Diaspora 
by 

Greg Egan

 

The Revised Book of Genesis

As is usual with everything by Egan, Diaspora is so densely packed with ideas that all summaries are inadequate. Only one comparison seems even remotely appropriate - to the biblical Book of Genesis.

Diaspora is a history of the re-creation of the universe, one in which there is no need for divine power to either start it off or continue its development. In fact, this is a history of how the defects and design flaws of the original creation story are corrected by hard experience. One of those flaws, perhaps the most destructive, is the vulnerability of the universe to arbitrary and uninformed divine intervention.

Egan lays out a blueprint for how a very different form of life than has been previously known comes into existence. Moving from the self-referential algorithms necessary to produce consciousness, to the algorithms of transformational topology necessary to impose that consciousness on the world coherently, he provides step by step instructions for the evolution of primitive pyschoblasts, embryonic minds as pure bits of energy, into citizens of the polis, an entirely electronic civilisation.

Such citizens are free to explore the Truth Mines containing not just the records of human experience, but the mathematical implications of that experience ‘experienced’ by its fellow-citizens. Through collective reasoning the polis has recognised that reliance on pure deduction is dangerous. It can lead to disaster, particularly that of exponential growth, as previous generations of the original creation had discovered on numerous occasions.

In other words there are limits to strictly mathematical reasoning: “The only way to grasp a mathematical concept was to see it in a multitude of different contexts, think through dozens of specific examples, and find at least two or three metaphors to power intuitive speculations... Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.” This is the function of art. Not just as a means of tempering mathematical logic, but as a way to find undiscovered truths - about ourselves as well as the rest of the universe.

The new creation of the polis has also learned how to interact with the old creation of flesh and blood. It can embody itself in robotic form and engage in productive discussion and planning with those unfortunate beings, us, who are the result of the original botched creation-attempt. Although Egan doesn’t claim it explicitly, this is functionally a new religion, one of the self-creation of the world and our total responsibility for it. A remarkable new theology generated from primordial circuitry.

The Antichrist by Joseph Roth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Malignant Ironies of the Big Lie

The principle beneficiary of communications technology is the Big Lie. Print media made the Big Lie possible. Telegraphy promoted the Big Lie by sterilising language. Telephony allowed the Big Lie by hiding the face of the Liar. Film and its variants tell the Big Lie by divorcing events from their context. Radio and television make the Big Lie entertaining. The internet disguises the Big Lie by protecting the Liar. Roth had sussed out the connection between technology and the Big Lie in 1933. Only recently has the world started to pay attention - not to Roth but at least to the connection.

To put the situation another way: technology has high-jacked language for the ends of those who control the technology. This has been the situation for quite some time. But only recently have the implications of this situation become clear: the Big Lie is unstoppable. This is Roth’s message. It is a message without hope. We are doomed because we cannot avoid the power of the technology. Even if we are aware of this power, and expose it, we are forced to submit to it in the very act of exposing it. We have become the Big Lie. We are shadows talking to shadows.

Although the world has always had more than a quorum of dictators, tyrants, and homicidal monsters, the mythical Antichrist had not arrived before the technology necessary to isolate and control language. The technology itself is the Antichrist, not those who temporarily direct it. They, after all, are as much dominated by it as the rest of us. The only thing that the technology allows is the production of “sounds without shape,” that is to say, disembodied signals, so that “To real things we give false names. Hollow words ring in our poor heads, and we no longer understand the meaning of the words.”

The Big Lie had triumphed through technology already when Roth wrote. Since then most of us have simply chosen to ignore the victory and our submission to the inevitable. This is probably prudent since we are all powerless in the face of such systematic evil. Consequently “We have instead granted the greater part of the short life that was gifted us to our shadows! We have not created life; we have lost it! We have not created; we have squandered! And we have squandered sinfully.”

Through the Big Lie, we are controlled by language, we make distinctions without differences, we learn to hate, we become willing to hurt and kill, not just others but ourselves. We become without anything that might be called reason. The “sons of Edison” are able to exercise less and less reason with every advance in ‘communication’ since language is the instrument of human reason, and language has been captured and imprisoned. In Babylon, at the Tower, we became merely confused. Now with instantaneous worldwide networks and translations, we are acutely dangerous.

In his Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky portrays the Grand Inquisitor as unable to recognise the returned Christ. This may be somewhat dark, but it is not hopeless. Roth’s story about being unable to recognise the Antichrist is, on the other hand, one of total despair. In our era of up-beat optimism about our ability to develop and regulate technology effectively, Roth is unlikely to go down well. His only practical suggestion is repentance, which probably can’t even be heard much less acted upon in the various Silicon Valleys and capitals of the world.

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The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Past Isn’t What It Was

“Given a choice between life and books, my son, you must choose books!” The gecko-protagonist (he was, he believes, previously human) remembers his father’s advice. Fiction is the only refuge from a reality which is always painful. It is the means of escape from a world in which we can never really be at home (the gecko, on the other hand, is very much at home; in fact he is a so-called house gecko, prized for keeping the home free of nasty bugs like mosquitoes; and, despite the intimation of the book’s title-in-translation, a gecko is not a chameleon).

To fictionalize one’s life therefore - not just in private but as one’s public persona - is essential therapy. Childhood trauma can be eliminated. Unfortunate parentage corrected. Gaps in education filled. Crimes erased. The gecko’s housemate, Felix, has found his calling as “a man who dealt in memories, a man who sold the past, clandestinely, the way other people deal in cocaine.”

Felix is an artist. As he confides to the gecko: “‘I think what I do is really an advanced kind of literature,’ he told me conspiratorially. ‘I create plots, I invent characters, but rather than keeping them trapped in a book I give them life, launching them out into reality.’” His philosophy conforms nicely with the advice of the gecko’s father: “Literature is the only chance for a true liar to attain any sort of social acceptance.”

And who could argue? If national history is a matter of variable interpretation, why not individual life-histories? Truth, Felix believes, is a superstition. We are happy only for those brief moments we close our eyes to reality.

Besides, do we not grow into our fictions? Is it better we merely accept those given us by our parents or boldly create our own? Isn’t this what setting goals in life is about, telling ourselves stories about ourselves and then living up to the stories? And where can truly original, authentic stories come from but an imaginary past?

And of course if one can successfully invent oneself, it is possible to invent one’s family, one’s ancestors, one’s friends and acquaintances with equivalent ease. With only a little practice we can be discussing them with others, visiting their graves, posting newspaper adverts to find those with whom we have list touch. If reality is a convention, our living it makes it real.

The difficulty. naturally. with fictional reality is that it gets out of control rather easily. For example the President, the government, even in principle the entire country can be replaced, replicated, and there would be no way to know. A fantasy police force, a fantasy justice system, with stand-ins created by the Mafia, or the Russians, or Mossad. And this long before the person of Donald Trump emerged as an international figure!

But there’s an even more fundamental problem: “All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected.” Eventually the lies collide with each other. The 17th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz speculated that God told everyone’s story and ensured that all stories were consistent. It’s not a bad theory if one is a theist. But if there is no one coordinating the self-generated fictions, the results can be disastrous, especially when things like revenge for atrocities are at stake. The network of lies then threatens to unravel violently.

The gecko is Agualusa’s god-like presence. He doesn’t know the real stories of Felix’s clients; but he does know the fictions that Felix creates for them, and he knows these to be fictitious (geckos can’t blink, and their adhesive feet make them quite literally part of the walls; so they see and hear everything). Apparently geckos are long lived creatures, but they are not immortal. And they are vulnerable to the demonic scorpion. What happens when the gecko dies?

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Passing 
by 

Nella Larsen

 

Our Most Common Prejudice

This novel is an extended example of a figure of speech called synecdoche in which a part is used to reference the whole. What makes it unusual, and highly creative, is that the part that Larsen uses is the gross and glaring fact of racial prejudice. The whole is a much more subtle and barely expressible prejudice that most of us find instinctive - prejudiced rejection of the purposes of others.

The storyline appears straightforward. Because she is light-skinned, Clare, Irene’s childhood friend, has been able to pass as the white wife of a high-flying international executive. He knows nothing of this deception and is in fact an avid racist, possessing all the most crude attributes of the breed. Irene is understandably shocked when she encounters Clare en famille, as it were. She judges Clare for her ambition, which had led her, she believes, to such idiocy.

That a person should attach herself knowingly to another who is inherently and openly hateful to what she really is, would be classed as a psychological illness. But such a diagnosis ignores the underlying motive entirely. Irene dismisses Clare’s intention as one of greed, of trading her racial identity for a lifestyle in the white cultural world. But this is merely a prejudiced presumption. She had not discussed the matter with Clare. And even if she had it is possible that Clare had never adequately articulated her motives, even to herself.

So has Clare made an error or has Irene misunderstood her objective? Ultimately one is forced to either impose an intention on Clare or attempt to understand that intention from Clare’s point of view. The latter course can be characterized as one of respect. The former course, that is the summary rejection of the purpose of another, much less its frustration, is a prejudice as profound as that directed toward race. But it doesn’t appear so, largely because it is a rejection justified as ‘moral’, that is, in terms of some abstract general principle. This is Irene’s initial reaction.

Respect is neither general nor abstract but always particular and concrete. It refers not to a moral code but to the specific existential circumstances of another. Respect means recognizing the intention of another as justified, that is, as grounded in the unique experience of that person. In fact, this is a good functional definition of a person, namely an entity which has a unique individual purpose. 

Almost simultaneously with her encounter with Clare, Irene discovers this intentional prejudice in the reaction of her husband to her own concern about her son’s education. Her husband considers her irrational and simply dismisses her concerns about the course of his schooling. His lack of respect for her intention - the welfare of the child - is obvious in the vacuous shibboleth he throws at her. This hurts Irene; but it also opens her to the possibility that she has been equally disrespectful to her childhood friend. 

This is the pivotal point of the story. Irene is on the verge of recognizing her own prejudice against her husband: “It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so.” Whatever her husband’s judgment of her, she is guilty of a similar judgment of him, and possibly of Clare.

The moral philosophy implicit in Larsen’s fiction is profound. What Irene discovers is that there is no morality which attaches to purpose. Purposes, intentions, commitments, ambitions may be shared or not, attractive or not, attainable or not, but they cannot be judged as reasonable, correct, or ethical. Only the actions undertaken to pursue purpose have moral content. Actions not thoughts are what affect others. It is actions we have control over not the experiences we have. It is from these experiences that we ‘extract’ objectives, either to avoid the things we have learned to fear, or to obtain things we may have been denied.

So Clare’s commitment to herself to have a life free from the burdens of racial prejudice must be respected. This is quite different from approving of her actions in marrying a white racist. This action is not only irrational, it is wrong for Clare. But it’s purpose is not. Ends are simply ‘there’, possibly to be discussed, modified, compromised, or even abandoned, but never to be disrespected or rejected in principle. Means have values which can be disputed, and Clare does dispute them. But ends do not.

Larsen’s point, or at least my interpretation of it, may be controversial but part of its profoundness lies in its controversiality. What she has to say is not some obvious truism like ‘racial prejudice is horrible and some people react to it in strange ways.’ Her book is a literary exploration of an extremely nuanced view in which behavior is the focus of moral judgment; and within which respect for the purpose of others is a central tenet, even when, no especially when, that purpose is unstated. 

This is not a worked out philosophy, but it is a valuable suggestion for a different way of understanding life’s responsibilities. It is a suggestion that puts racial prejudice in a larger and more general context while pointing to its real evil - the denial of the capacity for purpose to another human being. That it is a suggestion made in 1929 at a high point of racial atrocities in the United States, makes it even more remarkable.

Postscript 28Mar19: As If to make my point, I received a GR friend request with a comment, apparently provoked by this review, that I “sound like an apologetic white person.” It’s not clear if the remark was meant as a compliment of a slur. But it does demonstrate some instinctive reaction that human beings have to assign and judge motives with about as much care and attention as tying a shoelace.

I Can Get It for You Wholesale: A Novel by Jerome Weidman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Second Generation Neuroses

The first generation of 20th century immigrants to New York City underwent a remarkably difficult transition to ‘The American Way’. By grit and luck they survived and clawed their way out of their Lower East Side slums to the relative splendour of The Bronx. They didn’t get rich but they were on the ladder of at least modest prosperity. They had lost only a nominal, often hostile, homeland and perhaps the stifling culture of an isolated shtetl. Their new life more than compensated for the loss.

The cultural calculus for the next generation, however, is less than clear cut. These children of immigrants know nothing of the historical community that produced and sustained their parents. What they do know is what it’s like to be on the bottom of an economic and social system which offers ‘opportunity’ but only at the price of cultural identity. They have assimilated the disdain for the foreigner that they have experienced for their entire lives.

And that includes the foreigner that they know themselves to be when they look at their own families. Their parents survival is not something they can hold as a success. They refuse to settle for lower middle class respectability. They hate the system that demands that they conform to its ethos of the moral and economic jungle. But they also hate being considered less than worthy of being part of that system.

This is the point at which the immigrant family becomes truly naturalized - when it’s children become alienated from whatever residue of culture they may have received and embark on pursuing the ambitions they perceive America wants them to have. These they adopt along with the ruthless guile appropriate to their reality. They scheme, lie, cheat, and double-deal because those are the practical skills required.

Harry Bogen is Weidman’s second generation protagonist. He is a clever, sarcastic, entirely amoral entrepreneur whose aim is to beat the system by exploiting every weakness he can find in everyone he knows. He exploits his business partners without mercy; hates the children of all other immigrants equally, including those of fellow-Jews; spouts casual racism as a mark of American sophistication; and is pathologically misogynistic to all women.

Except that Harry apparently loves his mother. He is devoted to her with a Freudian intensity that is disturbing. Interestingly, Harry never mentions why; he never mentions his childhood at all except to lament his father’s lowly position. Harry’s mother is for the reader an entirely symbolic being whom Harry adores and showers with presents. He buys her stylish dresses and fur coats. He wants her to frequent the beauty parlour and keep herself looking young. He wants to bask in her loving presence while she feeds him blintzes (his only cultural connection to the family’s past). She worries about how he’ll cope when she’s gone. She fusses over him continuously; waits for him returning from work while leaning on a pillow on the windowsill; criticises his business morals, gripes about his lack of suitable women-friends.

There are clues that this mutual devotion masks something deeper though. Why does Harry despise women so intensely? Why does the facial similarity to his mother of a girl he’s introduced to by her generate incipient violence against her? Why does Harry feel it necessary to buy his mother’s affection with such overt bribery? To what extent is his mother complicit in his alienation from the very culture and history she represents? There are layers of personal history that Weidman doesn’t reveal explicitly. But these too are part of Harry’s second generation neuroses. His relationship with his mother is the flip side of his business maliciousness; both have the same hidden source.

Weidman has written a very sophisticated fictional case study of this second generation condition. The book is almost entirely dialogue, mostly involving Harry’s nefarious schemes about either business or sex, interspersed with his real thoughts, always sarcastic and demeaning, about the people he comes in contact with. His slipping in and out of Yiddish-English idiom to demonstrate the gap in experience between Harry and his mother is masterful. And Weidman’s knowledge of the New York rag trade of the 30’s creates a social commentary of considerable worth in its own right.

This is a sort of Jewish Noir version of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. It is a better book than Dreiser’s in technique, development and implicit themes. Weidman seems to be one of those writers who have been largely forgotten because they are simply too painful to remember. Harry Bogen is not merely a second generation immigrant corrupted by ‘the system’. He is an American Everyman who perceives in some way that what was lost in becoming assimilated was perhaps worth more than what had been realised at the time

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The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Joys of Eccentricity

Scientific method, like human nature, is a term of approval or disapproval not a description of anything real. We use such terms as if we knew what they mean; but they are largely without any definite content. Their primary function is one of propaganda, sometimes professional, often religious, always tendentious. Taking such terms seriously - except to dismiss them - is usually bad for human beings and other living things.

This aptly-titled biography of the prominent 20th century British scientist, Paul Dirac, is an illustration of the point. Dirac was a bona fide eccentric, a nerd, a geek, probably autistic, someone who just didn’t fit wherever he found himself. He was also a genius who was the first to formulate the relativistic mathematics of quantum mechanics. How he did this was hardly methodical and can only be called scientific in retrospect.

Dirac was initially trained in what today would be termed a trade school in Bristol. There he learned, among other things, engineering drawing, and that he was hopeless with any task involving manual dexterity. He was, in a sense, the antithesis of the mythical British empiricist. He went on haphazardly to advance his studies in applied mathematics and fitfully to pursue an interest in the then nascent field of relativity physics at Cambridge.

Only by accident did he notice that the results being produced in another area of contemporary physics, quantum mechanics, by the rather more famous scientist, Werner Heisenberg, had a formal mathematical structure similar to that one of his teachers had been interested in several years before.* This lead Dirac to formulate a suggestion for the behaviour of sub-atomic particles in roughly this form:

position symbol × momentum symbol – momentum symbol × position symbol = h ×(square root of –1)/(2×π).**

This suggestion was rejected by most quantum physicists at the time as being patently unscientific, a mathematician’s fancy. Part of the reason for the disdain shown toward the idea is that the terms on the left side of his equation - the symbols for position and momentum - are entirely abstract. That is to say, they are dimensionless entities, like a mathematical point, that have no real existence outside of the mathematician’s head. By definition, they can’t be measured (or what amounts to the same thing, they could be measured in any of an infinite number of ways); so they can’t be real things. The formula, therefore, must be meaningless.

Helass for the sceptics, the eccentric formula turned out to be exactly the key required to unlock the mysteries of quantum behaviour (and in the way of science, to produce quite a few more - like the possibility of anti-matter). Either what Dirac had done was surreptitiously ‘good science’ behind its hapless façade; or what constituted good science was in need of redefinition. Subsequent results pointed clearly to the latter. Whatever Dirac had done defined proper scientific method, although no one would have admitted it beforehand.

But even Dirac didn’t know how he had arrived at his idea and therefore what his method might have been. Coincidence and history simply appeared to combine to produce a thought, which prompted him to find a certain mid-nineteenth century tome in the University Library. Hardly, therefore, a series of events to be written up in the annals of the philosophy of science. Nothing about the process could be called scientific except that it was conducted by a person who was (barely) considered a scientist.

It would seem that in surveying the history of science the vast majority of ‘breakthroughs’ both big and small occur in just this way. Whatever ‘method’ produces them only becomes visible after they are produced; and then such method typically appears to be un-replicable as a procedure or clearly inappropriate for universal application. This is, on the face of it, a highly unscientific state of affairs. If we can’t specify the process by which reliable knowledge is generated, how can we distinguish between authentic science and bogus fakery, between reason and revelation, between astronomy and astrology?

The answer is that we can’t. Not by specifying an acceptable or mandatory procedure in any case. The only way to verify the results of scientific, or any other sort of, thought is to promote widespread and unrestricted argument about it. Through such argument it might be established that there are procedural flaws in one’s thought or experiments. Equally it might be established that the existing ‘rules’ for thinking or experimenting are inadequate.

But it’s not even possible to state the criteria in advance by which the choice should be made among these alternatives. The criteria are only discovered in the argument, and then continuously re-discovered through subsequent argument. Reason itself emerges from the debate; it cannot be imposed upon the debate.

If scientific method means anything at all, it means keeping this argument going with as many participants as possible. The only way to judge the quality of that argument is how completely it ‘sweeps in’ extremes of opinion. This, I think, is the abiding political as well as personal import of Dirac’s very eccentric, and unmethodical, professional life.

*This,is the mathematics of quaternions in which multiplication of elements is non-commutative; that is, where A x B ≠ (is not equal to) B x A.

**Where h is Planck’s constant and π is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of every circle (its value is about 3.142). This ‘matures’ by 1928 to something highly technical and irrelevant to the commentary here.

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The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice 
by 

Christopher Hitchens

 

Money Does Smell (Usually Badly)

Puncturing the self-inflated balloons of hypocritical cant is always entertaining. And Mother Teresa is right up there with Donald Trump when it comes to the latest fashion in imperial new clothes. Charity is its own reward or it is bunk. And anyone who sets charity up as a business becomes a huckster and seller of snake oil whatever they started out as. This is a law of nature and Hitchens confirms it magnificently in this wonderfully written case study.

It is empirically verifiable that authentic spiritual enthusiasm, or any idealism at all, has a limited half-life and degrades rapidly into obsession with ‘the numbers’ immediately upon the loss of an important customer or a major benefactor. At that moment the ‘mission’ no matter what it has been heretofore becomes bigger than oneself, an objectified, independent entity, that must be protected. This is the point when the idealist becomes the victim of his own hubris. And also the point when others are enrolled in the cause. As every entrepreneur knows, organisations are a bitch. They sap your strength and immerse everyone involved in political conflict.

Jesus discovered this cruel reality - the immediate distortion of himself and his message - as soon as he had assembled his motley Apostles and sent them on the road. Whatever they told the folk round about, it wasn’t very well received. And the Apostles themselves were clearly confused about the points to be made and their authority to make them. Eventually that confusion would be resolved by calling for devotion to the Church as the message. The result, we understand now, is a fixation on corporate reputation with practical consequences that range from the promotion of religious warfare to the protection of paedophilia.

Not that Mother Teresa started with motivations as pure as those of Jesus. From the start of her crusade to use the poor of the world to her best advantage she was “a religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer and an accomplice of worldly, secular powers.” She had a shibboleth for every occasion and press conference, usually using the word ‘love.’ She consciously used her stature and dress to create an effect of supplicatory humility. She was also a malicious control freak who imposed what she regarded as a therapeutic level of suffering on her charges as well as her staff.

Mother Teresa is in contention with Billy Graham as the world’s most successful televangelist. Certainly their claims to special personal revelation are on a par with each other. Their abilities to harvest the loose change of the rich and famous are comparable. Their affinities for right-wing government thugs are hard to distinguish. But at least Billy Graham kept accounts and was audited on occasion. No one knows how much Mother Teresa collected in her global ministry, how it was spent, and where it is now. Only one thing is certain: little of it went to any sort of palliative care for her inmates, who, according to numerous eyewitness testimony, were treated as living sacrifices to the God of pain.

“The conjurer is only the instrument of the audience,”says Hitchens. Although, the cheerleaders for MT’s audience differ from those of Trump’s (Hillary Clinton and Oprah are big on Mother Teresa), the bulk of the paying audience is about the same demographic in both cases - under-educated, evangelical idealists who would love to get their revenge on those in charge, in the next life if not in this one. But only after donating what they can’t afford to their respective campaigns for canonisation. Certainly Hitchens’s comment applies equally to both MT and DJT: “It is time to recognize that the world’s leading exponent of this false consolation is herself a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers.”

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Clevverness Counts Agenst

Nowhere in the Book of Genesis is there mention of the creation of the numbers. This is a serious matter. If God didn’t create the numbers, they’ve existed as long as he has. Maybe they are God. Some people say that it was human beings who created the numbers. And that would make human beings God... well sort of.

It’s numbers that makes human beings so clever, you see. “Counting clevverness is what it wer. When they had all them things and marvelsome they cudnt sleap realy they dint have no res. They wer stressing ther self and straining all the time with counting.” It turns out being God (and counting) is a pretty dangerous occupation that can really mess up night and day. Not ‘Fiat Lux,’ Let there be light; but ‘Fiat tenebræ horribiles,’ Let there be terrible darkness.

The numbers are part of the 2nd knowing. But before them was the 1st knowing. The 1st knowing didn’t have counting; so it didn’t breed technology, particularly the technology of domination of the primordial “Addom”. It also pre-dates the splitting of the human psyche into opposing halves - The Littl Shyning Man and Eusa.

The 1st knowing is not individual but social; it exists among people and feels like it comes entirely from elsewhere; it is instinctive and yet alien: “It puts us on like we put on our does. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part.” The 1st knowing has been lost but commemorated in fragmentary myth. Riddley is the potential “connection” to the 1st knowing.

But there are others, the emerging government of the “Mincery” (as in ‘I’m from the Mincery; I’m here to help you’), based in Bernt Arse, a developing industrial centre. The “Pry Mincer” and his henchmen are keen to recover the capabilities of the 2nd knowing, that is, the the knowledge of power and control. They have established a cult of Eusa, as the other half of the alienated Littl Shyning Man.

The cult includes a standard scriptural text required to be memorised by the populace; and a traveling Punch & Judy show as liturgical drama. The cult promotes the idea of a ‘second chance’ for humanity with technology (that is to say, with numbers) through the discovery of the hidden secrets of the 2nd knowing.

Riddley is effectively a heretic and goes on the run. His prophetic revelation is that “EUSAS HEAD IS DREAMING US.” He discovers that the descendants of the Eusa people are living in Cambry, the old cathedral city. There he finds the essence of the 1st knowing: the most powerful are those who do not seek power at all. This is the force which creates us: “It thinks us but it dont think like us.” Numbers are a great temptation to power for people who don't remember this.

In sum: an entertaining but unexpectedly profound investigation of creation and the meaning of being human. It’s not a bad emendation at all to Genesis. And it’s easier to read than Finnegans Wake.

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High-Rise by J.G. Ballard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Social Sci-Fi

For a few years in the 1980’s I had a flat in Lauderdale Tower at the Barbican in London. All of the Barbican development is brutalist - cast concrete with exposed cast marks etc. - but Lauderdale and it’s sister-towers are particularly extreme examples, sporting pebble-dashed balconies and bare internal walls that reject even the most technologically advanced wallpaper adhesives. I take it from Ballard’s descriptions that English architectural aesthetics hadn’t advanced very far when it came to the Docklands development which was several decades newer.

To call such architecture anti-human might be an exaggeration; but not by much. One can only tell oneself that it is post-modernist chic for so long. The fact is that it is depressing as hell. Even recollecting the lift lobbies provokes the phantasm of concrete dust in my throat. Concrete is as concrete does I suppose. And what it does primarily is drive people mad. As Ballard says, it is “an architecture designed for war.” And a kind of peace-time shell shock is not uncommon.

The problem is its unrelenting uniformity. Placed in proximity to another architectural style, brutalism may look merely bad. But when it is the only game for acres and acres, it presents a complete absence of any aesthetic whatsoever. It’s the equivalent of living in a sensory deprivation chamber. There’s nothing to react to. Everything - people, furniture, social interactions, art - is mediated by a grey blandness which doesn’t highlight any contents but reduces them to an uninteresting drabness. I found that when I wasn’t unaccountably aggressive toward my neighbours, I was becoming incipiently suicidal.

So I can identify with at least one of Ballard’s protagonists, Dr. Laing. High-rise stress is something that creeps up on you. The unconscious reacts slowly to the uniformity of life in identical concrete enclosures by attempting to differentiate itself. It constantly prods the conscious self to demonstrate its individuality. While such psychology is probably active to some degree in every human grouping, it reaches a peak of intensity in an enclosed habitation that provokes it without mercy.

Laing‘s mistake was to believe he could escape the demands of intimate relationships in the supposed anonymity of a large residential building. This is like joining a monastery to avoid family problems. In a high rise, as in a monastery, relationships may be more limited in scope but they are far more intense in their allowable aspects. And both high rise residents and monks have similar techniques for expressing fierce disapproval in complete silence.

Social nuance is proportionately heightened to the degree it is expressively repressed. This creates a pervasive field of energetic tension which needs only the social equivalent of the Higgs boson to create the matter of real violence. And there are many more of these particles to do the job - faulty lifts, interrupted utilities, children, pets, and parties will do the trick.

Ballard puts his finger on the precise mechanism which unleashed a potentially lethal game of tit for tat among the residents: “By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses.”

Talk about sick building syndrome! But of course the ‘structure’ Ballard refers to could equally be the internet, which didn’t come into being until twenty years after High Rise was published. The problem, then, isn’t the building but something in the physiology of human beings (Laing is coincidentally a physiologist) which responds badly when certain, apparently trivial, social interactions are replaced by any ‘rigid,’ that is to say, ‘efficient’ technology.

In other words, people act badly not when social norms are relaxed or abandoned, but when they are no longer apparently needed, when we believe they are enforced without our participation. But social physics is as sensitive to minor changes in structural constants as cosmological physics. Every new technology is a kind of unplanned experiment with variations in sociological constants equivalent to variations in scientific laws like gravity or the weak nuclear force. The main difference of course is that fictions of technology move toward reality rather less predictably.

My flat in the Barbican, by the way, was owned by the Corporation of London. I was therefore a Council tenant. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, Council tenants were entitled to buy their properties at a price about 50% below market value. But about nine months before the scheduled sale date I decided that the certain financial gain was not worth the required mental strain, and moved out. Just an example I suppose of human unpredictability when inhabiting alternative worlds.

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My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Turning Yearning Into Learning

Aspiration is easy to confuse with a desire to move on in life. Aspiration implies a change into something else; this is antithetical to becoming more of oneself, to mature in other words. Aspiration becomes a virtue only when the idea of personal authenticity has been abandoned. At that point we enter into the delusion that we can shape ourselves into anything we choose - or more accurately what those around us, society, have chosen as worthwhile.

George Eliot never let aspiration replace her desire to become more of what she was. In this she has become an icon of women’s liberation in all the best senses of that term. What is perhaps less obvious is that she is also an inspiring figure for men for exactly the same reason. Aspiration is the culturally generated male disease par excellence. George Eliot’s resistance to that disease is clinically available for male inoculation in My Life in Middlemarch.

Mead’s triangulation of her own life with that of Eliot and the character development in her novels is as remarkably affective as it is effective. Mead shows how to read fiction - as simultaneously an exploration of the author’s life and an articulation of one’s own. Eliot is not among the great writers in the English language because she describes her own experience and general social conditions so thoroughly but because she writes things which are immediately recognizable as the truth of one’s own circumstances.

For me that truth is the extent to which social expectations determine what we think are personal decisions. We are confronted, however, by a set of ready made options from which to choose - doctor, lawyer, Indian chief according to the children’s rhyme. The choices are already rigged. This is Eliot’s profound insight. As Mead summarizes not just Eliot’s youth but her entire life: “She knew she wanted something. She knew she wanted to do something. She didn’t know what it was. She just knew she wanted, and wanted, and wanted.”

The wanting never stopped. It never turned into a position, a role, a self-image, actually a self-imposed idol. As Mead says of Eliot, “She turned her yearning into learning.” That yearning never degraded into a fixed aspiration, an ambition which would conform with acceptable norms. This takes the courage of a Ulysses to maintain. Most men don’t have such courage; they don’t even know they need it. Hence the importance of George Eliot to those with mixed chromosomes.

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A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics by David Stipp
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The God Equation

Turning the infinite into the finite (and back again) is no mean feat. It is what Christians claim God did with Jesus. It is also just one of the things that the equation produced by the Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler, in the late 18th century does in mathematics. Or to put it another way, Euler’s equation shows how things that we know are real are actually manifestations of something inconceivably alien, not simply infinite but also entirely other. I think it would only diminish the significance of Euler’s triumph to even state it in mathematical terms to non-mathematicians. So here’s a descriptive rather than analytical summary of Stipp’s highly accessible book.

The ancient Greeks learned how to deal with the idea of infinity by treating it as unreal and illusory, as something which didn’t really exist outside our heads. Since we couldn’t see it, touch it or feel it, infinity wasn’t, as today’s jargon has it, ‘a thing.’ Euler didn’t prove that infinity was a real thing (that was Georg Cantor a century later); but he did show that the infinite went into the construction of real things. Thus whatever the infinite was, it wasn’t only in our heads. Infinity may be irrational, that is beyond our thought of concrete objects, but it is still real as shown in Euler’s equation.

The fact of something real called infinity is relatively easy to deal with in the scheme of things, however. An infinite amount or number or degree of something is always in relation to something we already know about - people, distances, speeds, or indeed numbers - just many, many more or much, much larger; or alternatively much much smaller with many, many more fine divisions. The infinity we talk about, therefore, is merely a collection of these things that we are familiar with. Infinity is the sum, as it were, of these real things.

But things get considerably stranger when we leave the domain of the senses. Even quantum physics may seem to make relative sense. Euler’s equation introduces an entirely novel ‘substance’ into our thinking about what constitutes reality. This substance is something no one has ever seen. It is the dark matter and dark energy of mathematics. The substance is composed of what mathematicians call transcendental numbers.

Transcendental numbers, like π, can only be expressed as an unpredictably infinite set of decimals (technically speaking they never converge). It is their unpredictability that makes them so strange - in terms of how many there might be, where they might be found, and their full identities. Transcendentals are certainly numbers but they can’t be expressed as numbers other than as themselves - not as fractions, formulas, or combinations of other numbers.

In simple terms, transcendental numbers don’t follow any of the normal mathematical laws, even those of arithmetic. They stand in splendid isolation. We know they exist but we don’t know how many there are or what they’re made of. Yet Euler’s equation shows that they too are a constituent of reality. In fact they are so important that they are the rough equivalent of the Higgs boson in particle physics - in a sense promoting the existence of the numbers we measure for things we can feel and see in everyday life - from circles to the mysteries of alternating current.

Some object to this treatment of numbers as if they themselves are real things. They call this view ‘Platonist’ and criticise it as mystically religious. But even if one adopts the view that numbers are all in one’s head tout court, the implication is that mathematics is how our minds consistently (and effectively) work in dealing with the world.

Whether the world is ‘really’ mathematical or only appears that way because of how our minds work would therefore seem a meaningless distinction. All of science, indeed all of thought, is as much a discovery of the reality of ourselves as it is of the universe. And what we discover are patterns that have a remarkable aesthetic attraction. That is to say, we find beauty.

Finally, there are those most mysterious of all numbers, the so-called imaginary numbers. Everyone agrees that this is an inapt description but we’re stuck with the term. A better term than ‘imaginary’ would probably be ‘impossible.’ This is the number i, which is the square root of negative 1. On the face of it, such an entity indeed appears impossible. There is no number, neither a negative nor a positive, which can be the square root of a negative number since whatever number is used will always yield a positive value.

And yet not only does i exist in mathematics, it is of widespread relevance in mechanical, electrical, electronic, and computer engineering, to name just a few of its applications. Infinity may be irrational; transcendentals may be irrational and unseeable; but the imaginary number i is not just irrational, and unseeable, it is entirely incomprehensible. And yet it too is shown by Euler to be a fundamental constituent of the world.

Benjamin Peirce, The 19th century American mathematician (and father of the first great American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce) summed up the import of the Euler equation rather succinctly. “It is absolutely paradoxical,” Stipp quotes from Peirce’s published lectures, “We cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.” I have never encountered a better or more inspiring claim to divine revelation.

Postscript: for a further literary interpretation of the Euler formula, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Further postscript: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/googl...

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Messiah by Gore Vidal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Never Go to California Unprepared

Gore Vidal has it exactly right in Messiah: Religion, and therefore religious politics, are fundamentally literary matters. It is not so much that religion and its politics use literature inappropriately but that they are examples of a very specific genre which arises from time to time, the purpose of which is to create what are essentially tribal bonds. Messiah is a fictional case study of the literature of religion.

It has struck me for some time that the Deplorables phenomenon in the United States is not primarily a political event but a form of religious enthusiasm. Perhaps the two are indistinguishable in their core. Regardless, there seems to be an essential element of belief among Trumpists that carries the weight of religious conviction. This raises questions of what has been traditionally called divine revelation, the formation of certain, unshakeable faith in someone or something. Where does such faith come from? How does it spread among large populations? How is it maintained in some sort of coherence as it does spread?

These are typically considered as questions appropriate to the sociology of religion. But the categories of academic sociology are misleading. By presuming that religious impulses are a response to some pre-existing emotional need or spiritual lack, sociology puts the conceptual chart before the empirical horse. Religion, like modern retail capitalism, creates its own demand.

Not uncommonly religion starts with the experience of a small number of individuals in the presence of a charismatic - Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, or as in Messiah, the undertaker’s assistant, John Cave (the initials JC are not incidental of course; neither is the name of the PR man who launches the Cavite sect internationally - Paul). But that shared experience has a limited half-life, and an equally limited audience with the technology of only word-of-mouth advertising to rely on. In any case the shared revelatory experience is lost. Enter then what is called fundamental theology, the religious theory of revelation and how it spreads.

Ultimately all fundamental theology becomes fideistic, that is one claims belief because one believes. No proof, no evidence, no rational argument creates faith. Belief therefore becomes an undiscussable principle. Taken seriously, this implies not just complete subjectivity but also total incomparabilty of experience. Technically speaking therefore, even believers don’t know what they’re talking about when they talk with each other. To the extent they agree on a religious vocabulary, they have divorced themselves from whatever personal religious experience they claim.

This is not just my view but that of the most important fundamental theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth. Barth’s work is primarily directed toward re-establishing what he considers authentic religious experience of ‘The Word’ as distinct from the simulacrum of that experience produced by merely human words. The implication of course is that religious language doesn’t refer to anything at all - material or spiritual. Religious language, however, does create a certain form of community, namely that devoted to a certain religious language. For Barth this is an unfortunate tragedy for humanity. For the rest of us, it’s just how things are.

And this is what Vidal recognizes. Religion is dependent upon literature. It is a literary phenomenon. The protagonist of The Messiah is not John Cave, the founder of the cult, but Eugene Luther (Vidal's first names), the evangelistic author of the cult’s foundational texts - Cavesword. Of course no text can be charismatic in the manner of a human being, but this is irrelevant. The text has its own kind of charisma, appropriate not to the originary shared revelation but to its cult. The religious community which forms around a text is bound together by the text not by the shared experience of the original cult (it is relevant to point out that while writing this paragraph I was interrupted by my news feed which informs me that Trump is presently in Alabama signing bibles for tornado victims).

This priority of the text over mental or spiritual state would seem obvious to all except sociologists of religion (and many theologians) who appear to regard the content of the religious text as significant. It isn’t. Most Christians have no informed understanding of the Bible much less the doctrinal pronounments derived from it. Latter Day Saints and Muslims may quote passages from The Book of Mormon and the Quran as required to make a political point but have equally vague ideas about the historical source of these passages.

John Cave’s message is that death is preferable to life. The dying itself is the only awkward part. This is a message satisfying in terms of Freud’s Death Wish for the psychoanalytically minded. And it goes well with any combination of Gnostic, Orphic, and millennial Christian tendencies. A theology for all seasons perhaps. Strange bed-fellows one might think, but religion is after all a kind of political alliance.

Having been formed with the text, the community uses the text to continuously affirm and reinforce itself. Allegiance, faith, passes from a person to a text, then to the institution created through the text established by the relevant institution - the church, the mosque, the temple.* The sequence is universal regardless of the text itself. The text is deemed sacred, and must be protected from mis-interpretation. It also may need to be revised from time to time to meet changing dogmatic objectives. The essential role of religious authority is to control and correct the text, its valid interpretation and its public assertion. Faith is commitment to the authoritative institution. Modern totalitarian regimes regardless of ideology have largely modeled their systems of text-control on historic Christian practice over centuries.

Vidal’s Cavite system of textual revision and enforcement was proposed only a few years after Orwell’s version in his 1984.** But Vidal realized something Orwell didn’t, namely that whatever went on inside anyone’s head was irrelevant to the process of social control. The ‘Thought Police’ of Orwell is either a misnomer or a misdirection of resources. Controlling what was said does the job of promoting social discipline quite nicely all by itself in Messiah. Belief is actually inconsequential to religious or social cohesion. Truth is what is written or said by authority. Faith is not a psychological state or abstract commitment; it is an active and public affirmation of authority.

Vidal doesn’t entirely discount human need when it comes to religion. For him there is a very plausible emotion behind the religious impulse in modern life: Boredom, more specifically the boredom of power which is a self-willed condition. Religion, particularly religion spawned in someplace like California, has a frisson of adventurous novelty that has proved itself attractive to bored middle class Americans for decades - even during the 1950’s.

And I’d bet that boredom is the driving root-motivation behind the phenomenon of the Deplorables. Combine cultural ennui with lack of education and it’s a situation tailor-made for the cult of Trump - bored, stupid fanatics frightened of their diminishing power.

* A common misconception is that the Christian Scriptures created the Church. This is historically incorrect. The early Church in its various manifestations carefully chose which texts it would consider as canonical and which heretical. I think it’s therefore accurate to say that Church and text evolved together.
**1984 was first published in 1949; The Messiah in 1954.

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We Can Remember It for You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bigger Commitments

The only thing that can substitute satisfactorily for a life-fantasy is a bigger life-fantasy, one which includes but exceeds the lesser narrative. Keep telling taller and taller tales about yourself and you end up with... well, theology, the biggest story that one can tell. This is the basis of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God, developed by St. Anselm, the 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury. What Anselm didn’t get, Dick does, namely that what the Argument proves is not God, but the infinite power of the human imagination to conceive even that which does not exist. Dick also knows that this power is redemptive whether or not anyone else recognizes it. It is our salvation. All this and more in 29 pages.

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Among Others by Jo Walton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bibliotropism

Excellent YA reading with acute relevance to us oldies as well. A fifteen year old girl from the Welsh valleys learns about life, death, sex, love and friendship. Handicapped in mysterious circumstances, estranged from her mother for equally mysterious reasons, Morwenna has to cope with everything from family blending to the trials of social isolation at an English girls’ school.

But mostly Among Others is about Morwenna’s irrepressible attraction to books, especially to the imaginative construction of alternative worlds in sci-fi. These take up where her younger fantasies of faeries leave off. “We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one.” Faeries after all are very knowledgeable but they can’t do much in the world of people, not without help.

Morwenna loves fantasy but despises allegory. Things are what they are and are degraded by being made to stand for other things. “Fiction’s nice. Fiction lets you select and simplify,” she says. Fiction, in other words, explains things. It helps a person get from a magical view of the world of a child to the realism of adulthood, without the loss of one’s imagination, including one’s moral imagination: “One of the things I’ve always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you’d never have thought about before.”

Books are the centre of Morwenna’s existence: “Sometimes it feels as if it’s only books that make life worth living.” Her judgment has been honed by reading all the best writers and understanding what makes them the best. Through her reading she also finds others who are sympathetic to her tastes and ways of thinking. By understanding them she understands herself and her situation. It is not an overstatement to say that she is redeemed through her reading.

Walton’s epigram for Among Others is a subtle mis-quote from Virgil’s Aeneid: “et haec olim meminisse iuvabit,” that is “it will be a joy to remember these things some day.” She has left out the important first word of Virgil’s original: ‘Forsan’ in Latin; ‘Perhaps’, in English. For Walton, there is no perhaps about Morwenna’s life. She will always find joy in what she has read and what it has done for her life.

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Faith by Jennifer Haigh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Believe what you want.”

Aside from pointing out the somewhat extensive analysis of Irish-American Catholic family politics and their impact on the handling of a real crisis, there isn’t much to say about Faith that doesn’t give the game away (the forthcoming twist is fairly apparent from early on; I hesitate to make it any more so). So instead of commenting on the book directly I’ve decided to indulge myself in a short, but I hope informative, rant about its main institutional target, the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church began to self-destruct when it admitted it had made mistakes. This is the real consequence of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s, and not a bad thing. The Church finally confessed to the world that it had been wrong about a number of important matters. It was wrong about the character and culpability of Jews (from the Gospel of John through the Holocaust). It conceded that not everyone who wasn’t a Catholic was damned to hell (a matter of formal doctrine since the 13th century). And it finally succumbed to the recognition that its liturgical rigidity over centuries was nothing more than a sort of cultural prejudice.*

The effect of these admissions was dramatic. If these teachings, some with the force of doctrine, had been erroneous, others might also be - purely theological matters like transubstantiation and rather more practical considerations like prohibitions against birth control. The very core if its system of religion, its hierarchical guarantee of the truth had been fatally compromised. It had lied; its pretence to divine insights was a sham. And the only thing worse than its lies were its confession to lying. For this it could not be forgiven. People left the fold in large numbers.

Knowledge is one thing, ethics is another. Lack of knowledge makes one stupid; lack of ethical sense makes one evil. The one thing that the Church would not admit was that it had no right to claim exclusive moral guidance. Faith and morals were its horse and carriage and as far as it was concerned in its exclusive purview. And even if its intellectual credibility had been compromised, its moral authority remained intact. It still was, in its own view, the repository of ethical wisdom. This was ensured by the way in which the Church was governed, had always been governed - as a self-perpetuating organisation of male power.

According to formal doctrine, the Church is, uniquely among the organisations of the world, a societas perfecta; that is, a self-governing, self-correcting association which contains within itself everything necessary to promote the salvation of the world. Individual members, including clerics, may act badly from time to time, but the Church as a whole will ensure that such behaviour is identified and corrected. And the way it is organised - as a strict hierarchy of rank and authority - is essential to this critical moral function. Even its mistakes are in some way beneficial to mankind in that humane punishment for offenders can be demonstrated.

The scandal of paedophilia which has grown unchecked over the last sixty years is important because, among so many other reasons, it demonstrates the falseness and inherent evil of this idea of the societas perfecta and its moral capabilities. The facts of the widespread abuse of children throughout the world would never have been discovered by the Church alone. And having been discovered, these facts would never have led to the actions necessary to stop the abuse if the matter was left to clerical powers. And even these actions forced upon the Church by law have yet to be executed properly or accepted as uniform practice.

The Catholic Church, it turns out, is a corporate organisation like any other. Its stated aims become short-circuited by its members; bad behaviour is trivialised and rationalised; and scum tends to rise to the top. The Church’s arrogance in claiming a spiritual status which exempted it from the ways in which all human organisations pursue, rationalise, and hide bad behaviour is staggering. That Catholic exceptionalism is no longer a credible claim, means the Church has been doctrinally hollowed out. Its supposed ‘protection’ against error by the Holy Spirit is the central self-serving rationalisation that has now been definitively de-bunked.

The result is that the moral as well as the doctrinal core of the Church is now vacuous. The Catholic Church has become essentially tribal, a declining genetic legacy which has little more than sentimental value. Faith (in both what it professes and in it as an authentic professor), which has been its distinguishing characteristic, has shown itself an unsustainable raison d’être. Increasingly diverse ritual may persist, and with any luck the Church may turn to ethics rather than doctrine for its self-justification.

This is the recurring theme of Faith: “Believe what you want,” just stop inflicting pain on other people. In this the book makes an important philosophical as well as ethical point - and not, of course, merely for Catholics. Religion is good for this reason, or it’s worthless. All this nonesense about faith as a religious phenomenon is a ruse. Faith is a political act of affiliation, a statement of tribal membership. And ‘know them by their fruits’ is excellent political advice.

*Actually it had implicitly and much more quietly changed a range of official teaching from that on the participation of Christians in the military, the morality of slavery, the charging of interest on loans and the reprehensibility of democratic forms of government. The softening of the official attitude toward the Jews, however, provoked much more displeasure among the faithful than any of these.

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Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith 
by 

Jon Krakauer (Goodreads Author)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Mar 02, 2019  ·  edit

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bookshelves: american, epistemology-language, church 

The Spirit of America

Harold Bloom has called Mormonism the American Religion. Not only was it created in America, Mormonism also articulates the American Dream in both its history and its doctrine: the ultimate deification of its members united in a theocratic independence of civil authority. Mormonism, although a relatively small sect, represents the mainstream of American evangelical, perhaps national, consciousness. What Under the Banner of Heaven demonstrates, if nothing else, is just how strange and syncretistic that consciousness is. 

Mormon faith is something quite distinct from that of Pauline Christianity, for example. In the latter, faith refers to intellectual assent to certain unchanging doctrines. In Mormonism, faith means obedience to the authority of the church hierarchy, which may decide to change fundamental doctrines from time to time. In Christianity there is a tradition of opposing ecclesiastical authority with dogmatic tradition. Mormonism opposes doctrine through hierarchical authority.

Widespread doctrinal debate is not possible, therefore, within Mormonism. Mormon sectarian divisions are much like the personal loyalties of hyper-orthodox Jewish sects which are directed toward individual religious leaders, and only incidentally to the dogmatic stance of these leaders. Loyalty is not to the position but to the individual, literally the definition of a cult of personality.

As Bloom has noted, there is a decided gnostic strain in Mormonism. The world, notably but not solely other human beings outside the church are, when not actually evil, a threat to the Mormon faithful. This attitude is expressed in extreme form by the so-called Fundamentalist Mormon Church which doesn’t recognise the legitimacy of civil government at all and openly conducts a strategy of ‘draining the beast’ by exploiting local, state, and federal government to obtain welfare benefits for members. 

But even ‘moderate’ Mormons appear to tolerate democratic institutions as a necessary and temporary evil. In this, Mormonism echoes the sentiments of the first Puritan, Baptist, and Methodist settlers who traditionally accepted democratic government only so long as it conformed with their doctrinal interpretations. ‘One nation under God’ is meant literally.

Mormonism bases its legitimacy on the idea of continuing divine revelation. Where Christianity declares revelation ‘closed’ with the death of the Apostles, Mormons accept not only the writings of Joseph Smith to be divinely inspired, but also the possibility of direct revelation to any (male) member of the church. Inspiration is a part of being Mormon.

Spiritual insight is a virtue/skill/capacity for all those who are bona fide members of the Mormon priesthood, which includes all Mormon men. This patriarchal egalitarianism appears almost Roman in its presumption that the boundaries of the state end where the household begins. The state has no right to intrude upon family matters, even if these involve questions of statutory rape, child abuse or paedophilia. The paterfamilias is sovereign in his sphere.

This recognition of continuing revelation (and its literal interpretation) at the level of the household has caused problems since the earliest days of Mormon development. Joseph Smith’s revelations about polygamy, for example, were countered by revelations to his sons (and his wife) that suggested Smith was being self-serving, not to say lascivious. In a highly authoritarian structure like the Mormon Church, there is only one path for those who revelations are either not recognised or condemned as heretical - separation. 

Consequently Mormonism is even more fragmentary than Christianity. Not only are there a variety of formal sects, there are also an untold number of ‘independents’ who conduct their unique cults at effectively within their own households. One’s family gods in Shintoism naturally come to mind. Within the American legal system, such independents may claim religious affiliation and constitutional protection when convenient; and reject hierarchical supervision when not.

Factually, all religions have their extremist adherents. Although Mormonism arguably has structural and cultural characteristics (as well as a history) which are amenable to violent interpretation by its members, this is not what I think is most interesting about either the Church or Under the Banner of Heaven. Rather, it is Mormonism as an interpretation of being American that is more significant and more informative.

The ‘official’ interpretation of the American Dream involves several mythical principles. Devotion to democratic government operating independently of religious affiliation; an openness to opportunity for talent and effort regardless of social status; and political involvement based on principles of equality and an absence of coercion are some of the most basic of these principles. 

But this dream has never been approached in reality; nor has it it even considered as desirable by whatever one chooses to define as the ‘establishment’ of American culture and politics. The mainstream of this culture is represented rather well by Mormonism. Not only does the Church accurately capture a perennial and persistent part of the American character, it also embodies the functional American ideal.

This ideal incorporates several apparent contradictions. Political authoritarianism is combined with a traditional rejection of the mechanism of civil government necessary to carry out that authoritarianism. The result is a government that is tolerated as long as it affects only those who have not achieved the status of authority. This class has included the native population as well as a succession of immigrant groups, most recently aspiring immigrants from Islamic countries and Central America.

Similarly American politics is highly factional without being ideological. Whatever political doctrines prevail at the moment may be replaced seamlessly by there opposite when required - especially at the call of a charismatic leader. The potential elector therefore chooses his tribe, and adopts an attitude of loyalty to that tribe regardless of its policies. This provides a great degree of moral as well as intellectual flexibility which Americans perceive as freedom.

American freedom, like Mormon faith, also has a peculiar meaning. It is the freedom to conform. If conformance is not forthcoming, the alternative is to leave. Freedom, as a practical matter, does not include the freedom to disagree, debate, or dispute while remaining a part of the polity. This is not a new development in Mormonism but it is a more modern expression of the original European settlers (Recall that the Baptists emigrated to the Rhode Island Plantations because they had been banned from the Massachusetts Bay Colony).

The ideal of truth in America has always been a matter of politics. This is a natural implication of the right of every American to their own divine revelation (or biblical interpretation if they prefer that term). To put it crudely but accurately: Being right is a personal right. Expertise, intellectual skill, superior knowledge have no priority over the intuition, the hunch, and the prejudiced opinion. 

This congeries of peculiar ideals lead to another which is peculiar in a different way: idealised violence. Violence in America is not a consequence of frontier lawlessness or pioneering necessity; it is an essential part of the dream. The combination of faith as obedience, authoritarian rejection of authority, freedom as withheld commitment, self-serving claims of conscience, and truth as relative to doctrine create an implicit appeal to force as the ultimate virtue. This ideal goes some way in explaining not just the statistics of violent crime in America, but also its resistance to any reforms, like gun control, likely to improve them.

My suggestion, therefore, is that Under the Banner of Heaven is not as probative about the nature of the Mormon Church as it is about American culture, particularly political culture. In this light, the book is far more informative than as a typical salacious exposé of cultic error or abuse. As is also the title itself.

Ghosts by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cosmic Intersections

The world isn’t what goes around inside our heads, but what our heads go around inside. Context is contents. And I don’t mean air, sights, and smells as context. I mean other heads. It is these other heads that supply us with language, opinion, and prejudice, lots of prejudice, which are the elements of the world we inhabit. These other heads are even embedded in the things that surround us - like in a simple cup of tea: “Lives, other lives! a myriad of them, distilled into this thimbleful of perfumed pleasure.”

Trying to clarify what goes on inside our heads by isolating ourselves - on a small, sparsely populated Irish island for example - is, therefore, not an inherently irrational therapeutic idea - in principle. We then only have to cope mostly with memories (supplied of course by others), and dreams of other heads in other places. But what happens when more new heads, or even an old one, start invading? And what happens to the invaders’ heads? “Here is the moment where worlds collide... Worlds within worlds. They bleed into each other.” Hanging around crazy people will make you crazy.

But here’s the thing: it’s not possible to sort our own head without another one to help, who nonetheless is unwelcome because annoying, and possibly crazy. We need another head to be inserted into our own to remember our crimes; or more generally to interrupt our thinking lest we enter an endless loop of memories, dreams, and regrets. When these helpful others are absent or when they die, it’s not enough to live on mere memories. These heads become ghosts - part of ourselves, yet also independent. “I am certain there is no other form of afterlife for them than this, that they should live in us, and through us. It is our duty.”

Ghosts have a clear function. The law calls this function restitution; psychiatric medicine calls it integration; art crticism, verification. They amount to the sane thing: sorting the contents of one’s head, that is to say the context of one’s head. Never an easy job; rarely a faultless one. But when they do their job, ghosts have a dramatic effect. They make it clear “that something had happened, that something had shifted, that things would never be again as they had been before.” This is about as close to solving the various mysteries Banville presents as one is likely to achieve.

And, as usual, Banville also presents the reader with his unique taste in vocabulary. Borborygmic, oneiric, brumous, mephitic, eructations, benison, plumbeous, tombal, balneation are new to me. But these are mysteries which are easier to resolve.

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