Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Travesty of Love

I have a small apricot tree against a wall in the back of my garden. Two of its branches cross in front of a decorative mirror. Yesterday a great tit ( parus major to be more precise) arrived on one of these branches. His reflection in the mirror clearly appeared to him as a rival and he became increasingly enraged at its presence, obsessively tearing leaves off the two branches. My wife and I shooed him away several times without permanent result. This morning both branches were bare and the bird had targeted his wrath on yet other parts of the dwindling tree. Senseless destruction, of course, and a complete waste of energy.

In the midst of this garden drama, I was engrossed in Mariette in Ecstasy, the story of a girl (I suspect loosely based on that of Therese of Lisieux, who had died with some notoriety 7 or 8 years before the book was published) whose only desire was to die - effectively at her own hand - for the love of her life, Jesus Christ. Hers is a story of narcissistic rage against... well, herself. Or, more precisely, the reflection of herself in the mirror of her religion. She has been taught throughout her short life that this reflection is reality and to attack it vigorously by continuously gazing at it and despising it for its inherent evil. Pain, deprivation, opportunities self-denial are all sought after in order to destroy the image of sin which she has of herself.

The community of cloistered nuns in which Mariette has chosen to live normalises her ambition for self-extinction. As the mate of the great tit in my garden watched and undoubtedly encouraged the bird in his insanity, so the other nuns find Mariette’s desires for union with her beloved Jesus to be not just praiseworthy but also saintly. Many envy her steadfastness in pursuit of her religious fantasies. Some even envy her advanced state of delusion as they watch her transport during routine household tasks. She becomes the centre of the community despite her young age.

But to call this group of women a community is to stretch the term. They do work together, have distinct roles, and pray together. But their purpose is entirely individualistic. Each is only interested in exactly what Mariette is interested in: personal transcendence. They have no shared communal goal at all. Their regard for each other is purely formal except for the frequent flirtations about their love for the Master. They are Pharisaic in the extreme, believing that ritual behaviour is the key to their bliss. When they pray, it is not for the world or for their families but for their own death. Mariette succeeds in this self-absorption in what can only be called a travesty of love.

I covered the mirror behind the apricot tree with a fleece. The tit returned to the branches with marked confusion, pecking at the fleece occasionally as if daring the supposed intruder on the other side to show himself. Eventually the ‘therapy’ of the fleece took effect. He and his mate went on to more constructive endeavours. If only there were such a simple therapy for human beings to rid them of their reflective delusions!

Postscript 3May21: For the last two days I have repeatedly tried removing the fleece from the mirror. The bird returns immediately, even more insane and violent each time. So much for my avian therapy.

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Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? 
by 

Paul Veyne, 

 

Paula Wissing (Translation)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Apr 13, 2021  ·  edit

it was amazing

bookshelves: french-language, epistemology-language, history 

The Ethics of Journalism

One of the academic hoops that almost all doctoral students must jump through to obtain their degree is demonstration of a ‘complete knowledge’ of their chosen topic. This is usually interpreted to mean a mastery of the most recent professional literature - authors, controversies, unsolved problems, methods used etc. The candidate is expected to enter into and absorb the academic culture he or she wants to join before anyone will take seriously his or her views about how that culture might be improved. Before writing there must be total immersion. 

Some, perhaps many, find this requirement tedious at best and at worst entirely irrelevant to the intellectual project they have in mind. But from the ancient Greeks onward, it is this certified knowledge of what has gone before that is the sine qua non of respectable ideas. Not truth, or originality, or practical significance, but tradition - what has been handed on from others. One may criticise, modify, or destroy the views of another but only after one has demonstrated an understanding of these views.

Since the birth of the university in the Middle Ages, this requirement has been enforced through the existence of a community of scholars which is broadly in agreement about the content of the relevant tradition - the vulgate or received texts - upon which intellectual certification is based. Without this community, advance is made impossible, among other reasons because the definition of advance itself would be moot. The fact that many of the best minds balk at the requirement to serve a sort of apprenticeship or noviciate, doesn’t mitigate the dominance of the community. They will only be successful if they can show how their ideas fit, or don’t, with the ideas of their colleagues both past and present.

By the standards of intellectual life, ever since dominated by the university, ancient writers of events were journalists not historians. They wrote what was reported to them, generally in good faith, but with little effort to assess the actual occurrence of events. Internal consistency in an account was sufficient to accept it as ‘true’. Or at least sufficiently credible to be used as a focus of intellectual contemplation. What was presented were not definitive facts but a melange of eye-witness reporting, tall tales, and authorial inferences. They rarely argued a case but aimed to set forth what had been passed down with commentary. Imagination was the foundation of the entire process, but imagination sparked by the same attention tradition as subsequent ‘qualified’ types.

Veyne is explicit in his view of both history and journalism and: “... the analogy between ancient history and the deontology or methodology of modem journalism. A reporter adds nothing to his credibility by including his infonnant's identity. We judge his value on internal criteria. We need only read him to know whether he is intelligent, impartial, or precise and whether he has a broad cultural background.” His presumption (and implication) is clear: neither history nor journalism can be judged with reference to either ‘the facts’ nor external authority. The ‘truth’ is only accessible within the text itself and by the standards of the culture from which it emanates.

This is likely to be disconcerting to positivists and even less rigid scientific types who are trained in the methods of the university. But that is because those folk exist within the fantasy that words can be matched against reality and then assessed for their degree of correlation. That this is impossible was obvious to the Greeks who considered the community of readers to be constituted as laymen such as themselves - educated, discerning, interested in their culture but not experts - who were able to make judgments of value. Truth for this community is constituted by that which is significant to contemplate, not that which should be considered as factually correct much less believed in the Christian sense. Myth was intended to provoke thought - moral, psychological, spiritual, and social - not faith. To believe was to value not to affirm. In that sense the Greeks believed their myths.

In our era, journalism and journalistic readership appear to have lost two key attributes when compared with their Greek forebears. As Veyne suggests, the ideal of deontological (value free) reporting is a modern conceit. It simply cannot be accomplished. Nor is it desirable. Such reporting implies the rejection of tradition and therefore the very culture in which the writing takes place. The readership is often similarly rootless. It doesn’t possess the ability to identify the lack of cultural erudition or the internal coherence of what they read. From a cultural perspective they are illiterate. They believe what they read with the fervour of faith - the more salacious, the more faith they invest. This has probably been the case for generations. But the triumph of the the likes of Trump and QAnon make the case without question. Journalism as the Greeks knew it is dead.

The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Mob and Its Conceits

This is the H. L. Mencken translation. I don’t know how well it captures Nietzsche’s native style; but it certainly captures Mencken’s. I think Mencken’s introduction alone is worth the price of admission. While it distorts Nietzsche as much as any “outraged Mississippi Methodist,” it summarises rather well Mencken’s genius and his utter derangement. Profound insights are mixed with trivial absurdities in about equal measure. The former include his observations about democracy; the latter his hatred of Judaism as a culture.

Mencken’s understanding of democracy is inseparable from his understanding of revolution, from the American and French to the Russian. They are brought about by mobs. Mobs don’t not learn. Mobs reinforce their own delusions and pursue them more ruthlessly and guiltlessly than any tyrant. The mob has leaders who emerge spontaneously from within itself because they are seen to be ‘one of us.’ The mob has no rules of behaviour other than to maintain loyalty to the mob. The mob has no conscience because it is sovereign, responsible only to itself and only as long as it remains in existence. When the mob disperses, it’s history effectively disappears and survivors are left with a mess to be cleaned up by those who would never join a mob.

Mencken was essentially right about democracy. It does promote the worst political environment for human survival. The difference between a mob and a democratic electorate is paper thin. Recent political events - in the United States, in Russia, in the Philippines, in India, and in Brazil to name only a few places - suggest that the mob has become the electorate. Just like any mob, each of the relevant electorates is motivated by some common but diffuse fear. As is traditional in mob activity, each is promoted and defended by religious practice and authority as a sort of cleansing of society. And, of course, the mob does not compromise; it gets what it wants or it destroys its opposition, and has no hesitation in fomenting revolution in the process.

The singular advantage of democracy, according to Mencken, is that popular anti-semitism will ensure that Jews can never attain to the ruling plutocracy. I don’t know where in his background this anti-semitism originates. To attribute it, in 1918, to a prevailing cultural norm would imply that Mencken was as much influenced by popular nonsense as the mob. To suggest that he had some particularly disappointing experience with individual Jews, would imply that he had a rather pronounced logical difficulty in his generalisations. In any case, his anti-semitism goes a long way in undermining his intellectual snobbery and his conclusions about the mob.

The most disturbing thing about Mencken’s anti-semitism is that it was neither casual nor superficial. Despite his reported remarks in the late 1930’s about the shame of the de-humanisation of Jews in Germany, the rationale for his hatred was identical to that of Hitler: Jews had invented the unnatural and irrational idea of caring for the less able and less well-off in the community. They had infected the Western world with this social malaise. And this is something Nietzsche had failed to take into account fully. The problem that both Mencken and Nietzsche (and Hitler) had with Christianity was at root a problem of Judaism. Judaism perverted the course of human evolution and therefore needed to be eliminated.

Both Nietzsche and Mencken wrote in a way that was intended to shock. Each overstated and exaggerated for effect. But Nietzsche was a philosopher and Mencken was a forerunner of America’s AM radio hosts. Nietzsche never wanted or expected wide-spread acceptance; Mencken lived for it in his books and editorials. Nietzsche analysed; Mencken sensationalised. Ultimately Nietzsche provokes reflection; Mencken merely revulsion at his own self-promotion. Nietzsche refused to join a mob; Mencken was a closet mobster of the first order.

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Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It's True? by Charles Seife
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There Is No Vaccine

People lie

Because there are no consequences, the lies people tell on the internet are bigger than ever before.

Because people are largely uneducated, and like gossip, the lies that people tell on the internet are more consequential.

Because the lies told on the internet spread like an highly infectious disease, it is appropriate to use this analogy to describe the way in which they infect human brains as a sort of plague.

All the traditional defences we have relied upon to reduce the rate of infection - authority, cross-referencing, factual consistency, social distancing, isolation - have broken down with the advance and global proliferation of digital technology.

Consequently we are all at continuous peril of infection from a virulent auto-immune disease that hides its effects and is welcomed by its hosts: “As we sink into the comfortable monotony of constant reinforcement, as we spend an increasing amount of time listening to sources of information that are tailored to strengthen our mental fictions rather than challenge them, we are slowly being turned into cranks ourselves. And those who don’t succumb are often at the mercy of those who do.”

In short: “Bad information is a disease that affects all of us... And there’s no vaccine.” Yep, that’s right ladies and gents. There is no cure, no preventative, no fix for the condition. I admire Seife for admitting it. But then why write the book? Exposing some of the lies which have been shown to be false, misleading, or just stupid, typically involved dogged detective work beyond both the capability and interest of your average internet user. His examples therefore are more salacious than instructive.

There is no vaccine now; there will be no vaccine. The underlying virus has always been there waiting, like COVID, for the right environmental conditions to emerge. Yet Seife has hope. For what? A general improvement in human nature? The rise of some sort of new journalistic authority? Some new philosophical breakthrough in epistemology? Education in computer literacy? As soon as these solutions are listed, it is obvious that the cause is lost. As he notes, the current state of affairs represents the real social triumph of democracy. Finally we have a technology which rids us of the plague of elites. Truth is what the majority say it is (two-thirds in the US Senate, a stand for plutocracy!). Our right to believe anything we desire has been vindicated by our technological fellowship with others who believe the same things. Could it be that Seife’s hope is just another internet lie to enhance his position with his aspiring journalist students, giving them some hope that their futures are secure? Someone tell me why these students are not doomed to irrelevance.

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The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact 
by 

Jean Baudrillard, 

 

Chris Turner

 

BlackOxford's review 

Apr 09, 2021  ·  edit

really liked it

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

Pataphysics As A Guide to Morals

Baudrillard is a consummate aphorist. Aphorism is tough to summarise much less to comment upon, but here goes:

Religion (faith) promised redemption but delivered divisive hate. Science (representation) promised reality but delivered fragmented illusion. Technology promised prosperity (progress) but delivered seductive hyperreality. In hyperreality truth and reality disappear and are replaced by simulacra - copies for which there are no originals. The only commitment remaining is that to language itself, signs without referents, words without meaning, causes without purpose. Language-fundamentalists now rule the world. Our knowledge is not a mirror of the world but a digital screen that constitutes the world.

This is not a Gnostic myth but a philosophical analysis which leads to a similar conclusion: We are doomed as a species. Our greatest strength, language, is also our instrument of mass suicide. Language does not merely speak us, as Heidegger said; it controls us totally for its own ends. The more we struggle against it, the more it tightens its hold around our collective neck. Yet we resist the recognition. We remain committed to the fanaticism of language despite its obvious trajectory. This is the intelligence of evil. The perfect crime. “[T]he simulacrum is not that which hides the truth, but that which hides the absence of truth.”

Baudrillard’s is a carefully empirical study, the prophetic accuracy of which is difficult to deny. QAnon, Trump rallies, evangelical Christians, suicidal Buddhists, Islamic terrorists, and any of several dozen conspiracy theories are what he predicted. There is not just disagreement on the facts but of what constitutes a fact. There is no rational argument because rationality itself is undefined. Patterns appear in data and can mean anything we want them to mean. Identity, from gender to career, is a matter of individual choice and is therefore as fluid as it is inalienable. Shibboleths about democracy, values, ideals, humanity, spiritual well-being have shown themselves to be what they are: rationalisations for someone’s quest for power. All conceivable modes of expression are absorbed into advertising.

God and the Real were once the ever-receding horizon of human knowledge, limits to be striven toward but never reached. They acted as standards by which advance could be measured. In the virtual reality of the simulacra, there are no such limits and therefore no standards against which to assess knowledge. What can be imagined is immediately incorporated into the world as we experience it. “We are never done with making good the void of truth. Hence the flight forward into ever more simulacra.” At best, the world-as-it-is is a sort of “strange attractor” which acts solely to promote yet more imagination. And that imagination leads to an hypothesis: 

“... the world does not exist in order for us to know it or, more exactly, knowledge itself is part of the illusion of the world. This is the very principle of the world that thinks us. The question of whether there is an objective reality does not even arise: the intelligence of the world is the intelligence of the world that thinks us.”

Our species-wide infatuation with artificial intelligence is a symptom of our “being incapable of accepting thought (the idea that the world thinks us, the intelligence of evil), we invent the easiest solution, the technical solution: Artificial Intelligence.” This is typical. It is what our species has always done, that is chosen the easy solution: 

“Against the hypothesis of uncertainty: the illusion of truth and reality. Against the hypothesis of destiny: the illusion of freedom. Against the hypothesis of evil [Mal]: the illusion of mis-fortune [malheur]. Against the hypothesis of thought, the illusion of Artificial Intelligence. Against the hypothesis of the event: the illusion of information. Against the hypothesis of becoming: the illusion of change.”

This is obviously not a book for everyone. And those who might benefit most from it are those least likely to read it, namely, those boosters and promoters of AI in all its forms. They prefer algorithms to aphorisms. Nevertheless, just the suspicion that they are not doing what they think they are doing might generate a bubble of humility in their sea of hubris. Spread the non-algorithmic word.

Postscript 10Apr21: this from the WP. It ain’t going to happen: https://apple.news/AKOtmBh3YQOKqMxdSO...

Money by Martin Amis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Here to Stay

The enduring legacy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher isn’t conservatism as a political programme but narcissism as a mode of living. As the aptly named John Self says in Money, “You just gave us some money... but you hate me, don’t you. Yes you do. Because I’m the new kind, the kind who has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness. To which I say: You never let us in, not really. You might have thought you let us in, but you never did. We’re here to stay. You try getting us out ... My way is coming up in the world”

Amis got it exactly right. John Self is now the new normal. The physical embodiment of his ethos is Trump and Harvey Weinstein. John Self is their fictional prototype: coarse, uneducated, racist, misogynistic, overweight, and entirely without taste. He not only became acceptable in polite circles, he became their centre. “You know where you are with economic necessity,” Self opines, by which he means money is the only criterion of value. Therefore more is always better, even if there is no object in having it except having it.

There is only a limited amount of pornography, alcohol, drugs, and sex a human being can consume. And their consumption in excess reduces the ability to consume more (it’s impossible to have seven month long hangover without side effects). This causes an irritability which leads to the potential for violence at any moment. Self knows this and lives in constant fear of himself. This in turn makes him more irritable, and so on. “With violence, you have to keep your hand in, you have to have a repertoire.” Get your revenge in first. Never yield. Always hurt the other guy more than he hurt you. Sound familiar?

For the English Self, New York City is an enormous brothel, with fast food restaurants in close proximity. The place excites him in a curious way: “You step off the plane, look around, take a deep breath–and come to in your underpants, somewhere south of SoHo, or on a midtown traction table with a silver tray and a tasselled tab on your chest and a guy in white saying Good morning, sir. How are you today. That’ll be fifteen thousand dollars . . .” NYC demands money just to stay alive, lots of it. It makes the making of money as a goal in itself comprehensible, even worthwhile.

Lots of literary allusions are peppered through the text, including an increasing number to the author himself, the ultimate hero of the piece, who proposes the redemptive force of literature as an antidote to the Reagan/Thatcherite legacy. Right, that’ll do it. I’ll write to Trump and Weinstein to clue them in.

Good writing. But consequently a sermon heard only by the choir of readers of good writing. Not Trump; not Weinstein, therefore.

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