Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Literary Addiction

I first read Under the Volcano in 1968. At that confused cusp in time between teen aged idealism and adult cynicism, I had travelled to Cuernavaca in pursuit of my first love whose father had moved his family there - I was sure at the time, but mistakenly, in order to ensure his oldest daughter did not succumb to my inept entreaties. As it turned out I discovered that I liked her family more than I liked her. So the trip turned into a bit of a disaster.

So in an attempt at literary therapy I threw myself into Lowry, who satisfied my romantic needs on several levels. First, he turned the city itself into something of a post-colonial paradise that was insulated from the cares of the world and its physical necessities. “The eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico,” exactly matched my own depressive mood. As I tried to follow Lowry’s Ulysses-like travels around the city, I could see the pervasive poverty of Cuernavaca as quaint; the rubbish tip of its central ravine as a melancholy barranca and entrance to the underworld; the obvious Mexican racism as an easy co-existence of Spanish-American and European culture alongside that of the still visible Aztec, Olmec, Zapotec and Mixtec civilizations. Mexico’s sadness became bearable.

And although a problem shared - in this case an immature affair of the heart - may not be a problem halved, it certainly allows for the serotonin-like effects of Schadefreude. However badly I was feeling, I wasn’t, like Lowry’s Geoffrey, drinking myself into paranoid oblivion; nor, like his brother, Hugh, was I gripped by terminal guilt; nor, as his wife, Yvonne, was I in the grip of an Electra (or Oedipal) fixation. And, despite my sadness, I hadn’t ‘lost it’ as we said in those days, referring to the elusive mental self, as had the Consul whose “equilibrium, and equilibrium is all, precarious--balancing, teetering over the awful unbridgeable void, the all-but-unretraceable path of God's lightning back to God?” In the scheme of things, I was getting off fairly lightly.

Finally, it was clear to me that Under the Volcano was referencing many things about which I had not the slightest clue - people, places, and events (not to mention vocabulary and cognate puns) which Lowry knew about and I didn’t were integral to his story. But I also knew he was using them as symbols. These things were more deeply meaningful than they appeared on the surface. And I had to learn about them in order to understand life - at least the life that Lowry described.* Call it ‘hope’ through lack of understanding. Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, which I could see from my bedroom window within the walls of ‘The Family Compound’, for example, took on a significance that was simultaneously mysterious but concretely other than mere mountains. They pointed elsewhere to hidden meanings, and therefore to my own youthful ignorance (and what really did happen in the bunker?). This was liberating since it distracted me entirely from the issue of lost love.

In short, Lowry helped me to grow up. Just at the moment I needed some way out of an emotional dead end he showed up with his posse of flawed characters in another-worldly world. I moved, however incrementally, from a state of emotional distress to one of imaginative possibility. Once that happens, for good or ill you’re hooked. Life without Lowry’s kind of writing is impossible thereafter. Oh well, I suppose there are worse addictions - just as Lowry suggests.

*This is an issue that largely has been solved by the internet. An indispensable guide to the book is publicly available and makes all Lowry’s references and allusions clear: https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-lingu...

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Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals 
by 

John N. Gray

 

Hemlock for the Masses

Straw Dogs is an intellectual meal and a half to digest. And it’s a fusion of styles and subjects that makes it a cuisine awkward to classify - classical philosophy, sociology, technological analysis and forecasting, with a soupçon of New Age mysticism. Having just had another substantial meal in Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God, which uses some of the same ingredients (with an extra helping of philosophy and hold the New Age), I feel compelled to compare the two.

Both books cover the same ground - the 18th century Enlightenment and its effects on modern culture. And both books reach similar conclusions - that the rationalism of the Enlightenment project has reached a philosophical as well as practical dead-end in the 21st century. And they appear to provide similarly vague suggestions about what to do about the intellectual situation - Gray retreating from his youthful right-wing free market liberalism and Eagleton from his left-wing dogmatic Marxism. They seem to have met at some mid-point around the idea of classical tragedy as an expression of our current intellectual state. Not that either author would acknowledge their commonalities. Gray thinks Eagleton is a closet religious fundamentalist. Eagleton thinks Gray is an ill-educated nihilist.

Gray looks forward pessimistically into a world of technological chaos and environmental ruin. His subject is homo rapiens, that species of animal which doesn’t think it’s an animal. This species, us, has come to dominate the planet and in all likelihood will destroy itself through its inveterate penchant for self-delusion. “Humans cannot live without illusion. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism.” 

According to Gray, homo rapiens literally has bet its collective farm on a variety of illusory ideas: God, Truth, Progress, Morality, Science, Purpose, and Meaning to name just a few. However none of these have proven either permanent or functional. The reason for their failure is not merely that they have all been the result of a misguided species-hubris, but also that they do not conform to the demands of Nature, that ultimate arbiter of intellectual taste. Gaia, the living soul of the planet, will not be mocked

Eagleton on the other hand looks backwards with an implicit optimism even in the throes of his frequent sarcasm. He has a lot less to say about anthropology than Gray and a lot more to say about the sequence of intellectual developments in and after the Enlightenment. He perceives a trajectory which has gone awry but which is correctable. Eagleton agrees with Gray about both the incompleteness of the Enlightenment as well as the resulting problem of fideistic humanism. He even recognizes the same human flaw which is its source: “Man is a fetish filling the frightful abyss which is himself. He is a true image of the God he denies.”

Stylistically the two writers depart radically. Eagleton writes with elegance and wit, packing every paragraph with philosophical allusions and subtle qualifications. He is a careful writer who understands the complexities of his subject (‘on the one hand, on the other... on the sixteenth hand’) Gray doesn’t write that way, or as well. He is austerely managerial (‘point one, point two... point ninety six’), making his case brick by intellectual brick without hesitation or qualification. Gray is not, therefore, nearly as academic as Eagleton but he’s a far more effective arguer of his case. The reader knows his point of view and can follow it step by step. 

Even more important, Gray doesn’t disintegrate into Eagleton’s anemic spiritual nostalgia. For Gray, the situation is as bad as it appears. There is absolutely nothing to have faith in - not in organized religion certainly, but neither in reason, nor art, nor pleasure, nor justice, nor least of all some inner voice which suggests some other reality across a metaphysical divide. Salvation for Gray is one of those illusions that nostalgic intellectuals crave. Eagleton’s hints that there is something we don’t yet have sight of that could pull us out of the fire.

Ultimately, however, it is clear that Gray is an exponent of Natural Law. This is a highly dangerous intellectual stance since it allows conclusions based on whatever presumptions one makes about what is natural (See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... for some of the history and consequences of these presumptions). For example, by relegating morality to the realm of the unnatural, Gray is implicitly promoting violence. While an ethic of civilized justice may well be nothing more than a shared fiction and convention, I think it’s clear that it is also far more life-affirming than the alternatives. Morality is indeed an invention of human society. And it may well be unnatural (although this is difficult to prove since it arises from natural human creatures). Perhaps moral civilization is what the religious-minded call a state of grace.

So you choose your poison - Eagleton, the philosopher of culture, who uses cultural analysis to demonstrate the deficiencies of culture without a divine presence; or Gray, the philosopher of nature, who uses a decidedly religious concept of nature to demonstrate its brutal disregard for its creatures. It seems to me that it would require a considerable faith to drink hemlock on the basis of either one.

A Fairy Tale of New York by J.P. Donleavy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ambition Fulfilled

Donleavy writes like a literate magpie. Twitchy. Snapshot-flicks of the head. Short calls of alarm and surprise. Just hard shapes, no colour. Startled by sudden movement. Alert to sounds. Fragments of instinct and memory. Picking up shiny bits. Never still.

Until, that is, he cuts into his Noo Yawk dialogue. Then it’s comedy with a noir edge that catches the character of the place - its suspicious immigrants, its world weary cops, its sarcastic taxi drivers, its canny street people, and its masses of folk on the make in one way or another. Whatever else happens in the City “Commerce continues.”

The protagonist, Cornelius Christian, doesn’t have (or need) much time to grieve his departed wife. He discovers through her funeral a new calling which involves helping others grieve, for a price: “A great life. This disposal of the dead. The only thing that can stop me now is failure.” It’s the New York therapy for death: ambition, from the Latin ambire, to seek popular reputation. It is not possible to live there without self-promotion. In New York City, “Without a siren it's hard to get noticed.”

Donleavy‘s not averse to a bit of slapstick about the situation when it’s necessary:
“Do you like good books and music.''
"Yes I do."
"I do too. Really good books. I really love books."
"I like books."
''I knew you did. It's written all over you.'”
And where could superficiality be more appropriate than in a funeral cortège. There’s nothing beneath the skin of the dead. In New York, its all about presentation in any case. No one gets past the cover of a book... or a person. Why bother?

Donleavy knows America as only an immigrant can - from the outside. That’s the only place from which the Dream can be seen clearly: “Perched on the rocky knolls those houses where people live who look safe from life. Behind their cozy window panes. In rambling rooms. Refrigerators full with ice cream, olives, pimento cheese. Sliced bologna and roast beef all ready to lay thickly between the mayonnaise slathered rye bread. Sit on a big sofa in the sprawling living room. Sink your teeth in all that eating and wash it down with soda pop. A big fire blazing. Dozens of radiators tingling hot all over the house.” Cozy, safe, warm, and fed. What else is there to desire?

But inside the Dream it’s an entirely different experience. Inside “The weak give the strong a marvelous appetite.” Popularity, after all, is a relative thing; and everyone else is a competitor. Reputation is shark bait not just reward. You win, I lose. It’s that simple. Inside, therefore, the Dream has certain unexpected dimensions. As in this laconic chapter epilogue:
“Happiness
Is
A big cat
With a mouse
On a square mile
Of linoleum”

Most people end up as mice in New York; and thus maintain the required level of ambition. But a problem of course arises for the few cats for whom the Dream is realized. The Dream has no goal except itself: “But now Cornelius I'm going to tell you something, what good is it having an ass worth millions if I've already got millions. The whole point of having an ass worth millions is to sell it for millions. I sold mine for millions. And I've got millions. But I've still got my ass. I guess I could sell it for more millions. That's the answer. More millions.” Ambition for ambition’s sake is... well a defective and self-defeating ambition. But don’t let on. The City would empty overnight.

I think Donleavy is one of the great stylists and story-tellers about New York City. Although Irish, he has what many New Yorkers would recognize as Yiddishkeit, a sort of empathetic affection for the underdogs, unfashionables, and disadvataged joes whose principle ambition is to survive. Despite that, I had never heard of him. Why not?, I ask myself. Must be be lack of ambition - either mine or his, I’m not sure which.

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Culture and the Death of God by Terry Eagleton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Persistence of Faith: A Job Half Done

Being informed about the world is not a result of reading the daily newspapers or the feed from Apple News. If anything, the news media, merely by their choice of what to report not to mention their motivation for reporting anything at all, inhibit understanding by distorting the significance of events and how they are connected historically. Trump is more right than he intends - all news is fake news. The age of the feuilleton, that collection of random factoids that we never wanted but that get served up as if we do, has reached its apogee with modern communication technology.

But there is a simple way to avoid fake news: don’t read the news. To quote the so quotable Sam Goldwyn, ‘don’t even ignore them.’ Instead spend your time reading people like Terry Eagleton. These are the people who have enormous factual knowledge and have sifted through the prejudices and interests of their sources with meticulous detail. The epistemological criteria they use to distinguish rationalization from reason are generated by wisdom not topicality. Because they think independently they are political without being partisan.

The clue that Eagleton is not a purveyor of fake news is that he doesn’t claim to know the way the world is. What he reports is his reactions to the way other people think the world is and why they think (or thought) that way. He is intellectually empathetic even when he is opposed to the issue at hand - in this case the prevailing wisdom about the nature of the so-called Enlightenment which began in the 18th century and continues to trouble many as an attack on religion by reason.

Eagleton reports himself rather than the world. In fact he doesn’t report so much as reveal what’s going on in his head provoked by what’s he’s read, which is an enormous number of authors and books, ancient and modern. The self he presents is distilled, concentrated, witty, frequently self-deprecating but above all critical. Nothing is taken for granted, particularly if it’s fashionable, politically correct, or established as academic doctrine. Therefore he is nothing but interesting - even if one disagrees with him.

Eagleton’s central point is that “The Enlightenment's assault on religion... was at root a political rather than theological affair.” Its protagonists never questioned faith as such, only the ecclesiastical network of clerics and government - the medieval equivalent of the military-industrial complex. The organized church (mainly Catholic) was a target not because of the irrationality of God but because of the very rationally pursued self-interest of those in power. “The task [of Enlightenment],” he says, “was not so much to topple the Supreme Being as to replace a benighted version of religious faith with one that might grace coffee-house conversation in the Strand.”

What the philosophes never addressed was the problem of faith itself - theirs as well as that of religious believers. Religion may have begun a decline but faith remained embedded in European culture: “From Enlightenment Reason to modernist art, a whole range of phenomena therefore took on the task of providing surrogate forms of transcendence, plugging the gap where God had once been. Part of my argument is that the most resourceful of these proxies was culture, in the broad rather than narrow sense of the term.” That is, faith as a fundamental epistemological principle which excludes any proposition, claim, or idea from investigation and critical scrutiny (a uniquely Christian invention), remained and remains the most distinguishing feature of the European way of thinking, including its thinking about politics.

Consequently “The Almighty has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of.” By not just leaving the principle of faith intact but also by employing it to justify their views of alternative social organization, Enlightenment thinkers literally revolutionized America and France, but weren’t nearly as radical as they might have been. “Today, one of the most glaring refutations of the case that religion has vanished from public life is known as the United States.” Reason, which was meant to be some sort of sensus communis enabling political unity, turns out to be just the opposite - the driving force of polarization in democratic societies around the world.

Eagleton quotes Gibbon’s view that “Reason is very often rationalisation, in the Freudian sense of lending a specious air of plausibility to some discreditable motive.” One need only note American evangelicals’ justification of Donald Trump’s policies on immigration, race, sexual equality, and international relations, not to mention his personal life to get the point. Faith reigns. Whether it is called Christianity or not is hardly the point. The principle of faith, which is indistinguishable from any other intellectual prejudice, is what is being demonstrated and defended.

This principle of faith, therefore, has become a sort of fundamental right which is quite different from the right of religious association. Faith is the right not just to believe anything one chooses from the apparently infinite sources of fake news but also to seek to enforce that belief politically. Faith is beyond evidence and immune to discussion. Faith is applied to a growing number of political issues from flouridization of water and autism to immigration and environmental policy. Faith presents an impediment to understanding and a block to political compromise in everything it touches. Consequently it is the one thing with which democracy cannot cope. It is faith which makes fake news so powerful. Faith creates its own form of nihilism. As Eagleton says, “atheism is by no means as easy as it looks.”

I have no doubt that Eagleton would disagree violently with my interpretation of his thought. Somehow he clings to something he calls ‘faith’ as a sort of intellectual life raft: “One reason why postmodern thought is atheistic is its suspicion of faith. Not just religious faith, but faith as such. It makes the mistake of supposing that all passionate conviction is incipiently dogmatic. Begin with a robust belief in goblins and you end up with the Gulag.” He appears to think that any conviction is equivalent to religious faith. The difference is that conviction is tolerant of politics as well as experience; faith is not.

So, yes, what you do end up with through faith, unfortunately, is a Gulag, or a politicized official Church or, even worse, a Trumpian democracy dominated by evangelical fascists. The only way Eagleton can avoid the consequences of his own logic is to make out faith to be some vague confidence that there is something beyond reason which might be important to our lives. He stops short of giving this any fixed content, however, except tenuous references to historic Christian doctrines like free will, individual responsibility, and the need for salvation.

Eagleton thinks these are important in a poetic sense and that artistic tragedy seeks to capture the essence of his poetic metaphysics. But it is the Greeks who invented tragedy, not the Christian Church. So while I can’t disagree with his conception of tragedy, it is difficult to see how such an idea has any connection whatsoever with the unwavering and anti-experiential pistis of St. Paul and its dogmatic descendants. It seems that Eagleton harbours his own brand of residual faith in his revealed self, a barely hidden authoritarian who would have us all subscribe to such a faith. A salutary self-referential lesson in post-Enlightenment thinking then. It does take effort to get out from under the burden of faith.

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The Atheist’s Mass by Honoré de Balzac
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Morality of Friendship

When one despairs of humanity, yet experiences a friendship with another human being, how can one commemorate that friend’s life after his death? Certainly by ‘doing unto others.’ But merely passing on the gift of friendship feels an inadequate tribute to the memory of the originating friend in an unworthy society.

There is something spiritual in the relational connection itself which can’t be transmitted beyond itself. Something is ‘owed’ to the friendship. “Genius,” Balzac says, “always presupposes moral insight.” And since morality is about people not ideas, or beliefs, or principles it may be necessary to give these up in order to be authentically moral, particularly if one is an “invincible atheist.” Perhaps a spiritual offering is the only solution.

As an incidental footnote: I was for some time a member of St. Benet’s Hall, one of the Catholic colleges at Oxford University. There arose a rumour st some point, attested by several reliable folk, that Richard Dawkins was seen more than once entering the Hall on Sunday mornings for Mass. I discounted the story as an Oxford myth. After reading this Balzac story I’m not so sure. It might have been true.

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The Idiot by Elif Batuman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Facebook Bound

I knew I should have kept a diary after I left secondary school. Not that I had experienced anything extraordinary in my young adulthood, but it could have proved useful for writerly gaps in later life. On the other hand if my diary was as tedious and banal as Batuman’s, I would have destroyed it as an embarrassing mistake.

To say that The Idiot is pointless might sound severe. Batuman writes grammatical sentences and believable dialogue. But the sentences and dialogue drone on endlessly about whatever happened to be around in her young adult life.

I suppose that someone of a similar age, perhaps embarking on an educational adventure like Harvard and experiencing Paris for the first time, would find The Idiot instructive and even interesting. For anyone else the autobiographical detail is likely to be as enthralling as a 19th century cookbook.

It did just strike me however: Perhaps Batuman is more important than I realize. Forget the old fashioned idea of the diary. What’s she’s done is to take a few years worth of anticipatory Facebook or Instagram posts and turned them into a book. So perhaps ‘welcome’ to a new genre. Please don’t let it be...

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The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Applied Kant

Immanuel Kant is known among philosophers as the All Destroyer. He undermined most of the philosophical systems which preceded him; and more or less set the agenda for those which followed - either to confirm, deny or modify what he had to say.

One of the things Kant had to say was that human intellect has a severe limitation. Because our physical make-up operates using certain ‘categories’ - space, time, cause/effect among others - we inevitably apply these to not just interpret what we see, hear and feel, but to see, hear and feel anything at all. We are therefore unable to distinguish what is in the world from what we bring to the world. Whatever we perceive is always in some way ‘corrupted’ by our sensual construction.

Thus things in themselves are, according to Kant, permanently beyond our comprehension. And the implication is that if we had different built-in categories of perception, the world would be a rather different thing than we perceive it to be. Einstein’s conflation of space and time into an entirely new category of spacetime is an example of how altering a perceptual presumption has a profound on perceptions by scientists. Phenomena like black holes and quantum entanglement may appear paradoxical only because we're perceiving them within inadequate categories.

But Einstein’s new category doesn’t get us any closer to Kant’s thing-in-itself. Spacetime is still a perceptual filter applied to whatever is actually ‘there’ in the universe. So Roberts’s novel poses an interesting ‘what if.’ What if artificial intelligence had advanced sufficiently to get itself beyond the need for perceptual categories? Or at least the ones human beings need to exist in a comprehensible reality. Would such an advance get us any closer to the thing-in-itself, if only by triangulating through various non-human perspectives?

Roberts suggests a number of possibilities brought about but such AI which are actually rather prosaic and tired (as well as unKantian): time travel, inter-galactic teleportation, the experience of additional dimensions, alien beings, inter-temporal quantum ghosts, etc. But he also alludes to one of Kant’s most important conclusions: the existence of God as the ultimate and universal Thing-in-itself. This was important for Kant because one of the ideas he did not want his philosophy to destroy was the theological concept of God. By putting limits on the abilities of human reason, his intention was in a sense to insulate theology from science and vice versa.

In this Kant succeeded, but not in the way he imagined. Science and theology went their separate ways - science into the vanguard of 19th century human thought, and theology into the intellectual dustbin of sectarian preachers and neo-scholastics. And that status quo has prevailed since in various guises. Evolutionists vs. Creationists; materialists vs. spiritualists; rational thought vs. religious faith. Straw men become the norm in the antipathies of the resulting debate. Ultimately a Richard Dawkins becomes as unpalatable as a Billy Graham. Those of us with any taste at all prefer to avoid these conversations.

It is nonetheless crucial to remember that Kant’s metaphysical point remains as valid as his scientific point: Intellectual investigation must not be impeded by religion; nevertheless the object of that investigation, what exists, is a permanent mystery - not merely where what exists comes from but what that which exists is at all. Kant’s categories may have been incomplete or mistaken, but his assertion that there are such categories is irrefutable. That these are to some degree a matter of choice and not inherent in the universe was demonstrated by Einstein. This recognition has not and should not lead to intellectual despair; but it is most certainly a reason for intellectual humility - for everyone. Scientism and fideism are parallel evils.

“[A]ction and passion are the will and the soul, the two always in dialectical connection. Separate one from the other, and it is hardly surprising that science becomes disconnected from God,” says one of Roberts’s time-travelling ghosts. But what would happen if the will and soul are fully integrated in order to perceive the Thing-in-itself? What sort of God would be found, if God there be? A beneficent, empathetic protector? A self-obsessed demon? An androgynous, somewhat sex-obsessed deity? An ecstasy-producing light? Love? Madness? Given that the harder one looks, the more like oneself the universe appears, perhaps what is to be found is merely oneself writ large.

At one point Roberts’s protagonist is admonished, “... let’s say, you’ve lived your life wearing space-and-time coloured spectacles, and this is a moment with the spectacles removed.” The moment in question could well be that instant before death, when the body - through age, or illness, or injury - gives up its dependence upon the categories of perception entirely and disappears into itself as the thing it always was. Perhaps, that is, only in death is the thing-in-itself attainable. So Roberts suggests. And who am I to disagree?

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The True Cost of Idealism

I have been guilty of the grave fault of idealism in much of my professional life. Consequently I cringe when I read of the young Elizabeth Holmes and her idealistic trajectory from the thrilling emotionally-laden launch of Theranos, which promised a breakthrough in medical technology, to its ignominious destruction as a fraudulent scam. In her I see myself - not in her level of talent or her self-confidence but in her profound self-delusion. It is this self-delusion which seems the universal cost of idealism, a cost which is borne not just by the promoter of an ideal but by the rest of the world as well - in her case about a billion dollars in round figures.

Idealism sells. What it primarily sells is itself - its promise, its enthusiasm, its own inherent goodness. Modern serial idealists in places like Silicon Valley are idealists about idealism. It is their idealistic energy and talent for putting together pieces in a technological/conceptual/commercial puzzle that gets them what they need: ideas, contacts, talented colleagues, reputation, and money.

The code phrase of the idealist is ‘Making a Difference.’ So Holmes “wanted to truly leave her mark on the world, she would need to accomplish something that furthered the greater good, not just become rich.” But most of all their energy and enthusiasm gets them power, the power to promote their own idealistic self-image.

Idealism is always couched in terms of abstract altruism, that is, improving the human condition. But no matter what the area in which a particular ideal is to be pursued - business, politics, medicine, academia - the idealist imperative, his or her sine qua non, is the acquisition and maintenance of power for themselves.

Power is a logical and practical prerequisite for the realisation of any ideal. Idealists therefore want to enrol the rest of us in their ideal. This is their route to power. Their role model is not that of Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa and the selfless doing of good but that of Pericles and the talking of doing good, usually about what others are required to do to prove their goodness.

The world of the idealist is constrained and defined by power regardless of the merits of the ideal put forth as its rationale. Power is the elephant in the room that no one talks about but that must be constantly fed. Eventually there is room for nothing else. The ideal one has started with becomes a nostalgic memory, restored to mind only at the behest of power to increase itself. This is the essential paradox 0f idealism: it will always end in tears.

The more articulate and forceful idealists are in presenting their ideal, the more power they accumulate. The idealist is a visionary, a prophet who deserves power because of the strength of their vision and prophetic acumen. Holmes made it clear to her employees that she was “starting a religion.” It is faith which justifies, for the idealist as for any believer, those actions necessary to acquire power. Chief among such actions is lying.

Chronic mendacity is not incidental or exceptional for the idealist. It is a necessary virtue of technique and substance. Lying is expected because all communication is negotiation, is it not? This is the common thread among idealists of diverse backgrounds, views, and personalities. Donald Trump is an entrepreneurial idealist; Benedict XVI is a religious idealist; Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are high-tech idealists; as indeed is Elizabeth Holmes. However else they differ, they share this distinctive trait: they lie instinctively and routinely, and without remorse, indeed, I suspect, without consciousness of lying at all.

Although idealists have to be enthusiastic salesmen, they are not mere evangelists who tout the advantages of their ideal, while staying silent about its possible defects or adverse consequences. Idealists are true believers. Unlike typical salesmen they do not present half truths, distortions, overstatement, and tendentious arguments knowing them to be such. They believe firmly in everything they say. They are compelling, even for hard-bitten venture capitalists. The guy Holmes recruited to do the engineering was mesmerised by her take of difference-making: “Edmond, who went by Ed, felt himself drawn in by the young woman sitting across from him who was staring at him intently without blinking. The mission she was describing was admirable, he thought.”

The ideal consumes idealists, including their awareness of reality. In their own minds they do not lie, they convince - themselves as much as others - in order to further the ideal. Lies are aspirational statements not false claims. Their repetition is constructive truth, an embodiment of hope, and a demonstration of that very Christian virtue of faith. So from the start of Theranos, Holmes was faking the results of her diagnostic devices through high-tech trickery - believing, much like Bernie Madoff (another idealist), that the breakthrough was at hand. She was selling nanobot snake oil to West Coast money men at the same time as Goldman Sachs (an exceptionally idealistic firm, just ask them) was pushing its sub-prime portfolios into German pension funds. Same product - efficiency - just different labels, one procedural, the other financial.

In short idealism is not merely a neurosis; it is a sociopathology. Idealists don’t simply have ideals; they seek to impose them on the rest of us - at a profit. Idealism is an infection spread from mouth to ear to mouth. As both a philosophy and a practical ethic it is the secular residue of the Christian idea of faith. It may not move mountains directly but it certainly can generate the cash to develop the machines which can. And idealism justifies anything for those who have it; it makes the idealist immune from self-criticism, and indifferent to the consequences of his actions. Idealism certainly gets things done in a world which expects and respects it. But what it gets done is rarely discussed.

In business the consequence is constant low-level deceit punctuated by not infrequent criminal fraud; in politics the consequence is extremism and ultimately terrorism; in religion, fundamentalism and doctrinally-justified inhumanity. Idealism, like its progenitor of faith, is something we culturally value. The central question that Bad Blood raises is not legal, or organisational; nor is it essentially about the moral code of Silicon Valley. It is about whether this legacy of what we glibly call Christian civilisation is a salvific virtue or a destructive vice.

Postscript: It is also clear that idealists have no shame: https://gizmodo.com/disgraced-therano...

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Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Smoke

For a sign to be a sign there must be an intention which is quite independent of the object which constitutes the sign itself. Finding intention, and therefore meaning, is a tricky business. It requires imagination, which projects meaning onto objects, making them signs by magic as it were. This creates a mystery: “For every sign deciphered by accident how many might go unnoticed, buried in the natural order of things? ... as if the surrounding reality was already contaminated by the possibility of meanings”

This density of ephemeral signs is the character of religious imagery - a multitude of self-referential signs authorised (literally) by accepted convention and extended everywhere. But it is also the character of sex in which the most unlikely objects - “needles, frogs, sparrow, stick, whiffle- tree, pen nib, leather, cardboard, et cetera, chimney, cork, scratch, drainpipe, hand, pellets, etc. etc., clods of dirt, wire mesh, wire, bed, pebbles, toothpick, chicken, warts, bays, islands” - can become signs and sources of sexual stimulation, that is, fetishes. A fetish is a sign of only itself; it is the feeling it creates. A fetish is therefore a linguistic dead end; it is the antithesis of an ikon, which makes connections elsewhere.

Fetishism is a slippery slope. As the patient responded to his psychiatrist’s Rorschach inkblots: “You’re the one with all the dirty pictures.” If religion sees everything as having its source in the divine, there should be little mystery in how some see the world as entirely sexualised. Intention projected is intention perceived. Hence paranoia maintains itself with all the evidence it needs. “How sticky is this cobweb of connections!”

Gombrowicz’s protagonist says, “What attracted me to the “behind,” the “beyond,” was the way that one object was “behind” the other.” Of course what’s ‘behind’ a fetish is not ‘out there’ but ‘in here.’ But in here is the last place anyone wants to look. Fetishes are dirty, shadow-side things. In terms of projected meaning, the closest thing to religion and sex is death, the ultimate shadow. And no one relishes the idea of introspection about death and its fetishes.

A problem arises however when the desire to keep the projected meaning of death external leads to a self-protecting action - murder - thus confirming the objective otherness of death. Even if the victim is only a cat, the point is made: death is there not here, the ultimate projection. And a satisfying outcome for the fetishist. But nonetheless even this is uncertain:“Such a trifle on the very boundary of chance and non-chance, what can one know?”

Cosmos goes considerably beyond Gombrowicz’s fellow-Pole Stanislaw Lem in his exploration of epistemology. Lem’s His Master’s Voice, for example, (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) considers the difficulty in distinguishing signal and noise from outer space. For him, meaning must be presumed in order to find meaning but not a particular meaning. Gombrowicz presents a rather more complex situation, the human compulsion to assign specific, definite meaning from a sort of inner space. The result of this compulsion is much more difficult to decipher than alien transmissions. About intentions: “What can one know, one can’t know anything, nothing is known.”




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Black Rain 
by 

Masuji Ibuse, 

 

John Bester (Translator)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Oct 09, 2018  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: japanese, biography-biographical, war, historical-fiction 

What Are We Now?

Only in Japan could the dropping of the atomic bomb be written about in the same even tone as the stocking of fish in the local lake. The details of death, injury, radiation sickness and physical destruction are given equal billing with the care and feeding of farmed carp, their preferred ambient temperature, and the use of abalone shells as weasel deterrents. 

Is there a way to describe Black Rain as anything other than Zen? What happens, happens. War happens; pain happens; disappointment happens. But the comforting routines of daily life, and the familiarity of friends and family, and the joy of food also happen. The neighbours may get on one’s nerves from time to time; but they remain neighborly. Tragedy is embedded in success and vice versa. All is there to be lived. How could it be otherwise?

The most enduring part of the bombing in Ibuse’s novel is not the memories of its immediate or direct physical effects but the underlying cultural implications. The post-explosion black rain, although not in itself lethal, is a serious issue that impedes an arranged marriage for the protagonist’s, Mr. Shizuma’s, niece. Was she corrupted by her exposure to it? The question is not so much medical as spiritual. This obviously makes it more difficult to answer. It also makes the bomb something central to Japanese life in a way which challenges its phlegmatic equilibrium.

Ibuse’s prose is meticulously delicate. This more than anything else, it seems to me, is his Japan: intricate, balanced, confident in its abilities, its history and its worth. It was less than one hundred years since the American-provoked demise of the shogunate and the economic and social disruption which ensued. But Japan had recovered itself then; so why not now in the wake of the latest American invasion? Ibuse’s objections, for example, to the use of inferior ‘Western ink’ - with its tendency to fade with age - for the making of a copy of his diary of the bombing is but one indication of his confidence in what is traditional. This, even as he must deal with the untraditional problem of his niece.

Japanese stoicism and apparent tranquility mustn’t be confused with lack of emotion. Mr. Shizuma’s immediate reaction to the blast at Hiroshima is “Why don’t people realize how we feel?” He means his own government as well as the Americans. Perhaps because they haven’t been told? He then realizes that the survivors of the blast don’t recognize even members of their own families. Something profoundly more important than the vulnerability of the human body has been revealed by the bomb. Only years later, however, in dealing with his niece’s problem does he begin to understand what that revelation might be.

But stoicism may be functionally indistinguishable from fatalism. At what point does a cultural virtue become an impediment to cultural regeneration? Mr. Shizuma’s “best to leave everything in the lap of the gods” may longer be an adequate response to the new world signaled by the bomb. As he transcribes his diary, the individuals he encountered during his escape from Hiroshima come to mind. Why had they been absent from the diary? He doesn’t pose the question. That’s up to the reader, who in Ibuse’s narrative has a superior point of view. It’s as if Ibuse is seeking guidance.

Only the reader as detached observer can make a judgment about how the tragedy has affected both Japanese culture as well as the marriage prospects for his niece. Mr. Shizuma rebukes his wife for thinking he might harbor a theory that implies such a judgment; he wants only to describe circumstances as realistically as he can, however inadequate that may be. Besides, the condition of his carp is a more pressing matter. And tomorrow is the annual ceremony to commemorate the insects that might have been killed during the harvest. Tradition calls,... and binds. But is it the balm of tradition itself which created the war? The dropping of the bomb? The misery and confusion that has resulted?

The tension between Mr. Shizuma’s culture and the realities of his world persists throughout the novel. As an outsider to Japanese culture, I cannot know whether Ibuse resolves that tension or makes it more pronounced. What is clear is that he has turned a profound tragedy, one not just for Japan but also for the world, into a profoundly moving work of art that has relevance for us all. Japan was uniquely affected by the destruction of the atomic bombs. But no culture can be free of their insidious effects, nor of the question of the adequacy of any culture to deal sanely with the power it has at its disposal.

At Play in the Lions' Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan by Jim Forest
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

That Troublesome Priest

There was a time when Catholic priests were controversial for courageously fighting injustice rather than for child molestation and the single issue politics of abortion. Dan Berrigan was one of the most controversial, most inspiring, and therefore most feared priests of my generation. Arguably he and his brother Phil, more than any others, changed the collective mind of a country, at least for a time, about the absurdity of warfare.

Neither Christianity, nor any other religion whatever its ethical teaching, makes better people. The American leaders who prosecuted the war in Vietnam almost all professed religious faith. Yet they lied, schemed and conspired to wreak sustained havoc on the world the consequences of which we are still living through. The classified documents which are known collectively as the Pentagon Papers show the depth and breadth of political corruption that caused and sustained that conflict. Daniel Berrigan was one of those who blew the whistle on the institutional mendacity and international thuggery of senior members of the United States government. “One of those rare priests asking questions few wanted to hear.”

The governmental tactics employed then have since become standard for promoting an acceptance of violence and the inevitable economic and social consequences of war: promote fear; provide a theory of necessary national interest; and misrepresent actions. Vietnam was the public relations testing ground for subsequent adventures in Central America, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Vietnam exploded the myth of American exceptionalism.

And religion was and remains implicated in all of this: “The powers of the state show a mysterious concern for the integrity of the word of God” when it is useful for propaganda. And then, as now with Trumpist evangelicals, “A universal Love has narrowed itself to accept hate and to command hate.” Still today, it is difficult to find a mention much less public protest by senior church leaders on topics like extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, deportation, racial hatred, and the mis-use of religion to oppress one’s fellow citizens. Christianity has shown itself to be no more exceptional than America.

Berrigan‘s ‘No,’ therefore, was most notably, but not solely, to civil society. Injustice is where one finds it. And Berrigan found it inside his Jesuit order and in his Church. Their tolerance of racism, their clericalism and ecclesiastical nationalism, their bland acceptance of the morality of nuclear warfare, their contradictory doctrines regarding human life were also on his agenda. Having undergone 15 years of intensely disciplined Jesuit formation, Berrigan could hardly be considered a congenital rebel, someone who merely likes to express dissatisfaction with the status quo. He was a confirmed member of the insider establishment. His gripe was with behavioral injustice not with any existing firm of social organization.

The reason this is important is that the heated criticism of his own order and church demonstrated that his resistance, although it had political consequences, was moral not political. He didn’t join any secular political group, nor did he lobby politicians. He never sought, or received, political support from the institutions of which he was a member. Nor did he join others which were involved in merely political protest. His resistance was a matter of personal conscience not politics. He defied the law; he didn’t advocate how it should be changed. In short, Berrigan was a front line soldier who put himself not others in jeopardy. He was a model of moral behavior not a director of how to behave. He acted to fulfill the social activist’s, Dorothy Day’s, urging to protestors to “fill the jails” With their own bodies in order to stop the war.

Dan Berrigan’s brother, Phil, in fact insisted on the principle of challenging the law publicly. “Those who violate the law should be prosecuted,” he said. Imprisonment was part of the protest. And both brothers did pay the price for their part in the disclosure of the details of the mendacity and violence perpetrated by his government. Dan was convicted of various felonies associated with his protests and sentenced to 3 years in federal prison. For a time he was, incredibly, on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list of criminals. Phil spent a total 0f 11 years inside.

The brothers’ only defense was that as Christians it was necessary for them to say ‘No’ to the legal and moral standards of the society in which they had been raised. They did not protest either the conviction or the sentence. In a sense these were part of the point - to suffer the civil consequences of one’s convictions is as important as the act of disclosive protest. Comparison with the whinging martyrs of later years - one thinks of a Julian Assange - is instructive.

I find it interesting that the sexual scandals of the Catholic Church were eerily anticipated by its persistent (and persisting) moral callousness on so many other issues. Berrigan threatened not the doctrine of the church but its authority, its credibility, and above all its power. The technique for dealing with deviation for the party line is the same for those who blew the whistle on injustice by and within the church as it was for those sexual abusers: move the offender elsewhere: “The Roman Catholic manner of dealing with such a priest is not to debate him, not to offer alternative arguments, but simply to silence him and send him to another country where his attempt to give Christian witness will not offend.” Clearly there is something inherently amiss in an institution which treats a moral hero with the same punishment as a moral degenerate.

Where Christian witness is not offending, and especially offending those in power, it is vacuous piety or tribal cant. If there is a lesson to be learned from Berrigan’s life, I think it is exactly that. The primary reason for the decline in both the membership of the church and its credibility, is its perennial reluctance to cause offense to those in charge of worldly affairs, and the affairs of the church itself. It has demonstrated repeatedly that its primary concern is self-preservation. Perhaps with more troublesome priests like Dan Berrigan, some sort of renewal is possible. But I’m not holding my breath.

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The Book of est by Luke Rhinehart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Prosperity Gospel for Graduates

The original edition of this book was published in 1976. My copy is from 2010. That’s quite a run in print. It claims, perhaps accurately, to be the greatest self-help book of all time. Of course it also admits that everything in it is a lie. Could it be both? If a Cretan says all Cretans are liars, is he credible? If this sounds to you like it might be a parody of what it’s promoting, you’re perceptive, but wrong. It just isn’t possible to parody either Donald Trump or est.

Werner Erhard, the creator of Erhard Seminar Training, was a genius who gave practical and popular voice to the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger with some Zen and Jungian spice thrown in. Or he was the most successful California cult leader and spiritual huckster to make it out alive. Each description is only words after all. Choose your poison.

‘Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.’ This is the essential message of est. Words mean what we want them to mean. And if we let them mean things which drive us crazy, we will be crazy. Or maybe not; maybe words are everything. So we must be very careful in the words we use, especially all the neo-logisms we learn in est-training: “ground of being,” “clearing space,” “truth-processes,” to “experience out,” “rackets” etc.

Words get in the way of our “authentic being.” They’ve been used by our parents, and teachers, and bosses, our culture to browbeat us into submission. Words and their oppressive connections are our enemies. We can only overcome this status of slavery to words and the devastation they wreak on our lives through... well, through more words, specifically those approved by Erhard.

Ideas and beliefs, that is to say words, destroy experience. They hide the real world and what’s going on in it. On the other hand that might sound remarkably like a belief. So it must be wrong... no right... no wrong.

Reason is the realm of non-experience, and therefore of deception. To think is to engage in deception. So stop thinking. Now there’s a thought to ponder.

“Fully experienced experience” involves forgetting everything you’ve ever learned about life from other people. Including this lesson about fully experienced experience? Didn’t we say at the beginning it’s all a lie!

Knowing how to do something is not the key to doing anything. Words are inadequate to describe how to do anything. Doing something is the key to knowing how to do anything. Like, say, reading is the key to how to read? Well bad example. But that’s only because it has to do with those horrid words again.

Individual experience is the only reality. Since we can alter our own experience, we are solely responsible for that experience. We can create our own reality. It’s vitally important to remember that next time you get mugged. The mugging - every misfortune actually - is down to you, pal. If only my toothache would cooperate.

Just in case you’re confused: reading does not constitute any sort of experience. At best reading is a substitute for experience that you probably should learn to do without since it just inhibits the real thing. Funny how there are no blurb-quotes suggesting I give this book a miss.

Oh, and remember that bit about being responsible for your own experience? Well don’t take that too seriously because what you are really is an input/output machine that just... well, experiences whatever it experiences. You are not the Doer but the Done To. And also, by the way, you’re God. But your only power is to recognise you’re a machine. So now “get off it.”

And since you’re a machine, the only reason you have for doing anything is because you did it. Look no further for motivation, you’ll only rationalize the situation and drive yourself mad. Understanding any of this, or nothing, is just fine. “You get what you get.”

Est training goes on and on like this until you ‘get it’ or you leave. Whether profound or vacuous, during its heyday est was spread like a computer virus or chain letter. Part of the training was to entice new trainees as well as to enroll in more advanced trainings. This would of course not only expand one’s est-ed friends but also validate one’s previous brutal and expensive training experience - a stroke of sales and organizational genius comparable to any religious movement. Not something one might expect from a used car salesman and graduate of Dale Carnegie seminars, Erhard’s previous achievements; but talent does eventually show itself. And the man certainly has talent of a unique sort.

I have never engaged in est training. But at several points in my life I have been more or less surrounded by folk who have, several of whom were very senior in Erhard’s organization and who spent a good portion of their lives volunteering with almost no compensation to the mission of the programme. They attest to the techniques and effects that Rhinehart describes so vividly. Mostly these folk were educated idealists who did find something they felt they desperately needed through their est experience. Whatever they got, it wasn’t money. Erhard got that and with it buggered off to Central America to avoid prosecution on charges (subsequently dropped) of sexual abuse of his daughters. The programme then transformed into something called the Landmark Forum which in a somewhat less brutal tone continues to provide help and succor to seekers-in-need.

Ultimately, however, all the est-believers I knew seem to have departed from the precepts of their training as if from a worn out religious faith of their youth. It worked for them, until it didn’t. The abrupt departure of the prophet-in-chief may have played a part. But perhaps the magic stops working at the point when the contradictions expressed through est are either fully assimilated or become unbearable. Est is a sort of radical Romanticism, Kabbalah with jackboots, Derridan deconstruction without the intellectual foreplay, a Wittgensteinian language game in which there are no winners, or Marine boot camp with fewer push-ups. Or perhaps it’s just an innocuous middle-class hobby. No matter how it’s considered, I think we’re all better off with some good fiction. It’s more satisfying and much cheaper.

Postscript: Here is a clip from the film Semi-Tough which appears to be taken directly from the text of Rhinehart’s book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5XYN...

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Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Real But Not Really

Seemingly trivial events have profoundly decisive consequences: A thirteen year old gets a little drunk and thereby becomes a terrorist. A young woman attends a party and falls for the terrorist. A boy’s mother makes a misstep while doing the laundry in a jungle river and drowns; the boy is launched into an entirely alien world of the woman who longs for the terrorist. This is the hopeless desolation of a sort of Thomas Hardy country in Peru. Hapless tragedy with a Spanish accent. No one comes out whole.

“No one knew how bad it would get.” Not the man, the woman, the boy, or the entire Peruvian nation as they slid imperceptibly into the irreversible chaos of civil war. The continuity of existence was simply lost. Even the names of de-populating towns and villages were legally erased. The old languages are no longer spoken. Identity consists solely of distorted fragments of unreliable memory.

But memory itself is dangerous. After all “the country was now in the process of forgetting the war ever happened at all.” Official policy is to forget. It is necessary to forget in order to renew memory. And even the boy realizes the risks of remembering: “Happiness, he’d decided, was a kind of amnesia.” Should one even seek the lost and disappeared? After ten years, surely the people we knew are gone even if their bodies have survived.

Everyone has a list of their missing relatives, friends, and colleagues. Lost City Radio is a program for finding missing people, for matching the seekers with the sought. But what does that mean? Is it as simple as matching lists? “How do you tell them it’s a show? Lost City Radio is real, but not real.” Other than acting as a focus for nostalgic longing, it only raises hopes for the impossible. The past is not only past; it never happened the way it’s remembered. The lists are of people not identities.

The truth is that the war has created a universal restlessness - about identity as well as place. No one wants to be where, or who, they are. Those in the jungle and mountains long for escape to the city. Those already in the peripheral slums of the city want to escape to the relative luxury of its center. Those in the center want to escape the fear of losing everything. And perhaps the missing want to stay that way. Identity is a dangerous thing; it can carry unwanted baggage.. Torture tends to make identity memorable but only uncomfortably so.

Memory, like history itself, is indeed real but not real. This is an incurable sadness.

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The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Acting Into a New Way of Thinking

“What a person does is what he is,” says the father of Asher Lev. This is the central theme of Potok’s book and, in a sense, it is the essence of Judaism. How one acts, one’s ethical impact on the world, describes everything that is relevant about a person. ‘Deeds not words’ may seem a mere shibboleth until it as taken as seriously as it is by the Hasidim for whom even the smallest and apparently trivial human act - entering a room, switching on a light, greeting one’s spouse or parents - has cosmic significance. In Hasidic Judaism it is punctillious behaviour toward others and towards the world - not belief, not intent, not doctrinal thought - which is the sign and carrier of one’s religion and therefore of one's self, one’s family, one’s society, one’s world.

Judaism in other words, not Ancient Greece, nor medieval Christianity is the origin of what has come to be known as ‘virtue ethics’, the idea that one can act oneself into a better mode of being. Put simply: the only way to be a better person is to behave like one. And ‘better’ has an operational meaning in Orthodox Judaism - that which brings the world closer to being a suitable dwelling place for the Almighty in the form of his Messiah. This is the world of the Torah, a world of hope and trust not of blind faith and formalized dogmatics. The difference is crucial. The Torah, and therefore God in the world, lives as it is acted out.

Judaism is consequently a remarkable ethos. It implies the ultimate salvation not of an individual but of the entire world based on the dedication of a quorum of individuals who choose how to behave properly toward one another. And salvation comes about not through one’s thoughts but through one’s relationships. That is to say, the spiritual force of redemption is present in human beings as a divine gift of creation which is in a way returned in kind when it is acted upon. It is possible to reject such an ethos but only by placing the power of human intellect beyond the claims of human responsibility to and for others.

It is, therefore, not inaccurate, although perhaps a bit unconventional, to say that humanity is the route through which God is redeemed within his creation. As one character notes, “Without man, what is God? And without God, what is man? Everyone needs the help of someone to complete the work of Creation that is never truly completed. Everyone.” The consciousness of this force in every act is the manner in which the gift of free will is acknowledged and respected. The Messiah will arrive when the world is sufficiently prepared by human effort. Our responsibility as human beings is therefore to act appropriately. Thinking, believing, and theologizing are optional hobbies.

Nevertheless, even in Judaism, conscious action can deteriorate into mere habit and stifling tradition. Behaviour then becomes fetishistic ritualism, little more than a mark of tribal membership. Its usefulness becomes that of political weapon or self-serving rationale for pursuing personal interests. Such a fate probably threatens all institutions not just religious ones. Doing things a certain way because they've always been done that way is more an ideology than an ethic.

Asher Lev's artistic life follows a parallel evolutionary path to that of his Hasidic sect. Both drive towards sameness for the sake of continuity rather than for improvement in the readiness of the world for salvation. Redemption is never finished; to assume otherwise is smug - in religion as well as art. Finding a way beyond the staleness of one's own conventions is as difficult for an individual as it is for a religious community. It takes a transformation, the force of which seems to come from elsewhere as a gift. We often call this gift ‘truth’ and it may not be easy to bear, so that it “must be uncovered slowly and with great care lest its fires burn and its power destroy.”

The form of this gift in Potok's story is literally a riddle posed by the Hasidic Rabbi. Acceptance of this gift - engagement with the riddle’s meaning - is also a return to its hidden source through which both Lev and his sect are renewed - artistically as well as spiritually. Then again, perhaps these are two ways of expressing the same event of a regenerated ethical awareness brought about by acting differently. It’s certainly a lot more effective than trying to think your way into a new way of acting.

Postscript: Also see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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