The subtitle of Robert Trivers' tome to his nearly lifelong obsession with deceit is The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Here is the "logic":
1) Deception is widespread across nature. We are most familiar with this fact in the context of camouflage. Evolution has favored genetic characteristics that conceal a species from its predators. This is not deception in the sense of an intentional or purposeful mental act, but it is nevertheless deception. Trivers also documents deceptive behavioral acts in the non-human animal kingdom that are designed to enhance reproductive success, but again these are typically not intentional or purposeful mental acts, but genetically-driven hardwired behavior in the species. Cognitive-based acts of deception in the non-human primate community appear to occur.
2) Deception is therefore an adaptive strategy that favors survival and reproductive success and must be understood in that light.
3) Deception is widespread in the human species. Trivers cites examples of deception in courtship that appear to be related to reproductive success. There are examples of deception that are related to survival. The Folly of Fools is a catalogue of the examples and means by which humans deceive other humans, a subject that a prior posting in Shakespeare's King Lear addressed (see August 28, 2011 post). And while deceit is a frequent, clever device in Shakespeare's works, deceit has been a feature of the literature of tragedy and comedy since ancient times. False identity is a frequent dramatic device in comedies. The big difference, however, in acts of deception by humans and deception in other species is that human deception is largely, but not entirely a cognitive phenomenon.
This brings us to the larger topic of Trivers' book: self-deception in human life. The question he poses from the outset of this book is this: our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner. Why then, do we act to "destroy" or depreciate the quality of that information through self-deception? Intuitively, one would think that gathering, correctly interpreting and using accurate, detailed information would the be the successful evolutionary adaptive strategy; however, the extensive catalog of the ways in which humans deceive themselves, and The Folly of Fools overwhelms its readers with examples that make you feel that that is all that we do (a point I will come back to later), suggests, by its prevalence, that self-deception is the successful evolutionary strategy. Trivers' explanation: self-deception is essential to humans' ability to practice deception --- "we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others." Trivers' lament is that if humanity understood better that the reinforcing cycle of self-deception and deception we practice frequently has such disastrous consequences for humans --- he discusses aviation and space disasters, war and other conflicts, and even professional disasters in the social sciences --- we would be better at fighting self-deception and reap benefits, both individual and social that we are foregoing by succumbing too easily to deceit.
Readers who are willing to cast aside his and her various biases --- cultural and religious, personal including emotional --- and mentally transport themselves to a state that one of my college professors, John Harsanyi, and later John Rawls called "the veil of ignorance" (see May 12, 2010 post and January 11, 2011 post) will easily accept that the litany of ways Trivers describes that we deceive ourselves are true. The telling of false historical narratives begins with self-deception. This includes self-deception that is deployed for purposes of in-group-integration, nation-building and the construction of religion and religious institutions. Importantly, self-deception is aimed at inflating the self (ego), or, correlatively, derogating others, inducing a sense of empowerment, moral superiority, and control. These examples occur at the level of individuals, however they are deployed at the group level and have their group-level "us versus them" correlates: inflating the family, the community, the corporation, the tribe, the nation, the religion, the race, the species, etc. and derogating other families, communities, corporations, tribes, nations, religions, races and species.
Where The Folly of Fools falls flat is the absence of any significant discussion of how self-deception actually occurs. The fact of self-deception is well-documented by Trivers, but the mechanism is not. There is certainly a larger story here, and some of the prior postings on this blog cover some of the elements: bias, imagination, and memory. The term "bias" appears many times in this book, but it is nowhere systematically explored as it is in Robert Shermer's The Believing Brain (see June 12, 2011 post). Trivers' tome would benefit from inclusion, even if only by reference, of a discussion of the literature of bias. It is instructive for how false historical narratives, political beliefs, religious beliefs, and even our assumptions about the behavior of others are formed. Underlying the formation of bias is how the mind really works --- something we know a lot about now although our knowledge is by no means complete either. The idea of heuristics, as described by Shermer (again, see June 12, 2011 post), the brain's capacity to solve problems through intuition, trial and error, rules of thumb, or other informal shortcuts, when there is no formal means for solving the problem is significant in the formation of beliefs. If Shermer is right that evolution has brought us to form beliefs first and only later do we try to inform our beliefs with facts, then Trivers' starting point to his thesis (stated above) --- that our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner --- is misplaced, or is at least missing an important aspect of how our mind works, that we do not always take in "accurate and detailed" information.
Other postings on this blog have discussed the fact that areas of our brain are devoted in part to trying to explain the information that our sensory organs have delivered to the brain. (See e.g. May 22, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post). In other posts I have referred to this as our "storytelling" capability, but it includes our capacity for abstraction and imagination and analysis. Imagination is deployed for a variety of mental acts: to explain the physical world that is either to large or too small for us to see (see July 30, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post); to explain history after rigorous research supported by contemporaneous documentation (see January 14, 2012 post, December 16, 2010 post and March 24, 2010 post); to create pure fantasy (see e.g., June 28, 2011 post and March 28, 2010 post); and to merge both fantasy and history in a retelling that is is either fiction or historical fiction (see July 17, 2011 post and November 16, 2011 post). Douglas Hofstadter, whom I mentioned in the previous post, had this to say in Godel, Escher, Bach:
"Not all descriptions of a person need to be attached to some central symbol for that person, which stores that person's name. Descriptions can be manufactured and manipulated in themselves. We can invent non-existent people by making descriptions of them; we can merge two descriptions when we find they represent a single entity; we can split one description into two when we find it represents two things, not one --- and soon. This 'calculus of descriptions' is at the heart of thinking. It is said to be intensional and not extensional, which means we can 'float' without being anchored down to specific objects. The intensionality of thought is connected to its flexibility; it gives us the ability to imagine hypothetical worlds, to amalgamate different descriptions or chop one description into separate pieces, and so on. Fantasy and fact intermingle very closely in our minds and this is because thinking involves the manufacture and manipulation of complex descriptions."
This is what our mind does, and self-deception is one potential outcome of our cognitive processes. Sometimes that self-deception is accidental, sometimes it is unknowing, and sometimes it is intentional. As Robert Shermer and others have documented, the deception can begin at a very early age before we are of a maturity to act against it and by the time we reach an appropriate age to question what we believe, we are too invested in or it is too costly to rebut engrained beliefs. At this point, it is a matter of memory and human memory is not limited to "accurate and detailed information." (See September 20, 2011 post). The brain has ways of categorizing information in less than a detailed way.
It is possible to read The Folly of Fools and conclude that humans suffer from a persistent state of delusion. If that is the true, the skepticism that Enlightenment philosophers confronted (see February 27, 2011 post) may well still be warranted, and perhaps John Searle's view of the 21st century that the era of skepticism was long past (see January 21, 2011 post) is perhaps unwarranted. I don't think so. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter cites research indicating that truth telling appears to be the default position of the human brain, and that deception involves extra cognitive effort requiring more energy. The question of whether humans are more inclined to tell the truth or to self-delude themselves is an unanswered question in my view, but I am not inclined to the view that our default state is self-deception. In the prior post discussing Carter's observation, I noted she had not discussed or accounted for the mental short-cuts we often engage in (heuristics) that may rely on certain biases in our perception or understanding of things observed. Those short-cuts may circumvent the extra cognitive effort that self-deception requires.
Trivers seems to think that our difficulty in addressing reality is that neurophysiological system (and hence our conscious experience) is always a fraction of a second behind the actual sensory experience. "Regarding one's personal life, the problem with learning from living is that living is like riding a train while facing backward. That is, we see reality only after it has passed us by. Neurophysiologists have shown that this is literally true. We see (consciously) incoming information as well as our internal intention to act, well after the fact. It seems as if it is difficult to learn after the fact what to predict ahead of the fact; thus our ability to see the future, even that of our own behavior, is often very limited." It is true, as Trivers says, that the left side of our brain devoted to explaining what it is we are experiencing follows by milliseconds the actual sensory experience of what is actually happening to us. But we are talking milliseconds. The fact of the matter is that humans do have the ability to see the future coming (sometimes imperfectly, but sometimes with greater prescience than we realize). As we live our lives, we are, during our waking hours, facing forward. One of the most amazing capacities of the human mind, and perhaps some other species as well, but certainly in humans is that it plays what Antonio Damasio referred to as the "movie within a movie," and we are able mentally visualize and anticipate what is about to happen. Mirror neurons may trigger something as we watch another person that enable us to anticipate what is going to happen to someone else. So we are not living our lives facing backward. Perhaps it is when we are asleep, as Rita Carter noted (see November 6, 2011 post), and our mind is busy building memories, that we are looking backwards.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (2000)
I am not a music scholar. I enjoy listening to music, and I enjoy playing music. But I have never taken the time to study music as much as I might like. My introduction to J.S. Bach did not arise listening to his music. I learned something about part of his musical oeuvre while reading Douglas Hofstadter's book Godel, Escher, Bach twenty or more years ago. Hofstadter's interest in Bach is the canon and fugue, and specifically Bach's The Art of the Fugue and The Musical Offering. Admittedly, I struggled reading Hofstadter's book. I was not familiar with Kurt Godel, and, except for his name, I was not familiar with J.S. Bach either. Only the prints of M.C. Escher, which fascinated me, had I had some prior exposure to. And Godel, Escher, Bach is not really about Kurt Godel, M.C.Escher, or J.S. Bach. Their ideas or works are mere tools for Hofstadter to talk about the coherence of the brain --- what some refer to as the "binding problem" --- which refers to the brain's ability to simultaneously receive several sensory inputs, triggering many different neurons in different parts of the brain, perhaps triggering a memory and/or a mental image of something about to happen, resulting in a unified conscious experience. Godel, Escher, Bach was a heady reading experience, even if I did not understand it all at the time, and I have often thought that it deserved a re-read a couple of decades later.
But our subject here is J.S. Bach. Hofstadter caused me to listen to The Art of the Fugue. I was probably lured into thinking that a Bach fugue is just as inventive and interesting as an Escher print. The sensory experience is different. Escher is a visual experience that confounds all experience. For a Bach fugue, you can close your eyes and make the fugue primarily an auditory experience. Best heard and listened to with a set of headphones, the meaning of fugue comes alive in Bach's exposition. If this is Bach, I thought, I am sold. I listened to The Well Tempered Clavier and The Goldberg Variations as well and discovered the same experience. What the listener is experiencing is polyphony: multiple voices, sometimes "speaking" at the same time, often responding to an earlier voice, but nevertheless speaking harmoniously and recursively. This is referred to as counterpoint. Among contemporary composers, the music of Steve Reich is an example of counterpoint. In harmony and recursion, there is a sense of coherence that simulates in part the kind of coherence that the binding problem speaks to.
Music and mathematics have been associated with each other since antiquity, and there is a "mathematical" feeling to Bach's music, not only its metre, but its harmony as well. This has been noted by others, including Hofstadter. Where music, like the compositions of J.S. Bach, present patterns and harmony, it is not surprising that we should find a relationship between numbers, functions, and rhythm and harmony. In contrast, I think of a work like Ornette Coleman's Skies of America, which for lack of a better word seems "chaotic," inspired by that aspect of life where patterns are disrupted and dissonance prevails. It is still music, but the mathematical beauty that some find in canons and fugues seem to break down in a composition like Skies of America. In the liner notes to Skies of America, Coleman writes, "Skies of America is a collection of compositions and the orchestration for a symphony orchestra based on a theory book called The Harmolodic Theory which uses melody, harmony, and the instrumentation of movement of forms . . .The writing is applied to harmolodic modulation meaning to modulate in range without changing keys. There are eight themes and a harmolodic movement for each theme." But harmolodics, admits Coleman, is an expression that is "freed from tonal limitations, rhythmic pre-determination, or harmonic rules." Fugues and canons, which are constrained by tonal limitations and harmonic rules, do not march to the harmolodic theory. It may not be the case that all forms of music share an affinity with mathematics.
The affinity between music and mathematics must be derivative of the physics of sound and how sound is managed by the auditory cortex in the brain. Pascal Boyer points out that the architecture in the brain's auditory cortex evolved to allow humans to to hear specific frequencies for vowels and consonants, and this capacity has predisposed our species to detect, produce, remember and enjoy music. "This is a human universal," he writes in Religion Explained. "There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For example, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way."
Boyer's view that music is an outgrowth of our capacity to hear speech and communicate is not a universal view; others believe that music is a prototype communication system connected to our emotional wiring. In short, some form of music, preceded linguistic communication. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter describes a "tingle factor" associated with music triggering an emotional response --- relaxation, arousal, tension, relief --- because sound is processed in parallel by the limbic system, which notes its emotional tone, and perhaps recognizes a similarity between a musical tone and vocal signals that carry emotional messages. J.S. Bach's fugues and canons generate an emotional tug that primarily triggers relaxation in my view, and certainly a sense of order within the world. The emotional connection may explain a close correlation between music and religion, particularly where rapture is a component of the religious experience.
In reading a biography of J.S. Bach (1685-1750), by one of the leading Bach scholars, I thought I might learn more about the fugue and counterpoint. I did not. I probably learned more about counterpoint from Hofstadter. Wolff's book assumes a level of knowledge of music and Bach's music that I do not yet have. But I did learn much more about Bach the composer and the man then my limited experience with his most familiar fugues and canons, which are perhaps the most secular pieces of his ouevre.
Bach is a musician of the 18th century Enlightenment, and not surprisingly his music is inspired by his belief in his god, and the influence of the Lutheran Church in central Germany is huge in both his life and the life of the community in which he lived. Bach is the composer of many sacred works that I am totally unfamiliar with, but I suspect that true Bach aficionados are undoubtedly rapturous about. Just as religion and the State were joined at the hip, religion and the arts had sponsors in common, if not unified interests as well. Religion likely embraced music because it did "tingle" emotions and, as others have opined, music can be a shared community building experience that institutions, whether religious or not, have deployed in the recruitment and retention of adherents. To the extent that religion is a transcendent experience, music can be transcendental as well. A tour of any major art museum around the world to look at the paintings of leading painters prior to and even during this era reveals the close relationship between art and religion. Even in the 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings of landscapes, seascapes, and ordinary life that does not transparently wear some religion on its canvas, there is nevertheless the theme that no event, however small in the cosmic scheme of things, is not one of god's creations. In science and math, Newton and Leibniz were both wedded to their religions and the governing political-religious authorities. The interesting side of this relationship is that the arts are substantially funded by the political or religious authorities. On the payroll of the communities in which he lived, Bach was essentially a public servant, and his professional obligations included providing for church music and music at other public events. True, there were some private, secular gigs on the side at coffee houses and other venues that provided remuneration, but composing and performing sacred music for church services was the priority of his employment. For musicians today whose music might be said to be inspired by the sacred, funding from political and religious authorities or sources is not all that significant. One has to wonder, however, whether the world would ever know Bach's canons and fugues if it was not for that system of public funding of the arts that existed in centuries past.
An aspect of Christoph Wolff's biography of J.S. Bach that intrigues the reader is the intellectual candor of the author. One of the learnings from this biography is that Bach's life, while documented in some ways, is not well-documented in other important details. Furthermore, much of Bach's written musical scores have not survived. Bach himself did not write down much about his life. And Wolff admits in his preface, "Thus, conjectures and assumptions are unavoidable, and this book necessarily calls for numerous occurrences of 'probably,' 'perhaps,' 'maybe,' and the like." If only the writers, editors and redactors of the Bible and its commentators --- Hebrew and Christian portions alike --- had the courage to muster that kind of intellectual courage to admit that their sources were not so well documented and could not bring themselves to confess that they were forced to speculate and conjecture, and that some of what they were retelling was, quite frankly, "probably" the stuff of fiction. There are a lot of "probablys," "would haves," and "perhaps'" in this telling of the life of J.S. Bach. Still, it is a credible biography; there is enough of a contemporaneous historical record about his life, and the written works he left behind that support the telling of this story, despite what is missing.
A highlight of Bach's life in music, in my view, is his constant rewriting and even "morphing" of earlier musical works. One could only learn this from an expert on Bach. Wolff refers to this as Bach's constant pursuit of musical perfection. This is not all that unusual in modern times: songs written in today's musical genres do not always sit still; they have ways of evolving. Bach evolved his music to suit different instruments and perhaps a different listener. His secular music borrowed from his sacred music. Wolff conjectures that in borrowing from previous compositions, Bach was economizing in meeting his obligations to his employers, essentially saying that there was no way that Bach could truly create a novel composition week-in and week-out for decades without borrowing from earlier investments of creative time. Wolff is probably correct. This fact also allows Wolff to conclude that while we do not have every written composition that Bach created, we probably have the core of his work, enough to conclude that, for his time, Bach was the most inventive musical composer of his time, whose works resembled no other composer.
But our subject here is J.S. Bach. Hofstadter caused me to listen to The Art of the Fugue. I was probably lured into thinking that a Bach fugue is just as inventive and interesting as an Escher print. The sensory experience is different. Escher is a visual experience that confounds all experience. For a Bach fugue, you can close your eyes and make the fugue primarily an auditory experience. Best heard and listened to with a set of headphones, the meaning of fugue comes alive in Bach's exposition. If this is Bach, I thought, I am sold. I listened to The Well Tempered Clavier and The Goldberg Variations as well and discovered the same experience. What the listener is experiencing is polyphony: multiple voices, sometimes "speaking" at the same time, often responding to an earlier voice, but nevertheless speaking harmoniously and recursively. This is referred to as counterpoint. Among contemporary composers, the music of Steve Reich is an example of counterpoint. In harmony and recursion, there is a sense of coherence that simulates in part the kind of coherence that the binding problem speaks to.
Music and mathematics have been associated with each other since antiquity, and there is a "mathematical" feeling to Bach's music, not only its metre, but its harmony as well. This has been noted by others, including Hofstadter. Where music, like the compositions of J.S. Bach, present patterns and harmony, it is not surprising that we should find a relationship between numbers, functions, and rhythm and harmony. In contrast, I think of a work like Ornette Coleman's Skies of America, which for lack of a better word seems "chaotic," inspired by that aspect of life where patterns are disrupted and dissonance prevails. It is still music, but the mathematical beauty that some find in canons and fugues seem to break down in a composition like Skies of America. In the liner notes to Skies of America, Coleman writes, "Skies of America is a collection of compositions and the orchestration for a symphony orchestra based on a theory book called The Harmolodic Theory which uses melody, harmony, and the instrumentation of movement of forms . . .The writing is applied to harmolodic modulation meaning to modulate in range without changing keys. There are eight themes and a harmolodic movement for each theme." But harmolodics, admits Coleman, is an expression that is "freed from tonal limitations, rhythmic pre-determination, or harmonic rules." Fugues and canons, which are constrained by tonal limitations and harmonic rules, do not march to the harmolodic theory. It may not be the case that all forms of music share an affinity with mathematics.
The affinity between music and mathematics must be derivative of the physics of sound and how sound is managed by the auditory cortex in the brain. Pascal Boyer points out that the architecture in the brain's auditory cortex evolved to allow humans to to hear specific frequencies for vowels and consonants, and this capacity has predisposed our species to detect, produce, remember and enjoy music. "This is a human universal," he writes in Religion Explained. "There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For example, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way."
Boyer's view that music is an outgrowth of our capacity to hear speech and communicate is not a universal view; others believe that music is a prototype communication system connected to our emotional wiring. In short, some form of music, preceded linguistic communication. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter describes a "tingle factor" associated with music triggering an emotional response --- relaxation, arousal, tension, relief --- because sound is processed in parallel by the limbic system, which notes its emotional tone, and perhaps recognizes a similarity between a musical tone and vocal signals that carry emotional messages. J.S. Bach's fugues and canons generate an emotional tug that primarily triggers relaxation in my view, and certainly a sense of order within the world. The emotional connection may explain a close correlation between music and religion, particularly where rapture is a component of the religious experience.
In reading a biography of J.S. Bach (1685-1750), by one of the leading Bach scholars, I thought I might learn more about the fugue and counterpoint. I did not. I probably learned more about counterpoint from Hofstadter. Wolff's book assumes a level of knowledge of music and Bach's music that I do not yet have. But I did learn much more about Bach the composer and the man then my limited experience with his most familiar fugues and canons, which are perhaps the most secular pieces of his ouevre.
Bach is a musician of the 18th century Enlightenment, and not surprisingly his music is inspired by his belief in his god, and the influence of the Lutheran Church in central Germany is huge in both his life and the life of the community in which he lived. Bach is the composer of many sacred works that I am totally unfamiliar with, but I suspect that true Bach aficionados are undoubtedly rapturous about. Just as religion and the State were joined at the hip, religion and the arts had sponsors in common, if not unified interests as well. Religion likely embraced music because it did "tingle" emotions and, as others have opined, music can be a shared community building experience that institutions, whether religious or not, have deployed in the recruitment and retention of adherents. To the extent that religion is a transcendent experience, music can be transcendental as well. A tour of any major art museum around the world to look at the paintings of leading painters prior to and even during this era reveals the close relationship between art and religion. Even in the 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings of landscapes, seascapes, and ordinary life that does not transparently wear some religion on its canvas, there is nevertheless the theme that no event, however small in the cosmic scheme of things, is not one of god's creations. In science and math, Newton and Leibniz were both wedded to their religions and the governing political-religious authorities. The interesting side of this relationship is that the arts are substantially funded by the political or religious authorities. On the payroll of the communities in which he lived, Bach was essentially a public servant, and his professional obligations included providing for church music and music at other public events. True, there were some private, secular gigs on the side at coffee houses and other venues that provided remuneration, but composing and performing sacred music for church services was the priority of his employment. For musicians today whose music might be said to be inspired by the sacred, funding from political and religious authorities or sources is not all that significant. One has to wonder, however, whether the world would ever know Bach's canons and fugues if it was not for that system of public funding of the arts that existed in centuries past.
An aspect of Christoph Wolff's biography of J.S. Bach that intrigues the reader is the intellectual candor of the author. One of the learnings from this biography is that Bach's life, while documented in some ways, is not well-documented in other important details. Furthermore, much of Bach's written musical scores have not survived. Bach himself did not write down much about his life. And Wolff admits in his preface, "Thus, conjectures and assumptions are unavoidable, and this book necessarily calls for numerous occurrences of 'probably,' 'perhaps,' 'maybe,' and the like." If only the writers, editors and redactors of the Bible and its commentators --- Hebrew and Christian portions alike --- had the courage to muster that kind of intellectual courage to admit that their sources were not so well documented and could not bring themselves to confess that they were forced to speculate and conjecture, and that some of what they were retelling was, quite frankly, "probably" the stuff of fiction. There are a lot of "probablys," "would haves," and "perhaps'" in this telling of the life of J.S. Bach. Still, it is a credible biography; there is enough of a contemporaneous historical record about his life, and the written works he left behind that support the telling of this story, despite what is missing.
A highlight of Bach's life in music, in my view, is his constant rewriting and even "morphing" of earlier musical works. One could only learn this from an expert on Bach. Wolff refers to this as Bach's constant pursuit of musical perfection. This is not all that unusual in modern times: songs written in today's musical genres do not always sit still; they have ways of evolving. Bach evolved his music to suit different instruments and perhaps a different listener. His secular music borrowed from his sacred music. Wolff conjectures that in borrowing from previous compositions, Bach was economizing in meeting his obligations to his employers, essentially saying that there was no way that Bach could truly create a novel composition week-in and week-out for decades without borrowing from earlier investments of creative time. Wolff is probably correct. This fact also allows Wolff to conclude that while we do not have every written composition that Bach created, we probably have the core of his work, enough to conclude that, for his time, Bach was the most inventive musical composer of his time, whose works resembled no other composer.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Jose Saramago, Cain (2011)
The story of Cain in Genesis is brief: No more than 30 or so sentences over 25 verses. Cain, the first child of Adam and Eve, is born and he grows to become a farmer; Cain and his brother Abel, a shepherd, make an offering to God, and Cain's offering is snubbed by God while Abel's offering is not; Cain takes this badly and kills his brother; God asks Cain what happened to Abel and Cain lies to God by stating that he does not know (here Cain utters the memorable phrase, "Am I my brother's keeper?"); God knows that Cain has lied and that he has killed his brother; Cain is told by God that he will wander the earth forever as punishment (a fate worse than death); God places a mark on Cain's forehead so that no one will slay him to ensure this fate worse than death; Cain wanders to the land of Nod, where he sleeps with a woman who bears him a son named Enoch. That is it. We do not know how the woman Cain slept with came to be born, unless the woman is Eve herself, which would not be totally out of character with other incest stories of the bible. Adam and Eve had one more son named Seth, and we are not informed of any daughters. The inference is that there must be other humans out there besides Adam and Eve copulating and multiplying, but the Genesis story provides no illumination of their existence. A shortcoming in the tale of the primordial first family.
Leave it to Jose Saramago's imagination to fill in the blanks of the Cain story. And not only does Saramago fill in a few blanks of Cain's story, but the biblical stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses, Joshua, Noah, and Job as well. For Cain is not merely a wanderer, but he is a time traveler as well: Cain, travels back and forth in time, and, with the fortune of a Forrest Gump, Cain just happens to make an appearance on the stage of many significant biblical events recorded in Genesis and Exodus. Who knew? And the wisdom Cain arrives at at the end of his journey is that God is not only petty, but he is a bad guy, not much different than the devil. God is neither merciful nor loving, and he certainly has little empathy or compassion for man or his Chosen People. This is a world of fallen human beings (see August 28, 2011 post): humanity characterized by lust, incest, rape, murder, jealousy, deception, and real estate wars.
Saramago is careful to point out that Cain is neither Jewish nor Israeli. While standing at the walls of Jericho with Joshua's army, Cain is asked whether he is Israeli. He says he is not. Well then if you are not Israeli, what are you? Saramago explains, "When Cain was born, there was no such thing as the Israelites, but neither was he a Hittite, an Amorite, a Perizzite, a Hivite, or a Jebusite." He is a man without an identity, or as Saramago describes, a "man without definition." But in one sense --- as wanderer --- his wandering is the story of the Israelites, the Jews. And as a time traveler, he is like the "prophets" Jeremiah and Isaiah whose prophesies of the future are based on the vantage point of the biblical authors in the future who project themselves into the past.
The Lord murders innocents at Sodom and Gomorrah; orders Moses to slaughter thousands of Israelites because they turned their attention to an idol; orders Abraham to slay and sacrifice his son; tolerates the devil heaping misery upon Job; the Lord commits genocide of nearly the entire human race when he causes the flood. Cain abhors what he witnesses in the Lord's behavior. But Cain is neither Abraham, nor Noah, nor Moses, nor Job. Cain refuses to be respectful of the Lord. In the end, Cain sabotages the Lord's plan to purify the human race by designating Noah and his family to protect a select few of each species, including the human species, from the Lord's flood, and to start life anew. As Noah's ark endures the flood and they wait for the waters to subside, Cain slays Noah and his family, so when the waters have finally subsided, Cain is the only human left. How now can humans possibly multiply? Sounds like the same internal procreation riddle that plagues the Genesis story from the birth of Cain. As Cain disembarks the ark, the Lord asks where are Noah and his family? This time Cain tells the truth: they are dead. I killed them. And the Lord and Cain argue who among the two of them is more loathsome. The lingering question that remains at the close of Saramago's narrative is how all those events that Cain, our wandering time traveler, witnessed far into the future ever happened, now that he and the Lord have killed off the entire human race except for Cain? There are no women remaining for Cain to procreate with.
Imagination is a wonderful human attribute, and it is certainly one important characteristic that distinguishes our species from its closest relatives. Paul Bloom has contemplated why imagination has survival value. It triggers emotional responses, and it creates pleasure, both of which have survival value. "Imagination is Reality Lite," writes Bloom, "a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work." I have a difficult time, however, succumbing to a conclusion that fantasy has significant survival value. Fantasy is at best an exaptation, just as V.S. Ramachandran concludes that our ability for abstraction is an exaptation (see October 25, 2011 post).
Imagination is what we use when we plan for the future, and that capability has significant survival value. (See May 22, 2011 post, indeed another post revolving around a novelist who took liberties with biblical stories.) Being able to view the past in different ways, seeing the strengths and weaknesses of the ways our predecessors carried out their lives, and even fictionalizing the past so as to provide an angle on the past that our predecessors could not see, is part of the art of imagination and planning for the future.
As I wrote previously in this blog, I also believe storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memories of things past. (See August 15, 2011 post). And storytelling, whether historical or fictional or both, enables the construction of both personal and social/group identity. The biblical stories served exactly that purpose as they were merged, edited, and redacted ultimately to serve the national goals of the Jewish kingdom.
I don't think Saramago is out to preserve our memory with his imaginative retelling of the Cain story. And while Saramago is whimsical in his treatment of the Lord in Cain, he is not satisfying a desire for pleasure from fantasy either. But I do think he is out to remind us that our memories are fragile, capable of being rewritten in ways that make us look at things differently, perhaps in a revolutionary way, causing us to pause to plan our future in a different way than we have been carrying on all these millenia. What Saramago's imagination has succeeded in doing, however, is to show that the biblical stories are no more than products of a fertile imagination, just as Saramago's Cain is the product of a fertile imagination. The God of the Bible and the God of Cain simply cannot be real. If God made man in his image, which is the biblical telling of our creation, we are rotten murderers, mass murderers to the core. If man imagined God in our image, then God cannot be perfect. The God of the Bible and the God of Cain dovetail in these respects: God is a fallen character. But I submit there is a third perspective: that (1) man imagined God as an unseen agent, who is not defective and is all-powerful, to explain what we are unable to explain about the world and universe around us, and, (2) as social structures among homo sapiens developed, leaders among men claimed special powers to communicate with God to either justify or sustain their relationship of power (authority) over other men. And it is the leaders among men who choose to make God what they want to make of him (or her): at one-time loving and empathetic, at another time a warrior and mass murderer, and at other times utterly indifferent. This third perspective is more consistent with the history of God in the Abrahamic religions. By this third perspective, God is wholly imaginary as well, a work of fiction.
Leave it to Jose Saramago's imagination to fill in the blanks of the Cain story. And not only does Saramago fill in a few blanks of Cain's story, but the biblical stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses, Joshua, Noah, and Job as well. For Cain is not merely a wanderer, but he is a time traveler as well: Cain, travels back and forth in time, and, with the fortune of a Forrest Gump, Cain just happens to make an appearance on the stage of many significant biblical events recorded in Genesis and Exodus. Who knew? And the wisdom Cain arrives at at the end of his journey is that God is not only petty, but he is a bad guy, not much different than the devil. God is neither merciful nor loving, and he certainly has little empathy or compassion for man or his Chosen People. This is a world of fallen human beings (see August 28, 2011 post): humanity characterized by lust, incest, rape, murder, jealousy, deception, and real estate wars.
Saramago is careful to point out that Cain is neither Jewish nor Israeli. While standing at the walls of Jericho with Joshua's army, Cain is asked whether he is Israeli. He says he is not. Well then if you are not Israeli, what are you? Saramago explains, "When Cain was born, there was no such thing as the Israelites, but neither was he a Hittite, an Amorite, a Perizzite, a Hivite, or a Jebusite." He is a man without an identity, or as Saramago describes, a "man without definition." But in one sense --- as wanderer --- his wandering is the story of the Israelites, the Jews. And as a time traveler, he is like the "prophets" Jeremiah and Isaiah whose prophesies of the future are based on the vantage point of the biblical authors in the future who project themselves into the past.
The Lord murders innocents at Sodom and Gomorrah; orders Moses to slaughter thousands of Israelites because they turned their attention to an idol; orders Abraham to slay and sacrifice his son; tolerates the devil heaping misery upon Job; the Lord commits genocide of nearly the entire human race when he causes the flood. Cain abhors what he witnesses in the Lord's behavior. But Cain is neither Abraham, nor Noah, nor Moses, nor Job. Cain refuses to be respectful of the Lord. In the end, Cain sabotages the Lord's plan to purify the human race by designating Noah and his family to protect a select few of each species, including the human species, from the Lord's flood, and to start life anew. As Noah's ark endures the flood and they wait for the waters to subside, Cain slays Noah and his family, so when the waters have finally subsided, Cain is the only human left. How now can humans possibly multiply? Sounds like the same internal procreation riddle that plagues the Genesis story from the birth of Cain. As Cain disembarks the ark, the Lord asks where are Noah and his family? This time Cain tells the truth: they are dead. I killed them. And the Lord and Cain argue who among the two of them is more loathsome. The lingering question that remains at the close of Saramago's narrative is how all those events that Cain, our wandering time traveler, witnessed far into the future ever happened, now that he and the Lord have killed off the entire human race except for Cain? There are no women remaining for Cain to procreate with.
Imagination is a wonderful human attribute, and it is certainly one important characteristic that distinguishes our species from its closest relatives. Paul Bloom has contemplated why imagination has survival value. It triggers emotional responses, and it creates pleasure, both of which have survival value. "Imagination is Reality Lite," writes Bloom, "a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work." I have a difficult time, however, succumbing to a conclusion that fantasy has significant survival value. Fantasy is at best an exaptation, just as V.S. Ramachandran concludes that our ability for abstraction is an exaptation (see October 25, 2011 post).
Imagination is what we use when we plan for the future, and that capability has significant survival value. (See May 22, 2011 post, indeed another post revolving around a novelist who took liberties with biblical stories.) Being able to view the past in different ways, seeing the strengths and weaknesses of the ways our predecessors carried out their lives, and even fictionalizing the past so as to provide an angle on the past that our predecessors could not see, is part of the art of imagination and planning for the future.
As I wrote previously in this blog, I also believe storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memories of things past. (See August 15, 2011 post). And storytelling, whether historical or fictional or both, enables the construction of both personal and social/group identity. The biblical stories served exactly that purpose as they were merged, edited, and redacted ultimately to serve the national goals of the Jewish kingdom.
I don't think Saramago is out to preserve our memory with his imaginative retelling of the Cain story. And while Saramago is whimsical in his treatment of the Lord in Cain, he is not satisfying a desire for pleasure from fantasy either. But I do think he is out to remind us that our memories are fragile, capable of being rewritten in ways that make us look at things differently, perhaps in a revolutionary way, causing us to pause to plan our future in a different way than we have been carrying on all these millenia. What Saramago's imagination has succeeded in doing, however, is to show that the biblical stories are no more than products of a fertile imagination, just as Saramago's Cain is the product of a fertile imagination. The God of the Bible and the God of Cain simply cannot be real. If God made man in his image, which is the biblical telling of our creation, we are rotten murderers, mass murderers to the core. If man imagined God in our image, then God cannot be perfect. The God of the Bible and the God of Cain dovetail in these respects: God is a fallen character. But I submit there is a third perspective: that (1) man imagined God as an unseen agent, who is not defective and is all-powerful, to explain what we are unable to explain about the world and universe around us, and, (2) as social structures among homo sapiens developed, leaders among men claimed special powers to communicate with God to either justify or sustain their relationship of power (authority) over other men. And it is the leaders among men who choose to make God what they want to make of him (or her): at one-time loving and empathetic, at another time a warrior and mass murderer, and at other times utterly indifferent. This third perspective is more consistent with the history of God in the Abrahamic religions. By this third perspective, God is wholly imaginary as well, a work of fiction.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks reports about a significant development in medical research that occurred during the 1950s and continues to provide benefits for both research and therapy for decades thereafter. If that was the tag line about this book, it might never had ended up on the best-seller lists. Add to that tag line that the book confronts a thorny question of medical ethics --- what sorts of disclosures must be made by medical researchers who take body tissue (in this case, cancer cells from a dying patient), and the fact that those in the medical research supply chain subsequently earn millions of dollars from that body tissue, and perhaps some in the public begin to pay attention. And add to that stew the fact that the donor was a poor African-American woman whose heirs never benefited from her donation; whose descendants suffered anxiety and some level of anger because of misinformation and ignorance when their mother's name and contribution to medical science became public knowledge two decades after she died; whose descendants never sought financial compensation or benefits, only recognition for their mother's contribution to medical science, and you have a best-selling page-turner. While there are several protagonists in this story --- including the author --- the primary protagonist are the so-called "HeLa" cells taken from the cervix of Henrietta Lacks by a doctor at Johns Hopkins University. The HeLa cells were the first "immortal" human cells ever grown in culture --- cells that reproduced themselves prolifically. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine, as well as other scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. The significance of these cells is that because they created a virtual pipeline of human cells that could be replicated in the billions, they enabled medical research to be undertaken on actual human cells, rather than on humans themselves or some other animal.
So that is the story. But there is a subliminal story that leads me back to the subject of the previous post --- the subject of identity, specifically group identity. Rebecca Skloot, the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, does not explore the subject of cultural identity or racial identity, but she does explore, at least superficially through her narrative, group identity in the context of a family and the family members' genetic links to their past. Genetic identity is linked to various other forms of group or social identity: political identity (the heritability of power), ethnic identity, religious identity, family identity, racial identity, and caste. But as an article in the British Medical Journal notes, "These identities overlap in various ways, and genetic evidence will not affect them all equally . . . confusion looms when genetic markers conflict with other kinds of markers of group membership such as shared culture or historical narrative." This was a point I was making in the previous post, when I pointed out that Jews do not appear to define Jewish identity strictly in terms of a genetic link to the past. It may be, as genetic research on some Jewish communities suggests, that within some ethnic/religious groups genetic identity is stronger than other groups, but is this an attribute that anyone, Jewish or not, seriously wants to promote about what it really means to be part of a human subgroup? It smacks of Nazism.
As I read Skloot's story of Henrietta Lacks and her family and thought further about The Finkler Question, I was reminded of a Hebrew word, mizpah, which means an emotional bond between people who are separated (either physically or by death). The word might have application, for example, to Jews physically separated from one another by virtue of the diaspora and their mutual recognition of a shared Jewish identity. But it would also have application to Henrietta Lacks and her children and even the grandchildren that she never knew. This bond is a type of identity, and at its core is human emotion. Several books that have been discussed in this blog have highlighted the importance of emotion in building social relations. (See April 11, 2011 post, discussing David Hume and Antonio Damasio) As Dacher Keltner writes, "Emotions are involuntary commitment devices that bind us to one another in long-term, mutually beneficial relationships." (See July 16, 2010 post). In the human context, certainly emotional bonding among the persons is an attribute of group identity, although the strength of this attribute may vary among the persons. As Frans DeWaal observes, however, this same emotional bonding may exist in some other species as well (see November 9, 2010 post).
Genetic identity is, of course, nearly definitive in the discussion of group identity at the species level, but within a species, different groups become influenced by nurture and culture and social constructs are developed. And while genes may be at the foundation of our physical design that triggers various emotions and behaviors that make us more or less social, nurture and culture are at the foundation of reinforcing and making some emotional social bonds stronger than others leading to the formation of social groups and their identity.
The tug of genetic identity is felt by Henrietta Lacks' daughter, Deborah, whose anxiety grows after she learns that her mother's cells have become famous. One of her fears is that the cancer that killed her mother might take her life as well, a fear which is quelled only when she learns that her mother's cervical cancer was caused not by a genetic disease or predisposition, but the human papillomavirus. Research indicates that individuals struggle with their genetic identity, but for reasons that appear to be related to the difficulty of many in understanding just what it is about genes that is important enough to focus upon in terms of identity. More significantly, it is an emotional bond that establishes this family identity, a bond developed during the early years' of nurturing Henrietta's children, and a shared historical narrative that ties mother and children together --- a narrative that Rebecca Skloot has told well.
So that is the story. But there is a subliminal story that leads me back to the subject of the previous post --- the subject of identity, specifically group identity. Rebecca Skloot, the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, does not explore the subject of cultural identity or racial identity, but she does explore, at least superficially through her narrative, group identity in the context of a family and the family members' genetic links to their past. Genetic identity is linked to various other forms of group or social identity: political identity (the heritability of power), ethnic identity, religious identity, family identity, racial identity, and caste. But as an article in the British Medical Journal notes, "These identities overlap in various ways, and genetic evidence will not affect them all equally . . . confusion looms when genetic markers conflict with other kinds of markers of group membership such as shared culture or historical narrative." This was a point I was making in the previous post, when I pointed out that Jews do not appear to define Jewish identity strictly in terms of a genetic link to the past. It may be, as genetic research on some Jewish communities suggests, that within some ethnic/religious groups genetic identity is stronger than other groups, but is this an attribute that anyone, Jewish or not, seriously wants to promote about what it really means to be part of a human subgroup? It smacks of Nazism.
As I read Skloot's story of Henrietta Lacks and her family and thought further about The Finkler Question, I was reminded of a Hebrew word, mizpah, which means an emotional bond between people who are separated (either physically or by death). The word might have application, for example, to Jews physically separated from one another by virtue of the diaspora and their mutual recognition of a shared Jewish identity. But it would also have application to Henrietta Lacks and her children and even the grandchildren that she never knew. This bond is a type of identity, and at its core is human emotion. Several books that have been discussed in this blog have highlighted the importance of emotion in building social relations. (See April 11, 2011 post, discussing David Hume and Antonio Damasio) As Dacher Keltner writes, "Emotions are involuntary commitment devices that bind us to one another in long-term, mutually beneficial relationships." (See July 16, 2010 post). In the human context, certainly emotional bonding among the persons is an attribute of group identity, although the strength of this attribute may vary among the persons. As Frans DeWaal observes, however, this same emotional bonding may exist in some other species as well (see November 9, 2010 post).
Genetic identity is, of course, nearly definitive in the discussion of group identity at the species level, but within a species, different groups become influenced by nurture and culture and social constructs are developed. And while genes may be at the foundation of our physical design that triggers various emotions and behaviors that make us more or less social, nurture and culture are at the foundation of reinforcing and making some emotional social bonds stronger than others leading to the formation of social groups and their identity.
The tug of genetic identity is felt by Henrietta Lacks' daughter, Deborah, whose anxiety grows after she learns that her mother's cells have become famous. One of her fears is that the cancer that killed her mother might take her life as well, a fear which is quelled only when she learns that her mother's cervical cancer was caused not by a genetic disease or predisposition, but the human papillomavirus. Research indicates that individuals struggle with their genetic identity, but for reasons that appear to be related to the difficulty of many in understanding just what it is about genes that is important enough to focus upon in terms of identity. More significantly, it is an emotional bond that establishes this family identity, a bond developed during the early years' of nurturing Henrietta's children, and a shared historical narrative that ties mother and children together --- a narrative that Rebecca Skloot has told well.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (2010)
While I am not uninformed or without experience on the subject of this book --- Jewish identity --- I am probably not qualified to address it, at least competently. This small vignette from the novel explains my sentiment. One of the novel's characters, Hephzibah, who is the curator of a museum-in-the-making on Anglo-Jewish Culture, asks her non-Jewish lover, Julian Treslove, to take a break from his role as "assistant curator" because he would not have much to contribute until the museum was open. Almost immediately after making the request, she regrets it, because she realizes she has effectively said that a non-Jew is not competent to organize a museum about Jewish culture. "It wasn't fair to him. Jews might have been possessed of a crowded almanac of Jewish events, a Jewish Who's Who extending back to the first man and woman, but Treslove couldn't be expected to know in every instance Who Was and Who Was Not, Who Had Changed His Name, Who Had Married In or Out. What is more he would have no instinct for it. Somethings you cannot acquire. You have to be born and brought up a Jew to see the hand of Jews in everything. That or be born and brought up a Nazi." I don't have the instinct to address Jewish identity. Except for the last sentence of this quote, Hephzibah is probably correct, but I ask, does it have to be that way?
At a certain level, it is possible to generalize the subject of identity so that what is true for the Jewish identity is true of the Russian identity, the German identity, the Muslim identity, the atheist identity, the WASP identity, the African America identity. But reducing human cultural identity to its lowest common denominators deprives us the richness of the stories that define the culture and ethnicity of different humans.
The subject of identity, in this case Jewish identity, has to be approached in two ways: personal identity, what does it mean to be Jewish?; and cultural or group identity, what does Jewish mean? Howard Jacobson zigs and zags between both, as he should, because it is impossible to separate the two. Personal identity owes its existence to group identity: we humans are social animals. The title of Jacobson's novel, The Finkler Question, reveals the inseparability of the two. Finkler is Sam Finkler, Julian Treslove's lifelong friend, and a man with his own personal identity issues. For Treslove, his friend Sam Finkler is emblematic of all Jews. Privately, Treslove refers to Jews as "Finklers." "It took away the stigma, [Treslove] thought. The minute you talked about the Finkler Question, say or the Finkler conspiracy, you sucked out the toxins. But he was never quite able to get around to explaining this to Finkler himself." Substitute Finkler for Jewish and one of the themes in this book is immediately revealed by it title: the Jewish Question.
The phrase the "Jewish Question" first appears in 18th century England as part of a debate over the rights of Jews in England --- voting rights, property rights. I did not dwell on it in my discussion of David Liss' The Paper Conspiracy (see November 16, 2011 post), but Liss fairly describes and frequently mentions the legal status of Jews in early 18th century England and their lack of property rights and voting rights. But while it began as a neutral phrase, the "Jewish question" evolved and took on an anti-semitic tone by the 19th century. A discussion of the "Jewish question" ultimately could not avoid a discussion of a "solution" --- whether it be assimilation, deportation and resettlement --- and by 20th century Nazi Germany, the solution became wedded with malice in the so-called "final solution," extermination. The phrase the "Jewish question" is a little bit like Treslove substituting Finkler for Jewish in his lexicon. Here the word "question," particularly in its anti-semitic context, really means "problem." Problems are in need of solutions.
The origins of the "Jewish question" begin long before 18th century England. They begin with the demonization of the Jews by Christians as early as the founding of the Catholic church, as former Catholic priest, James Carroll, has so thoroughly documented in Constantine's Sword. Regrettably, oppressors --- in this case, both Christians and Christian institutions --- almost never confess to their own problems and look at themselves in the same way that they look at others, and so we do not hear simultaneously from them about the "christian question." But there is in this history of demonization a "christian question," just like in other times and places there is a "muslim question," a "hindu question," a "communist question," or a "Hutu question." Jacobson at least implicitly, if not expressly, recognizes this through Finkler, who turns the tables on the "jewish question" by drawing attention to the plight of Palestinians in Israel and Gaza at the hands of their Zionist/Israeli oppressors through his involvement with a group of Anglo Jewish intellectuals known as "ASHamed Jews." Samuel Finkler, a man who is so thoroughly cloaked with a Jewish identity, has the capacity to assess critically his own cultural identity in the same way he assesses the identity of others. The "Finkler question" is as much about a Jewish assessment of the Jewish identity as it is about a non-Jew's assessment of the Jewish identity or a Jew's assessment of the non-Jewish identity.
Turning to the question of cultural identity, what does "Jewish" mean? Is the term's meaning found in the story told by Thomas Cahill in The Gifts of the Jews: the first people to provide humanity with a narrative history of near linear progress and hope that tomorrow will be better than today, which is better than the day before, in contrast to the "circle of life and death" narrative common to other cultures, such as the Mesopotamians or Hindus before the common era? Is the term's meaning found in the first people to embrace monotheism? After all, the first four of the Ten Commandments, purportedly given by god to Moses and the Jews, are about the unity and singularity of one God who is the source of all life. Is the term's meaning found in the covenant story of chapter 17 of Genesis, a story of a real estate bargain for a narrow swath of land east of the Mediterranean, south of Assyria, and north of Egypt, cleaved and sealed with a promise that all of Abraham's male descendants would thereafter be circumcised? A significant part of The Finkler Question's conversation, as well as Treslove's ruminations, are about circumcision and land. The ASHamed Jews' diatribe about Zionists and Israel is as much a diatribe about the illegal occupation of land as it is about the contradictions of Jews who "throw their weight around and then tell you they believe in a compassionate God." Is it found in the larger story read and re-read every year, along with the laws, rules, customs of the Torah, beginning with Abraham, continuing through to the story of Moses and those who wandered out of Egypt with Moses, found in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and perhaps the oral tradition as well? Or is the meaning of Jewish found in the diaspora story, a wandering tribe in exile, yet seemingly able to assimilate in the communities of others until someone comes along and says we need to purify our community?
I did not ask whether the meaning of Jewish is found in connections among people to some mitochondrial DNA that links a genealogical family of people across generations. The phrase l'dor v'dor suggests that what Jewish means is connected through the traditions that are passed along between generations. The Nazis certainly thought in terms of a blood connection. But the Jewish treatment of the Marranos who converted to Christianity in order to avoid persecution in the times of Inquisition indicates that those who failed to continue to practice Judaism, even privately, were no longer full Jews. Likewise conversion to Judaism by a non-Jew brings about full membership in the Jewish community. Blood lineage is not an essential element of what Jewish means. Jacobson does not seem to think so either. Finkler is married to a woman, Tyler Gallagher, who converts to Judaism after they marry, and the story contains enough information that could lead one to conclude that Tyler is "more Jewish" than Finkler.
As for the novel's main character, Julian Treslove, unsure of his own identity, explores creating a Jewish identity. Treslove cannot maintain a relationship with any woman more than an evening, a day or a week. As the novel opens he seems to adore every woman who walks by him. He is the father of two children conceived during what appears to be little more than a one-night stand. In the novel's central act, Treslove is walking home after a dinner with Finkler and their mutual friend, an older Jewish man, Libor. He is assaulted by a woman, injured, and robbed, and she curses at him. At first he thinks he hears his assailant say, "Your jewels." He thinks again, maybe she said, "You're Jules." And the more he thinks about, he thinks she said "You Jules, you." No, it was more succinct: "You Ju." Treslove concludes that his assailant has mistaken him for Finkler. She thinks Treslove is a Jew. He rejects the idea that mistaken identity is one of mistaken appearance: he is the wrong size, the wrong temperature, the wrong speed to be perceived as Jew. It must be something else, he tells Finkler: it is a matter of spirit and essence. Spiritually I am like the Jews. He is reminded that Finkler once told him, "Ours is not a club you can join." And then he meets Hephzibah --- at a seder-in-November meal hosted by Libor. He begins a year long relationship based on mutual love and appears to be on the cusp of trying to establish a Jewish identity. Once again, however, he cannot consummate a relationship after a year of trying. Treslove cannot establish his personal identity.
As far as individual identity is concerned, there is no monolithic Jewish personal identity in Jacobson's novel. There are Jews who regularly go to synagogue and read the Torah every year; there are Jews who do not go to synagogue or rarely go to synagogue and do not read the Torah every year. There are Jews who are ardent Zionists and defenders of the modern Jewish state of Israel, and there are Jews who believe that the Zionists and the State of Israel have lost their way. There are Jews who will only marry another Jew. There are Jews who marry non-Jews, and sometimes they raise their children as Jews and sometimes they do not. There are Jews who are converted Jews. There are Jews who will only have marital affairs with non-Jews. There are Jews who consider themselves Orthodox, there are Jews who consider themselves "conservative," and there are Jews who consider themselves "reform." There are European Jews and there are Sephardic Jews.
Personal identity is a matter of autobiographical memory. This is our autobiographical self (see April 8, 2011 post). But our autobiographical memories are shared, and this facilitates social bonding and the building of relationships. It also influences our story-telling and the stories we tell each other, whether represented as fact or fiction. Cultures are built on the sharing of autobiographical memory, yet at the same time personal identity is strongly influenced by the culture that one personally experiences. While at the outset I said that personal identity owes its existence to cultural or group identity, the reverse is true as well as cultural identity ultimately owes its existence to the sharing of many personal identities. Autobiographical memories are merged and revised into a collective memory. But as we have seen in prior posts, memory is fluid, constantly changing and redeveloping in marginal ways. (See November 6, 2011 post). What is meant by "Jewish" for one era, is, and is likely to have a slightly different meaning in another era. What it means to "be Jewish" in one era, is likely to have a slightly different meaning in another era.
At a certain level, it is possible to generalize the subject of identity so that what is true for the Jewish identity is true of the Russian identity, the German identity, the Muslim identity, the atheist identity, the WASP identity, the African America identity. But reducing human cultural identity to its lowest common denominators deprives us the richness of the stories that define the culture and ethnicity of different humans.
The subject of identity, in this case Jewish identity, has to be approached in two ways: personal identity, what does it mean to be Jewish?; and cultural or group identity, what does Jewish mean? Howard Jacobson zigs and zags between both, as he should, because it is impossible to separate the two. Personal identity owes its existence to group identity: we humans are social animals. The title of Jacobson's novel, The Finkler Question, reveals the inseparability of the two. Finkler is Sam Finkler, Julian Treslove's lifelong friend, and a man with his own personal identity issues. For Treslove, his friend Sam Finkler is emblematic of all Jews. Privately, Treslove refers to Jews as "Finklers." "It took away the stigma, [Treslove] thought. The minute you talked about the Finkler Question, say or the Finkler conspiracy, you sucked out the toxins. But he was never quite able to get around to explaining this to Finkler himself." Substitute Finkler for Jewish and one of the themes in this book is immediately revealed by it title: the Jewish Question.
The phrase the "Jewish Question" first appears in 18th century England as part of a debate over the rights of Jews in England --- voting rights, property rights. I did not dwell on it in my discussion of David Liss' The Paper Conspiracy (see November 16, 2011 post), but Liss fairly describes and frequently mentions the legal status of Jews in early 18th century England and their lack of property rights and voting rights. But while it began as a neutral phrase, the "Jewish question" evolved and took on an anti-semitic tone by the 19th century. A discussion of the "Jewish question" ultimately could not avoid a discussion of a "solution" --- whether it be assimilation, deportation and resettlement --- and by 20th century Nazi Germany, the solution became wedded with malice in the so-called "final solution," extermination. The phrase the "Jewish question" is a little bit like Treslove substituting Finkler for Jewish in his lexicon. Here the word "question," particularly in its anti-semitic context, really means "problem." Problems are in need of solutions.
The origins of the "Jewish question" begin long before 18th century England. They begin with the demonization of the Jews by Christians as early as the founding of the Catholic church, as former Catholic priest, James Carroll, has so thoroughly documented in Constantine's Sword. Regrettably, oppressors --- in this case, both Christians and Christian institutions --- almost never confess to their own problems and look at themselves in the same way that they look at others, and so we do not hear simultaneously from them about the "christian question." But there is in this history of demonization a "christian question," just like in other times and places there is a "muslim question," a "hindu question," a "communist question," or a "Hutu question." Jacobson at least implicitly, if not expressly, recognizes this through Finkler, who turns the tables on the "jewish question" by drawing attention to the plight of Palestinians in Israel and Gaza at the hands of their Zionist/Israeli oppressors through his involvement with a group of Anglo Jewish intellectuals known as "ASHamed Jews." Samuel Finkler, a man who is so thoroughly cloaked with a Jewish identity, has the capacity to assess critically his own cultural identity in the same way he assesses the identity of others. The "Finkler question" is as much about a Jewish assessment of the Jewish identity as it is about a non-Jew's assessment of the Jewish identity or a Jew's assessment of the non-Jewish identity.
Turning to the question of cultural identity, what does "Jewish" mean? Is the term's meaning found in the story told by Thomas Cahill in The Gifts of the Jews: the first people to provide humanity with a narrative history of near linear progress and hope that tomorrow will be better than today, which is better than the day before, in contrast to the "circle of life and death" narrative common to other cultures, such as the Mesopotamians or Hindus before the common era? Is the term's meaning found in the first people to embrace monotheism? After all, the first four of the Ten Commandments, purportedly given by god to Moses and the Jews, are about the unity and singularity of one God who is the source of all life. Is the term's meaning found in the covenant story of chapter 17 of Genesis, a story of a real estate bargain for a narrow swath of land east of the Mediterranean, south of Assyria, and north of Egypt, cleaved and sealed with a promise that all of Abraham's male descendants would thereafter be circumcised? A significant part of The Finkler Question's conversation, as well as Treslove's ruminations, are about circumcision and land. The ASHamed Jews' diatribe about Zionists and Israel is as much a diatribe about the illegal occupation of land as it is about the contradictions of Jews who "throw their weight around and then tell you they believe in a compassionate God." Is it found in the larger story read and re-read every year, along with the laws, rules, customs of the Torah, beginning with Abraham, continuing through to the story of Moses and those who wandered out of Egypt with Moses, found in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and perhaps the oral tradition as well? Or is the meaning of Jewish found in the diaspora story, a wandering tribe in exile, yet seemingly able to assimilate in the communities of others until someone comes along and says we need to purify our community?
I did not ask whether the meaning of Jewish is found in connections among people to some mitochondrial DNA that links a genealogical family of people across generations. The phrase l'dor v'dor suggests that what Jewish means is connected through the traditions that are passed along between generations. The Nazis certainly thought in terms of a blood connection. But the Jewish treatment of the Marranos who converted to Christianity in order to avoid persecution in the times of Inquisition indicates that those who failed to continue to practice Judaism, even privately, were no longer full Jews. Likewise conversion to Judaism by a non-Jew brings about full membership in the Jewish community. Blood lineage is not an essential element of what Jewish means. Jacobson does not seem to think so either. Finkler is married to a woman, Tyler Gallagher, who converts to Judaism after they marry, and the story contains enough information that could lead one to conclude that Tyler is "more Jewish" than Finkler.
As for the novel's main character, Julian Treslove, unsure of his own identity, explores creating a Jewish identity. Treslove cannot maintain a relationship with any woman more than an evening, a day or a week. As the novel opens he seems to adore every woman who walks by him. He is the father of two children conceived during what appears to be little more than a one-night stand. In the novel's central act, Treslove is walking home after a dinner with Finkler and their mutual friend, an older Jewish man, Libor. He is assaulted by a woman, injured, and robbed, and she curses at him. At first he thinks he hears his assailant say, "Your jewels." He thinks again, maybe she said, "You're Jules." And the more he thinks about, he thinks she said "You Jules, you." No, it was more succinct: "You Ju." Treslove concludes that his assailant has mistaken him for Finkler. She thinks Treslove is a Jew. He rejects the idea that mistaken identity is one of mistaken appearance: he is the wrong size, the wrong temperature, the wrong speed to be perceived as Jew. It must be something else, he tells Finkler: it is a matter of spirit and essence. Spiritually I am like the Jews. He is reminded that Finkler once told him, "Ours is not a club you can join." And then he meets Hephzibah --- at a seder-in-November meal hosted by Libor. He begins a year long relationship based on mutual love and appears to be on the cusp of trying to establish a Jewish identity. Once again, however, he cannot consummate a relationship after a year of trying. Treslove cannot establish his personal identity.
As far as individual identity is concerned, there is no monolithic Jewish personal identity in Jacobson's novel. There are Jews who regularly go to synagogue and read the Torah every year; there are Jews who do not go to synagogue or rarely go to synagogue and do not read the Torah every year. There are Jews who are ardent Zionists and defenders of the modern Jewish state of Israel, and there are Jews who believe that the Zionists and the State of Israel have lost their way. There are Jews who will only marry another Jew. There are Jews who marry non-Jews, and sometimes they raise their children as Jews and sometimes they do not. There are Jews who are converted Jews. There are Jews who will only have marital affairs with non-Jews. There are Jews who consider themselves Orthodox, there are Jews who consider themselves "conservative," and there are Jews who consider themselves "reform." There are European Jews and there are Sephardic Jews.
Personal identity is a matter of autobiographical memory. This is our autobiographical self (see April 8, 2011 post). But our autobiographical memories are shared, and this facilitates social bonding and the building of relationships. It also influences our story-telling and the stories we tell each other, whether represented as fact or fiction. Cultures are built on the sharing of autobiographical memory, yet at the same time personal identity is strongly influenced by the culture that one personally experiences. While at the outset I said that personal identity owes its existence to cultural or group identity, the reverse is true as well as cultural identity ultimately owes its existence to the sharing of many personal identities. Autobiographical memories are merged and revised into a collective memory. But as we have seen in prior posts, memory is fluid, constantly changing and redeveloping in marginal ways. (See November 6, 2011 post). What is meant by "Jewish" for one era, is, and is likely to have a slightly different meaning in another era. What it means to "be Jewish" in one era, is likely to have a slightly different meaning in another era.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Leonard Mlodinow, Euclid's Window (2001)
This blog is, in part, an effort to connect dots --- particularly among the books that have come off my Bookshelf. A number of dots connected in my mind as I read Leonard Mlodinow's Euclid's Window.
Euclid's Window opens in Greek antiquity in the port of Miletus on the west coast of what is now Turkey. Mlodinow asserts that a "revolution in human thought, a mutiny against superstition and sloppy thinking," occurred here in the 7th century BCE. Around 620 B.C., Thales of Miletus, who Mlodinow describes as humanity's "first scientist or mathematician," lived here and is purportedly responsible for the systematization of geometry, a methodology that would later be incorporated in Euclid's Elements. This blog first mentioned the scientific contributions of the Milesians in a prior post (see March 28, 2010 post), noting historian David Lindberg's comment, "[I]n the answers offered by these Milesians we find no personification or deification of nature; a conceptual chasm [that] separates their worldview from the mythological world of Homer and Hesiod. The Milesians left the gods out of the story. What they may have thought about the Olympian gods we do not (in most cases) know; but they did not invoke the gods to explain the origin, nature or cause of things." (See March 24, 2010 post). The inference from Lindberg's observation is that when the human mind frees itself from myth, religion, and superstition --- the types of "beliefs" that Michael Shermer wrote about in The Believing Brain (see June 12, 2011 post) --- scientific progress is unshackled.
While Mlodinow does not make the same observation about the Milesians, he does seem to fall into a trap that Lindberg encourages historians to avoid: blaming Christianity entirely for Europe's failure to maintain the scientific progress that the Greek's initiated before the first millennium A.D. (see March 24, 2010 post). Apparently relying on Edward Gibbon, Mlodinow cites the Christians for burning down the greatest library of its era at Alexandria, Egypt and all the scientific and philosophical works that were part of that library. This claim may not be true or entirely true, but the fact the Mlodinow seems to harbor this belief, as revealed in this reference and other statements he makes, strains his credibility as a writer of science history (at least about science and mathematics in the era of the Dark and Middle Ages). It is true that once the institutions of the Dark and Middle Ages lost touch with Greek scientific inquiry and knowledge, institutional biases developed that made it very difficult for that knowledge to be rediscovered, and among those institutions was the Catholic Church. Yet, as Lindberg documents, those institutions also had a small role in the rediscovery of Greek science and thought.
As Mlodinow moves from his portraits of the geometers and Euclid to Descartes to Carl Gauss (and Reimann), the reader senses the impending merger of geometry and physics (or perhaps the impending takeover of geometry by physics) with the development of non-Euclidean geometry. Since the times following Euclid, Euclid's Fifth Postulate (the parallel postulate) had proven troublesome. Euclid stated a proposition that would determine whether two co-planar lines were parallel, converging, or diverging: take two lines and cross them with a third line; if the sum of the two inner angles on the same side of the crossing line is less than two right angles (180 degrees), then the two lines are converging (on that side of the crossing line). The postulate seems intuitively correct. The problem is that the fifth postulate could not be proven as a theorem would be proven. It was assumed as a fact, until non-Euclidean geometry began to address surfaces that are curved and the parallel postulate failed. Geometry began not only to take a hard look at spherical surfaces and topography --- the earth, but it began to turn its attention to space.
Enter Albert Einstein, relativity, and the influence of gravity on the shape of space. Even Mlodinow's brief discussions of Euclid, Descartes, and Gauss made me recall Rita Carter's discussion of the posthumous study of Einstein's brain in Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post). Carter reports that researchers at McMaster University in Canada found that Einstein's brain "was different from most in several ways, the most notable being that two sulci (infolds) in the parietal cortex had merged during development, creating a single enlarged patch of tissue where usually there would be a division. In normal people, one of these areas is primarily involved in spatial awareness, while the other does (among other things) mathematical calculation. The merging of these two areas in Einstein's brain," Carter speculates, "may well account for his unique ability to translate his 'vision' of space-time into the most famous mathematical equation of all time, e=mc2." Here Carter has been discussing synaethesia, the phenomenon where, because of the close proximity of two parts of the brain, there is a merging of sensory phenomena: e.g., hearing the sound of a certain word or number takes is associated with a certain color. Have the brains of certain mathematicians who can develop mathematical theories or even practical algorithms that describe physical phenomena or physical space developed in a way that facilitates their mathematical skill and insights, in contrast to the brains of most humans? Mlodinow's historical survey of the history of geometry certainly makes one wonder about that.
Reading Euclid's Window also reminded me of a quote from Michael Shermer that I mentioned in the June 12, 2011 post, "We are not equipped to perceive atoms and germs, on the one end of the scale, or galaxies and expanding universes, on the other end." Yet clearly, as Mlodinow's portrait of Einstein and later Edward Witten moves from relativity and quantum mechanics to the "standard model" and ultimately to string theory, it is clear that some minds are clearly capable of not only envisioning atoms, but even smaller particles, and some minds (sometimes the same minds) are capable of envisioning galaxies and expanding universes. Without this capability, Mlodinow would never have had a story to tell. Mlodinow sums this up as follows: "Through Euclid's window we have discovered many gifts, but he could not have imagined where they would take us. To know the stars, to imagine the atom, and to begin to understand how these pieces of the puzzle fit into the cosmic plan is for our species a special pleasure, perhaps the highest. Today, our knowledge of the universe embraces distances so vast we will never travel them and distances so tiny we will never see them. We contemplate times no clock can measure, dimensions no instrument can detect, and forces no person can feel. We have found that in variety and even in apparent chaos, there is simplicity and order."
This is not a deep book. It is written for the general public who has an interest in mathematics and the history of science. I began by criticizing Mlodinow for his knowledge of history in the Dark and Middle Ages, but by the end of the book and the discussion of string theory, I came to conclude that I wished I had read this book before embarking on other deeper books about string theory.
Euclid's Window opens in Greek antiquity in the port of Miletus on the west coast of what is now Turkey. Mlodinow asserts that a "revolution in human thought, a mutiny against superstition and sloppy thinking," occurred here in the 7th century BCE. Around 620 B.C., Thales of Miletus, who Mlodinow describes as humanity's "first scientist or mathematician," lived here and is purportedly responsible for the systematization of geometry, a methodology that would later be incorporated in Euclid's Elements. This blog first mentioned the scientific contributions of the Milesians in a prior post (see March 28, 2010 post), noting historian David Lindberg's comment, "[I]n the answers offered by these Milesians we find no personification or deification of nature; a conceptual chasm [that] separates their worldview from the mythological world of Homer and Hesiod. The Milesians left the gods out of the story. What they may have thought about the Olympian gods we do not (in most cases) know; but they did not invoke the gods to explain the origin, nature or cause of things." (See March 24, 2010 post). The inference from Lindberg's observation is that when the human mind frees itself from myth, religion, and superstition --- the types of "beliefs" that Michael Shermer wrote about in The Believing Brain (see June 12, 2011 post) --- scientific progress is unshackled.
While Mlodinow does not make the same observation about the Milesians, he does seem to fall into a trap that Lindberg encourages historians to avoid: blaming Christianity entirely for Europe's failure to maintain the scientific progress that the Greek's initiated before the first millennium A.D. (see March 24, 2010 post). Apparently relying on Edward Gibbon, Mlodinow cites the Christians for burning down the greatest library of its era at Alexandria, Egypt and all the scientific and philosophical works that were part of that library. This claim may not be true or entirely true, but the fact the Mlodinow seems to harbor this belief, as revealed in this reference and other statements he makes, strains his credibility as a writer of science history (at least about science and mathematics in the era of the Dark and Middle Ages). It is true that once the institutions of the Dark and Middle Ages lost touch with Greek scientific inquiry and knowledge, institutional biases developed that made it very difficult for that knowledge to be rediscovered, and among those institutions was the Catholic Church. Yet, as Lindberg documents, those institutions also had a small role in the rediscovery of Greek science and thought.
As Mlodinow moves from his portraits of the geometers and Euclid to Descartes to Carl Gauss (and Reimann), the reader senses the impending merger of geometry and physics (or perhaps the impending takeover of geometry by physics) with the development of non-Euclidean geometry. Since the times following Euclid, Euclid's Fifth Postulate (the parallel postulate) had proven troublesome. Euclid stated a proposition that would determine whether two co-planar lines were parallel, converging, or diverging: take two lines and cross them with a third line; if the sum of the two inner angles on the same side of the crossing line is less than two right angles (180 degrees), then the two lines are converging (on that side of the crossing line). The postulate seems intuitively correct. The problem is that the fifth postulate could not be proven as a theorem would be proven. It was assumed as a fact, until non-Euclidean geometry began to address surfaces that are curved and the parallel postulate failed. Geometry began not only to take a hard look at spherical surfaces and topography --- the earth, but it began to turn its attention to space.
Enter Albert Einstein, relativity, and the influence of gravity on the shape of space. Even Mlodinow's brief discussions of Euclid, Descartes, and Gauss made me recall Rita Carter's discussion of the posthumous study of Einstein's brain in Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post). Carter reports that researchers at McMaster University in Canada found that Einstein's brain "was different from most in several ways, the most notable being that two sulci (infolds) in the parietal cortex had merged during development, creating a single enlarged patch of tissue where usually there would be a division. In normal people, one of these areas is primarily involved in spatial awareness, while the other does (among other things) mathematical calculation. The merging of these two areas in Einstein's brain," Carter speculates, "may well account for his unique ability to translate his 'vision' of space-time into the most famous mathematical equation of all time, e=mc2." Here Carter has been discussing synaethesia, the phenomenon where, because of the close proximity of two parts of the brain, there is a merging of sensory phenomena: e.g., hearing the sound of a certain word or number takes is associated with a certain color. Have the brains of certain mathematicians who can develop mathematical theories or even practical algorithms that describe physical phenomena or physical space developed in a way that facilitates their mathematical skill and insights, in contrast to the brains of most humans? Mlodinow's historical survey of the history of geometry certainly makes one wonder about that.
Reading Euclid's Window also reminded me of a quote from Michael Shermer that I mentioned in the June 12, 2011 post, "We are not equipped to perceive atoms and germs, on the one end of the scale, or galaxies and expanding universes, on the other end." Yet clearly, as Mlodinow's portrait of Einstein and later Edward Witten moves from relativity and quantum mechanics to the "standard model" and ultimately to string theory, it is clear that some minds are clearly capable of not only envisioning atoms, but even smaller particles, and some minds (sometimes the same minds) are capable of envisioning galaxies and expanding universes. Without this capability, Mlodinow would never have had a story to tell. Mlodinow sums this up as follows: "Through Euclid's window we have discovered many gifts, but he could not have imagined where they would take us. To know the stars, to imagine the atom, and to begin to understand how these pieces of the puzzle fit into the cosmic plan is for our species a special pleasure, perhaps the highest. Today, our knowledge of the universe embraces distances so vast we will never travel them and distances so tiny we will never see them. We contemplate times no clock can measure, dimensions no instrument can detect, and forces no person can feel. We have found that in variety and even in apparent chaos, there is simplicity and order."
This is not a deep book. It is written for the general public who has an interest in mathematics and the history of science. I began by criticizing Mlodinow for his knowledge of history in the Dark and Middle Ages, but by the end of the book and the discussion of string theory, I came to conclude that I wished I had read this book before embarking on other deeper books about string theory.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper (2000)
The year is 1719. The scene is London, England. King George I, recently arrived from Germany, sits on the throne of England. Unlike the French, the English have not yet created a local or national police force to protect its citizens. The entrepreneurial class filled the official void, and established themselves as "thief-takers," bounty hunters hired to capture criminals. The most notorious of the thief-takers, Jonathan Wild, exploited his status to form an organized crime gang of thieves who stole property only to be hired by the victim, who would pay for its return, to "find" the same stolen property.
England is suffering financially at this time under the weight of a growing national debt because of the War of Spanish Succession. The South Sea Company, a business organized in the early 18th century as a stock company, buys half of the national debt in exchange for its stock, pursuant to a plan to convert that debt to lower interest debt that would ease the government's financial burden, but also provide the South Sea Company with steady revenue. The South Sea Company then pursued a program to drive up the price of its stock and a speculative frenzy ensued. By 1720, the infamous South Sea Bubble, the first stock market crash, occurred, leading to bankruptcies and other financial problems across Europe.
There is a nascent, unregulated stock market operating out of coffeehouses on and around Exchange Alley, where "stock jobbers" trade in company stocks. Stock jobbers are not held in high reputation, apparently for all the reasons that, over 200 years later, the United States of America established a Security and Exchange Commission to regulate this trade.
All of this is true, and against this background, David Liss' fictional story of a competing thief-taker, Benjamin Weaver, begins in earnest. Weaver, a Jew among the predominantly Protestant community of England, has assimilated reasonably well. He has recently become a "thief-taker," retired from his earlier professional roles as highwayman and competitive boxer. He now competes with Jonathan Wild for clients, but unlike Wild he forswears the unethical practice of stealing only to later "find" the stolen booty for a fee. Weaver is the grandson of Miguel Lienzo, the protagonist of Liss' third novel, The Coffee Trader, a prequel of sorts to A Conspiracy of Paper. Liss' oeuvre, if we want to call it that is not generic historical fiction, but economic historical fiction. The marketplace is as much a part of his work as the cast of characters and the plot.
A murder has allegedly occurred, and A Conspiracy of Paper is essentially a whodonit. The precise "who" is known early on, but the "official" conclusion is that the death was merely an accident. Others, however, suspect foul play --- a "conspiracy." Suspects abound as to who is really behind the conspiracy.
This is the period of the English Enlightenment. John Locke is fifteen years in the grave. David Hume (see February 27, 2011, post) is only 8 years old. But Isaac Newton is in the golden era of his illustrious life. Bernard Mandeville was editing his Fable of the Bees (see January 30, 2010 post), and George Berkeley was active trying to undo Locke's view of a materialist world.
To solve the murder mystery, however, none of these Enlightenment philosophers contributes to a method of investigation. A French mathematician and Catholic philosopher, Blaise Pascal, provides a source of inspiration. Probability theory is invoked. And so is right brain/left brain wisdom. I refer to the mind's right brain capacity to make intuitive hunches, and the left brain capacity to meditate, analyze, and sort through information. Weaver's friend, Elias, advises him, "[Pascal's] thinking is precisely what will allow you to resolve this matter, for you must work with probability rather than facts. If you can only go by what is probable, you will sooner or later learn the truth." Weaver responds, "Are you suggesting I conduct this matter by randomly choosing paths of inquiry?" Elias responds, "Not randomly. If you know nothing with certainty, but you guess reasonably, acting upon those guesses offers the maximum chance of learning who did this with the minimal amount of failure. Not acting offers no chance of discovery. The great mathematical minds of the last century, Boyle, Wilkins, Glanvil, Gassendi --- have set forth the rules by which you are to think if you are to find your murderer. You will not act on what your eyes and ears show you, but on what your mind thinks probable."
The murder victim is Weaver's father --- the son of Miguel Lienzo, who migrated from Amsterdam to London with his brother. Weaver's father is a stock-jobber, and Weaver suspects, as information starts to become available, that his father uncovered a conspiracy to manipulate the value of South Sea Company stock.
Only later in the novel, as Weaver laments how difficult it has become to bring the investigation of his father's murder to a conclusion, and he says, "Your philosophy [referring to Elias] has brought me this far, but I cannot see how it takes me much farther," Elias responds, "If philosophy no longer yields results, perhaps it is not because you have reached your limit to understanding philosophy. I think it is far more probable that philosophy had done what philosophy can do, and you would be wise to trust your instincts as fighter and a thief-taker. . . Trust your instincts." What would Sherlock Holmes say?
In the end the crime is solved, not because of instinct, but because a crucial piece of information suddenly falls into Weaver's lap -- the revelation of a lie that reveals the identity of the murderer. The revelation is not accidental. Jonathan Wild pushed the information in front of Weaver to help him out. The conspiracy behind the murder of his father turns out to be a vastly different conspiracy than Weaver initially postulated and conceived. Probabilities and beliefs did not solve this murder. Factual information did, much in the way that scientific experimentation during the Enlightenment era was undermining long-held beliefs that were products of mental reasoning, faith, and bias.
Decisions are made based on probabilities because we have incomplete information, uncertainty. Hume essentially made the point (see February 27, 2011 post), and he could not have been the first. Some people have access to more information than others and can act on superior information to their advantage. Wild is such a person, and in Wild's version of thief-taking where the taker is also the thief, it is just an early version of what we now call insider-trading. A Conspiracy of Paper was written and published as the 20th century came to a close and the technology stock bubble burst. And stock market manipulation and insider trading have not disappeared either. Liss is an excellent storyteller, and he is very clever at detecting in the annals of economic history, just as he did too in The Coffee Trader, the parallel times of the human past that reverberate in the modern mind.
England is suffering financially at this time under the weight of a growing national debt because of the War of Spanish Succession. The South Sea Company, a business organized in the early 18th century as a stock company, buys half of the national debt in exchange for its stock, pursuant to a plan to convert that debt to lower interest debt that would ease the government's financial burden, but also provide the South Sea Company with steady revenue. The South Sea Company then pursued a program to drive up the price of its stock and a speculative frenzy ensued. By 1720, the infamous South Sea Bubble, the first stock market crash, occurred, leading to bankruptcies and other financial problems across Europe.
There is a nascent, unregulated stock market operating out of coffeehouses on and around Exchange Alley, where "stock jobbers" trade in company stocks. Stock jobbers are not held in high reputation, apparently for all the reasons that, over 200 years later, the United States of America established a Security and Exchange Commission to regulate this trade.
All of this is true, and against this background, David Liss' fictional story of a competing thief-taker, Benjamin Weaver, begins in earnest. Weaver, a Jew among the predominantly Protestant community of England, has assimilated reasonably well. He has recently become a "thief-taker," retired from his earlier professional roles as highwayman and competitive boxer. He now competes with Jonathan Wild for clients, but unlike Wild he forswears the unethical practice of stealing only to later "find" the stolen booty for a fee. Weaver is the grandson of Miguel Lienzo, the protagonist of Liss' third novel, The Coffee Trader, a prequel of sorts to A Conspiracy of Paper. Liss' oeuvre, if we want to call it that is not generic historical fiction, but economic historical fiction. The marketplace is as much a part of his work as the cast of characters and the plot.
A murder has allegedly occurred, and A Conspiracy of Paper is essentially a whodonit. The precise "who" is known early on, but the "official" conclusion is that the death was merely an accident. Others, however, suspect foul play --- a "conspiracy." Suspects abound as to who is really behind the conspiracy.
This is the period of the English Enlightenment. John Locke is fifteen years in the grave. David Hume (see February 27, 2011, post) is only 8 years old. But Isaac Newton is in the golden era of his illustrious life. Bernard Mandeville was editing his Fable of the Bees (see January 30, 2010 post), and George Berkeley was active trying to undo Locke's view of a materialist world.
To solve the murder mystery, however, none of these Enlightenment philosophers contributes to a method of investigation. A French mathematician and Catholic philosopher, Blaise Pascal, provides a source of inspiration. Probability theory is invoked. And so is right brain/left brain wisdom. I refer to the mind's right brain capacity to make intuitive hunches, and the left brain capacity to meditate, analyze, and sort through information. Weaver's friend, Elias, advises him, "[Pascal's] thinking is precisely what will allow you to resolve this matter, for you must work with probability rather than facts. If you can only go by what is probable, you will sooner or later learn the truth." Weaver responds, "Are you suggesting I conduct this matter by randomly choosing paths of inquiry?" Elias responds, "Not randomly. If you know nothing with certainty, but you guess reasonably, acting upon those guesses offers the maximum chance of learning who did this with the minimal amount of failure. Not acting offers no chance of discovery. The great mathematical minds of the last century, Boyle, Wilkins, Glanvil, Gassendi --- have set forth the rules by which you are to think if you are to find your murderer. You will not act on what your eyes and ears show you, but on what your mind thinks probable."
The murder victim is Weaver's father --- the son of Miguel Lienzo, who migrated from Amsterdam to London with his brother. Weaver's father is a stock-jobber, and Weaver suspects, as information starts to become available, that his father uncovered a conspiracy to manipulate the value of South Sea Company stock.
Only later in the novel, as Weaver laments how difficult it has become to bring the investigation of his father's murder to a conclusion, and he says, "Your philosophy [referring to Elias] has brought me this far, but I cannot see how it takes me much farther," Elias responds, "If philosophy no longer yields results, perhaps it is not because you have reached your limit to understanding philosophy. I think it is far more probable that philosophy had done what philosophy can do, and you would be wise to trust your instincts as fighter and a thief-taker. . . Trust your instincts." What would Sherlock Holmes say?
In the end the crime is solved, not because of instinct, but because a crucial piece of information suddenly falls into Weaver's lap -- the revelation of a lie that reveals the identity of the murderer. The revelation is not accidental. Jonathan Wild pushed the information in front of Weaver to help him out. The conspiracy behind the murder of his father turns out to be a vastly different conspiracy than Weaver initially postulated and conceived. Probabilities and beliefs did not solve this murder. Factual information did, much in the way that scientific experimentation during the Enlightenment era was undermining long-held beliefs that were products of mental reasoning, faith, and bias.
Decisions are made based on probabilities because we have incomplete information, uncertainty. Hume essentially made the point (see February 27, 2011 post), and he could not have been the first. Some people have access to more information than others and can act on superior information to their advantage. Wild is such a person, and in Wild's version of thief-taking where the taker is also the thief, it is just an early version of what we now call insider-trading. A Conspiracy of Paper was written and published as the 20th century came to a close and the technology stock bubble burst. And stock market manipulation and insider trading have not disappeared either. Liss is an excellent storyteller, and he is very clever at detecting in the annals of economic history, just as he did too in The Coffee Trader, the parallel times of the human past that reverberate in the modern mind.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)