Colonel Lágrimas by Carlos Fonseca
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Purposeful Madness

If, as a mathematical genius, one discovers that the language of mathematics itself is evil, where does one turn for solace, or at least for an explanation of why this is so? Not religion, which uses even less reliable language. Not psychiatry, which has a language no one actually understands. Not science, which is the process by which mathematics is used to poison the world. And certainly not philosophy, whose vocabulary has nothing to communicate at all.

No, if an explanation for the failure of mathematics is to be found anywhere at all, it will be in alchemy, and its cognate field of Kabbalah. Both alchemy and Kabbalah reject conventional wisdom about how the world is constituted. They are the ‘sciences’ of anarchy that undermine all language. The former knows that things are not what they seem. With patience and by using arcane secretive processes, the essence of things can be transformed. The latter knows that the language we use to describe things can only lie. Language can never touch the essences discovered in alchemy. Together alchemy and Kabbalah may reveal the fatal flaw at the heart of mathematics.

So the mathematical genius hides himself, forsaking not just professional society but also all but the most primitive human contact. He “...doesn’t want to be understood. His wish is simpler: he wants to be forgotten... to erase all legacy.” He spends his day doodling esoteric symbols that are inspired by historical figures known, and often persecuted, for their devotion to the dark arts: “... in his desperate battle for anonymity, he seems to inject himself with enormous doses of historical memory. The pleasure of healthy poison.”

The colonel, for so is he unaccountably called by the locals, is not a military man. He was of course born somewhere but he is stateless. He mother was an Hasidic Jew; but his father was a wandering anarchist. So the colonel has no real religion. Perhaps he was already anonymous as far as the world was concerned - except of course for the matter of his mathematical skills. His mathematical writings should be the most vulnerable part of him. Very few others had any interest in them. And none of those with interest could really understand what they meant. On the face of it they are ephemeral - opaque equations, derivations, and proofs. Mere words.

Yet, perversely, these ancient pre-doodles persist. He had asked someone to round up the publications in which they appeared and destroy them. But he doubted the promise. In any case, other mathematicians had seen them already. They would remember the content even if they did not understand it. They would pass on what they knew. The alchemists’ and Kabbalists’ greatest secret was how to hide what they had discovered. This is the secret he was bent on discovering.

But language always wins. It is madness to believe otherwise. The colonel’s sin is irrevocable. When he dies: “Someone will take charge of the macabre task of looking into the corners of this moldy home in search of his final work: a mathematical sketch of an invisible project. Then will come the meetings and a kind of mathematics-cum-mysticism, the posthumous labor of a group of professors-cum-Talmudic sect.” Language is invincible. It conquers even those who use it... no, especially those who use it.

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When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

No One Does Evil Willingly

Is life on Earth getting more or less humane? Are those we consider heroes of humanity really worthy of adulation? Do our ideals of professional excellence, choice informed by scientific fact, and intellectual progress stand up to scrutiny? It depends, of course, on the criterion used to measure what’s going on. But whatever measure employed, it seems there is always another lurking in the wings of history to bite our collective ass. Here are summarised several examples provided by Benjamin Labatut in this marvellous little book of factual fiction in the manner of Borges.

The Jewish scientist Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize for his 1914 discovery of a chemical process for the extraction of nitrogen from the air. This process provided synthetic fertiliser for crops and thereby promoted a dramatic increase in world population. Haber also directed the creation and use of chemicals for warfare, including that of a cyanide-based pesticide, known as Zyklon B, that was used to kill millions of Jews, including Haber’s own relatives.

Karl Schwarzschild, also Jewish, was an astrophysicist. He was also a genius who was first to provide a complete mathematical formulation of Einstein’s theory of relativity. He predicted the existence of black holes a quarter century before they could be confirmed - incidentally, while he was an artillery officer in the German Army. Inspired by intense patriotism for the Fatherland Schwarzschild had abandoned academia in order to calculate trajectories for barrages of poison gas. He died on the Eastern front, convinced that black holes were a cultural as well as physical phenomenon, and that he and the rest of the German people had fallen into one.

Alexander Grothendieck (only half Jewish) was arguably the most important mathematician of the 20th century. He was incarcerated in Vichy France and at one point escaped with the intention of walking to Berlin in order to kill Hitler. He failed but survived his ordeal. In 1958 a mathematical research institute was founded in Paris devoted solely to him and his students. During the next twelve years this group revolutionised much of mathematics and created the entirely new field of algebraic geometry. But in 1970 Grothendieck abruptly stopped not just his research but also any involvement with mathematics whatsoever. He had come to consider mathematics to be the single greatest threat to human existence. His reasoning was impeccable: “The atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicists armed with a fistful of equations.”

These and others equally fascinating vignettes in Labatut’s book are moral tales. They are also empirical evidence of the arbitrariness of human judgment. The existentialist philosophers were right: human life is absurd. Hegel was right: the world is built on contradictions. Jesus was at least partially right: the first are often last, and vice versa. The Buddha was probably right: the world is illusory; good becomes indistinguishable from evil. And Qoholeth from the Hebrew Bible was without question right: all is vanity.

Socrates believed that no one willingly commits acts of evil. Hegel thought that even the worst acts have good reasons.* Another way of expressing the same sentiment is that human beings are capable of rationalising any behaviour, thought, or desire as beneficial to the world at large. If there is any human trait that can be considered as downright sinful it is this ability. Yet we continue to confer Nobel Prizes, FA Cups, knighthoods to the likes of Jimmy Savile, and high political office to people of the caliber of Donald Trump, clearly hoping that all the accumulated wisdom of our culture is wrong.

* To quote him exactly: "You need not have advanced very far in your learning in order to find good reasons for the most evil of things. All the evil deeds in this world since Adam and Eve have been justified with good reasons."

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The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time by Julian Barbour
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thinking Outside The Box

I have no doubt that Barbour is a polymath of considerable renown for his work in the history and philosophy of science. His insights are thrilling in their originality and import. His ability to make connections not just among diverse areas of science but also with literature, philosophy, myth and religion is remarkable. His aphorisms are memorable. The consequence is that his writing is dense to the point of impenetrable obscurity.

Unless you are prepared to engage with the details of such things as phase space, shape spaces, minimal model, root-mean-square lengths, Poincaré recurrence, the Boltzmann brain, Abelian gauge theory, the N-body problem, Kepler pairs, and invariant variations, you will not find much to linger on in The Janus Point. This is unfortunate since it is a self-proclaimed paean to the universe, a sort of celebration of all that is. But it’s a celebration much like an Oxford commencement, in which the orator gives his often lengthy speech entirely in Latin. Snippets are intelligible to many in the audience but only the experts in ancient rhetoric understand the content.

The snippets that I comprehend in The Janus Point centre on his chief concerns: 1) the apparent reversibility of the laws of physics which is contradicted by all experience, and 2) the necessity within current cosmological theory for postulating inscrutable ‘special conditions’ for the universe at the moment of the Big Bang. Both these issues he perceives as deficiencies in cosmological theory involving a misconception of time and a related mistake in the application of the second law of thermodynamics. In his exposition, Barbour critiques not just the historical ‘greats’ in Physics - Newton, Boltzmann, Leibniz, Thomson, Mach, and Einstein among others - but also more recent ‘heavies’ like Penrose, Feynman, and Hawking. Throw in a bit of Shakespeare, Augustine, and Wagner and the result is density bordering on that of a black hole.

Barbour’s response to his two main concerns is, after considerable discursive detours fore and aft in the text, is literally to “think out of the box.” By this he means to consider the universe as what it is: not an experimental enclosure in which the established laws of thermodynamics reign, but an un constrained, expanding space in which certain concepts like entropy and especially time must be re-defined. He proposes an entropy-like concept which he calls entaxy, and which is measured in terms of ‘shape-complexity.’

If I understand him correctly (and this is questionable), Barbour claims that the inevitable increase in the entropy of the universe, and its consequent heat-death, masks a simultaneous process of increasing shape-entaxy. Such entaxy is a potential for order in an otherwise chaotic universe. It is just such entaxy which allows the structure of galaxies, planets, and biological life, including ourselves to emerge from such background chaos. In a sense we already live in the cosmic end-times since “the total entropy of the black holes known to exist within the observable universe dwarfs the entropy of all the matter outside them.” Yet cosmic structures continue to thrive.

So Barbour wants to define time as the growth in complexity rather than the increase in entropy. And according to him (with such complexity that I do not understand it) this implies that the experience of time ‘emanates’ as it were from the point of the Big Bang. But, crucially, it does so in two directions, thus making the Big Bang a so-called Janus point. The ‘line’ on which the arrow of time travels is thus infinite in the past as well as the future. Only what we consider as the past on our side of the Janus point is future on the other side!

Lest I misrepresent what Barbour has to say, let me use his summary: “... the claim this book makes. It is not just that it proposes a new theory of time and with it a first-principles explanation of its arrows; it also aims to overturn the doctrine that it is entropic disorder on a cosmic scale that puts the direction into time. The claim is this: the direction gets into time not through the growth of disorder but through the growth of structure and complexity.” That much I understand.

But I must say that I don’t understand anything more about time that I did before the agony of reading The Janus Point over the last several days. Barbour claims that time is “... ultimately a measure of the difference of shapes, both on the cosmic scale and within well-isolated emergent subsystems.” Really? And as a human being I perceive this how? I’m sure it’s very important to understand. That I don’t is a burden I must endure.

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Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept by Brent Nongbri
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There Is No Old Time Religion

For some years I have proposed the thesis that Christianity is an historically aberrant religion. By defining itself in terms of ‘faith’ Christianity, or more specifically the Jew, Paul of Tarsus, who invented Christianity, made religion into something it had never been before - a matter of belief. Or so I contended. The consequences of this invention have been both profound and disastrous for humanity, and quite possibly for life on Earth.

It turns out that I was mistaken. Paul did not invent a new form of religion; he invented all of religion as we have come to know it. His definition of religion as faith has come to be applied to customs and practices that are historically remote from any idea of belief or truth, metaphysical or practical. Whole cultures have taken up the Pauline concept of faith - religion as belief - as their own, completely unaware of how alien this concept is to their traditions. Paul, therefore, has much more to answer for than Christianity.

Paul’s real genius was not in the formulation of any particular doctrine peculiar to Christianity. Rather it was his skill and insistence on the dual psychological/sociological role of what has since become known as religion that created a new global category of human thought. Paul made religion both solely personal and solely communal simultaneously. This is the great innovation of ‘faith’. It created not just Christianity but also religion as a modern phenomenon.

Nongbri‘s extensive analysis of language, traditions and cultural practices shows that there is no such thing as ‘ancient religion.’ He examines four historical episodes involving progressive Jewish, Roman, Christian, and Islamic developments of the idea of religion. He makes his point succinctly: ‘The real problem is that the particular concept of religion is absent in the ancient world. The very idea of ‘being religious’ requires a companion notion of what it would mean to be ‘not religious,’ and this dichotomy was not part of the ancient world.”

Hence my error: I have been giving Paul much less credit than he deserves. He didn’t just change what religion means, he permanently altered the consciousness of the world. Religion wasn’t even a ‘thing’, it had no ontological status, before Paul created it. Nongbri made me aware of an enormous gap in my knowledge.

Nongbri understands the centrality of Christianity to his thesis when he says “It is thus not surprising that various Christian texts have been identified as marking the beginning of the concept of religion.” Incredibly, however, Nongbri has almost nothing to say about the Christian foundational texts by Paul of Tarsus. Paul doesn’t even appear in the index.

Nongbri‘s focus on the 4th century church historian Eusebius as a key point of Christian development of the idea of religion seems almost absurd since Eusebius’s concept of Christianity is solely Pauline. For Eusebius, all religions were already ‘faiths.’ Christianity had by then re-interpreted Judaism as such and was on the verge of inspiring Islam as a faith opposed to its own. Nongbri completely ignores the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline writings which would not only definitively prove his point about the invention of religion but also would explain the consternation Christianity provoked in Roman civilisation, the relationship among all his ‘episodes,’ and the subsequent European wars of religion. If for no other reason, Occam’s razor would seem to demand he look in Paul's direction.

Because of this crucial hiatus in Nongbri’s analysis, he is unable to notice the source of the private/public distinction which became so important in the Renaissance. Nor is he able to appreciate to drift back to a reunion of these spheres, drawn together by the gravitational pull of Pauline faith. This faith is simultaneously totally private - a personal relationship between a human being and the divine - and totally public - requiring an approved relationship with other human beings.

John Locke, in response to the 16th and 17th century wars of this new thing called religion, attempted to put the genie back in the bottle by separating the political from the religious. He accepted faith for what it is and suggested a ‘hack’ that would ease the tension. But his was a patch not a fix. His solution seemed to work and inspired what is recognised as the secular state in which religion is a private matter best kept out of politics.

More recently, however, we have discovered that faith will not tolerate this separation of the private from the public. Faith is a category which is not just dominant but also all-inclusive. Taken seriously, faith is not just political action, it is also apolitical (or anti-political) militancy, that is to say, terrorism. Hence our modern faith-based wars of religion.

Nongbri knows that faith is the fulcrum of the development of the modern idea of religion. And he is aware of the political consequences of faith. His 2008 thesis is entitled ‘Paul Without Religion: The Creation of a Category and the Search for an Apostle Beyond the New Perspective.’
Yet he unaccountably neglects the person who made faith his life and death issue in this volume of 2013. And I am at a loss to account for this.

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The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Tragedy of Success

The Queens Gambit is about professional chess in the same way that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is about professional tennis. That is to say, the core of the book is about how we use our talents to destroy ourselves. In this it is sImilar to Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story which, although written three quarters of a century ago, carries the same warning about the same game.

Beth is a chess prodigy. The first impression of her story might be that she is another Billy Eliot or a Mozart, a rerun of talent triumphing over adversity. But Walter Tevis has done something unusual. Although the book is written on the third person, the reader gets to know very little about Beth from the outside. The perspective is that of Beth from the inside - what she, feels, thinks. But what she is to herself is opaque. She, like most of us, has no idea that she is neurotic.

Beth is an Objective Introvert in Jungian terms. That is, she is particularly sensitive to the social environment in which she finds herself; and she tends to adapt herself in a variety of ways to that environment. I think it’s fair to say that Objective Introverts are the permanently oppressed in modern society. In ages past, they might end up in monasteries or as quiet functionaries in a family business. But in a competitive corporate society their lack of aggressiveness and apparent malleability makes them seem weak and unserious, unfit for commercial adventure.

Unless, of course, they have some significant talent that allows them to shine - like playing chess. In that case the talent is perceived - by its possessor as well as the rest of society - as a compensation for an otherwise unfortunate personality. Like the autistic savant who can sketch an entire cityscape from memory, the talent is not only a way to fit in but also a route to fame and fortune. Or so it might seem.

Beth compensates for her psychic imbalance using two strategies: chess and dope. Chess provides a focus from which the constant pressure generated by the the world can be mitigated. The dope dulls what’s left of the world and eases the pressure between matches. Outstanding therapy therefore.

The problem of course, as in any self-help regime, is that the remedy quickly becomes part of the problem. As Beth is successful professionally, chess promotes even greater introversion. And the dope becomes a greater intrusion than the rest of the world had ever been. Together they drive her further into what becomes obsessive addiction.

Beth’s personality is not her problem. What gets her in trouble is her compulsion to ‘fix’ her personality. If she could realise that there is no need to do so, she might not be so driven to find competitive success. But she’d probably enjoy chess - and life in general - much more.

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