Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Spinoza’s Man

Although he had a lifelong interest in philosophy, Einstein had a limited background in the subject, mainly Kant and Plato. He had even less knowledge of theology. Yet I am impressed by his intuitive understanding of the subject and its relevance to his scientific work. Quips about God and dice aside, his scientific ethos can be associated with a theology as nuanced as the quote used as the title of Païs biography: “Subtle is the Lord; but malicious He is not.”

Einstein made only a few explicit comments about religion. Perhaps his most informative was the statement: “A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation.” The phrase ‘superpersonal objects’ is important - not supernatural, or spiritual, or divine, one notices. And Païs reports him as saying in his later years: “Science without epistemology is—in so far as it is thinkable at all—primitive and muddled.” The phrase has explicit philosophical import - how we may connect words to things that are not words underlies all 0f human inquiry.

In line with Kantian epistemology, these objects, these things, that Einstein refers to are literally everything there is in the universe. They are unknowable for what they are in themselves. They first must be perceived by limited human sense capabilities, even capabilities enhanced by technology. Even more fundamentally, they must be expressed in language. And words are not non-words. Words have no logical foundation except in other words. And even language itself is superpersonal, that is beyond the capacity of individual human beings to comprehend entirely much less control.

So Einstein’s epistemological stance in the first instance implies an inherent uncertainty about the world, and with that a requirement for scientific humility. But humility does not imply incapacity. It is here that Einstein seems to make his theological presumption: the universe wants, or at least allows, itself to be known. It supplies what human beings need to be able to investigate it. This is one interpretation of what Enlightenment philosophers have called the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Theologians call this principle ‘Revelation’ and study it in a sub-discipline called Fundamental Theology. This refers to essentially the same thing as the Principle of Sufficient Reason, namely the ability of human beings to receive comprehensible messages about something that is unknowable in its infinity. Typical dogmatic theology - Christian or any other sort - understands that human knowledge of the divine must be incomplete but then insists on limiting what can be known to some rather arbitrary text or interpretation, thus effectively deifying language as well as causing untold misery by attempting to enforce interpretive restrictions.

Einstein’s God is not the dogmatic God of Christianity or Orthodox Judaism. As Païs says, “If he had a God it was the God of Spinoza.” He bases this on Einstein’s admiring statement about the man: “Although he lived three hundred years before our time, the spiritual situation with which Spinoza had to cope peculiarly resembles our own. The reason for this is that he was utterly convinced of the causal dependence of all phenomena, at a time when the success accompanying the efforts to achieve a knowledge of the causal relationship of natural phenomena was still quite modest.”

I think it is interesting that for Spinoza there are two categories of things which exist, substances and modes. Substances, it seems to me, are what Kant would later call things-in-themselves; and modes are the equivalent of descriptions, that is to say, adjectival expressions, thus language. Substances generate modes, but Spinoza is not terribly specific about how this is accomplished. Modes also refer to ways in which God can be described. The modes of God are essentially everything, all the individual substances, of the universe. Thus there is but one substance, and that substance communicates continuously through people, events, molecules, galaxies, etc.

Like Spinoza, Einstein believed that ‘the universe would provide.’ Some have liked to call that belief ‘faith.’ I think that would be a terrible misconstrual. An abiding hope perhaps but not faith in the Christian sense, simply because it was a belief with no fixed content. In fact quite the opposite. Einstein as a scientist was never dogmatic about, for example, the meaning of quantum physics, although he disagreed with the interpretations of many of his colleagues. And this applied not just to scientific results but also to scientific methods for obtaining results:

“He [the scientist] must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist in so far as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; an idealist in so far as he looks upon the concepts and theories as the free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist in so far as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as a Platonist or Pythagorean in so far as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research”

In short, Einstein was a pragmatist not a dogmatist. His view that “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”is therefore not some sentimental blanket approval of theology. It is a very specific, although sparsely worked out, statement of the kind of religion that was compatible with his conception of science. Spinoza never started a church or a cult. The idea is absurd. So is the idea that Einstein had some sort of dogmatic faith, that he was even in some way an ‘anonymous Christian’ as the Jesuit Karl Rainer would have it. No, in addition to being a genius, he was also theologically thoughtful. He was Spinoza’s man.

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The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Our Way of Life

The affluent feeling of Mediterranean sexual tension is Highsmith’s trademark. Who will end up with whom is a sort of background radiation in her books. Her characters are always 1950’s Americans but they could easily be mistaken for the 1930’s English of Agatha Christie - with more libido and less confidence. The Tremor of Forgery is no exception.

In this story, though, she plays an interesting dialectic between two Americans in Tunisia - one a coastal liberal, the other a right-winger from the heartland. The first, Ingham, lives his smug, petty life as if the rest of the world would eventually catch up to the standard set by America, and meanwhile could be enjoyably exploited. The latter, Adams, is afraid the world just might catch up to America, and in the process inflict great harm on “our way of life.”

The context of the action is the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt, which also happens to be the point of highest intensity of the American War in VietNam. Highsmith uses this context to provoke a judgment on her characters. The ‘conservative’ Adams is, of course, in favour of the country’s ever increasing engagement in VietNam and predicts inevitable victory in light of vastly superior technology. The Arab-Israeli conflict he is less sanguine about, primarily because he doesn’t like Semites - Arabs or Jews. His theory of the world is that America is being persecuted and must defend itself from these and other inferiors.

But Highsmith’s real target is the liberal Ingham who has no theory of the world whatsoever, except that he’s doing fine. His concerns are trivial, as are his emotional attachments. He is repulsed by Adams’s views but doesn’t contradict him for reasons of politesse. He’s writing a novel (with the same title as Highsmith’s) in which the main character is a rationalised version of himself, a conman who feels no guilt about his massive embezzlement. He has no tremor whatsoever as he forges cheques from his employer. His self-delusion is complete.

By the time The Tremor of Forgery was published in 1969, Highsmith’s references to casual sex and homosexuality had become passé. American society had moved on from its overwhelming Puritanism of the 1950’s. Nevertheless she could read that society very well. What she saw then is the birth of what we have now grown to maturity in American politics - a religiously grounded, xenophobic, violent, faction describing themselves as anti-communist; and a self-absorbed, commercially successful, apparently sophisticated and worldly faction with no social conscience whatsoever. I think she foresaw the development clearly..

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Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Life Gives You Lemons…

The Arum Lily sends up its menacing red ‘Lords and Lilies’ flowers only after all its leaves have died. The more delicate Ithuriel’s Spear does the same with its pale blue Mogen David’s. Some things appear dead when they are most alive. Perhaps because I read Christ Stopped at Eboli in my garden, I find a similar pattern in its subtle structure.

When Levi arrives in the village of Gagliano (Aliano), after having been incarcerated and then judicially exiled in another remote Southern Italian place, he is understandably depressed. The sharply eroded slopes and ravines of white clay support little vegetation. The village is crushingly poor, the only real connection to the rest of the world (aside from the barracks of the fascist-led carabinieri) is the post office. The place it seems survives solely on the intensity of the universal hatred of each of the inhabitants for every other. “Here they had hated each other for centuries and would go on hating, among the same houses, before the same white stones of the Basento Valley and the same caves of Irsina.”

The prospect of spending three years in such desolation is harrowing. To escape the unremitting sun reflected off the white clay and the equally unremitting sight of the squalor and emotional force of the enmity, Levi takes refuge in a newly dug grave in which he can read and rest in relative comfort. It is here in the story, and through his conversations with the ancient gravedigger, that the tone of his writing shifts. He has an epiphany about these country people, these pagani, that is touching but unsentimental:

“They can not have even an awareness of themselves as individuals, here where all things are held together by acting upon one another and each one is a power unto itself, working imperceptibly, where there is no barrier that can not be broken down by magic. They live submerged in a world that rolls on independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria, where there can be neither happiness, as literary devotees of the land conceive it, nor hope, because these two are adjuncts of personality and here there is only the grim passivity of a sorrowful Nature. But they have a lively human feeling for the common fate of mankind and its common acceptance. This is strictly a feeling rather than an act of will; they do not express it in words but they carry it with them at every moment and in every motion of their lives, through all the unbroken days that pass over these wastes.”

Levi has found something more than a physical and cultural wasteland in Gagliano. And something more than an example of repressive 1930’s fascism. The national politics and violence (the war in Ethiopia had just begun) that had been his main concerns are relativised amidst these people. He does not romanticise their suffering but he does understand what it takes to endure it. They, the pagans, don’t have the capacity to articulate what they experience; he does.

Looking at the village via Google Earth today, it seems a rather pleasant place. Not as prosperous as a hilltop village the South of France but certainly quaint and somewhat charming. One has to conclude that the populace is significantly better off than their forebears were eight decades ago. The leaves, like everything else then, were certainly desiccated and brown, much like my Arums and Spears. But now, if not particularly flowery, the place seems at least habitable. Perhaps Levi anticipated that kind of transformation as he became aware of these people as fellow human beings.

As I mentioned, my garden does exercise a substantial influence on my life - for better and worse. All fanciful judgments are mine, however, not the plants’.

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Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan by Anthony T. Kronman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Answers Lying in Wait

Anthony Kronman and I share much. We are approximately the same age so that we share the experiences, aspirations, and (perhaps) even the disappointments of the boomer generation. We did our university degrees not far from each other in New England; and although his studies were in philosophy and mine engineering, I think it’s fair to say that we shared an optimism about learning which was more personal than cultural. We had similar youthful questions about meaning - mine epistemological, his triggered by political philosophy. Both of us set these questions aside in order to make a living - in the law and business respectively. We both returned to these questions in mature life, remarkably at about the same age, he through his direction of a philosophical programme at Yale, me by completing a doctoral degree in theology and teaching at Oxford.

Most remarkably of all, we seem to have arrived at very similar answers to the questions we had posed ourselves as young adults. Kronman’s erudition and articulateness are far superior to mine, but in him I find so much of what I have been attempting to say, inadequately, for years. It seems we have by chance, fate, or cultural necessity stumbled across the same answers lying in wait as if they had been there all along. He, like me, is what has been called a ‘systems thinker,’ an accusation that simply means that we look for the largest context possible in which to explain an event or phenomenon or problem. And the largest most expansive context either one of us was able to find had a name and a history - God.

Kronman is succinct in his conclusion: “My central contention is that all our most distinctively modern beliefs and practices necessarily assume the existence of the eternal God of sufficient reason, and that none of our deepest convictions in the realms of science, art and politics can be sustained without it.” This term ‘sufficient reason’ is one coined by the 17th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (also very much a systems man) but has been in practical use since the ancient Greeks. My view is that the principle refers to the human intelligibility of the universe. Without this principle, inquiry, that is the posing and answering of questions (as well as much else), would be utterly pointless.

But for Kronman as well as for me, God is not something that exists, at least not something that exists in the manner proposed by the religion which dominates our cultural heritage, namely Christianity. God for us is not something outside of nature, that is to say the world of material things. God exists sive natura. More specifically, God exists (or does not) in the relationships within the world, particularly among human beings and between human beings and the rest of ‘creation.’ Kronman is very precise, and I think absolutely correct, in his assessment of Christianity as its own as well as humanity’s worst enemy:

“… Christianity differs from Judaism and Islam… in its theological character. Judaism and Islam of course have theologies too. But their fundamental orientation is orthopractical. Both are religions whose adherents are distinguished, first and most importantly, by their observance of certain ritual and legal requirements, rather than by the affirmation of a set of rigorously prescribed beliefs. Christianity, by contrast, has always defined itself in orthodoxical terms. To be a Christian means to hold specific beliefs about man’s relation to God.”

In short, Christianity is a literally ideological versus an ethical religion. Its faith is a matter of words not actions. Its formal doctrine is that correct belief out-weighs even the most outrageous and inhumane behaviour, in fact that belief often necessitates such behaviour.

While I would go back a bit further in history to identify the killer virus within Christianity (the idea of faith as articulated first by Paul of Tarsus), it is not misleading to place its mature form in the writings of St. Augustine. As Kronman says, “… the [modern] demise of Christian belief is brought about by tensions inherent to it and already evident in the conflict between Augustine’s doctrines of human freedom and divine grace.” Essentially: if God is omnipotent, there can be no free will; and if there is free will, God can’t be omnipotent. He shows how the attempts to mitigate this paradox have merely resulted in throwing not just philosophy, but also politics, economics and institutional culture from one pole to the other - from total freedom (liberalism) to complete incapacity (fundamentalism) and back again. He goes on to say that, “The theology of the Christian religion, with its distinctive emphasis on divine grace and its rigorous insistence on God’s separation from the world, thus simultaneously intensifies man’s rebellious wish to be God and creates the conceptual room for him to do so.” Christianity, in other words, creates its own idolatry.

Kronman looks particularly to Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Walt Whitman for help in constructing a context for understanding the world at the level of the divine. His choice of inspiration cannot be gainsaid. Each of these shares an appreciation of the world which recognises the limits of human comprehension in an infinitely comprehensible universe. All three recognise that whatever we think God to be, he is not that. But this is neither a disappointment nor a challenge. Rather it is an opportunity for endless exploration and its joys.

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The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Politics of Humiliation


Anyone familiar with differential calculus can recognise the fundamental logical problem of attributing responsibility for results (pay for performance; test scores; organisation success; etc) to an individual. The contribution of any one factor (person) to a total can only be assessed when all other factors (social background, level of education, genetic composition, ethnicity, etc.) are held constant. So for example, in the question of performance pay, one must be able to discern the relative importance to the salesman’s ‘numbers’ in the context of the entire organisation from the receptionists, secretaries, and researchers, to the scientists, production staff, and managers. Holding these things constant is obviously an impossible task.

Nevertheless we (those blessed for our contributions) seem bent on the idea of assigning personal responsibility for what happens in life. At least when we consider those less well off (and sometimes those better off) than ourselves. We deserve (at least) all that we have. They deserve (and more) exactly what they lack. The psychology and sociology of the meritocracy is pervasive. And the economic, political, and social effects that should have become obvious through masses of academic research over decades have surfaced most acutely in the election of Trump and his takeover of the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton was right - Trump’s followers are indeed the losers in the meritocratic façade. What she didn’t get is that they want to be winners.

Michael Sandel recognises the psychological, social, economic, and political effects of our commitment to merit. But his primary concern is the morality of a merit-based society not its practical consequences. What interests me most about his approach is his identification of Christianity as the source of our effective deification of merit and the main obstacle to our overcoming its tragedies. I think he is justified in doing this; and his brief history of relevant theology is insightful. But I think he is wrong about his inference that personal merit is a Judaeo-Christian idea. Merit is indeed something that appears in Hebrew Scriptures and traditions, but like many other aspects of Judaism, Christianity transformed this idea into something quite unrecognisable in the matrix culture.

The most obvious transformation in Christianity is the notion of personal salvation. In the Hebrew Scriptures, it is Israel, a corporate body not individuals as such, from whom YHWH demands obedience. The individuals mentioned are always tropes for the larger society. Everyone in Israel shares both divine favour and punishment. Early medieval Judaism did develop the idea of the Zachuth Avot, the Merits of the Fathers, through which the ‘goodness’ of Israel’s founders was considered somehow available to all Jews in mitigation of their faults. I suspect that this was in response to the emerging Christian doctrine of the infinite merit achieved by Jesus through his death. But the difference in the two is crucial. The Zachuth is an inter-generational assistance to avoid and atone for fault; Christ’s merit, being infinite, is a complete expiation of fault.

Enter the man, Paul of Tarsus, whose interpretation of what he was told about Jesus is keyed precisely on the idea of the infinitely meritorious death of Christ. If this death wipes out the need for God to punish those who transgress (in later ages called the Atonement Theory), then the only thing necessary to assure one’s eternal salvation is the acceptance of this ‘fact’ as a matter of unshakeable belief. This is uniquely Pauline not Abrahamic. Thus begins the persistent struggle in Christianity to explain the problematic relation Faith/Works. Sandel traces this struggle (with the help of folk like Max Weber) in its various manifestations - Grace/Effort; Providence/Just Deserts; Luck/Character - and shows how its resolution in modern culture is a self-confirming doctrine of Whiggish smugness. Success is a mark of both hard work and divine favour. The meritocracy, in other words, is an institutional embodiment of Christianity. It serves to unite the diverse sects into a greater whole that includes even the most ardent atheists.

Isn’t it interesting that the Trump followers are the most conservative (that is to say, authoritarian, racist, misogynistic, as well as Christian) in the population? Despite their tendency toward violence, they really don’t want a revolution. Their ideal is merely to impose the same kind of humiliation which they have been subject to on the current social winners. They don’t want respect; they want revenge. But ultimately they are trapped in the same doubts about respectability/worth/significance as are their more successful compatriots. Meritocracy makes us all losers. But unless the consequences of Pauline Christianity and its secular residue are owned up to, we’re likely to just keep digging that hole deeper.

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Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness by Joel Gold
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Enduring Mystery of Psychosis

As the old advert promoting advanced education used to say, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” It is frightening to consider how close we all are to the epitome of the wasted mind that is psychosis. If we are lucky enough to avoid psychosis in early life, we are still likely to have friends or family members who seem to just leave the domain of sanity and mentally inhabit some other region. And there is always that longer term threat of dementia to contend with. Whatever place those with advanced Alzheimer’s emigrate to, it represents a sort of hell to those left behind.

The central concept underlying a diagnosis of psychosis is ‘delusion.’ The psychotic, it is said, lives in a world of delusion. Psychiatry and psychology have come up with various classifications of these delusions, usually keyed on human desires and fears - power/impotence, sex/violation, reputation/disgrace, etc. The content of these delusions, researchers claim, vary by culture and epoch, but their form (a somewhat malleable term) remains constant. The most influential current theories about these delusions, according to the Golds, all centre on the social desire to belong, to be a valued member of society. Part of the rationale for such theories is that social cohesion is an evolutionary necessity. We can be driven mad by our intense personal drive to be part of a psychically as well as physically supportive community.

The authors suggest at several points that there are many more psychotics, and people on the verge of psychosis, than medical science has yet identified. One can hardly avoid referring to QAnon conspiracists, anti-vaxxers, and supporters of the Big Trump Lie of a stolen election as confirmation of the suggestion. A poll out this week shows that approximately half of all Americans believe in at least one of the various fantasies circulating on the internet - from Hillary Clinton’s sex-trade in children, to the toxicity of vapour trails and 5G, to Mike Lindell’s rants about Chinese vote-flipping. Delusion is obviously rampant. Or to put it another way, many Americans have found the home they’ve always dreamed of.

Or delusion might be rampant if only we could be sure about what psychosis (or more broadly, mental illness) signified. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a 500 page Bible for the profession. The DSM lists the detailed symptoms of almost 300 named mental disorders along with helpful hints about what ‘therapies’ (mostly drugs) might be indicated. The rub is that psychiatrists have almost no idea how and why these therapies affect brain chemistry. The DSM taxonomy has no basis in biology. It is purely a lexicon of symptoms. As the authors note, “… we still don’t have anything like a theory of mental illness that is good enough even to be wrong.”

Even more worrisome is that the idea of ‘delusion’ is fundamentally undefined. According to the DSM, “a delusion is a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.” The editors of the DSM have clearly had a defective training in philosophy to put such a statement in print without embarrassment. What constitutes proof? Who determines this? When does stubbornness become delusion? And what is this vague criterion of ‘almost everyone?’

So I can understand the Golds’s central question: “Which of the myriad irrational beliefs that people have are delusional? In our view, this is the most important ignored question in the study of delusion.” I agree. But then I hit an intellectual dead end with their claim: “Our answer, in brief, is that delusions are symptoms of a disorder in a mental capacity whose function is to navigate the threats of social living. What distinguishes them from other bizarre thoughts is their origin in this mental capacity.” Come on guys. Disorder of a mental capacity? Isn’t that where we started? The term moves the quest on not an iota.

That one man’s delusion is another’s cause is obvious. The distinction is one of politics not science. This is obvious from the history of the psychiatric discipline itself. Delusion, it seems, might be the fundamental principle not only of psychosis but of the psychiatric profession as well.

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The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Physics of Skin

The community of scientists reflects the character of the larger community of which it is part. That is to say, it is racist, misogynistic, self-deluding, and agonisingly slow to change to the same extent as the larger society. Prescod-Weinstein puts the situation bluntly: “The tradition of racism among white scientists is perhaps not surprising when we recognize that science and society co-construct one another.”

The scientific community rejects this characterisation. Of course it does. In fact it does so with considerable skill and credibility since it’s members are among the best educated, most articulate, and most respected elite of society. They are, in a word, privileged. They are also overwhelmingly male and almost exclusively white.

Naturally most of us attribute our successes to intelligence, hard work, and persistent dedication. I have no doubt that scientists feel the same way. Scientists also consider themselves and their work as ‘objective.’ This should mean that any presumptions they hold about their work are subject to change in light of further evidence. But historically such openness to evidence has never been the case. The Old Guard typically fights desperately to maintain their presumptions by dismissing such evidence as spurious, wrong, or fake.

And so it is with scientific social mores. As the author says, “Articulating scientific questions is social.” So is articulating who is admitted to the community, the judgments about whose work is credible, and even the language accepted as ‘ours’ within the community. That these social norms have resulted in prejudicial exclusion of women, people of colour, and others who don’t conform with the dominantly white male composition of the community is undeniable. So scientists largely ignore the issue. “Science thus became a process in which bias was consecrated by scientists. Racism was axiomatic, rather than a belief requiring skeptical investigation.”

Hence the author’s main point: “Studying the physical world requires confronting the social world.” The sociology of science is corrupt. It is corrupt not only because it is irrationally prejudiced about race and gender, but also because it contributes to the creation of bad science. Gottfried Leibniz was perhaps the first philosopher who, in the 17th century, recognised that what we call reality is a composite of individual viewpoints. To the extent that science is about approaching reality, it inhibits itself when it is exclusionary - no matter how unintentionally on the part of any individual scientist.

Prescod-Weinstein uses an unusual technique. Her book is a sort of intellectual memoir of her life as a cosmologist and particle physicist, and a meditation on the successful Black professional woman in the post-colonial white man’s world. This is a world not just dominated by race and gender but also one in which scientific rationality has been used consistently to justify it own prejudices: “how things worked had to be consistent with justifying abominable behavior… Science thus became a process in which bias was consecrated by scientists. Racism was axiomatic, rather than a belief requiring skeptical investigation.”

Many will object to such a blatant subjective assessment of the scientific community. Tough. It’s time to face up to the extent and persistence of the horrors of racism in the most important institutions of our society. This book may be a model for pushing that process forward.

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Subdivision by J. Robert Lennon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Not Kansas; Not Even Scotland

I had hoped for more. Turns out the book is more or less The Wizard of Oz (1939) for the current generation - trauma-generated dreams placed in a leafy suburb rather than another-world paradise. Others have done it before, of course. Ian Banks’s The Bridge (1986) and William Golding’s Pincher Martin (1956) are but two examples of the genre. But The Wizard is also first class political satire; The Bridge contains an interesting love story; and Pincher Martin has a surprise ending. Subdivision on the other hand has no interesting external references, only hints at a possible background story, and proliferates characters who have no discernible part in the life of the protagonist. The unresolved symbolism used throughout - from quantum physics to vision distortions - can only be called trite. Whatever the quality of the author’s prose, I found the book derivative and tedious.

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The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Words Are Eating Your Brain

There can’t be any doubt that the language we speak contributes to the way we perceive and judge the world. The words we use are defined by other words, all of which have connotations and associations unique not just to the language but to particular subsets of language users. This we call culture and feel justified in making the distinction between, say, European and Asian cultures in which attitudes toward and the meanings of things like trust, guilt, loyalty and rationality (not to mention the rather broader topics of law, morality, science, god, etc.) vary enormously.

This cultural variability is nothing new to science or popular knowledge. Nor is the contribution that language makes in preserving cultural distinctions and practices. What is new though, at least to me, is that language practices - particularly that of reading - have a marked effect on human physiology. Reading actually changes the structure of the brain. For example, among those populations that read “… verbal memories are expanding, face processing is shifting [to the] right [hemisphere of the brain] , and corpus callosa are thickening—in the aggregate—over centuries.”

Therefore, as literacy rates have increased in certain countries (mainly in the Northern hemisphere) over the last 500 years, language “has jury-rigged aspects of our genetically evolved neurological systems to create new mental abilities.” It is very much as if language itself has a life of its own and has infected the human species for use as the vector of its development.

So much for those AI theorists who put the conquest of technology over humanity some time in the future. The fundamental technology we have is language. And in a sense it has controlled human development from its arrival in the species. We have quite literally been its tool as it carries out its neurological transformation. Our brains are being re-wired constantly every time we open a book or read a billboard.

Like a parasite that promotes self-serving behaviours in its host, language encourages “the value of ‘formal education’ or institutions such as ‘schools’—as well as technologies like alphabets, syllabaries, and printing presses.” Those with greater language-facility are more likely to ‘get ahead’ and rise to social roles of high repute. Taking Henrich seriously, it becomes difficult not to think of language as an alien race come to enthral us for unknown ends.

For me, these observations by Henrich, are wonderfully interesting, evocative, and stimulating. But he goes on to bury them in mountains of rather passé and more than exceptionally boring details from hundreds of anthropological and ethnographic studies that do nothing but distract from the book’s key point - that language is physically reshaping us in ways we are only beginning to comprehend. His paean to Western culture conveniently omits mention of its racism, misogyny, and violence. Oh well, I suppose he has he academic reputation as well as popular street cred to consider. Fortunately I do not.

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Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Swimming In the Kool-Aid

Here’s the skinny: your attempt to change the world will result in more global misery; your commitment to some idea/dream/vision will inevitably be subjugated to your need for the power necessary to realise it; your enthusiasm will gradually transform into obsession which will alienate the people who care about you the most. Ultimately you will be disappointed and probably blame others.

You won’t be wrong to do so. Baby-boomers did not invent the notion of self-actualisation, but we made it popular. ‘Be all you can be.’ ‘There are no limits.’ ‘Make your life meaningful.’ These were some of the motivational phrases. They are difficult to reject, primarily because of fear of missing out (FOMO) and associated middle class aspirationalist pathologies.

Falling victim to someone else’s enthusiastic commitment is even more destructive. This is what Anna Wiener writes about. The lure of wealth, prestige, peer reputation is certainly there but the trigger for her was the smooth confidence of some tech entrepreneurs in New York City whose mission it was to “disrupt” the publishing business through an e-reader app. Pushed for an explanation of why publishing needed a disruption, there only possible rational response can be ‘efficiency.’ It’s cheaper to publish on-line than through a system that requires office and editorial staff, print works, and of course masses of paper. But the irrational response is much more honest: ‘because we can.’

But New York was only a taster for the much larger narcissistic, gas-lighting show on the West Coast. San Francisco is where the art of the techno-scam had reached its peak. Wiener found her niche among battalions of fellow-hopefuls: “The mark of a hustler, a true entrepreneurial spirit, was creating the job that you wanted and making it look indispensable, even if it was institutionally unnecessary. This was an existential strategy for the tech industry itself.” And the central figure in this cultural drama was, still is, the charismatic visionary like her new CEO: “‘We are making products,’ the CEO said, building us up at a Tuesday team meeting, ‘that can push the fold of mankind.’” Intoxicating stuff - quite literally.

The costs of attaching oneself to this kind of life with its revolutionary veneer, it’s flattering salary, and its faux, misogynistic camaraderie only become apparent after one is hooked. Like crack-cocaine, one needs more and more just to feel normal. There seems no lethal limit to the commitment required: “All anyone is asking is for us to pour our hearts and souls into this unstoppable adventure.” This sort of idealism, of course, has its own jargon, used repetitively to create tribal solidarity: “Down for the Cause: the phrase was in our job listings and our internal communications. It meant putting the company first, and was the highest form of praise.”

What is required is, as in dogmatic religion of any sort, is “the mass suspension of disbelief.” And as in religion, a transformation, a metanoia, slowly takes place - not like the fall of St. Paul from his horse but just as decisively. Wiener describes the process in excruciating detail. “Work had wedged its way into our identities. We were the company; the company was us.” A management theorist’s dream - the company’s interests written on every heart as if these interests were their own. The process by which this ideal corporate state was achieved is simple and known to the military-minded for millennia: “… keep people busy until they forget about the parts of their life they left behind, … the twenty-four-hour hustle”~

The culture of Silicone Valley is certainly not unique in the corporate world - Wall Street firms and big management consultancies are similar. But arguably the most successful execution of ideas about the business corporation that have been developed over the last half-century or so is in these high-tech star-ups which combine financial chicanery, managerial manipulation, and technological hysteria. This is the intellectual legacy that the boomer generation gave its professional progeny. This legacy has impoverished life in incalculable ways. What could be more telling than Wiener’s observation that “The sole moral quandary in our space that we acknowledged outright was the question of whether or not to sell data to advertisers.”

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Revenge by Yōko Ogawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Japanese Gothic

Revenge begins and ends in old, discarded refrigerators. The theme of fruit - growing, discarded, consumed and going bad - pervades the text. Characters, bizarre in their motivation and behaviour, appear and dissolve like vapour. Events become self-referential but which text precedes the other is unclear. The atmosphere is spectral but not supernatural.

Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor convinced me that she is not just a writer but also a complex and subtle intellectual. That there is a plan to Revenge and a key to understanding this plan therefore is therefore certain. Without this key, the work is intriguing but incomplete. In The Housekeeper and the Professor, it was the mathematical Euler’s Theorem. But what such a key could be in Revenge is, at least for the moments, beyond me.

Anyone with insights, please get in touch.

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A Room Called Earth by Madeleine Ryan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Ethics of Conversation

Too girly for me to understand, at least initially. Is this young woman confident or just faking it, self-aware or self-obsessed, empowered or entitled? The first part of the book seems impenetrable without the secret code of the new young feminism. I have no doubt that such creatures exist but to me they are as incomprehensible as inter-stellar aliens.

She likes parties, and being seen, and one-night stands, and make-up, and her body, and her cat (because it stares at her), and her garden (largely because of the smells, including the plants that have the scent of sperm). But as far as I could tell, she has no taste, no criteria to distinguish between the good and less good, except her momentary whims.

She has opinions about everything - whiteness, colonialism, poverty, conformism, and competition, to name but several of her bugbears. But she has no suggestions - political, technological, or personal - for improving ‘social or environmental conditions. She seems resigned to her irrelevance: “All I have to offer Australian soil is the sound of my high heels slamming against the pavement…”

She doesn’t do drugs but takes her own vodka to parties. Apparently, for her, drugs interfere with one’s sovereign will; but alcohol of the right sort is merely a relaxant. Acutely aware of other people and their thoughts, she scores fairly high up the spectrum when it comes to casual interaction. At the party she so much wanted to join: “I’m weaving between them all and avoiding eye contact, because if I happened to lock eyes with somebody, they’d see that I had something to say, and that’d be embarrassing, because I wouldn’t say it.” Not that the self-absorbed folk in her social circle appear to notice. In the land of the blind… etc.

And then, incredibly, she starts to be something else: >I>“…it always seemed to me that if there’s an objective reality that we all share, it has to be wordless.” And she’s aware of the problematic implications of this: “Parting ways with someone or something doesn’t always make sense, so people often create reasons to be angry and resentful, because it weaves a stronger narrative around the process of letting go.” Suddenly she’s profound not silly: “I find that I have a much deeper appreciation for my fellow human beings when their mouths are shut.”

From that point onward it becomes clear that the young woman may be more thoughtful, more interesting, even more wise than the author has let on. Although I can’t agree with her radical existentialism and quasi-Zen philosophy, I recognise that her views are still advanced for her stage in life. She has something to say. She is articulate about saying it. And she knows that by saying it she’ll change nothing in the world but herself. Her every thought is ironic.

To reproach her youthful excesses would therefore be callous. Her central conclusions are sound: Most conversation is weaponised drivel. That of men is physically as well as linguistically dangerous. Women alienate themselves from each other in their conversations out of fear of men. Yet somehow human life persists.

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Dying: A Memoir by Cory Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How to Fail Honourably

For the medical profession, death is failure. Doctors, it seems, are willing to supervise any degree of physical, emotional, and even spiritual torture to avoid it as long as there is money available to finance it. And if there isn’t, then according to the socially-minded, society has failed on its responsibilities.

I think such sentiments are quite correct when it comes to accidents and acute conditions that are subject to healing and mitigation. But chronic degenerative illness like cancer and dementia are another matter entirely. In so many cases death is not failure but the best conceivable outcome, especially when it is the clear desire of the one who suffers from the condition.

Criminal law tends to keep medics towing the party line in most countries. But the arguably greater power of family emotion is what justifies the pain imposed on chronic sufferers either directly by various invasive therapies or indirectly by the warehousing of human beings in care homes. Families are the one’s who insist upon such ‘care’ regardless of the consequences for the one who suffers. They want life, often at any cost.

That this may be selfishness disguised as love is not a civilised topic of discussion. Before a crisis, it is morbid to bring up such things; during a crisis, emotions of impending loss dominate everyone’s mind, including the mind of the victim of such emotions. Many pray for continued life, even the most impaired, when it is obvious to any outsider that death is a far superior state.

Cory Taylor suggests that talking about death, particularly self-inflicted death, is more effective than prayer. For her, life is not best described as a gift but as a loan, perhaps like a library book. It can be returned before the due date as it were. Just the thought of this possibility provides comfort and may even prolong life by mitigating what can seem like endless pain. For those whose lives medical technology has allowed to become overdue, assisted dying is a way to pay off the fines painlessly.

Most conversations we do have about dying avoid the main issues: pain and sadness. What else is there to talk about really? But what good would it do to ‘dwell’ on such horrible topics? Well possibly quite a lot. Much of grief involves things left unsaid, including the unsaid fear of the one dying as well as the fear of loss by others. It seems to me that grieving together about impending death is therapeutic for everyone. Setting a date for one’s demise could just be the catalyst necessary as a ‘conversation starter.’ If that sounds to crass, perhaps that’s a symptom of the problem.

The substance of Taylor’s book is reminiscence - the tensions, misapprehensions, mistakes, and regrets of her life. For her, writing is therapy. “I still write so as not to feel alone in the world,” she says. So of course she creates a story of her life, a story which is typical in its inevitable sadness - family breakup, sibling estrangement, and imagining what could have been. What gives her the courage to write through her increasingly enfeebling condition is the knowledge that her stash of Chinese suicide poison is secure and within reach. As she says: “Even if I never use the drug, it will still have served to banish the feeling of utter helplessness that threatens so often to overwhelm me.”

I don’t know if Taylor used that stash. But it would make sense if she did. Upon finishing the book, I thought of the exhortation of St. Thomas More, quoted from his Utopia in Dignitas’s brochure on assisted dying:

“I have already told you with what care they look after their sick, so that nothing is left undone that can contribute either to their ease or health: and for those who are taken with fixed and incurable diseases, they use all possible ways to cherish them, and to make their lives as comfortable as possible. They vi­sit them often, and take great pains to make their time pass off easily: but when any is taken with a torturing and lingering pain, so that there is no hope, either of recovery or ease, the priests and magistrates come and exhort them, that since they are now unable to go on with the business of life, are become a burden  to  themselves  and  to all about them, and they have really outlived themselves, they should no longer nourish such a rooted distemper, but choose rather to die, since they cannot live but in much misery: being assured, that if they thus deliver themselves from torture, or are willing that others should do it, they shall be happy after death. Since by their acting thus, they lose none of the pleasures but only the troubles of life, they think they behave not only reasonably, but in a manner consistent with religion and piety; because they follow the ad­vice given them by their priests, who are the expounders of the will of God. Such as are wrought on by these persuasions, ei­ther starve themselves of their own accord, or take opium, and by that means die without pain. But no man is forced on this way of ending his life; and if they cannot be persuaded to it, this does not induce them to fail in their attendance and care of them; but as they believe that a vo­luntary death, when it is chosen upon such an authority, is very honourable.”

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The Skin by Curzio Malaparte
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Christ Was a Neopolitan

Malaparte was clearly a practical man. He had a sense in which direction the train of history was moving, and he knew at which stops to make transfers or even to reverse direction. In short, Malaporte was a survivor. The Skin is a novelistic memoir of his existential skills - intelligence, political awareness of context, acute insight into motives and unconscious intention, but most of all irony.

The Skin is intensely ironic from its opening sentence referring to the liberation of Naples in 1943 as a “plague” to its closing “It is a shameful thing to win a war.” Malaporte avoids sarcasm by never blaming anyone (which is effectively the same as blaming everyone) for the misery inflicted by not just war but its lingering aftermath. His irony is cool, detached, a sort of Stoic commentary on the inevitability of suffering.

Clearly Malaporte is empathetic with his Italian countrymen as they suffer the physical deprivation and spiritual degradation of defeat. He sees them and reports them in excruciating detail. But his is a sort of empathy without sympathy. His attitude toward the mass pain of Allied occupation is more or less that of an astute philosopher of history: “What else could have been expected?”

Apparently the Catholic Church condemned The Skin, perhaps because of its portrayal of the essential human corruption on which the church is built. But I’m sure that the condemnation was theological as well as political. The book is a profound statement of what it means to be human - the crassness of power, its casual infliction of pain, the vulgarity of those who serve power, and the ultimate falsehoods of idealistic myths. In other words, the world, or at least its human component, is evil at its core. Nothing can save it, certainly not more idealistic myths.

To put this more precisely: fighting for the good results in not better but worse. The implication is that the good cannot be protected by violent action because violence can always be rationalised as in the interests of the good. People lie, mostly to themselves, about why they do what they do. The more educated they are, the more facile the ability to find sufficient fictions to justify sheer stupidity - like participation in war.

This is the positive part of Malaparte’s extreme gnosticism. It is what makes his irony bearable. There are no just causes; there are only interests which are transformed into ideals and used to motivate harm and self-delusion. Perhaps the greatest irony is that this seeming hopelessness is the central principle of Christianity - only love wins. The fact that this principle has been consistently undermined by the churches, cultures, and individuals which claim to be Christian is the paradox at the heart of The Skin. No wonder the Catholic Church was keen to suppress it.

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