What I'm Reading

From OpenArt

“Absolution Gap” by Alastair Reynolds: This science fiction epic throws us into a future where humanity has colonised countless planets. Reynolds crafts a vast and intricate space opera, delving into themes of technological advancement, engineered religions and an existential fight for survival against the Inhibitors. 

“Who Killed Jesus?” by John Dominic Crossan: Shifting gears completely, Crossan's book takes a historical and critical look at the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. He dissects the various Gospel accounts, contrasting 'prophecy historicised' and 'history remembered' in the context of the political and social climate of first-century Galilee and Judea. This work would certainly be controversial amongst those with traditional religious convictions. In his conclusion, Crossan explains how reason and faith - correctly understood - cannot and should not be taken to contradict each other: historical and sacralised readings (parable expressed as history) each have their own validity.

“Fools, Frauds and Firebrands” by Roger Scruton: Renowned philosopher Roger Scruton takes aim at various intellectual movements and ideologues in this collection of essays. Scruton, a champion of conservatism, critiques figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek,  arguing against their views on reason, morality, and society. This is a battle which will be fought forever.

“The Culture series of Iain M. Banks” by Simone Caroti: This analysis of Iain M. Banks' justly-famous science fiction series delves into the utopian society of "The Culture." Caroti explores the series' themes of post-scarcity economics, artificial intelligence, and how people spend their time within this highly advanced civilization. An interesting point of comparison might be with Reynolds' "Absolution Gap" mentioned above – how do these two fictional universes grapple with similar questions about humanity's future? Caroti's book is not so well-written, but better in content, than Paul Kincaid’s rather moralising take on the same subject (Iain M. Banks: Modern Masters of Science Fiction).

Despite their vast differences in subject matter, all these books grapple with big questions about humanity, society, and our place in the universe. Scruton and Crossan, though likely from somewhat opposing viewpoints, both engage in critical examinations of established (and orthodox) narratives. The science fiction books explore different facets of humanity's potential future, with Reynolds presenting a more dystopian outlook compared to the utopian Culture envisioned by Banks.

Things I forgot inside one year

Amazon link

Chapter 8 (as well as chapter 6)

Scruton demolished Slavoj Žižek (with faint praise) and Lacan far better than I ever could. How could I have forgotten!

What we think of when we think of death

The soldier: the first one can be hard; after that it's pretty easy.

The dualist: there may be some connection between the person I feel myself to be and the squidgy mass of cells-in-soup inside my skull - but the same thing?!

The neuroscientist: it's process - the mind is what the brain does; I concede we don't know how that could work.

The evolutionary biologist: natural selection has favoured the complex human nervous system. It supports sophisticated social behaviour in challenging, dynamic but mostly predictable environments. What's the problem?

The philosopher: to explain consciousness is categorically different to experiencing it. We both know you're in pain and why, but you're the one screaming.

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Me:

Sometimes when I think of dying I feel that a complex organ (my brain) will stop functioning and its constituents disperse into the biosphere. No big deal.

Sometimes I think that human subjective experiences are extraordinarily similar. Millions of people have sensations, feelings, thoughts and consciousness just like mine. My personal deletion in death is not dissimilar to me falling asleep and waking up next morning as a… slightly different person: someone very like me who is not me.

The human race (or successor conscious beings) may advance in times to come - or may become extinct. We all feel that to secure the former is worth any sacrifice (most of us!) but there is no evidence the universe is the kind of entity which could care either way.

The process of evolution ensures that we have to care - selection bias - so that's really no surprise. We each live within our individual consciousnesses, so structured that we have to care about ourselves and those others we take to constitute our mutually supportive community. If you like, those are the boundary conditions for being a socially adjusted human (not sociopathic, schizophrenic, psychotic, etc).

When we die, a universe may die with us and within us, but let's not be precious. The flow, the continuity of the collective consciousness of humanity gives me reassurance. Just like I'll not be too concerned about falling asleep tonight - as someone will likely awaken tomorrow morning with whom I identify.

Like most people trained in physics, I happen to accept the block universe concept in which the passage of time is a psychological construct, a product of local spacetime interaction between our bodies and the environment. In this sense the past and the future are equally existent and our lives exist in entirety - just as a DVD contains the whole movie, all at once.

(Maybe the universe is really some complex multiverse structure in Hilbert space - who knows?).

Anyway, because I'm a reasonably adjusted human being, I'm a fan of sensual, emotional, smart, prosocial consciousnesses having an indefinite, fulfilling future. I'm reassured by progress so far - at least in this branch of the universal wavefunction. These emotions are conditioned by my future-ignorance, of course.

And for reasons mentioned, I'm not too scared about the eventual unavoidable extinction of the personal consciousness of this author.

You, dear reader, will take up the torch.

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Greg Egan's short story "The Walk" in his collection "Axiomatic" uses this approach as setting. 

Roger Scruton in his book "On Human Nature" makes the distinction between being conscious and having a theory of consciousness.

And I wrote a short piece about this - 'Live Forever' - at sciencefiction.com.

See also Adam Carlton's short story, "Doppelgänger": memory discontinuity hangs heavy.

A Better World, Where Are You?

 

"I was brought up as a member of the Church of England and simply follow the customs of my tribe. The church is part of my culture; I like the rituals and the music. If I had grown up in Iraq, I would go to a mosque… It seems to me that people who attack religion don’t really understand it. Science and religion can coexist peacefully — although I don’t think they have much to say to each other. What I would like best would be for scientists not even to use the word “God.” … Fundamental physics shows how hard it is for us to grasp even the simplest things in the world. That makes you quite skeptical whenever someone declares he has the key to some deeper reality… I know that we don’t yet even understand the hydrogen atom — so how could I believe in dogmas? I’m a practicing Christian, but not a believing one."

My position is not quite the same as Martin Rees's.

To be esoteric for a moment, I am a deontic Catholic: not one who buys into the Confessional ontology (i.e. a literal, uncritical, ahistorical reading of the sacred texts). Though paradoxically, it's only when the vast majority of adherents and clergy cleave to a Confessional ontology that the institution persists through the endless millennia. 

Nevertheless historical, materialist deontology is the right paradigm (Roger Scruton is my go-to guy here on deontology).

Sally Rooney hints that with the death of the Marxist-Leninist, communist ideal, Catholicism is one of the few remaining subversive forces insofar as - at its best - it counterposes and organises social solidarity based on high ethical principles against an alienated rootlessness taken to absurdity by a debilitating, progressive wokeness - from which elevated standpoint Catholicism is popularly ridiculed, or treated as absurd or incomprehensible.

(There are other countercultures which also deserve support: those arts which uplift, unify and empower ordinary people and exemplify unfashionable virtues: duty, honour, courage, competence, resilience.)

Sally Rooney's characters in "Beautiful World, Where Are You?" reflect on their ineffectual exposition of a fashionable, but sterile and impotent Marxism. They unwillingly experience the attraction of the granite, collective worldview of the eternal and universal Catholic Church: so often hijacked institutionally by bad people… so often bureaucratically underpinning reaction... but as John Dominic Crossan has so eloquently outlined, so revolutionary and omnipresent in its core doctrine.

Christmas card kitsch

In this season of Christmas cards, my mind wanders again to the wonderful concept of kitsch.

Roger Scruton's recent essay on kitsch does not deserve to be lost in obscurity. He quotes Milan Kundera's classic depictment of the essence of kitsch:

"The Czech novelist Milan Kundera made a famous observation*. "Kitsch," he wrote, "causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!"

"Kitsch, in other words, is not about the thing observed but about the observer. It does not invite you to feel moved by the doll you are dressing so tenderly, but by yourself dressing the doll. All sentimentality is like this - it redirects emotion from the object to the subject, so as to create a fantasy of emotion without the real cost of feeling it. The kitsch object encourages you to think, "Look at me feeling this - how nice I am and how lovable."

"That is why Oscar Wilde, referring to one of Dickens's most sickly death-scenes, said that "a man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell".

...

"Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious, when in fact he feels nothing at all."

Scruton criticises much modern art as superficial anti-kitsch: an attempt to shock, rather than pamper the emotions of the audience. But shock alone is not art - and neither is shallow irony:

"Take Allen Jones, whose art, currently on display at the Royal Academy, consists of female lookalikes contorted into furniture, dolls with their sexual parts made explicit by underwear, vulgar and childishly nasty visions of the human female, the whole as frothy with fake sentiment as any simpering fashion model. Again the result is such obvious kitsch that it cannot be kitsch. The artist must be telling us something about ourselves - about our desires and lusts - and forcing us to confront the fact that we like kitsch, while he pours scorn on kitsch by laying it on with a trowel. In place of our imagined ideals in gilded frames, he offers real junk in quotation marks.

"Pre-emptive kitsch is the first link in a chain. The artist pretends to take himself seriously, the critics pretend to judge his product and the modernist establishment pretends to promote it. At the end of all this pretence, someone who cannot perceive the difference between the real thing and the fake decides that he should buy it. Only at this point does the chain of pretence come to an end, and the real value of this kind of art reveals itself - namely its money value. Even at this point, however, the pretence is important. The purchaser must still believe that what they buy is real art, and therefore intrinsically valuable, a bargain at any price. Otherwise the price would reflect the obvious fact that anybody - even the purchaser - could have faked such a product."

I find the concept of kitsch quite hard to pin down. There is the element of emotional manipulation, which may even be self-manipulation as described by Kundera, where vanity and self-satisfaction perfuse the primary emotional response.

There is also something of the judgement made by the smart and cultured about art which pleases the lower orders. Suppose that those three ducks on the wall are genuinely appreciated by the dim and uneducated whose tenements they adorn. When our lips move into a smirk and we mutter "kitsch", are we condemning the taste of those who decorate their meagre habitations thus, or are we demonstrating our complicity with those cynical capitalists who fabricated the wretched birds in the first place, intending on an unsophisticated and blindingly obvious emotional response?

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* The Unbearable Lightness of Being.