The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Asking the Proper Questions

The relationship among the three protagonists in Coetzee’s story is mysterious. All three come from somewhere else. They are intimately connected and dependent upon one another; but their origins and histories are obscure. Although they comprise a family, it appears that each is genetically distinct. They are on the run, possibly for breaking a minor civil regulation. Although poor, they are sustained by the benevolence of community members. Among these is an apparent homicidal maniac who also may be a paedophile.

Like Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians , relevant background and motivations are left unsaid. Vagueness about purpose is purposefully part of the narrative. Consequently there are many ways to interpret the the interactions among Simon and Ines, the parental figures, and David, the young boy whom they care for. The title and biblical allusions to the Flight to Egypt and several figures from the Old Testament suggest a religious reading. Alternatively, the tale can be taken as a commentary on a fundamentally corrupt society that honours convention more than authentic morality. These interpretations may certainly be valid but I find them unsatisfying.

Coetzee hints at a different sort of interpretation entirely through his early reference to numbers and the relation between numbers and life in a sort of kabbalistic, speculative parable. His point seems to be deeply philosophical, perhaps spiritual, but not a matter of religion or political sociology. In this reading, the boy David is the number One, a singular, and singularly unique entity. As this fundamental number, he exists independently of his purported parents. In fact, he is the source of their existence, although they do not recognise him as such. David is elemental and will not be forced into some presumed role. According to his teacher, David is “integral,” that is: a self-sufficient whole. In fact, of course, he is the first integer from which all others emanate.

Ines, David’s purported mother, is the number Two. She contains David within her but she is not he (1+1=2). In fact she is the first prime number, that which is only evenly divisible by itself or by the number One. During the story, Ines becomes progressively distant from David. She has her own family life of siblings, other relatives, and friends. Although One might claim an affinity with Two, he cannot assert any rights as a prime number, and therefore as part of her family.*

Simon is the number Three. He is the protector of the One and the Two. He includes them in his life (1+2=3). But he too is unique and independent as the second prime number. Two is increasingly concerned to maintain her distance in terms of intimacy from Three. In a sense she is threatened by both One and Three - One because he might claim to be her progenitor (2 x 1=2); And Three because if he is stripped of One, he might become her (3-1=2).

These are not numbers as we typically know them, namely as signs for conducting practical tasks like counting or making change in the market. Those pedestrian numbers are part of “ant arithmetic.” They are sterile ciphers without life and which, therefore, have fixed meanings as if they were ordinary things. These ant-numbers make it appear that all numbers have a prosaically easy relationship with things, that in fact numbers are merely sets of things.** This is a misunderstanding. Real numbers come from elsewhere, from the stars, or heaven if you like. They are virtually mystical entities which can only be expressed adequately through activities like Sufi-esque dance.

One of Coetzee’s characters divides numbers into “noble ” and “auxiliary.” It seems likely that the noble numbers are primes (2,3,5,7,11,13,17...); auxiliaries are all the rest. All non-prime numbers are the sum of two primes, hence their priority (4=2+2, 6=3+3, 10=7+3...). They are the building blocks of the mathematical universe. Prime numbers are the general answer to the question ‘what should we ask about?’ in mathematics. The answer to all mathematical questions lie, in a sense at least, among the primes since they generate all other numbers.

Two and Three, as primes, lead on to the entire universe, and to an infinity of enormous families of numbers which have strange and intriguing relationships with each other (there is no highest prime number; more are always being discovered). All primes are odd; not only unique but also strange. During the story, David turns Seven, the fourth prime, a sign of maturity as well as superiority to his parents who even together only sum to Five, the third prime number. He also ‘dances down’ Seven in front of his father (and offers to dance the next prime of Eleven, but is told to stop). He can generate all the primes, and therefore all the numbers from within himself. They are all ultimately expressions of him. Neither his father nor mother can understand this, trapped as they are in their isolated noble/prime positions.

In short, numbers have a life of their own, each with its own characteristics, origins, and even temperaments. Numbers are very much like human beings; perhaps humans are a form of number (Or, conversely, number is a self-projection of what being human is). This could explain their odd behaviour. Some are intimately, even passionately, connected. Passions, like numbers, have a life of their own as well. These passions have unexpected, sometimes apparently irrational, consequences. No one knows how or why they exist; and, like prime numbers, we are likely to stumble upon them by accident.

Non-prime numbers lack something; they are defective in that they have more fundamental components. Non-primes are mundane in contrast to the primordial simplicity of the passionless primes. They are the ones that cause problems in the world. They passionately and constantly look for their prime components for completion. This passion for completion can’t be denied or derailed. It is inevitable. And it can be awkward. Then there is always the possibility that during the search for one’s components one encounters a Nought, the zero-negation of existence itself, a disaster for all numbers. Nought can never be forgiven; it can’t even forgive itself.

*One is not a prime number by accepted convention among mathematicians. Giving One that status would cause serious logical problems which are simply resolved by excluding it from consideration.

**Famously, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to demonstrate in the early 20th century that arithmetic could be derived from set theory. They failed. The reason for their failure, and indeed the impossibility of establishing any logical foundation for mathematics, was proven several decades later by Gödel.

Postscript: There is also an important theme of measurement which runs through the book. Coetzee alludes to the widespread misconception that measurement involves the assignment of numbers to things and events. This is part of the process through which mystical numbers are turned into sterile ant-numbers. The reality is exactly opposite: in measurement things and events are assigned places on various numeric scales, what one of Coetzee’s characters calls ‘metrons.’ The numbers are what are real; things and events only appear when they are placed on these eternal scales. See For further explanation: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic by Ben Westhoff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What Marx Never Considered

The war on drugs is a war on global capitalism. Few want to make the connection, largely, I think, because it would make clear the futility of the effort. Westhoff sees how drugs and capitalism are related: “More than anything, this is a story of global capitalism run amok... if global capitalism is hard to control, the new-drugs trade is nearly impossible,” he says. But Westhoff then proceeds as if there were some hope in dealing with drug use as a problem of law and public health policy. Control is not almost but entirely impossible according to his own analysis. Drug use is not a disease; it is a part of the larger ideology of capitalism. Like all ideologies, drugs have their own logic which is impervious to external criticism or internal correction.

Westhoff’s title accurately represents the issue. The remarkable spread of opioid use in the last 20 years - not just opioids but a plethora of recreational highs - has been fuelled not by consumer demand or cultural deterioration but by corporate resources. Synthetic drug development is a component of the worldwide corporate economy as important as computer and communications technology. From basic innovation, through commercial development, to global distribution, the patterns of corporate actions and reactions are identical in the two industries.

Synthetic drugs are not sourced by uneducated and oppressed farmers in Pakistan or Columbia. They originate in corporate laboratories. They are chemical inventions initially requiring advanced knowledge to create. Competition is fierce, both to be the low cost producer, and to eliminate or evade the regulatory restrictions. With patent protection largely unavailable, continuous invention is essential. It takes organisational skill not criminal muscle to participate in this market successfully. Scientific research, legal expertise, and political lobbying as well as an acute feel for the market must be finely coordinated to ensure staying ahead of the commercial curve.

The Sackler family pioneered the mass opioid revolution with the development and marketing of its now notorious OxyContin. But OxyContin is only the pharmaceutical equivalent of the Model T Ford - first off the high volume production line but technologically rather primitive. An international industry has sprouted which now produces an extensive line of high-tech synthetic products. Consumer choice has never been greater. Just as ‘any colour as long as it’s black’ was archaic almost as soon as Henry Ford uttered it, so drug design has become far more sophisticated than even the Sacklers had imagined. They have been left in the corporate dust by smaller, more nimble, more creative producers - just as IBM had been leapfrogged by Microsoft and Apple.

In the designer drug business, just as in any high-tech enterprise, the genius in the garage has the innovative edge over the established producer. This is an implicit principle of capitalism. It is what keeps capitalism alive. And like an Ayn Rand protagonist, if the genius can’t get his bureaucratic colleagues in industry or academia to support him, there is no need to stick around. The entrepreneurial spirit is nowhere better demonstrated than in the start-up of a promising new line of untested compounds. So-called ‘psychonauts,’ the avant-garde of the drug community, abound as volunteers for commercial Beta-testing. Risk of death is considered part of the fun.

Apparently there is plenty of unused garage space in places like China. The chemistry of psychoactive substances is, although few seem to notice, a matter of intellectual capital. It is knowledge that can be located anywhere, and transferred instantaneously anywhere else. Once a compound’s chemical composition and physical effects are known, large scale production is simpler than making bathtub gin during Prohibition or old-fashioned moonshine in the mountains. Formulas, recipes, and manufacturing techniques aren’t subject to customs inspections. Patent infringements are hardly a worry in a world of unrestricted trade under the table. Advertising is unnecessary, and there is no such thing as bad product placement: “If addicts find something that killed somebody, they flock to it,”

The laws directed toward restriction of the designer drug market are either stupid and ill-informed (Ecstasy), often unenforceable or producing paradoxical effects (criminalisation of analogues) or hopelessly naive (banning ‘how-to’ cookbooks). Lab-based drugs, unlike plant-based ones, don’t have a material supply chain that can be interrupted. Distribution can be controlled locally in a sort of guerilla-organisation which is highly mobile. Transactions are handled through the untraceable dark net in crypto-currency.

In short, the synthetic drug industry is unstoppable. Either attempts to control it will consume an unacceptably large amount of resources; or it continues to expand uncontrollably based on good commercial logic. Or both. This is capitalism threatening capitalism in a way Karl Marx never considered. He also never considered that socialism would take the same corporate form as capitalism. No one has yet come up with an alternative to our current ideology of corporate economy. Perhaps that must wait until the drug crisis becomes more pressing. Meanwhile we all tread water in a deepening pool of synthetic happiness.

Postscript: this article appeared in my newsfeed five minutes after posting this review: https://apple.news/A25KW860CQQGu8pIrj...

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A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Become the Dream You Want To Have

Lowell Lake is a nebbish, the Yiddish concept of ‘someone who, upon walking into a room. makes it feel like someone has just left.’ Or as Davis puts it: “a tiny, dim meteor in an empty matchbox.” Lowell is essentially invisible, even to himself, especially to himself: “in his eating club, he was the chairman of the committee that cleaned up after parties.” Indeed, he is always cleaning up... after himself. It’s not that he doesn’t care; he is acutely, meticulously aware of his ignorance: “he was definitely aware that something was expected of him. He wished he knew what it was.”

Lowell is comically hapless in the way we are all hapless: the reasons we pretend determine our actions are either rationalisations or archaic as soon as they are expressed. He gets to Stanford University by mistake, married by momentum, moves to Manhattan through a misunderstanding, and then on to Brooklyn as the result of a disastrous miscalculation; he becomes an editor of a trade monthly more or less by accident. Lowell exists in a fog: “A lot of things hadn’t occurred to him. He was paying for them now. Sometimes he wondered if he was even paying for things he didn’t know about.” Don’t we all?

Lowell is a reverse pioneer, returning East over the Sierras, the Rockies, and the Central Plains from whence his forbears came, to take up residence in a new kind of empty wilderness, a New York apartment in which “All traces of prior human occupancy had been obliterated.” He could be described as living in the moment. But that might imply that there was some excitement to be found in his attentive perception. This there was not. Lowell is, quite understandably, bored to tears by his own company. His wife by all accounts feels the same way about him. Their life of quiet desperation is as tense as that of any pioneer.

Lowell doesn’t really like himself. He believes that he would like himself in different circumstances. So, true to form, he goes about changing circumstances - thinking, drinking, clothes, yield nothing new. Anything requiring talent - writing, painting, and so forth - were non-starters. But the one thing pioneers are notoriously good at - moving to a new address - occurs to him as just the ticket for personal salvation. No training required. Essential relationships - work, home, friends - don’t have to be compromised. And isn’t this, moving on physically, the real All-American solution to psychological problems? The practical core of the American Dream?

So like millions of past migrants, Lowell up-sticks from Manhattan to that unknown land, that Lebensraum , that Canaan across the East River, that outer borough known as Brooklyn. In Brooklyn a man can be a man. In Brooklyn there was space and potential. Sure there was also criminality and organised gangs of natives, and political chaos; but that is the nature of the frontier. Brooklyn offered a (not overly adventurous) adventure. Through adventure one might carve a future. Or so Lowell’s inarticulate fantasy suggested. The fact that Brooklyn was also the place that his wife was trying throughout her life to escape from was a small hurdle to be overcome. What pioneering spouse had really ever wanted to follow her husband into the wilderness?

Thus unfolds a scenario that we Walter Mitty-types know only too well. The disappointments, the unexpected consequences, the basic unpleasantness of the process of becoming who we think we ought to be. On the one hand, this process demonstrates the pervasive tragedy of all human ambition. On the other hand, it is also really very funny to watch ourselves and our families gradually turning into our parents and siblings. It is certainly a remedy for that condition captured in another Yiddish word: Chutzpah .

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The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Philosophy of Financial Markets

There are essentially two ways, two visions, two philosophies, of conducting inquiry in the social sciences. In one, rational behaviour is defined by some plausible propositions; behavioural data are then analysed; and people are shown to often act irrationally. In the other philosophy, the observed patterns of human behaviour are used to define an implicit standard of rationality which may be hidden and even unconscious. These patterns (or ‘signals’) are then used to predict future states. The first is an example of the philosophy of Rationalism, which holds that laws precede and produce facts. The second is an example of Empiricism, which claims that facts precede and produce laws. The intellectual battle about which of these views is better is ancient and still hasn’t been resolved - not just in the social sciences, but also in all scientific inquiry.

Within the social sciences, financial economists are generally Rationalists. They create models of economic choice which they then use to judge the rationality (which they call efficiency) of markets, and sometimes to exploit what they find to be irrational behaviour by buying or selling to correct the situation (making the market more efficient makes money, a win/win for the individual and society, they believe). Financial chartists (or technical analysts if one prefers) are Empiricists. They look for patterns (‘structure’ in the jargon) in the movements of markets prices from which they attempt to predict future prices (chartists don’t apologise; they are in it for the money). Financial economists and chartists view each other as fools and hucksters. Economists point to the absence of chartists’ theory as proof of their irrationality. Chartists claim the lack of theory as a virtue and deride the economists ignorance of the real world. They don’t want to second-guess the market, only to understand its inherent rationality.

Historically, Rationalist financial economists had the upper hand in academic circles and among the big names in financial trading.* Beginning in the early 1950’s, its influence grew rapidly as it was taught to generations of MBA’s who spread it like an infection throughout the world. The bias toward rationalism was so pervasive that it was the primary cause of the 2007 financial crisis, which demonstrated just how irrational rationality could be. In the way of these things, fashions changed in the perennial attempt to beat the market. Empiricism was in; Rationalism was out. Old-fashioned chartism entered the realm of Artificial Intelligence and became respectable (hence the euphemism of ‘technical analysis’).

And the new chartism works. No one knows why it works. It just does, as Jimmy Simons and Robert Mercer discovered to their enormous personal benefit. Neither knows all that much about financial markets, but they know about data, raw information from a staggering array of sources, within which are hidden patterns like the traces of gold at Sutters Creek or like intelligible messages buried within the gobbledygook of an enemy code. Markets didn’t need a theory; they provide their own theory if one pays enough attention to the detail. And computer technology was just the tool that was needed to sift, sort, and correlate all the detailed data one might collect in the search for the El Dorado of financial trading.

Financial economics worked, while it worked, largely because big investors felt compelled by academic theory to act rationally. Fund managers, banks, and other fiduciaries had a duty to act rationally on behalf of their clients. In the absence of any plausible alternative, professional ethics demanded adoption of the theory. The theory, therefore, became a self-fulfilling prophecy - and the prophecies came true until the world discovered that its rationality was no more than a conventional fiction. By avoiding the intellectual arrogance of presuming it knows better than the market, the new chartists can claim to be grounded in reality not economic fantasy.

The problem of course is that no one knows why the various correlations, connections, and intersections of data work (when they do). Empiricists don’t usually look for reasons. And when they do, it is typically to rationalise the conclusions their algorithms have already produced.** The algorithms which manipulate the data may contain an implicit theory but that doesn’t really bother the Empiricist. Nor does the lack of reasons for the various correlations. Coincidence or cause, the empiricist isn’t worried. What he does worry about is someone stealing his proprietary algorithms. The Rationalist benefits by the widespread use of his theory; the Empiricist by the strict secrecy of his programmes.***

Therein lies the Empiricist’s Achilles Heel. There is literally no reason to believe his correlations are stable. There is no way to test or verify hypotheses. Technically, there are no hypotheses. And no one aside from the proprietor is checking the validity of the findings of inquiry (thus violating a fundamental principle of true scientific inquiry). Correlations may change randomly and without warning. The enemy code, if there is one, might be altered entirely from day to day. Investors who employ the chartist strategy will never know if they are, quite literally, entering uncharted territory. On the other hand, society is considerably safer in the hands of chartists, as long as they act independently of each other based on their own algorithms (something the old-fashioned chartists did not do). Some may win while others loose; but they’re unlikely to all win or lose together, thus provoking systematic misery. That, however, until enough big investors discover similar correlations and interpret them as signals rather than noise.

Ideas have life cycles just like ladies’ fashion and gentlemen’s fascination with machines. When ideas become widely adopted, they are more accurately described as fads. If you miss one, don’t worry; they be another along shortly. The publication of this book probably announces the entry of high-tech chartism into fad-dom. no doubt there will be more and more success stories reported which will generate more and more interest, and produce more and more demand for data-mining and other empirical techniques. The failures, of course, will go largely unreported. At least until one big enough occurs that is worthy of newsprint, airtime, or blog space. I am eagerly awaiting first reports.


*I am not entirely unbiased on this subject. My great uncle was Fischer Black who devised the options pricing model which is arguably a central concept of financial economics in theory and in practice.

** Simons’s mathematical background seems to make him unaware of this as a fatal flaw. Numbers, after all, have stable relationships with each other. Once discovered, these relationships never vary.

***This is not strictly true in that Goldman Sachs, for example, has an interest in keeping its proprietary pricing models confidential. However, it is essential that Goldman’s also can convince its clients that the proprietary model conforms to a responsible financial theory. The general acceptability of the theory is what matters. The rest is a matter of client faith... or gullibility.

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The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Appalachian Spring

Combine the Heartland evangelism of the Origin of the Brunists with the Appalachian haplessness of The Glass Castle, then season with a few homicides and sexual perversions as in American Psycho and you have The Devil All the Time, an everyday tale of disenchantment with the land of opportunity and its principles.

The main action takes place in the hill country of Southeastern Ohio. The hamlet of Knockemstiff, a real place, is ground zero. The place names are telling. Knockemstiff nestles among other communities like Bacon Flat; Hungry Holler; Deadman Crossing; Scioto Furnace, Aid, Sinking Spring - places named in passing, never meant for settlement. One major purpose of the American Revolution was to open the land to the West of the Appalachians. The British had churlishly refused both permission and protection. But when the first settlers arrived, they just kept passing through. All except, it appears, the morally and genetically deficient.

What seems to be the common thread among the characters is the desire to escape - getting on, getting ahead, and getting out. Getting out not just of Knockemstiff, or Appalachia, but out of America. They all have ambitions - a reputation for something other than what they are, the re-capturing of a childhood feeling lost forever, the sound of the voice of God promised by the preacher at the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified, or simply the possession of a shack on a hill. But they know that no one gets out alive. Their frustration is magnified by circumstances. These are people being driven mad by the cultural weight of Christian fundamentalism, physical isolation in the narrow ravines of worn out coal mountains, and an overpowering environmental bleakness.

If they do escape, it’s only temporary and usually as fugitives from justice. Murder is an act of religious faith; suicide, ditto; serial killing for no reason at all is therapeutic. A kind of nihilistic drive appears genetic. At least it’s passed along by the combination of nature and nurture available around Knockemstiff. The physical connection which generalizes events in Knockemstiff to the rest of America is US Route 50, one of the first national roads built in the 1920’s, which runs from Ocean City Md to San Francisco (now largely replaced by Interstate 71). It passes through mainly rural country; parts of it have been called the ‘loneliest road in America’. Route 50 is the Main Street through the town of Chillicothe (the fictional Meade), about three or so miles North of Knockemstiff. It’s the River Styx by which the dead and the good-as-dead commute in and out of Hell.

Smells are significant throughout The Devil from the outset: the rotten eggs-like fumes from the local paper mill; the rotting animal flesh surrounding Willard’s ‘prayer log;’ the stink of Carl’s body and his wife, Sandy’s, mouth; the throat-catching ammonia reek of the roadside dive; the smell of Charlotte’s lingering cancerous death. The foul odors of Dante’s Canto 11 seem rather tame in comparison. I think Pollock’s point is that closing one’s eyes to the devastation that is America is an inadequate defense. The effects of this devastation are pervasive. Everyone is affected, even those who choose not to see.

One might suspect that Pollock is slandering this inherently beautiful part of the world. But helass recent reports suggest he may have restrained himself somewhat. The biggest industry roundabout is the state prison which is meant to offset the secular decline in the coal industry. For many locals it seems to be a second home close to home. Until recently there was an uranium enrichment facility threatening the locals with further genetic distress; but even that has now closed.

And Pollock may have toned down his fictionalizing of real events. For example an entire family - mother, father, and two adult sons - have recently been arrested for the murder of another entire family - seven adults and a sixteen year old boy - over an issue of custody of an infant (they did leave the infant unharmed, they are keen to point out). The incident was planned over several months and carried out like a military operation (https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-...). The pattern is precisely that described in The Devil - seething tension frequently erupting into brutal violence on a massive scale.

Ultimately, Pollock is making an aesthetic point: America has become an ugly place, a place without discernment. It suffers from a massive lack of taste and this infects everything from the physical environment to morality. As he describes one of his most lugubrious characters: “Looking across the room, he rested his eyes on a cheap framed picture hanging on the wall, a flowers-and-fruit piece of shit that nobody would ever remember, not one person who ever slept in this stinking room. It served no purpose that he could think of, other than to remind a person that the world was a sorry-ass place to be stuck living in.”

Writing The Devil five years before Trump, I suppose makes Pollock prophetic.

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Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World by Carlos Fraenkel
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Idolatry in the Modern World

The thesis of Teaching Plato in Palestine is that honest philosophical discussion creates understanding among people with conflicting interests. Such understanding, Fraenkel believes, can lead to truths which can be recognised and appreciated by all. To achieve this we must create a “‘culture of debate’” [the double quotes are necessary since he constantly uses them in the text].

In taking such a stand, Fraenkel appears as a typically liberal academic who, perhaps a little naively, thinks that talking is better than fighting. Who could possibly disagree? But his rather sentimental attachment to academic philosophy masks his deeply ingrained dedication to continuing the error that is the cause of much violence in the first place: the idolatry of language.

The thought that argument - a logical progression of statements based on explicit presumptions - can lead to changed minds much less human solidarity is simply ludicrous. He forgets that there are two principle forms of logical argument: modus tollens and modus poenens. The latter takes the form of ‘if p then q’ and then seeks to prove that ‘p’ is the case thus establishing the truth of the conclusion ‘q’. Modus poenens is how we typically make our argument, moving step by step up a chain of reasoning.

But modus tollens is how we listen to someone else’s argument. This has a similar initial logical structure: ‘if p then q.’ But then there’s a turnaround because this also implies ‘if not-q then not-p.’ Few of us pay attention to an ascending chain of reasoning. We know by experience that this is inefficient. We know instinctively that if we don’t agree with a conclusion, it’s because buried deeply in any argument is an implicit ‘p’ that is untenable. And we know that those making arguments are keen to hide this hidden ‘p’ from us. Since we disagree with the conclusion ‘q’, we know there is dud link somewhere in the chain of reasoning.*

And there is indeed such a dud link in Fraenkel’s argument. He believes that agreement about words and how they fit together - things like principles, moral codes, philosophical systems, indeed logic itself - implies agreement about what might be called our life-interests, those things that are not words which are important to us. The words we use to describe these things - family, nation, God, wealth, reputation, culture of debate - mean very different things to different people. Words are only defined in terms of other words, never in terms of personal experiences. This quite apart from the fact that some of these experiences have never been or even can be described in words.

Fraenkel thinks that words are the ultimate bringers of peace. He’s delusional. At best they are agreements to suspend hostilities (treaties). At worst words are what create and solidify animosity (manifestos). The various Christian creeds provide ample proof of the use of words to establish tribal solidarity at the expense of violence in a larger community. Words become idols more readily and more pervasively than any golden calf or Roman house-god.

The danger of agreement about words is far greater than the opposite. Agreement gives the illusion of fixity, that the words are more than words, that they describe reality. Words are not reality. This is the liberal political fallacy. And it is Fraenkel’s erroneous presumption. His argument is vacuous. It can lead nowhere rational. It is also dangerous because the making of such arguments can only increase mutual suspicion and hostility when their vacuity becomes clear.

I believe that violence is always evil, that power which can exercise violence must always be mistrusted, that power exists in society primarily as a consequence of words, and that words are therefore as dangerous as they are useful. Words like Islam, Israel, Christianity are obviously so. Words like Rationality, Debate, Clarity are less obvious but no less potent forms of potential power. Arguments always contain inherent interests, which may not even be visible to those arguing. Debate may reveal those hidden interests, or make known ones more entrenched. But they never can resolve interests which conflict. Such resolution is a matter of religious conversion, love, or mental imbalance, not good arguments.

*As I write this, I am listening to the latest news about the Trump impeachment hearings. The public response to allegations about Trump has always demonstrated modus tollens as the dominant mode of listening. Almost all Democrats think the man is a crook. Almost all Republicans think he is being persecuted. The arguments presented are virtually meaningless.

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S. S. Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Scary Women

Testosterone may be useful for personal protection; but it is a social plague. One of the best measures of a civilised society is the degree of mitigation of the difference in physical power between the sexes. This is accomplished by laws and customs that limit the use of male physical strength to intimidate females. This is to the good. But as in most other aspects of life, there is a downside. Men can be intimidated by females who resent and seek to punish men. Being nowhere near as clever or persistent as women, men are at a decided disadvantage, especially if the women concerned act tribally.

Jaeggy captures this dialectic rather well in the oxymoronic descriptions of her protagonist’s life among domineering women who exploit men mercilessly: “acrimonious indulgence;” “rapacious charity;” “abysmal politeness;” and “vainglorious restraint.” Her grandmother (a German Miss Cavendish) is the leader of the pack: “In not forgiving she was magnanimous, tolerant, equable.” The girl herself is “a hostage to good. A prisoner of good.” She lives a life in which “Pleasure and punishment are combined.” Her father is anathema because of his failure to live up to the economic expectations of the coven.

In this world of contradictions, reality is hidden behind impenetrable symbols. The girl lives within “a genealogy of images.” At one time her mother played the piano; but that was before the family’s financial troubles. Now, she says “The sound of the piano represents all that I have not had.” Her personal history is swallowed up in these symbols. She is “The girl who has no past.” Even her gender is a symbol of symbolic obsession: “The women of that family had an autistic passion for camellias, roses, and nothing else.” Women, she is taught, are, or ought to be, nihilists: “they harbor a profound resentment, a visceral resentment toward the world, toward existence.”

Estrogen, it seems, has its own unique challenges. Legal reform is unlikely to be effective in meeting them, probably because the law tends to be dominated by men who don’t have a clue about its effects. Women, on the other hand, run society.

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The Magic Christian by Terry Southern
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Grace & Favour

The German economic sociologist, Max Weber, wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1905. It is one of the most important studies of Western culture in the 20th century. In it Weber contends that the attitudes of individual responsibility and disciplined industry which are essential to modern society are the product of the Protestant, particularly the Calvinist, revolution of the 16th century. In brief, his claim is that Capitalism is an evolutionary result of Christianity. On the face of it, this interpretation might seem unlikely given the contradictions between the capitalist and Christian ethics. But that hasn’t stopped either academics or the general public from accepting Weber’s conclusion as reasonable.

A key component of Weber’s thought is the idea of grace. In Calvinism, grace is an entirely unmerited gift given by God arbitrarily to individual human beings. Grace cannot be earned only received gratefully. Although there is no way to know with certainty whether one has been the recipient of grace, the likelihood is that one’s material circumstances, that is one’s accumulated wealth, reflect one’s spiritual state. Material prosperity reflects divine favour. This view is embedded in the general culture (and consequently politics, cf. Trump) of much of the world’s population. It is particularly prevalent among those Evangelicals who follow the self-styled Prosperity Gospel (again cf. Trump and his supporters).

Terry Southern’s Magic Christian is a send-up of both Weber’s sociology of Capitalism and his Calvinist theology. The book’s protagonist, Guy Grand, is simultaneously a successful entrepreneurial billionaire (in 1959 dollars!) and the divine Holy Spirit of The Christian Trinity, who randomly dispenses largesse without any apparent rationale throughout the world (the book’s title refers to a ship, not to Grand, and is somewhat distracting). Grand is assisted in his mission by two maiden aunts, Agnes and Esther Edwards, who complete the Trinitarian dramatis personae (the first referring to Jesus as the Lamb of God, Angus Dei; the second is the Old Testament Jewish Queen of Persia and also refers to the near Easter deity Ishtar; Jonathan Edwards was the foremost American theologian of the 18th century).

But unlike conventional theological portrayals of the Spirit, Grand is a cosmic practical joker rather than spiritual enlivener. He acts like the unpredictable god Coyote, traditional among native Americans, or the Scandinavian Loki, the perennial trickster. Grand is likewise in it for the laughs. So when he tips a hot dog seller $500, or pays someone thousands to eat a traffic summons, or hires a workman to pound saltines into dust in the middle of Times Square, his lack of rationality is part of a larger aesthetic, namely his personal sense of humour. He likes to see how folk react. He’s an equal opportunity abuser.

Grand doesn’t restrict himself to dispensing his grace-filled wealth only to individuals. His best efforts are reserved for whole industries. From advertising, to cosmetics, to automobile manufacturing, he acquires companies, raises salaries, ruins the products, then pays off the employees and customers whose lives he has played with. This always “costs him a good bit to keep his own name clear.” But given the infinite store of grace (that is to say, wealth) available, money is never a constraint on the divine japes. No divine fingerprints are anywhere to be found. The Spirit remains anonymous. And although he is present at his best performances, no one even knows what he looks like.

Yet there is a method in Grand’s apparent madness. He makes this clear in a pep talk to the staff of one of the companies he is about to destroy:

“... a couple of consumer principles we can kick around here at conference: one, the insatiate craving of the public for an absolute; and two, the modern failure of monotheism—that is to say, the failure of the notion that any absolute can be presented as one separate thing.”

In other words, there is indeed an inherent contradiction within modern consumer society: the failure to deal adequately with the necessity for contradiction.

And Grand has a Grand Plan, as it were, a sophisticated programme for addressing what is clearly a gap in the market:

“Monotheism is shot to pieces on the one hand—dire craving for an absolute existing on the other. I submit to you staffers that the solution establishes itself before our very eyes: namely, that an absolute—in any particular field—must be presented as a dichotomy!... Now what we want is one product which we can present in the two forms—good and evil, old and new, primitive and civilized—two items designed for the same use but presented as completely antithetical, both morally and philosophically—not aesthetically, however . . .”

Grand knows his market. Its most profound desire is to be subjugated but to call that subjugation freedom. The American aesthetic!

There we have it, the dichotomous condition of Capitalism and Christianity, separate and apparently incompatible, yet melded together seamlessly in modern American culture. The contradictions between the two - the material and the spiritual, rapacious competition and loving cooperation, this world and the next, subservience and independence - all assembled in one neat, easily available, reasonably priced package. Not just the best of all possible worlds, but also the most fun! At least for the divine Grand. What mega-church pastor could resist such a bonzo product line?

Magic Christian is 70 years old. But aside from the protagonist’s use of trains rather than planes to get around, it isn’t at all dated. Southern was a satirical genius (cf Dr. Strangelove). But he was also an educated one. His targets weren’t individuals, or countries, but an entire culture. This culture hasn’t changed much at all since 1959 except to become more of itself. As the protagonist says, “Grand’s the name, easy-green’s the game.” And so it remains... on Earth as it is in Heaven.

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Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Digging Ourselves Out

It’s unlikely that any writer has been more described in terms of other writers - preceding and following - than Alfred Döblin. Joyce, Dostoevsky, Henry Miller, Bukowski, Martin Amis, Henry Fielding, Upton Sinclair, Céline, Burgess, Smollett, Isherwood, dos Passos, and Conrad among others have been mentioned frequently as influences or being influenced. It seems impossible to pin Döblin down to a definite style or technique. I find him an inspiration for William Gaddis’s JR, for example, in his ‘stream of conversation.’

Yet he is also unique in time and place. Weimar Germany is in social chaos. Work is hard to find, even before the Great Depression, especially for an ex-con. Pornography and the sex-trade in general are thriving, despite the Victorian (or more accurately the Wilheminic) era ‘blue laws.’ The historical class structures are being undermined by the same residues of the Great War that are affecting Britain. Politics has yet to work out its disastrous compromises, although the omens of the future are clear. And in a perverse way Berlin, despite its status as a conquered capital city, is the centre of a new global culture.

Perhaps this is why Döblin is so difficult to categorise or characterise. In this one book is all of not just Western literature but also Western culture, a literary Mahler’s Ninth. Franz Biberkopf is the new Everyman, even more so than Leopold Bloom. Bloom was up against tedium, boredom, and oppressive religion but at least Dublin was what it always had been. Biberkopf’s Berlin had no historical continuity. It was the far side of the moon, waiting to be discovered by the rest of mankind.

This new world is non-traditional. It demands the abandonment of habits in order to survive. Because the mores of ‘good behaviour’ have yet to be established, it feels like a prison in which a mis-step can have lethal consequences. Trial and error rather than best practice in everything from sex to career (the anticipation of Viagra is startling). So despite wanting to lead a life of stable conformity, such a thing is no longer possible:

“He swore to all the world and to himself that he would remain decent. And as long as he had money, he remained decent. But then he ran out of money, which was a moment he had been waiting for, to show them all what he was made of.”

This is the new man - the player, the scammer, the inside trader, the mobster, the exploiter of loopholes, the corporate boss. The entire foundation of social relations had been altered. Sociologists may not see that for decades, and even then not very clearly. But Döblin captured the whole event in Biberkopf as he caroms around the streets of Berlin. Almost a century later, it has become obvious to the rest of us how perceptive he was. After his release from prison Biberkopf realises that the world had changed in his absence. “I know I need to dig deeper,” he says. Indeed, don’t we all.

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There Must Be Some Mistake by Frederick Barthelme
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Junk Culture

There are two dominant architectural genres in America: the tacky ad hoc industrial/commercial sprawl available on every federal highway in every town from Brownsville to Appalachicola; and the private designer communities tucked in between - like Destin, Florida and Kemah, Texas - which are equally tacky but considerably more expensive, given that they are planned to be an escape from the first. Both genres are vacuous and depressing, physical representations of a lack of any real purpose among their inhabitants. At least that’s what Barthelme conveys to me in this drama of quiet middle-class desperation.

People seem to drift haplessly in There Must Be Some Mistake . The entire cast drifts into various strange relationships for reasons that are unclear. They drift into or out of jobs and house purchases with no rationale other than it feels right at the time. Their aesthetic sensibilities seem to be a permanent state of suspension lest they recognise the general ugliness of the world they inhabit. They, like the architecture they inhabit, are also vacuous. They are, therefore, moved, influenced, and motivated by the slightest random stimulus to do self-destructive things.

This is “junk culture.” It consists of elements so tawdry that they have a demanding aesthetic presence. I suppose they seem to require a kind of Hobson’s choice: either to develop a sort of immunity to their garish, overwhelming repulsiveness; or to force an entirely new standard of beauty, as if there were no other societies than the one which tolerates such violence to the idea of beauty. Wallace Webster, the once aspiring architect turned ad man, has made his choice; he has learned to love it: “I thought I’d get tired of the tacky crap, the minigolf and souvenirs and franchise restaurants, but I never did.”

Bathelme writes here about the Gulf Coast but it’s clear he intends all of America: “Everywhere along the coast, from south Texas to Louisiana, there was this worn-out feel, some godforsakenness that drifted through the air like sad Latin music.” What’s there is a history of destruction and wealth turning into destruction. Things are bad but no one wants them any different. They don’t even want to escape; that would be un-American. Wallace lives on Forgetful Bay, a non-place of condos among other non-places that litter the entire Gulf coast, with other non-people who have similarly decided that this is the best to be expected from life.

There is a certain level of nostalgia about an imagined past of quaint seaside towns and the quasi-frontier life in the old industrial areas. But the memories of such things are thin and have no motive force. The murky past anticipates an equally murky future. Life at its best is a sequence of brand-name purchases. The brands are what have survived in a deteriorating world. They are the only things which provide comfort and stability, a sense of cultural continuity. No wonder Wallace is constantly thinking about returning to the God of his boyhood Catholicism - the most enduring brand name available.

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The Penguin Book of Hell by Scott G. Bruce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Control Without Fingerprints

In my youth, and that of many another Catholic school boy of the time, religious ‘retreats’ were an essential component of the curriculum. Three or four days each year were set aside for doing nothing but considering one’s spiritual state - a sort of Catholic tent revival without the singing (silence was strictly enforced). This group activity was usually supervised by a Jesuit priest who, I presume, specialised in such work.

The agenda for retreats never varied. In addition to a fixed daily routine of liturgical observances - Mass, the Divine Office, Benediction - everyone was required to attend lectures on the so-called Four Last Things, namely Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. In these, the assembled adolescent boys would be berated, intimidated, and ultimately convinced of their inadequacy as human beings. Think of Marine boot camp as the physical equivalent of the psychological readjustment which the process was meant to achieve.

The sequence of the lectures was critical. Hell was the emotional culmination of the entire experience. I’ll wager that no one who has heard the kinds of gruesome descriptions awaiting those who did not act as required, particularly regarding obedience and sex, can ever forget them. And this was precisely the intention of the entire programme - to frighten everyone present into permanent, unquestioning submission to ecclesiastical authority. It worked. The fact that the whole process effectively constituted child abuse wasn’t considered relevant at the time.

Even for those who ceased their formal affiliation with the Church in latter years, the emotional residue of these lectures remains buried in the unconscious, shaping much of our lives. Young masculine minds have a penchant for absorbing ghoul into their personalities:

“Hell became a vast prison of red-hot iron and choking smoke with great gates built to withstand the seething tide of furious, tormented souls who crashed inexorably against them in their futile attempt to escape their suffering. The literature of Hell boasts famous villains, but most of the damned are ordinary people like you and me, each judged to be deserving of eternal punishment for their own private sins.”

As Scott Bruce points out, hell was not invented by Christians. But the concept was certainly developed and refined into a uniquely practical doctrine for social control by an institution which had, for a time at least, abjured physical violence. It left no visible marks. There were no limits to the horrors that could be invented and applied. And, most important, it was a mechanism by which each individual became his own policeman. The watcher was also the watched; failing to watch zealously was sufficient cause for damnation. At least Protestantism was more humane in its views - predestination mitigates responsibility and salvation by faith alone narrows one’s worries substantially.

Bruce’s thesis is that although the concept of hell has lost its grip on the modern imagination as a place of punishment (even in church circles), it still exerts a metaphorical hold on Western society. This is no doubt true. Socialism is the inferno of Capitalism; and vice versa. Africa is (according to Trump) a hell-hole; as is most of Latin America. The United States trades hell-based insults with the Axis of Evil which then responds to the Great Satan. The doctrine has been secularised. But it’s intention remains the same as it was in religion: to generate self-enforced conformity and willing obedience within a population.

Christianity transformed the Ancient Greek Tartarus, the Jewish Sheol, and the Roman Underworld from mythical places of indeterminate existence into purportedly real prisons of retributive punishment. Given Jesus’s constant emphasis on the universal availability of heavenly delights according to the gospels, this is a remarkable volte face. Clearly the transformation is politically motivated, not to attract followers but to keep those who were already part of the tribe in line. Hell has never been a very effective marketing strategy but it its hard to beat as an organizing principle. And so it remains: yet another legacy of European culture benefitting the world at large.

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Drawn and Quartered by Emil M. Cioran
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The End of the End

Drawn and Quartered begins with an account of the Gnostic myth of the origin of mankind. Originally part of the heavenly host, human beings were unable to make up their minds whether to join the battle of the angels for or against God. For this indecision, we were banished to earth. The essential feature of our existence here is its lack of meaning, an appropriate punishment indeed, which we constantly attempt to escape by inventing stories like the Gnostic myth.

This “truth of no truth” is the ultimate truth, as it were. “Our only choice is between irrespirable truths and salutary frauds.” We must hide from the truth in order to exist at all. This is “an inhuman truth,” one that is both inhumane and beyond the ability of our species to comprehend it. So we do our best to avoid it. The principal tool of our self-delusion is history. Without history we are already in what theologians call the eschaton , the end times. “History is the obstacle to ultimate revelation.”

Francis Fukuyama was right therefore when he declared the End of History (in 1992), but not in the sense he imagined. Cioran anticipated his point, and radicalized it, long before Fukuyama had made it: “Henceforth there will be no more events!” they will exclaim” (in 1979). Fukuyama was referring to the inevitability of democratic capitalism as the future of the political world. Given subsequent events, Fukuyama was merely guilty of wishful thinking. Cioran got it right: it is when a political system looks most permanent that it is most vulnerable to being swept away. This is the truth hiding in Fukuyama’s error.

This is what the eschaton looks like. We inhabit it. We have always lived in it but have taught ourselves not to notice. This is an error whose truth we cannot conceive. In the midst of the end we are unable to appreciate it for what it is: the absence of any meaning we have been trying incessantly to impose upon the world. There is nothing more beyond this. Even the end has no meaning. “The truth is, history does not quite lack essence, since it is the essence of deception, key to all that blinds us, all that helps us live in time.” For Cioran , history is “the rush toward a future where nothing ever becomes again?” His suggestion is that we stop rushing; we have arrived.

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The Subliminal Man by J.G. Ballard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Global Delusion

Technology was supposed to let the working man work less. Instead everyone in the family now has to work more hours and retire later just to service the debt payments. Who wants that? And if no one does want it, why does it happen? Somehow the fix is in. As Leonard Cohen sang: “Everybody knows.” But no one seems to mind. So much for free will.

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The Gnostic Gospels 
by 

Elaine Pagels

 

The Power of Religious Imagination 

The central paradox of the religious imagination is its perennial attempt to constrain religious imagination. Elaine Pagels’s analysis of the so-called gnostic scriptures which were accidentally discovered in 1947 is a case study in the practical consequences of this contradiction. That human beings can hate, persecute and kill one another over poetry is a considerably greater mystery than any of the spiritual narratives contained in these texts.

Orthodoxy means ‘right-thinking.’ Such an idea is not inherent to all religious thought. Orthodoxy is primarily a political not a spiritual category. Its importance lies in its organizational, or perhaps more generally its tribal, implications. It is a way of distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’ and really has to do more with what is said or written rather than with what is thought. Orthodoxy is functionally the constraining of thought by the control of language.

Prior to Christianity, orthodoxy did not exist. Religious imagination was unconstrained and its expression in language was unproblematic. However, the introduction of ‘faith’ as a central category of the Christian religion necessitated not just an obsession with language but also its precise control in order to protect correct belief. Faith is a linguistic rather than a spiritual concept. Belief is expressed in words. Words are therefore inherently sacred; they are superior to any reality. Orthodoxy seeks to enforce that superiority and with it a fixed symbolic interpretation of reality.

The gnostic texts of Nag Hamadi are remnants of what were widely circulated documents in early Christianity. The originals of some of these documents may be older than those ultimately accepted into the Christian biblical canon. They are heretical, that is to say unorthodox, and were condemned as such by senior Christian apologists as early as the second century. In accordance with the linguistic demands of faith, copies of these documents were destroyed en masse when Christianity became the official religion of empire. But some survived - interesting poetry seems to resist complete destruction.

The gnostic texts are nothing if not interesting. ‘Gnosis,’ as Pagels notes, roughly translates as ‘insight.’ And the insights into human character and the nature of reality provided by these texts are fascinating, certainly ranking with the most thoughtful modern fiction. They deal with “illusion and enlightenment rather than sin and repentance.” They presume that the source of what is usually called the divine is internal to human beings not existing independently elsewhere. And they accept the simultaneous, and necessary, existence of good and evil in that divinity. Not until Jungian psychology in the 20th century were such insights again publically expressed.

I find it appropriate that the fifty-two Nag Hamadi documents are written in Coptic translated from Greek originals. Coptic uses a modified Greek alphabet and transliterates Egyptian hieroglyphs into phonetic script. The association of the documents with ancient and mysterious hieroglyphics emphasizes their purely linguistic character. They do not represent the reality of the world but only our human attempt to deal with it. The difference is crucial.

A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Listen to Your Mother!

Life is a horror story straight out of H.P Lovecraft. Only hopeful delusions prevent us from recognising the terrible reality of those things we have been taught to respect, admire and desire - spouse, children, work, moderate suburban comfort. Only by inducing ourselves to believe that these things are inherently valuable and that they justify our lives can we bear to tolerate the triviality, dissatisfaction, and absence of any real affection.

Yet reality continues to impose itself. Unable to cope with one’s own defects not to mention the continuous rivalry with one’s siblings and parents, the unconscious mind objectifies them as monsters and demons which mean to destroy us - which of course is precisely what reality intends to do. The universe is indeed evil. The prevalence of defective genes, physical illness, and neuroses makes the point obvious even as we temporise and rationalise about them.

Parents only begin to understand this after years of marriage and child-rearing. Whatever the original reasons for pursuing family life, they are inadequate for sustaining it. People change. Experience generates suffering. Dreams of the future are never fulfilled. Life becomes tedious and full of resentment and pretence when it was supposed to be an adventure. And the reality of death becomes more real.

Yet none of this, of course, can be communicated to the children who are doomed to repeat the experience. Children think that the violence and pain and disappointment they experience are aberrations which can be avoided. They’re not. They are inevitable. All children believe in justice and have no concept of economics. This is what makes them vulnerable. They lack the skills to survive in an unjust, commercial world. And they know parents lie in any case.

Particularly apt for pre-marital counselling.

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