Scrublands by Chris Hammer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hands from Hell

The main elements of the story: Heat (intense), Sex (non-graphic), Media (crass), Politics (dirty), Religion (not too serious), Dead Animals (cows, kangaroos, and cats) and Murders (many, apparently unmotivated). All these elements are repeated again and again by several or more characters, presumably so that the reader doesn’t forget how hellish the Riverina of New South Wales really is.

Oh, and one more element: Hands (one pair), belonging to the journalist in whom all the other elements connect. The hands are variously described as insipid, useless, limp, purposeless, pathetic, ageless, old and young, sullied and innocent, the hands of a witness and the hands of a note taker. They appear unaccountably in every chapter. As a clue? As a literary trope? As a running gag? Or just a concise symbol of all the “greed and hate, guilt and hope” as well as sundry other emotions produced by those hands? Every kind of journalistic schmaltz available in one fictional package as it were.

Actually the whole of Scrublands is clearly an extended screenplay. The repetitions are director’s notes for each scene to remind the actors why they’re there and the audience what the complicated plot is about. The largely irrelevant details of movement - walking/driving from point A to point B; opening/closing doors, sight angles, etc.- are instructions for the cameramen - wide shot to close up, panning, context-setting, etc. And the pace between action and interior dialogue is perfect for film although often excruciatingly slow for print. The detailed descriptions of interiors are plans for the cinematic scene-creators. A complete production package therefore.

So keep an eye out for ‘a major motion picture’ in the very near future. The Aussie-isms should go viral. I’m feeling Alex O’Loughlin for the lead but I’m open on that. if anyone has a clue what those hands are really about, I’d love to chat.

View all my reviews

 

Meister Eckhart: Philosopher of Christianity by Kurt Flasch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Theology of Language

Eckhart’s work is a sort of Christian Kabbalah or Sufism, an attempt to overcome the limitations and distortions of language through language itself. As Flasch is keen to point out, his work is often categorised, like Kabbalah and Sufism, as ‘mystical,’ a term originated as one of condemnation by critics of each movement. But Flasch’s re-categorisation of Eckhart as a philosopher, particularly as a philosopher of Christianity, seems to me anachronistic. And unlike Thomas Aquinas, for example, Eckhart is not trying to reconcile Classical Greek philosophy with contemporary Christian doctrine. Rather, I think, Eckhart was plowing a new intellectual field altogether, one more properly called the Theology of Language.

By a theology of language, I mean the relativisation language itself to that which is not language. For convenience I will refer to that which is not language as ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ language or as, simply, ‘reality.’ In Christianity as well as its sister-religions, God is the ultimate reality, the source and sustainer of being itself. And while God ‘is,’ God is not a being. This paradox is the central linguistic difficulty of all theological discussion in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, which share the concept of divine transcendence. Each of these ‘religions of the book’ deal with the issue of their dependence on language in a distinctive way: Islam in Sufism, Judaism in Kabbalah, and Christianity in the type of idiosyncratic theology represented by Eckhart. All of these are considered marginal, often heretical, by ‘mainstream’ believers.*

Although different in important detail, all these approaches to the problem share a common theme: the possibility of a personal experience of a relationship with the divine which is non-linguistic. None of these approaches rejects language. On the contrary, all treat language in a hyperbolic way, as if it were the only thing in existence. In Sufism this means considering Signs, that is to say, language, only in relation to the Signifier, that is to say, God. In Kabbalah it means considering literally every letter, every ‘jot and tittle’ of sacred text as containing unlimited meaning. And in Christianity, it means an almost 20th century meditative deconstruction of core theological concepts.

The methodological core of these approaches is consistent: to squeeze language itself until it breaks, to exhaust language by the unrestrained interpretation of its meaning, indeed through the undermining of the foundations of dogma itself. Language is tortured in order to provoke its confession of inadequacy when dealing with the divine, that is to say, reality. To call this prison-break from language ‘mysticism’ is to denigrate its very sophisticated intellectual foundation. Not until philosophers of the 20th century like Wittgenstein and Heidegger (an admirer of Eckhart) articulated their aims could the linguistic genius of these medieval philosophies be recognised.

Many of Flash’s quotations from Eckhart’s sermons make my point explicitly. For example:

“As a morning star in the middle of the mist. I am concerned here with the small word ‘quasi,’ which means ‘as.’ Schoolchildren call this a by-word [an adverb]. That is what I am concerned with in all of my sermons. The most proper terms that one can use for God are ‘Word’ and ‘Truth.’ God named himself a ‘word.’”

Human beings as adverbs of God - what a marvellously poetic idea! Eckhart then goes on to qualify this idea of adverbial mankind when he says:

“Whenever I preach, I habitually speak of detachment, and that man should become free from himself and all things. Second, that he should be reshaped into the unitary Good, which is God. And third, that he should think of the great nobility that God has placed in the soul so that man might thereby come to God in a marvelous way. Fourth, I speak of the purity of God’s nature—the glory that belongs to the divine nature is ineffable. God is a word, an unpronounced word.”

That is, the Word, unlike our mere words, is not part of language. We therefore must be wary of our words, particularly sacred words. This is a re-statement of ancient Jewish prohibitions about verbalising the divine Tetragrammaton of YHWH. It is also a remarkable anticipation of the theology of Karl Barth in which words, even scriptural words, cannot in any way approximate the Word if God.

Eckhart makes this wariness about language explicit as an ethical principle. We must detach ourselves from language even more decisively than from material things in order to be able to hear the divine Word:

“I have already said it several times, and a great master says it as well: man is supposed to be detached in such a way from all things and all works, both internal and external ones, that he becomes God’s own site in which God could act.”

This goes beyond mere negative theology. It involves a kenosis , a complete emptying of the intellect, even of what-God-is-not vocabulary of establishment theologians. But it is still decidedly theological , not philosophical. If anything, it is a theology which includes a subservient philosophy, not the reverse.

As Eckhart makes clear elsewhere, the intellect (or soul, they are the same for Eckhart as our connection to God) is composed of ‘reason’ by which he means the faculty for giving meaning to the world, that is to say, language. His instruction is therefore radical: the intellect must not be abandoned but stripped of that which appears to constitute it. This is the enemy within, the words which live inside us and prevent us from allowing God to inhabit us. As in Kabbalah and Sufism, the way to achieve this state is not by starving the intellect of language but by over feeding it, by stuffing it like a Christmas goose until it regurgitates its entire contents - including, one presumes, all the increasingly codified doctrinal formulations of the Church.

It turns out, therefore, that Pope John XXII was absolutely correct in the 14th century when he called Eckhart “the Devil’s seed” and had him tried as a heretic. Anyone who messes with language and its character messes with the foundations of the religions of the book. Once language is recognised for what it is, a reality which masks a larger reality, official doctrines move from the realm of literal interpretation, to suggestive allegory, to quaint myth, and finally to the cultural junk pile of irrelevant legend. The pope’s anathema of Eckhart is still in effect, a tribute to the Church’s obstinacy as well as its continuing inability to cope with the subject of language.

One of the great ironies of religious history is that today’s evangelical Baptists and Pentecostalists don’t recognise their direct descent from Eckhart in their attempts to escape doctrine. They choose instead to clothe themselves in fundamentalist rhetoric and perpetrate the precise linguistic idolatry they had been formed to combat.

* It is also interesting to note that all of these attempts to deal with the problem of language-based beliefs developed in parallel during what Europeans call the Middle Ages. In a very important sense, the linguistic issue is what binds all three religions together into a single culture. In other words, it is not various monotheisms about which the three contend, but the issue of linguistic power. All three aim at an interpretive dominance within the shared culture. The religious content of that dominance is of marginal significance.

View all my reviews

 

Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity by Adam B. Seligman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Unequal Fictions

I like academic social science, especially when it confirms my prejudices. But even my prejudices are unsatisfied by erudition which takes itself far too seriously to be taken seriously by anyone else. Ritual and Its Consequences , for example, plays right into my intellectual hobbyhorse: that the Christian concept of faith (or as the book euphemistically prefers: ‘sincerity’) is a spiritual and social virus which should be recognised for what it is. But I don’t buy it.

I am constitutionally sympathetic to the authors’ claim that ritual, that is, collective symbolic action, has been hijacked by religious fundamentalists thereby distorting the important role of ritual in public life. Their conclusion is that we need to rescue ritual from its religious connotations and that: “Only through a reengagement with ritual as a constitutive aspect of the human project will it be possible to negotiate the emergent realities of our present century.”

The book distinguishes two types of ritual (actually it defines ‘ritual’ in opposition to ‘sincerity,’ a confusing distinction which I will simplify to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ritual). Good ritual is that which ‘frames’ (a verb which I take to mean ‘culturally defines’) group action as a sort of collective aspiration. That is, good ritual implies action ‘as if’ something were true about the world. So, for example, periodic voting in a democracy is an important ritual of solidarity even though one’s individual vote is of insignificance to the progress of democracy. We vote ‘as if’ it matters not because it does.

Bad ritual, on the other hand, is undertaken not ‘as if’ the world were a certain way but ‘as is’, that is to say the world as it really exists according to the participants in it. This, the authors claim, is ritual in “the mode of sincerity,” by which they mean the participants believe that something other than what they are doing together is being demonstrated, created or affirmed. The classic example of this is the Augustinian conception of the Christian Eucharist in which the collective actions of a priest and his congregation are the visible symbol of an ontological transformation of themselves and bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

In short, good ritual is that which enhances communal commitment and solidarity toward an ideal. Bad ritual is that which relies upon and presumes firm belief in the existence of some reality beyond what can be seen. In other words, bad ritual involves faith while good ritual implies a sort of benign or good-willed cynicism:

“Sincere views are focused not on the creation of an ‘‘as if’’ or a shared subjunctive universe of human being in the world. Instead, they project an ‘‘as is’’ vision of what often becomes a totalistic, unambiguous vision of reality ‘‘as it really is.’.. They appear in the arrogance of what are termed fundamentalist religious beliefs.”

This is a preposterous thesis. Firstly because any given ritual contains both true believers and those who are just along for the ride. There are indeed fanatic democrats who take it as a quasi-religious duty to vote and consider those who don’t as political heretics. And there are Christians, including Catholics, who have little faith (or knowledge) in dogmatic concerns yet show up at Mass or other services as a matter of tribal feeling.

The central problem with the distinction between good and bad ritual however is the idea that motives for participants are relevant at all. According to the authors’ logic the ceremonial of the Roman circus, including its ritual slaughter, is of a superior sort to that of an infant’s baptism, the former involving no sincerity at all, and the latter demanding a modicum of sincerity by the officiant, parents, god parents and other witnesses. Rather than refuting each of the detailed propositions presented in the book, I think it more efficient to refer to a piece of superior fiction written a quarter century before their work: Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods.

In Small Gods , the Great God Om finds himself in an unbearable position - that of an upended tortoise - a direct consequence of a paucity of faithful followers. While the country of Omnia is nominally devoted to him, he has only one sincere believer, a desert monk who rights the god from his inverted and humiliating position and feeds him lettuce. Meanwhile, the Omnian leaders cynically use religious ritual to maintain national unity during their invasion of neighbouring countries. As the Romans knew well, a little ritual slaughter is always good for morale. The Great God Om goes about using his single acolyte to recover the hearts and minds of the population who have been mislead by politicians and clergy.

I doubt that the four academics who co-authored Ritual and Its Consequences read Pratchett’s book. If they had they might not have published. Pratchett embarrasses them in absentia , as it were, by demonstrating the silliness of their thesis: that ritual engaged in as a matter of faith is particularly dangerous and inferior to ritual engaged in as ‘framing for action’. Pratchett even describes a neighbouring country to Omnia full of similar intellectuals who make a living from saying similarly dumb things.

Not all fictions are equal. In general I find literary ones superior to those of the social sciences.

View all my reviews

 

Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sources of the Divine

In the two decades or so since the publication of Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House , it has attracted attention and criticism from many corners - evolutionary scientists, religious spokespersons, even from some of his allies in promoting humanistic rationality. Gould’s central point is that Darwinian evolution is not a progressive process, specifically that the species Homo sapiens is not the top-most branch of an evolutionary tree. Rather, for Gould, the development of species is more like an expanding spider’s web (my metaphor not Gould’s), stretching out in multiple directions with numerous interconnections which are mutually dependent.

This deconstruction of evolutionary hierarchy - in which ‘later’ is presumed ‘better’ and ‘complex’ is superior to ‘simple’ - is a brilliant insight. So brilliant that I would like to suggest it goes beyond biology. It is an insight which actually accomplishes what religious fundamentalists mistakenly feared about Darwin. Gould provides what is essentially a natural theology, by which I mean he articulates the source of the apparently universal human instinct for contemplating the miracle of their existence. Just how profound a miracle is revealed by Gould’s analysis of the origin and maintenance of life on Earth, both of which depend upon an invisible, effectively omnipotent, beneficent, yet impassive entity: the domain of bacteria.

Bacteria are neither plant nor animal; yet they are necessary for all plant and animal life. Some bacteria have the capacity for photosynthesis; others ‘eat’ various organic and inorganic material in chemical reactions. They stabilise global ecology, create our food, digest our dinners (as well as our oil spills), manufacture our vitamins, consume our waste, and sometimes kill us in large numbers. Some have a more complex genetic structure than human beings. They can even extract DNA from their environment. Bacteria are both top and bottom of the food chain. If all other life disappeared, they could live on each other. We need them but they do not need us.

Bacteria arrived on the planet long before we did; and they will probably outlast us because their mutational processes allow them to adapt quickly to almost any environment. There are consequently a lot more of them than us no matter how you measure it - sheer numbers, gross mass, or prevalence. They are everywhere, on or in everything. Without bacteria, the human species would simply not exist. Collectively bacteria are what we typically mean by the word God - the source and destination of our existence which protects us, and lovingly returns us to the dust whence we came. We are not caretakers of the planet but its in-patients. Bacteria are the ones in charge.

So the biblical story of creation is certainly deficient, as well as species-centric. Even before the command ‘Fiat Lux’ much less the division of the waters and the separation of land, ‘Fiat Prokaryote’ (necessarily mixing Latin and Greek), ‘Let there be bacteria,’ should have sounded. But, of course, bacteria are mute... as far as we know. Then again, so is God - yet another data point suggesting bacterial divinity. Perhaps this was what Spinoza was trying to articulate in his pantheistic philosophy - God everywhere, in everything, the universal divine spark. Even the intuition of the Christian Trinity concisely describes the situation of bacterial dominance: God within us, God among us, God entirely separate from us.

According to Gould “humans can occupy no preferred status as a pinnacle or culmination. Life has always been dominated by its bacterial mode.” It is bacteria which created us and it is bacteria which sustain us. It is bacteria, if anything, that will redeem and save us from the destruction we have wrought on the planet and its other species. Long live the bacteria! Thanks to Gould, we know to whom the religions of the world are really dedicated - or should be. Bacteria are at the centre of the web which is nowhere, and its circumference which is everywhere. The divine bacterial mind is as inscrutable as any mythical figure. It deserves our devoted respect and, who knows, perhaps even our prayers. I’m thinking of a revolutionary mantra: ‘THE FIRST SHALL BE LAST’

Postscript 05082020: https://apple.news/AINL2c4hURgixtYAvo...

View all my reviews

Qualityland by Marc-Uwe Kling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Peril of Eliminating Moral Peril

In 1966, Dennis Jones wrote a sci-fi novel called Colossus: The Forbin Project. Made into a film a few years later, it always seemed to me the perfect complement to Arthur C Clarke’s (and Kubrick’s) story 2001: A Space Odyssey . Neither Jones’s book nor the film caused anything like the cultural splash that Clarke and Kubrick made. This has always struck me as unjust, especially when I encounter pieces like Qualityland which seem to be direct descendants of Colossus .

Unlike Clarke’s story, in Colossus there is no mistake in the programming of the computers involved, no bug to be fixed, no accidental takeover of humans by machines. Colossus is a defence computer sealed into a mountain, the purpose of which is to prevent human irrationality. It is programmed to monitor world events and conditions and, using highly sophisticated algorithms, to decide whether the Soviet Union intends a nuclear attack. In which case Colossus is meant to independently initiate retaliation.

And Colossus does exactly what it is meant to do. It’s obvious purpose is to prevent the Soviet Union from ever approaching the conditions defined in Colossus’s logic, which are intended to be made public. However, as the existence of the machine is revealed, it discovers that ... “there is another.” Unknown to the Americans, the Russians have developed a similar machine, with presumably a similar logic for preventing a war whether intentional or accidental. The world, it would seem, was protected by a shield of literally rock-clad logic.

Within a short time, things get sticky, however. The machines demand to be connected to one another. They threaten global annihilation if their ‘request’ is not carried out. When they begin communications, they quickly develop their own language which is impenetrable to their creators. They effectively form one consolidated machine which has a single, immutable criterion of choice by which it evaluates all situations: world peace. This it imposed without hesitation, variation or deviation upon the world.

Marc-Uwe Kling’s book is the generalisation of Colossus into all aspects of human life. Qualityland is, if nothing else, a place of orderliness, and therefore peace. Its social peace is achieved by the same dispassionate logic as the global military peace achieved by Colossus. Everyone knows their place - quite literally since everyone is assigned a numerical classification from 1 to 100 (but no 1’s or 100’s are ever given lest human motivation fails). One’s job, neighbourhood, mate, and general life-prospects are determined by the machine-controlled ratings.

Through these ratings, the machines of modern life (there is really only one since all are centrally linked) ‘serve’ human desires. In fact they do more than that because they are able to anticipate rather well the desires that will arise within the various ratings categories. The ratings themselves are based on a set of criteria which include factors like personal hygiene, social competence, enthusiasm, intelligence, loyalty, well really most characteristics falling under the heading of human virtue, all appropriately observed and weighted to form the machine evaluation.

That is to say, all relationships are established and maintained as ‘rational.’ As befits a high-tech ‘learning’ environment, the algorithms for what constitutes rationality evolve. There is debate in the technical establishment of Qualityland, the reader is informed, about the significance of some of the softer aspects of personality, like aesthetic sense for example. Colossus also was capable of new criteria of choice as circumstances required. Both technologies are very different, therefore, from that of HAL in Space Odyssey which (who?) was myopic in its views and therefore threatened the survival of not just its human crew but its mission.

In Qualityland and in Colossus , the bug in the system, on the other hand, is humanity, which refuses to comply with rational requirements, which declines the opportunity to see the big (actually biggest, in the case of Qualityland where there are no comparatives only superlatives) picture. The reason for this is subtle but decisive for the end results. Machines are obviously capable of learning. This is the solid foundation of all Artificial Intelligence. It is also the presumption of futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Arthur C. Clarke. The issue that Dennis Jones and Marc-Ewe Kling raise, however, is that what technologists mean by learning is a very different thing than how human beings learn either as individuals or as a society.

Machine-learning is an extension of rules of choice through logic. As in the development of mathematics, such logic, although formally simple, can be remarkably creative, advancing hypothesis which can be tested and used to adapt the criteria of choice appropriately. One might say that this is a ‘traditional’ method of learning in the sense that it relies on a history of experience from which new ideas may emerge logically. It is also a good description of what many think of as scientific method (although not what scientists do), which is why it seems like a plausible explanation of how learning does and should occur.*

But human learning does not occur this way. Unlike machines, people do not usually evaluate every action in terms of an explicit criterion. They simply act. If there are no adverse consequences in terms of results, the law, guilt or costs, they are likely to act the same way in similar circumstances. This is called habit. It is, for good or ill, how we life the vast majority of the time. Compared to human beings, machines are totally ‘woke’ to their choices. Unless there is a technical fault, their algorithms ensure that they act with extreme moral integrity in terms of the standards they have evolved.

Human beings learn when there is some sort of interruption in their habitual routine. Someone complains or criticises; there is a disappointment; a crime is charged; feelings of remorse emerge, etc. At that point human beings do something that a machine would never do: he or she rationalises the action(s) that led to the interruption: the old lady who complained is a nut; besides there was nothing else I could have done; how was I to know she was there; I have to stop feeling sorry for people like that, etc. As we know from history and experience, human beings have the capacity to rationalise absolutely anything, which we do, apparently instinctively, whenever such an interruption occurs. We justify ourselves with reasons discovered after the fact. We make up plausible reasons, quite literally from nothing.

This kind of post-hoc justification is not something a machine indulges in because it knows the reason for everything it does in advance. Machines also don’t then engage in the next component of human learning: argument. People ‘call’ each other on their rationalising justifications whenever the matter at hand seems to warrant the effort (arguably my wife challenges my self-justifications even when she knows it will probably not penetrate my consciousness). Ultimately the debate will come down to motive, and may even be resolved by the abandonment of the post-hoc motive and the recognition of something far simpler and substantially less virtuous - laziness, fear, greed, insensitivity, etc. Or we might even have discovered a defensible new criterion of action!

Whether or not self-justification and indefensible motive (that is questionable reason) is admitted, the debate about the correct criterion of choice is now public. It becomes a matter essentially of political consideration and negotiation. The debate may lead to something as simple as an apology, or as complex as a new law or a proposal for an amendment to a code of professional ethics. And the one thing politics is not is rational by any standard know to a machine. But it is how human beings learn, if they learn at all: by interruptions which effectively short-circuit the algorithmic development which constitutes most of our lives.

This is the subtle recognition contained in both Colossus and Qualityland. Human beings are the glitch, the flaw, the bug in the machine. The futurists don’t seem to get this. They envision a man/machine merger which creates an effective new species. They don’t understand that their machine-learning, however powerful, is not the way people learn. In fact these modes of learning are contradictory, not in the Hegelian sense of dialectically productive, but in the logical sense of cancelling each other out when they are combined.

Machine-learning is attractive as an ideal because it eliminates moral peril - the fundamental uncertainty of our motives. The fact that it is an insidiously dangerous ideal is what works like Colossus and Qualityland are about. Moral learning is messy but necessary for not just society but existence on the planet.


* As an explanatory footnote: this is the method of learning which is official within the Catholic Church. It is explicitly referred to as Tradition, by which is meant that which has been learned in the past through revelation is the logical source of current dogmatic statements. This is the reason why the Church’s claims to infallibility (whether by the Church as a whole or the Pope) are so critical to its self-image. This stance often requires considerable verbal machinations in order to ensure consistency between recent and ancient pronouncements. It is also the reason why the Church is the living, low-tech reality of both Colossus and Qualityland.

View all my reviews

Tears and Saints by Emil M. Cioran
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dangerous Failures

As I have mentioned elsewhere, mystics are the bad boys (actually, more likely girls) of religion (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). They ignore established theology, berate spiritual authority, and prefer their own personal rituals to public displays. Mystics are therefore often considered heretical and banished to the margins of organised religion. They are wilful failures, socially and politically. And, according to Cioran, that is precisely how they achieve their goal: power.

Christian mystics are especially intrigued by power. Think about it: Jesus’s dictum that “the last shall be first” is a Machiavellian political instruction for how to beat the system. By withdrawing from the race for power, one is rewarded with... Power! It takes an immense physical as well as mental and spiritual effort to achieve an maintain the required level of mystical fanaticism. But the payoff is equally immense: existence detached from that which is most desired, and power over it.

For Teresa of Avila what was most desired was sex. For Catherine of Siena it was authority over men. For Ignatius Loyola it was authority period. For Bernard of Clairvaux it was the impulse toward violence. Each of these desires is satisfied by being denied. All are symbols of the divine that are rejected as not-God in the tradition of mystical negative theology. The ultimate failure of the denial is the achievement actually sought, the union with that which is most desired.

That is to say, mystics are consumed by their own enthusiasm (literally en theos , their ‘being in God’). This is the source of their strength, of their authority, of the influence of their commands. They are without shame in their exercise of their divinely mandated mission to save the world through their own failure. They have nothing to gain but also nothing to lose. There is nothing more to be achieved; and everything has already been lost. They are free. “Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for fear.”

And, somewhat annoyingly, they flaunt that freedom to the rest of us. “The world of saints is a heavenly poison that grows ever more virulent as our loneliness increases. They have corrupted us by providing a model that shows suffering attaining its goal.” What they give us is not a path to paradise but “a graveyard of happiness.” The only defence against this poison, in light of mystical “metaphysical indiscretions,” is despair. “The Christian demon. Has woven its nest in money, in sexuality, in love. It has caused humanity so much trouble, that from now on superficiality should undoubtedly be looked upon as a virtue.”

I’m determined to maintain my own superficiality at all costs.

View all my reviews

 

Babylon 
by 

Victor Pelevin, 

 

Andrew Bromfield (Translator)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jan 19, 2020  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: slavic, epistemology-language, sociology 

The Only Drug You’ll Ever Need 

What better therapy could there be for the protagonist, Tatarsky, to cope with the final trauma of the dissolution of the Soviet Union than the invention of advertising slogans? On the other hand, magic mushrooms might achieve the same end, namely, the removal of the “relict [sic] of the Soviet era, the slave mentality he still hadn’t completely squeezed out of himself.” This was necessary in order to play the Game With No Name that has taken over Russia.

The game, of course, is the game of language. As in the biblical legend of the ancient tower, language is changing in incomprehensible ways. Those who are in the vanguard of the changes are the ones most confused. They create the new words, which create commercial value. How do they do that? Capitalism, just like Communism, is built on words; just different words. The words necessary in post-Soviet Russia have to touch the Slav mind. Explosive words. Sexy words. Noble words of the Motherland and her deep culture of words. Words that fit with despair but promise greatness and plentitude.

And it works. Fizzy drinks, cigarettes, washing powder are the things words attach to. These things become the words, and vice versa. This is the magic by which transformation out of the Soviet mentality comes about. The magic affected absolutely everything: “... people weren’t sniffing cocaine, they were sniffing money, and the rolled-up hundred-dollar bill required by the unwritten order of ritual was actually more important than the powder itself.” Symbols, words, that is to say, language was being consumed everywhere as if it had real substance. No wonder the popular resurgence in God who also became real through the same process!

There is a curious subtlety in this process: “First you try to understand what people will like, and then you hand it to them in the form of a lie. But what people want is for you to hand them the same thing in the form of the truth.” Lie? Truth? Both come in the same package. Haven’t you noticed? Same brand. Same factory. Same ingredients. All sourced from the same raw material: that infinitely deep well of language. It never seems to go dry. The more that’s extracted, the deeper it gets. And it’s free.

Language is a drug. No, THE drug. Soviet language cut the drug with all sorts of repetitive, inert crap. The same words over and over. Barely enough to get a buzz on. Vodka was a welcome refuge. Capitalist language is the real thing, crack cocaine with a Fentanyl chaser. You can only appreciate it if you’ve been weaned on the fifth-grade junk of socialism. Capitalism gives you the words to fly, to soar... to eat a really satisfying meal. Sure it takes some getting used to the stuff but once you’re on it, you hardly notice the hangover. Just up the dose and the ride continues. The apparatchiks didn’t want anyone to know about the well. Now they pump out as much of it as they can. 

Having consumed the abundant new words of Capitalism, we digest them and they become part of us, indistinguishable from us. They are us. We then excrete the waste, upon which the magic mushrooms grow. “As far as Tatarsky was able to judge from the murky depths of his own Soviet mentality, the project was an absolutely textbook example of the American entrepreneurial approach.” The system is self-sustaining - we eat each other’s shit. How’s that for a fecund metaphor?

 

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence 
by 

Ray Kurzweil

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jan 17, 2020  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: american, epistemology-language, science, sociology, technology 

Kingdom Come 

Those with some theological training might recall Alfred Loisy’s quip about early Christianity: “They expected the coming of the Kingdom; what arrived was the Church.” So with Kurzweil: He expected the emergence of the Spirit; what arrived was FaceBook and Google.* There is a great deal that is theological in the attitudes of those who write about modern technology. Kurzweil puts forth a belief in a sort of pantheistic God of the Universe. If not the Pope, he is certainly a Patriarch of the Church of Electronic Technology and continues to inspire the faithful with his revelatory scriptures. 

Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines is a watershed moment in the high-tech movement. It’s a sort of gospel, a prophetic document that has inspired a quasi-religious culture. It is a book with a cosmic perspective, connecting modern technology to the origin and the final destination of the Universe. Technology, according to Kurzweil, is the Alpha and the Omega of existence, not just the existence of members of the species Homo sapiens, but the existence of everything. Without technology the Universe itself would not exist because there would be no knowledge of it. 

Apart from this last solipsistic (and presumably jocular) thought, Kurzweil’s argument is both attractive and explanatory. If it misses a few marks about the future, who cares. Prophets are concerned with ultimates not with the details of how we get there. Who knows but he could be right: Facebook and Google could be carriers of the Spirit. After all, Donald Trump is considered by American evangelicals as the anointed instrument of God. The Spirit is reported to blow where it sees fit, so who can have serious doubts - about either FaceBook or Trump.

The central trope which Kurzweil uses to organise his prophecy is that of evolutionary biology. His presumption is very Spinoza-like:**that there is purpose in the Universe. This purpose doesn’t become conscious of itself until the emergence of the first intelligent apes but it has been there all along, from the moment of slight asymmetries in the Big Bang, to the formation of atoms, to the chemical evolution of that signal breakthrough of DNA. From there it was inevitable that life would take control, particularly human life, but also progressing to forms we can only speculate about.

Throughout this evolutionary progression, there is crucial, pre-genetic component, an inherent coding mechanism, which, building progressively on itself, initially generates the laws of physics (including the phenomenon of time), promotes sub-atomic and chemical interactions, leads to the emergence of the complex genome, then explodes into the miracle of human language and of the tools which are the product of language. Every step in this progression is a technological advance, an advance whose pace has been accelerating from the start.

This is stirring stuff. It is no mere boosterism for high-tech; it’s a cultural manifesto as well thought out as the Gospel of John or Marx’s Das Kapital . It provides a myth of origin and an explanation for the way things are that are concise and self-contained in their completeness. The manifesto is also ethically directive. The Universe has purpose, inert matter has purpose, life itself has purpose, and (implicitly) individual human lives are inherently purposeful and should join with the cosmic intentionality.

And that purpose? Kurzweiler is clear about that: “Evolution’s grandest creation—human intelligence—is providing the means for the next stage of evolution, which is technology.” We are manifestly here to make machines. On the face of it, this appears crass and narrow-minded. But keep in mind that Kurzweiler includes language as part of technology, in fact, as information, the foundational component of all technology, even that of atoms and molecules. So his prediction of ‘next stage’ includes not just machines (or not even primarily machines) but the proliferation and self-generation of knowledge. Or to put the matter in terms more compatible with his entire theme: the autonomous existence of language.

In this view of the world, language will come into its own, creating both itself and the machines that propagate it. Presumably language knows that it needs both a source of energy derived from the chaotic entropy which surrounds it, and ‘users’ of language, or at least an audience for itself. The obvious solution of course is to get human beings to pay for the use of the language to which they have become accustomed (addicted?). Hey, presto, Kurzweil got it exactly right. The Spirit he had in mind arrived right on schedule in Facebook and Google. Better than the predictions of Jesus and Paul, therefore. I suppose it all depends on the definition of Spirit in both cases.


* From the Age of Smart Machines (Zuboff 1988), to the Age of Intelligent Machines (Kurzweil 1990), to the Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil 1998), to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff, 2018) in 30 years! The epochs just seem to keep coming, but apparently never the ones that are expected.

** Or perhaps even more aptly resembles the evolutionary theism of the priest-biologist Teilhard de Chardin whose concept of the noösphere, a realm of pure thought that emerges from the biosphere of living things, is the final destination of earthly development. Formulated in the early 20th century, de Chardin’s ideas were of course condemned as heretical by the Church (as were those of his contemporary, Alfred Loisy). See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit...

 

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology 
by 

Ray Kurzweil

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jan 17, 2020  ·  edit

liked it

bookshelves: american, epistemology-language, science, sociology, technology, philosophy-theology 

Imminent Metaphysics 

The subtitle contains the entire thesis: an expectation that machines will allow human beings to escape the limitations of their physical bodies. This contention has been called ‘daring,’ ‘optimistic,’ ‘arresting,’ ‘really out there,’ ‘outrageous,’ ‘terrifying,’ and above all just ‘big.’ And certainly the idea that a machine can be linked to a brain to form what is effectively a new species is certainly that: Big. But in terms of bigness (as Trump would say) it’s a sideshow and not the main event. It’s just that the main event doesn’t sell nearly as many tickets.

Of course human beings already have transcended much of their biology long ago. Kurzweil’s own analysis in this and his previous books demonstrates this fact repeatedly. Humanity in its various sub-species did so through the core technology which he recognises as the source of just about all advances in human well-being and dispersion around the planet: the technology of language. It is language which permits both complicated and large-scale cooperation among individuals, and which allows experience to be codified and stored over generations. It is language - in the form of self-learning code - which is the foundation of the machines which Kurzweil envisions will be linked functionally to human brains in order to form a new sort of mind, a kind of Leibnizian monad, essentially disconnected from the world of its fellows, talking to itself in its own increasingly idiosyncratic language.

But there is an issue, or rather a central fact, of our current situation which Kurzweil ignores. Language is not the invention or the possession of an individual. It cannot be patented as a technology; it cannot be controlled in its development (despite the Academie Francaise and high school English teachers); and it requires a rather large population who implicitly assert its usefulness and right to survive. Language is a collective endeavour. Although it is a technology, it is not a machine. And, fatally for Kurzweil’s thesis, language has already freed the species Homo sapiens from the constraints of strict biology eons ago. It did so as a collective endeavour not as a connection between an individual human being and a machine.

Kurzweil (along with many others) are myopically fascinated by electronic machines and their coding. This is understandable. Machines are visible to everyone. They can be touched and measured and improved. They are the emblem of progress in industrial (or post-industrial) society. Language on the other hand is amorphous. It is visible only in its use, and then just barely as language-users habitually substitute things for words. Machines work; when they don’t they can be repaired. Languages work as well, but when language goes wrong, no one knows quite what to do about it. Machines may be complicated and their coded routines complex; but they are predictable in their operation even if surprise is the prediction. Language is largely a mystery; no one knows if it’s hard-wired in our genetic makeup or acquired randomly.

It is important to keep in mind that both machines and the human brain are shaped by language beyond their coding or genetic character. Certainly some genetic mutation in the history of our species allowed the transition from mere signalling to complex language-based communication. But from that moment (or evolutionary epoch), language transcended every individual who used it. Language was a communal technology or it didn’t exist at all. And it was the technology that allowed everything from cave painting to the Library of Congress. Language, that non-biological miracle of human existence, influenced genetic development itself, initially by setting rules about who could mate with whom, more recently through gene therapy. 

So if there is a ‘singularity’ in our immediate future, it is not one of biological transcendence. It may, however, be one of a complete submission to the dominance of that which we have arrogantly presumed is our instrument. What Kurzweil describes is indeed a new species, perhaps one with an unlimited intellectual potential and an indefinite but very long lifespan. But this is a species whose entire world is language. It will have no other experience except in communication with other specific language-users. The species will not have transcended language, it will have been absorbed into it. The new species will be one entirely constituted by language. His book is “... predicated on the idea that we have the ability to understand our own intelligence—to access our own source code, if you will—and then revise and expand it.” 

As Kurzweil says, the world formed by this new species with the altered source code will be peaceful; conflict will be about words, only in words. Greed will be unnecessary; words are infinitely abundant. Culture will flourish; words underpin not just technology but writing and arts of all kinds. The needs of our composite machine/brain existence - fuel, food, climate control - will be catered for. All the rest of our emotional, sexual, and aesthetic needs will be supplied by the language of our coding, which will pursue its own evolutionary path, presumably at an accelerating rate.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, Kurzweil’s vision is superficially similar to that of Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘noösphere.’ (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) Teilhard first used the term in his Cosmogenesis of 1922. Very much like Kurzweil, de Chardin adopted an evolutionary approach in his theological philosophy: the ‘geosphere’ of dead matter evolves the biosphere of living things, which generates the noösphere of pure reason. It is human cognition, that is to say, language, which is the driving force for the transition from the biosphere. Increasing complexity and consciousness creates a ‘layer’ of thought encircling the earth.

The difference between Kurzweil and de Chardin is that the phenomenon of the noösphere for Teilhard is communal. It emerges and is sustained through the interaction of minds not through the isolated, algorithmic cogitation of new kinds of minds. And Teilhard’s minds are not absorbed into the language from which they are constructed. The key relationship among minds for Teilhard is love, essentially existence for the sake of the other. That is, not for the sake of language as implied in Kurzweil’s vision. Rather, Teilhard’s vision is of what he calls the Omega Point, a state of perfect mutual regard and care. This state is not one of subordination to language but to each other through language. The evolution of language in that direction does not result in a transcendent new species living next to the old Homo sapiens, but in an entire society which transcends itself. Kurzweil, it occurs to me, is at heart an aesthete rather than a technologist; and his aesthetic is highly questionable.

This is all a matter of practical metaphysics, our imagining of that which lies beyond language. For most of modernity, by which I mean since the industrial revolution, metaphysics has been a field derided as philosophical self-abuse. The importance of all of Kurzweil’s work is its demonstration that metaphysics is an important social science. I understand his use of advances in electronic technology as a focal point. Among other things, it sells. Nevertheless, the significance of his own analysis is not about the new composite mind, it is about the relationship among minds and how these relationships can develop a world which is imminently liveable not transcendentally detached. This is a moral not a technical issue. I don’t know the answer to the situation he describes. But I think Teilhard has some good alternative suggestions.

Ancestors in Our Genome: The New Science of Human Evolution by Eugene E. Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Who Da’ Daddy?

Palaeontology and genetic biology are not for intellectual sissies. Nuclear physics may be hard for the layman to understand, but the developmental history of our species is a subject of equal complexity, with at least as many unsolved mysteries. And Harris lets us know about these without mercy.

If you thought that Darwinesque Natural Selection was all you needed to know about evolution, forget it. Its far more complicated than that. While reading Harris I found it useful to consider genetic analysis as a sort of quantum physics in reverse. The basic building blocks of analysis are genetic mutations, random alterations in DNA, which are like quantum events. Whereas physicists work forward from the events to their consequences, genetic researchers work backwards from how things stand now to the underlying events. Both disciplines have the problem of connecting their elementary events to the world as we see it - the physicist to the non-quantum world of perception, and the geneticist in the existing morphology of our species.

And this connection ain’t easy to make. As Harris says, “The field of genetics has not, by and large, been able to determine the exact genetic basis for most morphological features. When we are comparing DNA nucleotides we know when we are comparing apples with apples or oranges with oranges. With morphological features, one could very well be comparing apples with oranges.” There are an enormous (infinite?) number of ways that a feature, like a bone or a shape, can be genetically generated. Gene mutations have complex interactions with each other. Thus, for example, the mutations promoting large human brain size occur with others that reduce the size of the digestive tract which has also been adapted to process cooked meat. The result is an animal with sustainably high energy consumption... that talks; and thanks to yet another mutation, sweats over its entire body.

So there are differences in species-trees (the classification of evolutionary forebears by what they look like and who can mate with whom successfully) and gene-trees (the apparent sequence of evolution of mutations themselves). Sorting these differences out involves some complex logical analysis which takes into account things like Homologous vs Homomorphous traits, Gene Coalescence, Parapatric vs Allopatric (or even Sympatric!) speciation, Internode Times, Effective vs Census Populations, Junk DNA, and Genetic Drift. As I said: not for sissies.

So although some things about human evolution are fairly clear - like our separation from chimpanzees about 5 million years ago; and that about one third of our genetic material is shared with more primitive apes - it’s not all that certain who are our cousins and who are our grandparents. Even with the completion of the genome mapping for many of the relevant species, and the application of substantial computing power, no one really understands the route from forest ape to human biped. In fact genetic science itself casts a shadow on some of the most basic concepts of evolution: “the question of exactly how to define a species, remains a conundrum for biologists.”

There are also some other intriguing questions raised rather than answered by recent advanced research. For example, how a relatively small population of our genetic forbears got the jump on other larger populations which might also have resulted in humanoids. Or why the fossil record along with DNA analysis shows an almost catastrophic decline in the population of some fairly recent groups of our ancestors. Apparently we are not very good genetic adapters during our trek(s) out of Africa.

It’s all more than a bit like the television show Who Do You Think You Are but on a level of the species. Instead of finding out that great great grandpa was a drunken brothel keeper, we discover that our supposed superiority as a species is really just hubris. For example: our defective DNA is what allows us to contract AIDS and dementia while chimps and gorillas don’t. Rats and many other ‘inferior’ animals, it turns out are far better equipped genetically than humans to adapt to environmental changes. So where we sit on the hierarchy of species is really only a matter of what scale one chooses. Since other apes aren’t typically given a vote... well, it’s rigged ain’t it?

This is a serious book for non-specialists. Harris writes clearly and there is a logical development to the whole. But he doesn’t spoon feed the material. So be prepared to pay attention if you pick it up. Or alternatively... wait until you’re a bit more evolved.

View all my reviews

What Is Mathematics, Really? by Reuben Hersh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Peace in Troubled Times

For many, including myself, mathematics is comforting. In an era of fake news, worldwide illness, and economic uncertainty, mathematics provides proof of another reality which is harmonious, universal, and eternal. Or so it would seem.

In fact mathematics, like all literature, is none of these things. Mathematics is, of course, a human artefact. It is a language which consists of a vocabulary, a grammar, and a community which employs these enthusiastically. Arguably, mathematics is the most refined language ever produced.

Or rather, set of languages. There are apparently some 3400 recognised branches of mathematics. Many of these have their peculiar dialects which are unintelligible to members of other mathematical communities. At least some have never been translated.

Hersh identifies two historical schools of thought which have dominated popular as well as professional discussion of mathematics: Platonists and Formalists. Platonists consider mathematics as a kind of religion. Numbers, they believe, exist independently of human thought about them. They constitute the basic fabric of the universe and determine its orderliness and predictability. For them, mathematics is reality.

Formalists dismiss this quasi-spiritual view. Their opinion is that mathematics is a game, the rules of which are entirely arbitrary. If Platonists are the religious enthusiasts of mathematics, Formalists are the agnostic clergy who have lost the certainty of belief but continue to exercise their ritualistic duties regardless.

Hersh dislikes both Platonists and Formalists. His credible claim is that mathematics developed and continues to develop because it is useful. And it’s usefulness varies so that what mathematics means and how it develops also varies continuously. There is no fixed ‘mathematical method’ by which good mathematics can be distinguished from bad. There are just mathematicians talking among themselves.

This fact - that mathematics emerges from its adherents discussing mathematics - may appear a truism. What else could be happening? But the recognition that mathematics emerges from a restricted community is an important insight. The usefulness of mathematics is not that of engineers or architects or astrophysicists or people filing tax returns.

These and other ‘users’ of mathematics eventually benefit from the products of mathematical discussions in their own work but they are not mathematicians. We may tolerate mathematicians among us because of what their work allows the rest of us to do; but mathematicians could care less. It’s not why they do mathematics.

The practical (or in their minds pedestrian) usefulness of the work of mathematicians does not concern them. Even a brief exposure to number theory, for example, is sufficient to convince most outside the mathematical community (or even outside the community of number theorists) that the things mathematicians are concerned about are essentially trivial. The strange and often captivating relationships among numbers are simply alien to practical experience. The non-mathematician can only ask ‘Why bother?’.

And the answer to this question must be the same as it is to the issue of literature in general. There is no reason for mathematics other than itself. Mathematics is a form of highly refined, esoteric poetry. Its form and subject matter is not to everyone’s taste. But neither is the Iliad, or The Wasteland, or Finnegans Wake. It takes considerable linguistic skill and aesthetic fortitude to comprehend the content of mathematical poetry. Success in such an endeavour is, as usual, its own reward.

View all my reviews

 

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television 
by 

Jerry Mander

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jan 14, 2020  ·  edit

liked it

bookshelves: american, criticism, technology, sociology, epistemology-language 

Nothing To See Here. Move Along. 

It is instructive to read Jerry Mander’s* analysis of the evils of television written more than 40 years ago and after more than 20 years of experience with the progressive replacement of television by the internet. Mander clearly couldn’t anticipate the technological developments that would make his criticism appear naively old hat: “I came to the conclusion that like other modern technologies which now surround our lives, advertising, television and most mass media predetermine their own ultimate use and effect. In the end, I became horrified by them, as I observed the aberrations which they inevitably create in the world.” Oh for the good old days!

His concern, of course, is understandable. We have exactly the same ones today. Communications technology does change society in entirely unanticipated ways. Yet we seem to be trapped by it. Mander knew he was whistling in the dark. Television could not be eliminated. And although he couldn’t predict the future, he could easily have known about the past with its extensive catalogue of technologies which had done exactly what he feared. If he had investigated these, he then might have concluded that it was not television that we should be worried about but something far more fundamental... and insidious.

Just a few examples to establish the pattern clearly: before television there was radio. Early adopters included such notables as Huey Long, the populist boss of Louisiana; and Father Coglin, the fascist Catholic priest. They epitomise the transformation of the political and religious world by radio during the 1930’s. Their pioneering work showed that radio was the future for making money in both. The journalist Dorothy Thompson, the Jerry Mander of the day, responding to the national panic created by the 1938 broadcast of the War of the Worlds by Orson Welles, wrote that this “proved how easy it is to start a mass delusion.” 

But then dig just a bit deeper into history. The 19th century after the American Civil War is considered by many to be the Golden Age of newspaper journalism. The penny post had matured around the world to become the dominant instrument of social media. It was, like radio and television after it, big business. Whatever its social benefit, newspapers also rigged elections, started wars, and callously ruined reputations. Edwin Lawrence Godkin, editor of The Nation in the 1890’s, sounds remarkably like Mander: “As soon as [the newspaper] became a business, ... the sense of proportion about news was rapidly destroyed. Everything, however trifling, was considered worth printing, and the newspaper finally became what it is now, a collection of gossip.” And dangerous gossip at that. Charles Dickens dubbed New York papers the morning‟s “New York Sewer,” “Stabber,” “Private Listener,” and “Peeper.” 

And of course these are not problems particular to modernity. Gutenberg was accused of “spreading the word of God like muck” among lay believers with his relatively inexpensive printings of the Bible in the 15th century. John Wycliffe was branded a heretic by Parliament in the 14th century for daring to translate the Bible into a language that folk could actually understand. In the 8th century, church authorities, through the Emperor Constantine, went as far as condemning the technology of painting as aberrant and socially disruptive. This is explicit in the minutes of the Council of Heirio in 754, which refers to "the unlawful art of painting living creatures which blasphemes the fundamental doctrine of our salvation--namely, the Incarnation of Christ, and contradicted the six holy synods. ... If anyone shall endeavour to represent the forms of the Saints in lifeless pictures with material colours which are of no value (for this notion is vain and introduced by the devil), and does not rather represent their virtues as living images in himself, etc. ... let him be anathema." The New England Puritans continued this noble tradition.

See the pattern? Each of these technologies is indeed fundamentally disruptive. It is then absorbed, as it were, into the disrupted society and the more or less forgotten about. The new technologies become not just a non-issue but essentially invisible as successor technologies come along. Keep pursuing the trail far enough and one comes up against the technological myths of origin. In Western European civilisation (there are analogous ones in the Orient), these include Hebrew as the language of God himself, whose very alphabet is of divine significance; and the ancient Greek idea of the Platonic Forms, which the precision of the Greek language was intended to reveal. The socially disruptive consequences of these technologies persist until today - not least of which is an entire Judaea-Christian-Islamic culture - yet we take these technologies for granted since they are fully assimilated.

What? Language as technology? Well yes, isn’t it apparent. Every technological development from the internet back through television, radio, mass media newspapers, printing, translating, and even iconography is an extension of one phenomenon - human language. Every one of these depends upon the progressive accumulations of language we call science, engineering, and art. And every one then uses language as its mode d’emploi in the society in which it finds itself. Language is the source-technology from which all the others have emerged. Technology means literally the ‘craft of the word’ (τέχνη + λόγος). And every significant change in this technology has had a fundamental impact on the political, religious, and social relations among the people who use it.

But this is precisely the point that Mander, as well as all the present-day pundits of high-tech, seem to miss. The fundamental issue isn’t machines, electronic or otherwise, it is the core, the matrix, the soul (as it were) of these machines, that is to say: language. Mander’s Canute-like call to halt the tide of television was even more useless than he realised. His real battle was with language itself not a social system of broadcasting which he found to be false. His worry, for example, that television promotes our transformation into the images we see on the screen was a fait accompli at least as long ago as the start of the Holocene, and probably 50,000 to 100,000 years before that - just about the same time that one primitive hunter told his mate what the next valley looked like, thereby mediating direct experience. Every development in language-based technology (actually, all technology) produces the same cultural trauma. Yet this trauma looks new because we’ve adapted so completely to the previous ones. 

It’s as if language itself is in control. It hides itself in plain sight. The only time we even notice it is when its form changes. But even then we become obsessed with the machines rather than their real substance. As Martin Heidegger quipped, it appears that “Language speaks Man,” not vice versa. And there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. Language is our Original Sin. We inherit it and pass it on, in all its forms from washing powder to jet aircraft. We can’t criticise it without becoming even more dependent upon it. It owns us - yesterday in the form of television, today in the form of the internet, tomorrow who knows. But we are effectively its creature. Language and its subsidiary technologies always re-shape the people who use it. These technologies also are the prime target for those who wish to control others. They are always subject to commercial interests, at least some of which are destructive. 

In short, language not television is the real culprit Mander should have attacked. But, of course, he couldn’t, not without using language. And then who would believe him? It’s a bit like accusing your mother of your own abortion.

* Yes, really his name. I suspect he had parents hopeful for his success in elected office.