The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On Turkish Sarcasm

I have reached a stage in my life at which almost everything I read provokes memories of things I have done, many of them toe-curling in their naive arrogance. This is not always, therefore, a welcome experience. But it is also often instructive.

In my younger days, a thoughtless ambition led me to accept a position as a senior executive of an international stock exchange. This was a profound error - on their part as well as mine. I assumed the job would benefit by my interest in abstract thinking; they thought I would be good at corporate politics. We all were enmired in our own fantasies.

Consequently there were few happy professional moments. But there was one. I had written a letter to the managing director of the Istanbul Stock Exchange suggesting a meeting to explore the possibility for a joint venture in the trading of financial options. In response I was invited for a weekend visit. Right up my street I thought. There is nothing more abstract, not even quantum physics, than options theory; and I’d have two full days to pontificate on the subject.

My experience had been that finance-types tend to be part of their own unique global culture. They know they’re selling largely hot air - like options theory - so they tend to overcompensate by adopting an attitude of confident aloofness and even disdain for the non-financial aspects of human existence, things like art, and philosophy, and non-instrumental relationships, including families. I had learned the drill and was determined to meet professional expectations.

So putting on my finance game face, I walked out of Customs at Atatürk Airport and was met by a delegation of three Exchange executives and bundled off to a venue whose name I can’t remember but which could certainly rival the Topkapi for elegance. An elaborate dinner was served, organized, I presumed, for my visit, although this was never made explicit. Most remarkable, however, was that the space was populated not just with exchange officials but also with their respective wives and children, including infants in arms. For the rest of the evening we talked and ate, and listened to an excellent local ensemble and never once mentioned finance, much less financial options.

The entire weekend was a continuation of the same themes: families, food, and interesting conversations. A boat trip, a city tour, several museum visits, and a half dozen Türk mutfağı restaurants, but not a word about business. At my departure, the same little band which had met me, waved me off. Although we all had seemed to get along well, there was no further interest expressed by the Turks in cooperation. I wrote a standard thank you note but received no reply. Decades later it still wasn’t clear to me whether I had spoilt a potential deal, if deal there was to be done, or been subject to a very civilized, very kind, very enjoyable send-up.

Reading Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, with an excellent introduction by his translators, provides some clues which I think unlock the hidden meaning of my experience. Turkish sarcasm is a wonder to behold if Tanpinar is representative of the genre. It is witty, but gentle and civil, and although very, very sharp, it is not overtly disrespectful. It is obviously a highly developed style through which to communicate to power without incurring its wrath, at least when it is produced by the pen of someone as skillful as Tanpınar.

I think I might well have been exposed to this style on my short junket, with a similar intent to that of Tanpinar in The Time Regulation Institute, namely to put me (or more likely the institution I represented) in my place without the slightest impropriety, bad taste, or overt hint of malice. I suspect my hosts were as practiced socially in this as Tanpinar is in his art.

I now can see myself then as an avatar of Tanpinar’s protagonist and narrator, Hayri Irdal, an hapless senior executive of the Time Regulation Institute, which is eerily similar to the institution of international finance that I represented. Both are impositions on the ‘natural’ cultures of the world, by which I mean that organic set of relationships which develop their own reason (and reasons) without any central direction.

Like the eponymous Time Regulation Institute, the financial institutions of the world set, enforce and manage arbitrary conventions of value entirely in their own interests. Also like the Institute, these financial institutions are supported by a complex establishment of academics, social scientists and administrators whose careers depend on their political dominance. To achieve this, they insist relentlessly on the reality of their conventions.

I am struck, for example, by Tanpinar’s characters who write learned articles with titles like “The Effect of the North Wind upon the Regulation of Cosmic Time” and “Time and Psychoanalysis.” My financial colleagues were writing equivalent pieces about “Future Investment Opportunities and the Value of the Call Provision on a Bond” and “Empirical Studies in Portfolio Performance Using Higher Degrees of Stochastic Dominance.” None of these are benign much less objective intellectual achievements. As Hayri Irdal says, “You must agree that it would be unthinkable to describe things as they are.”

Finance theorists, just as Tanpinar’s theorists of time, like to claim that they have simply revealed truths which have always controlled our lives. By raising awareness of these truths, they maintain the conceit that they are promoting human rationality, and therefore the orderliness and efficiency of society. Their ideas may appear new, sometimes even foolish, only because of their unfamiliarity in daily life. Or so they would like the world to believe - mainly because it hides the way they make their living, which is by controlling the standards by which value is measured.

Tanpinar lays out the scam succinctly in his parody of time inspection. The accuracy of clocks is a legal duty of the Time Regulation Institute. Fines are payable for any timepieces that are registering either fast or slow according to the nearest public clock. If said timepiece is in proximity to more than one public clock, and there should happen to be disagreement among them, there are set procedures in place to protect the integrity of the system of time as a whole... and to ensure that fines are still paid. Quite simply: time, like financial value, is what some authority says it is. Any deviation is punishable without limit.

The situation is analogous to that of financial value as indicated by different methods of calculation in different markets, all of which are arbitrary. Goldman Sachs, for example, has a sophisticated statistical ‘model’ which it uses to value the options it sells to its customers. These customers are unaware of the details of this model since it is a proprietary secret. So they are actually buying the model not some associated options contract.

Ratings agencies have different models, as do government regulators, and other financial institutions. As a matter of convention all of these diverse sources are correct in principle despite their discrepancies from each other. Whichever model is sold the hardest becomes the industry standard and defines value... until its arbitrary conventionality becomes obvious as it did in the financial crisis of 2007. The ‘fines’ are paid by the customers.

Time and money. The more we become accustomed to the fixed conventional reality of these two somewhat illusive concepts - as presented by the likes of Hayri Irdal or Goldman Sachs, or... well me - the more fulfilling our lives will be. For a person to obey the minute hand of a watch or to submit to the iron laws of financial efficiency, is to follow “immaculate pathways, bringing him ever closer to the dream of eternal bliss.”

Time and money. Different names for the same spiritual journey toward social bliss; the nexus is in language. Control the language and one controls the culture. Tanpinar knew that this is what Atatürk was up to with his insistence on uniform ideas of time, among many other things, in his ‘modernization’ of the Turkish state after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Chinese know this in the radical transformation of their society using financial theory which asserts a uniform calculation of the value of money.* The rest of the world suffers cultural deterioration largely in silence.

It requires a certain attitude toward one’s fellows to want to control language in this way. Goldman Sachs has it, as does Donald Trump, and Hayri Irdal who summarizes it well: “I began to look at people with eyes that wondered, ‘Now, what use could he be to us?’ and to see life as dough that could be kneaded by my own two hands.” I don’t think it’s too far fetched to say that my Turkish hosts saw me as having just this attitude as well. To communicate that directly would have been ineffective in educating me and likely offensive. So I was treated to a justly deserved dose of what I take to be Turkish Sarcasm. It has required more than three decades to decipher what they probably intended.

I think I’ll write another note of thanks, permits more apologetic than my last one.

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

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Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Real Code Noir

My only direct knowledge of Haiti comes from my marginal involvement in the attempted Haitian coup of 1970 against ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. The failed survivors took to sea in several small ships, ran out of fuel, and asked for humanitarian assistance from the Coast Guard. My ship was diverted from training in Guantanamo Bay and ordered to tow the rebel vessels to Roosevelt Roads, a naval base on Puerto Rico.

I, as an expendable junior officer, was assigned to take command of the larger of the Haitian ships, few of whose crew spoke English, and all of whom I suspected, irrationally, of being Tonton Macoutes, who would rather kill and eat me than allow themselves to be interned by the U.S. Navy.

My first task was to inspect the ship to ensure we had collected all the small arms. Because the generators were out of action, there were no lights; so I had to creep around the the lower deck compartments with a flashlight. Opening the door to the main hold I caught a human shape about 30 feet in front of me, arms outstretched as if crucified, legs dangling limp, with a rope around its neck. Beating a quick retreat back through the watertight door, I took a few deep breaths before re-entering the compartment.

Instead of a bloated face and tortured body, what I found was an old-fashioned deep-diving suit, with its brass helmet, hanging stiffly on its assigned hook. Relief was overcome by feelings of stupidity and embarrassment lest any of the Haitians had seen me. But the practical lesson was also clear: voodoo works - especially in the dark, and particularly when you’re out of your depth. So I do have a sense of recognition reading Isabel Allende’s tale of oppression and voodoo revenge.

Haitian voodoo fascinates me in its functionality. It is an underground culture that demonstrates how powerful the human drive to create cultural tradition actually is when people are ripped from their familiar societies. And it scares hell out of white people - for approximately the same reason, namely it represents a humanity that can’t be extinguished by power.

This is worrisome to those in charge for precisely the reasons given in Allende’s book, which are identical to those generating my fear on the Haitian ship. It’s not just a fear of loss of control, as in the Haitian slave rebellion of the early 19th century for example. It is also the more fundamental dread that one is living in an alternative reality, an unknown darkness, which might exert itself at any moment. In other words, that one is actually captive in an alien spiritual as well as physical universe.

Voodoo syncretism, its assimilation of fragments of the various cultures it comes in contact with (much like the English language in this magpie-like tendency, it occurs to me), is its strength. It is sufficiently familiar to white people because it uses some Christian symbols like the cross and the Virgin Mary. But it is simultaneously alien and threatening because it treats these symbols as what they are - enigmatic signs - and connects them with other symbols and rituals, not as dogmatic assertions or fixed creeds but as further ‘floating’ signs.

This is not the European way. It may not be the African way either. But it does create a coherent society with its own customs, language and social structure that are impervious to the culture around it. It is a product of intellectual ingenuity, artistic creativity, and spite.

Voodoo itself, therefore, is a continuous rebellion - not just against racial oppression but also against any attempt to fix the character of either human beings or human society. It undermines the established, the official, the approved, and the powerful (and thus the Code Noir, the laws of slavery). As such it is quite rightly feared. It is simultaneously there and not there, entirely real and entirely mythical, solid and ephemeral. Or a hanged man and a diving suit.

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unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation 
by 

Brooks Jackson, 

 

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jan 27, 2019  ·  edit

did not like it

bookshelves: american, aesthetics, measurement, philosophy-theology, science, epistemology-language 

The Cost of Truth

There is no market price for truth; buying truth would be a contradiction equivalent to seeking it by torture. But there is a cost of truth. Estimating this cost is the subject of what’s called epistemology. UnSpun is a book of practical epistemology, something particularly apt in the age of Trump and Putin. That unSpun is largely worthless as a guide to good epistemology doesn’t detract from the importance of its subject.

The premise of any epistemology is simple: everybody lies. Best friends sometimes, salesmen most of the time and politicians all the time. We all know this no matter if we live in a totalitarian atheist state or a hyper-liberal religious democracy. The value of truth to the speaker or writer of language is precisely nil. Only the hearer and reader has an interest in the truthfulness of a statement.

The central epistemological question therefore is what and whose interest is being communicated in any message. Whether it’s a commercial advertisement or a political appeal, the interests being represented are not ours. This is not cynicism, merely an emotionless principle which is logically and empirically verified universally. And it’s not paranoia since we can live comfortably with the lesser lies, fibs, and misleading hints.

Of course the difficulty is that the messages we are often given suggest interests we didn’t even know existed. Who knows but they might be ours and we hadn’t realized it. Listerine points to bad breath, for example. Apple says creativity is what is most important in life. Daz will give us whiter clothes - even for our colored fabrics. And Trump insists we should worry about Muslims and Mexicans. In the first instance it is these interests, not the product or issue, that is being sold to us. The intention of the message is to establish a criterion of choice, which if accepted will lead to ‘correct’ purchasing or voting behavior.

The first epistemological principle for dealing effectively with these suggestions about interests is simple: if the message provokes fear, inadequacy, lack of personal merit, or looming social inferiority, it is almost certainly false, misleading, or tendentious. This is an emotional not a rational signal and therefore demands a certain degree of emotional rather than intellectual maturity. Sensitivity not education is what counts. It is the emotions which can distinguish between being sold and being informed. Like any other skill, emotional sensitivity to suggestions about what is important and valuable must be learned. It’s called aesthetics.

This first ‘aesthetical’ principle can be obscured by the use of ‘facts’, particularly statistical data, quotes, and phrases like ‘more than’, ‘better than’ either stated or implied. Factual assertions are meant to ‘prove’ interests when they are associated with the interests that are being sold to us. However, what must be kept in mind is that facts do not generate interests; rather interests generate facts. This shouldn’t be controversial. In our daily lives we encounter an infinity of potential facts. Actual facts are those events which have some sort of importance that has already been established.

This then is the second epistemological principle: all factual assertions are relative to the interests they reflect. There simply are no objective facts. Factuality, like its corollary ‘value’, is a conditional not an existential characteristic. It is patently impossible to know the meaning of data presented as factual, much less the methodology by which these data were produced, without understanding the interests they are meant to further. 

Some call this second principle ‘relativism’ and criticize it as promoting social and moral chaos. But paradoxically it is the presumption that there are fixed criteria that can be used to identify truth which contributes most to the acceptance of commercial and political absurdities. These absurdities are accepted within a culture because the culture itself believes it has found the ultimate standard of truth - in Scripture perhaps, or scientific method, or logical analysis, or some trustworthy person, or, quelle horreur, technology. Agreement guarantees validity. Except of course when it doesn’t. As both scientists and Adventists have found over centuries.*

It is not incidental therefore that it is American Evangelicals and the other Deplorables, with their insistence on the idea of absolute truth, who are most susceptible to the Trumpian deceptions and Creationist obfuscations that are obvious to the rest of us. Living without fixed criteria of truth is an emotional burden. It’s uncomfortable, an irritant which we’d like to eliminate, and with it the difficulties of conscience which plague those who doubt. Evangelicals are the 21st century bourgeoisie - they are emotionally lazy; they crave stability, which they find in tribal conformance. They don’t necessarily lack intelligence; but they do have uniformly poor taste.

The burden of epistemological uncertainty can be heavy. Belief, faith, loyalty to one’s cultural group is easy. Doubt is hard. Hopeful doubt is even harder. But it is the real cost of truth. And it has a name: Responsibility, specifically the responsibility for choosing the aesthetic criterion by which we view the world, by which we sort the assertions made about by ourselves and others. This criterion can never be final because the choice itself makes learning about other criteria possible. Nor can the criterion be discovered by a fixed procedure since it is logically prior to such procedure. So there is no way to avoid an entirely personal responsibility for truth.

UnSpun doesn’t like this conclusion. Its authors would like to lay down some fixed epistemological rules. While they agree that uncertainty is something we have to live with (Rule#1 “You can’t be completely certain”), they think there is an intellectual criterion called “certain enough” we can use to separate the truthful wheat from the deceptive chaff (Rule#2). The specific advice is: “In the world of practical reality weighing the facts is a matter of choosing the right standard of proof to give us the degree of certainty we need under the circumstances.”.

Read that sentence again. It is somewhat awkward. Allow me to present it a bit more clearly: ‘Compare competing facts in order to determine the correct criterion for comparing the competing facts.’ The circular nonsense is obvious. Even if it weren’t, the question of how much is ‘enough’ is something the authors steer well clear of.**

UnSpun’s further suggestions are equally specious. Its Rule #3 says “Look for general agreement among experts.” One wonders where there is such a list of experts for the multitude of advertising and political claims that are made to us daily. And, not incidentally, what criteria are used to designate one as ‘expert?’ The authors don’t seem to have heard of the problem of infinite regression. Bucking the issue of truth up a notch isn’t helpful.

Rule#4 is “Check primary sources.” Absolutely first class advice when your preparing for your doctoral thesis in sociology. Not so helpful when checking the claim that brand A analgesic relieves pain twice as fast as brand B. Oh and by the way, the competing claims to being primary sources are not trivial. Ask any biblical scholar how many hundreds of ‘original’ versions of the Hebrew testaments there are.

Rule #5 “Know what counts” and Rule #6 “Know who’s talking” are unexceptionable. They are merely equivalent to saying that facts are relative to interests, although elsewhere the authors have difficulty with this principle.

Rule #7 “Seeing shouldn’t necessarily be believing.” This is indeed informative. But it is really only a restatement of the fundamental premise of epistemology: Everybody lies, including oneself, to oneself. Nonetheless its specificity is a useful reinforcement.

Rule #8 “Crosscheck everything that matters.” This is certainly a fine piece of advice for either an investigative reporter or a trial lawyer. But it is largely irrelevant for the average consumer or man at the polling booth. The authors obviously included it as an afterthought to appear professional. After all the wealth of anecdotal material they present in the rest of the book depends on doing just that.

So while unSpun has a noble objective and reads like an entertaining episode of ‘Hilarious Television Bloopers,’ it doesn’t offer much usable insight or advice about the process of finding the truth about anything. Give it a miss. That might marginally reduce the cost of truth.

*To me it is one 0f the wonders of bad thought that people who should know better suggest more epistemological poison as an antidote for the untruths being peddled. See for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... I have discovered that I am not alone in this opinion: https://www.thenation.com/article/dav...

**The glib reference to the category ‘facts’ in unSpunreminds me of the importance of the philosopher, Edgar Singer’s, definition of a fact. ‘A fact,’ he pointed out, ‘is that which is not contradicted by any other fact.’ Circularity does have its uses. UnSpun just uses it in the wrong way.

Lanark by Alasdair Gray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alien Life-forms

Lanark, on the face of it, is a complex fantasy of a sort of Glaswegian student-Bohemia experienced by the eponymous hero (alias Thaw). There are intriguing allusions and dense metaphysical comments on almost every page. I don’t think it is prudent, or even possible, to summarize its narrative or its meaning. But a key to both might be found in what I think is its philosophical, and therefore essentially literary, context.

According to some, the most serious impediment to explaining the world isn’t the absence of a unified physical theory or the inadequacy of human language. It is the presence of what can only be called a pervasive evil. Evil is an irrationality, an inherent contradiction, which clearly exists - in nature everywhere and especially in people - but which defies explanation. Yet consciousness demands one. How can such an absurd universe produce beings who question its very absurdity?

This is the premise and issue of an ancient style of thinking called Gnosticism, the essential presumption of which is that we thinking, reflective beings actually don’t belong here. We have been exiled from elsewhere and are condemned to wander aimlessly in this universe of hopelessness, pain, disease, death, and... well evil until we are rescued from it and returned to whence we came. This view is expressed in too many diverse ways to be called a philosophy; but it does have an historical continuity that reflects its intellectual and emotional power.

Christianity, and consequently Christian culture, is tinged with gnostic influences from its inception; but has always rejected the gnostic mode of thinking as unbiblical in its presumption of the essential evil of the world we inhabit. Christianity does, however, maintain somewhat paradoxically the idea that there is a ‘better place’ which is our true home. This it calls Paradise, a realm close to God with no pain, no disease, and no death; that is a place without evil.

Gnosticism has been suppressed by Christianity (and also by Islam) as a heresy. But it reappears frequently in European history in various forms - usually among those who take the problem of evil seriously. The early Desert Fathers and strange stylites, sitters on poles, and other ‘martyrs to the flesh’ are examples; as are the medieval Cathars and Bogomils and their spiritual heirs, the strict Calvinists, and the even more enthusiastic adherents of the Republican Party in the United States. Each of these groups has their own version of a spiritual theory of the world in which escape from the tribulations of living is not only possible but constitutes the real goal of living at all.

The historical originators of Gnosticism were the Manichaeans, Persian followers of the sage Mani, who developed a rather elaborate, and empirically based, theory of human existence. Look up in the night sky, they said, and you will see clearly that there is another world beyond that enclosed by the solid vault of heaven. Those points of light we call stars are actually holes, imperfections, in that vault, the casing of our world, through which we can see bits of the world beyond. That is the realm of light whence we came and to which we are meant, according to cosmic logic, to return. The real mission and spiritual duty of all human beings is to seek the knowledge by which such a home-going can be achieved.

As proof that such a re-unification with the domain of light is possible, the Manichaeans again pointed to the night sky. In addition to the fixed points of light there were several wandering objects called planets. The function of these objects is to patrol our world on the lookout for the sparks of light, that is to say human souls, which have managed to detach themselves through secret knowledge from the evil bonds of the Earth. These sparks are scooped up by the roving planets as the sparks emerge from their earthly prison.

And as further proof, if proof were necessary, the planets then deposit their luminous cargo periodically onto that other celestial body we call the Moon. Thus the monthly waxing of the Moon as these sparks are added to it. And also the monthly discharge of these from the Moon, its waning, through the vault of heaven as they are merged with the infinite light beyond.

As far as spiritual theories of the world go this is relatively plausible. Little wonder then that its principle tropes - Light and Freedom - appear periodically in European literature. Lanark is an example. Its characters are obsessed with light, either finding it or avoiding it. Lanark‘s goal is to escape from the realm of artificial light into that of pure ‘heavenly’ light.

Others, Lanark observes, have obviously succeeded; they have “disappeared when the lights go out.” This is a risky business. On the one hand, “the only cure for these—personal—diseases is sunlight.” On the other hand, “When people leave without a companion their diseases return after a while.” So the problem of reunification is not just cosmic as the Manichaeans thought; it is also personal and involves relationships with others. We’re in it together. Therefore Lanark’s plan is simple:
“‘I’m leaving when I find a suitable companion.’
‘Why?’
‘I want the sun.’”

Of course the extended metaphor of Lanark communicates the secret gnostic knowledge of the light, but such knowledge is in itself insufficient: “Metaphor is one of thought’s most essential tools. It illuminates what would otherwise be totally obscure. But the illumination is sometimes so bright that it dazzles instead of revealing,” as one of the characters points out. Lanark knows that what’s necessary above all is a very specific sort of courage: “‘Admit!’ he told himself, ‘You watched the sky because you were too cowardly to know people.’”

I doubt anything can explain Lanark satisfactorily except Lanark. But I do think its gnostic pedigree might add something significant to the comprehensibility of its otherwise alien life-forms.

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Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Spirit of Capitalism: A Case Study

Adam Smith said it first: ‘Greed is good.’ According to him and his intellectual and political descendants, the desires of individuals form a self-regulating economic system which is advantageous to everyone. The rich do get richer, but so do the poor. It’s called capitalism: having and meeting needs through honest competition without interference from bureaucrats, politicians, or government agencies.

And capitalism works. It does exactly what it says on the packet. Dreamland is a testament to the power of Adam Smith’s theory. The Sackler family and Purdue Pharma spotted a need - unrelieved pain - and they met that need with a ‘killer app’ known as OxyContin. They lobbied for the easing of government restrictions on its use, and employed their formidable marketing skills to sell it to every MD and health care institution in the country. A capitalist win/win success story: less misery, more wealth.

Except there is what economists call an ‘externality.’ Like so many other pharmaceutical breakthroughs in the last half century (Valium was another of the Sackler family marketing successes) OxyContin is really, really addictive. Great for the company who can count on continued rising sales; not so great for the individuals who are dependent on the stuff and have to pay for it, or for the public health and social services that have to deal with the consequences.

But once again the capitalist system demonstrated its ability to respond creatively to issues it might encounter. OxyContin is costly. Its market price has to recover some huge R&D expenses as well as equally huge corporate overheads. Global marketing, for example, doesn’t come cheap. The situation is a Harvard Business School case study in competitive opportunity. Product innovation and a radically new low cost delivery system comes to the rescue of the monopolistic market.

The product is black tar heroin, a low tech high yield pain-killer that costs peanuts to make. Conceivably anyone could have entered the OxyContin market developed over years by the Sacklers; but it was an entrepreneurial group of rancheros on the Pacific coast of Mexico who grabbed the brass ring first. Clever enough as well to avoid the established marketing channels for white heroin (a specialité de la maison of the large, and consequently dangerous, illegal cartels in the big cities), these Mexicans became the WalMart of the drugs world, spreading widely and rapidly across rural America.

Like WalMart, the Mexicans piled it high and sold it cheap. Also like WalMart, they had a fantastic logistics system to supply their nationwide network, using low wage, easily replaceable drivers from the Mexican homestead. Interruptions like police arrests and confiscations were therefore about as serious as an occasional flat tire or speeding ticket. A simple telephone call and the operation was back on the road. Writing off an occasional lost load was trivial given the minimal cost of goods sold. And even this risk was mitigated by the standard financial business tactic of ‘portfolio diversification’ through franchising - too many eggs were never in any one basket.

But unlike WalMart, customer service was a priority in the black tar heroin trade. With another phone call, the Mexicans delivered to your door, or the toilet of your nearest McDonald’s, with the speed of Amazon. Special introductory and volume discounts, periodic sales to promote turnover, local mouth to mouth advertising, incentive compensation, and other standard commercial techniques completed the value-proposition. Absence of fixed assets meant that resources could be re-allocated as required for maximum return. The market boomed and so did the business.

Of course quality control often might not be what it should have been. Product strength and purity wasn’t quite as uniform as OxyContin. But no doubt these hiccups would be ironed out over time. The casualties (mostly infections from muscular injection), deaths (dosage is hard to judge) and costs of emergency services (notably medical rather than police) for the most unfortunate customers were merely part of a business learning curve. In any case an entire sub-culture emerged across America that became increasingly savvy to the new product. Caveat emptor was never a more serious command.

America isn’t unfamiliar with illicit drug use. What makes the black tar heroin market political however is that: 1) it is dominantly white people who are its customers; 2) these people are mainly middle class from the towns and regional centers of the ‘heartland’; 3) it is a market created by pillars of the existing capitalist society - the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession; and 4) it is organized and run not by international mobsters and terrorists but by a bunch of Mexican sugar cane farmers with a real can-do attitude and entrepreneurial spirit.

That’s the story told in Dreamland. The bulk of the book is journalistic detail, largely anecdotal, about representative ‘players,’ their victims and their families in the legal and illegal drugs game. In good journalistic style, Dreamworld is long on description of people, places and things but short on analysis and productive opinion. So the content of the book doesn’t go much beyond a television documentary. As an introduction to the issue, the book is worthwhile. But serious students of the problem will probably want to look elsewhere for actionable inspiration.

Postscript 31Jan19: Capitalism is truly irrepressible: https://www.propublica.org/article/ox...

Postscript 20Jul19: Still at it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/invest...

Postscript 20Jul19: Forget Purdue Pharma. SpecGx is 10 times bigger: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphi...

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Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Subtleties of Power

Power tends to hide itself as a defense against any potential challenge to its existence. So democracy, it is said, is government ‘of the people’ not of the autocratic head of the local council. The greedy CEO is forced by his position to act in the interests of the corporate shareholder, or so he says. And men commit intellectual, and emotional, as well as physical violence against women because it is claimed to be their nature; besides, the world would be less organized, less innovative, and less safe for women and other living things if men were not so aggressive..

The camouflage is effective; even those wielding power feel themselves constrained as powerless. The council leader can’t impose his development plan; he must cajole, and argue, and compromise. The CEO fights a continuous battle with his senior managers about whether cost, or innovation, or marketing is the priority of the moment - with the consequence that he can never get entirely what he wants. And men perceive themselves as nagged, put upon, and having to endure unappreciated economic peonage within a family life they never imagined and didn’t sign up for. Victims all, if you press them hard enough.

This ‘power hiding as victim’ tactic is a central theme of Men Explain Things To Me. It is such a common ploy that it seems almost trivial to point it out. Except it is undoubtedly the most important source of the most prevalent injustice everywhere in human civilization - the oppression of females by males. The rationale of absence of power is a substantial component of what Rebecca Solnit calls “the archipelago of arrogance,” that pattern of subtle and quotidian male dominance which is an extension of the more visible, because more overtly violent, male crime against women.

There is reportedly a female as well as a male reaction against such apparent female gender prejudice - movements like Incel, #WomenAgainstFeminism, Concerned Women of America, the National Coalition for Men and many other organizations have claimed that Solnit’s arguments demonize men. She repeatedly points out this is not her intention; but also cites the raw statistics to show that “Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.” It is after all, for example, men who constitute almost 19 of every 20 inmates in American prisons; who are the leading cause by far for deaths of pregnant women, who executed all but one of the sixty-two mass shootings in the US at the time of her publication, and who are responsible for the overwhelming majority of cases of domestic abuse.

The male attempt at control, of course, is a generic and cultural trait. Like racial prejudice, it isn’t really captured in statistics but is viscerally experiences in the existential reality of women. Solnit has to be considered representatively credible when she makes claims like “the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.” The fact that many men do it to other men while almost no women do so, in my own experience, is personal confirmation of her thesis.

This attempt at control is routinized and normalized often by law; but most commonly it is exerted through the informal mores of civilized society. The pervasive didactic male attitude “is one way that, in polite discourse, power is expressed—the same power that in impolite discourse and in physical acts of intimidation and violence, and very often in how the world is organized—silences and erases and annihilates women, as equals, as participants, as human beings with rights, and far too often as living beings.”

You either get it or you don’t. But if you don’t, your world us a very strange and probably threatening place indeed. Gender dominance is a training ground for other forms of control in society from racism to mass political and commercial manipulation. The subtleties of male superiority establish an implicit right to power which “comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict suffering and even death on other people.” It is this entitlement as an attitude as well as a cultural fact that Solnit is attacking, not men. “We are free together or slaves together,” she says; to me, quite sensibly.

Nancy Pelosi appears to be giving this basic lesson to Donald Trump as I write. Good luck Nancy.

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Hang Him When He Is Not There by Nicholas John Turner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sympathy & Confusion

Sympathy and confusion are parallel themes throughout Hang Him When He Is Not There. The two words appear frequently in each of the episodes which constitute the book. And I suspect, given my own reaction to the text, that sympathy and confusion are precisely the responses that Turner intends from his reader.

Sympathy for the disturbed, disabled, and sometimes demented characters who populate his fictional world. And confusion as a consequence of the un-chronological structure of the story and its largely anonymous narrators, each with a unique voice.

It would be improper (as well as barbaric) to reveal anything other than that, except perhaps one central idea which is required for the reader to keep in mind: “All substances have memories. All are scarred. None forget.” Books are especially prone to such a condition, which is highly infectious.

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The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade by Philip Jenkins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Love Is Hate

According to Philip Jenkins, religion probably didn’t cause the Great War with its 10 million dead, four destroyed empires, and a continuing legacy of international instability, but it certainly prepared for and sustained it. As a consequence, religion itself, particularly Christianity - Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic - was fundamentally transformed even if it took several generations to understand what that transformation entailed. Christianity revealed itself to be as subject to corruptive manipulation and profound evil as any other human institution. It is not an exaggeration to say that this revelation inspired several new (and often contradictory) theological drives.

Christendom, however one chooses to define that conceptual entity, had been badly damaged by the Protestant Reformation but Christianity continued to dominate European culture in its various national forms. The French Revolution and its aftermath further undermined the Church by demonstrating its intimate connection with national power. But it was the Great War which proved beyond doubt that the spirit of Christianity had become, if it was not always, one of extreme national violence. As Jenkins summarizes the situation: “Christians in all combatant nations—including the United States—entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of cosmic war. None found any difficulty in using fundamental tenets of the faith as warrants to justify war and mass destruction.”

Somewhat surprisingly, the blatant and almost universal encouragement of the Christian churches to engage in the war from 1914 onwards did not immediately cause a reduction in mainstream church membership. But the experience of both the war and the inherent contradictions in Christian teaching had two highly consequential effects that were masked by this apparent stability: The rapid growth of parallel spiritual movements both within and without Christianity; and an equally rapid development of alternative institutional theologies. The effects of these movements would only become apparent from the 1960’s to the present day.

The immediate ‘beneficiaries’ of the trauma of the Great War were those previously relatively marginal sects and cults - Pentecostals, charismatics, and non-charismatic Evangelicals. Unsurprisingly perhaps, since these have a minimal reliance on formal doctrine and therefore can be perceived as a reaction against the intellectual Christianity which had so avidly promoted the disaster. Other groups with some distance from the established churches - Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and various occult and spiritualist cults, for example - also grew rapidly. The prevailing religious sentiment according to Jenkins was one of apocalypticism, that is, of the approach if not imminence of the Final Judgment. This feeling would become a dominant force in the dispensationalism and its political manifestation in the latter third of the century.*

The war also catalysed a fundamental re-direction of Christian theological thought, particularly ecclesiology, the religious theory of the Church itself. The Swiss, Karl Barth, arguably the most influential European religious thinker of the 20th century, constructed his so-called dialectical theology as a direct attack on the existing ‘liberal’ theological arguments for war and the widespread support for it among clerical leaders on all sides (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). The Catholic Church was somewhat slower off the mark, but it too permitted and eventually fostered the creation of a rather radical practical theology of the relationship between religion and the world. The most dramatic result of this new thinking by scholars like Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, among many others was the Second Vatican Council which effectively ‘re-institutionalized’ the Church.

Jenkins’s study does not claim to be a detailed sociological analysis of the Great War. Nor does it attempt to trace the specific emotional or intellectual threads which emerged from the conflict. It is therefore more suggestive than definitive. Nonetheless his overall conclusions are significant. Clearly Christianity was not destroyed in either an institutional or personal sense; but it became something that no one anticipated: “Europe’s Christianity survived the Great War, but in ways that would have startled and often horrified the church leaders of the previous centuries. The war sparked a religious and cultural revolution within the faith”

Jenkins also recognizes what might be called the extreme vulnerability of Christianity to not just the power of the state but also to virtually unlimited self-rationalization. He makes it clear that this is not a temporary condition: “As we examine the mainstream assumptions of the greatest churches at the time, we repeatedly see just how close to the surface of the Christian and biblical tradition such patterns of state alliance and militancy actually lie, and how easily ideas of the church militarist emerge in times of crisis. A study of history, up to and including the twentieth century, must make us question any attempts to dismiss such uses of Christianity as a crude distortion of the faith.”

Living as we do now in the Age of Trump and Putin it is obvious that the danger posed by Christian involvement in politics is not limited to the issue of war. Christianity, if anything, has become more tribal since the Great War. But it has become no less emotionally powerful and intellectually self-serving.


*Jenkins published in 2014, thus to early to include an account of the Evangelical/Trump phenomenon or the Orthodox/Putin alliance.

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Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Lunatics in Charge of the Asylum

Satantango is an allegory of the decline of the Communist state into a sort of primitive capitalism. The mouldering, almost derelict estate with its confused and despairing residents, looking toward a de-industrialized East, all hoping to move West as soon as they scrape the funds together. The remnants of a police state that is no longer subject to the authority of the police but to its former informers. The drunken villagers who desperately desire a messiah in whom they can believe.

The new regime is established by “The law of relative power” This literal pecking order is now “The law of the land. The people’s law.” “You are to adapt yourselves to the new situation! Is that clear?!,” commands the Orban-like (or Putin-like) figure of the secret policeman. The populace are helpless: “They are slaves who have lost their master but can’t live without what they call pride, honor and courage.” So “They are waiting. They’re waiting patiently, like the long-suffering lot they are, in the firm conviction that someone has conned them.” But they ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

The Laurel and Hardy duo of Irimias and Petrina are the new entrepreneurial hucksters, the corporate pioneers, fledgling merchant bankers facilitating the transition to ‘freedom.’ They don’t know much about anything but they know the right people. The Captain of the Secret Police gives them their special mandate: “You’ve been summoned because you have endangered the project by your absence. No doubt you have noticed I’ve not given precise details. The nature of the project has nothing to do with you.” Their job is to execute, not to plan; but their discretionary power is effectively unlimited. The ‘project’ itself remains mysterious, just another long con perhaps.

Irimias and Petrina are the influence-peddlers who threaten to blow everything up piece by piece if their influence is ignored. They are irrational, hair-trigger bullies. Yet they are idolized by the country-folk who are willing to sacrifice their meager (mostly ill-gotten) gains to these characters who appear resurrected from the long dead. They may be anachronistic jokes, but they’re all that’s available. In the land of the blind... etc. This new regime is one of numbers rather than ideology, or is it an ideology of numbers? In any case, the landlord of the bar knows the score: “The greater the significance of the numbers the greater my own significance.”

And so the satanic dance begins in all its gauche splendor within the village bar. Meanwhile, outside in reality, it continues to rain and the world turns to yellow mud. But that doesn’t compare with “the rain of death in the heart.” Consequently everyone stays drunk as long as possible. It’s a strategy which makes a great deal of sense in the circumstances. It helps to mitigate the pervasive stench.

If you think you’d like a spicy allegorical goulash of Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams with a soupçon of Kafka, this might be your cup of tea... or bowl of paprika as the case may be.

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Mysterium 
by 

Robert Charles Wilson

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jun 19, 2019  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: american, sci-fi, church, sociology, philosophy-theology, epistemology-language 

An Essay on Theocracy

Mysterium uses sci-fi to compare and contrast a theocratic state with its secular equivalent within which religion is practised. It’s an interesting idea. And Robert Wilson does an intelligent job of identifying where and how the differences are established and maintained. In his theocracy, the ultimate power of the Church is represented by its control over the development of the nuclear bomb. This makes for good fiction but begs the question of how such authority might be created. I have some suggestions based on the history of the Church and some more recent events.

In my sunset years I have grown to despise Christianity as a philosophy and as a moral force in the world. One, I suppose, has to take it very seriously in order to reach this conclusion since on the face of it, the religion is just some admonitions about moral behaviour touted by many obviously normal, that is to say, immoral, people. Only close scrutiny and considered thought reveals that it is the adherence to Christian beliefs which produces the consistent history of immorality that is evident and persists in those societies it has infected. Looking beyond the surface appearance is a principle theme of Mysterium; so my remarks are in the spirit of the book.

My conclusion and attitude, of course, could all be put down as an old man’s disappointment with his life (not to mention dementia). This is certainly a possibility. But, although I have more than a few regrets, I can’t say that my life is in any sense a disappointment. It has provided me far more than I deserve as an average human being and given me the chance to think beyond my immediate needs for survival. And I fancy I think more clearly, certainly with more experience, than my youthful self (dementia or not).

I can’t even say that I am disappointed in Christianity. The Christian religion has always appeared to me as exactly what it says on the tin - the only way to eternal salvation. As long as one maintains the fictional notion of eternal salvation, one can hardly be disappointed in the institution that claims to give access to it. But I have never really been troubled by this salvation-neurosis. The Jansenist fire and brimstone retreat masters of my youth just never struck me as credible. Even then the contradictions between a loving God and the vindictive pains of hell were obvious.

No, my gripe with Christianity is about power, the coercive power that it exercises and justifies through its tribal theology of faith. This has been a surprise to me rather than a disappointment. Despite its rhetoric of love and forgiveness, Christianity is primarily a religion of human power over other human beings. This power takes a variety of forms, from its hierarchical organisation which claims that some of its members are intellectually or spiritually superior to others, to its doctrines that those who are not its members are vastly inferior to those who are.

But the most important, and in many ways least noticed, power-grab by Christianity has been its attempt to control language. From the re-invention of religion as ‘faith’ by Paul of Tarsus, to the definition of the Biblical canon, to the formulation of specific dogmas (and their antithetical heresies), to the systematic development (or restriction) of theological thought, to the frequent violence used to enforce all of these, Christianity has sought to control the language of the divine by making language divine, by effectively claiming it as a religious artefact. And by controlling language it means to control everything else from history to science, in other words, reality.

Christianity divinised language for its own purpose - to bring others under its authority. Very few of those who pronounce the various Christian creeds on a Sunday have any idea of the meaning of the words they are using. And even fewer of those who think they do understand the meaning of the words agree among themselves. But this doesn’t matter because the significance of the creeds is only in the words as words. Whatever they refer to can be left to the individual imagination. Words are tokens of tribal membership, a symbolon or confirmation to others that one is a respectable member of the band, and subject oneself to hierarchical obedience regarding language.

According to Christianity, nothing is unforgivable, but only for members of the Church and only through its authority. This doctrine is stated in words, derived from other words, and applied through words to those who profess the right words. This is the essence of theocracy. No theocratic functionary dare claim direct communication with the divine. Those that do are considered mad. But through their claim to a definitive understanding and interpretation of words, the theocracy can dominate human behaviour. Not necessarily by changing it but by approving or forgiving as required. All human foibles and crimes are permitted as long as they are subject to review by the Church.

So there is no reason to suppose that a theocratic state would be any more moral than an atheistic one. In fact there are logical reasons to consider it more likely to tolerate socially harmful behaviour - because it has the power of forgiveness for those who have faith. This is what the political philosopher Carl Schmitt, a Catholic, called the power of the exception. At root this is a linguistic power to either negate or re-interpret laws, which are of course words. Such is the case in Mysterium - the power of the exception - and such has been the case in the Church since its foundation.

Another way of saying the same thing is that Christian faith is a principle of amorality, that is, arbitrary and self-serving norms of behaviour. It puts all actions beyond public criticism. This is one reason for the Catholic (and many Protestant) Church’s historical animosity toward democratic government. It is also the reason why the Church has resisted exposing the extent of its own immorality, not for decades but for centuries. It has forgiven itself as a matter of faith. Contemporary Evangelical forgiveness of Trump’s lies, racism, misogyny, and frequently expressed personal hatreds is a compelling example of just how powerful this idea of Christian faith can be in rationalising aberrant, even criminal, behaviour. And it entirely bypasses established political channels.

So Trump’s assault on language is a very Christian one. The Evangelicals and their politicians get this. It is their route to that ideal of faith, the Christian nation. Mysterium is a parable of that strategy and its consequences. Let him who hath ears to hear...

 

The Gods Themselves 
by 

Isaac Asimov

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jan 18, 2019  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: american, sci-fi, epistemology-language 

There’s No Free Lunch

The wonder of Asimov’s fiction is that it has so many possible interpretations, many of which are acutely philosophical and often counter-cultural. Here’s one about The Gods Themselves:

Scientific method is the modern intellectual fetish. We talk like we know what it means; and that what it means is the rational expansion of knowledge, leading to an improvement in the human condition. But both presumptions are questionable. Historically, scientific progress has been more accidental and the consequence of less than creditable emotions than a rational search for knowledge. And the real value of scientific results can’t be assessed by the method that produces them. In other words, as with Asimov’s Electron Pump (or with nuclear power which is a bit closer to home), we can’t tell if science is rational or not in its output. We’re flying blind, celebrating the fact that we’re flying without caring in the least about our destination or that flying might be dangerous.

Our blind spot about scientific method is its source: Thought. There is a cost to the ability to think. But because this cost is deferred, it looks like its a free gift in and to the universe - mind appears as something different than body. As if thinking were a character of existence rather than of something that exists. Cogito ergo sum: Descartes’ dualism is the practical philosophy of everyday life even if the professionals have debunked it long ago. So, for example, those things associated with thinking - language, mathematical analysis, contemplation, meditation, reading, story-telling - are considered more or less spiritual. That is, they appear unaffected by the iron laws of material economics. 

But the reality is a very strict physical law: Think now, pay later; and pay big. Thinking takes energy. Not just the energy required of the organism in which thinking is taking place, but also the energy required to execute the ideas that thinking produces. The central resource of the cosmos is the local differentials in energy. To the extent these are present, work is possible. Thought is the instrument that seeks to minimize work by minimizing the potential for work. Thought seeks to exploit these differentials, and thus annihilates them. The ultimate victim is thought itself. The more we think, the closer to death we come. Thought is a suicide mission.

Consequently, the evolution of thinking beings is an ecological disaster for the universe. The universe, and its separate components like the Earth, consume themselves much more quickly with the existence of thought than without it. Thinking sucks up energy differentials and flattens them. Thinking then begets technology which begets waste heat which begets entropy which is another name for death. Thinking beings have an inevitable death wish that even Freud never considered.

Therefore to the extent that Asimov is thought-provoking (and he clearly is that), he is destroying the capability of the universe to maintain thinking beings at all. Makes one think, doesn’t it?

Postscript: Perhaps Asimov anticipated Alain de Botton. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal by Donald Senior
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Galileo’s Revenge

You wouldn’t have read about him in your news feed but Raymond Brown was a remarkable biblical scholar. Remarkable not just because of his exceptional talent but also because of his persistent courage in facing down the intellectual oppression of the institution to which he devoted his life, the Catholic Church. His intellectual biography is a drama as significant as that of Alfred Loisy or Teilhard de Chardin, as the modern re-enactments of the 17th century persecution of Galileo. The most important difference being that Brown won (or at least didn’t lose) his battle against ecclesiastical authoritarianism and institutionalised anti-intellectualism. I’m not sure this victory calls for celebration given the continuing attitude of the Church toward reasonable thought; but at least it represents some sort of progress.

Brown started his career during a period that was the ecclesiastical equivalent of the McCarthy Witch Hunts in the USA or the Stalinist Purges in the Soviet Union. Instead of Communists under the bed or Trotskyites in the parlour, there were Modernists in the closet. Modernists, like their secular analogues, had essentially unspecified ‘attitudinal’ problems rather than explicitly erroneous beliefs. They were therefore difficult to spot in the general Catholic population.

To neutralize such incipient rebellion the Church had established in the early 20th century several inquisitorial Commissions charged with rooting out those, like Loisy and de Chardin , who made public pronouncements about intellectual responsibility. But the commissioners’ networks of informers and secret tribunals were also intended to reveal and silence the hidden mass of Modernist fellow-travellers, particularly among the clergy engaged in biblical research, who might pose a threat to the standard, official interpretation of scripture and thus to the authority of the church.

The ‘safe’ areas of Catholic biblical research during these intellectual Dark Ages were topics such as biblical languages, archaeology, and biblical geography. But very few dared venture out to investigate what biblical passages ‘really meant’ to the people who wrote them and for whom they were written. This would demand analysis of the history and social context of scripture which had already produced disconcerting results among Protestants during their century or so of serious biblical exegesis.

Hot topics like the virgin birth and the infancy narratives of Jesus (mostly metaphorical according to Brown), the biblical character of priesthood and the church hierarchy (rather different than the historical result), the ordination of women (no real impediment), the historicity of the accounts of Jesus’s passion and death (not reliably factual), and even the Resurrection of Jesus (not a resuscitation). These issues were treated with nuanced delicacy by Brown but he consistently, and successfully, challenged the rather naive literal interpretations that dominated official teaching.

Moreover, Brown didn’t discuss these things only among other ‘experts,’ he went public in the popular media. And, even more scandalously, he respected and cooperated with non-Catholic scholars, some of these Jews! Brown therefore was frequently criticized and sometimes ‘silenced’ for his views by the hierarchy and traditionalist Catholics. Much of this criticism was abusive, ad hominem, and unfounded. Twenty years after his death there are still those who view his work as heretical and a danger to the Church.

So Senior’s biography of Brown leaves me with nagging questions which seem relevant to us all, Catholic or not, scholarly or merely interested, believer or atheist. Questions such as: What are the limits of institutional loyalty? At what point does one have sufficient reason, or even an obligation, to abandon a commitment to a corporate group, a community, or a country? Does faithfulness, religious or secular, actually demand that one suppress one’s intellectual judgment, one’s conscience, for no good reason other than obedience to authority? When does an institutional regime deserve to be attacked rather than merely reformed?

Despite my admiration for Brown, it is unclear to me that his continued loyal participation in the Catholic Church did him or anyone else any good. It does, however, suggest where phenomena like the irrational loyalty of Republican supporters of Trump and his ilk originate, namely from some tribal instinct we rather imprecisely call religion. Expedient allegiance would seem an equally accurate description. Regardless of the term, I very much doubt its virtue.

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The Hero With a Thousand Faces 
by 

Joseph Campbell

 

The Divine Aesthetic of Hope

Written in 1948, Hero With A Thousand Faces is only slightly younger than I am. I was introduced to it in my mid-twenties, almost half a century ago. But upon re-reading it I find it as revelatory as it was then. By avoiding the idea of faith entirely, Campbell keeps alive a religion of hope. Hero With A Thousand Faces is a theology of the God of hope. It is a description of this God as a way of perceiving both the world and oneself. It presents, therefore, not an aesthetic idea of God, but God as an aesthetic, the Divine Aesthetic.

Campbell’s Divine Aesthetic is divine because it is “the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.” It is both universal and infinite. It applies in every culture and in every age. It is constantly the same and yet manifests itself in uncountably many ways, in art, music, dance, science, technology, literature, and of course religion. Its scripture includes fairy tales and learned treatises. Its followers are everyone who can speak, and even infants and the infirm who can’t.

We live in a world of symbols and complex arrangements of symbols we call stories. Some we create for ourselves, some that others create we are born into, and some are essentially eternal. These latter appear to arrive with our genes; they are quite literally bred into us. Befitting their status, these symbols are beyond our control. Hence they appear omnipotent in the specific sense that the Divine Aesthetic includes all aesthetics (including itself, in defiance of pedestrian, finite, human logic). And, who knows, perhaps they are as powerful as they appear. We have no way of assessing their scope or the full character of their existence. They are part of us yet entirely separate. They unite us but allow us to think we are entirely independent of one other. They themselves are not divine, as Plato thought; but they are manifestations of the incomprehensibly divine made suitable for human consumption.

These symbols are gifts; we did nothing to earn them. And their ostensible purpose is to help us through life, and ultimately into death. They are there to comfort and challenge, to explain and confuse, to point out the way forward and to appreciate the road not taken. But above all else, these are symbols of hope, that whoever or whatever is their source knows us better than we know ourselves, and knows us to be bigger, larger, more comprehensive, more inclusive than we can imagine. We are the heroes of our own stories, if we are willing to take these stories seriously.

To call these stories myths is accurate but, in the way of language, vaguely pejorative since the implication is that they are ‘merely’ fictional and therefore not a component of reality. The word disguises the fact that these stories are “the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” These are not conventional moral tales; they are stories of adventure, “unpredictable, and dangerous adventure,” from which we will not survive. 

We embark on our unique adventure but we are never alone. Our contemporaries are always there to compare notes, to provide encouragement, to share confusion and pain as necessary. And the records of the past adventures of the dead are readily available. So our ‘congregation’ is as large as we care to make it. And aside from access to a reasonable library (ah, the internet!) we have no need for additional resources. The Divine Aesthetic is Green as well as companionable. 

Of course there are essential rituals within the Divine Aesthetic, points at which one comes more closely to the source of the symbols and their stories. As Campbell puts it: “from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come: an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, like the substance of a dream.” It is perhaps that point of melting, which is really our extinction, that each ritualistic step in the hero’s journey is meant to emphasize. Dust to dust, but between the two is something exciting. Or at least we are entitled to hope.