs and the group which supports, and likely provided, them is what really matters. The tradition of this culture of efficiency is not so much the substance of the beliefs but in the insistence with which one adheres to them. How many Christians after all concern themselves one way or the other with the issue of the Virgin Birth for example. One sides with the tribe in such matters. Individual thought is not encouraged in the land of individualism, strangely the most conformist place on the planet.

Forbes magazine, hardly a leftist mouthpiece, called gullibility “the American tax on optimism” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarl...). But it is gullible insistence which breeds its own optimism, a kind of fellow well met cheeriness which is not infrequently about the end of the world as we know it, a joyful apocalypticism. Gullibility is a necessary correlate of the culture of efficiency. Without it America would never have existed, and could not continue to exist.

This is why nothing sells quite so well in America as righteous, political, divinely sanctioned, end-times anger (wrath, in other words) directed against a demonised ideological foe - socialists, immigrants, government, Jews, people of colour, elite city folk, the Other in general. Their alternative faith, or their lack of faith entirely, imply a challenge to one’s own beliefs that must be responded to with vigour and, if necessary, violence. This is the law of the frontier, or at least the myths handed down about the frontier (keeping in mind the gullibility gene).

America is indeed “the world behaving as a theater for [one’s] inmost thoughts” As Trump so diligently demonstrates daily. This means, as one of Coover’s characters points out that “The end of the world, Mr. Jenkins, is not an event; it is a kind of knowledge.” This knowledge seems unique to the culture of efficiency which correctly predicts its own inevitable demise - there is only one most efficient survivor after all. One wonders what the sequel to Day of Wrath might reveal about its further evolution... or it’s fading remnants.

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The Name of the World by Denis Johnson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Pointless

There may be significance to this book but I suspect only for the author. As a fictionalised memoir, it lacks development. As a novel, it has neither plot nor character. It is as flat as the mid-western plains on which it takes place.

A middle aged, bereaved husband and father finds some sort of psychic oblivion as a part time university lecturer. The post is apparently a sinecure which allows the author to get in a few digs about government-funded higher education. There are no lectures to give so he simply ruminates - for four years - about his loss. He hates his life and muses “Soon I’d have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.” He’d better because the reader is not going to waste the time.

Then, in quick succession, he gets fired, develops an obsessive but abortive relationship with a wild child student who could have been molested at age four, attacks a group of celebrating teenagers, and absconds in a stolen car to Alaska, thus fulfilling his own prophecy earlier in the day: “I needed one more aberration in the round I’d been following, one more liberating aberration, before I broke gently free and continued on a new path. I’d say I was almost conscious of needing it. Almost consciously looking for trouble.” Yep, sure, and... ? Is this a mature man or an errant 16 year old?

The level of emotion is something the reader has to take on faith since he shows none. He appears to act out of impulse not feeling. What feelings he has are... well trivial and misplaced. Driving an automobile for the first time since his family had been killed in an accident while driving with a friend, he feels guilt. “I can’t think of any more significant betrayal in my life, that is, any clearer contradicton of a former self, than owning this car after four years’ mourning two victims of a car crash.” What! Guilt about not saying goodbye, or the fight during breakfast, or the hours of overtime at work, one might understand. But driving a car? Hardly.

It could be of course that Johnson’s novel is meant as a send-up for the culture in which it is placed, a sentimental but unfeeling culture which doesn’t know a priority from an eggshell, a culture whose individuals are manipulated by circumstances to do bizarre things. If Name of the World is in fact sarcasm masquerading as slice of life rapportage, or some sort of Jungian allegory which completely escapes me, I can only apologise to the author. Otherwise, it is indeed pointless.

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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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The First Man by Albert Camus
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Hunger for Discovery

This is Camus’s last work. But for anyone interested in his philosophy, or more importantly the reasons for his philosophy, this should probably be the first to read. The First Man is intensely emotional without being sentimental, self-critical without regrets, and above all human with a humanness which is, I think, the key to everything else he wrote.

The book shows Camus as a person shaped in his intentions as well as his vices by a most remarkable and unlikely multi-cultural background of poverty, intellectual depravation and what can only be called highly disciplined love: “They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.” The narrative is not so much biographical as episodic, recounting the obviously most important emotional events and recognitions of his life. The dominant theme, only emerging explicitly in middle age, is the search for the hidden personality of his dead father, killed in the Great War during Camus’s infancy.

Jacques, Camus’s fictionalised Self, was aware of some vague deficiency, “There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurt,” he says. The source of this feeling only becomes clear upon the discovery of his father’s war grave almost forty years after his death. The epiphany at the graveside is instant and profound:

“... in the strange dizziness of that moment, the statue every man eventually erects and that hardens in the fire of the years, into which he then creeps and there awaits its final crumbling – that statue was rapidly cracking, it was already collapsing. All that was left was this anguished heart, eager to live, rebelling against the deadly order of the world that had been with him for forty years, and still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at last in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but for ever.”

Is it right to think that this is a confession of a moral conversion, a conversion from a sort of resentful resistance to the world to a sympathetic acceptance of its infinite depth and complexity? I think so. And it certainly changes my appreciation of Camus in his roles as writer, philosopher, and political activist. Although he is in many ways representative of his time and place - the radical post-war politics of France - he was never a product of his times. He was from elsewhere, literally in his Algerian upbringing, and intellectually in his appreciation of the non-intellectual foundations of life. His family, his neighbours, his friends “looked on life with a resigned suspicion; they loved it as animals do, but they knew from experience that it would regularly give birth to disaster without even showing any sign that it was carrying it.”

Camus was, if we take Jacques literally as his mouthpiece, a “sceptical believer,” not in religion or fate or ideology, but in the necessity for ever wider and deeper human discovery. Ultimately this belief is an aesthetic, a filter which allows him to reconfigure the previously perceived ugliness of the France of his adulthood in terms of the impoverished but definite beauty of his Algerian mother, the devotion of his remarkably tenacious family, the care of an outstanding teacher, and the unhesitating dutifulness of his mysterious father. But it is this last that psychically drives all the rest; the skeleton key to his life. Only by opening himself to this loss was he able to relax into himself: “at last he could sleep and he could come back to the childhood from which he had never recovered.”

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Beyond Infinity: An expedition to the outer limits of the mathematical universe by Eugenia Cheng
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Maths As Art Form

If you find it hard to tell your reals from your naturals or can’t remember why infinitely repeating decimals aren’t irrational, then this may be the book for you. A charming sortie into the poetry of mathematics, a guided tour of what they didn’t teach you in school: how numbers work and what it means to say that there are an infinite number of them. Cheng knows how to make a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, and with just the right touch of humour. Beyond Infinity is an enlightening, understandable, readable introduction to the abstract art of mathematics. You may or may not want to practice that art after reading it, but you will certainly have an appreciation for the excitement and beauty of mathematics that you didn’t have before.

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Leibniz and the Kabbalah by Allison P. Coudert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Practical Poetry

I am particularly intrigued by this academic monograph because it illustrates yet another case in which scientific and philosophical thought has been inspired by religious poetry. Such poetry is arguably the most profound form of abstract thinking since it tries to address both the object of thought and the language in which it is expressed simultaneously. I have commented elsewhere on Aczel’s account of the discovery of the mathematical concept of zero in Buddhist poetry (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). In Leibniz and the Kabbalah, the source of inspiration is the Jewish mystical equivalent. And the practical result is equally significant, suggesting, among other things, a basic composition of the universe which would not be confirmed for another two and a half centuries. (See also for a wider perspective on the religious inspiration of mathematics: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

Leibniz, it is sometimes quipped, was the last man to know everything - implying of course that by the start of the 18th century, knowledge about the world was reaching such density that no one person could assimilate it all. This may be the case; there are, after all, exponentially more stories to be told about stories already told, or propositions as Leibniz like to call them.

But it is also arguable that Leibniz was the first person, not excepting even his contemporary, Isaac Newton, to see the world as we do now - as a succession of stories, the best of which include previous stories. Our current story is of a world composed of mass (substance for Leibniz) and energy (force), two elements that Leibniz believed could be transformed into each other. Not until Einstein’s famous e=mc2 would this insight be recognised as something fundamental about the nature of the universe. But Leibniz told this story first.

Among other things, this theory of a single ‘thing’ of which the universe is made, called ‘monism’, overcomes the philosophical legacy of Descartes who had posited a two substance world of mind and matter with no clear connection between the two. In addition, Leibniz was able to maintain the idea of purpose, that is teleology, as something inherent in the order of things not as an exception to a pervasive mechanical world of cause and effect in the manner of Newton. Force, energy, has a direction; it moves toward something not away from some causal impetus.

Leibniz‘s theory of the world is contained in his Monadology, the primary components of which are atomistic particles not of matter but of energy. These particles he called monads - immaterial but sensible units of spirit or intellectual force. In short a monad is a thinker, a mind or, if one prefers theological terms, a soul. Somewhat more scientifically, a monad is a unique entity by which the force of its reflective will is self-consciously realised in the world.

Each monad, of which human beings are the primary example (Leibniz is open to the possibility of angels or even aliens), has its own perspective on the world. And since each is a unique force, it has its own direction and its own singular terminus. The interaction of these purposeful entities can take many forms, from coordinated cooperation to conflict and war. If nothing else they form complicated relationships, but not in a mechanical sense. Complexity arises primarily because of the existence of purpose and intention which are unregarded, perhaps even unconsciously held, among monads. There is therefore an ethical imperative: to find/discover/invent the purposes which include more and greater purposes as special cases.

Traces of the Monadology show up in the modern world in fields as diverse as cosmology (the multiverse and quantum time), psychology (the unconscious and the drive toward psychic integration*), political theory (the necessity for democracy and equality before the law), as well as systems theory, and perhaps even in mathematics and physics (Leibniz insisted that his science flowed from his metaphysics, and infinitesimal calculus and his anticipation of modern field theory are primary examples of this). These traces also appear most explicitly, and somewhat unexpectedly, in the American philosophy of Pragmatism developed by C.S. Peirce in the 19th century (for whom matter was also a temporary state of spirit); and thence into the 20th century European philosophies of phenomenology, existentialism, and de-construction. The terminology varies but the essential ideas of intellectual force, personal intention, and individual responsibility abide from Leibniz’s original formulation.

Coudert‘s thesis is that these essential elements are directly inspired through Leibniz’s close relationship with the Dutchman Francis van Helmont, who, although a Christian, had immersed himself in the Kabbalistic writings of the 16th century Jewish mystic, Isaac Luria. Through her detailed analysis of correspondence and various incidental documents, Coudert makes a very strong case that Leibniz directly accessed these interpretations (including van Helmont’s term ‘monad’ itself) for use in the Monadology. While others, particulately Giordano Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa (both churchmen), also clearly influenced Leibniz’s brand of Platonism, many of its unique characteristics are only to be found in Kabbalah.

Kabbalah posits what it calls an original ‘breaking of vessels’ in the creation of the world. This involves, as it were, the distribution of the cosmic divine purpose into fragments. These fragments of force are Leibniz’s monads. Their ultimate destiny is what the Kabbalah calls Tikkun or Restitution, that is the progressive re-integration of the monadic dispersion of purpose back into a coherent whole. Each monad has a responsibility to itself as well as to the whole to contribute to this Restitution, not by abandoning its particular purpose, but by articulating it and broadening it continuously toward an idealised state, called Ein Sof - literally ‘Nothing Grasped’ as a name of God, or simply Infinity.

Obviously, as with all of Kabbalah, these are metaphorical terms of a religious poetry. But I find it remarkable that its clear intent is so coincident with Aczel’s Buddhist equivalent - the ungraspable zero which is simultaneously infinite. And just as in Aczel’s story, the transition from poetry to philosophy was sudden but definite. According to Coudert, “Van Helmont's monadology remained little more than a ‘metaphysical poem’; and it was Leibnitz's ambition to solve its many inherent contradictions.”

It was just this poetic inspiration which Leibniz needed to consolidate his own experience and hypotheses. Essentially it was Luria’s rather unsystematic exposition of his “allegories, enigmas, and mysteries,” which provoked his highly systematic mind to discover just what he needed to construct his theory. So as with Aczel’s tale of the discovery of zero, the philosophical discovery of the coherent mind as a force in the world was not accomplished by commercial, or even vaguely economic, means but through the unlikely vehicle of religious metaphor.


* See, for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Measurement by Paul Lockhart
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Green Bananas: Quantification and Its Discontents

I’m at that stage in my life in which I hesitate to buy green bananas lest they go to waste: I might not be around to eat them before they’re fully ripe. The color green is a significant measure of not just the bananas but my life, at least what remains of it. I don’t know if anyone else uses this measure; it may have only personal appeal. Certainly Lockhart would reject it; he wouldn’t see the point. The title Lockhart has chosen for his book is somewhat misleading. He has nothing to say about the possible significance of green bananas, nor of many other scales of measurement. This is acutely disappointing. It also reflects a fundamental error in what he thinks constitutes measurement. This is acutely dangerous.

Lockhart makes a distinction early on between the imaginary world of maths and the physical world of objects and phenomena, like green bananas. He is only concerned with the former - Euclidean lengths, areas and volumes. Bananas of any kind, or the drop of curtains in the living room, and the road miles between Devon and Scotland - the kinds of things folk actually are concerned to measure - are not things that keep him up at night.

Lockhart does make geometry - the analysis of space - his focal point. But only after making geometry an entirely arithmetic affair. That is, he confines the things he is concerned about measuring to objects in the mathematical world. This conflation of maths and geometry is an old philosophical trick, and clearly has its uses - among others the capacity to develop all sorts of clever ways to estimate shapes, quantities, and complicated volumes.

But this capacity comes at a price: it makes it look as if measurement is a process of documenting the properties of an object - because that’s what happens in mathematical geometry. Since the objects of mathematical measurements are entirely fictional - composed of dimensionless points, lines without width and algebraically perfect dimensions - the properties of these objects are defined as part of their conceptual existence. A mathematical triangle actually does have internal angles summing to precisely 180 degrees - because that is part of its definition (Although triangles in non-Euclidian geometry can have less than 180 degrees, but that’s another story).

The fact that there are exactly half the angular arc-degrees of a circle in such a triangle is a property of mathematical triangles simply because they are defined to have that property. We make them that way. Just like we construct perfect circles, line segments, and conceptual three dimensional spaces. Such objects do not occur ‘naturally’, they are the sum of their defined properties. Their properties are limited to characteristics that can be derived from a set of axioms, which act as divine words of creation. Things don’t get any more knowable than that.

Obviously the physical world is different from this mathematical universe. The most important difference is one that is typically ignored in most discussions of measurement - namely that the ‘properties’ being measured in the physical world are not in any way inherent in the objects or phenomena being measured. Real objects and phenomena are not defined by their measurements, merely described. There are no axioms from which the properties of a real object, say the greenness of a banana, can be derived.

Unlike mathematical objects, real objects can be measured in an infinite number of ways but their ‘properties’ are in fact entirely unknown. To speak of such properties is an innocuous conceit in everyday life, but creates gross misconceptions when we act as if our words had the same power in the physical world. They don’t and we should know better.

To put the matter succinctly, physical measurements do not, indeed cannot, record the properties of phenomena. Rather, physical measurements are constituted by the assignment of the phenomena to a place on an ordinal scale (usually but not necessarily involving numbers) called a metric. A metric is merely a rule for ordering which we impose on things in the physical world. We Impose this ordering; it does not cut the world, as it were, at its joints. This we call quantification.

Quantification does not establish the properties of the object of the physical world in any sense. The object is in fact made a property of the metric through quantification. We adopt, as it were, things from the physical world into the mathematical world when we measure them. Being a mathematical object the properties of a metric are known precisely; and we can change the definition of this mathematical object to include the physical object as long as we have regard to the basic axioms on which the mathematical world is constructed. The position assigned to an object on the metric, its order, its rank, or its number, is not a property of the object but a consequence of the axioms of the metric.

I know from experience that this proposition of the measured object as a property of the metric on which it is measured is unfamiliar, disconcerting, and confusing. The remainder of this review (essay really) is my attempt to make the proposition less of all these. The reason for my making the effort, and for the perhaps greater effort of the reader, is that this proposition has significant practical as well as philosophical implications for metrology, the study of measurement. These implications are obscured to the point of disappearance in Lockhart’s book; so it is a convenient foil against which to establish the proposition as valid and useful.

The impossibility in principle of measuring the inherent properties in the physical world was shown by Immanuel Kant more the two centuries ago. No one has successfully refuted his proof that what he called the Thing-in-Itself is permanently and inevitably inaccessible to human language, including the language of mathematics. We are, as Plato expressed the situation poetically, forced to know the world as shadows on the wall of a cave.

This limitation isn’t a matter of perceptual ability, for example a lack of instrumentation or appropriate technology. Phenomena can be quantified at any level of technological development and they, that is their inherent properties, will nevertheless remain essentially unknown. No matter how accurate our observations, we are still observing shadows.

This is another way of saying that even an infinite description would not capture the essence of a rose, a poem, a star... or a banana. Even more disturbing is that the descriptions we make through measurement are not simply incomplete. They are, in a sense, lies, falsehoods which have the capacity to not just distort reality, but also to hide it entirely. We can end up investigating not the shadows but the cave wall on which the shadows appear. More importantly, measurement can be used to manipulate physical reality for hidden purposes - commercial, ideological and political. The way to prevent these potential falsehoods from affecting our judgments is to recognise what actually goes on when we measure, when we quantify something, in the physical world.

On the face of it, Kant’s claim appears counter-intuitive, if not just plain silly. Measurements may be erroneous sometimes, but that doesn’t make them lies, only corrigible mistakes. We can, we know, get more accurate by being more careful, eliminating bias and just generally paying closer attention to the operational procedures of observing, recording and reporting our measurements. What could justify the idea that we cannot know the properties of something we can measure? Isn’t that what we’re measuring - properties? We are able to estimate the depth of the ocean, the temperature of the air and the density of building materials.

Actually this isn’t what’s happening. The water, the air, the slab of marble are mute forces that act on our senses either directly or through our technology. But even the way we talk about measurement attributes our measurements to the ocean, the air, building material as something which is part of them, their attributes, their properties, not our senses.

This is the fundamental issue Kant was getting at. The issue is not the accuracy of a measurement on any metric - for example of depth, heat, or impenetrability - but of the suitability of the metric itself. Which metric to use to measure an object is the subject of what Kant called epistemology, the study of what metrics we use to impose on, colloquially to ‘represent’, a reality we cannot comprehend in any other way.

Epistemology got somewhat side-tracked over the last two centuries, concentrating on things like methods of research and the necessary rules for valid inference. It turns out that no one has been able to discover the singular methods or rules by which scientific advances take place. In fact, not infrequently, the biggest breakthroughs in science occur by violating established methods and ignoring apparently fixed rules of inductive logic. (But even that doesn’t constitute a rule - sometimes following the rules also generates startling results.)

One way to recast epistemology as a fruitful area of study is to recognise that the central problem which must be addressed is not one of method or procedure but one of numbers, specifically metrics, in their relation to the physical world. Lockhart ignores the non-numerical world entirely, thus avoiding the issues of epistemology. This is scientifically disingenuous, mainly because it makes the choice of the metric of measurement seem either trivial and therefore of no fundamental significance in our understanding of the universe.

Numbers are fictional entities. By this I mean no disrespect to numbers, nor do I deny their existence. By fictional I mean that numbers are stories. We have stories about how numbers have arisen, the evolution of their symbology and some very complex and sophisticated stories about how numbers are related to one another. These latter stories are called number theory, and they define the properties of numbers just as all mathematical objects are defined - by axioms and their implications.

So, although we don’t know everything there is to know about numbers - the axiomatic implications are infinite - we know quite a bit. Like their properties, the way they interact, their limitations and their capabilities. For example we know that numbers are infinite (in fact they are of various increasing orders of infinity). We also know that they are they are infinitely dense, that is, there is always a number to be found between any two numbers. We also know, perhaps somewhat disconcertingly, that there are many numbers (in fact there are infinitely more than other numbers) which are impossible to express entirely by numbers. These are called irrational numbers and they cannot be completely stated even with an infinite number of digits or decimal places.

Perhaps the most basic example of the error in presuming that quantitative measurement establishes properties of an object or phenomenon is provided by mathematical geometry itself. A fundamental proof in Euclidean geometry is that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This applies to all right triangles. In particular it applies to the unit triangle, the two sides of which have the measure length of one (the numeraire - feet centimeters, finger-widths, etc - don’t matter). The hypotenuse of this triangle, as many of us will remember from our school days, is therefore the square root of two (the square root of (1 squared + 1 squared)).

The square root of two is one of those indeterminate irrational numbers. It can’t be stated exactly, only approximately. Yet any physical triangle of unit dimension will have a definite length. Whatever that real length is, it simply is not the same as that in the mathematical world, namely the indeterminate square root of two. In short the square root of two cannot be a property of a physical triangle. The triangle, whether mathematical or real, is a property of the metric of measurement - in both cases, even if less obviously so in the geometrical abstraction.

It gets worse however. Certain irrational numbers, like the number pi that links the diameter and circumference of a circle can’t even be expressed algebraically. They are called transcendentals. Transcendentals are of fundamental importance in mathematics even in basic geometric analysis. And there are an infinite number of these too. Yet they too are impossible to find in the physical world. They appear as sort of an alien presence to direct our attention around the cave but they never show up in it.

The difference between the mathematical world and the physical world has caused immense practical problems for the unwary thinker who forgets that mathematical properties don’t transfer to the physical world. The notorious paradox of Zeno is one of the oldest and most persistent confusions to plague the philosophically oriented scientist. Zeno’s infamous sprinter could apparently never reach his finish line for the purported reason that he would first have to run half the distance of his race, then half the remaining distance, the half that, and an infinite further number of further halved distances. In a finite time frame, therefore, the runner cannot ever finish the race. Entirely logical and obviously entirely incorrect.

There are various way to deflate the annoying Zeno. But the simplest is to merely point of that the infinite density of the points on the mathematical line from start to finish is not a property of the course itself. Zeno pretended it was and that his runner had the property of being at successive positions along this infinitely dense line. Once it is recognised that in fact the runner never has these positional properties but is himself being assigned as a property of Zeno’s metric of distance, the paradox disappears.

Advances in modern science show how the defined characteristics of the mathematical world don’t ‘map’ or correspond on a one to one basis with the physical world. Quantum theory for example posits the existence of shortest distance, smallest mass, and even briefest time periods. The infinite density of numbers means that there are effectively ‘gaps’ in physical reality which cannot be found in numbers.

Lockhart knows there is a fundamental discontinuity between the mathematical and the physical world: “Mathematical reality... is imaginary,” he says, “It can be as simple and pretty as I want it to be. I get to have all those perfect things I can’t have in real life. I will never hold a circle in my hand, but I can hold one in my mind. And I can measure it. Mathematical reality is a beautiful wonderland of my own creation, and I can explore it and think about it and talk about it with my friends.” But even beauty has its limits as a criterion for appropriate action.

Lockhart doesn’t take this discontinuity between the physical and the mathematical very seriously at all. “What is measuring? What exactly are we doing when we measure something?” He asks. “I think it is this: we are making a comparison. We are comparing the thing we are measuring to the thing we are measuring it with. In other words, measuring is relative. Any measurement that we make, whether real or imaginary, will necessarily depend on our choice of measuring unit. In the real world, we deal with these choices every day... The question is, what sort of units do we want for our imaginary mathematical universe?... One way to think of it is that we simply aren’t going to have any units at all, just proportions. Since there isn’t a natural choice of unit for measuring length, we won’t have one.”

By disregarding the physical world and its differences from the mathematical world, the issue of the right metric of measurement is first reduced to a question of the ‘units’ of measurement (the numeraire) and then to the simple procedure of comparison. While he’s certainly correct to point out the measurement is essentially comparison he can’t see that the choice of what to compare is of crucial importance. He can’t even see the metric.

For example when I was a child I collected British postage stamps. I was fascinated not just by their design and content but by their relationships to one another. The image below is of four such stamps compared in four different ways, that is on four different metrics. Although each metric does have a numeraire, a distinct unit of some monetary amount associated with it, these units are actually of trivial importance. Just as Lockhart suggests, each gets along just fine as a simple comparison. Metrics are rules for ordering. Here are several possible rules for ordering the stamps: [click on the link since I haven’t figured out how to make the html work. Apologies to all]

https://btcloud.bt.com/web/app/share/...

These are obviously four quite different comparisons and result in uniquely different ordering. All the comparisons are ‘real’ in the sense that there is nothing in philately which defines an inherent property or which comparisons are allowed. They just happen to be comparisons that someone might want to make. The position of stamps on each scale is clearly not anything to do with the inherent properties of postage stamps. Yet according to Lockhart (and me) these are measurements. All are correct but none pretend to anything but what they actually are - measures of relative value.

All physical measurements are measurements of relative value. We wouldn’t bother to make them unless they were. They are an ‘appreciation’ of an object or phenomenon in light of a specific intent not a statement of the character of the object or phenomenon in itself. This value is not expressed in terms of the units of an arbitrary numeraire (dollars, pounds, utils etc.), which as Lockhart points out might be irrelevant anyhow, but in the relative position of the stamps on each metric. This is another way of saying that all measurements are made for a purpose. This purpose is incorporated/expressed in/ approximated by the metric. And crucially, it has nothing to do with the object or phenomenon measured. Once again: it is not a property of these things; the things become a property of the metric.

Any number of further examples could be given but they would only sharpen the point not make it. The epistemological challenge is very real indeed. But Lockhart has the wrong end of the epistemological stick. Units of measurement matter orders of magnitude less than the metric - the ordinal scale of measurement - on which and through which measurements are made. The political and sociological as well as the scientific implications of this fact are beyond the scope of this review. Perhaps another book will pop up as an excuse for following these up.

Then again there’s the problem of the green bananas.

See for further analysis of the same subject: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... which also contain further references. For an axample of the opposing and also erroneous view that measurements exist entirely in the head of the one measuring, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Number: The Language of Science by Tobias Dantzig
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Literate Mathematics

A classic in every sense: a model of style and erudition to rank with Oscar Wilde, as inspiring as Zadie Smith, as concise as a page from George Orwell, and as timeless as any of Dickens’s tales. If you have an interest in mathematics, or if you have been scarred by the imposition of tedious calculating techniques in your school days, or if you simply want to understand an enormous part of intellectual history, this is the single most important book you could have at hand.

The first edition was published almost 90 years ago. Yet it is fresh and witty and simply full of the most remarkable facts and astute observations about the development and use of numbers. Apparently, for example, birds (particularly crows) have a relatively developed sense of number (at least up to five). Dogs, horses and other domestic animals appear to have none. And the English trice has the double meaning of three times as well as simply many, plausibly echoing the Latin ‘tres’ and ‘trans’ - beyond - thus memorializing an ancient method of base 3 counting.

Dantzig‘s factual anecdotes are similarly captivating: “Thus, to this day, the peasant of central France (Auvergne) uses a curious method for multiplying numbers above 5. If he wishes to multiply 9 × 8, he bends down 4 fingers on his left hand (4 being the excess of 9 over 5), and 3 fingers on his right hand (8 – 5 = 3). Then the number of the bent-down fingers gives him the tens of the result (4 + 3 = 7), while the product of the unbent fingers gives him the units (1 × 2 = 2).”

The only misjudgment Dantzig makes is his underestimation of binary arithmetic. “It is the mystic elegance of the binary system,” he says somewhat disapprovingly, “that made Leibnitz exclaim: Omnibus ex nihil ducendis sufficit unum. (One suffices to derive all out of nothing.)” Little could Dantzig (much less Leibniz) have foreseen the rather non-mystical importance of the base-two counting in the age of the digital computer.

Dantzig is acutely sensitive to the cultural matrix of mathematics. That matrix, he points out, is neither commercial nor academic; it is largely religious. “Religion is the mother of the sciences.” The Greeks of course had several mathematically based religious cults. Even the most recent (and difficult) mathematical field, number theory “had its precursor in a sort of numerology” of biblical texts. (See here for more on the religious inspiration in mathematics: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

But he also recognises religion as a major impediment to the development of mathematical knowledge: “When, after a thousand-year stupor, European thought shook off the effect of the sleeping powders so skillfully administered by the Christian Fathers, the problem of infinity was one of the first to be revived.” Religion, thankfully, shot itself in the foot in interesting ways: “Now, the acquisition of culture was certainly not a part of the Crusader’s program. Yet, this is exactly what the Crusades accomplished. For three centuries the Christian powers tried by sword to impose their “culture” upon Moslem. But the net result was that the superior culture of the Arabs slowly yet surely penetrated into Europe.”

Perhaps most impressive is Dantzig’s intellectual humility. He begs ignorance of the philosophical issue of whether or not numbers exist outside of human thought about them. But he is not without an important philosophical view: “Herein I see the genesis of the conflict between geometrical intuition, from which our physical concepts derive, and the logic of arithmetic. The harmony of the universe knows only one musical form—the legato; while the symphony of number knows only its opposite—the staccato. All attempts to reconcile this discrepancy are based on the hope that an accelerated staccato may appear to our senses as a legato. Yet our intellect will always brand such attempts as deceptions and reject such theories as an insult, as a metaphysics that purports to explain away a concept by resolving it into its opposite.”

To conclude with this sort of poetic image justifies entirely the description of this book as “an ode to the beauties of mathematics.”

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The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by Candida R. Moss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Error Has No Rights

In 1832 Pope Gregory published an encyclical, Mirari vos, in which a traditional view of not just the Catholic Church but also most other Christian sects was made an explicit part of their teaching: Error has no rights. In fact this encyclical was part of a series of directives by various popes over the next century that denied almost every human right we take for granted - from freedom of conscience to the importance of democratic institutions. These are all still ‘on the books’ and are promoted as authentic doctrine by many to the present day.

The connection between this Christian denial of human rights and Christian martyrdom, Moss’s topic of investigation, is straightforward: self-induced Christian paranoia. From the writers of the New Testament, to the earliest apologists, through the crusades and pogroms of medieval heretics, and into today’s evangelical warriors, the persistent trope of Christian culture is one of actual or impending persecution. According to Christian ideology (consistent but distinct from its theology*) the world is out to get its adherents; and always has been.

What Moss shows very clearly is that this narrative of persecution is fictional from its earliest versions. It persists because it is functional. As she says, “The rhetoric of persecution legitimates and condones retributive violence. Violence committed by the persecuted is an act of divinely approved self-defense. In attacking others they are not only defending themselves; they are defending all Christians.” This ideology is the rationale behind every political (and, historically, military) move by all Christian churches. It justifies the most inhumane actions - from widespread persecution of others to the denial of the right to even object to such persecution. This is institutional paranoia on a massive scale.

Christian paranoia is most acute when it is least justified. Just as the tales of primitive martyrs mainly emerge only after Christianity is legitimised by the Emperor Constantine, so modern evangelicals claim oppression by the democratic state as they wield their considerable political muscle on issues as diverse as abortion, voting rights, and gun control. Its martyrs include foetuses, disgraced preachers, and politicians who have lost their seats because they have espoused ‘Christian causes.’ Always on the lookout for opposition, real or imagined, Christianity is an inherently divisive ideology. According to Moss: “The recognition that the idea of the Christian martyr is based in legend and rhetoric, rather than history and truth, reveals that many Christians have been and remain committed to conflict and opposition in their interactions with others.”

And as Moss notes in passing, “some Christians argued that the crucifixion was an elaborate magic trick and that Christ never really died.” Is it any surprise therefore that so many American Christians believe that Trump actually won the recent election and is governing the country from Florida?


*The ideological evolution of Christian thought moves from suggestions of forbearance to directives of terrorism in approximately the following steps:
1. Jesus died.
2. Jesus died for your salvation.
3. Others have died to prove that Jesus died for your salvation.
4. All the faithful, too, must be prepared to die for Jesus in order to promote his message of universal salvation.
5. Jesus’s message of universal salvation must be defended, if necessary by oppressing or even killing those who reject it.

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Language, Torah, And Hermeneutics In Abraham Abulafia by Moshe Idel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Language as Everything

Abraham Abulafia was a Spanish 13th century Jewish mystic. Roughly contemporaneous with Thomas Aquinas, Abulafia can be said to have played the role of Plato to Aquinas’s Aristotle. Or perhaps a more familiar comparison is between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, the former making the primary philosophical issue one of language, the latter making it one of technique (falsifiability in Popper’s case) which simply presumes the neutrality of language in science.

Abulafia, so far as I know, never mentions Aquinas, but he does mention and is mentioned by the Medieval rabbinical community which was very much in accord with Aristotelian metaphysics. The rabbis, it is fair to say, hated and mistrusted Abulafia for the same reasons Popper hated Wittgenstein. Both Abulafia and Wittgenstein threatened to undermine the stories which their respective communities - one in religion, the other in science - had been telling themselves for centuries, namely that there was a single correct way through which the world can be understood and knowledge of it verified.

Abulafia and Wittgenstein employed very different vocabularies in very different intellectual contexts; nevertheless the messages of both were the same - that the apparent neutrality of language was a myth and, even worse, a lie. Language, both insist, has its own agenda, which is anything but neutral and which relativises all knowledge, scientific as well as religious. Wittgenstein used some rather clever logical analyses to demonstrate the point. Abulafia did something else entirely, which is what makes him of interest to me. His remarkable method is the subject of Moshe Idel’s book, which makes it clear that Abulafia is as important a figure for the philosophy of science as he is for Jewish cultural history.

Abulafia has become known as the founder of the school of Prophetic Kabbalah. Both terms need a bit of introduction: prophecy for Abulafia does not mean clairvoyance or prediction of the future but the appreciation of what actually is, the state of the world as it exists rather than how we might think about it. This is very much a modern, indeed 20th century, point of view which is not incongruent with the philosophical schools of phenomenological and existential philosophy.

Kabbalah, like any religious poetry, is subject to a variety of interpretations about what it really refers to. The world? A spiritual world different from this one? A mystical realm of numbers which reveal esoteric secrets? Actually none of these, despite the cultic aroma that hangs around much of its current popularity. As Abulafia believed, and Idel points out, Kabbalah refers to nothing but itself. It is a self-contained system of thought (or more properly meditative imagination), the purpose of which is not to prove or demonstrate anything but to undermine, to relativise, everything one thinks one knows about the world - even about Kabbalah itself.

This is clearly a noteworthy, self-referential effort, one which has been essentially re-invented in some modern philosophical schools like that of Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction and its theological variant of John Caputo’s Weakness of God. These efforts, ancient and modern, start with a paradox: that language is our route to understanding the world, and each other. But on the other hand language lies. It pretends it is not a thing in the world, that it has nothing to say about itself, and that it can faithfully ‘represent’ the world to us. Just a little thought is enough to see that none of this is the case. Language carries an enormous amount of impedimenta, excess baggage - historical, emotional, political, and plain perceptual baggage - which makes it unreliable at best.

Abulafia‘s method for addressing this paradox is not to try to abstract the world or our experience of it from the grip of language - a clearly impossible quest - but to turn the tables, as it were, on language by making it everything, the only thing in existence. Let’s act, he suggests in effect, as if language constitutes the “entire intellectual universe.” This move does two, somewhat unexpected, things. First it forces complete attention on language which has no referent to distract us from its concrete being. Second, the move reveals the distinctive power of language over human beings. By raising this power to the level of the divine, Abulafia makes this recognition unavoidable.

There is consequently a benign if doubly paradoxical effect of making language divine: it forces the language user to notice language as something which is, not merely something one uses. It is the poetic equivalent of Heidegger’s quip that ‘Language speaks Man’. Language gets caught out in its game and can only blush. Abulafia then takes it apart as if it were parts of the human body, dissecting every letter, every word, every sentence of his text (the Torah) and squeezing each into a mould which makes language itself, not to mention the folk who employ it, very uncomfortable indeed.

By recognising the inevitable subservience of human life to language, Abulafia makes it an object of not simply reverence but also awe. It therefore must be respected and studied carefully as one would any sacred but dangerous object (Abulafia considers Hebrew as the holy proto-language from which all other languages derive, in other words the equivalent of Noam Chomsky’s deep structure). And to study language apart from its nominal referents is to effectively de-construct it, to reveal its hidden intentions. Thus Kabbalah anticipates not just the semiotics of the 19th century, but the dominant philosophies of the late 20th century.

Idel summarises Abulafia’s technique: “The method for attaining wisdom proposed by Abulafia as an alternative to philosophical speculation is essentially a linguistic one. Language is conceived by him as a universe in itself, which yields a richer and superior domain for contemplation than does the natural world. Beyond its practical use, Abulafia claims, language contains a structure that conveys the true form of reality; therefore knowledge of the components of language is equivalent and perhaps more elevated than knowledge of the natural world....”

One might read the last part of this quotation as a sort of medieval scholastic rationalism. But that would be a mistake, because Abulafia makes it clear that what he is getting at is the discovery of the matrix of perception within the user of language himself, a matrix which is inevitably shaped by language: “Language is a thing which brings to actuality, what is imprinted in the soul in potentia... Indeed when man becomes perfect he will understand that the intent behind language is the discovery of the function of the Active Intellect,.. For the essential intention of language is to convey the soul's intent to another soul.”

In other words, the first function of language is the expression of the self to other selves, and, at least as importantly, to itself. This self Abulafia calls the Active Intellect, which is not static or fixed but constitutes a moving target of learning and development. He equates this Active Intellect to the Torah; but for him the Torah comes in two parts - the divinely inspired, and written, first five books of the Hebrew Bible, nominally the work of Moses; and the equally inspired but unwritten (or oral) Torah. This latter is far more extensive than the written component. As Idel points out: “We may see in Abulafia's conception of the oral Torah, an understanding of the sum total of intellectual truths, and in this sense it is identical with the meaning of the Active Intellect.”

In short, the Active Intellect is reality, not the reality which is merely perceived or limited by current science or experience, but the universal and timeless reality known to God.* To approach this Active Intellect, Abulafia considers it necessary to overcome our own intellects, that is that place or process in us which is dominated by language. And he names the faculty which is crucial in this overcoming of intellect: imagination. “The potency of the imagination is a vessel for the apprehension of prophecy, for all of his [i.e., the prophet's] apprehensions are imaginary; they are parables and enigmas... and the sense of this is contained in the plain meaning of the [Hebrew] word DMYVN, which is MDMH [dimyon - imagination; medammeh ־ imaginative faculty] “

I cannot help but equate Abulafia’s ‘imagination’ to Harold Bloom’s creative misreading (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). As Bloom knows, such purposeful misreading of a text or tradition is a kind of betrayal and fraught with psychic trauma. Abulafia suggests the depth of this trauma by using the biblical story of the binding of Isaac by Abraham in preparation for killing him, the so-called Aquedah of Genesis 22: “In analysing the words of Abulafia, we learn that the story of the binding is conceived as an inner conflict, a man testing himself to see if he is capable of having his intellect rule over his imagination... It seems that the very task of this linguistic method, which is similar to that of Abulafia, requires preparation similar to that of Isaac's preparation for the binding to sacrifice. What is implied here is that we must gain control over ourselves and bind our materiality to be able to contemplate the conceptual realm.”

Whether or not one agrees with Abulafia’s approach, it must be regarded as a remarkable undertaking, especially in a religious rather than a scientific context. Abulafia was castigated as a heretic just as Wittgenstein was, and sometimes still is, condemned for undermining truth, science and civilisation as we know it. Their shared intention to disintermediate language constitutes a cultural assault that does not often go unpunished. Nevertheless there are those who are rather courageous in their defense of thought. Idel’s summation could apply equally to Wittgenstein with a few changes in vocabulary:

“All the cunning of reality, all the strategems of the Torah and the craft of the commandments exist in order to bring close those who are far, at the epitome of distance, to the epitome of proximity to Him. All of this is in order to remove all intermediary [levels] that bind man in ropes of deceit, so as to liberate him from their hold, as was the case with the Exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the sea as on dry land. And this is in order to place only one intermediary between man and God, i.e., the powerful heroic human mind that empowers itself with the power of the Torah and commandment, the revealed and concealed, which in themselves constitute the Divine Intellect.”

*It is relevant here to note Carl Jung’s two fundamental principles of psychology: 1) The contents of the Unconscious are indistinguishable from reality, and 2) the Conscious together with the Unconscious is indistinguishable from God.

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Jesus, Interpreted: Benedict XVI, Bart Ehrman, and the Historical Truth of the Gospels by Matthew J. Ramage
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Just Silly

“What is the appropriate presupposition for the task at hand?” Ramage approvingly quotes Benedict XVI who appears in his own words as a card-carrying Pragmatist. Benedict is correct to ask the question of course. But by some not very subtle sleight of hand, both he and Ramage then go on to equate presupposition with religious belief, as if faith simply supplied some otherwise unknowable but superior presupposition from which to think about the world. This is not only an intellectual fraud, it is also an attack on human intellect itself in the manner of all Christian apologists since Saul of Tarsus successfully redefined religion as something to do with the heart rather than the head.

Jesus, Interpreted is a direct response to Bart Ehrman’s books on the historical exegesis of the Bible carried out by scholars over the last 250 years or so (See for example https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Ramage admires Ehrman’s scholarship and exposition but doesn’t like his conclusions - mainly that the clear layer of legend which has been added to the oldest gospel texts (those of Mark) indicates a progressive divinisation of Jesus by his followers after his death. Ramage does not dispute the legendary addenda but he does disagree about their implications. He wants to demonstrate that the ‘revelation’ of Jesus’s divinity was virtually instantaneous to his followers during his lifetime.

Ramage’s (somewhat fey) apologetic technique is to use the exegetical and apologetic writings of the former pope, Benedict XVI, as counters to Ehrman’s thesis. As Ramage recognises, however, this is a risky path since Benedict differs fundamentally in his views from those of the historical church regarding the critical study of the Bible. By allowing the debate to move beyond the scope of mere church interpretive authority, Benedict does promote intellectual engagement at a level never before experienced in the Catholic Church - a dangerous move if common standards of rationality are employed as criteria of credibility.

But there are doctrinal limits to the freedom intellect which even Benedict dare not transgress. And these are precisely set in the matter of presuppositions. And in general the presuppositions he and Ramage have are those articles of faith which they want to defend. This is patently tendentious. The method is not to investigate or interrogate scripture but, in the ancient manner of the first Christian apologists, to sift through documents, legends, and traditional interpretations to find confirming data, and to use these data to invent explanations for inconsistencies, errors and contradictions. The intent is to protect the presuppositions at all cost.

Ramage attacks what he calls Ehrman’s “merely philosophical presumptions”. He believes that his own presumptions about the religious testimony of early followers of Jesus are at least as good a place to start in thought as as any epistemological principles. In particular, Ramage wants the miracles reported in the New Testament to be accepted as factually accurate accounts. This he makes equivalent to Benedict’s plea for an “open philosophy” in biblical criticism. The rest of his argument follows from this presupposition.

It is difficult to know where to even begin a rational response to this point of view. Faith in miracles is not equivalent to critical exegetical presuppositions like authorial intentions, or sociological conditions, or states of knowledge. These can be questioned, modified and if necessary abandoned. The presupposition of miracles is simply an intellectual dead-end; it is not permissible to question much less abandon it. Garbage in, garbage out as they used to say in computer programming. So it is impossible to even call Ramage wrong; he is only silly. Jesus, Interpreted simply digs the hole Christianity finds itself in to new depths.

Postscript: For more on the difference between religious faith and scientific presumption see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Michael Puett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Good News From the East

The Path, like the Harvard lectures on which it is based, is exceptionally popular for a book of its kind - on the face of it an esoteric philosophy which doesn’t offer self-help so much as the re-definition of what constitutes self. I suspect, however, that the reason for its appeal is not its ‘doctrines,’ of which it has none, but its offer of a sort of religion which has been lost in the West for almost two millennia. The Path outlines a religion of ethical and ritual habit rather than a religion of faith and belief. The loss of this sort of religion has been so total that many are likely to perceive its suggestions - for this is what they are - as no religion at all.

Religions of faith - notably Christianity and Islam - are relative exceptions in the theological world (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). The distinguishing characteristic of these religions - separating them from the Judaism from which they derive, and from the religions they like to term pagan, including not just the state religion of the Roman and Greek empires but the other world religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, etc. - is the idea of doctrinal belief. All other religions except Christianity and Islam articulate what they conceive as correct behaviour rather than correct belief; which actions are necessary for a fulfilling, satisfying and meaningful life, not which thoughts or words of attestation are necessary for salvation.

The introduction to The Path sums up its message succinctly: “you can wield that power of habit, or ‘ritual,’ to achieve things that you never thought were possible, given who you thought you are.” Such an idea is heretical in Christianity; it smacks of Pelagianism, the idea that human beings have some responsibility for, and ability to affect, their own spiritual state without the need for externally supplied ‘grace’ and the system of intellectual beliefs which is purported to be its source. Augustine of Hippo bitterly fought against such a view in the 4th century and embedded it in one form or another in every Christian sect - Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal. The logical consequence of his doctrine is the rather dismal idea of pre-destination and the overwhelming imperative to obey ecclesiastical authority.

For members of the religions of faith, faith justifies. It justifies not merely the sinful human being who is judged by God, but it also justifies any behaviour thought necessary by ecclesiastical authority to protect what it deems the tenets of faith. This principle is so inculturated among adherents of faith-based religions that they can barely conceive of a religion without either doctrine or the authority to enforce it. The fact that the perennial Chinese wisdom summarised in The Path is neither dogmatic nor authoritarian, but suggestive and experimental, comes as a pleasing surprise. I think it also helps in its popularity that while this wisdom is social in terms of both its ethical norms and their interpretation, it is not tribal in the mode of requiring attestation to or in a group.

The concept of what might be called ‘ethical habit’ is not new in the West. It was an area of well-developed thought in ancient Greek and Roman civilisation. Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoic philosophers, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius were all advocates of so-called virtue ethics. Christianity and its Pauline insistence on faith as the only necessary virtue, however, more or less crushed any real discussion of this ‘pagan’ practice. Thomas Aquinas had some positive things to say about virtue ethics in the 13th century, but nothing that would compromise the pre-eminence of faith as the only necessary condition for the good life.

Interestingly, it is mainly Catholic moral philosophers of the 20th century who have revived interest in virtue ethics. Elizabeth Anscombe established her reputation on the defense of virtue ethics in 1958. Since then a number of moral philosophers have followed suit - Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, and Stanley Hauerwas, among others. Collectively they have taken what has become know as the ‘areatic’ turn (from the Greek for virtue) in moral philosophy, that is, a turn precisely in the direction suggested by Chinese thought and Michael Puett.

Nonetheless, this areatic turn has had nothing like the impact that Puett’s course, or his book, has had on the spiritual imagination, especially among the young. Puett is not peddling some new version of peace and love hippiedom among his Harvard students. This is serious stuff; and it is being taken seriously. And I suspect the reason for its relative acceptance compared with modern virtue ethics is precisely because it is free from the dogmatic requirements for faith that are implicit in the Western versions.

Virtue ethics, when taken seriously, is a contradiction to Christianity (and I suspect in Islam for the same reason). If faith saves then virtue either follows or it is irrelevant. If faith is not necessary for the practice of virtue (and it demonstrably isn’t) then faith itself seems fatally compromised. What Chinese wisdom and Puett provide is a virtue ethics, a way of living one’s life, without the baggage of faith and its spiritual as well as intellectual non-sequiturs. This kind of responsible freedom hasn’t been available for public debate for some considerable time. This alone makes Puett’s thoughts important. They also happen to be very interesting.

Postscript: For more on doctrinal religions and their consequences, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Moonglow by Michael Chabon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dimly Reflected Emotions

Sadly Gary Cooper never made a film with Vivien Leigh. But with a script like Moonglow, they couldn’t have avoided it. The omni-competent nice guy and the sexy but flakey European as his wife are parts made for them (the required French accent wouldn’t have been all that far from her role in A Streetcar Named Desire). With all the necessary schmaltz, Yiddish wit, and Holocaust sub-text, it would have been instant boffo - America as it once was and may be becoming again: proud of its wars, politely but insistently racist, with rotten health care and tribal politics, and an ultimate hope for resting place in God’s gated community somewhere in the Florida swamps.

Depending on the Director, the script could take various tacks, from the edifying and heart-felt family drama of Miracle on 34th St. to a sarcastic variant of Dr. Strangelove. The tone depends entirely how the key decisions in the lives of the protagonists are pitched: as inevitable human tragedies or obviously avoidable mistakes. So much is hidden by Chabon as the story unfolds that it could be told with alternate points of view as it goes along. After all, the male lead does begin to appreciate eventually what he’s got himself into in marrying a ‘survivor’: “Like many of the spouses of ‘the lucky ones,’ my grandfather had observed that what got labeled luck was really stubbornness married to a knack for observation, a fluid sense of the truth, a sharp ear for lies, and a deeply suspicious nature.”

“She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.” The proverbial pot and cover, therefore. He doesn’t want much: “in those years his ambition was not to own a piece of the world. Just to keep that piece from falling down or burning up around him would suffice.” But she also doesn’t give very much, especially after her stint in the mental ward: “She emerged from that first time at Greystone in a fragile and quiet state, holding herself like an egg balanced on a spoon.” ‘Repentance” he finds, therefore, “is the most solitary of pursuits”. But he really doesn’t have the leisure required for repentance given his crushing responsibilities. His obsession with space and technology lead him to an unhappy thought while contemplating a captured V2 rocket as, “a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place.”

Although wonderfully written, I have an uncertain problem with Moonglow. It is clearly meant to manipulate my emotions. This Chabon knows how to do through his dead-pan humour, his pacing, his slow reveal. But I find myself asking is this what I want from fiction? A sort of emotional booster shot? Isn’t this just a variant of pornography? When I’m done, I am left with a feeling indeed; but I can’t even attach that feeling to the figure an actor or celebrity, much less someone I know. I don’t even know what to call it. Appreciation? Regret? Sympathy? Anger? Nothing fits. Chabon has magicked up a response out of nothing but words on a page. I don’t know if I’m pleased with either him or my reaction. Gary and Vivien at least would have given an illusion of reality I could hold onto.

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Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers by Amir D. Aczel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Everything Is Not Everything

One of the enduring but fruitless debates in the philosophy of mathematics is whether or not numbers exist apart from human thought about them. This little book provides a pleasing alternative to these abstruse arguments by suggesting that numbers and the mathematics which use numbers as its raw material are a remarkable genre of religious poetry devoted to the concept of the ‘void’. The oldest form of this poetry seems to arise in the Buddhist cultures of Southeast Asia, at the latest in about the sixth century CE, and in any case well before equivalent discoveries in Europe.

The critical insight of these religious meditations is the necessity of the (at least metaphorical) existence of the Shunyata, nothingness - what modern mathematicians would come to call the empty set, or more colloquially: zero. The form of logic that led to the discovery of zero is not only fascinating in itself, but it also remains relevant for addressing one of the most persistent of modern mathematical problems: the so-called Russell Paradox. According to set theory, the set of all sets both does and does not contain itself. Clearly there is a fly deep in the mathematical ointment. But there does seem to be a solution - in the wonderfully laconic explanation by a Buddhist monk: “Everything is not everything.” Zero might just be “the womb of all the other numbers.” It just doesn’t get more poetic than that.*

Aczel tells a personal tale of historical research, philosophical exploration, and at times somewhat trying travel in an enjoyable, unpretentious, and wonderfully informative style. His asides alone - from the linguistic remnants of the old French system of base 20 counting, to the ‘topos’ of Alexander Grothendieck, a leading mathematician of the 20th century - are worth the price of admission. But his central point “that the number system we use today developed in the East because of religious, spiritual, philosophical, and mystical reasons—not for the practical concerns of trade and industry as in the West,” is a remarkable and enlightening observation... and suitably poetic.

* Interestingly the great Leibniz seems to have a similar but independent conception. According to Laplace, as quoted by Dantzig: “Leibnitz saw in his binary arithmetic the image of Creation ... He imagined that Unity represented God, and Zero the void; that the Supreme Being drew all beings from the void, just as unity and zero express all numbers in his system of numeration.“ See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript: for a remarkably similar source of scientific insight in religious poetry see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee by Bart D. Ehrman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Aberrant Religion

Christians, or more precisely Paul of Tarsus, invented not just a religion but also a new form of religion, one constituted by belief rather than by ethical or ritual action. This religion is markedly different from that which was practiced by its nominal focus, Jesus. And it is different from all contemporary and subsequent religions. It is a religion which claims to know the ultimate truth about reality and demands that its adherents accept, profess, and, if called upon to do so, enforce that truth. Such a religion, based on correct belief, is bound to insist that its own origins are divine in order to justify its claim. Faith, that is, created the divine Jesus as an epistemological imperative.*

The above is my view not Ehrman’s. But it could easily form the overarching theory for which Ehrman, and the scholars on which he bases his argument, provide the factual data: Faith, once adopted as the principle of finding out about the world, inevitably leads to the divinization of some part or aspect of the world. The object of faith is not the source of faith but its essential product. This object is not born complete in the minds and culture of a group but evolves as necessary to protect the principle of faith itself, adapting and, where necessary, distorting, the existing, usually implicit, epistemological principles as it proceeds. The narrative of How Jesus Became God outlines this historical process.

Faith, in other words, manufactures a guarantee for its own validity. It constitutes a self-sealing system of thought which is impenetrable. Faith also attaches to what is available to ‘prove’ itself. Paul in his writings, the earliest in Christianity, uses what is convenient (but never central) in Hebrew literature to make his point. No wonder he frequently appears somewhat confused about his object, which is only of secondary importance. This object was not a man, since Paul never met Jesus and apparently knew next to nothing about his life. Nor was it the authority of a religious tradition or scripture, since Paul took great pains to show why historical Judaism was wrong. Faith for Paul is a kind of intellectual obstinacy.

Paul’s object of faith was a vague idea, his own, which he called Christ. The precise character of this idea was uncertain to him and to his contemporaries. Paul hints at its divinity but can’t seem to make up his mind about what that means. Only subsequently is the confusion reduced, after perhaps six or more generations of faithful believers have a go at retelling, embellishing and editing the stories they have heard about Jesus.** Even then the confusion about Paul’s object never is completely eliminated. Conflicts, heresies, and intellectual politics are the hallmarks of Paul’s religion of faith to the present day.

The reason for such continuing conflict of course is that Pauline Christianity is an extremely literal affair. Whatever the object of faith, that object must be formulated in words before it can be attested by believers. The formula is the only reality of concern, no matter how arcane, incomprehensible, or self-contradictory it may be. Language not experience becomes definitive. Thus the creed (from Latin credere, to believe) takes the place of any emotional or spiritual event in religious life. This, of course, places language itself in the position of a divine, and therefore unchanging, entity. And this in turn necessitates ecclesiastical control of the meaning and interpretation of language. Ultimately, religious authority claims its place not just as the arbiter of doctrine but also as the arbiter of thought itself.

Christianity is, consequently, a decidedly aberrant form of thought. Aberrant because it is a departure from every other standard of thought, philosophical or religious, that has ever been proposed. But it is also aberrant in its classification of all other modes of thought as various sorts of belief in competition with itself, as statements of alternative belief rather than what they are: ethical and liturgical rituals... and some very fine poetry that no one takes literally.

The world, Pauline Christianity claims, cannot live without faith and refuses to admit even the possibility that faith is its own questionable invention. Christianity’s self-guarantee is constituted by the Incarnation and Resurrection, the doctrines of God’s becoming a part of his own creation and overcoming it - not as explanatory myth, or edifying example, or evocatively fey poetry but as certain truth. It is not sufficient to act as if these doctrines were true; it is necessary to convince oneself fervently and without hesitation that they are true in order to be ‘saved.’ This distinguishes Christianity not only from all other religions but from all other modes of thinking.

Therefore, according to Christianity, the object of faith is of central relevance to human life. Of course, in the ensuing debate about this object, Christianity has both the home team advantage as well as age on its side. The Christian apologetic makes all religion a matter of faith: Judaism is incomplete faith; Islam is erroneous faith, Buddhism doesn’t merit the term faith at all; and polytheism, ancient and modern, is childish, superstitious faith. Atheism, of course, is simply ungrounded faith because it refuses to specify a divine object. The issue being pressed is faith not Jesus - this is the perennial sleight of hand which has been performed by Christian apologists in plain sight for two millennia.

So I think that Ehrman has done a service in summarising the historical, sociological, and biblical research about how Jesus became God. But I also think he misses something important about why Jesus became God. This why it seems to me is inherent in Paul’s conception of faith as the essence of religion. Once his premise about faith is accepted, something or someone has to be supplied as its object. Anything will do, no matter how mundane or abstract. Paul invented Christ as that object. More modern folk, imbued with the Pauline spirit, have substituted any number of cult leaders, other arcane deities, language in the form of uncertain ancient texts, or even alien beings as their objects of faith.

To put the matter bluntly, if somewhat crudely: Paul’s most enduring contribution to the world is not his promotion of the divinisation of Jesus. Rather it is his establishment of the principle of faith as a legitimate criterion for human action and a requirement for authentic religion. To put it even more crudely, it is this same Paul who has provided the world with its first defensible theory of terror: faith justifies. It justifies not just unkindness, but also cruelty, murder, war and the continuous persecution of any who oppose the idea of faith. Medieval Crusaders, ISIS, the Know-Nothing American fundamentalists, and the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult all share Paul’s theology of a justifying faith. It seems to me obvious that the evolution of this theory of faith has come to mean far more than the question of Jesus’s divinity.

* For what Paul means by faith, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

**Ehrman has raised considerable ire among evangelicals by suggesting that the idea of Jesus’s divinity evolved. Authors like Larry Hurtado claim that the recognition of his divine status was ‘explosive’ and complete ab initio. This despite a clear development in thought from Paul’s epistles to John’s gospel, a period of seventy years or more (and some rather different accounts in the intervening Synoptic Gospels). The indisputable fact that the character of Jesus’s divinity remained problematic even among fervent believers over centuries also undermines any claim to ‘explosive certainty’. One reason why I am concerned to shift attention to the epistemological principle of faith is that it really doesn’t matter whether the ‘revelation’ of Christianity was more or less instantaneous or developed in the course of time. Once faith becomes the criterion of truth, it demands a divine object. Paul apparently had such an explosive experience. Others had to interpret his reports. In doing so, they differed, and continue to differ, in their opinions about what he meant. To claim instant recognition would seem absurd as well as irrelevant.

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Wittgenstein's Nephew 
by 

Thomas Bernhard

 

A Philosophy Of and For the Curmudgeon

A catalogue of pet-hates and prejudices masquerading as a memoir, Wittgenstein’s Nephew is a perennial rant of the old against not just the young but against the world in general. This is a world of unmet expectations, incivility, and bad taste. The only possible response to this world is a resigned snobbishness accompanied by the occasional whine of despair. Paul, the nephew of the philosopher, is simply a foil for presenting this as a philosophy rather than as merely an experience.

Paul and the author share much the same view. For example, Austrians are perfidious toads who appreciate nether art nor culture. Hospitals and the medical establishment exist to torture their patients using “the most inhuman, murderous, and deadly methods... Of all medical practitioners, psychiatrists [a Viennese creation] are the most incompetent, having a closer affinity to the sex killer than to their science.” The sick are in any case insufferable - when they are sick because they are inhuman and when they become well because they believe they should have human rights once again. 

The world of course is in a constant state of deterioration for the old: “where the food has always been cheap but was still of excellent quality, as it no longer is.” Because the old see the world in the round, as it were, they have little trust in it, “being unable to contemplate the beauties of nature without at the same time contemplating its malignity and implacability, I fear it and avoid it whenever I can.” Only the old can appreciate the aversion to life produced by experience.

A certain cynicism and irrational obstinacy is therefore inevitable. Public recognition is simply receiving pearls from the swine to whom one has given them in the past: “For a prize is always awarded by incompetents who want to piss on the recipient.” The only thing that makes such recognition tolerable is the cash that comes with it, if it comes at all. But eventually even the cash doesn’t compensate for the debasement one suffers at the hands of the ignorant. Is it any wonder, therefore that one eventually becomes obsessed with trivial details: “I also realized at the time that no one with intellectual pretensions could possibly exist in a place where the ...Neue Zürcher Zeitung is unobtainable.” Survival consists of maintaining routine after all.

At bottom of course is not so much the certainty of impending death but the terrible, uncertain threat of living madness, largely self-induced: “I had behaved toward myself and everything else with the same unnatural ruthlessness that one day destroyed Paul and will one day destroy me. For just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world, I too shall sooner or later come to grief through my own unhealthy overestimation of myself and the world.”The madness to be feared is precisely oneself.

There is something peculiarly Viennese about this impending madness for Bernhard and for Paul Wittgenstein. And it seems to affect intellectuals uniformly, “In the same way Nietzsche’s mind exploded, just as all the other mad philosophical minds exploded, because they could no longer sustain the pace. Their intellectual fortune builds up at a faster and fiercer rate than they can discard it, then one day the mind explodes and they are dead.” Or perhaps this is merely an example of languid Viennese sarcasm. The import is the same: one’s intellectual capacity simply and inevitably evaporates - a mental sterilisation far worse than the accompanying sexual decline.

In Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Bernhard shows himself a master of self-mockery: an entertaining tale of the old at their best and their worst. My wife thinks I should study it carefully.