A Tale for the Time Being

After I thoroughly enjoyed Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, my special lady friend suggested that I would also like this novel, based on a phrase from Master Dōgen’ Shōbōgenzō. They’re both so good that it’s hard to pick a favorite between these two. A Tale for the Time Being is perhaps a bit more philosophical in tone, but the action is equally imaginative, even if most of it is told in epistolary form as the author-narrator reads through the lost diaries of a Japanese teenager. One of Ozeki’s “supapowas” is her ability to make these ordinary marginal characters come alive for us, to make us feel the sufferings and joys of everyday life as worthy topics for fiction. Frequently, this produces some pretty uncomfortable moments. We are forced to confront the first noble truth of those thousand papercut shames that make up human existence. Girls start menstrating at awkward times. Beloved housecats get into fights. The power goes out. We quarrel with our mates. But, for me, these quotidian stories are what makes Ozeki’s novels so special, so warm, so … Buddhist. It goes beyond the direct references to Dogen and the old nun grandmother Jiko. She has a way of giving us a compelling story that is also a teaching in itself, which is perhaps the next best thing to experiencing the insight ourselves. We just need to live for a while in her narrative of impermanence and transition.

The Concealed Influence of Custom

I thoroughly enjoyed Jay Garfield’s book about not-self. While he mentions Hume’s ideas several times in that book, and again at the end of this interesting interview with Clear Mountain Monastery, it’s only in passing. So when I discovered that he recently devoted an entire book to Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, I was easily sold on the idea of following up my reading of Hume’s slippery system with some secondary literature.

It turned out to be an fortuitous choice. Garfield’s exposition of Hume is everything good secondary literature should be. Clear. Concise. A generous reading¹. And a great source of context illuminating Hume’s inspirations and his later influence. Garfield’s thesis is right there in the title – the linchpin of Hume’s thought is the concealed yet immensely powerful influence of custom, taken in the dual sense of individual habits of mind and collective customs of language and behavior. In this reading of Hume, there is no deeper explanatory principle for why we think or do something than the fact that we habitually think or do it this way.

While this explanation may at first appear to beg the question, Garfield provides us with a key piece of context that enables us to see the problem Hume is trying to solve. Hume’s concept of custom is deeply rooted in the English legal theory of his day, with its emphasis on the way the normative power of law derives entirely from customary, or what we would today call “common”, law. This tradition saw laws as perfectly normative, both morally and legally, for members of a given community, despite the fact that they are never written down and may vary from time to time and place to place. Garfield tells us that English legal theory of the late 1600’s in fact regarded custom as the source of all normative legal power. Even the “common law of the realm” written down by the King was merely the formalization of a power that already existed in the practice of custom. Its authority borrowed from and built on this sole true source of authority.

Despite this helpful piece of context, the idea that custom is what explains, rather than what needs to be explained takes some getting used to. Fortunately, Garfield revisits this strategy of “Skeptical Inversion” throughout the book in various contexts, so by the end we feel like we have a solid grasp on it. He argues that this strategy, which is an update of ancient Greek Pyrrhoninan skepticism, is the bedrock of Hume’s philosophy and one he applies uniformly to all the important metaphysical questions that come up in the Treatise.

Take, for example, the question of whether or not the external world exists. Some argue that it does and try to prove that our mental representations must be adequate representations of it. Some argue that since we only have access to our internal mental impressions, the external world is merely a figment of our imaginations. The same sort of split can be applied to the question of causal influence. Some argue that cause and effect is real and objective part of the world. Others suggest that since we can never directly experience cause and effect but only constant conjunction, then cause and effect is just a human convention with no objective reality.

Frequently, Hume is read as supporting the second of these options, as if this is what it would mean to be a skeptic and an empiricist. So he is read as suggesting that cause and effect are ‘just’ human constructions. This is simply a misreading of the Treatise, and Garfield helps us identify precisely what it gets wrong. Hume definitely does argue that we cannot uncritically accept our belief in an external world filled with real causal interactions. But he definitely does not thereby argue that these things don’t exist or are merely illusions or just subjective projections. In fact, as a good Skeptic, Hume doesn’t have any opinion at all about whether the external world really exists. Instead, he sees the whole argument as completely mis-framed. To the question of whether the external world exists or not, indeed, to all ontological questions, he replies, effectively Mu. Which is to suggest that the two possible options the question implies are not exhaustive – there is a middle way approach to these black and white questions. This approach is not an average or shade of grey compromise, but an [[The Extremely Middle Way|extremely middle way]], one that opens a new dimension to the problem. Garfield calls this Hume’s “rejection of grounding biconditionals” (CIC,7) in this case, a rejection of the unstated assumption both sides share that our belief in an external world is justified if, and only if, an external world actually exists. Instead, Hume argues can have no opinion about whether the external world exists or not, and yet still assert that we are justified in our belief in one because of our customs. And indeed, since for Hume these customs are the unique source of justification available to us, the question of what grounds what is inverted here. We don’t believe things because they are “in fact” true; things are “true” because we believe them. Rather than the way the world “really” is grounding our belief (or lack of belief) in it, we find that our habit of belief in an external world, as revealed by our individual habits and social customs, grounds the reality of that world. For Hume, the world is absolutely real. But its reality is not what we usually assume it to be. It is not real in the way we first expect.

At this point we can probably see that Hume’s Pyrrhonian Skepticism is very similar to Buddhist teachings, particularly the Mahayana view of emptiness and the two truths. Given the known similarity between Pyrhho and Buddha this isn’t terribly surprising. Since he is also a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, I was hoping Garfield would provide a much more detailed discussion of these correspondences. In fact, this is part of why I wanted to read this book to begin with. But while he mentions the comparison on a number of occasions, it is mostly in passing or the footnotes. Apparently I’ll have to read his other work if I want to pursue the analogy in more depth.

1 That not incidentally mostly concurs with mine.

Theo of Golden

A friend recommended Allen Levi’s sole novel as a heartwarming tale of the simple pleasures of giving, and that’s about the best summary of it one can imagine. The titular Theo is a distinguished octogenarian who makes an unexpectedly extended visit to Golden, Georgia. Once arrived, he discovers a collection of portraits drawings, done by a local artist, hanging for sale on a coffee shop wall, and embarks on a long project of purchasing each one and gifting them to the various coffee shop patrons they depict. While slightly odd by modern standards, this seems like a nice thing to do, and also great way to meet people and hear their stories. So for most of the novel we get to enjoy the fruits of Theo’s random acts of kindness. It’s a lovely sentiment, much needed in our current world. The novel then concludes with a surprising and touching twist that I won’t spoil.

After reading such warm and redeeming sentiments, it feels a little catty to mention that it’s not actually an especially good novel from a literary perspective. The writing is mediocre, with a tendency towards effusive description that nevertheless remains rather unevocative due to its lack of craft. The plot is basically just one damn thing after another, and is only given shape by the few surprising pages at the end. I guess I’m glad to find that such an ethically uplifting story is a NYT best seller, but it does point to the fact that, regrettably, it’s true, standards have fallen in adult entertainment.

Interference

Almost a decade ago now, I read the executive summary of the Mueller Report. It struck me at the time that the contents of the report didn’t match up very well with the way the report was seized on by the media. The right claimed the whole thing was a hoax and a “witch hunt” and that Russiagate was just a way for the Democrats and the deep state to smear Trump. The left maintained that it was obvious Trump was Putin’s lackey, and that the report merely documented this fact.

The report itself, however, supported neither of these readings. Nor were its conclusions at all ambiguous or difficult to understand. It made it quite clear that the Russians ran a sophisticated cyber campaign that aimed to interfere in the 2016 presidential election in favor of Trump. It also documented the ties between several Trump campaign staffers and the Russians. It went on to show that these people knew at least some of what the Russians were secretly doing and devised strategies for the campaign to profit from this information. Finally, it did not reach any conclusion about whether Trump himself knew about the Russian operation, nor about whether he obstructed the FBI investigation into this operation or Bob Mueller’s Special Counsel report on it. While it did not prove Trump had knowledge of the whole affair and was trying to cover it up, it also did not prove that he didn’t, and so clearly did not exonerate him. Instead, it merely documented that his behavior at every turn matched what one might expect to see if something was being covered up. It was all very well organized, with endless facts and footnotes, and maintained the extremely lawyerly tone of most government bureaucracy.

I read the actual report because … well, you can’t learn shit from Twitter, people! Read the goddamn original if you want to have an opinion! But also because I know one the authors, and he’s always seemed like a stand up guy. Plus, if you can’t read your friends books, what can you read?

Which brings us to the present. This friend, along with a couple other top aides to Mueller, have now written a less formal, more behind the scenes look at how the investigation proceeded and what it found. I hope Interference reaches a wider public than the report on which it is based, though I think perhaps the ship of the political moment has sailed on, and it will mainly interest only serious political junkies and lawyers steeped in the details. But if you’re someone who remains interested in knowing what actually happened, and how we know what actually happened, I think you can rely on it as an able and non-partisan summary of the whole Russiagate saga. It’s just not clear to me that anyone I know fits this description.

So what then, did I take away from this book, given that I’d already read the first version?

First, learning more about the history of the investigation was interesting all by itself. The book gives us our only insight into why the principals made some of the decisions they did. While I’m not lawyer enough to contest most of these, they sounded to me like pretty plausible choices among difficult options.

Second, the the book gives you a inadvertent look into what I think you can legitimately call the “deep state”. Mueller and all his key lieutenants, as well as many of their counterparts within the first Trump administration, have all been in and out of various federal and local government positions in both colors of administrations over the past 40 years. The biographies reminded me of what people referred to as the “revolving door” in the context of the constant back and forth between the financial industry and key people at the Federal Reserve. While this situation in finance can of course generate clear-cut conflicts of interest and corruption, its main effect is less nefarious. It mostly just ensures that the people running the show are all invested in the same social and professional circles. That is, it maintains what you might call a certain ‘clubby’ atmosphere. Club members tend to share a set of (often unconscious) assumptions, as well as a natural desire not to rock the boat. This can lead to some groupthink and systematic inflexibility, as everyone is invested in perpetuating the system they’ve built their lives around. The ship of the Deep State is hard to turn. Which, if you put it in the proper perspective, is certainly as much a feature as a bug. The Deep State is much maligned. But how else can a sprawling Republic filled with low-information voters pulling levers for the latest game show host operate with any consistency across time? Would you rather put a know-nothing like myself in charge of National Security or Monetary Policy? Or worse yet put a politician directly in charge of these? No, the truth is we need the Deep State. We need all these people who make our bureaucracy a career. And the question of their accountability has to be paired with their effectiveness. We’ve clearly disturbed this balance in our current politics, and I suspect it will lead us into a long period of less effective (and, perhaps paradoxically, also less accountable) policy on many fronts.

Finally, the book was interesting partly because it was so frustrating. Most of this frustration comes from reading about how these very capable, very hardworking agents of the Deep State completely misread how their report would be received. Despite all their experience they come off as kinda naive about how they’ve ultimately just been employed simple to manufacture yet another political football. Of course, there are principled reasons they stick to the ‘just the facts maam’ approach, relegating themselves to the role of messenger to the DOJ and Congress. With the not inconsiderable benefit of hindsight though, we can see that they fundamentally mistook the situation. They imagined that it was still possible to coast above politics, in the non-partisan heaven realm that I assume all genuine civil servants wish they operated in. They took no care to shape the media reception of the final report. They seem to have trusted that the facts would win the day and Congress would follow up and do its duty. It’s a sign of our times that today this seems almost hopelessly naive. If the greatest strength of the Deep State is its continuity, its greatest weakness is clearly this inability to imagine that anything significant can change.

A Treatise of Human Nature

David Hume was one of those philosophers I always thought I would read … someday. So I’ve had a copy of his Treatise sitting on the shelf for quite some time. Recently I picked it up just intending to read a few pages while I decided what I really wanted to read next. But somehow Hume’s thought immediately pulled me in because his basic premise was so simple and attractive. We have studied the natural world as a science, but this study is always conducted by human beings. So if we want to put our understanding of this world on a firm footing, we will have to back up and start with an underlying science of human nature. As the subtitle of the book indicates, Hume thought of this as, “An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects”. The goal is a sort of introspective empiricism that treats the mind as a collection of natural processes whose laws we can surely uncover if we carefully observe them. Bacon meets the brain.

In a way, this desire to back up and put our knowledge on firmer footing is not at all new to Hume. In fact, one might see almost all of philosophy in this light. Socrates was willing to question everything, and only knew that he knew nothing. Descartes famously resolved to doubt anything that could be doubted. Spinoza tried to demonstrate that all things derive from the concept of God in geometric order. What’s new with Hume is not the quest for a stable foundation of our logic, but the acceptance that this quest is bound to fail. Hume genius lies in the fact that he doesn’t actually provide us with something we can be ultimately certain of. That is, he converts what has always been considered an a priori question into an empirical one. Even the new science of human nature will inevitably be constructed by humans. This admission changes everything.

What Hume begins with as indubitable is merely that fact that there is experience. If there wasn’t some sort of experience, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. But he refuses to immediately betray the wildness of experience by attributing it all to a consistent and stable subject like Descartes’ thinking substance. Instead Hume takes for granted only what we actually discover when we take a moment to settle down and simply observe the mind in action – this place is a dump! All kinds of things float through experience. Sights and sounds, aches and pains, images of other people, ideas about what to have for lunch, sublime philosophical reflections, puerile humor – it’s all in there, jumbled up, constantly changing, seemingly with no particular order, and certainly not in our control. In other words, Hume begins with what happens to you in your first meditation. Mental fucking chaos – the real empirical starting point.

It’s clear that this starting point doesn’t satisfy us as a stable foundation on which to build a philosophy. And that’s the whole point. Hume explicitly tells us that there’s no sense in looking beyond experience for something more fundamental, because in any case this putative thing would have to be experienced to be of any use. Perhaps there’s something more under this experience, but it is senseless to speculate. We simply can’t reach the a priori philosophical certainty we always thought we wanted any more than Newton could understand the inner nature of matter. From an a priori perspective any thought is possible, and each one would count as a real experience. Like Newton, all we can do is observe how the mind behaves and try to notice any empirical patterns.

And that’s precisely what A Treatise of Human Nature attempts to do. Hume begins with patterns he finds in our understanding or reason (Book 1), explores the patterns in our individual passions or emotions (Book 2), and concludes with examining patterns in moral judgement or society (Book 3). ¹ Which is to say that the entire book is simply an empirical description of our various habits of mind. Hume isn’t trying to tell us how we should think, but examining how we do, in fact, think. He is not trying to provide us with the perfect starting point from which we can deduce all of the true thoughts and none of the false ones. He is beginning in the middle, with the observations made by an observer who may himself be fallible, since, after all, we are only capable of observing the mind with the mind.

Despite the clarity and simplicity of Hume’s overall vision, the Treatise can often be a strangely confusing book. First, we contend with the English of 1739.  While the spelling and diction are only a little different, the clause structure seems to have changed pretty substantially. Even though Hume writes informally, without academic jargon and only very infrequently citing the history of philosophy, I found I often had to read sentences several times before getting the gist. There are commas, where you least, expect them and some pretty weird; semicolon use. Second, the Treatise is fairly long, and the principles of its organization are not always obvious. Hume clearly foresaw that his new approach would fail to convince anyone if he didn’t also offer many arguments as to why the a priori metaphysical approach falls short of describing how we actually think. There are many interesting examples, but together they stretch out the main argument and dilute its line. Someone looking for a more digestible version of the same ideas is advised to read the Abstract, a twenty page summary of the main argument that Hume later published as a fictional review of his own book. Third, while Hume elucidates many clear principles to account for the way we think -- simple habits of mind like relating things we see as contiguous or resembling or related by cause and effect -- when he delves into specific empirical examples, the way he applies these principles can often appear a bit ad hoc.  

It may seem puzzling that this review hasn’t delved into the details of some of the claims Hume is most famous for, such as the idea that correlation is not causation, or that we can never know the external world. Partly, that’s just because it would end up being too long. Partly, it’s because I’ve already started in on some secondary literature which will give me a chance to address these topics elsewhere. But it’s also partly because these particular claims are not what’s really novel and important with Hume. Compared to other philosophers, I’ve read Hume quite casually so far, not necessarily getting concerned with understanding the details of every one of his arguments. Yet I found the book immensely valuable simply for its overall orientation to how we should do philosophy. So I wanted to emphasize this empirical shift as the most important contribution Hume can make to our thinking, without getting bogged down in the flash card details of what he thought of topic X.

1 Kant will attempt to solve Hume’s skepticism as best he can with his transcendental method, but it seems to me that the ding an sich was actually born with Hume, even though he didn’t bother to elaborate this fruitless concept. Also, it strikes me that what I understand of Kant’s three Critiques more or less follows the three books of Hume’s Treatise – Pure Reason, Practical Reason, Judgement.

Democracy

Though Goodbye To All That felt like an instant classic, I’d never read any more Joan Didion until coming across a used copy of her 1984 novel Democracy. This had been sitting on the shelf for years, and can now return to the limbo of the cat bookstore. It’s not a bad novel. But it certainly isn’t great enough to reread or recommend.

Didion’s writing is sharp, with lots of amusing details and clever dialogue. Unfortunately she didn’t seem to quite know where she wanted to go with this story. It gets off the ground very slowly, with some ungainly postmodern flapping of wings, before settling into the conceit that Didion is a journalist chronicling the downfall of the politically connected Victor family following Harry Victor’s unsuccessful bid for the 1972 Democratic Presidential Nomination. The central character in this implosion is Irene Victor, the politician’s good wife, and a fictional friend of our equally fictional author-narrator. Of course, with a title like “Democracy” you will not be surprised to discover that the novel is also a political allegory for the American evacuation of Saigon. Oh, how naive we and the Victor’s were in assuming that being an American means always coming out on top through the force of sheer individual gumption, etc … It’s a fine realization, and one many Americans could still stand to revisit I suppose, but it’s hardly a message needed today as urgently it was in 1984. It seems like a tall task to write a political novel that ages well.

Skid Road

I thought a friend had recommended Murray Morgan’s “Informal Portrait of Seattle” as an entertaining People’s History of my adopted hometown. Unfortunately, my memory was in error and I am now unable to thank whoever it was that prompted me to pick this up at the cat bookstore.

Morgan covers the history of Seattle from its founding in 1852 up through the 1950’s, with an afterword that says a few words about developments up through 1980. The prose is overly florid for my tastes, but it’s still readable and the book is so packed with interesting anecdotes and information that griping about its style seems churlish. As the subtitle indicates, this is not an academic history of the city. Morgan illustrates the story of each era by focusing on a single main character along with their supporting cast of local personalities.

So, for example, the book opens with the larger than life figure of Doc Maynard – a likable if somewhat dissolute man fleeing his overly domestic life in Ohio – rolling up in an Indian canoe and laying claim to most of what is now Seattle south of Yesler Way. One might imagine this causing some annoyance among the natives, but in fact Doc Maynard was a good friend to many of the local tribes, and, in any event, they couldn’t imagine the party of 5 white guys who wanted to live on Elliot Bay much of a threat. Morgan goes on to tell the history of early Seattle's increasingly fraught relations with the Native Americans, through the lens of the life of Doc.

Later, we get a chapter on the coming of the railroads and the troubles of Chinese immigrants as told through the story of Mary Kenworthy, an unlikely early advocate of populism. This is another particularly interesting bit of history because of all the complex crosscurrents at work at the time. There was the economic exploitation of the railroad monopoly, the local populist agitation against it, the national response to what some saw as creeping socialism, the scapegoating of the Chinese, but also their defense by National forces brought in to protect them from the local mob. This is one of the strengths of history told through personality – it can more easily accommodate all our contradictions.

The book also covers the town’s reinvention as the doorway to the Klondike Goldrush – with all the scams, gambling, and prostitution this role entailed – by narrating the life of John Considine, the most enterprising pimp of the era. The final chapters relate the stories of corrupt Mayor Hiram Gill and the newspaper era, and (also corrupt) Dave Beck and the postwar union time frame. Overall, I feel like I now have a good sense for the various phases of development of the city, and a greater appreciation for some of the names on the streets.