We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

High Gothic Art

Hawthorne, Poe, Lovecraft, and even James: Jackson is in their company when it comes to the Gothic genre. She writes in noir et blanc; every word is necessary; the context is revealed at just the right continuous pace; and there is plenty to reveal. No gimmicks, no spiritualist allusions, no unlikely situations: Jackson puts later writers like Stephen King to shame with her talent and wit.

Someone is a homicidal maniac, but which of the Blackwood sisters is it? The traumatized and agoraphobic Constance, or the obsessive-compulsive and more than slightly mad Mary Katherine? Or perhaps it’s the wheelchair-ridden Uncle Julian who fades in and out of dementia? The victims had their own problems, genetic as well as domestic; who knows but they did each other in. An accident is a possibility - perhaps the ancestors left some lethal material around. Then again, the ‘villagers’ are not a very stable bunch; nor for that matter are the ladies of the local gentry who have more than a morbid curiosity in the family Blackwood. When the sinister cousin Charles come to visit, the question becomes more than academic.

The village itself is part of the mystery. How did it arise as what keeps it going economically? What is the cause of the animosity among the ‘leading families’? Why is the finest house in the village, which should be owned by the Blackwood’s, now a junkyard? There is no uncertainty that the village has some distinctive mores: “In this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home.” Jackson piles on the complexity at the same rate that she reveals the situation. For every question answered, two more are posed. The first person narrator might be either insane or acutely insightful. It’s a technique guaranteed to keep the reader’s interest.

It’s also a technique which creates a narrative world amazingly efficiently. The questions of the reader are the things the characters themselves are concerned about. The stance of each, his or her position in the puzzle, is who they are. Little further description is necessary. Strangely, how they fit with other is enough for the reader to imagine what they look like, how they dress, what the landscape is like. For example, Jackson characterises the entire village without specifying anything: “All of the village was of a piece, a time, and a style; it was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it.” She adds nothing but a terse negative formula: “whatever planned to be colorful lost its heart quickly in the village.” Nothing more is needed. She provokes participation by the reader who fills in the descriptive gaps like the eye automatically interprets perspective.

This is more than genre horror or fantasy. Jackson writes literary fiction. This is her masterpiece.

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Nightmare in Berlin by Hans Fallada
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Recovering Believers

The chaos of military defeat is a more difficult social condition than war or the most repressive political regime. Fallada’s eponymous nightmare starts in April 1945, “the time of the great collapse.” Community all but disappears, and with it the mores of civilised behaviour. Any residual bureaucracy is at best mean-spirited and at worst actively dangerous. The ethic of Do Unto Others takes on a new meaning: “it’s better to be doing than to get done!” One cheats and steals, or one dies. Loyalty, civility, and self-sacrifice are defects not virtues.

Hope and fantasies about the good times to come have a somewhat inadequate half-life in the enveloping social vacuum. Deprivation is not merely physical; the adaptation of one’s mind to a new reality is necessary: “in letting go of the lies that had been drip-fed to them all their lives as the most profound truth and wisdom, they would be stripped of their inner resources of love and hate, memory, self-esteem, and dignity.” The true cost of belief is only evident after the belief is realized fully for what it is: profound self-deception. Physical disaster might well energise a positive response. Metaphysical disaster inhibits even the will to live.

Alcohol in any form, the usual therapy in times of such stress, is scarce and subject to black market pricing. But morphine and scopladeine can be had through one’s doctor - or one’s string of doctors in one plays the system correctly, a possibility created by the chaos itself. Enough opiates have been stockpiled in the war-time health system to last for years. Scores of doctors have become their own pushers.

Drugs are more important than food; they both dull the appetite and ease the mind. One is able to lie “in a semi-waking dream, experiencing the euphoria, the rush; at last they have managed to escape the bitter reality.” There is nothing incremental or accidental about the resulting addiction: “it was better to be knocked out all at once, to not be there any more.” How unfortunate that the drugs also incapacitate the skills for staying alive.

In his Foreword, Fallada calls Nightmare in Berlin a medical report not a work of fiction. Indeed it isn’t great literature. But as a memoir of suffering and persistence it is well worth reading. The fact that he was able to write at all in the midst of the chaos and despair at a time when even in his own mind “‘German’ had become a term of abuse throughout the world,” is remarkable.

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Wilt by Tom Sharpe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Better Late Than Never

Scatological sarcasm is a Sharpe speciality. In Porterhouse Blue he uses it to parody Oxbridge tradition. Wilt goes for the jugular of California-chic, a somewhat more recent tradition inserting itself into British life during the 1970’s.

Being in a somewhat sheltered environment in the 70’s educational-wise, as Wilt’s wife Eva might say (I spent most of that period on a ship at sea or in the semi-dream state of a married graduate student), I missed a great deal of the development in popular culture. The mere fact that I had never read Sharpe suggests my naive isolation. This gap had potentially serious life-consequences.

Among other things I was entirely unprepared for the revolution in sexual mores going on in the world entirely without me. I was Philip Larkin in reverse, stuck happily before the Beatles album in 1963. Only decades later did I encounter people like Sharpe’s Prigsheims who inhabit an alternative universe of casual guile, equally casual promiscuity and of such exotic self-certainty that they are all but irresistible to anyone but a Wilt-like nebbish (whom I undoubtedly resembled).

I survived the experience more or less whole, but only with some considerable emotional confusion. It strikes me that contemporary fictional commentary like Sharpe’s, which articulates and sends up the latest behavioural fashions, would have been awfully helpful as therapy both before and after such events - if only to provide some reassurance of one’s sanity. Farce, it seems to me, makes a real contribution to what’s come to be called Continuing Education.

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Thomas the Obscure by Maurice Blanchot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Existentialist Kabbalah

Interwar existentialism appeared as a sort of overnight philosophical and literary mushroom. Typically attributed to the intellectual spores thrown off by the 19th century philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, the single word description of existentialism is ‘absurd’. Absurdity is lack of reason in every sense - the absence of implicit meaning, the sterility of human action, and ultimately the pointlessness of life. According to Martin Heidegger, for example, the event which provokes the question of the reasonableness of life is its inevitable termination, death, which is the triumph of unreason.* For the writer Albert Camus, the possibility to personally choose death rather than life gives life its foundational significance, despite the obvious indifference of the universe.

Maurice Blanchot is an existentialist. But he is not an absurdist in the same way that Heidegger or Camus are absurdists. Blanchot believes that because none of us can have an experience of death, it can’t be a motivating factor for life. Death is a rumour which can’t be taken seriously. For him, life itself, the experience of existence is the only motivation necessary to fill it with meaning, purpose and reason. Experiencing existence in the midst of the daily pressures, obligations, and distractions may not be easy, or even ‘natural’, but it is certainly possible. Being, as it were, is it’s own reward if we care to appreciate it.

At the very outset of Thomas the Obscure, Thomas experiences near-drowning, apparently intentionally. As everything about his world and even his own body dissolves in a sort of trance, he experiences “a sort of holy place, so perfectly suited to him that it was enough for him to be there, to be;” To be; not to die is his intention and his experience; and it is an attractive experience not one of fear. He approaches death and spits in its eye when he feels his own existence quite distinctly from his other bodily sensations or his thoughts.

Later that night Thomas has another out of body experience, seeing and feeling himself simultaneously: “what he looked at eventually placed him in contact with a nocturnal mass which he vaguely perceived to be himself and in which he was bathed... outside himself there was something identical to his own thought which his glance or his hand could touch.” He is objectively present, even to himself. In other words he has some sort of unique significance in the world of things. He can simultaneously experience and reflect upon that experience. This is the miraculous character of his being. It is not necessary to look elsewhere for ‘reason.’ This is itself sufficient reason for his life.

The existential void, nothingness, exists for Thomas, but it is hardly a threat. His experience is that “through this void, it was sight and the object of sight which mingled together. Not only did this eye which saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision... Its own glance entered into it as an image... from all evidence a foreign body had lodged itself in his pupil and was attempting to go further... the body of Thomas remained, deprived of its senses. And thought, having entered him again, exchanged contact with the void.” Thought and the void are interchangeable (or perhaps better said: the void is an idea) - a challenging as well as provocative proposal. Where does it come from?

Blanchot is certainly not from the same intellectual gene pool as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Camus. His literary forebears are Flaubert and Kafka - the first aesthetic, the second spiritual. Blanchot testifies to both, especially the latter, in his writing and correspondence. And it is Kafka’s brand of existentialism - Jewish, Eastern European, and (knowing the inadequacy of the term) life-focussed - which Blanchot represents. As Thomas realises on the second night of the story, “He was really dead and at the same time rejected from the reality of death.” Death is not his enemy, nor his inspiration.

Blanchot was not merely incidentally interested in Kafka. He analysed Kafka’s work in detail and recognised its dominant influence: the Kabbalah, that mystical discipline which seeks to integrate language with living in a way which can only be described as existentialist. Gershon Scholem, the leading scholar of Kabbalah in the 20th century, considered Kafka’s work as canonical in Kabbalistic literature, on a par with the Zohar, and even the Bible itself.

The Kabbalah is absurdist in the manner in which Blanchot (and Kafka) is absurdist. It seeks to undermine not just the dominance and distortions of language but also the conventions of reason language embodies. Thomas explicitly reports at the evening’s dinner that he is “unsatisfied by the words.” The purpose of Kabbalah is to reveal what lies behind language, beyond the distractions brought about by everyday life, to expose us to, in a word, existence. This is what Heidegger called Dasein, the particular reflective mode of being of a person. But in Blanchot, there is Dasein with a difference (For a fuller explanation of Kabbalah and its interpretive use, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

Dasein, according to Heidegger, must decide what its life is, what it will be committed to, what its point will be. For Heidegger, the content of these choices is all there is, this is Dasein tout court. But not so for Blanchot. He knows that any fixation of purpose is already lethal. It implies the cessation of new interpretations, of new possibilities, of learning about oneself as well as the world, of life in a sense more profound that the stopping of physical processes.**

For Blanchot existence is a receptacle for the sort of content by which Heidegger defines Dasein. This receptacle is not a thing in any concrete sense (neither is Dasein) but something, nevertheless, which is, and is independent of its contents - a psyche, a life-force, or if one prefers, a soul. Its content is constantly changing. It certainly can’t be defined by some arbitrary choice at any moment in time.

In fact, in some sense this entity is entirely beyond time; it is eternal and the locus of a potentially infinite series of interpretations passed on from generation to generation of physical persons (largely through language!). It is an entity, therefore, not driven, like Dasein, by fear of death, but the continuously new possibilities of its interpretations of life.

Thomas explicitly uses the method of Kabbalah while reading after dinner. “He was reading with unsurpassable meticulousness and attention in relation to every symbol.” This is the technique by which Kabbalah ‘alienates’ language in order to re-establish it as subservient to human interests. Every word, every letter, each mark of punctuation has a potentially hidden meaning, in fact an infinity of potential meanings, to be discovered and explored. Others would think Thomas wasn’t really reading at all because he never turned a page, but this was only because he was being so excruciatingly attentive to his text.

The technique has an unusual effect. Words become active subjects rather than mere passive objects of Thomas’s perception: “he perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if by a living being, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were in that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like a procession of angels opening out into the infinite to the very eye of the absolute.” This may seem dream-like but in comparison with Heidegger’s neologisms and prosaic complexity, Blanchot is at least comprehensible.

It’s as if the attention directed at the text enlivens the text itself and encourages it to provide its re-constructive judgment on Thomas: “he recognized himself with disgust in the form of the text he was reading, he retained the thought that (while, perched upon his shoulders, the word He and the word I were beginning their carnage) there remained within his person which was already deprived of its senses obscure words, disembodied souls and angels of words, which were exploring him deeply.” Heidegger claims that ‘Language speaks Man’; and in a sense it clearly does. But as Blanchot suggests, Language also interrogates Man. If so, there is no need to invent a new vocabulary as Heidegger has done. Much better to attend to the angels of words we already possess.

Thomas struggles with the merciless text as if he were a student with the Torah. But he is “thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing.” The Kabbalistic paradox of constructive deconstruction is complete. Thomas encounters his own existence through the existence of the text. Perfect ‘absorbtive’ Kabbalah, as Moshe Idel was later to describe it (See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

I am an expert neither in existentialism nor Kabbalah. But I don’t think Blanchot can be understood much less appreciated, at least in Thomas the Obscure, without a recognition of his unique combination of these two threads of intellectual and literary endeavour. Together I think they provide at least an entry into his method of writing and thought.

*Heidegger’s description of ‘Being-towards-death’ in Being and Time is clearly dependent on Kierkegaard, although he is not cited explicitly. This idea of death giving significance to life, although having Greek philosophical precedents, is most fully expressed in Christian theology. The Christian motive for living is salvation after and, crucially, through death. This is markedly different from the Judaic (and Islamic) motive of obedience to the divine will as an end in itself. It is, I think, the primary differentiating factor of Christianity as a dogmatic religion of faith, and Judaism as an ethical religion of correct behaviour. I believe my characterization of Kafka and Blanchot as ‘Jewish’ in the above is, therefore, apt both historically and culturally as a Kabbalistic rejection of the Christian standpoint that death provides the meaning for life.

** The distinction between purpose and purposefulness is at the heart of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as well. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation by Moshe Idel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Better Driving

While driving a car, it’s impossible to focus on the windscreen and the scenery at the same time. It’s the same with experience and the language we use to express it. Focus on the experience of perceiving a text or a conversation, and the language itself, even to oneself, becomes invisible. Focus on the language, and the experience of the text or conversation becomes sterile as the words themselves are disconnected from everything except other words, other spots on the windscreen. Without language, the experience is mute, perhaps even impossible.

Language is, in other words, anything but a neutral conduit of our experience. It is, like the experience of the scenery or the text, namely a something. And as something, it carries with it all sorts of baggage: personal associations, historical references, social judgments, and untold depths of nuance. All this means that the scenery is mixed with the windscreen in unpredictable ways. Dust and rain obscures our vision. A sudden crack from a thrown pebble distracts us. An annoying fleck of bird poop resists all attempts at removal. These things get in the way of what’s ‘really there’, namely the scenery - and other traffic - which is what is of vital interest. And consequently language also makes for somewhat diverse interpretations of literary texts. Language conceals and distracts while it communicates.

Philosophers and literary critics have spent much time and intellectual effort trying to understand the connections and disconnections between language and our experience of the world. But whatever success they’ve had - and it’s not really that much - is tempered by the fact that they’re focussed on the windscreen. That leaves the rest of us none the wiser about the effect of language on our experience. It tells us a great deal about textual windscreens - grammar, technique, vocabulary - but not very much about how to read - or drive - more intelligently.

Mystical literature like the Kabbalah has a very different approach to the problem of language and experience. Unlike philosophical or critical analysis, Kabbalah is a mode of thinking which doesn’t accept the presumption that language and experience are different things. Both are so intimately connected that the presumption in a sense causes more problems than it solves. By dissolving each into the other, Kabbalah starts from a unique perspective, that of the reader - or driver - one might say.

In Kabbalah, as Idel documents, two sets of processes go on simultaneously. The first is very similar to what is called ‘deconstruction’ in modern philosophy - essentially the ‘making strange’ of language itself. Kabbalah in a sense defocuses attention from the windscreen of language. Language is alienated or, as Idel terms it, arcanized. These processes elaborate “secretive understandings of the canonical texts understood as pointing to these realms in allusive ways: anagrammatic, numerical, allegorical, or symbolic.” I suppose this is not unlike probing the chemical or atomic composition of the glass of the windscreen. But the analogy starts to break down because Kabbalah is also a kind of poetry, and so difficult to connect productively to analysis of a windscreen.

The second set of processes is what philosophers call hermeneutics, essentially the re-interpretation of experience in terms of the arcana of deconstruction. It involves deliberate re-construction and “consists in the emergence of complex exegetical systems that present specific methods to decode the arcana believed to be concealed within the canonical texts.” This in turn involves imagination, an ability to connect the previously unconnected in interesting ways. Herman Hesse’s masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), describes how this occurs. All experience, all texts, all symbolic representations are fair game; anything can be connected with anything else to reveal surprising relationships.

Re-construction is based on an interesting central presumption: that there are secrets to be found. “Secrets are commensurable to the methods that will resolve the enigma implied in the secrets. On the other hand, secrets should be imagined to exist, otherwise the resort to eccentric exegetical techniques, without the trust that something inherent in the text or in the mind of the author is available, would become a hollow game.” Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) traces the consequences of this presumption, which is essential to modern information theory, in deciphering signals from an alien world. In Kabbalah, however, the sender is identical to the receiver, not some extra-terrestrial civilisation. Kabbalah, in other words, is about de-ciphering secrets about and within oneself not understanding messages from outer space or some other dimension.

Idel places Kabbalah in the historical context of Judaism as part of its “Renomadization” or Diaspora after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. This is important because it literally displaces the deity from a fixed location to not merely the text of a sacred book, but also to the reader of the sacred text. “In the postbiblical period God is conceived of much less as penetrating reality at His free will, using the apparatus of the Tabernacle or the Temple, than as constantly present within the literal signs of a portable book.” Signs are of course nothing without a sign-knower, that is, an interpreter.

The implication is that God is to be found most readily within oneself, a conclusion remarkably congruent with that of the 19th century Christianity of theologians like Frederick Schleiermacher, or for that matter with the psychological theories of Freud and Jung. In short, God, if he is allowed, speaks constantly through the thought of the individual and in the language of his social milieu. In semiotic terms, the sign, the signified and the signifier are considered as one. This is one way to understand Idel’s title of ‘absorption’. Kabbalah absorbs everything into itself. Hearing the divine voice, however, is not merely a matter of listening, of absorbing text; it demands the active work of de- and re-construction. This involves discipline as well as practice. Sort of like driving a car.

For more on Kabbalah and literary interpretation see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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His Master's Voice by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Signal as Noise

As is typical with much of his other work, Lem explores a perennial philosophical issue in His Master’s Voice: How can we know that what we think we know has any claim to reality? Lem’s use of a very Borgesian pseudo-factual account of a mathematician’s encounter with a cosmic intelligence is brilliantly apt. Plato knew the problem well; Kant re-stated it ad nauseam; and Trump confirms its significance on a daily basis. Don Delillo‘s Ratner’s Star has a similar theme (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). HMV is, therefore, in a sense timeless and a persistent literary trope; it deserves a place in every thoughtful person’s bibliography.

Here is a sequence of numbers: 1415926535. Could you say with certainty what the next number in the sequence will be? It is in fact 9. But unless you already knew that the sequence is composed of the decimal units of the transcendental number pi, it is unlikely you would have a greater than 10% chance of getting the right answer. As an irrational number, pi can be expanded to an infinite number of decimal places without ever repeating the sequence. But obviously if one knows that pi can be calculated to any degree of precision required, the number in any decimal place is known with little effort.

This trivial exercise summarises a fundamental problem in information theory: how does one know that apparently random noise isn’t really a communicative signal? The sequence above, for example, could be analysed endlessly and yet no pattern, no meaning would emerge from its very real randomness. Unless of course one already has the key to the code, namely pi. The discovery of meaning, in other words, requires the presumption that there is meaning to be found. All of science, actually any inquiry from the interpretation of literature to forensic investigation, must start there. Put another way, meaning depends on a receptivity to communication, which means a high tolerance for listening to nonsensical noise in order to find the signal buried within.

The rub is that it is very difficult to prevent a hopeful presumption of meaning from transforming into an article of faith. When that happens, the result is... well, the X-Files, a mad obsession which cannot be satisfied until the presumption is ‘fulfilled’. So, the Kabbalist finds hidden patterns in the sequence of letters in scripture; the believer sees clear signs of the end times in natural disasters; the conspiracy theorists prove their presumptions about the Kennedy assassination or Area 51 or the Deep State; and geniuses like Immanuel Kant come up with wildly erroneous conclusions about the invariable ‘categories’ of which the world is constituted. The human need to find meaning seems insatiable, even when - especially when - there is no equivalent to pi to be found, no key except that which we impose without sufficient reason in line with our obsession.

Lem doesn’t solve the paradox of meaning of course; he merely documents it in a particularly interesting way. Perhaps there is no way out of the paradox, which makes the contradictions of quantum physics, for example, seem like a walk in the park. But that hardly matters when the writing is as intriguing as Lem’s. And he does provide a handy pocket-guide to dealing with the problem: “genius,” he says, “is, above all, constant doubting.” This, I suggest, includes maintaining doubt even about the meaning of meaning.

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The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Developmental Agony

I’m not sure how this book has been marketed or how I encountered it, but it’s definitely YA not adult fiction. Lots of schmaltzy tragedy and teenage angst with a core of unlikely coincidence. Very hard going if you’re over age 21 I suspect. Definitely a waste of time for an old stump such as myself. The most significant effect of reading the thing is a feeling of vaguely regretful embarrassment for an afternoon I can’t recover. So unless you’re into mean girls, oblivious parents, eating disorders and self-harming, you’ll want to give it a miss.

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Oxford Blood by Antonia Fraser
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Bloody Awful

Antonia Fraser is a person for whom silver spoons were invented. So I suppose her fictional work must be about the privileged media luvvies who feasibly share her background. Characters named Jemima, Cy, Cass are giveaways. The little white Mercedes sports car fills out the picture. Locations like Holland Park and Oxford let the reader know what sort of people these are; they’re of course people like her. One must write about what one knows, mustn’t one?

Do the rich not bleed? Of course they do. And they have secrets like everyone else that they’d rather not be made public. Their wealth and position of course are the only reason anyone would find their secrets even remotely interesting. That’s what sells newspapers (the book was written in those ancient times before the web and DNA testing). And presumably they were expected to be the reasons people would buy Fraser’s book.

I can’t think of any other reason to invest one’s time in Oxford Blood other than as an unintentionally ironic guide to English upper class mores and speech patterns. There’s little else in it worth bothering about. The premise of a dead baby swapped for a living one in order to continue a noble family line is trite as well as absurd. The contradiction of action and intention is all too obvious. The premise might serve (just) as the foundation for an episode of Midsomer Murders. But it’s more likely that it wouldn’t make it past the first script-editing conference.

The baby in question has grown by late adolescence into a Boris Johnson-like japester on the razzle in The Oxford Bloods, a rough imitation of the Bullingdon Club, an association of rich knob-heads who wreak drunken havoc in only the best Oxford eating establishments and rate the success of their nights out by the size of the bill for damages. Think Brideshead Revisited but without the restraining influence of old-fashioned college porters and limited family allowances. Others may quarrel with my taste, but it has never been my ambition - literary or otherwise - to know much about such people. To be aware that they exist as symbols of inherited privilege and intensive inbreeding is more than enough.

I suppose that England needs these genetic remnants of the Norman Conquest. They do provide comic relief during times of national crisis. Eccentricity, however, sails perilously close to buffoonery. One might ask why the Lady Antonia would write about such drivel. The answer, I think, is simply that she can, and therefore does. Lots of similar folk are there for encouragement and support. No mystery about that.

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Wilt by Tom Sharpe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Better Late Than Never

Scatological sarcasm is a Sharpe speciality. In Porterhouse Blue he uses it to parody Oxbridge tradition. Wilt goes for the jugular of California-chic, a somewhat more recent tradition inserting itself into British life during the 1970’s.

Being in a somewhat sheltered environment in the 70’s educational-wise, as Wilt’s wife Eva might say (I spent most of that period on a ship at sea or in the semi-dream state of a married graduate student), I missed a great deal of the development in popular culture. The mere fact that I had never read Sharpe suggests my naive isolation. This gap had potentially serious life-consequences.

Among other things I was entirely unprepared for the revolution in sexual mores going on in the world entirely without me. I was Philip Larkin in reverse, stuck happily before the Beatles album in 1963. Only decades later did I encounter people like Sharpe’s Prigsheims who inhabit an alternative universe of casual guile, equally casual promiscuity and of such exotic self-certainty that they are all but irresistible to anyone but a Wilt-like nebbish (whom I undoubtedly resembled).

I survived the experience more or less whole, but only with some considerable emotional confusion. It strikes me that contemporary fictional commentary like Sharpe’s, which articulates and sends up the latest behavioural fashions, would have been awfully helpful as therapy both before and after such events - if only to provide some reassurance of one’s sanity. Farce, it seems to me, makes a real contribution to what’s come to be called Continuing Education.

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Job by Joseph Roth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thaumaturgy: A Philosophy of Blessings and Curses

For those who do not live solely in a scientific universe of mechanical rationality, the world is enchanted. It is filled with forces which have personality and therefore might be appealed to for deliverance or assistance. In the monotheistic religions, such forces are natural but may be suspended or re-directed by God. The result is a miracle - either a blessing or a curse which has a supernatural cause - as of course in the biblical story of Job.

But miracles are problematic for the religions which recognise them: If God is omnipotent and therefore can relieve suffering or manage the world to be benign, why does he not do so as a matter of course? Further, if God is omniscient and knows what his creatures need from him without their asking, why does he require fervent, even obsessive, prayers from their before acting on their behalf? Finally, if God is immutable, that is unaffected by all the forces over which he has control, how is it that human prayer has any effect on him at all? These are the issues which run through Roth’s Job.

In Roth’s Job, Mendel and Deborah Singer live in an obscure Jewish shtetl in the far west of the Russian Empire. Mendel does not believe in miracles: “His upright mind was directed toward the simple earthly things and tolerated no miracle within range of his eyes.” He prays because that is what is due to God, and he accepts his fate. He wants nothing; he asks for nothing: “he was nothing more than one praying, the words went through him on the way to heaven, a hollow vessel he was, a funnel.”

Deborah on the other hand does believe in miracles, but as a Jewish woman it is not her job to pray to God; instead she prays for the help of her dead relatives - for smuggling her conscripted son out of the country and bringing her handicapped son into health, among other things. Her objective is to change the way things are, favorable or not: “To pray for the older sons, she again made pilgrimages to the cemetery. This time she prayed for an illness for Jonas and Shemariah, as she had once begged for Menuchim’s health.”

This is a family, therefore, with an essential division in religious outlook when it comes to divine assistance - and an equally divergent attitude toward religion itself. Mendel’s resignation is accompanied by guilt. His misfortune, he believes, must be the result of a spiritual error or inadequacy or his part: “he thought incessantly: Where is the sin? Where is the sin?” Scrupulosity, no matter how spiritualised, is clearly not the same thing as trust in the divine. Mendel neither trusts God, nor is he willing to stand up to a God he believes is wrong as did his biblical counterpart - at least until what is really important to him is taken away.

His wife has no such spiritual qualms. If life is difficult or the world threatens, these are merely temporary events. Her first instinct is to blame Mendel for his inaction. But ultimately Deborah’s confidence is not shaken by setbacks. After all “Perhaps blessings need a longer time for their fulfillment than curses.” She simply attends the graves of the ancestors more frequently. Mendel quotes scripture to her, but she won’t be bullied. She responds coldly, “Mendel! You always know the wrong sentences by heart. Many thousands of sentences were written, but you remember all the superfluous ones!”

The spousal differences also show up in their perceptions of the world at large. Mendel, given the status and vulnerability of Jews in the countryside, is fearful to the point of paranoia: “Alien to them was the earth on which they stood, hostile the forest, which stared back at them, spiteful the yapping of the dogs, whose mistrustful ears they had awakened...” Deborah, however, engages with the local peasants, even to the extent of negotiating a free ride to the county town. She obviously knows the same facts as her husband about the dangers of drunken locals, Russian soldiers, and periodic pogroms, but exerts her will for her family regardless.

The lives of Mendel and Deborah are subsequently filled with the usual mix of happiness and tragedy with which most of humanity is familiar. Some events are so testing that they lead to apostasy and the abandonment of the idea of divine benignity itself. What remains with them throughout their lives, however, is not trust in divine good will but ritual, ceremonial routine, tradition in clothing and relationships. These are the things which sustain them until coincidence, fortune - or who knows, God - decides to favour them with the unexpected. What matters ultimately is neither faith nor hope in the divine, nor the exertion of human effort, but the support provided by a sort of familiar set of actions until,... well until the world looks better, or one is no longer around to notice the state it’s in at all.

This is the miracle of ritual. As Adam Levin puts it in his novel, The Instructions, "..it is good to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether you do justice or not." Ethics is a routine which helps us to live and die better.

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The Gradual by Christopher Priest
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Spiritual Relativity

The Gradual is an allegory, and a fairly complex one at that. As with any allegory, it remains impenetrably obscure without some hint as to the key for its interpretation. I think the key here is medieval monasticism, specifically Gregorian Chant as the undisclosed but barely hidden theme of the book.

The first clue is of course the title itself. It refers to a ‘time gradient’ which affects travellers as they move about in Priest’s decidedly dialectical world from evil and ugliness to peace and tranquil beauty. But a Gradual is also a liturgical book of the Catholic Mass. it typically contains only the musical parts of the ceremony and not those that are merely spoken. Most of the music is ancient and anonymous, passed down and progressively modified with no accreditation by generations of monks. The music is written in Gregorian notation which uses four lines and three spaces as the range of average, probably untrained, voices without instrumentation. The protagonist of The Gradual, Sussken, is a composer who travels from his homeland to the Dream Archipelago, first for business, then for refuge.

The set of four lines in Chant (rather than the five in modern music) is a musical stave upon which the square-shaped notes are placed. Seen from a distance, this is the impression one gets of the islands of the Dream Archipelago floating in the Midway Sea. According to Sussken, “Every island had a different note.” In fact his initial musical inspiration comes from the three islands he can see from his room on the mainland of Glaund - corresponding of course to the three spaces in Gregorian notation. For Sussken, “The islands formed a pattern, a format, a structure in the way I understood structure: movements or parts that while being single and separate made up a whole. Islands, I had thought, would be like a sonata... “

A stave, of course, is also a kind of staff or pole. In The Gradual, the stave is a small staff which is an essential tool for managing the time variability in the Dream Archipelago. Time is lost or gained, seemingly randomly, as one travels eastward into the ‘score’ of the islands. Sussken is mystified by the absence of a reliable time standard: “Every day my watch appeared to lose or gain time –one day it gained four hours, or lost eight. I was not sure which.” After his first trip, he experiences a sort of Einsteinian Relativity - his nine weeks away are almost two years elapsed at home.

The most distinctive feature of Gregorian chant is that it has no definite time signature, no fixed rhythm. So, for example, Chant can be slowed to a lyrical lilt or speeded up to a rapid clip depending on liturgical circumstances and the whims of the choir master. Perhaps the most striking modern version of this is Vaughn Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in which the time of the music seems constantly and unpredictably to expand and contract. Just as does time for Sussken in the Dream Archipelago.

At the port of entry on every island of the Archipelago (all inter-island transport is via ship), a group of young ‘adepts’ awaits and scrutinizes arriving passengers. These monk-like adepts, both men and women, claim to have exclusive knowledge of how to adjust inadvertent time distortions for those who suffer from them - much like the clerical claim to intermediate between God and human beings. The adepts generally do not intrude upon the privacy of travellers but once they have found a willing mark, they solicit for ‘donations’ at every opportunity. They carry small etching tools as a sort of mark of office, not unlike the habit and crucifix of a medieval monk.

Once approach to the adepts is made, out of a kind of spiritual turmoil brought about by the fluctuations in time, the process of adjustment is highly liturgical. It involves the constant presence of, and attention to, the stave, upon which the adepts make arcane notations. ‘Clients’ of the adepts, upon making a necessary donation, are required to follow precise directions without question in a quasi-mystical ritual which reverses any previous ‘tidal aberrations’ of time they have experienced. Whether superstition or artful science, the process does appear to yield results: clocks become synchronized.

Throughout this ritual ‘adjustment’ the client is required to carry all the baggage which has been taken on the journey into the Archipelago. Baggage is cumbersome and tiring to lug around, thus provoking consideration of what is really important and necessary to one’s existence. Clothes, books, and other personal possessions are progressively dumped as it becomes clear they are not worth the effort of possession. In monastic jargon, this is equivalent to a novitiate, a testing of the intention and suitability of the candidate for inclusion in the spiritual community, and as Sussken realises “a purging of the old.”

Glaund, Sussken’s continental homeland, is a cold, northern, industrialised state in a more or less permanent war with its closest neighbour. It is ruled by a military junta which conscripts a large portion of each generation to fight endless battles on an obscure continent - a sort of distant military chess board which spares the productive capacity and civilian population of the home countries. Think Vietnam, or Iraq, or Syria. This is more or less the modern secular world and its material obsessiveness.

The Dream Archipelago, on the other hand, is composed of thousands of independent island states which live in harmony with each other. They have adopted but adapted a definitely medieval form of polity: “... the ways of a benign government that had devised a modern way of operating the ancient feudal laws of the islands.” Sussken’s artistic creativity is seduced by this alternative reality: “It was in every sense a real world away, halfway around the globe, and past concerns seemed for the time being minor and irrelevant. The music I lived for was finding fruition. I wanted to stay in these islands forever.”

The islands are climatically temperate, tranquilly sociable, environmentally aware and try to maintain good but arm’s length relations with the warring continental states. “The Dream Archipelago was the largest geographical feature in the world, comprising literally millions of islands, but it was closed to warmongers.” It is not much of a stretch to consider each island as a large monastic establishment whose principle threat is the militaristic and economic ambitions of the secular world. The monastic theme is made almost explicit in referencing “the sense of enclosure created by the wealth of islands.” Henry VIII certainly noticed both the enclosure and the wealth of the medieval equivalents.

Aside from permitting both warring parties a bit of R&R in their paradisiacal enclaves, the islands have two primary defenses against the secular powers: the time variability, a spiritual condition really, which only the islanders know how to manage; and the fact that there are no maps or charts of the entire Archipelago which might allow an invasion. This theme of hidden or arcane knowledge lends a certain gnostic flavor to the islands which is not inconsistent with the earliest desert monasteries. But like those early monastic establishments, the islands also change, and not necessarily for the better. Even paradise has its dialectical flaws.

I could be wrong in any of the detail suggesting the connection between The Gradual and medieval monasticism; but I think the overall conclusion is sound. The book, for me, has echoes of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion among other allegorical fantasies. Certainly this is not the only possible key to Priest’s tale, but I hope it’s a productive one.

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Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Virtual Reality as Life Therapy

I admit it: I was wrong. After reading Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments, I dismissed him as a half-literate techno-traitor peddling some personal resentment about a mis-spent life in technology; but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Steered by another GR reader, I ran smack into Dawn of the New Everything and immediately began groveling. Lanier is not only someone of integrity, he is the kind of person who is worthwhile aspiring to in the very specific sense that he has used his life to address the mystery of his life.

The son of artistically and intellectually talented Holocaust survivors, Lanier’s personal life alone is worth knowing about. Raised in the wilds of West Texas, he started primary school in Mexico because the education was better and the bullying less. Before he left school he had designed and built a Theremin which not only made eerie music but also transformed the music into images that he projected at night onto his house.

At age 13 his father allows him to design and build a geodesic home for them in the New Mexico desert. Dropping out of high school age 14, Lanier starts university before being accepted or even applying. His main worry isn’t dating, or grades or even nuclear war but the fragility of the earth’s orbit. He pays for university by starting a herd of goats from which he makes cheese for a hippie commune. At 15 he thinks up the idea of shared virtual reality: “putting each other in dreams.” By 17, he has flunked out but finds himself at 19 playing jazz sets with Richard Feynman at Calthech.

Lanier then launches himself into a nascent Silicon Valley without even a high school diploma. At this point it becomes clear - certainly to the reader, perhaps at the time even to Lanier - what he has always been: a mystic. As I have discussed elsewhere (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), mystics are not necessarily religious, and they are almost always annoying. They’re judgmental without apparent reason, socially awkward, irritatingly self-contained, and driven by strange and alien forces which they cherish. So indeed, does Lanier describe himself.

Lanier‘s mysticism attaches itself to technology. In other times and places and circumstances, it might have taken to steam engines, or string concerts, or baroque architecture; but for him it happened to be computers and the emerging field of artificial intelligence. Mysticism is not a job description. No mystic ever got paid well, or at all, for being a mystic. But if they’re lucky, and Lanier was, they get to be mystical through what they do for a living.

This isn’t easy to do. In the first instance, mysticism is not a conscious philosophy of life. Neither is it a systematic or rational roadmap for one’s career. Simply put, mystics make connections, usually strange ones which they can neither explain nor completely describe; they just know. They don’t analyse; they see wholes and marvel that others can’t. This makes them difficult to follow. They don’t proceed from a beginning leading to some terminal point; they proceed from beginning to beginning. There is only flow, process, indeterminacy; never a conclusion. This is precisely what annoyed me so intensely when I read Ten Arguments.

But I know Lanier is a mystic primarily because of his attitude toward what he does. For him, VR is not just a scientific or technological pursuit; it is the central science and the most important area of technological development. It is for him, therefore, the core of human intellectual activity. Or, perhaps better said, it is the entirety of thought itself, and therefore of the universe. VR is Lanier’s language for the connections among things which are not connected in normal discourse - from neurology to cosmology and from preconscious sensation to eschatology. VR is code for these potential connections.

VR is also an attitude, a stance toward the world, and a method: “Virtual reality peels away phenomena and reveals that consciousness remains and is real. Virtual reality is the technology that exposes you to yourself.” That is, the object of study through VR is not programming, or information, or ‘the world’ but oneself. This is a remarkably mystical point of view. It allows Lanier to devote himself to the technology without idolizing it. He knows its dark side, just as his knows his own.

VR has a spiritual component for Lanier. “Virtual reality was and remains a revelation,” he says. Perhaps not for everyone, but I believe him. That’s what he experiences. VR for him is indeed a transcendent event. He explicitly admits as much: “As technology changes everything, we here have a chance to discover that by pushing tech as far as possible we can rediscover something in ourselves that transcends technology.”

What is most interesting is the source of this transcendence. It isn’t in the successful creation of technology, but in the failure to do so: “Bugs were the dreams within virtual reality. They transformed you.” This realization brings with it a truly stirring thought: “Maybe there’s peace and happiness to be found in uncertainty. There isn’t anywhere else to look.” This in turn leads to a profound existential appreciation of what he is up to in his professional life: “VR is the technology that... highlights the existence of your subjective experience. It proves you are real.”

Others who know much more about artificial intelligence and the practicalities of survival in Silicon Valley will have a different take on Dawn of the New Everything. But for me, Lanier’s book is a revelation about how it is possible to live one’s life, whether in high-tech or not. We all play the cards we’re dealt; but what’s special about Lanier, it seems to me, is that he took his hand and insisted on his own game: An unexpected inspiration.

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The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West 
by 

Mark Lilla

 

The Kingdom of Darkness Revived

Lilla’s thesis in this well-conceived and well-written book is that the separation of theology and politics which took place in the 17th century has left enormously important issues unaddressed and therefore unresolved. These issues have subsequently grown in theoretical significance and practical impact. Without intellectual effort to resolve them, he believes, they will continue to undermine the most important institutions of modern liberal, democratic government. I think he's got the wrong end of the stick. The solution isn't better thinking, it's more inclusive politics.

The turning point for European political thought occurs, according to Lilla, with the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in 1651. Leviathandestroyed utterly the theological theory of the state based on divine will and replaced it with an anthropological theory rooted in human fear and the need for security. One might argue with the specific facts of history or human character contained in the book, but not with the magnitude of its impact on the world of political thought.

The fact that Hobbes as well as so many other political theorists left more than a few loose ends is obvious. If realisation of the divine will is not the ultimate point of politics then what is? The will of some equally vague concept called The People? The, one hopes benign, will of an absolute dictator? Or is such authoritative will some implicit, hidden, even racial desire of a populace which only becomes articulate through the political process? Two thirds of the book traces the responses of political philosophers, mostly German, to these questions into the 20th century.

Lilla perceptively points out that Hobbes does not rubbish religion in his argument. In fact Hobbes takes as read a certain religious impulse in human beings which is universal. This impulse, Hobbes points out, is a natural and even rational response to the extreme vulnerability which all people experience to the obvious perils of a cosmos which is at best indifferent to their well-being. Religion, Hobbes knows, brings comfort and a feeling of security to many. As such it is neither irrational nor detrimental to human life.

However I don’t think Lilla fully grasps Hobbes’s point about the specific religion he is talking about, namely Christianity. An obvious central part of Hobbes’s argument is that the doctrinal conflicts within Christianity have been the principle cause of political violence in recent European history. The Christian religion, in other words, has failed in its basic human function by increasing the levels of danger people must endure. This is the most potent point he could make, and it rings true even today as a really good reason for the separation of church and state among other principles of government.

But Hobbes of course was a political theorist writing about an alternative source to the divine will with which to justify political activity. He was not a theologian, much less a scholar of comparative religion, nor was he writing a sociological critique of Christianity. He did not, therefore, probe the source of the Christian religion, only its political effects. His primary concern was European political life, its recent history, and a way to avoid the obvious traps laid by the ecclesiastical establishment that could undermine effective, that is to say, secure, reliable, peaceful government.

Until recently there was general optimism that the political issues of anthropologically-based politics could be incrementally addressed as we muddled through the not very attractive activities of politics without divine authority. This was the principal legacy of Enlightenment. What the world has experienced, however, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, is that the political demand for a return to theologically grounded politics is growing steadily - in America, in India, in Europe, in Africa, and even in China - as a component of the new politics of culture. Christianity and its political theology have become a new political force. And not only among Christians: the more general impact of the Christian religion is to encourage other religions to see themselves in Christian terms, as religions of faith.

Such a claim, I know, needs an explanation in far greater detail than can be provided here. Nevertheless Lilla hints at it constantly even though he doesn’t seem willing or able to articulate it clearly. He knows there occurred a political change in the world with the advent of the Christian religion. In simple terms: “Christianity was not law-based,... it preserved the Decalogue but abolished the highly developed system of Jewish law in favor of a law of the heart.” Christians have always claimed that something fundamental happened, something ontological, with the arrival of Jesus in the world. And they are right; but not quite in the way they mean. [See for further discussion: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...].

Christianity is a religion of belief, of faith, of commitment to specific ideas as true and necessary and worth more than life itself. The ‘law’, that is divine commands about how to act, is dumped from Christianity at its inception as a distraction to the authentic life of the spirit (with the unaccountable exception of the Ten Commandments). Christianity, devoted as it is to ideas, consequently invented the distinction between true and false religion. Law needs to be merely obeyed; ideas must be believed. Law is socially visible in its adherence or transgression; belief is utterly private. Prior to Christianity, religion could be more or less socially dictated, spiritually effective, tribal or imperial, primitive or elegantly ceremonial. But it was never true or false. The fact that we take for granted that religion in general is constituted by beliefs about what is the case about the world is probably the greatest triumph of Christianity. It could even plausibly constitute an ontological change.

Christianity has a self-image as an ethical religion. It is not. It is a doctrinal religion which considers ethics, that is appropriate behaviour, to be derived from such doctrine. Faith is not an ethical principle, it is a theological doctrine. In Christianity the divine will is not expressed in terms of correct actions but in terms of true ideas which are formulated as dogmas and which the ‘faithful’ are required to formally endorse - even if they have no understanding of the idea itself. From time to time this central doctrine of faith might be down-played for political reasons. It nevertheless remains the radically distinguishing and fundamental proposition of the Christian religion and is logically prior to any particular doctrines like the Incarnation, Resurrection, and the Parousia or Second Coming..

It is the resurgence of this radical (more traditional, dare one say) Christianity of faith that is the nub of the problem, not some intellectual disconnect between theology and political theory. Modern political theologians do not want, as Lilla suggests, to merely “revive the messianic impulse in Western life;”(although even that seems sufficient cause for concern) They want political power, very specifically the power necessary to restrict the political power of others who do not share their faith, thus reversing the political trajectory of the last four centuries. And they will use Hobbes's anthropological desire for security as a vehicle to garner that power through fear and division. This problem is intellectual only in the sense that political theologians will formulate the most absurd arguments for the re-Christianisation of government. [See for one such argument: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...].

Lilla knows that Christianity is a peculiar kind of religion, that its “inner ambiguities produced endless doctrinal differences over spiritual and political matters that rendered medieval European life increasingly intolerant, dogmatic, fearful, and violent.”* But what he doesn’t understand (and I can arrogantly say neither did Kant and Hegel) is that this is the essential nature of faith-based religion, which hasn't changed since the 16th century, or for that matter since the 1st (see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Religion is not an equivalent word for faith, despite the fact that Christians have attempted to make it so for 2000 years. And faith-based religion does not tolerate politics, regardless of the fact that dictatorial politics are an essential component of how it decides what constitutes faith. [See for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...].

Faith has a peculiar fate when it escapes from the power of a central authority and runs loose in modern, liberal political systems. People believe different things, often ideas which are incomprehensible to them, and often different from what they profess to believe because of membership in religious groups. When life is constructed around such beliefs rather than customs, and rituals, and norms of behaviour, it is very fragile indeed. One can never presume on another man’s faith; one does not know the hidden status of another’s heart; the credal assertions of belief can’t be counted on as more than formulaic attestation of tribal membership. In other words, in a world dominated by faith no one can be trusted. Nor is negotiation possible. Customs might be altered but never doctrines. This is Hobbes’s enduring point.

Lilla also recognises that “Christian fanaticism and intolerance incited violence; violence set secular and religious leaders against one another; and the more violent and fearful political life became, the more fanatical and intolerant Christians became. Christendom had found itself in a vicious theological-political cycle unknown to any previous civilization.” He therefore correctly concludes that “the political and the religious problem are the same.” But what Lilla unaccountably seems reluctant to acknowledge is that these conditions are not incidental to Christianity; they are its inevitable consequences as soon as it touches politics. He frequently refers to Christianity as one among ‘other faiths’. Christianity is no such thing. It is THEreligion which makes faith its central mark. Faith is indeed a matter of the hidden heart and not the expressive head, nor even of the behaviour of the rest of the body connected with either of these organs. No other religion works this way.

What Lilla misses, therefore, is that Hobbes’s observations are about the anthropological nature of faith not the theological doctrine of God, Christian or otherwise. What was left as an unconsidered residue from Hobbes’s sweeping analysis was the politically debilitating concept of faith itself, which remained, festered, and has re-surfaced in 21st century life with the same divisive, irrational and often violent force that it did in the 16th century. Lilla considers the Great Separation between politics and theology to be a consequence of conflicting doctrines. Of course he is right in a sense. But conflict of beliefs can only arise when beliefs rather than norms of behaviour are the issue, that is when faith is counted as something of ultimate importance. Hobbes’s ‘Kingdom of Darkness’ is not the Christian religion per se but any religion of faith, that is any religion which promotes itself as superior to politics.

Lilla further knows that “although Christianity is inescapably political, it proved incapable of integrating this fact into Christian theology.” But what he can’t get himself to say is that this is because Christianity cannot do this and remain Christianity as a religion of faith. To the degree it takes itself seriously as a religion of faith, it will find any form of government other than its own absolute dictatorship inimical. It must do so in order to protect its prerogative for defining faith in doctrinal terms. Christianity as a religion of faith rather than of behaviour, in other words, is indeed a very definite political form, one which is incompatible in its roots to modern, constitutional, politics. 

The proof of this incompatibility is historically evident. The Catholic Church ran an open political war against democracy on just this basis throughout the 19th century, rejecting the Enlightenment view of politics as a heresy. Protestants in America had a go in the early 20th century under the banner of The Fundamentals, reaching their triumphal apogee with the insertion of the term ‘one nation under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance. Today, Evangelicals of various doctrinal stripes are conducting guerilla actions toward the same end: the inhibition of inclusive politics through the capture of key political institutions. They distort the political process without shame through racist voter restrictions, gerrymandering, and single-issue campaigns that destroy civilised debate. Lilla believes we can benefit by thinking harder about the situation. I don’t. I think it was the evangelical theologian, Mark Noll, who suggested that “The problem with the Evangelical mind is that there isn’t one.” The horse’s mouth is good enough for me.

* I can’t resist one of Lilla’s chapter epigraphs in this regard:
“The kingdom of God is among you.
LUKE 17:21
My kingdom is not of this world.
JOHN 18:36”