The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neither Positive Nor Equivocal: The Malignant Uselessness of Being

Fear is an instinctual response to threat common to all animals. Horror, the self-generation of fear without threat, is unique to human beings. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is an extended meditation on this remarkable fact. And its conclusions are even more remarkable: that the faculty we call consciousness, and consider as the apotheosis of evolutionary genetics, is profoundly destructive, not because we possess it but because we attempt to temper it through delusion. (While at least half of Ligotti’s book is written tongue-in-cheek, it isn’t obvious which half that is. Therefore, in my remarks here I have chosen to ignore his irony entirely).

Ligotti is perfectly clear: “Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.” The conspiracy is one of humanity against itself. We limit our consciousness in order to survive in a world of unbearable suffering, both ours and other creatures. Consciousness exposes each of us to a “too clear vision of what we do not wish to see” and therefore must be hampered and downplayed lest it threaten our own survival through the horror it reveals.

That we are a threat to ourselves is factually incontrovertible. That we pose this threat because we are potentially aware of the overwhelming reality of existence, is the surprising but plausible significance in the Genesis tale of eating from the tree of knowledge. Through that metaphorical act, we became “a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead.” We must deny what we are in order to be what we are.

Ligotti’s book is therefore a useful counterpoint to the likes of Yuval Harari’s rather more optimistic Sapiens (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Harari credits the genetic mutation that promoted representational language, essentially gossip, as the climactic breakthrough of our species. Presuming the close evolutionary connection between representational language and consciousness, Ligotti turns this triumph into a disaster. For him, “we live in a habitat of unrealities,” called stories. We are an evolutionary mistake which we have been trying as a species to overcome by minimising its influence both personally and socially through story-telling - literature as neurotic malady rather than therapy.

Ligotti‘s argument is neither tendentious or brash. He knows that the condition he is describing prevents acceptance of his entire line of thought. We want desperately to repress our knowledge of reality. But despite his originality in expression and his self-confessed minority view, his ideas have a long and intellectually sound pedigree. Ligotti has demythologised and established on a purely rational footing the ancient philosophical tendency of Gnosticism. His claim is not that Gnosticism is a superior view of the world, merely that it is respectable. And that its current lack of intellectual respectability is a consequence of the potentially disruptive power of the Gnostic position.

Gnosticism has always been the recurrent heresy of the intellectual in the Western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is a heresy because it denies the essential goodness of creation upon which each of these traditions insist. But it denies this with good reasons that are supplied by the traditions themselves, primarily the acknowledged existence of evil in the world, both natural and that of human corruption. Where can such evil originate? And why is it not eliminated by the all-powerful force which created the world in which it exists?

The Gnostic answer to these awkward questions is that in fact the force which created our world is itself evil. There may be some higher divinity but our souls have been separated from this entity and enslaved in material bodies created by a Demi-God for precisely this purpose. Our real duty as human beings is to escape this materiality in order to be re-united with, re-integrated into, that higher divinity. Of course another way of stating this is that our real fate is to lose our own consciousness by being absorbed in the cosmic consciousness of the divine.

Gnostic influence has always been strong in the Western religions. The battle of the angels led by Lucifer and Michael, Satan taunting God in the book of Job, the competition in Egypt between Aaron and the Pharaoh’s magicians are examples of the assimilation of Gnostic ideas in biblical traditions common to all three Religions of the Book. From time to time Gnosticism has posed a real threat to established doctrinal order - from the Manicheans of Jewish and Christian antiquity, to the Bogomils and Cathars of the Middle Ages, to the Calvinists and Jansenists of the 16th and 17th centuries, to the Shakers of the industrial era, and to the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Camus among others in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Gnostic influence, its fabricated stories, has been persistent and insistent in its expression.

Ligotti‘s innovation is to establish Gnosticism as more than religious poetry or esoteric philosophy. Like Harari, he speculates not about the divine origin or metaphysics but the genetic evolution of the human species. By radicalising it, he turns Gnosticism on its head. Consciousness is not a quality of the divine that points to our origin and to our real home in some spiritual haven. It is the work of the satanic Demi-God within creation itself not above it, which dooms us to an overwhelming awareness of our inevitable fate and the pain to be endured along the way. There is nowhere to run, no safe haven. This bleak fate is in our genes not our souls. And we are aware of this in our saner, that is to say, more pessimistic, moments.

Neither Ligotti nor Harari can provide a good evolutionary reason for the emergence of language and consciousness. In fact even Harari considers that the development of his Cognitive Revolution was likely to have been initially unhelpful to the species. Indeed like all evolutionary changes, it must have been a mere blunder, a shot in the genetic dark. But what Harari thinks of as a fortunate accident in the long term, Ligotti sees as an eventual evolutionary dead end in the even longer term.

Neither view, of course, can be proven. This is Ligotti’s point. What he is really demonstrating is that the presumption, both culturally and scientifically, of anthropic evolutionary dominance is itself mythical. It is a conceit that is employed in various ways to justify exploitation of things and other people. It is also intellectually a means to justify power, the need for coercion, even evil, all in the name of the good. This is the ethical importance of Ligotti’s case, a case that is “neither positive nor equivocal” about how bad things really are.

Postscript: Ligotti was inspired largely by this man: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript 8May19: And in terms of how bad things really are: Nature crisis: Humans 'threaten 1m species with extinction' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-en...

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The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found 
by 

Don J. Snyder

 

Baby Boomer Bust

This is a religious tale, a tale of white, privileged, presumptuous, self-serving religion. That it doesn’t appear overtly religious is a consequence only of its vocabulary; it wants us to believe. The religion it represents is one of a certain kind of middle class order in the universe, a force which ensures that the righteous - that is, those who worship and serve this force - will be vindicated. This is the religion of the Boomer Generation, those who rode the wave from working class to professional status in the latter half of the 20th century. Like most religions, this one often eats its adherents.

The biblical book of Job is Snyder’s template. Success is achieved, lost, and recovered. And like the book of Job, someone (probably at an editor’s insistence) messed it about by adding a prologue and an epilogue that ensure its devotion to cosmic orderliness despite the intermediate humiliation and suffering. The world is just and beneficent; we simply have to await it’s working out. Blessed be the name of the force.

Snyder’s fast track academic career is cut short by what he portrays as bureaucratic incompetence. His prayers to the force go unanswered. He rages; he demands justice; finally he seeks the inner wisdom, the hidden logic of his situation. One door closes, another opens, you make your own luck, when the going gets tough... etc. What he has lost in professional prospects, he more than gains in familial intimacy. Order has been restored. 

Here’s the truth of the matter: there is no assured connection between competence and achievement, between integrity and reputation, between virtue and happiness. This is so as a matter of principle and is not dependent on the structures of organisation, sociology, psychology, or spirituality we might establish. It matters not whether one is engaged in the pursuit of corporate advancement, entrepreneurial innovation, or merely a quiet life. Life does not conform to the promises of the religion of orderliness.

Disorderliness, chaos, entropy, the unforeseen always get us. This is empirically observable. Yet according to the religion of orderliness, these are manifestly evil. They are also universally apparent. So, paradoxically, the religious beliefs we hold most dear are precisely those which prove the irrationality of those very beliefs. The presumption that the world is benign and wants to be understood, even in our very small part of it, is a conceit which disappoints everyone from the most eminent scientist to the newest infant.

Snyder’s religion is based on the anthropic principle, that is, that we have evolved to understand the cosmos, essentially that it is our rightful home and that we can expect certain privileges as a consequence. Entitled to a secure job; entitled to have children, as many as we want; entitled to respect for our superior intellect or wealth or unremitting drive; entitled to feel sympathetic solidarity with those who have failed to benefit from advanced education and a continuously expanding economy.

As I said: white, privileged, self-righteous. Also deluded. It is the realisation of the delusion of entitlement not the reality of life itself that causes anger, resentment, and the various neuroses of modern society. One of those neuroses is sentimentality. Sentimentality, too, is an entitlement. When the rest of life goes down the tubes, I’ve still got my family, or my self-respect, or my memories, or some image of an idealised past. Nope. That may be the cruellest part of the delusion, that relationships, including the relationship with oneself and one’s history, are inviolable. 

In any case, even if you win, you lose. There are an infinite number of cares, duties, goals, and responsibilities that one could have attended to but didn’t. So regret is inevitable. Human life involves zero-sum economics - doing more of X means doing less of Y. But the Boomer faith is in the free lunch. Everything is possible. The force will provide; it is on our side. Like Job, we just have to rail at it enough until fortune is restored.

But as I mentioned at the outset, the epilogue of the book of Job is probably fraudulent, added by some editor concerned with establishing the fairy-tale nature of divine concern. Literature, too, is part of Boomer religion. For some, it is the religion’s central tenet. It gives comfort and hope and, most important, reasons for why things are as they are. But literature, including the biblical, is just another name for the delusional redemptive force. 

Snyder thinks he’s found another name for the force - hard physical work, work with hammers and nails and saws. Manly work. One of my younger brothers tried that religion. High steel and wilderness house-building. It worked really well for him. But physical work has physical cost. He died on site of a heart attack aged 43. No free lunch.

Postscript: For more on the peculiar psychology of Boomers, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

 

We Need to Talk About Kevin 
by 

Lionel Shriver (Goodreads Author)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Apr 27, 2019  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: american 

Parenting Tips: Don’t

I have no doubt that fertility rates among women who have read this book have dropped significantly from the average. It is a Proustian-like meditation on the overwhelming irrationality of having children in the modern world. The upside potential of children is marginal in a post-industrial society; and the downside is... well too tragic to think about.

The risks only start with possible physical abnormality. Personality is far more of an issue. And ultimately one has to consider the amount of pain being introduced into the world, not just for oneself and the child in question, but also for all those who might be harmed overtly or not, intentionally or not, by this new life form.

A serious consideration of these risks is what leads to the philosophy of Gnosticism. In fact Gnosticism is the thinking person’s heresy. The world is, empirically speaking, evil. We are thrown into it involuntarily and the only thing we’re entitled to expect from it is frustration, disappointment, and pain. Sex and the cultural lures of parental virtue are the fountainhead of this evil.

Escape from the snares of connubial attraction is rare but possible. The Manicheans, the Bogomils, the Cathars, and the Shakers all had proprietary techniques for surviving until they could be rescued from a world that was obviously created by a cruel demigod. But all these groups shared the view that sex and its consequences were to be avoided at all costs. Christianity picked up more that a taint of Gnosticism in its formative years. It is this and not biblical literalism that is the source of so much religious aversion to sex.

Shriver’s novel is a sort of modern Gnostic cautionary tale. It is uncomfortable to read mainly because it is so irrefutable. Children, and therefore the decisions which allow them to be produced, are an unwarranted imposition on the world. At least as many homicidal maniacs as self-sacrificing heroes will be produced; and in any case both will suffer in their own way. Just as many children will despise and reject as will love and respect their parents; and among the latter group will be those like the offspring of Fred West and other sociopaths whose love itself is sociopathic.

The reasons people engage in sex are fairly obvious, even if only vaguely understood. But, despite religious objection, sex today is in principle independent of procreation. The reasons people have children are generally trivial when not downright nonsensical - to have a ‘real’ family, to satisfy the ‘needs’ of the other, to be able to shape another human being, to expand the possibilities for love, and dozens of other sentimental shibboleths which Shriver does an excellent job of cataloguing. None of these reaches the level of meaningful thought. Nor do they recognise the essential crap-shoot character of bearing and rearing a child.

We Have to Talk About Kevin is a horror story worthy of Thomas Ligotti. Within it, otherwise normal people become enmeshed in a sort of conspiracy of which they had no prior knowledge. This conspiracy at best involves an open-ended commitment to continuous worry, financial stress, and the occasional emotional devastation. At worst, it orchestrates psychosis, social ostracism, and personal annihilation. But however you look at it, children are a nightmare.

 

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An Auction of Prestige

Harold Bloom in his 1975 book A Map of Misreading recast literary history as a record of the struggle between the “son” and his literary “father” (it has frequently been pointed out that Bloom is more than a bit sexist in his expression). Through a Kabbalah-like misinterpretation of one’s literary forebears, Bloom believed, a writer both builds on and destroys the work he admires most. This provokes a sort of anxiety in the writer, a struggle of wit and language with one’s mentors which results in both creative new work, and a re-creation of the old.

Ishiguro’s book is an example of the process, extended to fine art and from the perspective of the mentor being misinterpreted. The fact that the book is set in the very restricted cultural location and time of Japan in the immediate post-war years seems, paradoxically, to generalise Bloom’s idea - not just to painting but also to the broader culture in which artistic effort is embedded.

Masuji Ono is an artist of his time, a man of tradition and set ways, a man of polite formalities, and devoted to the importance of history; but also to hard drinking and male loyalties. He has a patriarchal view of society which, although more liberal than his parents’, nonetheless borders on the misogynistic. Like almost all Japanese of the period, he was a nationalist who responded to the war and its aims enthusiastically.

The physical losses resulting from the war are of course traumatic. Masuji’s son and wife have been killed; his house damaged and his neighbourhood destroyed. But the spiritual trauma proves just as distressing. From being a pillar of the artistic community, he is now not simply old but old hat. Western mores are undermining traditions and family relationships as well as artistic fashions. His pre-war loyalties are now suspect.

The central event of the story, as in Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain, is the betrothal of his daughter. Marriage is still a highly formalised and ‘negotiated’ affair. Yet these negotiations take place in a world that has changed radically and it is unclear if either his parental skills or his art are adequate to their respective tasks. In Black Rain the issue is the physical purity of a woman after exposure to radiation from an atomic blast. In Ishiguro’s narrative the issue is also one of purity, but of a much more subtle familial purity involving Masuji’s war-time activities. In both cases the opinions of others must be investigated minutely in order to reach a settlement.

According to Bloom, in a very Freudian manner the artistic son, by working through his own anxiety, gives birth to his father, or more accurately a re-birth in a new cultural oeuvre. This involves the son overcoming both the history of respect and the resentment (they go together) for the father. But for Ishiguro this process also demands an awareness by the father of his past dominance and faults inflicted upon the son and a recognition of a need for forgiveness. For Ishiguro, the son and father give birth to one another simultaneously through a sort of inverted auction of prestige - only by subverting one's reputation and personal pride to those of the other is creative reconciliation possible.

This dynamic applies as much to generations as to individuals. As a by-product, it removes art entirely from the domain of economics, that is, of self-interest. Ishiguro suggests that this process of inter-generational reconciliation is what makes true art. It is a process that unites not just artists but an entire culture, creating not just solidarity but also an openness to the new and foreign. This is the way in which art transcends the eponymous floating world of transient appearance, fashion, and reputation.

I have no idea whether Ishiguro is familiar with Bloom’s theory of literary development. But, if so, he certainly has re-invented that theory by appropriately misreading it in this captivating book.

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Mr Salary by Sally Rooney
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Electra’s Hidden Talent

I suppose I’m the wrong generation, with the wrong aesthetic, and an inadequate ability to adapt to what is now hip (note my archaic expression). Whatever others see in Ms Rooney’s Style and intent eludes me entirely. Is this sordid tale of an intense Electra Complex typical of her oeuvre? If so, I intend to avoid any more of her work in the interests of self-preservation. It actually put me off reading for several days. And that hasn’t happened for decades.

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Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Betrayer Betrayed

Death has a particular form of cruelty for the living - the impossibility of explaining one’s mistakes to the dead, and, therefore, of continuing to enrol them in the convenient fictions of one’s life. If death is also the moment when all mutual resentments are finally revealed, a point of total truth and and expression of all the secret fantasies never spoken about, it becomes a nightmare for the living. Jewish ethical wisdom summarises the situation neatly: it is the victim who needs to forgive transgression; but the dead have no capacity.

Betrayal can be a subtle art. It is most subtle, and most rationalised, when it occurs incrementally as a series of seemingly innocuous steps none of which can be called treacherous, but which taken collectively are decisive. The sin becomes all the more severe when the sequence of steps is in fact predicted by a draft fiction, written long before events, in which real intention is unwittingly stated. Found and edited by one’s spouse just before her death, her commentary makes that intention obvious. But, of course, this is not obvious to the perpetrator who can’t see his own crime - until, that is, he can no longer offer an explanation to the one he has betrayed.

The finality of death is most terrible because one can not convince the dead of anything. The fact that an explanation may be necessary is a potential source of embarrassment, rage and despair in the living. There is neither forgiveness nor forgetting. The threat is that one’s entire life has been a disastrously hidden lie which has been decisively and unanswerably exposed. An interpretation has been made. And the judgment is final. There is no appeal, no chance to ask for clemency, no mitigating circumstances are admitted. The brute facts have spoken.

Leaving draft fiction about for one’s wife to find is the pre-internet equivalent of publicly cataloguing one’s web site visits. Spiritually, we are our first drafts, or our web logs. It’s no use objecting that either are accidents, much less research. These things demonstrate intention, intention of which we may be only unconsciously aware. Consequent action is only incidental and dependent mainly on opportunity not virtue. Someone once said ‘if you want to know who you really are, look at your chequebook.’ This is no longer true since many of us no longer need them. But the sentiment is correct. It’s the hidden records of our existence that show who we are.

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Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Revolutionary Conformity

The Bob Dylan song ‘You’re Gonna Have to Serve Somebody’ comes to mind when reading this deceptively simple story. In fact, like Dylan’s lyrics, it is a highly sophisticated commentary on the need for human beings to belong to a social group, to have a role, and what happens - good and bad - when they do.

Miss Furukura is acutely aware of the details of human behaviour and speech but she has no emotional reaction to what she experiences. She must learn to fit in by copying from those around her, which she does expertly. She is concerned about her lack of emotional reaction but only because others seem to find it strange. Actually she simply does not make judgments unless necessary. She sometimes does inappropriate or extreme things in unfamiliar situations; but she is also punctilious on following corrections. Mostly she wants to be left alone to follow what she perceives as a happy and rewarding life as a single woman making her way as a shop assistant with no ambition and no serious worries. Except one - Miss Furukura finds the world frightening because it might deprive her of her way of living.

Shiraha is an alienated thirty-something, left behind in the credentials-race. He perceives the world as a jungle in which only the aggressive hunters survive. He is a prototypical Incel - an involuntary virgin who resents women because they prefer aggressive males. He also hates the society which considers him less than normal for not fulfilling his manly role. Shiraha is the inverse personality to Furukura. He is touchy and sensitive and judgmental of everything. But he makes no effort to conform or even to be civilly pleasant. He too wants to be left alone, to hide from the society which He wants to escape; she wants to avoid being ejected.

Remarkably, they each find an apparent solution to normality in the other. By allowing friends, family and co-workers to believe that there is a relationship between them, they suddenly appear to have the same social aspirations and mores as everyone else in Japanese society. They become normal. But instantly normality doesn’t become them. She quits her job; he gets serious about career and bread-winning. He also starts to exhibit Japanese machismo. The relationship between Miss Furukura and Shiraha, meant to be a ruse of convenience, entirely destroys their routine adaptations to the world. They have been absorbed.

The world accepts the couple because it believes that the couple has the same ambitions and problems as they do - children, money, advancement. And, if only briefly, the couple accepts the world in light of this acceptance. Until, that is, Miss Furukura understands that, however she got there, she is what she is - a convenience store woman, and proud of it. Sayonara Shiraha as well as the fears of her past and worries for her future. Maturity has arrived with a bang when you find it’s a necessity to choose well:

You may be rich or poor
You may be blind or lame
Maybe livin' in another Country
Under another name
But you're gonna have to serve somebody

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A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Revenge of the Deplorables

We have learned recently that the union of the illiterate and the evangelical is a powerful political coalition. As Rendell notes “illiteracy is a kind of blindness.” And evangelicalism is a form of egomania, a public selfishness that “is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” The mashup of the two is a perennial phenomenon, but nevertheless it is surprising when it occurs... and somewhat dangerous. The ignorant leading the self-righteous. Could Rendell have been channeling Trump as early as 2000?

A Judgment in Stone has one of the most arresting first lines in English fiction, rivalling even Dickens: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” Of course Eunice’s illiteracy is a consequence of a complex set of circumstances; just as the Cloverdales’ upper middle class lives are more or less determined by theirs. Yet everyone gets on. Neither Eunice nor the family she murdered could therefore be said to be in control, or driven by compulsion. The designation of ‘victim’ depends on how far into history one wishes to go.

But the catalyst, the source of the flame that lights the fuse of homicide is a different story. Joan Smith is a religious fanatic by choice not circumstances. “She suffered from a particular form of paranoia. She projected her feelings on to the Lord.” She is thus justified by her privileged access to the divine will, which of course happens to coincide with her own on every occasion. She is the disenfranchised wannabe, the self-identified victim whom the world hates. She prefers to attribute that hate to her beliefs and so can claim righteous motivations for every action.

The sub-text is important. The Cloverdales are defenseless because they have no experience of Eunice’s world or Joan’s depravity. They lack the imagination to understand what the coalition of the two is capable of doing. Respectability is a vulnerable mode of life. It limits one’s imagination. As usual in all her work, Rendell’s literary mission here is to ensure that middle class smugness has just a touch of insecurity added for piquancy.

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The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional by John D. Caputo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Divine ‘Perhaps’

I first read this book when it was published in 2015. It was important to me then because it formulated a stance on theology - what Caputo calls theopoetics - which I had been struggling with for some years. Inspired by his earlier works on the weakness of God, I had sought a way to understand theology as literature, and literature as what theology was trying to emulate as an ideal.

Upon re-reading the Folly of God, I find that in some ways I have left the book behind. Caputo has penetrated my thinking so thoroughly that it seems he is reminding me of the obvious. This is a reflection of his simple, direct, and witty style. On the other hand, there is much in this short book that I had missed completely or simply forgotten about. The density of Caputo’s ideas is often masked by the clarity of his prose. I now find many of these hiding in plain sight.

I suppose that many who enter into Caputo’s oeuvre may have a similar experience. He is easy to understand but not so easy to comprehend. I doubt anyone is adequately prepared to ‘get’ him completely until he or she has been prepared by his work itself. This is not so much a matter of logic as it is experience in thinking through the import of what he has to say. In other words, Caputo’s real effect is to change one’s values, that is, what one takes notice of in the world.

This ‘transvaluation’ can be an emotional as well as an intellectual trauma. I’ve noticed my own response to be a sort of PTSD which takes time to settle down. This was especially acute while I was still in an academic environment in which more ‘traditional’ theological concepts reigned. Since my retirement, the tensions I felt in being unable to discuss Caputo’s concept of divine weakness and its implications have miraculously dissipated, proving if nothing else that sometimes it’s advantageous not to have anyone to talk to.

Central to Caputo’s theology is the idea of the ‘unconditional.’ This is not an idea that is meant to triumph over other ideas, or to solve problems in existing theological narratives. As Caputo says, “The unconditional is not a winning strategy and theology is not about winning.” In a sense, therefore, Caputo is delightfully anti-evangelical, not out to convert or to convince, or to score doctrinal points but to help people like me figure out the meaning of the unconditional in our own circumstances.

Caputo makes a claim which has historical connotations: “... the best interests of theology are to be found deep down in the depths of our experience.” This claim can easily be mistaken for a call to return to a Romanticism of the early 19th century, to a God of emotion, feeling and subjectivity. It is however a simple reversal of a metaphor - God is not to be found in the heights but in the depths. And the experience he’s talking about is not individual but collective. The more of us whose experience is recognised, the deeper we go.

Evangelicals, indeed most believers, attempt to make God into an object and then to argue the existence of that object. This is patent blasphemy, an attempt to control the meaning of God for the purpose of exercising power over others. “A Supreme Being causes supreme problems” is how Caputo summarises theology of the Heights.

Not the least of these problems is political, namely that we are lead to believe that power has a source outside of humanity and that this power is distributed in a sort of cascade down through governments, and organisations, and families (historically mostly male) to the lowliest of the low. Indeed, this has been the standard line throughout the history of political theology, long before the politics of theology was seen for what it was - a method of justifying the powers that be.

Echoing the German-American theologian Paul Tillich, Caputo points out that atheism is “the best religious and theological response to such an idea of God.” Tillich, in turn, had been brought up in the Lutheran tradition of the so-called ‘theology of the cross,’ a tradition that emphasizes the self-debasement of God, not in order to conquer but to submit to the needs of others. Caputo, therefore, although radical, is radically Christian in his respect for atheism. I imagine that he accepted everything Christopher Hitchens ever said about the absurdity of most religious claims.

“Theology begins with atheism,” but it doesn’t end there for Caputo. The point is that it is a waste of time arguing for or against anything called a Supreme Being. He quotes a great European mystic, Meister Eckhart, to demonstrate the significance of a theologically sensitive atheism. Eckhart claims in his memoirs that he “prays to God to rid him of God, to make him free of God.” This is precisely the point of what is called ‘negative theology’, the elimination of constructions, almost always self-serving, of what we want God to be. The atheistic presumption is a quick intellectual root to the same starting point.

For Caputo, as for Tillich, God is the Unconditional. That is, God is not an identifiable entity; God is no-thing. God is not great. God is not a cause, much less the First Cause. God is, however, that which allows us to say ‘there is a God,’ whether such a statement is true or not, or has meaning or not:

“God is not a highest being but the very being of beings, or the ground of beings, the light of beings, the deep, boundless, ceaseless, illimitable, unrestricted resource of anything and everything, of every word or distinction between words that we utter. That means that everything we say about God is ‘symbolic.’”

At this point, I think that I go further than Caputo and Tillich are willing to go. I see no difference between the citation above and a statement that God is language itself, or perhaps more precisely that God is all of the potential literature which can be produced through language. Language, in other words, is the Unconditional, that which is without limits.

Not that there is any lack of things which are temporarily beyond (or below) our ability to express in language at any moment. We have no language, for example, with which to express coherently the instantaneous action at an infinite distance of quantum mechanics; or the phenomena of black holes. But we shall. At which point other ‘beyonds’ will have surfaced (probably by penetrating more deeply into the physics of what is near at hand).

So language itself has no limits. We couldn’t even express the Unconditional without it. Language, of course, doesn’t exist as a perfect Platonic entity in some metaphysical heaven. It is always ‘embodied’, primarily in that cultural artifact called literature. But the existence of that literature as an artifact, does not mean it is controllable or can be conditioned by the artificers.

Literature has its own life which is affected by us and which affects us. It surrounds us. It puts itself at our abuse as well as use. We seek its wisdom, counsel, and assistance. Some of us devote our lives to its proliferation. All of us carry parts of it deep within us which inspire and constrain what we do and what we want. It does this meekly and without any overt or directed intention of its own. In short, it serves, as a gift of grace.

And yet existing literature, God with us as it were, is not the entirety of the Unconditional. There is a deus absconditus, a hidden God, who waits and calls from an unknown we call the future. That literature of the future has no form whatsoever, even abstractly. It, unlike quantum mechanics and black holes, is permanently beyond our comprehension or ability to describe. We might be able to anticipate technological developments but we are blind to the directions language and its literature will take.

This, for me, is theopoetics. I don’t want to claim that theopoetics is God, that would be obviously self-contradictory. But I do want to suggest that theopoetics is what has traditionally been called the Word of God, God revealing himself to human beings. The distinctive feature of that Word is its authentic inclusivity. In fact inclusivity is the definition of authenticity, not some claim to antiquity or revelatory authority. This is a Word that is always tentative, always changing, but always pointing to the ‘divine perhaps.’

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Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Responsible to a Higher Power

The train driver, the shelf-stacker in the supermarket, the telephone engineer working on the overhead cables. These people are not just anonymous, they are also effectively invisible. We all are aware, at least vaguely, that there are any number of people who mediate our world continuously but go largely unnoticed. In fact the better they do their work, the less notice we take of their existence.

Among these invisibles are the copy editors of commercial publishing. They sit between writers and readers, largely unknown, unrecognised, even derided as obsessive fanatics who interfere with authorial art. Mary Norris is one of these. She has been one of these for most of her adult life. And she has written about it, undoubtedly in the same correct prose she has insisted upon throughout her career.

The title she has chosen is suggestive - ‘Confessions’. There is no irony here; I doubt there is much irony anywhere among copy editors. This is not an exposé of the inner workings of the publishing business; it is an old-fashioned apologia, an explanation of one’s life, directed, like the similarly named book by St. Augustine, to oneself as much as to the world at large. It is a sort of empirically derived theory of a modest, ordinary, unremarkable life, a description of what it’s like to be floating unnoticed in a sea of fame, notoriety and reputation.

The dramas in this invisible world are real but slight, often trivial by external standards - the appropriateness of restrictive or unrestrictive clauses, the irritation of a dangling participle, the use of gender specific pronouns. These are hardly issues to rival the negotiations of international trade agreements or a corporate takeover. Copy editors rarely even meet the famous authors whose work they improve.

Nonetheless, there is something distinctively important in Norris’s memoir of a life devoted to correctness. Grammar and spelling and usage are not merely the equivalent of literary etiquette, how we show respect to each other through small formalities. Language is the core of our everyday existence; yet it is as invisible to most of us as the other things and people who mediate that existence.

Norris’s is a life devoted to that central invisible fact of language. Her concern is its preservation, protection, and its beauty as an object created by human effort but beyond human control. This makes her a ‘nerd’ but in a manner entirely different from that of a computer programmer for whom the ‘language’ they employ is essentially fixed and dead. In contrast, the ‘client’ in Norris’s profession is not the author, nor her employer, nor even the reader; it is language itself, which is alive and has its own agenda.

So Norris is not simply an example of another invisible professional. In a way that is different from the train driver, or the shelf-stacker, or the telephone linesman (or for that matter, the bank president or the national politician), Norris’s professional life is one of true vocation to something that is as close to the divine as human beings are ever likely to get.

Such a life is not to be judged by wealth, advancement or reputation but by the service rendered to an ideal which is vague even to the one who holds it. It is her devotion to an ideal of language which is both expressive and precise that I find remarkable in this short book. It is an ideal which she knows can only be approached but never reached. Language is her higher power, always just beyond her grasp but always calling for, and getting, her attention.

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Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Theology of the Imagination

Bartleby & Co. is a survey of the negative literature of the last two centuries - what hasn’t been written and why - with interludes of fiction. It is fascinating, informative and wonderfully inspiring. The book promotes the adoption of silence as the preferred aesthetic response in a whole range of circumstances; but also encourages positive expression because “Only from the negative impulse, from the labyrinth of the No, can the writing of the future appear.” What Vila-Matas has created, in his own estimation, is less than a book, but obviously more than silence. He calls it “footnotes commenting on a text that is invisible,” that is to say, the book he didn’t write.

“The literature of the No,” as Vila-Matas calls this genre he invented by giving it a name, is typified by Herman Melville’s story of Bartleby the Scrivener, the writer who never writes, in fact he never leaves his business office, “not even on Sunday.” Bartleby is Everyman, or at least that 99% of the human population who don’t write and don’t regret not writing. But it also includes a large proportion of writers who indefinitely defer, temporarily abandon, or abort their writing entirely. It is all these for whom “Their soul emerges through their pores. What soul? God.” They are, in short, untold stories, but nonetheless stories and these stories are in some sense divine.

So Vila-Matas has an underlying theme of a popular theology, popular not in the sense of simplistic or even simplified but in the sense that it concerns everyone not just God-professionals like theologians, clerics and religious enthusiasts. In a very particular way these non-writers, failed writers and former writers are God-like: “It is well known that God keeps quiet, is a master of silence, ... is a consummate writer of the No.” Vila-Matas quotes approvingly from an invented philosopher: “I could not agree more with Marius Ambrosinus, who said, “In my opinion, God is an exceptional person.” And every writer of the No is exceptional.

What is most exceptional about God, of course, is his hiddenness, his transcendence, his inaccessibility to human thought. He is the Other masked in his own subjectivity. God is literally no-thing. He is alien, a void, just like another human being into which we pour meaning out of our own subjectivity. And this nothing exercises enormous power within the human mind through “the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness.” The serious consideration of this condition is something ancient called negative theology, the study of what God is not.

The origins of negative theology are Greek. The philosophical incomprehensibility of the Divine was imported into Christianity and, at least in the Eastern Orthodox Church, acted as a sort of brake on the doctrinal ambitions of the ecclesiastical establishment (one reason for the relative emphasis on liturgy in the Eastern Church). But the Western Church, with its doctrinal focus (and consequent dependence) on language, had a real problem squaring the Christian claims of revelatory access to divine secrets with the simultaneous recognition of the ineffability of God.

It was the 13th century Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, who devised a solution. His theory was that revelation of the transcendent was facilitated by analogy, what he called the analogia entis, or analogy of being. God, Thomas said, was not a being like created things. God’s nature of being was entirely different, completely alien to that of human existence; but, he claims, it is possible to make analogies between the two kinds of being. So ‘God is love’, ‘God is Trinitarian’, etc. are not definitions, nor even metaphors, they are purported inferences or translations from one mode of being to another.

The analogia entis, however, is obvious theological double-speak. If the being of God is beyond human understanding, human language is fundamentally inadequate as a foundation for the transfer of meaning from one kind of being to another. Language is just as transcendent, just as ineffable, just as incomprehensible in its being as God is in his. The 20th century theologian, Karl Barth, spent most of his professional life trashing the analogia entis as an invention of the Catholic Church, the purpose of which was to avoid what he believed were the authentic implications of Christian faith. By presuming that language was within human control, the analogia entis avoided confronting the very close analogy between language and God.

Vila-Matas presents an entirely new (that is to say ancient) version of negative theology in his book, and a very serviceable theory of how it complements revelation (or in more modern terms: imagination). Implicitly he bases this theory on what might be called the analogia novae rei, the analogy of new things, or perhaps more simply, the analogy of creativity. And quite appropriately he presents this theory as literary rather than theological. Nonetheless, it is patently both, which is its most exciting aspect: “Literature, as much as we delight in denying it, allows us to recall from oblivion all that which the contemporary eye, more immoral every day, endeavours to pass over with absolute indifference.”

The analogy of creativity translates between writing and reading. Writing is expressive, persuasive, and active; it is art. But silence, hiddeness, reticence, inaction are also creative. To put it another way, reading is the negative or apophatic twin of writing. They are equally creative positions in the world. Reading and writing are not, however, complementary activities; they are in fact antithetical ways of considering that which is transcendent and beyond our control and comprehension, namely language.

Reading is not merely not-writing; it is an attack on writing. Whatever meaning or intention went into writing is subverted by the reader through an interpretation over which the writer has no control. The only thing that reading and writing have in common is language. Not the language of a particular writer’s text but the infinite potential of language in general. The non-writer is the arbiter of the written word. The reader is a constraint not a person, or better “a tendency that asks the question, ‘What is writing and where is it?’”

Reading, like its counterpart of mysticism in religion, shows “the vanity of all initiative, the vanity of life itself.” Reading shows writing to be a transient thing, something of arbitrary and passing fashion. It creates for the writer “an aesthetics of bewilderment” by demonstrating “the antiquity of the new.” Just as even negative theology says something positive about God - namely his incomprehensibility - so reading makes the meaning of any text infinitely variable and thus impossible to pin down definitively.

Writing may be vain but it is not insignificant. It points to an effectively divine ideal that is beyond human capability to achieve. Vila-Matas quotes a writer who ceased to write, “I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem.” To merge with the infinity of language is what a writer wants to do. It is an essential aspect of pataphysics, the process of imagination. Reading, as a sort of counter-imagination, both encourages and frustrates writerly ambition. Vila-Matas also quotes the 19th century French moralist and essayist, Joseph Joubert: “One must resemble art without resembling a single work.” This union with language can only be achieved by reading, not writing.

Joubert was also the one who “wondered how to look in the right place when one does not even know what one is looking for.” And so it was Joubert who “spent his life searching for a book he never wrote, though, when all is considered, he wrote it without realising, thinking of writing it.” This is the ultimate creativity implied by reading - the permanent search which prevents writing from becoming a literally doctrinaire occupation. There is no final say, no definitive interpretation. The creativity of reading both limits and promotes the creativity of writing. This is the analogy of creativity. Reading and writing are incommensurate with each other except by the analogia novae rei.

Christianity, particularly Western Christianity, has misconceived language, and therefore literature, especially its own literature. It has claimed divine status for itself. By pretending to be superior to language, it divinizes itself and asserts the right to dominate not just writing, which is something perhaps tolerable in a religion of the Book, but also reading, that is, interpretation. This is, in its own terms, idolatry. God and language are indistinguishable in their transcendent power, their universal presence, and their unlimited potential for knowing. Neither God nor language can be constrained with impunity. By sterilizing negative theology, and persistently censuring the literature of the No (what it calls mysticism), Christianity has stopped the search for its own goal; it has become purposeless.

So Karl Barth was correct: the analogia entis is a ruse. But his fideistic response to that ruse is also self-defeating because it requires quite literally a deus ex machina that grabs people by the emotional throat and demands irrational intellectual assent and blind belief. What Vila-Matas provides is an alternative connection between God and man, between the infinitely powerful universe and the struggling individual. This connection is not through being but through creativity, not just the ability to make new and interesting interpretations of one’s existence, but also the necessity to do this continuously and permanently. The ability to read as well as write is a kind of grace that comes as a gift from elsewhere.

This is the biblical ‘image of God’ which demands not faith but only readerly hope to achieve. It also helps in understanding the seriousness of Oscar Wilde’s allusion to religion: “It is to do nothing that the elect exist.” Salvation is not achieved but is received by reading, by doing nothing. Reading demands not blind faith but rather blind hope that there is something to be found by simply absorbing what is there, the content of which is entirely unknown. The negative theology of reading cannot help but make a positive statement. This is a theology of the imagination in which “Everything remains, but changes; the everlasting is repeated mortally in the new, which is gone in a flash.”

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Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven--And How We Can Regain It by Jeffrey Burton Russell
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

An Abuse of Literature

Heaven is apparently ‘in’ at the moment. Theologians and apologists of all stripes have decided that it is a concept with many more miles than it has already run. Jeffrey Burton Russell would like to “let Heaven out of the closet.” Like any good evangelical, he wants us to know that his ideas are sound, that they really, really are necessary for living a meaningful and productive life.

The first clue that Russell’s book might be less than compelling is the overtly cheesy title. Paradise Mislaid is not only a faux reference to Milton, presumably to provide some historical credibility, the title has also been shared by a second-rate set of murder mysteries, a somewhat tedious memoir of 50’s National Service, at least one novel of the conflict between science and religion, another with some rather forced classical allusions, a fascinating history of a failed social utopia in the Paraguayan jungle, and a psychotic thesis about life after death. Originality is not Russell’s forte.

But he isn’t any better on logic either. According to Jeffrey Russell, heaven is a metaphor, a figure of speech. It does not exist in space-time, he says. It’s a word without a referent. In short, it is a fantasy. Nevertheless, he feels, we desperately need for this fantasy to be restored as a respectable element in our thinking about reality. Russell apparently knows this because the idea of heaven makes him happy; and he wasn’t happy when he was an atheist and didn’t believe in heaven. But the man doth protest excessively - one suspects in order to comfort himself. Why can’t he be simply content with his happiness?

Russell’s explanation for the necessity of an other-worldly state of peace, love and spiritual fulfillment in a this-worldly state of human conflict, hatred and material want is not merely trivial, it is also ideological and dangerous for human beings and other living things. He may succeed in distracting himself from the real issues of living with others; but one can only hope that most people will catch his sleight of hand. Like most evangelical Christians, he doesn’t only want to get across a thought, he also wants to change the way the rest of us think. He just knows things that others don’t about reality.

So Russell very quickly goes into didactic mode, teaching us how to think properly. “Heaven is best understood,” says Russell, “in terms of representation of reality by depth metaphors, metaphors that intend to point toward ultimate truth.” Not ‘can be understood’; not even ‘might be understood’; but are ’best’ understood. A real pedagogue then. ‘Best is the superlative for what?’ one asks.

‘Depth metaphors’ are apparently those really good tropes that are used in theology and philosophy to describe things like fundamental human nature and God. So Russell has a clear literary view of his subject. And if he could keep himself to literature and the poetics of metaphorical usage, he might make a little sense. But he embeds that literary idea in a philosophical theory which gives him a privileged position to know which metaphors are not only ‘deep’ but also correctly formed, that is, point to truth. This is chutzpah not knowledge.

Russell should know that a metaphor doesn’t point to anything except the terms used in the metaphor itself. ‘God is love’ may be an acceptable attempt at a definition, but it is meaningless as a metaphor because the first term is vacuous without the second. Even Jesus stuck to similes in his descriptions of the Kingdom of Heaven. And Russell should know that metaphors connote different things to different people in different contexts. But apparently he doesn’t. This is ignorance.

Significantly, what he does know is that these depth metaphors are not static; they evolve continuously to accommodate various meanings in the the societies in which they appear, reflecting everything from the level of scientific knowledge to the characteristics of the prevailing social structure. They are, in a word, political. Yet despite Russell’s extensive discussion of the changing history of the idea of heaven that points to its variable political meaning, he fails to make the connection to the concrete human interests which are the object of politics. For him the evolving idea of heaven is simply keeping up with the times. This is duplicity.

In fact, throughout the history of Christianity and Islam, and before them of Judaism, heaven has been part of what is called apocalyptic literature. Apocalyptic consists of the tales of eventual justification and revenge for distraught believers with regard to the rest of the unbelieving world. Christianity in particular, despite its official protestations of love, is a highly resentful, grudge-bearing and generally vengeful religion and therefore has a great deal to say about heaven (cf. the Book of Revelation for the gory detail).

Apocalyptic is a sort of scriptural pep talk meant to provide solace and renewed cultic strength during tough times by dangling a carrot of eventual relief. And heaven of course implies hell. One’s religious enemies will pay the price of their intransigence and inability to appreciate reality for what it is. Thus there will be an ultimate vindication and eternal justice in the ‘other’ world - either the world to come after one’s death or at the end of creation.

It seems obvious, but not to Russell, that there is a consistent political intention in the notion of heaven throughout its otherwise complex linguistic history. The purpose of the idea is to either promote solidarity and the courage to persist; and/or to provide a positive theodicy, that is, a favorable verdict on the apparent actions of a God who claims to care but refuses to demonstrate his benevolence. These are its sole functions. Its meaning is the offer of deferred reward beyond the mere approval of the community. A child knows this intuitively. But Russell does not.

Put another way, in starkly political terms, the purpose of heaven is to serve power not those who are subject to power. The religious doctrines of heaven don’t flow naturally, as it were, from the springs of the collective unconscious. They are formulated, promulgated and enforced as doctrines from religious establishments, the primary aim of which is their own continued existence. Heaven is a justification for the earthly power of religious leaders.

To the degree that the faithful consider heaven to be a possible personal future, the clerisy of priests, bishops, imams, and mullahs is secure. The scandals that have plagued the Catholic Church over the last half-century, for example, are all traceable to this sort of doctrinal politics which is self-protective and rational only in terms of institutional survival. In fact no doctrine is without its political motivation and its political intent, and therefore its service to power rather than truth.

Heaven provides a sort of soft apocalypse (similar, perhaps, to a soft Brexit in its incremental transition period) for those believers who can’t work themselves up to accept the imminence of a Second Coming. Fundamentalism isn’t often ‘respectable’ but ‘just desserts’ is a part of religious as well as liberal ideology. Heaven is therefore palatable to that bulk of middle of the road believers.

If they are among the oppressed, heaven provides hope and therefore inhibits action which might be socially revolutionary. For the oppressors, Heaven provides a rational for a certain type of smug conservative politics, a ‘Let God sort things out’ attitude which fits comfortably with neo-liberal economics and strict enforcement of the existing social order.

What is most objectionable in Russell’s analysis, however, is not the obvious attempt to deflect attention from real human problems and injustices through spiritual hogs wallop. This is just typically self-serving evangelical rhetoric. Rather, it is his attempt to usurp the very foundation of literature by claiming to know something divinely inspired about language, about what language is and how it works. His allusion to Milton’s great poem in the title is literary sacrilege. Russell is a threat to literature, that is to thought itself. This is not just devious ignorance, it is pure evil. Russell should not merely be mislaid but buried, preferably very deeply.

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War with the Newts by Karel Čapek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We’re Here Because You Were There

Not many go unscathed in the comic sarcasm of The War with the Newts: most European nationalities (Dutch and Czech in particular), Americans (especially Hollywood types and Yale alumni), most Asians, religious enthusiasts (including Jews, Catholics, and militant atheists), and all seamen, academics, and newspapermen are castigated by Čapek without mercy. But his primary target is the emerging global capitalism of the early 20th century. I doubt any other work of fiction has captured either the process or the consequences of unrestrained commercial exploitation better than Čapek - consequences for the exploiters as well as the exploited.

By teaching a peculiar species of aquatic lizard to protect themselves from sharks in exchange for pearls, modern industrial freebooters unwittingly create a competitor-civilisation. The hapless capitalists do not realise that there are what economists call ‘externalities’ or unintended secondary effects of their passionate but ultimately pointless ambitions. The resources they acquire from the newts are worthless except to produce more products to be sold to the newts. Give a newt an oyster and he gets a meal; give him a knife to shuck oysters and he gets a weapon of global domination.

Čapek is endlessly witty and his translator is a master at capturing that wit in English. Describing the tribal chief of an isolated village in Indonesia: “He was an elderly gentleman and naked, but far thinner than mayors are in Europe.” And the tenacious clinging of oysters to their rocky beds as “Shells that stick fast to the stones like the Jewish faith.” And he knows his differentials when it comes to Catholic piety: “‘Then I shall have a Catholic mass said too,’ decided Jens Jensen. ‘For Captain van Toch. But I shall have it said here in Marseilles. I think that in that big church they’ll do it cheaper, cost price.’ ‘It could be; but an Irish mass is the real thing. In my home, man, the Jesuits are devils; they can nearly do wonders. Just like witch doctors or heathens.’” And Čapek is not averse to the odd important sociological observation such as “Fossil reptiles prefer blondes!”

In his introduction, Robert Adams says Čapek writes like G.K. Chesterton. He’s wrong. Čapek is much more entertaining. His wry commentary on sex, business, and the ironies of human ambition could never emanate from Chesterton. And the cosmopolitain Čapek makes Chesterton look like a provincial hack. His attack on European colonialism is as relevant as it ever was in our era of continuing global exploitation of the poor by the rich, not least because of his insight that it leads to massive population movements that are universally destructive.

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Entanglement by Maya Panika
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Quantum Community

Sci-fi and gothic fantasy have constituted the new practical theology for almost two centuries, paradoxically exploring things that are beyond language within language. Large numbers of people love it; I suspect because at their best these relatively new genres riff on perennial theological themes buried within the accumulated cultural sludge we all slosh around in. Entanglement is a good example of how this transition from theology to sci-fi/fantasy works.*

Christianity and Judaism both have ancient traditions of communion with the dead. The Christian doctrine of the Community of Saints holds that the dead who made it to the top of the moral pile have pull with the divine for the benefit of the living; and that those who have not fared quite so fortunately in their spiritual fate can benefit from the prayers of the living. In Judaism the idea is that the Avot Zacuth, the grace earned by the merits of the Jewish Fathers, in fact all pious Jews, can be used for the benefit of those Jews in need of strength or succour.

These are more than quaint traditions. They are ethical considerations which are only incidentally metaphysical. They have their real significance as reminders that almost all of what we are as human beings - intellectual as well as physical - is inherited. Respect for those, whom we cannot know by name, is the least that we owe. The idea that we can interact with the dead is a religious expression of what we otherwise find commonplace as we learn things like Isaac Newton’s calculus, or consult the opinions of Marcus Aurelius. By extension this community reaches back into pre-history including our pre-human ancestors whose fossils and footprints we interpret with much care and interest.

Modern science has created a new addition to this idea of ethical communion and with that raised some interesting associated issues. Quantum theory suggests, for example that there are multiple universes - at every quantum event the universe bifurcates, duplicating itself with only quantum level variations, a sort of cosmic genetic evolution. The connections among the worlds are hidden but real. They are also staggeringly complex and beyond any theory we may ever possess.

If there are such bifurcating worlds, what is the appropriate ethical relationship among them? The question is not dissimilar to that confronted by the first Europeans who encountered the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas and Australia, particularly about the ethical status of these beings who didn’t fit within established definitions of human. Unfortunately for the original inhabitants, the answer came only after their effective destruction.

The observable, and observed, effects of quantum entanglement are equally disconcerting. According to EinsteinIan physics, the speed of light forms an upper limit of communication within the universe. Yet quantum events occur instantaneously regardless of distance. It’s as if time has been collapsed and ceases to exist for quantum level events.

The implication is that we are part of a community which is literally universal, connected immediately to every part of the cosmos. And since the ‘light-based’ notification of events in this community may be billions of years old, many of the members of this community have been dead for quite some time. They are potentially both present with us and dead simultaneously - like Schrödinger’s cat. The quantum community, therefore, extends far beyond the primordial ooze of our planet as far as the Big Bang, perhaps farther.

So in the case of quantum universes and instantaneous action at infinite distances, the communitarian connections are not simply among the living or between the living and the dead, but with the not-living-here and the not-dead-here, entirely novel categories of existence. What are the consequences of communication among such universes? In one sense, such a world is as alien as any conceived by an Asimov or an Arthur Clarke. On the other, it is a world intimately connected to us by history and physical structure. Such a world looks just like ours and is peopled exactly like us, in fact some of these people are us with some minor difference. What responsibility should we take on in that kind of world?

The concept of spirit takes on a rather interesting meaning in this world, what Panika calls My World, for anyone who succeeds in establishing contact with the broader quantum universe. The traditional word to designate a being which exists simultaneously but separately in another dimension is ‘ghost’. Similarly ‘angel’ is the connection, or messenger, who can communicate with that dimension and therefore with ghosts, some of whom may have found themselves ‘stranded’ in an alien dimension through the simultaneous quantum effects of instantaneous action and universal bifurcation.

Angels are dangerous creatures according to Thomas Aquinas. Theological rumour has it that at least some of them are jealous of human beings reportedly being created ‘above’ them. There is no mention of them in the creation stories of Genesis, Aquinas says, because their existence could become a distraction. They are signifiers of the overwhelmingly Big Picture, for which Aquinas uses the word ‘divine’.

But the intense brightness of angelic pure knowledge can blind mortal beings to the divine. In other words, angels are unnatural and can be demonic, a random spanner thrown into the smoothly functioning works of creation. They represent a crack in reality which threatens to spread within and among universes. Their capability is the quantum equivalent of the knowledge of good and evil in the creation story of Genesis. Perhaps their ability to move across quantum dimensions is the fundamental design flaw of creation, the original evil.

The quantum community, consisting of the related beings across dimensions, is what Panika’s fictional meditation is about. Like all sci-fi, there is an element of tongue-in-cheek that is an inevitable part of the genre. But, like the best sci-fi, there is a serious cultural core which both motivates and justifies it. Theology is the poetry of the unexplainable. To consider it as more (or less) is a profession of cultural ignorance. Entanglement certainly qualifies as some good modern theology.

*See here for other good examples: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript 4April2019: Apparently there is serious resistance in some sectors of global society to the sci-fi/fantasy usurpation of conventional theology. Catholics in Poland, it is reported, have held a massive auto-de-fé of the Harry Potter books as blasphemous and encouraging witchcraft. I take this as a confirmation of my point.

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Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self by Marilynne Robinson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Religion of Science

The psychological infirmity of projection is probably the cause of more strife in the world than any other. Those who oppose or impede us are not merely wrong; they are, we are sure, misinformed, incompetent or ill-willed. We impose these judgments based on their opposition not because we actually know anything about our opponents. We do this largely because we fear our own ignorance, lack of talent, and questionable motives. Our own defects are attributed to those over whom we want to exercise power.

Marilynne Robinson does a very good line in neurotic psychological projection. She does not like science; or at least she does not like her idea of what science is, which is a clear attribution of the defects of her own religious position to those with whom she disagrees. The remarkable thing is that in order to make her slurs about science, she must disavow her own principles of religion as well as a long history of Christian theology.

Robinson starts with a self-contradiction. She believes that most people (by which she means most intellectuals, particularly sociologists and analytic philosophers) think that they think differently than did their ancestors of several hundred years ago - mainly because they no longer speak and write in terms of religion. She disagrees: “...my argument [is] that the mind as felt experience had been excluded from important fields of modern thought. I meant to restrict myself, more or less, to looking at the characteristic morphology of the otherwise very diverse schools of modern thought for which the mind/ brain is a subject. But I find that these schools are themselves engrossed with religion.”

So quite apart from the extensive scientific and philosophical research into the “mind as felt experience” and the rejection in most of this research of religious terminology (has she heard of phenomenology and existentialism?), Robinson claims that not only has there been no epochal shift in thought since the Enlightenment, but also that science is a special kind of religion which is inferior to Christianity. And just to round out the contradiction, she would like us all to stop thinking the way we do about science and religion!

Oddly, however, Robinson is right. Science is a religion according to the way she would like religion to be. And it is a religion which is superior to Christianity precisely according to the criteria she uses. Her view of Christianity is that it has always been about continuous assimilation, interpretation and re-interpretations spiritual experience. I don’t think any post-modernist philosopher or the most hard-bitten physicist would disagree with the value of such a religion. One can only wish that her vision of religion were shared by her fellow-Christians!

Robinson, however, projects onto science the doctrinaire character of Christianity by presuming science is defined by fixed principles. This is a characterisation of the Christian religion not science, which changes its methods and principles of proof about as often as it does its theories. There is nothing in science considered immune from learning and modification, from theory, to method, to the people engaged in debate. Science, or more generally reason, has no fixed definition. The criteria for what constitutes both are constantly shifting.

Christianity on the other hand holds that there are fundamental principles - like the existence of God, and any number of abstruse doctrines - which are not matters of investigation nor are they subject to change. This is precisely how Christian sects define themselves - as adherents of some originary doctrine. The fact that there are many interpretations of this originary doctrine tends to make them more rigid rather than more curious. Therefore, while religion as ritualistic and ethical community may indeed be compatible with science, religious faith of the kind promoted by Christianity is not - because it claims there are things which cannot be learned about further, not because of what it claims to have learned.

There may indeed be things which cannot be learned about; but we cannot possibly know what these things are. This is what might be called the principle of scientific humility: we can only investigate what we have at hand. This principle has a religious origin. It is historically derived from what is called negative theology - the idea that whatever God is, he, she, or it cannot be captured in language; God is beyond our capacity to learn about. Negative theology has a long orthodox religious history; it is accepted without exception by all Christian theologians. It is also ignored by everyone of these theologians as soon as they start to write about the divine. Only science takes negative theology seriously. It simply refrains from idolatry by being circumspect and highly conditional in its claims.

So in that sense, but only in that sense, is science an alternative religion. And it is also in that sense that science is a superior religion. It recognises the impossibility of achieving knowledge of the divine. So it avoids the presumption and blasphemy of theological speculation. Science does not condemn theology as poetry only as pretending to knowledge that it cannot attain in light of its own principles. It is this which Robinson cannot admit - that the problem she has is not with science but with her religious colleagues, and is within her own mind.

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