From Hippo, with Love

Confessions 

St Augustine

This is, apparently, the world’s first autobiography. The parts of the narrative that deal with the author’s personal and emotional life are both well told and historically interesting, not to say fascinating. Augustine was also one of the greatest ancient post-Classical philosophers, and I was impressed by his ability to communicate difficult ideas simply and lucidly.
    I’m not religious, so that aspect of the book was less important to me than it would be to most readers. I am interested in theodicy, but I found Augustine’s rather unsatisfactory – the usual Catholic position of blaming everything on human free will and error without tangling with the real questions about the goodness of God that are raised by the existence of evil. Augustine says evil isn’t a substance in its own right but simply the absence of good, or more accurately the absence of some good; in other words, evil as such doesn’t really exist. All things are good to God, he explains, but some things are less than perfectly good. All this is very neatly laid out but the logical contradictions are not addressed or even, it seemed to me, noticed.
    What I’d been hoping for most from this book was some insight regarding how an intelligent person (as Augustine most certainly was, though his true genius lay elsewhere) could appease or silence their intellect in order to accept the logical and moral contradictions of Christian belief. I have seen it happen to people in real life, and it always looks to me like self-betrayal, essentially giving up on oneself and settling for the easy option – like that bit in Watership Down where some of the escaped rabbits grow weary of the hardships of life in the wild and decide to return to the farm. But in this regard, I was thoroughly disappointed by the Confessions; all the author has to say on the subject is that the Word of God supersedes all other knowledge and renders all intellectual questions irrelevant. I’ve heard that line before and I’m afraid it does not convince me.

    As for the man himself, he always did believe in God, in one form or another, so this question never troubled him. His quest was not for God but for a religion that could meet his intellectual and psychological needs. As the narrative approached the moment of his conversion I grew quite excited, waiting for the big intellectual denouement, but the whole thing came and went in a welter of emotive description and heartfelt praise, like the climactic scene of a romance novel, without a single intelligent word said about what I really wanted to understand.

    At this point I rather lost interest in the good father’s story. The remainder of the Confessions – books XI to XIII – appears to be largely about time and memory and suchlike; good philosophical stuff, but these are subjects about which the ancients, Augustine included, knew far less than we do and could not help but have the most primitive ideas. I don’t know that I shall ever finish the book.
    I wish I knew of a critical analysis or review of the Confessions for non-religious readers, written from a secular, essentially philosophical and historical perspective. If anyone knows of such a thing, please tell me about it. I want to read it – so long as it’s not too long-winded.

Digital Dualism

When people project their thoughts along what even we greybeards no longer call the Information Superhighway, nuance and subtlety seem to get left behind in the parking lot. Our opinions and responses, even with regard to the most complex ideas and issues, are reduced to brutally opposed binaries: for vs against, men vs women, Left vs Right, us vs them, good vs evil. We act as though each of us is all one thing or another, as if where we stand on any issue completely defines who we are.

    Conceptual binaries are, of course, an essential part of our human mental equipment, but they’re far from being the whole toolkit. Nothing, to coin a phrase, is all black or white. The world is a messy, complicated place, infinitely varied in all its aspects, and human beings are evidently the messiest and most complicated things that exist in it. Binaries, therefore, useful though they are for the operations of logic, cannot even begin to describe us. Binaries are just endpoints on the spectrum of all possible measurements some physical, economic, social or psychological variable. Sometimes we can look at these variables as being made up of relevant binaries added together in different proportions, the way you get varying shades of grey by mixing black and white in differing proportions. But however it is these intermediate positions are defined or arrived at, most of us – when offline, at least – are willing to acknowledge their existence. We don’t normally think of the world and its inhabitants as being all one way or the other, with nothing in between: not unless we’re idiots, or fanatics.

    But when we get on the internet, and particularly (though by no means exclusively) on social media, all that subtlety and nuance, all those insights into how complicated life is, how conflicted people are, how difficult and often illogical our behaviour and in particular our moral choices can be, and how much allowance for all this one should make when dealing with others – all these suddenly seem to vanish. If anyone disagrees with us, they’re The Enemy, to be opposed, argued with, trolled, gulled, ridiculed, insulted and beaten back into the digital undergrowth with every resource at our disposal. We scarcely notice that in projecting this kind of extremism on to our opponents, we make extremists of ourselves too; by pushing them into one corner we inevitably force ourselves into the opposite one, and never even notice that we’re doing it.
    As someone who does most of his communicating these days through the internet, I have had reason to think a lot about this. Most of my thinking so far has centred on the frailties of human nature, particularly my own, and I am happy to report that, by trying to understand those I communicate with on the internet better as people, I have become a less argumentative (and at times abrasive) interlocutor than I used to be. But I’m no saint, and am still liable to lose my equanimity from time to time when confronted by people with whom I disagree, especially if they lack what I regard as courtesy or are trying to sell me something.

    More and more often, though, I’m beginning to wonder whether these polarities and divisions, these regular online revelations of what must surely be our worst selves to the whole wide world, are entirely our fault. I am becoming convinced that the playing-field on which we perform, like the buttress inside an Eton fives court, is affecting the rules of the game.

✸

How could that be? Here is what I think may be the matter. 

    Computers and the internet are products of digital technology, and digital technology is based on binary logic: ones and zeroes. A computer is basically nothing but a huge arrangement of switches, and each of these switches can have only two positions: ON and OFF – or, as it might be, 1 and 0, or YES and NO. All the logical operations of a computer, even the most complex and abstract, are nothing but a series of brute binary choices: this way or that way, accept or reject, true or false, yes or no. No middle ground.

    Is it coincidence, then, that our surrender to computers and the internet seems to have made us start thinking of all human questions in terms of reductive binaries, just as all problems are reduced, inside a computer, to a series of Boolean logical functions? Is it too big a stretch to think that the apparent inevitability of either total disagreement or total agreement that we find on the internet – this idiot tendency to view everything in the world as a collection of binary qualities or traits – good or evil, Left or Right, for or against – is at least partly determined by the very structure of the machines we use and the specific, highly reductive logic by which they operate? Is it possible that much of the disagreement and misunderstanding that arises when people communicate via the internet could be arising, somehow, from the very digital infrastructure that makes it all possible?

    And will it get worse as digital technology infiltrates every aspect of the world we live in? In some countries (though not, of course, in dear old Ceylon) the infiltration is almost complete. What kind of monsters shall we have become by the time it is fully accomplished? Will civilization itself still be left standing? Look at how divisions in politics, society and the global community of nations have accelerated and been exacerbated since the internet became a public utility. Look, for God’s sake, at what has happened to the United States of America...

    I am neither a philosopher nor a computer scientist. If some member of either profession – or, for that matter, any profession – could suggest a mechanism by which this digital duality might be transmitted from the infrastructure to its users, I should be very grateful indeed. And if they can show me why it can’t – show me, that is, where I am wrong, and set me straight – I would be more grateful still. Only try not to make your argument too straightforwardly black and white, or coming over the internet as it probably will, I am all too likely to disagree, reject it, and insult you into the bargain.

Hill-Country Cosmopolis

The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom

by Gananath Obeyesekere

A slender but fact-filled volume whose author clearly intends to present an alternative and more truthful view of the Kingdom of Kandy in its heyday than the perspective afforded by modern Lankan historians and scholars. The latter must, of course, hew closely to present-day Sinhalese-Buddhist ‘nationalist’ orthodoxy if they hope to obtain academic publication or preferment in this country.

In the view of this orthodoxy, the Kandyan Kingdom throve whenever it was a strict Buddhist theocracy that piously rejected foreign and secular influences, and was finally laid low when it could no longer resist these external forces and alien conspiracies. Obeyesekere challenges this orthodoxy, whose principal champion in recent years was the late Prof. Lorna Dewaraja, countering many of her claims with evidences to show that Kandy was never a strict Buddhist theocracy but, for most of its history, a sophisticated multicultural polity in which people of many races and religions lived together amicably and whose kings, while remaining ‘good Buddhists’, were tolerant and even accepting of other cultures and faiths. Those kings, moreover, were educated cosmopolites with a well-documented taste for sellam – that is, recreations of a decidedly erotic and decadent nature – good Buddhists though they may have been.

Obeyesekere blames the rise of what, elsewhere, he famously dubbed ‘Protestant Buddhism’ for the capture and confinement of modern Sinhalese thought and culture, which has created this distorted ‘nationalist’ view of the Kandyan past and of Lankan history in general. Though one may sympathize with his thesis, it is quite hard for the non-expert to judge how well he makes the case for it in this particular book. Yet even a lay person – one, at least, who has spent some time on the study of human nature – can see that the Kandyan polity Obeyesekere evokes in his book is a far more realistic and credible conception than the artificial, clearly idealised entity imagined by the nativist orthodoxy.

Gananath Obeyesekere, who until his death last month was regarded as perhaps the most eminent of all Lankan scholars and intellectuals, fought against this propagandization of history all his life. This book, one of the last he wrote, is certainly not one of his major works; apart from being, as I say, rather slender, it is perhaps a little too selective in its presentation of material, often causing this reader to wonder what, if any, the evidence for the other side of the argument might be. It also bears those telltales of an elderly scholar’s work, poor self-editing and a tendency to gloss over matters that, while familiar to the author through decades of study, may demand more explanation for the benefit of his readers than he has seen fit to provide.

The more serious editorial error is that of context. This book can only make sense as an extension of Gananath Obeysekere’s body of historical work and his long, largely personal effort to counteract, through his great scholarship and eminent reputation, the damage that propagandists and ideologues have done to Lankans’ knowledge and interpretation of their own history. Sadly, no effort has been made, either by the author or the publisher, to make this connexion explicit. As a result, the book begins and ends somewhat mysteriously, with no scene-setting in the introduction and no thematic conclusion at the end; none of the publicity for it that I have seen makes any mention of its true context, either. Perhaps someone has been playing it safe. For those of us who know Obeyesekere’s work this is not a fatal flaw, but readers who come to this book knowing little or nothing of his record will surely be mystified, and very likely bored.