All You Zombies by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Never an Episode of Star Trek...

... And why not? Consciousness creates itself according to Heinlein. Forget about the mythical divine genesis stuff or that Darwinian evolution bunk. This is the real thing, the theory with oomph: time travel comes with the Homo sapiens territory, at least for the ones who can hack it (it’s the rest who are zombies). The perks are pretty spectacular - picking when and where you’re born for a start. And none of the neurotic consequences of family life. Literally no one to blame but yourself. Puts an entirely new perspective on the idea of solitary sex. Must have knocked their socks off in 1959. It’s still a bit of a whiz-bang. That’s probably why not.

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Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall: From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Batman: What Did Bobby Fischer See?

The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a now famous paper in 1974: ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ His concern was the nature of consciousness. For him “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism- something it is like for the organism.” What he concluded is that no amount of description - of the organism itself, of its environment, of its history or upbringing - is sufficient to either derive or explain the subjective experience of such an organism, except to a sufficiently similar organism.

It is clear from Frank Brady’s biography that Bobby Fischer is so unlike any other human organism, that his experience - what he saw, how he judged what he saw, and why he acted in response to what he saw - is entirely impenetrable. This has to do in part with his 180 IQ score, perhaps with his marginally autistic personality, certainly with his profound talent for the game of chess. But ultimately the problem of ‘interpreting’ Bobby Fischer is much more general. As Thomas Aquinas insisted, each individual human being is his or her own species, and therefore fundamentally unknowable in Nagel’s terms.

In this light Bobby Fischer is Everyman. The difference between him and others is that his fame and his eccentricity provoke the questions that we don’t typically ask about people we know about. We prefer to project ourselves into their situations and provide them motivations, responses, and rationalisations that are entirely our own. But with Fischer, his talent is so enormous, his behaviour is so strange, that it’s just not possible to judge him to be pursuing any purpose but his own, a purpose that even he may have never been aware of.

Brady can therefore only speculate about Fischer’s mental processes:

“It seemed that his strength grew not just from tournament to tournament and match to match, but from day to day. Each game that he played, or analyzed, whether his or others’, established a processional of insight. He was always working on the game, his game, refining it, seeking answers, asking questions, pulling out his threadbare pocket set while in the subway, walking in the street, watching television, or eating in a restaurant, his fingers moving as if they had a mind of their own.”

Indeed: “a mind of their own.” Fischer’s consciousness was devoted to one thing: chess. He had other interests - swimming, baseball, ice hockey - but these were obviously engaged in to further his pursuit of the game. With his intelligence and determination, he could have pursued any number of professional careers. Why chess grabbed him so totally at an early age and then dominated his life to the extent of eliminating any apparent self-reflection (and often logic) is the specific mystery of Bobby Fischer - the mind revealed only in his fingers.

It’s impossible to tell whether Fischer’s life is psychotic or cannily purposeful in a way that the rest of us just can’t comprehend. Was chess simply another symptom - along with his bizarre anti-Semitism, his quondam religious fundamentalism, his disdain for modern medicine and dentistry, his suicidal feud with the US government, and a general unprovoked nastiness - of a complex but deranged mind? Or were these consistent and rational responses to an understanding of the world that could only be achieved through Fischer’s unique position within it? Walking a mile in his shoes was never an option for anyone else.

I suppose that this mystery is what makes biography interesting. Biography can only articulate the mystery; but that appears to be all we need to find it worthwhile. A reminder perhaps that none of us really understands anyone else, and very likely not even ourselves. Whatever Bobby Fischer saw, no one else ever did, or ever will.

Postscript: Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story is a remarkable literary analysis of Fischer’s personality written a half century before events: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The New European

I try; I really do. I want to be hip, and cosmopolitan, and wittily detached. I even take the trouble to track Houellebecq’s locations on GoogleEarth in order to keep my interest levels up. But I fail. I do; I fail. I feel broken, dissipated, impotent. I try to hide it but the lines on my face are unmistakable marks of defeat as well as age. I must be the wrong temperament, or the wrong nationality, or perhaps have the wrong hormones. Yes, that’s it, the hormones.

I do enjoy the self-satisfied Euro-cynicism and the complacent nationalistic profiling (“You’re never well received by the English–they are almost as racist as the Japanese, like a lite version of them;” “How could a Dutch person be xenophobic? That’s an oxymoron: right there: Holland isn’t a country, it’s a business at best”). And I know about the literary allusions, the very French psycho-drama, and the implicit rebuke of the culture of late stage global capitalism. Serotonin is no doubt a work 0f refined and sensitive taste.

But taste just doesn't compensate for the pervasive dullness of the story, the triviality and banality of the descriptive details, or the smug vapidness of the characters. Tout est de ma faute. J'ai eu l'éducation d'un paysan et je n'ai jamais lu Molière. Je ne peux que baisser la tête de honte.

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On the Heights of Despair 
by 

Emil M. Cioran, 

 

Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Translator)

 

Not Walt Whitman... But Close

This fictional memoir sums up a young man’s view of being old. Being old means finally having to confront the end of oneself. Cioran does this as a self-professed therapeutic exercise. His translator calls the book a prose “song of myself,” thus connecting Cioran with Whitman. Perhaps; but could this be more than merely the sense that each is the opposite of the other?

Whitman finds his joy and inspiration in his good health; Cioran revels in his physical suffering as the source of artistic virtue. Whitman is called by the “urge” of the world; Cioran feels the urge of death. Whitman celebrates; Cioran mourns. Whitman looks forward to a “lucky” Death; Cioran wants us to give Death the fear it deserves. Whitman says “I exist as I am, that is, enough.” Cioran says, “We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”

One could go on cataloguing the precise contradictions between the two. Their views on their own lives and that of the world itself are so obviously antithetical that the list of correspondences quickly becomes boring. Nonetheless there is this that makes them brothers: the irresistible necessity to express their innermost, subjective selves. Both feel they are exploding with something of universal significance. What each perceives is simply too powerful to remain hidden. 

What both provide, therefore, is a sort of phenomenology of the soul. Not as a promotion or recommendation, but as a description. In a way it is not the content of each exposition that is most important but the method of construction. As Cioran says, this method is one of lyricism, that is, the attentive expression of emotions and other physical states. No ideas, no arguments, no explanation, no theory. So despite their radically different stances, Whitman and Cioran are actually similar examples of this lyrical method. They certainly aren’t philosophical positions from which to choose.

 

Under the Skin 
by 

Michel Faber

 

BlackOxford's review 

Sep 25, 2019  ·  edit

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bookshelves: dutch-flemish, british 

Get Outta My Dreams
Get Into My Car

The woman has a job to do: finding young, fit male bodies and bringing them on back to the farm. It takes dedication and sacrifice on her part; but there are worse jobs. She gets to live in the Scottish countryside, work in the outdoors, and generally be her own boss. And she’s proud of her trade-craft. After so many years, her hunting and seducing skills are sharply honed.

But there’s always more to learn. She’s got the local accents down pretty well. But her own still needs work. And foreigners can still be a challenge. And like anyone in her line of work, the rigid techniques of quick assessment of the quarry and complete calm at the moment of capture have to be re-learned everyday. It’s never boring.

True, it can get a bit lonely. She doesn’t really know anyone roundabout. And of course she’s a freak to many, even her mates. So meeting anyone special locally is out of the question. The only thing she has is her work. And we all know what that’s like. If that’s the only basket you have, the eggs that are in it have to watched extremely closely. Letting emotion enter is a dangerous business - especially when it involves the prey. But hey, that’s what being human is all about - emotion.

More than a bit Octavia Butler-ish, especially her Bloodchild, combined with the social commentary of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. After the first clutch of hitch-hikers met their fate, I’d had enough. Or perhaps I’m just jaded and closed-minded when it comes to Scotland.

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Do Scientists Make Good Philosophers?

I am confused. Not (inordinately) by quantum physics: Smolin is an excellent populariser of an almost impossible subject. But by his philosophy, which appears self-contradictory. Either I don’t understand his philosophical argument or he doesn’t. Either way, it’s not a terribly convincing exposition of his point of view.

Smolin begins in a way that makes my heart sing: “To explain the world to ourselves we make up stories and then, because we are good storytellers, we get infatuated by them and confuse our representations of the world with the world itself. This confusion afflicts scientists as much as laypeople; indeed, it affects us more, because we have such powerful stories in our tool kits.” A scientist who takes seriously the centrality of story-telling to everything connected with human beings is a rare and beautiful bird.

He then increases my admiration by recognising the essentially conventional character of not just science but all human inquiry: “To have a scientific mind is to respect the consensus facts, which are the resolution of generations of dispute, while maintaining an open mind about the still unknown.” Some people know more than others about certain things, like physics. Groups of these people argue continuously about what they know about those things. Their concurrence is the best view, for the moment, that we’re likely to have about those things, even if the unknown remains... well, unknown.

And finally, Smolin recognises the validity of what I call metaphysics or what others think of as religion, that intellectual realm beyond language and beyond at least current experience. “It helps to have a humble sense of the essential mystery of the world, for the aspects that are known become even more mysterious when we examine them further.” In many ways the mystery of the ‘beyond’ increases the more we know. Existence itself, we begin to realise, is not something we are able to measure and evaluate. The closer we get to this descriptor-which-is-not-a-property, the less sure we are about everything else. So that “The simplest facts about our existence and our relationship to the world are mysteries.”

But then Smolin starts to get a bit eccentric. He says, “Behind the century-long argument over quantum mechanics is a fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality—a disagreement which, unresolved, escalates into an argument about the nature of science.” But he has already implied that he doesn’t want to fight about reality but rather who has a better story. It is at this point that he gets swept into metaphysics not as a scientist, or even merely as a thinker, but as a polemicist, that is, someone with an ideological axe to grind, with a story that he takes to be more than a story. He wants to tell me, and you, and his fellow scientists what’s really there. And it is here that we part company.*

Smolin‘s world is divided between realists, people like him who believe that there is a world that exists independently of our experience of it; and purported anti-realists, those who believe that our knowledge of the world, particularly our knowledge of atoms, radiation and elementary particles, is not just a matter of convention but ONLY a matter of convention. That is to say, that what we know about is solely the language in which we know it, and that’s the end of the matter. He claims that most scientists today are anti-realists and that this attitude represents a kind of ideology which is inhibiting a solution to the big problems of contemporary quantum physics.

This distinction between realists and anti-realists, however, is a parody and a slur; and in the context of his argument, it is fraudulent. To understand why, it is necessary to define metaphysics a little more carefully. Immanuel Kant, the 18th century thinker, is the go-to guy when it comes to what we mean by metaphysics in the modern world. For Kant, metaphysics is not about religious revelation or mythical accounts about how the world came into being. Rather it is a purely rational endeavour for discovering what might lie beyond language, beyond our immediate experience and what allows us to connect the two. Our experience is certainly of reality; it’s the getting of that experience into language which causes the disjunction between reality and story.

The intellectual technique which Kant developed for metaphysical inquiry is called Transcendental Deduction. In simple terms this technique tries to establish what things must be the case in order for us to connect our experiences with the language we use to express that experience. These ‘transcendentals’ are things that we employ instinctively as human beings to make sense of what we casually call reality. Since we cannot even conceive of something called reality without them, however, we are never able to communicate about reality itself, only reality filtered or constructed through this human faculty. Since communication about this reality can only take place through language, we are constantly tempted, as Smolin admits, to confuse language with reality.

Even these transcendentals are parts of stories however. Kant suggested, for example, that reality must have certain characteristics if it were to appear to us as it does, even through our human filters. Space and time, he said, are two such characteristics. These are the kind of things that must be there in light of our experience. But about a century after he wrote, it became clear that he was wrong. It is not space and time that are elements of reality, but space-time, an entirely different metaphysical, as well as scientific category. Space-time is part of a contrasting story. As such it is yet another deduction about the world, not necessarily a ‘thing’ in the world. It is a word, a concept, that is connected to other words and concepts, and not to that vague unknown called reality.

And Smolin is undoubtedly correct: something is missing from current quantum theory. Perhaps, as he suggests, time generates space, which might then explain quantum entanglement. But neither Kant nor any other ‘idealist’ thinker, scientist or layperson, would deny the existence of reality as something independent of human perception or experience. What they are likely to deny is that the language we use to express this reality is ever any kind of permanent truth. Among other things, our deductions about what is actually ‘there’ are changing more or less continuously. And we know that the language we use to describe what is there, however scientific, is not the reality of what is there. The map is not the territory. Smolin’s story may turn out to be better by the standards of his colleagues but it will never be any more real.

Regardless of its elusiveness, indeed its inherent unattainability, reality is a necessary transcendental category for all scientific inquiry. Perhaps it is the only one that really matters. Without a presumption that there is something ‘there’ to be inquired about, inquiry would not take place. Without the failure of scientific stories to achieve what we hope to achieve, knowledge could not be distinguished from self-interested boast. Reality is a permanently receding horizon which doesn’t get any nearer the more precise our measurements or the more inclusive our theories become. To even suggest that some scientists claim that reality doesn’t exist is simply a tendentious ploy on Smolin’s part. It’s a ridiculous assertion. And it needlessly undermines his own position.

It is perfectly possible and respectable for scientists to differ about the best transcendental deductions to be made about reality. Or indeed for scientists to simply decline to make such deductions and ‘get on with calculating.’ And there are better and worse deductions to be made depending upon how inclusive they are of alternative deductions, that is to say, scientific stories about the world. Smolin’s story isn’t one of these; it is only about the possibility of one of these - that he apparently wants assistance in writing. He claims his story might be better once it gets finished. Sure, and I might have been a world-wide celebrity with Stephen Hawking’s intellect and Rock Hudson’s looks. Shoulda, woulda, coulda, as my mother used to say. Until his story is told, it has no status except that of dream.

The literary parallel is to me inescapable: Can you imagine a Jane Austen who instead of exposing the misogynistic mores of contemporary English culture in her work, wrote instead about the reprehensible lack of critical fiction among contemporary authors and solicited allies in her cause for ‘real’ fiction? Or perhaps a Cervantes who instead of creating the genre of the novel, complained about the absence of untrue but meaningful narratives about human beings trapped in their own imaginings? I think it’s clear that neither of these imaginary figures would be taken seriously by history.

So despite his overtly Kantian epistemology, which makes the distinction between stories and reality, what it is that Smolin wants to replace current quantum mechanics, is at best only something temporarily better not something definitive, true or even necessarily a closer approximation to reality. Instead of slinging intellectual mud, perhaps he just ought to get on with it. I regret my conclusion because Smolin is a fan of Leibniz, as am I; but he’s not doing himself or Leibniz justice with this fruitless rant about realism.**

=====================

* Smolin contradicts his initial assertions about science both implicitly and explicitly throughout the book. Here is one example:

“I want to uncover a world beyond quantum mechanics. Where quantum mechanics is mysterious and confusing, this deeper theory will be entirely comprehensible. I can make this claim because we have known since the invention of quantum mechanics how to present the theory in a way that dissolves the mysteries and resolves the puzzles. In this approach, there is no challenge to our usual beliefs in an objective reality, a reality unaffected by what we know or do about it, and about which it is possible to have complete knowledge. In this reality, there is just one universe, and when we observe something about it, it is because it is true. This can justly be called a realist approach to the quantum world.”

Note the sudden appearance of ‘complete knowledge’ and ‘truth’ and the disappearance of ‘mystery’. Smolin clearly reckons he is on the trail of ultimate reality itself. Note also that he is particularly concerned not to challenge our ‘common-sensical’ beliefs. Yet in the previous paragraph he wants us to dump our common sense understanding of what physicists call ‘locality,’ that is, the impossibility of two objects sharing properties at a distance. So much for the distinction between stories and reality.

** inspired by Leibniz, Smolin imagines a universe of entities called ‘nads’ which are similar to Leibniz’s ‘monads’. These nads are defined relationally to each other, an idea perhaps borrowed from the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in which each Person is defined entirely in terms of its relations to the other two. Nads are ‘events’ rather than things in Smolin’s conception. Interestingly, this idea has been previously put forth by Philip Caputo in his Theology of the Event. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

But this idea makes no sense in terms of Leibniz’s Monadology since each of his monads is ‘windowless,’ that is, has no perception of anything but it’s own isolated state. The only relation the monad has is with God. The monad’s perception is in fact supplied entirely by God who also ensures that the collectivity of monads is coordinated in their perceptions and actions. Smolin seems dangerously close to this theology when he suggests that there are ‘hidden connections’ among nads which defy locality restrictions and explain quantum entanglement. That may be interesting poetry but it is not compelling science... or theology.

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Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

False Empathy

Nostalgia is not my thing. But it’s something Alice Hoffman does very well. Narratives about Dickensesque orphans, lost loves, family dislocation, the past in general appeal to many but I find them saccharine, precious and vaguely morbid.

Nostalgic sentiment abounds in Here on Earth. But it is artificial sentiment. No one could possibly remember the details of conversations thirty years earlier, or the subtle emotions involved. Yet here they are verbatim as if they were being played out in real time. These are conversations and situations written about for their effect, to manipulate the reader not to inform or to provoke an interpretation. The interpretation is already there, pre-packaged and waiting for a vulnerable and uncritical mind.

This is superficiality just above the level of the treacly romances of a Barbara Cartland, but only just. Hoffman is undoubtedly a much more adept writer of prose. But what she writes about is just as trivial. So much feeling thrown around like confetti at a wedding. Little subtlety; no real tragedy in terms of competing virtues; just pure schmaltz with the substance and impact of a made for television chick-flick.

On the other hand, Oprah apparently loved it for the same reasons.

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The Strange Case of Rachel K by Rachel Kushner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cuban History

The first of these three stories, ‘The Great Exception’, is a Borges-like counterfactual fake that tells the truth of Cuban national origins in the sexual fantasies of Queen Isabella. From the island’s discovery by Columbus, who is killed, cooked, eaten, and assimilated by the aboriginal inhabitants, to its development as a decaying tropical Paris, to its virtual annexation (along with the Kingdom of Hawaii) by the United States, the constant theme is sexual vice. The ‘exception’ in question seems to be the accidental discovery of the Americas. Or perhaps it refers to this latter military/political event, an exception to the myth of American exceptionalism. They did, of course, what any big country does to smaller ones - they enslaved it in imperial rule.

‘Debouchment’ covers the subsequent period in Cuban history, “the era after the Spanish ate the parrots to extinction (while the natives stuck to grilled banana heart), and before the Russians came, with their Brutalist architecture and their smoked pig’s fat.” This is a time, after the abolition of slavery, of the rationalisation of continuing racial and economic oppression. Deterioration continued but now “with amber Lalique windows, and the addition of cheval-de-frise on the low walls of Spanish colonial buildings, to prevent vagrants from sitting.” And the essentials of Cuban life remained constant: “syphilis, tobacco, and trees with fruit whose flesh is the pink of healthy mucus membranes.” But this all stopped abruptly when Castro’s bandits bombed the Pan-American Club.

The title story of Rachel K is a case study of the depravity of 1950’s Cuba. A former French Nazi masquerading as a diplomat tangles with a faux-French stripper with painted-on faux-net stockings. She is a prostitute who “makes a life out of twilight.” Like the country itself “The boundary between her private life and public life has blurred, as has the boundary between engaging her body only in intimate pleasures with people she trusts, and using it as an object she owns.” ‘K’, after all, is not just for Kushner, but also for what one uses in German to spell the name of the country.

In Havana the French Nazi “found occupied Paris all over again.” Better than Paris because it wasn’t occupied by other soldiers in the midst of war but by the corporate executives of international companies on the make. “It was occupied Paris, with Americans in Cadillacs instead of Germans in Mercedes.” Rachel ignores him, then teases him, then engages him in intimate conversation during which the “Nothingness” that is in these people, their un-mappable emptiness, continues to leak away into the recorded national past.

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Wide Open by Nicola Barker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Island Life

The Isle of Sheppey, set in the mudflats of the Thames estuary, has limited appeal as a tourist destination. But according to Nicola Barker, its attraction lies not in its scenery but its intriguing population of eccentric summer-folk who find it just right for escaping what might be called normality. Most don’t know who they are; some even swap identities. Others are genetically defective with odd behavioural consequences. At least two are psychotic; but one of them may not even be real. Still others are simply confused by the circumstances of life and prefer the isolation.

Barker enmeshes the reader in this confusing melange of Sheppey from the outset. The backstories of each of the characters are connected to some bizarre family tragedy in which they all are involved. The slow revelation of this tragedy is the substance of the novel. Magical coincidence reigns throughout as the various symbols laid down like gingerbread crumbs coalesce.

The technique is that of a sort of literary fan dance. The narrative twists and turns suggest what’s there, but no more. As one of the characters says: “That the thing you are most interested in is the thing no one gets to see.” Each of the tics, and foibles, and stray comments increases the reader’s eagerness for more. It’s cheaply seductive; and it works.

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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Natural Justice

Hypocrisy allows us to remain alive. Without it we would be forced to recognise the misery we endure and the misery we inflict. So we lie; we make evil, even if it’s necessary evil, into virtue. Untruthfulness is re-branded as ‘discretion.’ Exploitation becomes ‘providing employment.’ Nationalism hides behind a mask of religious faith. And environmental destruction is promoted as a divine right which human beings have an obligation to honour. As Mrs Janina Duszejko, Civil Engineer, English Teacher, Gnostic Astrologer, Committed Vegetarian, and translator of William Blake knows, “The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing.”

While not religious, Janina believes in cosmic order. She thinks birth, death, and the course of our lives are determined by our pre-conscious experience with the stars and the planets. Living through the long winters in the isolated mountains of Southwestern Poland have given her plenty of leisure to pursue these connections. The factual results of her research are clear: “every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.” Her conclusion is that of William Blake himself: “Anger puts things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell; Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision, which it’s hard to attain in any other state... Without a doubt Anger is the source of all wisdom, for Anger has the power to exceed any limits.”

Janina is angry and she dreams of revenge - mainly against the local hunting fraternity who have killed her two dogs and any number of wild creatures whom she has befriended or admired. She is unable to break through the wall of institutional hypocrisy that the hunters have erected to protect themselves. But despite the solidarity among the local gentry, the police, the state forestry people, and even the Church, the leading hunters are found successively dead over the course of a year. Janina blames the animals and writes the authorities repeatedly to inform them of her suspicions. She doesn’t want the animals punished but forgiven as a matter of justice, for it is obvious to her if to no one else that “the world was not created for Mankind.”

Only religious fanatics and other self-serving types could argue otherwise. Oh, wait, perhaps they’re righteously angry too. Is it only hypocrites who are hypocritical?

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Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Never Trust a Blood Relative

Talking to Strangers is an elaboration of a simple (trivial?) idea: It’s very difficult to tell when people are lying. According to Timothy Levine, the academic psychologist on whom Gladwell relies for his basic argument, the presumption that people tell the truth is almost universal, a few Holy Fools (and, I suppose, Judge Judy) excepted. Levine calls this his Truth Default Theory. Gladwell applies it entertainingly, if rather repetitively, to cases of duplicity ranging from double agents in government agencies to international financial fraud.

The interesting part of Gladwell’s thesis is that we can’t be trained out of our predisposition to believe what ‘credible’ people, that is, folk who exhibit facial traits and body language which conform to cultural conventions, have to say. Police, judges, regulatory officials, even counter-espionage experts have equally poor records for detecting falsehood compared to the rest of us (it also works the other way round: truth-telling appears as lying if accompanied by ‘mis-matched’ behavioural signals). We are genetically programmed to be dupes (I suspect sex as the evolutionary motive!). And there is no reliable technology that does any better.

The implication for me is that the more anyone is familiar with expected conventional behavioural responses, and can perform these as needed, the more credible they will be. Not a terribly innovative conclusion admittedly, but it does suggest that Gladwell has the wrong end of the authenticity-stick. We may have to worry about strangers being honest; but the real danger is the mendacity of those closest to us, those who know what we find credible, namely intimate family members, not strangers.

There’s another issue as well. It’s clear that most 0f us lie to ourselves from time to time, that is, we conveniently and selectively recall events which confirm our self-rationalising narratives. We cannot observe our own physical behaviour to determine the extent of mismatch. Nor would it make any difference if we could since we may actually believe our own press, as it were. I know academics and business people who act this way as a matter of routine. It’s part of their strategy for success. They speak and write with total conviction about things they really know nothing about. One of these may be the president of the United States. Who knows, perhaps even Gladwell is amongst these experts at self-delusion and is simply scamming the rest of us with complete sincerity.

Or am I merely projecting a sort of cynicism about Gladwell’s slick rapportage? Possibly. But he does seem to have a somewhat murky past as a defender of several dodgy industries like tobacco and pharmaceuticals (See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...). Presumably he was quite handy at spinning credible publicity out of otherwise damaging facts. “Transparency,” Gladwell says, “is a myth—an idea we’ve picked up from watching too much television and reading too many novels.” One wonders to what degree his book might be an instance of the phenomenon he is describing.

Oh, and as an aside, the attribution of the death of a black student in the custody of a Texas jail to an ‘escalating miscommunication between strangers’ verges on the obscene. His use of this example to book-end his narrative and his references to it as a recurring theme suggest some serious judgmental deficiencies. I don’t feel myself defaulting to truth, or Gladwell’s purported truth, in the least.

Postscript 18Sept19: it appears that Gladwell’s bubble is bursting: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc...

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Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Praying Our Way to the Apocalypse

Having most likely entered my final decade of life, I have been drawn into reflecting on my experience with the various institutions in which I have been directly involved - the family, the church, the military, academia, and financial and commercial business. Ticking them off as a has-been in each, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that I have been a consistent failure in them all. But reading Rendevous with Oblivion gives a glimmer of hope that perhaps this failure has not been all mine.

The collection of essays is a catalogue of institutional corruption, not just in politics where it has always thrived, but also in every significant class of human cooperative endeavour. Persistent sexual abuse by the clergy of children and vulnerable adults; the selling of university places on a large scale; the involvement of senior military people and politicians in patently treasonous activities; the systematic protection of the architects of worldwide financial collapse; the exposure of routine fraud and other reprehensible behaviour among leading cultural lights, all suggest that something systematically is undermining what we vaguely refer to as civilisation.

The issue which Frank raises is not that these institutions have corrupt members. Such has always been the case. It is rather that the institutions themselves now serve corruption, that they initiate, tolerate, and promote bad behaviour among their members. What was formerly considered as aberrant is now perceived as normal, even admirable. What were at one time institutional inhibitors to the excesses of human desire are now conduits through which those desires can be achieved. What in fact were refuges from the worst effects of free market competition are now places of the greatest intensity of self-aggrandisement.

To the extent that these institutions are the substance of civilised society, we are retreating into a sort of barbarism. This may not be noticed because the substitution of social virtue with expedient self-interest is subtle. Justice gives way step by step and with progressively strident argument to security. Social responsibility is privatised through ideological rationale as a matter of personal choice. Personal financial success or celebrity come to define social contribution. Integrity gives way to the necessities of ambition which is understood as admirable. And value is what other people say it is. This is the world which Frank documents. It is a world that even Thomas Ligotti might find shocking in its unrelieved exploitative evil (Chris Hedges, not so much).

It is difficult to maintain the institutional perspective when exhibitionist clowns like Trump, AM radio hosts and cable-news pundits, internet bloggers and social media inciters are what’s most visible and the most obvious symptoms of widespread deterioration in the social fabric. But the problem and its solution is institutional. That is to say, institutional corruption cannot be reversed by changing the leading players, nor through a change in the ruling political party, nor even by legislative or political reform, which would have to be carried out by the very people who would be its target. Paradoxically institutional reform is a purely personal and entirely local act. It starts and it ends in recognising the extent to which corruption has been internalised in each of us by the redefinitions of social virtue promulgated by these institutions.

Theologians call this kind of profound transformation metanoia, a spiritual conversion to an alternative way of acting. Such a transformation does not have a rational basis since the institutional rational of every aspect of current society argues against it. This is especially problematic for the religiously-minded who believe that they have already been subject to the required change in attitude. They are, on the contrary, the most resistant to anything which might dim their light of faith, their possession of the absolute truth; yet it is precisely this light, this obsession with formulas of truth, that blinds them to the reality of the situation. Quite literally it is their God who is the architect of our impending social doom.

Of course believers are generally not a majority of the population. But they don’t need to be. The really powerful source of institutional decay is the secularised legacy of religion. Two central principles of Christianity seem to be particularly relevant. The first is the idea of personal salvation, that is, an ethical responsibility solely for conduct and fate of one’s own life. The second idea is the way in which this fate can be assured, namely through total confidence, obdurate faith, in the correctness of one’s beliefs, rather than in the relationship with one’s fellows. These principles have been assimilated into Western culture and form the core of its ideology.

Historically, the development of modern institutions of government, politics, education, and law, has been at the expense of the institutional Church. The decline of the institutional Church, however, has perversely released the germ of anti-social, intransigent, militant faith more widely into these non-religious areas of civil life. The result is an ethos of selfish self-confidence which destroys democratic politics, promotes tribal loyalties, and prevents both learning and reasoned argument. It seems to me likely that this is the epicentre of the cultural malaise that Frank describes. We have learned the habits of religion so well that they have survived its institutional decline; and now they are destroying us.

My own failure within these institutions isn’t mitigated by their deterioration. But perhaps others, particularly the young, might see the implications of Frank’s analysis in their own lives. One can only hope. The track record of success of the old communicating with the young is abysmal. So I’m not holding my breath.

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Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime by Sean Carroll
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Scientific Revelation

There is more than a hint of theological method in modern physics. Carroll confirms this in his insistence that quantum physics is, in his words, not an ‘epistemic’ but an ‘ontological’ discipline His claim is that current quantum theory is a description of the way the world really is not merely a way of understanding the world. This is the traditional position of theologians who would like us all to consider God as the ultimate reality even if we find this reality to be not what we perceive it to be.

In fact Carroll defines science in general, not just physics, in theological terms. For him, the essential presumption of science is the intelligibility of the universe. This implies not just that there is a pre-existing order to be discovered but also that such order in some sense wants itself to be discovered. These implications are precisely those of what is called fundamental theology, the study of how God can be known about at all.*

The similarity between Carroll’s view of quantum physics and fundamental theology is important because in both there is no distinction possible between epistemology and ontology. How we know about the world, or God, is indistinguishable from what the world, or God, actually is. Theology has a term for referring to this knowledge of being (or Being) - revelation. Essentially, you either get revelation or you don’t. It can’t be argued about because the presuppositions about what constitute both existence and knowledge about existence are contained simultaneously within it.

Thomas Aquinas is perhaps the most well-known theologian to defend the presuppositions of revelation. In doing so, his preferred approach is cosmological, that is, treating the entire universe as an entity to be explained in terms of its existence and its history. At such a level of analysis, ordinary logic (like that of cause and effect and their priority in time) start to break down. Thus, Aquinas asks, if every effect must have a cause, what is the ultimate cause? And if human beings exhibit free will and purpose as an effect of that ultimate cause, is it not reasonable to attribute will and purpose to that cause. QED, the universe is a consequence of divine action with some divine purpose toward which it is drawn.

Carroll makes a parallel case for quantum physics and the Many-Worlds theory of Hugh Everett, formulated in the 1950’s. First, just like Aquinas, he adopts a cosmological position. The universe, he says, is one vast quantum state, a wave function of enormous complexity. This is not inconsistent with the theory of quantum physics even if it could never be empirically verified. And it fits with the strange results of quantum experimentation. QED, reality is composed 0f an indeterminate number of simultaneous universes. In other words, Everett’s theory qualifies as a revelation.

If this is the case, then this wave function will evolve according to the mathematics of the Schrödinger equations, just as it has always done. Not according to the logic of Newtonian (or Aristotelian) cause and effect but the logic of probability and entanglement. This wave function is not something temporary or local that might transform into something else, say a particle, or ‘collapse’ upon observation. Within it is not only the universe we know about but an infinite number of others that exist simultaneously.

The wave function, in other words, is the very stuff, the ultimate reality of the universe; and it doesn’t make distinctions between observer and observed or between possible and actual. Our brains and the farthest galaxies as well as everything in between, including any number of other worlds, must be part of this wave function, since there can be nothing else. So the conventional ‘Copenhagen interpretation,’ despite its usefulness, is wrong. The wave function is the Alpha and the Omega, the source and giver of not just life but also existence, the Ground of Being (as modern theologians like to say). If it explicitly isn’t called godly, it’s only because the divine has suffered a significant reduction in brand-value in recent centuries.

That all sounds logically fine, if more than a tad baroque. But the reason it all sounds fine is the same reason that Aquinas sounds fine to the Pope. Once ontology and epistemology are conflated, that is, when that which is is presumed to confirm that which we know, we have entered the realm of religion. At that point, we simply assume a cosmological guarantor in what we take as revelation. Revelation is its own assurance; it proves itself. And at that point Aquinas is about as credible as Carroll

* The most important Christian theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth, devoted himself almost exclusively to this issue. The intellectual machinations he had to employ in order to establish the intelligibility of God are really important for scientists like Carroll to consider before casually presuming an even more diffuse source of such an attribute.

Postscript 16Sep19. Another view: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/...

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Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The Artist as Snowflake

An American language-student is in Madrid on somebody else’s dime, living in a paradise of lethargy, artsy natives, and drugs. He is an intellectual fantasist; somewhat autistic when it comes to poetry; and somewhat narcissistic about everything else. He also has a young person’s discernment about what is important, which is to say none at all.

He claims to be engaged in ‘research.’ But since he lies, it’s not clear what this could mean. In fact there is more than a little of Patricia Highsmith’s Mr. Ripley throughout the entire book. The narrator/protagonist is a practised fraud whose instinctive reaction to any situation is to scam. Even when zoned out on weed and booze, he can calculate and perform.

The difference from Highsmith is that she had a story. Lerner has a string of events that simply go on and on in a flood of indirect speech filled with myopic detail. Paragraph after page-long paragraph of ‘this happened, then that happened, then I smoked another splif.’ If this is about finding one’s artistic bearings, I suggest someone has slipped him a bum map with his hash. Pretentious and tedious nonsense - clearly this is part of a new literature I cannot understand.

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Quichotte by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The New Normal

There are very few privileged stories left; all have become fair game for deconstruction and dismissal. Religious stories have self-destructed through their over-ripe pretensions to factualness. Political stories have all resolved themselves into the one story of the strong suppressing the weak. Business stories have shown themselves to be mere variations on themes of greed and self-aggrandisement. The professional stories of folk like doctors and lawyers and accountants have decayed into sterile formulae with which to justify any behaviour. Love stories have degenerated into tales of obsessive desire. As a consequence “Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything’s slip-sliding around and there’s nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams.”

This is the new normal: “The true story is there’s no true story anymore.“ The “Great Instability” Rushdie’s Elon Musk-figure calls it. “There’s no true anymore that anyone can agree on.” And that takes some getting used to. We have “become so accustomed to wearing its masks that it has grown blind to what lies beneath.” Scratch away the thin veneer of language and it becomes impossible to rationalise the irrational. The creepy-crawlies that lie beneath language are disconcerting until we get used to them. As Quichotte’s Sancho says watching America fly by his Greyhound window: “We are scary as shit.”

Life is more reliable, less stressful with stories that are shared and stable, stories that we can believe in. At least life is better for some of us. Not necessarily for most of us. But for those who matter, that is, for the traditional story-tellers, the authorised raconteurs of our civilisation who have been telling stories of their own superiority since Isaac and his mother briefed against Ishmael and his. Fixed stories create peace only to the extent they also create injustice. Language is the principal tool 0f injustice. It keeps the powerful in power and lets them feel justified in their power,

Quichotte is about what happens, at least temporarily, when the stories that have been taken for granted bite the dust of history. Racism becomes respectable. Intellectuals tout anti-intellectual rubbish. Thuggishness is the universal virtue of people in power. The elite can be identified by their consistently bad taste in literature. In general, the real is indistinguishable from the unreal. The real becomes so unreal that it cannot be understood:

“Normal is unreal people, mostly rich unreal people, having sex with rappers and basketball players and thinking of their unreal family as a real-world brand, like Pepsi or Drano or Ford. Zap. News channels. Normal is guns and the normal America that really wants to be great again. “Then there’s another normal if your skin color is the wrong color and another if you’re educated and another if you think education is brainwashing and there’s an America that believes in vaccines for kids and another that says that’s a con trick and everything one normal believes is a lie to another normal and they’re all on TV depending where you look, so, yeah, it’s confusing.”

Trump and OxyContin and TV game shows and incompetent politicians are not the causes of the loss of privileged stories. They are the consequences of not knowing how to live without them. “The Age of Anything-Can-Happen” provokes people to find something solid, that is to say, a good story, to hang on to. Everyone scurries around trying to find and defend theirs as the best, the only one, that others should adopt. In a sort of literary panic “A whole nation might jump off a cliff like swarming lemmings... Countries fall apart as well as their citizens.”

For the moment we’re “living now in a postreality continuum.” We see “Perfectly okay people, people who were our neighbors and our staff and with whom our kids went to school, turning into mastodons overnight!” Factual argumentation is a lost art: “Once one has turned into a mastodon he is utterly impervious to good sense.” In a sense, language itself has been surpassed: “the surreal, and even the absurd, now potentially offer the most accurate descriptors of real life.”

Rushdie has an interesting suggestion about where to look for salvation from obsessively competing stories and their inhumane consequences. He wants us to look to the people who know about living contentedly with contrary stories in their heads as a matter of course, the people who know that what they present to the world is a persona, a mask, which is a technique for survival, not something essential to themselves. He wants us to take note of “we, the broken people!—may be the best mirrors of our times,... we migrants.” Refugees are the future.

Of the many literary allusions in Quichotte, I think the one to John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer is central. Manhattan Transfer was a stop on the rail line from Philadelphia to New York City before the tunnel was built connecting New Jersey to Penn Station. Passengers disembarked and took the ferry to Manhattan. Dos Passos considers many of these passengers for what they actually were: internal migrants, refugees really, from America itself. These re-vitalised the city with their openness to the stories it had to tell. Migrants, wherever they are from always have the same question: “Do we belong here?” This uncertainty is what sets them on the path on which new stories can emerge.

And this question is shared not just among migrants but also with the old, who have seen it all before and recognise the stories for what they are: “In old age one becomes detached from the dominant ideas of one’s time. The present, with its arguments, its quarreling ideas, is revealed as fleeting and unreal.” In addition, who knows the difference between stories and the reality they refer to better than an author, particularly an ageing author who knows “the Author’s life was a fake, just like his book.”

Quichotte, like the original 0n which it is modelled, is a story about stories - all of them necessary, none of them true. Even very good authors, perhaps because they are very good authors, tend toward confusion so that, like the Don of Cervantes, Rushdie’s fictional author “on some days has difficulty remembering which history was his own and which Quichotte’s.” But the author, like the migrant learns to live with this confusion rather than impose his solution to it on the rest of us.

So Quichotte is the new kind of privileged story, privileged not because it is more true but because it includes so many other stories. Just as does the story of Don Quixote, an older new story. Both are reminders that no story tells it all, isn’t it.

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Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Religion of Technology

“If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” This is the persistent message of the National Rifle Association in America. Of course what they neglect to say is that if guns are legal, those using them illegally will have the best guns. As so it is with all technology of coercion, including the more subtle but highly effective technology of religion. Leiber’s tongue in cheek allegory speculates on some interesting developments of such technology and its consequences.

Before the 16th century, the principal technology of European religion was miracles, or at least the verbal and primitive written reports of miracles, that is, unexplained and therefore unnatural aberrations in natural forces. But these were crucially augmented at the end of the Middle Ages by the technology of printing, causing an uncontrolled expansion of non-conformist interpretation, heresy and schism. The Protestants had the best technology for a time, only to be surpassed in the 18th century by the wily deists and atheists of the Enlightenment with their knack for popular publishing.

By the early 20th century the most advanced religious technology was radio as exploited by the likes of the American Father Coughlin who, at the time Leiber was writing his book, had a ‘congregation’ of over 30 million tuned into his weekly broadcasts.* Coughlin, however was only the forerunner for an entirely new industry of television and internet media evangelists from the 1950’s Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen to today’s Megachurch pastors like Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland. Most of these have been exposed for practising the sins that they condemn - avarice, lust, deceit, etc. And the exposure and failure when it comes, is typically down to more effective technology - of surveillance, of accounting, and of the inspection of records.

Leiber’s religious technology is partly organisational (as it always is) but primarily one that protects those who are part of the religious hierarchy and enhances their physical strength, thus allowing ‘priests’ to intimidate and control ‘commoners’ in the name of the Great God. But the opposition Satanists, known as the Witchcraft, have an even more powerful technology, one that works on the intellect and emotions. They are able to create illusions and delusions among the priestly hierarchy that effectively neutralise their physical superiority. This technology includes moving picture holograms and various forms of stimulative cerebral ‘rays.’

Both sides know that their powers are technological not theological. Dogma is a matter of providing theological rationalisation for what appears as miraculous to the populace. Neither the hierarchy of the Great God nor the Witchcraft really believe any of the official religious line. Nor, interestingly, do they consider the mass of commoners, who are fully indoctrinated in religious beliefs and behaviour, capable of understanding the real game of power being played by the two groups. Therefore neither side seeks to promote themselves through propaganda or ‘re-education.’

Inevitably, I suppose, the dialectic of the battle between the two technologies - the one physical, the other psychological - resolves itself not in the victory of either the old religion or the new but in the creation of a synthetic innovation - the Religion of Technology. This religion worships not a transcendent entity but an immanent system of power and technique. This is the book’s redeeming feature, a sort of prediction which has come to pass. Technology has indeed become a spiritual force, determining and constituting the relationships among virtually the entire population of the planet, and controlled by a remote and mysterious elite. The medium is the message. There is no need to preach it; it spreads itself among a docile and receptive congregation.

Or perhaps technology has been considered divine from the beginning. After all, tools that enhance human capacity are rather god-like. John Milton would have understood the situation. Poetry, too, is a form of religious technology.


* Arguably Billy Sunday was the last nationally-known, conventional revivalist, evangelical preacher who relied solely on physical gatherings. Both his popularity and his influence declined in direct proportion to the spread of radio during the 1920’s.

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This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen 
by 

Tadeusz Borowski, 

 

Barbara Vedder (Editor/Translator), 

 

Jan Kott (Introduction), 

 

Michael Kandel (Translator)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Sep 08, 2019  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: slavic, holocaust-modern-diaspora, historical-fiction 

The Dead Are Always Right

Tadeusz Borowski survived the horrors of Auschwitz, some of which are described in these stories, only to commit suicide. Despair is not an adequate explanation for such an act by a man who had experienced what he had. Neither, for me, is any other purely emotional reason. 

So I have spent the better part of the last three days thinking and writing in an attempt to understand the rationale, the redeeming purpose perhaps, of his suicide. Surely, I surmised, his death, as that of Primo Levi among so many others, is something other than tragedy doubled. As it turned out, my thoughts were excruciatingly trivial; the 5000 or so words that followed were patent nonsense. 

To say that the Holocaust, and especially the deaths of people like Borowski and Levi, are things beyond reason is simultaneously obvious and revelatory. Obvious because the sheer number of such victims provides overwhelming evidence of the depravity of human beings; revelatory, because their deaths explain that when we understand this, we become unbearable even to ourselves. We are an inherently hateful species.

 

War & War 
by 

László Krasznahorkai, 

 

George Szirtes (Translator)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Sep 05, 2019  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: hungarian 

Over-sharing

Breathless, relentless, urgent, a man on a mission; yet Korin is stuck like Baalam’s Ass, unable to move on a railway footbridge over an industrial wasteland, a prisoner of seven thuggish, homicidal children who could actually care less about him. They are his Greek chorus to whom he feels the need to confess his suicidal intentions and from whom he expects counsel. Korin’s fear of being physically harmed is exactly offset by his fear of not being listened to. The children know he is insane and ignore him instead of killing him.

Korin has lost faith in the world. This is a functional definition of his insanity and the reason for his intended suicide. Nothing he perceives, including his own thoughts, can be trusted. He has concluded that his only alternative is acceptance, submission to the power of a universe and its gods which are imaginary but not illusory. Because Korin has already lost his mind, he is desperately afraid of losing his head, of it literally separating gradually from his body before he completes his mission. 

So Korin ‘shares’ with the children... and shares... and shares with everyone else he encounters. He wants them to understand what has happened to him, his epiphany of the senselessness of the world and the task he has. His job as records keeper for the Council, and his avocation as local historian, he recognises, were entirely meaningless. Facts, data, reports never approached anything like the truth. But what can accepting all this mean? He had been creating an artificial world in his head; and now he isn’t anymore. So?

Escaping the children, Korin resumes his mission by travelling to “the very center of the world.” He appears somewhat unsure about where that might be and will take the next flight to anywhere. His loquacious intensity is unremitting and it gets him a ticket to New York City, a visa, a stand-by seat, and the care of a beautiful stewardess, who also thinks he is insane, even if benignly so. Customs and Immigration find him eccentric but otherwise harmless, as do the other people he meets on the streets of NYC.

Although he has lost faith in the gods, he remains a devotee of Hermes, the divine messenger and their general factotum. Hermes has a singular function among the Olympians. He tells stories, eloquently. Korin‘s devotion to Hermes is well-placed even if paradoxical. He has a story to tell, a story of men returning to their homes from war. He found it in his municipal archive. His objective is to publicise it to the world... and die.

This is all somewhat spooky. Written two years before the attacks of 9/11, I’m sure that if the book were more popular in the US there would be conspiracy theories in abundance about it. More likely though, it is a literary artist’s expression of a sort of religious faith in literature. Or rather the obsessive, compulsive need to articulate what one finds important. This need is, of course, as silly and neurotic as any other human need. Perhaps it is even insane. One significant advantage, however, is that it does not involve blowing up buildings.