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 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 power and 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 (and certain slaughter at the hands of the farmer). 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 investigation of time in Book XI is impressive, certainly for someone writing in an era lacking accurate timepieces; Augustine could probably have been persuaded to agree with Einstein that ‘the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ I skipped most of Book XII, in which the author seems to take to task those who interpret the Bible symbolically before doing, as far as I could see, exactly the same. I skipped the last book, XIII, completely.
    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.

Mental Slumming: The Prague Cemetery

I normally enjoy the work of Umberto Eco. A professor as well as a novelist, he all but invented the field of semiology, the study of the meaning of signs and symbols. It isn’t too long a step from this to his celebrated fascination with conspiracy theories, which I have long shared. Like Eco, I set out from the premise that all such theories are false, created to benefit their fabricators and promoters in some way. They can very easily turn dangerous, even lethal, and are intrinsically evil in any case, for they are nothing more nor less than inflammatory lies told with the intent of making trouble.

       The Prague Cemetery is the origin-story of one of the most infamous conspiracy theories of all. It is the third of Eco’s novels that I have read. The other two were also about conspiracy-theories and forgeries: The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. I greatly enjoyed the first and absolutely delighted in the second, so I took up the present volume with high hopes. When I found that it was a historical novel set in Europe during the revolutionary phase of the nineteenth century, my hopes rose even higher; history, after all, is my subject. Here, I thought, is just the dish for me.

       The confusing opening sequence threw me a little, though all was easily (and perhaps too soon) explained. When the real action began in a series of flashbacks, I readied myself for a treat. The first part of the novel is set in Italy during the Risorgimento, a period about which I knew little and was keen to learn more. Forewarned by Eco that, apart from the central character, nearly everyone else in the novel is a real person, I read through this part of the story with my phone beside me, googling away at names and historical references. This slowed my reading down a bit, and probably kept me from getting properly into the story, but without it I should have been even more quickly put off, because the text is full of references to historical events and persons and much of the interest of the tale depends on the reader knowing who and what the main ones are.

       Meanwhile, another obstacle to reading pleasure had manifested itself. The central character, Simone Simonini, is a selfish, cynical, apparently asexual misogynist and introvert without a single redeeming quality in his make-up. It was Eco’s self-confessed ambition to create the most repulsive character in all of fiction (Shakespeare’s Richard III was the target he set himself to beat) and though he, arguably, succeeded, he did so at the expense of his book. Much of the tale is told in the first person and even the parts that aren’t are still largely focused on the protagonist, so Simonini’s repulsiveness rubs off on the novel itself. By the time the Risorgimento sequence ended and the action moved to Second-Empire Paris, where Simonini, who is employed by various secret services as a secret agent and fabricator of inflammatory propaganda, has been sent to make trouble, I was thoroughly nauseated, so I put the damned thing down for good. It had taken me almost a month (a pretty busy one, I must admit) to get through about two hundred pages.

       The Prague Cemetery was published when Umberto Eco was eighty, and although he still had all his marbles at the time, the book is indubitably an old man’s work, with all the infirmities and deficits that we, the superannuated, must endure in our declining years. Skip it is my advice, and – if you haven’t already – read Foucault’s Pendulum instead. At least that one has pretty girls in it.

Time is Only a Side Effect

The Order of Time

Carlo Rovelli

A strange, slim, captivating volume. Its scope is wide-ranging, the writing dense in terms of content and reference, yet it would be slimmer even than it is (and far less captivating) if you dispensed with all the digressions, elaborations and poetic flourishes that bulk it out. The notes at the back are as impenetrable as the text is lucid, mischievously reversing the traditional order of things. 

     Rovelli, a theoretical physicist whose speciality is loop quantum gravity, considers here what physics implies about time. The discussion is in three parts. In the first, he demonstrates how relativity abolishes universal simultaneity, absolute time and even the relation between past, present and future, before moving on to show us how quantum mechanics eliminates even the flow of time. We are left with a set of events that we are able to distinguish from one another only because our experience of reality is blurred. There is only one physical support for the contention that time exists at all: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. 

     Having narrowed things down this far, Rovelli then does his best to demolish the ‘illusion’ of time generated by entropy. I don’t think he wholly succeeds, but I am not clever enough, nor sufficiently well read either in physics or philosophy, to mount a meaningful criticism. The best I can do is report that I was able to follow his logic quite easily but found it unconvincing in places. As to why, the reasons are better articulated here than I could express them myself.

    The second part of the book is very short and describes some of the physical implications of discarding time as a factor in our calculations.
     The third and most important part is an inquiry into how the sense of time that is so real and familiar to us comes into being. The discussion ranges through philosophy and psychology as well as physics. This is inevitable, since time is both metaphysical and – in so many of its aspects – subjective. Rovelli, who seems to be as interested in philosophy as in physics, argues that it is wholly so, emerging from the peculiar way in which humans (and some other animals) have evolved to operate in the physical world. 

     I think I grasped the way in which, according to him, time emerges from entropy, and I love the insight that it is the latter and not energy that really makes the world go round. This is one of a handful of intellectual thunderflashes Rovelli detonates before our eyes: time is an effect of gravity, time is made of emotion (he’s a fan of Proust, as well you may imagine), the world is made up of events not objects. However, it seems to me that he hasn’t quite worked out how all that happens; he modestly advances the proposal that it has to do with the particular way we have evolved to experience reality, which in turn defines the reality we experience. This argument is closely analogous to the weak anthropic rationale for the hospitality of the universe to intelligent life.

     The physics of how, in this entropic argument, the past is constructed out of traces of former states of a system that lie preserved in its current state is both speculative and abstruse. It also seems a bit risky, in survival terms, for organic evolution to have proceeded on such a basis. To Rovelli’s credit, he isn’t laying down the law here; this is how he thinks it all works, but he freely admits that his explanation is merely the best one he has found that fits the facts.

     Despite this softness at the centre, the book seems to hang together well. Rovelli’s model is certainly more comfortable, conceptually, than those ghastly block universes in which, absent time, every configuration of the world exists simultaneously. In Julian Barbour’s version of this concept even motion in absent; consciousness (or experience) is just a ball bouncing from one point in configuration space to another. Beat that for futility.

     One thing that Rovelli doesn’t really address, though, is how come we all share a common experience of time even though it appears to pass differently for each of us and our perception of it is based on our different individual histories, etc. This, of course, is an aspect of a bigger question: our experience of reality is constructed, but how? He does gesture at an answer by explaining that we partake of aspects of the world that are relevant to us, and since we’re much alike as entities these aspects are roughly the same. Sadly, this doesn’t take us very far before we stumble over the question of how to account for the differences.

Girl, 2000

She

H. Rider Haggard

A lowbrow classic, She is a book for schoolboys of all ages from twelve to... well, two thousand, I suppose. I can’t imagine any woman of any age ever wanting to read it, but despite this apparent handicap, Rider Haggard’s famous adventure story is one of the most popular novels ever written, with over 100 million copies sold. It’s a specimen – perhaps the specimen – of what used to be called a Rattling Good Yarn, and oozing, too, with that all-important Sex Interest, which Haggard ladles on in part-sublimated Pre-Raphaelite dollops (you know the kind of thing – the Blessed Damozel leaning bosomily over the Bar of Heaven, Waterhouse’s Lamia with one tit frankly out, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth). It must have caused unnumbered nocturnal emissions, voluntary and involuntary, in the public-school dormitories of its day.

    Indeed, the formula has been more than good enough to keep us reading for well over a century, for though Haggard’s titillatory efforts seem merely funny today, the central character herself has an erotic power that cannot be denied. Jung held that Ayesha, the eponymous She, was one of the purest depictions of the anima in literature: a woman as near immortal as dammit and so appallingly beautiful that a single glimpse of her face is enough to enslave you and destroy your sanity, yet whose favour is also the key to untold wisdom, riches and power if only you can win it. 

    Everyone knows the story, or at least the outline of it. Since its first serialization in the Graphic, an English popular magazine of the era, it has appeared in multitudinous guises from feature film to comic strip to BBC radio drama, and inspired countless imitations (Indiana Jones is a descendant). To tell the truth, though, I didn’t find Ayesha nearly as eldritch or as archetypal as advertised; in fact I found myself liking her better and better as the story went on. She’s a girl of sturdy and loyal character, even if she doesn’t think twice about torturing deserving cases in her catacombs or giving love-rivals the kind of drop-dead look that actually works. 

    I wish I’d read She when I could have appreciated it properly – before, that is, age, experience and the countless other books I’ve read spoilt the innocent pleasure I might have taken in it at, say, age fourteen. I still enjoyed it well enough, though I had to skip through a few over-amped passages of description here and there, and put up with the fictional narrator’s half-baked amateur philosophizing. There’s a surprising amount of purple in Rider Haggard’s passages, some of it arguably fatal to the tension or excitement he is trying to build up; much of this occurs around the middle of the book and looks suspiciously like padding. Perhaps the author was simply trying to meet his contracted word-count-per-episode for the Graphic.

    Apart from a short but evocative nautical episode near the beginning, the writing only really comes to life after Ayesha enters the story – halfway through the book, in the middle of a lot of cod-philosophy about people growing more cynical as they get older, and suchlike. The later chapters, in which she transforms from villainess to heroine, are by far the best of the book, full of genuinely exciting scenes and images.
    She is the kind of novel that excites the contempt of intellectuals, and the long-outworn familiarity of its tropes – a product, lest we forget, of its own vast success – obviously works against it as far as the present-day reader is concerned, but it remains a pretty good read for all that. Ayesha may not truly have been immortal in the flesh, but as a literary creation – and a manifestation of the collective unconscious – she will never die. 

Intermittently Fascinating

The Book of Imaginary Beings

by Jorge Luis Borges 

A literary bestiary. The Classical monsters, from Kronos to the satyrs, are well represented. So are the cobbled-together cacozens of the Middle Ages, part this, part that and part the other: plausible as heraldic images, impossible to picture as living, breathing beasts. But Borges, in this short book, also brings us a haul of imaginary creatures from China, Latin America, the Malay Archipelago and just about everywhere else. Now and then we find among the specimens something genuinely exotic, like the Simurgh of Sufi fable or the Celestial Stag believed in by Chinese miners. Other beasts here were first imagined by famous modern authors: Kafka and C.S. Lewis each features more than once, and Kafka’s Oradrek is by far the most lovable monster in the book. Going in the other direction, readers of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun will discover in this bestiary a Talos and a Baldanders – though on reading the entries for these beings, they are likely to find themselves more mystified than ever.

Although the subject-matter of the book harmonizes perfectly with Borges’s oeuvre, The Book of Imaginary Beings is too heavily in debt to its sources to give us much of the pure, the veritable elixir. Only two of the beings featured in it appear to me at all Borgesian. The Á Bao A Qu, an allegedly Malay monster (it sounds Chinese to me) could, in its aspect, character and setting, have sprung fully formed from the brow of the master, while The Sow in Shackles, who terrifies Argentinean peasants by tightrope-running along the telegraph-wires at night, rattling her eponymous chains, partakes of the Latin American magical realism of which Borges was a forerunner. She could have been imagined by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but she wasn’t. Yet for me, the most hauntingly Borgesian piece here is the one describing the fauna of mirrors, which speaks fascinatingly but obliquely about that mysteriously visible but strangely inaccessible world.

Sadly, many of the entities described – such as dragons, unicorns, or the Phoenix – are too familiar to be really interesting to us. The author does his best to find exotic traits and tall tales attributed to them in obscure and often dubious authorities, but this only partly ameliorates the tedium of over-familiarity.

I don’t know who would love this book. Bestiaries aren’t as unfashionable in our day and age as you might think; consider, for example, Monster Wiki and the character menus of RPGs. But film and video monsters come ready-made; the hard work of picturing imaginary creatures has already been done for us – and done breathtakingly well, by experts. This bestiary doesn’t have a single picture in it. 

Any work of this genre is ultimately a series of index entries lacking either plot, narrative or theme: an assortment, a farrago, a grab-bag filled with unfamiliar but not necessarily delightful treats. Most twenty-first century readers would be bored and mystified after a few pages. In the end, as with certain other works of Borges – ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, for instance, or ‘Funes the Memorious’ – the appeal seems to be mainly to hopeless bookworms and literary trainspotters, the kind of people who are fascinated by old books and long-dead writers. I am one of those people, but I am sorry to say that I found The Book of Imaginary Beings only intermittently fascinating.

Turn Down the Sound, Abate the Fury

How to Deal With Idiots (and 

Stop Being One Yourself)

by Maxime Rovère

trans. David Bellos

All writers struggle with the limitations of language. Philosophers have it particularly hard; the ideas they work with are complex and often counterintuitive, easily misinterpreted or misunderstood, and the effort to be as precise as possible often ends up making things worse. Many great philosophical tomes are – let’s face it – damn near impenetrable in places. Usually the most important places.

    Aware of this, philosophes down the ages have addressed the problem in various ways. Some try to divide their thoughts up into bite-sized chunks: Aristotle was perhaps the first of many to publish his lecture notes. Others have sought to distil their work into a set of handy aphorisms, while the more literarily inclined devise allegories or works of alleged fiction as vehicles for their ideas. Nietzsche famously succeeded with both these methods: see, respectively, The Anti-Christ and Thus Spake Zarathustra. More recently, Jostein Gaarder got excellent results with his philosophical novel Sophie’s World.

    Sometimes philosophers attempt to leaven the heavy dough of their cogitation by expressing themselves informally, adopting the terms of common parlance or whatever they imagine common parlance to be. Maxime Rovère does this in How to Deal With Idiots, which is presented and packaged as a popular self-help book, or rather a parody of one. Though he gamely maintains the conceit all the way to the end, his material inevitably overflows the mould he has created for it as philosophical disquisitions tend to do. By Chapter Four or so the game is well up (the chapters are very short, by the way, as is the book as a whole), and we’re starting to grapple with the gnarly ethics of personal interaction, which is what the book is really about. Rovère’s speciality (one of several, it seems; he’s also an expert on Spinoza and an accomplished translator) is something called ‘interactional philosophy’. In this book, at least, a better name for it might be ‘transactional ethics’. Most of us will recognize it as a type of moral philosophy.

    It is not a spoiler to reveal that the book never really teaches the reader how to deal with idiots; rather, Rovère hopes to teach us how to avoid ‘creating’ idiots, which he defines as events rather than persons, and how to minimize the unpleasant consequences when we fail, as we are bound to do more often than not. Some of the methods he suggests will be familiar to practitioners of Buddhism – not of Buddhist meditation, but of the attitudes and mental hygienics of Buddhism. The roots of his thought are not Buddhist, though; they are planted firmly in the history of Western philosophy and moral criticism, and a short bibliography appended to the book cites Kant, La Boetie and Nietzsche along with Sacher-Masoch and de Sade, as well as a number of modern philosophers whose names I don’t recognize and forebear to mention on that account.

    I found the book enjoyable and much easier to read than the general run of philosophical works, though that’s not saying much. I did not think it wholly persuasive. At times I found that I could reinterpret the author’s explanations or refute them entirely just by changing the context of his words from the one he obviously had in mind into another that would fit them equally well, but convey the opposite conclusion. I think this is one of the risks you run when you try to put complex thoughts into simple language.

    There was little in the book that I found entirely new, though it did make me reflect on my own attitudes and behaviour, which was clearly the author’s intention. Rovère’s advice would certainly make us all kinder, more understanding and accommodating people if we followed it, but the difficulty, as always, lies in practising what one has embraced as precept while coping with the stresses and strains of everyday life, and with the implicit understanding that the world itself can never really be made better. Idiots (as the penultimate chapter admits) always win in the end.

    An intellectually and sympathetically engaging read, then, though I do wonder whether the format the author has chosen puts his case as convincingly as it could be put. It’s a strange book this, neither flesh nor fowl, and although there’s nothing wrong with the taste I am doubtful of the nutritional value.