Klara and the Sun

Despite the whole Nobel Prize thing and multiple major motion pictures, Klara and the Sun turns out to be the first Kasuo Ishiguro novel I've picked up.  What interested me most was the fact that it was described as a sci-fi novel.  Since sci-fi is so often a genre that suffers from some truly appalling writing and storytelling craft, it usually pays off to find those few sci-fi writers who can actually, you know, write.  Klara does not disappoint on this front.  While it's a breezy read without a hint of challenging high literary style, it's still clearly the work of a master craftsman.  Ishiguro manages the build-up of tension, and the various possible directions the story could move in like, well, a Nobel Prize winning author.  

Like the best sci-fi, the focus of the book is on the relevance of a hypothetical future to our image of our present identity.  The novel is narrated by Klara, an AF (artificial friend) purchased for the sick young girl Josie.  Just like when an author tells a story through the eyes of a child or an animal, Ishiguro' use of an android voice allows him to make the commonplace and everyday look strange and new.  Klara has to learn about the world, about the dynamics of the family who purchases her, and about her own perceptions and feelings along the way.  Like I say, mostly this lets Ishiguro explore human universals like love, sacrifice, and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, from a new angle.  But he does allow himself one more technical speculation; the novel comes closest to 'hard' sci-fi when Klara describes her perception of the world as fractured into multiple box-like screens or views that zoom in on certain aspects of reality.  Ishiguro doesn't make the import of this perception completely clear, but it struck me as something akin to describing the inner experience of a parallel processing algorithm.  And if you don't feel like one of those yourself these days, you must have been living in a cave for the past 20 years.  

Since the novel has something of a page-turning thriller aspect to it, I won't spoil the plot any more than I already have.  I think it's best read with no prior knowledge (we learn that Klara is artificial on the first page, so knowing this spoils nothing).

Begin Again

A lot of the time when I think about society, I look at it in terms of a huge machine, some of the pieces of which are individual humans.  I think about flows of matter or money or data, gradients of incentive, and self-reinforcing causal mechanisms.  It seems dangerous to personify society.  Society is not a person.  Hell, even people aren't people when you look carefully enough, as any good buddhist, psychologist, or philosopher could tell you.  This ultimately machinic view of the world is important and useful in all sorts of cases, not least of which is preventing ourselves from tipping over into facile hope or debilitating fear.  As Deleuze put it, "There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons".

Obviously, the ultimate view of reality is not the only one, nor is it the appropriate one in every case.  One thing it conspicuously lacks is any sort of moral viewpoint.  I give this preface to situate the type of thinking that is necessary for approaching Eddie S. Glaude Jr.'s sensitive and thoughtful intellectual biography of James Baldwin.  Glaude follows Baldwin in approaching the history of US race relations from an almost entirely moral perspective.  This means that neither is especially interested in exploring the political and economic causes and circumstances that led to slavery, its abolition, or the various more or less aborted attempts our country has made to reckon with this history.  What they want to ask is the simple moral questions behind all that history -- how could anyone do something like this!?  How could anyone keep doing it, in one form or another, for 400 years!?  And finally, how can any of us live with this level of hate for this long!?  In a sense, these questions are ultimately rhetorical.  You cannot answer them with an analysis of causes, nor quell them with a new set of progressive policies.  Glaude's idea is that you can only let the heavy weight of the question sink in till you can't stand it anymore.  And then you try to begin again, as a new person and a new country, with a new clarity about the problem and the goal.

The central trope of the book is that the problem we face today is analogous to the problem Baldwin faced after Medgar, Martin, and Malcolm were all shot.  How can you avoid despair when you realize that the country still can't lay its past to rest and live up to its image of itself, that it is still telling itself "the lie" as Baldwin put it?  Today, Trump and Charlottesville prompt the identical question.  This seems like it will never end.  It feels like we will keep endlessly fighting the same battle.  The fact that you can point to tangible progress in terms of the extent and depth of suffering created by racism, and might even see the Trump phenomena as the last gasp of White Power as it loses its demogrpahic grip on the country, is beside the point in this context.  It's clear that a large swath of our country has still not made any progress on the moral aspect of this question.  

As we reach this realization we find ourselves in a moment analogous to the poignant one Baldwin and King reached in 1968.  Less than a month before King was assassinated, Baldwin provided an introduction to a speech MLK made at a fundraiser in LA.  On the eve of his death, both Baldwin and MLK gave speeches to the effect that the civil rights movement was ultimately failing.  I found this extraordinary.  Having been taught to see MLK as more or less a superhero who obviously triumphed, I was amazed to read about his own, sadly final, assessment of the situation.  Of course, in a practical sense he was wrong -- the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed in 64-65 ended up making a big difference in lots of ways.  We rightfully celebrate MLK as a hero, not just a martyr.  But, even by the late 60's, it was clear that the movement was failing in a moral sense.  America was not able to stop, to look honestly at its history, to admit that what it had done was wrong, and to reach a moral epiphany to do better.  And that was ultimately both King and Baldwin's goal, to get us to see the hate that animates us and to turn towards love.  In this context, it's hard to see how we've progressed at all in the past 50, or even 150 years.  We tell ourselves a story of an ever more perfect union, but this hate still walks proud in broad daylight,  backed by all the power of dogs and guns and money.

Baldwin of course survived this moment to see all the disguised backpedaling of Nixon's southern strategy and Reagan's welfare queens confirm his moral analysis.  The latter half of the book examines his writing and state of mind as he confronted this "after times" in the last 20 years of his life.  If you are hoping to uncover a simple, feel-good solution that Baldwin came upon and that would apply analogously to our own moment, you have obviously not been following along.  Still, Glaude looks to his experience for some inspirations.  Baldwin gave up on trying to catalyze a moral reckoning in all of white America.  We can give up on trying to change the minds or compromise with Trump's core base.  Instead we can focus on organizing the power of what has now become the majority of this country that can see the problem.  Baldwin also spent a lot of time in Turkey during these years, a place that allowed him space to rest, recharge, and just put some of the rancor to the side for moments.  Glaude suggests that we also need an "elsewhere" that replenishes our reserves.  And finally, we can do what Baldwin never stopped doing, opening the book of history and looking honestly at the terror this country has again and again reigned down on anyone it doesn't consider white.  It's a hard book, but highly recommended.

The Great Transition

Well, I found the history of the medieval world I was looking for.  Bruce M. S. Campbell's central focus isn't Ghengis Khan and the Mongols, but since The Great Transition sets out to explain just why the Black Death happened when and where it did, he is forced to write a comprehensive ecological, political, and economic history of the age of the great Khan.  One component of this history is the westward spread of plague from its ancient native habitat in Qinghai and Tibet.  The unification of the Mongol empire is discussed in the book because it played a key facilitating role in that movement.  But of course, the full story is extremely complicated.

The fact that The Great Transition explores so many aspects of the full complexity of this era is exactly what makes the book itself great.  Campbell begins by reviewing a mountain of climatological evidence like tree ring widths, harvest records, solar radiation charts, etc ... to give us an overview of the way the climate shifted from the MCA (medieval climate anomaly) regime to the LIA (little ice age) regime right around the time of the first major plague outbreak in Northern Europe (1348).  This was a really major shift in temperature and precipitation patterns whose effect on humanity was compounded by the often observed volatility that accompanies a regime shift in dynamic systems.  One effect was increased rainfall in Qinghai, which resulted in increased grasslands, increased rodent populations, increased fleas, and increased spread of the plague bacterium within rodents.  A severe drought that followed this exceptionally rainy period seems to have been the trigger for desperate infected fleas to begin biting their next favorite host -- Mongolians.    In lesser hands, particularly in today's political environment, "the plague was caused by climate change" might have been the entire thesis.  But Campbell is that rare interdisciplinary thinker who resists reducing a complicated story to one that is neat, plausible, and wrong.  

He goes on to explore the many factors that went into the development of Northern Europe from a fallen Roman backwater to its 1100- 1300 CE efflorescece.  These range from the surprisingly positive effect of Christianity as a unifying force at this time, to the establishment of extensive trade fairs that added a significant market economy on top the existing feudal subsistence economy, to the integration of Europe into a global trading network that linked Genoa and Venice through the Middle East to the (at the time) more developed areas of China and India.  The composite picture he builds completely changed my image of late-medieval Europe.  In fact, he estimates that at its height in 1250, Venice was as rich per capita as anywhere in the world ever got before industrialization.  That is to say that it was pushing the technological frontier of trade specialization in a mostly agricultural economy.  His focus, however, is on the significantly less wealthy finge economy of England, simply because the English kept the best records.  With this data -- demographic, agricultural, economic, even the number of monasteries founded in 1200 -- he is able to go deeply into the details of what makes the European economy as a whole tick.  The complex of factors that led to a relatively wealthy and interconnected Europe are exactly the factors that made it vulnerable to the plague's spread.  

It's only from these heights that you can understand how Europe was brought low by the combination of climate, political, and economic changes that accelerated to a tipping point with the Black Death.  The weather got worse, causing harvest failures and undermining the economic viability of specialization and trade.  Cash rich european potentates made war on one another, which also increased transaction costs and reduced the radius of economic activity.  The Mamluks monopolized the traditional links between Europe and the East, which forced trade over the more expensive silk road routes and exposed Europe to the plague.  All these factors working in tandem are necessary to explain why the plague hit when and where it did and why it had such dramatic impact.  And Campbell doesn't shy away from exploring their individual complexity or their sometimes counterintuitive interactions.  

But he isn't done yet.  In the final chapter of the book he goes on to explore why it took Europe 150 years to recover from the plague, and how it's society had changed by the time economies and populations started growing again around 1500.  After the initial wave of plague that wiped out roughly 40% of the European population, there were a number of smaller waves that kept the population below replacement rate for generations.  While this reduction in population obviously led to a dramatic recession, it turns out that life for many of the survivors was actually much improved on average.  The reduction in labor force led to a doubling of the real wage rate over the next century or so, and since the plague destroys people but not farmland or equipment there was more capital to go around and a consequent halving of interest rates.  To top it off, Europe's silver mines (that had paid for much of the lopsided trade with Asia) were tapped out at this point, leading to widespread bullion famine and the deflationary spiral that happens when a market economy demonetizes.   All these factors locked Europe into a new post-plague equilibrium that prevented economic growth, trade, and populations from rebounding quickly.  These also account for some of the concerns that dominated Europe on the eve of the birth of colonialism.  Blocked from going Eastward, the continent reoriented towards the West, resulting in the great voyages of "discovery" to the West Indies and around the horn of Africa.  The significance of the fact that new stashes of gold lay in both these directions was not also lost on a bullion starved European economy.  And finally, there's nothing as great for incentivizing long-term productivity growth through technological investment as high real wage rates.  Let's hear it for the fight for $15, late medieval style!

Dear Life

Since I enjoyed Runaway so much I thought I'd try another book of Alice Munro short stories.  Dear Life is actually her most recent short story collection (2012), and given that she's 89, probably the last one.  While these stories are still finely crafted, with the same understated and allusive rural canadian drama, I think I enjoyed Runaway more.  Munro seems to have moved further in the direction of short and inconclusive sketches.  They are models of economy and implication, as I think a short story should be, but somehow many of them left me wishing for more exploration or elaboration -- not an ending maybe, but perhaps more of a clear direction.  Most of these stories tail off like a trail that got washed away.  If this sort of thing interests you, it's worth noting that the last few stories, including the title story are announced as mostly autobiographical.  Strangely, these actually struck me as the weakest stories in the whole collection.  

The Spell of the Sensuous

Sometimes, paradoxically, a book is so obviously an ally that our discussion of it can end up sounding like one long critique.  I think this happens when the ideas are close enough to our own that we feel a strong need to distinguish ourselves from them as from our double.  No one finds as many problems with an idea as the person who, having had it yesterday, woke this morning to a realization of its partiality.  Before we start then, I should make clear that David Abram's The Spell of the Sensous is a wide-ranging, insightful, and thought provoking book.  It's beautifully written (though at times he takes the poetry a bit overboard for my taste).  The main idea is something I am entirely sympathetic to -- the development of civilization has changed the way we think about and even perceive the world in deep and fundamental ways.  And I learned a lot about the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Pintupi and Koyukon stories, and the history of the alphabet.  So, overall, I highly recommend the book.  

Now I'm going to tell you about all the things that are wrong with it.  Abram's basic thesis is pretty simple.  He thinks the alphabet fucked us up.  You can see that the thesis has two parts.  

1. We're fucked up.
2. It was the alphabet that did it.

If that sounds overly simplistic to you, you've identified the first problem with the book.  

Abram's tries to show us how human consciousness of our environment has shifted over time.  We've moved from our ancestor's intensely local, physical, and sensous participation in an enveloping animistic environment, to our current more global, cerebral, and detached interaction with an environment we see as merely a mechanical entity we can exploit.  He illustrates this older way of looking at the world by examining how various oral cultures that survived into the 20th century tell stories about their direct sensuous participation in their particular environment.  In the meantime, he denounces our more recent idea that we are an immaterial consciousness merely imprisoned in a physical body, because he sees a direct line between that idea and our current (as of 1996) environmental crisis.  Then he attributes the shift between these two mindsets to the invention of the alphabet.  

Which, as a historical thesis, is just ridiculously oversimplified.  No doubt the technology of the alphabet, and the way it lends itself to a more universal literacy, has had a profound impact on human society.  In fact, for as much as we talk about it all the time, I think we dramatically underestimate the impact of simple technologies on the shape of our world.  Language.  Agriculture.  Writing.  The alphabet.  The printing press.  Double entry bookkeeping.  Corporations.  Radio.  The internet.  These technologies all changed the world in profound ways, and generally we don't even think of most of them as technologies.  But if it's a clear oversimplification to draw a straight line between even the radio and Hitler, how much more tenuous is laying global warming at the footsteps of the first written vowel?  This is when history starts to verge on conspiracy theory.  In his conclusion, Abram admits to the problem, and acknowledges that there were many causes of the shift in worldview he discusses, not the least of which would be the shift to sedentary agriculture.  To wit, every single "oral" culture he discusses in the book turns out to also be a nomadic hunter-gatherer-pastoralist culture as well.  So much for the control group.  He also tells us that he wasn't trying to present a historical thesis but merely to "tell us a story" about how we lost our connection to nature, a just so story akin to the Aboriginal one about how Little Wallaby Man pissed the Ooldea soak into existence.  This disclaimer would have been a lot more convincing if he'd put it at the beginning of the book.

While soft-pedaling his historical argument seems disingenuous, he's right that we can get more out of the book by reading it in allegorical and poetic fashion.  There are quite a few lovely and provocative images meant to upend our modern techno-scientific worldview.  These all center on the way our embodied physicality comes before our ability to represent the world and our inner self.  So, for example, instead of thinking of our perception as picking out discrete objects in the world, he encourages us to see our senses as participating in an ongoing exchange with an entirely animate environment, which, "... ensures that my body is a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the encompassing earth"(62).  Merlau-Ponty's ideas about the reciprocal sensing and sensibility of the perceiving 'flesh' then dovetails with the animism he attributes to all oral cultures who don't see themselves as fully separate from their environment.  Likewise, before we see language as a representational or propositional code specific to humans, we can appreciate its kinship with the expressive music of our environment, the songs of birds and insects and streams.  Even our seemingly innate notions of homogeneous empty space and linearly passing time can be seen as reductions of a more originary embodied space-time.  We began in a local and heterogeneous space we call the landscape, filled with particular formations, each with a story that connects us to them as we literally move through the space.  On the other hand, our sense of time is just a metaphor for hidden dimensions of our immediate sensual world -- the past lives hidden underground, the future is just over the visible horizon, and even the present is filled with the mystery of the air, hidden in plain sight.  I don't think these metaphors we live by make for compelling history, cognitive science, or philosophy because they are simply too reductive.  But they do provide some different ways of conceptualizing our experience, which makes them hugely valuable.  

Abram is also right that we can learn a lot by exploring the new metaphors that come with the act of writing.  The first of these is covered in Plato's famous discussion in Phaedrus of the impact of writing on memory.  Written symbols form a kind of portable and external memory that can come to supplant our own internal memory palace.  This severs the connection between oral memory and spatial location, and encourages a culture like the Hebrews to conceive their entire history as contained in the book rather than the land.  The Greeks of course take the system a step further than the Jews by adding written vowels.  This takes all the participatory guesswork out of reading a sea of consonants and creates a perfect synesthesia where the marks on the page literally speak to us.  And lo, the voice of the author, with its concomitant linear internal subjectivity, is born!  Finally, how could the identity of the written symbol, and the particularly arbitrary identity of the letter with a syllable, not lend itself to thinking of signs in the world as an immaterial code that represents what it codifies?  This metaphor will eventually turn all of nature into a book, albeit written in the language of mathematics (though this is still mostly Greek to me).   

So we are left with the question of what to make of all these metaphors.  If we leave aside the dubious historical thesis about the role of the alphabet, we are still left with "original" metaphors about our continuous sensuous interaction with the world and later "derived" metaphors that qualitatively separate our mind from our body and our self from the world.  Which means that story has the narrative arc of The Fall, and the alphabet figures as Original Sin.  This is exactly where I start to have deep philosophical problems with the book.  Not just because of the moralistic christian pessimism of its unquestioned assumption number 1: we're fucked up.  But because the desire to turn the narrative into a morality tale leads to all kinds of irreparable philosophical blind spots.  It commits Abram to seeing phenomenology as a science of direct or immediate non-conceptual experience.  It commits him to romanticizing this experience as "ab-original" just as it commits him to romanticizing the Aborigines.  It blinds him to the incredible creativity of the new evolutionary processes set off by the technologies of language and writing.  And, most fundamentally, it commits him to knowing what it means to be human, knowing that the only true and authentic way to happiness is through the life of the land, back to the Garden of Eden we have so despoiled.  This sort of certainty is philosophically and pragmatically problematic.

There is no original experience.  There is no direct and firm bedrock of what your experience is "really like" that you can arrive at through introspection of either the phenomenological, scientific, or buddhist sort.  And so there are also no invalid experiences.  None of experience is second class or derived or illusory.  None of those categories make any sense without their opposite.  All experience is just experience.  We can gain a great deal from inspecting it, but what we can't do is get back to its root or ground or origin.  We can't recognize with certainty any of those starting points, for certainty is itself just another experience.

Those observations may sound depressing or limiting, but I see them in exactly the opposite light.  Because without an origin, we escape from the narrative of The Fall.  Which means we also escape from its sin and its end, always our present infamy.  The lack of origin liberates.  It opens up the possibility of continuing to discover more experience.  It makes the question of what is valuable in experience open-ended, does not foreclose in advance on new possibilities in the name of an authentic and aboriginal way of life.  This may rob us of our moral high ground on environmental degradation, but in its place, it gives us the ability to sift through all our modern experience and evaluate what works and what doesn't.  What we lose in Good and Evil, but we gain in good and bad.  

We can phrase this thought in the more concrete terms of the book.  In a sense, it is one long expression of the idea that we are just animals, enmeshed in an animistic world where everything lives and breathes with an animal power.  This idea immediately makes me hear Spinoza's great protest against the limits of our knowledge: "we don't even know what a body can do".  Spinoza wanted to remove the limits we arbitrarily place on the body to circumscribe its possibilities.  Who knows, maybe a body can even think.  The same question, though, applies to any concept we want to use as the origin point for our thoughts.  We're just animals, but we don't even know what an animal can do.  An animal invented writing and everything else that now "artificially" separates it from the rest of the animate world.  Maybe technology itself is an animal, reproducing itself just like a virus.  If it's fine to breathe life into the rocks and streams, then why deny it to anything a particular hairless chimp did after 800 BCE?  What's more, it's clear than the phonetic alphabet does not create the power of abstraction and representational codification that so incenses Abram.  It merely accelerates a possibility that has been there from the beginning of language.  So maybe the more authentic animal state is the entirely pre-linguistic one, in which case we're going to disqualify birds and dolphins because they possess at least some power of representative communication.  These arbitrary dividing lines define a concept that will serve as an essential origin point and limit for what it means to be a human animal.  But these sorts of lines can never be understood as anything other than phase transitions in some ongoing process.  We need to explore this process that defines 'animality' by linking up various animals as they transform into one another.  Instead, Abram offers us a definition of animal that relies on little more than a howl of moral outrage whenever we transgress the lines he happens to have in mind.

The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching

It doesn't seem there are really any bad Thich Nhat Hanh books.  Somehow the deep practical wisdom you can feel in them keeps his simple writing style from toppling over into self-help platitudes.  I think anyone, regardless of whether they are a buddhist or a meditator can profit from reading things like Anger or Being Peace.  But while The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching has plenty of practical advice for better everyday living, it's a little different from those others.  Here, Hanh elaborates his own understanding of the classic concepts of Buddhist doctrine.  There are many chapters devoted to the four noble truths, one for each limb of the eightfold path, and others for the various lists that Buddhists seem so drawn to, such  as the three dharma seals (aka characteristics) the four immeasurable minds (brahmaviharas), the five aggregates, the seven factors of awakening, etc ... In other words, this is not really a book for beginners.  It's clearly aimed at people who already practice, who are already familiar with some of these sanskrit terms and ideas, and who want to get a fuller and more precise sense of what the Buddha had to teach.  

Which is not to say that Hanh just presents a straight-up traditional account of Buddhism.  He wants to make these ideas accessible to a modern audience, and he proposes making some important changes in our understanding of the traditional formulations in order to do this.  His biggest beef is with the traditional focus on the centrality of suffering.  Indeed, he goes so far as to say that dukkha is not really even the third characteristic, at least if we consider these are the ultimate descriptors of what is.  Suffering is not universal in the same way as impermanence and non-self.  Instead, Hanh replaces dukkha with nirvana in his formulation.  Nirvana is actually the third fundamental and universal characteristic of everything, which is then obscured by suffering.  We didn't need the Buddha didn't teach us that there is suffering or that life is unsatisfactory -- we needed him to teach us that there is more than this, that there is a way beyond suffering and struggle.  It's a substantial and, I think, wonderful substitution that changes our whole perspective on the tradition.  Instead of reading the three characteristics as negations (im-permanence, non-self) it allows us to read them as positive and liberating factors.  Nothing lasts forever.  We are not separated from an alien universe.  And if we look into, accept, and let go of our suffering, and our clinging to permanece, self, and suffering, we can find the unimpeded joy that's already present.  Awakening, in other words, is a positive process of unblocking what's already in this world, not a negative one of leaving it behind.  We only negate the negations, the things that hold us back.

Hanh's shift towards a more positive interpretation of Buddhism fits well with another (for me) surprising aspect of the book-- his heavy emphasis on the non-dual.  Though he doesn't mention the concept much by name, he speaks repeatedly of transcending the subject and object, existence and non-existence, and is constantly reminding us of the "interbeing" of all things.  What I'm calling his non-dual subtext reaches a climax in the penultimate chapter on dependent origination.  Hanh would like to see the model of 12 links arranged in a linear causal chain, replaced with 10 links arranged in a network where each is connected to all the others.  He calls this "interdependent co-arising" and uses one of the Buddha's images of three reeds standing up by leaning on one another, teepee style, to illustrate how everything co-is, so to speak.  This network or vortex model of causality is dear to my heart, so I enjoyed the overall aim of the presentation even if the particular 10 or 12 links involved seem kinda arbitrary to me.  I would be interested to know what other people with more commitment to the traditional scheme think of his re-working.

I Am a Cat

The title tells you most of what you need to know about  Natsume Sōseki's popular classic.  It's an early (1905) entry in the "narrated by an animal" genre so recently perfected by Henri.  As such, it's a satirical look at humans from the aloof and superior perspective of our domesticators.  

Unfortunately, like a lot of satire, much of the punch is probably lost in translation, both literal and cultural.  Satire is always specific to an era, in this case to the Meiji period, and to be funniest requires an intimate familiarity with the customs and common wisdom of that era.  In this case, on top of the cultural distance, there's the problem of linguistic translation, particularly when a lot of the humor depends on a juxtaposition of literary and everyday language.  Per the translator's introduction, this is an important part of why the novel is a Japanese classic still taught to schoolchildren.  They seem to do a good job of preserving at least some of this in the translation, so I think even an English reader gets some sense of Sōseki's humor and refined literary style.  Most of it is just not that funny though.  With the exception of a few scenes, the comedy is less apparent than the bitter, disgusted, cynical tone that pervades the novel.  Not a single character comes off looking even remotely sympathetic in the story, including, ultimately, the cat.  Even our initial affection for the not so humble narrator evaporates as he is gradually corrupted by his humans.  So in the end, the whole works is just kind of a sneering downer whose interest was lost on me.