Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

More From Mary Poppins

“What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus’d.
—Hamlet”


This epigraph from Shakespeare, which Pinker uses to preface his latest book, summarises his fundamental misunderstanding of the issue he addresses. For Pinker, Shakespeare seems to be saying ‘if you got it flaunt it.’ ‘It’ being “such large discourse,” that is to say, language, which is indeed “godlike” and itself amounts to “reason.” Indeed we are a species able, no compelled, to use language in order to survive. The luxuries of sleeping and eating depend upon our effective use of it. However Shakespeare’s irony as a writer forced to make his way in life through language is obvious. But not to Pinker. Rationality is not scarce; it exists in an over-abundance. It may yet kill us all if we keep treating it as the divine solution to our ills.

Let me start by agreeing with Pinker: no human being is irrational, not even the most psychotic or criminal mind is without rationality. We all have what to us are good reasons for doing whatever we do. Or we are at least capable of formulating such reasons after the fact with conviction and assurance. The fact that others may not accept either our premises or our deductions does not make us irrational; it makes us wrong.

But Pinker doesn’t follow his own logic. This makes him contradictory, a good sign that what he’s peddling should be wrong for all of us. He thinks that he knows what he calls “the benchmarks of rationality” that should be the goal of education and the standards by which we judge what we hear and read, and presumably what we say and write. The benchmarks he has in mind are largely statistical and don’t address the core issue of rationality at all.

Whenever anyone starts an argument with ‘there are only two options to consider,’ be on the lookout for the garden path to reasoned stupidity. Pinker’s dichotomy of choice is that there are, “two modes of believing: the reality mindset and the mythology mindset.” No prizes for guessing which one Pinker is going to promote. But what he actually does is subtly shift the subject with this linguistic tactic from rationality to reality. And since reality must be superior to myth, it will define the rational.

The problem of course is that Pinker has no idea what he means by reality. Or, better said, the ambiguity of reality is just what he needs in order to hide his contradictions - from himself as well as his readers. Without the touchstone of reality his subsequent argument is vacuous. What he is actually appealing to is some quasi-religious need in himself for stability or fixedness in how the uncontrollable beast of Language can be tamed, or at least contained within safe boundaries. He makes this need clear and wants us all to share in his anxiety: “In an era in which rationality seems both more threatened and more essential than ever, Rationality is, above all, an affirmation of rationality.”

Indeed, just as faith is an affirmation of faith. Pinker wants us to restore our faith in language and its ability to track with this thing called reality. Some words, he wants us to know, are closer to reality than other words. These latter are the words we should use to judge other words. How do we spot such words? Here is another proposition with which I agree wholeheartedly: “… none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other’s fallacies.”

So there is the central contradiction which Pinker tries to navigate around throughout his argument. Reality, he contends, is outside of language and defines rationality. But no, he also contends, rationality is what other language users determine to be rational. One has to ask of course: who are these other language users? What makes their opinions privileged? How are disagreement between groups to be resolved? In short, which group is to be considered dominant in the matter of language accuracy?

Pinker knows that what constitutes rationality depends on the circumstances. For him rationality is “… a kit of cognitive tools that can attain particular goals in particular worlds.” Yet another point on which we agree. The bushmen of the Kalahari employ a rationality that would not assist survival on the streets of Manhattan. What we take for scientific method and logic today is not what was accepted a century ago, nor will it be that which is accepted a century hence. The evolution of rationality itself is a fact that Pinker doesn’t deny. And yet he insists there is such a thing that is established in an unchanging Platonic realm of ideas.

Pinker makes a distinction between “the rational pursuit of goals… [and] an objective understanding of the world.” In this he engages in yet another self-contradiction. What he means by ‘objective’ apparently is the result of investigation by a totally disinterested observer. But if such an observer has no interest in a situation or condition, what prompted him or her to investigate in the first place? It is a basic principle of science that no effort is made without a reason, a question, a puzzle, a doubt. To engage in such an effort would be not just unreasonable but impossible. Yet Pinker thinks there is such a person, probably nesting comfortably among the other Platonic figures in a philosophical heaven of stability and without language.

Pinker spends a great deal of time on cute logical paradoxes. These are largely irrelevant to the core problem of rationality, which is the reasons for doing things not the errors we might make in acting on those reasons. Our choice of reasons, even if the reasons are only articulated after our actions in order to literally rationalise them, is an event that by definition cannot be reasonable. But that choice is what then determines the constitution of that which we casually call a fact. Once again: there are no objective facts; such things are self-contradictory. The only real issue of rationality is reasons.

For example: The expressed reason for the Holocaust was the need to rid the world of a harmful ideology of mutual responsibility that was invented and preserved by Jews. The official reason for the European invasion of the Americas was the promulgation of the true faith necessary for salvation. The reason for the existence of the CIA is the protection of American interests abroad at any political or cost to the rest of the world. Hegel demonstrated the rationality of these reasons dialectically; just as Kant with utmost rationality put paid to the idea that facts could undermine the reasons we promote.

Pinker has absolutely nothing to say about these sorts of reasons, except that they might be rejected if they had been discussed and debated openly. And perhaps not even then since it depends on who is doing the discussing. The matter is entirely political. Like it or not, morality, like facts, is a political matter. Pinker’s call for critical thinking is nothing more than a suggestion towards scepticism about established mores and rationality. So once again he contradicts himself. The crowd can be wrong after all. They may have missed a fallacy but they’re sticking with it. For them no fallacy exists; they just started with different reasons.

The bottom line is that while there are words that are better than other words for getting on in the world, we don’t know what they are from moment to moment. The words we use today may prove to be the cause of tomorrow’s destruction; but we have no way of assessing this either. Pinker is right to suggest that all we have is each other in the search for the right words. But we have no idea how to organise that search much less know when it is successful. We are at the mercy of this thing we presume to control - language. And Pinker, as he does in everything he writes, refuses to get that this is our predicament. What he provides is not Shakespearean insight but a diverting musical comedy. A gentle Mary Poppins, perhaps, come down from above to assure us children that the universe is benign and that Trump is a temporary aberration. How comforting.☂️

Postscript 30/09/21: for more on the same topic, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Postscript 23/10/21: An example of the very irrational state of scientific rationality: https://apple.news/AA27bMZ17QuCqAo51e...

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The Gold Eaters by Ronald Wright
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Deadliest Infection

There’s a reason to read good historical fiction. The Gold Eaters is an example. Ronald Wright’s previous non-fiction historical summary of the European invasion of America, Stolen Continents, is a compelling revision of the standard myths of the civilising effects of white culture. But in this fictional account of the conquest of Peru and the Incan Empire, he is able to add an emotional and spiritual dimension which is not evident in the bare facts of a population, or a people, or a civilisation devastated by the invasion. The personal implications of historical trauma tend to go unnoticed in academic history. Only a fictional narrative can allow events of global import to become experiences of personal significance. Paradoxically when these narratives connect with each other through a readership, the personal tends toward the global.

Consider that it took only one generation from the Spanish landings in the Caribbean to the utter transformation of societies stretching from Bala California to Chile into slave encampments run by illiterate thugs supported by a religious ideology of submission to their authority. Nowhere on earth has experienced such rapid, profound and widespread disruption as what would come to be called Spanish America. Neither, until the 20th century and its Holocaust, would human beings commit such atrocities on one another with such casual conviction and in such numbers. And yet we speak today of the speed of change in modern society.

And the leaders of these bands of marauders are considered explorers, pioneers, and adventurers. These men were rapacious beasts who worked for other ignorant beasts and who employed psychotically violent beasts. Perhaps the real reason the names of men like Pizarro, Cortez, Balboa, De Soto, and Ponce de Leon have been considered heroic, enough to have innumerable cities, landmarks, cultural festivals, and even children named after them, is in part to dim the horrors of what they accomplished to our modern sensitivities, but also in larger part to act as an enduring precedent that justifies continuing domination today. Race was and is the central fact of the Conquest of America.

Race justified the subjugation of anyone who was not white. Race justified the massive dislocation of populations within the areas of Spanish conquest and between Africa and the Americas. Race justified the creation of a social hierarchy which ensured the permanence of white dominance by establishing racial distinctions and using racial antipathies to white advantage. Race justified the erasure of historical traditions, languages, and family lineages through the introduction of the ‘true religion’ of white Christianity. And today the effects of all these justifications - economic inequalities, educational deficits, large-scale immigration, international criminal enterprise - are being justified as unfortunate consequences of… well, of course, race.

It had to be expected, I suppose, that the still dominant white culture of the conquerors would object to the telling of history in a way that emphasises both the personal impact of historical wrongs, and the ongoing legacy of these wrongs. These narratives are, it is said, part of the new ‘cancel culture’, that is, an attempt to diminish the achievements of great white men. How obscene. How utterly ignorant. And how typical of the genetic beneficiaries of the horror these men have imposed on the world.

Reading The Gold Eaters is not an edifying experience. It clearly isn’t meant to be. Although sedate in tone, the tragedy of the events it describes is obvious. The book is one small recognition of the harm done in the name of racial and cultural superiority. What option is there but to spread that recognition and to indeed cancel the continuing tragedy of that purported superiority. It is, after all, an infection, worse than the viruses brought by the invaders, passed down largely through the technology of writing. How else then to kill it other than by writing the truth in fiction?

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Aztec by Gary Jennings
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sifting Through the Wreckage

The 16th century Spanish Invasion of the Americas was a disaster that spread with the speed of a tsunami. Certainly so for the native populations which were killed en masse or enslaved. But also for the conquerors (and the rest of us) who lost the accumulated wisdom and beauty of highly sophisticated civilisations which only lacked the technology of violence and the viral antibodies of their opponents.

Having destroyed these civilisations, the Spanish immediately set to work trying to recover their characters and histories. Testimonies of survivors were recoded, languages documented, and cultural practices commented upon. Eventually these led to archaeological and sociobiological investigations. One hopes that at least some of these efforts were prompted by a growing guilt that the extinct cultures had been misunderstood and underestimated through the prevailing prejudices of the time.

But the problem the Spanish friars had persists: how does one reconstruct the existential reality of these defunct civilisations from the diverse fragments of evidence, residue really, that are available? What did the world look like to these ancient people? What were their presumptions about themselves and their societies? What made life worthwhile (or hellish) for them?

These are questions that go beyond the ability of social sciences or academic history to answer. Only fiction can bring together the myriad factual threads into some sort of coherent narrative. The art of creating this kind of narrative is tricky. It can easily degenerate into a completely artificial adventure with an essentially pre-historic hero as the object of projection of modern concerns and causes. Or it can become an essentially illiterate mask for the promotion of various theories about the lost worlds.

Gary Jennings was a master of historical narrative who could navigate his way through the Scylla of fantasy and the Charybdis of the bad science fiction. He is able to take the bits of theology, politics, law, social organisation, personal status, even diet, that have been gleaned through centuries of research and make them a comprehensible whole. He uses informed imagination to fill in the gaps. The literary device Jennings employs, the sworn testimony by an elderly survivor to the local bishop and his scribes at the command of the King, allows the development of numerous themes without the need to incorporate relevant background into a separate story-line.

The result is a kind of intimacy with the Aztec culture that is remarkable. The real value of the book, I suggest, is the exposure by contrast of one’s own moral, social and political presumptions. The Aztecs were a rather sophisticated and diverse people who developed an effective, interesting, often instructive, sometimes inspiring programme for coping in and with the world. Jenning’s books, therefore, seem to me essential for anyone interested in Mesoamerican history and sociology.

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Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An Advertisement For Me

Jarett Kobek dislikes many people: heterosexual men because of what they do to women; the rich because of their lack of taste; politicians because they have no souls; users of social media because it gives a voice to stupidity; Christians because their beliefs about love have caused tens of millions to die through their hatred; liberals because they promote war; Jeff Bezos because he touches on all his other dislikes; and Donald Trump because… well just because.

I share these dislikes. So it is with shock and horror that I come to learn that Kobek also dislikes me. He’s never met me but he knows who I am. I’m reading his book. That’s enough for him to despise me: “I’ve duped you into buying my turgid work.” That’s not even on the cover blurb. I feel well and truly ambushed. He does relieve the shame a smidge by qualifying his condemnation: “Unless you’ve pirated this book. If you have, then good for you!” I did. So the pain of victimisation eased a little.

But Kobek doesn’t stop there. He also knows that I’m going to write something about him. This alone puts me on the top of his hate list, up there with Bezos and Trump: “I don’t blame anyone for getting addicted to their smartphones. I only blame people for their terrible attempts at reviewing my work.” And not in some literary space with editors and other writers who can impose some standards of grammar and imagination about what I might write. No, my comments, he knows, will be “in cheap little reviews on Goodreads.com and Amazon.com.” Talk about surveillance! Kobek must have agents everywhere. I can’t seem to find a hole hidden enough to escape.

It’s obvious I’m trapped by Kobek’s omniscient gaze. I can only submit. “Everything’s an advertisement,” he says. Of course. So obvious, but only once it’s said.. Everyone has an angle, is on the make, wants to separate someone else from their cash, and probably lusts after tickets to a revival Guns n’ Roses concert. Oh my God, that’s it: I want to be Jarett Kobek. But Kobek wants to be Kurt Vonnegut, a guy who never advertises. I think I’m too old for this. Someone please tell me what it all means.

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The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Linguistic Nightmare

Minae Mizumura is a critical observer. She is also a critical reporter, especially of people she encounters. None of her writerly companions attending an international assembly in the middle of Iowa cornfields escapes her sharp-eyed evaluation. And since most of the participants can’t converse with each other, her judgments are mostly only that, sharp-eyed. Nevertheless Mizumura rates with Louella Parsons or Roger Ebert in spotting the character behind the persona.

Mizumura doesn’t like America much. I understand. In terms of popular culture, America is the biggest island on the planet. But apparently the campus of Iowa State University is an exception (see comment #1 below). The authorities there have been importing literary talent for three month stints of ‘interaction’ for decades. This oasis of diversity is what Mizumura is mainly reporting about in this memoir that edges into polemic as it goes along. She, like me, is a curmudgeon (termagant seems vaguely sexist) who, while being mostly civil to everyone she meets, does harbour dark fantasies that she has no hesitation disclosing in print.

One of these fantasies is that the English language is as oppressive as the American people. Mizumura was ripped (her word) from her native Japan at the age of twelve to study in the USA. She never got over the experience and escaped back to Japan as quickly as she could, blaming English (or at least its American variant) for polluting not just her writing but also the entire Japanese language. She is, therefore, not overjoyed to be participating in an academic programme whose only commonality is some degree of fluency in English.

Some part of Mizumura’s distaste for America is cultural. She projects American brashness and unawareness of subtlety onto the language itself. But the principle source of dissatisfaction is racial. She feels out of place in an area dominated by blond-haired blue-eyed giants who start to look old by their mid-thirties and are likely overweight in any case. Having sat in the rear of a Tokyo bus, and looked forward to a busload of people with exactly the same (to me) hair and head features, I can empathise with her alienation.

But I can’t help feeling that there is a latent racial prejudice in her attitude toward English. Her earliest high school educational experience in the Great Neck suburb of New York City is probably to blame. She and I are rough contemporaries in that same school system, which at the time was highly segregated and decidedly lacked diversity of any sort. I can imagine that Mizumura was considered strange if not vaguely threatening to her schoolmates who weren’t even vaguely cosmopolitan.

This school experience seems to me what is behind Mizumura’s somewhat bizarre obsession with saving the Japanese language. She worries that if even a former international lingua franca like French could fall prey to the linguistic magpie of English, - the “valiant” (her term) Académie Française notwithstanding - what chance does Japanese have to retain its integrity? While in Iowa she began to worry not just about the fate of Japanese but also of Mongolian, Rumanian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Nynorsk (a Norwegian dialect), and Tswana (the native language of Botswana) to name but several. Clearly her issue is of worldwide import!

I can’t understand the nature of this issue though. Mizumura meets several other writers from dictatorial and other regimes which attempt to restrict or direct what is written about and how. She recognises this as oppression. What she apparently doesn’t recognise is that language is the ultimate form of true collective decision-making. Language users are constantly inventing and importing new words and phrases, usually modifying their meaning dramatically along the way. Some of these innovations are rejected and some become part of everyday speech. And some are just what the doctor ordered to sabotage directive authority. Few are coerced; none of these last except as irony.

But Mizumura has a very different logic. “There is a hierarchy among languages,” she thinks. On the top of her hierarchy is English, not because it has the largest number of speakers or because of the ease of learning it but because it is the dominant second language and has thus become ‘universal.’ She is worried because “To a writer, the fall of one’s own language means nothing less than the fall of one’s national literature, of which every writer is a bearer.” For them not to feel this way would be “ethnolinguistic betrayal.” It appears that she regards her fellow writers and the readers of Japan with a disdain at least equal to what she feels for Americans.

I do share a certain nostalgia with Mizumura about lost languages, - Latin, Classical Greek, Aramaic, and Anglo-Saxon get my votes for revival - mainly because each language is really untranslatable. Each cuts the world at different joints, as it were, and has connotations, echoes, and substrates that are unique. Yiddish for example has only several million remaining speakers but continues to decline and has no significant literary production today. But American English has absorbed an enormous number of Yiddish words and phrases, not as translations but as part of itself (schmuck, bupkis, chutzpah, klutz, glitz, schlep are just a few that come to mind). If anything, Yiddish is to some extent preserved in English. This is what English has always done. It is the whore of languages, mating with all and sundry, and taking whatever seems more precise, or beautiful, or different, or just because it makes communication with a non-English speaker possible.

So, Mizumura’s plea to the Japanese people to appreciate their language more by limiting the influence of English is more than just bizarre, it is also counter-productive. Linguistic insulation is not something at all desirable. Attempting to achieve such insulation implies totalitarian measures which history has shown to be ultimately ineffective. Language is not something we control but something we submit to. We may tweak its edges but whether those tweaks result in any permanent effects are not things we can determine.

I have to conclude that Ms Muzimuza’s lament is really a working out of a teenage trauma rather the formulation of a serious suggestion. I hope that as therapy this book and her fictional companion volume are successes. But as a literary theory both are bunk.

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But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just Think Apocalypse

The trouble with ideals is that they become less than ideal almost as soon as they’re stated. When we articulate them, to ourselves or others, we subject them to reflection and discussion. We immediately learn something that makes us want to change, refine or amend them. But our emerging commitments to these ideals inhibit any change in direction. Who wants to be considered flighty or lacking in serious thought?

It’s not just ideals of course. Our preferences, our expectations, our intellectual conclusions, our concepts, as well as our prejudices are never stable. At least they shouldn’t be because this is what we call learning. But do we really want to learn anything that inhibits our progress toward an objective, no matter how obsolete it might have become?

Learning, then, is problematic. But not because of lack 0f experience or incompetence. The traditional locus of the issue of learning is that of formulating the rules for identifying valid chunks of knowledge. This is the domain of epistemology - how do we know what we know? Epistemology is an area of study that has been given a great deal of attention, both philosophical and practical, without much result. We still don’t know how to tell the difference between news and fake news.

But there is another, rather ignored, aspect of the process of learning that may be much more significant than epistemology. Learning, all learning whether in science, literature, the arts, politics, ethics, or just understanding how a new computer functions, undermines, relativises, and often negates everything previously learned. When physicists latched onto Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, it took decades for many of them to unlearn what they knew about their trade, for example.

There is no word, no concept, no technique (except perhaps psychotherapy) that I know of which addresses the dramatic adverse consequences of learning. Yet it is clear that learning, when it occurs, can indeed be traumatic. And where it doesn’t occur it is often due to the anticipatory fear of this very trauma. Some part of our psyche knows just what we’re in for if we let go of any number of established truths we rely on for mental balance. I suspect, given the overwhelming publicly available evidence to the contrary, that this is what’s going on in the heads of American Republicans. To admit that they’ve made commitments to a self-avowed con man is more than their fragile minds can manage.

In other words, obdurate ignorance can be a very purposeful activity. And not just for Trumpists. To accept the possibility, no the certainty, that literally everything we know, and likely take for granted, will be shown to be bogus at some time in the future - perhaps by ourselves but most certainly by others - is disconcerting at least, and devastating to some. Yet many continue to believe that things like facts, evidence, rationality will convince others to adopt a conclusion or a point of view. Ain’t gonna happen. Far to scary.

In any case, at least one school of philosophy (to which I subscribe) has it that true facts will only emerge in that moment just before the extinction of all thinking creatures, that is to say, the human species or its replacements on the planet. At thst moment everything that can be known will be known. Facts will have verified and truth revealed. Before that climactic moment epistemology is a dead end.

Unfortunately, of course, no one will be able to appreciate the epistemological breakthrough at that apocalyptic moment. And we are utterly unable to predict or anticipate what the final truth(s) might be. This, of course, makes the threat of our current tentativeness in all forms of knowledge even greater. We will never know the truth despite our frantic investment in inquiry. All our inquiry will ultimately fail. Isn’t it safer, certainly more comfortable, to just ignore those loonies who go on about climate change, fascist threats, and lack of public education?

Our fear of learning is humiliating. Of course it is. And every previous generation would have felt the same about what they knew. Yet we know they were wrong in every area of knowledge from physics to what constitutes good fiction to how to parent children. If nothing else history shows that future generations will perceive our level of knowledge, our tastes, and our methods (for literally everything, including learning) as passé at best but more likely downright silly.

Accepting that what we think we know is always wrong is like previous generations accepting that the earth isn’t flat or that is not the centre of the universe and is moving at tremendous speed, not through a hypothetical ether but through a field of space-time which itself is warping as we pass through it. Next year’s science may have us wrapped up in x-dimensional strings.

The futility of learning will not stop us from learning. We are, for better or worse, inquiring animals. Perhaps it is language which provokes us to find just the right language about ourselves and the world. Or perhaps it is desire to get beyond language entirely in the hope of discovering what we casually call reality.

What is certain is that recognising what we know now is wrong, will accelerate learning. It might also make less arrogant, obdurate, and pig-headed. My wife has convinced me that this is the only way to live long ago.

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Zapata and the Mexican Revolution 
by 

John Womack Jr.

 

Catalytic Converters

Emiliano Zapata is an important figure in the history of Mexico, not particularly for what he accomplished but rather for what he allowed others to cause to happen. John Womack is a widely praised historian of Latin America who does an outstanding job of describing the national circumstances that led to Zapata’s involvement in revolutionary activity. Womack also makes it clear that Zapata was largely unaware of the politics of his situation or the likely consequences of his actions. Zapata’s role was catalytic not formative; his participation generated consequences because of the intentions of others. Womack does a less good job, I think, considering this or what it meant and means for Mexico’s future.

The War of Mexican Independence at the beginning of the 19th century replaced the Spanish monarch as head of state but maintained, even strengthened, the feudal character of New Spain, which character had been under threat in the late eighteenth century by mercantilist directives from Spain. Although begun as a popular uprising sparked by racial inequality and officially sanctioned oppression, the War of Independence eventually produced a republic organised and maintained by essentially the same local network of elite loyalties that the country had started with. 

A nominal democracy, Mexican Republican politics from their origins were not a matter of parties, publicly competing candidates and issues, but of balancing factional interests in the selection of candidates behind the scenes. Deals were made in private and candidates selected on the basis of acceptable compromise. Possible competitors would then withdraw and the result of elections would be a certainty. From an exterior perspective, this appeared as stability.

This Mexican form of democracy was not a model for the world perhaps, but it worked to some degree, interrupted by the occasional coup when compromise could not be reached. This system, I am told, is very similar to the accommodation between feudalism and democracy that exists in the Channel Island of Jersey, which, while also a democracy, has all its most important executive, judicial and law enforcement officials appointed by the British Crown. Jersey is a place also proud of its political stability.

After the failure of the French Intervention in Mexico during the American Civil War, Porfirio Díaz led a coup d’etat that proved decisive for the country. For 35 years Diaz presided over a programme of strict political feudalism (to call it dictatorship would be to misrepresent it entirely I think) and overt economic capitalism, a feat perhaps used subsequently as a model in other Latin American countries. 

Diaz’s strategy was one of ‘scientific management,’ that is the promotion of the rationality of production efficiency regardless of the human costs of dislocation or poverty. The success of this programme was certainly a mark of political genius, evil genius perhaps, but nevertheless genius. Decades in advance of so-called Taylorism in the United States, Diaz created an expert staff of cientificos to advise him on the intricacies of microeconomic rationality. He took that advice and incorporated it into his political negotiations.

And the strategy worked as it was meant to, especially in the the sugar cane producing state of Morelos, the home of Zapata. By the first decade of the 20th century, Diaz, through political appointments, legislation, and (if necessary) pure thuggery, had facilitated the transformation of the local family-run haciendas into enormous corporate estates with the latest industrial milling equipment. He had also given these agrarian conglomerates access, through railroads, to international markets. In short, he had done what he set out to do, that is, to re-create Mexico, or at least this sector of it, as an example of industrial capitalism.

But Diaz still ran an essentially feudal state, which because of his success, required increasingly complex ‘deals’ among an increasing variety of interests. He essentially blew that feudal system apart in Morelos by appointing an inept and unilaterally chosen person as governor of the state. As a consequence, uncontrolled factionalism emerged that eventually compromised the entire system in Morelos, and undermined confidence nationally. 

Political instability led to repression which led to resentment which led to violence. Zapata organised and led an army of the dispossessed and disaffected that defeated the government forces of Diaz in fairly short order. Zapata was promptly betrayed by Diaz’s replacement, who in turn was ousted quickly by Zapata’s fellow revolutionary, General Huerta, who was in turn ousted from his position with the support of Zapata’s troops within a year. Clearly once a feudal order has been disrupted, the end result is hard to imagine (as the late Roman Empire, and the subsequent one called Holy, can attest). As was in the case 100 years earlier, a decade of revolution led directly back to the status quo ante.

Zapata is a heroic martyr in the political mythology of Mexico. But the practical outcome of Zapata’s efforts and the sacrifice of his life are really insignificant - an ambiguous and largely meaningless Article 27 about land reform in the Mexican Constitution, and some half-hearted land redistribution in the 1930’s. Not that the revolution of 1910 had no effect. Essentially the feudal system was reconstituted in the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, now the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which continued the same intra-party political deal-making among (new) conflicting interests as was traditional for the previous century. 

The PRI’s hegemony succeeded in maintaining stability from its formation in 1929 until its first loss in national elections in 2000. It lost to the candidate from the National Action Party (PAN), signalling the end of the intra-party deals and accommodations. ‘Real’ democracy had emerged. And with that the ability to maintain some kind of balance among competing interests evaporated. When the PAN President Felipe Calderón declared a national war on drugs in 2006, he disrupted the existing feudal equilibrium that had been established by the PRI. 

It appears in the light of subsequent nationwide violence that Calderón too may have been the catalyst for yet a new Mexican revolution. The feudal equilibrium again has been disrupted. But the feudal democratic tradition is the only one available. There is no difference in principle between the interests of the sugar cane producers of 1910 and the black tar heroin manufacturers of 2010, except for the profit margins (or for that matter between the founder of the Sinaloa drug cartel, ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, and the bandit Pancho Villa, whom Zapata fought both with and against). And as in previous national conflicts both sides have been forced into a stalemate. It is clear, as it always has been, that the solution is political not military. I wonder when the new Diaz or PRI will emerge and in what form to stop the violence - before Mexico becomes Peru?

 

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Looking For Guidance

I am aware of the pain, frustration, and often terror that black people feel in the racist environment of America. I know that black voters are persistently taken for granted, casually betrayed, and almost always mis-represented by white American politicians. I see in news reports and in statistics, the systematic unfairness of the American judicial system and the calculated use of the system to weaken the political strength of the black community. I have read about the success of politicians like Nixon and Reagan who have explicitly used the bait of the ‘Southern Strategy’ and the ‘War on Drugs’ to degrade people of colour and to exploit the pervasive racism in the country.

In short, I am that mediocre white dude who is clearly the target (as well as the caricature) of this book. I have indeed implicitly presumed opportunities are available simply because of my race. I have been oblivious to the myriad signs and signals that have become part of my stereotypical reaction to racial difference. Despite my liberal talk, I have not demonstrated the real political priority of race by my actions. If this book is intended to remind me of these things and to increase my sensitivity to race and confirmed commitment to the issue of race, it has done its job.

But if I am the target market, what’s the point of the book? It does not present a nuanced argument or offer previously undisclosed facts about how racism works in America. It does not suggest new legislation or propose social norms. So aside from feeling chastised, what am I to do with this book? Talk it up among friends? Write reviews to help it sell? Pass it on perhaps? I need guidance. A polemic is just a rant when there isn’t a political objective.

The committed racist won’t even open it. The lover of cowboy films will deny that the persistent cinematic theme of white supremacy has any effect at all on his perception or attitudes about race. Joe Biden supporters are likely to dismiss his dodgy record on things like bussing in light of the rather more pressing problem of a Trump second term. The fact that some of Bernie Sanders constituency appear to be racist thugs, ditto. And what Republican, even if he or she does read, is going to take seriously an issue about either misogyny or racism in their party when their national cohesion depends upon just that issue.

In her introduction, Oluo says she decided to write the book during a retreat for women writers. They ended up, she says, talking about the horrible white males they have encountered in their lives, most of them not even reaching the level of mediocre. I have had a similar experience and come to a similar conclusion as these women in the woods. They (we) do everything they’re (we’re) accused of - contradicting, talking over, acting pompous, pretending to knowledge they don’t have, aspiring to reputation and position for which that are incompetent, and very often presuming that they are superior because of their race and sex. They (we) are mostly awful.

“Nobody is more pessimistic about white men than white men,” Oluo says. And of course she’s right as I just confirmed in that last paragraph. As a man one is either a moron, or trying not to be a moron, which is even more depressing. I believe testosterone and its cultural glorification is abhorrent. I think that in the Age of the Smart Machine traditional masculine virtues are bunk and hope that women can quickly overcome techno-misogyny for all our sakes. And I know it’s necessary to shout about the persistent vileness that is racial hatred, in all its forms.

But shouting at me has diminishing marginal returns. So what does a mediocre white dude with his XY deficiency and his inferior gene pool do?

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The Mark of the Sacred by Jean-Pierre Dupuy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Therapy For the Doomed

Self-transcendence has been the key to human success. And it will probably be the cause of its destruction. This, I think is the central conclusion of Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s breathtakingly acute analysis. It is a conclusion without hope but nevertheless of some comfort. By relativising absolutely everything, from climate change to Trump, the Mark of the Sacred provides a kind of Zen perspective that allows anxiety to dissipate. It is a therapy for the doomed.

For Dupuy, self-transcendence is a uniquely human ability which shows up in innumerable hidden as well as obvious forms. Language, perhaps, is one of the most obvious. We use language, we create new language. Yet we live in a world controlled by language. Language transcends us as individuals even though it exists only to the extent that it is used by individuals. That we submit to language in a community is arguably our only competitive advantage in a world inhabited by stronger, faster, more instinctively aware beasts, not to mention the legions of microbes that would devour us if we couldn’t figure out how to fight them off collectively.

Self-transcendence is also demonstrated in political, commercial, and social organisation. Democratic politics is the creation and sustainment by a population of a polity, a set of constitutional laws, that then dominates that same population. In today’s world, we are perhaps even more dominated by an organisational form created in the Middle Ages that combines the transcendence of both the state and the church. This is the modern corporation, established and run by individuals who then are required by law to act in its interests rather than their own. Society as a whole is only marginally controlled by law and explicit restriction, but relies on continuous implicit respect for ‘something bigger,’ such as Order, or Freedom, or Regard for one’s neighbour.

Dupuy argues that the oldest and most universal form of self-transcendence is religion. Certainly no civilisation that we know of, ancient or modern, has been able to exist without the creation of a cause, identity, origin, or purpose external to itself. The essential externality has, of course, been God in some form or other. “By ‘God,’ I mean what all the divinities that human beings have made for themselves throughout history have in common—an exteriority that they have managed to project outside the sphere of human existence.”

For the ancient Israelites, the ultimate exterior transcendence was YHWH for whom and by whom they existed. For The 18th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, it was the divine Guarantor, who coordinated the activities of his ‘windowless’ Monads to ensure the best of all possible worlds. For we of a more secular, but no less religious, age, our self-transcendence is most often expressed as Reason, a somewhat ill-defined but very much glorified God.

As Dupuy notes, “reason, like all human institutions, has its source in religion.” Whether we view it as a substitute for religion or as an extension of traditional religion matters very little. Dupuy quotes Emile Durkheim approvingly (and frequently) as the first to understand that “the fundamental categories of thought, and therefore of science, have religious origins.” And not just thought but all the social structures created by thought: “… it can be said that nearly all great social institutions are derived from religion.” Marriage, justice, government, science, ethics, and basic social courtesies and virtues have their ultimate origin in the ultimately transcendent entity - God.

The traditional term for designating that which is explicitly transcendent is ‘sacred.’ We create the sacred but it is beyond us. Hegel called the process by which we do this ‘self-exteriorisation’; Marx termed it ‘alienation’; Adam Smith, the Invisible Hand. The French anthropologist, Louis Dumont, referred to the condition these processes established as ‘hierarchy,’ by which he meant the term in its original Greek meaning of ‘sacred order.’ This sacred order has an important characteristic. It “encompasses the contrary.” This can be stated rather precisely in terms that seems to include all of human social organisation:

“The coincidence of the whole and one of its proper subsets (which, for a mathematician, implies the idea of infinity) is what permits the whole to stand in opposition to the complementary subset. The whole, in other words, encompasses its contrary—the part that does not coincide with the whole.”

This statement may seem confusing to non-mathematicians but it is an extremely simple concept. A good example is the kind of corporate organisation common in many large German companies in which members of the workforce are elected to the ‘supervisory board’ which has corporate authority over management who in turn have authority over the board members from the workforce. Dupuy calls this a “tangled hierarchy.” My old teacher Russell Ackoff used the term “circular organisation” and advocated it extensively among American businesses.

Dupuy puts Dumont’s idea through an important ‘stress test’ and finds its weak point. He concludes that “the most stable social order is the one that contains the threat of its own collapse.” Think of democracy which permits maximal disagreement and diversity of political parties. Or, even more apt, a loosely regulated financial market (an old colleague of mine, Richard Pascale, wrote a book for business managers called Managing on the Edge which had the same theme). These institutions work best according to political and economic theory - until they, abruptly and without notice, don’t. At which point they tend to disintegrate completely into crisis: “The crisis that accompanies the collapse of a hierarchical order bears a name that has come down to us from Greek mythology: panic.” When the god Pan is seen in the forest, the locals hotfoot somewhere else, anywhere else. As word gets around, he instantly becomes the new exteriority for the entire population..

Panic undermines all hierarchical order; in fact it inverts it. When there is panic, all of the virtues of the system are inverted. What was good - freedom, self-determination, light-touch regulation, even fundamental concepts like private property and the sanctity of contracts - becomes evil. Commenting on the 2008 financial crisis, Dupuy makes the point clear: “… the virtue of a crisis of such unprecedented scope is that it makes clear, at least to those who have the eyes to see it, that good and evil are profoundly related; indeed they have become identical with each other as a result of the crisis. If there is a way out, it will be found only by allowing evil once again to transcend itself and take on the appearance of the good.”

So democracies do fall into dictatorship (e.g. Weimar Germany) and markets do become horribly chaotic (as in the dot.com bust or the even larger derivatives meltdown). But because we do not like these outcomes doesn’t imply that democracies or markets don’t work. They surely do - by creating the possibility a new hierarchical order, in which, perhaps, democratic freedoms are suspended and regulation becomes a dominant commercial force. Virtues become vices and vice versa. Therefore says Dupuy, “The challenge facing policymakers in a time of panic is to find an external fixed point that can be used to bring it under control.”

In other words the real strength in our institutions, if strength there be, is their ability to find new gods which re-establish orderly society. Finding/inventing/creating the new sacred as panic sweeps across our societies is necessary for survival. But this is where our history and our cultural heritage betray us. We are trapped by a monumental paradox of our religious life first identified by Max Weber:

“… the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot be identified with the sacred, since it is responsible for the ongoing desacralization (or disenchantment) of the world that epitomizes modernity; second, that desacralization threatens to leave us defenseless against our own violence by unchaining technology, so that unlimitedness begins little by little to replace limitedness; third, the greatest paradox of all, that in order to preserve the power of self-limitation, without which no human society can sustain itself and survive, we are obliged to rely on our own freedom.”

When the respective religious authorities decided to fix their canons of sacred scripture and stop the process by which these writings had been continuously edited, amended, and re-interpreted, our fate was sealed. Religion became faith, complete confidence in some static expression of exteriority. Not only the gods, but also God became archaic, an impediment to human welfare and the welfare of the rest of the planet.

So, in Dupuy’s judgement we have lost our ability for self-transcendence. Our societies no longer act as “God-factories.” Religion has now substituted for the sacred and destroyed it by halting its evolution. The traditional gods have indeed died, even among those fundamentalists who spout an Ole Time Religion that never existed except in their imagination. Theirs is at best a sacralisation of Nostalgia and at worst of White Colonialism. The new gods proposed by the innumerable cults that spring up continuously (QAnon, any number of conspiracy theories, alien enthusiasts, enthusiastic adventists, etc.) appeal mainly to the emotionally needy, the shysters, and the resentful, not to the mass of those affected by the emerging panic on numerous fronts from immigration to the corruption of every major social institution.

We will continue to worship the gods we have established by default in our disenchanted societies - wealth, position, political power, the righteousness of capitalism - because they are, we believe, what Marx called the universal equivalent of every possible desire. They give us whatever else we might want. This is the Prosperity Gospel that proclaims a religion without a hint of the sacred. Even more disastrously, it has annihilated an awareness of the sacred.

It turns out that Hegel was probably correct. Reason has its own agenda of which we are largely unconscious. But whereas he was confident enough to call such an exteriority ‘cunning,’ thus implying a secret plan for human welfare, the better translation might be the Ruse of Reason, the cosmic practical joke that is the species Homo sapiens.

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Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mission Impossible
(Beowulf Rides Again)

An uncharted tower lies buried in the accumulated sediment of history. Living words lead downward to dangerous beasts. Something, an Event, happened here but no one remembers it. Interesting distractions are everywhere but nothing can be trusted. Everything has meaning but nothing makes sense, doesn’t fit together into a whole that’s clear. Shady innuendo abounds. Someone is lying. No one who has been here before has come back unscathed. All the clues are here but… . Is it reality? A dream? A drug-induced illusion? A set-up by some unfriendly authority? Or, perhaps, just an author’s adventurous adolescent fantasy? And, most important, what is at the bottom of that buried tower?

Other readers have identified similarities or references to other modern writers in Annihilation. I think many of these are apt and very likely. However, I think the book’s inspiration may be much more culturally embedded. This involves the poetic epic of Beowulf, written in Old English sometime around the first millennium but referring to even more ancient events in 6th century Scandinavia. Beowulf’s ‘Crawler,’ the beast in Annihilation’s Tower, is Grendel, whom Beowulf defeats by tearing off his arm. But this is not the end of the saga. Grendel’s mother is a much more serious foe than her son. Beowulf must fight her in her lair deep under a lake. The outcome is a draw.

Vandermeer’s story uses many similar tropes to those of the author of Beowulf - the ghoulish monster threatening the (relatively) civilised world, the hero’s plunging into the depths to confront the ultimate challenge alone, Beowulf’s abandonment by his colleagues in his last (deadly) battle, and even the reference to the injured arm (the psychologist’s in Annihilation). The generally mysterious background and location is similar in both emphasising their saga-like character.

And just as Beowulf contains subtle biblical references, so too does Annihilation with its mention of sacrifice, personal transformation, resurrection, and spiritual continuity. What interests me most is the author’s concluding reference to a thorn inserted into humanity’s gene pool from elsewhere. I suggest that this thorn is in fact language itself, an Event beyond recall and a possible biblical reference (Babel’s Tower) that indicates the power of language and its inherent destructiveness. It is also Beowulf’s final foe, the indestructible dragon, against which he cannot prevail. The very word ‘annihilation,’ representing all language, is a hypnotic command (or magical spell) provoking suicidal efforts.

Hence my outrageous subtitle above.

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God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Stuck Between Terrorism and Neurosis

Slavoj Žižek is a well-known Marxist philosopher, that is to say, a dialectical materialist. He is also a Christian theologian with a particular interest in what Christians call The Spirit, a decidedly immaterial entity. One might think these two aspects of Žižek’s thought are an unusual, on the face of it contradictory, combination. But consider this:

Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
- 1 John 4:8

Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
- Matthew 10:34

Contradiction is the essence of Christianity: the last shall be first; blessed are the poor and the meek; a God without power; Father, why have you forsaken me?; a call to all the world for redemption that cannot be understood by the world. And these are only contradictions in the originary messages of Christianity. As has been noted by modern theologians, the early Christian community expected the imminent return of Jesus as the triumphant Christ; what they got instead was the Church and its consistently corrupt, self-serving, and decidedly un-Christian members. So who better than a master dialectician to assess the state of Christianity than a Marxist philosopher who happens to be a believer?

This book is a follow-on from a debate that Žižek had with the English theologian, John Milbank of Radical Orthodoxy fame. This debate is documented in their joint publication of The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic in 2009. Žižek feels that although that debate ended, it wasn’t finished. Apparently Milbank just wanted to leave the field, believing that both had reached the stage of simply repeating their positions and more or less talking past each other.

What interests me in God in Pain, however, is not any additional debating points presented by Žižek, but his acute theological understanding of modern society, particularly his diagnosis of the source of the global factionalism that ostensibly involves all the major world religions. While I think he ignores the pivotal (and destructive) role of the Christian idea of Faith in his discussion, an idea that has penetrated other religions so deeply that we now consider Faith and Religion as synonymous, his recognition of the political import of religious tradition, either active or unconscious, is important.

This statement , I think, sums Žižek ‘s position reasonably well: “… [I]t is not only that every politics is grounded in a ‘theological’ view of reality, it is also that every theology is inherently political, an ideology of new collective space (like the communities of believers in early Christianity, or the umma in early Islam).” In other words, theology is unavoidable as the dominant source of what goes on in the world, even of relatively few are aware of it.

Žižek begins his own political theology not with references to classical or contemporary theological works, but by using a central insight of the influential French psychiatrist and polymath, Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s fundamental thesis, in brief, is that the denial of the existence of God does not make all behaviour allowable but quite the opposite:

1. The true formula of atheism is not ‘God is dead’ but rather that ‘God is unconscious.’ A dead God, like a dead father, would, from a theoretical perspective, impose profound inhibitions on human behaviour. An unconscious God would be merely an absent father whose prohibitions could be broken with impunity.
2. Psychiatric analysts know from experience that if God doesn’t exist consciously or otherwise for an individual, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove this every day.

In short: “The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God… If God doesn’t exist, then ‘everything is prohibited’ means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment.”

This inversion also hold for those who hold themselves to be true believers: “‘if God exists, then everything is permitted’—is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as his instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are redeemed in advance, since they express the divine will .” Thus Augustine’s Amor et quod vis fac, ‘Love and then do whatever you want to.’ And Luther’s rabid hatred of the Epistle of James, which suggested that ethical actions were at least as important as faith for salvation. Or for that matter the “righteousness through faith” claimed by Paul in the epistle to the Romans.

The difficulty in trusting in the divine will, of course, is often obvious to everyone but the believer. As Žižek notes, “the ambiguity persists since there is no guarantee, external to your belief, of what God really wants you to do—in the absence of any ethical standards external to your belief in and love for God, the danger is always lurking that you will use your love of God as a legitimization for the most horrible deeds.” Such danger is not only in the personal extremes but also exists in the institutional mainstream. For example:

“The well-documented story of how the Catholic Church as an institution protects pedophiliacs in its own ranks is another good example of how, if God exists, then everything is permitted (to those who legitimize themselves as his servants). What makes this protective attitude towards pedophiliacs so disgusting is that it is not practiced by tolerant hedonists, but—to add insult to injury—by the very institution which poses as the moral guardian of society.”

So, this presents the apparent alternatives which are presented to the contemporary thinking person. Either we become neurotic atheists all the while denying the unconscious constraints imposed on us. Or we become fundamentalist terrorists who seek to impose our interpretation of the divine on all and sundry with no real concern about human well-being. In political terms, think of the Left-wing judgmental, politically correct, no-harassment-here, identity police who actually carry around an enormous degree of cultural guilt which they would like the rest of us to share; and the smug, know-nothing Right-wing evangelicals who destroy democratic politics through their single-issue focus and their immunity to factual argument. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.

How does one avoid these extremes with both intellectual and spiritual integrity intact? What’s important here as well is that Žižek has something equally significant to say to the ‘middle-ground’ who wish a pox on the houses of both Left and Right-wing extremism. These folk frequently have given up on politics all together as irredeemably evil, or at least not worth the effort of even voting. This he considers a sort of modern gnosticism. Žižek puts gnosticism in an interesting light: “I have used here the term “gnosticism” in its precise meaning, as the rejection of a key feature of the Jewish-Christian universe: the externality of truth.”

This externality of truth is central to Žižek’s call to not just the extremes but the modal political population. He realises that neither Christianity nor any other religion can provide a fixed moral code of behaviour. But he also knows that morality is not a strictly private matter. We are individuals but we are also in each other’s pockets. Religious belief is a provocation and spur to ethics but ethics is external to religion itself. So, for Žižek (as well as for me) sacred scriptures, doctrines, and religious commentaries are a kind of theological poetry. So, for example, “… the [Christ] Event is a pure-empty-sign, and we have to work to generate its meaning.” And we create this meaning cooperatively in community. This means practicing political love (agapé) in the working out of moral and legal standards of behaviour.

This externality of truth does not imply that truth exists abstractly, known only to God or his official mediators perhaps; nor does it reject the possibility that what is considered truth changes and evolves from time to time, or even from situation to situation: “…[W]hat “Revelation”[that is to say ‘gold-standard’ truth] means is that God took upon himself the risk of putting everything at stake, of fully ‘engaging himself existentially’ by way, as it were, of stepping into his own picture, becoming part of creation, exposing himself to the utter contingency of existence.” That contingency of existence is us as we find our way along the road of moral, scientific, and even literary truth. God allows us to learn, even to learn what learning means.

For me this implies Hope in God, and Faith in each other, not the other way round. God’s faith in the human species, to join with it in an enterprise of learning, is the infinite miracle of grace. The meaning of the gospels, therefore, is not contained in dogmatic statements or creeds but in the activity of the community as it goes about learning: “… it is up to them [the audience/hearers of the word/congregation] to act like the Holy Spirit, practicing agape.”

Žižek is, I think, appropriately vague about what agapé is. After all we are also learning how agapé works in practice and are quite rightly experimenting more or less continuously with what politics should look like. But I lose him abruptly when he identifies the motivation necessary to adopt it: “Agape is what remains after we assume the consequences of the failure of eros.” That is, true political love is what’s left over after we’ve exhausted every other option. The problem, of course, is that humanity has shown a remarkably consistent tolerance for failure. It seems unlikely that agapé has any chance of large-scale adoption short of the threat of immediate extinction; and perhaps not even then.

So I have to conclude that Žižek’s redirection of Faith towards Man from God is God whistling in the dark. I can certainly maintain some sort of Hope - in Man as well as God perhaps. But I think Faith, if Žižek’s theology is correct, is not a virtue even God can afford to have. Quite apart from the likelihood of continuing human obduracy, the central problem with Žižek’s conception is that the agapé relationship, even if it were mutual, is not transitive. That is, if A exhibits agapaic love towards B, and B a similar love toward C, these relations say nothing about what A’s relation to C might be.

The implications of this are profound. First this intransitivity puts a limit on the size of the community involved. The limit is essentially the number of others that an individual can be expected to love in the appropriate manner. There is an implied intimacy which suggests that this number is rather few, say less than 20. Yet even if it were in the hundreds, the organisation that could feasibly be sustained is obviously rather small. This is precisely the problem faced by many business start-ups, for example. There seem to be definite ‘break-points’ - 7, 20, 50, 200 - at which the character of the organisation changes dramatically (or if one prefers, The Spirit gets harder to find) because intimate relationships cannot be maintained as the enterprise grows.

There is a further consequence, even in relatively small-scale communities. Relational intimacy is not free. It requires effort to maintain as every married person understands. One cannot afford to spread one’s love, even agapé, around indiscriminately. Moreover, communities cohere as much around difference as they do around similarity. Thus Christianity has traditionally defined itself as not-Jewish even during the period of gospel-writing. Modern businesses typical stress their differences from the competition as a tool of internal solidarity. The Marines are not soldiers. Canadians are not Americans, etc. Even communities built on love can simultaneously hate.

Therefore, while I find Žižek’s analysis stimulating and at times inspired, his prescription, if I understand it at all, is of questionable worth and passé despite his novel terminology. His agapé, for example, sounds very much like the epsilon-relation proposed over a century ago by the American Pragmatist, Josiah Royce. Royce too had the dream of creating increasingly inclusive communities founded on the Christian idea of love. For the reasons I outlined above, among others, his dream failed despite some really determined efforts. Agapé, it seems, resists institutionalisation. So while I continue to try to avoid both terrorism and neurosis, I’m at a loss to suggest what a political process might look like that reconciles the two.

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The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Be Kind To Be Cruel

Anna and her brothers, Tommy and Terzo, are keeping their mother alive in a Tasmanian hospital while the world around them burns with apocalyptic wildfires. As she withers, they invest more will, emotion and money to stave off the end. Of course they believe that they do so out of love. But the author (and the reader) know this is a fabrication. These are cruel people.

Yes, it’s true. Human being can rationalise anything, including the torture of loved ones, perhaps especially the torture of loved ones when they cannot resist, namely when they are very young or very old. When young, we teach them to want, desire, believe, and say the right things (and hide other things that you must never ever tell about), through psychological intimidation if not outright physical abuse. When old, we insist they undergo every possible treatment to prolong their life, regardless of the pain, anxiety, and distress it might entail. We do these things in the name of love, of duty, even religious obligation. We are monsters.

“For Terzo it was simple—and she understood now why that was. To every problem of their mother’s weakening flesh was their infinitely stronger cruelty. Once you accepted its necessity, it was unstoppable and impossible to defeat. She felt almost giddy with the sheer power of their cruelty. Buy in the help they needed using Francie’s money—and to what better use could it be put?”

The fact is that we love power, or at least the feeling of power. Power to control events, to shape outcomes, to create the future. There’s a certain buzz one can only get through deciding, acting, and claiming credit for a result. If the result is the extended life of another, the buzz itself justifies the love of power, not only is power necessary but it is also rightfully employed in our hands. Given sufficient power, we may even come to believe that our hands are those of God guiding the world towards its correct fate:

“Anna and Terzo both had what people call comforts: a little money, a little power. By the standards of the real rich, pitiful; by the metrics of the truly powerful, negligible, even laughable. But still: money and power. And they were accustomed to acting on the world and not allowing the world to act on them.”

The rationalisation extends to our possession of power not just its exercise. We don’t have any real power, we say. In fact we are the victims of power. It is others, the rich, the influential, the connected, who have power. We are forced to protect ourselves from these people, as well as from the vagaries of existence itself, that is to say, from God. We are obligated to resist this power, particularly the power of death. Thinking of her mother in light of her brother’s dictates about her treatment, Anna muses “It wasn’t enough that she lived in her sea of waking dreams. In Terzo’s view, she had to live like us, rationally, in a rational universe. And as there was to be no death.” Isn’t life the most important thing?

What we mean is that my life is important. My life should not be interrupted by the loss of your life. My life should not be compromised by the reminder that your death foretells my death. My life is painful enough; your pain relativises mine and at least doesn’t make my pain more intense. My life can be given purpose and meaning by exploiting your life; your life makes my life seem bigger. Your continuing life is a distraction from the vast numbers of other lives - whole ecosystems - that are being extinguished now and prospectively over which I don’t have any control whatsoever. We never make these rationalisations explicit. Instead we call them love, devotion, obligation, even hope. Thus we engage in the ultimate delusion.

What we are deluded about is fear. Not necessarily fear of death, or loneliness, or unwanted memories and regrets. What we fear is nothing, literally nothingness, for which we have no other word. “What is the image of nothing?” Anna asks. Exactly. Nothingness doesn’t exist. We used to think that nothingness was an interstellar emptiness. But we’ve learned that emptiness is filled to overflowing with ‘stuff,’ fields and interactions, and comings and goings of particles. Such space is hardly nothing. Nothingness is inconceivable. Nothingness is what mystics mean by God.

It is the certainty of the inconceivable which, I think, scares the pants off us. So much so that we are willing to inflict unlimited suffering on those who confront us with its paradoxical presence. Our bodies may return to the earth but that ability/organ/conception we call our minds goes no where at all (perhaps it was never real at all). And with it our ability to rationalise comes to a dead halt. Our minds can’t adapt to that; we can’t rationalise it no matter how hard we try.

This is why so-called schizophrenics are such a problem. By her dying mother’s bedside, Anna’s schizophrenic nephew says, “Your mind’s a garden, Auntie... Mine’s fucking Aleppo.” The mind that can’t rationalise is, while not dead, a living symbol of both the fragility of thought and the nothingness for which there are no words. Schizophrenics are beyond reason. Thus the historic treatment of schizophrenics - incarceration, drug-induced idiocy, electro-shock. All in the name of ‘care.’

In Flanagan’s novel, the rationalisation we do around death is a kind of stealing, a stealing from reality. It makes words superior to what is and what happens. It shows up in Anna’s mysterious loss of body parts, in her son’s thefts from around the house, and in her inability to resist her dominant brother’s will, expressed of course in directive, decisive words. Her brother steals her own will, her self, every time he argues, bullies and cajoles. Repressing this makes the siblings merely “amiable strangers.”

The brother, Tommy, father of the schizophrenic, knows what lies buried beneath his brother’s words but he is incapable of overcoming their power:

“Tommy stutters. I mean, is translating experience into words an achievement at all? Or is it just the cause of all our unhappiness? Is it our tragedy and our ongoing conceit? The world gets carried away with words, phrases, and elaborate paragraphs. One word leads to another and soon enough you have affairs, wars, genocide and the Anthropocene. Silence, according to Tommy when in his cups, is the only place where truth can be found.”

Tommy understands that in the matter of death, words have nothing to say. His stutter is an obvious trope about his relationship to language.
Tommy knows that contrary to what the poet says, and despite what our waking dreams within language (not just the internet for heaven’s sake) would like us to believe, death does have dominion.

So Anna finally realises about her mother “They had saved her from death, but only… by infinitely prolonging her dying.” With this Anna also has an epiphany that coincides with Tommy’s insight: “words are walls between ourselves and reality,” especially the reality of other people. Consciousness itself may be the image of the nothingness she senses, a void filled with ultimately meaningless words that are shown to be so at death - the release her mother had longed for, from her words as well as theirs.

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Montano's Malady 
by 

Enrique Vila-Matas, 

 

Jonathan Dunne (Goodreads Author) (Translator)

 

A Literary Mornington Crescent 

Mornington Crescent is a game which is played on the BBC radio panel show, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue since 1978. In light of its longevity, I think it’s safe to say the game is popular in Britain. But, given its very English sense of humour, I always doubted its appeal abroad. Until, that is, I encountered Vila-Matas’s Montano’s Malady. Written in 2002, the book might well have been inspired by the game. Well perhaps not but I think there can be little doubt that they both have the same quirky target audience. Who knew that the Spanish shared a sense of humour with the English?

The game of Mornington Crescent might best be described as a parody-simulacrum, a satire for which there is no object except itself. The eponymous Mornington Crescent is a tube station on the Northern Line of the London Underground (notorious for its poor service; the station itself was closed until almost 20 years after the game was first aired). Each of the panelists in turn cites a London landmark, street, or other Underground stop, ostensibly leading to the winning declaration of ‘Mornington Crescent’ by one of the panelists.

That’s it. There are no other rules to Mornington Crescent. There is no necessary connection between any of the locations provided by the panelists. Whatever occurs to the them, for whatever reason is an acceptable next move in the game. Nevertheless, during the game there are many challenges and mutual criticisms among the participants as they debate the meaning of the rules and the acceptability of locations cited. Listening for the first time to the game being played is disconcerting. Empirically, it seems to make no sense at all. Eventually the listener either changes the programme or catches on. The point of the game is simply to allow the participants to be entertainingly witty at each other’s expense. Its object is amusement, period. In short, a game without any final outcome except the arbitrary announcement of ‘Mornington Crescent’ signaling its end. No points, no final scores, no winners or losers.

And so it is with Montano’s Malady. Books and authors replace London landmarks but the rules are identical. There are no rules except what occurs in the mind of Montano’s father, a critic and reviewer of some standing, who is desperately trying to stop playing his version of the game, a game which has dominated his entire life. He simply cannot help making random literary connections. Even as he attempts to describe in his diary what he considers an affliction turns into an extended narrative of associations, quotations, ideas, references, and comparisons. He is a compulsive aesthete who wants to escape aesthetics but fails because he employs his aesthetic sense to do so, over and over, in different forms using various literary genres and periods.

So like Mornington Crescent, Montano’s Malady is a satire of itself, a parody-simulacrum. It’s point is amusement, Vila-Matas’s self-amusement for sure, and incidentally for his readership. And why not? It’s an acceptable way for a genius to show off the foundations of his genius, namely other writers. All Vila-Matas’s writing pals are there with him too, as ‘panelists’ sharing the barbs and the inside jokes. I’m sure they enjoyed taking part. Hey, it’s entertainment. No other bottom-line. I’m calling the BBC tomorrow about a new panel game format for the World Service.

Matrix by Lauren Groff
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Sisterhood

I may not understand Groff’s intention with this book. Or perhaps I do, in which case I don’t like it. It is historical fiction only in the broadest sense that a woman called Marie Abbess of Shaftesbury did exist. Anything else is mostly legend. And Groff’s casual conflation of two historical characters on the basis of a shared given first name (Marie of France, a contemporary but very different woman than Marie d'Anjou) seems a bit out of line even in fiction. It seems to me the book is much more a feminist polemic. It is obviously a vision of a feminine utopia, a Shakerism without the men anywhere in sight, and contentedly gay.

The problem is that Marie uses increasingly ‘male’ tactics to get and keep control over her visionary paradise. She begins with fraud, moves on to manipulation and intimidation, and ultimately resorts to violence in order to get her way. It seems to me that her female-only hideaway is just another form of domination in a world ruled by domination.

Anyway, here are my notes to justify my conclusion. Beware: spoilers ahead if you care about reading the book without prejudice:

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Marie wants it all, or at least everything that the 12th century has to offer - ridin’, huntin’, and shootin’, with a well-prepared feast of roast swan afterwards, which she can enjoy wearing the latest fashions from France. As the illegitimate child of Geoffrey of Anjou, she reckons she has the right to such things. But the Empress Matilda thinks otherwise, so off she’s packed to Angleterre.

Marie is a woman’s woman (nudge, wink) who became imprinted (enamoured, obsessed) with the good Lady Eleanor of Aquitaine (her half-sister) while on a purported Women’s Crusade to Jerusalem (a sort of medieval Hadassah cruise one supposes, which it was not historically - wives did accompany husbands; Eleanor was along for the ride, armor and all). Marie is hopeful that her devotion to Eleanor, now Queen of the English as well as the French will earn her the points necessary to fulfil her dream. What she gets instead is a forlorn nunnery in wet and dreary Wiltshire…

… And no word from the beloved Eleanor who is off flooding the Plantagenet gene pool (and then regretting much of the outflow from the overcrowded space). Marie’s admiration for Eleanor is mysterious (it is more likely, historically, that she was focused on her half-brother Henry II). Eleanor has slept her way to the top of the social ladder, something Marie wouldn’t even consider given her preferences. Eleanor is apparently a looker; Marie is a butch two feet taller than her peers with a face like… well, a horse. Eleanor has learned how to take and maintain power in a world of men; men don’t exist in Marie’s world except as faceless, nameless ghosts who are best avoided. Eleanor is ‘establishment’ through and through; Marie gives up on that world entirely in order to create her own anti-establishment.

Nevertheless Marie uses what she has, her growing band of nuns, to make a name and a position of respect. And she thinks she has found what makes Eleanor so successful: “Women in this world are vulnerable; only reputation can keep them from being crushed.” So she develops an image of ruthless competence and dedicated persistence. And she is not above using the church itself to further her ambitions. As she has learned from her blind, dotty abbess, “Mystical acts create mystical beliefs.”

Marie creates a set of phoney accounts to mislead the local bishop about the convent’s growing wealth. And flirtatiously flatters her own female superiors into submission. Corruption is necessary after all to fight corruption, she muses. And for a woman of definite sexual tastes, the abbey provides the casual but close companionship she desires. And why not, since men aren’t involved, there’s no biblical prohibition against womanly mutual comfort. She is getting accustomed to this business of faith as well: “How strange, she thinks. Belief has grown upon her. Perhaps, she thinks, it is something like a mold.” And her principle belief is that men are the carriers if not the source of evil and will be banned entirely from the abbey’s estates.

Marie’s post-menopausal visions are the driving force of her middle age (Groff spends several pages on Marie’s hot flushes, suggesting she likes the image of women of a certain age as witches). They tell her to make the abbey an “island of women” entirely enclosed and fortified against the vagaries of the (male-inhabited) world. Over the objections of her senior nuns she builds a enormous labyrinthine maze around the abbey. All hands contribute, neglecting their religious rituals but designing and building new machines, roads, dams, and fortifications with military precision.

Marie’s project is noticed by both the nobility and the church authorities. And not favourably. But Marie has already started a massive international PR programme to quell criticism.:

“through the countryside, the women will tell stories, woman to woman, servant to servant and lady to lady, and the stories will spread north and south upon this island, and the stories will alchemize into legends, and the legends will serve as cautionary tales, and her nuns will be made doubly safe through story most powerful.”

Eleanor, freed finally from family and regnal strife, seems to approve Marie’s efforts. So Marie receives a new vision and a new project. Hoping to entice Eleanor to retire in the abbey, Marie starts the building of an enormous abbess house. For this skilled men are needed. Appropriate precautions are taken. Blindfolds are necessary for any member of the community who bring the men food, drink, and pay. The maze provides security. But there is a gap in defences, enough for some sperm to sneak over the wall, as it were, and one of the naughty novices gets pregnant, miscarries and dies. Marie works jointly with the Queen “against the old carrionbirds Gossip and Rumor.” to bury the scandal.

Marie has made her dream a reality through cunning and wit. She has power, power to maintain a “second Eden.” She is the new Eve. And as Eve was a precursor of the Virgin Mary so the Virgin is a precursor of Mother Abbess Marie. She is turning into an apocalyptic fanatic: “Marie sees evil settling on the world, an evil overcoming the goodness in the hearts of even the holy.” She essentially forms her own church, installing herself as high priestess: “I will take upon my own shoulders the abbey’s sacerdotal duties.” She says Mass, takes confessions, changes the Latin ritual to feminine endings, and performs the other roles canonically reserved for males.

It is in the confessional that Marie gets to understand the depth of suffering her flock has undergone at the hands of men: “she sorrows for her daughters in their lives before, the secret invisible weights they have dragged behind them into the abbey.” Rape, abuse, the guilt of fighting and not fighting off these men. Out of fear, love or loyalty no one snitches to the authorities. Marie, of course, knows everyone’s secrets at this point. Prudence prevails.

Cults produce other cults, Marie finds, as competition emerges in the abbey’s ranks. The first rule of power is to protect power. If two mystical prophets share the same time and space, one of them is false. Marie manoeuvres her potential rivals out. She expands her physical empire, even as Eleanor is dying and loosing hers. Marie feels elation rather than sorrow. “She feels royal. She feels papal.” She even encroaches on Crown land. Unfortunately protection of this dramatic enlargement of her ambition will require murder, and the death of her friend. With this last comes regret and a personal revelation:

“Marie’s arrogance brought this final illness upon Wulfhild. Her endless hunger ate up the daughter of her spirit. The need to enlarge this abbey she has thought of as an extension of her own body. Her actions always in reaction to the question of what she could have done in the world, if she had only been given her freedom.”

Yet she still refuses to recognise the papal interdict of England forbidding all religious rights - the ultimate arrogance. In Marie’s quiet island of women and work, ritual and observance go on as usual for years. Even in old age she can successfully resist men wielding power through deceit and misinformation more than equivalent to their own. She is unrepentant, missed by her sisters in death, and portrayed by Groff as a sort of light that failed.

Seriously?

I get it, I do. Tricking Da Massa is rewarding revenge and one has to admire Marie’s ingenuity (or rather Groff’s). Men are mostly shits; history demonstrates their danger to women. And Marie’s ability to still raise an orgasm or two well into her seventies is admirable indeed. But if that’s the sum of Marie’s life, it might have been wasted in better ways. The image of Eve (the first Matrix) and the Virgin Mary (the greatest Matrix) engaged in an eternal sensual kiss, both embraced by Abbess Marie (the last Matrix) isn’t really sufficient to maintain either a mystical cult or visionary momentum. Ultimately Marie couldn’t institutionalise herself and her vision. Both passed apparently into obscurity. Groff’s resurrection doesn’t add much of value to the legends.

I await the avalanche of Mariolatrus abuse.

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