Religion (Lapham's Quarterly 03 01)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 03-1: Religion (2010) Excerpts from practitioners, theologians, sacred texts, anthropologists, philosophers, and critics of religion. My take-away: the testimony of religious adherents and the observations of the critics add up to several principles. 

     First, religion is species-specific behaviour. All known human societies have practiced some form of religion. Religion consists of customary rituals performed on certain occasions, some of which are tied to the annual seasonal cycles.

     Second, stories are told to explain the religious significance of the rituals. When writing was invented, these stories were written down, and some came to be seen as god-inspired or -dictated sacred texts. All societies claim that their religious stories are true, while those of rival religions are more or less superstitious or worse. This attitude I label religionism. My experience and the occasional survey data indicate it’s the most common form of religious expression.

     Third, religion is usually transactional: Appease or please the god or gods of your religion, and you will have a good life.
     Fourth, the major religions all include the same range of religious expression, from literalist fundamentalist religionism to mysticism. Most adherents to any given religion are indifferent to mysticism, but become hostile when mystics tend to ecumenical acceptance of all expressions of faith.
     For me, the most important inference from these widely varying expressions and critiques of religion is that faith is primary, religion is secondary. Religion works best when its adherents know it’s a limited, incomplete, and at bottom incoherent attempt to express the faith that animates it, which is that the Universe makes some kind of sense, and that human life has some purpose.
     Recommended. ****
     Footnote: for more, see Karen Armstrong’s books about the development of religion.

Running Wild (J. G. Ballard)

J. G. Ballard. Running Wild. (1988) On 25 June 1988, someone murdered the 32 adult residents of Pangbourne estate and kidnapped 13 children. Forensic psychiatrist Dr Richard Greville’s notes chronicle his investigation and eventual solution of the mystery.
     Ballard has imagined a disturbing event. It’s his critique of the philosophy of child-centred education that protects children from stress, failure, and evil. Convincing and creepy, it’s a book that sticks in the darker nooks of one’s mind.
     Recommended, but I suspect most readers will not like it. ***

Politics As Usual (Lapham's Quarterly 05-04)

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly 05-04: Politics (2012) As far back as we have written records, we have politics. Politics certainly predates writing, since it meets two human needs: The communal need for social regulation; and the individual need for social structure and  influence. That means politics is about power, which means it conflicts with the human needs for freedom and autonomy. There’s a tension between the need for amicable social relations with one’s neighbours and the need for non-interference by one’s neighbours. This tension creates all the problems that politics is intended to solve. Unintended side-effect: Politics affords the power-hungry the opportunity to satisfy their powerlust. As humans combine into ever larger groups, the result is ever more powerful government.

     In short, politics is a mess. Thoreau considered it a necessary evil. Others have proposed ideal states in which everyone is happy and free. These fantasies are derived by more or less rigorous logic from some set of premises that the proposer believes are self-evident. Circular logic and question-begging abound.

     An excellent collection, as usual. May still be available from LQ’s stash of back issues.

     Recommended. ****

Boney solves the case: Death of a Swagman (Upfield, 1945)

 Arthur Upfield. Death of a Swagman (1945) A swagman dies at a remote shack used to house whoever is sent to check on the wind-driven water pump. An ex-actor who runs a funeral business, and can inhale a cigar’s worth of smoke. An ambitious police sergeant who benefits from Boney’s tutelage. The sergeant’s wise young daughter who captures Boney’s heart. The usual cast of miscellaneous farmers and their hired hands. Boney himself, arrested and imprisoned for a week, during which he paints the fence around the police station an "eye-offending yellow" and learns a lot just by listening. Another nicely done puzzle and several slices of early 20th century Australian outback life. The solution is just barely plausible. Recommended. ***

Psycho-pathologies trigger murder: A Guilty Thing Surprised (Rendell, a Wexford case)

 Ruth Rendell. A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970) Another re-read. Rendell is perhaps too fascinated by psychological pathologies. This time she uses Wexford as the stalking horse, and he does a reasonably good job of unravelling the puzzle. The novel works, but it’s not the best Wexford. Still, any Wexford is better than the average in this genre. I read the book over two evenings and wasn’t close to the solution until about the 3/4 mark. I count that as good entertainment. This copy was a nicely printed trade paperback, which increased the pleasure. **½

Obsolescent Science: This Idea Must Die (Brockman, 2015)

John Brockman, ed. This Idea Must Die! (2015) A reread, and worth it. The contributors sometimes contradict each other. Their mini-essays constitute a course in science. It seems that explaining why an idea is no longer useful or may have become an impediment requires explaining it clearly enough that the reasons for killing it make sense. I enjoyed reading these arguments again.
     One idea that’s not mentioned as worthy of forcible retirement is that Science Describes Reality. It doesn’t. It constructs conceptual models of reality. Several of the essays attack one or another of these models as misleading or worse.  But all the arguments start with the assumption that what’s made the idea obsolete is that it no longer describes reality well enough to warrant acceptance. But taken together, the discussions show that science doesn’t describe reality at all.
     We can’t apprehend reality. The best we can do is to compare our perceptions, the simulations of reality that our brains construct. When we do that, we discover whether we perceive the same similarities and differences. We discover whether our perceptions have common structures. Science uses experiment and observation to methodically examine, and mathematics to describe these common structures. Thus science is about how we perceive reality. We do pretty well, actually. Mathematics is the language of structures, which is why it works so well in science. It’s also the only universal part of language. There is more to be said about the universality of mathematics, but this comment is already longer than it needs to be.
     Thoroughly enjoyable, and highly recommended. ****

How Writing Changed Us: Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong (1982)

Walter Ong. Orality and Literacy (1982) A careful survey of the state of orality studies, or better, the study of spoken language. Since the 80s, the field has proliferated, with increasing emphasis on how we generate speech in different contexts. That spoken and written language were different was obvious. What was less obvious was that the written language was not the superior mode. In fact, spoken language, exhibiting as it does the vagaries of regional and class dialects, was often deprecated as a primitive and even degraded form of the proper language as recorded in writing.
      Ong does not attack this attitude directly, but shows that an oral culture uses language differently than a literate one. He’s concerned that literate readers of the earliest writings aren’t aware enough that these are records of oral compositions, and hence of oral modes. He does a wonderful job of describing and explaining how people without writing construct(ed) their songs, stories and orations using standard tropes and repetitive patterns as scaffolds for building the performance in real time, and certainly each time adapted to whatever audience listened to them. What Homer memorised was not an unbroken stream of thousands of lines of verse, but pieces of the story, which (he) would select, adapt, and reconstruct. Ong’s evidence is both field work by anthropologists who recorded the myths and histories of non-literate peoples, and also the bits of speech embedded in the epics as recorded.
     Ong (and his fellow scholars) go a step or two further. They claim that literacy changes the way we understand the world. What’s written is read, not heard. The text takes precedence over the writer, and eventually become detached from the writer. When we read old books, we read them as independent and objective witnesses to the past, often not realising how much we reconstruct a text, any text, as we read it. Hence the mistaken belief that we can understand the “literal meaning” of a text.  In an oral culture, speech and speaker are one: the story exists only while it is being spoken, and the relation between the audience and the speaker’s utterance is personal, immediate, and fleeting. A written text preserves what was though and understood generations before us. A speech exists only while it’s spoken, and memory of what the now dead ancestors thought and understood is reinterpreted every time it’s spoken. Written law can be consulted. Spoken law depends on trust in the speaker. Grasping the difference between the oral and the written may help us understand why so many of our present day conflicts are about what words signify. We tend to believe that if we understand the text we understand reality, and if we understand reality, we know the truth.
     I found the book heavy going at times, and have already begun to re-read it. Ong’s style is clear, and he has nice dry wit. His observations cast a new light on the effects of electronic media. The Wiki article on him adds a great deal to my comments.
     Recommended. ****

Borden Chantry, a typical Lamour Hero.

 Louis L’Amour. Borden Chantry (1977) L’Amour makes Westerns believable. He does this

by making his heroes human, often being a little obtuse, sometimes too stubborn for their own good, and several grades below super-hero skill-levels. Borden Chantry is an unwilling marshal, taking the job because a drought and poor prices forced him to suspend ranching. A dead man lies in the street. It looks like a bar fight gone wrong, and several townsfolk suggest further investigation isn’t needed. But no one knows the man, and the few clues to his former life suggest that no mere drunken brawl led to his death. So Chantry is left with a mystery. The town drunk, who may know more about the dead man, is killed, leaving his son an orphan. Chantry realizes that the killer has tried to hide his tracks and motivation. Chantry’s strong sense of duty leads him to risk his life in solving the puzzle. A nicely done short novel which would make a nice movie in the High Noon mode. A potboiler, but a very good one. ***

Wings Above Diamantina (Upfield, 1936)

 

 Arthur Upfield. Wings Above Diamantina (1936) Nettlefold, owner of Coolibah Station, and his daughter Elizabeth find a pretty red two-seater monoplane in the dry bottom of seasonal Emu Lake, the only flat piece of land in Emu Lake paddock. A comatose woman is trapped in the passenger seat. How she got there, why she has been drugged, and who tried to kill her by staging a plane crash are the questions that define Inspector Napoleon “Boney” Bonaparte’s) latest case. He finds the answers of course, and a case of true love not only thrives, it rescues a young man from the effects of what we now call PTSD. Well done in every way, a classic of its kind.
     The Boney novels would make a good TV series, but the dated racial attitudes and language would likely be edited out, thus losing the Ozzie ambience and historical accuracy that is part of their charm.
     Recommended ***