What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Heavenly Conspiracy

Here’s the truth that few want to recognise: Most of what we read (or for that matter hear) is made up, not by the writer but by ourselves. Forget about what words on the page refer to. Mendelsund is not interested in the classical problem of epistemology. We add immense amounts of descriptive and contextual material to what’s on the page without being aware of our doing so. According to Peter Mendelsund, “... the idea of a mirror is an analogy for the act of reading.” What emerges from a book is largely our own imaginations reflected back. The more the author withholds, and this is usually a great deal, the more imagination we supply, right from the first words. As he says, “All books open in doubt and dislocation.” We are thrown in to the sea of reading every time we open a new book; and we have to learn how to swim all over again in that particular place with its unique character, dangers, and surprises.

While psychologists have known that people are not the best witnesses to any of their experiences (including, presumably, their experience of reading), they really haven’t described the phenomenology of this fictionalisation of fiction. Philosophers since Kant have realised that what we see is a function of our human sensory apparatus. But they haven’t had much to say about how human language ability isn’t like other human ‘senses.’ Mendelsund has an interesting suggestion. Reading, and by implication all language-using, he suspects, is really an act of transcendence, not only transcendence of the text but also transcendence of the other immediate aspects of life including much sensory input. “You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book (say, this book), nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward),” he speculates.

I think Mendelsund is on to something. I agree with his assessment that “A book feels like the intersection of these two domains—or like a conduit; a bridge; a passage between them... An open book acts as a blind—its boards and pages shut out the world’s clamorous stimuli and encourage the imagination.” While reading we take on an entirely distinct existential condition for which we don’t have an articulate description, not even a name. By its very nature, reading is an escape - but not onto the text. The act of reading is a kind of transformation, not just a fleeting intimation, but another mode of being.

Mendelsund makes the further interesting observation that this transformation is the same phenomenon that we experience while listening to music. This suggests that we may hear much more of what we read than we are conscious of. The parallels between composition in both modes provokes some intriguing aesthetic insights: “In music, notes and chords define ideas, but so do rests.” This I find particularly exciting. Perhaps there really are books written in different keys, just as there are symphonies telling their own genres of stories. And perhaps the conspiracy between reader and writer that produces this other world of literature and music is the source of our idea of... well, of heaven.

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The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life by Alex Bellos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s Never Too Late For A Happy Childhood

In my youth Ripley’s Believe It or Not was a monthly (or was it weekly?) publication in comic book format. It was fascinating to a child because it ‘documented’ all sorts of strange events, people, and conditions that were apparently unknown to adults - two-headed snakes, ghostly apparitions, unlikely survivals, and past-life memories were standard fare. It was instructive, if in no other sense than to provoke an attempt to verify the most outlandish of its claims. In addition, one could feel somehow superior to one’s ignorant elders who were entirely unaware of the essentially magical character of the world.

The Grapes of Math is a sort of Ripley’s Believe It or Not of mathematics; it appeals to that same childish sense of the strange, the bizarre, and the occult. To discover, for example, that it is Shakespeare who is responsible for the transformation of the word ‘odd’ from denoting uneven numbers to suggesting strangeness of people or situations is just the sort of revelation I mean. Or that digits always appear in a frequency specified by Benford’s law regardless of their sources in daily newspapers, census reports, or stock market data - and no one understands why!

These and dozens of others are factoids which the young adolescent mind finds fascinating. They also constitute an enjoyable introduction to the otherwise abstruse and often rather intimidating topics of number theory, algebraic geometry, and infinitesimal calculus, among many others. I’m not sure that Alex Bellos’s breezy survey will appeal to all those young folk who find maths difficult but it certainly does much to bridge the arts/science divide. And if you’re a bit older, the book might even provide some fodder to fill the odd gaps in cocktail party chat.

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The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition by Peter Cole
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Call To Nothing

All poetry strains language. The poetry of Kabbalah breaks language into pieces and reconstructs it. Kabbalah does this by treating language as holy, as an emanation of the divine, indeed as infinite variations of the Names of God. By using language properly, that is by allowing it to overwhelm oneself in abject submission, language breaks the bonds we place on it. Meanings are unmoored; words float about forming a new context; language no longer communicates, it removes itself and becomes angelic in order to reveal.

Cole claims (rightly I think) that Kabbalah is the real progenitor of modern literary techniques like deconstruction: “... long before Frenchified notions of trace and erasure took hold, a Kabbalistic poetics was drawing attention to aspects of language-in-action that slip readers into (as D. H. Lawrence put it in a wholly different context) a “dawn-kaleidoscopic” world of ramifying meaning where absence and presence evoke one another.” But these secular techniques are limited since they can only produce further interpretations and not glimpses of reality.

One way in which Kabbalah evokes reality is by hiding the Name of God within a poem (for example in the cumulative first letters of each line). The one who recites it is unaware, therefore, of his linguistic capture by the divine. Kabbalah also frequently uses litany towards the same end, as in the piece Windows of Worship:

“And Moses asked Metatron . . . What are these windows [of the first heaven]? And he said to him, These windows are:
Windows of worship
Windows of beckoning
Windows of weeping
Windows of joy
Windows of satiety
Windows of hunger
Windows of penury
Windows of wealth
Windows of peace
Windows of war
Windows of bearing
Windows of birth
and he saw—
windows without number and end”

Unlike typical Christian litanies, it may be noted that Kabbalah is not full of unremitting positivity. For example, the ‘windows’ above are of unpleasantness, even horrors, as well as of joyful things. Contraries and contradictions are embedded within almost everyone of these poems. This culminates in what Cole (and D.H. Lawrence) calls “theoeroticism,” the divine sex life in which the eternal masculine and feminine aspects of the divine are continually ‘at it’ creating the world.

Ultimately Kabbalah tells us what modern linguistic, philosophical and psychological research has only begun to understand, namely that we are trapped in the language that we thought we merely used. Cole quotes a fourth or fifth century text which is typical:

[The angel] Metatron said to me:
Come and I will show you
the letters by which heaven and earth were created;
the letters by which seas and rivers were created;
the letters by which mountains and hills were created;
the letters by which trees and grasses were created;
the letters by which stars and constellations were created . . .
the letters by which the throne of glory and the wheels of the chariot were created . . .
the letters by which wisdom and understanding, knowledge and intelligence, humility and rectitude were created, by which the whole world is sustained.”

The poetry of Kabbalah provides a sort of spiritual theory of the world, a theory which I find more inspiring as well as more accurate than the scientific theories of the Big Bang. In this spiritual theory, creation is shown to be what it has always been, a product of our ability to speak and write:

“He called to Nothing—which split;
to existence—pitched like a tent;
to the world—as it spread beneath sky.”
With desire’s span He established the heavens,
as His hand coupled the tent of the planets
with loops of skill,
weaving creation’s pavilion,
the links of His will
reaching the lowest
rung of creation—
the curtain
at the outermost edge of the spheres . . .
Who could make sense of creation’s secrets,
of your raising up over the ninth sphere
the circle of mind,
the sphere of the innermost chamber?
The tenth to the Lord is always sacred:
This is the highest ring,
transcending all elevation
and beyond all ideation.”

That tenth ring is there but always just out of reach, always the object of search, but never attained. It is after all Nothing, Ein Sof, the Void - more commonly known as Reality. Nevertheless, the call to nothing gets a generally better response in literature than in science.*

* I realise that it an overstatement. Nevertheless it is frequently the case that scientists do not recognise the ultimate hopelessness of their purported task to ‘find reality.’ The Spanish-American philosopher Miguel de Unamuno summarised the situation metaphorically for mathematics: “I believe that if the geometrician were to be conscious of this hopeless and desperate striving of the hyperbola to unite with its asymptotes, he would represent the hyperbola to us as a living being and a tragic one!” This appears to me to be the universal human tragedy, the very Original Sin wherein, according to biblical sources, God allowed mankind the power of language which He did not create.

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Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism by Harold Bloom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Sounds of Silence

Harold Bloom’s religion was literature. He dedicated his life to writing of every type. But his was no religion of faith, of unswerving belief in the merits of the written word. Bloom recognised books, literature, indeed all of language, as a double-edged sword. One side allowed humans to conquer the world; the other trapped them in a sort of spiritual peonage. His therapy for this Gnostic reality of language was to use language against itself. That is to say, he loved poetry.

Bloom was not a self-recognised poet. Neither was he a novelist or a creator of new literary forms. He was a critic, by which he meant that he wrote his biography as a response to the things he read. And this response was fundamentally religious:

“The original meaning of the state of being blessed was to be favored by God. Since I do not share my mother’s trust in Yahweh’s covenant with my people, I long ago transmuted the blessing into its prime form, which is our love for others. I turned to the reading and studying of literature in search of the blessing, because I came to understand we cannot love enough people. They die and we abide. Literature has become, for me and many others, a crucial way to fill ourselves with the blessing of more life.”

I think that it is because of this religious background that all of Bloom’s criticism may be considered as a form of poetry. His constant and inventive comparison of a word, literary piece, or genre with another effectively relativises all of literature by demonstrating the conflict (‘agon’ is a term he often uses) among interpretations and meanings. Bloom struggles with language not in the sense of searching for the right word or phrase but as a poet fighting to be free of it. Just as Jacob wrestled with God only to receive his eternal blessing as well as a permanent deformity, Bloom recognises the consequences of the biblical blessing and the injury imposed by language. He quotes Wallace Stevens:

“To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with more
Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
To speak humanly from the height or from the depth
Of human things, that is acutest speech.”

Bloom says: “Poetry, as I most richly conceive it, is the ultimate secular mode of what the ancients called theurgy.” Theurgy is the calling down of the gods through incantations and spells - in other words, magic. By making unexpected connections within his incredibly expansive knowledge, this is exactly what Bloom does. The reader can only be astonished, for example, when he connects the biblical Song of Deborah with the Battle Hymn of the Republic in the American Civil War, or expresses his admiration for the biblical villains Ahab and Jezebel, or proposes the concept of “self-otherseeing” as a literary explanation of Revelation as a normal part of human existence (as well as a central key in reading Shakespeare). He improves our understanding of texts ancient and modern by making their connections clear:

“I listen even at my age to a trumpet call that urges me to fresh hope: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” I think of Walt Whitman chanting: “Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me, / If I could not now and always send forth sunrise from myself.” Or I hear Wallace Stevens lamenting: “The exceeding brightness of this early sun / Makes me conceive how dark I have become.”

“All institutionalizing of prophecy is betrayal,” Bloom says, revealing his view of religion as a permanent search, an unending interpretation of the world’s best interpretations (he hated the God of Milton not because it was violent but because it was doctrinal, and doctrine always serves the interests of power). And no matter how erudite, how nuanced his critical work is, it is never suggested as definitive, never pompous, but rather is intended to provoke yet more interpretation: “My intention for this book is to teach myself and others how to listen for the voice we heard before the world was made and marred.” It is out of silence that language emerged, and where it returns to be understood. And whence with Hamlet he now speaks.

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Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe by Richard Holloway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Silly Like Us

Richard Holloway is an Anglican priest and bishop. This is important to know. He epitomises a tradition of religious tolerance that extends not just to the various High and Low factions of the Episcopal Church, but also to all other religions, including militant atheism.

Some find his stance, like that of his fellow Anglican Don Cupitt or historically the similarly-minded Baruch Spinoza, to be pantheistic at best and probably merely atheism hidden in a veil of religious language. But neither he nor I could care less about the label. He is, for me, a modern mystic who does what mystics have always done, namely to call out the linguistic idolatry of true believers.

Holloway knows that everything we can say or write, the only thing we can say or write, is part of a story. Some people, like him, are interested in the ‘big story’ of which other ‘smaller’ stories may be a part. The big story may either be religious or scientific. But these two categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They shade onto and inspire one another.

Holloway doesn’t want to evaluate the relative merits of any of these big stories. His issue is personal and ethical: “The difficulty is in identifying the story we are actually living by.” His method for accomplishing this is to make clear to himself as well as his reader that we are all stuck in a web of linguistic interpretation. That is, all our stories are fictions. They are the product of stories and they all produce more stories. “All our stories [are fictions], particularly the ones we think aren’t stories, aren’t fictions.”

So Holloway tells some stories about himself, some fictions he might take for granted and mistake for something other than fiction. He follows Hegel in sympathetically articulating contradictory stories about ‘big things’ like God, the Cosmos, Salvation, War... and, well, Scotland. He finds himself comprehending and reacting positive to stories on both sides of every issue, while being unwilling to commit fully to either side.

This is more or less standard philosophical dialectic. The expectation is that Holloway then would search for a resolution of the conflicting stories, a synthesis, or ‘bigger story.’ But he doesn’t. Rather than tell the bigger story, he searches in his own background for the much smaller stories which have contributed to his instinctive preferences. It is our unconscious memories of events, coincidences, and accidents that shape these little stories, not any rational choice.

What Holloway is trying to undermine is not religion but faith, that pernicious state praised as a virtue ever since St. Paul defined it as such. “Our problem is that, as well as possessing a capacity for reason and reflection, we are also a highly suggestible species, prone to crazes, panics, conspiracy theories and other psychological spasms: in short, beliefs. Beliefs, like communicable diseases, are highly infectious.”

And beliefs, as the ‘substance’ of faith, are impervious to experience, either personal or factual. As Holloway says, “... faith systems are usually authoritarian in their practice and self-definition and, with one or two exceptions, they tend to believe that their own version is the perfect and final word on the subject. Most of them were formed to promote a fixed belief in an ultimate reality whose existence, though uncertain, they are never permitted to doubt.”

“Where does it come from, this notion that a form of words held in our heads can either save us or kill us? Or that a thought or theory can damn or redeem us?,” Holloway asks. I think it obviously comes from a worship of words, a confusion of literature with reality to which we all are prone. This is our Original Sin. None of us can escape it fully. But we do need desperately to substitute the virtue of humility for that of faith in order to be slightly less silly.

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Chickenhawk 
by 

Robert Mason (Goodreads Author)

 

National PTSD

Chickenhawk is an old-fashioned sort of memoir, one with a moral that is as general as it gets. Bob Mason’s account of his time as a combat helicopter pilot describes a personal trajectory that countless others have experienced - from unflinching enthusiasm to eventual toe-curling embarrassment and regret at one’s naïveté and poor judgment. Mason is intelligent enough and honest enough to describe the detailed progression.

Mason had a boyhood dream to fly helicopters. The idea of ‘helping,’ perhaps even saving lives through his skill as a pilot was something that grew from a childhood fantasy to a young man’s ambition. As luck would have it, in the mid-1960’s the US Army needed enormous numbers of young folk as pilots for their new Air Cavalry which, the country was assured, would bring the annoying war in VietNam to a successful conclusion. He signed up and in so doing fell down the deepest rabbit hole of his life. As did many others.

Young men begin to mature, if they ever do, when they come to the realisation that their youthful ideals are just polite rationalisations for their own selfishness. The recognition that the stupidity, maliciousness, and inherent mendacity of the world are things they participate in fully regardless of intentions can come as a shock. It’s worse than when you found out that your parents were people who frequently made the same mistakes all other people make. 

The world wants your idealism in order to exploit it. This is the way society works. Corporate, professional, religious or political life will exploit it reasonably well. But the military is the gold standard institution for the exploitation of the young. And nowhere is idealism better exploited than in the military in time of war. By the time you get what military life reality is, it’s too late to do anything about it. You’re stuck fast in a morass of madness.

This explains why young idealists - those who want to ‘give something back’ or ‘make a difference’ or ‘eliminate world hunger’ or just ‘serve’ - end up being among the most cynical and self-serving people in middle age. Their resentment in the face of reality is overwhelming. The world doesn’t want their idealism except for its energy, dedication, and unthinking acceptance of what is frequently just plain evil. Everyone is eventually ground down. Careers turn into open prisons in which prospects are limited to the ladder of institutional advancement, the next rung of which means not receiving significantly less pain but being able to dispense a little more to those lower down. This compensation is rarely satisfying.

Nguyen Cao Ky, former head of the South Vietnamese Air Force and Prime Minister in 1965, provides a chapter-epigraph in Chickenhawk. It seems to me particularly apt as a summary of both the lack of maturity prevalent at the time and an explanation for the kind of stunned national resentment that has been simmering ever since: “Americans are big boys. You can talk them into almost anything. All you have to do is sit with them for half an hour over a bottle of whiskey and be a nice guy.” As Mason says in a sort of commentary on Nguyen’s remark: “No one likes being the fool. Especially if he finds himself risking his life to be one.”

Could it be, I ask myself, that the elevation of a man like Trump to such political prominence in the United States is an unconscious but nevertheless purposeful symbolic cultural reaction of the country to its own insistently naive idealism? A sort of national PTSD? There are, it seems to me, worse explanations.

 

Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English by Jonathan Rée
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Linguistic Promiscuity: The Politics of Words

Never trust language, no matter who is using it. The problem doesn’t lie with the speaker or writer; it’s in the language. Language may be useful, beautiful, inspiring, even true. But it is never real. Language has nothing to do with reality. Quite the opposite: it always separates us from reality. Witcraft is an entertaining and erudite demonstration of just how language obfuscates; and how that obfuscation is also immensely revelatory about the reality of its users. Perhaps the book is a bit too erudite for the casual reader in its level of detail. But it’s main points seem clear enough.

Because words are connected only to other words, not to non-words, their meaning is never fixed. Words bob randomly on the tumultuous sea of language. Sometimes they float on the surface appearing to have ‘obvious’ references to non-words; but these tend not to last as long as the words themselves which are constantly rearranging their relations to other words. Sometimes they sink a bit into the depths and are known only to professionals whose domain is that of arcana and esoterica like doctors and lawyers - archaic fossils which are kept in use as tribal symbols, like religious creeds. And very often they drop to the ocean-bottom and lose their connections to other words entirely except for linguistic historians like Reé.

Nothing makes the semantic fluidity of words more obvious than translation. The connections among words in one language never correspond to the connections in another. So for example Heimat in German might be translated into English as ‘homeland;’ but the connotations in German of its use under National Socialism aren’t captured at all. And there simply is no English word which can do any better. Quite literally, to translate any word accurately would require a reestablishment of the entire lexicon of both languages, a clear cultural impossibility.

Less obvious, but more dangerous as a consequence, is the implicit translation we make of historical texts. For example, the 16th century English adjective ‘naughtie’ doesn’t refer to the trivial misbehaviour of a child, but to mature predatory evil. And it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with its homophone ‘noughtie,’ designating a person of the early 21st century, which I have recently found to be mis-spelled as the former term. Sometimes, of course, the change takes place far more rapidly. For example, Even as recently as twenty years ago, ‘gay’ implied happiness not homosexuality.

Changes in the significance of any single word affect the entire language. This is especially obvious in technical languages such as those used in philosophical discourse. For all its precision, it is simply not possible to represent the terms of discourse in Ancient Greek, upon which much of philosophy is based, into modern languages. Even the word for ‘word’ in Greek, logos (λόγος), can be translated within a semantic range that includes ‘order,’ ‘reason,’ ‘opinion,’ ‘expectation,’ and ‘principle’ just to name a few possibilities. This puts a definite cramp in the exhortation to ‘be reasonable’ by the participant in any philosophical argument. No one has any firm idea what the exhortation could mean; or, more likely but equivalently, each participant will have their own idea.

In fact even in our native language we are translating all the time when we listen or read. Every individual has his or her unique constellation of connotations. Our words always mean something different to others. We call this sort of simultaneous translation interpretation. The result is an unavoidable linguistic indeterminacy (or promiscuity, as Reé calls it, thus demonstrating his point) that obviously has practical consequences; although language does its best to hide the obvious.

For example in my own field of theology the great Arian controversy between the Eastern and Western churches about the divine status of Christ in the second and third centuries - was he equal to his Father or not? - was resolved with a monumental linguistic fudge. It was decreed by the participants of the Council of Nicaea that Greek ousia (ουσία) and the Latin substantia were equivalent and that Christ’s and the Father’s were the same. In fact the two terms were contraries, perhaps even opposites. The pretence about agreement kept everyone together though, if only for a time. And the Nicene creed is recited in many Christian churches today with the terms in question translated as ‘being,’ which according to Plato was merely another designation of logos! Some words do get around.

The law is as equally fond as religion in trying to maintain the fixity of language. For example legal historians like to connect the modern corporation, and therefore its status, with the Roman corporatio. Linguistically this seems plausible but it is entirely wrong. The Romans knew nothing like the modern corporation and would probably be appalled at its status as an artificial person. The corporation does in fact have its roots in Roman law, but in an obscure convention that was ultimately picked up by the new orders of Catholic friars in the 13th century which wanted to use property without owning it. It took almost exactly a century of legal battles in the Roman Curia, the international court of the day, to arrive at an articulation of the institution that would come to dominate our world.

For Reé imprecision and inaccuracy are unavoidably built into any philosophical discourse. Indeed any use of language confronts the same problems. But for Reé it is in philosophy that these problems are meant to be addressed: “Most branches of culture – from poetry and prose to music, politics, law and unreflective forms of thought – are deeply imprinted with the distinctions, concepts, rhythms, strategies and styles of the language they inhabit. But philosophy is different. It stands in a refractory relationship to all the languages in which it is practised, and it has always been linguistically promiscuous.”

In this sense the role of philosophy is counter-cultural, namely to call out those folk like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, many politicians, some scientists, and of course Donald Trump, who pretend that they are the ultimate arbiters of language and what it really means. In general those who insist most on their ability to describe and analyse the world in their own terms are probably the least reliable. Their real agenda may not be visible, but that they have one is made clear by their insistence on the correctness of their own language.

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Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When The Flesh Becomes Word

The upstage part of Future Home is an extended ode to pregnancy. It extols the courage, persistence, and fears of women who harbour the next generation within themselves. The downstage part is a somewhat vague context of environmental destruction, governmental oppression, and several other political and social issues (like Native American rights and history). What holds the book together is the unlikely theme of Darwinian evolution and the Catholic religion. But perhaps that connection is not as unlikely as it might seem at first encounter.

In the early 20th century the Jesuit anthropologist and philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, developed a theological theory of evolution.* Evolutionary processes, he said, are teleological, that is to say, directional. They start with the merely material (the Geosphere), proceed to the miracle of life (the Biosphere) and are headed toward the spiritualisation of all life (the Noösphere). Put another way, it was Teilhard’s view that the reports of the New Testament would be reversed: the Word that had become Flesh would revert to the Word as the natural end, the Omega Point, of human development. We would all become united and experience one another not as flesh and blood but as non-material ‘souls,’ as parts of the one Word.

And, of course, Teilhard was absolutely correct. Humanity has now tasted its ultimate fate as pure word - symbol, image, and story - in the electronic Noösphere of the internet. Certainly the means by which we have used to create this non-fleshy state of existence would surprise Teilhard. But he would probably recognise today’s Cloud as a building block of global evolutionary progress. Humanity is clearly crawling out of its rather constraining skin and scaling new heights. We have effectively become spiritualised in the net.

But it would also be surprising if Teilhard were not profoundly disappointed with his own predictions. The Noösphere isn’t all it was cracked up to be. True, it has a sort of unifying function in that everyone on the planet is potentially connected to everyone else. But FaceBook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter, while they do a wonderful job of ‘de-fleshing’ us, really do nothing to unite us. Quite the opposite. Trump, QAnon, and Russian and Chinese trolls have demonstrated the downsides of living in the immaterial world of the Word.

In Future Home, evolution has apparently gone onto reverse. Ancient creatures are appearing, viable births are declining, and genetics have turned against existing species. The conceit of evolutionary ‘progress’ has been revealed for what it is - part of the story we have told ourselves, that we are the apex of evolutionary development, top of the food chain, chosen by the divine to rule and propagate. According to Erdrich’s story, however, this ain’t necessarily so. The Noösphere is not a particularly pleasant hangout, especially if you’re pregnant.

Erdrich has her protagonist suggest a theory: “Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep. We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are an idea not worth thinking anymore.” If that is the case, perhaps Teilhard had the right idea but just got his directional metaphor wrong. Evolution doesn’t progress ‘upwards,’ it cycles ‘around.’ Whenever God gets a bit weary or fed up with the details of running the cosmos, he lapses into a sort of divine unconsciousness. The Noösphere, then, is a way-stop back to the beginning of creation from where he might have another try at getting it right.

*Teilhard is mentioned by Erdrich about halfway through the book. I don’t think her reference is incidental.

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The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
by 

Christine Kenneally

 

BlackOxford's review 

Oct 07, 2020  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: australian, epistemology-language 

HAL Has Always Been A False Friend

Remember the opening scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey? A hairy primate handles a thigh bone, presumably of a dead animal, and suddenly discovers it is a a tool, possibly a weapon. Cut to the inter-planetary research vehicle en route to a strange signal in the far reaches of the solar system. Thus, we are meant to understand, is the beginning of technological development, and eventually extra-terrestrial exploration. Obvious. A well thought out allegory for human progress, right?

Wrong. Seals and sea otters use rocks to open mollusks (so do some fish); chimpanzees use sticks to dig for termites; elephants manufacture fly-swatters from tree branches; dolphins make nose-protectors out of sponges. But none of these species have proliferated like Homo sapiens, much less indulged in space exploration. Kubrick’s allegory is flawed.

There is, though, an important technology which is fundamental to human development. But it isn’t the discovery of fire, or the usefulness of old bones, or the ability to live in social groups. Far more important is the technology that we take for granted and that has dominated us as completely as HAL, the computer, dominated Kubrick’s hapless astronauts: language.

Language is what enables us to be the dominant species on the planet. All the tools that we have used to subjugate the natural world and each other - spears, sailing ships, submarines and spaceships. These and almost everything else we consider part of normal human existence are embodied language. They all require not just plans, blueprints and instructions, but also a long history of thought and discussion (and therefore language) in their creation.

So it is the discovery of language not the usefulness of thigh bones that Kubrick should have used in his opening. But he couldn’t because the mystery of language is so profound that there really is no cinematic or any other way to represent its origins. Language ability depends on complex anatomical, neurological, and sociological interactions. Some researchers think the right conditions for language occurred as recently as 10,000 years ago; others suggest that it might be 100,000 years or more (still an eye-blink in evolutionary much less cosmic terms). The big linguistic bang of writing only occurred 6000 years ago. No one knows if the development was rapid, like the discovery by Kubrick’s primate, or incremental over hundreds, perhaps, thousands of generations. 

Kenneally’s idea of ‘the first word’ is an attempt to remedy Kubrick’s misleading suggestion that technology is the engine of human progress. It isn’t. Language is the driver of our species-development. And our facility with language really hasn’t been going on long enough to justify the term ‘progress’ at all. Language, as Kubrick’s film implies, seems to have a life of its own. HAL is language which just happens to be in the form of a machine, a literal embodiment of the ‘no-thing’ that is language. It is revealed as a ‘thing’ controlling the astronauts only because it speaks to them and refuses to do what they ask. In everyday life we are unaware of HAL’s presence because language prefers to hide its existence, pretending that it is simply an obedient carrier of human intentions and an accurate expression of reality. 

But language is neither obedient nor accurate. It is a kind of spirit which is nowhere and everywhere. It is in us, among us and beyond us simultaneously. As the philosopher, Martin Heidegger, quipped: “Language speaks Man.” That is, language is what we are as both a species and individuals. We don’t have an option to use it but are forced into it from the moment we are born. We are socialised in and through language; then educated in the intricacies and conventions of language; and eventually learn how to survive and make careers within some industrial, professional, or academic ‘bubble’ of language in which success is measured almost entirely by criteria established in and by language. 

Of course language is useful. But we tend to confuse usefulness with reality. For example, Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity as a force acting instantaneously at a distance has proven very useful in, among other things, space exploration. But gravity as Newton thought of it simply doesn’t exist. There is no such force. Scientists now speak of gravity as a distortion of space-time. And, who knows, when the secrets of quantum gravity are eventually uncovered, there may well be further explanations that debunk today’s version of reality.

This point is at the heart of Kenneally’s very accessible little book. The world of language is quite separate from the physical world in which it, and we, operate. And the connection between these two world is tenuous. Even the pragmatic criterion of ‘if it works, it must be true,’ is profoundly unreliable. This is demonstrated by the advance of science itself as theories once held as approximations of reality are discarded as fundamentally misguided. Not only is there no way to verify the connections between words and things, but there is also no way to know if such a verification has even taken place. Language resists any attempt to tie it down, to be tested and evaluated for its connection to what is not language. 

So language - in the form of concepts, words, propositions, arguments, theories - pretends to be reality. And we tend to go along with the deception because we really have no alternative. We can’t function without it. As Kenneally points out, “The creation of the net was an awesome leap in technological evolution. Yet for all that it offers, it is the merest shadow of something much larger and much older. Language is the real information highway, the first virtual world. Language is the worldwide web, and everyone is logged on.” And, one must add, we have been trapped in that web from the very first word uttered, perhaps, in a sort of shriek of triumph similar to Kubrick’s primate with his thigh bone. 

I suggest that it is somewhat premature, even now, to recognise that ancient shriek as one of human triumph. It could well be one of cosmic despair.