The Church and the Kingdom by Giorgio Agamben
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Law Becomes Coercion

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher who recognises the significance of theology to politics. He also recognises the significance of politics to theology, particularly when the latter is infected by the secular considerations of the former. This is the subject of this short book which contains Agamben’s 2009 homily in the Cathedral of Notre Dame to the bishops and clergy of Paris. Although specifically addressed to the Catholic Church, it is a commentary on all of Christianity. It is calm, precise, and scathing.

Much of Agamben’s philosophical work has been directed against the 20th century political theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, a Catholic, had introduced and defended the idea of the ‘state of exception’ as a legitimate reason for anyone with political power to declare him or herself superior to any existing laws in order to meet the demands of a crisis. Most famously this idea was used by the German National Socialists to take power after the Reichstag Fire in 1933. But it has been a common practice of governments of every kind everywhere - the American internment of its Japanese citizens, and the more recent arrest and incarceration of suspected foreign terrorists after the 9/11 events are just two other examples.

Agamben was, I think, the first philosopher to seriously challenge the legitimacy of the notion of the state of exception. His arguments are nuanced and often complex but they lead to one point - the suspension of law becomes a habit which not only leads to coercion and violence but also to the de-legitimation of the state or other entity which practices it. Therefore, he points out in his homily, virtually all the national governments in the world have through their own actions against their own citizens have become illegitimate. One consequence of this he alludes to briefly - the growth in quasi-religious subversive cults on both the left and the right.

But his message to the bishops is not about national governments, it is about their church. This is an institution that has used the state of exception more or less continuously in order to suppress any and all attacks on its privileges and claims to superiority. In doing so, Agamben implies, the institution has destroyed its own legitimacy. Among other things, this is the real cause of the same problem among nation states. The church has led the way in the corruption of secular government. What it has modelled to the world, the world has taken note of.

Ironically, the corrupting power of the Christian church in most European nations is far less than it is in America where churches both Catholic and Protestant have employed the state of exception as a standard political tactic since the country’s foundation. The practise has in recent decades been intensified and used overtly to influence political campaigns under single issue banners like abortion, gay rights, immigration, and so-called Christian values. Politicians like Trump, Cruz, and their Red State cronies have used this state of exception rhetoric to advance their own agendas. If Agamben is correct, it is not the political which must be the priority for reform in America but the religious.

Postscript: For an exposition of Agamben’s rebuttal of Schmitt see: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8...


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A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Decoding For Beginners

A Children’s Bible reads like one of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books updated for the 21st century. The children still live in their own world of adventure and discovery but sex and drugs are now incorporated as commonplace. Parents are no longer benign background figures but largely absent in their own world of alcohol and drug-induced haze and sexual exploits. The kids hate them and spend most of their time commenting about how unfortunate it is to have patents at all.

These modern children are not only aware of the sins of their parents, they also know that their greed, selfishness and general disregard for the world is destroying their future. Their parents essentially have no behavioural boundaries. But the young people - age from 8 to about 17 - instinctively know that civilised life requires rules (the one who has turned 18 is simply out of control and so beyond hope, already practising adulthood). So they invent various games and establish criteria for merits and demerits among themselves, thus inverting the conditions of Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The narrative, appropriately held together by a girl named Eve, is peppered with biblical allusions - to the Hebrew Captivity in Egypt, the Exodus, the Flood, the Virgin Birth, the Crucifixion, and the Saviour’s arrival, among others - rearranged, intertwined, and reinterpreted. There’s even a pretty good development of a theory of the Christian divine Trinity. It makes an interesting introduction to the process of exegesis, and not just of the Bible. It is simultaneously an interpretation of current social conditions as seen from a child’s perspective - essentially the futility of the unending attempt to shelter ourselves through wealth.

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Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Emancipate Yourselves From Mental Slavery

Bob Marley had some sensible universal advice: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.” Jesus had been slightly more explicit when he said, “The truth shall make you free.” Martin Luther King probably summarised the issue best, however: “No one is free until we all are free.”

Amanda Montell, like Marley, Jesus, and MLK wants us to be free. She wants to liberate us from the covert linguistic manipulation of QAnon, Trump, and the hundreds of other conspiracy theorists, politicians, religious leaders, and exploitative commercial ventures that are after our attention, our money, and our souls.

Montell has a lot to say about the most obvious instances of such manipulation, from the Jonestown self-immolation of over 900 hundred people to the aggressively threatening tactics of Scientologists. But she also argues effectively that the linguistic activities of commercial ventures like SoulCycle and 3HO are just less lethal forms of the same techniques. Her intention is to alert us all to the range of possible traps we might fall into:

“From the crafty redefinition of existing words (and the invention of new ones) to powerful euphemisms, secret codes, renamings, buzzwords, chants and mantras, “speaking in tongues,” forced silence, even hashtags, language is the key means by which all degrees of cultlike influence occur.”

Montell is confident that simply knowing about these linguistic tactics, we will be safe from their insidious effects. “Once you understand what the language of ‘Cultish’ sounds like, you won’t be able to unhear it,” she assures us.

But Montell has a problem which is obvious from her own research: Cults speak to those who need them. The need could be friendship, attention, money, sex, a sense of belonging, a sense of superiority, spiritual completion, or literally thousands of other human cravings, many without names. So her claim to be able to unhear potentially destructive language may be valid right up to the point at which it is needed.

Face it: human beings are neurotic. It’s probably language that makes them so. We all have psychic deficiencies, flat sides, perversions, unwanted traits, gaps in our abilities, and unfulfilled aspirations. We are likely to be immune to the cultist palaver until it strikes home in one of these personal, and likely unconscious, flaws. Then, bingo, we may not be off to Jonestown but that rather pricey contract with SoulCycle looks awfully inviting.

So while I admire Montell’s epistemological ambitions, I think it only right to point out the self-referential character of her thesis. She’s likely to appeal most to just those folk who already have a horror of becoming any kind of groupie (You know who you are!). But Bob Marley’s follow-up line in the chorus of Real Situation is also an apt critique:

Well, it seems like: total destruction the only solution
And there aren't no use: no one can stop them now
Ain't no use: nobody can stop them now

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The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Un-Disclosing God of Language

Overall an interesting premise but a very weak and amateurish development. There are just far to many issues to keep track of - Judaism, language, generational gaps, sociology, parenthood, pointless sex, science fiction and magical (sur)realism, among others - none of which are resolved satisfactorily. By the end, the author runs out of steam and seems to simply give up on the whole enterprise. Disappointing. Here’s one interpretation of a chaotic book:

What does a Jewish family do in adversity? It talks of course. Among its members. Then with other congregants at the synagogue. With the rabbi. They analyse the situation. They figure things out. They may even write to The Times or circulate a plan.

But when the adversity in question is language itself, what happens? If language causes mass illness, terminal illness, what can be done? And if it appears that one’s children, although immune from the illness, become the willing vectors for spreading it, what hope is there for the family itself?

Under such circumstances society cannot exist, at least not a society built on the premise of language - in law, in commercial activity, or as the basis of obligation of any sort. Memory and feeling tend to dissipate and eventually disappear. Such a society would require not just silence but the strict self-censoring of all thought so that it never reaches the level of speech or writing. In other words all of us would have to commit to a radical unknowing. As in the biblical prescriptions, the word would literally be “buried in the heart” so deeply that it could not be found much less expressed.

Recovery from the disease of language would, of course, be no mean accomplishment. Like any detoxification, it is a lonely, confusing, and painful process. Even more so since there is no possibility of communicating the experience to anyone else. Language is poison no matter what it might be used for. Even sign language can be lethal if not handled(!) properly. Authorities are obliged to act in such circumstances, procedures established, experiments run.

Sight of one written letter at a time - and even then only in fragments - might be permissible, for a sort of Cabalistic analysis of a script - potentially lethal as soon as it was whole enough to suggest comprehensibility. This technique allows writing/reading without the introduction of meaning by the writer/reader - an environment of controlled ignorance, as it were. A real composition/exegesis, therefore, without the danger of interpretive pollution either in the text or the writer/reader. This allows the search for an alternative alphabet without an inherent toxicity to proceed without unacceptable casualty levels.

Then again the business of script, not just the alphabet, is a tricky matter: “If we hid the text too much, it could not be seen. If we revealed it so it could be seen, it burned out the mind. No matter what. To see writing was to suffer.” Large numbers of test subjects did indeed suffer. Sometimes this led to “acoustical expiration. Suicide by language.” Unfortunate but merciful in the circumstances.

It turns out the the Book of Genesis had correctly diagnosed the human condition: “This was not a disease of language anymore, it was a disease of insight, understanding, knowing.” And to this there is a solution. Unfortunately it’s pharmacological not linguistic. Even more unfortunately it involves the bodily fluids of immune children. Bad news for one’s progeny.

And bad news even for the adult forebears. “We make the language in our own image and the language repulses us… We thought the world we lived in could be hacked into pleasing shapes simply by what we said.” says the protagonist, Samuel. His rabbi is even more critical:

“… language kills itself, expires inside its host. Language acts as an acid over its message. If you no longer care about an idea or feeling, then put it into language. That will certainly be the last of it, a fitting end. Language is another name for coffin.”

Ultimately, according Samuel, now a hermit, language leads to despair,: ”I found I could do without more things to misunderstand.”

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The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity by Hans Jonas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Living in Hell

Written in 1933 but still the best introduction to this ancient system of belief, The Gnostic Religion is a book of our time. Nominally about religion, Jonas documents the political and cultural conditions which provoked the rapid spread of philosophic dualism throughout the Romano/Hellenic world. Although resisted vigorously by the establishments of Christianity and Judaism, Gnostic influence on European civilisation remained persistent over two millennia. And today during a period of analogous cultural shifts, Gnosticism has emerged from its own ashes as a dominant philosophy and religious culture.

The philosophy of Gnosticism is hard to pin down since it promotes individualism in thought, a sort of neo-liberal free for all of ideas. But Gnosticism’s anthropology and cosmology capture its intellectual position reasonably clearly as recorded in its mythology. There the essential dualisms of God/Creation, Mind/Matter, and Good/Evil are stated rather poetically. We are prisoners in this material world of filth and suffering, held captive by the Archons who prevent our psyches, those lost sparks of light, from returning to their real home beyond the vault of of the sky. The Archons and their commander, the Demiurge, created the world for just this purpose. We are an alien life form suffering from “worldsickness”. That is, we are essentially living in hell:*

“The cardinal feature of gnostic thought is the radical dualism that governs the relation of God and world, and correspondingly that of man and world. The deity is absolutely transmundane, its nature alien to that of the universe, which it neither created nor governs and to which it is the complete antithesis: to the divine realm of light, self-contained and remote, the cosmos is opposed as the realm of darkness. The world is the work of lowly powers which though they may mediately be descended from Him do not know the true God and obstruct the knowledge of Him in the cosmos over which they rule. The genesis of these lower powers, the Archons (rulers), and in general that of all the orders of being outside God… ”

The central religious concept of Gnosticism, namely gnosis or knowledge, is one of hope rather than nihilism however. This is the knowledge necessary for the psyche to outsmart the Archons. By being aware of the situation, our psyches will be able to escape through a sort of spiritual muscle memory after our death. Gnosis should not be confused with Pistis, that is Christian faith, or unswerving belief, as invented by St. Paul to distinguish Christianity from Judaism. Gnostic knowledge is not promulgated widely as, for example, in the gospels (although Jesus’s admonition to remain silent about him in Mark 1: 24-25 could well be a Gnostic hint**). Gnosis is secret in the sense that it is only passed on to initiates from one identified as the saviour. Those ‘in the know’ are special and club together for mutual instruction and support.

Despite being attacked as a heresy, Gnosticism shares much with Christianity. Orthodox Christians also consider the world we inhabit to be ‘fallen,’ a ‘vale of tears,’ and functionally evil. They recognise that it is a world rife with temptations that distract us from a reunion with God, that is to say, salvation. Christians put their faith in the word of God, which is at least analogous if not identical to the Gnostic trust in their secret knowledge which is also considered as divine revelation. And Gnostics too also have their Saviour whose efforts on their behalf are necessary for achieving their spiritual goal.

Consequently it has been impossible for church authorities to prevent Gnostic influence. Even the gospels, especially that of John, and the epistles of Paul show significant Gnostic influence. The Church Father, Origen, was anathematised for incorporating Gnostic teachings on unity with God into his preaching. The ex-Gnostic, St. Augustine, retains many Gnostic views in his Confessions. Even the great 20th century Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, echoes ancient Gnostic mistrust of words in his assertion that the gospels are not the Word of God but only the word of man.

Moreover this Gnostic mistrust of words shows up frequently in Christian mysticism as an undermining of official doctrine. The claims by mystics to have direct union with the divine have often been highly suspect as implying such union independently of the church and sometimes even of Christ. Finally the dualistic nature of Christian philosophy - more or less identical to the Gnostic - makes it easy for Gnostic ideas to infect popular spirituality under the radar of church officials. Hence Jonas’s referral to “the hidden Gnosticism in the modern mind.” An early Gnostic hymn, for example would not be out of place in an evangelical congregation today:

“Having once strayed into the labyrinth of evils,
The wretched [Soul] finds no way out . . .
She seeks to escape from the bitter chaos,
And knows not how she shall get through.

It was Harold Bloom who suggested that Gnosticism is the American religion (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). He identified Mormonism as its paradigm but included all religion in the country, Christian or not, in that category. Whether this is due to the country’s invention by Gnostic Deists, the frightening void of the frontier, or the inevitable syncretistic tendencies of an immigrant society is unclear. The several historical American ‘awakenings’ use this explicitly Gnostic term to refer to mass revivals, as do today’s televangelists. In any case this brand of Gnosticism has spread globally with the extension of the American Empire’s military, media, commercial, intellectual, and general cultural presence (the irony that the United States should be promoting a religion of ancient Iran and Iraq can’t be missed).

That Gnosticism literally demonises nature, rejects established norms of behaviour as merely instruments of repression, cultivates the theory of a cosmic conspiracy, promotes an attitude of smug superiority among its adherents, and encourages the emergence of fanatical leaders who promise salvation from current evils is obviously not of merely historical interest. Jonas perceived the rise of National Socialism in German as a Gnostic event. But he also saw it in a broader cultural context. “Something in Gnosticism knocks at the door of our Being and of our twentieth-century Being in particular,” he writes. I think it is likely Jonas would have judged our current circumstances as a second act in the long-running production of the Gnostic comeback.

*This is all based on empirical science of the time not primitive fantasy. The duality of human nature is something most of us still take for granted as a Cartesian legacy. But Gnosticism goes much further in thinking beyond Homo Sapiens. The world of light above the vault is evident because we can get glimpses of it through the pinpricks in the vault which we call stars but only for convenience. And the Archons (we call them planets) can be observed patrolling continuously in search of sparks attempting to escape. Sparks which are able to avoid the Archons are collected are periodically transferred to their home in the world of light, a phenomenon we erroneously refer to as the waxing and waning of the moon.

**Such hints in the New Testament are numerous. For example in the epistle to the Ephesians 5: 14, an undoubtedly Gnostic insertion reads: “Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”

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The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Grudge Against Creation

We tend to blame the rise of conspiracy theories on the internet and access to social technologies. Of course this is merely down to unawareness of history. Conspiracy has never needed a high-tech enabler to rush around a population. The primitive technology of the human voice can overcome any cultural or political barrier. And when conditions are right the conspiracy is suddenly visible and sucks its adherents from one world into another.

Historically the most ambitious conspiracy theory ever advanced doesn’t involve child-trafficking, stolen elections or the evils of chemical-additive to the water supply. These are trivial claims compared with the rather cosmic conspiracies of the ancient Manicheans and Gnostics. In these theories the scam being run is not by people on each other but by God on all of humanity.

According to the gnostics, the world that we inhabit is the result of an evil plot carried out, with either divine approval or acquiescence, to torture humanity. This can be demonstrated empirically by simply looking around. The substance of this world is human suffering, not accidental or intermittent suffering, but intentional and unrelenting. As Olga Tokarczuk puts it through one of her characters: “pain is the emperor of this world.”

The Books of Jacob is about this all-encompassing, ancient tale of Gnostic conspiracy updated for use in the modern world. The factual proof, the theoretical explanation, and the available remedies are all here. So are the psychological and sociological reasons for the acceptance of such otherwise outrageous tales. Target audiences are identified and their motivations matched with appropriate media messages. In fact the book is a sort of how-to guide, a play-book, for starting and promoting conspiracy theories effectively.

Gnostics hate the world they inhabit. As Nahman, a follower of Jacob Frank, the subject rather than the character of Ms Tokarczuk’s story, nicely summarises the sentiment, “… from childhood on, I, too, absorbed this eternal grudge against creation.” Some gnostics want to be elsewhere, usually in a realm of light whose existence is confirmed by the pinpricks of light we can see in the firmament of the night sky. This sort of hopeful emigrant to the stars is sullen but benign. He minds his own business, reads a great deal, and keeps on the lookout for escape. The rest of us hardly notice.

But the other sort of gnostic, the permanent residents as it were, would prefer a replacement for this world. They are activists. Despite their pessimism, they are also idealists who have a vision, not a vision of some desired end-state but of change, revolution, disruption of the status quo. they want to belong to a movement, religious hippies, perhaps. As Nahman says of himself, he “has the sense that he’s a part of something bigger, something unprecedented and unique.” These gnostics also want revenge.

Gnostics differ from nihilists in that in that they believe that under new management (theirs) the world could be habitable. But they share with mere destroyers of society ignorance of any positive virtues which new social structures should have. They are aware of their ignorance. They know they’ve been lied to: “Certain facts have been concealed from us, no doubt, and this is why we cannot assemble the world as we know it into a single whole. There has to be a secret somewhere to explain it all.” The Messiah knows the inside story:

“The world doesn’t come from a kind or caring God,… God created all of this by accident, and then he was gone. That is the great mystery. The Messiah will come quietly when the world is submerged in the greatest darkness and the greatest misery, in evil and in suffering. He will be treated like a criminal. So the prophets have foretold.”

Resident gnostics, consequently, tend toward a Messiah figure in whom they have confidence for working out all the details of social change. Jacob Frank was such a Chosen One for that strange region at the nexus of the Polish, Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires in the 18th century. As Joseph Roth described the populace so succinctly 200 years later: "...fatherland for them is whatever country decides to conscript them." The Messianic call represents a chance to belong, to be settled, to be recognised.

The concept of the Messiah is of course Jewish in origin. He is the spiritual and political leader of a new world order. Messiahs act; they preach; they attract crowds; they take control; they confront authority. This is the Judaic ideal. But the apotheosis of the messianic ideal in practice is certainly Christian, having been worked out both spiritually and politically over many generations. The Christian Messiah knows how to rule. Consequently, Jewish Messiahs have proven rather less adept in their Gnostic ambitions than the more established Christian competition.

Messianism always starts as a populist movement. It then moves to infiltrate the establishment. Its ultimate success however depends on its ability to overthrown the establishment in which it has become a junior partner. This is a tricky business. Christians got lucky with Constantine; the Mormons with Eisenhower. But Jacob Frank was rather less so with the Polish bishops of the 18th century. Tokarczuk does a pretty good job of explaining why. Gnostic movements tend to fragment and their Messiahs become increasingly radical as they believe their own press. Like Jesus they are then liquidated. Unlike Jesus, they leave no Gnostic St. Paul to organise the survivors.

One can only hope that QAnon, the various neo-Nazi factions, Steve Bannon and the other Trumpist Republicans don’t read Books of Jacob for tips on subversion. Thinking about it, I consider this a fairly certain bet.

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The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom by John N. Gray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Self-Help Delusion

In our era free will inevitably gets tangled up in the libertarian idea of freedom of choice. But of course even the most ardent neo-conservative will append the qualification “within the law,” thus justifying the most overwhelming constraints on that very choice. This is Gray’s opening gambit in what is an intriguing survey of relevant literature about what free will is and what to do with it.

Traditionally, Gray points out, freedom is a spiritual concept referring to the state of the soul, a freedom from internal conflict, a peace within oneself and with the world. As he summarises: “What those who follow these traditions want most is not any kind of freedom of choice. Instead, what they long for is freedom from choice.”

The source of this aversion to choice is not mystical or aberrant but a matter of common sense. Choice implies uncertainty, not about the facts but about what criteria, what values, should be applied in any factual situation. Those values come from elsewhere - families, one’s social circle, etc. - and are subject to judgment about which apply and in what combination. In turn that judgment is inevitably influenced, usually determined, by desires of various sorts. Without desire judgment would be unnecessary. So desire is inherent to choice. And desire comes from elsewhere, either provoked by others to a mimetic envy, or as a primal urge originating in one’s genes, hormones, or random life-experiences.

Consequently the empirical evidence for free will, or even its desirability, is scanty and consists primarily in illusory metaphysical tales. Most of these involve evil as a character actor - the Demiurge of creation in Gnosticism, the Devil as God’s rival in Christianity, the Sitra Ahra, the Other Side, as the realm of ill-meaning demons in Cabalistic Judaism, the Iblis in Islam which exploits human weakness incessantly, and the Karmic force of predestination in Buddhism which directs and demands re-incarnation.

Despite the variations, all these tales agree that evil is irresistible by the individual. Freedom can only be achieved by sacrificing, submitting, or escaping free will itself with the assistance of whatever higher power is available. Thus the possession of free will implies its absence, while its loss makes it present, but paradoxically without choices on which to exercise it. The concept of free will simply evaporates except as a linguistic premise. It is self-contradictory.

These diverse traditions belie the dominant world-views of our time: the Scientific view of the world (that it can be improved by human thought), and the Romanticist view (that it can be improved by strength of human will). Essentially these tales have cherry-picked from ancient wisdom in a manner which turns freedom into a buzzword for violence and exploitation. The issue is not that these tales are illusory but that they claim privilege over other tales and exclude the others from human consciousness.

The Scientific and Romanticist tales can be maintained only by ignoring the overwhelming evidence of human corruption. What the Scientific and Romanticist tales have inherited from those of perennial wisdom is their tendency toward dogmatism and prejudice. Science pretends to be doing good in the world by increasing knowledge, for example. But most of what Science produces is either wrong or dangerous. And Romanticism has generated a plague of idealisms - the political, technological and social ideologies of the large scale; and personal ambitions on the level of the individual. These are causing untold suffering and planetary destruction.

It is obvious that neither Science nor Romanticism can credibly claim to be grounded in freedom. Nor can they claim to increase freedom as personal peace and harmony with the world in any meaningful way. The combination of the two, frequently within the same mind, have created a toxic mix of delusion, that is to say corrupt illusion, which promises to create a new species of humanity - better, smarter, longer-lived, and more socially adapted than at present.

The eradication of evil and the creation of inner peace through a dedicated technological commitment to an improvement in the species is the order of the day. But there’s a glitch: “Eradicating evil may produce a new species, but not the one its innocent creators had in mind.” Transcending oneself is a risky venture. We don’t know how to do that either through machines, therapies, or genetics. Some might suggest that it is an act of hubris fuelled by that very common evil of human pride masquerading under the banner of freedom.

Like all metaphysical presumptions, free will is a self-confirming hypothesis. Affirming it makes it so because we act as if it were real and attribute the consequences to judgment rather than to the desire which dominates judgment, or better yet to the desire which determines what we find necessary to judge at all. Any such presumption becomes harmful when it is treated as more than an illusion. It’s also awfully hard to overcome.

Illusions, like the language in which they must be expressed, are necessary for the self-reflexive consciousness of human existence. Our ability with language means that we are compelled to live within it and the illusions it facilitates. We have no choice in the matter. In any case we would likely end our lives if we didn’t have them to buffer our suffering, the suffering we cause, and existential dread we cannot confront.

So the issue of free will is really a red herring according to Gray: “What seems to be singularly human is not consciousness or free will but inner conflict – the contending impulses that divide us from ourselves.” Free will distracts us from the ethical and psychological lessons contained in ancient wisdom about the limitations of human ability. Perhaps our greatest step toward resolving that inner conflict is an ‘unknowing’ of many of our most precious illusions.

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Ethics Of Writing by Carlo Sini
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Peculiar Power of Alphabets

Some time ago I made the outrageous suggestion that the adoption by the Greeks of the Phoenician alphabet in the 8th century BCE was a decisive turning point in Greek, and therefore European, culture (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). My hypothesis was that this purely alphabetic script which replaced its largely hieroglyphic and pictographic predecessors was a force for both literary and civic development. The alphabetisation of the Greek language promoted not just the recording of ancient bardic legends passed down in song; it also meant that the written language represented the spoken language. That is, written language had become part of everyday affairs.

But according to Carlo Sini, my hypothesis does not go nearly far enough. For him The alphabetisation of Greek affected not just literature and civic affairs. It transformed the way we think. Writing became not just a symbolic exercise but an expressive reality. As Heidegger put it, the concept of truth passed from that of aletheia (‘disclosure’ in Greek) to that of veritas (‘rational or reasoned truth’ in Latin). As Sini says, “We read aletheia and we think veritas.”* More philosophically:

“The alphabet becomes a system of signs that enables the translation from a visual sign to a vocal emission. The concept of universality thus arises as the ability to transcribe any spoken language and any personal experience into a dimension where thinking and saying are void of all factual contingencies.”

Sini’s basic proposition is simple: the form of alphabetic language has content. Although this content can never be encountered outside the infinite number of particular examples in which form exists in everyday speech and writing, it is there shaping our minds to its demands. Primary among those demands is a certain linear mode of discourse which itself generates the rules of logic, the conventions of mathematics, and eventually a decidedly analytic culture that we call Western civilisation (It occurs to me that it may also generate a number of linguistically-induced dead ends, from the self-referential aporia of mathematics to the apparent contradictions of quantum theory). The Greeks thought of Hermes as the inventor of the alphabet and represented it as a pile of stones in his temple one on top of another with no inherent relation to anything else, a warning of the dangers it posed perhaps as well as a memorial.

So Sini’s philosophical task is to develop an ethics of writing which recognises the finite but not relative character of truth. He accepts Heidegger’s distinction between Disclosure of Being and The Judgment of Reason, but does not accept that either settles the matter as the only alternatives. Rather, Sini treats truth not as an idea or a criterion but as a practice that moves from the use of signs to the use of symbols (using Peirce’s terminology). Writing (or language in general) does not for him mean the oblivion of truth but is “the technical mode in which the content of the form of truth presents itself.” This content of the form is the heart of his philosophy and is difficult to summarise, but here is Silvia Benso’s attempt in her introduction:

“[T]ruth should be understood on the basis of the content of the logical form as defining linearization of the voice. In other words, the ultrasensible vision of truth has as its ground the emergence of the “logical” meaning of logos that in turn is the result of a concrete practice that translates previous ancient vocal and gestural meanings into a new universe of sense. Such is the universe of logic with its specific signs.”

As I said, this is not easy going. Sini’s work demands dedicated attention. But the potential payoff is a new and possibly productive way to avoid the perils of both literalism and relativism which seem to plague our world at the moment. His idea that “truth is situated inside a universe of practices“ is certainly provocative. It certainly conforms with Peircean semiotics, and with Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. But Sini tries to penetrate these insights further. For him:

“…[E]ach person does not set up the rules of the game, but rather becomes a piece in a game that is already being played and is nevertheless very serious. In this manner, truth emerges as inserted in a universe of practices that themselves conform to other social practices while founding new ones. All practices, therefore, including the specific practice of writing constituting philosophy, are linked to ethics, that is, to a specific way of being in the world, to an ethos.”

What Sini hopes to achieve is not any kind of epistemological revolution but a “simple invitation to dream more truly,” as he puts it. I can’t resist. If nothing else this is the most exciting train of thought I’ve encountered in a very long time. For me its primary importance is the possibility of revealing how language becomes an instrument of power rather than merely expression. So I’m hooked. Stay tuned for further instalments.

*I believe that another way of saying this is that we speak logically in the form of modus poenens (If P then Q; P; therefore Q) but we listen in the form of modus tollens (If P then Q; Not Q; Therefore Not P). In other words we experience in the form of Disclosure (modus tollens) but think in the form of Reasoned Truth (Modus poenens). The results in almost every aspect of life are devastating. The process eliminates the possibility of argumentative resolution on any issue except accidentally. This is an explicit example of what Sini is establishing in his piece. It is, of course, possible to read his exposition itself in the manner of modus tollens, something he is trying to avoid by his lengthy discussion of the reality of form. But ultimately even this may rejected by some, in a way confirming his distinction and the dramatic power of the alphabetic/linear/analytic form.

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Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius by Harry Freedman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Ghost of Spinoza

That Leonard Cohen wrote profound poetry and music is widely recognised. That he had a deeply religious upbringing in one of Montreal’s most prominent Jewish families is probably less well-known. And his explicit biblical and other scriptural references can easily be missed because the very artistic talent by which he subtly blended them into a distinctive voice in popular culture.

Harry Freedman, a Jewish scholar and literary historian, has accomplished something remarkable in this book about the intersection of Cohen’s public/professional and private/spiritual life. Essentially it is a kind of reverse exegesis which traces much of Cohen’s work back to its original scriptural and other cultural inspirations. Freedman interprets Cohen in light of both Cohen’s biography, and Freedman’s knowledge of Judaic culture. The result is informative, interesting, and provocative in the best sense.

To use only one example, Freedman shows how Cohen takes the somewhat problematic biblical story of The Binding of Isaac, the Akedah, and transforms it into a contemporary moral tale in his song The Story of Isaac. In the spirit of the Talmud, the Midrash, and Kabbalah, Cohen digs at what is unsaid in the Bible, creatively interprets what’s there in terms of current conditions, and ultimately represents it in Story of Isaac.

Through this, the Akedah undergoes a profound transformation from, “… a test of Abraham’s religious fanaticism, into a protest about the way people are willing to sacrifice others for absurd ideals.” Cohen’s specific issue was the American War in VietNam, but like so much of his work it also has universal significance. Other less obvious references to the Hebrew Bible are to King David in The Tower of Song, to the tale of Bathsheba in Hallelujah among many others.

Cohen also had (thanks to his Irish nanny) an intimate understanding of the Christian Gospels (but notably less of the writings of St. Paul whom I doubt he had much time for either philosophically or aesthetically). So the song Democracy draws a comparison between the protestors in Tiananmen Square and the crowds surrounding Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount. But many of his allusions - to the Gospel of Matthew in Suzanne, the subtle poetic puns on Hebrew and Christian scripture, Christ’s temptation in the desert in Closing Time, and the Crucifixion in Ain’t No Cure for Love - are far more subtle and refined. Cohen was learned in other traditions as well. He had a commitment to Buddhism throughout his adult life. Buddhism permeates his work in equally subtle ways

Cohen was, of course, an artist not a theologian. He did not aim to develop any kind of systematic view of the divine. He nonetheless did have a sort of religious ambition beyond his own spiritual development. Freedman quotes him from an interview:

“Everybody has a sense that they are in their own capsule and the one that I have always been in, for want of a better word, is that of cantor – a priest of a catacomb religion that is underground, just beginning, and I am one of the many singers, one of the many priests, not by any means a high priest, but one of the creators of the liturgy that will create the church.”

This citation suggests to me Cohen as more than a popular singer/songwriter who also happens to be Jewish. He is also a continuation of a tradition, arguably established by another notable Jewish artist/philosopher, the 17th century Baruch Spinoza. I say artist with reference to Spinoza because he too was intent upon understanding the world by constructing a new aesthetic.

I associate Spinoza and Cohen not only because I think they may have had compatable intentions but also because their patterns of spiritual life were so similar. Both men were steeped in the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism. It should be no surprise, therefore that they developed a similar syncretistic spiritually appropriate to their times.

Like Spinoza, Cohen broke his formal relationship with Judaism without abjuring his respect for Judaic culture or his acceptance of a divine presence in the world. Freedman quotes the speech in which Cohen essentially banished himself from Judaism:

“I believe that the God worshipped in our synagogues is a hideous distortion of a supreme idea – and deserves to be attacked and destroyed. I consider it one of my duties to expose the platitude which we have created.”

Although Spinoza was a bit more circumspect and diplomatic than Cohen, the two shared just about the same sentiments and came to similar religious views. Spinoza considered the entire cosmos as a manifestation of God, in particular each human being as an instance of God to be treated as such. Cohen, although adopting the language of Buddhism which has no concept of God, nevertheless expressed a functionally equivalent ethic. According to Cohen, “the ethical question is, what is the proper behaviour, what is the appropriate behaviour in the midst of a catastrophe?” This comes directly from the Śīla, one of the three sections of the Noble Eightfold Path. But it is entirely consistent with not only Spinoza but also the fundamental principle of Judaic and Christian ethics as a whole.*

Cohen, like Spinoza was consciously involved in a cultural conflict. Cohen describes it this way:

“This is the old war, Athens against Sparta, Socrates against Athens, Isaiah against the priests, the war that deeply involves ‘our western civilization’, the one to which I am committed.”

Like Spinoza, Cohen’s war was, as Freedman notes, “a spiritual and cultural confrontation, a battle for the human soul.” Precisely this phrase could attach easily to Spinoza. Each in their own way was attempting to influence the world, to make everyone more aware of how and why they were acting from moment to moment - Cohen through his music, Spinoza through his formal logic.

My point in making note of the similarities between Cohen and Spinoza is not to diminish Freedman’s analysis. Rather I would like to enhance it by suggesting that Cohen is not just a carrier of a literary and ethical tradition of Judaism. There is a Judaic political tradition which is equally profound, that of being “ a light to the Gentiles.” Like the prophets Isaac and Micah (and even Jesus) as well as Spinoza, Cohen calls insistently for the priests, rabbis and political leaders of the time to shed their smug conventional wisdom, the rituals that have become merely ritualistic, and the sanctimonious cant that replaces spiritual experience. He is sorely missed - for himself and as the ghost of Spinoza..

* As summarised by the 1st century CE rabbi Akiva: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself (Leviticus 19:18) - This is the all-embracing principle of the divine law.” Jesus said the same as did Marcus Aurelius, and St. Augustine after him.

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A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species by Rob Dunn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Flash in the Pan

According to Rob Dunn, the growth in the human population and its expansion to every climatic zone on the planet occurred more or less instantaneously (in evolutionary terms) over the last 12,000 years. This he refers to as “A train crash. An explosion. A mushroom rising from the wet ground of our origin.” No other species has ever accomplished this. According to the measure of ‘presence’ we obviously dominate the many losers in the Darwinian race for survival:

“By one estimate, 32 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass on Earth is now composed of nothing more than fleshy, human bodies. Domestic animals make up 65 percent. Just 3 percent is left over for the rest of vertebrate life, the remaining tens of thousands of boney animal species.”

So our sense of entitlement, of having been given ‘dominion’ over the other life forms with which we share space, seems to be justified.

But it turns out we are size-ist, ageist, humanist, and somewhat Swede-ish when it comes to assessing our place in the world. The millions of insect species, the billions of bacterial species, and the trillions of species of phage that live off the bacteria make us less than amateurs in the long-haul adaptiveness required in order to continue our hegemony. And this doesn’t even count the unknown number of microbes which inhabit the Earth’s crust and which have life-spans of millions of years. We have been confident only because we have been ignorant:

“As we confront the future, our collective bearings are off, and our perception of the world around us is deeply flawed. Nothing is where it used to be. We have begun to crash into things; we find ourselves blindsided by life.”

For our blindness, Rob Dunn says, we can thank the great 18th century Swedish botanist and zoologist who was the first to attempt a systematic catalogue of life on Earth. He apparently missed a lot that didn’t exist for the naked eye in the North Woods. So it’s taken some time for science to catch up with our actual situation which, as many suspected, is not nearly as sanguine as conventional metrics might indicate. Since our appearance on the evolutionary scene, Dunn says, we have been breaking all the rules of ecology, and we ought to stop it now that we’re less ignorant.

And there are many such rules, all intellectually interesting and with fascinating implications. The rule of natural selection is the most well known but taken in isolation it has been used as evidence of human evolutionary superiority. Other rules are equally relevant and suggest that we may not be so well-placed in the evolutionary hierarchy. For example the “diversity-stability law, states that ecosystems that include more species are more stable through time.” So as we cause the extinction of untold numbers of species that failed to adapt to us (or simply put them at a safe distance), we reduce our own survivability. This is reinforced by “The law of dependence ‘which states that all species depend on other species.” Others like the species-area law, the law of corridors, the law of escape, and the law of niche are derivatives of the requirements for diversity.

What Dunn doesn’t mention, however, is a law from another discipline, that of cybernetics. This is the Law of Requisite Variety which in essence states that any living thing must be as flexible in its response to environmental change as the range of changes in that environment. In other words, unless the diversity of possible responses is at least equal to the diversity of the potential changes around it, the species will not survive. It seems to me that all of Dunn’s ecological laws are in fact subsets of this Law of Requisite Variety.

Dunn suggests that we must become more adaptable by reversing our insistent violation of the laws of diversity. The argument is that this will increase the level of environmental stability, thus reducing the range of conditions to which humans must adapt. But it seems to me that there is a fundamental issue with his logic, and indeed that of a number of well-meaning environmentalists. This logic presumes that human choice to stabilise the environment, even if that were politically possible, is a rational objective. It is at least possible that such efforts are merely whistling in the dark.

Look at the facts Dunn provides. The most adaptive species on the planet are those microbes living in the Earth’s crust. Their environment is very stable, they need do nothing to survive until an expanding and dying Sun consumes the entire planet. Then there are the bacteria and their phages. These adapt rapidly and effectively to every environment known on the planet, from the Arctic wastes to the deep sea vents of methane gas, even to the presence of human beings. Whatever the planet has thrown at them, they have been able to use to their advantage.

The species Homo Sapiens is another matter altogether. We have evolved relatively slowly into a relatively stable environment. Our adaptations to this environment are almost exclusively technological rather than genetic. That is, we protect, feed, shelter, and multiply ourselves through our knowledge of the world, and our collective abilities, that is to say, through language. Language is our fundamental technology through which we have managed to survive and thrive. It is language that allows Dunn to communicate his laws and to suggest what we have to do to stabilise the environment.

But isn’t this the ultimate in anthro-centrist arrogance? As Dunn says, “Most of what is knowable is not known.” Indeed, most of what is knowable will never be known, will never be brought into language. The complexity of interaction and dependencies among species makes theories of nuclear physics look like casual conversation. This quite apart from the fact that non-biological possibilities for environmental change - from sun spots and changes in magnetic polarity to large-scale volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes - can make any understanding of current dependencies irrelevant at a stroke.

Dunn’s proposition that knowledge is the key to species survival is in itself paradoxical. Such knowledge can only be obtained by technology, the very technology which promotes the violation of Dunn’s laws of evolutionary biology. Philosophically speaking, he is recommending that we dig the hole we are in even deeper. It seems to me that our “train crash” actually occurred when our species found/created/developed language. We have been able to exploit a very narrow window of environmental stability pushing that capability relentlessly. We have been temporarily successful with this unique evolutionary strategy which depends acutely on a continuation of that stability, a very unlikely scenario even without human involvement. Dunn wants to push the technological strategy even further.

I prefer to think of us as a fragile aberration in evolutionary history, a genetic blind alley of over-specialisation, in short a flash in the pan of life. Dunn claims a 20th century American entomologist, Terry Erwin, as creating a Copernican Revolution in biology through his de-centring of biology so that Homo Sapiens was no longer its implicit focus. Perhaps what is necessary now is a kind of Einsteinian Revolution which recognises not just that we are not the top of the evolutionary heap, but that we don’t even qualify in the heats for the evolutionary race.

Dunn’s “first law of palaeontology” is that we will one day be extinct. We are likely to conform with that law with as quickly as we rose from species-obscurity. Pity the poor cockroaches, rats and bedbugs that will go extinct with us. Do they not bleed?

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Volunteers: Growing Up in the Forever War by Jerad W. Alexander
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Jerad Alexander grew up on American military bases. These are not unlike American middle class suburbs (except that they are significantly safer). They share a similar uniformity of design, a similar social system, and a similar lack of any discernible aesthetic or intellectual interest. Residents in both are fed similar cultural diets - through formal education, public ritual, and conventional popular wisdom - which are meant to convince them that they are the most fortunate people on earth. America is promoted to itself in these places as both an exception to the norms of governance found elsewhere in the world, and as exceptional in its benign execution of its capacity for violence. America, it is claimed, is exactly as described by the 17th century philosopher Leibniz - the best of all possible worlds.

The consequence of this insistent propaganda since its foundation is a profound but naive conservatism which goes far beyond the political or religious aspects of life. Among other things, it establishes a deeply held class consciousness by the upper and lower middle classes. The tension between the two manifests in as a neurotic compulsion to belong, to be attached to something that marks them as special in a society that values conformity to this principle of superiority above all else. Eccentricity, like irony, is notably lacking in the American character.

In American society one either accepts the economic and social cards one has been dealt; or tries frantically to get a new deal. The latter has always been available only for the few; and despite the hype, even fewer break through than ever before. But even for those who strive to overcome class conservatism, the established game, the implicit acceptance of middle class divisions as a cultural fact, is evident. Both groups are motivated chiefly by fear, one of falling into relative poverty, the other of becoming entirely destitute. This fear was seen clearly by James Baldwin regarding race but I think that it also is generated by an acute class consciousness.

Alexander is a self-identified product of this American class system. Apparently his entire life has been dominated by the military distinction between the officer and enlisted classes. Enlisted men and commissioned officers inhabit entirely separate worlds. This is the foundation of military society, but it is also a model for American social structure. The officer and enlisted classes offer opportunities for advancement but only within the class structure. Movement between classes is rare and not encouraged. Officers lead, direct, command, and decide. Enlisted personnel make, repair, obey, and suggest (they also sweat and suffer inordinately in military life). This is precisely the division of labour in the corporate world that dominates American society. The shop floor simply does not rise to the boardroom.

Alexander’s reported experience is of the lower ranks of both the military and the wider society. This, I think, is the real subject of his memoir. It is a depiction of a culture that is stifling in a very particular, one might say exceptional, way. There is a subtle but pervasive resignation that emanates from its rigid class divisions. Paradoxically this resignation does not show up as despair but as the obsessive search for somewhere to feel special, to belong, to become a recognised part of the social machine. This is so for both classes and not just in the military. And as Alexander describes in detail, these two classes despise and fear each other. That this is articulated more by military personnel than civilians is a consequence of the formality of the arrangement in the former not any substantive differences.

Alexander was indoctrinated virtually from birth into a culture that not only marked him as second class but also prepared him for a gruelling love/hate relationship - with his country as well as the military - that would keep him in his place despite the obvious inequity in status, position, and prospects. His subsequent life in the Marines (indeed his ambition as per his class) was one of hard drinking, vacuous talk, artificial camaraderie, and pain casually received, not by an enemy but by his own superiors. He was taught by rote and repetition to respond instinctively - to orders, defined situations, and the prevailing childish machismo of his colleagues.

What Alexander found in the Marine Corps was a place of refuge from The Real World, that is, American society outside the Marine Corps. The Corps is to American society, according to Alexander, as American society is to the rest of the world. The ideal Marine is the apotheosis of the American Dream - he has a definite place, no matter how humble, in the military corporate hierarchy. The Marines constitute a community of true believers. They are the real clerics of Americanism. The Marines are rowdy, boisterous, hard-nosed monks who are committed to some vague idea of spiritual superiority. Wherever they go, they remain Marines and proud of it.

Yet they are treated abominably by the officer class, not only initially but throughout their service, especially when they are in combat. They complain constantly about this while simultaneously professing total commitment to an abstract ideal. The factory line worker in constant danger of becoming unemployed by ‘corporate level’ decisions is no less suspicious, even hateful, toward his/her own management officer class. Yet this same factory worker will proclaim the superiority of corporate capitalism and his/her fear of any possible reform with equal vigour.

Marines, like many other Americans, carry with them an insulating shell of resistance to assimilation wherever they travel. This can be perceived as naïveté but it is in reality an active defence mechanism that prevents dilution of commitment, and therefore belonging (the British Empire had a similar programme to prevent the horror of ‘going native’). It is the most obvious manifestation of American conservatism - if anything new were worth knowing we would already know it and already have it. Strife between the middle classes may be tedious but it’s a tradition at the heart of American conservatism. Each class polices the other.

Another more mordant way of saying this is that most Americans are trained to remain children. They have never been taught how to learn anything beyond conventional wisdom. Learning itself is often thought a subversive activity that threatens The Dream. The class system promotes a sort of permanent infantilisation. They love guns (actually all explosive ordnance) because they’re adult toys; religion because it supplements belonging and feelings of existential superiority; conspiracy theories because secret knowledge gives them confidence of their self-worth and judgmental acumen; and passionate awkwardness about anything proposed by their own leaders because they are convinced that others are as incompetent as they are in dealing with change, which of course they are.

Near the end of his personal saga, Alexander reveals his own growing recognition of the dodgy bill of goods he has been sold. In a chapter epigraph from John LeCarre, he signals an important recognition: “war is nothing if not a return to childhood.” He then presents what can only be called an epiphany, too late for the victim but a crucial sign of maturation that appears to be rare among his colleagues. It’s as if the con of his entire life was finally revealed:

“Our mythologies have formed our ideologies, our ideologies have led us to patriotism, and our learned violence as an expression of that patriotism has led us to volunteer for this, and now we stand in a circle and look down at the dead man… ”

Alexander says, “War stories are the bookends of the American story.” But they are really more than that. The way America fights its wars has always been a reflection of the way America lives. And the way it lives is within a rather rigid even though unacknowledged class structure which is maintained by a bogus mythology, including a pervasive fear about anything which might undermine the mythology.

Consequently America as a nation learns nothing from its experience. Alexander’s book could easily be about The American War in VietNam of more than a half century ago or about the War in Afghanistan which has recently ended. And Alexander himself is indistinguishable in the long line of other enthusiastic children who have simply ignored the lessons of the past and doesn’t understand that he typifies his society despite his atypical experience. I have no doubt that his memoir will be similarly ignored by future generations of Americans. The motivation to learn seems lacking when one lives in the best of all possible worlds.

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Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel by Stephen Budiansky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Word Made Flesh in Vienna

It was Alan Turing who discovered an important implication of Kurt Gōdel’s Incompleteness Proof. One of the consequences of the impossibility of finding a justification for the logic of arithmetic is that some mathematical propositions, although true, cannot be shown to be so. The logical steps required to prove their veracity are infinite. In technical terms, this makes them undecidable. That is, both the proposition and its negation are possible without contradiction - a mathematical incongruity that stops reason dead in its tracks.

It strikes me that the central irony of Gödel’s life as described by Budiansky is precisely this kind of undecidability applied to himself. Gödel had incredible insight and ability in logical reasoning. But for him reason was a syntactical process, that is, a purely symbolic exercise. It had nothing to do with the world outside mathematics. Its semantics, that is the connection of abstract logic to the world outside of mathematics, was something Gödel had no interest in, and very little ability.

Gödel was not unaware of his handicap. In notes to himself quoted by Budiansky, he makes it clear that he is often simply incapable of what Immanuel Kant called Practical Reason, the logic of right action: “… [I]t takes me five to ten times as long to reach a decision than other people.” Budiansky reports that he filled page after page with procedures to employ in making decisions. But his self-diagnoses transformed routinely into self-fulfilling prophecies. It is as if his inner demon of abstraction and procedural inference had been given the task of correcting itself. The result was predictably not very encouraging. Yet he obsessively continued the practice of self-analysis and self-correction throughout his life, trying, it seems, to prove the reflexive paradox of his own Proof wrong.

His decisiveness and fluency in mathematics were entirely absent from his personal and social life. Taking action frequently made him ill with uncertainty. For example, leaving Vienna to take up a position at The Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, he became so distressed he had to return to Vienna. After his year long stay in America, he hospitalised himself almost immediately upon arrival home with concern about the prudence of his return. Then venturing again the following year to Princeton for his second stint at the Institute, he resigned almost immediately claiming stress and ill health. He had decided to return to an increasingly violent Austria in which university life had all but been destroyed! Subsequently when it was clear that Austrian fascism had annihilated the intellectual life of the country and the Anschluss by Hitler was only days away, Gödel was offered an appointment at the University of Notre Dame. Yet he dithered interminably and finally inexplicably rejected the offer. Neither sensible judgement nor fortitude were Gödel’s forté.

This profound indecisiveness was apparently accompanied by an equally profound fear of being observed, that is of being seen as a person apart from his mathematical accomplishments. He did give occasional lectures in front of colleagues and otherwise sympathetic audiences. But at his courses at Princeton, Gödel stood speaking with his back to the students facing the blackboard but never writing on it. Clearly he wanted his students attention solely on the ‘mask’ of his symbolic reasoning and not directed to his physical person. Yet his stance suggests not shyness or even a sense of threat but almost shame for betraying the guilty secret of mathematics as well as his own judgment in devoting his life to a ‘defective’ pursuit of truth.

So as an example of someone who identifies him or herself as their work, Gödel is hard to better. What seems especially significant though is that his quasi-paranoia was directed at himself rather than at those he perceived as observing him. This doesn’t appear to have been a form of autism - Gödel did frequently, and annoyingly, ignore events he found distracting but he could be charming and had a droll sense of humour. He was apparently a devoted and sensitive friend. It was his own physicality that Gödel did not trust, perhaps originating in his recognition that he was unable to make reliable decisions outside of mathematics, particularly about his own life. That he had discovered the black hole in mathematical reasoning could well have been as much as a psychic tragedy as much as a professional triumph.

This is obviously a terrible psychological burden to bear. It is a commonplace that mathematicians do their best work in their youth. Gödel berated himself in his mature years for his lack of work of the same quality that had made his reputation. No assurances from friends, colleagues or university administrators that he was still regarded as an important mathematician could convince him to mitigate his own self-reflective judgement. He simply could not be consoled. And as his German-speaking colleagues, especially Einstein, either died or left Princeton, Gödel showed full-blown signs of breakdown.

Another implication of Gödel’s Proof was developed by his friend Alfred Tarski. It turns out that not only are some propositions undecidable but also that even the notion of what constitutes truth is undefinable in arithmetic. Could this be the subconscious origin of Gödel’s indecisiveness and defensiveness? Certainly many others have lived out their neuroses in useful ways.

Perhaps Gödel’s life, therefore, was not only an example of total devotion to mathematics but also a physical manifestation of his primitive insight about it. He fought passionately against metaphysics using patently metaphysical arguments, arguing for example that his Proof showed both the Platonic reality of numbers and that this reality was permanently beyond human comprehension. As he matured is it possible the basic incongruity in his Self of abstract reason simply took its course to disintegration? That he became more himself in other words. I’m not being trite when I suggest that Gödel had a bug in his organic operating system, a genetic quirk that led him gradually into extreme self-alienation.

So for me the question this biography raises is something both personal to Gödel and yet general to the science of mind. Is it better, that is to say more accurate, more productive and in some ways more fair, to describe Gödel as a psychologically aberrant personality, or as someone who just lived out his fate as best he could? In more poetic terms Gödel seems very much the incarnation of his own mathematical word, a person of total although tragic integrity.

Might it be that each of us has some similarly in-built genetic logic that will have its way in whatever circumstances we might find ourselves, in fact motivating us to create those circumstances as well as respond to them?

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K. by Roberto Calasso
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Man Possessed

Roberto Calasso, I think correctly, identifies the poles of Kafka’s personality as election and judgement, creating a sort of field of force in which he oscillated continuously. Calasso traces this dynamic throughout Kafka’s work in a brilliant exegesis, using references to Kafka’s notes, diaries, and letters as well as the stories themselves. Layer by layer he reveals not only the significance of the work but also how that work is inseparable from Kafka’s psychology.

Although Kafka clearly wrote about himself, his mode of being in the world to use the existentialist phrase, his writing wasn’t therapeutic. He considered he compulsion to write as demonic. Writing was not only painful it was also spiritually unrewarding. In accordance with the dominant themes of election and judgement, Kafka was doomed to be an author. He had no choice in the matter. And as an author, he exposed himself - not just the literary work but himself - to public assessment.

Kafka’s stories are literally about himself. In The Castle, its protagonist K has been chosen and summoned for service. In The Trial, Josef K. is arrested and subject to a tribunal for crimes unknown. Yet despite their radically different positions, both are subject to the mysteries and vagaries of an invisible and unreachable source of power. The chosen is also the victim and vice versa. Both share what power decides so the status of each is indistinguishable from the other. Both are constantly being watched and assessed against some hidden standard.

Perhaps the strangeness of Kafka’s stories is precisely because they are about his attempts to penetrate his own unconscious, not to fix it but to make it visible and then to merge with it totally. To become, perhaps, the enormous beetle of The Metamorphosis or the condemned man of In The Penal Colony who has his crimes written on his entire body and who must read them by feeling them.

It strikes me that Kafka developed a unique psychological point of view (theory would be too pompous a word). As for Freud, there is Another within us whom we must recognise and understand to be ourselves fully. And as for Jung, the contents of this unconscious realm is not private, nor even personal, but cosmic and reflect a realm beyond language, another world entirely. So for Kafka the search for Self is the search for the eternal which is camouflaged in the mundane.

But Kafka knows that this search is presumptuous. In some manner it offends the Archons, those in power. It is also selfish, a kind of narcissism:

“Writing is a sweet, marvelous reward, but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a lesson for children, that it’s the reward for having served the devil… [I]ts diabolical element seems absolutely clear. It’s the vanity and the sensuality they circle continuously around our own figure, or someone else’s—in which case the movement multiplies, becomes a solar system of vanity—and feast on it.…Blasphemy with respect not to a God but to the whole.”

Kafka described himself as a creature that “… is bound by invisible chains to an invisible literature and who screams when approached, thinking someone is touching that chain.” To say he was a man possessed, therefore, is no exaggeration. The expression of that possession was his own personal and singular myth. Calasso’s articulation of that myth is remarkable.

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No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Internet Poisoning

That the internet is primarily a purveyor of trivia is obvious to anyone. The big revelation is that human life is nothing but trivia. Our access to the trivial lives of others overwhelms the not-trivial which also therefore becomes trivial. We’ve all been swallowed by the big hippo. We live in a world of gossip. It’s been abuilding for some time before anyone noticed how strange it all is.

According to Yuval Harari (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), it started with the great Cognitive Revolution of the species Homo Sapiens, in which we discovered language and its promotion of speculative thought: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings." Gossip clearly has its uses.

But according to Thomas Ligotti (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ), gossip exists only to distract us from the reality of our existence as “hunks of spoiling flesh on deteriorating bones.” We tell each other stories that we claim reveal, explain or define reality. It is the stories that become our habitat in which the prevailing misery and horror of the world is diluted, mitigated, or otherwise explained away. From that place of delusional safety we impose enormous destruction upon the rest of the world as well as ourselves. Gossip kills.

So it turns out that the thing that evolved to protect us, language, has always been our greatest threat (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Now that language has become as pervasive, as confusing, as oppressive as the reality it replaced, we become aware of the threat. We are aware of too much suffering; too many wrongs; too many opinions, arguments, conclusions and nonsense. We are perplexed. Whatever we say contributes to the problem. Saying nothing is unthinkable. Silence means loss of identity. Gossip is a drug and we are addicted to it:

“In contrast with her generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis.”

The portal of language is everywhere, more enticing than a group session at a halfway house for coke heads. Mind isn’t that thing inside our heads; mind is out there. Not in other people’s heads but in the traces of what is written and said. These convince us we’re OK. Who is willing to lose his/her/their mind by abdicating one’s role in this collective mind? But there is hope. The contents of the collective mind has become primarily gossip about gossip. I mean c’mon, who believes this stuff? Who cares about any of it for more than a week or two?

“The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”

So autism is on the rise. Only the autistic understand reality. They know language is untrustworthy. Only the non-verbal has real significance. The ethical has nothing to do with ethics, just kind behaviour. High function autism has become a necessary life skill. Survival depends on not listening, not reading but only pretending to. As language is progressively degraded (by promoting itself), it is being exposed as noxious, arbitrary, and completely unreal. It’s worse than the reality it substitutes for. Gossip is poisoning itself:

“We took the things we found in the portal as much for granted as if they had grown there, gathered them as God’s own flowers. When we learned that they had been planted there on purpose by people who understood them to be poisonous, who were pointing their poison at us…”

Then reality strikes with a vengeance and gossip is seen for what it is.

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Swing Low: A Life by Miriam Toews
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What’s Left After Words?

A biography of one’s little known father would seem a risky commercial venture. Make it first person and the rest of the family is likely to resent the presumption. Write it from the perspective of a man with advanced dementia, and total disaster can’t be far distant.

And yet Miriam Toews carries it off magnificently. The book, it turns out is only nominally about her father, Mel. Mainly it’s about her coping with what he left behind , namely an apparently inexplicable decision on his part to end his life. The book is therapy, in which she invents what was in his head based upon the facts of his life, those known to the intimate world of his Mennonite society, and those shared only within the family.

Despite the manner of his death, Mel is a hero to Miriam. In fact his suicide confirms his integrity. His life was a battle with his bipolar condition, his high functioning autism, and his complete inability to express himself in personal relationships. Yet he had overcome these handicaps to develop a loving marriage, raise a family, pursue a successful career as a teacher, and generate universal respect within his community.

Like any other history, Mel’s is a fiction. Miriam doesn’t actually know what thoughts Mel had. She only knows his behaviour, which seems confused, erratic and at times irascible. She sees him scribbling page after page nonsense, and intuits what he trying to do, that is, to tell his story. So she does the work of which he was incapable. That she can imagine herself as her father is a tribute to both of them. Especially because, as Miriam articulates for Mel, “There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.”

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