Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Piety and Playfulness Forbidden

It is sometimes difficult to keep in mind that America was founded and organised by intellectuals. For about a century, Puritan regard for scholarship and classical education dominated the colonial ethos. Community leaders were primarily Oxford and Cambridge graduates who shared a vision of not just a theologically learned church but also a culturally and scientifically learned population. Remarkably, only six years after the foundation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Harvard College had been established. Shortly thereafter its degrees were considered to be equivalent to those in England by their former Oxbridge colleagues.

Hofstadter gives Christianity its due in promoting the incipient American intellect. But he also documents convincingly how, as American Christianity evolved, it smothered not just the germ of intellect but the reputation of thought itself. The result has been a more or less permanent national aversion to intellectual tradition in favour of professional commercialism and the cultivation of manipulative intelligence. This aversion is demonstrated repeatedly from the mid-eighteenth century First Great Awakening to the revivalist rallies of Donald Trump. It is expressed persistently as a suspicion of reflective thought and resentment of those who practice it.

Hofstadter‘s key distinction is that between intellect and intelligence. “Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole. Intelligence can be praised as a quality in animals; intellect, being a unique manifestation of human dignity, is both praised and assailed as a quality in men.” This distinction seems to capture exactly my own experience of the American mind in business and academia. And it allows Hofstadter to conduct a profoundly revealing analysis of American society. One has only to watch Trump in action and his audiences’ reactions to know Hofstadter has had a profound insight.

The term ‘intellectual’ originates in fin de siècle France and refers originally to the academic and literary defenders of Emil Dreyfus against his anti-Semitic accusers. So from its beginning the term has had a liberal or leftist political connotation. And it still does. A conservative thinker like William F. Buckley would never have been referred to as an ‘intellectual’, but most likely as a ‘conservative commentator.’ Throughout the 20th century the term is used as one of opprobrium by right wing politicians, usually Republican, and evangelical Christians to suggest unAmerican, godless, and socially disruptive patterns of thought.

And this intended slander is probably fairly accurate. Intellectuals can appear to be unAmerican in the sense that their attitude toward knowledge and learning tends to be more vocational (in the religious sense) and elitist rather than commercial and egalitarian. They are also likely to question the historical validity and meaning of doctrinal religion. And because they are usually not constrained by the thought-limits imposed by faith or commercial necessity, they will not infrequently appear to stir up various simmering social pots. Hofstadter identifies two characteristics which are typical of his idea of an intellectual: piety and playfulness. Piety demands a level of serious reverence and humility about one’s intellectual endeavours. Playfulness implies the urge to go beyond the solution to problems, in fact to search for the problems which solutions cause. Both are somewhat seditious traits in American culture.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, despite its obvious refinement and nuance in its historical interpretation, is of course a product of its time. Originally published in 1963, much of it documents the effects of and the emergence from the intellectual persecution of the McCarthy era in the 1950’s. But even the frequent references to McCarthy’s tactics provide important insights that are relevant to understanding today’s political situation. For example, it is clear in Hofstadter’s analysis that the focus of the Senator’s efforts was not a grand Communist conspiracy, but the intellectual establishment itself. Communism was a tool not a target of his (and Richard Nixon’s) Congressional activities. Just as religion has been a perennial tool not a social objective of American politicians throughout the country’s history.

In light of Hofstadter’s analysis, political events today become much more comprehensible. For example, it is not simply Obama’s race against which Americans reacted in their last elections; it is just as likely to be an unfortunate legacy of his intellect. Americans never have had much tolerance for reflective thought in their leaders. Trump as the antithesis of the intellectual leader gives them respite. They love his hip-shooting, banal inanities and gaffes. They want his ignorant, often patently incompetent political appointments. They admire his intractability on factual matters like climate change and international tariffs. It is both comforting and terrifying to realise how consistent American culture has been since the Revolution.

Where Hofstadter got it wrong was in thinking, like many of us, that anti-intellectualism was in decline in America, that Richard Nixon was a fallen star along with the entire constellation of evangelical Republicans, that the American educational system would re-orient itself to promote greater intellectual competence rather than trade skills. Nevertheless, even his mistaken presumptions about the future are enlightening. I certainly feel less confused about American culture and politics than I did last week..

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Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On Faithful Truthiness

Umberto Eco spotted it first in the 1980’s: The United States exists in a condition of hyperreality, within which the authentic cannot be distinguished easily from the fake (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...). In fact the fake is preferred to the authentic: it costs less, it’s more accessible, and its easier to clean. But Alexis de Tocqueville sensed it as a possibility 150 years earlier in his experience of the enthusiastic insincerity (or insincere enthusiasm; its difficult to distinguish) of the population (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...). Americans, who never had a terribly firm grip on their perceptions of the world, were showing clear signs of profound and destructive self-delusion about things like slavery and the sustainability of a polity based on mutual regard. Andersen’s book provides confirmation of Eco’s hypothesis, and a rather comprehensive history, perhaps more comprehensive than necessary, to justify de Tocqueville’s suspicions.

Andersen’s book is a study in American cultural epistemology. Epistemology is the study of the validity of the stories we tell ourselves about the world. The first principle of epistemology is that the map is not the territory. In other words, no matter how convincing, or plausible, or logical, or factually supported, whatever story we tell ourselves about the way the world is, is just that: a story. And the story is not reality. The story remains a story. And no story is worth dying, or killing, for. Americans, more than any other people on the planet have difficulty is grasping this principle and its import. There is no second principle.

Gullibility is the result of failure to pay heed to this principle. Folk get confused. As Mark Twain noticed, they substitute feeling for thinking, which creates a hell of a mess. American gullibility is unbounded according to Andersen. If you print it in the tabloid journals, or say it on the AM radio stations or cable television channels, or publish it on the internet media, they will come. Not everyone will come at once but, according to reliable statistics, the majority of Americans believe any number of bizarre and unfounded nonsense. Abe Lincoln got it wrong: Most Americans can be fooled most of the time, even if its rarely by the same huckster. Some get hobbled by the gun lobbyists; others worry about the spread of satanism. Sometimes an individual collects a number of such fantasies. He’s the obvious nutcase. But those with a more limited portfolio - say Obama birthers who are convinced that WWF wrestling isn’t rigged, and who believe that Epstein was murdered by Hillary - are just normal.

Perhaps there is a genetic component in the American propensity for wild fantasy. The country has been traditionally ‘sold’ elsewhere as one sort of paradise or another. Inherited gullibility in prospective immigrants might well be a factor in succumbing to the hype. Andersen quotes the historian and onetime Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, suggesting that “American civilization [has] been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe in advertising.” Perhaps the concentration of such a characteristic is the real origin of Madison Avenue.

But given the likely dilution of the American gene pool over centuries, some other explanation seems necessary. Andersen tends toward the theory that Americans have been drinking their own ideological bathwater for so long that they actually believe that they have the right to believe anything they want to just because they can. Of course the corollary to this, as John dos Passos pointed out, is that they also believe that their neighbour has no right to know more than they do.

This would explain the perennial American anti-intellectualism and the equation of expert knowledge with dictatorial power (See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...). Americans resent knowledge about the world that they don’t have. They do not consider the hard-won knowledge of others through scholarship or dedicated experience to be equivalent to their own quick-fire insight and casual explanation about a situation. This is their peculiar version of Occam’s razor: ‘if it hasn’t occurred to me before, it’s not worth knowing about.’ Ayn Rand’s strange philosophy of the lonely and persecuted corporate hero is typical of this culture and explains her popularity, even among intellectuals (or perhaps especially among intellectuals since their trade is in ideas, mainly their own).

Trump of course is the perfect cultural as well as political representative of his fellows. He resents and rejects any factual assertions not his own. He constructs fantasies continuously and publicly. This behaviour is considered not just acceptable but also admirable by about half the country. They live in his stories. After all, they had suspected for years that immigrants were the source of the country’s drug problems, that black people have themselves to blame for racism, that the Christian religion is under attack, that white folk are treated like second-class citizens. Trump confirms their every casual insight worked out laboriously over straight-talking in the bar, the diner, the bible study group. Or for that matter at the country club poolside and in the corporate boardroom. American gullibility is not class-conscious. Anti-vaxxers, neo-libbers, creationists are generally better formally educated but equally impervious to rational discussion.

Andersen thinks that the mere availability of stories in America is part of the problem. This of course is nonsense. Every literate culture produces fiction. Whatever stories are told in America are told round the world, and have been for quite some decades, if not centuries. Rather, Americans are unique because they believe the stories that they hear and tell are not just true but real. They have no determinate criteria for truth other than their ‘gut;’ but that’s enough. Truth demands faith, and faith implies intransigence. There can be no compromise, no modification of the truth. Truth is sacred, that is to say, the affirmation of the implausible stories of politicians, businessmen, and media personalities are a quasi-religious duty. Such faith naturally implies that learning is not possible. When the truth is possessed, it no longer need be sought. And error, that is the object of the faith of others, has no right.

Andersen does more than imply that the Christian religion, particularly Protestantism, has a lot to answer for in shaping this peculiar obduracy of the American mind. But what he doesn’t see is that it is not the specific Christian doctrines or their variants that are central to the American attitude of obstinate adherence to silliness; it is the presumption that faith itself is a virtue appropriate to a democratic society. Unwavering, unthinking faith in one’s interpretation of authorised texts is easily transferable into similar idiosyncratic faith in the ideals and institutions of American politics and civil life. Such faith, it turns out, is inimical to the democratic political process as well as to the civil cohesion of the country.

Faith fragments any society, except where its particular tenets are imposed by force. And this, of course, is precisely what the evangelicals and right-wing pundits would like to do today - by law if possible but through violence if necessary. This is the essential logic of faith: Truth must prevail over reality. But secularists and the Left have also been engaged in the same faith-based game for as long as the country has existed. “We hold these truths to be self-evident...” has proven a rather dangerous Deist conceit. Nothing about America is self-evident except the willingness to insist what that might be against one’s neighbour.

I know, I know: not all Americans are like this; and only 48% of the population voted for Trump. But the unit of analysis in Andersen’s book and my comments is not the individual American but the collective culture of America. This is a culture dominated by ideologies, religious and secular stories which appear to be popular to the extent they are absurd, and in which absurdists have faith. In a democratic society, the absurdists, as swing voters, have come to decide elections. They also sell well in a society that appears bored with itself. It is perhaps a central American fantasy that these people are marginal in the culture. The message of Andersen’s book is that they are not and have never been. They are what the place is built on and run by - its true believers.

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The Vicar Of Tours 
by 

Honoré de Balzac

 

BlackOxford's review 

Aug 28, 2019  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: french-language, church, sociology 

Fully Absorbed Faith

The Vicar of Tours is a wonderfully farcical literary ballet in which a naively ambitious cleric, a scheming colleague, and an acutely resentful landlady play out the creation of a mutual hell. Balzac’s acute sensitivity to the psychological warfare that the three wage among each other is timeless.

Whatever one might think of Christianity, or for that matter religion more generally, it is certain that its principles, philosophies, and practices will be absorbed into the trivial pursuits of daily life. That is to say, each religious adherent will make their ‘faith’ into whatever suits best their neuroses until it is fully absorbed into those neuroses.

The façade thus created, no matter how obviously neurotic, is socially accepted because one’s own pose must be protected. This allows for civilised co-existence. Until, of course, it doesn’t. At which point the illusion of civilisation, as well as religious faith, is revealed. Or is it that civilisation is shown to be stronger than any religious belief?

As Balzac notes, “Celibates substitute habits for feelings.” Even insignificant modifications to routine are of enormous symbolic import therefore. However, when religion becomes habitual, which it almost always does, it is no match for the habits of the law, that is to say, civilisation. Civilisation may be corrupt, but at least it admits to being so.

The New Gods by Emil M. Cioran
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lowering Cultural Sea Levels

One might suspect Cioran of being a modern Gnostic given his persistent references to worldly horrors, both human and natural, his understanding of suicide, and his rather dim view of human ‘fleshiness’. But he is not. For Cioran, Gnosticism is merely another form of wishful fantasy. As he takes great pains to point out, Gnosticism is a great way to avoid our responsibilities, which is even a worse flaw than believing we have any. It gives us the excuse we need for our vices and deficiencies. “The Demiurge is the most useful god who ever was. If he were not under our hand, where would our bile be poured out?”

Gnosticism is one of the first Christian heresies (also popular as such in the other monotheisms of Islam and Judaism). It asserts that the universe was created by a god-like cosmic force, the Demiurge, which separated the souls of human beings from the presence of the official, supreme God and entrapped them in material filth. Gnosticism arises periodically in various forms, especially among intellectuals, as an explanation for the patent extent of evil in the world. Whether perceived as poetry, philosophy, or ontology, Cioran finds such thoughts offensive.

For Cioran, Gnosticism is not some abstract metaphysical theory. Or at least that isn’t what worries him. Gnosticism is an ethic, a code of behaviour, which justifies hatred: “Each and every form of hate tends as a last resort toward him [the Demiurge]. Since we all believe that our merits are misunderstood or flouted, how admit that so general an iniquity could be the doing of mere man?” Gnosticism is bad because it promotes the doing of bad things to each other as well as to whatever else exists on the planet.

Western religion has absorbed a great deal of Gnostic tradition despite its heretical designation. Christianity (as well as Islam and Judaism), for example, denies that evil exists except as an absence of God, a lack 0f the good. What appears as evil is merely a vacuum waiting to be filled by the knowledge of the true God... and by more believers who will spread his fame. Hence the command to “go forth and multiply and replenish the earth,” to fill the world with the consciousness of God and his infinite goodness. This is more than the blind leading the blind; it is the blind making others blind for their own good.

The effect of this command is to deputise each one of us as an official part-time demiurge. We all are authorised the power of creation, the power, no the duty, to procreate, to replicate ourselves at all costs until we destroy all other forms of life. Genetic defectives, sociopaths, abusers, those unable to provide the essentials of life, ill-equipped and ill-trained adolescents, dynasty builders, we are all enticed to reproduce, not only by nature but also by this cultural imperative. According to Cioran, “Parents—genitors—are provocateurs or mad.” The downward trends in world fertility rates suggests that many people are agreeing with Cioran’s diagnosis, not because sex is evil but because having children is mostly selfish and stupid.

The Supreme God is now all but gone as more than a symbol of various global faith-tribes in all the monotheistic religions. So our demiurgic power and authority is effectively unconstrained by any reference to absolute good. Heaven and hell are sterile metaphors. This is frightening, more frightening than the former religious doctrines. To combat this fear we have switched our allegiance elsewhere. “In the eyes of the ancients, the more gods you recognize, the better you serve divinity, whereof they are but the aspects, the faces.” The great advantages of polytheism are tolerance and, as in the American Constitution, the separation of powers. But we’re no longer accustomed to this kind of regime. We prefer our gods with single names and singularly impressive strengths. So our history has lasting consequences.

“Under the regime of several gods, fervor is shared. When it is addressed to one god alone it is concentrated, exacerbated, and ends by turning into aggression, into faith.” We have learned faith and we intend to practise it with new gods, or rather with one new God that each 0f us constructs. Theology has replaced mythology, with disastrous ethical consequences. We are forced to choose our god - Christian or Muslim, capitalist or socialist, communist or fascist, black, brown or white. These are clear choices supplied ready cut and packaged, with prices attached. As Cioran quips laconically, “We do not beseech a nuance.” As the conservatives like to remind us all: ‘We need boundaries.’

“There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism.” As long as no one takes their religion as more than a mark of solidarity, no one notices the presumption. This is why evangelical Christianity, Islam, or even Judaism as ‘faiths’ are so dangerous in a democratic society. Their truths are non-negotiable; their people are united in resistance to those not their people. So “as soon as a divinity, or a doctrine, claims supremacy, freedom is threatened.” Nineteenth century Protestants were correct: the Catholic Church did indeed desire the subversion of American freedom. But so did those Protestants; and they still do.

There are no longer any false gods, merely diverse and contradictory interpretations of the same God. This subtilely but decisively is destroying politics around the world. What remains is a sort of hostile nihilism expressed perfectly by Trump and Putin and Modi and their cronies. Cioran got it exactly correct: “We denounce the coexistence of truths because we are no longer satisfied with the dearth each one affords.” Today, it is the Christians who have slid into Gnosticism. They feel they are surrounded by evil and untruth and must escape at all costs. The planet and its people are collateral damage.

The alliance between dictatorial rulers and ‘strong faith’ is not accidental. Since the ascendancy of Christianity in the Western Roman Empire and Islam in the Eastern, it has always been so. Quite apart from its political impact, this alliance has also been disastrous aesthetically. “Nothing more odious than the tone of those who are defending a cause, one compromised in appearance, winning in fact; who cannot contain their delight at the idea of their triumph nor help turning their very terrors into so many threats.” Hatred is an aesthetic, one which monotheism promotes consistently. It is through this aesthetic not political debate that racism, misogyny, and violence proliferate.

Cioran doesn’t so much deconstruct individual ideas as point out the questionable foundational presumptions of the entire edifice of European thought. A large part of this foundation is religious; and although generally forgotten and ignored, it lies there mouldering and rotting until it can no longer support the weight we culturally load onto it. Like the wooden piles that support the canal houses in Amsterdam, the foundation crumbles when exposed to the air. In this sense Cioran moves counter to perhaps the most visible symbol of our present; he lowers cultural sea levels.

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Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There Are No Words

Good fiction adapts to circumstances as it ages. What was immediately on the mind of the author and the details of his experiences are important beyond the times in which or about which they were written. I suppose this is of working definition of what’s meant by a ‘classic.’ In this sense at least I think Davita’s Harp qualifies as just that, a classic.

Potok’s book was written in 1985 but its setting is the late 1930’s. This is an era of severe political division and aggression in the United States. Communism and Fascism combat each other in local neighbourhoods as well as in international politics and military action. Unionising and union-busting, often violent, are commonplace. The horror of the Spanish Civil War is being pursued enthusiastically, and brutally, by both sides. Stalin starves the Ukrainians while Hitler de-personalises the German Jews.

The immediate context inhabited by Potok’s protagonist, a young American girl with a Christian father and Jewish mother, is casually anti-Semitic at all levels of society, from the playground to the boardroom. Easter European Jews are not only the most recent immigrants, they are also the most visible representatives of Marxist ideology and the chosen enemy of German fascists, for whom there is substantial American sympathy. So Jews are the natural object of moral panic.

But since she knows nothing about Judaism, she is also scorned by the Jewish community who simply don’t comprehend her status. As in a story told to her by a family friend who is also a writer, she is a grey horse living alone between a herd of black horses and a herd of white horses. No matter which herd she decides to join she will be an outcaste. On the face of it, this is a rather banal metaphor. But Potok has something in mind which makes the girl a universal figure, a representative of the entire world. Thus creating art.

Quite apart from the global ideologies and the emotional prejudices within her family and community, two fundamental principles are clearly at issue throughout the book: justice and freedom. To oversimplify, but not by much, the Torah is the symbol of ultimate divine justice. Although she is not religious, this priority is reflected in the mother’s Socialism. For the father’s family, the King James Bible is the epitome of freedom both in its creation and its continued importance in the rugged culture of rural Northern New England. Each group is alien to the other, involving very different experiences and interpretations of the same text.

The young protagonist doesn’t know it, but she is caught in the crossfire between the two interpretations of existential reality. Her mixed religious background is part of the metaphor for this situation, as is the Communist/Fascist antipathy (and the visible misogyny everywhere). How justice and freedom are prioritised and interpreted determines which side of the political and religious divide one ends up on. The dialectic is not inherent in either concept; but historically they have emerged as contradictory, forcing a cultural choice upon the girl.

It is here that the writerly friend of the girl’s mother emerges to suggest something crucial. While reporting on his experiences in the Spanish War, he writes: “Here things happen daily for which there are no words.” His experience of the crimes and inhumanity of both sides is not merely indescribable. It is descriptions of the conflict in terms of ideologies, religions, and opposing causes, that is to say, words, that are the origins of the conflict itself. The opposition among these ideologies, religious beliefs and causes is as tenuous, artificial and as historically conditioned as the dialectic of freedom and justice. The writer abandons politics completely in an attempt to escape.

And there the real paradox beings to appear: Words giveth and Words taketh away. Only death or mental collapse is the end of words, both often caused by the words. The mythical Yiddish witch, Baba Yaga, will do to represent words to the young girl. The witch torments her dreams. But the words of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, provide her only comfort when her father is killed at Guernica. Her mother too ultimately finds hope in words, strangely through the ministrations of her Christian evangelical sister-in-law. Both use words but not in accepted ways.

People don’t like your stories, especially political stories, if you don’t come down for either justice or freedom as the most important thing in life. Refusing to choose means you’re likely to remain the grey horse isolated between the white and black herds. Abandoning words is not a sensible option. Finding some other words to deal with a profoundly tragic and complicated reality is the real challenge. In this light, Potok’s story, although the best part of half a century old, retains its relevance.

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At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Inmates In Charge of the Asylum

Novelists are, of course, fraudsters. They make a living by telling lies just enough like the truth to be credible and passing that off as work. Of course it isn’t work, but mostly boozing and collecting daft comments made by other people, mostly other writers as it turns out. They even turn their plagiarism into a principle of artistic technique: “Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference.”

But even a fraud and layabout must sleep from time to time. And there’s the chance for the interchangeable characters to exert a bit of independent thinking. Tired of being trapped in insipid prose and tired plots, they can take a few literary initiatives of their own. They’re fed up with the braggadocio, fighting and womanising of the likes of Finn McCool and other Celtic heroes. And the outdated styles of Joyce, Beckett, Zane Grey, Eliot and Pound. They want quality; and they get it. Poetry that sings:

“When things go wrong and will not come right, Though you do the best you can, When life looks black as the hour of night - A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”
“When money's tight and is hard to get And your horse has also ran, When all you have is a heap of debt - A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”
“When health is bad and your heart feels strange, And your face is pale and wan, When doctors say that you need a change, A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”
“When food is scarce and your larder bare And no rashers grease your pan, When hunger grows as your meals are rare - A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN”
“In time of trouble and lousy strife, You have still got a darlint plan, You still can turn to a brighter life - A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN!”

And who would argue? To hell with King Sweeny and the whole lot o’ them ungainly fellers flying from glen to glen like giant fowl. We need new heroes, like that bloke who can long jump to beat the band. That Jumping Irishman is a world-beater. And let’s not forget the merits of the Good Fairy, a wraith not be confused with your run of the mill leprechauns who don’t give nearly such good advice.

The trick is to keep these writing blokes unconscious. “We must invert our conception of repose and activity... We should not sleep to recover the energy expended when awake but rather wake occasionally to defecate the unwanted energy that sleep engenders.” That way novels would be in the hands of the experts, not the amateur wannabes with nothing new worth writing about.

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The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory by Jesse Walker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Deep State Is Deeper Than You Thought

I recently floated the idea that victimhood is the central part of American identity (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). I now find that I am a late-comer to the party. Several others as long ago as the 1960’s had already made the point. More recently, Jesse Walker has expanded on the original hypothesis. The United States of Paranoia is the result. It is convincing, comprehensive, and scary as hell. American society seems to be imploding into its own hollowness. That vacant space at its core is, I think, the profound but unacknowledged racism which is an implicit principle of American society.

What could it be that provokes such a large part of the population of a technologically advanced country to believe any number of questionable and even obviously false assertions about the world? Conspiratorial obsession is not a fringe activity in America. From colonial times it’s has been part of popular culture as well as mainstream politics. But the obsession doesn’t seem to be something imported from Europe with its various waves of immigrants to North America. Every new immigrant group found it in place when they arrived. The obsession arose within a home-grown sociology unique to the place, and quickly adapted to by its new residents.

Several explanations for this peculiarly American phenomenon get made from time to time. Some blame technology itself for disseminating rumour and politically motivated lies. But America has been susceptible to threatening fantasy long before radio, television, or the internet. The 19th century version of the Deep State was Slave Power, the purported conspiracy of slave-owners to ensure their political dominance. It is that conspiracy which is responsible, according to its proponents, for the assassination of not only Lincoln, but also the death by poisoning of three other presidents, and the attempt on the life of a fourth.

Like religious heresy, any conspiracy rapidly creates its counter-conspiracy. So, of course, the counter-conspiracy among anti-slavery elements according to Slave Powerists is responsible for, among other things, delaying the annexation of Texas into the Union. And much more besides: “Southerners had elaborate conspiracy theories of their own, blaming slave revolts, both real and imagined, on the machinations of rebellion-stoking abolitionists, treacherous land pirates, and other outside agitators.” Conspiracy generates momentum for yet more conspiracy. As Walker says, “It was a paranoid time. In America, it is always a paranoid time.”

This sociology, according to one of its most prominent researchers, is dominated by a “style of mind” which is typified by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Historically, if this style of mind has nothing external, like immigrants, on which to alight for its edification, it will turn inwards. One third of Americans believe the US government was involved in 9/11. Almost three quarters believe there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK. A similar proportion believes the government is hiding what it knows about UFO’s. Conspiracy becomes a habitual routine, a first port of intellectual call, and an abiding destination. Once conspiracy is mooted, it just doesn’t go away.

So it isn’t surprising that within minutes of the recent announcement of the suicide of the sex-criminal Jeffrey Epstein, accusations were made in the right-wing media against the Clintons. These were endorsed by the Rumour-Monger-In-Chief and will undoubtedly simmer on the media fires of sensation-seeking pundits for decades. This is only the latest instance of the frequent moral panics that seems to sprout when there seems least need - the Beatles tour, the O.J. Simpson trial, H.G. Wells broadcast of War of the World’s. It seems almost anything can set off a sociological hair-trigger looking for plots, secret cabals, and threats to democracy and religion.

Since this sort of repetitive behaviour is rather stupid on the face of it, one might suspect the level or quality of American education to be a factor in its prevalence. If the nuttiness were restricted to the economically less well off or those without access to better schools and universities, this might make sense. But it is often the elite in American society, those who have had what is generally considered the best of advanced education who share most enthusiastically in the most wild of conspiracy theories. From the Puritan leader, Cotton Mather, to Mark Twain and other popular intellectuals, to Senator McCarthy and his cronies, to a number of presidents (including at least Harrison, Wilson, Nixon, Clinton and the present one), cultural leadership has consistently promoted the idea of imminent conspiratorial threat.

It is as if the United States is haunted. And perhaps it is. The poet William Burroughs wrote that there was evil abroad on the continent even before the European settlers arrived. He might have been right in the sense that the native population was, by their very existence, a continuous threat to early settlers. They lived in close proximity but shared neither language, nor habit, nor religion. The native population were inhibitions to progress, to be either forced somewhere else, isolated, or eliminated. Even today, with native Americans snugly corralled on reservations, the suspicion and mistrust of tribal culture persists.

But of course as the native population was dispersed or destroyed, a much more potent threat was being created: African slavery. Slavery was an institution which was nowhere more prevalent than the United States. It was commercially profitable but carried with it exactly the same threat as a large native population. Arguably more of a threat since the proximity of slaves was even more intimate; and their relative number among the slave-owning population was much greater. Slaves too had their own languages, their own mores, and their own syncretistic religions. And they had even more reason than native Americans to wish harm on their captors.

Slaves could not be dispersed or destroyed. Rebellion from within was therefore a constant possibility. A slave-owning, or even merely a slave-tolerant society must be acutely aware of the slightest indication of seditious behaviour. It has to learn to listen for conspiracy. Acting quickly in error to suppress such a possibility is far less risky than failing to act while a factual assessment is undertaken. Conspiracy theory becomes, therefore, a positive adaptation for survival.

Emancipation did not reduce the racial threat but increased it. African-Americans might no longer be anyone’s property, but they still lived in proximity to the white majority in concentrated, segregated groups. They insisted on the integrity and validity of their own culture. They were quite literally alien, only encountered in controlled situations of racial subservience. Watch any sci-fi movie from the 1950’s with this in mind and it’s easy to see the racist metaphor being played out openly.

The obsession among Americans with UFO’s is yet another example of this displaced racial animosity. Even the most ‘liberal’ of white folk could enjoy the frequent reports of interplanetary threats as an incidental and harmless pastime. They are neither, but rather an aspect of pervasive cultural reinforcement of the dangers we should be prepared for from the dark-skinned intruder. It is no coincidence that domestic Communism and Jazz were considered as major cultural threats simultaneously with the rise in UFO sightings.

The great gay conspiracy panic from the 1950’s onward is yet another example of the dangers posed by people who are effectively of a different race. Their threat is essentially racial not ideological or religious. Americans don’t ‘do’ ideology, and they know little of the sources of religious doctrine; but they are first rate racists.*

Lest I be accused of creating yet another theory of conspiracy, it seems necessary to point out that the racial animosity that exists in America is not the result of conspiracy. It is too prevalent and too implicit to reach the level of discourse much less plotting. It is, rather, the very peculiar ‘style of mind’ which is spread and passed down generations without a thought about its origin or even its existence as the American way of being. It is an attitude hiding in plain sight which is what makes it so difficult to confront. Conspiracy is a symptom of what has become over centuries a cultural imperative, that is pre-emptive protection from those who pretend to be like us. ‘They are not like us. We are their potential victims. We know this is our DNA not in our brains.’

Walker does an outstanding job of cataloguing the history of conspiracy theories in America since the 17th century. And many of these involve the threat posed by African-Americans both before and after emancipation. And he is entirely clear in his conclusion about conspiracies in America: “They are at the country’s core.” My principal criticism is that while he supplies an enormous number of the dots, he doesn’t connect them with anything like a theory of the case. He provides no reason why Americans act, almost uniquely, with such repetitious stupidity. The book needs an additional chapter.

Here’s an idea for that chapter: My hypothesis is that the historical and current behaviour of Americans, even the most politically and socially liberal, is driven by the cultural imperative of racial threat. This makes them particularly vulnerable to the con artists, politicians and cultists who claim secret knowledge essential for survival. Conspiracies of all sorts emanate from this central social disfunction. The range of these conspiracies is unbounded but they all have their emotional home in the fears of racial attack and retribution. Until they confront this, Americans will remain victims of themselves.

* Of course racism is subtlety expressed in many other cultures. One well-known British author, for example, clearly fears the literal drowning of civilisation and world-dominance by Africans (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). But unlike typical American fiction, no conspiracy is involved; his Africans are simply not clever enough. This is more generally demonstrated as well in the differences between British and American sci-fi and mysteries. Doctor Who fights numerous alien forces but these aren’t conspiratorial, only obsessive. Sherlock Holmes has his nemesis in Moriarty but only as an individual, never a cabal.

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

Electra’s Hidden Talent

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

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The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Irish Existentialist

So, if Alice had fallen down the rabbit hole in Ireland rather than in England, the result could well be The Third Policemen. Or, more aptly, if Shem and Shaun had set out on the road West instead of East down the River Liffey, it could be the alternative Finnegans Wake. But on the third hand, it seems more likely that O’Brien is engaged in a massive send-up of Everything Irish, from its grammar to its destiny.

O’Brien’s protagonist, who has no name for most of the book, is on a quest, not a very honourable quest but one that serves to set up the story. Although he is the teller of the tale, it is really Ireland itself that is its subject, its peculiar history, its equally peculiar inhabitants, and especially the land itself which has its own peculiarities:

“The road was narrow, white, old, hard and scarred with shadow. It ran away westwards in the mist of the early morning, running cunningly through the little hills and going to some trouble to visit tiny towns which were not, strictly speaking, on its way. It was possibly one of the oldest roads in the world. I found it hard to think of a time when there was no road there because the trees and the tall hills and the fine views of bogland had been arranged by wise hands for the pleasing picture they made when looked at from the road. Without a road to have them looked at from they would have a somewhat aimless if not a futile aspect.”

The thoughts and actions of Mr. No Name are dominated by a crackpot philosopher, de Selby, who bears more than a passing resemblance to the 18th century 'immaterialist' Irish philosopher, Bishop Berkeley. At least both figures treat life as more or less hallucinatory. This is a judgment O’Brien adopts wholeheartedly throughout the story: Ireland as a collective delusion. Of course, as with his protagonist, this country may not exist at all: “If you have no name you possess nothing and you do not exist and even your trousers are not on you although they look as if they were from where I am sitting.”

Entering into this hallucinatory state, Protagonist has found his Soul, that ‘other self’ with whom he can speak and derive wise counsel. The Soul, called Joe, is generally more rational and coherent than the others Protagonist meets on his journey, or indeed than the rube Protagonist himself. Nevertheless their conversations do not inhibit the frequent emergence of Walter Mitty-like fantasies among the many other questionable experiences. This is a clear confirmation of his conceptual presumptions: “Of all the many striking statements made by de Selby, I do not think that any of them can rival his assertion that ‘a journey is an hallucination’.”

The policeman of the title is one of a team of country constables who have a peculiar talent. They are able to see the colour of the wind, an apparently important ability that has much to do with the fate of new born infants. Other than their chromatic duties two of the three are concerned mainly with the theft and proper lighting of bicycles. One points spears and carves Russian boxes as a hobby; the other slurps his porridge from the bowl. The third has more useful interests. All are expert on the Atomic Theory which explains the progressive transformation of human beings into bicycles, and vice versa.*

Remarkably, O’Brien anticipates (inspires?) Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi idea of 3D printing of everything from machines to food 60 years in the future - bicycles, of course being the prototype. As the police sergeant explains, the world and everything in it consists of Omnium, a substance without any definite substance, but with a force:

“Omnium is the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden inside the root of the kernel of everything and it is always the same... It never changes. But it shows itself in a million ways and it always comes in waves... Some people call it God and there are other names for something that is identically resembling it and that thing is omnium also into the same bargain.”

Omnium exists in its natural form “lacking an essential property of all known objects,” namely dimension. But it can be used to stimulate any of the human senses. In short, Omnium is the equivalent of Bishop Berkeley's immaterial Idea.

Smoke and mirrors are appropriately two of O’Brien’s favourite tropes. Both obscure; both distort. He also revels in the negative questioning of those, like the devil, who prefer to give negative answers to every question. So, “Would you object to giving me a straight answer?” elicits the response “No”, which is in fact an agreement to speak plainly. One must be prepared at all times to obfuscate and to de-rail obfuscation. This is the Irish way.

There is no doubt that, as with Finnegans Wake and Alice in Wonderland, it would be possible to make a career of The Third Policeman by tracking down allusions to people, places, myths, and events in Irish history (as well as in modern nuclear physics).** The book, in a way, provokes such a study of the national character. Whether this would be a productive use of one’s time or not is another question. I’d have to say with definite ambiguity: ‘No.’

*One is tempted to think of the modern discussion of the AI/Human interface. O'Brien certainly must have been one of the first to consider living machines.
** I suspect, for example, that his pal, Divney, with whom he commits a rather horrific crime, is England (or perhaps merely the Northern Irish counties). The two live together for some time, more or less accidentally, but end up not trusting each other, although they sleep in the same bed.

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The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

War Corrupts Everything

War extinguishes the lives of many of the (mostly) men who are engaged in it, and many of the (mostly) women and children who are in its vicinity. But, however ghastly these immediate effects, they are trivial in the scheme that war has in mind. This is a novel about the Great War in its real greatness, the corruption of an entire society, sometimes overtly but also (mostly) insidiously, among young and old, rich and poor, educated and ignorant. Everyone pays for war, but not (mostly) through taxes.

The individuals fundamentally changed by war include, of course, its survivors, many of whom are physically or psychically maimed, sometimes grotesquely so. These latter are the undead. The effects of the dead, undead and otherwise injured ramify through the networks of families, friends and workmates that constitute a collective of suffering. These, not the graves of the dead, are where the real corruption takes place: “When the world has been shattered, nothing makes any sense. All hail the power of the bouncing balloon. In the absence of Jesus or him one must accept what one’s given.”

And quite apart from individuals, relationships disintegrate. Children without parents, women without husbands, de-populated towns and villages, are open to infection, both organic and social. The great flu epidemic, which originated in the trenches, was as effective as the Great War in its killing power. Government, established to handle the routine and predictable, becomes inept and even more exploitative than usual. And the ideologies of crackpot spiritualist and political ideas take up residence in the minds of the rest of the population.

So it shouldn’t be all that surprising to encounter a paedophile ring established as part of a public charity and sponsored by a deranged titled family. In the run of things, such an endeavour hardly seems worthy of notice much less prosecution. It seems the ideal literary focus for bringing together the ever-lengthening threads of war. Corruption of the young is how war transcends generations and survives those brief periods of peace. Youth absorbs the mores of war through sex more than formal education. War normalises everything since nothing about war is normal. The abnormal is, strangely, a way of forgetting about what war has accomplished. The rag and bone man can dispose of the remnants.

What’s lost in war is the entirety of a civilisation. Civilisation, as Freud knew, is that which restrains random human impulses. War does not create the impulses but it does release their constraints. As one of the undead laments “It’s too easy to say that we came back as beasts. We were beasts to begin with and then the war brought it out.” War is then a sort of reverse therapy, dislocating everything for the sake of chaotic reconstruction, only to engage in it over again. Civilisation, it would appear, is (mostly) the respite between rounds in which to take a breath and have a wash before re-engaging the foe, and losing another home, another civilisation.

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A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Affectionate Sarcasm

This first Cadfael story is about clerical arrogance, deceit, vanity, pettiness, ambition, vengefulness, and ultimately homicide in a 12th century monastic community. It also touches on idolatry and superstition in medieval Britain. And it makes several clever swipes at clerical celibacy and misogyny, miracles, religious piety, and the efficacy of prayer. Yet for all that it cannot be judged anti-religious. It is clearly a work in which there is an underlying appreciation for the ideals of medieval Catholic culture.

Edith Pargeter’s skill in carrying off such apparently contradictory intentions is probably what makes her Cadfael series so popular. What she endorses about Christianity is unstated but understood. It is the character of Cadfael himself, who after a rather full life of adventure - sexual as well as geographical - finds monastic life and its routines to be just what he needs. It is through his eyes that all the deficiencies of the Church are observed and recorded. And yet he implicitly assures the reader that it remains a worthwhile institution.

There is more than a touch of Pre-Raphaelite sentimentality in Pargeter’s prose (captured rather well I think in the cover of my edition). Nevertheless it is impossible for me at my stage in life to disagree with Cadfael’s express motivation for adopting the lowly status of monk: “When you have done everything else, perfecting a conventual herb-garden is a fine and satisfying thing to do.” I understand entirely.

Postscript: I suspect that Pargeter’s St. Winifred is based on the legend of the 12th century St. Frideswide, patron saint of Oxford. The famous Pre-Raphaelite stained glass artist, Edward Burne-Jones, created a large window in Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral in 1858 depicting scenes from her life. The last of these has various of her devotees surrounding her deathbed (see below). In the background Burne-Jones has placed a modern porcelain flush toilet. Pargeter emulates just this sort of tongue in cheek humour in her story.


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Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power by Anna Merlan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It Must Be Something in the Water

Conspiracy is a form of American poetry. It is incredibly imaginative, inspiring for many, and captures the essence of the civilisation from which it emerges, namely it’s ill-educated resentment of the world, especially of itself. From before the foundation of the country, Americans have considered themselves victims of some ‘higher power’ which oppresses them and seeks to destroy something essential about them. In the colonial era the oppressor was the native inhabitants, the English Crown, the French,... and witches. In the 19th century it was immigrant Catholics. In the 20th century it was Jews and socialists. In the 21st century the oppressor is the Deep State in all its complex manifestations from Satan worship by the elite to poisonous contrails to the government itself.

In this sense among others, the election as President of an arch-conspiracy theorist is perfectly representative of the population. Trump’s only notable skill is his ability to tap into the pervasive victimhood of Americans. But this is apparently enough to maintain him in power. He knows his audience. They live in a vague fear which they attribute to Central American immigrants, or disruptive black activists, or dishonest drug companies, or militant atheists, or the perfidious Chinese. But this is obvious projection. What they really fear is themselves. What actually oppresses them is their own continuing failure to confront their failure as a political entity. Trump helps them celebrate this evasion and they love him for it.

Not that there aren’t real conspiracies underway in America. But these are not hidden - the commercial process by which political campaigns are financed, the blatant gerrymandering by politicians, the influence-peddling within the military/industrial complex, the overt attempts to racially restrict voting, and the overthrow of foreign governments, often democratically elected ones. These all severely damage democracy and require active participation by large numbers of people. Yet there are no national radio shows, cable television programmes, militant interest groups, or privately funded news syndicates for these as there are for the investigation of alien invasion, the JFK assassination, the exposure of mass shootings as fake, and the conspiracy against conspiracies being carried out by the mainstream news media.

There is a clear link between American ‘conspiracism’ and Evangelical apocalypticism. Both are Gnostic in origin, which as Harold Bloom has noted, is the real national religion of America. Gnosticism is spiritualised paranoia, the belief that the world is out to get you, particularly by those in charge of the world, who have probably achieved their status through demonic influence. Gnosticism holds that we are all victims, but that only those of us who know we are victims are worthy of consideration. There is very little psychic distance between being convinced that there is a pedophile ring of top government employees and that the signs of the final trump (no pun intended) are obvious. The logic of conspiricism sits comfortably with that of American Fundamentalism in both its secular and religious versions.

Pizzagate, bitherism, antivaxxers, Twin Towers as CIA plot, and the dozens of other conspiracies publicised every day on the InfoWars and Alex Jones media are not odd beliefs held by marginal people in the USA. These are now legitimate, respectable opinions endorsed by celebrities, politicians, and academics. There are interest groups who apparently sincerely believe that the US is in danger of invasion by the United Nations, that the Las Vegas mass shooting of 2015 was orchestrated by the Obama administration (or ISIS or Mexicans depending on which senior politician you listen to), that the Sandy Hook massacre of school children was faked by ‘crisis actors,’ that Fox News and Breitbart accurately promote Conspiracy as an explanation for any murder or scandal.

So, as Anna Merlan says, “... people who peddle lies and half-truths have come to prominence, fame, and power as never before.” No longer can the crazy views prevalent in America be considered as idiosyncratic expressions of freedom of speech. The inmates do have control of the asylum. These are symptoms of mass psychosis. The political system in America may have contributed to this condition, but what contributed to the design of that system as well as the increasing irrationality of American society is something culturally more fundamental. An inherent feeling of victimhood is one way to express it. And it seems to have turned the country into a madhouse.

Postscript: The recognition of American victimhood is not news. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Stalin Front: A Novel of World War II by Gert Ledig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fear Without End

The Stalin Front is flippantly gruesome, a script I’m surprised Quentin Tarantino never picked up. It is a catalogue of the slaughter, degradation, and physical misery that soldiers suffer. As the translator’s introduction says, it is pure Kampfschrift: ‘fighting writing’. As such there is no deviation from the one emotion that is shared by every one of its characters: unremitting fear.

There is of course fear of the enemy, which is to be expected. But there is also fear of one’s fellows - fear of superiors, in the first instance because that’s the principal instinct trained into a soldier, but also because superiors may stop acting as superiors; fear of your peers whom you know would ultimately sacrifice your life for theirs, just as you would theirs for yours; and fear of the institutions of society that have collectively agreed to put you in a position of despairing hopelessness.

Ledig summarises the source of these fears succinctly: the fear of injustice. War can be defined as the absence of justice, of even the possibility of justice. It is the knowledge that justice is unattainable from any source within war that generates both the fear and the innumerable ways in which soldiers have discovered to mitigate the effects of injustice, from the distortion of orders to desertion.

It is not simply enemy bullets which kill and maim randomly, and therefore unjustly. The entire system of war, its protocols, procedures, and military organisation are established explicitly to avoid judgments about the relative merits of a course of action, criteria of choice, or the competencies of individuals. In fact there are no individuals, only classes into which individuals are assigned - ranks, degree of fitness, and function. None of these categories attracts the concept of justice.

Ledig’s technique for describing the universality of injustice in war is to create two opposing units, one German the other Soviet, which effectively surround each other, isolating the other unit from the rest of their army. And each of these units holds captive an enemy officer at its centre. The result is a sort of corporate enclosure in which the parts also contain the whole. The world outside this enclosure effectively doesn’t exist. Those who think they’ve escaped from it meet the fate they probably would have within it.

The last thought of the German Captain as he is shot in the back trying to rejoin his men is “Is this justice?” Of course it isn’t. Neither is the non-judicial execution of the Sergeant, nor the madness of the Cavalry Officer, nor the survival of any number of cowards and incompetents. Only after the battle subsides does a vague hope reassert itself. Standing by a graveside, the NCO comments on the pious words of a chaplain about the inscrutable justice of God: “‘I secretly hope there’s some truth in it.’ ‘Yes,’ said the Major. ‘I’d hate to think that was just another trick’.”

I suppose not allowing ourselves to think it’s just another trick is what keeps us alive, in or out of war. Injustice is after all our greatest fear

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The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books by John Carey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For He Is an English Man

To be a master of a literature is not to pretend to dominate its content but to allow oneself to be dominated by its scope and subtlety; to recognise that one’s opinions are simply a marginal part of that content and not a judgment on the whole. This is the sense in which Carey is a master of English. The language has made him. And his book is a tribute to the force and skill of that language.

What English has made John Carey is a modest, witty, morally sensitive, interesting person with an ability to tell a story of his life that is both charming and profound. It is charming in its unassuming detail of what the title identifies as an entirely unexpected life. And it is profound for exactly the same reason. There are no great epiphanies, no quasi-religious conversions to the life of the mind, just the incremental inexorable drift of a human being toward a fate which is a surprise rather than a decision.

My grandmother was a Carey. So perhaps I’m prejudiced by the possibility of a genetic connection (I admit to feeling this sort of thing when I encountered the memorial in Winchester Cathedral to a certain seventeenth century Bishop Carey). Nevertheless I think any prejudice is justified by the way Carey does his literary criticism - with the precision but not the bluster of a Harold Bloom, with the conscience of a Terry Eagleton less the Marxist rhetoric, and echoing the devotion of a James Wood while accepting its subliminally religious character. Carey’s religion is literature but he doesn’t expect himself or anyone else to feel the need to be saved by it.

Carey’s self-revelations are typically tentative and hesitant not rationalising or self-assertive:

“I thought of the padre who had given me Tom Jones, and how much I had admired him, and it came to me that, though I thought of myself as an agnostic, I was really a Christian who just did not happen to believe in God. As a choirboy I had sung the Magnificat hundreds of times, praising God for putting down the mighty from their seat and sending the rich empty away, and my belief that this was right, and that the mighty and the rich deserved to be humbled and to go hungry, had outlasted my belief in God.”

It’s difficult not to like the man, even if he isn’t a relative.

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Blindness by Henry Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cheerio to All That

Blindness might be a parody of English upper class manners and speech from the 1920’s, except that Henry Green, even in this his first novel, knew how to capture exactly what he saw and heard. Life among the chaps at Eton, all frightfully boring and dull except for Seymour and B.G. with whom one could banter in witty epithets and aphorisms. The only real challenge there was to avoid games, and the housemasters when cutting up in town.

Worst luck going blind don’t you know. Sets a person back a bit. Very important not to let the side down though. So much for the literary after-life (that uncertain period after Eton). It would be fun seeing again but hey ho, as Momma says, we could be poor. Fortunately old Nanny is still around to tend to her charge. No different really from when he was a baby. Easier actually since he’s much less mobile now. This is also fortunate because so is Nanny. So with the nurse, the maids, the cook, William the valet, and various other staff, she can just about cope.

The depressing thing is that the affairs in the house are not all that bright. Taxes you know. Country on the way down. The war had to be paid for after all, one supposes. Momma was alone with all the domestic administration. The motor has to go, and the chauffeur. And one is still expected to respond to these endless charity requests. What with one of the under-butler engaged in a dalliance with cook, there’s hardly time for running with the hounds much less a decent shooting party.

And on and on it goes: a chronicle of class disintegration, national transformation and youthful development. Blindness is probably better sociology than it is literature, a document of the time and place produced by someone who was an eye-witness. It shows where Green might be headed but he certainly hadn’t yet arrived. He just hadn’t seen or heard enough at Eton and Oxford.

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Three Cheers for the Paraclete by Thomas Keneally
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Ideology of the Word

Structured as a tragically satirical farce, the theme here are anything but farcical: the intellectual desert of Catholic orthodoxy, the overt and pervasive misogyny of males in the Church, clerical arrogance and ambition, the imperatives of ecclesiastical economics, and the consequences of institutional conformism. Originally published a half century ago, the book remains acutely relevant as an explanation for more recent events like the conviction and incarceration of Cardinal Pell, the head of the Catholic Church in Australia.

For most of the last two decades I have lived and worked in the Catholic colleges of the University of Oxford. As undoubtedly would have been the case with any other similar institutions, my experiences have been mixed. I have encountered as much venality, rudeness, and spite as I have altruism, personal kindness and charity. And just about in the same proportions as in the non-religious institutions with which I have been associated.

But there is something peculiarly intense about both the virtues and vices in a Catholic clerical community. It is probably inevitable that in a community devoted to words and the form of words, everything becomes symbolic. Nothing is insignificant. And nothing said or done has a half-life. Resentments, perceived slights, mistakes (intentional or otherwise) may be forgiven but they’re rarely forgotten. Such communities thrive on ‘mutual formation’ which means that the memory of events is essential to communal life.

At an institutional level this facility for memory is called ‘tradition’, a very powerful term in Catholic circles. Tradition is the final arbiter of any controversy - what others have said, the opinions of those whom we respect, and the words in which those opinions are expressed. Despite any superficial changes in the Catholic Church over recent years, it is tradition which abides as the generative principle of the institution, its sociology and the psychology of its members, particularly its clerical members, who are by definition male.

Consequently, in the Catholic Church, language itself has become an instrument of male domination - among its male members as well as by its male members over the females. This is itself an important component of tradition, arguably the keystone of the entire Church edifice. To allow this principle of language or its control by a male clerisy to be questioned would be institutionally disastrous and so hasn’t changed at all since Three Cheers for the Paraclete was published. And so it remains the intransigent source of the continuing issues within the Catholic Church.

Keneally’s book is about James, a priest who challenges the male worship of words in the Catholic Church. Set in mid-century, it could as easily be a story of 1919 or 2019. The stifling clerical culture is constant and Keneally captures its detail with great skill. But he also puts his finger exactly on the central tenet of the existence of Catholic clergy: “... the priest isn’t an individual. He’s a corporate being.” This is the existential reality of the Catholic priesthood. The priest is a product and a prisoner of protected words. But if he escapes from this ideology of words, or even if he merely neglects them, his existence, as perceived by himself, is threatened. “I call myself an institutional being,” James laments.

The import of this astute observation can’t be overstated. Most of us work for corporate entities, and our lives are dominated by corporate activities. But few of us consider ourselves as created by these corporations. Not so the Catholic priest who is taught that his very existence is a result of his ordination “as a priest forever according to the order of Melchisedech” (note the cooptation of Jewish tradition). He is made so by words; his priestly life is minutely regulated by words that remind him of his total dependence on the institution which controls the words; and his priestly duties consist largely of repeating prescribed words on a daily basis.

One of James’s seminary students captures the set of mind required for a priest: “Everything codified and as organized as a trawler master’s manual. Only God is a little more intangible than a diesel engine.” The party line is unassailable truth. One obeys; and one is expected to be obeyed in turn. As a priest “You can’t overdo conformity,” he continues. Rudeness, obfuscation, the suffering of others are all justified by the need for orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is about words not actions. And since faith is always a thing of words, the right words are everything.

So I can’t say that the men I’ve met and worked with over the last two decades are individually better or worse than others. But it is clear to me that the institution to which they have devoted their lives exploits them mercilessly in precisely the ways that Keneally describes. It is an institution which would sacrifice them without a second thought if they were to prioritise people over words but would protect those who were loyal to the words regardless of their behaviour. This is an example of an organisation in which the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

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Youth Without God by Ödön von Horváth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Worst Case Scenario

Whenever a religion demonstrates its inadequacy to account for the contemporary facts of life, be sure that another religion is on the way to fill the vacuum. It too will fail but only after increasing the quantum of human misery significantly.

The impulse toward religion seems irresistible. Why? Comfort? Despair? A desire for justice or revenge? It seems that the evil which permeates the world demands a response. Religion is that response. Without religion there is no hope. Or so it might seem.

Religion rationalises evil as a temporary aberration, something to be endured for a higher achievement - heaven, nirvana, the respect of the gods, self-satisfaction. Ultimately justice will prevail and evil will be overcome, or at least relativised as the error religion claims injustice to be.

Since it is evil that necessitates God, he is automatically recruited to the cause of combatting the designated evil - the black man, the immigrant, the political opponent, the religious opponent, the opponent of any sort. These are unjust by definition and must be corrected by their elimination as God commands.*

Youth is never without religion, which it inherits from its parents, and therefore youth is never without God. Religion is strongest in youth, for whom the correcting of injustice is of obsessive concern since youth feels no other real responsibilities except obtaining justice for itself. Youth, fortunately, is constrained in its religious duties by a lack of power and so seeks out and combats evil primarily among its own ranks.

Some remain youthful throughout their lives, maintaining their religion as a guiding force as the scope of their adult power expands. They may redefine what constitutes evil, and consequently adapt their religion to the times as they advance in age. Unsurprisingly, religion tends to become increasingly conservative with age among those who cherish it. This adapted religion, more repressive from generation to generation, they in turn pass on to youth, with God as guide and constant ally.

Those who discover in adulthood that religion is mythical, that God is dead, may worry that evil will be consequently unconstrained. At least this is the story they hear from the religionists. They don’t realise that it is the existence of evil which has prompted the creation of God; and that the death of one’s God means the life of another God, fighting some other purported evil. This might provoke despair but shouldn’t be surprising. One God’s Mede is another God’s Persian.

As the translator says somewhat defensively in his introduction to Youth Without God: “A man does not need to be a fervent believer to sense the absence of God, or to detect the presence of darker agency.” He thinks we live in a godless age and suffer, or are at least confused, on account of it. But it is clear that Horváth knows that the racist, nationalist, militant Nazism which his protagonist experiences is anything but godless. The title represents a hope not a concern.

The new National Socialist God justifies justice of an entirely different sort than the old God; but there is justice nonetheless. So that it is incorrect to claim that “No divine justice will come: not before death, and not after it; not for the old, and not for the young.” This is not the “worst case scenario.” Far worse is the new theological regime which thrives on a divinely ordained justice of a different sort of human repression. Perhaps it’s time to realise that justice can’t be defined elsewhere than in human community.


*This is essentially an extrapolation of Alain Badiou’s thesis that the designation of the Good and Human Rights as the opposite of perceived Evil is a very dangerous business. I don’t know if Horváth’s story influenced Badiou, but it certainly demonstrates the importance of Badiou’s insight. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Morphine by Mikhail Bulgakov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Chasing the Dream

Life goes on in the middle of war, even in the middle of revolution. There are births and natural deaths, and unfortunate marriages, and people keep doing their jobs. And people also go mad. Some commit suicide without even noticing that a revolution is underway. The Tsar is dead. Long live the Tsar. Or whatever the new man in charge is called.

Or perhaps the suicide is a figure for the ancien regime (or its replacement). Power is, after all, an addictive drug, the dosage of which always has to be increased to achieve an equilibrium. Morphine leads to more morphine, leads to cocaine, leads to oblivion. Unchecked by any external forces, power expands until it kills those who wield it. They corrupt themselves from the inside.

The history of revolution is not dissimilar to that of addiction - fragmentary records which do not begin to express the circumstances or sufferings of either. The narratives of both are equally evasive, rationalising, and self-serving. From the first shot, the first injection, the ultimate trajectory is fixed but unrecognised by those involved. They chase the dream.

Meanwhile others are perfectly happy. How odd existence is when dominated by dreams - induced by either drugs or power. More is never enough.

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There There by Tommy Orange
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Indigenous Immigrants

North and South America are inhabited almost exclusively by displaced persons. The story of each person is unique but their commonality is an experience of lostness often expressed through a sort of transcendentalist attachment to ‘the land.’ Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is My Land’ captures either a hope or an ideology depending on how it is interpreted. But it is also a restatement of Walt Whitman’s ‘Self’ who is the displaced and replanted part that speaks for the the whole: "It is you talking just as much as myself... I act as the tongue of you.”

The Urban Native American is a special category of displaced person however, first because of his forcible removal from wherever he came from, but more importantly because his dispersion among other displaced persons leaves him without an historical cultural community, and therefore without a self. Immigrant Scots, or Russians or Italians don’t identify as former Europeans. But Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota Sioux only possess any substantial cultural weight as Native American, a designation forced by circumstances. What they share is only displacement, not history, or language, or religion or social traditions.

So neither Guthrie nor Whitman speak for the Native American. And neither, in a sense, does Tommy Orange. Rather he speaks about individuals whose commonality is a lack of commonality - except for finding themselves fetched up together in Oakland California as a sort of desert island for the dispossessed. Each story is unique, genuinely unique, because the cultural connection among them is this invented category of Native American.

“We are the memories we don’t remember,” says one of Orange’s characters. What is shared is a vacuum. For these people “Everything is new and doomed.” Even their identity which has been imposed by the dispossessors. The irony implied by Orange’s use of the famous quote about Oakland “There is no there there,” is doubled in these stories. Stein meant that what she remembered of her childhood in Oakland had been obliterated. For these Native Americans the problem is not displaced memory but an absence of it. One can only hope that Orange’s ‘tongue’ is as effective as Whitman’s in creating a coherent community in which to be oneself.

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