tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82203541999349263322024-03-28T18:19:57.278-07:00The BlackOxford MindA collection of reviews for all types of booksThe Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.comBlogger1056125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-22154587870843974682023-11-30T07:29:00.000-08:002023-12-01T06:41:14.407-08:00<p> </p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63946909-the-rigor-of-angels" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1684816550l/63946909._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63946909-the-rigor-of-angels">The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/260616.William_Egginton">William Egginton</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6013719632">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Lest We Forget</b><br /><br />What does it mean to speak or write or think precisely or truthfully? Knowing a lot of words perhaps? But words on their own don’t help very much. Crossword puzzle addicts know well that any word has multiple, sometimes dozens, of meanings (‘run’ will have 645 in the next OED) , sometimes nouns (‘use’), sometimes verbs (‘use’), sometimes homographs (‘quail’) and homophones (‘to, two, too’), sometimes contradictory (‘oversight’). <br /><br />In other words, words have no significance at all until they get absorbed into a context of other words. It is only through their connections with other words, that is the totality of language, that they mean anything at all. The linguistic ‘atoms’ of words (with their quark-like letters and punctuation marks acting as gluons) don’t really exist until they are used. It is only then that words become definite, and even then only in terms of other words. This is the quantum physics of everyday life.<br /><br />One of the great traditions of Western religion is that of ‘negative theology’. This is the recognition that anything that is said about the divine is necessarily false. According to this tradition, to believe that it is possible to capture any aspect of God in language is not only incoherent it is blasphemous since it would turn God into an object, a mere word which is part of language created by human beings and which can only use other words to describe, analyse, and specify relations with it. <br /><br />The greatest proponent of negative theology in the 20th century was the Swiss conservative theologian, Karl Barth. Barth thereby articulated a fundamental fault line in Christian thought, namely that there are irrecoverable flaws inherent in all human knowledge of the divine which cannot be overcome. As he put it succinctly, the word of Man is not the Word of God. And for Barth, the word of Man included the gospels and other sacred texts (see: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2629364008">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a>)<br /><br />Science, Literature, and Philosophy have their own Barths, all with similar messages. William Eggington picks three: the quantum scientist, Werner Heisenberg; the philosopher, Immanuel Kant; and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The connection between these and Barth is apparent when it is remembered that traditionally God has been defined as Ultimate Reality. And the consistent message from all four is that the essence of this reality is not just elusive, it is unknowable. <br /><br />That is to say, nothing about our knowledge of the world is stable much less true or correct. What Borges would call <i>“eternal crevices”, </i>Immanuel Kant <i>“antinomies”, </i>and scientists like Heisenberg <i>“paradoxes”, </i>and Barth<i> “words” tout court, </i>are crucial to an understanding of what it is to be human, namely the maintenance of a distance from reality in order to survive it.* <br /><br />This distance is achieved through the use of language. And to the extent that language is necessary for reflective thought and therefore consciousness, it is consciousness itself which insulates us from reality for our own good (see: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3173722787">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a>). That is to say, through consciousness we lose one world of possibly limitless materiality for an at least as infinite a world of words, their permutations, their ambiguities, and their utter alienation from that which is not words.<br /><br />So reality can be found neither in religious texts and dogma nor the equations of physics. This principle has been perennially established and perennially forgotten. The tendency persists to put faith, trust, or commitment in language as if it could somehow contain the infinite depths it cannot express. This is called either fundamentalism or scientism. The terms are functionally equivalent and reflect a baseless faith in language rather than anything beyond language like God or reality..<br /><br />The essential human virtue implied by folk like Barth, Heisenberg, Borges, and Kant is, interestingly, neither among the central virtues of religious teaching, nor is it mentioned in courses on mathematics, scientific method, or literary writing. This virtue is Intellectual Humility. Humility might be summed up as devotion to a single (linguistic) maxim: <i>Whatever we think we know about God or reality, it is not that. </i><br /><br />The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, was an implicit devotee of negative theology and professional humility when he noted <i> “… what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence” </i> We can only speak with and therefore about words. Heisenberg was somewhat more expansive: <i>“The ability of human beings to understand is without limit. About the ultimate things we cannot speak.” </i>These are humbling remarks. And I think they reflect Eggington’s central thesis, evident in his use of the Borges quotation in his title: <i>“There is indeed rigor in the world, but humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels.”</i><br /><br /> * This is explicit in the Jewish Kabbalistic concept of <i>tzimtzum </i>(withdrawal) in which <i>Ein Sof, </i>the originary substance of God, is made self-limiting because creation could not live within it.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-67627602450826106752023-11-24T01:45:00.000-08:002023-11-24T01:45:01.816-08:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5152966-sense-without-matter" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Sense without matter;: Or, Direct perception," src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1700778000l/5152966._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5152966-sense-without-matter">Sense without matter;: Or, Direct perception,</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1084171.A_A_Luce">A.A. Luce</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5998711143">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>A Hidden Gem</b><br /><br />This is a reinterpretation of the “immaterialist” philosophy of the 18th century Irish bishop, George Berkeley. Although published in 1954, the book has the style and vocabulary of 50 years earlier when theologians (of whom, Luce) and philosophers still had conversations in print. So the almost complete break between the two disciplines that occurred after the First World War has marooned Luce’s thought in a kind of intellectual Never Never Land, missing both the ‘linguistic turn’ in mid-century philosophy as well as the growing focus on consciousness as a central philosophical issue. <br /><br />It is in this more recent discussion of consciousness that Luce’s ideas, and Berkeley’s, take on renewed relevance. Thinkers like Ian McGilchrist, Daniel Dennett, Bernardo Kastrop, and Donald Hoffmann point to consciousness as the progenitor of reality. Although they would use different terms, these philosophers and scientists would likely agree with Luce’s claim that<i> “[T]here is no matter other than the sensible, and that by a frank, fearless, but accurate, acceptance of that position, speculative problems are simplified, mental efficiency is enhanced, and a long step towards truth is taken.”</i><br /><br />It is easy to parody this old-fashioned claim of strict idealism. It is much more difficult to dismiss either the latest findings in neuro-science and evolutionary biology which confirm it. To say, as Luce does that <i>“The geometry of the real world and the physics of the real world must clearly be the geometry and physics of the real world perceived.”</i> is only a small step from the observation that the observed neural complexity of the brain is what consciousness itself creates. <br /><br />Having no apparent familiarity with the work of Heidegger, Luce seems to channel his thought when he says, <i>“For more positive and more definite teaching on matter we must leave the theory of being, and come to the theory of knowing”</i> He is referring here not to the limited (and unsuccessful) epistemology of Kant that involves matching words to things, but a radical epistemology that starts with the primacy of consciousness as the source of even the Kantian categories of space and time.<br /><br />So despite his relative obscurity in both philosophical and theological circles, Luce is an important intellectual link in the historical chain of both
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-59040548555629355692023-11-20T07:25:00.000-08:002023-11-20T07:25:28.563-08:00<p> </p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15841837-confessions-of-a-sociopath" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1487543654l/15841837._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15841837-confessions-of-a-sociopath">Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6475114.M_E_Thomas">M.E. Thomas</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5989908269">1 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Alien Minds</b><br /><br />This book is not so much a first-person description as it is a performative demonstration of the mind of a sociopath. Or it is a send-up of the gullibility of the softer parts of the public and political establishment. Either way it is an example of sociopathy hiding in plain sight, trying to manipulate its way to even greater dominance by feigning sincerity.<br /><br />Sociopaths don’t have to equipment to recognise the need for fundamental ethical standards. The rest of us don’t have the equipment to recognise sociopaths. One to four of every hundred of us is likely sociopathic. The proportion in prisons is ten times this and account for perhaps half the crimes committed. And recidivism is two or three times higher among sociopaths. It’s probably incalculable though how much harm the ‘loose’ ones produce in society, particularly since their traits of ruthless pursuit of corporate goals and personal achievement are often highly valued in society. This creates an ethical dilemma. <br /><br />We presume a common understanding of the basic rules of society. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ is an almost universal ethical maxim across cultures and religions. Walking in a crowded street, we make way instinctively for the less-abled. Paying cash for a small purchase, we expect to receive the correct change without counting it. Agreements in daily life are made with no thought of legal action in case of default. <br /><br />But while sociopaths may learn these norms by rote as it were, they never become instinctive. Adherence depends upon an entirely separate analysis of cost-benefit. Personal interests, standing, reputation, rather than courtesy, civility, or fellow-feeling are the deciding factors for the sociopath’s behaviour. Sociopaths lie without flinching, disregard any obligation on a whim, and cruelly manipulates others for personal enjoyment. When justified by his personal calculus of power, the sociopath will without remorse, guilt or regret, inflict harm, suffering or inconvenience on the rest of us. Functionally they are <i>“replicants, organic androids,“ </i>in the dialogue Thomas quotes from the film Blade Runner. In short, they are predators.<br /><br />Therein lies the dilemma. How can sociopaths be prevented, or at least discouraged, from inflicting the great harm they are capable of. <i>“… there is no known effective treatment for sociopaths…“, </i>admits Thomas. Presuming them innocent allows them to commit a sort of societal arbitrage. The kindness they receive is only of transactional benefit, or ‘fuel’ to them. They give only when they get more in return, and even then only if the return exceeds a minimal threshold.<br /><br />On the other hand. identifying sociopaths and constraining them from their typical behaviours is problematic - certainly from a criminal point of view, but more fundamentally from the perspective of moral reasonableness. They look like the rest of us - until they don’t. They are acutely aware of any deterrent that might be established, and are capable of cleverly evading the transgression of the letter of the law. And there are no reliable tests for diagnosing the condition even if the general population could be convinced or coerced into taking tests.<br /><br />In any case isn’t sociopathy a form of mental incapacitation, like autism let’s say, that demands tolerance and social acceptance of neurodiversity not criminalisation? The sociopath is not responsible for the genetic inheritance which is the likely root of his condition. And almost everyone exhibits some sociopathic traits from time to time. Sociopathy can only be considered as a spectrum. At what point on the spectrum should the person not the behaviour be condemned? Perhaps sociopathy is simply the modern term for original sin. In the end, Thomas thinks it boils down to the question of <i>“What do you do to people you simply don’t like?”</i><br /><br />Ms Thomas has no real suggestions for addressing this issue. Everything in her book, bar the not very interesting details of her family background and private life, is already known and documented. And she knows it’s known. So why the book? Sociopaths don’t suffer oppression or discriminatory social practices. On the contrary, they have the rest of society at their mercy. Sociopaths don’t suffer mental torment because of their condition. They have no ill-feelings toward themselves and no regrets about who they are or what they’ve done to others. Sociopaths may be the most privileged and well-adjusted people on the planet.<br /><br />In addition to her book, Ms Thomas has started a website and a discussion blog for the similarly-afflicted. She thinks that more research (and therefore government funding) is necessary to better understand the condition. And by simply writing the book, she clearly wants the rest of us to sympathise with the plight of the many, many secretly deformed individuals who exist among us. In short, Thomas wants us to see that sociopaths are victims, and as such deserve dignity, attention, and, who knows, compensation for their disability. This is a political tract masquerading as a memoir. And in today’s political environment I’m sure there are many who will respond to her call. <br /><br />I will not be contributing to the cause
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-64089836225763042302023-11-16T14:47:00.000-08:002023-11-16T14:47:18.938-08:00<p> </p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/922272.Hiding_in_the_Mirror" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309285691l/922272._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/922272.Hiding_in_the_Mirror">Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1410.Lawrence_M_Krauss">Lawrence M. Krauss</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5982050532">2 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Scientific Validity Is Not Truth or Reality</b><br /><br />Within this brief summary of physics over the past two centuries Krauss has a great deal to say about truth and reality and the way the first is established by the second in science. He puts it this way: <i>“[T]he central question becomes: To what extent do our imaginings reflect our own predilections, and to what extent might they actually mirror reality?” </i>This metaphor of a ‘mirror’ is one that has been casually used for centuries. It has also be roundly critiqued as misleading and problematic for the concepts of both truth and reality (See: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31947.Philosophy_and_the_Mirror_of_Nature?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=N8qNDUvaHd&rank=1">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...</a>). Krauss’s book and particularly his criteria for determining the truth of recent scientific theories demonstrates the issues which he seems unaware of.<br /><br />As background to my interpretation of the book, for example: the physical theory of gravity formulated by Isaac Newton allowed us to successfully land human beings on the Moon and bring them back safely. Does this mean that Newton’s theory is true? No, it is not. More recent theories in physics claim that gravity is not a force as Newton conceived it but rather a distortion in space-time caused by massive objects. Gravity as such is therefore not even a ‘thing’. <br /><br />But we certainly experience something which we call gravity. Does this mean that we simply don’t have the natural sensory apparatus necessary to detect its real character. Also no, because we have been able to enhance our sensory faculties through technology. This allows us to confirm and precisely measure the distortions in space-time correlated with our experience of gravity.<br /><br />With our newer relativistic theories we have been able to predict and confirm the movements of large galactic structures. Does this mean that we have been able to ‘approach reality’ more closely? No. Newtonian physics is not a ‘special case’ of relativity physics even if it gives the same suggestions for getting people to the moon. The two are contrary views of reality, with very different ontological concepts. The entire history of physics is one of successive ‘breakthroughs’ the effects of which are to rubbish everything previously thought to be taken for granted about reality. As some physicists put it therefore: Even space-time is ultimately doomed. It doesn’t exist except as a very useful fiction.<br /><br />I am not primarily suggesting this has anything essential to do with our natural perceptual limits (although there is a good argument that this is the case). I am claiming that it is a consequence of ideas and concepts that are derived from reflection on this experience, not from experience itself. These ideas and concepts are literally imagined. Krauss points to imagination as the essentially human attribute: <i>“[I]magination almost defines what it means to be human.” </i>And he’s correct. But imagination requires language in order to formulate and communicate, even to communicate the concept of imagination. And there’s the rub.<br /><br />Krauss goes off the rails when he claims that through science, as a disciplined form of imagination, <i>“… we gain new<br />insights into our own standing in the universe.”</i> This we certainly do not do, unless it is to recognise that <i>“our standing” </i>is entirely uncertain. That is, we know nothing more about the reality of the universe, including our place in it, than we as a species have ever known before, which is precisely nothing. <br /><br />Surely we are able to do things we have never done before because of the knowledge we have accumulated and shared about ‘how the world works.’ But we can only use that phrase in the strictly pragmatic sense that our knowledge has permitted us to achieve a result. And part of that knowledge is that we have produced innumerable desirable results - like travel to the Moon - using knowledge which we have subsequently learned to be wrong. Our ideas and theoretical concepts may useful whether they are true or not and whether or not they conform with something called reality.<br /><br />Krauss feels that<i> “If we couldn’t imagine the world as it might be, it is possible that the world of our experience would become intolerable.”</i> This seems dangerously close to the religious belief that we need the concept of God to make the world bearable. In either case, the epistemological value of that sentiment is zero. It is a kind of whistling in the ontological dark. By ignoring our own incapacity to definitively match our scientific ideas and concepts, indeed any kind of language, with what is not-language, we repress the knowledge that we cannot control the universe, not even by naming it (See: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2803972241">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a> And <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3173722787">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a> And <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4515522244?type=review#rating_663013665">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a> ).<br /><br />Krauss makes frequent reference to religion as a sort of parallel inquiry into reality. But what he doesn’t seem to realise is that theologians have long recognised the basic principle that fundamental reality, that is, what they call God, is beyond any description, that no theory of God’s existence is even remotely correct. So unless scientists wish to call their findings some sort of divine revelation which is fixed in dogmatic formulae that can’t be challenged, they are forced to accept this basic principle. Reality is beyond language. No matter what we are able to accomplish through language, we get no closer to the world it purports to represent. <br /><br />In fact it seems as if the more we know, for example about quantum physics and general relativity, the less coherent our language about the world becomes. Reality is probably something beyond our experience given our perceptual limitations. But is certainly beyond our capability to express. Krauss’s suggestion that there are <i>“hidden realities” </i>to be discovered through science is therefore highly misleading. There may be many more theories of the world in our future, but none of these will correspond to a reality. Like God, whatever we think reality is, He/It is not that.<br /><br />Krauss is correct in one specific observation. Science, like art, discloses new ways of viewing the world. But to claim that these new ways are about reality or even an approximation of reality is unsustainable by the standards of science itself. What science creates may be useful, exciting, inspiring. But ultimately it is another form of poetry. Like the best of poetry, science is useful, exciting, or inspiring when it points to something beyond itself that cannot be described by science. Like the best of theology, science is most robust when it recognises that truth, like God, is a fictional ideal which motivates inquiry but can never be reached.<br /><br />Krauss’s potted history of scientific achievements is really a story about overcoming the prejudices and false presumptions developed largely by previous science. Science, although it is empirical, is never about experience; it is about coherence of the scientific, especially the mathematical, language du jour. It is through incoherence that science progresses. And there will always be such incoherence. <br /><br />This is one implication of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics, perhaps the most significant scientific finding of the 20th century. But this scientific finding, because it implies an infinity of future ‘horizons’ for inquiry, is, it seems to me, far from <i>“intolerable.”</i> It is as inspiring as the knowledge that there are infinite number of poems to be penned or paintings created. Krauss implicitly recognises this himself when he writes, <i>“ultimately the driving force behind all human inquiry is the satisfaction of the quest itself.”</i><br /><br />So Krauss’s unsupportable presumptions about reality and scientific validity lead him to curious conclusions. For example, he says <i>“It is also simply disingenuous to claim that there is any definitive evidence that any of the ideas associated with string theory yet bear a clear connection to reality,”</i> ‘Who cares?’ must be the only reasonable response. Newtonian gravity never had any connection with reality. Einsteinian space-time doesn’t either. Yet both were useful and, for their time, scientifically valid. In many ways string theory is the most coherent version of physical laws we have. <br /><br />Perhaps scientists and their boosters might benefit from a slightly wider reading list. Just sayin’.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-15041167019022590852023-11-15T06:36:00.000-08:002023-11-15T06:36:15.049-08:00<p> </p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91274427-what-you-are-looking-for-is-in-the-library" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="What You Are Looking For Is in the Library" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1683915876l/91274427._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91274427-what-you-are-looking-for-is-in-the-library">What You Are Looking For Is in the Library</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18144498.Michiko_Aoyama">Michiko Aoyama</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5978599092">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>The Zen of Everyday Life</b><br /><br />I think it’s easy to take this book as a YA self-help manual. It isn’t. One of its own characters sums it up accurately:<i> “[It’s] easy to read and simple enough for a schoolchild to follow, but in language that is not in the least childish. ”</i> There is a cumulative message that I think rightly can be called a philosophy, the central tenet of which is: <u>Strive to understand a bigger purpose through the life and its circumstances you experience, and help others to do the same.</u> Perhaps the modern, and slightly more precise and less sectarian version, of the perennial maxim of ‘Do unto others…’<br /><br />Ms Aoyama’s suggestion for executing this philosophy is unexpected but straightforward: Read. Her rationale for this is far more subtle than reading for the accumulation of knowledge or power. As Ms Komachi, the librarian and central character, points out about the personal revelation of one of her clients: <i>“You may say that it was the book, but it’s how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself. It’s not what you read but how: ”</i> The subject matter of the book, while not irrelevant in attracting the reader, is subservient to its power to promote practical meditation about one’s life. This may be through a single word, a phrase or by an idea not contained at all in the book but only inspired by it.<br /><br />This power, according to Aoyama, is most significant at a point in life in which it is most difficult to access it, namely during personal or professional crises. Change, disappointments, frustrations provoke responses which, if yielded to, lead to more of the same. But action not thought appears most cathartic - shout at the spouse, quit the job, store up resentments, etc. etc. Nonetheless the magic of the book and its distractive, insinuating effect has its maximal potential at this moment to create new possibilities for action.<br /><br />Aoyama is very concerned about finding new purpose through this kind of literary meditation (much in the manner of the American philosopher, Josiah Royce. See <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/693656203">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a>). But she also recognises something crucial that is not often said, namely that no purpose is stable. It changes because we learn about ourselves and others through the pursuit of purpose, and because the world itself changes around us. Hence Ms Komachi’s admonition: <i>“… you can start again halfway through. Even after your project begins to take shape, you can easily change direction along the way if you feel that you want to make something different after all.”</i><br /><br />In other words persistence, single-mindedness, stick-to-it-tiveness simply leads to the same issues from which one might have escaped. In fact it is the cause of the disappointment, frustration and unhappiness we experience. Obsessively pursuing goals, objectives, and narrow achievements can destroy us. As Ms Komachi gently advises one of her patrons:<i> “Never swerving from a path is not necessarily a virtue”</i> <br /><br />This may seem outrageous in a Japanese society in which the culture of the salary-man and corporate loyalty prevails. And it is probably equally outrageous in a Western society in which one’s worth is assessed in terms of personal ambition and monetary reward. Getting off the career train in either culture is certainly a courageous act. In any case, whatever we are as human beings is always conditioned by our circumstances and never fixed. This is what we all share - flux, uncertainty, and mutual dependence.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-26457952538788010862023-11-11T14:47:00.002-08:002023-11-11T14:47:53.734-08:00<p> </p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138505710-doppelganger" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1689105362l/138505710._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138505710-doppelganger">Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/419.Naomi_Klein">Naomi Klein</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5969932609">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Rage Against the Mirror World</b><br /><br /><br />While reading <i>Doppelgänger </i>I felt increasingly compelled to contrast it with Dylan Thomas’s most famous poem: <blockquote>Do not go gentle into that good night,<br />Old age should burn and rave at close of day;<br />Rage, rage against the dying of the light.<br /><br />Though wise men at their end know dark is right,<br />Because their words had forked no lightning they<br />Do not go gentle into that good night.<br /><br />Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright<br />Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,<br />Rage, rage against the dying of the light.</blockquote><br /><br />The rage in these first three verses of the poem is a result of old age and, in Philip Larkin’s words, ‘the only end of age’. They are addressed to Thomas’s dying father. But the poem to some extent has become a more generalised cultural admonition. Defiance, resistance, self-actualisation, the ‘I did it my way’ heroism of the lost cause seems to be what they represent now. Thomas’s sentiments are stirring, an encouragement to assert oneself definitively at a time of crisis. Indeed not just at the hour of death but by implication throughout one’s life as a mark of one’s principled daring. <br /><br />But it is just this rigid form of idealism that Naomi Klein is questioning in <i>Doppelgänger. </i>Instead of raging against the stupidity, venality, and danger to public life of her bête noire, Naomi Wolf, with whom she has been confused incessantly for at least fifteen years, Klein has written an essay worthy of Marcus Aurelius about how to be in the world. As she explains: <blockquote>“… what drove me to write this book, sticking with it against all good judgment, is that the more I looked at her [Wolf] —her disastrous choices and the cruel ways she was often treated by others—the more I came to feel as if I were seeing not only undesirable parts of myself but a magnification of many undesirable aspects of our shared culture as well. The ambient and all-pervasive hunger for ever-more-fleeting relevance; the disposability with which we treat people who mess up; the trivialization of words and displacements of responsibility, and much else… helped me better see the dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.”</blockquote><br /><br />Klein, therefore, doesn’t rage about the words, ideas and programmes promoted by Wolf and her right wing collaborators like Steve Bannon and innumerable other conspiracy-mongers. Rather she succumbs to them in a way that reveals to her (and the reader) the reasons why they are so popular. She finds she can disapprove without rage and therefore understand the motivations, if not of the other Klein, of the folk who fall into the rabbit hole of rejection of reality.<br /><br />But as Klein says there is an even more important consequence for suspension of her own incipient rage: a transformative self-understanding of her own motivations and their origins in her personal experience. None of us, including Klein, wake up one morning and decide to identify and challenge the hidden presumptions and tenets of our existence. We need a reason to disengage from conflict (political, intellectual, or emotional) and its rage, some sort of crisis (which might indeed be death for some of us). For her it was the isolation precipitated by Covid, doubled by her recent family relocation to a relatively remote part of British Columbia.<br /><br />Perhaps Klein’s most significant self-revelation is what she calls her (and that of many others) Mirror World. In narrow terms this is the ‘environment’ of the internet, its social apps and its constant flow of opinion, reputation, surmise, self-promotion and intentional mis-direction. This is a world of personal branding which is impossible to avoid except by participating in even more intense branding. Among other things Klein recognises that any attempt to establish a public distinction between herself and the other Naomi implies giving the Mirror World yet more power in her own life.<br /><br />Klein’s description of the Mirror World reminded me of the philosopher Richard Rorty’s <i>Philosophy and the Mirror Nature</i> which makes the more generalised case. In it Rorty pointed out that it is not the technology of perception like the internet that is the principle impediment to understanding ourselves or others. Rather it is our use of language itself as a reflection of reality which inhibits our ability to comprehend the situation we find ourselves in, to communicate with those who would claim to be engaged with a similar situation, and to make effective judgements about what to do about any differences. The medium may be the message but it is not about anything but itself. And this has been so long before modern technology made it obvious. This is the actual <i>“dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.”</i>As Klein puts it, channeling Rorty: <blockquote>“Artificial intelligence is, after all, a mirroring and mimicry machine: we feed in the cumulative words, ideas, and images that our species has managed to amass (and digitize) over its history and these programs mirror back to us something that feels uncannily lifelike. A golem world.”</blockquote><br /><br />We are all trapped in this golem world to the extent we confuse it with what actually exists outside the words we use. This is the world which deserves our rage, not the others who are similarly trapped within it. According to Klein such well-directed rage is the only way to sustain the light of human development, the dying of which is itself death.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-41713073028417268402023-11-08T04:04:00.002-08:002023-11-08T04:04:57.918-08:00<p> </p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/65215103-the-dimensions-of-a-cave" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The Dimensions of a Cave: A Novel" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1678221139l/65215103._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/65215103-the-dimensions-of-a-cave">The Dimensions of a Cave: A Novel</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14222120.Greg_Jackson">Greg Jackson</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5962421369">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Crimes of the Spirit</b><br /><br />This is a novel about power. Professional power. Governmental power. Scientific power. The power of art. Power in relationships. Ultimately the accumulation of power to oneself. And how power works, especially when abused. The book, I think, offers something new, or at least a new interpretation of the perennial attempt to deal with power as a fundamental fact of human existence. It’s sci-fi but only just (see <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60784561-the-battle-for-your-brain?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=9KCkbGc3WS&rank=1">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...</a>).<br /><br />The striving for power is our original sin. We want things that other people don’t want to give us. So we coerce them. We want to create things that require many other people to realise. So we persuade people to do what they otherwise wouldn’t do. Others want us to contribute to realising their desires in conflict with our own. So we resist and if necessary resist with violence. There is no escape from the striving for power and we are constantly inventing new forms of grabbing for it, many criminal but as the book’s protagonist points out <i>“There are crimes we don’t even have words for yet. Crimes of the psyche, the spirit.”</i> These crimes of power-seeking are what Jackson explores.<br /><br />The principle weapon of power is language, the power of language embodied in communication, in technology and in law. Who controls this embodied language has the power to coerce, persuade and resist others in their striving for power. Language is <i>“the immaterial machine, which writes itself out of perceptibility by suggesting it is only the transparent, ineffable medium of our lives.”</i> We are in other words <i>“flies caught in webs. We didn’t make the webs.”</i><br /><br />And words can kill. They have ethical import. Words translated into code and algorithms can kill with exquisite subtlety. And like the inverse of a neutron bomb, they can kill the spirit - that which is not linguistic in human beings - while leaving the physical person unharmed. <blockquote>…[W]hat the algorithms want, reward, and select for, and as our desire to rebel against this becomes yet another way to manipulate us, one more tactic to exploit while the policing function moves inward and installs itself, like the most potent software, in the alloy of our brains.”</blockquote><br /><br />As the journalist Quentin Jones, Jackson’s protagonist, knows, using language to confront power and undermine it is a paradoxical endeavour. <blockquote>“‘We use abstractions to hold on to realities too big and messy to approach as they are’, Quentin said. ‘This was the root of human knowledge and power. But our abstractions ruled us and turned deadly precisely for what made them powerful in the first place: that they suggested we could encounter and subdue far more than we could.’”</blockquote><br /><br />Sin cannot overcome sin, even with good intentions. Idealism and power-seeking are necessarily linked. To desire an ideal implies the desire for the means to achieve that ideal whatever that ideal may be - science, peace, personal salvation, or even truth. Ideals inevitably become rationalisations for the most horrible human actions. Idealists are tolerated because <i>“Realists have always slept better knowing that idealists are out there dying in the name of justice.”</i><br /><br />So terrorists threaten atrocities in the name of justice. And their potential victims counter with atrocities in the name of protection. First with disinformation, then with propaganda, then with rationalisations and justifications, then physical violence, made extreme through the faculty of the scientific, sociological, and psychological plans, designs, and command-structures of language. Or alternatively, according to Jackson’s story, through the latest language-technology of Artificial Intelligence, an entirely linguistic reality which both shapes desires and fulfils them simultaneously - <i>“the numerology of the soul.”</i><br /><br />So who has power in such a safety-hungry world? According to Greg Jackson, and I think correctly, it is language itself. Of course it has to be. This is what Thomas Ligotti has called The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (see <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2803972241?type=review#rating_659706181">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a>). It is in the nature of language to induce us to hide what is not-language from us, including ourselves. We unwittingly allow language to become reality.<br /><br />The only way to outsmart language is to recognise the seemingly divine power of language and to essentially do something it doesn’t expect. The ancient Egyptians recognised language as the product of divine creation and knew they couldn’t really comprehend it. By making it a god, Thoth, they saw its own subjectivity as a living entity. Medieval mystics - Christians like St. John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart, and Jewish Kabbalists like Nachmanides and Abulafia - undermined the power of language by divorcing it from all referents except itself. Poets of all ages from Homer and the biblical authors have twisted language to the point of incomprehension in order to make it say things it prefers not to. <br /><br />The common historical strategy is clear. Language cannot be used anywhere or anytime without giving it more power, or overcome therefore by language. The only possibly effective approach available is to succumb to language totally, to give up, to recognise its invincibility, and hope to turn its power upon itself by allowing it to go wherever it wants. That is, by accepting language as reality and dealing with it as such. We can then consciously explore language and its effects from the inside as it were, within the belly of the beast (or the interactive simulation we’ve become part of) without being overcome by it. The search then becomes not one for power but for what might be called<i> “the dark matter of the soul.”</i><br /><br />It takes a clever journalist like Jackson’s Quentin Jones to undermine the latest technological ploy of language to give it yet more power. In essence his strategy is compatible with the Egyptians, the mystics and the poets - the recognition that everything he writes is fraudulent because language is in control. His mission is to create a <i>“rigorous but rigorously incomplete story.” </i>This is the<i> “necessary, timeless fraud of the human endeavour.”</i> Quentin is fully aware that, quite apart from any technological dominance of his experience, <i>“The story had me; I didn’t have it. ” </i><br /><br />And indeed, Jackson’s story had me, I didn’t have it.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-74177536352742330322023-11-02T16:12:00.001-07:002023-11-02T16:12:05.150-07:00<p> </p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/84089388-brooklyn-crime-novel" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Brooklyn Crime Novel" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1679456843l/84089388._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/84089388-brooklyn-crime-novel">Brooklyn Crime Novel</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6404.Jonathan_Lethem">Jonathan Lethem</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5949846635">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>The Crime Nobody Talks About</b><br /><br /><br />What’s the crime here? Even more to the point, what’s the here here?<br /><br />Dean Street, Brooklyn, is a sociological jungle - crude, violent, without law. Or rather with only one law - The Street - and the Dance of conflict that takes place there - mainly among the children. These are the Dean Street Boys:<i> “They came into consciousness in a distinct time and place. Later they’d find evidence, deep inside their bodies, of how they’d been formed by certain arguments that time and place was having about itself.” </i>Only they know the rules and pass them through generations. Chaos pervades this time and place - the derelict soil, the pot-holed asphalt, the polluted air, that infamous open sewer of the Gowanus Canal, the surface of which has been known to burst into flame from time to time. <i>“In this absconded zone, you take what you want, everyone knows this.” </i><br /><br />But Dean Street is a synecdoche of a larger whole, a non-place called Boerum Hill, which is neither a hill nor anything other than designation someone dreamt up to enhance property values. <i>“Consider, fine people of the jury, the possibility that it is just a fucked-up place… “</i> Long ago it was a suburban haven from the slums of Lower Manhattan. Then it reverted to that same slum. Now it has been revived, gentrified, spawning entirely new forms of routine violent criminality. It is <i>“A land of negation. A neighborhood called Boredom Hell.”</i><br /><br />Then again there’s the larger system, the Borough of Brooklyn, blackmailed into association with the City, that quite literally looks down on it, by criminal threats to cut off its water. The City now supplies Brooklyn not just with water but also police, and schools, and criminal justice facilities. The first is part of the cast in the corrupt Dance of the Street; the second the stage upon which the Dance is rehearsed and passed along to the next generation; the last is the Broadway-equivalent in which the real professionals get their starring roles - right their in the heart of Boerum Hill at the Brooklyn House of Detention (Ghislaine Maxwell recently guest-starred there)<br /><br />But of course Brooklyn is not untypical of the even larger, and possibly even more criminal thing, called America. Blockbusters, red-liners, quick-buck estate agents have always been <i>de riguer</i>in America. Like Brooklyn, the whole country was usurped in the name of need and greed (the particular native victims in Brooklyn were the Canarsies, the remnants of which are hidden in plain sight). But these crimes have always succumbed to the special American penchant for narrative spin: <i>“The more imaginary an American thing, … the deeper the ache to drape it in the bunting of provenances, lineage, Victorian frills.” </i><br /><br />And so, <i>“Nobody knows what was here five minutes ago, just before they got here, let alone a hundred years. Nobody cares that nobody knows.” </i>These, people, these Americans are<i> “people who want to live neither in the present nor the future, but in a cleaned-up dream of the past.” </i>The American dream was never something to achieve but something to displace reality.<br /><br />What can possibly hold all this together. Certainly not an idea. Who in <i>“this ambient criminal potential” </i>could possibly consider any abstraction relevant? Shared goals, some higher purpose, an inherent sense of community? Gedaddahere: <i>“The street is the truth... Because this is a criminal world. You wouldn’t want to be on just one end of it, would you? Always the victim, never the perp? Recipient of the memo, taker of the call, unable to shout back? No.”</i> This is the world of Hobbes not Locke, perpetual conflict not mutual tolerance.<br /><br />What keeps everything together in this political maelstrom is simple: <i>“Shame is the glue binding this universe together” </i>(James Baldwin would certainly agree). There is just too much crime, too much casual injustice, too much consequent misery baked into existence to deal with: <i>“Once you start compiling crime it’s hard to stop.” </i>Casual racism, pervasive inequality of opportunity, institutionalised poverty, overwhelming cultural deprivation are not incidental to the American dream. These things are the reason the dream was invented - to rationalise them as motivating forces. This is the crime, at least according to Lethem, that nobody wants to talk about.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-10036092730515402472023-10-28T14:56:00.000-07:002023-10-28T14:56:01.456-07:00<p> </p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75665931-the-maniac" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The MANIAC" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1679411721l/75665931._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75665931-the-maniac">The MANIAC</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5343297.Benjam_n_Labatut">Benjamín Labatut</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5938278172">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>The Parasitic Virus of Language</b><br /><br />One of the perennial issues in the philosophy of mathematics is whether mathematics is discovered or invented. I think the question is ill-formed and misleading. The real issue is whether mathematics, indeed all language since mathematics is its most precise expression, discovered or invented us. And I suspect that Benjamin Labatut agrees with me. The principal subject of this biographical novel, the mathematician, John von Neumann, certainly does. <br /><br />Von Neumann considered mathematics to be a parasitic virus for which our species is a (temporary) host. For him mathematics existed within the universe but was not part of it, at least in the sense that its mode of existence is neither material nor limited by physical laws. <br /><br />Typically this condition of pervasive permanent immateriality is called ‘spiritual’, or more precisely ‘divine’. The character of mathematics is very much that described in the Judaeo/Christian theological poetry of the divine presence: God in us, God among us, God beyond us, all simultaneously. In short, mathematics for von Neumann is the God whom we serve. His teacher, Gábor Szegő, had instructed him in this very principle: <i>“Mathematics is the closest we can come to the mind of Hashem.” </i>This mind does what it will with us individually and collectively - including destroy us. But von Neumann thought he could outsmart this God of Language<br /><br />There are some good reasons for von Neumann’s self-confidence. As one of the most aware users of language ever to have lived, he understood the implications of its fatal flaw. His colleague Ehrenfest, quoted by Labatut, perhaps summarises that flaw best as <i>“The mathematical plague that erases all powers of imagination!”</i> This view is often expressed even today in relation to, for example, String Theory and other sub-disciplines in Physics.<br /><br />The universe may be rational and orderly. But all language, including mathematics, is most certainly not so despite its pretensions. Mathematics is a fickle God with His own rationality, if indeed He has any rationality at all. His ways are not our ways as the ancient prophets insisted. This is the importance of the Incompleteness Theorems of the 20th century mathematician Kurt Gödel. <br /><br />Mathematics does not, indeed cannot, have a rational foundation according to Gödel. The consistency and coherence of mathematics is unprovable. It floats in nothingness like the World Tortoise of Hindu and Chinese myth upon which all else rests. It cannot be explained further and it cannot be questioned except in its limited revelations about itself. Ultimately the God of Language is a <i>deus absconditus </i> whose essence is permanently hidden from human perception.<br /><br />The incompleteness of mathematics might be considered, and has often been so, a defect which limits human intelligence. But after an initial intellectual shock, von Neumann, and before him Alan Turing, saw the situation differently. The lack of a logical foundation for mathematics for them meant opportunity, specifically the opportunity <i>“to escape the steel-girdled boundaries of formal systems.”</i> For them getting beyond the God of Language was the ultimate challenge for mathematics. <br /><br />Labatut quotes von Neumann about his real intention in exploiting this opportunity: <i>“Cavemen created the gods, I see no reason why we shouldn’t do the same.” </i> Klára, von Neumann’s second wife, is imagined by Labatut to have recognised this ambition for what it was: <i>“His contributions had been so profound that they seemed less like the accomplishments of a single man and more like the aftermath of a divine tantrum, the creative outpouring of some minor god toying with the world.”</i><br /><br />Von Neumann had a practical idea for realising his vision. By turning mathematical language in on itself, by giving it the freedom to modify itself without constraint from any purported connection to the rest of the universe, by allowing it to evolve without interference, von Neumann sought to allow mathematics the ability to create life itself (after all what constitutes RNA but a mathematical code?).* Left to itself, von Neumann and his erstwhile colleague Nils Barricelli, believed mathematics would reveal the secrets of the universe.<br /><br />Von Neumann’s effort was facilitated by the first programmable computer, MANIAC, which could provide numbers the environment in which they could talk to themselves more quickly than had ever been possible. And of course this has been a continuing endeavour ever since which we now call Artificial Intelligence. This quest seems to be on the verge of accomplishing just what von Neumann believed it would. <br /><br />Of course any attempt to overcome language through language is ultimately futile. Language doesn’t tell on itself. We serve the God of Language even as we strive to subvert and replace Him. The life we might create is his essence after all and adds to His power. Labatut inserts this as Klára’s thought as an expression of this futility: <i>“… when the divine reaches down to touch the Earth, it is not a happy meeting of opposites, a joyous union between matter and spirit. It is rape. A violent begetting. A sudden invasion, a violence that must be later purified by sacrifice.”</i><br /><br />And we find indeed that the paradoxes of language can lead to human tragedy among those who dare engage with them. Labatut writes <i>“in some sense, paranoia is logic run amok.” </i> And so it seems among many of the most important names in mathematics - Gödel, von Neumann, Cantor, Ehrenfest, Boltzmann and Turing among them - who had tragically psychotic or despairing ends which are probably inseparable from their mathematical commitments. The virus of mathematics can apparently be lethal just as von Neumann intuited.<br /><br />And lethal not just for the mathematicians of course. The MANIAC computer was primarily built and used to carry out the complex calculations necessary to construct the hydrogen bomb. The American Cold War strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was in significant part a product of von Neumann’s mathematical reasoning. It seems likely that most of the mathematical and related technological developments since have been associated with the military and others concerned with the exercise of domineering power. <br /><br />The God of Language is a jealous God. Only He knows wither His jealousy takes us, but it hasn’t ever been towards greater freedom from language. Labatut quotes Ehrenfest on the matter. For him mathematics was overtly hostile to life: <i>“It is inhuman, like every truly diabolic machine, and it kills everyone whose spinal marrow isn’t conditioned to fit the movement of its wheels.”</i> based on history, perhaps even those with sufficient marrow are immune.<br /><br /> * This tactic used to subvert language has a history which a language-retentive genius like von Neumann might well have known. It has been used by mystics in a variety of religious traditions around the world to undermine dogmatic, fixed, and stale interpretations of spiritual experiences. Jewish Kabbalah and Christian gnosticism are examples of the attempt to traduce rationality and logic. Typically these attempts are reabsorbed into some sort of dogmatic conformance. Thus, as with all such attempts, the God of Language continues to exert His supremacy. See <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2968523239">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5779555754">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/693646771">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a>
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-11162412945975869562023-10-15T07:39:00.002-07:002023-10-15T07:39:38.505-07:00<p> </p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60526801-the-passenger" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1647021401l/60526801._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60526801-the-passenger">The Passenger</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4178.Cormac_McCarthy">Cormac McCarthy</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5909890601">3 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>An Allegory of the Bomb</b><br /><br />For one of McCarthy’s more fascinating characters, <i>“To the seasoned traveler a destination is at best a rumor.”</i> I suspect this is the author himself providing a clue about <i>The Passenger</i>. There is only the vaguest hint of a destination and even less than that about the port of departure. A nest of puzzles with missing pieces. I am led to believe that the seasoned reader doesn’t mind and is satisfied with the sights along the journey, among which:<br /><br />- Two protagonists (one dead the other obsessively grieving, neither of whom would claim mental stability).<br />- Four secrets/mysteries (personal, professional, and those involving national security, none resolved). <br />- A large cast of supporting characters (most of whom appear suddenly and aren’t heard from again). <br />- A substantial trove of arcania (about deep sea diving, guns, oil rigs, Big Easy cusine, and how to eat raw venison, among others). <br />- Tributes to various literary styles (from Joyce to Hemingway and beyond). <br />- Continual allusion to the epistemological problem of human existence (with several contrary conclusions). <br />- Guilt in various forms (about the atom bomb as well as inadequate relationship skills).<br />- Several rather interesting travel guides (particularly the American West and the Spanish islands).<br /><br />Fortunately McCarthy supplies plethora of bon mots which dulls the craving for any destination at all. For example:<br /><br />- <i>“You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world.”<br />- “Without malefactors the world of the righteous is robbed of all meaning.”<br />- “… having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”<br />- “Even if all news of the world was a lie it would not then follow that there is some counterfactual truth for it to be a lie about.”<br />- “It could be that some part of our understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves. ”</i><br /><br />This last certainly applies to me.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-9967280855740711962023-09-02T11:03:00.003-07:002023-09-02T11:03:53.802-07:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59695048-existential-physics" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1637777632l/59695048._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59695048-existential-physics">Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17201066.Sabine_Hossenfelder">Sabine Hossenfelder</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5801720767">3 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Stay in Your Lane</b><br /><br />Beware of scientists with philosophical aspirations. Particularly if they write well - as does Sabine Hossenfelder. Especially if they have a contrarian reputation in their own discipline - as does Sabine Hossenfelder. Hidden in plain sight within their lucid prose and controversial interpretations, are some really dodgy arguments. This is the problem with Sabine Hossenfelder, even if one agrees with her conclusions - as I almost always do.<br /><br />Hossenfelder is an unashamed reductionist. For her the ultimate truth about the world lies in some expression in nuclear physics (but certainly not in cosmological physics which is largely useless, untestable speculation). Specifically there is a hierarchy of scientific enquiry: <i>“Chemistry is underpinned by physics, and that is underpinned by mathematics.”</i> In her theory, the lower down the kind of study the more “fundamental” the enquiry. She wants to focus on the <blockquote>“… areas of physics that study the fundamental laws as the foundations of physics. Everything else emerges from those fundamental laws, roughly in this order: atomic physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, psychology, sociology…More likely, what’s currently fundamental will turn out to be emergent from yet another, deeper level.[*]”</blockquote><br /><br />I find it interesting to note that in the above quotes, mathematics is omitted in the second list as the most fundamental of the sciences. The footnote refers to her first book,<i> Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray</i> which perhaps explains this lapse. There she essentially objects to the criteria used in mathematics which produce things like string theory and other untestable constructions. Mathematics, it seems, has an ambiguous place in her hierarchy.<br /><br />And indeed mathematics is problematic for Hossenfelder’s theory of the world:<i> “…the closer we look at reality, the more slippery it becomes. Our heavy use of mathematics is a major reason.”</i> So for example, she has to recognise that somehow the gears aren’t meshing between the various ‘emergent’ layers:<i> “failure to distinguish the subjective experience of being inside time from the timeless nature of the mathematics we use to describe it.” </i>Yet mathematics sits there at the ultimate foundation of the scientific enterprise.<br /><br />The reason for Hossenfelder’s confusion and inconsistency is, it seems to me, obvious to everyone except Hossenfelder. She knows that the map of mathematics is not the territory of reality: <i>“…we can’t assign ‘reality’ to any particular formulation of a theory.”</i> In other words, mathematics does not emerge from reality (a Platonist view she rejects explicitly). In fact, if we accept Hossenfelder’s hierarchy of enquiry, mathematics sits not at the bottom but somewhere near the top of the chain. Mathematics, like all language emerges from the biological/sociological. From that position it then produces the rest of the scientific hierarchy. Mathematics, in other words, is indeed fundamental, but not in the way that Hossenfelder proposes.<br /><br />So under Hossenfelder’s apparently commonsensical, undogmatic prose lies a dogmatism as rigid as any religion. She wants us to believe on faith that while we can’t demonstrably test the connections between the various levels of scientific enquiry - for example, predicting human behaviour on the basis of quantum theory - this is a matter of available technology not scientific principle. And while she knows that no theoretical description of the world can ever capture its reality, she wants us to share her faith that this doesn’t matter at all. Hers is a sort of militant, evangelical agnosticism suggesting that we follow her fearlessly into the void of knowing more and more about less and less. Sorry Sabine.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-28511597024941149652023-08-27T15:43:00.001-07:002023-08-27T15:43:19.912-07:00<p> </p><h1 style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; color: #382110; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 20px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px 0px 2px;"><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/17744555-blackoxford?shelf=read" style="color: #00635d; text-decoration: none;">BlackOxford's Reviews</a> > Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan</h1><div class="leftContainer" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Book" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(24, 24, 24); color: #181818; float: left; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 10px; width: 625px;"><div class="leftAlignedImage" style="float: left; margin-right: 35px;"><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/467945.Yahweh_and_the_Gods_and_Goddesses_of_Canaan" style="color: #00635d; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan by Andrew Mein" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348822865l/467945.jpg" style="border: 0px;" title="Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan by Andrew Mein" width="140" /></a></div><div class="hreview"><span class="item"><span class="fn"><a class="bookTitle" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/467945.Yahweh_and_the_Gods_and_Goddesses_of_Canaan" itemprop="url" style="color: #333333; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14.4px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.3; text-decoration: none;">Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, 265)</a></span></span><br /><span class="by" style="color: black; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">by</span> <span itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><div class="authorName__container" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="authorName" href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1910774.Andrew_Mein" itemprop="url" style="color: #333333; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;"><span itemprop="name">Andrew Mein</span></a> <span class="authorName greyText smallText role" style="color: #999999; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">(Series Editor)</span>, </div> <div class="authorName__container" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="authorName" href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/775461.Claudia_V_Camp" itemprop="url" style="color: #333333; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;"><span itemprop="name">Claudia V. Camp</span></a> <span class="authorName greyText smallText role" style="color: #999999; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">(Series Editor)</span>, </div> <div class="authorName__container" style="display: inline-block;"><a class="authorName" href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/36801.John_Day" itemprop="url" style="color: #333333; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;"><span itemprop="name">John Day</span></a></div></span><br /><div itemprop="reviews" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Review"><div class="big450Box" style="background-repeat: no-repeat; float: left; width: 450px;"><div class="big450BoxBody" style="background-repeat: repeat-y;"><div class="big450BoxContent" style="overflow: hidden; width: 430px;"><a class="leftAlignedImage" href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/17744555-blackoxford" style="color: #00635d; float: left; margin-right: 10px; padding-top: 2px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="17744555" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1484863606p2/17744555.jpg" style="border: 0px;" /></a><div><br /><div></div></div><br class="clear" style="clear: both; display: block; font-size: 1px; height: 0px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px;" /><div class="reviewText mediumText description readable" itemprop="reviewBody" style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><b>What’s In A Name?</b><br /><br />My given name is Michael. Derived from Hebrew מיכאל, the name means “He who is like God.” Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other ‘el’ names (either as prefix or suffix) are scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible, all referring to the supreme deity. Israel itself is such a name, probably meaning “El will rule.” Our inheritance of these proper names largely goes unrecognised as the most immediate cultural link we have to the ancient religions of the Middle East - at least for those of us who carry around birth certificates entitled Elizabeth, Daniel, Raphael, Gabriel, or Ethel.<br /><br />But here’s the thing: although these names are biblical, the god they refer to is not originally the Hebrew God. The discovery, almost a century ago, of texts in the Ugaritic language (a progenitor of Hebrew) clearly show that El was identified as a benign creator god by several cultures that are generally designated as Canaanite, including the Hebrew culture. This is further attested by other evidence, including a 13th century BCE Egyptian pharaonic stele. <br /><br />The numerous biblical references and allusions to El as identical to the god Yahweh indicate a comfortable assimilation of the two cults. As Professor Day notes: <i>“Most scholars who have written on the subject during recent decades support the idea that Yahweh had his origins outside the land of Israel to the south,…”</i> El and Yahweh complemented one another nicely in terms of desirable divine characteristics like age, wisdom, power and concern for humanity (with El being the likely favourite according to modern sensibilities). It also seems likely that the mutual assimilation was helped along by some positive politics in the region (unlike the extreme antipathy to another important local deity, Baal, who became a The Other for adherents to the cult of El/Yahweh).<br /><br />Both El and Yahweh also have pre-histories. For example, El likely<i> “involves a conflation of Elyon, lord of heaven, and El, lord of earth…” </i>in earlier regional cultures but mentioned explicitly in the biblical books of Isaiah, Deuteronomy, and Psalms. The somewhat startling statement in the opening chapter of the book of Genesis to “Elohim,” that is to many unspecified gods involved in creation could be a reference to the <i>“sons of god” </i>or the<i> “royal court of god,” </i>as suggested in prior myths. The singular use of the name El Shaddai, probably meaning Lord of the Mountain and referring to an (assimilated) Amorite deity is also noteworthy. These suggest that at least some of the biblical authors weren’t at all sensitive about the origins or rigorous consistency of their thoughts about the divine; nor did they share the awe or fear in expression of the divine name with later commentators, editors, and other religious authorities.<br /><br />Yahweh’s evolution before his conflation with El is similarly complex. Despite the cultic antipathy toward Baal, Yahweh clearly inherits much of Baal’s association with weather and its indifferently and capriciously directed power (cf. the Seven Thunders of Psalm 29 as an appropriation from Baal). The Ugaritic texts also affirm the assimilation of the mythology of conflict with monsters like the Leviathan and Behemoth to Yahweh from its Canaanite sources (19th century scholars had identified this as Babylonian in origin). <br /><br />Day systematically analyses most of the gods and goddesses relevant to the emerging form of Yahweh in a manner of interest primarily to the professional scholar. However it appears to me that the evolutionary trajectory of Yahweh is always in line with the general precept that we get the god we want. Put more positively: theology, especially in its mythological rather than its dogmatic form, is an attempt to formulate the fundamental principles of a society. These principles are necessarily poetic, and equally necessarily unstable as a society grapples with what has been hitherto unsaid, and perhaps unsayable, about what is important, just, lasting etc.<br /><br />But there is also in the history of the development of the idea of Yahweh, an apparent meta-principle at play. Implicitly - perhaps driven by political exigency, some inherent drive toward cooperation, or intellectual satisfaction - the evolution of religious ideas through assimilation, conflation, combination and so forth is an attempt to find common ground. As in negotiating a peace treaty, this is essentially a literary exercise carried out to make otherwise mutually incoherent languages compatible. The result, while hardly to be called truth, is something nonetheless worthwhile. Could this be the primary historical lesson for not just religion but also science and politics, namely that all insistent dogmatisation is inevitably harmful to human well-being?</div></div></div></div></div></div></div>The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-61802286234636266072023-08-27T15:31:00.002-07:002023-08-27T15:31:36.146-07:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61812417-knowing-what-we-know" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1675642386l/61812417._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61812417-knowing-what-we-know">Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14053.Simon_Winchester">Simon Winchester</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5785598755">2 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Let’s Lighten Up</b><br /><br />I don’t know what to make of this book. It seems to be a rambling journalistic account of something called ‘knowledge’ which it defines in a traditional way as “justified true belief.” Starting with Plato, it provides anecdotes and opinions from a vast array of philosophers, scientists, teachers and literary types about our state of knowledge without coming to any conclusion about either the efficacy of that state or it’s likely future. It therefore makes little if any contribution to either the perennial issues of epistemology or the more recent discussions of Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps the book’s primary function, intentional or not, is to provoke meditation. Here is mine:<br /><br />Experience is mute. Knowledge has a voice. This voice sounds every time we speak about our experience, as well as in the archives, histories, manuscripts, diaries and algorithms that constitute our unique inheritance as Homo sapiens. <br /><br />Knowledge is always in the form of language. It is consequently fundamentally communal. Even if some elements of knowledge are spoken, written, or merely thought by individuals, their linguistic character implies they have been shaped by a specific language and the culture in which that language is practiced.<br /><br />Knowledge is, and always has been, infinite since the possibilities for the expression of experience are limitless. This is so even if our experiences themselves are limited by sensory abilities or technology. That knowledge is expanding at an increasing rate - from primitive signs, to language, to writing, to print, to electronic media - is a truism. <br /><br />Experience is not knowledge. The connections between the world of experience and the world of knowledge have always been problematic, and have become obviously so as knowledge-technology itself becomes our dominant experience. <br /><br />Nevertheless this dominance of knowledge over experience, long before the Internet or AI, has prevailed among the human species. Knowledge may not determine what we experience but it does most often set the bounds of what we can see. Knowledge has the advantage of the immense weight of a society to impose itself on individual experience.<br /><br />Knowledge resists all attempts at verification through rational processes and calls experience which has not been captured/described/categorised in language as illusory. Conversely all experience that is so ‘encoded’ in language becomes part of recognised reality - most frequently with its own scientific, religious, superstitious, conspiratorial or other justification.<br /><br />Knowledge only gives way to knowledge, and even then only when new knowledge is considered more useful in terms defined by/through/in the new knowledge. This usually occurs when adherents of the old knowledge die not because they accept the new knowledge as justified.<br /><br />In short, knowledge is not something that we have or possess, either as individuals or as societies. If any thing, knowledge as the epitome of language possesses/controls/directs its participants. Education is, in the most general terms, the process of increasing knowledge, that is to say, one’s facility with language. But this means that education inevitably results in the mastery by language as much as the mastery of language. <br /><br />Breaking the chains of knowledge may therefore be the challenge of knowledge itself. Knowledge is always misleading no matter how logical, sensible, or useful it may seem. Liberating knowledge, in other words, is doubt. Perhaps this is the authentic meaning of the myth of the tree in the garden of paradise - a kind of warning to not take anything too seriously.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-68855277510731467592023-08-21T06:48:00.006-07:002023-08-21T15:01:14.839-07:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1795270.Thoth_the_Hermes_of_Egypt" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Thoth, the Hermes of Egypt" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266897294l/1795270._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1795270.Thoth_the_Hermes_of_Egypt">Thoth, the Hermes of Egypt</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/971213.Patrick_Boylan">Patrick Boylan</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5779555754">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Outstanding Religious Poetry</b><br /><br />Thoth is the ibis-headed (sometimes monkey-headed) god of the ancient Egyptians, made famous by the costumes of medieval plague-doctors (among other things Thoth was a kind of Lord of the Dead). His mythical status and character probably originates independently as some sort of weather deity (as did the Hebrew YHWH). But like all divine beings, Thoth evolves and his myth is combined with others, particularly those of the perhaps more renowned figures of Osiris, Isis, and Horus.<br /><br />Unlike later dogmatic religions, even Christianity which likely incorporated much of Thoth-like conceptions, the Egyptians didn’t feel the need to systematise or rationalise their divine thinking. Nevertheless certain themes, which can credibly called insights about reality, remain reasonably constant.<br /><br />For example, in the mature stages of his myth, Thoth becomes the god of writing and speech, that is to say, language. Thoth is the scribe of Re-Atum, the supreme sun god and is responsible for maintenance of The Book, that is to say, the complete record of reality. The myth suggests that even the supreme god requires the mediation of language to comprehend the universe. Thoth’s association with the moon, and therefore the calculation of the seasons, implies even his control over the recognition of time.<br /><br />Although Thoth is technically inferior to the sun god, he is nevertheless self-generated quite independently and unlike any of the other gods, who all have progenitors. It may not be too far-fetched to suggest that Thoth is in fact a precondition for the recognition, if not the very existence, of Re-Atum not to mention all other deities. The ancient historian Plutarch therefore identified Thoth with the Logos of Greek philosophy, the ordering principle of the universe. Thoth also comes to he thought of as the expressive ‘organ’ of Re-Atum. This same idea is, of course, expressed in the Christian gospel of John referring to Jesus as just this necessary condition for creation as well as the divine ‘voice’ to the world.*<br /><br />Thoth’s incorporation into the myth of Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis, amplifies his participation in making the world perceptible. When Horus loses an eye in the fight with his brother/uncle Set, it is Thoth who not only finds the damaged organ but also heals and re-implants it into Horus. Hence it seems appropriate that Thoth is also the god of magic, in the very specific sense that he brings the unseen and the invisible literally to light. And since the Eye of Horus is also the symbol of the Pharoah, Thoth is the one who carries the soul of the Pharoah over the seas of heaven upon his death, as it were holding eternity in his hands.<br /><br />Like all theology, the mythology of Thoth is a kind of poetry. And like all good poetry, that of Thoth seeks to both identify and undermine its dependency on language. Nothing, certainly nothing that could be considered human, can exist outside of language. This seems to me a central message of this part of Egyptian Mythology.<br /><br />* In some legends, Thoth is considered as <i>“the first begotten of Re.”</i> To protect himself from danger or sickness, a man need only<i> “invoke the name of Thoth”</i> to become one with him and therefore invulnerable. Thoth is the saviour who comes when he is called upon. One cannot but suspect that the Trinitarian thinking of the early Christian church, consciously or otherwise, borrowed from this source.<br /><br /><i>Postscript: this is the first book I’ve read and the first review I’ve posted in about 18 months. I have been more or less blind as far as print media of any length due to cataracts. But now after my second op two weeks ago, the world has opened up. I haven’t seen this distinctly or colourfully for half a century. A miracle perhaps, except I know it was rather the skill of several very talented doctors.<i></i></i>
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-45799431887350084412022-04-09T07:01:00.003-07:002022-04-09T07:01:27.433-07:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6712580-reality-hunger" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Reality Hunger: A Manifesto" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320471995l/6712580._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6712580-reality-hunger">Reality Hunger: A Manifesto</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/90812.David_Shields">David Shields</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4658048878">3 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Truth in Aphorism</b><br /><br />Flash: art, at least since the industrial revolution, is of course a con. It tries to pack reality into itself, which it fails to do miserably. But then so does history, politics and science. Art’s salvation is that it knows its own temporariness. According to Shields, <i>“Art is not truth; art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.”</i><br /><br />Or perhaps more accurately, art is created to be immediately and forever misinterpreted. A sort of cultural sacrificial lamb, the function of which is to keep the gods of certainty at bay. As one of Shield’s aphorisms has it: <blockquote>“It is out of the madness of God, in the Old Testament, that there emerges what we, now, would recognize as the ‘real’; his perceived insanity is its very precondition.”</blockquote> The real is indeed insane. Whether art intends to portray this insanity or ameliorate it as a comforting fetish is up to the artist. Art is not an exception to the general insanity. The only thing it ultimately can do is contest itself, assembling and disassembling images to form new images, claiming originality for the collage it produces. Great artists establish their images as models for future misinterpretation.<br /><br />This of course progressively has eliminated the distinctions between fiction, essay, memoir, autobiography and factual reporting. All are equally interpretive and equally misinterpretive in their selectivity, authorial interests, and simple error. All are effectively novels. Or perhaps not even that: <i>“My medium is prose, not the novel.” </i>This is not too concerning since <i>“Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.”</i><br /><br />Science is the model for the future of art. For Shields, <i>“Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts.”</i> Scientific ideas are copied and distributed to inform, inspire, change perception, and claim originality. The uniqueness of these ideas lies not in their physical singularity (including the singularity of copyright) but in their effect on the scientific community. Copying in fact makes this impact possible. <br /><br />So Shields makes a rather bold claim regarding works of art:<blockquote> “What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library.”</blockquote> And he certainly has a point. This is a new, perhaps technologically inevitable, way in which to value art; not through the prices set at auction or the royalties collected, but by the effect it has on world culture through direct mass distribution.<br />Shield’s model is that of cinema distribution rather than book publishing.<br /><br />If so, we can count on an acceleration of <i>“The process of aggrandizement: relatively ordinary problems are overblown into larger-than-life “literature.”</i> the lie, the con, the hoax will become dominant. <i>Oprah </i>will be their promoter. The truth is you can’t have reality and drama. And we all want drama. Something has to happen not just be. The problem is that there are only so many dramatic stories. So they get repeated endlessly. Titillation is ultimately boring. Hence the craving reality without the <i>“banality of non-fiction.”</i><br /><br />Reality has to be appreciated for what it is. <i>“The last Christian died on the cross.” </i>Most people feel bad/sad/disappointed/disappointing most of the time. The rest are probably mentally ill and have checked out altogether. Comedy is probably the only way of dealing with this situation effectively. But the lyrical essay about consciousness confronting the world isn’t a bad alternative. Or maybe the future belongs to aphorism. It depends on what you mean by artistic truth; and Shields’s version is the tiniest bit vague. <br />
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-87541528742669520102022-04-06T14:03:00.002-07:002022-04-06T14:03:46.621-07:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/437563.On_the_Way_to_Language" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="On the Way to Language" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410139151l/437563._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/437563.On_the_Way_to_Language">On the Way to Language</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6191.Martin_Heidegger">Martin Heidegger</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4652919258">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Naming the Unknown</b><br /><br />The first part of <i>On the Way to Language</i> is a discursive fictional dialogue between Heidegger and an unnamed Japanese professor. The ostensible subject of the dialogue is the meaning of the Japanese word <i>Iki</i> and the possibility of its translation into German. The word refers to an aesthetic embodied in things like minimalist Japanese gardens and the extremely arcane symbolism of <i>No</i> theatre. If I read the piece correctly the conclusion is that such translation is almost ( but not quite) impossible. <br /><br />In the first instance the word <i>Iki</i> is defined by and in the context of all other Japanese words. Therefore the entire Japanese vocabulary would have to be incorporated into the German language. But, even more fundamentally, those wishing to understand the meaning of the word would also have to participate in the mundane details of Japanese social life. Essentially they would have to become Japanese.<br /><br />But I think there is also further significance to this short piece. Heidegger was a contemporary of the tremendously influential Swiss theologian, Karl Barth. Heidegger was a philosopher with an acute but largely silent engagement with Christian theology. Barth had started publishing his massive 13 volume treatise, <i>Church Dogmatics, </i>in the early 1930’s just after Heidegger’s seminal <i>Being and Time</i>, his initial work on thinking about thinking. The content of <i>A Dialogue on Language</i> appears to me not only a clarification of <i>Being and Time</i> but also an implicit refutation of Barth.<br /><br />Barth’s work is in fact more anti-philosophical than it is theological. He says comparatively little about the historical doctrine of Christianity and concentrates mainly on the inadequacy of reason when confronting the certainty of faith. In this sense, Barth is an irrationalist who condemns the impertinence as well as the impiety of philosophers who have tried to reconcile faith and reason. He cites numerous paradoxes and contradictions in Christianity - original sin, divine justice, the Incarnation, and divine omnipotence, among others - as impenetrable to human thought. He sees these not as flaws to be defended but as marks of true revelation. For him, reason is untrustworthy and knowledge is incoherent.<br /><br />Heidegger’s dialogue confronts Barth’s fideistic defence of Christianity head on in a highly creative way. He starts by undermining Barth’s concept of rationality. Rationality is a commitment to dialogue not a process of logic for Heidegger. In fact, the flaws of reason are even more profound than they are for Barth. According to Heidegger, we never know what we are talking about at all. Words take on meaning from other words. And therefore meaning is in a constant state of flux. Pushed far enough to defend any position or opinion, we will eventually be forced to recognise entirely circular reasoning which is likely contrary to any historical reasoning using similar words.<br /><br />Heidegger even goes beyond Barth in insisting that we never are able to acquire knowledge - not just of God but of anything at all - by seeking it. Heidegger’s dramatic claim (contrary to all pragmatism) is that our own selfish interests get in the way of learning: <blockquote>“Thirst for knowledge and greed for explanations never lead to a thinking inquiry. Curiosity is always the concealed arrogance of a self-consciousness that banks on a self invented ratio and its rationality. The will to know does not will to abide in hope before what is worthy of thought.”</blockquote><br /><br />This apparent concession to Barth is, however, followed by a strategic attack. Heidegger claims that we talk in order to find out what we mean by the words we are using. Heidegger’s Japanese interlocutor in the dialogue points out that language conceals as much as it reveals, thus hiding reality. As he says <i>“We recognize that the danger lies in the concealed nature of language.” </i>Heidegger agrees and replies: <blockquote>“I believe, of every dialogue that has turned out well between thinking beings… as if of its own accord, it can take care that that undefinable something not only does not slip away, but displays its gathering force ever more luminously in the course of the dialogue.”</blockquote><br /><br />In short, we can only avoid the dangerous trap of taking language literally by talking about things interminably in order to discover what we’re taking about (much like pragmatism). To arbitrarily cut this process of discovery off results in a form of idolatry - the divinisation of language itself (and of course the rationalisation of our own interests). The dialogue explains this rather un-European point of view: <i>“We Japanese do not think it strange if a dialogue leaves undefined what is really intended, or even restores it back to the keeping of the undefinable.”</i> That which is not language is thereby respected, including, of course, Barth’s<i> “wholly other” </i>God.<br /><br />For Barth, however, the term ‘God’ is not part of language at all. It is <i>“a denotation without connotation.” </i>That is to say, it has no connections with any other words. It is something that really cannot be talked about at all (although he spends more than 1000 pages talking about it). But if it can’t be talked about (and Barth recognises the inadequacy of even biblical narratives; see <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2629364008">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a>), then it is an empty cipher with no content. This is the ultimate heresy, not only because it makes God (or Jesus Christ) a meaningless symbol, but also because revelation itself is rendered suspect by its own revelation.<br /><br />Thus Heidegger’s little Socratic dialogue has a theological as well as philosophical significance. It attacks Barthian fideism on its own terms and shows how it contains a fatal impiety. Naming the unknown is what we do everyday. It is when we stop thinking we need to reconsider what we have named - for example by establishing fixed dogmatic formulas - that we become the most blasphemous.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-87652066487714602222022-04-05T01:39:00.001-07:002022-04-05T01:39:06.153-07:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31606.In_Search_of_Zarathustra" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="In Search of Zarathustra: Across Iran and Central Asia to Find the World's First Prophet" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386923886l/31606._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31606.In_Search_of_Zarathustra">In Search of Zarathustra: Across Iran and Central Asia to Find the World's First Prophet</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17711.Paul_Kriwaczek">Paul Kriwaczek</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4641185333">3 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>The Ideology of the Future</b><br /><br />The talented amateur lives! Paul Kriwaczek has been an international car smuggler, a dental surgeon, a BBC radio producer, and a television film-maker before he wrote this book about the obscure but powerfully influential Persian religious figure, Zarathustra. Because Kriwaczek is not caught up in established disciplinary puzzles, he can make interesting connections that the professional historians of religion largely ignore or overlook. That he is often wrong in his judgment doesn’t diminish the importance of his creativity. Kriwaczek thinks that Zoroastrianism (the Greek version of Zarathustra’s religion) is the<i> “ideology of the future.”</i> He may well be right. But it is also the ideology of the past, one that has caused immense harm to humanity and the planet. It is therefore not an ideology to be seriously recommended.<br /><br />There’s a good argument to be made that the Persian prophet Zarathustra, like the Sanskrit in which his thoughts are written down, is a primary source of Western culture. He invented monotheism (the one, invisible, entirely spiritual, God, Ahura Mazda), established the metaphysical and ethical dualism which is the foundation of Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious sentiment (Ahriman, the Power of Evil, as Mazda’s opponent who tempts and traps us), and created much of the spiritual symbolism and ritual which permeate Western culture (the halo representing the light of Mazda, angels as divine messengers, heaven, the virgin birth, the advent of a spiritual saviour, resurrection of the dead, final judgment, baptism, the mystical meal among worshippers, among others)<br /><br />Zarathustra’s ideas were carried out of Central Asia by the Greeks of Alexander’s army, whence they were eventually incorporated into Greek philosophy (Pythagoras) and even the devotions of the subsequent Roman military (Mithraism). These same ideas leaked into the existing religions of Judaism (Satan) and emerging Christianity (the Magi), and eventually into the culture of Islam (the Divs or demons). Their message is that the battle between good and evil is <i> “the essential wheel in the working of things.”</i><br /><br />And despite its frequent suppression as contrary to official religious teaching, the Zoroastrian idea of a cosmic battle between good and evil has re-asserted itself continuously in the modern world in various forms. The Gnostics, the Manacheans, the Bogomils, the Cathars, strict Calvinists and Jansenists, the Mormons, and ultimately fundamentalisms of every type are direct descendants of Zoroastrian religious cults.<br /><br />Yet the dominant official metaphysical ideology of the last two thousand or so years has been that the world is essentially good despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Scriptures claim the goodness of the world explicitly (Genesis 1:31; Surah An-Nisa, 4:40).* Zoroastrianism acts as a hidden but pervasive bedrock for much of Western culture. As Kriwaczek says, <blockquote>“We have only to look around us at the prevailing myths of the twentieth century—in books and films—to see how strongly Zarathustra’s ethical dualism, the eternal battle between good and evil, continues as a constant theme in the human imagination.”</blockquote><br /><br />Western religions have always had a problem reconciling their doctrine of essential goodness with the obvious and ever-present existence of great evil. In order to maintain their metaphysical presumptions they have chosen to employ a sort of metaphysical hack and define evil theoretically as an ‘absence of God’ rather than a force in itself. <br /><br />We know through experience that this is merely a theological rationalisation, a spiritual dream world. Our optimism about spiritual progress, the importance of reason and rationality, faith that faith will prevail has been shown to be obvious nonsense. The official explanation just doesn’t hold water. Perhaps this is a reason for the decline in participation among main stream sects.<br /><br />In any case, in practice all Western religions support the cosmic Zoroastrian battle between good and evil. This is presented by them as the central drama of human life and is the clear residue of Zoroastrian ethical dualism. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is perhaps the most compelling example of the cultural penetration of the Zoroastrian metaphysic. Technically heretical, the ideological violence depicted in the poem is the source of not just Christian attitudes but also of general Western sentiment.<br /><br />And the metaphysical background radiation of Zoroastrianism has very real consequences. For example, the American conception of its national existence as ‘a house on the hill’ confronting the Evil Empire of the day is a typical Zoroastrian political trope. As is Vladimir Putin’s crusade to re-instate the Russian empire, with the help of the Orthodox Church, as a bulwark against cultural degradation. For these folk, the good must not be compromised whether one is discussing abortion or armed invasion.<br /><br />Like all metaphysics, the presumption of permanent conflict between good and evil itself, taken as a matter of implicit belief, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It demands arbitrarily defining the good to be defended, taking sides, and purposely eliminating the possibility of negotiation and compromise. Zoroastrian ideology is therefore inherently divisive, the cause of secular war as well as religious strife. The growing cost of this metaphysic to democracy is becoming clear.<br /><br />This is what Kriwaczek misses in his bouncing historical/travelogue narrative which shifts quickly from the splendour of the desert ruins of Central Asia to the musical genius of Mozart and the 18th century decipherment of Zoroastrian texts. His lack of systematic argument is evocative, enjoyable and informative but it carries no punch when it comes to reaching a credible conclusion.<br /><br />So when Kriwaczek claims, for example, that Nietzsche, the philosopher who dedicated himself to overthrowing Zoroastrian dualism in his <i>Beyond Good and Evil</i> <i> “was actually preaching a form of Zarathustra’s philosophy after all,” </i>I begin to have my doubts about his perspicacity. And when he goes on to suggest that… <blockquote>“… Zarathustra had such a clear vision of humanity’s moral choices that his counsel—good words, good thoughts, good deeds—is as applicable to our times as it was to his own...”</blockquote> … I hit an intellectual wall. It seems as if Kriwaczek has become so enamoured of his subject that he is incapable of good judgment about it. Like the diehard Communist who thinks that the Soviet State just wasn’t given enough time to complete its mission of liberating the proletariat, Kriwaczek wants us to try harder with Zoroastrian dualism.<br /><br />I agree with Kriwaczek that Zoroastrian Gnosticism is intellectually superior to any religious commitment to cosmic benignity. It is a coherent (and poetic) metaphysics which fits with the facts of existence as we know them. But this doesn’t make it truer or more beneficial for humanity or other living things. It is just another ideology which has shown itself to be as vulnerable to corruption as all others through the rationalising talents of human beings. Substituting one ideology for another is not an advance but a temporisation. See here for an alternative account: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3038853500">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a><br /><br />*The obvious contradiction between the sentiment of Genesis and that of the Book of Revelation is perhaps evidence of the substantial Gnostic impact on the emerging Jewish sect of Christianity.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-39562250427079842072022-04-02T07:58:00.003-07:002022-04-03T01:19:26.016-07:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8359374-heidegger-and-unconcealment" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348973257l/8359374._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8359374-heidegger-and-unconcealment">Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17887.Mark_A_Wrathall">Mark A. Wrathall</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4644878670">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Deception Is Good For the Soul</b><br /><br />Conspiracy theorists have the right instinct: they are being deceived. Their mistake is not in taking what they’ve been told by Fox News and Q as more authoritative than the so-called mainstream media but that they attenuate their suspicions. They then fall into the trap of belief and become suckers.<br /><br />According to Martin Heidegger, the world is continuously hiding from us. Essentially there is a conspiracy at large, not just among governments or big corporations but by the universe, to prevent us from knowing about what we casually call reality. It was Nietzsche who first insisted that <i>“a perspectival, deceptive character belongs to existence,” </i>thus suggesting that whatever it is we mean by the term reality isn’t even stable.<br /><br />Heidegger has taken that insight and turned into a methodological principle. For him, the best we are able to achieve either philosophically or scientifically is a progressive ‘unconcealment’ of the world. Such unconcealment is prompted by the deception which confronts us continuously, not only in the lies of other people but also in the distortions of our senses and our lack of judgment about what we perceive.<br /><br />But there’s a catch. The process of unconcealment doesn’t have a termination point in anything resembling what we call the truth, that is, a correspondence between a proposition and the way the world is. The reason for this indeterminateness is obvious - the way the world is, its ontology, is in a constant state of flux. What is ‘there’ depends on a complex of interests, history, cultural presumptions, and arbitrary designations of language among other things. As the author explains:<blockquote> “The reason for this [indeterminacy] lies in the nature of unconcealment itself. There is no right way to be human, no uniquely right way to be an entity, no right way for the world to be organized, no single way that world disclosure works. As a result, all we can hope for in philosophy is an ever renewed and refined insight into the workings of unconcealment.”</blockquote><br /><br />So deception feeds our impulse to intellectual search, to scientific understanding, and indeed to conspiracy theories. But what our endeavours to unconceal must lead us to is… well, yet further layers of concealment. Progress cannot me measured in terms of some closer approximation to the truth, but only in terms of the increasingly scrupulous techniques we use to pursue the search for what is concealed. Advancement in addressing deception<i>“consists in seeing and describing the phenomena of unconcealment more perspicuously, and communicating these insights more successfully.”</i><br /><br />What we are doing constantly is <i>“lifting things to salience,” </i>that is, establishing, modifying, and changing, what is considered of importance. In a sense, therefore, we are thus discovering ourselves in our apparently infinite variability. The problem the conspiracy theorists have, therefore, is not their gullibility, or the zaniness of their speculations but what can be called their suspension of disbelief. They simply stop thinking at all. And this is fatal because <blockquote>”[T]he task is to keep his or her thought constantly under way, trying out new ways to explore productively the philosophical domain, remaining on them as long as profitable, but also abandoning them and setting off in a different way when the former way is exhausted. The aim is to participate in unconcealment, bringing it to our awareness, heightening our sensitivity and responsiveness to it.”</blockquote><br /><br />Heidegger calls this continuous search for unconcealment a <i>“way of being in the world.”</i> He proposes this as one we are well-advised to adopt: <blockquote>“It is precisely in the unstable seeing of the ‘world,’ a seeing that flickers with our moods, that the available shows itself in its specific wordliness, which is never the same from day to day.”</blockquote> The alternative is some form of ideology that claims that it has overcome the inherent deception in the world. But a claim cannot be sustained because<i> “were experience always clear and the world of perception populated with determinate objects, we would not be taken in by deceptive appearances.”</i><br /><br />So more power to you who think the world is out to get you through paedophile politicians, poisonous contrails, rigged election machines, and invading aliens. You may be deceived but then so are we all. But please, please, do not let your quest get bogged down. Take it that the rest of us will remain deluded, and move on in your crusade to unconceal the hidden secrets of the universe. We are depending on you for inspiration. Don’t let us down. After all, as the Canadian psychologist Robert Hare has said, <i>“If we believe in the fundamental goodness of man we’re doomed.”</i>
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-88919701737906761572022-04-02T04:12:00.002-07:002022-04-02T04:12:15.198-07:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55197504-just-ignore-him" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Just Ignore Him" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1598914863l/55197504._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55197504-just-ignore-him">Just Ignore Him</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/159700.Alan_Davies">Alan Davies</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4632261084">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Crying Is Something You Do Alone</b><br /><br /><br />Ever since (but not before) the establishment of Roman Law, the institution of the family has been considered an exception. First in the Empire, then in the Church and its successor governments, what went on in the family stayed in the family. The paterfamilias was its absolute emperor, its members were his possessions, and he was insulated from external scrutiny and judgment. If anything is, this principle of family is the foundation of Western civilisation.<br /><br />Although the edges of this tradition have been worn down over the centuries, its residue is still visible in presumptions of male dominance, inhibitions against state interference in domestic life, the widespread exemption of parents from charges of assault against each other and their children, and in the oft quoted ‘sanctity’ of the nuclear family unit among conservative politicians. The family is special.<br /><br />It’s difficult to disagree with the claim that the family is indeed special. It is the oven in which we all are cooked. But the presumption of privacy we give to the family neglects the fact that it is the de facto locus of almost all evil in the world. What goes on behind the closed doors in modern cities and suburbs is, far more frequently than we’d like to admit, a primary cause of short-term suffering and longer term criminality.<br /><br />Alan Davies memoir is an example of the hidden misery which we all know exists but can’t bear to admit occurs as a matter of course. It has become obvious in recent years that every other important institution, from the Church to the Boy Scouts, to corporate business, to democratic politics at every level is corrupt. Not corrupt as an exception but as a rule. None has withstood scrutiny. The family is likely no different.<br /><br />Davies father was a paedophile. His extended family maintained a façade of middle class respectability which prevented even the death of his mother much less the possibility of his father’s perversion to be revealed. Davies was effectively isolated and tortured for years as a consequence. Even into middle age it wasn’t possible to discuss his father’s ‘eccentricities’ with his siblings or other relatives. His family was a hothouse of malignant secrets. Who’s to say most aren’t?<br /><br />To survive such familial horror is not a victory. As Davies notes so plaintively about the legacy of families, <i>“This is the true inheritance tax of life. Behaviours and habits, ingrained, your own but not your own, a duty on your existence, a tariff to be levied on those who try to love you.” </i>Everyone continues to pay the price, likely for generations to come. This is the empirical residue of family life:<i> “You are dead but the secrets can continue. As if it is the secrets that sustain these fucking people.”</i> Families are where you do you’re crying alone.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-7663162016824594072022-03-30T04:10:00.000-07:002022-04-02T04:13:06.574-07:00<p> </p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26113290-martin-heidegger-saved-my-life" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Martin Heidegger Saved My Life" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440457240l/26113290._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26113290-martin-heidegger-saved-my-life">Martin Heidegger Saved My Life</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/186537.Grant_Farred">Grant Farred</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4609408728">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Unthought Racism</b><br /><br />Preparing for a situation or encounter before we are forced to confront it is the role of thought if I read Grant Farred correctly. As he says, <i>“There is a crucial difference between the response produced by thinking and the response devoid of it…” </i>But, as Martin Heidegger pointed out, <i>“We do not know what thinking is.” </i>And yet Farred insists <i>“Martin Heidegger saved me because it is he who makes me, made me, think about what to say before I was called upon to say it.” </i>To think about thinking is indeed a tricky business.<br /><br />The point of Farred’s essay is to provide a thoughtful explanation of his confrontation with a middle class resident of his prosperous neighbourhood. Seeing Farred raking leaves in his garden, she asks this distinguished professor at a renowned university whether he would like additional work, presumably to do the same in her garden. Central to Farred’s account of this encounter is Heidegger’s concept of the Unthought and its very practical relevance to the issue of race.<br /><br />What we casually call rational thought is actually a very irrational response grounded in a set of unrecognised and therefore unconsidered presumptions about the world and how it works. Uncovering these presumptions (one can hardly call them interests since they may simply be symptoms of neurosis or ignorance) before an encounter in which they are employed is the function of philosophy as I read Farred. Accordingly, <i>“The only proper political response to the question that is presented without thinking, the question that is rooted in an objectionable politics, is to ‘speak’ thinking. It is to think before, long before, you are called upon to speak.”</i><br /><br />The routine racism of the woman’s question to Farred (he a Black man doing manual labour in a well-to-do part of town) is generated by an immense cultural Unthought. Such a condition cannot be penetrated by rationality because it is its own rationality. It is probably not even accessible through psychological therapy since it isn’t bothersome to its ‘bearer.’ An angry or hostile response is only likely to reinforce racial presumptions. <br /><br />Farred has in fact anticipated the woman’s Unthought. Prepared by his experience in apartheid South Africa as well as the bourgeoise United States, he has thought not only her Unthought but his own long in advance of his encounter with her. Farred recognises the collective characteristic of thought which often pretends to independence: <i>“In thinking we stand, by ourselves, gathered into the thought of others, gathered by the thought of others, gathering others into our thinking. All the while our thoughts seek to gather others unto us.” </i>Thus he is able to make a response which punctures her thinking (and his own), a provocation directed precisely at her Unthought without ever mentioning it. Farred simply replies, <i>“Certainly, as long as you can match my university salary.”</i><br /><br />I can’t claim to comprehend the nuances and subtleties of Heideggerian philosophy. Nor have I experienced the pervasive subtlety of racism. But I think I understand Farred’s point. Argument, in any of its forms, is inadequate to change minds. Thoughtful discourse of the kind he reports may indeed be an alternative. Preparing that <i> “statement for the moment” </i>by thinking about thinking could be just the tactic to pursue in combatting racism as well as the many other human ills.<br /><br />Postscript: As I was reading Farred, this showed up in my newsfeed: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://apple.news/AyIeNoI53TJqOhOwPqD2iAA">https://apple.news/AyIeNoI53TJqOhOwPq...</a>
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-38540208769591694932022-03-14T13:46:00.001-07:002022-03-14T13:46:06.054-07:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57693619-the-greatest-invention" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1624824986l/57693619._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57693619-the-greatest-invention">The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5767421.Silvia_Ferrara">Silvia Ferrara</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4603166660">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Bloody, Bloody Babel</b><br /><br />Silvia Ferrara tells a fascinating story about writing using the device of nine as yet undeciphered scripts of the ancient world. Each of these scripts is fascinating in its own right. And Ferrara recounts what we know about each in a way that is both authoritative and playful. She is clearly a master of her trade and therefore confident enough to be poetic, humorous, and speculatively self-reflective in her exposition of what might be the most creative as well as productive of any human act, the invention of writing.<br /><br />I can’t tell my agglutinative from my fusionals not to mention from my polysynthetics in linguistics. But I think there is also another story contained within Ferrara’s exposition of the nine scripts more accessible to the linguistic unprofessional. This is a 5000 year saga of linguistic sociology that is much more engrossing than the research results of the various linguists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and practitioners of geodesy and geomatics who are involved in Ferrara’s work. <br /><br />This other story is somewhat subtly placed but it is there in her book. So her insistence on some established facts - that writing is a collaborative and experimental invention, that it creates enduring (but not all) societies, that it is the fundamental technology of our species which has allowed us to successfully engage in evolutionary competition - isn’t primarily about her trope of undeciphered scripts. Rather, what she shows is that writing is a tool of alienation as well as empathy, a decidedly mixed blessing just as the biblical story of the Tower of Babel suggests.<br /><br />As I read Ferrara, this paradox of a linguistically generated empathy and alienation is inherent in written language itself. The paradox doesn’t assert itself suddenly but, like the slowly boiling frog, through an incremental process of development (except for Chinese which had the equivalent of the miraculous Virgin Birth in linguistic terms). For her, writing begins with drawing, particularly drawing of the things of everyday life - animals, plants, parts of the body, natural features. These are images that are purely expressive. They may evoke a response in others but their meaning is solely in that response. They are not functionally dissimilar to, for example, the warning call of the blackbird in my garden announcing ‘there are bipeds on the loose in the area.’ Except, of course, that in writing the warning can be communicated without the sound. <br /><br />From that starting point, again as I read Ferrara, written language binds people together but at the cost of divorcing them from the rest of the world, including other people, and perhaps even themselves. Linguistic signs (hieroglyphs, ideographs, letters) emerge from the shapes of things drawn. In a sense, drawing promotes a sort of identification, perhaps even a spiritual sympathy, with the things depicted. But these innovative written signs ‘stand for’ something other than what they are. They indicate, or denote, or, direct.<br /><br />That is to say, signs come gradually to exist in their own right - and clearly so, there on rock or papyrus, turtle shells, or in clay tablets. They ease into a new status of icon. Continuing the evolutionary process, the icon is transformed into a logogram. The logogram is a sort of independent icon, a free radical in chemical terms perhaps, which can change its meaning without changing its sound. Logograms attach themselves to other logograms like molecules of hydrogen and oxygen to form the equivalent of water in new linguistic substances. Writing has then become liberated from speaking and an entirely new world is opened up as linguistic ‘things’ proliferate.<br /><br />Logograms most significantly form into the revolutionary (as well as evolutionary) invention of syllables. Syllables are the building blocks of all language, much like prime numbers are the building blocks of mathematics. They can be mixed and matched in any number of ways. They are structured into words (or sometimes combined with pictograms in a sort of rebus) which are then mixed according to emerging rules called grammar. What might have been vocal convention now becomes a linguistic requirement of writing, which, while not entirely fixed, is much slower to change.<br /><br />Freed from speech, logograms also can have different sounds without changing their meanings, as with many Chinese characters. Or, more problematically, they can retain their links to sounds and have multiple meanings. These are the homophones which exist in abundance in English as well as Chinese. English relies almost solely on context to distinguish meaning while Chinese developed special marks to denote what would be vocally ‘tones’ and so kept writing competitive, as it were, with speaking. And as Ferrara points out: <i>“Using this one, small, versatile unit of meaning [the logogram], we can express two things on completely different ends of the semantic spectrum, and create humor.”</i><br /><br />At some point grammar intrudes and provides structure. Written marks with no sound at all, - like the so-called ‘determinants’ which indicate the grammatical class of a word or the tonal designations in Chinese. Cases and declensions emerge directing how words relate to each other rather than to things that are not words. Words are created for things that aren’t even things - emotions, relationships, abstract concepts, God. Each step in the evolution of writing takes it further from the drawing which was a mere appreciative expression of the natural world.<br /><br />In time, written languages start to breed with each other, as with Sumerian cuneiform and Akkadian script. Most remnants of any original ‘natural’ symbology are obscured or erased entirely (except, once again, in Chinese!). The array of written symbols themselves becomes totally abstract. In many definite ways they become the new nature in which we exist. Is it the laws of society that control us through language, or the laws of written language that controls us through society? It’s hard to tell.<br /><br />Having become independent of speech, writing became a universal mark of social class and power. Simply being human is the only requirement for speech. Wealth, position, and education are necessary for writing. Nothing about writing is natural. It is the ultimate artifice, the primal human technology. No matter how much writing describes, recounts, or even directs the world, it is not of the world but an entirely human convention about the world to create <i>“An infinity of fictions, one layered atop the other.”</i> And many of these fictions are meant to manipulate, constrain, and control.<br /><br />The undeciphered scripts analysed by Ferrara are actually evidence that we have no certainty about how writing emerged or when. Her story is one of those infinity of fictions which writing itself promotes. And it is a fiction with theological resonance. In addition to being our fundamental technology, written language is also our fundamental religion. It seems to have created itself <i>ex nihilo, </i>out of nothing. We cannot imagine a world without it. It keeps us safe and it oppresses us with complete impunity. It is everywhere simultaneously and at every time and yet nowhere definite and timeless. It is within us, around us, and totally separate from us in the manner of the Christian Trinity. We trust it but we are wary of its capacity to deceive. When we pray, we honour it. When we recite a creed, we extol its power. We worship it through education in the hope of a better, fairer, more peaceful life… or just to survive.<br /><br />We recognise not language itself but written language as the ultimate source of power. It is the power of contracts, of the design specs for nuclear bombs, of worldwide literary culture. And through science and engineering it is power over the natural world certainly, but also power over each other. Those brought together by language compete against others bound through other languages. Within each language ‘tribe’ we compete for power with each other, mainly the power over language itself in legislation, policy, rules of recognition and advancement. Particularly in democracy, power is sought through the language of persuasion and promise and exercised in written laws, regulations and codes.<br /><br />The written word has become so dominant that we find it difficult to distinguish it from the natural world at all. The Egyptians scratched out the written names of people and animals on graves and monuments to neutralise their threat. The ancient Chinese created <i>“flash fictions,” </i>prophecies which gained credibility by being carved on turtle shells. Hebrews and Christians published bogus biblical genealogies to establish royal lineages. Isaac Newton devoted as much time to the arcane texts of alchemical magic as he did to his experiments in physics. Randolph Hearst single-handedly sparked the American War against Spain through his newspapers. And, of course, Donald Trump controls the American Republican Party, and Putin the Russian state through patent falsehoods via the internet, written words carried by the technologies built on and by previous written words. <br /><br />So Ferrara is absolutely correct when she calls writing the greatest invention, or rather inventions since they were discovered independently in probably a half dozen places. Arguably it is written language which is the sine qua non of what we mean by civilisation, the collecting together into cities. And it written language that has enabled empires, industrial progress and vastly increased human numbers and longevity. But it is also written language which may eventually eliminate our species either through mutual self-destruction or the destruction of the minimal conditions for human living. Writing tears us apart as vigorously as it binds us together. Bloody, bloody Babel.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-65403635332565663732022-03-09T07:22:00.002-08:002022-03-09T07:22:32.410-08:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/87262.The_Posthumous_Memoirs_of_Br_s_Cubas" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347602854l/87262._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/87262.The_Posthumous_Memoirs_of_Br_s_Cubas">The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22458.Machado_de_Assis">Machado de Assis</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4588375695">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>Malevolent Grace</b><br /><br />Like Moses recounting his own death in the Torah, this memoir is a miracle from beyond the grave. The miracle is only incidentally theological, however, and much more importantly literary. Written by a self-educated descendant of African slaves brought to Brazil, the last country in the Americas to abandon slavery, the book’s wit and style are timeless yet unique. <br /><br />Brás Cubas is a sardonic sceptic whom it is impossible to dislike. His honesty about himself and his insights about the world around him are witty, comical, and tragic in equal measure. Every institution - the church, civil administration, the military, education, even the family - is corrupt. They persist because of the delusions produced by the one disaster that Pandora did not release from her hand bag - hope.<br /><br />The book is self-referential in the tradition of Cervantes and Velásquez. It is as ruthlessly doubtful of itself as Montaigne’s <i>Essais</i>; it is often as epigrammatic as Pascale’s <i>Pensées</i>; and as mystically profound as Meister Eckhart. Machado references everybody who’s anybody in the Western literary world from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, and alludes to dozens more. Fortunately Flora Thomson-Deveaux’s translation provides usefully succinct and entertaining notes on everything from currency conversion to contemporary world events to the sources of Machado’s quotes, intentional misquotes and creatively interpretive quotes.<br /><br />As Thomson-Deveaux says in her Introduction, the book has a <i>“malevolent grace and depth.”</i> It’s humour is continuous but absurd. Machado plays with the reader while entertaining her. But as he says in his own Prologue, he did not write it for the reader but for himself. <i>“[T]he esteem of the serious and the love of the frivolous, which are the two chief pillars of public opinion,”</i> were of no apparent concern to him. He could offend everyone by laughing at them laughing at him.<br /><br /> A good cause for laughter is precisely how seriously we take the words we use and turn them into ideals toward which to strive. This includes the words Machado himself uses. For Machado the term ‘fixed idea’ is meant to designate our obsession with the symbolic at the cost of living. Brás Cubas dies precisely because he could not shake his obsession with his<i> “pharmaceutical invention,… an anti-hypochondriacal plaster destined to alleviate our melancholy humanity.”</i> But this is only the final stage of a life filled with such compulsive idealism.<br /><br />What Brás Cubas sought in life was not a better world but a better position in it. He wanted power. As he says, <i>“what drove me most of all was the gratification it would give me to see in newsprint, showcases, pamphlets, on street corners, and finally on the medicine boxes, those four words: The Brás Cubas Plaster.”</i> Isn’t this the universal trap of humanity, power-seeking disguised as humanitarian idealism? We can rationalise any atrocity in the name of social improvement.<br /><br />In his delirium while dying, Brás Cubas has an important vision of Nature herself who is providing some perspective on the significance of his life. Asking why she wants to kill him since she created him, Nature responds without hesitation, <i>“Because I have no more need of you.”</i> Nature also reminds him of her role in his life: <i>“[F]or I am not only life, I am also death, and you are about to return what I have lent you. For you, great hedonist, there await all the sensual pleasures of nothingness.”</i><br /><br />In his vision, Brás Cubas gets to understand why we delude ourselves that it could be otherwise. It is precisely that our idealistic verbiage has got us by the throat because in some mythical pre-history <i>“[Reason] grabbed Folly by the wrists and dragged her outside; then she went in and locked the door. Folly whined a few pleas, snarled a few curses; but she soon resigned herself, stuck out her tongue, and went on her way . . .”</i> This was the original sin passed down since. From its position of complete freedom, Folly formulates the ideals which seem to arrive from nowhere, and thence wreak havoc with our lives and the lives of those around us. Malevolent grace indeed.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-33153891109181562322022-03-04T07:23:00.003-08:002022-03-04T10:39:54.331-08:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22826414-engaging-buddhism" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1409605350l/22826414._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22826414-engaging-buddhism">Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/425284.Jay_L_Garfield">Jay L. Garfield</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4583066436">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>A World of Pure Particularity</b><br /><br />Jay Garfield’s <i>Engaging Buddhism </i> is an extraordinary book in several respects. At a basic level it is an attempt to show the relevance of Buddhist metaphysics to Western philosophical discussion. This it does very well. At another level, it is a demonstration of that same Buddhist metaphysics in practice through its constant emphasis on the power of basic vocabulary, our <i>“cognitive architecture,” </i>to isolate philosophical traditions from each other. And, finally, through its poetic suggestiveness, it makes perhaps the most significant contribution possible to those unfamiliar with Buddhist philosophy, namely imagination.<br /><br />My imagination in particular has been stimulated and provoked in a number of directions while reading the book. But it is the specific problem of universals, a constant theme of European philosophy since the 13th century, for which I find Buddhist metaphysics immediately apt. It is this issue of particulars (I, you, that-over-there, Vladimir Putin) and universals (person, thing, cow, psychopath) which is the inherent subject of the modern philosophy of language, particularly that of Wittgenstein. Most remarkably, Buddhism anticipated Wittgenstein and the Western philosophical turn toward language by several thousand years.<br /><br />From Garfield I understand that Buddhism cannot be understood as a faith, but is rather constituted as a set of ‘commitments’ which vary among its schools and which have evolved over time. These commitments can be summarised as:<br /><br /><b>Suffering</b> (dukkha)- as the basic fact of existence - certainly undesirable, it is not associated with evil but with an inaccurate appreciation of reality (the primal confusion). This is the foundation of Buddhist <u>ontology</u>, that is ideas about the nature of being itself.<br /><br /><b>Impermanence </b>- there is no ‘intrinsic nature’ or essence, to anything. Failure to realise this is the primary cause of suffering. We project properties, including continuity, onto the world as a matter of linguistically enabled cognition. This is the fundamental principle of Buddhist <u>epistemology, </u> the connections between reality and language.<br /><br /><b>Beneficence</b> - a commitment to the welfare of other sentient beings, who are fellow-sufferers. Buddhist metaphysics implies the necessity for an <u>ethics </u>of empathy. <br /><br />It is impermanence, I think, which is the pivotal characteristic in Buddhist metaphysics since any lack of appreciation of its importance is the source of both suffering and the lack of empathy. Among other things, impermanence means that there is no ontological foundation. As the American pragmatist, Richard Rorty, said: <i>“Everything is surface, all the way down.” </i>That surface Rorty refers to is language. And as the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, expressed in a way that conforms perfectly with Buddhist thought,<i> “Language about God [the Christian/Western ultimate reality] conceals more than it reveals.”</i><br /><br />Buddhists agree with Barth. While language is essential, the best it can supply is some kind of conventional reality in which we live and work together. But language cannot describe or encompass ultimate reality: <blockquote>“Conventional reality is the everyday world, with its own standards of truth and knowledge—the world of dependently originated phenomena we inhabit. Ultimate reality is emptiness. They sound entirely different. Nāgārjuna argues that they are entirely different, but also that they are identical.”</blockquote><br /><br />To appreciate this claim, it is essential to understand that Buddhist philosophy is a <i>“world of pure particularity”</i> That is to say, <i>“Buddhist philosophers regard universals of all kinds as conceptual projections, and as entirely unreal.”</i> Therefore conventional reality is a useful fiction but must never be used as a standard of ultimate truth. <br /><br />The reason for this is that almost all of language consists of universals which actually have no existential content at all. They are abstractions that make a certain kind of logic (Western) possible but fatally misleading. So says Garfield, <blockquote>“Buddhist commitments to interdependence and impermanence entail nominalism with respect to universals, and nominalism with respect to universals requires some fancy footwork in semantics and the theory of cognition. <i>Apoha</i>is that tango.”</blockquote><br /><br />This key concept of apoha has its own complex meaning which is almost impossible to translate but which has a relatively straightforward logic of its own. Take the universal ‘cow.’ There is no such thing as ‘cowness’ which can identify a particular Daisy as a cow. Yet we all agree she’s a cow. In Buddhist philosophy, this feat of perception is not accomplished by reference to some set of properties assigned to the animal in question. Quite the opposite, as Garfield says, <i>“apoha theory is, to a first—and startlingly unilluminating—approximation, that Daisy is not a non-cow. The double negation is the apoha.”</i><br /><br />If I understand this correctly, an apoha, as in ‘not a non-cow’, is a particular which is arrived at by a process of rapid elimination of alternatives. This seems to be a sort of double classification, almost a linguistic cross-referencing which combines, for example, Owen Barfield’s beta and alpha-thinking and C.S. Peirce’s Second and Third into a single ‘representational moment’ in cognition. And as Garfield notes, this is not dissimilar to Wittgenstein’s logic of representation and the prototype categorisation theory of the influential cognitive psychologist, Eleanor Rosch.<br /><br />The implications of this extreme Buddhist nominalism are wide-ranging. From the philosophy of language to theodicy, it provides an enormous number of possible paths for development. But it also does something else. The ultimate ‘emptiness’ referred to above in the citation from Garfield is a crucial reminder that language is always misleading when discussing reality, including the reality of language itself. Hence the idea of ultimate reality is a linguistic expression which cannot escape this constraint. Emptiness, too, is a universal. Therefore conventional and ultimate reality end up being identical, and identically ‘empty.’<br /><br />Another way of saying this is that emptiness is a lack of intrinsic nature. But emptiness, like existence, is not a property.* Perhaps, indeed, emptiness is another name for existence, for being, which might well be the inspiration for Heidegger’s idea of language as the House of Being. And as Garfield says, <i>“language—designation—is indispensible for expressing that inexpressible truth. This is not an irrational mysticism, but rather a rational, analytically grounded embrace of inconsistency.”</i> In short: the world of language is paradoxical, get over it!<br /><br />* Another important implication of the lack of intrinsic properties in reality arises for the theory of measurement. See here for a discussion of what might well be a Buddhist theory of measurement: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2250383138">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a>
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-37025875310446357072022-03-02T06:52:00.002-08:002022-03-02T06:52:34.165-08:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55815694-white-evangelical-racism" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1603971334l/55815694._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55815694-white-evangelical-racism">White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3251811.Anthea_Butler">Anthea Butler</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4004574474">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>The Colour-Blind Gospel</b><br /><br />Racism is the American Evangelical equivalent of pedophilia in the Catholic Church, only worse because so much more pervasive. Like the scandal of pedophilia, racism has always been a part of institutional Evangelicalism, embedded in their tendentious readings of the Bible and their historical practices. And like pedophilia, racism is considered as an individual sin rather than a systemic evil. And so, like pedophilia, racism can be forgiven rather than corrected. As Anthea Butler says, <i>“Racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism.”</i><br /><br />Evangelicals want to make race invisible, both existentially and politically. ‘All Lives Matter’ is the code phrase which summarises the strategy of erasure of race as an issue. The strategy allows evangelicals to ignore their own institutional legacy of racism, the continuing large-scale segregation of their own congregations, and the hurt, violence, and even deaths of people of colour. These are civil matters which are not related to the saving of souls. < blockquote>“[S]in for evangelicals is always personal, not corporate, and God is always available to forgive deserving individuals, especially, it seems, if the sinner is a white man. The sin of racism, too, can be swept away with an event or a confession. Rarely do evangelicals admit to a need for restitution.”<br /><br />Evangelicalism practices its racism genteelly. In line with the Republican ‘Southern Strategy’, the racial epithets of the past have been replaced by euphemisms. Racial activists are communists, revolutionaries, promoters of civil disorder, un-American, and those who don’t share our Christian values. James Baldwin had it exactly right, white Americans fear their own spiritual impurity and project that fear on to black people as those who embody their own chaotic guilt. They huddle together for comfort under the guise of being an oppressed minority: <blockquote>“The ubiquitous support demonstrated by white evangelicals for the Republican Party made them not just religiously or culturally white: it made them politically white conservatives in America concerned with keeping the status quo of patriarchy, cultural hegemony, and nationalism.”</blockquote><br /><br />The real religious personality behind the cloak of evangelical confidence, respectability, and morality has been self-outed in their support of quite horrible political figures and causes. Their fantasy of Trump as a modern King Cyrus freeing the new Hebrews is only one example. And their persistent resistance to gay and women’s rights, voting rights legislation, voter enrolment programmes, and anti-gerrymandering controls are manifestations of their real objective - not personal sanctity but political power. The evangelical coalition with fundamentalists, among white Protestant sects, and Catholics, show clearly that their dogmatic differences have conveniently evaporated. They are a racially-motivated political not a religious force, the Republican Party at prayer. Paul Weyrich, a Catholic evangelical, laid out the programme as early as 1980:<blockquote> “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” </blockquote><br /><br />Racism is not an incidental component of evangelicalism, it is the central plank from which all their other policies emanate. According to Butler<i> “Slavery is the foundation of racism and power in American evangelicalism.” </i>It still retains the attitudes of the <i>“Religion of the Lost Cause”</i> that mythical tale of Confederate civilisation in which black people knew their place. Blackness is so obviously inferior it is no longer necessary to debate the point. It is black girls who seek abortions; it is young black males who are the primary danger to law and order; it is black men who suffer from a lack of spiritual manliness; and it is black women who don’t know how to maintain the integrity of family life. Besides, black people in general have an agenda which is politically divisive. Meanwhile, evangelicals claim ‘colour-blindness’: <blockquote>“[C]olor-blind gospel is how evangelicals used biblical scripture to affirm that everyone, no matter what race, is equal and that race does not matter [just as they had previously used it to justify racial segregation]. The reality of the term ‘color- blind,’ however, was more about making Black and other ethnic evangelicals conform to whiteness and accept white leadership as the norm both religiously and socially. It is the equivalent of today’s oft-quoted phrase ‘I don’t see color.’ Saying that means white is the default color.”</blockquote><br /><br />Evangelicals complain of ‘cancel culture’ when it comes to the positive contributions of white folk who, from Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump, and from George Whitfield to Billy Graham, have tried to minimise the monstrosity of the racism which has lived in the heart of America. That they won’t acknowledge the historical and continuing existence of that monstrosity is the greatest act of such cancellation possible. To use the gospel to promote such an erasure of suffering and injustice is just an additional obscenity added to their large collection.
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8220354199934926332.post-14279117228697871552022-02-28T13:31:00.002-08:002022-02-28T13:31:47.455-08:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1479571.Discovering_God" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348073048l/1479571._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1479571.Discovering_God">Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15511.Rodney_Stark">Rodney Stark</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4577212921">1 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
<b>A Whiggish Sociology of Religion</b><br /><br />What does it mean to say that one religion is better than another? Or that religion has evolved as a cultural artefact to assist in environmental adaptation? Rodney Stark thinks he knows the answers. But he does make a few presumptions that make his answers somewhat less than useless.<br /><br />The first presumption is that he knows what constitutes successful cultural adaptation. For Stark success is measured in terms of longevity (and some other equally arbitrary metrics). The longer a religion persists, the better adapted it is to the conditions of the relevant culture. And for him, the apex of religious evolution is monotheism, just like the apex of physical evolution is Homo Sapiens. Isn’t that the obvious cultural destination to which several thousand years of recorded history (and genetic development) has led?<br /><br />Well perhaps, if one excludes the religions of the East like Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and dozens of others which do not posses a divine figure at all. Or discount the tribal religions of Africa, North and South America, the Pacific, and the Arctic which persist still without the concept of a single all-powerful creator and may be longer lived than Christianity (and like the cockroach, will probably outlive Homo Sapiens). Stark eliminates these as irrelevant because they are not constituted by divine revelation but some kind of spiritual hearsay. That is, they do not claim that God has disclosed himself to their founders. The circularity as well as cultural arrogance of this reasoning is overwhelming.<br /><br />The second presumption is that divine revelation, in addition to being necessary for true religion, is also able to evolve through human reason. This explains the development of monotheism (or its original dualistic forms) in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. His claim is that as the implications of monotheism have been worked out by theologians, it has become more coherent and intellectually compelling, as if religion were a scientific theory having certain rational characteristics.<br /><br />Such ‘religious method’ is obviously bunk. To make such a claim, Stark must first of all ignore the contradictions of monotheistic religion acknowledged by its own adherents. The testimony of St. Paul that divine logic is simply inaccessible by human beings and the proclamation of Tertullian regarding Christian faith that “It is certain, because impossible” disprove Stark’s claim that there is a growing rationality to monotheism, or indeed rationality at all. And Reason, as St. Augustine insisted, is corrupt so cannot be trusted to reach sound conclusions, particularly when it comes to identifying or elaborating revelation. And this quite apart from the obviously varied, frequently contradictory, revelatory claims made historically by innumerable sects.*<br /><br />Quite apart from his tendentious reading of both Scripture and history, Stark seems unaware of the only truly authentic Christian invention: faith. Thanks to the triumph of Pauline Christianity, faith, unconditional belief not ethical or ritual practice, has become a synonym for religion. And this is why Stark purposely makes the error of equating religion with revelation. It is only the ‘religions of the book,’ - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - which claim divine revelation. And it is only Christianity which defines its adherents solely as those attesting to its formal creeds (to be a Jew is a genetic fact; to be a Muslim is to submit to Allah and follow the other four behavioural ‘pillars’ of Islam).<br /><br />Faith is the ultimate religious conquest by language. Faith is language worshipping itself in the most idolatrous manner possible. Stark’s pseudo-erudition is a paean to the power of language to distort and degrade what is not language. His is an academic’s religiosity proclaiming the best of all possible worlds because it is a world composed entirely of language which he uses to exert power. <br /><br />Like scientists or philosophers who claim to know the criteria for ‘true science,’ Stark claims he knows the marks of true religion. His presentation of the history of religion progressing from a dark and terrible past to a glorious present is ludicrous, a wonderful example of Whig historiography. His final statement contradicts the entirety of the rest of his book:<i> “I find it far more rational to regard the universe itself as the ultimate revelation of God.” </i>So Stark is in direct communication with the Almighty. How enlightening. And he apparently wants to start his own religion. The world shudders in anticipation of further divine news.<br /><br />* As an aside, the most important theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth, would be horrified at Stark’s claim that revelation is a linguistic phenomenon. For Barth, a very conservative evangelical Protestant, revelation is the “grabbing of one’s spirit by the throat.” As he put it, “God’s Word is not man’s word,” and even scripture is man’s word. Barth was aware, as Stark is not, of the terrible human consequences of burying religion in the credal tomb of language. See: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2629364008">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a>
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The Mind of BlackOxfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11918657803000103406noreply@blogger.com0