Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Revenge For What They Done

Slavery is the worst crime against humanity ever committed by a country now infamous for its successfully orchestrated coups around the world, its rather less successfully prosecuted wars, and its consistent support for oppressive regimes as long as they protected its business interests. So a bit of historical context for this novel is essential.

Many consider the abolition of slavery in America a virtuous act. It wasn’t. The Emancipation Proclamation was an expediency of war. The promise of “40 acres and a mule” made by the conquering General Sherman to freed slaves was rescinded by the slave-owning successor to Lincoln, President Andrew Johnson, leaving them with no economic resources. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1868 (essentially by force), was effectively nullified by the Jim Crow laws and did far more for the abstract person of the American corporation than for the well-being of black American citizens. The Civil Rights laws of the 1960’s were resented by almost half the white population of the country, had to be enforced through the military and federal prosecutors, and have been eroded continuously to the present day. “Reason and law don’t mean much when white folk want their way,” as one of Djèli’s characters says.

White resentment in America has now transformed itself into a narrative of victimhood. Since an appreciation of irony is not a common (white) American trait, one might say that for the most part such victimhood is merely a matter of apathy, mis-education, casual self-interest, or stupidity. But there is a hard core that is passionately committed to violent racism. It is this kernel of hate that creates and sustains the victim narrative, continuously invents new threats for white people from black people, and routinely carries out crimes against black people ranging from police harassment to murder. These people are monsters.

These monsters are the focal point of Djèli Clark’s book. His monsters aren’t just produced by unfortunate environmental circumstances, that is, parental training and social emulation. Cultural racists are merely Kluxes. A sort of Lamarckian evolution has taken place in some, however, so that racial hatred is now embedded in their genes. They pass on their monsterhood, as it were, to their children, who now form a substantial gene-pool of rock solid , incorrigible hate. There is no re-education or re-habilitation that can alter their drive to destroy black people. They are also very difficult to kill. Like Zombies, they can loose limbs and organs while continuing to pose a threat. These are the Ku Kluxes who have even evolved pointy heads that fit nicely into Klan hoods.

In the early 1920’s, the period of the novel, there were probably at least 3 million former slaves alive in the United States. They, and their children and their children’s children, were disenfranchised, denied due process of law, physically isolated, and systematically oppressed by every agency of government. Their legal status had changed but their existential reality had not. There had recently been massacres of black people in Tulsa, Chicago, St. Louis, Washington DC, and in rural Arkansas, Texas, and Florida. The same Ku Kluxers were in charge as had been the half century before, and the two centuries before that under other titles but with the same monster genes. And they continue to evolve, getting cleverer all the time about the vulnerabilities of black folk, knowing more and more about “the places where we hurt.”

It is necessary to “have the sight” in order to spot the Ku Kluxes in a crowd. They are “the Lie running ‘round as the Truth.” Together they form the “Invisible Empire” of white supremacy. That empire is managed from elsewhere, by a force not of this world, by the devil himself. And so supernatural help is essential to combat them. This is a battle for the soul of the world, a spiritual war. And it not just one of many confrontations with evil, but rather the deciding war, equivalent to that recounted in Milton’s Paradise Lost, only with Satan leading his mob while waving a copy of the Bible. So forget your government help, your socialist heaven and your evangelical apocalypse. This here is the place to be. “They say God is good all the time. Seem he also likes irony.”

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Science Fictions: The Epidemic of Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science by Stuart Ritchie

Scientific Meta-Hype

Here’s a rough summary of Science Fictions:

1. There is no officially established procedure called ‘scientific method,’ by which to judge the quality of research results.
2. The process by which the results of scientific research are validated for consideration by the scientific community cannot ensure the reliability of these results either.
3. Consequently what circulates at any given time as scientific fact is mostly wrong or misleading. It takes time to discover errors.
4. Steps can be taken, mostly by non-scientists and a new kind of science, to reduce if not eliminate the amount of junk science currently being produced.

In other words science works, when it does, not because of how experimentation, theorisation, and analysis are carried out, or how the findings of individual scientists are publicised or criticised by colleagues, or because these findings are proven wrong, but because most of what is publicised will eventually be ignored as irrelevant. This Ritchie finds disturbing.

A key word in the above is ‘eventually.’ For science to be science, everything that is known is tentative. And centuries of scientific experience shows that everything known at any time will be ignored at some future time except as a kind of intellectual fossil. This is as close to an accurate existential definition of Science as one is likely to get.

I don’t think Stuart Ritchie would disagree with this assessment. Science, like politics, is extremely messy. That is to say, Science is inherently inefficient (I use caps to designate the modern institution). It does not progress according to any definable logic since it is constantly reviewing the logic it has previously adopted. Therefore, looking back from any point in time, the resources engaged in scientific efforts - money, talent, time, administration - have largely been spent in a demonstrably fruitless way.

This waste is essentially what Ritchie is writing about. A large part of his book is devoted to the errors, frauds, and bloopers in scientific research ranging from his own field of psychology to cancer research and molecular physics. Eventually these mistakes mostly are not refuted but buried by further research. In the meantime the scientific community has wasted effort. And, he says, this waste has serious impact because of delay in acquiring important knowledge for health, social policy, and the general well-being of society. The waste can be reduced, he says, and he has suggestions about how to do that.

Ritchie calls our current situation a “crisis.” He believes the existing institutions of Science are “corrupt.” He cites compelling evidence that “any given published scientific article is more likely to be false than true.” There have been, he says, “over 18,000 retractions in the scientific literature since the 1970’s,” largely due to forgery, conflict of interest, self-promotion or even criminal intentions. In cancer research Ritchie cites a study in 2017 which:
“… scoured the literature for studies using known misidentified cell lines found an astonishing 32,755 papers that used so-called impostor cells, and over 500,000 papers that cited those contaminated studies”

So serious business. Perhaps the UK government, which was purportedly “following the science assiduously” at the outset of the COVID pandemic in 2020 should have read Ritchie’s book immediately it was published. That might have saved some lives, relieved marital strife during lockdown, and avoided the immensely costly track and trace boondoggle. So what is it that the world should do to lessen the incidence of junk science, avoidably stupid science, not to mention criminal science? Surely this is an issue deserving of further investigation by the proper authorities.

Well a part of Ritchie’s solution is something somewhat more trivial than the problem he describes. Essentially his first recommendation is that SCIENTISTS MUST BECOME MORE VIGILANT. In more detail, this means brushing up a bit on their statistics, taking their job as peer reviewers of professional articles more seriously, mitigating the hype surrounding unusual research findings, being more watchful for professional fads, and being a little more suspicious of whatever they read in print. Hardly revolutionary, and somewhat condescending.

“Become more vigilant” is about all he can say to fellow scientists if he wants to maintain credibility. Anything else, like government supervision or professional regulations about how to conduct proper science, would destroy science itself. So he directs his next directives to non-scientists - universities, research institutes, journal editors and foundations. He would like them to stop providing incentives to scientists and academics that promote a lack of vigilance - number of published articles, citation intensity, implicit funding demands to overstate expected research results, organisational promotion etc.

But it is at this point that Ritchie’s ship of a new science runs aground and founders. He admits that scientists themselves are complicit in the web of incentives he abhors. In fact they want them:

“What’s particularly disconcerting is that the people entangled in this thicket of worthless numbers are scientists: they’re supposed to be the very people who are most au fait with statistics, and most critical of their misuse. And yet somehow, they find themselves working in a system where these hollow and misleading metrics are prized above all else. ”

Of course they are. So Ritchie’s killer app is an extraordinary proposal for the establishment of an essentially new profession of the “meta-scientist,” that is a group of scientists who study the work of other scientists. Part of this proposal are suggestions for new journals devoted to this meta-science, including the reporting of results of research flops, so called null result studies, which didn’t lead anywhere. He also wants public “pre-registration” of research intentions and expectations, as well as “Open Source” free access to registered research and its results. He thereby cleverly keeps scientific regulation in the family, as it were, away from politicians, government bureaucrats, and the un-lettered masses.

Ah yes, Dr. Ritchie, may one ask who controls the controllers? Will the world need meta-meta-science in a few years time. And isn’t your idea of pre-registration just a teensy bit bureaucratic and of unproven scientific worth. It’s an idea that may be suitable for big government-funded drug studies simply because of the fortunes to be gained. But for evaluating the reaction of mice to increased testosterone, for example, such regulation seems highly inappropriate. Then there’s the issue of the scientific police who would enforce the registration and supervision of research. Would their approval be necessary for changing a study’s direction mid-stream? And would the penalties for non-compliance be civil or criminal do you think?

Is it too much to assert that the condition in which science finds itself today is no different than it found itself when the Royal Society was founded in 1660, or for that matter in the ancient groves of Grecian academe. In fact I’m willing to bet that there are proportionately fewer scientific hacks in the world today than there has ever been thanks to modern procedures of accreditation and the spread of information through modern technology.

So what is the point of Ritchie’s proposals? Every example of error or malfeasance that Ritchie cites is an instance of the current community of scientists exposing and discounting flakey results. More will certainly be uncovered. Isn’t that the important fact - they will be uncovered? Not as fast as Ritchie would like apparently. But then can he demonstrate scientifically how much quicker good results will be available? And at what cost? And given that eventually all scientific conclusions will be subject to correction, is it possible that he’s just blowing smoke?

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H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Escaping the ‭Law‭‭ ‭Written‭‭ on the Heart

A prominent theme in Barker’s clearly allegorical novel is “The tuning fork is in our hearts.” This refers to the internal moral compass of those who live within The System in harmony with their fellows who are an homogenous group called The Young. For me, the reference to theology seems unmistakable

In the second chapter of his epistle to the Romans (echoing the fourth chapter of the book of Exodus but reversing the meaning), Paul extols the superiority of the “the law written in the heart” over that of the traditional Jewish law of the Torah. Reinforced in the letter to the Hebrews, this law of the heart is also extended to a “law inscribed on the mind.”

These Pauline pronouncements constitute not just the new religion of Christianity but also a new kind of religion. This is a religion of personal conversion rather than ritual participation. It demands faith in, unwavering commitment to, the contents which have been divinely inserted into the heart and mind, the conscience in other words.

Similarly, each individual in the Barker novel is monitored continuously by his or her personal conscience, The Sensor, which monitors all speech, including the speech of thought. Every word is evaluated as to its meaning and emotional correctness in the context in which it is expressed. Narratives are assessed in terms of their conformity with established narratives stored within The System

In Paul’s idea of religion, the contents to be inserted into the mind and heart were linguistic, consisting of key words and narratives. It was therefore necessary to have a reliable mode of transmission between God and human beings. The church eventually declared itself a Societas Perfecta, that is, the source all information that is needed - from what is allowed to be read, to how what is read should be interpreted. Paul’s church was the ultimate source and authority for truth.

In the novel “The Young are Perfect and The System is Perfect and everything is Known.” Like the Societas Perfecta, there is nothing outside itself which is worthy of knowing. Any extraneous knowledge is at minimum distracting, and potentially disruptive to the harmony and ultimate happiness of the community. Desire to acquire such knowledge is a transgression, a sort of editorial discontinuity as in the H(A)PPY of the title. As such, independent thought is discouraged: “Our survival is dependent upon our unity. We must be dispassionate. The System is our unity. The System is our dispassion.”

Paul’s narrative of ‘conversion by faith’ proved remarkably successful. It still dominates a large part of the world’s population. And it is a narrative which has infected other religions originally founded on a commonality of genetic or cultural heritage. Paul’s influence is so great that many of these other religions now often consider themselves to be ‘faith-based.’

In other words, the narrative of faith has become a global phenomenon and consequently must be more or less continuously adapted to new circumstances, established religious feeling, and unforeseen challenges. This implies that the interpretation of the words of faith must be decided by an ultimate authority - the Magisterium, the Board of Elders, the Conference of Churches, Caliph, Ulama, Chief Rabbinate, etc.

So also in the novel, “The System is, in essence, a creative entity; a truth, an aspiration, a hope, an imagining.” The System adapts and interprets as necessary, and as it does so it adjusts personal narratives accordingly in order to neutralise their disruptive impact before they are made legitimate in The System:

“The Sensor automatically deconstructs [all existing] stories for us, so that we may fully comprehend their true meaning, their immense reach and their invidious power, their ultimately deeply conservative urge to comfort and pander and bolster and reassure. To understand them is to disable them. It’s how we stay safe. By knowing. By being aware. It’s how The Young remain strong and Clean. By keeping vigilant.”

But there is always the possibility of a kind of heresy, unauthorised personal narratives, new stories which have not been vetted and approved by the The Sensor. These have the potential for polluting the entire System and undermining its unity. The protagonist in H(A)PPY, Mira A, is plagued by numerous random thoughts which she is trying to make sense of by fitting the pieces together into a coherent story. She is advised that she is “trying to make sense out of nothing,” which is exactly what she’s doing. And this, she is told, will have dire consequences. “‘You must determine to stop telling this story,… or you will poison The Graph. You will pollute The Information Stream. You will unbalance The Sensor.’”

The Graph is the measure of the well-being of the entire community. A deviation in The Graph for one member shows up in measure for all, since all are one. The protagonist recognises her fault and essentially confesses. “I’m so sorry,… how I have . . .SINNED,” she laments. She knows that doubt is the unforgivable sin and deserving of TERRIBLE DISCIPLINE. In this she conforms exactly with Paul’s proclamation in his letter to the Corinthians that to err in an expression of faith is to affect the entire “one body” ,which is the church, adversely.

Based on these clues, it seems to me a pretty safe bet that Barker’s allegory is one of escape from an encompassing faith-based culture such as that invented by Paul. But yet it also seems clear that the book is not about Christianity per se. Within Barker’s System, for example, personal names are replaced by numeric designators that look remarkably like internet IP addresses, suggesting that technological narratives can be as compelling as religious ones. And The System’s sensitivity to the nuance of language seems an allusion to the extreme’s of today’s ‘woke’ culture.

Getting trapped within official and generally accepted faith-based narratives is what we humans seem to do as a matter of routine since Paul and his friends started the ball rolling 2000 years ago. Perhaps this is what Barker’s novel is about - an escape route. For Mira A the escape involves music which of course evades the language of System indoctrination. But is her escape to merely another prison of faith? Or perhaps worse.

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A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Pity the Babes in the Woods

What an odd and labour-intensive way of getting even with your parents - write a book, not about them, but their entire generation. Now here is an author with issues.

Here’s the bare logic of this book: In American democracy The People are sovereign and The People in recent years have exercised that sovereignty abominably, so much so that the wisdom of the Sovereignty of The People is becoming highly questionable. The author seems quite aware that he couldn’t profitably write a book about the failure of American democracy so he wrote one about the failure of a generation of The People - the so-called Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 - during whose purported sovereignty the wheels came off of the American democratic experiment. Gibney’s attack on Boomers rather than democracy allows the author to sell books to steadfastly patriotic younger Americans while condemning everything they hold dear. He can also maintain his own hope in the future of America - as the Boomers die out, he is confident of a new Golden Age of prosperity and social justice, surely with himself in high political office..

Gibney is right to cite the Boomer generation for their frequent blind ignorance and malicious stupidity. It was Boomers who have been in charge since the 1980’s, and the Boomers in charge were put in charge by other Boomers. So by definition Boomers must carry the can. The evidence of Boomer malfeasance in the office of both politician and private citizen is overwhelming according to Gibney: The unmaking of the fabric of traditions of civil courtesy and middle-class toleration; the creation of a culture of self-serving individualistic idealism; the establishment of greed as a prevailing virtue; the compromise of their progeny’s future through the accumulation of massive national debt; decaying infrastructure; almost continuous war-mongering, a range of government policies that made the poor poorer, the rich richer, and kept the middle class in a fearful limbo; the plundering of state benefits throughout their lives. Yes, these things certainly happened on the Boomer watch.

So who could argue with Gibney’s list, which is apparently compelling, not least in its incompleteness. And who could argue with Gibney’s accusation of the lack of conscience or remorse about these events as the true sign of sociopathy. There is certainly no monument which expresses atonement. But where could one go to register an apology? I take him to mean that there seems to be no one in a leadership position who is willing to take responsibility in a biography or memoir. I don’t know of any either. But offhand I can’t think of leaders from any previous generations stepping up to the plate either. A nonsensical argument really. But just to calm Gibney slightly, therefore, let me be the first to declare mea culpa on behalf of the entire generation (actually I already did at length: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

In any case, the book is wrong to blame this Boomer generation, sociopathic or not, for the state in which the country finds itself. Gibney doesn’t appreciate the traditions of the American Way which is what he’s really writing about. The condition of persistent incompetence - political, financial ,social, legal, environmental, and aesthetic - is an inevitable consequence of the logic of the American system of government and its associated culture, of which Gibney himself is very much a product. That system and its culture shaped the Boomers and encouraged them to make their mess. Boomers were the next in line, as it were, of previous generations who praised American democracy while exploiting every crack in its very porous façade. Boomers built on the shoulders of the giants before them. Gibney might well look at the foundations rather than the floor just below his.

Consider the main political and cultural facts. From its inception the electoral system in the United States - the way candidates are chosen, elections financed, voter eligibility defined, constituency boundaries established, and votes counted - meant that the the concept of The People is highly variable. The country has never been sure what this concept meant. Disenfranchisement - both legally and as a matter of practical routine - of people of colour is a long-standing tradition that needs no commentary other than that it is still going strong. There is a straight line from slavery and black voter suppression, even in pre-Civil War Northern states, to Democratic Jim Crow, to Republican gerrymandering and voter disqualification. Keeping The People an uncertain idea is in the blood of America as its primary corruption, its Original Sin.

But this conceptual ambiguity about The People is made largely moot by another aspect of the American system. Its tri-partite structure was meant to mitigate the possibility of the emergence of a sovereign, that is an individual with the power to declare exceptions to any established law. America prides itself that no one is above the law. This is entirely accurate. The law is indeed sovereign. By design there is no sovereign power to usurp it that is held either by The People (however that is defined) or any other wannabe monarch or dictator. Power is so distributed that its locus can’t be found, something Trump learned to his frustration in 2021. The design of hidden sovereignty appears to work. But at a price.

For a start, the phrase Sovereignty of the People is entirely vacuous and therefore so is Gibney’s thesis about Boomer responsibility as The People. And just as the locus of sovereignty cannot be determined, so the locus of responsibility and accountability is equally elusive. Consequently there is no force of blame or shame in American governmental structures. This is not a generational phenomenon at all. It is how the system works and what the culture demands. Ministers of state may resign for personal crimes but extremely rarely for professional mismanagement. Again, the psychotic Trump administration is an example. But so is that of paranoid Harry Truman, the fraudulent Warren Harding, the treasonous Richard Nixon, and the racist Woodrow Wilson to name but a few in the 20th century. The 19th was even worse.

The diffusion of power means that blame can be shared widely and thus neutralised; and that accusers have little power to force personal accountability. Thus Gibney has no choice but to throw shade to an entire generation. Easy to do, and no one’s likely to sue for defamation. He can name names like Trump and Bush and Clinton but his accusations have no force. “Who cares,” is a rather standard reaction, “We got rid of them didn’t we? The system works.” Boomers are his target simply because they’re still around, in his view, polluting the political and social waters of America, not because they are noticeably more incompetent than their predecessors.

And there’s more misdirection by Gibney. The diffusion of power in America means the country is not so much governed, as it is adjudicated. Political issues are constantly weighed, negotiated, and resolved according to the interests at hand by folk who are directly or indirectly dependent on those interests. This adjudication of interests, or values, is most often economic, sometimes religious, but never moral or altruistic; and, despite its staging for public consumption, adjudication is always concluded in private agreements reflecting the interests of the negotiators themselves - so much pork in my barrel for so much pork in yours. Boomers used this very democratic process but they didn’t invent it. Gibney does not like how things get adjudicated. Neither do I. Neither did de Tocqueville 180 years ago. La même chose. Nothing new at all to do with Boomers.

Of course politics is not independent of the culture in which it takes place. The parties in the process of adjudication - in both its legislative and judicial phases - are overwhelmingly corporate entities not individuals. America is neither a capitalist nor a socialist but a corporate nation. And it is corporations which finance elective candidates, provide research as guidance in the detailed formulation of law, lobby legislators, and subsequently litigate in court to enforce their self interested interpretation of law. They also employ the majority of the constituents of politicians. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Gibney, a successful corporate leader, neglects to mention the dominance of corporate culture in America and his part in it.

The Founders knew nothing of the corporation, its potential for the concentration of wealth, or its future pervasiveness and power. Collectively they form the reservoir of non-military power in the country. If democratic politicians want a share of that power, they adjudicate appropriately. The Boomers know what the Founders couldn’t. Yes, Boomers are the corporate creeps who inherited their corporate loyalties from their Depression Era parents. And when you inherit lemons, if you’re smart you don’t make lemonade, you plant lemon orchards on a bank loan, line up second round equity investors, short lemon futures, and arrange an IPO to cash out. Oh, wait… that’s what Gibney does for a living!

So the Boomers went their parents one better and opted for corporate careers not mere corporate jobs. They moved up, largely by being skilled at the process of adjudication, which is the essence of how corporations are run. Gibney doesn’t seem to get it: the corporation is the dominant shaper of American culture. It has been so for at least a century. And barring some natural catastrophe or nuclear war, it will continue to direct the moral as well as economic energies of America. Getting ahead in corporate life is what life has meant for the Boomers. Hate the Boomers, hate the corporations that moulded them. Then what, Mr. Venture Capitalist? You’re a pretty big cog on the corporate wheel. Are you planning to retire to a Buddhist monastery?

What is misplaced in Gibney’s extended rant is not his factually justified accusation of moral bankruptcy and managerial incompetence by many Boomers. These can’t be denied and they are regrettable. The Boomers primary flaw however was that they were of their time and they did what they considered their time demanded without serious reflection. They succumbed to the temptations of democratic politics and corporate economics. Like every other generation, Boomers were babes in the woods, travelling so far into the undergrowth until they could find no other place to be. Gibney and his generation will do exactly the same in the woods planted by the Boomers. The real challenge for Gibney and his cohort is getting an understanding not of the psychoses of the Boomer generation but the psychoses of their own which will be different but probably just as devastating.

Postscript 26/10/2021: upon further consideration, I have realised the authentic genre of this book and its place in the cosmos: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death 
by 

Irvin D. Yalom

 

, epistemology-language, age-ageing 

The Possibility of the Impossible

The transition from being to non-being is one impossible to conceive. Its one word description, death, tells us nothing about it that is comprehensible. The word points to something which is the equivalent of a God of whom we can know absolutely nothing. Death is, therefore, an intellectual impossibility, a contradiction, a one-word oxymoron. Hence the inversion in my title of Yalom’s quote from Martin Heidegger: “Death is the impossibility of further possibility.” 

Heidegger is certainly correct in his brilliantly pithy definition. But like much of existentialist thinking his definition paradoxically makes death something objective, impersonal, and abstract. Heidegger refers to everyone’s death not to my death. My death is an impossibility to conceive despite the fact that it is an event that is more than possible in the relatively near future. 

Yalom recounts dozens of case histories from his practice as a psychiatrist. They all involve, according to him, the repression of the fear of death. Such repression manifests itself in a range of neurotic symptoms from depression to downright destructive behaviour. Achieving recognition by his clients that the core of their problem is a hidden fear of death is Yalom’s goal.

Yalom is an existentialist himself but his profession demands at least a nodding respect for Freudian psychoanalysis, which he duly gives. But he also notes that Freud was a bit too keen on tracing all neuroses to sex. The problem is that Yalom seems to simply substitute death for sex as the universal issue that we all must address. All his cases are examples of the Universal Case, as it were, which is something, surely, that none of us need to be reminded of.

Yalom connects the fear of death to human consciousness. Without self-consciousness, he says, we would move from existence to non-existence without the baggage of the crippling neuroses that many appear to have. But note that the squirrel, the toad, the cat fear being killed as well, and they don’t have the human capacity for consciousness. Animals fear death but don’t become neurotic about it, or not so much as anyone has noticed.

So Yalom may not have thought this out thoroughly. Animals may be subject to cruelty, loss, or deprivation in their young lives which makes them skittish, fearful, aggressive, or even murderous in later life when the general conditions of the cruelty, loss, or deprivation recur. They have learned to be afraid, hostile, or aggressive when conditions demand it. But the essential difference with the species homo sapiens is: not a second before. 

The human beings that Yalom discusses fear not that which is external to them, but what’s in their head. They don’t respond appropriately to some set of external conditions; they carry the original experience around with them more or less continuously, watching it erupt in inappropriate situations. What are they responding to?

The problem may not be the fear of death at all, but the incomprehensibility of my own death. My death is an unexplainable phenomenon. It literally has no meaning I can find - not in the history of death among my family and friends, nor in the case studies of Yalom. These all fit with the Heideggerian definition. But none of them have anything at all to do with the possibility of the impossibility of my own transition to nothingness. They make death a linguistic event, which I find somewhat distasteful as well as false and misleading, as if we could understand it if we simply talked about it enough.

Could it be that the meaningless of death is the source, not of fear, but of a justifiable breakdown of human intellect, including language, that great differential of humanity? Confusion, doubt, bewilderment, feelings of disorder (or on the other hand feelings of expectant relief), anger, fraud perhaps, even wonder are, it seems to me, equally likely responses if that is the case. And all are equally inadequate. It would seem to me that this intellectual breakdown constitutes the only breakthrough possible, namely that there is no way to put my death into words or, therefore, to contemplate it usefully.

The inevitability of death, therefore, and whatever childhood experiences may have provoked its recognition, is not the issue. Yalom’s clients seem to confirm this. Inevitability is something they know and in a way cherish as the only thing to do know and they’re generally comfortable with that. The acceptance of our utter inability to capture anything else about my death in language, for me, seems a sort of release - not from fear but from the tedious business of having to uselessly think, or talk, about it any more. Yes, very much like staring at the sun.

Postscript: By chance another GR reader sent me a paragraph by Nabokov which I find apropos to this discussion of death. It both confirms and contradicts what I have to say. But it also suggests that most of us are already dead anyhow. This may be a way to talk about death productively, namely as our temporary existence as essentially artistic artifacts: 

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.

 

System Error: How Big Tech Disrupted Everything and Why We Must Reboot by Mehran Sahami
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Name Yer Poison: Corporate Greed or Political Incompetence?

According to the three authors from Stanford University, America in particular and the world in general faces a stark choice. Either we allow Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to create a technocratic dystopia of mass delusion and surveillance; or we create an alternative, equally dystopian, bureaucratic regime of corporate regulation to stop these greedy people producing the economic and social externalities that are now becoming overwhelmingly apparent. Not much of a choice really. But the authors want us to remain optimistic.

The three agree that the issue is about values and the sacrifices in some values that have to be made in order to promote others. They clearly don’t like the way those trade-offs are being made today. The technocrats only care about making money. Meanwhile the externalities caused by their success hurt enormous numbers of people, particularly those already on the margins of society. They suggest that the techies and tech-supporters in charge must develop a conscience about these externalities and act to mitigate them. They also would like the rest of us who are not involved in the industry to get back to thinking about what the common good really means. But mostly they insist that the government take action to rein in the capitalist excesses and to improve governmental technological skills. Really they’re writing about a reboot of an entire society not just an industry.

At times, the authors sound like they want to blow up capitalism. At other points, they appear to believe in the potential of a divinely omniscient power of democratic government to rationally sift through the intricacies of arcane technology to identify and address potential issues. And they surely want all of us to become au fait with the things that they think are most important about the technologies. But when it comes to explicit actions that might be beneficial, they get really vague, not to say puerile. In their hand and flag-waving about values, trade-offs, and “harnessing technological progress to serve rather than subvert the interests of individuals and societies,” they bring little of significance to light.

They want debate, for example. I’m not at all clear what this debate would be about, who would organise and participate in it, or where it would take place. They want some sort of governing body for coders and engineers, something like a high-tech American Medical Association that would grant licenses to practice, or at least create and enforce codes of ethics. They want regulators and prosecuting attorneys who aren’t intimidated by the political power of big tech companies. They want to stop self-regulation, increase data-protection, promote stakeholder capitalism, severely restrict insider share-dealing, pursue anti-monopoly suits relentlessly. But they provide few details about the who, what, and where of any of this.

In the final chapter, the authors flip from concerns about grasping capitalism to concerns about inept democratic politicians, agencies, and institutions. They seem to implicitly recognise that the externalities, the unintended consequences, of government intervention in the industry are also real. “Despite our enthusiasm for the role of democracy in governing technology, our democratic institutions do not always inspire much hope,” they say. This is where they get a bit more specific. They would like to see the Office of Technological Assessment recreated at Presidential level. But can they or anyone else really believe that such a governmental body would be able to anticipate much less direct or even positively influence the work of tens of thousands of tech entrepreneurs and their backers much less enormous established corporations? Among other difficulties the revolving door would have to have an enormous capacity!

In short, the book has nothing new to say and nothing old that is worth saying again aside from a few self-justifying war stories. Joint efforts like this often seem to sink to a level of prosaic mediocrity. This could become a classic of the genre. Or perhaps as members of the Stanford faculty they feel hesitant about biting down too hard on the hand that feeds them. Their employer is not only physically at the heart of the problems they want us to know about, it also receives a great deal of funding from the folk creating those problems. And by the way, didn’t these guys along with their colleagues and students help to create these problems in the first place? So perhaps a certain ambiguity and frivolity is prudent. The faculty lounge will remain calm. The Stanford legacy committee will continue to pull in (and earn) big bucks. And no doubt the students will continue to sign up for their classes without fear of being type-cast as intelligent social parasites. So as a result of this little bit of light weight virtue-signalling nothing will change.

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Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife by Ariel Sabar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Education Can’t Cure Stupid

This story is in essence simple and chock full of compelling academic gossip, educated dupes, money, and sex: A Harvard professor of history makes a mistake in accepting a fragment of ancient papyrus as authentic and representing it as a ‘gospel.’ When evidence is revealed that the papyrus is probably a fake, the professor temporises rather than accepts her error. Her faculty and then the university are induced to participate in her mistake by publicising the papyrus in a somewhat deceitful way.

A journalist, the author of the book, documents the mistake, the original self-deception, the subsequent dodgy endorsements, and traces the origin of the forged papyrus back to a professional liar and pornographer in Florida. It’s all the academic equivalent of the Theranos scandal - and just as arcane and sordid in its details and… well, just as tedious.

In other words, the book is essentially about lying and the diverse forms of lying - fraud, duplicity, self-delusion, misdirection, intrigue - indulged in by educated society. If the lying hadn’t emanated from a prestigious institution like Harvard, no one would have cared. But we all seem to think that there should be fewer lies produced at Harvard rather than more and better liars. So the book produced a scandal which has a certain class of folk tittering.

Rather than participate in the tittering, I’d like to propose Black’s Rules of Practical Epistemology:

Rule #1: Everybody lies, but only when their lips move.

Rule #2: The magnitude of the lie is not proportional to the deviation from truth or reality but to the potential loss or gain for the liar.

Rule #3: Lies will be uncontested by the hearers of lies according to the same criterion as that in Rule#2; that is to say, people will believe any lie which they believe it is in their interest to do so.

Rule #4; No factual evidence can ever override one’s perceived self-interest.

Knowledge of these rules should save philosophers and sociologists a great deal of avoidable anguish. Most of the rest of us already employ them in our daily routine.

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The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Anti-anti-Semitism

As far as I know the institution of the genizah - a kind of literary mortuary used before the final burial of any document bearing the divine name - is a concept and a practice unique to Judaism. Sometimes, as in Rachel Kadish’s novel, the genizah is abandoned because of persecution or some other disaster, at which point it becomes an historian’s or archaeologists’s potential treasure trove of sacred trash. But the real cultural significance of the contents of the genizah is not the meaning of the correspondence, old liturgical books, sermons, or household ledgers it might contain. Of central concern is the language of these documents. In no other culture is language itself considered sacred*, not simply deserving of respectful disposition but demanding of the rites of demise - or failing that, the kid glove treatment of a museum curator.

The genizah which is the centre of Kadish’s novel is found in the house of the Eastons, a rather unlikeable upper middle-class English couple. These two are not overtly anti-Semitic but harbour an undisguised resentment that such an item was found on their premises (Mrs. Easton in particular knows full well what the thing is, and purposely mispronounces its name, as if it were an offensive smell). Their call for help about what to do with the contents of the genizah is pointedly to an academic acquaintance rather than to the local Jewish community. Their fear is that the local Jews would interfere with their plans for the house. The wisdom of their decision to call in an academic is confirmed when they learn that what they have discovered is of considerable monetary value. The theme of cultural appropriation beyond the mere documents is thereby established early on.

My view is that just as there is subtle anti-Semitism, there can be equally subtle anti-anti-Semitism and that Kadish’s book is a good example of the genre. Calling out the various nuances of prejudice explicitly isn’t usually effective, largely because they can be denied as misinterpretations created by excessive sensitivities. Much more effective, therefore, is to allow the signals of condescension, dismissal, and even hatred emerge through a softer allegorical mode which has a parallel ambiguity and deniability. A store of Jewish cultural treasure hidden in a Gentile household seems to me a rather fruitful way of depicting the reality of Jewish existence, not only in England but throughout Europe. My assessment of the book is made in this light.

There is a sufficient (but certainly not good) reason for the simmering anti-Semitism in The Weight of Ink; and it has been a persistent reason throughout the history of Christian culture: self-definition through the denial of Jewish identity. Christians have always been keen to ensure that they were not those whom their gospels had said crucified Jesus. They insisted on this to the imperial government in Rome, and to their intended converts in Asia Minor. And most crucially to themselves in their later gospels and in their epistolary scripture. They wanted nothing to do with ‘Judaizers,’ around whom they feel (and properly so) illegitimate. But it is two such Judaizers - one a Jew, the other an historian of Judaism - who are admitted to the house as researchers and who disrupt the Eastons’ cultural tranquility.

What is less obvious but more relevant in subsequent history is that Christians also identified themselves by redefining what had previously constituted religion and religious language. Christians might continue to speak the same Koina Greek, Latin, or Aramaic as Jews but they rejected not just the historical interpretations of what had been written and said in these languages, but also the fundamental category of language as a divine gift. For the Eastons the contents of the genizah are an asset to be bought and sold. That is, the language of wisdom, suffering, and history in its letters, sermons, and records is useful rather than revelatory. The language has no impact on the course of the Eastons’ lives. For them it was mere waste paper.

Ironically it was Jesus who articulated the prevailing Jewish attitude toward language. When tempted in the desert, Jesus rebukes the devil that human sustenance includes “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Further in Matthew’s gospel, he is reported to proclaim unambiguously, “For‭ verily‭ I say‭‭ unto you‭, Till‭‭ heaven‭ and‭ earth‭ pass‭‭, one‭ ‭jot‭‭ or‭ one‭ tittle‭ shall in no wise‭ pass‭‭ from‭ the law‭…” (5:18). It is the ‘weight’ of the letters written in the old gall ink in some of the documents of the genizah that literally eats the paper on which it is placed. These letters evaporate, only to be inhaled by those who open the documents, becoming part of them as the dust is assimilated into their bodies in an eternal cycle - language in search of a voice in search of a language to express itself.

The law is the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. It is sacred, as Jesus says, in its every detail. It must be revered and obeyed until the end of time. Yet Paul, his avid but unmet disciple, contradicts Jesus, abrogates the Mosaic Law of the Torah, and declares a New Law of Faith (Romans 3: 21-28). For Paul, obedience to the law, and its ethical action, is replaced by something Jesus never mentioned and wouldn’t have understood. What Christians can’t forget (or forgive) is that Jesus was a Jew who knew the importance and the role of not just the law but also the nature of the words through which the law was conveyed. Mrs. Easton is a flirt. She uses words to seduce and get her way. She has arrogant faith, mainly in herself, that her will is law in her house.

The word ‘faith’ was redefined by Paul in order to make his claim credible. Faith was his new form of religion expressed in his new religious language. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures the word faith is synonymous with trust, usually trust in the wisdom and justice of the divine but with no content beyond that. For Paul, Faith is a quantity of a substance one receives from God and proclaims in words provided by Paul. He calls it Grace and preaches the word of faith, which, according to Paul, is not a word at all but a mystical entity, a symbol, which occurs in no other vocabulary, called Christ Crucified. The Eastons’ ancient Jewish house is being ‘re-purposed’ as an art gallery with abstract symbols to be displayed in every room.

Paul transforms faith from trust in the traditions handed down for generations into an intellectualised belief and its tribal acclamation. From this, Paul formulated a command which he claimed replaced all commands of the law: “Believe on the Lord Jesus” (Acts 16:31). Paul, of course, abolishes the sacredness of language along with the law. For his followers, language becomes a tool, largely of propaganda and revenge, against those for whom it remained what it had been, a divine gift through which they were to make their way in the world. Language becomes a kind of ad hoc bricolage justifying the new regime. The incongruous Victorian addition to Eastons’ house are a physical manifestation of the new concept of language.

The ancient Hebrew trust in language is nothing like Paul’s unconditional belief. There is nothing intrinsic in language to believe in at all. Dare I say that a primary principle of Hebrew thought is argument. What that argument is about is most frequently what words mean, as proven by the detailed, seemingly endless, discussions in the Talmudic and Mishnaic commentaries! Quite appropriately therefore, the central mystery of Kadish’s story is the identity and fate of the elusive scribe, self-identified as Aleph, which is also the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The researcher’s argue about Aleph continuously. Appropriately, Aleph, the letter, has no sound; it is an unvoiced preparation for speech.

In fact the entire narrative is really based on complete confidence in Aleph as a person as well as a copyist. The language of the law and Aleph is laconic. It is the silent preparation for further thought. The details must be filled in by imagination. Such imagination is the driving force of the book’s protagonists (who in good Talmudic fashion don’t agree on anything). This is precisely how language must be trusted… and how sacred scripture gets written and rewritten with invented material inspired by the previous writing. The contents of the genizah live even when they appear dead because they provoke diverse interpretations.

In theological terms, the Hebrew language (by implication every language) is iconic, it is meant to point elsewhere, beyond itself - if it is allowed to. In Christianity, language is subservient to faith and quickly turns idolatrous, words are confused with reality, and then form the de facto objects of worship in fragmenting creeds and confessions. Paul’s contradiction of Jesus is paradigmatic for the continuing conflicts within Christian society as well as between Christianity and Judaism. The genizah is also iconic, pointing to yet another important trove in the house with enormous historical significance beyond Judaism, a light to the Gentiles as Isaiah suggested.

So the genizah by its existence is an affront, an offence, an unwanted reminder to a Christian culture which considers something/someone superior to the gift of language and its divine directives. It is what the Christian scriptures, as well as the Eastons, would consider a stumbling block, an impediment to progress in faith. The house had been built by a Jewish merchant but had been subsequently acquired (or probably usurped) by English Christians when protection of Jews was withdrawn by the Crown.

But within it remained this historical core of Judaism that is getting in the way of re-wiring of the place, that is to say, it’s source of power. It is this Jewish core of powerful language which foils the work of the electrician, the plans of the Eastons, and the way in which the house fits into local suburban society. Kadish’s book expands the potential scope of that impediment to confront the global increase in anti-Semitism .

The contents of the Eastons’ genizah are literally haunting because they implicitly abjure and renounce the Pauline discontinuity that is buried in the Eastons’ culture not just in their abode. It is pure human arrogance to believe that anyone can dominate language, even in the name of religion. All of us are subject to it. But this discontinuity is precisely what Paul was selling. Yet it is clear, even to a child, that the source of sin in the world is not the absence of Pauline faith, but the distortion of language to justify our wanting something - wealth, reputation, influence, that is to say, power. There are, of course, no children, no genetic heirs, in the Easton household. The house, its wealth, not its significance, will be passed on but the Pauline discontinuity will be repeated. It will remain without tradition.

Like any allegory worth its salt, The Weight of Ink has a number of sub-themes that swirl around in it, allowing for limitless interpretation. But all these themes - disappointing relationships, religious uncertainty, professional rivalry, misogyny - have their resolution in the fate of the genizah and its contents. Each of the main characters discovers or has revealed to them his or her hidden neuroses, some equivalent to an unacknowledged discontinuity under the stairs. All these, in one way or another, are linguistic in nature - misunderstandings, incomplete explanations or outright lies. A certain maturity is achieved, even in the old, when these are recognised and addressed. Pope Pius XII once famously said that he considered himself a spiritual Semite. Taking him at his word, perhaps that was the first step to address Christianity’s obsessive repression of Judaism. Or was it his form of allegorical misdirection?


* Apologies to adherents of other religions as necessary; but let me explain. Ecclesiastical Latin was never a sacred language but at its best a universal means of conveying the sacred; and at worst an elitist attempt to control discussion about what the sacred meant. Classical Arabic, the language of the sacred Koran, is not itself sacred, simply untranslatable. The English of the King James Bible is not sacred, merely archaic. The ritual Vedic Sanskrit is considered the language of the gods, but, again, not in itself sacred. Some incantations in the Buddhist Pali, are believed to have supernatural powers, but this puts them in the domain of the magical rather than the sacred. And not even Tolkien considered his elvish language of Valarin anything more than a means of facilitating divine gossip.

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Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics by Clare Carlisle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Resting in God

Baruch Spinoza is another intellectual hero of my youth. I have not read him to any significant degree since then. But reading Clare Carlisle’s interpretation of his Ethics reveals to me how much I had assimilated his thought and gradually came to presume it as my own. Perhaps this demonstrates just how important - and potentially dangerous - learning is. We inevitably become what we are taught. The principal task of old age may be to decide if we have been taught well. Carlisle’s book convinces me that I probably was.

Spinoza was an honest man. I mean this is a very specific sense which I think Carlisle captures without giving it a name. His honesty is not simply that of saying what he thought - that trait is obvious from the difficulties which ensued from it - or of following a logic no matter where it might lead - such a compulsion is indistinguishable from a sort of intellectual fanaticism which he didn’t have. Rather, Spinoza’s honesty was about what he didn’t know. Sometimes this appears as ambiguity, but I find what he has to say - about God, religion, and eternal life - as modest and circumspectly precise rather than vague. He is explicit as he can be, but no more than that. In short, Spinoza’s honesty extends to his own intellectual limitations. He doesn’t claim to know how the world works but only his part in it, and not even that with complete certainty.

Carlisle insists that for Spinoza religion has nothing to do with creeds, doctrine, or confessional statements. She’s right to do so. These are words, and regardless of their purported origin, remain words which cannot represent the life of the Spirit. For Spinoza, religion is a virtue, that is to say, a manner of behaving, a code perhaps, that guides our actions in light of their effects on others. His religion is truly ethical in that it begins and ends with consideration of not just the well-being of fellow-humans but also of the entire cosmos. This is the exact opposite of dogmatic religion which attempts to derive ethics from theological propositions. As Carlisle points out, Spinoza was devoted to his work but not a man of passionate obsession with its content. He criticised himself as much as others did.

Spinoza was not a contrarian interested in making a name for himself, with controversial views, in academia, the church, or businesss. He was aware of his attraction to honour and reputation, but rejected them as incompatible with the need to express that which he felt important. Although he started from a different set of intellectual presumptions than those prevailing at the time, he frequently ended with the endorsement of religious views from Judaism, Catholicism, and Calvinism. He ‘purified’ relevant teachings in a manner entirely different from that of Luther, for example, who started with a list of objections from which he created a movement that in time took on the character of the institution he challenged. Spinoza had no interest in a political or religious movement of reform. His goal was intelligent conversation with whoever found such conversation useful. His intention was never to convert, or even convince, but to remind us of truths we might already know.

Spinoza did not engage in his intellectual journey in order to direct the course of the lives of others but to seek the wisdom that would change the plan of his own life that he then shared with others - much in the manner of Ignatius Loyola with his Spiritual Exercises. He practised what he preached as his primary mode of preaching. Later psychological science might call his personality integrated or whole in the sense that his spiritual, intellectual, and physical life were constantly present to his awareness. His ultimate goal was not to do good in the sense that idealists use that term but to rest in the good, to literally enjoy the peace of a reflective existence in a cosmos that wished him neither good nor evil. This commitment conforms with the Christian and Jewish mandate to consider others before oneself. The implication is that the ultimate good, that is God, is literally the service of oneself to the rest of creation however that may arise given one’s abilities and situation.

It was Spinoza who led me into the philosophy of purpose of C S. Peirce, Josiah Royce and a certain school of American Pragmatism. The first rule of life for Spinoza was to speak in order to provoke a response which required listening. Through listening the intentions of others could be heard and incorporated into one’s own purpose. By so doing, one’s own intellect is healed of its deficiencies and in that sense purified. This still seems to me a radical philosophy. Although I am no longer as confident as my youthful self of its feasibility, I remain emotionally committed to its possibility, as I also do to the consequences of what he called ‘a turning of the soul,’ an attitude which doesn’t anticipate redemption in some other world but a life of loving kindness in this world.

It was the first Christian, Paul of Tarsus, who redefined religion as belief rather than virtuous living. His metaphysics of Christus Victor, Christ Triumphant, was an infectious neurosis that spread rapidly because of its simple demand for its followers to have faith in its complex trinitarian God and to state the necessary formulae of their belief publicly. In response Judaism became, even to itself, an opposing faith despite its ethical core and ancient m0nolatry. Islam arose in the context of a world of religion already defined in terms of faith with its belief in an unambiguously monotheistic God. Spinoza was the first to recover the pre-Pauline idea of religion as a ritual and ethical practice. Remarkably, it was Spinoza who anticipated a growing interest in virtue ethics among Catholics from the middle of the 20th century.

The principle of Spinoza’s religion is straightforward: Acting one’s way into a new way of thinking is far more effective than trying to think one’s way into a new way of acting. This is pure Spinoza. I think that this is the path to the place of rest he found for himself and left for the rest of us.

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Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything by Graham Harman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Scamming the Scammers

I have a negative bias about the subject of this book. It takes its name from a computer programming technique (object-oriented programming, OOP) that was the Next Big Thing in the late 1980’s. At that time I was around many people who praised it and promoted it. But I could never get either a clear explanation from these folk about what OOP was or why it was superior to so-called procedural programming. It remains, for me, even today the densest form of nerd-talk abounding with neologisms that make Heidegger’s philosophy look like merely conversational chit-chat. So, that a group of philosophers would choose such a designation as Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) for their work is surprising and somewhat off-putting.

After reading this book, I have as much a grasp of OOO as I had of OOP. So I must start my comments with the author’s intention rather than anything more substantive in order to focus my remarks. What is the philosophical or practical issue that the book is meant to address? The philosophical issue he wants to address is epistemological: what counts as authentic knowledge? Practically, Harmon thinks that it will help us deal with the apparently growing problem of untruthfulness in democratic politics as demonstrated by the persistent popularity of Donald Trump and his cohorts. Specifically he wants to advise us all ”How we go about detecting the gap between knowledge and reality is one of the main concerns of this book.” I am mystified by this. His claim is obviously bombastic and certainly not something he has justified in the remainder of the book.

Like many other thinkers who are concerned with the enormity of today’s political mendacity, Harman does not want to compare what people say to the truth, which is an evidential state dependent upon facts which are in turn tendentiously selected in politics (or for that matter in any argument). That is, facts have to be weighed against one another; and their is no rational method for assigning weights. Instead, he wants to test political (and other) statements against what he calls reality. “Reality is the rock against which our various ships always founder, and as such it must be acknowledged and revered, however elusive it may be,” he says. His philosophical target is not relativism but idealism, by which I take him to mean the tendency to treat language as if it were things that are not-language. Harmon doesn’t trust language. Neither do I

I can understand Harman’s desire to escape from the pitfalls, flaws and scandals of language, to reach some external point from which to measure the authenticity and accuracy of what is said and written. Wouldn’t we all? But the inherent problem of course is obvious: it’s not possible to escape from language by using more language. Any attempt to do so simply digs the epistemological hole one starts in even deeper. Language is invincible. Even recognising that there is something called reality which is not-language demands to be expressed in words. Therefore the appeal to reality rather than truth as the test-bed for claims, statements, propositions, and promises is entirely vacuous as so many others have found before.

Harman nonetheless wants us to accept that OOO, in its rather monumental linguistic complexity, really does have a handle on this reality business. But he has a bizarre way of trying to convince us. For Harmon, reality is composed of a sort of bricolage of philosophical conceptions. Bits and pieces of thought, that is to say, language, taken from philosophers from Socrates to Heidegger and beyond. From this melange, he formulates what he thinks is the fundamental building block of the cosmos - not atoms, or quarks, or fields of various orientations, and certainly not strings, but rather The Object, which is immaterial, of no determinate size/function/quality, and essentially isolated from other objects in the manner of a Leibnizian Monad, a Platonic Form or a Peircean System. More analytically: “[A]n object is anything that cannot be entirely reduced either to the components of which it is made or to the effects that it has on other things.” Or, in short form, “an object is more than its pieces and less than its effects.” If that sounds vague, Harmon wants it that way because language can’t do it justice.

I admit that I don’t understand what Harmon’s ‘object’ is. This is disappointing and no doubt reflects an intellectual deficiency on my part. But my deficiency isn’t serious enough to prevent me noticing something crucial about Harman’s definition. It contains lots of words. It is therefore true (although not all that comprehensible) because it has been specified by these other words in a grammatically correct sentence. This thing he calls an object is, therefore, about as far removed from reality as any other philosophical conception. It is a definition which Harmon then imposes on the cosmos (including the hapless reader) and which he then claims as his standard of reality. Under all the hand-waving and bogus referencing of history, biology, economics, and any other intellectual fragments he can muster, he ends up with this? A reality constructed from immaterial Lego blocks by a closet arch-idealist who cuts off the branch of language he sits on and then acts like it’s still there?

Harmon seems to have lots of academic chips on his shoulder. The catalogue of things he finds objectionable in most sciences as well as in philosophy is long and varied. Their are few thinkers who escape his critical eye. He does remind me of the very passionate young nerds who were pushing Object-Oriented Programming back in the day - everyone else was wrong, the world was not as we thought, all existing ideas were passé. But at least they had something to sell - computer code doesn’t write itself. I can’t imagine who is in the market for what Harmon is trying to sell. Perhaps it’s the conspiracy theorists from QAnon and the Republican Party. Can you just see a television reporter challenging some Trump surrogate about stolen election claims on the basis that they don’t conform to a set of abstract philosophical objects with ghostly (sic) qualities? I think the gap between knowledge and reality has opened to the size of the Grand Canyon. Trump should love it just for its supply of alternative facts.

Postscript: I hesitated to include Harman’s ultimate conclusion in my remarks because I found it so intellectually embarrassing for the man. But on second thought, it really needs to be publicised lest my bias is thought the source of those remarks. This is his solution to the Trump problem:

“From a OOO perspective, there is no truth: not because nothing is real, but because reality is so real that any attempt to translate it into literal terms is doomed to failure. We can invoke knowledge against Trump’s deceptions and evasions, but only insofar as we adopt a new definition of knowledge that incorporates elusive real qualities rather than directly masterable sensual ones. None of us can point to an instrument that clearly displays global warming or the world refugee crisis on a luminous screen, as patent truths that compel specific strategies for dealing with these issues. What we can do, however, is hold the Trumps of the world accountable for taking no account of reality, by which I mean the genuine disturbances in our world that indicate that climate and refugee problems must somehow be incorporated into the body politic.”

That should stop Trump in his tracks alright. Redefine knowledge. Go beyond the palpable and measurable. Get those elusive qualities, those immaterialities, squarely on the table. What a contribution to philosophical and political thought! Quackery.

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Rejoicing, or the Torments of Religious Speech by Bruno Latour
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Faith Has Lost the World

I do not believe. I do not disbelieve. Nor am I indifferent to religion. Therefore I don’t fit the categories into which I am permitted to place myself. I am not an atheist. I am not a member of the faithful. And I find agnosticism insipid. ‘Seeker’ is a hippie term that implies cultic experimentation which I find puerile and beside the point. ‘Enthusiast’, in the original meaning of infused with the divine, has a vaguely relevant ring but implies far too much emotion. Admirer-at-a-distance, spiritual supplicant, undogmatic disciple, mystical protégé are all somewhat distasteful conditions I would rather avoid. In the world of religion I do not seem to have a conceptual place to lay my head.

Bruno Latour shares my problem. In a sense he solves it by creating a community of the two of us who know the peculiar pangs of religious isolation. Latour doesn’t provide a name for this community, or a new category of religious experience, or a description of the box into he and I might fit, but he does an excellent job of inventorying the contents of this box as well as outlining a programme that might well invite other people to share it. The regime he suggests is one implied by some modern theologians like Jean-Luc Marion but, I think, with more clarity and … well, more respect for non-academics who don’t really care about professional or confessional disputes. So, for me Latour has provided a first-rate thinking person’s guide to religion in the 21st century.

Latour’s basic insight is brilliantly simple and to the point: In religion God is not the issue. More precisely, whether or not God exists is not a question that is in any way relevant to any religion, at any time, among any group of human beings. This is exactly the same point as that made by Marion in his God Without Being (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Marion’s thesis is grounded on Christian scriptures. If God is love, he says, then He loves before He exists and therefore exists in a manner we cannot conceive. One might say He loves Himself and everything else into existence and then is present as a sort of dark matter, impossible to detect but necessary to recognise. Both Latour and Marion thereby remove the distracting and impossible issue of ontology from religious discourse.

Put this another way: What you and I, our ancestors, and countless others have seen, felt, observed around us for the last 200,000 years or so has been more or less the same. No, not in terms of landscapes, or technologies, or specific threats to life and limb, but rather in terms of our difference as humans compared with the rest of the world, our mysterious separation from the other animals with whom we share so much, our obviously superior facility with memory, expectation, and reflection which don’t appear to be present anywhere else and which constitute our only competitive advantage in a world that seems dominated by brute strength and thoughtless forces.

Many, perhaps all, of those people to some degree or another, had an insight that what they were experiencing was a reality that they could not quite grasp; and that the reality of their mates, friends, and enemies was not quite the reality which they themselves were experiencing. In a typically human way, they brought these experiences under a kind of control by putting them into words. They could then share these words as if they had just discovered a new species to hunt, or a particularly delicious strain of berry that had been unknown to the clan. If the words sparked positive responses, they might become commonplace in communal discourse as ‘the way things are’. It is even possible to imagine a certain amount of primitive intellectual excitement about the discovery of some new aspect of life. In any case these primitive people frequently appeared to have used the word God to express both the mystery and the reality which they could not quite reach.

In the way of things linguistic (as well as religious) the words used to describe these experiences expand, collect connotations, become more sophisticated, morph into many variations, and take on diverse evocative meanings, often widely different for different individuals and groups. Although this process is unstoppable, there is an apparently irresistible impulse in some people, usually leaders in a religious community, to insist that the evolution of the language used to describe religious experience cease. The result is the identification of official sacred texts, creeds, doctrines, and a concern about orthodoxy, that is, the allegiance to particular texts. God is no longer then what Latour calls “the obvious framework for ordinary everyday things” but an abstraction, a symbol to which we pledge our allegiance… or not. As the symbol is attacked or compromised by facts or the horrid actions of one’s fellow believers, we are left with the mere belief in belief, a virtual world of spiritual Knownothingness equivalent to obdurate ignorance.

The consequences for religious individuals of such a ‘linguistic turn’ are, of course, severe. Those for whom orthodoxy does not express their own experiences are likely to be condemned as heretics and apostates. They will be duly victimised. However the implications for the religious community itself are even more devastating. Quite apart from the likelihood of schism, the insistence on linguistic orthodoxy shifts the focus of the entire community from religious experience to religious language. Quite literally what is considered divine in practice are the words that have been fixed. Gradually the community loses the ability to communicate within itself about their individual experiences at all. At this point religion has lost all meaning except that of tribal membership attested by affirmation of texts, creeds, etc.

Perhaps thinking since the Enlightenment has degraded our ability to talk about God. But not because of a denial of the validity of religious discourse by scientists. Rather it is religionists who have adopted the language of science - particularly the positivistic presumption that words can be reliably correlated with things that are not-words - that destroys our religious discourse. Latour puts the matter clearly: “There’s no point trying to get around this rule: the connection between a religious text and the thing it talks about is not the same as the connection between a map and its territory.” The attempts to break this rule are more down to the theologians than the scientists. Any referent in religious language is beyond our comprehension. Poetry respects this but is taken seriously by neither science or theology.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the recognition by Latour and Marion of the dangers of language to religion were anticipated by Karl Barth, arguably the most important theologian of the 20th century (and also a conservative evangelical pastor). Barth’s lifelong crusade was to convey the distinction between the Word of God, and the word of Man (see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). For Barth even the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity are necessarily human constructions which could not be trusted to do more than inspire a response to the divine presence in the world. Scripture for Barth is not definitive but provocative. When it is considered as more than mere language, it hides the reality it is meant to reveal, and it prevents the communication about reality among us. Barth knew that belief could be poison in religion.

And this is Latour’s point as well. Religious revelation is not constituted by angelic messages from some other world, it is the transformation of individuals who have been provoked to appreciate things differently in this one. The language of religion in modern society has ceased to be provocative. It has not only lost its meaning; it is no longer even audible; its poison has deadened our sense of a shared reality. Contemporary religious language pretends to express something that has no meaning among even many of those who affirm the formulae of faith and belief. This goes some way to explain the apparently contradictory behaviour of many Christians, for example, who take the phrase ‘God is love’ as a mantra to legitimise violence, racism, oppressive and discriminatory legislation, and so on, as an expression of ‘Christian values.’ They seem to realise (and to fear), that their religion has become vacuous, that all they have left is meaningless words which they repeat endlessly in the hopeful arrogance that they might become reality. Latour summarises his view of the situation elegantly: “The world has ‘lost faith’, as they say? No, ‘Faith’ has lost the world.”

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Empire of the Inca 
by 

Burr Cartwright Brundage

Savage Aesthetics

Religion was not an option in the Incan Empire. Nor was mere ritual participation adequate to ensure membership among the elite. Some more or less continuous expression of fealty (one hesitates to say faith) to an originary divine event was essential. What is most remarkable about this is that it is part of an entirely illiterate culture. There was no sacred scripture recording this event. So it had to be passed on orally. Perhaps this is both its strength and its weakness as a coherent social force.

Incan culture was established around a very specific divine revelation - as significant as that of the Israelites, as self-serving as that of the Mormons, as violently expansive as that of Islam, as tightly organised into a theocratic state as the medieval Catholic Church, as racially sensitive as the Dutch Reformed in South Africa, and as rigidly orthodox as any American fundamentalist. Religion constituted the Incan Empire at least as thoroughly as Confucianism was the cultural glue that maintained the Chinese imperial state or Enlightenment ideology allowed the United States to emerge as a coherent polity.

The site of the birth of the Incan Empire, Cuzco in a high valley of the Andes, was granted to the empire’s founders by the Sun God, Inti, through a proclamation by one of his sons. This proclamation authorised the clearance of the locals and established the ultimate mission of the Incas: to conquer the world. This is the sacred legend that justified an imperial royal line that began in the early 13th century (just about the same time as the Aztec entry into the Valley of Mexico). The mythical origins of Rome or Carthage were no more elaborate or outrageously aggrandising. The Incan rulers were quite literally sons of god and kin to the great pantheon of gods recognised by the various upland tribes they overran. The term ‘Inca’ itself means ‘Lord’ in Quechua. Genetics was their ace in the hole when confronted by any challenge to legitimacy.

The central concept in Incan religion appears to have been huaca, that is power or force. Huaca emanates from many sources - the earth and its constituent parts of soil, rock, and flowing water; the sky in both its stars and its fearsome weather; animals like the Jaguar, condor, and the mythical thunder-cat; shamans, sorcerers and oracles who shared an intimacy with the gods; but, most of all, the descendants of the gods themselves, the rulers who were near the top of the hierarchy of power distribution throughout creation. Rulers radiate holy influences throughout the land. Such power cannot be resisted. It maintained the natural, divinely fixed, state of things. Any attempt to alter this situation was both heresy and treason.*

Among native Peruvians, sin had a community connotation just as it had had for the Israelites. Sin could blight the lives of one’s family, one’s village, and even the mighty state. Sin disturbed the pattern and distribution of huaca thus promoting chaos. To prevent such disaster, confession, both individual and en masse, was an Incan institution. Confession was nominally secret but if the confessor wasn’t satisfied with its completeness or veracity he could essentially take the matter to a public inquiry. Sin, therefore, was a mechanism through which local officials became highly effective commissars, responsible for the religious orthodoxy and political correctness of every Incan community. But the political downside of this integration of church and state was as real for the Incas as it was for contemporary European states. The shamanic/priestly guild which held the power of forgiveness also became a rival centre of power in an increasingly complex religiously political society.

While divine lineage and confessional obedience might provide a cultural defence against outsiders, it creates immense tensions among the divine progeny and the clerical classes - a tension not unknown in medieval Europe. The Incan Empire was essentially a community of religious fanatics. And religious fanaticism is always vulnerable to rival fanatics within its own ranks. All stories, especially religious ones, are subject to contrary interpretations. Ultimately this means either politics or war, or, more likely a constant oscillation between the two. Combine religious conviction with personal ambition by the rulers and rival oracles, and the result is a society permanently on the edge of self-destruction. As Brundage dryly puts it, “Cuzco had become the center of a turbulent and aggressive politique”

Imperial succession quickly became the locus of the issue of the proper holder and grantor of huaca. As in the post Augustan Roman Empire, family intrigue seems to have become the primary recreation of all potential heirs. Apparently, different gods provide different revelations, which are curiously adhered to by members of the elite in line with their own interests. And so it goes repeatedly until the Spanish turn up with their revelation and upset the whole religious/political/military dance that had gone on for about a century. The conquistador Pizarro played opposing brothers who claimed legitimate succession against each other brilliantly and took the entire empire for Spain with an insignificant force.

In the mid-century before Pizzaro’s coup, Pachacuti, the greatest ruler of the empire, had pretensions to immortality when he remodelled the temple of Inti at Cuzco in stone and precious materials. He intended that the whole city become the logos, the Word carved in stone of the new and supreme Inca dispensation. But it is for his public works projects rather than his architecture or art that he is known for in history. Immense hydraulic projects, the draining of swamps, warehouses for grain storage, the giant terraces for farming and gardens, indoor plumbing, and, of course, the enormous long road network along the Andes. Because the Incas had no system of writing, however, the details of their organisational and bureaucratic achievements, their system of long distance oral messaging, and their periodic ‘humanitarian’ distribution of food during famine have been lost entirely.

The self-proclaimed grandiosity of the Incas is progressively depressing as one delves further into their activities (recorded mostly from verbal statements, and mostly accurately, by the friars accompanying the conquerors). If there was ever an entire culture (or rather its elite) which believed its own press, it was this one. In their religion, their projects, their accumulation of booty from military conquests, it is clear that they quite literally adored themselves. Their supposed ancestor, Inti, the supreme God of the Sun,** became little more than a “primordial mascot” according to Brundage. Their ideas of religion were adapted, sometimes radically, to their ideas of empire. Pachacuti, for example, sterilised the competitive huaca of the clerics through a kind of Stalinistic cull of suspected ‘deviationists’ by a secret police. “He wanted an archbishop not a pope,” as Brundage puts it. Since Inca history was oral, and since the emperor controlled the language and official stories of history, Pachacuti could conceive of himself as absolute truth - whereas even the pope was constrained by sacred scripture!

Pachacuti’s ultimate achievement, if one dare call it that, was his round-up of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the best and brightest children from the families of his fellow-Incans for sacrifice at his new temple in Cuzco or sent out in pitiable lines to the provinces to have their hearts similarly gouged from their bodies. This tremendous brutality - in order to ensure the emperor’s recovery from illness, the proper festivity during a royal celebration, or the success of a forthcoming military campaign - was apparently routine, a real tradition of death. Brundage, one supposes because of professional conventions, reports these sorts of atrocities with an extraordinary sang froid. Perhaps such a noncommittal, measured description in fact emphasises just how unlikeable and un-admirable these people were. It is arguably the world’s good fortune that fraternal animosity stopped the spread of this culture in its tracks.


* This idea of power flowing downward from an omnipotent God is one shared by European culture. The entire world-view of the ancient Peruvians was very similar to that of the Judaea-Christian culture. Brundage summarises the congruences: 

“Under this welter of myth we can descry a basic Peruvian story: creation, followed by the creator's destruction of mankind in a flood, and then their recreation or survival brought about by a bodily (and sometimes beggarly) son of the creator. The superficial resemblance to the Judaeo-Christian story is evident, and indeed one of the mysteries of the colonial period in Peru is why the friars did not make more of this.”

** This is not quite true. Pachacuti, for reasons of state and personal whim, had the clerics declare that there was a god ‘beyond’ Inti who had actually created the universe through his Word. This was not the Inca god of tradition but almost a pet of the emperor himself. As with Constantine in the later Roman Empire, the religious officials dutifully confirmed the imperial insight.