In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War by Tobias Wolff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Soul of America

Many reasons have been given for the failure of the US in its war Vietnam and the significance of that event: misunderstood interests, cultural arrogance, silly military strategies, ill-informed tactics, and adverse domestic politics, among others. But Wolff provides a far more compelling reason and more profound meaning: the spiritual corruption of the US Army, a condition which likely reflected that of the country as a whole.

By any standard the country of South Vietnam was a materially corrupt place. All the governments since the time of separation of the country after the defeat of the French were venal and nepotistic in the extreme. The situation of the average South Vietnamese citizen after the French departure, if anything deteriorated substantially. This was apparent even to ambassadorial staff and reported to US authorities very early in the conflict. (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

This condition of material corruption was probably sufficient on its own to provoke the eventual victory of the North with or without the assistance of the US military. But that assistance added a dimension to the conflict which was a gift to the North, a gift not only in terms of morale, but also in substantive military advantage. This latter negative contribution to the prosecution of the war is the substance of Wolff’s utterly fascinating memoir. (A comparison with the equivalent from the North Vietnamese side is informative: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

All first person accounts by Americans involved in the war in Vietnam share stories, anecdotes, and complaints about the existential distance between men on the ground and their commanders, about the failure of commanders to comprehend the basic facts of life of the South Vietnamese Army, about the racism of American soldiers toward each other as well as toward the Vietnamese, and about the pervasive deceit practiced by commanders among their own troops. (See for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

But in almost all these accounts, these conditions are treated as anomalous, not because they were uncommon but because they were considered as errors created by inexperience, miscommunication, or the occasional naked ambition of individuals. (Even those most critical of the war do this implicitly: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) What Wolff suggests is that not only were these conditions the rule rather than the exception, but that they were as intentional as the material bribery, trading with the enemy, and avoidance of responsibility of the South Vietnamese. The difference was that the Americans’ were symptoms of a spiritual void, a moral ennui which was both pervasive and infectious.

Wolff’s technique of moving fluidly from description of the external reality he experienced to his reflections on his own internal reactions to them is an outstanding way of making his point. His own spiritual corruption is simply an instance of the whole. And it takes on the shape of the whole as a matter of survival - in terms of personal identity as well as bodily existence - within the military culture.

Wolff realizes that the cash-based corruption of the South Vietnamese at least allows them to maintain a sense of purpose, even if that purpose is entirely selfish. The American corruption is more fundamental and involves the abandonment of intention, even thought about intention, entirely. His descriptions of this mass spiritual emptying are compelling:

“At Dong Tam I saw something that wasn’t allowed for in the national myth—our capacity for collective despair. People here seemed in the grip of unshakable petulance. It was in the slump of their shoulders and the plodding way they moved. A sourness had settled over the base, spoiling and coarsening the men. The resolute imperial will was all played out here at empire’s fringe, lost in rancor and mud. Here were pharaoh’s chariots engulfed; his horsemen confused; and all his magnificence dismayed.
A shithole”

During the era of Vietnam, everyone in the US government - the Presidents, The Secretaries of Defense, their various advisors, and both houses of Congress - lied to each other, to their constituents and to the soldiers who were sent off to fight. This is well documented in many written and filmed histories and personal memoirs. But rarely are the implications of this pervasive ethos of deception so clearly stated as in Wolff’s straightforward memoir. The result is not merely de-moralizing, it is universally destructive of the very instinct of rationality:

“In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you don’t look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries. You encourage yourself with charms, omens, rites of propitiation. Without your knowledge or permission the bottom-line caveman belief in blood sacrifice, one life buying another, begins to steal into your bones.”

The relationship between seniors and subordinates in military life is obviously central to their joint ability to act effectively, however that is defined. But as Wolff points out, that relationship was fundamentally flawed. Officers and men did not fight for each other; they did not even pretend to protect each other; and they, too, continuously lied to each other right along with their government masters. The consequence was not just a feeling of gnostic dread but also of a loss 0f any sense of the future:

“The ordinary human sensation of occupying a safe place in a coherent scheme allowed me to perform, to help myself as much as I could. But at times I was seized and shaken by the certainty that nothing I did meant anything, and all around me I sensed currents of hatred and malign intent. When I felt it coming on I gave a sudden wrenching shudder as if I’d bitten into something sour, and forced my thoughts elsewhere. To consider the reality of my situation only made it worse.”

An empty spirit is a vacuum which is impossible to maintain. It is necessary that something replace the absent contents - call it a moral code or fundamental drive, or culture, it doesn’t matter all that much - and with these new contents a new soul is effectively created. The process is both gradual and sudden, the malady both chronic and acute. The open, verbalized response to the Tet offensive of 1968 was a recognition of what had been the case all along and experienced as such by the Vietnamese:

“As a military project Tet failed; as a lesson it succeeded. The VC came into My Tho and all the other towns knowing what would happen. They knew that once they were among the people we would abandon our pretense of distinguishing between them. We would kill them all to get at one. In this way they taught the people that we did not love them and would not protect them; that for all our talk of partnership and brotherhood we disliked and mistrusted them, and that we would kill every last one of them to save our own skins. To believe otherwise was self-deception. They taught that lesson to the people, and also to us.”

In my experience of reading about Vietnam, Wolff is unique in a remarkable respect. Despite the snafu’s, apparent irrationalities, possible incompetencies, mendacity, and what most of us would think of as screw-ups, Wolff doesn’t attribute anything to error. What is done is intentional, strictly purposeful, even when those taking action are unconscious of the purpose involved. This stance then provokes the question ‘What was the real purpose of the war in Vietnam?’ Not its stated military or political objectives, which in any case were never clear and shifted continuously. Nor its strategic rationale about Asian dominoes and American honour. But the actual unstated purpose of everything that was done, the net collective intent as it were of everyone involved.

As I read Wolff, the purpose of the Vietnam war was to show America to itself, a purpose which it accomplished exceptionally well. America was a moral desert. Only its exposure to itself had any chance of establishing a consciousness of this condition. The fact that all sorts of explanations and theories have been put forward to obscure and qualify this revelation is to be expected given the desolate barrenness that the country had shown itself to be in a time of great stress. Wolff’s witness to this spiritual desolation is moving as well as important. Only upon his return to ‘the world,’ did he recognize his own transformation within the military:

“In Vietnam I’d barely noticed it, but here, among people who did not take corruption and brutality for granted, I came to understand that I did, and that this set me apart.”

That the consciousness of an objective achieved was too much for America to bear is obvious. The country has yet to come to terms with the real horror of its own intentions in Vietnam. More generally, it has really never been that New England Congregational ‘house on a hill,’ a place of spiritual realization. It has always been an oppressive, self-rationalizing and violent place in which the natives distrust and con each other as a matter of principle. Am I too hopeful to suggest that with Donald Trump America is giving itself a second chance to see itself for what it actually is?

View all my reviews

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Bleakest of Expectations

The substance of this book is scientific, namely the most important threats to human life on Earth and their elimination or mitigation. But Rees’s intention, of course, is political. He understandably wants to contribute to the generation of a consensus and provoke rational cooperative action - on tax, on technological development, on research priorities, on government funding for science, on sociological attitudes and even on the structure of politics itself. It is this last which is probably the most important but about which Rees has almost nothing to say. It is this absence of a remedy for politics that I find the central and most frightening aspect of the human condition.

Rees believes that economics can take care of some issues - just being more efficient in fuel usage and re-cycling of material like steel are “win-win” for everyone involved. Other problems require international coordinated planning and direction - global warming for example. He suggests the United Nations as the central body to supervise such efforts. So one might call Rees a political pragmatist: use the market - including the democratic ‘electoral market’ - where possible and a benign dictatorship where necessary.

There are of course a whole range of political possibilities which sit in between the radical neo-liberal and the radical socialist. But these two set the rough boundaries of the political experience of humanity. The Scylla and Charybdis, one might say, of human potential. Beyond either limit is merely national shipwreck and chaos, including the end of civilized political activity.

I am incompetent to comment on the scientific credibility of what Rees has to say about the technological solutions which seem most promising to keep the planet habitable. Obviously there is a necessary debate which will persist among professionals as they carry out their research and respond to innovations. This debate is conducted within certain rules of accepted scientific method, logic, and other ‘tools of rationality’. Such debate is not without its political aspects - about things like what constitutes evidence, the credibility of individual researchers, and the assessment of the weight of proof on various sides of an argument for example. But science is a constrained politics. Its criteria of value, of what’s important in any discipline, while not fixed, are fairly stable.

Politics outside of science are an entirely different matter. There are no political checklists by which good and bad politics can be distinguished. And certainly whatever values, criteria of correct action, prevail at any moment, there is little hope for their stability. Even just realizing these values - economic growth or more equitable income distribution for example - will change what’s important in general politics. In a sense, therefore, there can be no real or lasting political progress. Politics is a pre-rational activity, one which seeks to establish which criteria, which values, are appropriate in the moment. Rees is making the case that scientific values should prevail.

The problem is that Rees’s case for the interests of science does not cope very well with the wider interests of human beings. Idealists may be concerned about freedom of speech; realists about the degradation of the oceans, ecologists about the loss of species. Most may be simply worried about their chances for survival or employment or advancement. Whatever their situation, it is inevitable that people, and the political groups to which people belong, will have different views on priorities, and the correct actions to address them. Politics is the process by which these views are reconciled, compromised and turned into reality. In this process science is just another set of interests.

This has profound implications which most of us would rather not think about too carefully. One person who has done, however, is the Nobel Laureate economist, Kenneth Arrow. In the early 1950’s Arrow formulated what has come to be called his Impossibility Theorem, a sort of rule of logic for group decision making. Like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in Physics, the Impossibility Theorem, although hardly as well known, is at first somewhat difficult to grasp. But once it is understand, it is possible to see its effects everywhere - from democratic politics to corporate decision-making to family feuds.

The proof of the Impossibility Theorem is fairly complex. But its conclusion can be stated simply: For any decision to be made by a group, if the members of that group have even slightly different criteria of correct action, interests, or values, the decision agreed upon will be that which everyone can accept but which no one wants. Once admitted to consciousness, the Theorem explains many otherwise unexplainable phenomena - from the prosecution of wars, to the election of Donald Trump. The consequences of the Impossibility Theorem are not occasional ‘glitches’ in decision-making, they are the rule, that only rarely result in anything that a scientist, or any fully aware person, could call rational.

So Rees’s confidence in either the market or in the capacity of democratic government to address the issues he raises is clearly whistling in the dark. Arrow will prevail as it always has done. Given the urgency of many of these issues, it isn’t at all likely that any kind of rational consensus can be achieved even if all his views about the future were accepted in their entirety. So does the future of the planet lie with the establishment of a benign dictatorship, perhaps, as Rees suggests, executed through the United Nations? Well certainly not if the United Nations operated as it does now as a trans-national committee representing national interests.

But suppose there was a ‘top-man’ at the UN, a world leader who had been given the authority and the military power by its members to enforce Rees’s scientific agenda. Is our global future dependent upon rooting out the roots of the Arrow problem by eliminating the inherent group decision-making irrationality of democratic politics?

Unfortunately, even such a dictatorship is incapable of pursuing the scientifically rational agenda. The reason is once again simple: The first rule of power, its Prime Directive, is the maintenance of power. In other words, power has its own inherent interests. These interests are perfectly rational - without power it can do nothing. Therefore, even in scientific terms it must oppose the rationality of science. Trump’s recent attempts to trash science - from his refusal to recognize global warming to his blaming inadequate ‘raking’ of brush for California wildfires - is an example of such rational opposition. It is rational according to the demands of power. Every time the man makes such crazy assertions, he solidifies his political ‘base’, whether he believes what he’s saying or not.

Trump is not alone in his demonstration of the Prime Directive of power. Rees quotes the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, who makes the point unequivocally: “We all know what to do; we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” This from a man who is well-insulated from the interests of the hoi polloi of Europe. Even dictators who are immune from the tedious conventions of democratic politics, have politics to contend with. Rees doesn’t seem to take this basic fact at all seriously.

The question begged by Rees then is ‘What political process is capable of addressing the kinds of issues that confront humanity?’ The sad answer is simply ‘None’. Nothing on the entire spectrum from any sort of representative democracy to the most absolute of dictatorships holds the solution to the Arrow paradox or the prime directive of political power. We seem to be in the realm of the miraculous. So I suppose mass conversion to some sort of global religion might stand a chance. But the probability of such an event seems less than that of the human race emigrating to some distant planet to escape the conditions its very existence creates.

I can only hope that someone sees where I’ve gone wrong.

View all my reviews

 

The Book Against God 
by 

James Wood

 

BlackOxford's review 

Nov 28, 2018  ·  edit

did not like it

bookshelves: british, philosophy-theology 

An Educated Failure

I have no idea what to make of this book. It is apparently pointless, written in deadeningly tedious prose about marriage, religion, and the neuroses of the English middle class. Woolf’s introspection without insight; and Murdoch’s thought reduced to triviality. Yet James Wood is a brilliant literary critic whose nuanced understanding of texts matches anyone’s. How can that person have written and published this book?

The protagonist, Tom, is a neurotic, hapless, puerile slob with poor personal hygiene. He also lies as impulsively as Donald Trump, particularly to his wife, until she gives him the boot. His response is to complain in the manner of Harry Enfield’s petulant teenager, Kevin, about her unfairness. 

Characters pop in and quickly out of the narrative with no apparent purpose. The dialogue is stifling in the extreme:
“Are you all right, Tommy? You know we all care about you.’ The words fell like instantly evaporating rain. ‘Oh good, it’s nice to know that you all care about me,’ I said, with excessive bitterness. ‘You’re being unpleasant again.’ ‘And you are being less than sensitive.’ ‘This isn’t the place for this.’” It goes on for pages like this.

The story is held together by an undisclosed horrid and life-changing event on Christmas Eve. Turns out the effort of getting to the reveal is entirely wasted. The big event is about as trivial as a weather report in the New Testament. Tom’s spiritual journey, implied in the title, is equally trivial and the book leaves him exactly where he started.

There is much philosophical and theological name-dropping throughout, to no point whatsoever. Silly opinions flow constantly at pub meetings, dinner parties, and family get-togethers. “‘No,’ replied Max. ‘I’m not going to church. But I think as I get older that no one is really ever an atheist. Everyone believes.’” And “My intellectual hero is Martin Luther. I don’t think that needs further justification. My spiritual hero –well there are so awfully many, but I will nominate Father Brown, in the marvellous old Chesterton stories. And my moral hero: Winston Churchill.” Yes, and...?

So, a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Clearly fiction is not Wood’s metier. But this book is so bad I find it difficult to judge his other work with my former enthusiasm (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An Angry Country

It’s difficult to imagine what encouraged the first English settlers to re-locate from their lives of drudgery in the Appalachian mountains to precisely the same lives of drudgery a thousand miles distant in the Ozark hills (mountains being a mere conceit). But move they did, with their traditions of inbreeding, moonshine and frontier violence.

The Ozarks, strectching over the corners of four US States, is a sort of American Kurdistan, an artificially divided country. The tourist brochures now describe the Ozarks as quaint. But this is a description that is apt neither for the gauche theme parks that celebrate an idyllic but fictional pioneer past, nor for the meth labs that have sprung up to replace the corn whiskey stills. In Winter’s Bone this is a lost country, pointing simultaneously to the origins of the real America and a not unlikely future.

Woodrell describes a world of neo-liberal, personal independence - every man for himself and God help the sap who asks for help - a real Jeffersonian agricultural democracy. The only significance of family relationship is that one isn’t shot on sight. This is a world of hyper-misogyny, permanently incipient violence, and drugs - lots of drugs as the primary cottage industry. Made in America has taken on a new significance. The pioneer spirit is alive and well: everyone else is a threat to personal independence; the greatest threat is law which is a blatant attempt to constrain individual freedoms.

Male bonding is proportionate to the frequency of joint illegal ventures. Contract, in the form of adherence to the ‘code,’ is King; penalties for non-performance are steep. Women, of course, only have the freedom to obey; they exist is a parallel universe of silent fear, maintaining what little social cohesion there is. Men don’t speak to them at all except to command; they have no capacity to make contracts, so they cajole and manipulate on the periphery.

Except for the iPods and the occasional paved road, things haven’t changed much in Woodrell’s Ozarkian culture over the last two hundred years. Same families, same feuds, same primitive responses to events - usually violent. The dialogue captures the mood as well as the mores:
“You ain’t here for trouble, are you? ’Cause one of my nephews is Buster Leroy, and didn’t he shoot your daddy one time?”
“Yes’m, but that ain’t got nothin’ to do with me. They settled all that theirselves, I think.”
“Shootin’ him likely settled it. What is it you want?”

The central social principle is staying off the grid in order to be left alone. No one has a right to interrupt a man’s nap, or his cooking of ‘crank’. If there’s no paper trail, you don’t exist. And if you don’t exist, it’s really difficult to find you much less prosecute you. So the details of births are undocumented; and there are only a few male names - prefaced by unique nicknames known only in the community - Thump Milton, Cotton Milton, Whoop Milton, and Blond Milton, all of the family Dolly, to name only a few. It’s easier to lose oneself that way. Identity after all is a sacred concept, so must be protected against intrusion and pollution by foreigners.

Cultural isolation has generated a unique mystical tradition of origin, that there existed a pure culture that has been lost in mysterious circumstances. The original settlers from Appalachia - the founding fathers - have been transformed into prophetic messengers proclaiming a new religion. The core of this religion is anger towards a hostile world. The reasons for the anger have been forgotten, except in the myths of origin, as a lack of faithfulness to tradition. The only real evidence of the past is the rubble left by previous generations, building stones strewn about ruined hillsides.

Anger in this culture has become virtually a genetic trait, passed down as a legacy. Without it, the natives have nothing in common, nothing to strive for. The anger is ultimately directed not at others but toward themselves, however. “You got to be ready to die every day—then you got a chance.” They hate themselves. Perhaps that’s why the migrated in the first place. The purpose of the drugs is not economic; their function is self-forgetting. The rest of the world is relevant only because it threatens the expression of their self-directed rage.

A symbolic microcosm of America in the age of Trump?

Postscript 26Nov18: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...

Postscript 29Nov18: a little Ozark nostalgia: https://www.newsweek.com/video-confed...

View all my reviews

The Victim by Saul Bellow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Ecology of Oppression

How many ways are there to be a schmuck? Bellow probably includes most of them in The Victim. Over-reaction, under-reaction, mis-directed reaction, delayed reaction - Asa Leventhal has them all. He can’t be called hapless because he is aware that action is necessary; but he never seems to pick the right alternative.

Leventhal is sure of himself when he should be cautious; impetuous when he should be fearful; fearful when he could act boldly in his own interests. Marriage, work, relationships are mysterious traps for Leventhal. So no matter how he acts, he has regrets. His self-doubt is monumental. He seems unable to learn from experience, and so repeats the same errors over and over.

To make matters worse, Leventhal is acutely sensitive to his immediate environment. He is sympathetic; he worries about others and how they feel; he takes their part even when it is to his disadvantage. So he is constantly confronted with the need for decision about how to adapt himself to circumstances. This sensitive introversion can verge on saintliness... or mental illness.

At times the internal and external dialogue approach the frustrating interchange of characters out of a Samuel Beckett play - senseless mutual incomprehension which the reader must endure along with the characters. Scruples, second thoughts, hesitations, reversals, things unsaid abound.

But, unlike Beckett, Bellow interjects wonderful lyricism into almost every scene. His descriptions of what Leventhal perceives can be exquisite: “The paper frills along the shelves of the cupboard crackled in the current of the fan. It ran on the cabinet, sooty, with insectlike swiftness and a thrumming of its soft rubber blades; it suggested a fly hovering below the tarnish and heat of the ceiling and beside the scaling, many-jointed, curved pipes on which Elena hung rags to dry.”

The contrast, therefore, between Leventhal’s observational delicacy and his operational effectiveness in life, as it were, is stark. “People met you once or twice and they hated you. What was the reason; what inspired it?” This is Bellovian irony. He knows well what inspires it: anti-Semitism. Leventhal meets the beast of anti-Semitism in the office, with his in-laws, in his remembered past. But he minimizes it; he lets it slide in order to maintain civilized relationships. He feels compelled to be a mensch even in the midst of simmering hostility. One must never be disagreeable if one is to survive.

The reason for Leventhal’s timidity is a very specific fear, a fear shared by other Jews in the story, the fear of creating a bad reputation among the goyim. Getting a name for being uncivil, for calling out those whose anti-Semitism is expressed so casually, would be counterproductive. It would simply confirm existing prejudices. It would also jeopardize the possibility of influence, both professional and personal. So it is necessary to tolerate the verbal barbs and nasty asides lest something more dire ensue. Says the wife of one of Leventhal’s acquaintances, “People are bound not to take things too much to heart, for their own protection. You've got to use influence on them.” And you can’t do that if you complain about irrational abuse.

So Bellow’s subtle issues throughout are about the morality of victimhood. Is it possible to escape from the overwhelming power of convention and prejudice? Are the oppressed complicit in their own oppression? How open can a person be in confronting the powers that dominate his life? These are issues of culture, and therefore literature, not for the popular press or the law courts. Which is why Bellow writes about them.

View all my reviews

The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Theology of Fiction

Fiction is a sacred art; but it is not a religion according to James Wood. To confuse fiction with religion, for him, is the rough equivalent of mixing news reporting with editorializing, or following one’s metaphors to their literal conclusion. The result is fake good news and bad literature. Unless religion and literature are kept separate, a Cicero speaking what is truth for himself can easily slip into a Thomas More who presumes to speak universal truth and is willing to sacrifice himself as well as others to its literal fixity. Or perhaps the transition would be into a neurotic Herman Melville (at his most hysterical) who sees himself as the new Messiah in his own religion and consequently is unable to write anything worthwhile again: “Literature is the new Church, and Moby-Dick its Bible.”

Wood believes the error of considering fiction as religion - his Broken Estate - emerged in the 19th century; but the rot didn’t begin with Melville. Biblical criticism over the previous hundred years had progressively reduced the Christian gospels to mere culturally approved, edifying stories. And Wood feels fiction had smugly transformed itself from story-telling to a cult of technique, he cites a specific point of transition: “Style became religious with Flaubert, at the same moment that religion became a kind of literary style, a poetry, with Emest Renan.” It’s a story with merit given the explosion of fictional technique as well as the rise in devoted readership after this point.

Wood quotes Flaubert to show the disappearance of narrative into the text itself: “... there is no such thing as a subject, style being solely in itself an absolute way of seeing things.“ Although it avoids explicit comment on itself, Flaubert’s stylistic obsession as commentary on itself is obvious. The novel becomes ‘about nothing’ except itself as a work of art. Post-modernism, it seems, came packaged in the placenta of modernism and had already gestated among the readers and writers of novels long before philosophers christened it with a name.

I understand Wood’s point. To allow fiction to be called a religion threatens its destruction by ignoring its core of ambiguity and uncertainty. But Wood does establish fiction as the humanist alternative to religion. At one point he calls fiction “the slayer of religions.” He makes an implicit case that the writing and reading of narrative is the origin of religion; and if it is not the authentic religion, then certainly it is that which undermines anything else making such a claim: “... the triumph of this atheism of metaphor.”

Functionally, Wood has an obvious problem separating fiction from religion, even before his purported 19th century watershed. Fiction unites the individual with himself (Austen); herself with a community (Dickens); community with other communities (Gogol); and human communities with those that are not human (Poe). Fiction even has its heretics (Woolf), occultists (Lawrence), fundamentalists (Eliot), paranoid preachers (Pynchon), unbelieving vicars (Barnes) and liturgists (Steiner). Fiction creates a cosmos, a cosmos which becomes religious when it is no longer treated as fiction but as truth and is therefore fixed in a certain shape (Melville). That is, fiction does exactly what religion does - without the dogmatic structure, indeed, but then not all religion is dogmatic.

And fiction, like religion is transhistorical. That is, it unites generations to each other in a visible community of saints as readers and writers. The fact that Greek classics are still read is the most superficial part of this communion. Each generation steals from and, as Harold Bloom says, distorts through re-interpretation what it inherits. So, “Melville Americanizes Shakespeare, gives it tilt.” Joyce makes Odysseus’s arduous adventure into a leisurely walk. Fiction, that is makes (any other) religion impossible for anyone who reads: “Language breaks up God, releases us from the one meaning of the predestinating God, but merely makes that God differently inscrutable by flooding it with thousands of different meanings.”

This evolution of story-telling implies a continuity of something that must be called belief, a psychological element shared with religion. “The real, in fiction, is always a matter of belief, and is therefore a kind of discretionary magic: it is a magic whose existence it is up to us, as readers, to validate and confirm.” This makes belief in fiction a more not less arduous task than in religion: “Fiction demands belief from us, and this request is demanding in part because we can choose not to believe.”

Beliefs, call them fundamental presumptions about the world if need be, are passed along from generation to generation. Even if one distinguishes the passed along belief in fiction as conditional withholding of unbelief, its effect is the same as that of religion - to open the mind to possibility, including the possibility of that of which it has no direct experience or an interpretation of experience that is novel. It is only perhaps in the insistence of religion that its fictions are superior to experience and are incapable of improvement that the differences between fiction and religion become clear. If so, belief in fiction is hardly distinguishable from the anti-doctrinal stance of, say, quietist Baptists or good New England Universalists. I dare say most Mormons are unable to articulate the ‘secret’ foundations of their cultic beliefs.

Wood is no post-modernist. Stories and the words from which they are constituted are too precious to be treated as arbitrary and isolated ciphers. But neither does he think the relationship between words and things are fixed by something called reality. Wood is a self-described realist, by which he means not that he attends scrupulously to details but that human experience shapes and is shaped by stories which seem important to that experience. Stories don’t drop like manna from heaven; nor do they completely capture any experience no matter how much fine grained detail of ‘externals’ they employ. “Behind one reality lies a deeper, more private reality, which is always lost.” Experience can be chased but never captured. Compared with religion, fiction is more modest; but it still sleeps around. Wood’s sympathetic treatment of Virginia Woolf’s ‘mysticism’ suggests that fiction and religion have an affinity which he doesn’t dare admit.

Fictions are the offerings we make to each other in an attempt to share elusive experience; or, what amounts to the same thing, make sense of it to ourselves. “Fiction is real when its readers validate its reality; and our power so to validate comes both from our sense of the actual real (‘ life’) and from our sense of the fictional real (the reality of the novel).” Fiction therefore involves a kind of conspiracy between writer and reader. The latter is as active as the former, as the congregant is with his priest who is dependent upon him: “Fiction should seem to offer itself to the reader’s completion, not to the writer’s,” Wood says in his critique of Julian Barnes.

The criteria of acceptance of the offering are as transient as the stories themselves. Some ‘work’, others don’t, perhaps because they are too idiosyncratic, perhaps because the world hasn’t caught up to them, or passed them by long ago. But they are never made required reading (except in secondary school) as if they held some essential truth. In this sense all fiction is necessarily experimental. It can’t be said to have value until it’s offering is accepted - obviously so because it carries its standard of value with it, just as does religion and its correlated ethics. Both fiction and religion change not just what we see but what we do.

Ultimately Wood doesn’t think fiction is a religion because he is a Thomist at heart who has an admirable (because humble) fear of disrespect for that which may be beyond language. For him, as for Thomas Aquinas, even the word ‘God’ is a kind of heresy because it is a distortion of the very existence of the divine. As Wood says: “when you bring God into the sea of metaphor, He is placed on equal status with everything else. You dare the infidel idea that God is only a metaphor. No, language is a voice that does not help us get any nearer to the silence of God; it is its own voice.” Fair enough, but then even St Thomas proceeded to write almost a million words about God in his Summa Theologicae. So Wood’s protestation that fiction is not a religion seems more than a bit forced. And certainly there are worse systems of belief.

View all my reviews

 

Metaphors We Live By 
by 

George Lakoff, 

 

Mark Johnson

 

Understanding One’s Native Tongue

It turns out there were really good existential reasons for paying attention in primary school English. All that business about grammar and figures of speech is actually essential for getting on in the world quite apart from speaking proper. This classic from the 1970’s shows why this is so in an entertaining and convincing way.

Language is a odd thing. It looks like something neutral, a tool for doing things, some good, some not so good depending on its user. But language is crafty; it seems to have its own interests more than ours at heart. The conspiracy of language becomes obvious as soon as one recognizes the fact that words are defined solely in terms of other words, never in terms of things outside of language. This is a difficult idea to hold onto, mainly because it suggests that none of us really knows what we might be talking about.

The way this works in daily life is by our inevitable and pervasive use of metaphors to describe the world and what we’re doing in it. We fall in love, offer food for thought, try not to waste time, and build theories. We don’t even notice that these sorts of activities are metaphorical. And “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” Of course, the ‘things’ in question are always other words. So language fools us into thinking its not even there.

Metaphors have their own agendas. For example we conduct an argument like we’re engaging in a war. We make defensible claims so that our thesis is not demolished by an attack by our opponents. These expressions are not without content or effect. Through them, at least in our Western European culture, we know that there are winners and losers in an argument just as in war. There are certainly other ways to consider argument - let’s say as leading to consensus in the culture of the North American Plains Indians for example - but not for us. We’re stuck with argumentative combat.

The pervasiveness of metaphors really can’t be overstated. They are literally in almost every sentence we utter. Our brains are effectively hardwired (!) by them. Metaphors We Live Bydocuments (!) hundreds of what might be called root (!) metaphors which ramify (!) uncontrollably throughout the language. From Time is Money to Happy is Up to a sight which Fills our Field of Vision, without a shared grasp (!) of these metaphors, communication would be impossible.

And then things get even more complicated. Metaphors not only morph, they also breed. So Love is a physical force, but it is also a patient to be cared for, a madness to be overcome, a form of magic which entrances, and even a war within ourselves and with the beloved. So-called Conduit metaphors form composites which may hide their origins in language rather than real things. Thus ideas or meanings are metaphorically physical objects; and linguistic expressions are metaphorical containers for these objects; and we communicate these containers by sending them from person to person as if they were parcels. This last step, ‘sending’ may not look metaphorical but it is indeed so, just in disguise as something that is actually done.

The idea of rationality itself, Reason as the philosophers call it, starts to look just a tad unreasonable when considered in terms of the metaphors involved. Look at the ambiguity of what we think of as reason sufficient to compel intellectual assent:
“... because I'm bigger than you. (intimidation)
... because if you don't, I'll... (threat)
... because I'm the boss, (authority)
... because you're stupid, (insult)
... because you usually do it wrong, (belittling)
... because I have as much right as you do. (challenging authority)
... because I love you. (evading the issue) ...
... because if you will..., I'll... (bargaining)
... because you're so much better at it. (flattery)”

Whether one agrees with the linguistic and philosophical foundations of Metaphors We Live By, the book is essential reading for any educated person. It is direct, understandable, and immense fun. It is also revelatory. Give it a go, metaphorically speaking.

Utz by Bruce Chatwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Living Within the Lie

How can one best deal with the reality of power, particllarly power which is obviously arbitrary and tasteless as well as unjust? This is an especially relevant issue during the regime of Trump and his vulgarising influence in world affairs. Utz is wonderful comedic farce about how to deal with power - at a personal as well as a political level - not by confronting it but by treating it with utter disdain.

The eponymous Utz is a Czech survivor - of two world wars and a subsequent communist regime. What sustains him is an aesthetic, specifically his appreciation for Meissen porcelain. “Wars, pogroms and revolutions', he used to say, 'offer excellent opportunities for the collector.” He is savvy enough to understand that power is never permanently held and that its machinations need not impede the life of the true aesthete. “Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber; a void where confused signals buzz about at random; where a murmur or innuendo causes panic: so, in the end, the machinery of repression is more likely to vanish, not with war or revolution, but with a puff, or the voice of falling leaves.” Power is its own worst enemy; if we can just leave it alone, it dissipates.

Utz is no avaricious materialist. Collecting is a spiritual endeavour that involves treating individual pieces as if they were icons that promote entry into another world. Such appreciation is impossible in a museum or public gallery where the pieces “must suffer the de-natured existence of an animal in the zoo. In any museum the object dies —of suffocation and the public gaze -whereas private ownership confers on the owner the right and the need to touch.” His obsession with porcelain is a quest “to find the substance of immortality.” But a collection of such objects is also a constant reminder of one’s own mortality: “These things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate. Nothing is more ageing than a collection of works of art.” The collection presents both concrete reality and existential hope for the one oppressed by power..

Even more, the pieces act much as the Golem in the Jewish legends of Prague - to protect, if not one’s body, at least one’s mind from the threats of power which abound in life. So, for Utz, “this world of little figures was the real world.” And like the Golem, and for that matter Adam himself, isn’t porcelain created from clay and water? These precisely crafted fragments of clay are our links to the supernatural which permit us to ignore the minor irritations of bureaucrats and customs officials no matter how expertly applied. “‘So you see,' said Utz, 'not only was Adam the first human person. He was also the first ceramic sculpture’.” Porcelain is a philosophy of primal mankind, of freedom.

Nevertheless, an aesthetic obsession, like a Golem, is prone to get out of hand unless there is a control mechanism. Utz In fact has two such controls: sex and an annual two weeks abroad. The first keeps him grounded, the second keeps him sane. It’s a clever therapy; and he recognizes his fortunate luxury. This is a luxury which allows him to avoid the main temptation to power, that is to say power as a remedy for power’s ills. “He knew that anti-Communist rhetoric was as deadly as its Communist counterpart.” In any case, his annual visits abroad served mainly to remind him of the venality and useless worry that were the essential conditions of living in the West.

Thus Utz’s aesthetic allows him to live comfortably and without undue stress “within the lie,” not just the lie of Czechoslovakian Communism, but also the lie that there is anything permanent or permanently obtainable in life. Not at all a bad way to deal with the power that envelopes one’s existence.

View all my reviews

Reader’s Block by David Markson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Hard Slogging

Reader’s Block, like its successor, The Last Novel, reads like a collection of author’s notes, random ideas that come his way which might be useful in a future narrative to be written by the subsequent Novelist Who pulls things together.

In Reader’s Block, Reader appears as a magpie collecting fragments of mostly literary opinion and gossip. Reader is rapacious and has no clear filter for what is relevant - a sort of literary omnivore - tittle-tattle, biographical detail, prejudices (particularly anti-Semitism), and apocryphal anecdotes.

Reader's companion, Protagonist (perhaps the prospective Novelist in reflective mood), presents questions about himself - his background, motivations, elements of character, etc. These are a sort of probiotic questions, preparing the mass of material for subsequent digestion. Presumably Protagonist is attempting to give some structure to Reader’s random acquisitions.

Perhaps because I read them in the wrong order, I found Reader’s Block less interesting and less witty than The Last Novel. The individual factoids were less impressive and the whole appeared a sort of groping in the dark for a theme. Perhaps that was Markson’s intention. Writing of any quality is a messy business.

If so, he captures the tedium of an author’s business exceptionally well. It’s undoubtedly a grind and a drone finding material and inspiration. But then there is a definite element of watching paint dry in observing Markson’s ironic portrayal of himself.

View all my reviews

Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fifteen Minutes in the Dark

The best science fiction looks backwards into the past as well as speculating forward into the future, linking things we think (or thought) we’re sure of with things that don’t exist. Comparing the two can be sobering as well as enlightening.

Asimov writes just this kind of inter-temporal story in Nightfall. On the one hand it anticipates things like the debates about climate change and dark matter that wouldn’t emerge more articulately for decades. On the other, it contains historical echoes of philosophical and theological issues from Pascale’s Wager to Galileo’s condemnation by the Church, to the impact of Kantian categories of perception. The story then mixes the anticipatory and the completed into a sort of a theory of Mind and explores the delicate dependency of Mind upon expectations as well as memory - specifically the dependency on light among a species unfamiliar with darkness.

As one of Asimov’s characters says, “Your brain wasn’t built for the conception [of total darkness] any more than it was built for the conception of infinity or of eternity. You can only talk about it. A fraction of the reality upsets you, and when the real thing comes, your brain is going to be presented with the phenomenon outside its limits of comprehension.” A very interesting premise. What then?

View all my reviews

The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gaia Strikes Back

The Genocides, written in 1965, is part of a very specialized dystopian sub-genre which might be called ‘Apocalyptic Greenery.’ This collection of anti-biophilia stretches at least from Greener Than You Think (1947), to The Day 0f the Triffids (1951), to Death of Grass (1982). All consider various sorts of revenge by the plant kingdom on its primary oppressors, human beings. The moral is clear: the world which houses us is not friendly toward us.

Of these fantasies The Genocides is certainly the most homicidal as well as the most biblically apocalyptic, referencing specific Old Testament passages throughout. Appropriately enough one of the key characters is a fundamentalist preacher turned survivalist. The send-up of Christianity is obvious in the comments made by one of his sons: “One way or another, atheists had to be stomped out. Because atheism was like poison in the town reservoir; it was like…. But Neil couldn’t remember how the rest of it went. It had been a long time since his father had given a good sermon against atheism and the Supreme Court.”

The Genocides differs from its peers in that it is not human beings who are the cause of earthly destruction but a mysterious alien race which uses the Earth as a plantation within which human beings, and apparently all other living things except a highly invasive species of plant, are merely vermin. The Genocides is also the only one to avoid any cliched allegory to the Cold War, a favourite trope among contemporary sci-fi writers. The ‘enemy’ is not our human confreres but something entirely ‘other.’

Disch suggests, therefore, that there are bigger problems than either international nuclear conflict or environmental destruction on the horizon: “There is evil everywhere, but we can only see what is in front of our noses, only remember what has passed through our bellies,” says the preacher’s other son. The clear suggestion is that we are part of a hierarchical gnostic universe which might contain any number of increasingly powerful species. To those some level beyond human, we are indeed mere vermin, as they perhaps are to those even more powerful.

Of course these unexplained aliens and their technologies of agriculture and pest-control are metaphorical but not in a hackneyed way. Disch points specifically to his issue: “There had been the intoxication, while it lasted, of power. Not the cool, gloved power of wealth that had ruled before, but a newer (or an older) kind of power that came from having the strength to perpetuate extreme inequity.” This is, I think, the core of the book: Power, what it is, how it is used, and where it leads, which is to eternal inequity. There is an important theological criticism here of Disch’s childhood Catholic education which insisted that all power comes from God and is distributed for the ultimate good of creation.

Disch makes no distinction between good power and bad power or between the power of Nature and the power of God. Power is of one kind only. It is a force which coerces. “Before the advent of the Plants, Tassel [a once prosperous farming community] had been the objectification of everything he despised: smallness, meanness, willful ignorance and a moral code as contemporary as Leviticus,” thinks the educated brother.

After the Plants and their alien Farmers arrive, the real status of human beings and their self-justifying ideas of power derived from some divinity are made clear: “They were the puppets of necessity now.” He who has the ‘best’ moral ideas, or the best weapons to enforce adherence to them, is ultimately irrelevant whether he knows it or not. Power is mere conceit and is only negatively associated with the divine.

The pursuit of power, in other words, is a central human failing. Ultimately it is vain, and will be proven so. None of us likes to recognise this. The idea of the divine source of power, it seems, is a typical human ploy to exert power over power by confining it in a benign (or at least sentient) box called God. “It wounded his pride to think that his race, his species, his world was being defeated with such apparent ease. What was worse, what he could not endure was the suspicion that it all meant nothing, that the process of their annihilation was something quite mechanical: that mankind’s destroyers were not, in other words, fighting a war but merely spraying the garden.”

View all my reviews

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“It Ain’t Changed None”

Those old enough to remember the film Easy Rider will know the fate of its protagonists, played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. They dared bring their long hair and loose morals into The Deep South almost 50 years ago. They both end up dead, shot off their motorcycles by the local rednecks for being different. The point of the film? Although Fonda and Hopper are white folk - and this was the target audience - this is what black people experience on a daily basis in a society that looks to differences in order to justify itself.

The film was made and released during the long reign of George Wallace (and his wife) as governor of Alabama. He was a man proud of his apartheid views who did all he could to provoke the real rednecks on the ground to a new Civil War based on race. Who would have believed at the time that the grandchildren of those rednecks who supported him would be the ones to sustain the same culture of hate, racism, and provincial sectarianism, much less a President sympathetic to their cause, a half-century later?

It takes the voices of two people, a mother (Leonie) and young son (JoJo), and two spirits, one of the mother’s brother and the other of a teen aged convict, to tell this story of dystopia in today’s Mississippi. Leonie is a hapless victim of race, poverty and drugs. The mixed race JoJo is the adult to his incompetent mother, whom he rightly mistrusts; and sole caretaker for his baby sister, whom he protects. Spirit One is the drug-induced image of Leonie’s murdered brother, Given, known naturally as Given-not-Given in his ephemeral form, who haunts his sister in her moments of intoxication. Spirit Two is the ghost of young Richie, worked and beaten and killed at the Parchman State Prison Farm, a real and familiar place to black Mississippians. Richie is interested in JoJo as a way to get home, that is, to some final peace.

The spirits consolidate memory and collapse time. They know how hate and racial violence have a persistence and continuity: “Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none... It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same,” says the ghost Richie. And referring to Parchman Prison: “Got a lot of men in there ain’t so friendly. Then and now. It’s full of wrong men. The kind of men that feel better if they do something bad to you. Like it eases something in them... Parchman was past, present, and future all at once?”

Leonie’s use of drugs has a therapeutic purpose - to see and feel her dead brother. All her other emotional attachments - to her children, to her parents, to her only friend - are stunted and frustrating. Only her relationship with her husband has significance, and that mostly destructive. Given’s murder at the hands of her white husband’s cousin is the likely cause of her emotional infirmity. Drugs return her to that time before violence. Ultimately, however, she loses even Given-not-Given when he accompanies their mother into a final restful death. At that point she also loses even the little of the cultural memory she had available through her mother. There is no future for her because there is no past. The therapy has failed, as it must.

Only JoJo has the innate mystical sensitivity and talent to see, hear and understand the spirit of Richie. Of this sort of lost soul there are in fact an uncountable number, the immaterial remains of those who have been wronged but for whom there is no justice. JoJo is their voice: “They perch like birds, but look as people. They speak with their eyes: He raped me and suffocated me until I died I put my hands up and he shot me eight times she locked me in the shed and starved me to death while I listened to my babies playing with her in the yard they came in my cell in the middle of the night and they hung me they found I could read and they dragged me out to the barn and gouged my eyes before they beat me still I was sick and he said I was an abomination and Jesus say suffer little children so let her go and he put me under the water and I couldn’t breathe.”

“‘There’s so many,’ Richie says. His voice is molasses slow. ‘So many of us,’ he says. ‘Hitting. The wrong keys. Wandering against. The song.’” And more, presumably, arrive everyday until the Song of Hatred is drowned out. This is why they sing.

View all my reviews

The Last Novel by David Markson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Semifictional Semifiction

The Last Novel is a compendium of apparently disconnected facts, aphorisms, anecdotes, and assorted witticisms. Mostly these are about writers and other artists but also includes other notables like scientists and politicians. All are delivered in the best traditions of WC Fields and Henny Youngman as perfectly crafted one-liners. The effect is startling - as if Markson first wrote something of high literary density - like a Finnegans Wake or an Under the Volcano - and then stripped away all the narrative to reveal only the allusions and references that were embedded in it. What remains serves the same function as a Russian icon - pointing beyond itself to some other reality. Markson refers to this as semifictional semifiction in the text, an outstandingly accurate description.

Quite apart from the technique, the sheer scholarship required to produce such a work appears overwhelming to anyone less well-read than Markson, the presumed Novelist of the piece, who pops up sporadically throughout. Novelist is a witty magpie who collects only interesting, offbeat shiny things for his nest: pithy insults, fascinating oddities, intimate flaws, passing remarks, and little known biographical details from the lives of Dante and Shakespeare to those of Waugh and Vonnegut. Collectively these tidbits form a sort of cultural detritus which Novelist excavates layer by layer. The things we forgot we knew about and how these things connect to what we do remember seems the implicit story line.

Novelist particularly likes contradictions and euphemisms. “Gerard Manley Hopkins, on realizing that he feels a certain kinship with Whitman: As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a very pleasant confession.” And “He had not escaped the common penalties of transgressing the laws of strict purity, wrote Alexander Thayer re Beethoven. Which is to say — he had syphilis.” In fact most of his observations are ironic ( “Lenin played tennis”), although I don’t detect any sarcasm. He is an observer rather than a critic or a judge, as in “In an era when singers frequently embellished music to their own taste, Rossini once complimented Adelina Patti on an aria from The Barber of Seville — and then asked her who the composer was.”

Novelist creates fascinating grammatical constructions: “Wallpaper, George Steiner dismissed much of Jackson Pollock as.” And then resolves the tension this creates: “Extremely expensive wallpaper, Kenneth Rexroth made it.” This rivets the reader as if he’s riding a skittish horse which demands constant attention. Every step has to be monitored; and watching the twitching of the ears is crucial lest one miss the intention. The narrator admits to his apparent unreliability. “Novelist’s personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.”

I’m convinced that much of Novelist’s style is shaped by ancient Hebrew poetry. His repetition of a point with variations is typical:
“The sound of Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet:
Like a girl saying yes, Eddie Condon said.
The sound of Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone:
Like a dry martini, being what Desmond himself said he wanted.”
And the piece also frequently involves interesting reversals in which the reference is purposely ambiguous:
“One of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.
Edmund Wilson called This Side of Paradise.
Not a lovable man.
John O’Hara said of Scott Fitzgerald himself.”

Novelist’s trains of thought are wonderful to experience:
“Latin, Greek, Italian, and German, George Eliot read.
Latin, Greek, Italian, and French — Mary Shelley.
Hindi, not English, Rudyard Kipling’s first language was.
People who pronounce the word ask as if it were spelled with an x.
As for that matter it was, until the late sixteenth century.”
Often the connections demand participative thought by the reader:
“The name Copperfield came from a sign Dickens had noticed on a shop in a London slum.
Chuzzlewit likewise.
Nothing but obscenities and filth.
Being all Conrad could find in D. H. Lawrence.
Disgust and horror, recorded Abigail Adams after a blackface performance of Othello:
My whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.”

And then, of course, there are the straightforward literary gags: “I come of a people who do not even acknowledge Jesus Christ. Why am I supposed to acknowledge Abstract Expressionism? Asked Jack Levine.” Or: “Good lord, Willie, you are drunk. Either that or you’re writing for a very small audience.” This could refer to William Faulkner or perhaps William Yeats; it’s probably better to leave it up in the air.

Novelist ends with a Flemish phrase - “Als ick kan”- which can be variously translated as ‘If I am able,’ ‘The best I can do,’ or perhaps simply ‘Perhaps’. In any case it’s tentative. The novel is billed as ‘Last’ but that can only mean ‘most recent’. Perhaps it’s simply a summary of Novelist’s knowledge of the world at some arbitrary point. And the same might be said of any interpretation of what Novelist has to say - only more or less recent; never definitive.

View all my reviews

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Can’t be silent”

Another GR reader called this book “a literary Rorschach test” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). I don’t think there is a better description. It elicits whatever is in your head into the clear air. The novel presents image after image of racial reality in the United States and asks the reader to suggest what they mean. It isn’t political; it’s phenomenological: ‘Here’s how things are. What do you think?’

The ‘things’ in question range from white privilege, to gangs, to gun violence (particularly by police), to drugs, to today’s forms of segregation, and the ways in which families adapt to these things - or don’t. Thomas’s writing is sharp, witty, humorous, and tight. Her movement in and out of dialect, and in and out of the two cultures inhabited by a talented 16 year old black girl in a white school is remarkably skilled.

My reaction to the Rorschach test is not to the images themselves but to what I think is behind them: purpose. What Thomas shows is that human beings are insistently purposeful creatures. And when these purposes are expressed inarticulately or are unrecognized by other human beings, they look suspicious, criminal, and ultimately evil.

For example, regarding gang membership: “With King Lords [a gang], we had a whole bunch of folks who had our backs, no matter what. They bought us clothes and shit our momma couldn’t afford and always made sure we ate.’ He looks at the counter. It was just cool to have somebody take care of us for a change, instead of the other way around.” Not much different from the Mormons then.

And Thomas knows that when human purposes interact, there’s a rhetorical battle going on to establish legitimacy. Some purposes get rationalized and presented as obviously superior to other purposes. This is the source not just of evil but of the ultimate evil - hatred.

In a crucial scene, for example, Thomas has the father of the policeman who is accused of murdering a teenager give a speech to the media: “‘My son loved working in the neighborhood,’ One-Fifteen’s [the cop’s badge number] father claims. ‘He always wanted to make a difference in the lives there.’ Funny. Slave masters thought they were making a difference in black people’s lives too. Saving them from their ‘wild African ways.’ Same shit, different century. I wish people like them would stop thinking that people like me need saving.”

So this thing we call purpose is more than a bit tricky. If we don’t make it clear why we do things, it looks like we’re stupid, hapless, and up to no good. We “can’t be silent” without betraying ourselves, as one of the characters says. On the other hand, if we presume that we do things for some crisply-stated morally ‘higher good’ we are probably deluding ourselves and everyone else about motives hidden even to ourselves. So neither can we be silent when we are exposed to such moralistic cant, even from our own mouths.

Of course I could be entirely wrong about this. Thomas of course is the one with all the dodgy pictures.

View all my reviews

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On Epistemology in Democracy

Global experience over the last decade is clear: internet social technology poses a far greater threat to democracies than it does to the world’s authoritarian regimes. Morozov was one of the first to recognize this as a likely possibility years before Donald Trump executed his coup of the American Republican Party and Vladimir Putin mounted his successful cyber-attack on the US elections.

The prevailing wisdom before Twitter and Facebook and the virtually infinite blogosphere was that the free flow of information and opinion was a path not just to factual general truth about the world but to the specific truth of liberal democracy. The internet was “Radio Free Europe on steroids.” Information that was ‘dis-intermediated’ from the interference of government and the constraints of cost would, it was presumed, promote massive popular unrest and lead to “regime change from within.” The Fukuyama thesis that a global liberal/capitalist society was inevitable would be realized.

This sort of “cyber-Utopianism” not only misunderstands the technology of the internet, it also misunderstands the vulnerabilities of liberal democracy and the interests of corporate capital. Democratic states are only formally constructed on constitutions. What matters practically in their functioning is a complex network of institutions - the press and other news media, political parties, lobbyists, and technical experts from the corporate world and academia to name only a few. Elections and their protocols are largely the result of how these other pivotal institutions function (or don’t), not the other way round. We depend upon them to filter, and sift, and verify what purport to be facts of the world.

But the internet has a major institutional advantage over these traditional sources of public information: cost. Social apps are private and commercially developed. Bloggers get sponsors or produce their editorials for nothing. It looks therefore like the perfect link between corporate capitalism and liberal democracy. The flaw in this train of thought is that corporate commerciality has little interest in the distinction between fact and fiction. What sells, sells. To put the matter succinctly: truth has precisely zero commercial value.

By by-passing other institutions, the internet eliminates the myriad of epistemological checks and balances that exist in a democratic culture. Trump’s Twitter feed is unedited and doesn’t come packaged with editorial comment, except for his own. The man is his own ‘trusted source.’ His followers are willing customers who have been conditioned by a lifetime of sophisticated advertising to accept self-serving assertions as statements of fact. Twitter has no interest in the veracity of his tweets, just their effect on the size of their customer base.

And as Russian and Chinese hackers have demonstrated beyond doubt, fake news can be inserted freely into technological networks for many purposes other than self-promotion. The absence of epistemological filtering means that all ideas and opinions are equal. In fact, the more outrageous, the more popular, and therefore the more commercial, the higher commercial value they have. The internet is not Radio Free Europe on steroids; it is The National Enquirer delivered to every house and on every billboard in the country. Whatever tendency there is in the United States to believe in conspiracies - from Communists under the bed to fluoride diluting natural essences - has been magnified by orders of magnitude.

I’m not competent to know whether Morozov’s suggestions for overcoming the epistemological nakedness of the net are sensible. Or even if they are still relevant after our experience during the 8 years since his book was published. What is clear, however, is that very few technological or sociological pundits have a clue about the likely impact of technology, especially its impact on political systems. That, and that there are a lot more surprises in store.

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

View all my reviews

The Museum of Things Left Behind by Seni Glaister
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Comedy of Power

In the line of Gulliver’s Travels, Gormenghast, and The Mouse That Roared, The Museum of Things Left Behind is a send-up of cultural, political and corporate power. Its conceits, its isolation and insulation from reality, its arrogant self-justifications and its inveterate misogyny are displayed with wit and humour. At a personal level the book plays up the particularly masculine disease of the anxiety of influence - the simultaneous devotion to and resentment toward one’s forebears from whom power has been received. Sociologically Glaister shows insight from obvious first-hand experience about how organizations really work, which is generally not how they’re supposed to. They have a momentum of their own which isn’t really subject to anyone’s control.

Glaister’s protagonist, the “Elected Dictator” of the minuscule country of Vallerosa, is, in theory, politically omnipotent. In practice he is the most neurotically constrained person in the kingdom. He can trust none of his ministers; and since the Prime Directive of power is to stay in power, he feels continually oppressed. His father, he feels, had done more. As he says to his chief of staff, “You know, Angelo, I’ve felt for a while now that I’m losing control. I see no tangible signs of it but, from the periphery of my vision, I can tell that, little by little, the things I have within my power are becoming becoming more precarious.”

His vulnerability to his own staff is matched only by his gullibility when confronted with the jargon of American management consultants who know their real job is not to accomplish anything other than to keep him around - in order, of course, that they might stay around. But even their assurances leave him with doubts: “The numbers. Do they add up? If we’re not importing anything, and we’re going to sell everything we’ve got, and all we’ve got now is tea, what are our people actually going to live on?... And, anyway, why do we need more? Whom do we offend if we’re satisfied with enough?” In the battle of common sense vs. the economic imperative, it is always advantage growth. ‘Better’ is the comparative for... well no one is quite sure for what. Success is what passes for success.

The eponymous museum is a Lost & Found of the detritus of the world forgotten randomly over the years in Vallerosa, a sort of national unconscious. But of course each of the residents also carries around his own psychic baggage, which can only be revealed by appropriate external intervention - in this case the arrival of a special guest with royal credentials. Is not her letter of introduction stamped with the image of the British monarch? Thus it is usually through error that one becomes aware of the unconscious. Real progress is always a mistake; we don’t create it, we fall into it.

The Museum of Things Left Behind is witty, well-written, and instructive. It’s a book that all politicians, corporate executives, and economists ought to read. But of course they won’t.

View all my reviews

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ayn Rand Lives

This is an important book about an important subject. It’s primary importance lies in the fact that it is completely wrong about what’s at issue and how to fix it. It is so wrong that it makes the case for its antithesis. This too is wrong, if only slightly less 0bviously so.

Here’s the thesis: “We live in the age of measured accountability, of reward for measured performance, and belief in the virtues of publicizing those metrics through ‘transparency.’ But the identification of accountability with metrics and with transparency is deceptive. Accountability ought to mean being held responsible for one’s actions. But by a sort of linguistic sleight of hand, accountability has come to mean demonstrating success through standardized measurement,... The most characteristic feature of metric fixation is the aspiration to replace judgment based on experience with standardized measurement.”

Here’s the problem: what Muller means by standardized metrics is what some group of people - managers, politicians, scientists - have agreed among themselves as to what constitutes ‘success’. The entire book is then devoted to examples of how this sort of agreement results in stupid actions and consequences. My experience, like his, is that many metrics are misconceived, obsolete, counter-productive, and well... stupid. But rather than investigate how to improve the way these metrics are arrived at by any group, Muller plumps for replacing them with a vague concept of ‘individual experience.’ But what is the content of this individual experience? It can only be another more or less (usually less) articulate metric, some different criterion of correct choice, or it’s nothing but fantasy. And if this criterion has not been accepted by the group as superior to the existing ‘standardized’ criterion, how has ‘accountability’ been served?

An answer might be that the decision on the criterion used by an individual in defiance of the established metric is the precise action for which he or she is to be held accountable. Is the metric of individual experience better than the established metric? This would be quite reasonable - disobeying orders for a good reason should be acceptable when the orders are obviously destructive, illegal, or have unexpected collateral effects. But this answer would require some elaboration about the process by which an individual’s experience, when in conflict with established criteria of decision, can be reconciled with, incorporated into, or modify the established view of correct action. A military courts-martial for example is usually not convened to determine whether insubordination has taken place but whether it is justified in the circumstances.

But Muller doesn’t provide the least hint how the experience of an individual, or new experiences at all, should be used to modify the ‘standing orders’ of established metrics. He seems to believe that there are real but inherently inarticulate criteria living in the nervous systems of decision-makers which, if forced into some level of operational literacy, would lose their real import. He also believes that in general terms these inarticulate instincts are superior to any metric formulated by a group. If the individual is in conflict with the group, the group is simply wrong. Whatever else he has to say about accountability is therefore nonsense. There is none. Disagreement about ‘what counts’ is down to some sort of genetically-instilled spiritual preferences (or perhaps hedonistic utility) that can’t be questioned lest it inhibit the exercise of individual sovereignty.

I understand Muller’s frustration with the idiotic metrics which are employed in business and social policy. I have my own thesaurus of war stories about how such metrics have destroyed organisations and damaged individuals. And Muller is fighting against a real intellectual enemy - the idea that measurement of anything is an activity devoid of political judgment. This ideology, and it is just that, is the antithesis to Muller’s thesis. It seeks to establish that what we measure, principally in our choice of a metric of success, as some objective property of the thing measured. This is the foundation stone of scientism which the belief that individuals must submit to the rationality of reality, a reality determined by a consensus of experts. These experts may include a diverse set of skills - accountancy, economics, sociology, management or finance for example - but their aim is the same: to impose a standard, universal metric of success wherever they ply their influence. And Muller is right to resist this sort of intellectual totalitarianism.

But he is not right to substitute the arbitrariness of some group of experts with the arbitrariness of some individual’s experience. This is just another ideology. It strikes me that Muller takes the ideas of economic neo-liberalism to their philosophical outer limits. Margret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan didn’t believe that society existed; only individuals interacting did. Muller extends this to the realm of practical ideas from moral calculus to commercial decision-making. Discussion, mutual discovery, agreement and group learning are not things he can even consider in his ideological cage. How conflicts about what is important and therefore what should be measured in business, politics, and any cooperative effort are simply not his concern. What he calls ‘metric fixation’ is no different from ‘social awareness’. I am quite sure that Ayn Rand is alive and well in Muller’s garden shed.

Postscript: Muller implicitly presumes that social groups are fictional and should be given no status within his ideology of measurement. The opposing ideology, that only social conventions have meaning in measurement, is also prevalent. See here for a typical example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... There are interesting philosophical implications of both views. For example ‘measurement socialists’ believe that the measurements they make are objective properties of the thing measured. While ‘measurement individualists’ like Muller believe that what is measured is entirely in the head of the one doing the measuring. Debates between the two groups are rarely edifying. For an alternative theory which avoids both the Scylla of collectivism and the Charybdis of individualism in measurement, see here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

View all my reviews