The Philosophy of 'as If ' by Hans Vaihinger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Scaffolding Around Reality

Although it is anchored in 19th century issues and language (especially archaic psychological language), The Philosophy of As If is still worthwhile as both an historical document and an important contribution to the philosophy of inquiry. Vaihinger’s central thesis is simple but profoundly so, namely that “… the object of the world of ideas as a whole is not the portrayal of reality — this would be an utterly impossible task — but rather to provide us with an instrument for finding our way about more easily in this world.” That is, what we call knowledge is not a description of Reality but is merely the scaffolding we erect around Reality in order to survive in it.

Although the book was first published in 1911, its content was formulated in the 1870’s. This is contemporaneous with the work of C.S Peirce in the United States on essentially the same subject matter. And although Vaihinger is keen to distinguish his views from what he knew of American Pragmatists (probably only James and Dewey), I think he would have recognised the congruence of his own thoughts with those of Peirce had he been aware of them. In particular, both men accepted Kant’s analysis that the thing-in-itself, or what we casually call Reality, is undiscoverable even through rigorous scientific inquiry. The statement “Fictions are never verifiable, for they are hypotheses which are known to be false, but which are employed because of their utility,” could have been made by either man (it is in fact Vaihinger).

The intellectual connection between Vaihinger and Peirce is demonstrated in many ways but most acutely in their views on the constitution of the ideal as a presumption of scientific inquiry, and in the importance of creative imagination in scientific development. For both, the concept of the ideal was neither a hypothesis nor an existent. Rather it was a logically necessary condition of inquiry, “a practical fiction,” analogous to the concept of God as the ‘guarantor’ of medieval theology. The ideal, unlike the guarantor however, is determined by the purpose of the inquiry itself and is therefore neither stable nor a matter of any sort of philosophical or religious dogma. Perhaps their similar religious educations account for the similarity of their conclusions (Peirce’s mother was a Protestant mystic; Vaihinger’s father was a pastor).

Both Peirce and Vaihinger put a good deal of stress on the creative imagination in inquiry. In fact both insist that there is a reputable logic that is neither deductive nor inductive. Peirce called this the logic of ‘abduction’ which resembles that of Kantian transcendental deduction. Vaihinger sees this same logic as a “synthesis of induction and deduction,” the result of which he calls “artifices.” As with Peirce these artifices (Peirce calls them hypotheses but this is only a matter of conflicting vocabulary) originate in a manner that can’t be accounted for by either inductive or deductive rules alone. They are imagined in some distinctive way. For Vaihinger they are “Stimulated by the outer world, [but] the mind discovers the store of contrivances that lie hidden within itself.”

Despite these similarities, however, I think Vaihinger is both broader and deeper than Peirce. In the first place Vaihinger’s philosophy is not just about scientific inquiry but of inquiry in general from mathematics to law and even to literature. In this he anticipates Wittgenstein in all but the terminology he uses. Unlike Peirce, Vaihinger was never a student of language. He nevertheless made an important point about language (using the term ‘discursive thinking’) that Peirce never made explicitly, namely that it has no reliable relation to reality. This is the whole basis for his fundamental thesis. Language can tell us nothing about Reality despite its usefulness which is

“… exactly what Kant so laboriously demonstrated in his theory of cognition, namely that it is utterly impossible to attain knowledge of the world, not because our thought is too narrowly circumscribed — this is a dogmatic and erroneous interpretation — but because knowledge is always in the form of categories and these, in the last analysis, are only analogical apperceptions.”

And Vaihinger takes this a step further. Not only is language unreliably connected with Reality, it is inevitably contradictory to Reality. That is to say, whatever terms we might use to describe those things that are not words will be wrong. No fictions, even scientific ones, accurately ‘cut the world at its joints.’ As he says, “Rigidly applied, such fictions lead to contradictions with reality.” But it is this very characteristic that is essential for the progress of science. It is when the inherent contradictions become clear - instantaneous force at a distance in Newtonian physics, or the violation of Einsteinian relativity by quantum entanglement for example - that science recognises the need for new research. Peirce had a similar view but applied it only to statistical error in empirical findings.

Vaihinger is also more than an intellectual bridge between Kant and 20th century philosophy, or between German Idealism and American Pragmatism. He is also an example of the significance of medieval philosophy in modern thought. For example, despite the approximately one million words Thomas Aquinas spent on his Theo-philosophy, he was well aware that absolutely nothing he said about God could be known without what he called revelation, and that even then this knowledge was distorted by the means necessary to convey it - human language.

Since the Enlightenment we have faced exactly the same situation with what we term Reality. Except that we now recognise that divine revelation is merely another fiction claiming a privilege it doesn’t warrant, and that there is no evidence that Reality is interested in revealing itself anyway. The Thomistic tradition of ‘negative theology’ - whatever we think God is, he is not that - is as relevant now as it was in the 13th century and might assist more than a few scientists to get over themselves as the new priests providing access to the Absolute.

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The Anomaly: A Novel by Hervé Le Tellier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Cosmos As Divine Bon Mot

Hervé Le Tellier seems to give his game away when he describes his duplicated alter ego: “… he knows that it would take only one of his sentences being more intelligent than he is for this miracle to make a writer of him.” And this he pushes for most assiduously. Every page has an appropriate bon mot or droll aphorism. And they are mostly ostentatiously witty and almost always original. Occasionally he packs them together in a writerly flood of exuberant showmanship, as in:

“God, but stupidity oozes from every corner of a religious mind. Every conviction is a thorn in the side of intelligence. Believers lose their wits in their efforts to see death as just another misadventure. Doubt has made me an autodidact of life, and I have enjoyed every moment all the more for that. I am never overcome by mystical emotions, even when gazing at the glorious glittering around a cloud. On the brink of death by drowning, I try to swim, I cannot in all decency pray to Archimedes. And as I sink today, my eyes open onto an abyss where no theorem holds sway.”

But this rhetorical handiness is tongue-in-cheek and a smokescreen for some serious thought. The premise of people being replicated and their duplicates appearing with some delay is intriguing and as far as I know original. It provides a way to literally confront individuals with themselves (including their own dying as well as quirks and defects). The only difference between each pair is a three month gap in experience. Reactions between these clones vary from the murderous to an instantly created bond of intimacy, and from the instinctively selfish to the considered self-sacrificial. In almost all cases the knowledge that there is another who shares one’s memories and secrets is in some way liberating. Perhaps this is connected with the realisation that there has always been an experiential and a reflective self.

Also I think there is something other than psychology that Le Tellier is alluding to, namely an old philosophy that may be too heavy to make explicit in a novel but which seems to be particularly relevant to our age of information. This is the early 18th century philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz, particularly his Monadology. The Monadology is a short piece on metaphysics. Like all metaphysics, it tries to fit what we know about the world into a consistent framework. This is precisely what the various scientific and religious experts must do in The Anomaly. Confronted by events that do not conform with existing conventions, they are forced to formulate what is essentially a new theory of existence.

In the judgement of Le Tellier’s pundits, the most likely metaphysical condition which explains the replicating bits of humanity is our existence as a virtual simulation. In principle such a cosmic simulation is possible, they conclude, and it could account for everything they were currently experiencing. The consensus is that whoever is running this simulation is conducting some sort of test. While it’s not clear what constitutes success in this test, results could be of utmost significance. As one of his characters suggests early on, “No one is safe from success,” especially if it defined badly. A conclusion is vaguely formulated:

“To take the idea further, it may be precisely because we can now envision the idea of being programs that the simulation is offering us this test. And we’d better get it right, or at least make something interesting of it.”
“Why’s that?” Silveria asks.
“Because if we fail, the entities running this simulation could just shut it down.”

Leibniz had a similar idea. For him, each of us is an independent intelligence but we are profoundly blind. His term for these virtual(!) substances was ‘monads.’ Each monad perceives other monads and their environment with varying degrees of distortion. Each is also programmed to act in a specified manner based on its perceptions. All monads constitute the thoughts of God, who is the Supreme Monad and who programmes the ensemble through “fulgurations,” that is, electrical impulses, thus assuring coordination of the whole. There is no real interaction among the monads, only the working out of a “pre-established harmony.” This is signalled by one of Le Tellier’s character when he says “Nobody lives long enough to know just how little interest anybody takes in anybody.”

Before the development of the language of cybernetics, therefore, Leibniz had described exactly the sort of cosmic simulation suggested by Le Tellier’s boffins. Like it or not, we are living an illusion - including, of course, the illusion of living an illusion. And before our age of conspiracy theories, it was probably necessary to tone down the rhetoric. As one of Le Tellier’s scientists asks, “… isn’t this bonkers hypothesis the most elaborate conspiracy theory devised by the most enormous imaginable conspiracy?” Indeed, and what are the odds, therefore, that The Anomaly starts a new internet cult?

Despite its oddness, the Monadology provides a solution to every educated Frenchman, the mind-body problem of Cartesian philosophy. How do these two ‘substances’ communicate? According to Leibniz, this problem doesn’t exist because the non-material soul and the material body interact according to the divine intention. And in any case, there is only one substance, the monad. ‘Do they have souls?’ is the first question directed to the assembled theologians in The Anomaly. The leaders of the various religions agree that the duplicates do have souls and must therefore be treated as human beings (except the Buddhists but they already accept that it’s all illusory anyhow).

But Leibniz did not dare to take the next speculative step suggested in The Anomaly. He should have done so given the biblical tales of creation and divine regrets about how things have worked out, but he didn’t have the language. The divine regrets and ‘restarts’ (in Christianity there have been at least three) are also confirmed in many other religious myths (the Aztecs are cited by Le Tellier but there are many others describing cycles of creation and destruction).

It is as if the divine programming were being tested and de-bugged. Leibniz’s claim about ‘the best of all possible worlds’ should have been modified to ‘the best programme God could write at the moment; but He’s improving.’ The test being run in The Anomaly is not of individuals or even of humanity as a whole. What is being tested is the programme itself. There is nothing we can do about it because we are part of it; we exist within it, we are it. So at a stroke Le Tellier satirises not only religion, science, and politics, but also the great Leibniz as well as himself. Le Tellier cites the ‘reserve’ evil contained in Pandora’s box, Elpis, or Hope, “the expectation of good… [which is] the most destructive of all evils.” Perhaps he’s right. There’s always a bug buried somewhere.

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Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reverential Technology

Life is too short to learn Chinese. At least it was until Mao reduced the number of characters in the language from over 45000 to less than 3000 and introduced a Latinised form that reasonably tracked the official dialect (Mandarin). Until then, only the elite officialdom was privy to the power of its complex ideographs. And many of that elite after a lifetime of study knew the secrets of this beautiful script but almost nothing of its written content. At the beginning of the 20th century the literacy rate in the country was no more than 10%, and almost no one in that minority was engaged in scientific research, engineering, or material innovation.

Yet during a century of national trauma - including occupation by almost every European nation, the overthrow of the ruling Qing dynasty, political degeneration into warlord rule, invasion and destruction by Japan, the Communist revolution and its aftermath in events like the Cultural Revolution - literacy is now almost 100%, and the country’s scientific, engineering, and material achievements exceeds all others except the United States. Jing Tsu’s history of the transformation of the Chinese language records the development of the underlying technology of this dramatic transformation, the Chinese language itself.*

Chinese is of course ideographic. Like ancient Egyptian, it uses glyphs. But unlike Egyptian, which was transformed into Coptic using the Greek alphabet, it never became expressed phonetically. There was good reason not to take the phonetic plunge. The disconnection between symbol and sound allowed enormous linguistic variation over a vast empire while maintaining the ability to communicate without translation. While there was an official pronunciation, this was used only among the elite at the imperial court. Even the Manchu invaders of the 17th century adopted the script without understanding a word of it. And Mao decreed the Mandarin dialect although he couldn’t speak it at all.

Jing recounts the details of the technical changes in the language that adapted it to modern technology, first to the telegraph, then to the mechanical typewriter, and ultimately to the computer. These are not insignificant for a script as aesthetically nuanced as written Chinese, and for a pronunciation that requires the subtlety of tone to distinguish among the language’s many homonyms.** But for me the most remarkable aspect of his story is the persistent cultural reverence for the ancient script itself.

The men (and they are exclusively so except for the unnamed women who developed a esoteric women’s script in Southern China) who pioneered these conceptual, bibliographic and technological changes are cultural heroes. Their devotion to the Chinese language, on occasion to the point of death, is something usually associated with religion in the West. The debate about the condition of the language is much like that of an English Council arguing the most appropriate programme for the restoration of a Grade I listed building. That is, the discussion is typically about alternative aesthetics rather than merely economic or technical efficiency, which are considered constraints but not objectives. Few other modern countries have had China’s linguistic experience (Soviet Tajikistan and other Arabic speaking republics were others in the 1920’s and 30’s; the ancient Phoenicians may have been the first when the Greeks and Jews alphabetised their ideographic symbols***).

In short, Chinese is revered not simply because of its antiquity, or it’s use by about a third of the world’s population. It is also an aesthetically beautiful object in its own right. Jing Tsu captures that beauty throughout his book.

*For a discussion of language as the fundamental technology see here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

**Consider, for example, the difficulties involved in creating a Latin script of some fixed number of alphabetic characters. In principle this appears easy since most Chinese words are composed of only two sounds, a beginning consonant followed by a vowel (each of these sounds has its own character as well). Suppose an extended alphabet of say 30 consonants and 10 vowels were used to express these sounds. This combination would yield 300 possibilities, that is, less than 10% of the distinctive sounds required in the vastly reduced number of words in the current dictionary. In fact a character is not a word in the Western sense. Its context defines it as much as the glyph. This is correlated with the crazy-making structure of the Chinese dictionary as well as the more-than-arbitrary character of library subject classifications.

***See here for a discussion of the Western transition to phonetic script: https:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos by Sohrab Ahmari
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Fiddler on the Roof

Religious converts are almost always radically conservative. Their psychological condition is not dissimilar to that of the common soldier who has been promoted to officer rank. He or she depends upon the stability of the culture to which they have committed their identity. The convert is attracted by a tradition and wants to protect it as he or she first found it. The ‘mustang’ officer is particularly keen to ensure good order and discipline among his former colleagues, and heaven help them if he is a member of their court martial. Proving oneself worthy of one’s heritage is a dominant motivation in both cases - a sort of Whiggish spirituality..

Sohrab Ahmari is just such a convert to Christianity. He has been gripped by some aesthetic compulsion to embrace the Christian myths. Now in order to confirm his aesthetic to himself and to prove his bona fides to his fellow-believers, he wants the rest of us to understand their importance. He also, in the manner of a newly received member of the officer class, wants the rest of us to accept these traditions as the key to our own psychological and sociological well-being. Discipline and right-thinking should be restored. Tradition must be revived.

Central to Ahmari’s tradition is the idea of freedom. But for him freedom is not the absence of constraint, rather it is “freedom rooted in self-surrender, sustained by the authority of tradition and religion… ” This is an ancient Catholic idea formulated first by St. Augustine in the late 4th century CE and promoted forcefully by the Puritans and Calvinists who dominated early American society. According to Augustine freedom is not the capacity to exercise choice because we are bound to choose badly. Left to our own powers we will sin which is “the will to keep or pursue something unjustly.” According to Augustine, we live in a permanent state of “akrasia,” that is weakness of the will. This condition enslaves us. For him it made no sense to talk of free will without the power of grace from God to keep it on the right track. And only through total submission to the will of God could this grace be obtained.

Augustine is careful to avoid the Gnostic implications of an evil creation, a potential residue from his Manichaean past. But he nevertheless claims that humanity as it exists is corrupt and therefore hopelessly lost in sin and disorder. Ahmari’s argument is straight out of the Augustinian playbook. He points to the vulgar banality of present-day America with the same superior disdain Augustine held for the declining Roman Empire. And like Augustine, Ahmari blames his philosophical forbears for the mess - Ahmari the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Augustine the Platonists and Stoics who also did not respect the Christian God.

According to Ahmari, channeling the Jewish theologian Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, “The message of tradition runs counter to the fundamental credo of a utilitarian society.” Whether this is true or not, is not this utilitarian society also the product of a tradition? In fact the very Christian tradition which Ahmari adheres to? This is a tradition, fundamentally unlike that of Soloveitchik, which begins with a presumption of individual rather than communal salvation. Is not the postulate of a personal inviolate soul the foundation for the philosophy of individualism in Mills and all subsequent economists who dominate the national discourse? In this context, Ahmari’s use of Soloveitchik is obscene. Christianity itself is the origin of the problem not its solution.

Ahmari’s abuse of Soloveitchik reminds me of an apt observation by another great Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem: “Authentic tradition remains hidden; only the decaying [verfallende] tradition chances upon [verfällt auf] a subject and only in decay does its greatness become visible.” Indeed, in its time the Christian tradition has demonstrated greatness. This is probably what attracted Ahmari to it in the first place. But to suggest that it is a tradition that should be revived is the equivalent of the recent claims by old Marxists that Communism failed only because it wasn’t implemented with enough vigour. Christianity brought us to where we are today. Max Weber documented that over a century ago. What Ahmari is saying therefore is that Christianity itself has gone astray. It is his brand of Christian tradition that should replace it.

In short, Ahmari is a typical fundamentalist. Not only does he consider his interpretation of the truth definitive but he also claims the authority to promulgate that truth to the rest of us (not as a church minister, or philosopher, or theologian, but as a journalist; the irony is precious I think). But he is also, paradoxically, a sort of pan-fundamentalist who calls upon those of other traditions to adopt his point of view to form a sort of Coalition of Traditionalists. Within this coalition, the factual will be reduced to the dogmata of faith. All other reports are suspect, and, even more importantly, irrelevant.

What Ahmari really wants to promote through his coalition is apparently the idea invented by St. Paul, faith. “Faith in God,” he proclaims with Pauline certainty, “assures us that there is ultimate meaning in creation, even if we can’t always discern it.” This explains his cavalier attitude toward the contents of faith in other religions. It is faith itself which he wants accepted as the criterion of truth. Like Augustine with the Manichaeans, Ahmari doesn’t recognise the roots of his view in the Iranian Islamic faith from which he and his family fled.

It’s fairly clear that Ahmari expects that once faith is established as the criterion of truth that the Christian truth will prevail. His intellectual hope is in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas who is the poster boy for Christianity as the supreme religion. His only remaining rival, he believes (and he is probably correct), is that of modern Gnosticism. He spends a great deal of effort connecting the work of Hans Jonas and Rudolf Bultmann about Gnosticism with modern American society.

Perhaps Ahmari is viscerally aware that Harold Bloom’s assessment is accurate, namely that “Gnosticism is the American religion.” In fact it is hard to distinguish from Christianity just as Augustine had found. And Ahmari faces his greatest difficulty here in that even more than in Christianity, Gnosticism knows “the wisdom of submitting to limits.” But it does so by appreciating reality as it is not as somehow redeemed. This grates annoyingly on Ahmari. But the only thing he can do, once again, is meekly submit to what he considers divine revelation. He wants us “To relate to the Blessed Virgin Mary as an uneducated peasant might.” Ah the joys of tradition.

Postscript: I have received several emails (hate mail really) claiming that I have overstated my case regarding the Christian, particularly the Catholic, views expressed by Ahmari. I therefore think it’s necessary to supply some supplemental evidence regarding his claims about tradition.

Indeed the Catholic Church is nothing if not tradition-minded. Many pronouncements by the Church express this tradition admirably. These include the following modern encyclicals:

Mirari vos (1832) which explains that liberal democratic politics are evil. Rejection of this proposition would become known as the American heresy and was promulgated well into the 20th century.

Singulari nos (1834): went further than its predecessor and proposed that even attempts to justify liberal politics are evil, thus stifling any debate about the matter.

Quanta cura (1864): states definitively that there are no inherent civil rights, neither freedom of speech, nor freedom of conscience, nor other democratic freedoms are valid.

Aeterni patris (1879): scholastic philosophy, that is the thought of Thomas Aquinas, is the only correct mode of thinking.

Libertas praestantissimum (1888): Error has no right of freedom at all, a restatement of a doctrinal statement of the 13th century which also insists that all but baptised Catholics are doomed to Hell.

Testem benevolentiae nostrae (1899): directed explicitly at Americans, it insists that Catholics must not assimilate to the national political culture, namely that of democracy.

Pascendi dominici gregis (1907): Religious truth is a matter of authority. Only the Church may determine what constitutes the truth.

Notre charge apostolique (1910): Religious truth/power is strictly hierarchical.


According to explicit doctrine, these pronouncements are infallible and therefore cannot be altered by any subsequent pope. This is what tradition means in the Catholic Church. In addition to these official statements, numerous less formal indications of the traditions that Ahmari alludes to may be cited including:
 
”If there is a totalitarian regime, totalitarian by fact and by right, it is the regime of the Church, because Man belongs totally to the Church.” - Pius XI in a September 1939 address to a group of French Union members, essentially justifying the existence of German fascism.

“Jews are Christ killers.” - Numerous editions of the Pope’s own L'OSSERVATORE ROMANO newspaper from the loss of the Papal States in the 1870’s until well into the Holocaust in 1942. Historically, this has been the rallying cry for two thousand years of anti-Semitic persecution that really doesn’t require further documentation.

To be clear, these are precisely the traditions Ahmari is referring to. There are many more that are equally repugnant but I think the point is made. The tradition of faith in which Ahmari has immersed himself is one of ideological totalitarianism and official hatred of those to whom he reaches out to for support at least as intense as that practised in his native Iran. His is an expedient ploy for furthering his narrow political ends.

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Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning by Owen Barfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Storehouse of the Imagination

The central metaphor of Poetic Diction is language as the storehouse of human imagination. Remarkably this was voiced 25 years before Wittgenstein’s Investigations, which it summarises rather neatly; and without any knowledge of Heidegger’s contemporaneously emerging philosophy, which identifies language as the “house of being” for humanity. As Barfield admits, his little book “claims to present, not merely a theory of poetic diction, but a theory of poetry: and not merely a theory of poetry, but a theory of knowledge. It is as such… that it must be judged.” And is difficult to judge it as anything else than profoundly prescient. That it as relevant, important, and stimulating as it was almost a century ago is the best tribute there could possibly be to Barfield’s intellect.

The metaphor of the storehouse does exactly what poetic diction is supposed to do. It disorients whatever it was we thought about language (and for that matter about storehouses). We are accustomed to consider language as that which we read and hear. But Barfield puts language somewhere other than where it is seen or heard in use. Not in some Platonic abstraction existing in a galaxy far far away, but as a potential from which we continuously draw and which sustains us at every moment. What we know about the world, indeed what we can possibly know about the world, is contained somewhere in that storehouse, and only there. It is by exploring that storehouse that we are capable of “grasping the reality of nature” because it is there that we actually participate with reality, including the reality of each other.

In the preface to the second edition, Barfield makes his debt to the philosophy of Hume explicit: “The notion that knowledge consists of seeing what happens and getting used to it as distinct from consciously participating in what is was first worked out systematically by Hume.” Language in other words is tautologically not what is not-language. And what is not-language is what we refer to as reality. We act within reality but we participate in and through language. And it is in light of this recognition that Barfield makes one of his most provocative claims. “Only by imagination,” he says, “can the world be known… The difficulty lies in the fact that, outside poetry and the arts, that activity proceeds at an unconscious level.” It is through poetic diction that new relationships, connections, and inferences are made in the storehouse.

Consequently, “the study of poetry and of the poetic element in all meaningful language is a valuable exercise for other purposes than the practice or better enjoyment of poetry.” Science, as well as all other human inquiry proceeds poetically. Science works, when it does, precisely because it utilises the poetic principle. The alternative means the death of not just inquiry but something more fundamental. “Of all devices for dragooning the human spirit, the least clumsy is to procure its abortion in the womb of language,” Barfield says, echoing both Leibniz and modern Pragmatists. Attempts to control or direct the imagination are always disastrous. The function of language as storehouse is “… to mediate the transition from the unindividualized, dreaming spirit that carried the infancy of the world to the individualized human spirit, which has the future in its charge.” In other words, the storehouse is a legacy which makes the entire history of humanity available to each person.

There are both aesthetic and ethical implications of the storehouse metaphor. Aesthetically the feeling of pleasure and beauty derives not from a perception of some static pattern of relationships in the storehouse but the creation of a dynamic comparison between some established convention and an entirely unexpected new set of connections. Hence the aesthetic is always a fleeting moment. The novel becomes the established almost as soon as it is created. This is what leads to what might be called poetic ethics. Barfield notes that “the average word  is a dead metaphor.” Dead metaphors are established comparisons we take for granted. We take such words literally, as if they unambiguously signify something which is not a word and connect to other words in some fixed formula. This leads to a form of secular fundamentalism, an insistence on controlling meaning and thus imagination. As I read it, therefore, we have a duty to continuously rattle the conventions contained in the storehouse. Perhaps in a way this is our fundamental duty as human beings.


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Tampa by Alissa Nutting
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The New High School Confidential*

I initially was unable to grasp the point of Tampa. It is explicitly pornographic, but pornography isn’t required for getting across the message that there are narcissistic female sexual predators. Recent news stories confirm that already. The book goes into some detail about the psychology of teenage boys and their difficulties in dealing with testosterone. But I doubt that anyone, male or female, will be unfamiliar with the effects of this infamous hormone.

There seem to be two moral lessons suggested by Ms. Nutting, that it is easier for female pedophiles to escape appropriate justice than their male colleagues; and that pedophiles will continue to reoffend regardless of the consequences. But these lessons are incidental to her story-line and, in any case, reasonably well known. Only after closing the book did it strike me: of course, this isn’t really a novel at all but a ready-made movie script. Move over 50 Shades of Grey. There’s a new tabu-breaker in town, soon in a theatre near you.

* A note on the title of my comments: High School Confidential is a film of my youth. Released in 1958, it portrayed teenage drug use, seduction, illicit sex, and generally bad behaviour. It was condemned by the Catholic Church and there were informal age restrictions in place. But aged 11 I bluffed my way in (movies cost 25 cents at the time for kids, I paid half a buck!). It’s a terrible film although Jerry Lee Lewis’s eponymous tune was a hit. In any case, when the film of Tampa gets produced (and it will), I suspect there will be the same reaction to it by the ‘moral authorities’ which will only encourage more children to do what I did.

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The Thin Red Line by James Jones
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Modern State in Action

The Thin Red Line continues the futile tradition of telling the truth about warfare. Steven Crane and Norman Mailer are James Jones’s American predecessors but the genre is universal. The truth is that war is tedious, sordid, and soul-destroying, as well as harmful to life. There are no winners, only broken survivors who share an experience of embarrassment masquerading as camaraderie. No one recovers.

The most remarkable feature of war-memoirs by common foot soldiers is their detailed similarity. Reading them without knowing the era in which they were written, each could be attributed to to any of the numerous wars of the 20th century and into the 21st. The descriptions of military life and combat are more or less the same and certainly consistent, from the World Wars to the subsequent conflicts in East Asia and then in the Middle East. Adjusting for weaponry and participants, the numerous 19th century conflicts from the Napoleonic to the American Civil Wars fit the same existential patterns. The repetition seems inevitable:

“One of the hazards of professional soldiering was that every twenty years, regular as clockwork, that portion of the human race to which you belonged, whatever its politics or ideal about humanity, was going to get itself involved in a war, and you might have to fight in it.”

It is obvious that the private soldier physically suffers. What is less obvious is that this suffering is intentional and has less to do with military necessity or incompetence than military discipline. Foot-soldiers are positively instructed in the art of being cattle. This means bearing the misery of living in rain, mud, and extreme temperatures often without adequate food or water, with nothing but the occasional impotent bellow in response. To survive that misery soldiers establish their own hierarchy within the official one. This informal structure is enforced by subtle but persuasive violence when required and demands the adoption of an appropriate neurotic persona:

“… everybody lived by a selected fiction. Nobody was really what he pretended to be. It was as if everybody made up a fiction story about himself, and then he just pretended to everybody that that was what he was.”

Such fiction allows them to line up placidly in an orderly fashion for feeding, shelter, and transport to whatever abattoir has been chosen by their superiors.

If anything, however, the common soldier’s mental and spiritual anguish is even more intense, because more relentless than his physical suffering. He lives in a state of fear. And there as many kinds of fear for an infantryman as there are kinds of snow for an Inuit. Fear of the enemy and the randomness of receiving a fatal projectile of one sort or another is obvious. But this fear is acute, and although intense, relatively infrequent and transient. Chronic fears of one’s superiors, and the opinions of one’s fellows, one’s reputation among the folks at home, and of the consequences of non-compliance fill in the gaps between ‘contacts’:

“When he analyzed it, as he tried to do now, he could find only one reason why he was here, and that was because he would be ashamed for people to think he was a coward, embarrassed to be put to jail.”

Then, of course, there is the act of intentional killing. Aside from the occasional psychopath, to kill, even at a distance, is traumatic. One may be trained to do it but this training cannot erase a lifetime of prohibition. Guilt for the taking of life is not something that can be mitigated by the shibboleths of duty, survival, or necessity. It is probably undecidable whether killing or watching others being killed is the more traumatic event in a soldier’s career. To kill inevitably provokes the question ‘to what end?’ And guilt is implicit in the only honest answer possible:

“It had all been done, and was being done, for property. One nation wanted, felt it needed, probably did need, more property; and the only way to get it was to take it away from those other nations who had already laid claim to it. There just wasn’t any more unclaimed property on this planet, that was all. And that was all it was. He found it immensely amusing… Property, property, all for fucking property. ”

But there’s another kind of fear as well, a dread probably as disturbing as death itself: the fear of abandonment. Paradoxically this fear is generated by one’s established place in a collective. It is the collective and its components - the squad, the platoon, the company, the regiment, etc. - that have an identity. The individual’s attachment to that identity is the equivalent of being imprisoned. Choice is not possible. Even disobedience as a choice is not possible because this simply annuls the attachment and results in rejection by one’s family, friends and the rest of society, a living death in other words. The illusion of a beneficent society is revealed. The Leviathan shows itself to best effect in war:

“It was a horrifying vision: all of them doing the same identical thing, all of them powerless to stop it, all of them devoutly and proudly believing themselves to be free individuals. It expanded to include the scores of nations, the millions of men, doing the same on thousands of hilltops across the world. And it didn’t stop there. It went on. It was the concept—concept? the fact; the reality—of the modern State in action”

That the tradition of this kind of writing is futile is demonstrated by the fact that so few take it at all seriously. And even fewer of them seem to attain positions of authority in the Leviathan.

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The Pyramid by William Golding
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

All Clothed and Ashamed in Our Clothing

As I was reading The Pyramid, news was announced that someone had vandalised one of the Eric Gill carvings outside Broadcasting House in London. It had been well-known for several decades that Gill had sexually abused his daughters during the time he was living at the lay Dominican community in Sussex during the 1930’s. The thought that Gill had never been publicly condemned much less arrested for his crimes apparently incensed the vandal who wanted to spark some kind of public outrage.

For about ten years I taught and took care of the library for Blackfriars the Dominican-run Oxford College that happens to be the oldest (and youngest, but that’s another story) in the University. In the chapel of Blackfriars, the Stations of the Cross were also designed by Gill in his distinctive style. JRR Tolkien attended Mass there regularly and it is said that he got his inspiration for the Orcs in his Lord of the Rings from Gill’s portrayal of Pontius Pilate as a rather frightening bestial half-man.

Although a religious institution, and Catholic at that, Blackfriars resembles Golding’s village of Stilbourne (ah, the Goldingian sarcasm!) in its essential character. At whatever point in its history one chooses to investigate it it is just ‘there.’ Individual people and buildings may come and go but the continuity of the place is remarkable. It exists in a certain kind of timelessness (or perhaps deathlessness). And within it there prevails a formalised intimacy which means that everyone knows everyone else’s business but never discusses what that business is. The result is a sort of strained tolerance which is always on the edge of breaking down, but never quite does.

Part of this tolerance is the acceptance of eccentricity. I have never been among such a collection of diverse individuals - friars, teachers, and students - than at Blackfriars. As in Stilbourne, eccentricity reigns. From the oddness of professional interests to the sometimes outrageous personal habits, it is simply accepted that people are indeed strange creatures and that therefore considerable latitude must be given and judgment rarely voiced except when behaviour is obviously destructive to the community. The threshold leading from quirkiness to evil is left vague lest it resemble some kind of law which might have to be formally enforced, thereby causing communal disruption by outsiders.

As in village life there is also a strict hierarchy. The Dominican Order may be one of the first truly democratic institutions but it also has a very well defined power-structure which can react decisively to threat by expulsion of errant members. As in Stilbourne, everyone knows their place. The only real sin is undue pride, that is acting above one’s station. Everyone has their place and although the hierarchy of power is rarely discussed, its boundaries are known and respected by everyone without comment.

This sort of sociology produces calm. One might say that nothing ever really happens, or perhaps that when something does happen, it happens quickly and subsequently is not talked about. So if a novice leaves, for example, or a friar falls for an attractive English professor, the event causes a stir for a day or two but is communally forgotten. Eventually it will be assimilated into a ‘remember when’ kind of topic of discussion at the dinner table perhaps. It will have lost all poignancy, emotion, or import and become just a matter of innocuous history.

In Golding’s Stilbourne, the ability to contain some fairly horrible things like child abuse, misogyny, grinding poverty, incest, pedophilia, and rape as ‘merely the way things are’ is a consequence of the same mores of tolerance and peaceful co-existence. Anything is acceptable as long as the reputation of the community - to itself, not necessarily outsiders - is maintained. Often this requires active pretence that one likes or admires others when the truth is that others are very unlikeable and even despicable. This is, it seems to me, a functional psychosis. It allows people to live together in apparent harmony, but at some cost. As Golding’s protagonist says of Stilbourne, “We were our own tragedy and did not know we needed catharsis.”

I wonder what Blackfriars’ response to the growing anti-Gill movement will be. It is not dissimilar, although on a different scale, to the anti-Rhodes agitation that has swept through the University during the last year. Like the Rhodes statue at Oriel College and the Institute bearing the Rhodes name, the Gill Stations are part of the fabric of the place. They can’t be denied or re-formulated. They are either there as a persistent reminder of past events and associations, or they are not. And their presence may just prove sufficient to break up and through Blackfriars’ cosy village life. There is real danger of exposure to those outside the village - “All clothed but ashamed in our clothing.” We shall see.

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The Mathematical Experience by Philip J. Davis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Coming to Conclusions

The Mathematical Experience is just about as close to a phenomenology of mathematics as we’re ever likely to have. It is not about theories or principles, or arcane arguments and proofs but about what the authors do, and what others have recounted before them did. It is not even an explanation since many of the ‘greats’ and great events in mathematics are themselves unexplainable. The contents may constitute a kind of philosophy but if so it is a philosophy of educated tolerance and respect rather than normative or dogmatic.

For me the real value of the book is its insights into what ‘mathematical method’ (and by extension all of scientific method) is about. There are many who insist that method is some attribute of rational thought which produces objective, robust, and incontrovertible facts about the world. That this is what any science does is at least questionable. But that these results are the consequence of following some fixed procedure is categorically wrong. There is no such thing as scientific method. Or more precisely, the criteria of what constitutes good science change, sometimes slowly sometimes almost overnight. Method is something learned right along with the results produced by method. Method cannot be distinguished from a more general culture:

“What was in Archimedes' head was different from what was in Newton's head and this, in turn, differed from what was in Gauss's head. It is not just a matter of ‘more,’ that Gauss knew more mathematics than Newton who, in turn, knew more than Archimedes. It is also a matter of ‘different.’ The current state of knowledge is woven into a network of different motivations and aspirations, different interpretations and potentialities.”

Yes, for the edification of all the fundamentalists in the world (and there are many more of these than the religious sort) scientific knowledge is relative. Even in mathematics, the queen of the sciences, truth is a variable feast. You may think that the internal angles of a triangle have always summed to 180 degrees no matter where you are in the universe. But of course such a conclusion is warranted only is a universe with certain defined characteristics. It turns out that the universe that Euclid described isn’t definitive at all as demonstrated by the Bernard Riemann* and other 19th century mathematicians who simply dropped Euclid’s presumption that parallel lines never intersect. Using different presumptions triangles can have more than 180 degrees internally.

With this in mind, it’s important to note that Euclid’s geometry is not a less accurate or less general description of the world than Riemann’s. Neither geometry is a description of anything other than itself. And each is an entirely different and incompatible world. The fact that one may be transformed into the other does not mitigate their differences. Just that as in physics, Newton’s theory of gravitational forces is not an approximation of Einstein’s space-time, so the ‘principles’ of different geometries are not ‘generalisations’ but very different mathematical life forms with the equivalent of distinct atomic structures. They are relative because they start with different theoretical premises. They are relative by definition. Only when they are used practically does a criterion emerge to judge one against the other.

That criterion is really what is meant by scientific method. When one is conducting research, when results are reviewed with one’s colleagues, when a paper is being prepared for submission to a journal, and when the referees decide it is or is not worthy of publication, the criterion of what constitutes good science prevails. If anything it is this process which has the historic right to be called scientific method. It includes the acculturation of individuals into an instinctive mode of thought which varies by discipline. It also establishes a sort of intellectual hierarchy in which senior members have the final say about the work of more junior members. As in any other such hierarchy, it’s control over recognition, advancement and professional status is almost absolute.

But here’s the paradox: no one knows what that criterion is. Or rather more precisely, there is no agreement among practitioners about what the criterion should be. As the authors note about their own work: “We find that our judgment of what is valuable in mathematics is based on our notion of the nature and purpose of mathematics itself.” And there are widely different views about both the philosophy and the pragmatic usefulness of mathematical thought. So mathematicians, like all scientists, adopt a live and let live attitude. The consequence is that the criteria of what constitutes good mathematics is left purposely vague.

Even the criterion of what constitutes mathematics tout court is indeterminate except as what is produced by those who are accepted as part of the mathematics profession. “The definition of mathematics changes. Each generation and each thoughtful mathematician within a generation formulates a definition according to his lights,” the authors say. This too is part of scientific method, the continuous reconsideration of what the term ‘science,’ that is to say, ‘reason’ actually means. Thus, “In the final analysis, there can be no formalization of what is right and how we know it right, what is accepted, and what the mechanism for acceptance is.”

What must be called the essential ‘tolerance’ of science (despite its hierarchical structure) is captured well in the Preface: “Mathematics, like theology and all free creations of the Mind, obeys the inexorable laws of the imaginary.“ Reason, mathematical or otherwise, guarantees nothing. At best Reason is a continuing conversation among a changing group of people. The conversation is always flawed but there is hope in its continuation:

“There is work, then, which is wrong, is acknowledged to be wrong and which, at some later date may be set to rights. There is work which is dismissed without examination. There is work which is so obscure that it is difficult to and is perforce ignored. Some of it may emerge later. There is work which may be of great importance such as Cantor's set theory-which is heterodox, and as a result, is ignored or boycotted. There is also work, perhaps the bulk of the mathematical output, which is admittedly correct, but which in the long run is ignored, for lack of or because the main streams of mathematics did not choose to pass that way.”

The American mathematician, C.S. Peirce is cited by the authors as defining "mathematics as the science of making necessary conclusions.“ this seems to me an apt summary of the book, keeping in mind that Peirce’s understanding of necessity was always relative to some changing end or purpose.


* Reimann also provided the mathematical foundation for the integral calculus developed by Leibniz and Newton, which had had no proof of its validity since the 17th century except its usefulness. So much for mathematical rigour. On a related topic, remember the very first thing you learned in Geometry, that the circumference of a circle is equal to its diameter multiplied by π? A cast iron Mathematical Truth, right? But only in Euclid’s world. No one in this world has ever, nor could ever, verify this truth empirically. Π is a transcendental number whose mathematical existence once again was only proven in the 19th century (by Joseph Liouville) although it had been in use for over two millennia. Nevertheless, π does not exist in our world at all. By definition, no measurement of π will ever be entirely accurate. No matter what level of precision we can achieve, there are an infinite number of additional levels that will foil our attempts to know what it really is. Something like God perhaps?.

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Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class by Catherine Liu
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Calling Time on Tolerance

Catherine Liu wants to start a class war. “Class war over distribution of resources is the critical battle of our times,” she announces boldly from her position of tenured security in the University of California. It a change in party politics or a push for voter registration. O, a revolution. And she means what she says, including the rejection of the fundamental precept of liberal democracy, tolerance. Tolerance can no longer be tolerated: “Tolerance for them [traditional Leftists] is the highest secular virtue—but tolerance has almost no political or economic meaning.”

It’s not entirely clear who would be on the opposing sides but in general it appears that the less well off are to be mobilised against the more well off. Her contribution to the war effort is to document the moral smugness of the current liberal ‘haves’ who have lost what she thinks is their historical role as advocates for the ‘have nots.’ More specifically, as a start she wants the supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to bury the hatchet and get serious about taking power and returning America to its socialist destiny. Who nominated Liu to articulate the grievances of the deprived classes is not disclosed. Her presumption is,… well how can one express it, … elitist and condescending in exactly the same manner as those she accuses of false liberality.

This sort of Marxist revivalism is quaint, reminiscent of the hard-liners of the 20’s and 30’s, especially since it is addressed not to those who have been the losers in the racket of democratic capitalism over the last 50 years or so but to the winners, those

“Liberal members of the credentialed classes [who] love to use the word empower when they talk about ‘people,’ but the use of that verb objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power without them.” Which of course they don’t.

In other words, she’s after the conversion of the gatekeepers to power - ”culture industry creatives, journalists, software engineers, scientists, professors, doctors, bankers, and lawyers, who play important managerial roles in large organizations” - to get on her bandwagon. Right, that’ll work. Just give ‘em a bit of some old fashioned woke rhetoric and they’re sure to sign up.

Presumably she also wants her colleagues in film and media studies (!) to get on board with the revolutionary programme. Indeed, perhaps they are the only ones who can understand its arcane rational and vocabulary:

“The poststructuralist cultural studies theorists despised the oppressive post–World War II liberal consensus as much as the most visionary of neoliberal economists like Alan Greenspan and his overlord, Ayn Rand… If you do not believe me, do a search for liberal consensus in digitized copies of cultural studies books of the 1990s and you will see it appears only to be dismissed with the patriarchy and heteronormativity and a vaguely Foucauldian idea of “domination.”

Forget translating this for the masses; your average corporate executive is likely to respond with a blank stare.

But, thankfully, Ms Liu is not unsympathetic to the challenges her programme will pose to many people. “To renounce one’s narcissistic fetishization of intelligence or refinement is not a simple act,” she says. In this she is absolutely correct as even Mao learned in his Cultural Revolution, which I’m sure Ms Liu looks upon nostalgically. Of course her own narcissistic fetishisation of revolutionary Marxism must be an exception to the rule. Her sagacity should not be questioned but tolerated.

Virtue Hoarders is a book published by a mainstream academic press. This is enlightening in a particular way. I now understand at least some of the vehement anti-intellectual stands taken by many Right wing politicians and pundits in the United States. If this tired Marxist rhetoric is typical of many academics, one has to fear for the mind of the country from the Left as well as from the Right.

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The Sun Collective by Charles Baxter
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

My Pillow Guy Dreams

If you’ve won a first-prize trip to Minneapolis (second-prize was, of course, two weeks in Minneapolis, replacing Philadelphia entirely as a holiday destination), this may be the book for you. Yes, folks, that land of arctic winters, mosquito-infested lakes and tick-strewn meadows has much more to offer within the city limits of that gem of the mid-West.

There’s the Martin Olav Sabo Pedestrian Bridge over Hiawatha Avenue (if it hasn’t popped it’s moorings again, but you can’t beat that for excitement); the Mall of America (8 million square feet of tribute to American consumerism; don’t be confused by the designation as ‘Utopia’ in the book which is merely aspirational); and the Minnehaha Falls (a sort of state-run theme park which has absolutely nothing to do with the Longfellow poem). These and many more tourist highlights form the heart of The Sun Collective.

But enough praise. The prose is ponderous. Plot is elusive. The pace is tedious. The magical realism is Disney not Isabel Allende. And the characters (who come and go largely without explanation) are all but invisible behind a mist of backstory and political commentary. Perhaps this is the form that Minnesotan literary satire takes given that the My Pillow Guy and Jesse Ventura set a certain level of expectation. If so, it’s a genre I can do without.

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The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Political Aesthetics

Michio Kaku wants to convince those of us who are not physicists that the cosmos is composed of very small vibrations. He starts with establishing the ancient pedigree of this idea and ends up explaining why these vibrations are the basis for not just Einstein’s famous E = mc squared, but also a unified theory of the four ‘forces’ of gravity, the strong and weak atomic forces, and electromagnetism. For Kaku, String Theory rules; he thinks it might even replace theology!

What I find most interesting about Kaku’s exposition is not the strength of the evidence he presents but the criterion he uses for evaluating this evidence, namely symmetry. In more technical terms, if an equation is “invariant under transformation,” Kaku considers it “beautiful,” and therefore scientifically superior to equations that are less symmetrical. In fact it is clear that what he considers evidential at all is determined by this criterion. Citing the early 20th century mathematician, G.H Hardy as a precedent, Kaku claims symmetry as the sole standard of proof in the arcane world of particle physics.

But even if one accepts Hardy’s mathematical aesthetic as definitive and applicable to all of science, Hardy did not define beauty in mathematics in terms of symmetry but in in terms of patterns of any sort. This is the passage Kaku quotes from Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology:

“A mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”

There are of course any number of patterns which are asymmetrical. In geometry, scalene triangles, parallelograms, and trapezia among many others have no symmetry. In nature, trees, spirals, meanders, waves, foams, tessellations, cracks, and stripes are patterns but not symmetrical. The sponge and coral colonies are asymmetrical animals as are all gastropods such as snails and slugs. So to claim symmetry as the only form of beauty and therefore the criterion of good science seems more than prejudicial for the rest of Kaku’s argument. It is also a gross abuse of Hardy.

Kaku’s subtly self-serving distortions, in fact, appear as a consistent pattern throughout the book. Here are several examples:

“Ultimately, all the wonders of modern technology owe their origin to the scientists who gradually discovered the fundamental forces of the world.”

Except of course for the very unscientific steam engineers of the 18th century and the almost anti-scientific Edison and Bell for example. Then there is Kaku’s admiration for the Ancient Greek philosophers. Kaku apparently believes that inquiry about the natural world ended with the death of Aristotle:

“Darkness spread over the Western world, and scientific inquiry was largely replaced by belief in superstition, magic, and sorcery.”

Thus ignoring both the Greek superstitions and the rather impressive Roman projects in civil engineering as well as scientific astronomy, mathematics, and geography. Kaku then goes on to describe an idealised scientific enterprise free of nasty unscientific concerns:

“Isaac Newton is perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. In a world obsessed with witchcraft and sorcery, he dared to write down the universal laws of the heavens and apply a new mathematics he invented to study forces, called the calculus.”

Kaku’s hagiography of Newton is not only trivial but misleading. Newton was also a leading alchemist of his day, and spent more time investigating magic, prophecy and the secrets of the occult than he did on mathematical physics. Kaku goes on to subtly suggest that his choice of symmetry is really only ‘natural’:

“… that is why the Earth is spherical, rather than another shape: because gravity compressed the Earth uniformly.”

But the Earth is not spherical, it is an irregularly shaped ellipsoid whose shape changes continuously. And one final example of Kaku’s pattern of cutting to fit, his fatuous claim that

“… the existence of Newton’s gravitational forces was confirmed by subsequent observation.”

Subsequent observations did no such thing. Observers presumed there were forces and then showed they could be described in the way Newton had formulated. As we know now, gravitational forces simply don’t exist as Newton conceived them.

I know very little about the substance of String Theory or it’s relative merits over its rivals. But my mistrust of Kaku’s account grew as I encountered this more or less continuous stream of questionable claims in areas where I do have some knowledge. Based on prior probabilities therefore, I feel hesitant to accept his view as authoritative. Among other things, Kaku’s idolisation of symmetry looks suspiciously like the Ptolemaic idolisation of circular orbits. I find it difficult to ignore a lurking scientism in the background.

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Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science by Aubrey Clayton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Spotting Scientific Method on the Hoof

Will I make (or lose) any money betting heads on a coin flip 100 times? Probably not.

On the other hand, if I get a positive result from molecular genetic testing for FGD1 gene mutations, does this mean I probably have Aarskog syndrome? Almost certainly not.

The difference in these two situations is critical. In the first I already know the probabilities involved. Half the coin flips will be heads, the other half tails. In the second, I want to know the probability that I have the disease given that I tested positive for it.

My likely first reaction to the test results is ‘But how accurate is the test?’ Wrong question. Even if the test has a very high accuracy rate, the occurrence of Aarskog syndrome in the population - estimated at less than 1 in 25,000 - is so rare that it is far more likely, given no other information, that the test is wrong than I am a victim.

The overall incidence of the disease in this example is called a prior probability. Prior probability is like the knowledge that there are only two equally likely outcomes - heads or tails - in the first example. It forms the background to the practical situation. At some point in the past some researcher estimated this prior probability based on some previous guess about ever ‘more prior’ probabilities, about the incidence of the disease, perhaps through the number of published papers about it (there have been about 60 worldwide).

In other words, what we already know is extremely important in interpreting new information. The more unexpected, strange, or novel an event, the more evidence we need to take it seriously. This is a common-sensical idea but it has profound implications, one of which, according to Aubrey Clayton, is that “It is impossible to ‘measure’ a probability by experimentation.” And this is another way of saying that “There is no such thing as ‘objective’ probability.” And therefore that “‘Rejecting’ or ‘accepting’ a hypothesis is not the proper function of statistics and is, in fact, dangerously misleading and destructive.”

And yet ignoring what we already know is exactly what most researchers do, especially (but not only) in the social sciences. This mistake is not trivial. According to Clayton:

“These methods are not wrong in a minor way, in the sense that Newtonian physics is technically just a low-velocity, constant-gravitational approximation to the truth but still allows us successfully to build bridges and trains. They are simply and irredeemably wrong. They are logically bankrupt… [Since] the growth of statistical methods represents perhaps the greatest transformation in the practice of science since the Enlightenment. The suggestion that the fundamental logic underlying these methods is broken should be terrifying.”

Of course these claims will be controversial. I take Clayton as authoritative when he says that “No two authors, it seems, have ever completely agreed on the foundations of probability and statistics, often not even with themselves.” If so, this book is yet another example of the inevitable (and necessary) instability of what is casually referred to as ‘scientific method.’ If such a thing exists at all, it is demonstrated in this kind of critique of established procedures, a sort of intellectual self-immolation.

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The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down by Jonathan Gottschall
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The Essential Poison

Sugar-coating hemlock doesn’t reduce its toxicity but I’ll bet it would be a real boost to sales. Perhaps this is the theory behind Jonathan Gottschall’s book about language. He makes his concern explicit. “I think of storytelling as humanity’s ‘essential poison,’” he says. By describing the poison in terms of stories and claiming we can tell the difference between better and worse stories, Gottschall implies that certain species-death is avoidable if we read the instructions on the label. Socrates, I’m sure, would object to the pitch on moral as well as health grounds.

Oddly, Gottschall doesn’t think scientists and mathematicians tell stories. This is because he dissociates stories from language, so that he can later claim a sort of priority for science in checking prose stories. But the specialised languages of formulas and equations are as much stories as The Story Paradox itself, including all the messy conclusions of self-referentiality. It’s part of his programme to make the medicine go down easier I suppose.

Gottschall also would like us to think that stories only became problematic with the internet and social media. This is, of course, ridiculous as the history of religion and its varied myths, all of which he cites, demonstrates so obviously. In fact Gottschall has got the chronology wrong. Stories created the internet. Language is the fundamental technology. Gossip is the killer app that allowed the species Homo Sapiens to survive in a world of stronger, faster, and more quick-witted predators. Language creates the collective human mind which is the most predatory instrument on the planet, perhaps in the cosmos. As Gottschall notes correctly:

“Behind all the factors driving civilization’s greatest ills—political polarization, environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare, and hatred—you’ll always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story.’

Gottschall thinks we can escape what he calls the magic of stories by knowing that they’re stories. Such an escape however would require some sort of final story about stories, an ultimate story like say that of the Catholic Church in its doctrinal statements, or the Fundamentalist’s Bible or the much sought after Theory of Everything in Physics. But these ultimate stories are just more of the same, that is, hopeless attempts to evade the hideous necessity of language through yet more language. Nevertheless Gottschall wants us to have hope, to think that he and we can discern better from worse stories. According to him, the solution is at hand, “We need more reason in the world.”

Where is such reason to be found? Gottschall thinks he knows: “Above all, we need to double down on our commitment to science because science is for standing up to stories.” Has he never heard of epistemology, that centuries-old failed attempt to identify better and worse scientific stories? In other words, his buck-passing solution to what he calls “a pandemic of conspiratorial thinking” has no credibility whatsoever. There is no vaccine (or anti-venom) that can cure us. His book is just another catalogue of useless, largely pornographic, anecdotes about QAnon, Trump, Hitler, Stalin and the various other nutcases who have committed atrocities.

I take the publication of this book as helpful in only one respect - evidence that the the quality editorial staff at Basic Books has deteriorated markedly over recent years.

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Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John N. Gray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Do-Gooders With Guns

Faith destroys politics. Because faith makes some desires non-negotiable, it leads inevitably to violence. It matters not that the faith is religious or ideological. Gray’s thesis is consistent with that of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) and of the American social critic Chris Lehman (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Christianity introduced the idea of religious faith from whence it infected the world’s consciousness. Faith has since become a synonym for religion throughout the world.

Gray traces the intellectual/political history of Christian faith, particularly its apocalyptic and eschatological doctrines, from its early stages, into the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and finally the philosophical and ideological movements of the 20th century and the policies of national leaders. His claim is that as the Christian religion has declined the principles of its faith have been absorbed into secular ideologies. Various forms of political idealism - communism, fascism, democratic capitalism - are restatements of the myths of apocalyptic reform and salvation using modern vocabulary - war on terror, regime change, WMD, democratic values, etc.

Both Liberals and Conservatives, professed atheists and believers, revolutionaries and counter-terrorists share virtually the same metaphysical presumptions about human destiny - free will, the redemptive potential of humanity, the inevitability of final justice, etc. These are Christian fantasies, useful perhaps for providing personal meaning in the world, disastrous as the basis for policy-making and political action. They provoke a distorted appreciation of reality and suggest responses which almost always result in failure, disappointment, and considerably greater misery for all concerned.

I am in sympathy with Gray’s analysis. But I am also disappointed that he did not extend it from the political into the technological and sociological. Today, theologically generated idealism - in business, government, academics, and of course ecclesiastical theology - is taken for granted as the appropriate mode of thinking. We have faith in Science, Markets, Freedom, Technology, Elected Governments as well as often some Higher Power to prevent the worst consequences of environmental catastrophe, mass immigration, nuclear derangement, wealth imbalances, racism, and pandemics.

Meanwhile, society is being destroyed by single-issue aggrievements that have become matters of faith. Utopian idealism goes under the guise of ‘vision’ and ‘strategic thinking’ in business. Academia promotes idealistic faith like no other institution - in neo-liberal economics, phoney professional altruism, and redemption by algorithm. Do-gooders with guns line up against each other at every opportunity to demonstrate the intensity of their commitments - either to a tradition or to the annihilation of a tradition. That the past is not past at all but constitutes the excess psychic baggage we carry around that trips us up constantly suggests the need for some urgent cultural therapy. I presume this is the point of Gray’s analysis, to inject a smidgen of humility into a global culture of human perfectibility.

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