Three more by Lapham: Philanthropy, Spies, and Disaster.

Lapham’s Quarterly VIII-3: Philanthropy (2015) There are two main themes: you should give alms or other assistance to those who need it; and you should give alms or other assistance to those who deserve it. This collection offers argument to support both principles, but on the whole, those who wish to limit their philanthropy to the deserving tend to concoct self-serving rationalisations to avoid giving anything. There are also accounts showing us what it’s like to be at the giving or receiving end, which range from the amusing to the harrowing.
     Anthropologically speaking, humans have survived and thrived best when they collaborated, and have kept accounts more in terms of ability than performance. The golden rule applies as much to sharing one’s wealth as to any other aspect of our lives. ****

 Lapham’s Quarterly IX-1: Spies (2016) Spying is as old as human conflict. “Intel” has determined the outcome of battles and wars. But success in spycraft appears to be random. Too many things can change between acquisition and delivery, quite apart from the inevitable defects of error, lack of context, and limited scope. Spies are traitors, hence we despise them even as we use thme. And reliance on spycraft as a tool of government fosters paranoia, which renders rational calculation difficult. For paranoia suffers from the prime weakness of all logic-based attitudes: logic is no better than the premises on which we use it. It’s garbage in, garbage out.

     These, and other like ruminations, were prompted by this collection, which has the rather sad effect of melancholy. For if we cannot trust each other, we cannot live together. ****

Lapham’s Quarterly IX-2: Disaster (2016) Whether caused by human error or malice, or by natural accidents, disasters shift our common enterprises into new directions, and sometimes completely change them. Soon after their effects have subsided to a pre-catastrophic level, we forget the perils that threatened our existence. Our preparations for the next disaster diminish as the memories of the last one fade. Eventually, we resent the cost of maintaining the defenses, and the next disaster’s destruction is, once again, greater than it could have been. – That’s the general thesis that emerges from these accounts of the sometimes unspeakable horrors we visit on each other or that are visited upon us.

     This collection was assembled four years before the covid pandemic upset all our plans. The records of past disasters show that our responses to covid-19 are simply the human responses to any disasters. Pity for the victims, help offered, sometimes heroic sacrifice, as well as denial, suspicion of conspiracies, blaming of the outsiders, rage at the authorities who must do the unwelcome work of constraining our choices, we find all these in the record. When it comes to disasters, only the details differ. Our behaviour repeats. Which is, I suppose, one reason that we wisely nod our heads and mumble cliches about not learning from experience. ****

Reread of Ngaio Marsh's Light Thickens.

 I've added a note to my review of Ngaio Marsh's Light Thickens, which I've just finished rereading.

Sixteenth century women: Tougher than they seemed.

 

Antonia Fraser. The Weaker Vessel (1984) A thorough survey of women’s lives in the 1600s. Fraser covers every role for which we have direct or indirect documentary evidence. The result is the usual mess of human virtue and vice, wisdom and folly. The sad fact is that during the 1600s, women lost some of the gains in legal and economic power that they had gained during Elizabeth I’s rule, which demonstrated that women were as capable as men. But even Elizabeth had to admit (in public anyhow) that her talent for government was a masculine one.
     A reminder that women have been treated as chattel through most of history. There are Y-chromosome burdened people who would like women to revert to that status. And also a reminder that women had (and have) to be tougher than men. The title is ironic: pregnancy and childbirth were and are dangerous; only the toughest (and luckiest) survived.

     Recommended, but it’s a long read. ***

A woman at the end of her tether: The Fire-dwellers (M Lawrence)

 

Margaret Laurence. The Fire Dwellers (1969) We eavesdrop on Stacey MacAindra, married to a salesman, with four children, over a few weeks while she tries to cope with increasing despair. She has a brief fling with a young man in a beach house, discovers that her husband’s bullying boss is an old schoolmate, a fraud who’s reinvented himself into an empty shell. When Duncan, the younger son, nearly drowns, she realises that Mac and eldest son Ian share a laconic code that’s as expressive of their deepest emotions as her more loquacious interior monologue,. Finally, she reconnects with her husband. But she’s still afraid for her children, and has to accept that she can’t protect them from every danger, real or imagined, that looms on the horizon of her mind.
     She’s managed to endure a crisis that threatened a nervous breakdown. That’s some achievement, when you think about it. It’s also what we all have to do from time to time, and some of us don’t have the resilience to manage self-doubt, childhood baggage, fear of the future, obsessive worry, and all the other psychic perils entailed in being human. Beautifully written, a classic that I didn’t read when it first appeared. I don’t think I would have understood it back then, actually. The writing, a mix of stream-of-consciousness, first person point of view, and omniscient narrator, is superb. ****

Consciousness and Reality (essay)

 Consciousness and the real world

The New York Times recently reprinted an essay by Galen Strawson. Read it here:
Strawson Essay

I don’t usually review articles, but this one is I think worth reading. Strawson’s argument reverses the commonplace conception of what we know and don’t know about reality.

Briefly, this is how I interpret his thesis: The Hard Problem is not Consciousness. It’s Physical Reality. Physics offers an incomplete view of reality. It tells us how reality works, but it does not and it cannot tell us what reality is. This point was commonplace 100 years ago, Strawson writes, but it has gotten lost in the recent discussion of consciousness. Stephen Hawking makes this point dramatically in his book A Brief History of Time. Physics, he says, is “just a set of rules and equations.” The question is what “breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” What is the fundamental stuff of physical reality, the stuff that is structured in the way physics reveals? The answer, again, is that we don’t know — except insofar as this stuff takes the form of conscious experience.

In a post about Schrödinger’s Cat, I made the point that what physics offers us is a model of reality, of whatever-it-is that’s out there. Models are inherently limited. Whether built of equations or of plastic and metal, a model is not the prototype. It’s not even a replica of its prototype. (1) A model behaves in some limited respects like its prototype, which can be useful. A bridge design, that is, a conceptual model of a bridge, allows us to calculate the stresses well enough that the real bridge built according to that design will carry traffic without falling down. (2)

The model of the bridge can exist in several media: drawings, sets of equations and algorithms, physical objects made of wood or plastic or metal. None of them is the actual bridge, and none of them captures the total reality of the bridge. But, says Strawson, we can know the real bridge, “insofar as [the bridge] takes the form of conscious experience”. Indeed we can. We can look at it, we can hear the wind make the supporting cables hum, we can feel it shake as a truck passes over it, we can feel the texture of the railings as we hold on to them. That, says Strawson, is the physical reality that our theoretical models can never capture. But our conscious experience is what we know, and all that we can know directly of physical reality.

So the hard problem is the problem of matter (physical stuff in general). If physics made any claim that couldn’t be squared with the fact that our conscious experience is brain activity, then I believe that claim would be false. But physics doesn’t do any such thing. It’s not the physics picture of matter that’s the problem; it’s the ordinary everyday picture of matter. It’s ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of the conscious self (on the ground that everything is physical, and that consciousness can’t possibly be physical) are usually also those who are most insistent on the primacy of science, because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine most brightly, the point that there is a fundamental respect in which the ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us — except insofar as it is consciousness.

 

 

Strawson implies that reality is consciousness.  I’m not sure that I agree with that. But his stance has at least two advantages over the notion that Consciousness is the Hard Problem.

First, it reminds us that physics itself is motivated by a desire to make sense of our conscious experience. The fact that our models become ever more abstract, that  they become “sets of rules and equations”, is a side effect of the experimental process that we believe yields objectively true insights. (3)

Secondly, it validates the empirical stance. We test accounts of reality, no matter how abstruse or abstract, against our own experience. “Truth” is the feeling we have that what’s being said corresponds to reality as we perceive it. This applies as much to the most mystical theology as to the most concrete engineering problem. It applies as much to the silliest confabulations as to the most tested and proven theory.

“The truth is out there” undergirds all our sense of reality. But we know the truth only by sensing congruences between different experiences, both remembered by ourselves and shared with others. Whatever is “out there” will forever be a mystery. That was Plato’s point in his image of the cave. His mistake was to believe that reasoning could access the reality outside the cave. He began the line of thought that ends with the blithe assumption that the “sets of rules and equations” describe reality not only more accurately but more completely than the accounts of our subjective experience.

There’s an irony here: The more we try to understand the nature of reality, the more we retreat from it. As Russel commented, in mathematics we know whether what we are saying is true, but we don’t know what it’s about; while in poetry we know what we are talking about, but we don’t know whether what we are saying is true.

With all its quirks and imperfections, the world presented by our conscious experience is the only reality we know.

Footnote 1: There is a difference between a scale model of a steam locomotive that runs on a steam, and a full size replica of the same locomotive. The model’s boiler, for example, will have to have thicker than scale walls, else it cannot sustain the necessary steam pressure. The model will not accelerate and decelerate in scale proportion, because its power to mass ratio will be different. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Peppercorn_Class_A1_60163_Tornado

Footnote 2: Nineteenth century theories of bridge behaviour were incomplete enough that many bridges fell down, and many people died. The real bridge does not behave exactly as modelled, thus giving graduate students in engineering lots of opportunity to observe them and refine the models.

Footnote 3: Quoting Bertrand Russell, Strawson writes:  “We know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events,” [Russell] wrote, “except when these are mental events that we directly experience.” In having conscious experience, he claims, we learn something about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, for conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff.

 Edited 2022-09-23

Last Weeks of A Complex Life: "Zoltan Beck Is Dying"

 

Joseph Kertes. Last Impressions (2020) “Zoltan Beck is dying”, announces the jacket blurb. We follow Ben, the son delegated to deal with his father’s day to day problems, as he tries to make his father’s last weeks tolerable. Alternate chapters tell Zoltan’s history, first as boy under Hungary’s Nazi collaboration, then under Communist government until his escape to the West and eventually to Canada. The two strands come together in a meeting between Zoltan and his Hungarian family, a sentimental ending to what is otherwise an astringent but comic and loving account of a man who has found a way to cope with his painful memories. It’s also an account of the refugee immigrant experience, and of living with a damaged parent, both of which slowed my reading of the book. I don’t like my fragmentary memories of the war and its aftermath surfacing without warning.
     Recommended. ***

Gahan Wilson, Master of Surrealist Horror: The Cleft (1998)

 

 Gahan Wilson. The Cleft and Other Odd Tales (1998) If you know Wilson’s cartoons, you will find reading these odd tales a familiar experience. Wilson is an acquired taste. If you're a newbie, I suggest you begin with his cartoons.

     Wilson has the knack of narrating the most disturbing events so matter-of-factly that one almost accepts them as normal. A valuable gift. It’s an odd feeling to enjoy such strange, unpleasant, and disorienting fantasies. But one needs to understand evil, and to recognise its (usually merely) traces in oneself. Recommended. ***

Peters teases and reveals: Naked Once More (1989)

 

Elizabeth Peters. Naked Once More (1989) The title is a come on, an allusion to Naked in the Ice, a best selling historical fantasy-romance. The McGuffin is a contract for writing a sequel, since the author has been declared dead seven years after her disappearance. The winner, herself a writer of light historical fiction, suffers accidents much like those suffered by her predecessor before her disappearance. The plot, nicely tangled, teases the reader with two questions: Did the author of Naked in the Ice disappear, or was she killed? The denouement, presented in a Hercules Poirot-like gathering of the usual suspects, is plausible, but only just. Peters has concocted a wittily written tale, which moves swiftly enough that the I didn’t note thinness of the characters and the sketchy ambience until I finished the book and wondered what I thought about it.
     So what do I think about it? A well-done entertainment, well above average for its genre. Much of its charm is in its style, and the casual (and revealing) asides about the publishing racket. Recommended. ***

Two more Lapham collections: Epidemics and Comedy

 Lapham’s Quarterly XIII-3: Epidemic. (2020) The current issue, with timely reminders that all our current protective measures against covid-19 have been used as far back as we have records. The ancients didn’t know about viruses, but they did know that staying close to infected people somehow transmitted the contagion. Lock downs, quarantines, masking, miscellaneous nostrums, and reliance on the protection of the gods are as old as epidemics. So are the hostile reactions to these measures, including distrust of whatever authorities imposed or prescribed them.

     The collection also shows that the school histories that everybody knows ignore the impact of plagues. We hear a lot about the great squabblers and their bloody wars, of the merchants and their wide-ranging travels, and the inventors and their ingenious devices for improving both war and wandering. The story of the plagues visited by Yahweh on the Egyptians is one of very few instances that gives illness its proper historical weight. But in the school accounts of the 30- and 100-Year wars which marked the transition from medieval to Renaissance Europe, the fact that plague killed somewhere between one-third and one-half the population is glossed over. Like many other crucial facts, I did not learn it until university.
    Another excellent collection. ****    

Lapham’s Quarterly VII-1: Comedy (2014) Enjoyable, as always. Someone has claimed that humans are the only animal that laughs, and the only animal that needs to. Recent careful observation of animals shows that some other animals display what looks very like the laughter of pleasure, the only kind exhibited by human babies, which suggests that all laughter expresses some kind of pleasure. The questions are what kinds, and why.
     In their answers, several of the writers quoted here distinguish between wit and humour, and several others claim that true humour transcends cultural specifics. I’d say that wit requires that the creator and audience share the same range of knowledge and insight, while humour relies on the most basic prompters to laughter, which are mostly the (usually less than lethal) mishaps of other people. Another constant is the sad and sometimes dangerous fact that authoritarians have no sense of humour whatsoever. Nor do the moralists who believe they have the duty to impose their moral purities on the rest of us. ****

 

Upun my word: a book of puns.

 Himie Koshevoy Treasure Jest of Best Puns (1969) The puns are usually laboured and often lame, displaying more ingenuity than wit. Which means for full effect they need the delivery of a stand-up comic who has mastered the inflection and timing of long jokes. No one-liners here. The collection also shows that wit depends on common cultural references, and since the 1960s many of these no longer apply, and some are now in poor taste. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book well enough, thus proving I’m an old fogey. I’ve read it twice or thrice over the years (I’ve forgotten). It is a well made book, printed on excellent paper, with at least tangentially relevant old-timey engravings facing each joke. But not a keeper.  **½

Sample (edited): The exploits of Alexander the Great are wondrous and many, but few realise he was an inventor who might well rank with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. It was he who discovered that timing mattered in battle. He needed a device to ensure his troops would arrive on the scene all at the same time, or thereabouts. Alexander took to his tent to think it over, and when he emerged he had the forerunner of the modern chronometer Every soldier had to wrap a chemically treated rag around his wrist. As the day wore on, the cloth changed colour, thus marking the passing of time. It was Alexander’s rag time band.

Food and Human Behaviour

 

  Lapham’s Quarterly IV-3: Food (2011) All human societies have devised rules, customs, conventions, and moral judgements about food. There some constants: One must compliment the host on their generosity in sharing food, and their skill in its preparation. One must demonstrate that one knows the best table manners. One must show appropriate restraint in eating. One is permitted or required to display good taste in the table settings. One must be on one’s best behaviour either as host or as guest.
    Just how these requirements defined and met in different times and places makes for entertaining and instructive reading. There also some recipes. Here and there, the selections hint at what underlies our species-specific elaboration of food-related behaviours: we’re an omnivorous social species, who would fight over our food without these restraints on our behaviour. ****

The Sea

  Lapham’s Quarterly VI-3: The Sea (2013) Lapham’s family operated a shipping company in California. One of his earliest memories is of watching one of the family-owned ships breaking up on the rocky California coast. Most of the people in it survived, but Lapham was duly impressed by what he saw. His introductory essay-cum-memoir to this collection is alone worth the price of the magazine. The rest reminds us that we humans have at best merely survived on the seas, which we know we have never subdued as we believe we have subdued the land.
     The collection tells a great deal of first hand experience. Recommended for any landlubber who wants to know why they don’t want to sail the seas, and for any seafarer who wants to relive the exhilaration and terrors of sailing. ****