On the Natural History of Destruction 
by 

W.G. Sebald

 

Helping the Angel of History

Although Sebald has some clearly stated moral criticisms of the Allied carpet-bombing of German civilians during WWII, these are not the main subject of his Zurich lectures nor of the personal responses he includes in this volume. Rather, it is the widespread impact of such trauma and the subsequent effects of what amounts to a massive cultural as well as psychological repression that he analyses. I think such an effort is worthwhile mainly because it suggests parallel phenomena in many other areas of large-scale human tragedy.

There are events simply too terrible to recall, to discuss, or even to admit to consciousness. Sebald’s case in point is the intentional mass killing of non-combatants in dozens of German cities from 1943 through 1945. The death toll in Hamburg alone was probably that of the atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And the physical destruction was virtually complete in many German cities over even greater areas than in Japan. 

The remarkable thing for Sebald is that these losses were not seriously considered in either official analyses or in literature for almost half a century. According to Sebald “There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described.” He goes on to portray a sort of continuing conspiracy to avoid “the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all Germans together in the postwar years, and indeed still binds them, more closely than any positive goal such as the realization of democracy ever could.”

Sebald identifies several possible reasons for this communal “self-anaesthesia.” The first and most obvious is the repressed guilt for the war itself. But there is also the humiliation risked if such events were to recognised in the presence of the forces of the occupying victors. And given the immense task of rebuilding from nothing in the affected cities, morale could only have been compromised by contemplating the causes of the devastation. These seem obvious, or at least plausible, enough.

But these are rationalisations rather than explanations. The basic fact that these rationalisations revolve around is the experience itself, an experience of survival within inexpressibly horrible conditions of death, destruction, decay, filth, and disease. The survivors witnessed extinction not just of their friends and families but of an entire civilisation. They starved, lived in caves, acted more like an insect colony than a society - in some cases, for years.

Collective catastrophe forms an historical break, a before and after. The before becomes largely mythological in light of the catastrophe while the catastrophic events themselves are incomprehensible, almost divinely transcendent in their sheer excessiveness. Melodrama is always a literary temptation in these circumstances; but this is a distraction rather than an exploration of the horror involved.

Sebald puts his intellectual finger on the central problem which is not with officials or authors but with the nature of the experience: Those who undergo such trauma cannot express their experience. He refers to the Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe’s notes on his conversations with survivors of the Hiroshima bomb who were unable to speak about the day of the blast 20 years later. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man describes his hopelessness in the Nazi death camp knowing that he will be unable to communicate the depth of the suffering he is experiencing. The survivors of apartheid in South Africa similarly report a failure of expression during the Truth and Reconciliation process. Some things simply can’t be said.

It does not seem unreasonable to extrapolate this sort of mute testimony to other events - to slavery and the extermination of the natives in America; to those who served in the trenches in the first European war; to the survivors of genocide in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. The list of such occasions in which language of their existential reality is entirely absent is of course endless. Recognition that perhaps the most important things about such events are inherently beyond language is significant in everything from literature to government policy-making. Minimally it might make us all a bit more humble in our opinions.

When Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier was asked in 1972 about the long term effects of the French Revolution, his famous response was “It’s too early to say.” Experiences get passed on subtly from generation to generation. Mass trauma seems most likely to get transmitted entirely outside of language. This makes their effects more rather than less pronounced. Just recognising this possibility might be a major intellectual breakthrough.

Sebald mentions Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, painted so evocatively by Paul Klee. The Angel, with horrified fixity, looks back on the past while it is swept forward by the storm of events. It is completely oblivious to either its present state or its future. It, therefore, has no real experience except of what has already been recorded. It is helplessly mute because records are inadequate to cope with the circumstances in which it finds itself.

Sebald’s book is a rambling series of notes, memories, and anecdotes which are highly personal and intensely engaged in German literary politics. It’s merit, I think, lies in these two apparently restrictive characteristics. Sebald doesn’t present a thesis; he provokes thought. The book is a sort of meditation which demands thinking about tragedies other than the destruction of almost every German city. It is a book that tries to at least get Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History to look over its shoulder.



Postscript 12Aug19: An interesting article on the transmission of trauma among generations: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts...

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The End of Reason

For those of us on the downward slide of dermal deterioration and progressive organ failure, Mortality is just the ticket: a sort of how-to about dying. No sugary, maudlin advice about the correct attitude toward the inevitable. No encouraging tales of the will to live. And no suggestions about mitigating the distress involved. Just a number of handy things to keep in mind about the roadblocks we’re all likely to meet on the road to peaceful non-existence.

Here’s the scoop: Barring accidents, and disclaiming by the insurance company, most of is are going to end up as drug addicts. We’ll be looking forward expectantly not to a cure for whatever terminal bug or virus or faulty organ we might contain, but for the next fix of Codeine, or OxyContin, or Morphine (for me it’s Gabapentanine, which provides blissful spinal pain relief and is, of course, highly addictive). The prospect of a remedy in the offing for what ails us isn’t nearly as significant as the supertanker of pain bearing down on us in a very narrow channel elderly existence.

This is where the human species has a maladaptation which is probably necessary for the continuation of the species. Memory can conjure up the events, emotions, and significance of the distant past, but it has no clue about the toothache repaired last week. Until, of course, it returns and we recognise once again another major design flaw in the human body.

If women could remember the pain of childbirth, I doubt that the fertility rate would exceed one. I also doubt that many people would submit to multiple chemo or radiation treatments, or the dozens of other medical solutions that require us to starve, vomit, excrete, secrete, and otherwise suffer intensely. No one tells you how bad it’s going to be - either because they’ve forgotten, or more likely because they presume the trade off between pain and an extra day of life is always stacked in favour of life.

This is, of course, nonsense. It is the selfishness of the living who are, for the moment, without pain and who want to avoid it by forestalling death at any cost. The terminal patient can be a victim of both the disease and the relatives who think their encouragement is justified by the extension of life. The medical profession will experiment endlessly, or at least as long as it is profitable, with one’s body. But it’s the family who think they own the soul, and they ain’t giving it up. Pain is an unfortunate side effect and really isn’t important in their moral calculus.

The point is that the medical treatments for the kinds of conditions from which most of us die today are forms of torture. I don’t want to be tortured. I don’t want to suffer. I don’t even want to suffer ‘significant discomfort’ for any extended period of time. I would like to remain conscious and intellectually active for as long as possible but not if such activity is inhibited by the threat 0f constant pain. I would like to experience the presence of my loved ones but in the knowledge that I can consider them, and they me, without pain even if this involves a certain trippiness.

In short, I far prefer sleep to suffering. I think Hitchens did as well. This seems to me quite reasonable.

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Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy by Susan Neiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Lifespan of Moral Evil

This is a long and complex book, possibly longer and more complex than it needs to be in order to establish its main thesis, namely that “The problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought.” More specifically, “The sharp distinction between natural and moral evil that now seems self-evident was born around the Lisbon earthquake [of 1755] and nourished by Rousseau. Tracing the history of that distinction, and the ways in which the problems refused to stay separate, is one aim of this book.” For Neiman, this is the birth of ‘modernity’, an attitude toward the world that will last until the other pole of her narrative, the death camp of Auschwitz as the representative symbol of the Holocaust.

Neiman establishes the centrality of evil through a creative but simple intellectual move:

“The problem of evil can be expressed in theological or secular terms, but it is fundamentally a problem about the intelligibility of the world as a whole. Thus it belongs neither to ethics nor to metaphysics but forms a link between the two.”

For her, therefore, the opposite of evil is not good but intelligibility. That which is unintelligible, that is to say chaotic, disorderly, brutally arbitrary, and without rational foundation is by definition what philosophers, and not just theologians, have historically considered as evil. Only during the Renaissance did evil become an accepted antonym of good, and only then did evil become a specifically theological problem involving the relationship between evil and God. This development promoted the distinction between moral evil and natural evil which has persisted into modern philosophical thought.

A sharp distinction between moral and natural evil was unknown to the ancient Greeks. More to the point, it was unknown to Judaism and Christianity. The biblical story of Job, for example, demonstrates decisively that moral and natural evil are indistinguishable. Neiman uses the Lisbon earthquake as the signal event from which the hard distinction arises. In a world considered to be created and maintained by divine order, such an event threatens the intelligibility of not just the universe but also its purported creator.

The distinction between moral and natural evil allowed everyone, Philosophes and Christian apologists, to have their cake and eat it - at least for a time. Moral evil is a human affliction; natural evil is a divine mystery. Ethics (or moral theology) diagnosed the human disease and its cure, while Christian faith prescribed a fatalistic confidence that, despite apparent disasters, the prevailing conditions and events of creation are best in the long term. The distinction also allowed a scripturally based explanation. There is a connection between moral and natural evil just as described in the natural disasters that had befallen ancient Israel. The new Calvinist theology fit right with this explanation.

God was thereby given a metaphysical free pass. But it was human beings who now became even more unintelligible, that is to say, more evil than they had ever been before. Religionists could point to a connection between moral and natural evil as just and appropriate compensation for sin. Suffering is a consequence of moral evil - entirely rational, and intelligible in concept, therefore. But how much is enough punishment? And why include the just and unjust? What about the infants? And by the way, are the infinite punishments of hell really justified by the finite sins of human beings no matter how heinous? The biblical sources themselves look less and less intelligible, and Calvinism more and more Manichaean.

But the Philosophes also shared the problem. What constituted a ‘normal,’ ‘rational,’ or ‘intelligible’ human being? The issue is crucial if human beings were to be considered as intelligible without God.* Leibniz had proposed a world in which God guided every human interaction. If God didn’t exist or was disengaged as the Deists suggested what standard could be applied to judge whether human behaviour was rational or insane? Without the concept of sin and its interference in ultimate purpose, this judgment looks to be arbitrary, certainly as arbitrary as the arbitrary acts of an all-powerful but unintelligible God. So evil remains an issue even after religion is established in its own intellectual niche by Kant.

So a purely human ethics doesn’t have a place to stand. Evil remains a problem. Human behaviour is at least as mysterious as divine behaviour. And mostly that behaviour looks pretty bad. So the cosmic problem of rationality continues in a sort of paired down or localised version. Irrationality was always the threat, but now it travels under the guise of moral evil, an undefinable flaw in humanity which, absent the idea of Original Sin, deteriorates into a label which connotes disgust without any further explanation. Evil is that which is incorrigible because it is unintelligible.

Which eventually brings Neiman to the other pole of her narrative - Auschwitz, the symbol of the fundamental unintelligibility of the event of the Holocaust. The trip from the Lisbon earthquake to the Auschwitz death camp is the central trajectory of her narrative. The Holocaust is incomprehensible in both its magnitude and its intention. It defies explanation, although many have tried to provide one. Its purpose is so unacceptable that even God could not have pursued it. Yet human beings conceived and executed it. Modernity, the idea that human beings are responsible for creating and enforcing their own ethical code, has ended in failure.

The Holocaust defies psychological, sociological and anthropological science just as the Lisbon quake defies theology. Rationality resides neither in God nor in Man. Nor, apparently, does it reside in Nature if we take things like Quantum and Relativity Physics seriously (hence Einstein’s quip about God and dice). The world may be describable but it is also as unintelligible as it has always been (I blame Plato). In fact, the more we know the less intelligible many things are. Neiman‘s analysis of philosophical history is interesting. But her idea of evil is, for me, indistinguishable from what other philosophers, writers and scientists call rational thought, or more simply, reason.

If this is so, then the 20th century certainly witnessed the death of reason as a fixed set of principles or methods, as the 18th century witnessed the death of the Will 0f God as the universal, uncontested explanation for the state of the world. Scientific research, linguistic analysis, psychoanalysis and existential philosophies also undermined the concept of intelligibility along with events like the unspeakable tragedy of the Holocaust. The result can be loosely called post-modernism. The criteria of intelligibility changed in post-modernism from what they had been previously, just as the criteria for good science or good literature had changed. If Neiman wants to assert, then, that the concept of evil as a threat to intelligibility also changed as a consequence, I have no objection. It might prove useful in other than historiography. It could catch on. Then again it might not

*One area in which this issue has taken on a dominant importance is Economics. The emerging field of Behavioural Economics is gradually encroaching on the dogmatically imposed rationality of classical micro-economics. More generally the issue in all the social sciences is whether human behaviour should be considered as de facto reasonable, that is in furtherance of some possibly undisclosed purpose, or judged by externally determined fixed standards.

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The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Snares of Grace

What attracts us to a certain kind of life? To a place? To another person? Obviously it is not the bare facts of their existence. Our emotional calculus is subjective. We select the facts that matter to us (or perhaps they are selected for us). We weave these facts into stories to which we then mysteriously become committed. Our lives take on a direction, spiritually as well as geographically. We become devoted to a cause, to something that we come to consider part of ourselves. We fall in love.

Religious people call this process being touched by grace. And certainly it feels as if one has been affected by an alien presence, something entirely outside of oneself. And there is some truth in this feeling because the stories we concoct are never ours alone. No story rises up without a history like Venus from the sea. All stories are to some extent ‘already there’ waiting to be heard and then retold with the emotion we have attached to them.

Some stories are attractive because they are familiar. But others are compelling because they are so different from any we have heard before. The key difference need not be in the story itself but in the unstated presumptions about what is important in life, about what should be noticed, even about what it means to be human. These are the stories that provoke ‘conversion,’ that is to say, the stepping beyond the normal, the conventional, the expected.

Conversion implies a loss of oneself, or at least the self one has been. The new self is only incipient in the stories in which one has enmeshed oneself. It emerges fully only through the unique re-telling of these stories. Vargas-Llosa understands the process: “The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others. It is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others—who would never grant it—until it is at last put into practice.”

If the story and the speaker of the story are very good, important things make sense, things like the origins of suffering and disappointment and the meaning of the feelings of isolation and loss. The best stories are those that include other stories (those 0f other animals as well as humans). And the most inclusive story has incredible value: “Whoever knows all the stories has wisdom.” At this point the story becomes a religion and the storyteller a prophet.* And the world changes, at least for a time. If the story is good enough for those who hear it, it can unify them against stories (and religions) from elsewhere that have nothing to do with their own experience.

*Several people have been in touch to ask how stories include one another. Vargas-Llosa demonstrates how explicitly in his alternate chapters on the tales of the hablador. His stories start out modestly about a single tribe and their origins and responsibilities. The stories gradually expand to include all the ‘men who walk’ in the forests below the Great Gorge of the River. They then extend further up into the Andes to incorporate Inca and other mountain traditions, including those of the Sky gods. Ultimately the stories extend to a re-telling of Judaic persecution and diaspora and of Christian accounts of the birth and death of Jesus. There is even an intriguing digression into the nature of language and its dangers that is worthy of Wittgenstein (or the Kabbalah). The hablador forgets nothing and ensures everything fits in a coherent narrative whole. This syncretistic innovation is its strength. The story rejects nothing; yet it insists on nothing. It’s elements are “what I have been told.” It would presumably continue to grow as it encounters new elements, at least as long as the people of the hablador continue to exist.

Postscript: As yet there has been no story told that is compelling enough to stop the exploitation of the Amazonian jungle or its inhabitants more than a half century after the events in The Storyteller. A more powerful religion is apparently required: https://apple.news/A9-lWNXAqRVyJeYFIH...

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All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Denouncing Reality

According to the philosophy of the 17th century Gottfried Leibniz, no one can know what constitutes reality. We are each trapped in our isolated existence, as if in a windowless room, experiencing things that are both incomplete and incommunicable. Hence everything we claim about the world is an unwitting lie. Truth is some sort 0f summary of what we experience collectively. In such a world, everything is coordinated, as it were, by a benevolent deity who sees to it that we mesh together with some kind of rational and just cohesion despite our inherent mendacity. This, of course, is nonsense. Not because our experience is incomplete or inadequately expressed, but because there is no coordinating God to ensure matters work out with a proper regard for rationality or justice.

On the other hand, perhaps what we call random chance is in fact divine intervention at its most subtle. The Dirty War in Argentina at the end of the 1970’s is Manguel’s point of departure for exploring this possibility from an unlikely angle, namely the unreliability (and irrelevance) of personal biography. Indeed, by recruiting almost every significant Argentine writer of the last century into his narrative of exile and suspicion, Manguel shows how truth emerges from falsehood in a most unexpected way - not through divine action but through the giving up of the endeavour to state the truth. This is the surprising discovery of his journalistic protagonist who is investigating a death in the emigre literary community.

It is intriguing that in order to pull this off, Manguel has to resort to the testimony of a dead man... after he is dead. The dead man is the only one who has the complete picture, who doesn’t lie unknowingly. It is he who has orchestrated the circumstances of the political exiles who find themselves in Madrid - by maliciously lying. But even the dead man, although resurrected for narrative closure, is subject to the laws of chance in both what he encounters and in the results of his actions. He is killed, for example, by another, the writer Bevilaqua, one 0f his victims, and who is already dead. And Bevilaqua never made a claim to know anything.

An Argentinian writer central to Manguel’s story is Enrique Vila-Matas whose study, Bartleby and Co. (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), is about the significance of the books that have never been written, and consequently never told lies. Bevilaqua, it turns out, never actually wrote a book. Ultimately this is why he is important - for not writing. The other writers in the story, both fictional and real, are actually unimportant because as one of the characters insists: “Believe me. Lying: that is the great theme of South American literature.” Only by not telling the story does it even have a chance to be true. This is an alternative that Leibniz had never considered: Truth requires silence; or at least the humility to know that silence has become appropriate.

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No God but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam by Reza Aslan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Riding the Tiger

Various studies of religion over recent decades show a remarkably similar pattern of development that seems to be universal. The start of religious movement is most often sociological and economic. The deficiencies of the prevailing conditions are typically expressed in syncretistic religious terms borrowed from whatever spiritual traditions are available. These social/spiritual insights are progressively codified and formalised as doctrine with only an increasingly vague connection to the original motivating social conditions. As a religious establishment forms to ‘protect’ emerging doctrine, this establishment takes responsibility for interpreting the meaning of religious practice in new circumstances. It is not unusual at this point that differences in interpretation cause schisms among adherents, leading to competing sects.

Aslan’s story is of Islam, but its main points are exactly these and are equally applicable to Christianity. Muhammad, for example, used precisely the same strategy as St. Paul in creating a ‘super-tribe’ of equal members open to all by simple affirmation of a fundamental tenet. Just as with the medieval papacy in which every doctrinal decision was politically motivated, so in Islam the collection of Hadiths, interpretations of Muslim doctrine, were equally political and used to further political aims by leading Muslims. And just as in Christianity, the initial religious thrust in Islam toward social justice and mutual regard succumbed quickly and persistently to the interests of the religious establishment in maintaining its position of power.

Islam is syncretistic, just as is Christianity, and both from similar sources. Islam assimilated its strict monotheism and the idea of prophecy from Judaism, much of its ritual from the pagan cults of Arabia, and its cosmology from ancient Zoroastrianism. But arguably, its most important acquisition was the Christian notion of faith, and the related compulsion to proselytisation. Neither of these was present anywhere among the tribal religions of the Arabian peninsula nor among the ancient religions of Mesopotamia and Persia. They were innovations strictly from Christian sources and, as with Christianity, formed the foundation for a doctrinal religion with global ambitions.

“Religion, it must be understood, is not faith,” says Aslan. He goes on to point out an essential aspect of this fact: “With the exception of a few remarkable men and women, no Jew, Christian, Zoroastrian, or Muslim of this time would have considered his or her religion to be rooted in the personal confessional experiences of individuals. Quite the contrary. Your religion was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity.” Religion, in other words, was a fact of human existence, not a set of beliefs about what other people had perceived as divine revelation. And so it has remained ‘with the exception of a few remarkable men and women’ throughout history. Faith is the basis of a new kind of tribalism which is grounded not on genetics or shared cultural background but on the verbal affirmation of an inner conviction.

But Aslan does not develop the implication of his own observation. Religions of faith are inherently expansive, and, therefore, combative, regardless of their doctrinal content. Both Islam and Christianity have the intention of world-wide conversion. They both have a need to justify themselves as bearers and guardians of truth and to overcome others who claim such truth. The paradox of a Christianity which claims its truth as universal divine love yet feels justified in committing any human horror to prove it, is only rivalled by the paradox of Islam which recognises the gift of human life as divine and is willing to kill in order to ensure others share that recognition. Such is the nature of faith and its doctrines, no matter what such doctrines are. Faith itself, not any particular belief, is the key to understanding these religions of faith.

Doctrinal faith is also inherently prone to fragmentation. That is to say, it promotes conflict, often intense, where none had previously existed. Claims to orthodoxy, correct beliefs, are as diverse in Islam as they are in Christianity. So, consequently, are the mutual anathemas that are delivered most vehemently against those who are closest but not identical in matters of doctrine. Such fragmentation is not promoted or maintained by the rank and file believer who typically has no idea of the content or complexity of doctrinal pronouncements. Rather, it is the result of religious leaders’ political ambitions justified on the basis of alternative interpretations of foundational texts. Put rather more simply: doctrinal religion is necessarily ideological and essentially divisive.

It might be argued that all religion is a political activity in the sense that one of its essential functions is to establish the distinction ‘them’ and ‘us’. But with the doctrinal religions of Christianity and Islam this ethnic distinction, which can be merely descriptive, is transformed into a political judgement that leads to alienation and hatred. Small-scale tribal tension becomes global competition. Possibilities for negotiation among conflicting parties are eliminated by opposing claims to absolute truth. In fact the politics of doctrinal truth tends toward the elimination of all other politics as is clear in such apparently different cultures as that of Afghanistan and Alabama, or of Tehran and Washington D.C.

If Aslan’s analysis is broadly correct, and I think it is, there seems to be an almost instinctive turn to religion in order to justify radical social action. His narrative of Muhammad’s striving against the inequities of contemporary life in Mecca, for example, is parallel to that of St. Paul in his struggle against the inequities of the Roman Empire. In addition, in order to establish their divine credentials for questioning the existing order of things, both men attacked those religious practices closest to them - Paul his native Judaism, and Muhammad his native veneration of the Ka’ba. Similar narratives could easily be developed for Hinduism and Buddhism among other religious movements

Having fulfilled its function in mobilising support for such social change, however, religion quickly develops its own self-serving agenda. The politics of religion then become conservative and, when required, oppressive in order to further its own claims to power. Doctrinal religions based on texts (and therefore interpretations) are most prone to such political cooptation. Whatever spiritual ‘luminosity’ might be present in such texts is inevitably overcome by political expediency. The social objectives riding the tiger of doctrinal religion always winds up inside.

Postscript: For more on doctrinal religion and its alternatives, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Teatro Grottesco 
by 

Thomas Ligotti

 

Industrious Nihilism

Look not here for meaning. But, upon finding any, do try to restrain your enthusiasm. The meaning of these stories is that there is no meaning. Our instinct is to fight against this, to supply explanations or additions to Ligotti’s prose. We are prone to create meaning out of thin air, as it were. But with Ligotti, don’t. Meaning doesn’t exist ‘out there’. And what’s ‘in here’ is totally arbitrary, including, of course, the absence of meaning. One suspects a limitation with the genre; but given Ligotti’s following, that doesn’t seem to matter.

According to Ligotti, we merely ‘rent’ ideas - a thoughtful and useful metaphor. All ideas are old and withered before they ever get to us: “Our very heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next... We live in a world where every surface, every opinion or passion, everything altogether is tainted by the bodies and minds of strangers. Cooties – intellectual cooties and physical cooties from other people – are crawling all around us and all over us at all times.”

These include big ideas like family, constitutional politics and rational thinking, but also commonplace ideas like the biographical details of one’s life, work (including writing as work), casual relationships or the idea that one can actually choose anything. These are all nonsense. At best they’re all part of a sort of un-billed show business, a pointless entertainment. At worst, and most often it’s worst, we dream this stuff up to avoid awareness of how absurdly pointless it all really is. This leads a number of Ligotti’s characters to consider ending it all. Surprisingly, none do.

The world consists of unreadable prescriptions made out by unnamed physicians and presented to uncaring pharmacists by menacing customers who probably want to do us harm. But then again perhaps this is an hallucination which itself is generated by our inveterate commitment to meaning. 

“The attic is not haunting your head – your head is haunting the attic.” This is the central tenet of horror fantasy. Ligotti wants to make sure we know this. This is what makes his fiction interesting. It means absolutely nothing, at least nothing about which to take hemlock. If you ‘get’ anything out of it, you’re a dupe. And I suppose if you get that, you’re a double-dupe. There's only so much 0f this one can take without serious literary indigestion. 

I wonder where I might get a prescription.

My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The World in One’s Hands

Sitra Achra, literally The Other Side in Aramaic, is the kabbalistic domain of evil. It contains what is false and impure, the most important component of which is the idea that evil is contained in the Master of the Universe. This idea is not only an impiety, it is also the source of countless other horrors that prevent human beings from appreciating their own reality. The struggle against the Sitra Achra is the central theme of My Name Is Asher Lev, established at the outset and pursued constantly throughout the book.

Evil is a very tricky theological issue. Typically it is either rationalised away as only apparent in a world governed by Providence; or it is considered an aberration brought about by human beings who act in error. Judaic Kabbalah, unlike most religious practices, however, takes the existence of evil seriously as a fundamental and pervasive fact. But it also refuses to fall into the Gnostic trap of including evil as an inherent part of the divine. Evil exists in a sort of parallel universe, one which lacks a crucial component of the divine and its Creation: language.

Such a universe is in one sense impossible to conceive. There are literally no words to describe it. The best we can do it to call it ‘darkness.’ Within this realm of darkness, chaos reigns. Out of it, the darkness seeks to overcome the light, in part by infecting language itself. Stalin, for example, as part of the Sitra Achra kills Jewish writers, both because they are Jewish and because they write, and substitutes Soviet propaganda for divine truth. There are even Jewish Communists who persecute other Jews. Ultimately it is words that killed the writers, the millions of others in Russia, and in the Holocaust - laws, and commands, and secret memoranda, and judicial verdicts, all in the language made unsafe by the Sitra Achra.

Kabbalah can be considered as a mystical approach to disinfecting language by turning language in on itself, using language to undermine the pretensions of language when it becomes something that it shouldn’t - lies, misrepresentations, distortions, and claims to reality. It is not enough to say the Krias Shema before sleep, the Modeh Ani upon waking, or the dozens of other prayers for every other occasion during the day. Even the language of these prayers must transcend language itself.

The artist in a community devoted to the Kabbalah is thus in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, he relativises written and spoken language through his pictorial interpretation of the world, even the world of darkness which is immune from linguistic description. Such interpretation challenges whatever existing representations of reality there might be and therefore is consistent with kabbalistic practice. On the other hand, it is unclear whether any artistic innovation might be yet another attempt by the forces of the Sitra Achra to dim the light of divine guidance. Is such art grace or heresy?

So the issue raised by Asher Lev’s artistic talent is not aesthetic. It is not even moral in the narrow sense of rightness and wrongness. His abilities as a painter have profound significance, not just for the community but for the entire cosmos. An artist attacks the Sitra Achra directly by entering into it with his art. His duty is to bring the Sitra Achra within the world of divine creation by giving it a language, a means of representing itself in order to see itself clearly.

This is a dangerous business. The danger is that the artist attempts to emulate the Master of the Universe rather than act as His instrument. Does the artist represent light or darkness? Is his art a purification or a desecration? These are as much questions for Asher Lev as they are for his community in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights in which even “washing for meals was a cosmic enterprise.”

Postscript: Also see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We the Barbarians

Here are the headlines about immigration for the benefit of the border patrol and the nativists to consider: We want to be here less than you want us here, even though here was ours before it was yours. We don’t want to be like you. We want to get back before we resemble you too much to go home. You have no idea of the “the weariness we feel at the monuments of another history.” But we’re much tougher than you are.

You make drugs illegal, the price goes up and the trade gets really attractive to bad guys, here and there. You make people illegal, the same thing happens. Everybody pays except the thugs. They make more money the more illegal you make the trade. It’s called capitalism. You invented it, but we’re better at it than you are.

You don’t speak our language. But we understand yours. So we can keep secrets; but you can’t. Not that we don’t already know everything we need to know about you: “Everything’s so stiff here, it’s all numbered and people look you in the eye but they don’t say anything when they do.” It’s fortunate for you that we are more honest than you are.

We are sometimes afraid when we are hungry or tired or caught in a difficult situation. But you are afraid all the time. You “live in fear of the lights going out, as if every day wasn’t already made of lightning and blackouts. You need us. You want to live forever but still can’t see that for that to work you need to change color and number. But it’s already happening.” We are an healthier colour than you.

We know what you think of us:

“We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.”

Perhaps. But we also know things about life you don’t. We are comfortable even in Hell. You are uncomfortable even in Paradise. We have the sort of courage you know nothing about. We are your future.

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Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals by Iris Murdoch
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Literary Systems Theory

There is a style of English philosophy which I find impenetrable. I understand the individual words, the import of the sentences, and (mostly) the thrust of the paragraphs. Yet I clearly fail to get the point of the whole. Murdoch, in this her most famous philosophical work, presents an example of my difficulty.

There is no doubt about Murdoch’s erudition, nor about her literary cogency. But the whole of Metaphysics reads like fragments of a private conversation which the reader is overhearing (the dedication to the Cambridge philosopher and devout Catholic, Elizabeth Anscombe, provides a clue as to her intended interlocutor). There is no context given such as the question being posed, or the nature of the answer provided. Instead there is a sea of literary and philosophical free association. Paragraphs run on for pages as the associations multiply and ramify. If an argument is present it is overwhelmed by the presentation of random opinions, no doubt interesting but mainly distracting from the main line of thought, whatever that might be.

Within this mass certain ideas seem to appear, only to disappear beneath the waves of further rambling discourse. The first, and therefore what I take to be the central idea of the book, is that of the aesthetic idea of a whole. This, for Murdoch, is a mode of appreciation: “The urge to prove that where we intuit unity there really is unity is a deep emotional motive to philosophy, to art, to thinking itself. Intellect is naturally one-making.”

Her claim, with no further proof, is that “The idea of a self-contained unity or limited whole is a fundamental instinctive concept.” I not so sure about this. Analysis breaks down any whole into independent components. And English empiricism itself is nothing if not analytical. There are any number of reductionist philosophers and scientists who would claim that thinking in wholes is a piece of mystical claptrap, and not a natural thing at all but an unfortunately learned error.

Not that I disagree with Murdoch about the importance of thinking in terms of wholes. This is what is commonly referred to as ‘systems thinking’. But what she thinks of as “the calming whole-making tendencies of human thought,” again without any evidence of this assertion, is highly questionable. Murdoch seems bent on projecting her personal experience. Thinking in wholes, as it were, is often extremely disruptive. Marx did it, for example, with some less than calming effects.

In her continuous referencing and cross-referencing, Murdoch also contradicts herself. She seems intuitively aware that the thrust of systems thinking is toward the consideration of ever larger wholes. This leads intellectually with a certain inevitability to theology (although her leap to Christian theology is more than a bit premature - yet another thing she deems it unnecessary to account for). She points out the historical effect of this: “The violence of shock and paradox has of course always been at home in Christianity ever since Paul made his point of preaching not just Christ but Christ crucified.” Indeed, violence and shock, as well as war and strife and a great deal of human misery. Not, therefore, all that calming.

Her second idea is the distinction between fact and value. I find it so convoluted as to be baffling. I think the reason for my confusion (and it is undoubtedly mine) is that throughout her discussion of ‘attention’ as the key to the appreciation of unity*, she makes absolutely no reference to the idea of human (or for that matter divine) purpose. We pay attention for a reason, not because it is an abstractly admirable human trait. We pay attention to get something we want or avoid something we don’t, to solve a problem or to establish that a problem exists.

Attention in other words is a consequence of what we value. We only go about establishing the ‘parameters’ of our attention, that is to say, the facts, because they are relevant to what we value, which is another way of describing our purpose. In short, fact and value cannot be separated for the simple reason that without value there is no fact. To put it in her terms, thinking in wholes creates a certain class of things known as facts. Attending to value as both facts and sources of facts is therefore pivotal in our existence. Our aesthetic determines what we perceive, what we are capable of perceiving.

Murdoch is very big on teleology as a cosmic principle. But she has no apparent use for purpose on a human scale, addressing real issues of well-being and justice. She therefore can’t see that her aesthetic theory has direct and practical ethical content without the need for Christianity or any other doctrinal religion. There are larger and lesser purposes, that is, intentions and systems of intentions that contain other intentions within them. In other words there are better and worse aesthetics depending upon which includes another totally within it.

Whether or not this view is compatible with Murdoch’s is a question beyond my limited intellect. Perhaps someone better equipped will be able to answer. But it seems to me a monumental self-indulgence to put into print a sort 0f random compendium of philosophical notes no matter how profound. There are better ways of spending one’s time than trying to discern her point or her intention.

*It is here too that Murdoch makes a rather substantial theological error while attending to enormous amounts of marginal material, when she says that it is crucial “to attend upon the grace that comes through faith.” Sadly, orthodox doctrine has it exactly the other way round: faith is the product of grace. And attending to faith is a very different matter, especially for an intellectual.

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Factotum by Charles Bukowski
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Site-seeing on a Budget

The human body comes equipped with any number of genetic and acquired defects. Yet it is very difficult to kill. This seems to be the principal message of most of Bukowski’s work. To the extent his protagonist, Hank Chinaski, is biographical, one can only marvel at his ability to survive such largely self-inflicted misery and his refrainment from self-immolation.

“The desire to find a job did not seem to be with me,” Chinaski says after enduring several weeks of virtual starvation and sleeping on park benches, and just prior to decking his nagging father. Chinaski is a mystical bum who depends a great deal on the spirit to move him to anything more challenging than a glass of beer. To suggest Chinaski is hapless might imply that he cares about his fate. He doesn’t. His aimless wandering is his purpose.

New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Miami, and just about everywhere in between. It’s not clear why Chinaski travels; all the sleazy rooming houses and the low-life bars are the same. The jobs in each are different but their commonality is that no one else will do them. Besides, he is always alone in any case: “I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it.”

Miraculously, it seems, Chinaski finds the strength and the time between drinks to write his short stories - four or five a week. Dedicated to his art, when he isn’t falling off a barstool. The one thing he does have is a sort of vengeful hope that he can make it as a writer. The only thing he has to write about aside from the booze is random sex. It sells of course. Anyone who can have that much sex after that much alcohol has something important to say.

There is a certain seedy courtliness in Chinaski’s encounters. After one particularly vigorous session, for example, he can give credit when credit is due: “for a woman with only one ovary she responded generously.” And he is aware of gentlemanly obligations: “A woman is a full-time job. You have to choose your profession.” If you’re a writer, this rules out anything serious. And it doesn’t inhibit the occasional punch out either. Chinaski is an abuser, even when he’s not drunk.

But the booze always wins, over and over again. The repetition is convincing but tedious. Going nowhere fast is a tough story to tell. Petty pilfering, collegial tiffs, office sex and descriptions of a variety of failing businesses don’t really sustain readerly interest.

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Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

America the Fearful

Fear turns democracy into tyranny. Perhaps fear is the foundation of democracy, the fear of material or spiritual loss. Isn’t that the sentiment behind the dispersion 0f power in constitutional government? If so, the Trump-phenomenon may be an inevitable consequence of democratic politics. And the thing to be feared most.

I am reading Ape and Essence, written in 1948, while the racist Trump rally is taking place in North Carolina. Chants of ‘Send her back’ are being directed at black congresswomen by the Evangelical Christian crowd. Huxley has his crowd at a not dissimilar rally shouting

“Church and State,
Greed and Hate: --
Two baboon-persons
In one Supreme Gorilla.”

‘Ape and Essence’ is actually a screenplay contained within this novel of post-World War II paranoia in America. The narrator of the screenplay makes the context clear: “And fear, my good friends, fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life.” Then it was fear of the godless Russians who were intent on taking away America’s Christian heritage. Today it is fear of Central Americans and women with headscarves who... well, threaten to take away America’s Christian heritage.

Huxley understood the problem of democracy as well as de Tocqueville did. As his narrator says, “Today, thanks to that Higher Ignorance which is our knowledge, man's stature has increased to such an extent that the least among us is now a baboon, the greatest an orangutan or even, if he takes rank as a Saviour of Society, a true Gorilla.” It is not inapt, I think, to perceive the North Carolinans and their political hero in exactly this way. The problem is not the Gorilla, who is merely a somewhat defective human being; the problem is the baboons, who use democracy as a means to exercise their fear and hatred without fingerprints.

“Cruelty and compassion come with the chromosomes,” says the narrator. Which one gets switched on is a matter of culture, of the habits and social training to which we all are exposed. Something has gone deeply wrong in the culture of America. It has happened before in other democratic states, but rarely with such global publicity and even more rarely with such unified support from the rank and file religionists of Christianity. “Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man's,” The narrator laments. The apes are in charge, from the bottom up. Democracy, it seems, releases “the Blowfly in every individual heart.”

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The Spire by William Golding
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Work! Work! Work!"

As the spire of the cathedral rises, the state of Jocelin, its Dean, declines - a sort of inverse Dorian Grey. Jocelin is the spire, absorbed by it into its stone and timber. As the spire is supported by four pillars of stone, so Jocelin is supported by the Master Builder, the Verger and their wives. Jocelin finds more of himself in each higher level, as the pillars and his supports deteriorate below him. He is insane. And his insanity is contagious.

A vision is a dangerous thing. Combined with religious faith, a vision can be lethal. And not just for the visionary; a religious visionary with authority is a civil menace. The visionary must repress everything not relevant to achieving his vision - family, friends, workmates, intimacy and contentment of any kind, and, especially, the idea of reality. The visionary causes organisational chaos and political discord, and is proud of it. The visionary knows only work, effort to achieve. Like the spire, he is otherwise empty, and acutely vulnerable to the world’s ‘weather.’ Vision demands the ultimate sacrifice of oneself as a prayer.

Work - ambition, career, advancement, achievement - is the modern form of religion. Faith in work is what drives capitalist culture. Where would we be if we didn’t work? If no one worked? It’s what we were placed here to do. Work is our calling, our vocation. Work protects. Work justifies our inadequacies (despite the warnings of St. Paul), and the injustice of our position. A vision is what we work towards, our teleological spur. Without vision we are without purpose. We have no meaning.

And working to find meaning drives us mad. As Jocelin discovers, “There is no innocent work.”

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Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Knowledge To Kill For

This is not your average paean to the pioneers of the high-tech industry. Who knew, for example, that Turing’s insight had to overcome two centuries of mathematical obsession with Newton’s (but not Leibniz's) infinitesimal calculus? And who knew that the development of the first digital computers was triggered by the military drive to create the hydrogen bomb? And who knew that the victory of binary arithmetic would be ensured by molecular biology? Certainly not me, and I suspect a number of other ignorant sods who presumed that this industry ‘just happened’, like milk suddenly appearing on the supermarket shelves with no clue about its origins in muck and mud.

Dyson, a son of the manse so to speak (son of Freeman Dyson, brother of Esther Dyson, and the grandson of Sir George Dyson), can be as concise as he is illuminating: “Three technological revolutions dawned in 1953: thermonuclear weapons, stored-program computers, and the elucidation of how life stores its own instructions as strings of DNA.” When these events are considered together rather than as independent strands of modern science, it becomes clear that nothing in our lives almost 70 years later is unconnected to war and the organisation for war provoked directly by the Second World War (and indirectly by the First). The American President Eisenhower’s concerns about the ‘military-industrial complex’ were proven justified not just about the defence industry but also about a new global society built upon inherently lethal knowledge.

The sources of this lethal knowledge were places like the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, the Los Alamos compound in New Mexico, and the Institute for Advanced Research In Princeton, New Jersey. These were modern monastic establishments whose existence was justified not by prayer but by thought, largely mathematical, and not by the construction of physical edifices but the creation of weapons of destruction. These were the forerunners of what would later be known as ‘think tanks’ and ‘skunk works,’ organisational entities devoted exclusively neither to economic success nor industrial productivity but technological innovation that would facilitate mass killing.

These new centres of thought were not isolated academic enclaves. They did assemble and concentrate the best intellects and coordinated their collective efforts in highly abstruse areas. But they also set agendas for university (and even high school) scientific education, successfully lobbied government about the priorities for military research spending, and shaped the interests of the most important private foundations that funded research from medicine to astrophysics.

Because they had no factories, no significant labour force, and no immediately commercial products, these establishments engaged in a sort of parallel politics. Although they were the driving force of the new military industrial complex, they were functionally invisible, in part because their work was confidential, but mostly because no one outside them could really understand what they were up to. They effectively constituted an independent empire of the mind, a Platonic haven of pure rationality, or at least what military requirements implied as rationality.

Most of the men (and they were almost all men) recruited into these establishments as thinkers or administrators were undoubtedly exceptionally clever in their respective fields. However, it is clear from the personal and institutional biographical detail which Dyson provides that very few of them would have achieved their ‘potential’ without this new form of scientific organisation. It is likely that they would have spent their lives in interesting but inconclusive research in dispersed academic institutions, or teaching Latin to high school seniors. The legendary names - Shannon, von Neumann, Ashby, Wiener, Mandelbrot, etc - would probably have been known but not with anything like the cultural force that they now have. These new organisations were intellectual king-makers.

So these military/intellectual enterprises, dedicated to refining the efficiency of human conflict, have transformed scientific culture. The concentration of intellectual talent, money and professional dominance means that there is only one path to scientific innovation - national defence, however widely that might be defined. Subsequent commercialisation, organised on similar lines in the Silicon Valleys and University Science Parks of the world, are functional subsidiaries of an invisible network, which few of us know anything about except when some ‘breakthrough’ (or breakdown) is announced in Wired or featured in Fast Company.

My lifetime is almost exactly contemporaneous with the digital epoch (Von Neumann died on my 10th birthday; Steve Jobs had just turned 2; Gates had just begun to walk). The presumptions, intentions, and fallacies of this epoch are things I share intellectually and emotionally with my generational cohort. This is Turing’s Cathedral, a cultural state of mind rather than a physical edifice. It took substantially less time to build than its medieval version. But its cultural influence is at least as great. Whether it will maintain itself as durably or with continued centrality is an open question, the answer to which seems to depend upon our fundamental but repressed attitude toward the god of war.

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Waiting for the Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death by Richard Holloway
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Be Bwave

I suppose that I’m the target demographic for this book. Having exhausted my three score and ten, I am now on bonus time. I have not been cheated of anything about life. There are family members who care for me. I have no material worries. In short, things have exceeded expectations. So Death is the obvious issue at hand.

“Fortitude is one of the most important lessons life teaches, and ageing may be our last chance to learn it... Fortitude is the ability to endure the reality of our condition without flinching,” Holloway says. But what he has in mind is not the fortitude of a Dylan Thomas:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Nor is it the fortitude of John Donne, who unlike Holloway despite his Anglican priesthood, was consoled by the Christian story of the Resurrection:

“Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so...”

Rather, for Holloway fortitude is a sort of British stoicism, a stiff upper lip in response to circumstances that are inevitable. The doomed fortitude 0f the squaddie in the British Square on the 18th century battlefield, the resigned numbness of Nelson’s quarterdeck as his officers stare into the muzzles of Spanish guns with sang froid. Death for him frames living in a way not dissimilar to some existentialist philosophers - as a way to an aesthetic appreciation. Knowing that one is soon to have no appreciation of anything is certainly a spur to feast on it while its there; but that sounds more like gluttony than fortitude.

Holloway thinks that Thomas’s rage implies resistance or bitterness or displaced anger. I don’t understand why. Rage seems to me a perfectly appropriate response to forthcoming annihilation. And I see no reason to connect it with other emotions, nor to condemn it as a waste of energy. All energy is ultimately wasted; what matters is how. However natural and inevitable it is to die, it is nevertheless outrageous, a monstrously excessive cost to pay, not for life but for consciousness. Death is an unjust impertinence despite its certainty. I don’t need to resent Death to quietly spit in its face. My body will be recycled but not my self. Why not rage? Why not spit?

Holloway’s substitute for rage or for joyful Christian expectation is a sort of wan nostalgia. In summary his logic is straightforward: ‘Just think about how much things have changed during your life; how few of your contemporaries are left; how uncomfortable life has become in so many small ways.’ In circumstances he subtly makes equivalent to going over the top into machine gun fire, why shouldn’t Sweet Sister Death be welcome as a restful end to loss, as David Jones says in his In Parenthesis?

“By one and one the line gaps, where her [Sweet Sister Death's] fancy will - howsoever they may howl for their virginity
She holds them - who impinge less space
And limply to a heap
nourish a lesser category of being"

So, prepare yourself calmly Holloway suggests: “Slip into choral evensong somewhere to experience the music and touch the longing it carries for the human soul.” A little light spiritual refreshment for the soul on the way out. Or take time to “indulge in that delicious form of reflective sadness we call melancholy.” You’ve earned a bit of depressive wallowing. And a bit of self-pity wouldn’t go amiss either. Best accept that “From the beginning, we were being driven by facts and circumstances that were never in our control.” None of it is really our fault. He even finds comfort in the Calvinist idea of predestination.

It’s difficult to disagree with any of these proposals. But, equally, it’s difficult to take any of this seriously. Age has its privileges and should be taken advantage of. But these particular shibbolethic aphorisms are... well insipid really, of the Keep the Aspidistra Flying variety. We’re getting ready for Death here, not training for a stress-free retirement. These things may promote a quiet Death but I can’t see they are likely to promote a better one.

And Holloway’s insistence on meditating on the prospective last moment before oblivion. What is this? We enter oblivion every night without a worry. Why should Death feel any different than sleep? My last conscious moment has about as much emotional significance as that final moment of the universe from entropic heat death. Holloway apparently thinks that most people fear death. I don’t. I fear pain and I fear loss of love. And Death might be just the thing to avoid both.

As for theories of an afterlife, I’d really rather read some good sci-fi by P K Dick than hear the stale tales of Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism (Judaism is generally more circumspect about the matter). Nor do I find the discussion of cryogenics - terrestrial or orbital - of pressing interest. The only conclusion I can draw from the availability of such services is that the medieval practice of indulgences has found a new market. The virtue of Hope often, it seems, promotes the vice of Gullibility.

In summary I have to say that although I may be the right demographic, I am not the right personality profile for this book. Despite Holloway’s increasing distance over the years from Christian doctrine, he remains so very Church of England. Don’t misunderstand me. I think the Church of England has discovered a wonderful way to live with a religion, namely by making all doctrine more or less optional. But this means that it doesn’t have very much important to say about some things. Death is one of these. This is not a bad thing. But perhaps when one has little say of import about a subject one should refrain from saying anything at all.

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Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The War in Heaven

Religious doctrine has always been an impertinent imposition on spiritual and metaphysical imagination by those in search of power. Doctrine not only stops the development of religious thought, it also promotes anti-religious sentiment that limits understanding of ourselves, of others, and of the meaning of our existence in the universe. Darwinia is a brilliant exposition of the insanity as well as inanity of doctrinal formulation and enforcement. Its premise is that the theory of evolution has been successfully suppressed by religious interests until The Miracle occurs. Significantly, however, the book is not anti-religious but also suggests the authentic, and humanly essential, poetic possibilities of religion.

It is not incidental that the book starts in 1912, that is, at the height of the Fundamentalist movement in the United States. Nor is it arbitrary that its main action occurs in the early 1920’s, a period of remarkable insight by the French Jesuit palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin. Nor, finally, is it merely fictional convenience that the story centres on the re-exploration of the European continent, the cultural powerhouse of Christianity. Darwinia is a fantasy incorporating these three themes with great theological punch.

Doctrine kills religious imagination. It treats imagination as an algorithm. It substitutes a shared vocabulary and grammar for the intimate communication of religious experience. It insists that all religious experience be expressed in this vocabulary as if it were divinely rather than humanely created. Doctrine stops the evolution of religious thought and therefore of collective religious awareness. Paradoxically, doctrine deprives human beings of the ability not only to express but even to have religious experience. It gives religion a bad name. Religious doctrine, consequently, inhibits the evolution of the species, particularly its capacity for cooperation for mutual benefit.

Think about the development of the musical symphony. Suppose Papa Haydn had been the doctrinal head of the European musical establishment in the late 18th century, and had declared his preferred symphonic form, and perhaps that of Mozart and a few others, as the definitive and perfected expression of musical art. His followers might have gone on to prescribe the allowable instruments, permissible harmonies, the limits of interpretation and embellishment within this form. The consequence? No Beethoven, no Brahms; and subsequently no Tchaikovsky, no Stravinsky; and probably no Beatles and no Beach Boys.

The Fundamentalists published their ‘fundamentals,’ that is, their judgments about the essential doctrinal components of Christianity between 1910 and 1914 (in twelve volumes!). These fundamentals included not just statements about the nature of God, but also what they considered orthodox opinions about the nature of the world, including so-called ‘old earth creationism,’ the idea that fossils, geologic strata, and other evidence of evolutionary development were in fact an original part of creation as described in the book of Genesis. Why God would plant such misleading evidence for human beings to ponder about is, according to this view, just one of the divine mysteries.

Because of events recounted in the book, Fundamentalism becomes the politically correct form of religion in the North America of Darwinia. But a sort of Lewis & Clark expedition to what has become a European wilderness discovers overwhelming evidence that this cannot be the case. In fact, a futuristic Interlude recasts both the events which provoked the fashion for Fundamentalism, as well as the entire trajectory of sentient existence. This Interlude tells a creatively imaginative tale about human purpose and spiritual destiny which is simply beyond the capacity of such doctrinal religionists to imagine.

The discoveries made by the expedition parallel those of Teilhard de Chardin during his work in China at approximately the same time. Picking up on an idea of a Russian anthropologist, Teilhard developed the concept of the ‘noösphere’ which is a central theme of the Interlude and the key to the whole of Darwinia (the place name itself is a slur invented by the Hearst Press mocking the theory of evolution). This noösphere is the ‘next phase’ in evolution according to Teilhard. It follows on from the bare geosphere of non-living matter, and from the subsequent biosphere in which living beings have penetrated to every corner of the geosphere, transforming it into a cradle of self-development. All is contained in the ontosphere, the realm 0f existence.

The noösphere is a result of life developing and proliferating thought. The noösphere in a sense anticipates the reality of the ‘Cloud’ of the worldwide web by several generations. It consists of our shared knowledge, and our awareness of this knowledge, as something dependent upon but distinct from the matter, both living and non-living from which it has emerged. Teilhard considered this as pointing to a phenomenon of cosmic not just earthly import: The progressive spiritualisation of the universe. This is precisely the situation described in the Interlude.

Teilhard considered that this process of the transformation of matter into thought has a final objective. He called this the Omega Point, a teleological terminus for all of creation. The Interlude suggests that the Omega Point is far beyond the time of the inevitable heat death of solar systems, galaxies, and even the suspension of the Higgs field from which matter originates. Time advances more and more slowly until it stops entirely. Thought is the cosmic resistance to this physical entropy. The noösphere is the last battleground of the old universe and it is the potential source of many new universes. But only, of course, if the noösphere is allowed to evolve without inhibition.

The American philosopher, C. S. Peirce, had anticipated Teilhard by half a century when he defined truth as that which would be known just before the end of sentient life in the universe. In his philosophy, this final goal is a necessary presumption of science, indeed of any inquiring mind. This is the equivalent 0f Teilhard’s Omega Point and points to an implicit hope which is the foundation 0f all metaphysics, including religion. It also suggests a force exerted by the Omega Point backwards, as it were, in time and affecting events in the present. This is the force exploited by Wilson in his fantasy in a remarkably interesting way.

Teilhard was of course condemned as a heretic by the fundamentalist bullies in his own Catholic Church. His error was considered one of ‘modernism’, the very same evil that was being fought against by the Protestants (the Protestants also found the Catholics to be too fundamentalist but that’s another story). But Teilhard’s poetry found its way into the environmental movement as the Gaia Hypothesis among other things, and into Darwinia as a central inspiration. The Fundamentalists went on to become the Moral Majority and Evangelical Republicans, still trying to make the rest of us conform to their myopic vision 0f reality. Peirce’s name has been generally forgotten but not his philosophy which lives on in a number of ‘schools.’

Metaphysical poetry, and the people who write it, speak it, and appreciate it are still fighting to be heard in religion. There are always Fundamentalists who want to turn the imagination, and religion with it, into an algorithm. The war never ends. It’s a bumpy road to the Omega Point.

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Man in the Holocene 
by 

Max Frisch, 

 

Geoffrey Skelton (Translator)

 

Climate Change

Floods, avalanches, landslides, mass extinctions. What are we to make of these randomly destructive events? Do they exist if there is record, no memory of them? And what difference would it make to not know about them? Or to receive no news from the rest of the world at all? Catastrophe really can’t be prepared for can it? And news is almost always irrelevant.

But how about events closer to home? Like whether the Alpine valley in which one lives is in danger from continuous Summer storms? Are there any signs of new cracks in the cliffs or across the sudden fields? Alas, even then, what good would it do to know?

Surely though, one’s own state of being is of crucial import. As one gets older, minor infirmities can only be expected. But are things now progressing more rapidly? Wouldn’t it be prudent to be worried about them? Perhaps they should be noted down somewhere.

Yes, that’s it. But then it’s really essential to go far enough into the past in order to discern the pattern of development. Not just the history of this one life, but the cumulative experience of the species as well. And the geological formation of the valley itself is as relevant as anything else. 

Indeed the tens and hundreds of millions of years of planetary development in its distinct periods from the Cambrian to the Quaternary, these too have to be considered. And with those, the numerous bits of human knowledge - how to construct a geometric golden section, the constituents of the cells of the human body, the expansion of the universe, train timetables - are things that must be remembered if one is to diagnose the changes taking place in oneself.

So notes proliferate. They fill the house. Their purpose is to keep memory alive. But they are actually symptoms of its death. The only disaster that matters is the one we can’t see taking place. We survive it; but at a price. The Holocene epoch is that during which the world loses its memory in a flurry of notes, and note-like memories. “Erosion is a slow process.” But eventually it triumphs.

Free Fall by William Golding
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reaching Out With Tongs

Forget about theological mysteries; the anthropological ones are at least as mysterious, and a lot closer to home. Most theology is just folk trying to explain themselves to themselves. What is this amorphous thing we call consciousness that inhabits (or infects or is generated by) a human body? Is it real or is it a delusion? Does it have authority and freedom or is it merely a part of some long chain of cause and effect, a mere response to pain and pleasure? Is it intelligible even to itself?

All of our lives demand holding the issues of personal metaphysics in suspension. In order to function we need to pretend that there is no mystery, that thought aware of itself is not just natural, but also uninteresting. To let down our guard by investigating ourselves too carefully would be wasteful and needlessly risky. People might snigger. And there are deeper problems, as Golding’s protagonist discovers: “... when the eyes of Sammy were turned in on myself.. what they saw was not beautiful but fearsome... to live with such a thing was unendurable.” So he prays; he doesn’t know to whom 0r what, but he prays: “If I could only take this world for granted!” He prays to himself, of course. And there is no reply.

But insistent thoughts appear unbidden and unwanted: “They are important simply because they emerge. I am the sum of them. I carry around with me this load of memories. Man is not an instantaneous creature, nothing but a physical body and the reaction of the moment. He is an incredible bundle of miscellaneous memories and feelings, of fossils and coral growths. I am not a man who was a boy looking at a tree. I am a man who remembers being a boy looking at a tree.”

Experience itself. Reflection upon experience. The experience of reflection. Simultaneous experience and reflection. These sum the unavoidable facts of human existence. But how accurate are any of these facts? Are they contradicted by someone else’s facts? To attend to them generates uncertainty and confusion but to ignore them is solipsism. Both are potential conditions of dark madness. Besides “What we know is not what we see or learn but what we realize.” And realising takes time, perhaps more time than we realise.

But there must be a beginning, that point when the light bulb got turned on, a Big Bang of the Self. What happened there in the slight lack of uniformity of primordial psychic energy to produce this particular consciousness and set its course of evolution? “... what am I looking for? I am looking for the beginning of responsibility, the beginning of darkness, the point where I began.” Or is this fuss just a matter of not knowing who my father is?

No, that’s not it. And neither is the explanation involving Ma, childhood friends and enemies; nor the youthful crimes, not the ones discovered, not the ones got away with. Not the sorrows or the tragedies that are there but have no force. Even the betrayals, given and received, are sterile. There simply was no choice. Like human language, or the human species itself, “I” doesn’t seem to have a definite beginning. And like the fossil of the ‘missing link’ between monkeys and men, I couldn’t know it if I held it in my hands.

Eternity is out of the question. Yet here “I” am. Why does it, this “I”, do what it does, want what it wants, think what it thinks? Who’s pulling the strings here? God? The past? A clever torturer who wants me to confess what I don’t know? Some deeper (collective) consciousness? “I cannot find the root. However I try I can bring up nothing which is part of me.” The line of bricks of memory builds something but not the bodily edifice I see now.

Was there ever freedom? If so, what happened to it? “Somewhere, some time, I made a choice in freedom and lost my freedom.” But nothing ever felt like a choice. It always felt like the next thing to do, the next part of a life of distinct parts, separate epochs. But now they all seem to be connected. Connected by what if not this “I”?

The answer and the point of it all seems to be this, this right here, right now. Literally this, what’s happening to me and then happening to you. “My darkness reaches out and fumbles at a typewriter with its tongs. Your darkness reaches out with your tongs and grasps a book.” The story is the answer. The story is where we originate. The story is mother, father, those we love, those we hate and fear, those we care nothing about. Others “had and have a finger in my pie. I cannot understand myself without understanding them.” Their story is my story. The story, therefore, is a simultaneous gain and loss of freedom. It’s what “I” is, which is always “we.”

Metaphysics is not for sissies.

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Trump by Alain Badiou
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gangster Politics

Trump consists of two academic lectures given by Badiou in the days immediately following the US elections. Like many others, he was shocked and distressed that “the vulgar and incoherent billionaire” could become the president of the most powerful nation on the planet. And like at least a few others, he attempts to articulate the significance of this event - how it came about and what it implies.

As befits a philosopher, Badiou is not a man of statistics. But he does employ one statistic in both lectures as the factual base for his analysis: “we must recognize that, today, 264 people possess as much wealth, in inheritance and income, as the 7 billion others who make up the rest of the world!” His point is not that these 264 people, or their slightly less wealthy friends, have somehow bought the election result. Rather he uses it to point out the absolute and incontrovertible victory of global capitalism which is, he believes, the lynchpin of the Trump victory.

Badiou echoes Thomas Piketty’s 2014 Capital in the Twenty First Century when he refers to, “the fundamental law of capitalism, namely the process of capital’s concentration.” This law not only operates in every country on the planet, it is a law that the government of every one of these countries is committed to enforcing. This he describes as the context of “the politics of no alternative.” As the regime of capitalism is global, so are its effects on the global political structure. A sort of “democratic fascism” has emerged simultaneously around the world.

The commonality in the leadership as diverse as China and France, and India and Hungary, not forgetting the USA, Russia, and North Korea is that they are all thugs. This is an essential consequence for managing the severe inequalities that capitalism will continue to generate. Trump is merely the American version of Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Orban, Putin, Modi and a dozen others whose primary mission is to stave off civil war for as long as possible.

These leaders have this rather narrow role because there is literally no alternative to the capitalism that has swept all before it. Communism is dead. Even moderate Socialism is déclassé. And theoretical Marxism is a mere intellectual antique. Consequently the “great historical hope for a just society, a hope that remained steadfast from 1792 to 1976” is no more. The idea of an increasingly fair society based on private property and individual enterprise is now dead. The property and the enterprise remain; but justice is no longer their aim.

Badiou can’t suggest an alternative to the current crisis. The best he can do is to hope for some sort of revival of the historical debate. This seems to me far less likely than the civil wars from which some new form of politics might emerge. So the message implicit in these lectures seems to be: ‘If you think Trump is your worst nightmare, you ain’t seen nothing yet.’

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