Gerald's Party by Robert Coover
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Playing Monsters

As with life, the purpose of the eponymous party is unclear. A celebration? A recurrent fixture? The start or finish of something? The narrative starts without context. So the point seems to be the revelation of the character of the party-goers, of which there are many. A genealogical chart would certainly have helped to relieve a relationship complexity worthy of Tolstoy.

Events in the party pass very quickly from trivial chit-chat to the far more serious matters of sex and death. The apparently much used and abused body of young Ros is discovered lying just below the level of conversation. Police are summoned who, while conducting a somewhat bizarre investigation, beat Ros’s hysterical husband to death with croquet mallets.

Meanwhile the party re-gains lost momentum. Drinks are distributed, canapés prepared and served, splattered blood from Ros’s wound washed, wiped and laundered. Vignettes of the various flirtations, copulations and other sexual adventures throughout the house are described in detail.

I’m guessing there is a large metaphor lurking just beyond my conceptual reach. Perhaps this party is the world for Coover, with all its damaged inhabitants. Or is Ros a sort of goddess of language, passed around and exploited mercilessly? Time puts in an appearance as a sort of running joke. The incompetence of the police team suggests a criticism of the institutional establishment of society. Or is it that Coover wants to shake the reader Into “the restless paralysis that always attends any affront to habit”?

“We’ve been playing monsters,” the title’s Gerald says to his young son at one point in order to explain his disheveled appearance. And that seems to me the key to the book. People are more or less monsters. This only becomes clear when you get to see them drunk and in large groups. In vino veritas indeed. Or is it just too sophisticated for my rustic temperament?

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That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Of Heads and Brick Walls

I like David Bentley Hart’s Christianity. He gets rid of much of the faded superstition and residual clericalism that pervades most discussion of the religion by its protagonists. But it is certainly David Bentley Hart’s Christianity, not anything like an interpretation that sticks with orthodox views. One is compelled to the conclusion that Hart is trying to change Christianity, or at least the Eastern Orthodox segment of it, from within. This leads to an i\important question: Why on Earth bother?

That All Shall Be Saved is a repudiation of an ancient and consistently held Christian doctrine: Some will be saved and some will be damned forever in eternal torment. There has never been a serious deviation from this principle throughout dogmatic history. It is one of those ‘tensions’ or contradictions in the teaching of Jesus that no one has ever been able to unravel. How his life ‘shed for all’ and ‘redeeming all of creation’ excludes some portion of humanity is one of the Christianity’s arcane mysteries, the secret of which is known only to theologians.

And according to most Christians, that portion of the damned is indeterminately large. The Jehovah’s Witnesses reckon only 144,000 will make it to the heavenly promised land. Catholics are a bit more generous but are still sure that unbaptised folk are doomed; and even those officially licensed into the club will have to measure up to behavioural standards. Some theologians like to stretch the point by including ‘anonymous Christians,’ that is, folk who act as if they were even though they’re not, in the final tally. But still, entry into the Kingdom is conditional upon getting rid of the stain of one’s sins here on Earth. Mormons are more into outreach and like the idea of baptising the dead retrospectively one by one as long as they can get their names on file. And certainly very few Christians will admit to wanting to encounter Hitler, Caligula, or Charles Manson on the other side.

Hart doesn’t agree with any of this. He thinks that all this stuff about Jesus’s unconditional love and infinite divine mercy means what it says on the tin: we’re all bound for glory. But he’s got a problem beyond dogmatic tradition. The originary documents of Christianity are pretty clear about the matter. The gospels hint strongly at the doom that awaits the stiff-necked. Pauline fire and brimstone has been the foundation for much of the later interpretations. And the mysterious but almost pornographic description of the everlasting torments of unbelievers in the Apocalypse is very clear (as is the limit on the number of the saved to 144,000).

And, of course, Hart has an even bigger problem when it comes to that mighty figure of the God of the Old Testament, purported to be the loving father of Jesus. This vengeful psychopath blows hot and cold on the whole idea of Creation as well as his decision to allow the existence of self-conscious beings capable of independent thought and action. This is a deity who demands only one thing - absolute obedience. And if he doesn’t get it, he is not averse to wholesale, indiscriminate slaughter. While the intellectual breakthrough to the concept of eternal damnation hadn’t been made by the ancient Hebrews, it was there in nuce waiting to grow into Christian fruition.

Hart does his best to bob and weave through this quagmire of theological principles and scriptural sources. But he knows that his is not just a minority view, it is also probably heretical. He acknowledges this explicitly: “I find it a very curious feeling, I admit, to write a book that is at odds with a body of received opinion so invincibly well-established that I know I cannot reasonably expect to persuade anyone of anything, except perhaps of my sincerity.” Then why the effort and sufferance of the expected criticism in writing such a book?

The answer seems to be that Hart is desperately trying to square the circle of Christianity. The infliction of punishment, eternal or not, is not a consistent part of the job description of the God of the Beatitudes. If virtue is its own reward, why is not evil it’s own penalty? If an omnipotent, omniscient, divine entity intended to either create or re-create a world with fewer design flaws, why has this God proven so consistently incompetent? Reasonable questions from any reasonable person. Mostly they are answered with platitudes or an appeal to divine inscrutability.

But there is a rather broader issue that Hart implicitly raises but dare not touch. If, in his considered opinion, Christianity has been distorted by the doctrines of punishment and damnation, what other traditions and interpretations have been similarly distorted and so similarly “have created in the minds of most of us a fundamentally misleading picture of a great many of the claims made in Christian scripture?” What is the real ‘content’ of Christianity after it has been stripped of its political, mythical, and fictional elements? Indeed how are these elements even to be distinguished in the historical melange of Christian thought?

As a doctrinal system of belief, once one element in that system is removed the entire structure of Christian belief shatters. The system does not offer a buffet from which to choose at random. It is, of course, possible to select elements to which one is amenable - heretics, reformers, and dissidents have done so since the religion’s inception. But such selection then involves the creation of a new dogmatic system, a sect, which is equally vulnerable to heresy, abuse, and dissent as the original.

As I said: why on Earth bother?

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The Enemy by Christopher Hitchens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Abiding Evil

This is Hitchens’s anti-eulogy on the event of Osama bin Laden’s death. Its obvious purpose is to counter the strange cult which had emerged even among some in the intelligence community that Osama was a principled if misguided gentleman. Whether this view is still shared by any of those who remain sane is questionable. So it is a bit dated. On the other hand, can there ever be enough reminders that there is nothing easier than the construction of stupid narratives about true evil. And more than that, Pakistan, another Hitchens target, remains one of the more duplicitous countries on the planet. Given the competition, that says quite a lot.

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Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not My World

The key to a first class suspense thriller is the hint that something important is about to happen. If what happens then suggests something even more important already has happened, the reader is cornered, dead meat. Mix in a little quasi-science and it’s human fly-paper. The compulsion to stay until events are explained is almost overpowering. Crouch knows the drill and sets a man-trap with the best of them.

The thing is that everyone knows the science is bunk. The characters are cut-outs from bodice-rippers supplied with minimal intellect to pass for upper middle class strivers. The narrative is packed with coy denials of relief. And the real mystery is how the author is going to resolve an entirely impossible story line in anything like a satisfactory way (spoiler: he doesn’t). The central idea is intriguing. But it’s a film script that depends on mood music and fast-action cuts not a novel. Mind-porn.

I’m sure the contracts have already been signed. Watch for the ‘Coming Soon’ adverts. For all I know it’s been and gone in the theatres already.

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Perfidious Albion by Sam Byers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

High-Tech, Low-Thought

Whatever else advanced technology pretends to be, it is mainly a way to get ahead, to advance oneself beyond the lesser hoi polloi who know nothing about its mysterious trade. The whole point of technology is that it prevents serious discussion of anything - including itself - by creating an arcane genre. Consequently the technology permeating our world is not so much an instrument of corporate or personal power as it is a disease invading the minds of its promoters, a vector for stupidity.

It’s easy to forget that modern technology is profoundly procedural. It is a bureaucracy in a box that demands precise conformity with its rules. Those involved with technology are, or at least become, obsessively conservative. Their lives depend entirely on keeping everything exactly the way it is, on following the rules laid out by technology. This, of course, contradicts their self-image as dynamic changers of society. All they really want is a bigger share of the pie. They volunteer as cogs to get it.

None of this is new. Like everything touched by human desire, modern technology has been rationalised as ‘transformative,’ ‘life-enhancing,’ and ‘socially revolutionary.’ It is none of these things. And the folk who spout the gospel of technology aren’t very different from those television preachers who promise immediate and eternal prosperity in return for ten bucks a month. They want your mind in order to get your money. So they fill your mind with nonsense to create an opinion-sphere.

The opinion-sphere operates according to the law of increasing spiritual Entropy. The more opinions posted on blogs, emails, YouTube, and message apps, the greater the spiritual Entropy. Intellect becomes increasingly uniform so that actual communication decreases. Intellectual work, that is to say, thought, is impossible because there is no information differential. What remains is the background radiation of deceitful self-interest, pursued relentlessly... and pointlessly.

Am I mistaken or does Byers read like a 21st century Charles Williams?

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Jesus in Asia by R.S. Sugirtharajah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Eastern Gospels and the Fetish of Language

Most literate people know about the so-called ‘lost gospels,’ perhaps as many as twenty accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus written within one or two hundred years of his death but which weren’t officially approved for inclusion in the New Testament - the gospels of Thomas, Mary, Judas and so on. However many of these were never entirely lost. Some found their way in fragments into the canonical gospels. Others were suppressed but never entirely forgotten.

All of these texts have an important cultural commonality among themselves. Even if they provide contradictory interpretations of the meaning of Jesus, they originate from a similar matrix of religious and mythical background. Babylonian legends, Egyptian concepts of the divine order, the pantheons of the Semitic patron gods, and Greek theology, cross paths to produce conflicting and complementary narratives about Jesus that are specific to what we usually call ‘Middle Eastern’ or ‘emerging European’ culture.

But there is also a very different literature of Jesus that developed entirely outside this culture. Strictly speaking the elements of this literature are not gospels but lives of Jesus written centuries after the canonical gospels. Nevertheless they are authentic interpretations of his life made by and for an audience embedded in cultures entirely divorced from that of their predecessors. Among other things, these ‘Eastern gospels’ demonstrate just how culturally specific the older documents are.

Among the oldest texts interpreting Jesus for alien cultures are those of Chinese missionaries and Persian monks of the 7th and 8th centuries. But it is clear that “the type of Christianization that happened in the West could not be replicated in the East... Chinese and Indian cultures at that time were too powerful to be simply dislodged.” The existing cultures had to be incorporated into the message of Jesus (or vice versa). So the manuscripts mix the teachings of Jesus with contemporary religious thought in a highly creative melange (Western critics of course term this unorthodox syncretism). The emperors of both China and India were not only open to a new religious teaching but also, at least for the Chinese, officially endorsed it: “It is right it should spread throughout the empire.”

Much of the material in these texts is drawn from sources which also underlie the official gospels - the Virgin birth, the guiding star, angelic appearances, etc. But the embellishment is noteworthy - the precise time of day of the birth of Jesus (in Jerusalem not the unknown place of Bethlehem), Jesus’s first words (spoken at the age of five!), and other legendary points of intimate detail which have about the same degree of (un)reliability as those in the canonical gospels. The texts want to tell a believable story but without the Jewish or other cultural baggage which would be merely confusing to their audience.

Much more interesting is that Jesus is not seen as superior or a substitute for other religious teachings but as an amplification or complementary manifestation of the divine. According to Sugirtharajah,

“Jesus is described variously as the ‘King of Dharma,’ ‘Radiant Son,’ ‘Compassionate Joyous Lamb,’ and ‘The Great Teacher.’ The honorifics often used for Sakyamuni (a name for the Buddha that referred to his Shakya clan origins), ‘Honored by the Universe,’ ‘World Honored One,’ as well as, in a more direct and radical move, one of the Chinese names for Sakyamuni, shi-zun, are also employed for Jesus.”

Jesus it seems is considered as Buddha’s brother not a religious rival.

The Chinese texts make it clear that Jesus makes the divine perceptible to human beings. But they reject the idea of his divinity: “The Messiah is not the Honored One. Instead, through his body he showed the people the Honored One.” This is consistent with the so-called Nestorian heresy of the 5th century but the humanity of Jesus is emphasised even more forcefully than in Western Christian circles: “Anybody who says ‘I am a God’ should die.” There is an obvious resistance to idolatry which would make Moses as well as the Buddha happy here.

There is also a strong component of what in the West is called negative theology, the discussion of what God is not, inherited from the Hebrew tradition. But here it is obviously of Buddhist origin:

“The Sutra’s conception of God resonates with the Buddhist idea of the emptiness and the incomprehensible nature of God: ‘The holy One of great wisdom (is so invisible as to be) equal to Pure Emptiness itself.’ In the end, God is beyond all human understanding: ‘God cannot be grasped’ and the Sutra reiterates the invisibility of the divine: “Nobody has seen God. Nobody has ability to see God. Truly, God is like the wind. Who can see the wind?’ The God of Jesus is ‘beyond knowing, beyond words’ so that no eye can see your form or your unclouded nature.’”

While Western theology pays lip service to these same ideas, it then goes on to ignore its own advice by creating rather speculative concepts of the precise nature of the divine.

It is clear therefore that the fundamental presumptions about the character and function of the divine do not correspond with what emerged in Western Christianity:

“The Semitic God has been replaced with the Buddhas or the great invisible emptiness that manifests itself in the Word as Spirit or Wind. The name of the Buddha is called on frequently in the Sutras: ‘When people are afraid they call upon Buddha’s name;’ and it is in the ‘Buddha’s nature to bestow grace, and with this grace comes also a deep, clear understanding that lifts us above folly.’”

Jesus is perceived as a source of grace, that is to say, encouragement and support in time of need, not as an evaluator of worthiness, certainly not as a judge.

This is not a religion of faith and its correlate of doctrine. It is one of trust, particularly one of trust in the natural world. Quoting the Chinese text itself, the author makes the point:

“Consider the earth. It produces and nurtures a multitude of creatures, each receiving what it needs. Words cannot express the benefits the earth provides. Like the earth, you are at one with Peace and Joy when you practice the laws and save living creatures. But do it without acclaim. This is the law of no virtue.”

While this is not incompatible with Jesus’s official ‘lilies of the field’ speech, the emphasis is dramatically different. This is not about plants but the entire cosmos. It is not God who reveals but Nature who demonstrates the good life. And the message comes with an ethical not a theological kicker: ‘take care of each other and the world will take care of you.’

There is no eschatological message in the Eastern interpretations, no Kingdom arriving at the end of time with punitive judgement raining down on humanity. Rather the kingdom is already available within oneself:

“Instead of offering a message with an eschatological dimension, the Sutras offer the Buddhist idea of mindfulness. Jesus’s parable about a house built on sand, for instance, is turned into an example of mindfulness: ‘When we lack mindfulness, we are like someone who builds a house out of ignorance . . . The wind comes and blows it away.’ The principal emphasis seems to be on the transformation of the self through conquering desire...”

There is strong evidence that this ‘inculturation’ of the teachings of Jesus worked rather well, not as a separate and competitive system of belief (such a concept would apply only in the West). But as a synthesising expression of spiritual thought:

“The Jesus Sutras reflect the importance of the ‘luminous religion,’ as the Chinese called it—an intricate, sensitive faith that is supple enough to incorporate Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucian thinking and yet retain its religious identity and distinctiveness.”

In light of European dogmatism, however, such an achievement was considered an unorthodox and therefore evil interpretation.

There is enormously more interesting material in Sugirtharajah’s book, including very intriguing comparisons with later Western evangelical texts intended for Eastern audiences. The entire ensemble he presents makes it clear not only that the fundamental presumptions about the nature and role of religion differ dramatically between the two cultures, but also that the origin and trajectory of development of Western Christianity is dominated by very specific, and largely forgotten, cultural issues.

For example, the meaning of ‘salvation’ in the East is purely a personal matter. It certainly has no relevance to cosmic redemption within a culture which did not consider itself to have immersed itself in a sin requiring expiation (an obvious paradox if the original creation was ‘good’). And while there is a recognition of another, spiritual world to which Jesus is pointing, there is no corresponding denigration of this world implied in the Eastern interpretations. Salvation, to the extent it is achieved, is present here, in us, and around us.

Many more explicitly religious presumptions are implied in Sugirtharajah’s analyses, which also include later responses by Western theologians and expansionary interpretations by modern Eastern thinkers. But I find that underlying these is is what we would now call an epistemological postulate that captures much of the difference of the existential attitudes of European and Chinese/Indian thought. Eastern interpretations of Christianity quite explicitly reject the idea of Pauline faith.

The Eastern interpretations, in line with their view of the inscrutability of God, downplay the idea of Jesus as the Word of God in John’s gospel and do not present their own writings as the literal words of God. God is “Pure Emptiness” which cannot be captured linguistically. To presume that words are capable of defining anything of the divine would have been blasphemous. In the tradition of all mysticism, the interpretation given even in these texts is relativised by the limits of language and human cognition. Jesus is seen as instructive, as holy, as an example of being human that somehow involves divinity. But there is no intimation that believing him to BE anything in particular is essential for spiritual health. The emphasis is on individual spiritual growth and ethics not faith.

And because Pauline faith has been dropped (or ignored) in the interpretation, there is no need for subsequent dogmatic development. The issues of orthodoxy simply don’t arise. Language itself is perceived, in good Buddhist tradition, as an impediment to salvation/enlightenment like any other worldly attachment. It is the Western devotion to language which I think creates the most salient difference to Eastern interpretations. Put succinctly: European Christianity from the perspective of the East has made a fetish out of language and built a religion around words. It needn’t have been so. Alas it has been.

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Zorro by Isabel Allende
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Perennial Saviour

An ancient people has been conquered by a foreign empire. Now subject to the arbitrary justice of the imperial representative, the locals are being pressured to abandon their religion and worship the god of the invaders. Among them a man of nobel lineage takes a wife. Together this man and woman produce a son who is devoted to truth and justice, a righter of wrongs, a saviour... a messiah. Sound familiar?

Well there are certainly many elements of the Christian myth. But Batman, his sidekick, and their cave is also in the picture. What child could resist? Add the background of the magical land of California when it was still Spanish and the romantic density is overwhelming. The Prisoner of Zenda, another favourite at age 10, fascinated for the same reasons - exotic location, noble heritage gone wrong, the possibility for justice in a fallen world.

So as a YA adventure novel, Allende’s Zorro is top notch. But if you’re already fully cooked emotionally speaking, and not into nostalgia, there’s not much there. Magnificent cover, however.

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The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

American Inferiority

One of the many paradoxes of the American republic is its self-image as a risk-taking, pioneering, adventurous people. Yet it is none of these. America’s timidity and uncertainty about itself is demonstrated most forcefully in its obsession with religion and its use of religion as a political force. As Katherine Stewart says, the recent turn to the divine has very little to do with religious doctrine, and absolutely nothing to do with Christian ethics. It is a political movement, the purpose of which is to create a feeling of certainty, particularly an existential certainty about American worth, for individuals as well for the nation. As she puts it, the current state of a plurality of Americans have “a longing for certainty in an uncertain world... The movement gives them confidence, an identity, and the feeling that their position in the world is safe.”

But this is not a new phenomenon, neither the uncertainty nor the response to it. America was founded on a deep spiritual uncertainty and a cultural obsession with safety. And it has a traditional way to deal with both: racism. While racism is a by-product of a more subtle malaise stemming from American religious history, it is the symptom through which the underlying disease can be accessed. This, I think, is what is missing from Stewart’s book. Without a recognition of the sociological/spiritual source of the problem, it only appears that the current state of American politics is the result of relatively recent events and concerns. And this is not the case.

It is, of course, misleading to view America religious movements in terms of doctrinal disputes. They have always been political, and always motivated by uncertainty expressed as fear. The so-called First Great Awakening in the mid-seventeenth century British colonies did not incidentally occur contemporaneously with the Stono Rebellion of slaves in South Carolina and the Slave Conspiracy in New York City. These were profoundly disconcerting events. Simultaneously with these revolts, indigenous peoples presented a persistent threat to New England and New York while they were allied with French. Race is what drove white colonists into the revivalist tents. Reassurance was what was sought and received: they belonged and they would prevail, together.

Following a series of post-Independence rebellions in the new United States, which shook the country’s confidence in itself, the Second Great Awakening coincided with intense national debates about the slave trade and the enactment of the fugitive slave laws. The traditionally symbolic event of the movement is the meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1800. The location is not insignificant. From the time of the American Revolution, there had been continuous warfare by the white settlers with the native Shawnee and Cherokee residents of Kentucky. Cane Ridge was effectively an evangelical Te Deum for victory over the natives, and a celebration of continuing white supremacy in the region.

The Third Great Awakening in the defeated Confederate states corresponds to the period of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. This is the period of ‘Jim Crow,’ the attempt to reverse Emancipation and maintain black serfdom into the 20th century. Church attendance was entirely segregated. Fear of black political power provoked intimidatory pressure on the black churches to refrain from political involvement. According to one leading historian of the period, “,,, in the racial climate of the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, ... inter-racial spirituality was considered to be 'unchristian' and 'immoral'.” Inter-marriage among races was prohibited by law in Southern states, with widespread approval from the churches. The complicity of Christianity in the attempts to maintain racial dominance is undeniable.

The 20th century version of these movements is Christian Fundamentalism. Named after a series of essays published just prior to World War I, Fundamentalism, has proven attractive to nativists, racists, and radical evangelicals ever since. The second Ku Klux Klan with its gospel of white nationalism is one of its more prominent artifacts. But so are the racial prohibitions in 20th century Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Pentecostal sects.

The new ‘radio preachers’ of the 1920’s and 30’s like Billy Sunday, and later Father Coughlin, were covertly sympathetic to the Klan and overtly racist in their own views. Even into the 1950’s, the most notable inheritor of the revivalist tradition, Billy Graham, would not take a stand against racism. To the degree that main stream churches succumbed to ‘liberal’ attitudes towards race, radical evangelical emerged to minimise race as an issue, diverting national attention to ‘moral’ issues of abortion, same sex marriage and their version of religious liberty.

Of course, each of these episodes is an arbitrary designation for what is a really a single and consistent culture of fear not religious conviction. There is a similar pattern in all of these historical examples. First, race is rarely mentioned as a motive or a subject of renewed religious fervour. However, neither is Christian doctrine. Aside from the allusion to ‘fundamentals’ in the 20th century (which ultimately could not be agreed upon in any case), concerns about orthodox doctrine were matters for the leaders of these movements not their followers. The attempts to explain persistent popular appeal of religious enthusiasm by reference to doctrinal repair or recovery is ludicrous. Ordinary Christians simply have no idea about the relative merits of double predestination, the number of the saved, or the Virgin birth.

It is historically obvious that American Christianity is a tribal affair. Each of the movements outlined above is an act of reinforcement of (white) tribal solidarity. They all cut across sectarian and associated doctrinal differences. And they very clearly provide comfort in times of social stress. And this stress is always dominantly that of race. James Baldwin attributed American racial attitudes to an inherent feeling of impurity, of inherent and irredeemable sin. I think he’s correct. This is an inherited spiritual condition which instinctively seeks a spiritual therapy. Hence the perennial attraction of the revival, the anti-intellectual jamboree of pure feeling among like-minded, and troubled, souls. The tradition of the revival serves both to hide and to justify racial fear.

Racism typically manifests as fear of the Other. However, it is actually fear of the Self that is at issue. In anti-Semitism, for example, it is clear that ‘The Jew’ has never referred to any Jewish person. It is a construct which is useful to confirm Christian identity by negation, and to simultaneously deny the fear of not being among the arbitrarily chosen group to be spared eternal damnation. Recall that strict Calvinism is the ur-religion of America. This fear of exclusion from membership among the saved is an essential part of the American religious legacy. The relative paucity of the Jewish population on which to project this fear was solved by the presence of the imported black man.

It should not be surprising that race is not an explicit topic among those participating. To admit the issue of race would raise the suspected impurity to the level of consciousness, something far too painful to contemplate. And since theology is simply an alien discipline, the vocabulary used is one of vague ‘values,’ which are to be upheld or recovered. Reading the transcripts of sermons given by the great revivalists from Whitefield in the 17th century to the various mega-preachers of the 21st, the persistent emphasis is consistently on either Pauline faith in the advice of the preacher or the unfortunate influences of ‘alien’ elements in society. These elements are rarely mentioned by name. But they are demons who certainly do not resemble the upright white folk who are part of church-going society. They are black, brown, or red, usually with identifiable accents.

My point is raising the history of Christianity in America is that religion has always been a matter of nationalism in the country. Indeed, religion has always been the principle mode of expression of this nationalism. The network of Christian churches traditionally has formed the political glue holding the republic together. This network has typically controlled local government, including the education system even before independence. And it has always been supported by ‘average’ participants as well as large benefactors. The use of modern technology to communicate within these networks is incidental.

Christianity in America appears more fragmented into sectarian factions than any other country on the planet. Yet intellectual issues of doctrine always give way to the need for political unity in order to exert power. And the one issue that is persistently central as the catalyst for this unity is race. Racial domination is the source and goal of power in America. That the country is deeply disturbed is not an issue. This is not a new condition; it has been so from its roots. Racial fear has been passed along from generation to generation as its principle cultural legacy.

So, I can’t agree with Stewart that “The roots of the present crisis in the American political party system lie at the juncture of money and religion.” The roots are psychological, or, if you prefer, spiritual. Money and religion are merely responses to a feeling of inferiority which is unacknowledged. The country blusters and obfuscates, especially in religion, because it feels unsure. The most visible proof of that feeling is the country’s persistent racism, which acts not as compensation but distraction from the feeling of inferiority. Confronting the religious façade with this fact, continuously and forcefully, is, I think the only hope of doing anything about it.

Postscript 16/11/200: Still going strong: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/op...

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The Kekulé Problem by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Acquiring Linguistic Immunity

The psychologist Carl Jung held that the unconscious is indistinguishable from reality. Although he is approaching the issue from an entirely different direction, Cormac McCarthy agrees. The unconscious shares something essential with what we casually call reality. It is beyond language, beyond our ability to express.

Every animal has an unconscious. It’s their internal operating system. “If they didn’t have an unconscious, they’d be plants.” The unconscious is much more primitive in evolutionary terms than what we call the consciousness we experience. That doesn’t make it less intelligent no matter how intelligence is measured. But it has a hard time with language: “...the fact that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether—even where they would appear to be quite useful—suggests rather strongly that it doesnt much like language and even that it doesnt trust it.”

“Why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.” Is is a question Freud didn’t ask and therefore implied an evolutionary inferiority of the unconscious. McCarthy suggests that language is a non-biological and consequently non-evolutionary, infection that found a comfortable and unoccupied niche in the human brain. Like a Coronavirus, it spread rapidly throughout the entire species. “Almost instantaneously,” he says, proliferating out of Southwestern Africa until we all had contracted the disease:

“The sort of isolation that gave us tall and short and light and dark and other variations in our species was no protection against the advance of language. It crossed mountains and oceans as if they werent there. Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it. But useful? Oh yes. We might further point out that when it arrived it had no place to go. The brain was not expecting it and had made no plans for its arrival. It simply invaded those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated... language had acted very much like a parasitic invasion.”

This upsets the unconscious which still controls almost all of what we do, including thinking. McCarthy is clear about this: “... the actual process of thinking—in any discipline—is largely an unconscious affair. Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived—a sort of milepost—so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.” Of what use therefore is this free-rider of language in human development?

The unconscious is a “process here to which we have no access.” It is a mystery opaque to total blackness. There is no doubt that it exists. And it does most things adequately. But what it doesn’t do at all very well is tell stories. “At some point the mind must grammaticize facts and convert them to narratives. The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that.” This is what gives language, and its mate consciousness, an edge. Consciousness can tell stories about the unconscious but not vice versa. This provides a tremendous social boost to the species. But this also seems to cause a bit of intra-personal resentment as the non-linguistic parts of ourselves are ignored. In short, language seems to be the direct source of our neuroses. So much for Freud’s ‘talking cure.’

So the unconscious pokes and prods with vague insights, dreams, and intuitions. McCarthy, I think rightly, judges that “Itʼs hard to escape the conclusion that the unconscious is laboring under a moral compulsion to educate us.” It is more or less constantly trying to correct the excesses committed through language. This is not the unconscious as Freud’s ‘dark side.’ The unconscious is the elder, and wiser, statesman who knows what’s good for us. And it’s not about to fight on unfavourable ground. “The unconscious is just not used to giving verbal instructions and is not happy doing so. Habits of two million years duration are hard to break.” So the unconscious sits and waits for us to run out of words, until we respect it enough to pay attention.

Jung likened our conscious selves to corks floating on an enormous ocean of unconsciousness. Allowing that unconscious to be transformed into language without compromising its integrity was his lifetime’s work. He also believed that the unconscious is what connected us to one another, to the past and in the future, something language only pretends to do. It seems to me that McCarthy is suggesting a renewal of this idea, and I can’t disagree.

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The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds by Alan E. Bernstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Threat of the Dead

It is easy to consider Hell as a strictly ideological concept, developed and used by religious leaders to intimidate believers. And this could quite easily be so especially in the advanced stages of Christianity. But Bernstein’s narrative also suggests another possibility. Historically, the dead have been a source of intense popular fear. Their presence among the living was suspect as the source of not just bad luck, but actual physical harm. Could it be that one of the compelling attractions of early Christianity was the taming of the power of the dead to inflict harm? Here are some thoughts provoked by Bernstein:

The dead have always been a worrisome lot, at least since the Babylonians started writing about them 4000 years ago. The possibility that they might remain in some way among the living is an understandable taboo. Proper disposal of the dead is not something to be treated lightly given either respect for family dignity or concerns about hygiene.

So mythologically the place of the dead has been particularly inaccessible, not primarily to keep the living out but the dead in. It seems the original Babylonian stories of this place are meant to define a kind of finality to death that wasn’t instinctively obvious to the populace. The living are unable to reach them. But more important, they are unable to affect the living. The gates of this underworld, in other words, are there for a very good reason - to keep the dead in their place.

It is apparently the Egyptians who raise the possibility that the dead could be helpful to the living and also that they might be subjected to retributive suffering. The reason for their punishment was made clear; they are doomed to “the fiery incarceration of opponents of a god who aids souls through death and is himself an example of resurrection.” The god in question being Osiris, the Great One, who provides an important trope of the dying and returning god for the Christian narrative (but interestingly not the Jewish one)

Horus, the son of Osiris (an interesting inversion of Christian doctrine) acts in a way worthy of the Christian book of Revelation: “My father having [once] been helpless hath smitten you, he hath cut up your bodies, he hath hacked in pieces your spirits and your souls, and hath scattered in pieces your shadows, and hath cut in pieces your heads; ye shall never more exist, ye shall be overthrown, and ye shall be cast down headlong into the pits of fire; and ye shall not escape therefrom, and ye shall not be able to flee from the flames which are in the serpent.” Unlike in the ‘loving’ Christianity, these torments are not said to be eternal, however. The villainous could return at anytime.

Such retribution for a divine victim seems to be the main concern of the Egyptians. But the underworld is also divided into zones which are provided for the dead depending on their level of devotion to particular gods. One thinks of not just the Christian division between Heaven and Hell, and still latter Purgatory, but also Dante’s nine circles. Whatever else is involved in the assignment of the dead to their places, the Egyptian believer may be assured that they will be protected against the dead by the gods themselves since it is their interests. But then again, how reliable are the gods, especially one who allows himself to be chopped to bits?

The Greeks were less fussy; they had two ‘compartments’ in the underworld - one in which the typical human soul wandered indefinitely; and another for the legendary losers of previous battles among the gods. This latter was placed at considerable distance from the habitation of the living; and it involved the restraint and torture of the so-called Titans. This idea “provided crucial ingredients within the cultural background out of which the concept of hell developed.” But, once again, how assiduous have the gods been in their security precautions. Who knows but that the continuing politics among the gods could allow the Titans and all the dead back into the world of the living.

But Greek culture also evolved a view that we can recognise as ‘modern,’ that is to say, Christian. Aristophanes’s play The Frog contrasts the fate of not those whom the gods find either respectful or offensive but rather either good or wicked. This shift from theology to ethics is arguably monumental and implies a greatly reduced cultural fear of the dead in favour of an attitude of moral judgement over them. Morality, in a sense, puts the dead under the thumb of the living. We judge them, not they us. Plato, himself was fascinated by the idea of postmortem retribution, not for impiety but for bad behaviour according to the mores of the day.

But the problem of the threat of the dead nevertheless remained, even among contemporary intellectuals. Ghosts, often vengeful, are a commonplace of late Greek and Roman culture. Cicero and Pliny took ghosts seriously, for example. Ghosts could do harm to the living either as ‘payback’ for bad behaviour or because of errors in the rituals of death carried out on behalf of the dead. Ghosts may also offer affection, but the fact of their possible existence remains disconcerting if not downright frightening.

The way in which these ancient myths evolved and were adapted, especially into the Christian cosmology, is fascinating. The Christian ritual of baptism, Christ’s descent into hell, the tortures to be expected there, and even the Resurrection are all ‘prefigured’ (as the evangelical apologists say) by the Babylonian and Akkadian stories of several millennia before the gospels. The idea of Graeco-Roman ghosts implies souls, and an after-life, and some sort of cohabitation of the living and the dead. All this seems a particularly auspicious time for the emergence of a religion which could coalesce this various cultural elements coherently.

While it is clear that the Christian narrative relies a great deal on these ancient myths, what Christianity does to these earlier stories is significant. Christianity domesticates, as it were, the land of the dead. According to Christianity, and later Judaism, the dead are our friends, at least those who have lived up to communal expectations. And the rest we don’t have to be concerned about. They are securely locked away in a heavenly Alcatraz, to which not even God has given himself a key. The Greek Hades and the Hebrew Sheoul share this characteristic segregation of the dead. But in Christianity, almost simultaneously with pharisaic Judaism, the dead are no longer considered “the life-devouring” but the life-promoting of the Jewish Avot Zachuth, the Treasury of the Fathers; and the Christian Communion of Saints.

I find the idea that we’re all in it together, not just those alive today, but those who have lived and those yet to be born, to be emotionally stirring even though I worry very little about contamination from contact with the dead. According to this ethos, it is a good thing that the dead mix with us - as sources of wisdom, as companions, as intercessionaries with the divine. Christianity makes an implicit distinction between ghosts, the spirits of the departed, and demons, unborn spirits who have gone astray. The spirits of the dead, the ones who are not condemned, are beneficial. The remainder are corralled and are harmless. So, while evil may always be with us, it is not the dead who are its carriers.

It occurs to me that this attitude toward the dead and its implications for the relationship with the dead are much more important for the success of Christianity than any abstract doctrinal assertions. Hell serves a therapeutic, or at least palliative, purpose as well as any intimidation it may provoke. Even today, no one but the professional theologians understand the meaning much less the import of doctrinal assertions. But to be given a reason to be comfortable with the continued existence of ones deceased friends, relatives, and ancestors is certainly easy to assimilate without need for further dogmatic explanation. ‘You are safe in Christianity’ is the appealing message, safe from not just death but also from the ravages of the dead. A winner of a cultural coup therefore.

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Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy by François Laruelle
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

A Struggle Without a Cause

Laruelle is a French academic philosopher (which makes him a celebrity) who does not want to fight... with anyone. Except those who claim to know reality... who are many in the philosophical community (and other places). With them he wants to struggle. Not to prove anything; such an aim would be fruitless. But to engage in the struggle. This is a struggle without reasons in the usual sense. Things like inequality, injustice, evil in general are not part of it. This is a metaphysical struggle. It is not based upon the material alienation of man as in Marxism. Laruelle is engaged in a rebellion, not for any particular reason but as a matter of principle. But this rebellion has nothing to do with the gnostic protest of the world as inherently evil, a view echoed in dogmatic Christianity which sees the world as needing salvation from such evil.

There may be inequities and injustices in the world. Indeed it may be that the world is inherently evil. What Laruelle objects to is the mere reflexive response to these conditions, either in offence or defence. “How to make of rebellion something other than a reaction of autoprotection against aggression? That is our question.”

This is a struggle “against the World and for the World.” The World in this case includes philosophy in all its historical forms, since the “World itself has a philosophical form.” Indeed, the World includes Reason as part of philosophy and as the conquest and defence mechanisms against which Laruelle is struggling.

It is clear that this struggle is about power, but not about either gaining or losing it. Rather it seems to be about continuously worrying about it in a way that many would consider neurotic. I admit to total bafflement, especially when confronted with page-length paragraphs similar to this:

[This radical struggle] is the vision-in-One of that struggle which is determined by Man who gives himself his reality and prevents it from returning to him, as to his self-sufficiency. When it is thus dual, but from a unilateral duality – a phase of struggle and one which is no longer of revolt but of human determination of revolt – it escapes from sufficient reason and makes itself a struggle-of-the-Stranger against . . . and for. . . the World according to a considered measure. We gain in this way from the most innovative practical part of Gnostic rebellion as well as from class struggle in order to gather with faith as so many simple aspects in the figure of Future Christ as subject-in-struggle.”

I think I have sympathy with Laruelle’s project; but I really have no idea what that is. I implore anyone who can précis Laruelle’s intention and argument without jargon to step up to the plate. You owe it to the world to tell us all whether this stuff is important or a very clever French confidence trick.

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The Decipherment of Linear B 
by 

John Chadwick

 

BlackOxford's review 

Mar 13, 2020  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: british, epistemology-language, greek, history

We Are What We Write

The world changed decisively in or around 776 BCE. Arguably the most important cultural event of European history took place then somewhere in the Greek peninsula. No, it wasn’t the mere matter of the first Olympic Games - although that may be connected. It was the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet, from which all other alphabets are derived. It is arguably this act that promoted the creation of European literature. It shifted an entire culture from one grounded on anonymous bardic legends to one of cosmic story-telling, led of course by the great Homer.

Writing itself in one of its various forms - pictographic, syllabic and alphabetic - had existed for several millennia before that point, but not really a literature. The 8th century breakthrough was the transformation of the Greek written language from one used for public administration, accounting, military reporting, and royal histories to one of everyday affairs. Language had suddenly become literature. And the first things written about in the new script were the legends that had been passed down verbally in the form of song. 

Linear B is one of the predecessor written languages to Homeric Greek. It was used in the Mycenaean civilisation in the late Bronze Age, perhaps as early as 1600 BCE. The Mycenaeans were in turn the successors to the Minoan culture, the first identifiable European civilisation, and adapted the Minoan writing system for use in primitive Greek. However until the mid-20th century, the fact that Linear B was a representation of Greek wasn’t even guessed at. Chadwick’s book is an homage to the young philologist who had the insight and professional skill to connect the linguistic dots which proved that Linear B was a form of Greek.

What is arguably more interesting in this academic saga, at least to me, is the cultural watershed created by the transition of Greek civilisation out of Linear B and similar scripts into an alphabetised system. Chadwick hints at the impact of the change when he says that this “writing changed much of the Greek way of life. not least its poetry.” My hypothesis, which I am entirely unable to support other than by deductive evidence, is that the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet had a dramatic effect on the way in which written language was used and the proliferation of its use within the population. I suggest that the later adoption of the Greek alphabet as a phonetic translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the Coptic language had similar effects.

Linear B had elements of all three forms of writing - ideograms like Chinese and ancient Egyptian, syllabic signs as in modern Japanese, and alphabetic components as in all European languages. Pictograms have the singular advantage of being entirely independent of pronunciation, and thus can accommodate diverse dialects while remaining intelligible among them. The disadvantage is that pictograms either limit vocabulary or require considerable skills of memory to use even in simple expression. Chinese children must learn something like 5000 pictograms to be fluent, for example.

Syllabic scripts have the opposite problem. They are tied tightly to pronunciation and therefore are difficult to use across spoken dialects. In addition, syllabic scripts become very complex if they are required to express the range of sounds possible in a language. English, for example has over 10,000 syllabic possibilities. 

As with Chinese, it is clearly possible to cope with these inherent limitations of syllabic script in the creation of a literature. Nevertheless, I suggest that the use of a phonetic alphabet provides a compromise between pictographic and syllabic writing. An alphabet is relatively simple to learn, can accommodate a range of dialects, and need not define each phoneme uniquely. 

The ‘simplification’ of Greek script from a ‘composite’ like Linear B, therefore, could have had significant benefit. Alphabetic script can mimic new vocabulary as it emerges, for example, and therefore include more and more non-official events. Eventually alphabetic writing can ‘capture’ bardic legends which had been purely verbal. Homer is the prime instance of this effect.

If I am in any way correct is this analysis, the process by which European literature was created is very different from that of non-alphabetic cultures. In a sense the development of an alphabetic literature is likely to be a more popular than a palace affair since it involves the written formulation of popular legend rather than the extension of official reporting. 

But there is also another, less advantageous, consequence of alphabetic literature. Official non-alphabetic records are directed toward ensuring truth, either by preventing errors in memory or by creating fixed records, usually of amounts. In short, this form of writing is meant to combat lies.

On the other hand, alphabetic writing is primarily concerned with story-telling, not with the recording of amounts or events but with the documentation of tales. While there is little chance of an ancient palace administrator confusing his records of the grain in the royal warehouse with the actual grain, there is every possibility that those reading the Homeric narratives consider them to be about actual events.

The telling of tales is not lying. But as the world has experienced repeatedly, some tales expressed in popular alphabetic script tend to be given a privileged status. Like the Judaea-Christian scriptures, they are considered more real than existential reality. These written records don’t inhibit lies; rather they are claimed as establishing truth.

My thought, therefore, is that the very process by which Greek (and therefore European) writing developed has to a significant extent created what might be called the ‘epistemological problem.’ This includes the rather persistent European involvement in dogmatic religion and its anti-social consequences. Essentially, we Europeans tend to confuse our words with things. In perfecting the Semitic invention of alphabetic writing, the ancient Greeks started us on a road of self-deception as well as self-discovery.

Proving perhaps once again that there is no free lunch, especially when it comes to culture.

 

Black Skin, White Masks 
by 

Frantz Fanon

 

A Psychology of Disalienation

Nominally a psychiatrist’s assessment of racial hatred from the point of view of the colonial residents of the island of Martinique, Black Skins, White Masks is actually a phenomenology of racism as relevant today as it was when it was published more than 70 years ago. What starts as an analysis of the effects of racism on its victims, blossoms into a poetic expression of being black, including the psychological progression through the various stages of escape from the numerous traps of self-image created by a racist society.

What holds the book together is a crucial recognition, namely that the source of racism and its operational mechanism is language. There is no question but that, as the author says, “White civilization and European culture have imposed an existential deviation on the black man.” But his analysis does not begin with a history of colonialism or slavery or their physical horrors. Rather language is his primary focus as the existential ‘operator’: “We attach a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language and consequently consider the study of language essential for providing us with one element in understanding the black man’s dimension of being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.”

It is the imposition of European languages on colonised people which establishes the abiding ground rules of racism. Inability to speak these languages is a mark of inferiority, even among those upon whom they are imposed: “the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets—i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being.” This is the hook which will never break free. Those colonials who do manage to master the master-language will even then be identified as the ‘remarkable black man who can speak French like a Parisian.’ 

Such success also has the additional advantage of fragmenting the colonial community into a hierarchy. Since there is obviously “mutual supports between language and the community,” the differential language skills within the colonised community provoke mutual antagonisms beneficial to the colonisers.

Fanon points out the generality of this phenomenon. It is not restricted to colonial empire: “Colonial racism is no different from other racisms.” The racism of America uses precisely the same linguistic tactics as that of France in Algeria and Madagascar and the Boers in South Africa.

Control of language gives the racist power over reason itself. This has the effect of alienating its victims in a particularly subtle but profoundly cruel way. The victim may be made to feel inferior physically, but he still has his mind. Nevertheless, “for a man armed solely with reason, there is nothing more neurotic than contact with the irrational.” 

So the more the victim of racism recognises the irrationality of his environment, the more likely he is to become mentally unstable. Fanon captures the feeling rather dramatically: “The white man is all around me; up above the sky is tearing at its navel; the earth crunches under my feet and sings white, white. All this whiteness burns me to a cinder.”

Fanon also recognises the role of religion, particularly the Christian religion, in promoting racism. He gives a personal anecdote to make the point: “Recently, one of these good French folks declared on a train where I was sitting: ‘May the truly French values live on and the race will be safeguarded! At the present time we need a national union. No more internal strife! A united front against the foreigners [and turning to me] whoever they may be.’” Values, our values, our traditional values are coded terms. They allow the racist to blame the victim for the racist abuse they suffer. After all, don’t they have an essential moral and spiritual defect? And isn’t this shown by their inability to profess religion properly?

Fanon’s summary of the psychological ‘system’ of racism could have been written by Janes Baldwin: “The black man wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man.”

The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion by Peter Hitchens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Good War Psychosis

Appeasement is the magic word, the killer app, the compelling knell of imminent doom in military policy debate. Use it and armed conflict becomes far more likely. Everyone knows that it was appeasement that started the war of 1939; that appeasement is something the world cannot tolerate faced with a Saddam, or an Khomeini, or a Kim Jong Un; that democratic electorates respond negatively to politicians who are accused of appeasement. The appeasement card is trumps when it comes to national policy.

That the events of Munich in 1939 involving Chamberlain and Hitler should have such permanent mythical significance in so many countries is remarkable. Those events are symbolic of the need for what has come to be called The Good War; and have been used repeatedly to justify armed conflict by democratic leaders ever since.

Hitchens has two central threads in The Phoney Victory. The first is that the narrative of the Second World War, particularly with regard to appeasement of evil but also extending to the ‘moralising’ of the conduct of the conflict itself, is largely mythical. The use of this narrative to justify involvement in subsequent conflicts is reprehensible and no more than manipulative propaganda on the part of government.

Hitchens’s second thread is that the lack of both diplomatic and military skill by several generations of British governmental leadership has been disastrous for the country. At almost every juncture, exactly the wrong decision has been taken. The result has been the loss of many lives and much treasure with no gain whatsoever. To call this outcome ‘victory’ is, for Hitchens, obscene.

Hitchens refers to the attitudes contained in the evolved narrative of war as a theology. As he says, “The theology of the ‘Good War’ demands a great deal of evasion, suppression and forgetfulness.” I think he is right to do so. There is a metaphysical component of this narrative which is obvious once stated. It pervades discussion in debates about NATO, the European Union, national boundaries and the motivations of national leaders.

The Good War is that which has divine approval. Despite the secularisation of society, such approval is still implicitly required for the exertion of armed power. Once such approval is claimed - by George Bush, Tony Blair, or even Vladimir Putin - the mythology of the 1939-45 War is set in motion. Young men and women are sent away to improve the prospects for the world. That such improvement never happens, seems to elude the grasp of the true believers in charge.

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Legends from the End of Time by Michael Moorcock
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Truth Meets Reality

There is a school of idealist philosophy which holds that truth is that which will be known just before the end of time. At that apocalyptic point, mind will have grasped all that is possible to understand. Religious folk call this point the eschaton, the end of the world at which God will be revealed, a view which has the same practical import: truth finally will coincide with reality.

Moorcock takes this business of the eschaton seriously. Well, seriously in a somewhat slapstick way. A time traveller and her young son undertake an educational jaunt as far into the future as their machine will take them, that is until it runs out of time. What they find there is simultaneously expected and disconcerting.

On the one hand, just as would be anticipated by any scientifically based society, the universe is clearly suffering its inevitable heat death. Entropy rules. And it is clear that the mere existence of human minds has accelerated this process. The energy differentials of even the most distant galaxies have been tapped relentlessly to maintain the physical requirements for thought.

But what the time travellers don’t expect is that truth has not emerged at all in the way they had expected. As quasi-Puritans whose lives are regulated by an encyclopaedia of maxims, they are shocked to find that the human beings at the end of time are engaged in a kind of free-for-all block party. The ‘neighbours’ are wildly diverse in the ‘truths’ they hold; but they are joyously united in their diversity. Reality, it turns out, has properly been a matter of opinion.

The most disturbing aspect of this diversity (or uncertainty, if one prefers) is the pervasive hedonism of the final world, particularly as it is represented in art. Eschatological tastes apparently run from the kitsch to the classical, from the banal to the bizarre. In fact what little energy differential that remains is expended on spectacular air shows and other ostentatious communal displays. Humanity (consciousness, thought, rationality, mind - whichever one prefers to call the phenomenon) is going out with a bang, as typically wasteful of its resources as it has ever been.

The implication is clear. This is the point of it all, of existence. The authentic eschatological vision is one of artistic fecundity, of wildly different interpretations of existence, just for the sake of it. By the time of the final Trump, as it were, we will all be artists, each with our own unique appreciation of reality. Truth will not converge to some tedious uniformity but rather explode into eccentric, ephemeral splendour.

In Moorcock’s vision humanity is finally at ease with itself and with its fate. There is no disease. There is no fear, even of the impending End. “Evil is a word, an idea, which has very little resonance at the End of Time,” says one of its chief residents (except of course the “pale imitation of art”). There is no violence, only a light-hearted tolerance of the inherent strangeness of others. As eschatological visions go, this one seems rather attractive. As one of the end-time characters says: “What a splendid ending,”

But for those unprepared: “Beware the Future.”

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The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Gini in the Bottle

If you don’t have it already, you ain’t never gonna’ get it. Following on Thomas Piketty’s by now famous analysis of the increasing concentration of wealth in capitalist society (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...), Walter Scheidel credibly argues that it has always been so. Economic records stretching back to great antiquity show that those who have always get increasingly more than those who don’t. In fact the wealth distribution in the 21st century is probably about the same as it was in Egypt of the Fifth Dynasty.*

The problem, it seems, is not capitalism but agriculture, the rule of law, and social organisation of any type: “... after our species had embraced domesticated food production and its common corollaries, sedentism and state formation, and had acknowledged some form of hereditary property rights, upward pressure on material inequality effectively became a given—a fundamental feature of human social existence.” So the price we pay for a stable society is a more or less permanent state of material inequality.

Importantly, there appear to be no social policies which have ever successfully reversed the trend toward the concentration of economic power. Democracy doesn’t do it. Education and freedom of opportunity don’t do it. Taxation doesn’t do it. Technology doesn’t do it. Socialism certainly doesn’t do it: “Even in the most progressive advanced economies, redistribution and education are already unable fully to absorb the pressure of widening income inequality before taxes and transfers.”

The only thing that does do it, that interrupts the apparently inexorable flow of wealth to those who already have wealth, is disaster. Not economic disaster, per se; the rich weather stock market, currency, financial and commodity jitters better than most. It takes real disaster - extended warfare, deadly plague, civil revolution, and the abrupt dissolution of government - to make any significant difference in the long term trends in material accumulation. According to Scheidel, “Across the full sweep of history, every single one of the major compressions of material inequality we can observe in the record was driven by one or more of these four levelers.”

Unfortunately Scheidel offers no theory of how to deal with the situation, something which suggests that his analysis, although astute, is less than useful. In fact, despite his professed admiration for the work of Piketty, Scheidel’s conclusions imply that Piketty’s work too is sterile, that aside from one or more of the four disasters, there is no remedy for what is perceived as a growing problem. The rich, it seems, are always with us.

And as the rich get richer, they get more arrogant, more powerful, and arguably more corrupt. Religion and ideology have failed to alter the situation. Even armed revolt, disease, and environmental upheavals have only temporary inhibiting effects on the historical trajectory of economic inequality. Could this be the one economic law which is universal and invariable?

It appears therefore that the ancient Greeks, for whom disasters were a challenge to virtue rather than a tragedy, knew something that we don’t, namely what the Dutch philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7... ) put it so laconically: “... war and happiness are inseparable...” Perhaps Homer, and after him Heraclitus, and much later Hegel, were right. War indeed might be the father of all things; or at least of all things economic. What hapless beings we are.


* Measured particularly by the Gini coefficient which indicates the degree of income and wealth concentration within a society. Scheidel’s analysis of the merits and flaws of this widely used measure is worth the price of admission to the book, if for no other reason than its revelation of the mind of an economist.

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The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius 
by 

Pierre Hadot, 

 

Michael Chase (Translator)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Mar 09, 2020  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: french-language, biography-biographical, philosophy-theology, epistemology-language 

Note to Self: Don’t Be a Dick

I find a comparison of the conversion experience of Marcus Aurelius with those of St. Paul and St. Augustine irresistible. Nothing shows more plainly the effect of Christianity on Western culture. More specifically, Christianity created a cult of language which the world has been trying to overcome ever since. Marcus Aurelius has left a legacy in hisMeditations of what the world is like without that cult.

Saul of Tarsus was knocked from his horse, spent several years in meditation, presumably among followers of Jesus, emerged as Paul, and then came up with the startling idea of faith, a religious category unknown among Greeks, Romans, Jews or any other religion practised among human beings. This faith required accepting the story he told about Jesus as incontrovertibly true (this was minimal; the gospels had not yet been written and he had no first hand knowledge of Jesus). The practical implication of Paul’s idea of faith was, and remains, the establishment of a language superior to human intellect to which intellect must submit.

The experience of Augustine of Hippo is less dramatic but has an underlying similarity to that of Paul. Augustine during a period of acute psychic distress hears a child's voice telling him to "take this and read it.” This is in response to his recognition, probably already inspired by Paul, that his life had become a habit he was unable to break. So he reads in Paul’s letter to the Romans to “behave decently.” But this can be achieved according to Paul only by “clothing yourself in the Lord Jesus Christ,” that is by unquestioning belief in Paul’s story about Jesus.

Marcus Aurelius also had a conversion experience in his mid-20’s, quite possibly at about the same age as Paul and Augustine. By tradition, this experience was provoked, as with Augustine, by the reading of a letter. Crucially, however, there was no voice urging him to do so. He already was an avid reader and had what we would call today a spiritual director in the Stoic philosopher Junius Rusticus. The content of the letter by a Stoic philosopher dead more than 400 years concerned fine points of the law. Yet it had a profound effect on Marcus, causing a complete upheaval in his life. But exactly opposite to that of Paul and Augustine.

Instead of adopting an attitude of anything resembling faith, Marcus suddenly relativises everything he has learned, that is to say, all the language he has assimilated about life principles, philosophical doctrines, and spiritual methods. He is abruptly and decisively wary of language. He makes this clear to his mentor as he reports his intentions:

“To have had some idea of the need I had to straighten out my moral condition, and to take care of it. 
That I did not let myself be dragged into sophistical ambition, or to compose treatises on philosophical theorems, to declaim fine exhortatory speeches, or, finally, to try to strike my audience's imagination by parading myself ostentatiously as a man who practices philosophical exercises, or is generous to a fault. 
To have given up rhetoric, poetry, and refined expressions. Not to walk around in a toga while I'm home, and not to let myself go in such matters. 
To write letters simply, just like the letter he himself wrote to my mother from Sinuessa. 
To be disposed, with regard to those who are angry with you and offend you, in such a way as to be ready to respond to the first call, and to be reconciled as soon as they themselves wish to return to you. 
To study texts with precision, without being content just to skim over them in a general, approximate way; and not to give my assent too quickly to smooth talkers. 
To have been able to read the notes taken at the courses of Epictetus, which he lent to me from his own library.”

Clearly Marcus has come to a realisation that behaviour toward one’s fellow not knowledge of purported truths is the crucial core of ethics. Language of any kind whatsoever cannot substitute for the actual relationship one has with others. Actions not words are the substance of ethics; and ethical actions can only be achieved by acting. Even the genre of the Meditations reflects a suspicion of language. It is not a thesis, or a memoir, nor even a complete story, much less a gospel. The Meditations are ‘merely’ notes to himself, reminders. Much of the content is directly precisely toward the self-encouragement to act rather than think correctly. For example:

The best way to get even with them is not to resemble them (VI, 6). 
Leave your books alone. Don't let yourself be distracted any longer; you can't allow yourself that any more (II, 2, 2). 
Throw away your thirst for reading, so that when you die, you will not be grumbling, but will be in true serenity, thanking the gods from the bottom of your heart (II, 3, 3). 

Here is the contradiction for Pauline faith. We have no word for it, but it represents an ethical attitude which is remarkably close to that of James the brother of Jesus and of Judaism in general. It is neither atheistic nor agnostic. But it is deeply human and humane. It typifies what ancient philosophy was about, namely how to act not how to think. Behaviour is what matters. One might use ideas to arrive at or explain correct behaviour but the ideas are always subsidiary to the behaviour. Pauline faith is fatal to such an ethic. The world of the second century was on a cusp and had no realisation of it. Very soon it would plunge into the ethical abyss of faith. We only have Marcus’s notes to himself to remind us what the world could have been like.