Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World by Eduardo Galeano
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Memoriam

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Just as I was finishing this book today, my closest friend, David, succumbed to the virus at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. The two events - completing the book and David’s death - reinforced the simple reality that there is no cure for the human condition. We are bound together by the facts of suffering and death, something we may only be aware of during a crisis such as the one we are now experiencing collectively. And isn’t this condition, as Galeano writes, paradoxical in the extreme? As we are compelled to distance ourselves from one another, we become closer. Perhaps, therefore, his hope can infect us all: “the despairing shall be paired and the lost shall be found, for they are the ones who despaired and lost their way from so much lonely seeking.” David had devoted his entire life to this same hope.
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The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Better Hope

Anthony Hope, John Buchan, Erskine Childers, and Eric Ambler stole my youth, or at least its imagination. They taught me two important things: that rumours were probably true; and that the world was culturally English (or wanted to be). The first piqued my boyhood interest in conspiracy; the second provided reassurance that conspiracy would be thwarted by virtue. Both these things turned out to be false. But I have no regrets about believing either.

No one seduced me more effectively into the British Empire and its self-image than Ambler. His characters carry the Union flag like a beacon into the murk of foreign intrigue. They mingle but never assimilate. Their integrity is tempted but doesn’t waiver. Local cultures are appreciated, but with a certain off-hand dismissal of unfortunate inferiority. What Ambler writes about of course never existed, never for the nation and rarely for its citizens. But it does represent a cultural ideal which is mightily attractive to a twelve-year old, and even now to an old man.

The England of Ambler and all the others disappeared forever shortly after The Mask of Dimitrios was published in 1939. The Empire not long thereafter. Nevertheless the ideal lives on in their books, one of educated awareness, self-contained confidence, and a certain poise which might be mistaken for courage. It is to be regretted, I think, that this ideal was to be transformed into the likes of Fleming’s James Bond and the scheming denizens of Carré’s London Centre. Or am I just yearning for youthful hope?

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The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men: A Cultural History by Paolo Zellini
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

An Abuse of Mysticism

In their arguments, conspiracy theorists and religious fundamentalists reveal more about themselves than about their point of view. Sometimes so do really enthusiastic academic mathematicians like Zellini.They all typically want to make the point that the rest of us are persecuting them. What makes some mathematicians so defensive about their subject? Are they victims of derision on the street? Do their academic budgets suffer because of underestimation of their intellectual worth? Or did they just feel unloved as children?

Whatever the reason for the apparent existential crisis in mathematics, the solution proposed by books like this one is ridiculous. Zellini wants us to know not just how important mathematics is but also how real it is. For him mathematics is so real that it permeates the universe. It is a force that exists quite independently our thinking about it. And he wants us to appreciate this reality as much as any evangelical preacher wants us to believe on the Lord.

Zellini’s specific grievance that there is “distorted image of mathematics as a merely linguistic game” (He doesn’t name names, but you know who you are!). He wants us to accept the fact that the language of mathematics is spoken everywhere throughout the cosmos if we only listen carefully enough: “... ancient arithmetic and geometry were beginning to assume the role not so much of describing or simulating real things as offering a foundation for the very reality of which they were a part.”

So for Zellini, mathematics is the most real thing there is: “... we are faced with a great mass of knowledge [in mathematics] designed to capture the most internal and invisible – as well as the most real – aspect of the things that exist in nature.” This should give mathematicians comfort. The things they do are essentially revelatory and spiritual in nature. They see what others can’t, the essence of reality. We must listen.

This is, of course, all nonsense. It takes a very profound inferiority complex to make such outrageous claims. Zellini‘s issue seems to stem from the body-blow to mathematical certainty in the early 20th century. Essentially, mathematicians themselves showed that even elementary arithmetic could not be proven to be consistent in its own terms. Mathematics was constructed on foundations of sand; its coherence, much less its reality, was questionable.

But, thinks Zellini, there is a way to restore confidence in mathematics. The saving concept is the algorithm. “The concept of algorithm would inherit the sense of mathematical reality”, he thinks. In other words, what is real is not numbers per se, as Pythagoras and Plato thought, but a process by which numbers reveal what is actually there. Algorithm is the carrier, as it were, of reality: “... in order to be real , the very same mathematical entities [numbers] that have been constructed through a process of calculation must be capable of being thought of in the same way as efficient algorithms.”

The book has some interesting things to say about the ancient connections between mathematics and religion. And no doubt there are intriguing mystical aspects to mathematics. But it seems that for Zellini mathematics is indeed a religion in itself, and a highly dogmatic one at that. The algorithm is its creed. His references to ancient Vedic and Greek theological texts are not merely intellectually inspirational; these texts are sacred scripture. How Zellini can construe the reality of an algorithmic relationship as more real than the numbers which are part of that relationship is beyond what I am able to follow in his discursive arguments except as quasi-religious principles emanating from these texts.

What I am able to understand is a sort of neurotic compulsion to prove that mathematics is the ur-language of the universe. This is scientism, the thinker’s attempt at world domination. I can only recommend therapy, or escape to a sympathetic totalitarian country.

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The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mind Isn’t In Here; It’s Out There

One of the greatest conceits of the species Homo Sapiens is that each member of that species thinks independently. That is to say, every individual has a Mind which is unique and which defines the existence of a separate and distinct person.

This is of course nonsense, as any advertising executive or religious preacher or populist politician knows very well. And the error of this presumption is what Dick’s rambling, aphoristic Exegesis demonstrates so relentlessly. Mind certainly exists, but it is, as the psychologist Carl Jung suggested, a collective phenomenon. Mind is ‘out there’ not ‘’in here.’

This collectivity is something we participate in, not something that we contribute to. The distinction is crucial because Mind exists not inside our heads or other part of our bodies, but somewhere external to ourselves. This species-mind incorporates us into itself. We can neither control it nor understand it. In former times this species-mind was commonly referred to as God. Christianity uses the term Logos, the Word, which has existed eternally, as the creative force that drives our world.*

The writer of the Gospel of John used the term Logos metaphorically to refer to Christ before he became a human being. The metaphor is entirely apt. In fact it is unlikely that he could have found a better one. As human beings, we exist within language. We are trapped within it. We are totally dependent upon it to sustain us. And as semioticians have noted, it is not possible to determine when our language capability began. It is effectively eternal.

In Dick’s work, the Logos is never far away and it is a running theme throughout Exegesis and in most of his fiction. In his novel Ubik, for example, the Logos, the voice of God, addresses all living creatures. The voice gives all their prospective reason for being. And for Homo Sapiens it also provides Reason, the ability to understand prospective reasoning. In Ubik, the Logos as the end-point of all existence ‘leaks back’ in time becoming a force that doesn’t just attract but also drives the world toward its true destiny.

Dick knows that the Logos must never be confused with the language that we speak. This is what makes him a mystic. The Word can never be captured in words. The Logos is the source of our species-wordiness. It promotes the ever-increasing use of language as a sort of glorification of itself. But the words are necessarily incomplete, and consequently senseless. More words must be produced as therapy for the already failed words. The Logos is unremitting in its pressure.

As human beings, we cannot escape the Logos. We try constantly to do so by analysing it, explaining it, even begging it for guidance. None of this is effective since they all involve the very thing in which we are imprisoned, the gift of the Logos - language. The Logos demands not attention or adoration but submission, that is to say, the giving up of the struggle to escape. This means recognising that the gift of language is simply that, a gift. It is not, as we are prone to believe, a representation much less a replacement for reality. The Logos is reality and will not tolerate presumption on its turf.

Dick’s revelations about the Logos are not mere repetitions of previous mystics. They are... well, revelatory, an unhiding of the way things are. Arguably his greatest theological insight is that the Logos, in addition to being a guide and comforter and the essence of our being, is also a tormentor. It gives expressiveness to us only to reveal how little expression we have and how trivial it is. It tortures those to whom it is closest, humiliating them by forcing them to employ language that is inadequate. It teases constantly that the ‘next time’ we write or speak will bring us closer to itself. Of course it never does. For the Logos, this is a mode of play. So Dick respected, perhaps even loved, the Logos. But he never worshipped it. Dick was not a religious man in any sense other than that he recognised the importance of what lay beyond language.

By any definition, and for whatever reasons of genetics, psychological experience or 60’s pharmacology. Dick had spiritual revelations in the mid- 1970’s which he described quite matter-of-factly and cogently to his friends and used effectively and with considerable artistry in his novels. These experiences are, I think, correctly compared with those of Teresa of Avila and other great medieval mystics. And his descriptions of being ‘taken over’ by these experiences conform precisely to the conditions of true theological understanding of religion as laid out by, for example, Karl Barth during the 20th century.

Mystics from at least Isaiah onwards are never appreciated fully in their own time. This is largely due to their intimate relationship with the Logos, a relationship which is revealed in their hyper-attachment and simultaneous hyper-disrespect for the words of human language. And so it has been with Dick who was largely rejected as a great writer until he was dead. Like all mystics, Dick uses words in order to distort them, to show, among other things that they are not reality. Science fiction, therefore, is a natural genre in which to express our complicated dependence on that entity that exists neither objectively on its own, nor subjectively as entirely separated from us, but inter-subjectively, that is ‘God among us,’ another name for Mind.

*AKA Virgil’s universal immanent mind, the Greek god Apollo, the Platonic Nous, the Zoroastrian Mazda, the Judaic Shekinah, the Hindu Brahmin and Dick’s own Ubik among so many others

Postscript: I find it eerie as well as interesting that in my news feed I discovered this article about cosmic particles detected in Antarctica suspiciously like the tachyons that Dick thought gave him his visions: https://apple.news/AP500ID96RjeOqVdYB...

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Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Breaking Out of the Cage

They will get you. If you are black in America, they will get you. They will get you before they get anyone else. And they will get you more forcefully and more ruthlessly just because you are black. Everything depends on this: politics, economics, education, crime, defence, corporate health and the general well-being of America. It is the unwritten constitutional guarantee of the country - whatever happens will happen first and worst to black folk. Glaude is unequivocal: “Our democratic principles do not exist in a space apart from our national commitment to white supremacy.”

Black wealth, and the lives associated with it are the insurance premium paid involuntarily by black people to cushion national disaster. Everyone paid for the financial insanity of Wall Street in 2008, for example. But black people paid most, as they have paid most in the various American international military adventures during the last 60 years. They will also pay most during the current Covid-19 crisis. More will be impoverished, more will die proportionately than anyone else. Black people are the shock absorbers of American culture; they are disposable. This is the function they perform in a society that considers this normal by not considering it at all.

And yet, incredibly, this is not a central issue in American politics. “What happens in black America is not a matter of national concern—unless, of course, it threatens people who ‘really matter.’” Unless they shoot someone, or are shot by police, black people are politically invisible in America. Black misery has been privatised. This is three or four generations after the civil rights leaders and their victories in the 1960’s. How did this happen? How did a rising political and economic power in America become so marginalised, so irrelevant to its existence?

“The United States remains a nation fundamentally shaped by its racist past and present.” The forces that were temporarily overcome in the 1960’s were never eliminated. The white supremacy that has existed from its founding continues to run the country. The proof of this is that black people are less valued by any reasonable standard - unemployment, health, mortality, rates of incarceration, education, pay. The gap in value between white and black is part of the American DNA. “At every crucial moment in our nation’s history, when there have been fundamental changes in how we’ve dealt with race, white people asserted the value gap and limited the scope of change.”

The political strategy by which race became a non-issue in America has many sources. But I think the dominant meme is that of ‘identity politics.’ Race has progressively become incorporated into a portmanteau of ‘interests.’ Everyone has interests. And according to the logic of democracy, diverse interests must balanced against each other. The interests of the financial entrepreneurs who create new trading instruments or the real estate developers in large cities are analogous to other ‘life-style’ interest-groups - gay, LGBT, feminists, veterans, environmentalists, and religious adherents.

The civil rights gains against racism in the 1960’s revealed the possibilities for addressing injustice in many areas. But racism is not one among many injustices. It is the root of them all. To treat it otherwise is to make it subservient to the interests of the entrepreneurs and the developers. Race is not an interest. It is not an ambition or a hope that people have. It is not something that can be accumulated or a means to a more fulfilling life. And it is certainly not something that can be ‘balanced’ against the well-being of others.

Race is an existential not an economic, political, or even sociological category. It cannot be changed, modified, mitigated, or traded-off against what others want, need, deserve, or have. Ultimately race is not even a criterion for the attainment of justice. Race is an absolute right which has been degraded into an arbitrary desire with the explicit purpose of making it irrelevant. This is an elemental subversion of democracy by those who reject that fundamental principle.

The degradation of race to the status of interest is the mechanism of white supremacy in America. It allows racism to be practised while never using the historical terms of racial abuse or the arguments of racial inferiority. Economic slurs about the ‘takers’ in society; sociological references to ‘criminal classes’; religious tirades against unAmerican ‘values,’ are now the ways in which racial hatred is expressed. As Glaude says, “Republicans wrapped the flag around their bigotry and couched it in criticisms of big government.” In this way white supremacy disappears, except as extremist nutcases on the FBI watch-list. But the real racism is acted out systematically by conceiving race as just one more claim to be politically assessed.

Glaude, therefore, is treading a dangerous line when he opens with his examples of black poverty. He knows this. Poverty is a consequence of race, but the issue is race not poverty. Actions to alleviate poverty may be required for humanitarian and ethical reasons. But, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, such actions have no significant impact on the fundamental issue. Race is non-negotiable. The recognition of race is not a political variable; it is a pre-condition for democracy tout court. The existence of systematic racism in America is a fundamental block to democratic politics. If you are black in America, democracy simply does not exist. This is the “great legacy of unfreedom at the heart of the American project.”

Glaude is insistent that white supremacy is so deeply built into the thing Americans call democracy as to be the standard of democracy. “We keep treating America like we have a great blueprint and we’ve just strayed from it,” he says, “But the fact is that we’ve built the country true. Black folk were never meant to be full-fledged participants in this society.” Without recognising this, American democracy will remain a caricature, a bad joke, a regime as oppressive and depressing as that of any other preferential ideology. That this may be difficult to comprehend is evidence of just how successful this ideology has been. It hides in plain sight; it is so pervasive that it cannot be seen except by those it crushes.

Trump is right: the system is rigged. But not against him and his supremacist allies. Their gripe is that the system might become unrigged, that voting rights will continue to be curtailed, that police will continue to be justified in providing ‘special treatment’ to black youth, that spending on black education and social welfare will be a fraction of that for white folk, that black infant mortality should remain twice the national average, that the American rate of incarceration is the highest in the world,wildly over represented by black people. All these things have to be ‘dis-remembered’ in order to bluster about maintaining American ideals. These are the ideals. They are what the system wants not incidental or accidental damage. This is Glaude’s central point. And it’s very difficult to find fault with it.

The ‘unit of change,’ as it were, that Glaude has in mind is not law, or attitude, or mental state but “racial habits,” those aspects of behaviour which are the carriers of racism. Primary among these is language. While the old fashioned racial epithets are largely gone from intelligent company, they have been replaced by the PC phrases which are the modern equivalent of the epithets that were common in my lifetime. And first among these is that race is not mentioned at all. We are to pretend that the way to deal with killings by police, riots, even complaints of racism, is by not referring to race. Race should be removed from the analysis and discussion of these issue as inflammatory and not relevant to their resolution. This is a racist tactic to divert attention from the pervasive fact of racism.

The second related habit can be summarised as white fear. This is “a deeply felt, collectively held fear shared by people who believe, together, that some harm threatens them and their way of life.” It is group behaviour passed from generation to generation through advice and admonition. Fear too is generated through language. Such fear is not a response to threat but to myth: “It isn’t based in any actual threat of harm. Instead, the idea of black violence or crime does all the work. The mere possibility of danger is enough to motivate us to act as if we are in immediate danger.” One cannot help but notice that the language of drugs is really that of racism revealing itself as moral panic - something repeatedly demonstrated about race throughout American history.

Ultimately the solution to bad racial habits has to do with unravelling the stories told by Reagan Republicans and their descendants about what race is in America. “We have to tell better stories about what truly matters to us” Thereis no alternative. This involves constantly harping on the real racial history of America and its legacy. To a significant degree, this means recapturing the spirit of Dr. King, black religious congregations and organisations like the original NAACP who sought to create a new narrative for being black in America. This narrative is not that of the co-opted liberal establishment for which race has become a political bargaining chip, one among many. It is a narrative which “will disrupt how society responds to black suffering and imagines black political participation.” This Glaude calls “a civil power outage.”

This undoubtedly means action in the streets rather than the statehouse, and making noise as well as writing and speaking. And, therefore, likely tear-gassing and arrests. And hostile media coverage. This is a necessary complement to voting in the non-democracy that is America, which may indeed involve an “electoral blank out,” the submission of blank/spoiled ballots to demonstrate disgust for the system. For Glaude, this is a route out of the political cage that the black population is in. I don’t know if this is good advice or not. But I can understand entirely the justified rage which provokes it.

Postscript 23 April 20: https://thebaffler.com/latest/ill-wil...

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All Gall Is Divided: Aphorisms by Emil M. Cioran
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Wonderfully Venomous Text

Cioran pokes and prods the bubble of language mercilessly. He knows he cannot harm it but he can mock it and taunt it. Like a Prophet of the Old Testament, he can demand a reaction from the beastial being which is everywhere and nowhere. Like a prisoner of war, he can engage in trivial sabotage to make language exert its power and cruelty openly.

In order to really hate language, one must first love it above all else, to realise that language is all we have even as it holds us in its fatal grip: “To cleanse literature of its greasepaint, to see its real countenance, is as dangerous as to dispossess philosophy of its jargon. Do the mind’s creations come down to the transfiguration of trifles? Is there some sort of substance only beyond words — in catalepsy or the skull’s grin?”

The only option is to use language without restraint, to beat it, to make it reveal itself for what it is: a means of manipulation masquerading as rapportage. “What makes a work last, what keeps it from dating, is its ferocity. A gratuitous assertion? Consider the prestige of the Gospels, that aggressive book, a venomous text if ever there was one.”

Only then can language be seen for what it is: a façade, the purpose of which is to maintain the momentum of the species. “That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.” Yet we are propelled by just that hope.

We are dominated by “the cancer of the word.” We deceive ourselves into believing our own press. “If we believe, so ingenuously, in ideas, it is because we forget that they were conceived by mammals.” We literally consume ourselves through thought. “Mind is the great profiteer of the body’s defeats. It grows rich at the expense of the flesh it pillages,” Perhaps we are not the crown of evolution but its lowest rung, verging on the temptation to “take refuge in the equilibrium of the mineral kingdom.”

Indeed “In this provisional universe, our axioms have only the value of fait-divers.” But the situation is even worse than it appears, because, “With every idea born in us, something in us rots.” Language kills from the inside. Those of us who manage to survive temporarily, “are doomed to plagiarism or reviewing.”

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The Discovery of the Mind: In Greek Philosophy and Literature 
by 

Bruno Snell, 

 

Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Translator)

 

Revelation Gone Wrong

Consciousness is a term of variable meaning. It cannot be pinned down in an unambiguous definition. Like ‘time,’ it is something we think we know about as long as we don’t take it seriously. Snell takes consciousness seriously. And what he finds is not a biological but a sociological source for what we presume is our most private possession. Consciousness, that is to say the recognition of mind, is a cultural phenomenon. It does not exist except it is recognised by those around us.

According to Snell, mind is a “metaphysical happening.” In a sense, he says, such an event is indistinguishable from a religious revelation. It seems to come from elsewhere, not in response to human striving but as an unexpected “grace.” It has no proximate cause but simply appears and is then accepted as real, true, and obvious. 

But the discovery of mind is not a consequence of divine action. It is a result of the use of language. It is the communal facility in language which provokes a recognition of something which is ‘there’ but not before it is named and connected to other names within the language. Then mind appears among us as something which has always been.

We casually conceive of mind as a property of individuals. But this is only because we have no where else to physically place it. We presume it is something private and intimately our own. Of course it is not. It only exists among us. The place in which it exists is literature. And, according to Snell, its appearance, its birth, can be dated more or less precisely to the Homeric epics.

In other words, mind is a story we tell ourselves:“Outside of history, and outside of human life, nothing could be known of the nature of the intellect.” Consequently the story we tell ourselves about what mind is constantly evolves. What we mean by consciousness, mind, soul, or intellect (ψυχή = undifferentiated psyche, the force which keeps human beings alive) is not what Homer meant. But it is he who began the conversation about them. And “the ancient legacy is stored in us, and we may recognize in it the threads of our own involved patterns of thinking.”

These stories, nominally about the self but actually about a society or culture, are imaginative but not fantasy: “the discoveries of the Greeks which constitute our topic, affecting as they do the very essence of man, take shape as vital experiences.” It is the transformation of experience into language that creates the culture in which mind can exist at all. 

This transformative process is not without pain. We pay a price for the culture of mind: “πάθει μάθως, ‘wisdom through suffering’.” This shows most clearly in religion. “In Christian thought God is intellect; our understanding of God is beset with grave difficulties, and the reason for this is a view of the intellect which was first worked out by the Greeks.”

The idea of ‘grace’ for example in Homeric narrative is that of the gods filling characters with irresistible emotion. “The Homeric hero stands free before his god; he is proud when he receives a gift from him, and again he is modest in his knowledge that all great things accrue to him from the deity.” Christianity takes this up but changes the connotation to one of enabling individuals to do good. It thus has all sorts of problems reconciling this with the other Christian idea of free will which is essential to its idea of sin.

Even more fundamentally, Christianity highjacked the Greek notion of πιστις, faith. In Homer the appearance of the gods give heroes confidence, faith, not in the gods but in themselves. The gods are just there. They may be ignored but they self-evidently influence events. There is no dogma and therefore no need for belief which has the status of opinion rather than principle. Consequently “the problem of faith never became an issue.”

Although Snell does not analyse this moment in any detail, it seems to me a critical part of the discovery of mind. Homer’s narratives were stories, not things to be considered as other than that. St. Paul’s redefinition of faith transformed some stories into truths. Since such truths as he claimed were entirely beyond human intellect, they are superior to intellect. Intellect must submit to them as a matter of faith.

It is at this point that the discovery of mind in Western culture makes its most painful turn. Essentially it idolises the language it has used to discover itself. Christianity imposes dogma, statements that are incontrovertibly true, upon the culture of mind. It makes mind an individual, isolated thing which is elemental and accountable only to God. We are still, very painfully indeed, trying to escape from this burial of mind under a mountain of the language that created it.

 

The Enchantment of Words: Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by 

Denis McManus

 

BlackOxford's review 

May 08, 2020  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: philosophy-theology, british, epistemology-language 

The Ethics of Uncertainty

My interest in the Tractatus is its ethical rather than its logical or philosophical import. This corresponds with Wittgenstein’s stated intention for the work. McManus agrees. So I feel justified in trying to interpret it as a guide for behaviour rather than as a philosophical opinion. And I hope I’m forgiven for using The Enchantment of Words as a meditative focus for that purpose.

If you want to know what’s really important to you, don’t write an essay; just look in your chequebook. What anyone has to say about what is important, valuable, or even significant in their life is largely either rationalisation or personal myth. What matters is not what we say (or write) but what we do. 

In other words, language is not a reliable ethical instrument. Not only do we deceive ourselves knowingly or not through language, but language itself is not up to the job of defining an absolute good. This latter point is not simply a matter of vocabulary; it is a logical necessity. Hence Wittgenstein’s focus on logic.

As Wittgenstein notes, valuations relative to some articulated intention are not ethically problematic. It is the idea of an absolute valuation that is logically incoherent. Judgments of value demand a metric, a measure or standard, by which such judgments can be made. Yet any such metric is a member of a class of metrics, any member of which can claim parity with the chosen metric.

And, crucially, the class of metrics is itself a member of an even more inclusive set of metrics. Therefore, the chosen metric is necessarily relativised as soon as it is specified. This applies no matter what level of generality a metric might have. In short, it is impossible to articulate an absolute measure of value, a conclusion known for centuries to theologians who recognise that the absolute measure of value is in fact God, for whom all expression is inadequate.

The central implication of Wittgenstein’s analysis, I think, is that the ethical, just like the experiential, cannot be found in thought at all. The ethical is always and only to be captured in action. The source of the ethical is not in finding and following an arbitrary metric of value but in acting ‘decently,’ a term which equates roughly to a sense of conscience without further elaboration by Wittgenstein.

This conclusion on the face of it appears paradoxical. And indeed Wittgenstein takes an explicitly paradoxical stance at the end of the Tractatus of repudiating what he has just written. What better way to show the inadequacy of language? This is precisely the tactic used by other great ironists, particularly religious ironists, Qoholeth and Jesus among them. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” is the scriptural equivalent of Wittgenstein’s self-contradiction.

In this light one is reminded of the fundamental principle of Judaism, a behavioural religion, as articulated by the great Rabbi Akiva: “Love your neighbour as you love yourself.” This, he says, is the entire content of the Law, the rest of scripture being merely (inadequate) commentary. Augustine in one of his saner moments made the same observation: “Amor et quod vis fac, Love and then do what you will.”Could it be that the Tractatus is actually a modern scholarly route to precisely this self-referential ethical destination?

That is, ethics cannot be expressed, much less taught. Ethics can only be shown. And as ethics are shown, they are passed from generation to generation and infect, not the thoughts, but the actions of others. This view leaves ethical conduct itself entirely uncertain, a condition that neither those without ‘decency’ nor those with authority over them like very much. Authentic ethics, therefore, is necessarily subversive, undermining all fixed principles of behaviour - including even this principle.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The Religious Right

This fellow Ronald Purser is like the committed Marxist who knows where Communism went wrong and insists we should give it another, more radical, try (Zizek and Eagleton come to mind). Or like those perennial Christians who fervently belief that some version of their religion originating at some arbitrary point in history is the authentic one to which their co-religionists should return (David Hart Bentley is one of the more recent but the appeal to the Ole Time Religion is rife in America). Purser reckons that the respectable spiritual tenets of Buddhism have been corrupted by bourgeois capitalism into an ideology of self-serving greed, a practical religion of the status quo. He wants this to stop.

Despite his petulant foot-stamping, Purser is of course right. A primary function of any institutionalised religion (and Mindfulness is very institutionalised) is to prevent civil disturbances, to calm the masses by suggesting an alternative universe in which all pain and injustice is eliminated. But this doesn’t justify saying it over and over again in 274 repetitive and ill-structured pages. Everything he wants to say is on the first page; the rest is tendentious padding. And to whom is such an unneeded excess directed? Not to the ‘mindful’ sellouts to capitalism who are by his own assessment unreachable. Probably not to other critics of purported Buddhist heresies, each with their own version of the correct path. And certainly not to the vast public who know nothing about such spiritual outrage and care even less.

What irks most is that Mr. Purser seems entirely unaware that his gripe against bastardised Buddhism is one that can be applied to all spiritual movements. All religious traditions, if they are to remain traditions, develop an economic imperative which demands commercialisation for survival. This inevitably means that they become dependent upon established institutions which are economically and politically dominant. In short, whatever the movement started as, it will end up as a religion serving the prevailing culture. Purser, the true believer, seems as unmindful 0f this as the targets of his righteous wrath.

Skip the book. Wallow in your smugness. Or not. But at all costs stay away from any idea that has cycled through California dreamland.

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The Space of Literature by Maurice Blanchot
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Meditations on Incompleteness

The only thing certain about any work of literature, indeed about writing of any kind, is that it is; it exists. But its being is of a certain kind. While essentially passive, writing is seditious. It promotes uncertainty about what is already known through both experience and other writing. It interrupts whatever intentions it encounters in the reader. It creates a space, a zone, of insecurity which paradoxically induces the need for more reading and hence more writing. Thus writing seduces both writers and readers into an obsessive state of permanent ‘unfinishedness,’ of longing for more.

“To write is to break the bond that unites the word with myself,” says Blanchot. In a sense this sterilises language. The word becomes independent once launched. On its own it has no effect. It is barely any thing at all. Language is not human but something alien per Blanchot: “To write is, moreover, to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power.”

And to read, one might add, is to break the bond that unites the world with the reader, replacing what is with what is written. What is read is doubly detached - from the writer and from the world. It is its own independent space, lurking, an alien reminder to the writer and a sort of fly-trap for any reader who happens to notice its existence.

Within this literary space anything is possible. Interpretations are potentially infinite. Like the physical universe, literary space, therefore, is expanding at an increasing rate. Writing breeds as it is fertilised through reading. It is not the gene that is selfish but the word that desires replication, translation, and re-definition.

Literary space is democratic in the same way that a dictionary is democratic. Individuals propose without constraint but only literary space disposes. This is the primary source of uncertainty. No one knows the physics of literary space. Its laws are its own, and hidden. Whenever these laws are in danger of being discovered, they change.

Religion is a small corner of literary space which is typically claimed by an authority which desires to limit local expansion and objects to incompleteness on principle. This sort of hubris has no effect on literary space but causes significant misery for readers and writers. The pen is not always mightier than the sword. But both are always subject to the dominance of literary space, and succumb to it eventually.

All activity inside literary space is useless. But it is where usefulness is defined. More to the point, it is where usefulness is re-defined, along with all other valuations. The revaluation of values occurs there more or less continuously in a way Nietzsche would approve, submitting himself to that very process. Since all authority relies on the stability of valuations to remain in power, there is a permanent tension between government - civil, social, religious, scientific, and institutional - and the activities of literary space.

Despite its density of population, literary space is a lonely place. Writing and reading are solitary activities. There is no consolation for this solitude except for the deeper penetration into literary space. Having entered into it, salvation is hopeless. Or rather, salvation is the very hopelessness of ever achieving a final understanding literary space. Incompleteness is our destiny, interrupted only by death.

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Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe by Mario Livio
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Unreasonable Search for Reason

Mario Livio’s book is about opportune mistakes in science. They are opportune in the sense that they produced a result which has changed scientific thinking either directly or indirectly. Although he doesn’t make it a central part of his argument, the cases he documents collectively undermine our illusions about science, illusions which are becoming increasingly obvious during the worldwide Covid-19 crisis. Rather than review Livio’s book in any detail, therefore, I think it’s more important to give a sort of appreciation of its import for our current circumstances.

Isaac Newton believed in witchcraft, astrology and alchemy. He also had a rather influential and effective theory of gravity. Pythagoras had an irrational aversion to beans, practised numerology and believed in the transmigration of souls, but also produced a geometrical theorem which is still of tremendous practical use after several millennia. Nikolai Tesla had a superstitious obsession with the number three, insisting, for example, on circling his office building three times before entering; yet he was the real genius behind most of Thomas Edison’s inventions.

In short, scientists are as neurotic as the rest of us. They do things in certain ways because... we’ll just because. Like the prize-fighter or the football player performing their good luck ritual before their match, scientists perform routines which they believe enhance the chances of achieving results. These routines are influenced by a variety of factors. Some of these factors are shared by other scientists; some not. Those that are not, scientists tend to keep quiet about - until these odd, personal, eccentric, routines result in some deviation from what is expected.

If an unexpected result is designated an error or mistake by a scientist’s colleagues, it is generally ignored. If it is accepted by the relevant scientific community, however, the result could well be considered a breakthrough, perhaps suggesting a new direction for research. Typically the scientific community isn’t unanimous in its judgment, at which point politics of the normal sort reigns. By ‘normal’ I mean that there is debate about what criterion of evaluation should be applied to the unexpected result. It is this criterion, quite literally one of value, which will establish whether the result is marked a mistake or a breakthrough (or perhaps the degree of each).

This is normal science in the sense that it is happening continuously without fuss in laboratories, conferences and professional journals. The rest of us outside professional circles rarely get a glimpse of what’s actually happening and could generally care less about the ongoing debates. Only when some significant event occurs - like a Covid-19 crisis for example - does the debate become public and the various contrary criteria which scientists in the same profession employ about what constitutes ‘good science’ become apparent. At that point they argue, often vehemently, in the popular media as well as among themselves about what constitutes success in the scientific endeavour.

The rest of us are justifiably bemused by this debate. Isn’t science a rational activity ruled by principles of reason? If we are ‘led by the science,’ as politicians keep reminding us, shouldn’t the direction we have to take be clear? Yet one professional faction calls for ‘lockdown’ and another for ‘exposure.’ And these are only the medicos. Once the economists and sociologists contribute their professional opinions, the range of recommended action is densely populated with alternatives. These disagreements are only the tip of a very large intellectual iceberg that has sunk more than a few reputation along ships. As Livio points out, the view of what constitutes science held by the great Lord Kelvin was radically different from that held by the great Einstein, which in turn was also radically different than that held by the equally great Heisenberg.

That is to say, science, of any sort, doesn’t seem more rational than any other human institution. What needs to be done is not a product of scientific method. Pick a criterion - herd immunity, overall death rates, maximum capacity for hospital admissions, mortality among distinct groups like the old, ethnic minorities, the poor, infants, or the relative cost of economic slowdown versus the prevalence of illness - and the answer to the question of ‘what to do?’ becomes fairly clear. And therein lies the issue. Rationality breaks down in the debate about the criterion of rationality. No one has a routine, a calculus, an algorithm, a method for determining which criterion of value is appropriate to use.

So a public scientific crisis like Covid-19 demonstrates just how essentially non-rational science is. Despite its pretensions, scientific thought is influenced and often directed by preferences, judgments, experiences, and beliefs which have no foundation in logic, law, or moral agreements. The choice of criterion to be applied to determine whether an individual scientific result or a global scientific programme is a mistake or an effective breakthrough is simply not one of reason. Science, whatever one means by that term, is an inadequate guide to action - just as claims of divine revelation are equally inadequate.

This may be frustrating, but it is not entirely bad news. As Mario Livio documents, it is through Brilliant Blunders that we discover the reality of disagreement about what rationality itself means. Perhaps the reality of our shared Covid-19 experience will make each of us slightly less certain of our own inherent reasonableness. The absolute priority of the search for the criterion of reason is what this viral plague has shown us. No one has a privileged position for determining the direction of this search. What we are in together is not just the disease but also the question of how we should view it.


Postscript. Here is a rather more prolix statement of my point: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n...
And here is another voice crying in the wilderness: https://aeon.co/essays/a-bioethicist-...
And here is another example of the unreasonableness of science: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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