Nietzsche and Borges and Murphy: Fiction and the Empty Universe

Neil deGrasse Tyson declares the number of possible persons by the number of possible combinations of DNA. This would make twins and clones the same person. In fact the number of possible persons is infinite. 

Borges added to Nietzsche’s notion of Eternal Return a Library in which all texts return infinitely, but with variation. But if the library is infinite, all texts also return infinitely without variation. All commas are forever where they belong. And if the universe is structured like the library, then not just all texts but all lives return eternally with and without variation. Every mistake you ever make you make eternally. But you also avoid it eternally. Everyone you ever could have married, you marry. Every life you could have lived, you live. Every mistake you could make, you make. Every mistake you could avoid, you avoid. Everything that can happen happens, happens forever in infinite repetition. And this helps us understand the great emptiness of the universe, an argument against the existence of God. Most of the universe is empty. Most of the library is nonsense. Pockets of meaning are infinite and infinitely rare at the same time, at every time, at all times and in all times. That’s the structure of the library. But it also means that the books we write which are fictions here are realities elsewhere, providing they are possible anywhere. Is there a universe in which flying carpets are real? If there is, there are flying carpets there and Persians who fly on them. If not, not. But Silas Lapham exists with his paint in a universe somewhere. And somewhere he doesn’t gamble on the stock market and somewhere he does.

Rushdie's God

 I am a particular fan of Salman Rushdie. Of his published words, the few I have not (yet) read are like the water that's left in your cupped hands when all the rest has passed through. Not much. I have taught an entire graduate seminar on his works--though that was long ago, before most of the ones we now have were written. I've gone to India to present a paper on his sense of history, which was soon after published in a book that came out of the conference. I did this in the days when I wasn't quite sure it was safe to travel to India to talk about Rushdie. (Turns out I had nothing to worry about.) If nothing else of Rushdie lasts, it's hard to imagine the Midnight's Children will not be read as long as there are people who read novels. 

That's not to say that I think Rushdie is universally brilliant and not even sometimes rated higher, I won't say "than he deserves" but, as I would rate him. He's a novelist. He's not a philosopher. And he's not theologian either. I'm neither of those things myself, so there's my grain of salt.

I, like Rushdie, like to talk about God. I don't like to talk about God the way Rushdie does. Rushdie is not just a devotee of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, but is (or in one case was) also a personal friend of theirs. It's the tradition of no less a mind than Bertrand Russell. And like them, he isn't just an atheist--I have no problem with atheists--but contemptuous not just of religion (I understand even when I don't share that response to religion), but also faith in general, to theism in general. As such, he equates believe in God with magical thinking, with believing in fairy tales and Santa Claus. Something only children and small minded adults can take seriously. 

On the question of whether God exists, I will not take any stand. On the question of whether this characterization of belief makes sense, I will. 

In Languages of Truth Rushdie offers a standard atheists "history" of religion (he cannot distinguish between belief in God and adherence to religion). Ignorant, pre-scientific people, needing to understand and control what they could not understand or control, felt the wind and invented an invisible blower of the wind to whom they could appeal when the wanted the wind to stop and who, if he did not stop the wind, hated or blamed them, in any case required some response from them if they still wanted the wind to stop. (I'm not quoting because the idea is so simple and so standard that it doesn't even matter if I embellish or understate; it comes to the same thing.)

God did not create us in his image, he tells us, we created God in our image. 

Rushdie may be right about all of that. That's not the question. He also may be wrong. Offering no evidence between "common sense," which is an extraordinarily slippery sort of evidence, no one reading Rushdie has in fact any reason to accept his version of history, his story, or, to put it in the terms it best deserves, his myth. There's an essential difference between a plausible explanation and an established fact. Rushdie wants to put his eggs in the basket of science, but then he offers a hypothesis as a conclusion. He has told the story many times of how he lost his faith as child--around the age of 14 if I remember correctly. A lot of children do. I don't see any evidence that his thinking on the question has advanced since then. Almost no one's ever does. (C. S. Lewis is an exception to that trend, not that I don't have problems with the version of faith advocated there as well. But whatever one might say about Lewis, his faith is well thought out, not the shrug-off of Rushdie.) I don't think anyone needs to take too seriously the undeveloped atheism or the theism of a fourteen-year old.  

The point that I wish to make is this: Rushdie replaces a faith in myth with a myth in which he expects us to place our faith. A myth of origins. A simple reversal of the old idea about God's image. How does Rushdie know we created God in our image? Here he does not delve. It's too obvious to need to delve. 

The problem with saying that faith is unreasonable, fairy-taley, jibber jabber, is the number of reasonable people who maintain that it isn't, not just amateur theologians like C.S. Lewis, but actual philosophers like Rene Girard and Paul Ricoeur. And the problem with the idea that we created God in our image is that the claim is always based on the unverifiable notion that God if God existed would never create the universe in which we live. It's unjust. It's too tolerant of evil. Our reason tells us that it is unreasonable for an omniscient, all loving God to make such a shit show universe. 

That may be true. There is reason to assert that it is. But we have nothing like a reason to believe that it is. If we do, we do so on faith. That an infinite God would use human reason, with not just its lack of knowledge but its lack of apparatus, its thoroughly qualified finiteness, to make what we have to call from our perspective "decisions" about how to make a universe is not just an act of hubris but an act of willful blindness. It's plainly silly. Think of a toddler telling you how to fix your car or your government or global warming and multiply that difference infinitely and you have the difference between what religion calls the mind of God and what Rushdie calls the mind of God. 

There's no getting around this. It will sound like a cheap response to the Rushdie, Hitchens, Dawkins crowd. But it is in fact the more reasonable response. It is the line of thought that unlike theirs takes into account reason and science. It sets myth aside to confront the facts as we know them. 

A Word on Thomas Hardy

 

It seems the first thing one must say today is in response to Hardian pessimism: to the aversion I have to reading novels that beat up on their protagonists. Hardy pulls out fingernails and pushes needles slowly into eyes with what feels like self-loathing, sadistic, pleasure. 

These stories go beyond tragedy, which always has a cause, which always tells us that “it had to be” even when we respond, “it should not have to have been that way.” Hardy wants us to know, “it didn’t have to be that way.” In his works it may be an evil individual, and it may be the arbitrary rules of the social unit (that put so much pressure on who may have sex with whom in its most obvious example of the “it didn’t have to be that way” variety) or pure chance. When the gods condemn us, we just have to submit. When society punishes us for mere natural actions that give us happiness or pleasure at no one’s essential cost, we can change those rules. But when well meaning people doing good are ground down for their virtue, the most natural reaction is disgust followed by despair. That which cannot be altered or resisted or blamed offers no meaningful response. Hardy’s universe is one no one wants to live in. There’s no fixing it. There’s no reconciling oneself to it.

Hardy’s response is “but that’s the universe you do live in. I’m just showing it to you. I’m taking the veil off the bullshit presented to you as food by all previous literature (with the possible exception of King Lear). I’m not telling you what to do with this knowledge, because there’s nothing you can do with it. Accept it if you choose to live in truth; deny it if you choose to live in delusion.”

But is this the universe we actually live in? Of course there IS a force behind the arbitrary destruction of all of Hardy’s admirable heroes. Hardy himself. The manipulating author who keeps good at bay while he opens all the apertures to destruction. That doesn’t however reveal anything about the accuracy of the portrayal. Hardy is Tess’s Apollo. But Tess might have died as she did without any Apollo. People die by chance on their way to doing good every day.

What strikes me as in indication of something deeply false about Hardy’s novels is the reaction of readers. Some of us turn away in disgust. Some of us in satisfaction of a kind. Some cry at the tortured goodness. But no one, I imagine, puts them down out of boredom, at least no one who wouldn’t put down any novel out of boredom. (That’s to say, if anyone is bored by Hardy it’s not because of his plots or his characters but because they don’t have the wherewithal to read.) But boredom is the only proper response to a Hardy novel if Hardy’s representation is accurate. The very idea that something wrong has happened, that some deep injustice has been perpetrated, that there’s something wrong with this indifferent universe may be the effect of centuries of bad storytelling, indoctrination into the myth of meaning. But it may also be from the deeper sense that there is something wrong, something broken in this universe. If Hardy’s right, he shouldn’t have sold any novels. When you hold the mirror up to the reader who sees himself for the first time, there may be an initial shock. But once “that’s who I am” settles in, the shock, whatever intermediary stages of denial and sadness must be made through, comes eventually to resignation and indifference. And we have still not got to indifference.

 

Is

 

Even if I tell you, tell you plainly,

        in the simplest words,

You will not get it.

 

Even if you tell it back to me in new words you picked from the fruit-heavy branches of your word tree so that I understand my own meaning as though you were giving it new to me

You will not have it.

 

But it will sit with you when you lie trembling in your sweat-soaked bed.

It will hold your hand and lay a compress on your fevered head.

And when the fever breaks, many many years from now,

When my voice and name have been composted past shadow,

You will repeat these words again (or others like them) like a prayer, slowly, to yourself

as you strain your thighs to the mattress edge

and shift your weight

and stand up shaking on the cold hard floor.

Then you'll have it; you’ll have got it, you will know.

Amberman

 

I’m told time freezes

It does not end.

Jesus,

What am I to do with that?

A long scope sees all that was or will be.

Determinately free

For all eternity I guess

A prehistorical bug encased in amber

Flapping still its prehistoric wings.

Li Bai Drinks Beneath the Moon

I, alone among the flowers,

Here, with a jug of wine,

Me, the moon, and my shadow,

I raise my glass of wine.

 

But the moon cannot drink,

And my shadow cannot stay.

Still, we must make merry the spring.

 

I dance with my spastic shadow

In the light of the jittering moon.

One wonderful jig and another

Until the wine is gone.

Drunk we are three,

Sober, one.

 

Let’s do this all again

sometime. We must all

do this again

sometime. There

in the river of stars.

 

x

Believing in People

We are each other.

 “If my story can remind you of anything, let it remind you that when you believe in someone, you can change their world,” Ortiz said. 

  The same is of course true if you don't believe in someone. This is how so much potential is lost, so many people ruined.

Lost in Waves

The ravens of night sweep the screen of the sky over the edge of the world.

It folds away in the ocean sway.

Darkness hides the waves and discovers the infinity of galaxies and stars,

A noiseless crashing of waves on the shore of your eyes.

The bright birds of morning recover the sky.

Light reveals the waves and hides the stars.

Short Review of When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom

 The whole time I was reading, I couldn't help but think of Kundera's superior "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." This is an imaginative, alternative, plausible history in which Nietzsche creates Freud's Talking Cure (Freud is a character in this book, but he never meets Nietzsche). The book is written by a psychotherapist, not a professional novelist. And that shows. He's not concerned with creating a work of literature as such. And that's the weakness of the book as a book. In Kundera, Nietzschean ideas are manifest in the very form of the book. They have an affecting role to play in the experience of "Eternal Return" (the most obvious example). This novel is in the realist tradition of the Victorian novel. It's interesting and thought provoking--though I will say the most interesting part to me was the Afterward, but one does have to read the entire novel to get the full effect out of that. Anyone with any interest in Nietzsche's life and thought and the whole, bizarre story, that connects Nietzsche to Freud via Lou Andreas Salome will find this story worth the time it takes to read it. The emphasis in the end is more on the Freudian legacy than the Nietzschean philosophy, which I find disappointing personally, for whatever that's worth. Still very glad I read the book. But if it's a choice between this or Kundera, read Kundera.

Preliminary Thoughts on Natural Signs

 

This may be the problem: In wealthy neighborhoods, the buildings are clean, the flowerbeds are blooming, the sidewalks wide and well maintained. In poor neighborhoods there are none of these simple signs. But signs of what? If they effect of flowers is to make us happier, we must also note that that effect has been commandeered by wealth via its mere sign value, not its animal value. So there are two things going on. We have what is good. We have what you don’t. We’re doing what’s good for us as animals. We’re pounding our chests and thumbing our noses at you.

Foucault likes to turn our attention to the latter. For the school of thought he represents, the other is nonexistent or not important enough to notice. And indeed for the person walking down the street in the wealthy neighborhood, feeling good, there’s no way to separate the “this is beautiful” from the “these people are rich” response to the environment.

But both still must exist. Not every sign is “arbitrary.” Not every sign can be swapped for every meaning.

Changing the rules of the game.

 History and reason reveal as clearly as they reveal anything that the only way for America to reduce gun violence is to control guns. At this point it's superfluous even to show that this is true--that all our measures to "harden" schools have done nothing, despite millions of dollars in investment that could have been used to enhance education--to reduce the frequency or the lethality of school shootings. Nothing. It is superfluous to point this out because every knows it. And everyone willing and capable of thinking through the question knows that owning a gun does not reduce your chances of becoming a victim of gun violence, but in fact increases them. Around 90% of Americans understand that, at the very least, we need stricter gun laws. Even those (most GOP) legislators in America who vote against these laws know that this is true.

And yet nothing changes. 

This reveals a structural failure in American democracy. The system has worked itself out to the point where the rules created for the game no longer produce the envisioned play. The game we are playing is no longer the game the creators intended. They were unable to foresee how the players would manipulate play in such a way as to undermine the game itself. 

It's time to change the rules. 

Review of "Is God a Mathematician" by Mario Livio

 

Is God a Mathematician?

The short answer is “no.” But like all answers that imply a binary set of definite possibilities, the short answer is more misleading than leading. This is an excellent book. No one capable of understanding it would fail to profit from reading it. So I’m not going to focus on its myriad virtues, which you can easily find in other reviews, but on it’s few but essential problems.

The principle question the book ask is this: Was math invented or discovered? This translates to “Was the universe created (or better ‘is it governed’) by mathematical principles that are ‘ideal’ in the Platonic sense?” Is there a math that is outside the universe (in some sense not perfectly understood) whose principles are the principles that makes the universe work as it does? Along the way he also asks “Is math a language?”

The book’s slightly longer and somewhat more helpful answer is “both.” Math itself is created, but what math reveals is discovered.

I say somewhat more helpful answer because this answer maintains the uninvestigated distinction between “invention” and “discovery” that, had it been investigated, would have yielded a richer answer.

Mario Livio does not adequately define his terms. He assumes we know what it means to be invented—like the microphone—or discovered—like a new planet. The new planet was always there, but someone found it for the first time. The microphone never existed before. Someone made it. This may seem as obvious to you as it does to Livio, but even within his book, unnoticed problems arise.

First problem: prime numbers, he says, were invented. Any number of cultures had numbering systems, but most of the cultures did not have a concept of prime numbers, and they got along fine with out them. Western Mathematicians uniquely decided to invent this concept. That 9/3 = 3 was however discovered.

Second problem: No one, Livio says, would say that Shakespeare “invented” Hamlet.

But that there are numbers that are only divisible by themselves and one is true in any counting system. They exist even if unnoticed. So do they really differ in a completely different way from the answer to a problem of division? Does it really make sense, in this dualistic thinking, to say that the concept of prime number has to be invented rather than that it has to be recognized? It may be that either option can be supported. And this brings into question the very distinction between invented and discovered.

And as for Shakespeare, one person who would have said that Shakespeare invented Hamlet was Shakespeare. “I’ll give you a verse to this note that I made yesterday in despite of my invention,” says Jaques in As You Like It to show how clever he is before having to make something up. In fact any educated person would have said so. That is what the word meant in Shakespeare’s day. What Shakespeare would never have said was that he created Hamlet.

Of course we can say that words change their meaning. So this doesn’t count against Livio.

It’s true that words change their meaning. They do so when the concepts that they supported in their previous meanings are no longer supportable. The very “invent/discover” distinction which we tend to believe is too obvious to need strict definition is one that Shakespeare would not immediately wrap his mind around. The corollary for us, who profit so much from reading Livio’s book, is that we too may need to rethink our very distinction between invention and discovery.

To come at this from another angle, Is God a Mathematician is a book build on two conundrums: if math is invented how can it predict facts about the universe that were not even suspected at the time the math was invented? How can the mathematical theory of knots, useless the purpose for which it was invented, explain the structure of molecules? The conundrum will go along way toward taking care of itself when we understand that discovery and invention do not describe two sets without common elements—a fact that this book needs to maintain that within the sent of “invented” things is a member called math, in which there are things that were discovered. If we have to have it both ways, or one way at one moment and another way at another, then the problem is certainly in the question or the model that gives rise to the question and not in the thing the question is posed to explain.

The second conundrum, which the book brings up several times but is not deeply interested in is this: Is Math a language? Livio will tell us it sort of is and sort of isn’t. He doesn’t believe much depends on a rigorous answer to this question, and he does not give one. This makes sense given the structure of thought in which the book operates. When it gets to the point where something can be or not be a language at the same time, it closes the door and goes better lighted hallways.

It does seem like a troublesome question not admitting of easy answer. If math is a language, how come small children, who are so good at acquiring languages have such trouble learning math? On the other hand, it is a symbolic structure made of signs representing concepts. It works by rules of syntax and grammar.

The problem however is only an apparent one, like a knot that is just a tangle that disappears with a tug. Math is not a language. Math is something we do in language. When I do math, I do it in English. When a French person does math, they do it in French. Math appears at first glance to be a language only because we use the same representations, the same words with the same spelling to represent the same concepts “2” is two in English and deux in French and er in Mandarin, but we all spell that concept as 2 when we do math. (A side note, Livio’s short but illuminating excursions into the history of math leave out the essential observation of the indebtedness of math to Arabic numerals.) Why do children have trouble with math? For the same reason they have trouble with logic (which no one calls a language) and with diplomacy and with any of the more complicated functions we do in language. What children acquire easily is vocabulary and syntax. Whatever it is they are capable of expressing they easily learn to express from one natural language to another.

Finally then my point is that Livio’s question about the discover v. invention of math is of the same type as his question of whether math is or is not a language. If a better vocabulary for thinking about math is developed (and I’m sure it has already been developed, though I can’t point to it at the moment), then the problem itself goes away. At least I suspect that is so.

All that said, this is a terrific book. For someone who gave up on math after three semesters of calculus it makes me re-think my choice. What I do not know because I did not get into higher mathematics is a field of wonder that I would love to explore. But life only allows us so many loves. And this peek at what I cannot explore further was infinitely worth the time I spent in the doorway.

Beside the Planetarium

           Upon dead branches

among dead trees, white blooms of

           the magnolia.

The Nothing that Isn't

 As the legend says, if the story holds

About 15 billion years ago

On a Sunday morning, before the sun

Nothing exploded and nothing was done.

 

Everyone wave, everyone wave.

Nothing is lost and everything’s saved.

Everything’s free and all is contrived.

And isn’t it something to be alive?

The Plucked String of History

The plucked string of history vibrates still
along its entire length
and half its length
and the entire
alphabet
of its
leng
th
 
Vibrates still with
every harmony
discord
 
at the utter edge of hearing
 
as I
stone deaf
alone in my car
bass cranked
rock like mad
at the news.