In Case of Emergency by Georges Simenon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fake Purpose

The usual sordid tale by Simenon: Middle-aged man engages in tragic sexual interlude with disturbed, young tearaway. The lives of several people are adversely affected or worse. The man claims to submit himself to rigorous self-examination in a diary of events, which he hopes will uncover the real reasons for his behaviour. Of course, his recorded thoughts are mere rationalisation.

Although the son of a laundress, Lucien considers himself a gentleman. Aged 45, he has triumphed in the legal circles of Paris and has a reputation for resolving hopeless criminal cases for the benefit of his clients. He lives in the best neighbourhood, dines with senior ministers, has a trophy wife (taken from his mentor and benefactor), a chauffeur, and as many extra-marital affairs as he can handle sensibly.

Lucien works hard during the day, even on the weekends, and is engaged in complex criminal activity as a sideline to his legal work. His wife hosts dinners two or three times a week. They frequently attend soirées and social events that keep them out until three or four in the morning. But he still has enough energy to visit his mistresses afterwards. This is what he himself calls “an intense life.”

Despite its pace, life is manageable, that is until he starts an affair with a young, manipulative client. At that point he comes “under a sign,” he becomes a marked man. Other men, similarly marked, can see it on him, in him. They constitute a sort of club among the Parisian elite. Yvette is a hapless trouble-maker but he is obsessed by her for that very reason. Lucien’s relationship with her is one of “pure sex”. “She tells lies. She's deceitful. She puts on acts.” But she is completely submissive to him. He has complete charge over her.

His course is suicidal; and he knows it: “My first worry is that my carcass may not hold out.” He’s risking everything for this woman, no not for this woman but for this relationship. She happens to be simply a component of the relationship which conforms with his fantasies. He perceives his affair as a revolt against a “controlling wife,” whom he has decided to abandon.

He is without remorse for the consequences of any of his actions and blames his wife. He thinks he is being brutally honest. But he is a cad, a crook, and a narcissist. This, of course, is what we do as human beings - make up purpose after the fact and claim it as mitigation for our stupidities. And lawyers, like Lucien, make a living from it.

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The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Roger Casement had consistently disappointing experience with modern institutions. His work as a shipping clerk in a private firm in Liverpool had no adventure. His time as an adventurer in the Congo for the Belgian monarch lacked humanity. His diplomatic efforts as part of the British government on behalf of humanity had little practical success. And his association with the ultimately successful 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland led to his conviction for treason against his country and death by hanging. If he had survived into the Republic, I’m confident he would have found that Eire didn’t meet his expectations either. And incidentally he was gay, which did him little good among many institutions with which he had yet to have contact.

One might accurately call Casement a serial idealist. He moved from one idealistic fantasy to another throughout his life, seeking that true cause within an organization composed of other similarly dedicated true believers. When he failed to find the right ideal or a sufficiently sympathetic organization, he doubled the stakes, plunging into more and more radical causes until he ended up conspiring with Germany to free his native Ireland from British rule. He was, in short, somewhat of a social menace.

There are numerous poems, ballads, and mythical stories about Casement as an Irish national hero. Brian Inglis wrote his biography in 1973; this was republished 20 years later, and then again in 2002. Casement has been the subject of international television documentaries, a stage play, another biographical novel contemporaneous with that of Vargas Llosa, a graphic novel, as well as numerous articles, government reports and literary references. Casement’s memoirs, journals and diaries have been published and extensively analyzed in the popular and academic press. He is even the theme of an American country rock song. The man, in other words, has been well studied.

Therefore it seems to me odd that Vargas Llosa would choose Casement as the subject of this biographical novel. At times it is unclear if Vargas Llosa had decided definitively either to write a biography or a novel. He ends up providing immense amounts of historical detail but very little about what’s going on in Casement’s head, except his progressive disillusion with the way the world had been organized in his absence. There are no innovative insights, no obvious literary themes, no controversial interpretations as there are in his other biographical novel The War of the End of the World. Other than as a somewhat strident cautionary tale for today’s young idealists, therefore, I don’t see the point.

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A Short History of Decay by Emil M. Cioran
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Poetry of Death

A Short History of Decay is a compendium of pessimistic aphorism, a sort of cosmopolitan collection of Gnostic scripture through the ages. It is entertaining, observationally acute, and compelling - all descriptions that the author would object to strenuously. I think he would accept ‘poetry of death’ much more readily, however. There is little except for death about which Cioran has anything good to say.

Cioran begins as a sort of secular Qoholeth from the Old Testament: All is vanity. And Cioran means everything, especially those conceits of faith by religionists who have lost the capacity to doubt: “What is the Fall but the pursuit of a truth and the assurance you have found it, the passion for a dogma, domicile within a dogma?” Cioran’s hero is the doubting Hamlet, he who hesitates, who doubts, who questions what he knows incessantly. “The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth”

But it is not religion per se that is the source of evil, it is human self-assurance: “Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it... His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse... We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits.” One can almost hear Nietzsche clapping with approval in the distance.

So the fundamental problem is idealism. People who have a plan for making things better are the carriers of a deadly mental virus. These small-time peddlers of happiness scam a willing audience into believing that it is possible to reduce the net amount of misery in the world. Thus “Society is an inferno of saviors!” What human beings don’t or won’t recognise is that existence is misery. Schopenhauer has now joined Nietzsche in approbation.

The only cure for miserable existence is the termination of existence, suicide. This is the only aspect of existence we can control. Contrary to the dictum of St. Paul that our lives are not our own, Cioran makes the rather more obvious point that they are. It is the only thing we can call entirely our own: “We change ideas like neckties; for every idea, every criterion comes from outside, from the configurations and accidents of time... death is the true criterion, the only one contained within us.” Writing seven years after Camus’s Sisyphus, he managed to radicalise even that paean to control 0ver one’s existence.

Philosophy, actually thought in general, is not helpful in the situation. “The abundance of solutions to the aspects of existence is equaled only by their futility.” Philosophies are at best consoling fictions, and at worst reasons to persecute other human beings. “All of life’s evils come from a ‘conception of life’,” Cioran thinks. In this he is not far from Kierkegaard’s distrust of philosophy: “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

In fact Cioran’s real issue is with language itself, with words pretending to be more than grunts and scratches. He thinks “Man is the chatterbox of the universe.” We throw words around as if they had substance. But as Wittgenstein has demonstrated, words refer only to other words. Consequently, Cioran concludes “We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us.” Ludwig would likely agree.

The only acceptable use of words, indeed the only ‘reasonable’ activity for a human being is poetry. At least poetry doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. In fact it doesn’t pretend to be anything at all. Poetry is a personal act of construction. “Only the poet takes responsibility for ‘I,’ he alone speaks in his own name, he alone is entitled to do so.” T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland seems a model for just this view.

Ultimately it is the ancient Gnostic appreciation of the world - shared certainly by the relatively optimistic(!) Thomas Ligotti - which drives Cioran: “Injustice governs the universe. Everything which is done and undone there bears the stamp of a filthy fragility, as if matter were the fruit of a scandal at the core of nothingness.” This seems to me outstanding poetry, as does his summary of his own life “In Time’s sentence men take their place like commas, while, in order to end it, you have immobilized yourself into a period.”

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Dirty Work by Larry Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Young Soldiers Never Get Old

Old people (mostly men) have always induced (seduced) young people (mostly boys) to continue their childhood fantasies of violence and dominance into adulthood by joining the military. The sequence is important: “There ain’t nothing meaner than some little deranged six-year-old sadistic motherfucker loose in a playground.” This youthful sociopathy is a strategic asset that is nurtured.

The military opportunity is presented in quasi-religious terms as a ‘calling’ from God and Country which will demand and develop important personal virtues in impressionable youth - loyalty, discipline, and faith in one’s leaders among the most essential of these. Since it’s easiest to recruit (or coerce) these young people from god-fearing, less than well-educated, under-achieving families, the military has a distinct demographic, historically referred to as cannon-fodder.

Military training has more or less the same aim everywhere in the world - to break down the inhibitions that constrain childhood violence to mere verbal threat or minor mayhem. Such training is necessarily traumatic because “It do something to you to kill another person. It ain’t no dog lying there. Somebody. A person, talk like you, eat like you, got a mind like you. Got a soul like you.” So the most fundamental moral sense must be extinguished: “People shooting other people is bad and don’t nobody have to tell you, you born knowing that.”

Getting that fixed permanently in a young mind isn’t easy. Therefore a new ‘higher power’ has to be established, something called ‘us’, which justifies lethal action. So, as the drill sergeant says, “We got an image to uphold here. The best in the world. There’s a bunch of them going over there in a few months that ain’t coming back. They’re gonna die for their country, they’re gonna die for their Marine Corps, for all the softass civilians like you guys used to be.” From the eternal scrutiny of this higher power there is no escape. The soldier stays in the school yard, now part of a gang.

Only a fraction of military personnel end up as front line troops. They are the ones who do the eponymous dirty work and who get the full ‘benefit’ of their training. This is where the gang matters. They also receive the benefit-in-kind of the training of their opponents and their gangs. The most horrid of the reciprocal gifts received and given is not death but the inability to live with oneself.

Living comfortably with oneself is the most primitive level of ‘normality.’ Disfigurement is bad. Loss of abilities, perhaps even to walk or touch, is worse. But wanting to die is the worst. That’s the part they don’t train you for and the drill sergeant never mentions - what happens when it’s over but so much gets left behind, friends and ideals as well as body parts - theirs as well as ours.

There’s nothing more to imagine in youthful fantasy, and things “ain’t gonna get no better.” At that point Ennui becomes an incurable companion in convalescence: “It woulda been a lot better for mama to see me in my coffin laid out and watch them put me in the ground and blow taps over me than to see me like that.” Staying young is not an option; but neither, for many, is getting old.

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Free Will by Sam Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kick ‘Em While They’re Down

This is a book of academic philosophy written in popular form. In it Harris is primarily concerned with defending his position about the illusory nature of the idea of Free Will, principally against the philosopher Daniel Dennett. However, there is an important cultural background to this debate which Harris has refrained from alluding to, I suppose in deference to professional discipline. This background is theological and subtly pervades the entire debate. The political import of the debate can’t be appreciated fully without this context.

Free Will is a Christian heresy, and yet it is the apparent foundation of all Christian morality. As usual the source of the doctrine of universal human corruption, and therefore the inability to act with true freedom, is St. Paul. For Paul, according to his subsequent interpreters, particularly Augustine, a truly Free Will is only possible through the gift of grace from God. And this gift is dependent upon faith in Jesus Christ. So those who have never heard of Jesus cannot have Free Will; those who have heard of him and do not have faith in him cannot have Free Will; and even those who believe they have faith cannot be certain that it is sufficient to guarantee them the capacity for Free Will. The heresy that claims even the slightest deviation from this doctrine is called Pelagianism.

It turns out that advances in neurological and other biological sciences have confirmed at least half of the ancient Christian doctrine of corruption and lack of personal freedom. As human beings, we are subject not just to the desires that Paul (religious violence), Augustine (sex) and so many others (mostly about power in one form or another) have struggled with, but also to the random experiences that provoke equally random thoughts that on occasion lead to behaviours which we ultimately regret. Many of these behaviours will be considered immoral or even criminal for which most people consider sanctions or penalties appropriate, either administered in this world or another. As Harris puts it so succinctly, with only the slightest allusion to theology: “If you don’t know what your soul is going to do next, you are not in control.”

So, the deepest part of oneself is at least mysterious if not patently unwieldy - Dr. Freud concurs. But the other part of the Christian proposition, the gift of grace through faith, largely negates the moral impact of the idea of human spiritual corruption. If faith is not offered because of ignorance, the moral fault is God’s not humanity’s. If faith is offered and rejected, the only ‘crime’ is such rejection and not any subsequent unacceptable behaviour. Many Christians hold that the grace of faith is irresistible (and yet freedom-giving!), which implies real freedom not to sin once it is received. The actual behaviour of Christians is such, however, that either the irresistibility of grace is somewhat overstated, or it doesn’t possess the kind of divine transformative punch which is advertised.

Accordingly, Free Will presents a sort of cultural crisis among folk who share a Christian legacy. Despite the apparent availability of a get-out-of-jail-free card in not just the absence but also the condemnation of the concept of Free Will in Christian culture, it is maintained as a fundamental principle of ethics, politics, economics, many branches of psychology, and, crucially, the law. Harris’s message consequently is controversial when it should be accepted without much comment: “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.” Good traditional Christian doctrine. Yet it is generally rejected by the culture which claims a Christian heritage.

There’s a significant ancillary issue in the philosophical debate, therefore. Free Will is one of those contradictions of faith-based religion which most religionists would like to ignore because it means abjuring power over others. It is the signal topic in which faith runs aground as an obvious and public anti-social concept. It’s a ship that just doesn’t float in a sea of people with conflicting interests, aspirations, sometimes malicious intentions, and not infrequent violence. Faith, as a matter of universal human experience, does not mitigate any of these traits. In fact if Free Will existed anywhere, in anyone, by definition it would be exercised only in furtherance of the good and would therefore exempt its possessor from any negative judgement. In other words, those who have it are always innocent; and only the innocent could claim it.

That Free Will is some sort of feeling is true. It is our name for something like consciousness is a name for something. Perhaps they are the same thing. But if so we know very little about either phenomenon except that it is expressed as a feeling we think we share with others; but we can’t be entirely sure. It is not solipsistic to suggest that your feeling of Free Will is not anything like mine. Neither one of us has a clear idea what it might be. By suggesting that there was such an entity as the will at all (a politically important Christological topic in theology), Paul and Augustine and the rest planted a concept, like faith and grace, whose main function is to raise doubt and promote guilt about not having them.

The idea of freedom persists even if the associated feelings of religious faith and species-guilt have attenuated. What we’re left with is a psychological myth and a forensic category meant to assign Free Will to precisely those who cannot have it, namely those who do supposed evil things, most often the poor, uneducated, abused, genetically deficient human being. Free Will is claimed as the source of their guilt but Christian doctrine says it cannot be. This is hypocrisy of massive proportions. To what end? Functionally it is to exercise power in restricting freedom and to justify doing so.

Augustine was right in his condemnation of Pelagius, but for the wrong reasons. The issue is not corruption of something called the human Will; it is, as Harris says, the fabric of our being: “Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior—but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control.” To claim faith or grace as a sort of short-circuit to this process is what Christians have perennially done with no evidence whatsoever. Whatever is meant, or interpreted, by faith and grace is simply another one of the chain of causes.

Harris thinks that Free Will is not a result of conscious awareness but of a lack of it: “Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying close attention to what it is like to be us.” I agree. It is an illusion that disappears as soon as one tries to attend to it. It has no subjective content as well as no objective existence. In this it is like faith and grace. And like them, Free Will has become a conceptual instrument of repression and justification for the exercise of arbitrary human power. I don’t think the philosophical debate is complete without this element.

Postscript: Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim sums up the situation neatly: “I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will".

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Beyond Weird by Philip Ball
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Fault, Dear Brutus, Is Not in Our Stars

Quantum theory is probably the best possible proof of the validity of Pragmatist philosophy. No one understands what the theory means. And as Philip Ball says, “No one tells you that it often lacks any justification beyond the mere (and obviously important) fact that it works.” And this has a startling implication: It’s not just the physical world that is different from what we thought; reason itself must be something much more obscure than we have ever conceived. Both the scientific route to quantum theory and the meaning of that theory contradict our most dearly held principles of correct thinking, or for that matter our most deeply engrained image of ourselves.

Ball takes an intriguing perspective. Most commentators on quantum physics, possibly most scientists, consider its contradictions - entanglement, wave/particle ambiguity, simultaneous existence and non-existence, etc. - as indications that the theory is incomplete, that some further theoretical breakthrough will resolve these contradictions and make it more rational. Ball doesn’t do that. Suppose, he suggests, “the apparent oddness, the paradoxes and puzzles of quantum mechanics, are real.” What we are then confronted with is a challenge to think differently because the world demands that we do so.

If reality is as quantum physics says it is, we don’t need a better physics, we need to reconsider what we mean when we use words like ‘reasonable’, and ‘rational’, and ‘logical’, and even ‘knowing’. If reality is as quantum physics says it is, we need to re-learn what it means to learn - not just about physics but about everything. If reality is as quantum physics says it is, the real issue isn’t about matter and energy but about mind. We may know far less than we thought we knew about what constitutes this dominant human capacity for making sense of the world because what it means to make sense doesn’t anymore. Quantum physics “calls into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and knowledge itself.”

Ball’s thesis is that quantum theory isn’t even about physics, it’s about information: “We now realise that quantum mechanics is less about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information: about what can be known and how.” In other words quantum theory is the key to an entirely new epistemology, an unexpected kind of ‘knowability’. As a species, we have stumbled across something more fundamental than another tool for exploiting the universe. We may, instead, have an impetus (or at least invitation) for beginning to investigate and understand ourselves in a new way.

This is clearly exciting stuff. When Ball points out that quantum theory “is not so much a theory that one can test by observation and measurement, but a theory about what it means to observe and measure,” he is implying that it is a theory of being human, a cosmic anthropology perhaps. After all, isn’t that what we spend most of our lives as human beings doing? Observing, comparatively assessing, and judging everything? If quantum theory is a theory of those things, it is a theory of us. It is certainly not a fully worked out theory but it does give a clear direction which is rather different than any other ever proposed.

For example, a central issue of quantum theory is measurement. Essentially, measurement is not a neutral act; it changes the character of the thing measured in some annoying ways. There is no such thing as ‘unobtrusive measurement’ in quantum physics. This challenges the idea of measurement as something which observes and comparatively assesses the properties of an object. The results of experimentation show that this is not the case. Measurement is not the assessment of the inherent properties of an object, it is the assignment of an object as a property of a scale of measurement, a metric.* This is the case as much in the ‘macro’ world we inhabit as it is in that of atomic particles. We just haven’t needed to recognise the fact.

So, this is a revelation of quantum physics: there are no inherent properties. ‘Properties’ are not inherent in anything. They are essentially scales on which we assign a place to events, objects, or relationships. As it turns out, sometimes the scales are incompatible with each other. Nothing to do with the object; everything to do with the scales. There is absolutely nothing ‘objective’ about these scales; they are chosen for some reason, some human reason, that has nothing to do with the phenomenon in question. These scales are not merely the basis for further judgment, they are themselves a judgment about what’s important in the world. That is, they are always subjective in the sense that they have a personal import to the one who chooses them.

The ‘meaning’ of quantum uncertainty, therefore, is fundamentally aesthetical and ethical, even in scientific research. The choice of a metric always means the rejection of other metrics. And the positive choice is not nearly so significant as the exclusion of the myriad of other possible metrics which could have been used to assess a phenomenon. The choice even at the quantum level is not binary - position vs. momentum - it is so for any number of so-called conjugate variables; and any choice means that an infinite number of other things will not be ‘observed,’ that is assigned a place on alternative metrics. This is one interpretation of the process of ‘replication’ of quantum events. The ‘imprint’ of the event is what is left on the metric; and if it is left 0n one it cannot be left on another. The event is quite literally a property of the metric which ‘absorbs’ information making it unavailable as a property of another metric.

These musings on measurement are mine not Ball’s; but I think they conform with the spirit of his analysis of quantum theory: “Rather than insisting on its difficulty, we might better regard it as a beguiling, maddening, even amusing gauntlet thrown down to challenge the imagination. For that is indeed what is challenged.” I imagine a logic which has yet to be articulated, specifically a logic of permissible choices of criteria of judgment. Such a logic would be both aesthetic and moral. It would also explicitly acknowledge that it is inevitable that we project our aesthetic and moral selves upon the world (as we do with the idea of a wave function - actually instructions for how to measure - which then allows the calculation of all sorts of ‘properties’ which are derived from these instructions). Perhaps most important is the recognition in this logic that we have a choice, and therefore a responsibility, about what we project. If we don’t know why we make certain choices, then we have a duty to find out.

The applicability of such a logic is of course not confined to measurement. Measurement is one activity in the more general realm of language (which in turn is a component of information, that are all elements, perhaps the only elements, of mind). This suggests that there might be an aesthetic/moral logic of language that overrides categories like vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatics. Perhaps that is what literature is meant to do - uncover the hidden quantum logic of language one story at a time. And that logic exists, if it does at all, in mind not matter. Or if that way of expressing it is prejudicial, perhaps it would be better to say that it exists in matter as incipient mind. Matter merely awaits its turn at mind... and vice-versa. Meanwhile mind tells stories about matter, and there is nothing to compare these stories with... except other stories. Matter, of course, remains mute on the subject and just lurks, biding its time.

*See for further discussion: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Council Estate

Before the internet in Britain, there was a thing called Fleet Street. This was as much a culture as a location. It sat culturally and geographically midway between the commercial city of London and the seat of government in Westminster. It produced something called newspapers, an artefact that had political and commercial importance. But it was adept neither at managing nor governing its own affairs. It was trapped by its technology and its traditions and was slowly suffocating. But while it lasted it produced characters as intriguing as those of Dickens; in fact most of them would have felt quite at home in Dickens’s London.

And Michael Frayn can do cultural comedy just about as good as Dickens. Towards the End of Morning (one of several titles the book has accumulated) rates with The Pickwick Papers in its appreciation of the idiosyncrasies of a passing culture seen from the inside. Like Dickens, Frayn was a journalist in his youth who also saw the limitations of the profession. And like The Pickwick Papers, his book is an institutionally posthumous record of the days when the only thing Fleet Street had little interest in was itself and its painful forthcoming demise.

Frayn seems at home regardless of genre - stage plays, drama, and here genuine but gentle English comedy. To the extent the book is about anything of general interest, I suppose it recounts how we all fiddle with daily trivia as Rome burns around us. What else can anyone do but fall in line with silly, archaic aspirations, suffer annoying neighbours, maintain peace with one’s colleagues, and avoid drinking too much at lunch. The mysteries of what goes on in the editor’s inner sanctum, much less the rest of the world, are unfathomable.

Journalists, like philosophers, pretend to know a great deal. In fact, if they’re good at their jobs, if they “write like an angel”, they need to know very little about anything. At least that was the case once upon a time. Perhaps now they don’t even need to do that. Since they’ve all moved out of Fleet Street to make way for the likes of Goldman Sachs the Third Estate seems to have gone even further downmarket.

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Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept by Brent Nongbri
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There Is No Old Time Religion

For some years I have proposed the thesis that Christianity is an historically aberrant religion. By defining itself in terms of ‘faith’ Christianity, or more specifically the Jew, Paul of Tarsus, who invented Christianity, made religion into something it had never been before - a matter of belief. Or so I contended. The consequences of this invention have been both profound and disastrous for humanity, and quite possibly for life on Earth.

It turns out that I was mistaken. Paul did not invent a new form of religion; he invented all of religion as we have come to know it. His definition of religion as faith has come to be applied to customs and practices that are historically remote from any idea of belief or truth, metaphysical or practical. Whole cultures have taken up the Pauline concept of faith - religion as belief - as their own, completely unaware of how alien this concept is to their traditions. Paul, therefore, has much more to answer for than Christianity.

Paul’s real genius was not in the formulation of any particular doctrine peculiar to Christianity. Rather it was his skill and insistence on the dual psychological/sociological role of what has since become known as religion that created a new global category of human thought. Paul made religion both solely personal and solely communal simultaneously. This is the great innovation of ‘faith’. It created not just Christianity but also religion as a modern phenomenon.

Nongbri‘s extensive analysis of language, traditions and cultural practices shows that there is no such thing as ‘ancient religion.’ He examines four historical episodes involving progressive Jewish, Roman, Christian, and Islamic developments of the idea of religion. He makes his point succinctly: ‘The real problem is that the particular concept of religion is absent in the ancient world. The very idea of ‘being religious’ requires a companion notion of what it would mean to be ‘not religious,’ and this dichotomy was not part of the ancient world.”

Hence my error: I have been giving Paul much less credit than he deserves. He didn’t just change what religion means, he permanently altered the consciousness of the world. Religion wasn’t even a ‘thing’, it had no ontological status, before Paul created it. Nongbri made me aware of an enormous gap in my knowledge.

Nongbri understands the centrality of Christianity to his thesis when he says “It is thus not surprising that various Christian texts have been identified as marking the beginning of the concept of religion.” Incredibly, however, Nongbri has almost nothing to say about the Christian foundational texts by Paul of Tarsus. Paul doesn’t even appear in the index.

Nongbri‘s focus on the 4th century church historian Eusebius as a key point of Christian development of the idea of religion seems almost absurd since Eusebius’s concept of Christianity is solely Pauline. For Eusebius, all religions were already ‘faiths.’ Christianity had by then re-interpreted Judaism as such and was on the verge of inspiring Islam as a faith opposed to its own. Nongbri completely ignores the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline writings which would not only definitively prove his point about the invention of religion but also would explain the consternation Christianity provoked in Roman civilisation, the relationship among all his ‘episodes,’ and the subsequent European wars of religion. If for no other reason, Occam’s razor would seem to demand he look in Paul's direction.

Because of this crucial hiatus in Nongbri’s analysis, he is unable to notice the source of the private/public distinction which became so important in the Renaissance. Nor is he able to appreciate to drift back to a reunion of these spheres, drawn together by the gravitational pull of Pauline faith. This faith is simultaneously totally private - a personal relationship between a human being and the divine - and totally public - requiring an approved relationship with other human beings.

John Locke, in response to the 16th and 17th century wars of this new thing called religion, attempted to put the genie back in the bottle by separating the political from the religious. He accepted faith for what it is and suggested a ‘hack’ that would ease the tension. But his was a patch not a fix. His solution seemed to work and inspired what is recognised as the secular state in which religion is a private matter best kept out of politics.

More recently, however, we have discovered that faith will not tolerate this separation of the private from the public. Faith is a category which is not just dominant but also all-inclusive. Taken seriously, faith is not just political action, it is also apolitical (or anti-political) militancy, that is to say, terrorism. Hence our modern faith-based wars of religion.

Nongbri knows that faith is the fulcrum of the development of the modern idea of religion. And he is aware of the political consequences of faith. His 2008 thesis is entitled ‘Paul Without Religion: The Creation of a Category and the Search for an Apostle Beyond the New Perspective.’
Yet he unaccountably neglects the person who made faith his life and death issue in this volume of 2013. And I am at a loss to account for this.

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Paul without religion: The creation of a category and the search for an apostle beyond the new perspective. by Brent Nongbri
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The World Turned Outside In

The 20th century theologian Karl Barth insisted that Christianity was not a public religion in which one ritually participated but a personal faith which grabbed one by the spiritual throat. In this he took a similar line to that of the political philosopher, John Locke, in the early 17th century who made the distinction between personal belief and civil activity. Both men, for political reasons, wanted to make Christianity an essentially private affair, something of the individual spirit. For Locke this was a possible solution to the continuous wars of religion that had plagued Europe since the Protestant Reformation. For Barth it was a way to distinguish his version of Christianity from that civil religion which had promoted not just Protestant liberalism in the 19th century but also the violence of World War I.

Both Locke and Barth succeeded, for a time. Locke inspired the secular state of the Enlightenment. Barth set an agenda which dominated 20th century theology. But neither achievement appears to be sustainable, much less permanent. Each put forward in their distinctive way a form of fideism, the idea that faith is something separate and independent of reason. Reason is a communal category. What is reasonable is what is accepted as reasonable by a community. To exempt faith from reason, political or intellectual reason, leaves it a solipsistic hulk. Eventually this hulk had to drift into the course of the liberal democratic state.

The rise of evangelical politics over the course of the 20th century is an affront to both Locke and Barth. Evangelicals wanted the collision between faith and reason for logical reasons. Faith cannot be contained within the boundaries established in the Enlightenment and it is not content to allow the reason of politics or science to proceed without it. So it has claimed, often rather effectively, the territory of political action (as well as apolitical and anti-political action) as its own. The fact that those lacking faith might find such claims to be unreasonable if of little consequence. Faith, in other words is as inherently a mass movement as it is an individual virtue.

This movement has its own standards of rationality which are largely alien to the general secular culture. These standards are essentially totalitarian in character. They are simply not open to discussion. The communal aspects of religion gives these standards, however unreasonable, a political power in excess of the mere numbers involved. In its most benign form this power is exercised as an electoral bloc. In its most malignant form it manifests as terrorism. In all cases it is immune to pleas of reason from those outside the faith-community. So, for example, while most of the world looks on Evangelicals’ tolerance of Donald Trump’s mendacity and immorality with consternation, his supporters view him as an instrument of a beneficent God.

The world was not always this way, that is conceived as divided between secular and religious concerns or wherein religion per se is a political force. These distinctions have an historical source and their own history. Nongbri sums up the situation neatly when he says, “we already intuitively know what ‘religion’ is before we try to define it: Religion is anything that looks sort of like modern Christianity.” This is not merely because many of those who are interested in the history of religion are Christians. Rather it is because the distinction of what we have come to call religion came into existence with Christianity.

Christianity is the religion of faith. It defines itself as such and it projects the idea of faith onto any other set of cultural practices it chooses, and calls them faiths as well. Christianity is the dominant world religion, not in terms of numbers of adherents or political influence, but because most of the world’s spiritual systems and cultures have accepted the Christian term of faith and therefore the Christian designation of religion.

And it is Christianity which insists that faith involves not just conformance with communal behavioural mores and participation in public ritual. Christianity proclaims that religion, all religion, is also a religion of the heart. It claims a superiority in this respect but this is only to compare itself favourably with other forms of heart-felt faith. Without the core of Christian teaching, the ethical views of other faiths, no matter how compatible with Christian standards, are fatally deficient and should be overcome by the true faith.

This idea of faith as the law written on the heart comes from a specific source. That source is not Jesus who spoke mainly of ethics and the subordination of all religious law to the interests of human beings. It is Paul of Tarsus, someone who had never met Jesus, never heard him speak, and witnessed none of his purported miracles, including his Resurrection, who took this commonplace spiritual metaphor and turned into a religious movement. The principle of this movement was faith, an internal spiritual state which was necessary to motivate external communal organisation and action. According to Paul, doing right is really not possible without believing the right things. Believing the right things was the necessary and sufficient condition for eternal happiness.

Thus the category of religion was created. For the first time spiritual practise and communal ritual were qualified by an entirely personal state of belief. This is an incredible theological innovation. It scandalised Paul’s fellow Jews*, mystified Paul’s fellow Roman citizens, overwhelmed cultures who had never even considered the separate character of spiritual ideas. And it did indeed change the world. But as both Locke and Barth discovered, not necessarily for the better. From the point of view of both politics and spiritual endeavour, Paul’s innovation has caused immense personal confusion and untold human suffering through violence, persecution and oppression of those without the right beliefs.

Paul, of course, did not perceive himself as the inventor of religion. That was the work of subsequent theological commentators, particularly Augustine and Martin Luther. Nongbri’s stated intention is to “re-contextualise” Paul, that is, to eliminate as much as is possible the subsequent interpretations of what Paul wrote. He wants to re-imagine Paul without religion but rather in his “vocational role” as a Jew.

While I understand the academic interest in this approach to the historical intentions of Paul (for example the degree to which he remained a Jew), the wider practical import, if any, of Nongbri escapes me. He seems to have no doubt that it is Paul who provided the originary material of this thing called religion as a faith-based activity. Subsequent theologising of this material clearly was accomplished in political and intellectual contexts which shaped official interpretations. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that Paul is the fulcrum, the watershed, the Big Bang of modern religion.

From experience I can testify that it is in the nature of aspiring academics to tame their enthusiasm in pursuing an interesting thesis. A little controversy shows a willingness to stretch established limits. More than that risks losing credibility in the community one hopes to enter and influence. Paul is a very sensitive subject in theology, as is the Whig fiction that Christianity is not the ‘cradle’ of democratic government but its historical nemesis. My sense is that Nongbri is (quite sensibly) playing it safe in his argument and his conclusions, particularly in his discussion of the Enlightenment. In any case, there is an enormous amount of creative thinking here that is inspiring for those of us who are long past academic ambitions and constraints.

*Dongbri shows that faith was not a category of Judaism. In Judaism, as demonstrated in the story of Abraham which Paul distorts for his own purposes, Yahweh commands and humans either respond or suffer the consequences. Belief doesn’t enter into the matter. Put another way: one doesn’t believe in air; it is simply there and taken for granted. There is no theory, no ‘inner light’ involved in the religious attitudes of Abraham, of the other Fathers of Judaism, or of the Prophets, only an unanalysed sense of obligation. And that obligation is about behaviour not conceptual systems. Yahweh is elemental, unlike the complexity of Paul’s God-come-to-Earth. There is nothing to believe or refuse to believe. Paul needed faith as a means of making this complexity acceptable. Apparently it worked.

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Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us about Our Past and Future by James Shapiro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m With The Jew


This book is about the timelessness, as well as the timeliness, of Shakespeare. That his work continues to attract readers and watchers, particularly outside his native England, is somewhat a mystery. His language is archaic; his plots complex; his characters morally ambiguous; and his historical settings unfamiliar. But perhaps it is precisely these characteristics which make his work archetypal - familiar enough to recognise, but also alien enough to demand attention and constant interpretation.

While reading Shapiro’s thoughts on the reception of Shakespeare by various audiences, I recalled taking my 12 year old grandson and his 8 year old sister to a production of The Merchant of Venice in Stratford-upon-Avon. We were seated close to the side of the stage in the semi-circular theatre, so the children got full exposure to the technique of the actors as well as the dialogue. At the intermission I asked the lad about his impression. Without hesitation he said, “I’m with the Jew.” His sister was less opinionated but nevertheless had a clear conclusion based on the rapid pace of the play: “Shakespeare sure has a lot of words,” she said.

I was impressed equally by both responses. The play, of course, is about what constitutes the proper criterion of moral judgment. It is not really possible to be not ‘with’ Shylock in light of the scam being carried out at his expense. To my grandson this was obvious suggesting a deterioration of the force of the mythical denotation ‘Jew’ for his generation. Yet his sister also had an important point: the performance was quick, not just in terms of the speed of delivery of the lines but in the rapid layering of moral discourse. It is difficult to keep up with Shakespeare’s subtlety as well as the actors’ highly nuanced interpretations, even for seasoned theatre-goers.

Shapiro is right to compare Shakespeare to the Bible. But the reason is not just the similarity of the Elizabethan English. It is rather, I think, Shakespeare’s equivalently capacious interpretability. There are, I am sure, Shakespearean fundamentalists who, like their biblical counterparts, believe they have the definitive assessment of Hamlet’s character or the ethical flaws of Lady Macbeth or for that matter the appropriate staging of any of the man’s plays. But the fact is that Shakespeare, like the Bible, provokes new, often contrary, interpretations of his work continuously. If there is a bottom to this interpretation, no one’s approached it yet - just as my grandchildren demonstrated yet again.

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Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal by Michael D'Antonio
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Metaphysical Monster

The Catholic Church is the world’s first and largest corporation, an organisation which can own things but which is not owned by anyone and an entity which is composed of its members but is superior to them. These are legal facts, which could be changed by legislation. But the Church’s legal status, it claims, is grounded not in law but elsewhere - in metaphysics, the study of existence itself. It is from metaphysics that the Catholic Church argues its uniqueness, its exception to all civil law, and its absolute right to govern itself without interference. These claims are ancient. So are their effects: most recently the demonstrable inability of the Church to purge itself, after almost forty years of trying, from the plague of paedophilia (more than sixty years from the earliest internal reports). Until it drops its metaphysical pretensions, even another forty years effort is unlikely to be enough to solve the problem.

Like most things Catholic, the rationale for the existence of the Church comes from St. Paul. Paul called the Church a ‘body’. He was not being metaphorical; he literally meant a body, an entity which was neither a tribe, nor a civil association, nor a state. The body he had in mind, he claimed, had a very different kind of existence, what philosophers call an ontology, from other sorts of organisations. According to Paul, the Church has an identity which is entirely independent of the identity of its members. Those who accept this identity take on mutual responsibility for the conduct as well as well-being of one other. And they are accountable only to the identity of the Church - effectively its clerical hierarchy - which determines if this responsibility is being carried out properly.

In short, Paul’s body of the Church is a metaphysical being which is inherently superior to the being of its members. It is empowered, because of its mode of being, to demand accountability from its members. But it possesses a metaphysical immunity for any actions it takes to further is own interests, which are per definition the real interests of humanity and the entirety of creation. The Church therefore is the sole legitimate arbiter of the interests of its members. And although its members are responsible for each other, the Church is not responsible for anything they do.

If this sounds vaguely like the definition of the modern corporation in law, that’s because it is. Paul’s body became an institution which spread throughout the world - not just the world of religion but also the world of law, which controls this very unusual, very troublesome institution. But the entity which began it all, the Church, has never been willing to compromise its metaphysical status by submitting to the mundane demands of law. The Church is and has its own law. And although it will submit to judgments of civil and criminal law because it is forced to, it will not admit to the superiority of civil justice.

D’Antonio calls the manifestation of this metaphysical theory “clerical culture.” This isn’t incorrect but it isn’t the whole story either. The leaders of the Church, priests, do act to protect the reputation and the physical well-being of the Church as a matter of course. Nevertheless, the idea of the clerical culture is an incomplete description of the problems of deception, evasion, and duplicity which have been clear progressively in North America, Europe, Africa, Australia and South America as scandal after scandal has emerged. And it is a dangerously incomplete characterization because it doesn’t address the essential metaphysical issue.

The apparently unending series of revelations of abuse of children by clerics also shows the complicity of the lay community. Family members of the abused children, parochial and episcopal administrators, and run of the mill parishioners, routinely cooperated in the cover-ups and often offensive denials of the culpability of the Church. This at least suggests that whatever it is about the Church that candidate priests learn in the education and that inculturates them into an attitude of both casual denial and equally casual rationalisation of abuse, is not an adequate explanation of the phenomenon.

The culture of the Church is not a matter of clerical attitudes or training alone. Clerical training, parochial and episcopal administrative responses to reported problems, and the perceptions of the non-clerical members of the Church are shaped not by policy statements or procedures. They are shaped and directed by doctrine - the drawing out of the logic of metaphysical presumptions. Catholics are not so much taught the doctrines of the Church, as immersed in them as reality from infancy. These doctrines are not separable from each other. They form a whole. Compromise on one implies compromise on all.

Baptism, for example is not simply a ritual of admission, it is doctrinally a metaphysical transformation which alters the fundamental existence of the new member of the community. Similarly the ordination of a priest is doctrinally a further change in being, a change which can never be undone. The Church itself is doctrinally a societas perfecta, an entity controlled and protected by the Holy Spirit which provides everything it needs to carry out its mission. Baptism creates a duty - primarily to obey. Ordination creates a privilege, to instruct, direct, and forgive (including of course other priests). The societas perfecta is an ontological status which cannot be improved upon.

Metaphysics is the sea in which Catholics swim. But metaphysics is not something inherited from Jewish roots. It is a Greek philosophical invention coopted by Catholic theologians over centuries. The resulting narrative of existence is not a topic of everyday conversation. Nevertheless it underlies any conversation involving the Catholic Church and what is possible to justify in the Church for itself. This is a pervasive metaphysical not clerical culture. Until the Church comes to grips with its obviously self-serving metaphysics, that is to say convenient fictions, conversation is futile and possibilities for reform are nil. The incidence of reported abuse may diminish but as long as the theory of the Church remains intact, abuse will recur in one form or another.

D’Antonio quotes Tom Doyle, a Catholic priest who was involved in investigating the first publicly litigated case of child abuse in Louisiana in 1984: “The Church in America is a dinosaur with a head the size of an ant, and the head thinks it’s in charge.” This is the kind of metaphysical monster which the Catholic Church has made of itself, and not just in America: a corporation which has lost control, particularly of itself. Ill-considered metaphysics is wont to do that to folk.

Postscript: an article received today which touches on the importance of metaphysics in the abuse scandal: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articl...

Post-postscript 24July 2018: the crisis just doesn’t quit: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ch...

Yet more: the scandal that keeps on giving: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ho...

15Aug2018: Incredibly, the pace of the thing appears to be increasing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/a...

19Aug2018: It’s a fair question to ask: who lies more, DJT or the bushops of the Catholic Church? https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/19/us...

30Aug2018: It turns out that JP II had about as much credibility as DJT, but they made him a saint anyway. Another symptom of the metaphysical mess: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/an...

24Sept18: a very encouraging sign of rebellion. This is a sermon given last Sunday in Washington DC and reportedly met with sustained applause from the congregation: https://docs.google.com/file/d/1DoogB...

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Spies by Michael Frayn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The World From Under a Hedge

There is nothing lacking in Spies. Character, plot and pace are about as close to perfect as it gets. Frayn’s understanding of the juvenile mind is formidable. His intellectual subtlety is enviable. His ethical sense is acute. He knows how to tell a story. Proust was inspired by the scent of fresh madeleines; the memory of Frayn’s narrator is provoked by the sickly stink of a privet hedge in Summer under which he spends his time in spying on the neighbourhood. The reader might expect, therefore, a less than up-beat moral.

The theme of Spies is the sort of quantum physics of everyday life. Its protagonist, Stephen, is acutely aware of the power of simple observation when he says, “Just by looking at things I shouldn’t have looked at, I’ve changed them.” This is the appreciation by age of the naive, destructive folly of youth. We change the world into something different by our smallest and most passive acts. His elderly self knows the dangers of youthful curiosity: “I think that what he instinctively grasped was this: that some things must never even be known.” One’s mere presence has consequences that can’t be anticipated.

Stephen’s epiphany is his realisation that he is responsible for what he experiences: “Most of the time you don’t go around thinking that things are so or not so, any more than you go around understanding or not understanding them. You take them for granted.” Taking things for granted is what young people do. It could be the definition of youth. Understanding the effect of one’s life on others is what only old people can do. Unfortunately it’s a non-transferable skill. So it has to be learned, if it is learned at all, by every generation.

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Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Lunatics in Charge of the Asylum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Copenhagen by Michael Frayn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Quantum Ethics

Intentions maketh the man - in love, life, and war. Well perhaps not. Who knows anyone’s genuine motives, especially one’s own. Our reasons for acting the way we do involve telling a story. Stories justify intentions as rational, beneficial, necessary, or just plain good. But whose story? All stories are arbitrary, or at least incomplete. And they’re all told after the fact. Stories require a point of view which can only be adopted after the consequences of action have emerged. So how compelling are these stories about intentions?

Sometimes, as in Quantum Physics, different, fundamentally incompatible, stories appear necessary to account for what happens - Wave vs. Particle stories for example. Quantum physics raises the question of what is real in the physical world. Analogously, Copenhagen, raises the same issue of reality in the moral world. Frayn uses multiple fictional dialogues between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941, with Bohr’s wife in a role of moderator, as a way to investigate this reality.

Formerly intimate friends, Bohr and Heisenberg found themselves mortal enemies after Germany invaded Denmark in 1940. Both had been instrumental in the discovery of the possibility of nuclear fission, and therefore the the atomic bomb. The purpose of their meeting, initiated by Heisenberg, has always been somewhat mysterious. Frayn uses the confusions of memory and possible misinterpretations of both men to invent his own story about the meeting.

Scientists like Bohr and Heisenberg tend to tell their stories about the physical world in multiple drafts that are then critiqued by their colleagues. So Frayn has them do this dramatically about their own intentions. The first draft is purely professional, all about scientific necessity and the analytic challenges of quantum theory. Intellectual importance, the interests of science, the dignity of humankind are the sorts of motives at hand. Pragmatics, in other words - the theory was useful; it worked. But do these motives work to explain the phenomena of their own behaviour?

The second draft opens the possibility of personal ambition. This version involves a considerable degree of self-rationalisation and putting the best possible gloss on matters of faded memory. Personal reputation, fears, jealousies, and antipathies emerge as things far more important than science or the advance of knowledge. But who can be sure of the combined effects of these hidden emotions. Many of these emotions may be unconsciously harboured and never reach the level of articulate thought. A principle of moral uncertainty emerges: Can we be aware of these motives and act on them at the same time?

The third draft includes the ‘bigger picture’, like involvement in non-scientific ethics - other things that were done, or prevented from being done during the war, that point to justification of one’s actions. Influence rather than direct undertaking is what’s relevant here. Therefore actions are more difficult to pin down as the origin of a chain of events, a chain reaction, indicating an overall programme. Intention becomes murky; and its justification even murkier. Can moral reality be described as a sort of quantum entanglement among events or is it a profoundly artificial abstraction of a sociological system?

It is clear that Copenhagen highlights the issue of scientific ethics. What isn’t clear is what contribution it makes to either the debate or the moral thinking of individual scientists. Heisenberg worked to help a homicidal maniac. Bohr worked to stop that maniac and participated in killing several hundred thousand Japanese as a result. Both men enabled a global reign of terror that persists. Is there an ethic in this story which makes sense?

So, uncertainty rules everywhere. However it is Margarethe, Bohr’s wife, who sees through the male logic and understands the central moral import of the situation. “If it’s Heisenberg at the centre of the universe,” she says, “then the one bit of the universe that he can’t see is Heisenberg.” Ethics come from elsewhere; we can’t trust ourselves with the burden. Who else to trust, therefore, is the critical question.

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Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality by Max Tegmark
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Mind of God

It starts with Plato, this idea that the universe is a mathematical expression, populated by objects which are (often imperfect) copies of abstract ‘forms’ (the most perfect of which are numbers), which in turn interact according to strict rules of geometry and aesthetic necessity.* More importantly it was Plato who suggested that things are not what they seem. What we are able to perceive are distorted manifestations of eternal truths which are permanently beyond our grasp, leaving open, therefore, the meaning of what we glibly call reality. In a sense he was the first post-modernist in pointing out that reality isn’t even verifiable much less obvious through our observation and experience.**

Hence the general preference of ‘hard’ scientists, like physicists, for Aristotle rather than Plato. Aristotelians like to rely on their senses; they crave observational data, facts. They look down on Platonists, including mathematicians, just as Freudians look down on Jungians, and for the same reason. They simply can’t abide the idea that eternal laws could generate facts - whether those laws are of the Collective Unconscious or the Eternal Forms. For science, facts precede laws both logically and ontologically. Facts are real. Laws are inferred regularities, evolving theories. As such they can only be considered as expedient hypotheses.

So the conflict of fact and law has been fought for two and a half millennia with no victory for either side in sight. Tegmark‘s book is a chronicle of a recent skirmish in which the Platonic standard is held high. Tegmark is a bit coy but he puts forth the historical Platonist party line clearly as: “a crazy-sounding belief of mine that our physical world not only is described by mathematics, but that it is mathematics, making us self-aware parts of a giant mathematical object... our physical world not only is described by mathematics, but that it is mathematics: a mathematical structure, to be precise.”

This particular battle is part of a much larger war, in a sense a cosmic war, called metaphysics. Metaphysics is the discipline of thinking about ‘what’s really there.’ The main difficulty in the metaphysical war from an intellectual point of view is the same as in any other war, namely that the cause one is fighting for justifies its own arguments. Each side has an implicit criterion of validity which, quelle surprise, produces precisely the results to show success by that criterion and failure by the opposing view. All wars in metaphysics are, therefore, ‘just’ - for both sides.

To oversimplify, but not by much, mathematicians really appreciate patterns. They search for them constantly and revel in the thought that they are already there waiting to be discovered. While scientists are also attuned to patterns, however, they know that scientific progress is most often generated not by taking patterns at face value but by concentrating on the apparent exceptions to patterns which are the source of new theoretical patterns. The standards of evidence in the two disciplines are very different.

So for the scientist, the weirdness of quantum physics and black holes is a spur to create a new theory, to confront a resistant universe with observational challenges. For the mathematician the challenge is to coax out the already existing pattern within the structure of his mathematical representations and techniques. One man’s Mede is another man’s Persian, to coin a phrase. Each considers the other to be somewhat Gnostic in their reliance on esoteric knowledge and their distinctive forms of mistrust of the universe - the scientific hesitation about generalization, and the mathematical disdain for the particular.

It makes no sense trying to reconcile the two views because, as an observant philosopher might point out, each already contains a presumption about what reality is and these presumptions are validated by there very use not by their results, which are fundamentally incomparable. This incomparability is not rational; it is aesthetic, that is, pre-rational. The aesthetic is the foundation upon which each constructs his own edifice of Reason.

The bottom line then is that while Our Mathematical Universe is an entertaining as well as informative read, its real value is probably to confirm the views already held by the Platonist choir. It is only likely to irritate the Aristotelians who already think that mathematics has ruined real science by its entirely abstract reasoning. To the latter, Tegmark will not seem merely “crazy-sounding” but crazy tout court.

*It turns out that Plato was more correct than even he could have thought according to the latest science: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/sci...

**For a rather wonderful tale of the Platonic view of mathematics, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy by Matthew Stewart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Ideology of Corporate Power

A sentimental aphorism has it that we’re all unique. Not so. Among the almost 8 billion people in the world, the chances that there is someone else who looks like you, talks like you, and even thinks like you if fairly high. There just aren’t that many genetic and cultural variables to ensure the reality of a conceit like uniqueness. But actually meeting a physical or psychological twin is another matter in which the 8 billion works against ever encountering him. Unless, of course, he writes a book and generates a little fame. Then, bingo, we realise our membership in a class, a culture, a generation of more or less replicable people. Someone out there shares our experience and concerns. A miracle.

So, paradoxically, when we have a near-double, we have an identity. Matthew Stewart is proof of my own replicability and confirms my own identity. We share the disappointed aspirations of young academics who find that knowing more and more about less and less is the path down an intellectual black hole. We both spied some hope that there might be a place for intellect in the practical world of business and became management consultants. This proved a way of making a living but ultimately brought us both close to moral bankruptcy. Both of us ended up returning to a sort of quasi-academic environment whence we hurl occasional broadsides at the present representatives of our past lives.

No one pays attention to these broadsides. It’s really not in anyone’s interest to do so because they are meant to undermine that central virtue of modern business life: confidence. Professional confidence (not to be confused with its moral cousin) is the only essential trait of the corporate business executive. Everything else - commercial knowledge, political skills, contacts, etc. - can be either acquired or learned with enough confidence to do so. Confidence makes one a player. Trump is the empirical proof that the world is corporate and is fuelled by confidence. Arrogance is simply unreflective confidence, the highest form of virtue. Most of the 8 billion appear to agree. The hell with them: there is an Other.

Confidence is self-generated; it can’t be instilled or taught. It is the virtue of the Americanised individualist. Confidence is the secular residue of that paramount Christian virtue of faith. You either have it or you don’t. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And the sure way to lose whatever you might have of it is to question its presence. Ultimately this is what Stewart does in this very well written book on the conceits of not just management consulting but also of the whole ideology of corporate management, which is really a global system of quasi-religious belief and power. For me the similarity of our experiences is toe-curling and I would like to forget about most of them.

Management is a ‘thing’ of the 20th century. No one is quite sure whether it is a coercive or a facilitating thing, or what peculiar substance it might have. But is a thing whose importance increased, not incidentally, with the importance of that other 20th century ‘thing’, the corporation. As a practical matter, it is these two things in which the world has most confidence. We may complain about the corporation and its management from time to time simply because it is involved in so much of our daily lives. But we are confident that their brand names and capabilities will be there when we want them. And we are confident that they will continue to provide us the employment, the career path, and the pensionable wealth that we need to survive.

So to suggest that global confidence in corporate management is misplaced is not going to be a popular message, at least among the already confident. Corporate culture is not primarily concerned with the organisation, production and sale of goods and services, that is to say, economics. Rather this culture is driven by expectations, that is to say, finance - what an entirely imaginary future might yield. This is a world comprised entirely of expectations, unverifiable facts as assertions. Despite their ephemeral nature, expectations are what makes the corporate world tick. Confidence is the mutually agreed upon engine of the corporate economy of expectations. Think big or get lost.

Expectations, of course, are products of the imagination. They are fictions. And like all fictions, they are lies. Expectations are not perceived as lies, however, as long as they are mutually re-enforcing. My lie confirms your lie and vice-versa. At that point our joint lie becomes reality, a context in which we feel comfortable... and, of course, confident. Stewart does a rather comprehensive job of cataloguing those joint lies. Corporate managers lie about their lack of confidence. Management consultants lie about their achievements. But together these lies can generate what everyone needs - greater expectations.

Confidence is not hope. Expectations are not prudent forecasts. Hope recognises one’s incapacity, one’s limitations, one’s vulnerability. Forecasts have at least some reference to cause and effect, action and result. But confidence is directly proportionate to the level of one’s expectations, no matter how absurdly high. Expectations are the social proof of personal confidence. This is a remnant of the Calvinist certainty of faith in salvation as proof of salvation. Management consulting exists functionally to boost expectations to new levels, to spread the faith. This, not any other results or consequences, is what they get paid for. As Stewart points out “this isn’t science; it’s a party trick.” It’s also the new ministry selling salvation in this world rather than another.

The corporation is a competitive market in expectations. Everyone in the corporation is trying to outgun everyone else in the expectation of advancement as a sign of their personal confidence. The more senior they are they more they are hired for just this reason. But the CEO, the department head, the section manager, the team leader, are all vulnerable to the conflicting expectations of those who work for them. Most of these subordinates think they are better than the folk who manage them. This makes expectations a battle field. And as Stewart says therefore, “consultants are selling something other than pure analysis.” In fact they don’t sell anything rational at all.

What they are selling is most often a way out of the gridlock in expectations within a management team. Consultants are the Prussian shock troops called in to tilt that field in the favour of the senior executive who often does feel remarkably like Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo waiting for relief by Papa Blucher. The consultants’ expectations become his expectations; and the lower level griping and sniping are crushed under a mass of analytics and Aristotelian logic. Consultants prove that people don’t know what they should know, don’t know how to act when they get to know it, and resist learning how to act unless threatened. The idea is to build such a formidable fictional expectation that no one dare raise his or her head above the parapet in objection.

In short, consultants are an instrument of power, of coercion, of dominance which has little to do with whatever nominal problem they have been hired to address. Stewart puts the matter less laconically: “The chief message to be communicated [to managers during a consulting assignment], in almost all situations, was that you will be expected to work much harder than you ever have before and your chances of losing your job are infinitely greater than you have ever imagined. As savvy managers understand, consultants are the cattle prods of the modern corporation.” If you not with us, you’re against us and will be condemned to hell. Generalised chutzpah.

Consultants are fired not when an assignment is completed (most would go on forever, other things being equal), but when they have become part of the managerial problem, that is, when they become a threat to the executive who hired them. Consultants may go native as they eventually understand the business and develop a truly informed opinion; they may become a cost liability which is no longer defensible by the client-executive; or they may have simply demonstrated that their contribution to commercial success is as fictitious as their past accomplishments. Whatever the specific circumstances, the underlying reason for ‘breakup’ is the loss, for the moment of their coercive power.

The ideology of management - that there is something ‘scientific’ to the idea of management - persists, however. It is the rational excuse for calling the consultants (or their replacements) back - sooner rather than later. This is the big cultural lie that everyone has an interest in ignoring. Stewart’s summary is hard to beat:

“The modern idea of management is right enough to be dangerously wrong and it has led us seriously astray. It has sent us on a mistaken quest to seek scientific answers to unscientific questions. It offers pretended technological solutions to what are, at bottom, moral and political problems. It conjures an illusion—easily exploited—about the nature and value of management expertise. It induces us to devote formative years to training in subjects that do not exist. It favors a naïve view of the sources of mismanagement, making it harder to check abuses of corporate power. Above all, it contributes to a misunderstanding about the sources of our prosperity, leading us to neglect the social, moral, and political infrastructure on which our well-being depends”

You are not alone, Matt. If we could get all these corporate types to read more literary fiction rather than pretend to manage, everyone would be better off. Until then, we can share our heretical lack 0f confidence.

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The Assistant by Robert Walser
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Watching a Train Wreck

Essential reading for the aspiring entrepreneur; even more so for his or her partner. Over a six month period, the protagonist, Joseph, observes the disintegration of a family driven to penury by its obsessive paterfamilias. Joseph watches as all the emotional and financial resources of the family are consumed by a business project. Having recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), I am struck by the commonality of experience related in books written a century apart.

In The Assistant, the role of Kingsolver’s fundamentalist African missionary is played by a Swiss German engineer; but the personalities and the sociology in which the action takes place are identical in the two books. Both centre on compulsive, irresponsible males who inflict their personal ‘visions’ on their families. The wives are aware of both the incompetence and neurotic drive of their husbands; yet they choose to continue their loyalty and support. The effects of this complicity in the delusions of male dominance are tragic in both cases.

One can only marvel how deeply ingrained this deference to male desire for whatever it is they think they want - money, power, reputation, redemption - in our culture. It is shameful, not so much because it exists but because it is so persistent despite widespread publicity about its destructiveness. Ever since fiction has been widely available to a literate population, the same theme of the exploitation of families by dominant males is consistently described.

Yet males continue to provide the excuse of ‘doing it for the family’. And females continue to believe the male rhetoric, oblivious to both the selfishness and the risk implied by such a rationale. Men lie. They start by lying to themselves about things like ambition, and personal fulfilment, and making the world a better place. They’re encouraged to do so by other men who want to justify their own lies. And when no one calls their bluff, they lie to everyone else, particularly their families.

Apparently, given a chance, women do the same: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Schrödinger's Cat 1: The Universe Next Door by Robert Anton Wilson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Statutory Ape

Henny Youngman was the British-American stand-up king of one-liners: ‘Take my wife... Please... etc.’ Wilson is the novelistic equivalent, an author who assembles a series of gags into a gig. The Universe Next Door isn’t a story so much as a comedic monologue.

The comedy covers everything from academic science and literature to politics and the cultural conceits of both the Left and Right. It is necessarily of its time. So, much of it is probably opaque to those not of a certain age. The jokes and allusions are so fast and furious though that there’s enough to keep the young interested if not so incensed as their grandparents.

And their grandparents were incensed - by the kinky sex, and the casual drug use, the glorification of various grubby sub-cultures, and the trashing of liberal sentiment. Wilson hated the Right-wing William F. Buckley but he also hated Buckley’s Lefty opponents just as much. He knew the real problem of the day was fervent idealism: “The Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.” So nobody liked Wilson and his nihilistic attitude.

Turns out though that Wilson was fairly prescient. He saw the idealistic terminus ad quem: the inevitability of terrorism and the rise of the anti-idealist leader. And he knew he was watching a revolution in the making. Writing in 1979, he predicted “The Revolution of Lowered Expectations... By 1984 nobody in the country had any higher expectations than a feudal serf.” Economically, he called it exactly right.

He also got some other things correct about what might be called democratic reason: “Sanity had failed to save the world and ... only insanity remained as a viable alternative.” The country elected Furbish Lousewart as its president. Lousewart‘s populist philosophy of “asceticism, medievalism, and despair” formed the revolutionary core. So the desired result was produced: “society is everywhere in conspiracy against intelligence.” Getting even is Lousewart’s (and everyone else’s) motivation. Nihilism has triumphed through the opposition of idealisms, religious as well as political.

Wilson’s one-liners are often as good as Youngman’s: “When you are up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you started out to drain the swamp.” But the problem with one-liners is that they have no intellectual staying power. They get thrown out by the author and then thrown away by the reader. They’re probably the only authentic way to communicate nihilism but until Twitter they had no lasting impact.

It took Trump and Twitter to realise Wilson’s fears. Wilson was two or three generations ahead of his time. The only positive advice he could give then was ignored but has now become obviously relevant with Trump: “Please listen; it’s vital to your future. We are all … living in a novel” the fact that it’s a very bad novel is what should concern us most.

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