The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity by Charles Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Demonic Divinity

Birds sing to each other, lions roar at enemies, cats purr with their owners. These are all communications. But none of these communications involves language. It’s easy to miss the fundamental character of language and presume that it emerged from some more primitive form of communication, that some ancient hominid species progressively developed a vocabulary of sounds and gestures which at some point became recognisable as what we call a language.

Didn’t happen. Birds and lions and cats don’t use a form of proto-language which in the course of evolution turned into human speech and writing. No one knows when human language began (or for that matter the precise hominid remains that we might designate as human). But whenever it happened, it was abrupt, decisive, and representative of an entirely distinct and unique mode of being: animal being certainly but not as had been previously known.

This is not to say that language appeared in its entirety - vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatic uses - in some sudden linguistic Big Bang. Language developed and evolved as any other cultural trait. But language-ability, the realisation that words (or sounds, or symbols, or gestures) exist independently of the things which they refer to, is an evolutionary singularity. A species does not ‘ease into’ a language. It either has it or it does not. The line is sharp and it is decisive. Once it is crossed, the entire species is effectively absorbed into language and has no way out, no return to a garden of oneness with nature for example. The biblical story of exile is profound.

Two twentieth century philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, are the most well-known thinkers about language. Heidegger called language the ‘house of being’ of mankind. We live solely within it, both protected and trapped by its existence. Wittgenstein showed how language exists only as a whole and can only be employed in relation to itself not in terms of its relation with what is not-language. He famously called these uses ‘language games,’ not in the sense that they lack seriousness but because they are governed by rules of deployment and context into which we are indoctrinated.

Charles Taylor’s thesis is that Heidegger and Wittgenstein are the intellectual descendants and heirs of the German Romantic philosophers of the early nineteenth century, particularly Herder, Hamann, and Humboldt. In a typically Taylorian move, he sets up a dialectic in order to establish the point. This is an interesting and creative move in that he avoids the tired old argument between Rationalists and Empiricists. He understands the next stage in intellectual development to be the opposition between the mighty Kant, who as far as Taylor is concerned synthesised a solution to that historical debate, and this new group of philosophers who took Kant one step further.

Kant, in Taylor’s view, understood that the empiricism of thinkers like Hume and Condillac had a fatal flaw: the ‘atomisation’ of perception. Perceptions are never isolated, they are always in a context of myriad other perceptions both contemporary and historical. Kant also showed the fault in the idea of Cartesian rationality with its mind/body distinction. The ‘laws’ of reason are not something to be discovered in ‘nature.’ They are constructed and imposed upon the world by human beings. What Kant didn’t recognise about his own philosophy was that he atomised language in the same way that the Empiricists had atomised perception. His focus on the ‘epistemological’ connection between words and things the Romantics considered an intellectual dead end.

And indeed, it has so turned out: after more than two centuries of thought and analysis, no one has been able to suggest a credible way to judge the correctness of the connection between a word and the ‘thing in itself’ (thus implying that our entire species is delusional). And it was the German Romantics who first understand why. Kant took language to be solely a human tool. The Romantics recognised language as having its own power, which it quietly exercised over those who thought they were using it. Eventually this recognition emerged as Heidegger’s pithy dictum: ‘Language speaks Man.’ Words are defined not in terms of what are not-words but only in terms of other words. Whatever we do with words is always about other words, however much we pretend to be talking about the ‘real world.’ The only world there is is the world of language. And every word in a language implicitly refers to every other word.

The clue which prompted this insight by the Romantics is indeed rather romantic, namely that the the world within language is much bigger than the world without it. Language is the cosmic Tardis of Dr. Who. It looks small and restrictive from the outside, even in the 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. But the space which language opens up is potentially infinite viewed from the inside. Certainly no individual has ever been more constrained rather than less in perceptions of places, people, and times by language. Language, just language, can evoke tears and laughter. And yet there is nothing ‘objective’ that is sad or comic. Language is what allows me to know about black holes and Bognor Regis although I have been to neither. I have no doubt that both are real because of the way both are used in scientific and everyday discussion. The language game, one might say, vouches for them. I don’t need to visit. A blessing.

The Romantics also intuited that there were things beyond language. Not just in terms of missing words or expressions, but more importantly that those things that were not-language were, as Kant concluded, not knowable in a fundamental sense. Language may mask its character by pretending that it is merely an intermediary between the thing-in-itself and us. But this is only an expression of its absolute power over us. We aren’t able to escape from it. It is a cage as well as a house. It shapes our perceptions as much as it expresses them. It is therefore convenient to mistake linguistic truth for reality. Convenient because language allows us to manipulate words into plausible self-justification for just about anything we do from fraud to fratricide.

I must admit that I always suspect Taylor of hidden religious objectives in whatever he writes. It’s when he discusses that which is beyond language that I begin to detect his attempt to make philosophical room for God, particularly the God of the Christianity. In this regard it is notable that he chooses not to mention at all one of the most influential of the early 19th century Romantics, Friedrich Schleiermacher, a theologian concerned with reconciling Protestant Christianity and Enlightenment philosophy. Schleiermacher developed the idea of God as a sentiment in the human heart, literally a word to which emotions attached. This was certainly a romantic if decidedly heretical concept. Yet it became a central tenet of so-called Liberal Protestantism during the 19th century and of the fundamentalist reaction against this movement in the 20th.

So, the battle over words continues apace. Largely because there is nothing other than words to fight about. Language does seem to be malignantly mischievous from time to time. Perhaps demonically divine is the most apt description.

For more on Heidegger’s Language as The House of Being: https://ibb.co/F6JdxHN

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The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When Obligation Ruled

It’s tricky to write effective fiction about an entirely alien culture, even if it’s human. Naturally the writer must presume we share a language with his characters. And it helps from a literary point of view that he allows them to use that language fluently and intelligently as their own.

But then the question arises of how to convey the mores of the alien society. These, of course, are so deeply embedded in any society as to be entirely invisible to its members. To be credible, the indigenous narrator cannot refer to them explicitly. They are there in the action but never commented upon. The normal can never even referred to only implied.

This is the trick Crace knows how to perform well: dealing with the normal by never mentioning it explicitly. As in his other novels, the rules of the social game are never stated. Why should they be? They are obvious and a matter of course for all the characters. Their actions and motivations may be enigmatic to the reader. How could it be authentically otherwise?

In the Gift of Stones , the cultural context is a primitive British society which is literally uncivilised but is nevertheless fairly complex. The populace consists of villagers and wandering bands which carry out trade, armed assault and robbery in about equal measure. The economy is not just pre-capitalist and pre-feudal, it is pre-monetary. Every transaction is one of negotiated barter. There is, of course, no legal framework to protect either life or wealth.

But there is a glue that in fact binds folk into a society: obligation. Obligation drives everything in Crace’s narrative. The villagers presume an obligation to work together without discussing it. They presume an obligation to work skilfully to presume their economic niche. Not much to inspire, therefore. If that were the extent of social obligation, the book would be banal.

The interesting cultural twist/observation/comment, however, is the obligation given and received by those with different, somewhat contradictory interests, namely those like the wandering bands. Even in the face of violent threats, the villagers are convinced that the traders will recognise that the villagers well-being is in the interest of the traders. The villagers, after all, are both customers and suppliers. The goose and golden eggs come to mind.

Significantly, obligation overrides everything else. Most importantly, obligation substitutes for emotion. Emotion is transitory and not to be given in to much less trusted. Obligation greases the wheels of social interaction much more efficiently than sentiment. But obligation as the social imperative is dependent on the primitive economy of flint stone and its usefulness in the world.

Like the transition from hunting to agriculture, the transition from stone to metal in human life was undoubtedly traumatic. An unexpected cultural casualty of this transition in Crace’s fiction is the dominance of unforced obligation. Its disappearance as the matrix of society rather than the economic change is the real cause of the trauma. This can only be communicated in stories after the fact. As usual, we only appreciate what we have recently lost.

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The Trouble with Being Born 
by 

Emil M. Cioran, 

 

Richard Howard (Translator)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Dec 28, 2019  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: french-language, philosophy-theology, epistemology-language, favourites 

Life Inside the Bubble 

I feel entitled to interpret and respond to Cioran’s aphoristic mode with some of the same chiastic development (even if not nearly as witty):

Homo sapiens, uniquely in the animal kingdom, lives in a bubble of language. He (and she) is so immured in this bubble that language and experience are inextricably confounded. The consequence of this involuntary universal peonage is that everyone substitutes things with words and responds to words as if they were things. It’s the cost of living in the bubble.

Reality is what happens. Everything else is literature.

Literature is an evolved form of language. It is constituted by an ideal philosophy, and ideal religion, and an ideal politics. Or at least as ideal as can be reached by Homo sapiens.

The philosophy of literature is empirically grounded on observation: human beings are the only story-telling animal. Other sentient beings use gestures, sounds, words, phrases, even sentences to communicate with each other. Only people connect words in complex creative ways. This is a blessing and a curse. It makes life inside the language bubble bearable but more or less isolates story-tellers from experience since the stories they tell create their own experience. No one has ever found a way to untangle the two (the attempt is the failed science of epistemology).

To compensate for the consequences of entrapment inside the bubble human beings have invented a religion of language (and a language of religion) that tells the story (actually many stories) of what exists outside the bubble. This of course is paradoxical since that which is beyond the bubble is reality, which as soon as it is brought inside the bubble becomes literature. Prompted by this contradiction, some people declare their language about things outside the bubble to be sacred, thus making life inside the bubble toxic. These people are idolatrous and call those who are not idolaters: atheists, agnostics, non-conformists, dreamers, and sometimes artists, by which they mean useless.

Those who recognise the existence of the bubble and its implications strive to keep story-telling free from such ossification. Feeling in need of support in a hostile world, they too have succumbed to the religious impulse but in a very different way. Their alternative religion is a kind of ethical politics which allows any story to be told and heard. They make no claims to knowing what is outside the bubble or approaching closer to it by working hard at story-telling within the bubble. Their life consists of the unrestricted exchange of words in unusual and unexpected combinations. They often allude to what they imagine might be outside the bubble but remain interested in the imaginations of others. From this they derive pleasure from which many other inhabitants of the bubble take offence.

Typically, those who take offence, whether religious or not, claim that the imaginative new stories are not reflections of reality and should be ignored or even banned as dangerous. This, of course, is a story of limited imagination (and probably a restricted vocabulary; they tend to occur together). Such stories have little weight unless accompanied by violence. Violence - physical, psychological, and spiritual - is the only effective method which allows reality to enter the bubble. Violence shatters the bubble completely. This those offended perceive as satisfying.

Literature has no defense against violence. The bubble is an aberration, as fragile, ephemeral, and temporary as the language upon which it is based.

In the end violence, that is to say, reality prevails.

Of course Cioran is a laconic genius; so he summarises the situation much more compactly: "As long as you live on this side of the terrible, you will find words to express it; once you know it from inside, you will no longer find a single one." It is difficult to cope with such terseness, even among the literate. Such is the character of good literature.

 

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Better Dead Than Read

In the Book of Genesis, God creates mankind last, as if anticipating the theory of Darwinian evolution. But the text is somewhat ambivalent about his accomplishment. Whereas all his other creations - time, space, light, plants, sentient creatures - are explicitly deemed ‘good,’ human beings are merely lumped in with everything else as God surveys the world. The biblical author seems to be hedging the blessing (mitzvah: both a command and a favour) of human ‘rule’ over everything. If so, his caution has turned out to be justified. Putting the inmates in charge of the asylum has turned out to be a profound design flaw.

But perhaps not for much longer. The species Homo sapiens seems to have run its course. It has overwhelmed the creative matrix which produced it. And it has done so in an evolutionary blink of an eye. Its facility for communication through complex language, as Emil Cioran has said, has filled creation with a glut of consciousness, an intellectual burden which it cannot sustain. The threat is not mankind’s greed, or hostility, or sexual urges but thought itself. Thought, which is language in action, produces cooperative effort, which produces technology, which removes all impediments to the spread of the species.

Except, of course, one impediment: the success of the species itself. It is a species which consumes everything it encounters. This it calls ‘finding a use for,’ or sometimes ‘making life better.’ This is an expected consequence of language-use. As Yuval Harari observes, it is gossip which propelled the species into poll position in the evolutionary race. Members of the species gin each other up to want more of everything: more children, more food, more air, water, minerals... well just more of everything. Isn’t this what ruling is all about? Making things better? Enhancing existence? Realising one’s full potential, as well as that of the species? Isn’t that the practical definition of salvation? Striving for perfection?

One of Stanislaw Lem’s stories turns the tables on the evolutionary story we tell ourselves about being the most developed species, the top of the food chain, the acme of known existence. For Lem all this striving, this wanting to be better, bigger, stronger, more secure, to be something other than what we already are, is an obvious evolutionary defect, a dead end genetic branch that will wither as creation moves on. And what it will move on to is the inertia of what the species now sees dismissively as ‘dead matter.’ This is, of course, obviously the case. Look in any grave yard for confirmation; or in the fossil record; or for that matter into the maw of the nearest astronomical black hole. Entropy, that is to say, that silent, peaceful equality is the heaven that awaits us, the omega point of Teilhard de Chardin.

Meanwhile we are effectively trapped in this bubble of language. We can’t resist it, or dispose of it, or in any way mitigate its profoundly destructive consequences - for us as well as for the other species with which we live. We are doomed to destroy them, as in a Ted Chiang story, simply by perceiving them. Even by naming them, we endanger their existence because it means we have become aware of them as a potential resource. We are prisoners of ourselves. Stories about future threats to human existence through developments in Artificial Intelligence are actually distractions from current reality. Language already controls us.

In this light, it helps to look at the record. The Ordovician extinction occurred over a period of a million years as global temperatures dropped, and was caused by silicate rocks sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. 86% of all species perished. The Devonian extinction, triggered by the development of plant life on land releasing nutrients into the oceans, thus wiping out 75% of marine animals. The Permian extinction was the big one, the proximate cause being methane-producing bacteria. 96% of life on each disappeared. The Triassic extinction has no agreed upon cause; but it wiped out 80% of contemporary species. The Cretaceous extinction, the one with the asteroid impact in the Gulf of Mexico as its final coup, was relatively mild; only three quarters of known species were eliminated. It too seems like the revenge of dead matter.

Isn’t it interesting that each of these events was precipitated by material, both living and dead, rather far down the purported evolutionary ladder than the most ‘advanced’ organisms then in existence. Evolutionary development carries with it inherent vulnerability to changes in the environment. The less developed, that is the closer to dead matter, the more likely the chances of survival. And dead matter probably only goes extinct in some sort of cosmic singularity like a black hole. Language simultaneously makes us aware and insulates us from this reality. Inside the bubble of language we can rationalise our inevitable fate - science will save us; God has another world waiting for us; the mathematical probabilities for another similar event is low, etc. We know deep down that language is deceiving us but we act like it’s just part of reality.

The implications are obvious. Neither God nor human beings created language, thus contradicting our fundamental language-based conceit. Language evolved from us but is independent of us. And we are addicted to it. We resent the power of language, even as we pretend to use it to further our own. We are at its mercy and we intend, unconsciously but deliberately, to stop its hegemony. Like every other extinction event, this one too is being executed by an ‘inferior’ species upon one which has emanated from it. We are determined to wipe out language, or at least to scramble it so profoundly that its meanings are irrecoverable. The elimination of so many other species along the way is merely collateral damage, unfortunate but necessary. This perhaps is the true significance of the story in Genesis chapter 11 of the Tower of Babel. And it certainly explains Donald Trump’s appeal to the mass of Deplorables.

Kolbert has the trajectory correct but the mechanism wrong. Nothing about the Sixth Extinction is accidental or unwanted. It was inevitable from the moment an idea and a sound or gesture popped into some primitive head and were linked. That was the start of the rot. And there are plenty of folk out there who are willing to go to the wall in order to stop it. Better Dead Than Read is their motto. Heed them; they are serious and dedicated. And they are winning.

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Dawn Through the Shadows by Linda Anne Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The New Catholic Ideology

Linda Anne Smith’s story about Catholic religiosity and its methods and its effects on university life is familiar to me. I hope she doesn’t mind if I comment on her book by adding my own story to hers as a sort of confirmation of her sensibilities.

I was brought up as a Catholic. Identifiably so since it was evident from my birth certificate, school uniforms, university applications (yes Dorothy, it was legal to ask in those days), and military dog tags. I would allude to my Catholic background in casual conversation with equally casual acquaintances without hesitation. At the moment I am striving with my remaining vigour toward the three quarter century mark. And during a fairly cosmopolitain life on several continents, among a variety of colleagues, friends, and occasional enemies never have I encountered any anti-Catholic sentiment, much less an abusive remark. Not once, ever.

Until, that is, I arrived as a ‘mature’ graduate student (aged 55) to embark on doctoral studies in theology at the University of Oxford. Almost immediately I was confronted by derisory remarks about my background and religious attitudes. Not by pagans, or Protestants, or Muslims or Jews, but by fellow Catholics who identified in me as an apparently ‘unwoke’ consciousness of the historical persecution of Catholics and the contemporary effort by politicians and hostile academics to marginalise Catholicism. I must admit it: I was impressed. My critics were intelligent, often experienced people who appeared to know and to have experienced things that I hadn’t.

Oxford is an oddly religious place with its chapels in every college, daily evensong at many of these, and sectarian societies of every spiritual brand (including atheist). Most of the colleges and halls were originally religious foundations and retain much of the spiritual culture from which they emerged. So religion is an acceptable and frequent topic of discussion, especially, of course, among the theology aficionados. Through these conversations it gradually became clear to me that none of the militant righters-of-Catholic-wrongs I was encountering had ever been victims of even the slightest persecution. Their experience was the same as my own, a general indifference to religion in daily life. Yet the shoulder-chips were obvious.

But their experience was precisely what they were objecting to - the fact that their Catholicism, whatever that meant to them, was entirely irrelevant to the rest of the world. That the world ignored them was was a sign of persecution. It was not individual Catholics who were being belittled or discriminated against; it was Catholicism itself. The Faith was being attacked even if the faithful were left unscathed. What more clever plot could the forces of darkness - mainly liberal thinkers who had their intellectual roots in the ‘failed Renaissance Project’ - have conceived? Fortunately, they had spotted the demonic plan and had begun the counter-attack on a number of fronts.

The first component of this strategy was to politicise the students. In the absence of wrongs to individuals, a communal issue was required. This was discovered in an historical inequity: there was a monument in Oxford to the Protestant martyrs of the Catholic ‘Bloody’ Queen Mary, but no equivalent monument to the Catholic victims of her sister Elizabeth. Petitions were signed, demonstrations organised, debates conducted. With only negligible resistance (regrettably from the point of view of the protestors), the University caved and installed a plaque at an appropriate location (ironically on a building of New College, which had recently eliminated its theology faculty, and is the academic residence of that infamously militant atheist Richard Dawkins).

The second component was political. Conveniently an academic theological movement called Radical Orthodoxy, centred on a former Oxford don and well-known academic, was just coming into fashion. Although it’s leaders were high church Anglicans, its thrust was very much Catholic in spirit (indeed several of the leading lights did convert). Radical Orthodoxy seeks to recover the historical spiritual order in England (read pre-Henry VIII), even down to re-instating the civil parishes as the principal components of the English polity. The movement had penetrated the Tory party at rather senior levels and could claim credible influence with policy-makers among the so-called Red Tories (cf. Jacob Rees-Mogg and his in-your-face militant Catholicism)

The final strategic element, one which is always essential, was finance. Several Oxford Catholics led the Westminster Archdiocese’s organisation of a series of Ethics in Business and similar conferences in London. These were high profile affairs, clearly meant not so much to improve the behaviour of British businessmen as to make contacts among the movers and shakers and suss-out who might be vulnerable to a touch for donations. In my rather pedestrian role as tutor and librarian at the Catholic Blackfriars Hall, I began to receive international calls from various organisation of Catholic businessmen, requesting possible contacts. The Catholic mafia, it became clear to me, was indeed a global affair when it came to money.

Throughout this experience, of course, was also the persistent dogmatic undercurrent. The Latin Mass Society was in ascendancy, the C. S. Lewis Society flourished, the Newman Society conducted a civil war among the Jesuits who ran it (the Traditionalists came out on top), and naturally the secretive Opus Dei popped up with its criticisms with increasing frequency. It seemed that I was encountering the outposts of militant Catholicism with its penchant for the world of Tridentine certainties everywhere - among the Dominicans at Blackfriars, the Benedictines at St. Benet’s Hall, the Franciscans at Greyfriars Hall, and the Jesuits at Campion Hall (still fighting with each other).

Then it finally struck me, what all this persecution business was about. It was fake news but it was news that inspired solidarity, particularly but not solely among the young. It was news that provoked what seemed to be a discovery of something that had been hidden, that is, an epiphany of the precise sort that young minds at Oxford expected. Oddly, the narrative of a beleaguered Catholicism was energising in a way that its doctrines and history were not. The fact that Catholicism was confident enough to attack (precisely what was being attacked was left vague) was itself worthy of interest. Not everyone snapped at the bait; but enough did to make the environment highly unpleasant.

So I get Smith’s concerns. There is a movement afoot of a militant Catholicism in America and Britain (and more generally Christianity; see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). What matters to this movement is not the welfare of individuals, not even their salvation; and certainly not the interests of the planet or its other inhabitants; but the power of the tribe, consisting of those who affirm the words of the creed and obey their spiritual masters. The number of clergy may have declined because of scandal and general lack of interest, but the proportion of those remaining who are fanatically dedicated to regaining institutional dominance has increased.

This movement has been remarkably successful by a sort of backdoor approach to acquiring devotees: get ‘em while they are young and vulnerable and looking for answers; but give them attention and food before you even listen to their questions; get them socialised before you get them believing in your answers. These are, of course, the tactics of all ideologues. And they will continue to work... until they don’t.

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Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism 
by 

Michelle Goldberg

 

BlackOxford's review 

Dec 24, 2019  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: american, history, church, philosophy-theology, sociology 

The Apocalypse Is Nigh... No Really, It Is 

Sometime in 2009, I heard a radio broadcast from the US which claimed that the culture wars which had been bubbling up since the 1970’s were finally at a end. The commentator, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, opined that the recent financial crash had brought Americans back to their senses. The real political issues, he said, are and always have been economic. Only half listening, I did feel a sense of relief that perhaps indeed American politics were becoming, if not more rational, at least more comprehensible.

How arrogantly ignorant was that commentator; and how utterly naive was I. Perhaps it was because a liberal, intelligent, engaging black man was in the White House. Perhaps it was because the fundamental problems of financial capitalism could finally be observed fully. Perhaps it was because the consummate stupidity of American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan had yet to be fully revealed. But whatever the reasons, it was simply not possible to be any more wrong about what had happened, and what would continue to happen to American political sentiment.

While the big news stories were about the usual raft of scandals in the Catholic Church, lies about military progress, and the search for someone to blame for recent economic misery, the real news lay largely unreported and even unnoticed. A coup had already taken place within American government, not in the palaces of the president or the governors (well, maybe a few of these), but in the school boards, county executives, local sheriffs and judges, and most importantly in the activists and delegates of the Republican Party. 

Somewhere around 40% of Americans identify as evangelical Christians, that is they believe in things like Creationism, the Second Coming, the eternal damnation of the unbaptised, and the sinfulness of many sexual practices. Many of these folk also regard the ills of society, from criminality to mental illness to bad government to be the result of the failure of Americans generally to respect and live up to what they perceive as the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And they desire to bring the country back to God through a re-Christianised law of the land.

But it is a mistake to attribute the political fervour of Christian evangelicals to faith, just as it is a mistake to attribute the equal fervour of Muslim activists to faith. In the first instance, most enthusiastic religious followers have little idea of the content much less meaning of the doctrines on which their political interpretations are grounded. As in all of history, they rely on theological leaders - local pastors, media preachers, and activist acquaintances - to inform them of correct opinion. As the leadership changes, so orthodox opinion also changes, sometimes even the beliefs themselves (Mormon racism is but one example). Credal attestations are but passwords to community.

The solidity of religious opinion in America depends overwhelmingly on one thing: community. Even before the country’s foundation, the church - initially the Congregational non-conformism of New England, then the Methodist and Baptist preachers of the expanding frontier - provided the principal social glue. Subsequently, the political structure of the country - states, counties, and municipalities that are independent of each other as well as of the national government relied almost exclusively on the churches to maintain whatever unity they had created across political boundaries.

This has always been the case. The only recognised relationship, for example between the government of a state and that of the federal government or that of a county or municipality is through the law. The State of Florida recently lost an important suit against the state of Georgia about farmers in the latter killing off oyster beds in the Gulf. There was no other way to mediate the dispute. The small community of Cedar Key, Florida (population 724 in 2018, where I once had a summer cottage), on the other hand, has ten active church congregations. Each of these is part of a regional or national ecclesiastical organisation. Even the independent Pentecostal congregations (of which there are three), have long-standing direct ties with sImilar groups around the country, organising exchanges, youth camps, and revivals.

It is the church which, whether recognised or not, has provided the social matrix of America as it has grown. In the 1960’s and 70’s it appeared as if this matrix was in political as well as religious decline. Liberal America, largely urban, largely educated, had devised a different form of communal organisation: the sit-in, the protest march, the mass rally. Churchmen like Martin Luther King and the Catholic Berrigan brothers were involved in these sorts of events, but as representatives of the church not in its name. When political goals were achieved - wars ended, racial prejudice outted, equality laws passed, and perceived wrongs made right - the organisations behind these events either evaporated (who remembers the SDS?) or just lost widespread support as representative of American society (the NAACP?).

Meanwhile the churches embarked on a massive guerrilla war, largely below the radar of the Liberal establishment. They quietly (well not entirely, the television preachers are notably boisterous) encouraged increasing participation by their members in local politics. By the turn of the 21st century, a generation or so after the great Liberal triumphs, the evangelicals had taken over the Republican Party at every level. They had played the long game, and they won it. Unlike their Liberal rivals, they’re not going to disappear with their victories. They want more. And they have the traditionally most powerful tool of social cohesion and change in America to get what they want: the church.

History is on the side of the church-going Right-wing in America. The Left has nothing like the grassroots network of the Christian Church. Liberal politicians continue to express hope that the electorate will wake up to the imbecility of Conservative politicians and their fundamentalist beliefs, that somehow Trump’s mendacity and obvious self-serving activities will undermine their faith. This hope is misdirected. The power of evangelical Christianity comes not from belief or faith but from its ability to create community. This has always been its primary role in America. 

Christianity has recovered from its mid-century setbacks with remarkable speed. As Goldberg points out: “This is Christianity as a total ideology.” Like all ideologies, this one appears vulnerable, incoherent, and often silly from the outside. But such perception misses the point. Christian ideologues, like every other sort, want friendship, emotional support, confirmation of their personal value, and a ‘place’ in society. They are needy, but now they are also powerful. They get their needs met not by abstract beliefs but by the very real people around them... even, most bizarrely, by Donald Trump. Goldberg doesn’t entirely get this despite her otherwise excellent rapportage. This gives her an inordinate hope for the future.

I, on the other hand, am just listening attentively for the first trumpet to sound. Merry Christmas.

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


America Is #1❗️

All power is untrustworthy, everywhere and about everything. There are no exceptions. Agents of power in a democracy lie more than similar agents in a dictatorship because democratic power is more vulnerable. This is the only epistemological principle to survive in a world of increasingly concentrated power. Nick Turse’s book demonstrates the validity of this principle, and with it the corollary that the greater the power the greater the lies that emanate from it. The United States has for some time been the most powerful democratic country on the planet. And its lies are the biggest and best in the world. Greatness is at hand.

During the American war in Vietnam, between 3 to 7 million were killed in a country of 19 million. No one knows the number with any greater precision because records of civilian deaths were purposely avoided, or as proportionately underestimated as military body counts for enemy troops were over-estimated. While many of these were ‘collateral damage’ in American military operations, most were intentional killing of unarmed and non-threatening civilians, mostly women and children, or the result of military policy decisions like ‘free fire zones,’ irresponsible aerial bombardment, and an almost complete absence of training in either the Geneva Conventions or local culture.

These deaths, therefore, were not exceptional and accidental but routine and systematic, the consequence of both military policy and a pervasive ground-level homicidal ethos created in training and passed down continuously through the chain of command. This ethos not only failed to understand the reality of the social and political situation in the country, it also successfully de-humanised the entire population in the minds of American soldiers. With an average age of 19, these soldiers were effectively children, armed with the latest military technology, frustrated by the system which kept them in physical misery, constantly fearful of violent death, and kept on the edge of psychic survival by the demands of their job.

The now infamous massacre at the village of My Lai in 1968 is exceptional only because it was discovered and reported in the American media. At My Lai a company of U.S. soldiers murdered an entire village of 500 women, old men, children, and infants over a period of four hours (with a break for lunch). The entire company participated with no significant hesitation or protest by anyone. The officer in charge had received a direct command to wipe out the village, which he carried out meticulously and without question. The incident, upon being ‘leaked’ by several observers, was denied up the entire chain of command. Eventually one man, the company officer, was subject to court martial, spent several months under house arrest, and received a presidential pardon.

Turse’s research revealed hundreds of similar incidents which, because they never reached visibility in the popular press, were simply buried by the military authorities. Some further, uncountably larger number of such incidents are common knowledge among the men involved as documented through hundreds of interviews carried out by Turse. All show the same pattern as that in My Lai: unopposed murderous brutality, perceived as not just necessary but normal by those participating, and protected by a code of omertà at the highest levels in the military and beyond.* Patriotic service, military commitment, loyal camaraderie, indeed heroism had become a matter of killing without restraint.

What underlay this total moral breakdown? In Vietnam everyone lied to everyone else. They had to in order to keep the system going, to make careers, and often merely to stay alive. Government officials lied to the military commanders, who lied to their subordinates, who lied to the soldiers on the ground - about everything from the rationale and progress of the war, to the real purpose of individual military operations, to the air and logistical support that could be expected. The troops responded in kind, lying about body counts, the details of operational encounters, and their attitudes towards their officers and comrades.

These ‘chain of command’ lies were augmented by administrative lies - failure to report or pass on reports of illegal military conduct; refusal by relevant officers to initiate courts martial or other disciplinary procedures; dismissal by courts martials themselves of obvious crimes; and the systematic destruction of documents and records of thousands of likely criminal incidents. Mendacity was not just a policy, it was also a culture within which atrocities were tolerated, indeed encouraged as long as evidence to the contrary could be suppressed, ignored, or denied.

Literally everything recorded and reported about the war was what we have come to call fake news. Upwards of 3 million American soldiers, advisers, agents, and officials lived in the midst of this fake news, were aware of its falsity, and experienced the social reprogramming necessary to establish and normalise an ethos in which this fake news was accepted. Even before Turse’s investigation of official archives, it was clear that the malaise was systematic throughout this substantial military population: And it is clear from the Army’s own investigations that the problem was pervasive:

“the War Crimes Working Group files alone demonstrated that atrocities were committed by members of every infantry, cavalry, and airborne division, and every separate brigade that deployed without the rest of its division—that is, every major army unit in Vietnam.”

The 3 million men returned home with the knowledge of both the acts and the refusal to acknowledge the acts and their consequences.

Given the frequent personal psychological dysfunctions that have been reported and analysed over decades since the end of the war in Vietnam, is it an exaggeration to suggest that these 3 million men formed a sort of leavening agent in American society, changing the social matrix of the country for generations to come? To what degree, one wonders, is the increasing rate of violent crime in the country; its persistent racism, and its populist mistrust of government (including its Trumpian expression, however paradoxical) a consequence of not just the training to kill and the suspension of basic moral structures, but also the normalisation of the lie as an American mode of being?

Subsequent experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria suggests that while the country may not be very successful on the battlefield, it is certainly an undisputed #1 when it comes to lying, particularly to itself. In this, among possibly many others, Trump is indeed the perfect representative of his country.

* See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... for the consequences of mendacity within the highest government levels during the war.

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Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Technological Kickback

Language is a form of technology, perhaps the source-technology from which all others are generated (even if academic linguists have difficulty in seeing it as such).* Language may not look like look a technology because it’s largely invisible. It takes time and effort to master but then it’s taken for granted so that it is no longer noticed. But like any technology, it does things for people which couldn’t be done without it. And like all technologies, language does things to the people who use it which they never anticipated. In both senses - as tool and as environment - language is the most powerful technology ever created.

Or more accurately, the most powerful family of technologies because while all languages allow the same things to be achieved, they don’t do that in the same way. Some languages, like Ancient Greek, are extremely precise and complicated in their components (words, or as Deutscher calls them: labels) and how these work together (grammar) to form very precise expressions. Others, like Hebrew, are noticeably lacking in many of these features (like extensive vocabularies and tenses). Yet both can be used, more or less efficiently, to express the same ideas. Concepts seem constant while the labels change. Or do they?

The mechanism of the language machine works on us as well as through us. Eons before the term Artificial Intelligence was coined, language itself took on a life of its own and started influencing the lives of human beings in ways of which we are entirely unaware. Its categories and its logics come to be perceived as natural, as an expression of the way the world really is. Things and labels became conjoined. Linguistic truth becomes confused with reality. Reasonableness, another linguistic trait, becomes a universal standard of human behaviour. Language runs the show. Deutscher calls it culture, which is shorthand for language at work.

Of course it isn’t possible to even discuss the hegemony of language outside of language. So the deck is stacked from the start. But it turns out that there’s a crack in the Great Linguistic Wall. Each language has some distinctively unique effects on the human beings who use it. Differences can be compared in order to ‘out’ the concealed structures that each language imposes. These differences typically hide in plain sight. As Deutscher says, “it turns out that the most significant connections between language, culture, and thought are to be found where they are least expected, in those places where healthy common sense would suggest that all cultures and all languages should be exactly the same.”

Culture likes to masquerade as human nature. Most religions (and more generally, ideologies), for example, claim that their precepts simply reflect the authentic ‘being’ of Homo sapiens and the society that species has created. The discovery that other cultures had different ideas about what constitutes true humanity, typically provokes a sort of fundamentalist response of cultural superiority. And naturally this response is expressed in words, which often contain within themselves the very superiority being argued. What the fundamentalists themselves don’t understand is that they are being used by the language they think they control.

This is an important book, and not just because it is an interesting and entertaining exposition of recent language-research. More importantly, it lifts the veil of language just enough to see its creative mechanism at work. No language provides a neutral, objective description of the world. All languages come with historical (and ideological) baggage which directs attention and prejudices conversation as much as it allows communication and cooperation. It probably takes as much effort to recognise this as it does to learn a language in the first place. The fact is that “language is a cultural convention that doesn’t masquerade as anything but a cultural convention.”

Yes, just like the internet claims to be nothing more than a socially liberating form of communication!

* Deutscher calls it a ‘lens.’ I’m generalising a bit from that; but I think making the metaphor more useful. The title as well as the contents is an oblique homage to the philosopher, Richard Rorty's, 1981 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It often does take social sciences, actually science in general, one or two generations to catch up with good philosophy.

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On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Unmaking Civilisation

Grossman’s thesis is that we should take better care of those whom we prepare for war. This was unexpected. My presumption had been that the book would be about the permanent psychological damage done to soldiers through their training and experience in combat and consequently pacifist. Instead the book makes what is primarily a political point: if a society makes men killers, it has a responsibility to provide the necessary therapy to undo the inevitable psychopathic consequences. While this point is difficult to disagree with, I suspect Grossman’s agenda is actually somewhat darker.

The American war in Vietnam, according to Grossman, had one undeniable success: it taught the American military how to train its members to accept and execute the act of killing as normal, responsible behaviour. The techniques which the military developed during that period added to the environment of growing media violence to which recruits had already been subjected. This directed indoctrination and diffuse influence created the perfect storm of what is effectively brainwashing. The effects are visible not only in the soldiers involved but also in the increasing level of gang violence and international terrorism, phenomena that depend on the same training techniques.

The maladies of combat for soldiers in Vietnam were, therefore, both more diverse and more intense than in previous wars. Despite the political and strategic incompetence of their leaders, these men did what they were meant to do, namely kill other human beings. Body count was not merely some arbitrary measure of success imposed by senior officers, it was an accurate expression of the function of a soldier. So, for example, while something less than 20% of front-line troops in World War II ever fired their weapons at the enemy (even at the risk of their own lives), upwards of 95% did so in Vietnam. A great triumph, one supposes, for the Training Command.

It is difficult to train men (Grossman’s data are all from men) to kill efficiently and consistently. The inhibitions to murder seem to be not just culturally generated but also genetic in most people. Breaking those inhibitions demands traumatic psychological and sociological adaptation as anyone who has seen films like Oliver Stone’s Platoon or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket will have already guessed. Effectively, recruits are taught to hate, to mistrust everything around them except direct orders, and to exclude moral considerations from consciousness. They are trained as psychopaths.

And yet they are expected to ‘reintegrate’ into society as if their psychological rewiring were an incidental event in their lives. This it is clearly not the case given the levels of suicide, mental illness, and criminality among soldiers who have been in combat. The experience of being the object of murderous aggression by an enemy is understandably agonising. But it is the training for this experience which creates more or less permanent damage.

Grossman makes the case that historically soldiers were subject to ritual purification before they re-entered civilian life. He suggests a modernised version of this for today’s soldiers. The paradox of course is that the effectiveness of military training is such that any therapeutic purification would have to be equally intense. The expense of such a de-programming effort would be immense. So it’s a political non-starter. In the meantime, society undermines its own well-being by purposely creating maladaptive human beings.

Postscript: Another GR reader alerted me to the latest on Grossman. He is indeed much darker than he appears in this book. Apparently he has gone completely over to the idea of a ‘warrior culture’ among the police as well as the military, making society even more violent than it already is: https://newrepublic.com/article/14167...

Additional postscript on the individuality of the gross statistics: https://www.thedickinsonpress.com/obi...

Postscript 30/11/20: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ned-d...

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Amsterdam Stories by Nescio
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Engagement & Alienation

To appreciate Nescio, I suggest it’s helpful to compare him with his English near-contemporary, Henry Green. Nescio might well be considered the Dutch Henry Green (or more precisely Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh is the Dutch Henry Vincent Yorke). Both were businessmen who were also authors of some remarkable prose beginning in the 1910’s and 1920’s. Although Green was far more prolific, Nescio like Green was a stylist interested in the perplexing details of everyday life. Both, perhaps because of their dichotomous lives, are primarily concerned with the idea of ‘duty,’ that is the implicit obligations or plichten that most of us respond to (or are trapped in, depending on mood).

Nescio and Green both use dialect extensively, which is unfortunately untranslatable in either direction. Green writes about the mores of the English country house, upper class snobbery and working class woes. Nescio is more narrowly focused on the bourgeois smugness of a much more compacted class structure in Holland. This he finds as tedious as the orderly and unvarying Dutch landscape:

“And the tide came in and the tide went out; the water rose and fell. Every night the limping harbormaster came and first he lit the green light on Noorderhoofd, the breakwater, then he came back down and then he had to go around the whole harbor and then you saw him by the tower again and then he opened the wooden gate and climbed the wooden steps and lit the light in that tower too. And then Japi said ‘Another day, boss.’”

Green tends toward description not evaluation. His characters aren’t trying to prove anything. They may be eccentric, but they are aren’t counter-cultural. Nescio’s, on the other hand, could be proto-hippies - a taste perhaps of what Amsterdam would become famous for a half-century later: “‘No,’ Japi said, ‘I am nothing and I do nothing. Actually I do much too much. I’m busy overcoming the body. The best thing is to just sit still; going places and thinking are only for stupid people. I don’t think either’... He had just one wish: to overcome the body, to no longer feel hunger or exhaustion, cold or rain.” His characters agonise over their apparent conformity to the ethic of work, responsibility and achievement. One way or another society wins, however.

Youth is consequently not a happy time in Nescio’s Amsterdam. Perhaps it never is anywhere. Society is oppressive, unlike in Green where it simply is. Dutch youth are portrayed as frustrated idealists who aren’t sure about their ideals. “We were on top of the world and the world was on top of us, weighing down heavily.” As office workers, they resent the wealth they see around them and the authority it exerts over them. For Green, young Birmingham factory workers are realists who recognise the world is changing, but largely without their help. They have no ambition to be other than they are except respected by authority and paid decently. Unlike the Dutch, they are comfortable with their social status.

The Dutch and the English seem ‘woke’ (to use the latest term for social awareness) in entirely different ways in the works of the two writers. The Dutch are remarkably modern; their conversations might be perceived as taking place today rather than a century ago. Although they are poor, they are cosmopolitain, travelling from one end of the Dutch-speaking world to the other and speaking other languages as if in defiance of their own culture. The English are parochial and provincial regardless of class. Except for some gentry, they do not travel, not even around their own country. They are entirely unaware of events outside their cultural world.

If I were fifty years younger, I might want to pursue this further. As things stand though, I think I’ll let the suggestion lie fallow. Perhaps some young aggressive scholar might pick it up.

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The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain by Gina Rippon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Science Is Messy... And Mostly Wrong

There are several important conclusions for the layman to be drawn from Rippon’s well-written and rather more than merely comprehensive book. First, brains are incredibly complex organs which we in fact are only beginning to understand. Second, the purported differences in male and female brains are almost entirely mythical though claims about them persist in both professional and popular accounts. But for me the most interesting implication of her history of brain research is just how much fake news there is claiming to be science at any given time.

The latest scientific results are typically taken as revelatory in brain research. Tests, measurements, and experiments correlate with some hypothesis which is considered as scientifically confirmed. The results are then reported and cited in various professional journals, thus providing credibility to the confirmation. This news then finds its way into the popular press as ‘established scientific findings,’ and becomes part of a type of scientific folklore. Like any other story, this new scientific ‘fact’ is verified by its sheer ubiquity - not just in professional and popular journals, but also on the worldwide web.

Yet, when it comes to the brain, the results of almost all research are subsequently shown to be wrong. Errors in experimental design, researcher bias, spurious correlations, bogus references, among many other flaws seem almost de riguer in all research into the brain. Starting with cranial measurements in the 19th century, but continuing with high-tech MRI imaging, it seems that all the errors to be made have probably been made... and more than once. Sometimes the results of previous research can be re-interpreted in light of new findings; but, mostly, old research is simply intellectual junk.

It might be argued that this is the way of science, and always has been, namely that the process of discovering the truth is necessarily messy, but that ultimately the right answers, or at least better ones, emerge from investigative chaos. Perhaps. But the problem is that there is a reticence to admit that the issue of junk science is permanently recurring. Every generation of scientific investigators believe that their results are closer to the truth than previous generations. Yet every previous generation has been shown to be profoundly misguided. Scientifically speaking, it seems a good bet that this generation will also shown to less competent than it now thinks it is. The vast bulk of its work will also be shown to be... well, bunk.

In light of Rippon’s detailed and informed description of the actual process of science in an area of research which includes not just medicine and physical sciences like chemistry and developmental biology but also ‘softer’ disciplines like psychology and sociology, I wonder at those who think they have a solution to the problem of fake news in politics or business or technology. Most news is fake in the same sense that most scientific results are fake, that is future events will demonstrate that the conclusions we have reached on the information we have are mostly silly. Whatever consensus that exists now about what the truth is will be replaced by a different, often contradictory, consensus in the future.

Only by convention do we dare term tomorrow’s consensus ‘progress.’ Progress is a criterion which means different things to different people. Consensus is such only among those who are part of the consensus, a self-defining and changeable mob. The specific criterion of progress probably changes as frequently as the results of the science involved. As indeed does the criterion of truth about the news of the day. Conditions change, interests change, economics change, all frequently as a result of what the news is, scientific or otherwise.

Thus science itself is a sort of free for all in which the rules get made up as we go along. The closest relative to science is, perhaps surprisingly, literature. In fact science at its best seems to be a cadet branch of literature, modelled on literature in its attempt to describe, interpret and integrate what it sees in imaginative ways. Most literature turns out to be junk as well, fake news that ends up in discount shops and the remaindering warehouse. The only thing actually ‘better’ about modern literature over, say, that of Attic Greece is that there is lots more of it. Science, like literature, is inherently wasteful. But that’s what it takes to find out why they are done at all.

Postscript 14May20: Here is another piece provided by a GR reader on the character of real science: https://www.vox.com/2015/5/13/8591837...

Postscript 21/10/21: An example of how most of the science at any one time is simple nonsense: https://apple.news/AA27bMZ17QuCqAo51e...

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America the Philosophical by Carlin Romano
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Good Philosophers Do Not a Culture Make

Philosophical boosterism is an unusual enthusiasm, especially in someone as articulate and intelligent as Carlin Romano. And it seems particularly unnecessary in an era when professional American philosophy has been long recognised as important and globally influential. C.S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rory are not only famous American names in philosophy, they are also links in a chain of philosophical tradition which is uniquely American, a tradition which has seeped, often subtly but nevertheless decisively, into European thought. There seems little reason to write at length about what has been apparent for at least a century. Why then the effort?

Romano, it seems, has a much broader agenda. He would like to convince us that the philosophical prowess of these intellectual giants, who happen to be American, are really the tip of an enormous intellectual iceberg. Below the professional/academic surface, according to Romano, lies a culture which forms the intellectual gene-pool responsible for such achievement. He uses decidedly un-philosophical prose to praise the elements of this culture:

“The openness of its dialogue, the quantity of its arguments, the diversity of its viewpoints, the cockiness with which its citizens express their opinions, the vastness of its First Amendment freedoms, the intensity of its hunt for evidence and information, the widespread rejection of truths imposed by authority or tradition alone, the resistance to false claims of justification and legitimacy, the embrace of Net communication with an alacrity that intimidates the world: all corroborate that fact.”

So America is not just the home of a respectable philosophical tradition, it is the new Athens, the modern Rome: “America in the early twenty-first century towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece, Cartesian France, nineteenth-century Germany or any other place one can name over the past three millennia.” There is apparently a sociology, a politics, and an inherent progressive attitude in America that make it a truly exceptional place.

It is the culture, therefore, not just the philosophy that Romano wants us to admire, and to respect as one “that suits the twenty-first century and jibes with accelerating trends of globalization in economics, politics, culture, ethics and communication.” America is the future of the world, and deserves to be based on its intellectual contribution if nothing else. Well, I suppose this might be considered in the same genre as the patter of a used car salesman, mere nationalistic puffery, possibly debatable but really intended as encouragement for the young to buy the product. But overselling is risky business.

Because then along came Trump. Trump is the antithesis of everything Romano claims for American culture. And he has populated the government, the courts and federal positions throughout the country with officials as mendacious, as ill-read, as self-serving and as lacking in aesthetic and ethical sense as he is. Even more damning: approximately half the American population considers him a valiant representative and defender of the culture they want to preserve - one that values religious cant over thought, racial tribalism over national solidarity, and intimidation over democratic process. Trump is the one fact which entirely destroys Romano’s pitch

It is clear today that the America Romano wrote about in 2012 is an illusion. That place and it’s people may be unique, but not because of a socio-political substrate that makes it culturally superior. Throughout the book I found myself thinking of Robert Venturi’s gushing praise for the architecture of Las Vegas in the 1960’s. Frank Lloyd Wright certainly produced some great American architecture. But the garish hideousness of the Las Vegas Strip is much more typical of aesthetic taste in the country. Romano is the cultural Venturi, elevating the ugly to the sublime because it happens to occur in the same geography.

The overwhelming anti-intellectualism and parochialism of American culture that can be seen in Trump, his associates and his supporters show the American philosophical tradition is a cultural aberration not an example. It emerged despite not because of its cultural matrix. It is clearly resented and considered as suspect by even those few Americans who know about it. The clichés about American disdain for intellect, it turns out, are truisms; the platitudes about the lack of any real interest in the welfare of the whole are really axioms of American culture.

Much in the way that Francis Fukuyama’s claims about the End of History with the rise of democratic capitalism came shortly before a series of financial crises in the West and the dramatic emergence of a decidedly un-democratic China, Romano published at just the wrong time. “Events, dear boy, events,” as a British Prime Minister once said. Events tend to foul the most promising hypotheses in so many annoying ways. If the future really is American, heaven help us all, including American philosophers.

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God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist by Victor J. Stenger
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

How You Get There Is What Counts

I am in sympathy with Stenger’s project, the demonstration that the religious dogmatic idea of God is bad for human beings and other living things. But I can’t accept his logic which is tendentious and self-contradictory.

Stenger recognises, quite correctly, that neither theism nor science has a universally accepted meaning. So he defines the former in terms of the religions of the Book: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The obvious difficulty then is that even this restriction doesn’t reduce the conceptual variability of the idea of God very much. So he reduces it further to what he believes are its essentials: a consciousness that is responsible for existence and that regularly if unexpectedly involves itself in the course of that which exists. Fair enough. He captures the bulk of religious adherents in this net, even if some of the most modern outliers escape.

He’s got the same issue with science. There is no agreement about what constitutes scientific thinking, scientific method, or even a scientist. So Stenger defines science as the formulation and testing of conceptual, that is to say linguistic, models. Science, he believes, describes but does not interpret the world. While even his epigraph by the great Von Neumann contradicts this claim, it is possible to rationalise it by suggesting that what he intends to convey is that scientific models are always tentative. Unlike religious dogma, these models are debated, tested, and often discarded depending upon whether they work or not. A model works better than another if it effective in a wider range of practical or experimental circumstances.

And therein, according to Stegner, lies the fundamental difference between science and religion. Nothing about science is fixed; not its principles, its methods, or its conclusions. Science learns through experience and adapts itself to the world as it is. Science is inherently relativistic. Religion, on the other hand, imposes an experience and filters the world through a mesh of complex doctrines. Science is empirical and experimental; religion is rationalistic and dogmatic. What could be simpler or more obvious? Science explores reality; religion gropes for the source of existence. The former works; the latter doesn’t. Epistemology and ontology are on the side of science.

Stenger’s pragmatic criteria of ‘working,’ however, is itself problematic. Ultimately he means that which works is that which is beneficial to human life. What benefit does he have in mind? Longevity? Prosperity? Personal satisfaction? Surely he can’t mean horsepower, explosive yield, or giga-cycles per second. And if not, what are we to think when these bigger benefits are not correlated with one another? Nuclear physics works in correctly predicting the power contained in atomic structures. It fails in protecting us from radiation poisoning. The internet provides incredible knowledge and convenience. It also created Trump. Are these things working or not?

Clearly any consensus about the meaning of ‘working’ is as temporary and variable as everything else about science. To claim otherwise would be dogmatic. This is an issue of politics not morality; or, rather, political morality. Even the rules of scientific argument are unclear. But rules there are. Science is rarely a violent activity, other than perhaps the occasional conference punch-up by rivals. Certainly no one has suggested warfare as a response to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, despite the intense emotions its can generate. Science is a kind of politics which in fact seeks to establish what ‘better’ means. When it stops doing this, it is termed Scientism and has effectively become a religion.

And this it seems to me is the real distinction between science and religion - the nature of their politics. The politics of science is ‘open’ in the sense that disagreement is tolerated, sometimes grudgingly but always eventually. There are certainly scientific schools of thought, cliques, and movements which believe each other to be misguided, misinformed, or lacking intelligence. But they unavoidably remain together in the attempt to discover not only what works better but what working better means. There is perhaps no better example of this than in the debate about climate change, which is essentially about what is good not just for human beings but for the entire planet.

Religion stops this search for the criterion of the good either by defining some abstract end point to human existence (the presence of God) or by prescribing some universal rules for behaviour (morals) which are hidden rationalisations for institutional self interest. Once established, these are then beyond debate. Consequently dogmatic religion is subject to heresy, schism, and alienation. The alternative to debate is often violence which is never good for human beings. More damaging, however, is the destruction of the kind of political community that constitutes science. This is a community that is in a sense pre-religious. That is, it doesn’t allow itself to become fixated on what anything means, especially God.

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