36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Goldstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reason in a Sea of Faith

Rebecca Goldstein knows academics and academic celebrities. She is after all both. So she knows the drill within the ivy covered walls and on the production set. She also understands the psychology. In no other line of work is the link between professional ambition and personal neurosis closer than in making one’s living with the mind. How could it be otherwise when the organ in question is central to both? Each chapter explores a distinct variety of neurotic behaviour in a world in which the mind itself has become a divinely tinged fetish.

The life of a doctoral graduate student, the academic in waiting, is especially neurotic. Some want an “inner life”; others are fascinated by and strive toward ‘genius’; still others are merely avoiding the possibility of commercial competition or manual toil. Not yet with a mind officially endorsed as professional, but also alien to the hoi pilloi of those in gainful employment, the graduate student is a sort of zombie with an ontology “somewhere between the angels and human beings.” In short, the first step in becoming a professional thinker is to join a congregation of like-minded neurotics.

The second step is to accept a source of intellectual salvation, a messiah or guru called the Supervisor. The fate of the aspiring intellect rests entirely in the hands of the Supervisor, beyond whom there is no appeal. Until the Supervisor gives his blessing, the student might be forced into the intellectual peonage of research assistant; required to attend assiduously to ego-stroking on demand; or ignored entirely for extended periods. Rigid loyalty to the messianic message is essential for one’s progress within the congregation (at Oxford, the ultimate governing body, consisting of all established academics is in fact called simply Congregation).

Only the neurotic would apply for and accept such status. And the neurosis has to be serious indeed to stay in it for an indeterminate length of time during which one’s life is on hold: “Genius itself is diseased and self-destructive, antisocial and ill-mannered. It’s also the only thing that redeems us.” This approach/avoidance contradiction is the essence of graduate studies, a horrible trap of one’s own making. One of Goldstein’s characters has made a career out of such self destruction: he “had always had a rigorous bent to his mind. He’d come to identify this as his major problem... It was why, after a full dozen years, he was still a graduate student, which was to be something a little less than human, the determination of his life for someone else to decide.”

What qualifies as a ‘significant contribution’ to one’s field of knowledge is entirely arbitrary. Innovation signifies disrespect for one’s intellectual betters. Reformulating some disciplinary truism is pedestrian. The path between the two is narrow and precipitous. Many are called but few are chosen. The least dedicated doctoral candidates leave the life of protected persecution; those who remain will likely consider suicide at frequent intervals as an option to reduce the feelings of incipient madness. The entire experience has one functional objective: to eliminate confidence. It is boot camp for the mind. Cass, the protagonist, has the searing memory from his graduate training of a profound inadequacy which has never left him: “Wherever he turned, he was confronted by the vast ignorance that made him unentitled to be a student of Faith, Literature, and Values.”

Not that it gets much better after one’s academic gonads are screwed in by an examining committee, probably stacked by the Supervisor. The professional academic game is as perilous as the preparation for it. Style, fashion, contacts, and luck are far more important than in the commercial world. And unlike the ecclesiastical world from which the institution of the university emerged, there are few career paths that are dependent upon dogmatic credentials. Results, after all, are measured not in terms of objective metrics like sales or profits or successful deals, or doctrinal orthodoxy but in terms of the opinions of one’s colleagues and peers, most of whom have reason to fear or resent one’s success. Academia doesn’t expand like business, making room by getting bigger; it expands by refining its specialisms, and each of these is a zero-sum game - every winner has its loser.

Coming out on top in academia is often a sudden event - very unlike the slow rise up a corporate ladder. Suddenly finding the light of notoriety may not be any less worrisome than obscurity. As Goldstein’s protagonist finds, “The more sophisticated you are, the more annotated your mental life, the more taken aback you’re likely to feel, seeing what the world’s lurch has brought to light, thrusting up beliefs and desires you had assumed belonged to an earlier stage of human development.” In short, you feel like a babe in the woods with absolutely no clue about how to feel or act in the circumstances: “[Cass] did something that won him someone else’s life, a better life, a more brilliant life, a life beyond all the ones he had wished for in the pounding obscurity of all his yearnings, because all of this, this, this, THIS couldn’t belong to him.”

So being a professional academic demands at least one central virtue: faith. Faith in what specific object is open to question. One’s abilities? The call to genius? The possibility of celebrity? A higher power? Whatever it is, it is beyond any rationality. And whatever else it ismight be, faith announces itself in response to the question ‘Why are you doing this?’ with the answer ‘Because’. Such a response is literally the end of reason but not the end of thought. Taking such a response seriously can lead to all sorts of thoughts that are commonly classified as metaphysical or spiritual. These thoughts may not be ‘useful’ but they seem to be irrepressible and they are certainly perennial. Whether they are also identifiably religious in any sense is entirely beside the point. They are part of being a human being.

Put another way, faith is constituted by the presumptions we make about the world that we dare not question in the normal course of our lives. It is difficult to distinguish the faith of an academic from an obsession in other people. Without obsessive faith in intellect nothing is possible; but having it guarantees nothing except bad pay, family tension and another generation of hopeful intellects to torture. Only when we summon up the courage (and the time) to confront what these presumptions have made of our lives, do we have a chance of understanding what we are.

“Everybody has written or is planning to write a book,” is a necessary academic truism. How ultimately depressing it is to think that the only reason academics read is to write something. Far more edifying to think they might read in order to explore whatever it is they might have faith in, and thereby themselves. I think this might be Goldstein’s point: academic neuroses may have their virtuous aspects. Let us hope, if not with faith then at least with charity.

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The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

High Intensity Motherhood

Am I alone in thinking that Helen DeWitt writes like the Alabama 3 play their music - a sort of Country/Acid House fusion with a surprising British flavor? She drives through her fictional life with a relentlessly hard beat of ‘this is it/me; deal with it/me’ with riffs and shouts from whatever’s around - bits of ancient language, unsuspecting academics, cultural connections no one else has ever clocked. She tolerates anything but boredom and whatever might get in between her and her son. She’s the perfect polymath mother for her genius offspring. Mama Don’t Dans 2 Tekno no mo’. She’s too busy feeding the little tyro his daily doses of number theory and archaic Hebrew tense forms. It’s he not she who sets the pace. She’s no intellectual slouch but he breaks the rate. Impossible to slow down much less get to rest. Her wit fits nicely into Bourgeoisie Blues lyrics: “his unswerving fidelity to the precept that ought implies cant and I just couldn’t.” The duet mind-melds like Spock: “An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind.” And ideas sure do, lots of ‘em: ‘How do proteins work? What do I look like, a Citizens Advice Bureau? Oh yeah, I meant to ask about what the Greeks thought about citizenship.’ They spark off each other on whatever the Adrenaline-equivalent of brain stimulant is. Can’t stop. No Peace in the Valley for sure. The world is deteriorating, but because of a sort of linguistic entropy not global warming: “it was depressing in a literature to see all the languages fading into English which in America was the language of forgetfulness.” Maternal love is a kick. Ain’t no man needed in that dynamic duo. No time anyhow. What a ride. What a pair. Sibylla and Ludo.

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The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cultural Compensation

The Examined Life strikes me as a re-incarnation of Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled which was published 40 years ago - before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher decreed the non-existence of society. Both books are written with the same structure of patient case studies. They contain the same histories of development of the writers into therapeutic maturity; the same essential message of human psychic complexity and mystery; and even some almost identical patient accounts. This doesn’t make The Examined Life redundant, only, I’m afraid, another voice crying in the wilderness of a society which doesn’t actually register its implications.

One of the unexpected side-effects of psychotherapy is the establishment of two independent Cartesian worlds - the world of everyday life in which people act stupidly as if driven by hidden forces of self-destruction over which they have no control; and the world of therapy in which the underlying purpose of such behavior is uncovered and found to be entirely rational. The first world is full of error, mishap and criminality; the second of clever adaptation to circumstances, understanding and reconciliation. The first is accepted as reality; the second as one of repair for a return to the first. They are distinct, separate, and entirely alien to one another, just as Descartes imagined them to be. But the first world is definitive as a cultural norm.

The second world, let’s call it the world of the spirit, is teleological. It presumes a purpose which can be articulated in a coherent narrative. According to Grosz, “all of us try to make sense of our lives by telling our stories... When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.” And empirically, the formulation of such stories does have an effect on the lives involved. Therapy for Grosz is largely a matter of helping patients construct coherent stories which allow them to re-enter the somewhat solipsistic mechanical world of social cause and effect with some sense of individual purpose. (As I recall Scott Peck’s stories were ones that were essentially false rationalizations. Perhaps it us story-telling ability tout court which has deteriorated during the period.)

But there is the obvious other side of the coin. We live in a culture which chooses to presume that aberrant behavior is just that - aberrant - rather than a purposeful and quite sensible adaptation to cultural presumptions. It appears that, at least in this respect, Freud was correct: society does intentionally suppress the individual for its own ends. Given the extent of psychic repression involved, it is perhaps remarkable that we have don’t have more mass murders and terrorism than we do. By the standards of psychotherapy, it is society which is in need of help since coherent narratives of purpose have fallen apart. The democratic state has demonstrated its essential absurdity; the church its political malleability and moral corruption; the corporate world its banality and indifference to human welfare.

Like Freud, I think this social/psychic schizophrenia has a great deal more to do with the doctrines and cultural remnants of religion than with the necessary conditions for the smooth-running of civil society. It is religion which has supplied us with the grand narratives of our lives even if we forget or reject them. This is particularly so in a Christianity which inserted its narrative of sin into an existing political structure and ideology. This Christian ‘meta-narrative’ restricts what other narratives, and therefore purposes, are acceptable and allowed to be thought much less expressed. Religion, therefore, once the supplier of narrative coherence for society is now the main impediment to the expression of collective purpose.

The narrative limitations imposed by Christianity are of course powerful, not only because of their persistent and pervasive presentation but also because of their political endorsement. For example, I live in a rural part of England. From a nearby hillside I can see five church spires evenly spaced over a beautiful pastoral landscape. The church was and still is present in every village. It, not some government department, was historically the enforcer of civil peace in the name of the sovereign and still provides substantial social cohesion. In America, the spires and steeples have a more subtle but more important effect. Since there is no direct connection among the federal, state, county, and local levels of government except through the courts, the denominational churches have been the traditional glue creating cross-geographic social unity.

Thus Christianity and its doctrines have been absorbed into the social fabric, including the central concept of sin. The idea of sin in Christianity is equivalent to aberrant behavior, is equivalent to subversive intent, is equivalent to criminal act. One has only to think thoughts outside the norm to be and to feel guilty. This equivalence holds even if we have largely dropped the first term in the series - sin - from respectable conversation and political debate. We don’t have a more modern term for sin, yet the concept persists in our unwillingness to accept the purposes which occur quite naturally and reasonably in fellow human beings - regarding gender, sex, race, poverty, protection, respect, among many others - that have been denied as valid and therefore repressed psychically and suppressed socially.

So I hope Grosz’s therapeutic memoir inspires individuals to consider their own personal stories. It certainly has for me. But I also hope that it provokes those same individuals to indulge the strangeness of others, including their apparent anti-social behavior, as more than what it seems. The presumption of purpose in others is often difficult but frequently rewarding, just as it is for oneself. And without that presumption, the political search for new narratives of collective purpose will fail. Scott Peck was an icon of an era of fading liberalism and its implicit recognition of social purpose; Steven Grosz, one can hope, marks some sort of return to the recognition of purpose in an apparently purposeless society.

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The Room by Jonas Karlsson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Everyday Solipsism

Long ago I was told a purportedly Hungarian folk-aphorism by a dimly remembered acquaintance: If one person calls you a horse, ignore them; if two people call you a horse, look in the mirror; if three people call you a horse, you’re a horse.

One way to interpret The Room is as a confirmation of that titbit of popular wisdom. To some extent, at least, we are or become what we are thought of by others. On the other hand the book could be a cautionary tale suggesting the precise opposite, that for better or worse we live in a world of our own making, including the making of our own personality, regardless of the opinion of others.

I think it is this ambiguity, or rather range of possibility, that makes The Room an exceptional piece of art. It twists and turns with little visible effort, provoking all sorts of insights from social attitudes toward mental handicaps, to an appreciation of autism as extreme perceptual realism, to the philosophical fragility of the concept of reality. Karlsson has packed more literary punch in his short novel than I can recall in any book many times its length.

My preferred take on The Room is as a critique of the casual, everyday, unnoticed attitude that we probably all adopt as a default strategy for dealing with the stresses of life. This attitude is one of solipsism, the belief or presumption that other people are not as fully present, as conscious, as intentional as we are. As a philosophy, solipsism is very difficult to refute. As a behavioral response, it is equally difficult to cope with practically.

Among other things solipsism stops all real discussion. Communication becomes a matter of insistent command and resentful obedience rather than negotiation. The world becomes an implacable enemy for the solipsistic mind which is isolated in a sea of irrational resistance.

Solipsism shows up not merely when others inhibit our own intentions but when they act in ways we don’t understand or find odd. We literally cannot imagine the purpose of such behaviour and therefore disparage, avoid, and suppress it as abnormal. It makes no sense to inquire about the purpose of others because they are, implicitly, either ill-conceived or simply absent.

Karlsson’s protagonist, Bjorn, is obviously ‘on the spectrum’; but he’s not crazy, at least not to begin with. He is annoying and odd. Nevertheless he is not solipsistic. He constantly considers what might be going on in the minds of his colleagues, who all treat him as a mental defective with little capacity for thought much less productive action. Bjorn might get his colleagues’ motives wrong but they act as if Bjorn doesn’t have any motives at all.

In fact Bjorn is a canny operator. He cleverly demonstrates just how talented he is. He knows the reason he is talented is precisely the thing that his colleagues find most distressing about him, his ability to retreat entirely inside his head in order to think, to contemplate, without interruption. Unlike him, they do not have the imagination required to understand his mental workings. Until, that is, he demonstrates its value.

Karlsson’s subsequent twist - in fact two - on this tale of a flawed but perceptive mind in society is brilliant - so brilliant it both confirms and denies the Hungarian aphorism. Human beings are indeed strange but intriguing creatures. And Karlsson has got their measure, or at least enough of it to create something classic.

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Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Vulnerability of Concentrated Knowledge

Battles’s charming little book on the history of the library is a moral tale, the theme of which he frequently emphasizes. Put simply: the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Until modern times, the largest collections of human knowledge were without exception subject to destruction, either by accident, purposeful vengeance, or governmental directive. The conclusion has to be that although libraries are rather quaint places to hang out and read, they really are an ontologically high-risk institution.

It strikes me that the library is intellectually high-risk as well. Collections must be organized to be of any use. This implies a system of classification by which ‘similar’ items are catalogued and usually stored near one another in the collection. The purpose of such a system is obviously to facilitate research by associating items with each other, typically by subject, author, and epoch. But as every librarian knows, all such classifications are arbitrary. No book neatly fits into a single category and ultimately it is placed in one for the convenience of the librarian not that of the reader or researcher. Battles describe classification systems as “an opaque cabalism of numbers and letters defiant of intuition, replete with the formulaic rigor of ‘scientific’ bibliography.” I think he’s being kind.

Nevertheless very large collections like the Library of Congress tend to exert an organizing power which is a virtual monopoly. The LC system of classification has become an unofficial worldwide standard. Part of the reason for this is economic: it is expensive to train and employ cataloguers who are competent in the use of the arcane coding conventions of the trade. Cheaper by far to buy the cataloguing records of the LC and use them in one’s own less prestigious institution. These lesser entities, including Battles’s Widener Library and Oxford’s Bodleian, may quibble with the arcana of the coding but they don’t mess with the LC’s decision on where a book belongs and how it gets connected to other books.

The economic efficiency of classification, therefore, becomes the ‘vector’ for the spread of the LC system; and also, therefore, for the spread of the errors as well as the arbitrariness it contains. In my own little college library in Oxford, which specializes in philosophy and theology, for example, the LC classifications could only be considered incompetent and were rejected en masse. This was a great annoyance to our Bodleian ‘partners’ who set a formidable standard of anal/obsessive authoritarianism. My suspicion has always been that the arbiters of taste within the LC hierarchy had very little knowledge or interest in either philosophy or theology. I have no reason to believe that their ability in, say, quantum physics or post-modern fiction is any better.

Part of the problem, perhaps the major part, is that librarians themselves have become obsolete ever since the explosion of learning in the early eighteenth century. Leibniz, it is said, was the last man to know everything; he died in 1716. If so, he would have been the last competent cataloguer. Since then, the best any librarian could do would be to venture a vague guess about what is connected to what in the soup of knowledge. But he or she needs a job after all: no libraries, no librarians; no need for classified collections, no need for libraries. QED. But the pretense persists that libraries are necessary. Librarians are the fascist enforcers of the classification scheme. Aside from ensuring quiet and returning books to the stacks, they have no function. A security guard watching a monitor and a robot could serve just as well.

Any modern classification system, particularly because it is fixed in its general structure, is an anachronism. It’s not merely the old fashioned card catalogues which are out of date; it is the basic concept of librarians that collected knowledge is necessary and can be classified, as if it were an expanded version of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, that is simply wrong. These classifications exist not for readers, who can now search for documents by any terms they wish through a half dozen publicly available search engines, but for librarians who otherwise would become either warehouse assistants trained by Amazon or contract programmers.

As one who enjoys the feel, the smell and the craft of books, I am sad that, based on Battles’s narrative and my own experience, the library as an institution is a dead man walking. Its physical vulnerability, the impossibility of maintaining the conceit of a ‘universal’ or even a complete specialized collection, the irrational and unnecessary systems of library classification are compelling facts. Additionally, as Battles suggests, most published material is junk and not worth either the cost of classification or the space to store it. This historical fact becomes more apparent everyday as the internet churns out more and more of it. Do I trust any of the functionaries in any library to decide the toss about what constitutes junk versus intellectually important material? Hardly.

The space of the library might, therefore, still be useful for a quiet read, but the miles of shelving and the skills of an army of cataloguers constitute a depreciating liability not a cultural asset. And maintenance of such an asset is not a very skilled or necessary profession. But there is an upside: WalMart greeters might qualify for new career possibilities.

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The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times by Christopher Lasch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Problem With Survival

Christopher Lasch was an intellectual hero of my youth. He was, in my still to be formed mind, a synthesizer of all the social thought that mattered. From psychology to politics, from technology to sociology, he seemed to have assimilated everything that was known about modern society and he re-formulated that knowledge with astounding skill, grace and judgment. Even so, reading him now after half a century, I find that I probably underestimated his thinking as much as I overestimated my ability to understand its implications.

The Minimal Self was written in the early 1980’s, a pivotal point in the cultural and political life of America. Greed was good. Communism was bad. Reagonomics reigned. And Americans were paranoid - certainly not for the first time but in a manner that was signally more desperate after their defeat in Vietnam, in the midst of profound economic woes and racial tension, and with a general feeling of being unable to control their lives. In a word, used by Lasch, the country was beleaguered.

Like the Boers in South Africa, Americans hunkered down. The national ethos became one of resistance - to ‘non-traditional values’, to economic and military challenges from elsewhere, but mostly resistance to itself. Its fear of what it might become in a future over which its influence was questionable had a dramatic change on its politics that few but Lasch noticed: an obsession with survival. Survival of a ‘way of life’, survival of the environment, survival of institutions like the family, survival of ‘democratic freedoms’. America had adopted a sort of “siege mentality,” the consequences of which wouldn’t be visible for decades as it persisted, festered and matured.

Politically, America had reached a pivotal ideological and cultural point: “The hope that political action will gradually humanize industrial society has given way to a determination to survive the general wreckage or, more modestly, to hold one’s own life together in the face of mounting pressures.” Lasch diagnosed this condition as a sort of national narcissism. Narcissism is not the equivalent of selfishness or egotism but a “confusion of the self and the not-self.”

“The minimal or narcissistic self is”, Lasch says, “above all, a self uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union.” The narcissist inhabits a world of struggling fantasy, discovering and fighting battles against the world in general. Illusion is the narcissist’s life-blood. He (and I suppose she) strives continually to “attempt to restore narcissistic illusions of omnipotence.” Crucially the narcissist has no ideal as an end point of such striving, no vision, no strategy; merely the objective of being in control.

It is inevitable that one encounters Trump in this description of the emerging personality of America. Lasch also spots the Promethean pretense inherent in Trump’s Make America Great Again. This is a pretense because it masks profound feelings of inadequacy: “...narcissism...[is] a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires—not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and to provide for their own needs.”

Narcissism is not functional, either for an individual or a nation. It is ultimately destructive: “It seeks both self-sufficiency and self-annihilation.” The survivalist living in the Montana mountains, the racists provoking conflict wherever they can, the resentful rural folk who feel by-passed by what they perceive as urban-centrism, the nihilist electorate which doesn’t quite know what they want politically but it isn’t ‘this’, along with Trump himself are quite prepared to destroy American society in order to dominate it. This is the profound meaning of the ‘We don’t care’ response of his supporters to his increasingly clear mendacity, criminal associations, and incompetence.

The Trumpians are indeed driven by a passion. But this passion is not directed to anything in particular, not even the improvement of their own economic or political status much less that of the nation. According to Lasch: “Narcissism signifies a loss of selfhood, not self-assertion. It refers to a self threatened with disintegration and by a sense of inner emptiness. To avoid confusion, what I have called the culture of narcissism might better be characterized, at least for the moment, as a culture of survivalism.” Trump’s narcissism has led him just the point he wants to be - on the edge of survival. And he’s doing his best to put the rest of the world there as well.

Many parts of Lasch read like they were written yesterday not decades ago. He is sage in a manner that seems to have been largely lost among more recent social critics. I find him inspirational as well as astute. One could do worse, therefore, than to revisit Lasch and his frightenly prescient work today. I intend to, and recommend him highly to others.

Postscript 17Sept18: here is an analysis that also traces the problem back to the Reagan years in a rather interesting way: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/americ...

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The Mystery of the Aleph 
by 

Amir D. Aczel

 

Seeing the World In Numbers

Kabbalah is an ancient form of textual deconstruction, a technique whose purpose is to undermine the accepted conventions of biblical language, thereby promoting interesting new hypotheses about their meaning. A principle function of Kabbalah is therefore literary; it is a method which can be expanded to the creative interpretation of all texts (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). But mathematics is also such a technique which, quite apart from its analytical use, allows creative synthetic interpretations of natural language and its conventions. In The Mystery of the Aleph, Aczel shows how mathematics and Kabbalah perform similar cultural duties.

Kabbalistic interpretation is, in a sense, intended to penetrate beyond the barrier of given language not by intensifying description (phenomenology) or by making more precise definitions of the components of natural language (words and grammar), but rather by allowing language entirely free rein. Language is recognized in Kabbalah as necessarily circular (only words can define other words); and, if not arbitrary, at least stiflingly conventional (bird, oiseaux, and Vogel have cultural connotations which prevent their straightforward equivalence). Some words, of course, are simply untranslatable from one natural language to another. For example, the Mesoamerican Nahuatl glyph tlacuilolli fuses the concepts of letter, art and mathematics. Or try to make an accurate translation of the Hebrew ‘waw consecutive’ tense; it’s not possible. So Kabbalah doesn’t ‘fight’ language, it takes it as all there is and doesn’t even attempt to connect language with material things in the world, or indeed even with independent meaning (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

One of the techniques of Kabbalah is called gematria, the use of numbers to substitute for and to analyze texts. The technique effectively translates the text from one language - a natural one - to another - mathematics. The immediate effect of gematria, therefore, is to transform the text from the realm of discrete, finite letters, words and phrases to a very different domain of what is technically called the mathematical continuum. This continuum, unlike natural language, by definition, has no gaps or breaks such as those which exist between letters and words. It is both infinitely precise and infinitely extensive. In other words, the transformed language is dense in the sense that there are many more elements of expression than the mere 26 letters of the alphabet (in English) and than in the contents of the Oxford English Dictionary.

In fact the domain of gematria, because it is expressed in numbers, overwhelms its natural language ‘host’. Since It is infinitely dense (there are an infinite collection of numbers between say 0 and 1), and infinitely extended (there is no greatest nor no least number), it can potentially express far more than a somewhat ramshackle vocabulary. Therefore the use of numbers as a linguistic tool expands interpretive possibilities without limit. There is literally no end to the exploration of texts in which to discover, to innovate, interesting meanings. Intuition and systematic investigation are equally valid and both may result in any number of fruitful new interpretations (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

It is in their consideration of the infinite that Kabbalah and modern mathematics touch each other rather intimately. This is the realm of the Aleph - the designation of infinity in both. As Aczel notes “The Kabbalists were apparently aware of the fact that infinity exists both as an endless collection of discrete items and as a continuum. God was viewed as both these infinities, as well as infinities so complex that they could not be conceived by the human mind.” Kabbalists in fact anticipated many important concepts of the infinite several hundred years before academic mathematicians. Conversely mathematical infinity has always had a religious connotation, from the ancient Greeks through the 20th century Catholic Church.

Aczel provides a great deal of detailed and interesting mathematical history to demonstrate the prescience of the great Kabbalists. But what strikes me most about his narrative is something that he never makes explicit, namely that mathematics as a professional discipline performs a very similar function to Kabbalah but on a broader scale. A direct result of mathematics, particularly the mathematics of infinity, is the profound de-centering of many ‘obvious’ truths about the world in a manner which is very Kabbalistic indeed. Or perhaps the comparison should be made the other way round: Kabbalah is, it could be argued, a specialized form of mathematical research.

Aczel implicitly makes a strong case that mathematics has been a language used to challenge natural language from the beginning of formal mathematical study. For example, the ancient Pythagoreans, by considering the entire world as constituted by numbers, created not just geometry but also initiated a cultural revolution about the nature of inquiry as something independent from commercial, practical or otherwise ‘useful’ purposes. Galileo’s and Kepler’s acute ability to see the world as numbers rather than material things provided the insight which literally displaced the minds of human beings about their significance within the universe. 

And the challenges by mathematics to the concepts and relationships embedded in natural language, if anything, have increased in intensity as the discipline has progressed. It was the mathematical demonstration of relativity and quantum physics which showed, and continues to show, how wrong our conventional views about the basic structure of the universe have been. In other words, as in Kabbalah, the use of mathematics is in the first instance a way to overcome fixed intellectual prejudices embedded in language (the sun rises) and to formulate new ‘guesses’ about the character of reality (orbiting planets sweep elliptical orbits of equal area in any period of time).

Most remarkably, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the mathematical investigation of infinity has undermined conventional wisdom about the world and shown the constraining character of language in rather startling ways. For example, in the mathematics of infinity there are as infinitely many numbers between say 0 and 1 as there are between 0 and 2, despite the extended domain of the latter. Put another way: any sub-set of an infinite set has as many elements as the whole set. Even stranger, it has been demonstrated that the number of points on say one edge of a cube is exactly the same as the number of points in the entire cube.

Thus the distinction between parts and wholes becomes very blurry indeed. And without that distinction, all descriptions of the world, words themselves, become, at best, poetic. What they might signify is indeterminate. Descriptive theory, therefore, is certainly not something that could be reliably called scientific. The problem of infinite sets even threatens the language of mathematics itself with formidable paradoxes like those of Russell and Godel; these paradoxes make physical issues like quantum entanglement look like child’s play.

This is more than mildly disconcerting to anyone who considers the logic of natural language seriously. Quite simply language can’t cope with the strange character of infinity. Take the fact that there are various orders of infinity, perhaps an infinity of increasingly infinite sets of numbers. This is certainly sufficient to undermine one’s certainty about the accuracy of settled scientific not to say religious opinions. Things get really loopy when it’s shown that “given any number, there is no ‘next’ number.” Any purported next number will have one before it in sequence. Mathematics, in other words, compromises much of what we know or can express through natural language (Failure to recognise that mathematics constitutes a distinct linguistic universe has been the source of much philosophical anguish; See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

Both Kabbalah and mathematics have been criticized for being ‘disconnected’ from reality. And of course they are. The mathematician Georg Cantor developed a whole class of so called transfinite numbers which are literally beyond reality. The result is a language of unreality, in which many unreal things can be expressed. This is very Kabbalah-like indeed. In Kabbalah, for example, the apparently spurious correlations between random biblical words and phrases have no certain referents in the world outside the text at hand. In principle this is no different from the apparent ‘un-testability’ of mathematical formulations in serious physics like String Theory; these too may have no physical referent (See this review by another GR contributor: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

These are consequences of treating language as if it were all that existed and quite independent of any material referents. The criticism of disconnection, therefore, is absolutely justified. Claims by a Madonna in the popular press or even by reputable professionals in scientific journals may in fact be entirely without merit and deserve to be dismissed either out of hand or after careful assessment (for an entry into the fun of celebrity pseudo-science, See: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...). This is a necessary cost which must be paid for treating language - either natural or mathematical - as an isolated, enclosed entity.

However, neither the silliness of a Madonna nor the extreme abstractness of String Theory invalidates Kabbalah or mathematics as a source of interesting insights about the world. Both are in effect alternative languages of parallel fictional universes, with their own distinctive rules and embedded relationships connecting their elements. They are different from natural languages because every element and relationship is defined unambiguously - the Kabbalah through the ten Sefirot or names of God, mathematics through its fundamental axioms. And although they are both finite in terms of their underlying generative principles, they have infinite expressive power. They can combine and re-combine their elements without limit and without the need to demonstrate either the truth or usefulness of any combination.

Quite apart from the role they might have in the analysis of material objects, therefore, Kabbalah and mathematics have the capacity to provoke new thought about what might be the case about the world, including what objects it might contain, such as distinct levels of infinity. These objects may then become part of a previously unrecognized reality in natural language. And this applies as much to scientific research as it does to literary interpretation. Thus the disconnection from ‘things’ is not a flaw but the primary functional characteristic of Kabbalah and mathematics. This characteristic is what links them both historically and in terms of purpose. They catch language at its own game and wring its neck until it yields, even if only marginally and temporarily (an outstanding literary example of the power of mathematics to transcend language in order to promote human communication may be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

Aczel also has an interesting hint - which he also mentions in his book Finding Zero - about the relationship between Kabbalah and mathematics - essentially that they challenge each other in a way analogous to their respective challenges to natural language (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). It is clear for example that mathematics is rather adept at explaining the unstated rationale for many of the intuitions of Kabbalah. But Aczel also believes that Kabbalah is potentially useful to mathematics as a way out of the paradoxes of infinite set theory. I am far from sufficiently competent to assess the merits of such a suggestion. Nevertheless, I find it an intriguing possibility which might fit comfortably in an overall theory of semiotic development that includes mathematics and mystical meditation as well as natural language.

Call it directed meditation, out of the box thinking, structured insight, paradigm-shifting, or skunk works, the profound epistemological point of both Kabbalah and mathematical formulation is to break out of whatever constraining linguistic state we happen to be in. Much of the resulting thought may turn out to be junk. In fact, as in Borges’s Library of Babel, most of it is junk, hiding important kernels of knowledge in an infinite labyrinth. But like genetic mutations in living things, that is the nature (and the cost) of creativity; most hypotheses formulated through ‘disconnected’ language will be useless or trivial. The role of science is to sort out which is which. However without the useless and trivial, the profound would never evolve to the level of scientific scrutiny (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

Seeing the world as constituted by numbers, in other words, is a way to overcome the power that language has over us in limiting and distorting our understanding of reality. I think that just as Kabbalah works to deconstruct texts in order to break out of conventional interpretations, so mathematics, particularly number theory and the mathematics of infinity, has an important function in undermining the fixed meaning of natural language and the pattern of thought it imposes. For me, Aczel’s narrative leads precisely to this point, one I find fascinating and, who knows, perhaps one that is worth more than Madonna’s or String Theory’s predictions.

Postscript 18Sept18: This piece gives a confirming perspective on the language-like character of mathematics: https://www.popsci.com/what-does-math...

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Theological Politics

For an avowed atheist, Arthur Clarke had a great deal to say about God, and not all of it negative. Childhood’s End is a tale of the theological roots of politics and how religious belief simultaneously stimulates and inhibits human society. Clarke’s view is subtle, complex, and appropriately ‘cosmic.’ As a commentary on the centrality of religion to human existence - for its opponents as well as its adherents - Childhood’s End is hard to beat.

If I read Clarke correctly, his view is that God is not the product of frightening illusion but of loving emotion. God is the idea we use to describe the wholly irrational but irresistibly compelling force of human affection. Fear is merely a derivative emotion brought about by the threat of loss of affection, not something positive, therefore, but an absence of love. The force of love is invisible, immaterial, unmeasurable, enacted everywhere and at all times; but it is, without any doubt, real. What Clarke does in Childhood’s End is provide a voice for such philosophical realism.

Love in all its forms - sexual, familial, communal, special, and inter-special - is only minimally an instinct, that is a motivation or drive. Rather it is a learned ability, a capacity which increases with experience and practice. Childhood’s End opens with conflict; moves to feelings of trust and friendship by one individual towards a powerful alien; and develops, under alien direction - which is effectively omniscient and omnipotent - into general peace and harmony among all of humanity. The capacity to love evolves over a century such that personal jealousy has disappeared, crime is almost unknown, involuntary or oppressive human toil has been eliminated, economic abundance and equality have been substantially achieved. In other words: paradise has arrived.*

Love is also a metaphysical condition. That is, it cannot be demonstrated to be beneficial, or even to be at all, except through a commitment to it. It is self-validating just as its antithesis, fear, is self-validating. Love and the world is loving; fear and the world is fearsome. The alien Overlords bring the whole of humanity to the metaphysical revelation of love through their tutelage and discipline. Only when love has been created as a reality can it be perceived and appreciated as a reality. This is a metaphysical paradox which is known to the Overlords, but must be demonstrated by human beings to themselves.

“But the stars are not for man,” the Overlord Supervisor proclaims. Human beings are not sufficiently competent in the skills of love to include anything outside their rather insignificant world. They may never be. They are therefore denied by the Overlords - in the name of love - the knowledge which would allow them to travel to distant worlds. This constraint is annoying and incomprehensible to many, mainly scientific types - not unlike the prohibition of eating from the Tree in the Garden. And the Supervisor could foresee the consequences, just as the book of Genesis had described - a loss of the Golden Age of innocence.

(view spoiler)[But it is not the scientists who are the first to rebel. The trouble starts among creative types - artists, actors, film producers, writers, musicians. They feel cheated because they have nothing to struggle against. Without an ‘other,’ they say that society has lost the ability to be creatively imaginative. So they club together in an isolated sub-culture to reverse the trend, as they see it, of people becoming “passive sponges” absorbing banal popular culture. Led by a Moses-like figure, the artistic inhabitants, appreciate the peace and ease of their world but still feel it is inadequate.

So according to Clarke’s story, the half-life of metaphysical appreciation is extremely limited. Love and its effects are easily taken for granted. We are a thankless species in our search for more, better, adventure or just something different. The skills of love can be lost within a generation. The absence of love spreads like a virus among a society’s children, creating a new species through a sort of Lamarckian mutation. The consequences are catastrophic: “It was the end of civilization, the end of all that men had striven for since the beginning of time. In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future” (hide spoiler)]

Theology considers love as a gift which is received from elsewhere. It can’t be produced on demand, only received when made available. We have no right to it and it dissipates when it is presumed upon. More important, it can be taken away by whoever or wherever it came from. It can disappear instantly as both an emotion and a practice. Love is a mystery about which Homo Sapiens has no clues. Therefore, when love is lost, we are wont to deify and pray to it as well as for it. Hence the remark of one of the characters early on in Childhood’s End: “Basically, the conflict [between the Overlords and humankind] is a religious one, however much it may be disguised.”

So the reason for the Overlords refusal to enlighten humankind eventually is made clear “The road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears.” There may be an Overmind which is superior to the Overlords and calls the shots in the universe; there may even be an intelligence, or many, which are superior to the Overmind. It matters not at all. Oblivion is inevitable. Love as we know it will likely be destroyed since it doesn’t really seem to conform to any cosmic purpose. This is a brutal religious truth and one we’d rather not deal with: There is no reward for love, except love itself. Recognition of this truth is the real end of childhood and marks an entry into grown-up thinking.

*There is substantial theological precedent for the idea of an evolving capacity for human beings to not only behave with each other, but also to behave, as it were, when confronted with divine revelation. The medieval Joachim of Floris, Nicholas of Cusa, and the modern Teilhard de Chardin are Christian examples. Jewish Kabbalists like Akiva, Luria, and Abulafia held similar views. Interestingly, it is the Mormons who hold this view most explicitly in their doctrine of the progressive divinization of humankind. Clarke is clearly tapping in to a long-held cultural tradition in this story. See here for more on the theology of sci-fi: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Road to Damascus on US hwy. 395 in Central California

Barbara Ehrenreich lives in her head. So do I. I, and I think she, can’t imagine any other mode of living. We share, if that’s not too oxymoronic an idea, a solipsistic attitude toward the world in general - that it really is dependent upon my thinking it into existence. We both know that this is irrational and a social handicap. But the attitude is not a matter of choice. Through some combination of nature and nurture, it is our fate to live on a sort of cosmic stage-set on which we are the only motivating force, constantly questioning why the props are where they are, and who wrote the script.

The disadvantages of the solipsistic tendency are obvious: we appear enigmatic, aloof, self-possessed if not acutely self-absorbed. Inexplicably we also appear this way to ourselves which promotes a permanent state of doubt crossing frequently into cynicism. This mystically tinged otherness is perhaps our most annoying character trait as attested by parents, siblings, colleagues and ex-spouses. To find another who is similarly disordered is, paradoxically, a comfort; not because misery loves company but because Schadenfreude is a real thing: There is someone, thank goodness, who may be worse off, metaphysically speaking, than me.

Nonetheless there is a reason for our solipsistic existence. We can’t explain it, but we can describe it. This is a public service. Having just finished How Proust Can Change Your Life, Ehrenreich’s Living With a Wild God is the perfect example of de Botton’s thesis: an appreciation of one’s life cannot be rushed and demands a developed vocabulary. For Ehrenreich it was Conrad rather than Proust who provided an initial motivation, but her point is the same: writing about one’s life, particularly its most incomprehensible moments, eases the stress of living it.

And if one gives it enough time the result just might be a therapeutic document, therapeutic certainly for the author and, with any luck, for others who don’t have her linguistic talent, as inspiration as well as example. It is also very helpful as a means of constraining oneself from giving constant stage directions. Ehrenreich says, “The reason I eventually became a writer is that writing makes thinking easier, and even as a verbally underdeveloped fourteen-year-old I knew that if I wanted to understand ‘the situation,’ thinking was what I had to do.” ‘The situation’ of course is how things are connected in one’s head, which one comes to realize is only remotely connected to the stage-set.

This disconnection, what the cognitive psychiatric types condemn as dissociation, is a positive adaptation. It doesn’t make us any less annoying, but it does allow us to be functional in society. It also allows us to have our visions, aberrant perceptions, and various intellectual conceits without having to constantly explain the unexplainable. This is sufficient cause for those of us traveling in Ehrenreich’s psychic boat to read her memoir. She might even make subjective introversion respectable. Then again I wouldn’t count on any widespread support in an America grounded in belief and faith. “Belief is intellectual surrender;” she says, “‘faith’ is a state of willed self-delusion.” I think I’m in love.

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How Proust Can Change Your Life 
by 

Alain de Botton (Goodreads Author)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Sep 09, 2018  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: british, criticism, philosophy-theology, epistemology-language 

Words Are Your Homeland

One of the most important deficiencies in the philosophy of science (and business, which prides itself as a practical science) is the idea of efficiency of inquiry in scientific method - how to get an answer to a question at hand with the least possible effort. Efficiency is predicated on the idea that it is possible to pare down the world to some essential core - somewhat like finding the right principle in law - such that the matter seems to resolve itself through compelling factual evidence. 

Efficiency of inquiry is a false friend however. One is reminded, for example, that over the last few decades things like eggs, meat, and dairy products have been classified as healthy, dangerously unhealthy and definitively life-invigorating by successive scientific studies. Or consider the pharmaceutical industry which makes a living by conducting efficient inquiry under government supervision for whole classes of drugs from amphetamines to minor tranquilizers, to opioids. Each of these has been shown to be dangerously biased and incomplete by yet more efficient inquiry. Efficiency, it would seem, is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The problem of course is that the efficiency of inquiry - or of economic production, or of medical treatment or, for that matter, of reading - is crucially dependent upon the definition one uses for what constitutes a successful result. What constitutes a relevant fact is determined by what success means in human terms. Eating red meat, for example, may be correlated with an increased incidence of heart disease. So the dietary advice is ‘eat less red meat’. On the other hand, red meat may improve, say, liver function. So the contradictory advice to ‘eat more meat’ is appropriate. Or as obvious with a drug like the Sackler family’s OxyContin, it is very efficient in relieving chronic pain; it is however even more efficient in creating mass opioid dependency.

It should be obvious therefore that the issue of which criterion to choose as a measure of success, of value, is logically and practically prior to any issue of efficiency. This implies an inescapable paradox: if inquiry about the correct criterion of ‘good’ action is subject to the demands of efficiency, the inquiry will fail. Without an enormous amount of apparently senseless chat about ‘why’ it is simply not possible to give an efficient answer about ‘how’. This applies to all aspects of human life: scientific, commercial, personal and moral. There is no way to discover or articulate what philosophers call the Good, without seemingly pointless, and endless, discourse with oneself as well as others.

This I think is the central thesis of de Botton’s little book: method is rational; value is political. The discussion and choice of method is necessarily a matter of politics, that is of resolving the conflict about what is important. This is simultaneously obvious and unpalatable. In brief (and therefore with entirely inappropriate efficiency): Wasting time in political argument is a necessary condition for saving time, as well as one’s life. Cutting short the argument compromises the result of inquiry. De Botton is much more elegant: “The more an account is compressed, the more it seems that it deserves no more space than it has been allocated.” Efficiency of expression, that is, can trivialize what is expressed - joy, sorrow, death, deprivation and, most important, life. One only need observe the quality of feelings expressed on Twitter for example to appreciate the depth of the problem.

De Botton presents this problem as profoundly present and fundamental for human existence and marvels “how vulnerable much of human experience is to abbreviation.” When we abbreviate the experience of others - either through ‘scientific’ inquiry or merely the way we read the newspaper - we condition ourselves to abbreviating our own experience as well as everyone else’s. The Twittersphere, as it were, is a consequence not a cause of inadequate appreciation of what might constitute the Good, and therefore the criteria of right action - that is to say, ethics.

So de Botton is keen that we recognize the therapeutic value not only of Proust’s technically rather inefficient memoir, In Search of Lost Time, but also of Proust’s life itself, which he devoted to finding as many words possible that might help others to appreciate their own experiences: “Far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, it was a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to appreciate life.” It takes a long period of concentrated effort to discover a vocabulary for describing one’s experience of something like wine. Inexplicably, the vocabulary comes before the experience. Appreciation of life also leads with the words necessary to describe its experiences. Many more words and much more time is required to collect the words for living - one’s internal politics - than for wine-tasting. De Botton suggests a Proustian slogan for increasing one’s life’s vocabulary. In its linguistic brevity it is apt but rather un-Proustian: “n’allez pas trop vite.” Don’t rush it!

Return From the Stars by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cosmic PTSD

It was called Soldier’s Heart in the American Civil War. Shell shock was a condition of the First World War. Battle fatigue of the Second. But the condition we know as PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, was unknown in previous conflicts and emerged from the American War in Vietnam. Each is a distinct syndrome befitting the circumstances of the time, including the prevailing technology. And I think there’s a good case to be made that the literature of each period created the ability to differentiate each development. Specifically I think Lem invented PTSD; and Return From the Stars is his diagnostic guide to the condition.*

PTSD is of course stress-related and occurs primarily through the experience of extended periods of life-threatening activities, particularly but not exclusively warfare. PTSD has several distinctive symptoms which differentiate the condition from other sorts of combat-induced stress. It need not involve physical injury or acute deprivation, for example. Individuals may be materially well cared for yet suffer intensely through the loss of comrades and the profound psychic dislocation or acting in an alien environment. It is also not typically a condition of the battlefield itself but one which manifests primarily after the time of peril has passed and upon reflection on experience.

But perhaps most significantly, PTSD depends crucially on the cultural context in which the survivor of danger finds him or herself. Having lived through an alien and alienating experience - the Americans in Vietnam, the British in Iraq, Russians in Afghanistan, Portuguese in Angola, the French in Algeria - individuals who return to an environment which is both different from their memories and hostile to their experience appear far more likely to show relevant symptoms. Because there are fewer individuals affected than in ‘world’ conflicts, and the personal risk of expressing the impact of their experiences in a culture which does not respect much less value those experiences, the psychic strain is of a unique variety.

Lem’s protagonist, Bregg, doesn’t return to Earth from war. Nevertheless he has spent 10 years under enormous physical and psychological pressure as a pilot on a mission to a distant star system. He has lost two of his four colleagues during the mission, and has returned to Earth a psychic burn-out, questioning both his youthful motivations and his continued career.

The Earth to which he has returned is unrecognizable as the one he left. His ten years away are equivalent to more than twelve times that for those who have not been traveling near light-speed. Nothing is how he had left it - technology, architecture, economics, food, the rituals and mores of everyday life, including sex, are entirely foreign. Moreover his mission, his sacrifice, has become déclassé in contemporary society. Even his musculature and stature represent a now repugnant historical epoch of high testosterone violence and machismo. He is, in short, a freak.

It is as if Lem has been able to anticipate (in 1961) the forthcoming mental effects of European and American military campaigns in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Bregg shows all the major symptoms of PTSD: depression, confusion, disorientation, alienation from both himself and his surroundings, an inability to express either the trauma of his experiences or the equal trauma of his return to ‘normal’ life. Yet the condition was not officially recognized by the medical establishment until the 1980’s.

It is possible and quite reasonable to read Return From the Stars as a prescient prediction of future technology - from Kindle to sophisticated robotics and driverless cars. But I think a solely technological emphasis shortchanges Lem’s literary as well as observational talent. His recognition of the kind of stress induced by technological development is extremely nuanced. Technology - of war, of travel, of perception - increases the ‘penetration’ of humanity into hostile and inhuman environments. Because these environments are increasingly ‘alien’, they are more acutely stressful and also more stressful to return from.

In using the device of ‘rational’ time-travel, Lem has created a narrative decades in advance of medical or sociological science for the sort of psychological effect of technology on human life. Much more than a techno-nerd therefore.

*Lem’s book was published in 1961. Arthur C. Clarke had published his Childhood’s End in 1952. Containing many of the same sci-fi tropes as the later book, particularly the return of a space-traveler to his now lost civilisation because of the effects of relativity, Lem’s emphasis is far more than Clarke’s on the psychic consequences of the technology.

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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Criminal Purpose

Intention is not the equivalent of purpose - neither for individuals nor for societies. Intention is mental and ephemeral, an idea-before-the-fact which is part of a complex of other ideas, many of which may be contrary or contradictory. Intention is expressed in what we say about what we want. Purpose is the behavioral result of actions which are actually taken, and which reveal our frequently unstated or even unconscious commitments. Purpose is the concrete effects of what we do; it is what happens. Purpose emerges from intentions through politics. We can rationalise, delude, and comfort ourselves about intention but purpose is the reality which insists on being seen for what it is. And purpose is often surprising, and sometimes ugly.

The stated intention of the American legal system is equal justice under the law, a part of the American Dream of ‘opportunity’. An actual purpose of this system is the political sterilisation and social suppression of Black America. The intentional Dream is a purposeful Illusion. It matters little whether the majority of Americans intend for this to be the case. The politics of accommodating conflicting intentions has ensured that it has come about. This is the argument presented by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow. It becomes a compelling argument once it is recognised that publicly expressed intentions - especially political intentions - have little to do with national purpose.

The American ‘War on Drugs’ is a central example of the phenomenon. Illegal drug usage was on the decline in the US in the 1970’s. The expressed political intention was to eliminate it entirely from American society. The real purpose was revealed only as the accompanying intentions of Black Ops in Central America, Conservative reaction to Great Society and Civil Rights legislation, and unresolved racial hatred began to interact. The behavioral purpose was coherent and deadly: the short term destruction of Black communities through the introduction of crack cocaine and associated criminality; and the long term political disenfranchisement of Black citizens through legislation that denies voting and a range of other fights to drug crime felons.

The purposeful results of the war have been remarkable, and remarkably unnoticed politically in America. What politician can stand against drug legislation while the war against drugs still rages? What liberal intellectual can deny the continuing impoverishment and dependency on public assistance in the Black community? And even in those organisations meant to promote the cause of Black equality like the NAACP, would it not be fatal for the future of affirmative action if they were to align with a ‘weak’ stance on crime? A perfect sociological storm therefore - one might almost say conspiracy, and who knows, it may well be.

It is important to understand that the national purpose has nothing to do with the reduction of crime. Criminality is part of the purpose. Alexander says “The term mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison. Once released, former prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion. They are members of America’s new undercaste.” This undercaste is in fact a new way to legitimate racial oppression. That is its purpose regardless of intention. Only when someone like Alexander articulates this sort of implicit purpose, is it possible to do something about it.

The new undercaste in other words is no accident; it is imposed subservience- slavery - by other means. This is clear if one looks at the history of Black oppression in America. Alexis de Toqueville, as usual, provides a convenient datum from the mid-nineteenth century: “The Negro race will never leave those shores of the American continent to which it was brought by the passions and the vices of Europeans; and it will not disappear from the New World as long as it continues to exist. The inhabitants of the United States may retard the calamities which they apprehend, but they cannot now destroy their efficient cause.” In this context The New Jim Crow is but the latest attempt to retard and destroy. The journey from indentured bondage to slavery to violent segregation to criminal servitude is one of continuously pursued purpose. This is the real Deep State Conspiracy.

Postscript: I am once again struck with the ability of literature to anticipate science in the articulation of social issues. In this case a novel such as Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn elaborates just the kind of criminilisation of a social group through the directed use of law more than 50 years before Alexander’s analysis. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Centrality of Race

Eddo-Lodge’s concern is not with prejudice, the irrational bias by white people against people of colour. It is with what she calls ‘structural racism’ for which overt racial prejudice is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. Structural racism is what is left after all the explicit legal, technical and other formal constraints on the developmental possibilities available for people of colour have been largely removed. Structural racism is cultural; it is invisible; and it, not the rules and regulations, has always been the source of the ‘racial problem’ - not only in Britain but throughout that part of the world dominated by European culture.

Structural racism is the result of unrecognised presumptions by white people - and also by ‘assimilated’ black people - that are psychologically ingrained and sociologically enforced to mistrust, malign, demean, dismiss, and discount the abilities and competence of black people. And because white people hold the power to hire, fire, reward, punish, recognise or ignore black people, these presumptions become racism. The effects of these presumptions are rarely dramatic or even discourteous: “White privilege is dull, grinding complacency.”

The presumptions involved need not be consciously held. They are in fact most powerful when they are unrealised and unexpressed. The central presumption is one that is held not by the overt racist but by the self-designated anti-racist: that race does not matter. This is the only presumption necessary, that race does not exist, for racism to flourish. Whiteness is not a neutral characteristic which can be ignored in order to nullify its effects, its entitlement, its privilege. It represents an absence of all the existential conditions for those who are the victims of racism.

Like it or not, in today’s society, to be white is a sufficient condition for being racist. This is precisely Eddo-Lodge’s experience: “The claim to not see race is tantamount to compulsory assimilation. My blackness has been politicised against my will, but I don’t want it wilfully ignored in an effort to instil some sort of precarious, false harmony. And, though many placate themselves with the colour-blindness lie, the... drastic differences in life chances along race lines show that while it might be being preached by our institutions, it’s not being practised.”

The cure for this inherent racism is not to examine oneself for residual prejudices; this may produce guilt but not effective action. Rather the essential therapy, if I understand Eddo-Lodge correctly, is to develop an appreciation of what it is to be black in a white man’s world, to understand the range of intended or incidental slights, suspicions, exclusions, and denigrations which a black person endures as a matter of course. This is of course extremely difficult to accomplish. Among other things it demands that one be constantly open to education - mostly from black people - about when, where and how these apparently trivial, but cumulatively profound, events occur.

This is a bitter pill for those who consider themselves the allies of anti-racism and she knows it. “Who really wants to be alerted,” Eddo-Lodge says, “to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others?” And she knows that it simply is not easy to see what’s missing: “In culture particularly, the positive affirmations of whiteness are so widespread that the average white person doesn’t even notice them.” The essence of white privilege is its diffuse ubiquity: “White privilege manifests itself in everyone and no one. Everyone is complicit, but no one wants to take on responsibility.” Overcoming white privilege is intimately personal and non-political, and for just those reasons extremely difficult.

“Seeing race is essential to changing the system,” she says. Attacking racism therefore implies seeing the absence of people of colour on television and in film; the absence of memorials to the victims of slavery; the absence of the history of exploitation of black people by white people in school textbooks and popular history documentaries; the absence of criticism of those white cultural heroes like the founding fathers in America and the pillars of British society who participated in this exploitation. Without this sort of positive, painful, persistent empathy, structural racism will continue to exist for generations and centuries to come.

Whether one agrees with her or not, Eddo-Lodge has to be taken seriously for what she has accomplished: the articulation of a devastating, factual description of the world from inside black skin. That experience she summarises as a “manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelops everything we know, like a snowy day.” I don’t see how this can be gainsaid as anything but truth.

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Permutation City (Subjective Cosmology #2) 
by 

Greg Egan

 

Fractious Fakes

What happens when your virtual clone hates your guts? Well apparently “Panic. Regret. Analysis. Acceptance” in that order. “People reacted badly to waking up as Copies.” Well, yeah of course. It’s a bit like finding out your girlfriend is really a transgender biker - a mixture of fearful awe and fascinated interest. 

From a literary point of view, Egan has done something both awesome and interesting: he’s created a sort of reverse allegory. Instead of language taking on an alternative meaning from its literal referents, he has people taking on the literal qualities of language - vocabulary, grammar, and effects. You aren’t what you eat but what can be said about you, and programmed, in Permutation City.

The key to Egan’s intention, I think, is in his protagonist’s muttering of a secret password, “Abulafia.” This is a reference to a medieval Kabbalist who, as Kabbalists are wont to do, turned everything into language in order to disorient those who use it -people in other words - and, paradoxically, thereby to free language-users from the insidious power of the language which is actually using them (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

The device of using a virtual reality ‘Copy’ within a virtual reality world - “urine and feces production optional” - is something Abulafia would have grasped immediately as obvious and necessary given the availability of the technology. This is Tohu, the Shattering of the Vessels through which the original unity of the universe is broken into fragments, both physical and spiritual. Tohu happens psychically as well for individuals. That is, bits of the Self are strewn about creation in a most unsatisfactory and unhappy state. 

These spiritual bits can become quite unruly in their condition of fragmented isolation. They are desperate to end their loneliness by re-integrating with the original whole. This is Tikkun, a sort of reconstruction of psychic pieces into a new entity. Paradoxically, of course, such a ‘rebirth’ also involves the ‘death’ of the fragmented Selves. If anything were to impede this process, an aberrant techno-savvy Kabbalist for example, there is an interesting story to be told.

And Egan tells the story masterfully. I can only marvel at how he finds his inspiration for a high-tech tale in an ancient wisdom like Kabbalah, and then proceeds to out-Kabbalah even the Kabbalists with his creativity.