Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church by Austen Ivereigh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tilting at the Windmills of Linguistic Power

There is more than a hint of hagiography in Ivereigh’s account of Pope Francis’s attempts at reform in the Catholic Church. And he knows it. Francis is clearly a kind, intelligent, canny, charming, and well-intentioned man, and deserves recognition as such. But when it comes to doing anything about the state of the Catholic Church, all of that is irrelevant.

According to Ivereigh, “Francis’s mission is to take the Church to the people, in order to not just save the people but to save the Church.” This sounds right in line with the populism that has come to dominate other political societies around the world. And Francis connects this populism with long-standing doctrine in an innovative way: “The people, he likes to say, are infallible ‘in their believing.’ They may not be able to tell you why they believe in God, but they know God.” According to doctrine, it is the People of God as a whole who are infallible. Francis’s twist is that this infallibility is not about any doctrine in particular, but about believing per se.

Francis clearly knows that the institution of which he is head is corrupt. This corruption shows itself in numerous ways from the hypocritical life-styles of many of its senior members to its resistance to the measures necessary to stop sexual exploitation. But the most profound symptom of its corruption is its self-image as a bastion of undebatably true ideas. It prides itself as the treasury of truths which it must protect at all costs regardless of the consequences for either its members or the world at large.

It is this self-image which Francis is attempting to change. He will fail. In the first instance, the politics of ideas is more intense in the Catholic Church than in any other organisation on the planet. The ideas of Catholicism are not contained either in the Scriptures it has approved, or in the doctrinal pronouncements it has issued from time to time, or in the great body of Canon law through which it functions. These are merely texts which demand more or less continuous re-interpretation. The stuff, the language, of ecclesial politics are interpretations of these documents and their previous interpretations. And the real substance, the payoff, is not correctness of interpretation but the power to interpret, that is, to determine truth.

Hence the rapacity of the internal struggle for dominance. Unlike commercial organisations, the Church is not subject to the disciplines of the market. People don’t get axed for missing targets. Ideas have absolute reign and can’t be verified by sales or profit figures. And unlike other political organisations, there is no accountability to an electorate. This means that individuals are free to conduct unrestricted guerrilla warfare against each other with more or less continuous palace intrigue. Any pope, Francis included, is just a temporary dancer in the continuous political ballet, a member of the cast not the director.

But there is a second and more fundamental reason for his impending failure. Without its resolute insistence on ideas which can neither be verified or disproven, only expressed, the Catholic Church does not exist. Its existence is these ideas, not, as Francis apparently thinks, the people who hold them. The people who hold them are the problem. They keep coming up with new interpretations of the ideas and fight among themselves continuously about whose interpretation is correct. So has it always been. The winners call the losers in these political struggles heretics, and themselves orthodox.

Thus Francis’s populism is supported by those of ‘no fixed belief’ as it were, those who are unable to express anything about their belief except the belief itself, a kind of primordial tribal affiliation. This is curious. He downplays the ‘content’ of belief continuously in order to undermine the politics of the ‘true believers’ who know exactly what they believe and why. While this is the only way to attack their power - ideas are the currency of power in the Church - it is also an evacuation of that which makes the Church the Church, namely ideas.

The paradox of Francis’s position is clear. It is actually the fundamental paradox of Christianity itself. As soon as those early followers of Jesus started promoting the truth of his ideas rather than the urgent necessity of his behaviour, the trajectory of the whole enterprise was determined. It had to become ‘professional’ in order to articulate those ideas clearly. It had to become hierarchical in order to protect the uniformity of those ideas. And its leaders had to become ruthless in their prosecution of their interpretations of those ideas.

So, while one can only wish Pope Francis ‘bonne chance’ on his great mission of saving the Church, one must also recognise that the only chance he has to do this is to destroy it. Perhaps Francis is a saint after all.

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Relics of Eden: The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA 
by 

Daniel J. Fairbanks

 

Dixie Christianity

Daniel Fairbanks hopes to reconcile science and religion in his aptly named and exceptionally well-researched Relics of Eden. The book is addressed to his fellow Christians in order to help them accept evolutionary theory as consistent with their religious beliefs. He will fail, primarily because he doesn’t understand his intended audience, who are immune to his argument not through ignorance or stupidity but through fear.

Who could have imagined that a century after the notorious Scopes trial in Kentucky (which confirmed the legal prohibition of the teaching of evolutionary theory), there is still a large, and apparently increasing portion of Americans who believe that evolution is a scientific hoax. Given that the evidence for evolutionary development through genetic mutation is overwhelming, I suppose the central question is ‘Why.’ What is it about evolutionary theory that these folk find objectionable? Have they abandoned rationality entirely in a dogmatic haze?

Darwin could only guess at the mechanism of evolution, just as his contemporary, Mendel, could only guess at the hereditary process by which his sweet peas varied from generation to generation. DNA analysis demonstrates not just the process but the history of the process as it occurred. Fairbanks, for example, shows precisely how the chromosome pattern of the great apes was randomly modified to create the humanoid genome. Essentially, an ape chromosome pair frayed at the edges and fused into a single chromosome. The science is complicated but the logic is simple and the evidence is compelling.

The way in which gene mutations actually take place was discovered in 1950 but not recognised generally among scientists for decades. The key to mutation are transposable or so called ‘jumping genes,’ which insert and delete themselves as base pairs within the DNA. These substitutions can turn of and on other gene functions and are then replicated over and over again by the DNA. 

In other words there is a built-in instability in the genome. It is, in effect, designed to change; it is the rough equivalent of a random number generator. In fact, over half of human DNA consists of these transposable and other variable elements. The mutations may be random but the mechanism is not. Most of these variable elements have become inactive, but they are hard evident of past developments.

The mutations of these variable elements can also be used to re-create the history of our species in its progressive separation from the apes, and the apes from each other, through analysis of the so-called Alu elements in the genes. We therefore know that we are more closely related to chimpanzees than to gorillas and orangutans. And so are the chimpanzees!

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the evolutionary process is not the divergence of species but the development of increasingly complex genomes from those of single celled entities. The history of this development is in the pseudogenes, currently useless genetic material that has at some time been important in expanding genetic complexity. The mistakes as well as the advances are documented in the inert DNA of our genome.

One of these pseudogenes explains why we, unlike most vertebrates, can’t manufacture Vitamin C. More importantly, pseudogenes appear as sorts of experiments with overall functionality of an organism. Those that ‘work’ remain active; if no longer needed (as with Vitamin C production) they become dormant. But they remain as extensions of the genome and their ‘archaeology’ in the human organism is evident.

Mitochondrial DNA, a distinctive sort well-known to detective buffs because of its its importance in identifying matri-lineal relations, is also particularly important in linking humans to their oldest ancestors - not apes but bacteria. mDNA is itself bacterial in both structure and function. It is the rough equivalent of chloroplasts in green plants and is almost certainly the result of the ‘invasion’ of bacteria without nuclei in more developed bacteria with nuclei almost 2 billion years ago.

All of this is not only enlightening, it is also aesthetically satisfying. There is a hidden orderliness in the world. But it is an orderliness which creates (one is tempted to write ‘intentionally’ creates) diversity just for the sake of it. This is what the American philosopher C. S. Peirce called Thychism, a tendency of the universe toward unwarranted, exuberant change and consequent richness. He considered Tychism as a sort of metaphysical law, and modern genetic research clearly confirms his insight.

So genetic science shows evolution to be both a rational and a beautiful process. Certainly this is not contradictory to religious doctrines of creation. It can easily be interpreted poetically as a mechanism devised by a very clever divine entity to allow his (or her) creation to unfold dramatically through time. This is exactly what Peirce thought.

Except for the most literal-minded fundamentalists, therefore, it is difficult to think anyone of even minimal intelligence can object to the conclusions of genetic research on religious grounds. And yet many do. If one takes heed of opinion polls in the United States, the rejection of evolutionary theory is expanding as the evidence for its confirmation grows.

Fairbanks is keen to deny that there is any tension between scientific results and religious doctrine. He uses the same time-worn arguments to make this point that the original defenders of Darwin did in the late 19th century. He is clearly preaching to the choir (to use an entirely unapt metaphor). No evidence, no sensible theory, no proof of any kind is going to convince the large and growing mob of evangelical Americans that all of what we see wasn’t put in place 6000 years ago. For them, all of these results have been achieved only in order to test us in our faith in biblical chronology.

However, to dismiss these people as merely stupid or obdurate is to deny what they in fact have, namely purpose. They want to hide this purpose in their religious protestations, perhaps from themselves more than from their opponents. The Scopes trial of 1925 is in fact a revelation of both the purpose and its intentional obfuscation. In short, the trial was argued theologically. However, the law over which it was fought, the Butler Act, was enacted not on the basis of theology but of race. This was, and remains, the real battleground.

It is race that has been the force behind opposition to evolutionary theory then and now. The prosecuting attorney, William Jennings Bryant, the Great Commoner, was a militant racist (even the defendant Scopes was a white supremacist, and likely a stooge). The universal references to the ‘Monkey Trial’ were clearly racially motivated. White superiority was at issue both in terms of the electoral passage of the law itself, and in terms of its fundamental presumption of the permanent, god-given authority of white men over black.

One black-run newspaper of the time identified the real point of the trial: to promote "that same old brand of white Dixie Christianity.” Where white reporters during the trial often remarked on the locals’ deep religious faith, African American reporters trumpeted the racial hypocrisy that lay behind southern professions of piety.

Fear of Darwin’s racial implications has always driven the anti-evolutionists, and it still does. If blacks and whites have a common ancestry, white racism would appear arbitrary rather than as divinely commanded. In any case it was crucial to maintain the legal fiction of whites and blacks as separate species, thus justifying prohibitions against miscegenation, which, of course, threatened to demonstrate the non-biological character of the prohibitions.

So the explanation of the increasing rejection of evolutionary theory in America really has little to do with theology, as Fairbanks presumes. Theology, or more accurately the racially-motivated, religiously worded preaching to race-sensitive congregations, is a linguistic mask behind which the perennial fear of rural America lurks. The resistance to evolutionary theory has increased proportionately to the evidence supporting it because racial fear, that touchstone of American politics, has increased right along with the evidence not in spite of it.

Postscript: See here for more detail on the deeper racial import of the Scopes trial and the connections between anti-evolutionism and racism:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3660880?...

Postscript 29/02/20: another more recent confirmation of the link between evangelicals and racism: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/02...

Dying: A Memoir by Cory Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How to Fail Honourably

For the medical profession, death is failure. Doctors, it seems, are willing to supervise any degree of physical, emotional, and even spiritual torture to avoid it as long as there is money available to finance it. And if there isn’t, then according to the socially-minded, society has failed on its responsibilities.

I think such sentiments are quite correct when it comes to accidents and acute conditions that are subject to healing and mitigation. But chronic degenerative illness like cancer and dementia are another matter entirely. In so many cases death is not failure but the best conceivable outcome, especially when it is the clear desire of the one who suffers from the condition.

Criminal law tends to keep medics towing the party line in most countries. But the arguably greater power of family emotion is what justifies the pain imposed on chronic sufferers either directly by various invasive therapies or indirectly by the warehousing of human beings in care homes. Families are the one’s who insist upon such ‘care’ regardless of the consequences for the one who suffers. They want life, often at any cost.

That this may be selfishness disguised as love is not a civilised topic of discussion. Before a crisis, it is morbid to bring up such things; during a crisis, emotions of impending loss dominate everyone’s mind, including the mind of the victim of such emotions. Many pray for continued life, even the most impaired, when it is obvious to any outsider that death is a far superior state.

Cory Taylor suggests that talking about death, particularly self-inflicted death, is more effective than prayer. For her, life is not best described as a gift but as a loan, perhaps like a library book. It can be returned before the due date as it were. Just the thought of this possibility provides comfort and may even prolong life by mitigating what can seem like endless pain. For those whose lives medical technology has allowed to become overdue, assisted dying is a way to pay off the fines painlessly.

Most conversations we do have about dying avoid the main issues: pain and sadness. What else is there to talk about really? But what good would it do to ‘dwell’ on such horrible topics? Well possibly quite a lot. Much of grief involves things left unsaid, including the unsaid fear of the one dying as well as the fear of loss by others. It seems to me that grieving together about impending death is therapeutic for everyone. Setting a date for one’s demise could just be the catalyst necessary as a ‘conversation starter.’ If that sounds to crass, perhaps that’s a symptom of the problem.

The substance of Taylor’s book is reminiscence - the tensions, misapprehensions, mistakes, and regrets of her life. For her, writing is therapy. “I still write so as not to feel alone in the world,” she says. So of course she creates a story of her life, a story which is typical in its inevitable sadness - family breakup, sibling estrangement, and imagining what could have been. What gives her the courage to write through her increasingly enfeebling condition is the knowledge that her stash of Chinese suicide poison is secure and within reach. As she says: “Even if I never use the drug, it will still have served to banish the feeling of utter helplessness that threatens so often to overwhelm me.”

I don’t know if Taylor used that stash. But it would make sense if she did. Upon finishing the book, I thought of the exhortation of St. Thomas More, quoted from his Utopia in Dignitas’s brochure on assisted dying:

“I have already told you with what care they look after their sick, so that nothing is left undone that can contribute either to their ease or health: and for those who are taken with fixed and incurable diseases, they use all possible ways to cherish them, and to make their lives as comfortable as possible. They vi­sit them often, and take great pains to make their time pass off easily: but when any is taken with a torturing and lingering pain, so that there is no hope, either of recovery or ease, the priests and magistrates come and exhort them, that since they are now unable to go on with the business of life, are become a burden  to  themselves  and  to all about them, and they have really outlived themselves, they should no longer nourish such a rooted distemper, but choose rather to die, since they cannot live but in much misery: being assured, that if they thus deliver themselves from torture, or are willing that others should do it, they shall be happy after death. Since by their acting thus, they lose none of the pleasures but only the troubles of life, they think they behave not only reasonably, but in a manner consistent with religion and piety; because they follow the ad­vice given them by their priests, who are the expounders of the will of God. Such as are wrought on by these persuasions, ei­ther starve themselves of their own accord, or take opium, and by that means die without pain. But no man is forced on this way of ending his life; and if they cannot be persuaded to it, this does not induce them to fail in their attendance and care of them; but as they believe that a vo­luntary death, when it is chosen upon such an authority, is very honourable.”

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The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Sociological Curate’s Egg

Meritocracy is, according to Markovits, the only game in town. It’s a rigged game, of course, in which winners win because they have won before. Thomas Piketty’s analysis of the inevitability of capital concentration applies as much to social capital as it does to monetary and physical wealth. Advantage is given to the advantaged. To those who have will be given more. This is the argument of The Meritocracy Trap. But I think there is a less visible if no less desperate game that is culturally just as important. Not taking this into account makes the book myopic and misleading.

Markovits believes that everyone plays, and that everyone loses in his game. According to him, Meritocracy means “middle-class children lose out to rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work.”But also, “Meritocracy entices an anxious and inauthentic elite into a pitiless, lifelong contest to secure income and status through its own excessive industry.” So that “meritocracy now divides the elite from the middle class. It drives the middle class to resent the establishment and seduces the elite to cling to the corrupt prerogatives of caste.” Merit is a dirty word; it is toxic, lacks virtue, and is politically incorrect.

I think Markovits makes some valuable observations about modern society. But I also think he claims too much for his theory of the Meritocracy and it’s cultural dominance. At the insistence of my wife, I have just spent six months watching the 215 episodes of the US television series The Middle. The Middle is a saga of a middle class white American family, the Heck’s, played out over nine years in a middling sized town in the geographic middle of the continent. It is well scripted, consistently well-acted, sociologically authentic... and entirely tragic. But not as the result of the influence of the Meritocracy.

According to the series, in agreement with Markovits, the middle is not a comfortable place to be. The Heck Family is squeezed between the criminal underclass of the town, by whom they are threatened, and the local petty capitalists, by whom they are employed, and therefore also threatened. Although working (at one point the adults have four jobs), and living in a respectable suburb, the family exists on an economic razor’s edge. Even the slightest perturbation in the routine of the household - a faulty appliance, a loose roof tile, a minor medical emergency - throws it out of economic orbit. When the kitchen sink self-destructs, they do the dishes in the bathtub for several months because they haven’t the funds (or the energy) for repair.

The one word description of their existence is ‘hapless.’ They neither plan nor attempt to anticipate the future. They live on a diet of junk food and short-dated groceries from the local discount store. Mother is affectionately incompetent, Father is emotionally unavailable and resigned, the Children are self-centred, continuously squabbling oddballs who respond, usually too late, to the demands of their own lives by blaming the parents. Both family life and the house itself are in a constant state of chaos. They obey the law, pay their taxes, attend church, and are civil to the neighbours, even the unlikeable ones.

For the most part, the family are effectively alienated from the social and economic competition of modern life. Although the parents have been to university, their attendance at a state-run institution was motivated by convention rather than ambition. Father is content as the manager of a small quarry, Mother as a sometime (incompetent) used-car salesperson and dental receptionist who tries to scam the system in trivial ways, usually unsuccessfully. The children are similarly unmotivated either toward academic advancement or economic improvement. They each have their ‘interests’ but no signs of maturing purpose. Their children, in turn, will have the same attitudes (as revealed in the last episode).

This is multi-generational life entirely outside the Meritocracy. The Meritocracy thinks of the Heck family as the losers, or more accurately since they are not competitors, Meritocracy’s collateral damage, who don’t appear to know that there is a sociological game afoot in which they have no chance of competing much less winning. Their apparent haplessness is really ignorance of how the meritocratic world works. Theirs is a self-perpetuating world of unexpected event and unplanned response. They feel vaguely downtrodden by the system but can’t be anymore articulate about their condition, neither to themselves nor to their children. They know their failure but can’t pinpoint its origin and are not concerned more than that.

These people are objectively disadvantaged but not in terms of the usual genetic reasons - race, gender, physical deformity, ethnicity, or natural gifts. They are marginalised as non-participants who have no experience in the game. Able to ‘get by,’ but unable to hope much less aspire to anything else. As such they are the essential foundation of 21st century capitalism, the modern proletariat. Without them the Meritocracy would cease to function as a coherent society. The race for exam results, certificates, degrees, professional titles, and other credentials goes on in a parallel world around them while they flip burgers, answer phones, and sell plumbing supplies.

“Meritocracy speaks in terms and settings so consistent that they fashion a distinctive language, repeated across contexts, again and again—a form of life, familiar to every citizen of the age,” says Markovits. Well, yes and no. The Meritocracy does speak a language of passion, and personal service, and commitment, and human betterment. This is how players of the game recognise each other. It is the equivalent of the Latin of the medieval clerks who were expected to maintain certain articles of faith and express them in the correct way.

But to non-players, the modern laity as it were, such language is meaningless gibberish. Non-players are interested in a steady job not a vocation. They have little interest in saving the world, just paying for their small part of it. By the time non-players realise that the language actually means something, it’s too late to enter the game. They are trapped outside it as much as the players are trapped inside.

Players strive; non-participants float. Each, or at least some proportion of each group, endures their own sort of hell. The first, various sorts of disillusionments and disappointments; the latter, a fog of cultural bewilderment made bearable by non-brand beer and the rituals of American civil religion. But both are where they want to be. As with the old industrial class structures, there is little miscegenation and a considerable pride in one’s ‘roots.’

So if The Middle does contain important insights into modern sociology (and I obviously think it does), Markovits has made an analytical faux pas. Not everyone has been seduced by the promises of the Meritocracy. And those who haven’t been are perfectly alright with that. They live in a world that is a lottery rather than a contest, in which Providence not Competence is the ruling force. And there is a certain comfort in that, an almost Zen attitude that everything will somehow work out as the dice are rolled over and over again.

I doubt if anyone is in a position to decide which is the superior fate - to be controlled by one’s own ephemeral ambitions or by chance. The significant point is that there are at least two ideologies in operation, two games, not one. This is the source of the obvious political polarisation in America. Each considers the other to be adhered to by losers. Markovits characterises one of these ideologies well but ignores, or perhaps can’t even see, the other which is captured in The Middle.

America has more than one founding myth. Before the Enlightenment Deism of the majority of colonial American leadership, and even before the self-creationist Arminianism of the Methodists of the First Great Awakening, and the Baptists of the Second, the strict Calvinism of Puritanism held that striving for betterment was a blasphemous activity. One’s duty was to play out one’s given hand in obedience to divine directives. The thought that merit could improve one’s lot was a heresy. America was founded as a theocracy, a city on a hill of divine resignation. The Heck family, and, I suspect, many other Red State families, are living remnants of this more ancient American myth.

Markovits seems unaware of these other myths of origin and their continuing effects in modern life. Perhaps his lifelong immersion in Meritocracy, in which grace is self-created rather than doled out without any rationality from elsewhere, has created a condescension toward alternative ideologies that limits his understanding of a tragedy not his own. His book is a curate’s egg therefore - good and bad in parts.

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Foundation by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Life in the Garden of Letters

Foundation is a technological society which believes it can avoid its likely demise through the application of more technology. Even its ‘thought leaders’ believe their job is to preserve technological knowledge in anticipation of the impending dark ages.

But everything they think they know about the past and their projected future and their role in both is false. The question they face is: can a new purpose into which they have been manipulated by their ancestors as well as by current events be accepted as their own?

What does it mean to accept such a purpose which appears to be already determined? To fake participation in an inevitable fate? To promote technology as a sort of religious cult? Is anyone really in charge? Democracy, to which Foundation is ostensibly committed, is a fickle and unpredictable form. What is approved today may be cast aside tomorrow.

Asimov’s understanding of science and imaginative story-telling makes him a credible writer. His ability to incorporate perennial questions of human import - including the moral and political - into this understanding makes him a great writer. Dealing with our inheritance of what is usually called culture, or tradition, or simply the past is a difficult subject to think about. Does it matter? Can anything be done to overcome an historical trajectory? Or do we have some sort of cosmic duty to conform to its demands?

Perhaps there is a Plan after all. If not God’s then one very astute scientist’s. And perhaps it involves keeping as many of us alive as possible to carry it out. The essence of this Plan is not taking action until the only action to take becomes clear. The only decision in such a strategy is the refusal to take a decision. Who knows. Could be. The result could hardly be worse than the rationalised missteps of arrogant political leaders or the volatile preferences of the democratic mob.

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The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Defeating Time

I recently rebuked Robert Coover for considering hypertext a modern literary invention (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Electronic technology may have given the genre a name but the idea and practice of hypertext has been around quite a while. I gave the example of the Bible as just such a text. And in his The Garden of the Forking Paths, Borges provides the conceptual rationale for hypertext 80 years ago. He also identifies its primary function: defeating time.

Like all hypertext, The Garden of Forking Paths is appropriately biblical. It has a beginning but presumes some sort of prior sentient existence; so really starts in medias res. And like the Bible, the story is about “A labyrinth of symbols,” whose interpretation is not given by the text. The book of Genesis has time as the first creation (the primordial separation of light and darkness). So quite understandably, Borges makes his “An invisible labyrinth of time.” And the labyrinth is, of course, a book.

The clear anticipation of the Multiverse, in which quantum effects continuously create alternative worlds is obvious:

“In all works of fiction, each time the writer is confronted with choices, he opts for one and discards the rest. In the inextricable Ts’ui Pên, he opts—at one and the same time—for all the alternatives. By so doing, he creates several futures, several times over, and in turn these proliferate and branch off.”

Sequentiality, therefore, takes on a new meaning. No longer does it imply merely ‘one thing after another.’ In Borges’s Garden, it means ‘everything after everything else,’ which is circular. On the one hand, there is no beginning since eventually all recurs. On the other, any point in the cycle can be considered a beginning, a place at which to jump on the carousel of existence: “... each is a point of departure for other branchings off. Now and again, the paths of this labyrinth converge.”

So the story in the story is “a vast riddle, or parable, about time.” Among other things, this conception resolves the paradox of eternity. If time is linear, it must have a beginning, and therefore by definition excludes eternity. The circularity of time in the Garden is authentic eternity, containing everything that could possibly happen within any slice of it. Good and evil are relativised not just to each other but to existence itself. They are both there and not there.

Thus the “unceasing remorse and weariness,” of the protagonist who feels intense pride as well as regret in his accomplishment. Not unlike Yahweh who decided that perhaps all was not that good in his creation just before initiating his exterminating Flood.

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The End of Books by Robert Coover
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Biblical Hypertextuality

In 1992 Robert Coover wrote this piece for the New York Times. It’s a report about how technology, particularly the invention of hypertext which allows jumping from one piece of writing in the middle of another, affects fiction. Coover taught a course at Brown for two semesters on the subject and his students produced some interesting results.

Coover observed at the time that “The most radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create.” Who could argue: If you build it they will come after all. Almost 30 years on, however, it is clear that the game of hypertextuality is a niche sport. Those who came were neither the most talented writers nor the most discerning readers.

And like many commentators on technology, Coover got the past wrong as well as the future. He thinks, for example, that “print can be transformed into hypertext, but hypertext cannot be transformed in print.” There is at least one ancient literary document that contradicts him: the Bible.

That the Judaeo-Christian Bible is a hypertext in print can hardly be denied. True, enough, both the oldest and the newest portions have been ‘frozen’ in time, but only after uncountable interpolations, edits, corrections and redirections carried out by innumerable writers over years, decades and centuries. Much of biblical exegesis is concerned with unraveling the bewildering webs of complex internal references, morphing themes, and poetic allusions contained in the document.

Biblical hypertextuality is more than structural. Just as Coover’s students discovered the joys of writer/reader interaction in their own creations, biblical engagement obliges enormous interpretative energy by the reader. The fact that so many diverse, often contradictory, interpretations have been produced, and continue to be produced, makes the point conclusively.

So, once again, perhaps there is not that much entirely new under the technological sun. Mainly, it seems, rediscovery of things we forgot we knew.

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The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When All Else Fails: Read the Instructions

It is a principle of psychotherapy and religious conversion that the need to change one’s views about life does not become compelling until all other attempts to get things to ‘work’ fail. The remaining option is unpalatable but unavoidable. Breakdown is a necessary condition for repair.

Žižek has an interesting though paradoxical take on this principle in The Courage of Hopelessness. Everywhere in the world, socialism is in retreat. Global capitalism has never been healthier in its manipulative exploitation of those who benefit through it as well as those exploited by it. The political Left is in disarray and probably prefers the status quo in any case. There is no coherent alternative intellectual argument on the horizon which might impede the further expansion of capitalist self-interest.

So, guided by the established principles of psychotherapy, religious conversion, and the general aphorism ‘when in a deep hole stop digging,’ it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect some sort of intellectual reversal by Žižek, at least a modification of his long-term Marxist analysis. Bot no, instead world events, for him, point more urgently than ever to the truth and usefulness of communism as an explanation of these events and as an ideal around which to rally for world betterment.

Don’t get me wrong: I admire Žižek’s intellect. His resistance to the idea of immigrants as the new proletariat, his defence of European culture as the source of anti-colonialism as well as the original malaise, his mistrust of academic and bourgeois Leftists as mere ‘jobs worth’ types concerned more with ideological credential rather than the political fate of the world are all things I can agree with.

But Žižek’s unmitigated devotion to Marxism seems to distort his considered observations about the way the world is. His response is more of the same that he has been preaching for decades: “The task confronting us today is precisely the reinvention of communism, a radical change that moves well beyond some vague notion of social solidarity.” Note: a reinvention of communism, an adaptation of the same underlying theory of the physical alienation of human beings from themselves.

But as he documents in his own arguments, people apparently want to be alienated from whatever Žižek thinks they really are. The proletariat seems to resolve itself into those who, for the moment, find themselves outside the protective bubble of capitalism. But capitalism is inexorably sweeping in these outliers. It is avoiding the mistake of that other global European institution, the Catholic Church, by accepting entirely local customs and traditions and transforming them into brands and desirable objects for sale.

For those already inside the global capitalist bubble, Žižek can only plead for a raising of consciousness about the ‘objective’ situation: “Our ethico-political duty is not just to become aware of the reality outside our cupola, but to fully assume our co-responsibility for the horrors outside it.” Sure, that’ll work. Just look at the great successes of the Green movement in changing national environmental policies. Their progress depends as much upon convincing folk of their own direct interests as any other political party. And what is there left but “ some vague notion of social solidarity”?

Perhaps I’ve missed it in my intermittent reading of Žižek’s work, but nowhere can I recall an admission of error, the recognition of an intellectual mistake that he regrets making, an apology for a lack of understanding or for misdirecting the understanding of others. He continuously returns to the same tired tropes of Marxism just as evangelical Christians harp endlessly about the real, the authentic, the eternal message of the gospels. His attempts to reinterpret Marxist doctrine as if a century and a half of ideological ‘experimentation’ has never taken place is just silly. Perhaps other people are reading a different manual.

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Surreal Numbers 
by 

Donald Ervin Knuth

 

BlackOxford's review 

Feb 19, 2020  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: american, epistemology-language, mathematics 

Also Sprake JHWH

All words in a language, all symbols, all operations that can be performed in the language are contained only within the language itself. That is to say, languages are self-defined; their elements are constituted by other elements of the language not by not-words outside the language. Language is therefore a circular affair. Or, more optimistically, language is helical. It refers to itself endlessly and gets more expressive as it does so as it builds upon itself.

Expressive of what? Of itself of course. This is what makes language so astounding. It makes the most amazing things out of... well out of nothing but sounds and marks. And it envelopes those who use it in a potentially infinite artificial universe. This infinite character of its creation is temporal as well as spatial. No one is sure when language started. Although we know it must have had a beginning in the development of life we call evolution, it nevertheless appears that it has always been there, waiting to be discovered. Before its discovery, nothing is thinkable. And it could exist forever, like viruses continuing in an inanimate state until encountering some organism which has been prepared for it. If language is ultimately annihilated, we will never know about it. There is literally no future, as there is no past or present, without it.

This appearance of eternal existence promotes the idea of language as divine. Indeed, for many it seems to logically necessitate the idea of god itself. And language can make a credible claim to creating the world. But it does so, as in other aspects of the evolutionary process, out of the chaotic material which is already available. The point at which words emerged from the chaos of not-words is indeterminate. But the Book of Genesis is probably as good an account of the event as any. Knuth thinks so anyway.

By analogy with the emergence of DNA, perhaps language appeared as a consequence of a chemical combination as a simple instruction set from which a linguistic edifice could be built. And perhaps it is within this instruction set that the first ‘word’ was chemically contained. The instruction set operated on this strange new chemical object and self-referentially produced other words that congealed around the first, analogously to a planetary system, into an extensive language.

All this is only a theory of course. But its a theory that fits very well with Knuth’s tale of the development of surreal numbers. These numbers are not surreal because of their properties, which are more or less the same as other numbers, but because of their origins. They are produced (or explained, the distinction is largely irrelevant) by a self-referential process in which all numbers are defined in terms of not axioms, or elemental definitions of ‘units’ but in terms of each other.

Knuth lays out two rules in his fictional account of surreal numbers:

“This shall be the first rule: Every number corresponds to two sets of previously created numbers, such that no member of the left set is greater than or equal to any member of the right set. And the second rule shall be this: One number is less than or equal to another number if and only if no member of the first number's left set is greater than or equal to the second number, and no member of the second number's right set is less than or equal to the first number." 

Thus surreal numbers simulate the development of all language. They are the result of combinations of yet more primal numbers, which are in turn generated by yet more primal numbers, which may well include the numbers one started with. Circularity for sure but with that distinctive helical twist of increasing complexity characteristic of all languages. The key of course is in the instruction set, the algorithm, which ‘bootstraps’ its own development by ‘positing’ that which it then develops. And what it posits is, quite literally ‘nothing,’ the null set {0,0}.

Knuth’s two rules are exceptionally clever, but they may require a particular mathematical set of mind to grasp fully. The novel is clearly meant to help in easing the reader into that state. Even then the basic self-referentiality of Knuth’s rules may seem disconcerting. Because they are exactly that. Recursive logic shakes the foundations of all foundational thinking. It tears the fundament out of fundamentals.

This might be easier for most folk to appreciate in words rather than numbers. Take the word ‘fact.’ In simple terms ‘a fact is a thing known or proved to be true.’ If one were to follow each of these definitional terms back through the Oxford English Dictionary, and make substitutions along the way, the definition of ‘fact’ that would emerge is as something along the lines of: ‘a fact is that which is not contradicted by any other fact.’

This derived definition is no more or less correct than the initial one. It merely demonstrates the necessary circularity of language, a circularity which the derivation of surreal numbers in the language of mathematics makes obvious as a sufficient condition for all languages. It also indicates why an appeal to facts in an argument always begs the question of what constitutes such a thing.

Knuth’s fictional explication of surreal numbers is based on the original mathematics of John Horton Conway (JHWH, or Jehovah of the novel) who also wrote a dozen or so serious books, as well as at least that many very serious games including the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.

 

Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World 
by 

Lawrence Goldstone (Goodreads Author), 

 

Nancy Goldstone

 

BlackOxford's review 

Feb 17, 2020  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: american, biography-biographical, church 

The Origins of Brexit

Ideas have consequences. Some of these are detrimental to human welfare and should be resisted as a matter of principle. Others are merely conceits which are of no real consequence except for those who hold them. Suffering, even dying for, ideas of human importance might seem extreme but at least has an understandable purpose. Doing so for an abstraction suggests petulance rather than conviction. But human beings can apparently rationalise the most bizarre and self-destructive behaviour.

The Holy Trinity, the idea that there are three distinct ‘personalities’ in one God, is central to Christianity. It is an idea that has only the vaguest biblical support for such a radical alteration to the Jewish monotheism from which it arises.* It is also a logical contradiction which took several hundred years of theological debate to clarify, only to have it designated a ‘mystery of faith.’

The most interesting thing about the idea of the Holy Trinity, however, is that in itself it is entirely without human consequences. Certainly it is a mark of Christian identity; and its affirmation is a kind of tribal signal exchanged among believers. But it is as abstract as the equations of quantum mechanics and considerably less useful. It has no ethical, organisational, or other practical import. It doesn’t even have any of the emotional significance of, say, the Virgin Birth or the drama of the Resurrection. It is the damp squib of Christian doctrine. It wasn’t even formally commemorated until the establishment of Trinity Sunday in the 14th century, and even then not as a first class liturgical celebration.

So the Holy Trinity is among the class of ideas which includes such popular items as Platonic Forms, Cardinal Orders of Infinity, and the Higgs Boson. These are the kinds of things that get side bars in Popular Mechanics not prime time network specials. Except for a rather small number of specialists, the Trinity is either a vaguely poetic representation of an ancient divinity, or it is a term of reproach (as in the holy trinity of wine, women and song). And yet from time to time folk get exercised about it, both pursuing and suffering violence in either defence or attack of the doctrine. Why?

I think that although the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is intellectually and morally meaningless, it is the symbolon, that is, the token of Christian faith in its most nakedly nationalistic form. Indeed, it is because it has no discernible content that its affirmation is the perfect test for proving the faith of an individual. A willingness to believe an absurdity for no other reason than it is required for membership in a group, a congregation, a society is a typical price of entry to all civilisations. Roman society insisted upon the divinity of the emperor; Soviet society on the supremacy of the proletariat; American society on equality before the law.

It is crucial that this sort of token be not just above empirical verification but above moral debate as well. “We hold these truths to be self-evident... “ puts what follows beyond not just facts and logic but also right and wrong. It is clear that the participants in the 4th century Council of Nicaea had exactly this intention when they formulated the doctrine using language that was not just ambiguous, but that could imply the opposite of what it meant in one language (Greek) when it was translated into another (Latin). The doctrine was from its origin primarily a political not a theological statement, meant to maintain ecclesial, and therefore imperial, unity, that is to say, power.

Into this finely crafted and archaic political minefield stumbles the brilliant and brilliantly naive Iberian theologian, Michael Servetus, in the midst of the Protestant Reformation. This is a period when everything about Christian doctrine appears to be up for grabs. So everything is questioned and much of it is rejected, including the legitimacy of papal authority. What Servetus doesn’t comprehend in his youthful enthusiasm, however, is that, without the previous ecclesiastical hierarchy, the only real remnant of Christian Faith is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. So he sets out to show it is wrong - unbiblical, illogical, and used to justify a self-seeking institution.

Servetus was, of course, correct. Anyone with a grain of historical understanding knows he is correct. The Nicaean documents are a fudge, a hoax. But in arguing his case as if it were a matter of right and wrong, Servetus was attacking not just an institution but an entire civilisation that had depended upon an obscure political compromise, a treaty really, that he was determined to ‘out.’ He was right and aimed to get everyone else to admit it. This could not be tolerated. The desire to be right often has this effect.

So he wrote a book. Not a great book. But a book which questioned the value of the civilisation which was to be reformed. This was intolerable.** Even his most radical fellow-reformers had a visceral reaction to his ‘unitarian’ conclusions and rejected him as... well as what? Nominally as a heretic; but then during the Reformation virtually everyone was a heretic of one sort or another. No, he was rejected as a traitor, a betrayer of what would ultimately be called the ‘European Project,’ or more accurately the continental version of this ideal. So John Calvin had him done in.

And they’re still fighting the same battle in the same place, Strasbourg, 400 years later. Nigel Farage, I suspect, escaped by the skin of his teeth. As I said, ideas have consequences... but not necessarily the ones we expect.

* The ‘components’ of the Trinity are traceable, at least poetically, to the Hebrew Scriptures. God the Father is recognised by Christians as Yahweh, at least in his more benign moods. There are many prophetic Sons of God scattered around as well, one or more of which might be a messiah, including Jesus (although the claim to divinity is a knockout). The Shekinah or Spirit of God as a manifestation of the divine presence on earth is frequently noted from the time of creation and throughout the history of Israel. The idea of Wisdom as a separate manifestation of God is also floated but Christians have tended to appropriate this as Mary, the mother of Jesus. Islam is theologically constructed with a similar poetic bricolage.

**The various Anabaptist sects originating in this period also strayed unwittingly into a political no man’s land when they thought they were discussing theology. They too were relentlessly persecuted not so much for heresy as for rejecting the idea of a Christian civilisation.

Abel Sánchez by Miguel de Unamuno
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Tragic Sense of Prose

I keep forgetting that interesting philosophers often write uninteresting fiction. Philosophy just doesn’t promote good literary technique. Different skill set. Or perhaps the philosophy was that interesting to begin with

Because Unamuno abjures an omniscient narrator, Abel Sanchez is mostly he said/she said dialogue. The only interior reflections occur as diary entries out of synchronisation with the ‘action.’ There are no contextual descriptions to indicate where conversations take place or any behavioural cues, given for the characters. Their demeanour is certainly a part of what they mean, but the author ain’t saying. Only some sort of ideology would prevent revealing this to the reader. The overall result is a kind of play script with no stage directions; or, even worse, talking heads in a television interview.

Each chapter is an artificial set piece conversation - between Abel and Joaquin; Joaquin and Helena; Abel and Helena; Abel, Joaquin, and Helena; Joaquin and Antonia, etc, etc, until the logical combinations are exhausted. The existential situation of each in relation to each of the others is made tediously clear. There is a definite childishness exposed in each of these conversations, progressing into a sort of teen age angst. The conversations never reach the level of adulthood. People who talk like this need therapy.

Unamuno presumably is revealing himself through these conversations. I can understand why I was attracted to him in my adolescence. Clearly I identified with his celebration of his own, largely self-generated, confusion about life. This piece is a sort of literary recruiting poster for the hormonally-challenged. Harry Enfield’s Kevin cones to mind.

The story line itself is common if not trivial: Boy meets girl; boy loses girl to best friend; boy swears and plots revenge. The effects of jealousy are passed down through generations. The two lead characters apparently have no lives outside their obsession with each other. Their pathology follows a lock-step progression which is tragic but driven more by emotional inertia than by passion. Theirs are merely misdirected emotions not the emergence of irresistible primal urges that represent the secrets of consciousness, fate, and the divine. This is chutzpah not authentic, unavoidable suffering.

One of Unamuno’s philosophical themes in much of his work is that we create the God we search for. Searching for the wrong God, that of jealousy for example, results in death (so do all the others but Unamuno prefers not to think about that as too painful). I am uncertain if this is true, but it certainly produces deathly prose.

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The Ages of the World 
by 

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, 

 

Jason M. Wirth (Translator)

BlackOxford's review 

Feb 15, 2020  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: favourites, german-language, epistemology-language, philosophy-theology, science 

The Language of the Heart

The Ages of the World is a great mystical treatise that rates with those of John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Meister Eckhart (and Spinoza and Seneca depending upon how one views mysticism). As philosophy, it is a self-acknowledged failure. As a documentary of the agony involved in approaching an experience of unmediated reality, it is probably unsurpassed given the more than 20 versions which Schelling obsessively drafted over decades. He knows throughout his experience of accumulating and expressing knowledge that “knowledge consists only in not-knowing.” What more concise statement of his mystical intent could there be?

But the Ages of the World is also an exit from the genre of religious mysticism and and entry into its modern secular replacement, existentialism.* The transition is painful, primarily because it becomes clear through Schelling that the barrier to an appreciation of reality, which mysticism has always attempted to overcome, is precisely the instrument used by science and philosophy in trying to capture reality and tame it: language itself. This is clear in the subjugation of even being itself to its expression:“Being (das Seyn) as such can never be the one that actually is (das Seyende), but for this reason there is no pure being, no empty objective something that has no trace of anything subjective in it.” In other words, what is must be named in order to be seen to be, but naming robs it of its being - a sort of a generalisation of the future Heisenberg Principle in quantum physics.

Language is a virtual reality in which we hide from the terrors of life outside language. The reality outside language is a frightening darkness whose truth we really do not wish to know. Wirth points out: “The danger science brings with it is its implicit identification of simulated reality with true reality.” Language, including the language of science and philosophy, constructs and controls. It imposes order and allows us to tell ourselves stories about a progressively developing past, and a benignly unfolding future. Language is unlimited power. But language has a crack in its power structure. Through language we become aware of a mode of behaviour - love (apparently defined as the submission of one’s will to the interests of another) - which does not employ power and eliminates fear, so making power unnecessary.

Thus Schelling engages in the obviously paradoxical effort to reveal the true “language of the heart.” This is his personal dialectic of contraction into language and subsequent expansion through its negation. Unity, real being which can be identified by the suffering involved, exists only on that passing moment between one version and the next. He wrote, and rewrote, only to begin again and again but never publishing Ages of the World. How could he publish since the language of the heart had the same impulse to power as any other language? But how could he stop writing when both he and the rest of humanity needed to understand what was at stake?

As the translator notes in his introduction: “The importance of his work was something he so deeply felt that he could only be disappointed, over and over, at his inability to articulate it appropriately.” Schelling had the same problem that the ancient Hebrew prophets had: he couldn’t express what needed to be expressed to an audience who didn’t want to hear what he had to express anyway. His own experience demonstrated the bankruptcy of whatever he had to say. Both he and God were trapped in existence. Although he never quite makes it explicit, God’s existence is language itself so that “nothing can exist outside of God.” God has put himself in the hands (and the mouth) of mankind from whence God controls the existence of Man.

Schelling is a name that represents German Romanticism. But that classification masks the depth of the man’s personal reaction to his own intellect. He had been shaped by the Age of Enlightenment, that period during which constraints placed on language by the Church, civil authority, and traditional philosophy had been largely removed. This meant freedom - of speech, of writing, of ideas. Unless, like Schelling, one pushed the conceits of freedom to demonstrate their real effects. At that point it became clear that it didn’t matter very much who was nominally in charge. Language itself was running the show. Again as his translator notes, “As was already clear to [Schelling] as a boy caught up in the fervor of the French Revolution, the political fantasy that a new world order could be established simply by replacing those in power is just that, a fantasy.”

This is a tragedy, the explanation for which is beyond human comprehension. It can only be expressed in mythical terms. The eternal separation in the Christian Trinity of the Father (contraction) and the Son (expansion) who are mediated by the communicative Spirit of Love is one version. Another is that of language as the eternal god Cronos (later to become the eternally-threatening Time Lord of Dr. Who). Language, that is to say Cronos, is the creator of time as the god struggles with primordial nature to generate his own birth. His children are human beings whom he consumes.** We submit to his demands because he promotes our stories of resurrection and eternal life. It is this dialectic of death and resurrection that maintains Cronos’s power. It is the origin of time as well as of the divine becoming.

So Schelling did not abjure Enlightenment. But he recognised that the freedom it generated for ideas had uncovered yet a more fundamental constraint on human freedom which had a remarkable resemblance to Original Sin. Language is an abyss of unfreedom. We are born into it. And we can do nothing to escape it. We cannot even be alone with ourselves since it mediates between experience and reflection: “there are two beings, one that questions and one that answers,” Schelling says with a mixture of pride in discovery and philosophical regret. The true-believer grasps on to language as firmly as any monk did to his doctrine of the Trinity or courtier to his self-interested commitment to the divine right of kings. 

What Schelling offers is not a nostalgic return to the old time religion, but a vague hope that love might in some way undermine Cronos’s structure of power in language in a sort of ecstasy of self-surrender. Such has always been the goal of mystics. And the world does not treat them kindly for it. Neither does Cronos who continues to devour them at breakfast.

* Not to mention an anticipation of Darwinian evolution and the not unlikely poetic inspiration for relativity theory and quantum physics a century in the future.

** It is interesting to note Schelling’s critique of the idea of ‘eternity.’ He recognised it as an oxymoron. On the one hand, if time were not part of Creation, it is by definition God. If it is part of Creation, then it has a beginning. Cronos exists as his own dialectic, language consuming itself. It is appropriate therefore that the Egyptian god Osiris is depicted consuming his own tale. Thoth, the divine inventor of writing assisted in the resurrection of Osiris and the subsequent birth of Horus who is a key figure in the justification of pharaonic power. Christianity cuts through the dialectic with its eternal Word, promoting language itself to divine status. The birth of dogmatic religion and idolatrous faith in language.

Philosophy of Mathematics by Oystein Linnebo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Better Than the Super Bowl

Numbers are words. Numbers exist in the same way that other words exist, namely when they are used in speech or writing. That is to say, they are neither objective nor subjective but inter-subjective. Numbers are names which refer to themselves, and there are specified ways in which numbers may be used with each other. This is their syntax. Like all words, numbers are defined by other words. This is called their semantics. Words are the only things we really know about. We know most about numbers because they are more precisely defined than other words. When we use numbers according to the specified rules, we are able to discover relationships among them, many of which are unexpected. These discoveries constitute the pragmatics of numbers.

This is a summary of my philosophy of mathematics. It is simple, easy to comprehend, comprehensive, and probably wrong. I say this because people far more intelligent than I have agonised over the existence, meaning and practical effect of mathematics without coming to a consensus. I cannot understand why this is so. Linnebo chronicles the last two hundred years or so of philosophical agony about numbers largely through a focus on one man, the German Gottlob Frege. Frege devoted much of his life to proving that arithmetic was entirely rational, that is, that it could be derived from indisputable first principles. He failed.

He failed for technical reasons involving necessary self-contradictions. But some forethought might have suggested that his failure was inevitable for other reasons as well, namely that there is no, and cannot be any, privileged language no matter how well-defined that language is. Language is its own representation. There is nothing beyond or outside of language that can be used to demonstrate its integrity. The logic of any language is contained in its syntax and cannot be gainsaid by reference to any logic applied from outside of itself.* The logics among languages may differ but they cannot be compared in order to determine which is superior. This is the ultimate conclusion of the mathematician Kurt Gödel, who finally killed Frege’s project as a matter of principle.

One implication of my philosophy of mathematics is that by using numbers we submit to them, their syntax, and their semantics in order to experience their pragmatics. No further justification for engaging is mathematics, it seems to me, is required. Nor is there any deep mystery, except perhaps psychological, about why we do this. Submission to mathematics, like submission to any language, is the giving over of one’s life to a society, namely that group which jointly participates in it. To use numbers is not to associate with the gods as the ancient Greeks thought. It is to associate with each other, to accept the judgments of each other, and to be recognised for furthering the implicit social project of the language of our association.

It strikes me as more than odd that Linnebo as well as the mathematicians he analyses simply ignore their own social dedication in their language of choice. The primary pragmatic consequence of mathematics is membership. Membership is achieved even in the failure to achieve any other result in mathematics. So, for example, Frege, and Bertrand Russell and even Gödel continued to ‘speak’ mathematics knowing that it is as ‘flawed’ as any other language. It may not be the key to understanding the universe; but it is nevertheless beautiful, intriguing, seductive, and it is most of all a way to spend a harmless afternoon with friends. Certainly better than watching the Super Bowl for those who prefer words to physical violence.

* This applies to the ‘dialects’ within mathematics as well. As Linnebo points out, the logic of Frege was very different from the logic of Kant for example.

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