The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: Deuteronomy (Part One: Tough Love)

{I don’t know how Pascal the existential Russian blue cat got his paws on a copy of Dennis Prager’s latest book—the gods know I didn’t give it to him, and his library card and his Amazon Prime account have both been suspended. At any rate, Pascal, as is his wont, has a bone or three to pick with Prager’s analysis of the Biblical book of Deuteronomy. This may take a while…}

Dennis Prager—prolific author, polymath, autodidact, moral scold, and founder of an eponymous YouTube “university”—has added a new title to his Rational Bible series. The latest offering is Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses. As one reviewer notes, “Prager is animated by his belief in the Torah and its enduring moral messages for humanity. Whether or not one agrees with his politics or individual interpretations of the verses, Prager’s commentary is strikingly relevant when he emphasizes the moral revolution of the Torah and the vitality of its moral teachings to today’s increasingly secularized Western world. Prager pinpoints several of the major differences between the Torah’s morality and the dangerous shortcomings of today’s secular West.” ¹

Deuteronomy was the fifth book of ancient Israel’s Pentateuch, five books which collectively comprise the Jewish Torah, or law. The bulk of Deuteronomy consists of three speeches Moses delivered to the Hebrews as they completed their forty years in the wilderness and were on the verge of crossing the Jordan and entering the Promised Land. Moses, you may recall, was forbidden to accompany the people, as he had displeased God along the way. In his farewell lectures, Moses recapped the post-Exodus journey and then spelled out the rules Israel was to follow to remain in God’s favor; he also enumerated the blessings that would ensue from obedience to God and the dire consequences that disobedience would bring. The title “Deuteronomy” is a Greek translation from the original Hebrew, and it means, approximately, “Here are more words.” 

Little known fact: according to Dennis Prager, Jesus quoted Deuteronomy more often than any other book of scripture! (Actual scholars say Psalms was quoted more, but Prager is focused on the Pentateuch, and Psalms, while scriptural, is not included in that category.) Not only that, America’s beloved Founders, blessed be They, cited Deuteronomy more than they cited either Montesquieu or Locke (probably because the intended audience would have been more familiar with the Bible than with French or British political theorists).

It is Dennis Prager’s claim (and not his alone) that Deuteronomy represented a moral advance over other ancient law codes, in part because it constituted (supposedly) a universal morality that applied to all people everywhere; it was not simply a primitive tribal code intended only for Israel. That claim is somewhat undermined by the Biblical text itself, which repeatedly makes it clear that Moses is relaying God’s commands to and for the people of nascent Israel: “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God,” says Moses. “The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.” Distinguishing Israel from “the nations” was, in fact, one of the primary functions of the Torah. God did not threaten other nations with punishments for not obeying His laws; He was sublimely indifferent to their worship of other gods and to their behavior in general, so long as none of that interfered with his exclusive lordship over Israel.

Still, Prager has a point: Deuteronomy is the source of some of our most essential moral and legal strictures, including the Ten Commandments (originally given in the book of Exodus, but repeated by Moses, with some elaboration, in Deuteronomy). The Decalogue, however, is just the beginning; many more laws, rules, regulations, and prohibitions would follow, all of them, according to Dennis Prager, perfectly rational and timelessly relevant. For instance, “A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.” ² And this: “If you come across a bird’s nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go, so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life.” It is thanks to the Deuteronomic code that we do not boil kids in their mothers’ milk or have “clothes of wool and linen woven together” or wear white after Labor Day. We make sure our roofs have parapets, our oxen are not muzzled during threshing, and any fugitive slaves we encounter are not returned to their masters: all because of Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy also gave us our earliest version of the Geneva Conventions, being a handy guide to ethical warfare:

When the Lord your God has delivered your enemies over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. You must destroy all the peoples the Lord your God gives over to you. Do not look on them with pity and do not serve their gods, for that will be a snare to you. This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains, on the hills and under every spreading tree, where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods. Wipe out their names from those places.

That may sound harsh to modern ears; but to be fair, God insisted Israel treat its own people just as harshly, should they stray:

If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them. You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people. Stone them to death, because they tried to turn you away from the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. Then all Israel will hear and be afraid, and no one among you will do such an evil thing again.

As the very epitome of “tough love,” the Deuteronomic code of war was obviously ahead of its time; over the millennia, in this aspect at least, men have done their very best to follow its lead.

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Dennis Prager - Wikipedia

¹ Book Review: Dennis Prager on Deuteronomy | jewishideas.org

² Milton Berle must surely have been an abomination in the eyes of the LORD.

Moses' last words to the people of Israel: "Best of luck in your future endeavors!"

Dreaming of Stalin

The following is from Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, an account of his various adventures and misadventures while living and working in Putin’s Russia. I cannot vouch for the accuracy, either then or now, of Pomerantsev’s descriptions, but I love his prose. So, Moscow circa 2014:

The demolition ball keeps the time of the city, a metronome that swings on every corner. Moscow changes so fast you lose all sense of reality, you can’t recognize streets. You look for a place where you went to eat a week ago, and before your eyes the whole block is being demolished. Whole swathes of town are demolished in fits of self-destruction, wastelands abandoned for years and for no apparent reason, skyscrapers erupting before there are any roads leading to them and then left standing empty in the dirty snow. The search for a style is psychotic. The first builds of the post-Soviet boom imitated whatever Russians had seen abroad and most desired: Turkish hotels, German castles, Swiss chalets. When Ostozhenka, the area right opposite the Kremlin, was knocked down, it was renamed ‘Moscow Belgravia’; there are ‘Mos Angeles’ and ‘Moscow Cote d’Azur,’ dropped into the city as artificially and awkwardly  as the political technologists’ faux Western-style parties. Elsewhere you can spy a neon medieval: behind high black gates [loom] Disney-like towers packed onto pink concrete castles, with rows of offices shaped like knights’ helmets, so they look like an army of warriors emerging from the ground.

Often you find all the styles compiled into one building. A new office center on the other side of the river from the Kremlin starts with a Roman portico, then morphs into medieval ramparts with spikes and gold-glass reflective windows, all topped with turrets and Stalin spires. The effect is at first amusing, then disturbing. It’s like talking to a victim of a multiple personality disorder: Who are you? What are you trying to say? Increasingly, new skyscrapers recall the Gotham-gothic turrets of Stalin architecture. Triumph-Palace, briefly Europe’s tallest apartment building, is a copy of the Stalinist ‘seven sisters’. Long before the city’s political scientists started shouting that the Kremlin was building a new dictatorship, the architects were already whispering: ‘Look at this new architecture, it dreams of Stalin. Be warned, the evil Empire is back.’

But the original Stalin skyscrapers were made of granite, with grand mosaics and Valhalla halls leading to small, ascetic apartments. The new ones try to be domineering but come across as camp; developers steal so much money during construction that even the most VIP, luxury, elite of the skyscrapers crack and sink ever so quickly. That unique Moscow mix of tackiness and menace. One time, I see a poster advertising a new property development that captures the tone nicely. Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan ‘Life Is Getting Better.’ It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious, either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules).

Gnezdnikovsky Alley is just off Pushkin Square, what tourist guides describe as ‘Moscow’s historic center’. It should be untouchable, but the tremors of drill and demolition ball only become more frenzied with every meter closer you get to the Kremlin. Property prices are measured by distance from Red Square: the aim is to build your office or apartment as close to the center of power as possible, the market organized by a still feudal social structure defined by needing to be within touching distance of the tsar, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the President of the Russian Federation. The country’s institutions—oil companies, banks, ministries, and courts—all want to crowd around the Kremlin like courtiers. This means the city is almost destined to destroy itself; it can’t grow outward, so every generation stomps on the heads of previous ones. Over a thousand buildings have been knocked down in the city center this century, with hundreds of officially ‘protected’ historic monuments lost. But the new buildings meant to replace them often stand dark and empty; property is the most effective money-laundering scheme, making money for members of the Moscow government who give contracts to their own development companies, and for the agents who sell the buildings to nameless and faceless purchasers who need some way to stabilize their assets.

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Books Report

In the Houses of Their Dead, by Terry Alford, is the hitherto untold story of how Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and their respective families, were linked by a common interest in spiritualism; according to Alford, the Lincoln family and the Booth family even sought the services of some of the same spiritualist practitioners (who were not in short supply in the mid-19^th century). Both families had their share of tragedy, suffering, and loss; unable to account for or to cope with such experiences, they turned to mediums, to “specialists in ‘blood writing,’ and to belief in a spirit world separated from the material world only by a thin veil.

In 1848, two teenage girls (the Fox sisters, who lived in upstate New York) ¹ set off a craze for “Spiritualism” and communicating with the dead; such a craze was undoubtedly useful at a time when the mortality rate for children was still high, and it would become even more useful a decade or so later as the Civil War piled up corpses on battlefields around the country. The fact that Booth eventually assassinated Lincoln lurks, of course, in the background of Alford’s story, but it does not distract from the narrative, which one reviewer calls “a lively, often surprising, and always enjoyable masterwork.”

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Union is by Colin Woodard, a well-regarded American historian whose previous works include American Nations and American Character. The story Woodard tells in Union is about how difficult it was/has been to turn e pluribus into unum; that is, to convert a collection of fractious and even rebellious states into a single country. In addition to a Civil War having to be fought over the issue, American union involved the creation of several myths, the exploitation of the hallowed memory of a martyred President, and the promotion (in journalism, literature, and the visual arts) of a narrative deliberately skewed to portray America as having been, from its founding, one nation, under God.   

With talk being bandied of late about a second Civil War, it is useful to recall that our union has always had its antagonists; sectional bickering is, historically, entirely normal in America. Union can also remind us that overcoming such bickering takes work and commitment; it will not happen on its own. Those who think that we as a nation are better together, or who agree with Benjamin Franklin that, unless we hang together, we will hang separately, will need to stand up and to speak up if our perpetually fragile union is to survive.

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Or we could just become post-Soviet Russia, which, judging by Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, might be entertaining, if nothing else. Pomerantsev is a Russian-born British journalist and filmmaker; he writes from his personal experiences in Putin’s Russia (this book was written, or at least completed, in 2014). Quite honestly, the stories of Russian “gangsters” and their trophy girlfriends—“A generation of orphaned, high-heeled girls, looking for a daddy as much as a sugar daddy”—are titillating, even though Pomerantsev makes no effort to disguise the ugly reality beneath the glitter and the glitz. For example, he describes riding a “slow, suburban train” from Moscow to meet up with an acquaintance (an ex-gangster turned movie producer and novelist); “These trains,” he explains, “are among the most miserable rides in Russia: full of the angry poor of satellite towns, the shop assistants and cops and cleaners, who come every day to the big city to be within breathing distance of all the platinum watches and Porsches, only to be blown back again each evening to their dark peripheries, carrying their shift clothes crumpled in plastic bags, drinking lukewarm beer in a cold train. The benches are wooden and impossible to sit on comfortably.”

Keeping in mind Russian history and the famous “Potemkin villages” arranged by Prince Gregory Potemkin to impress his lover, Catherine the Great, ² it should come as no surprise that Pomerantsev portrays Putin’s Russia as suffused with the regime’s “black PR,” which Russians know better than to take seriously, even if international observers are often deceived. “The Kremlin’s reality is scripted,” Pomerantsev declares, a claim he would elaborate in a later book (This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality).

I do not recall which Russian author (Turgenev? Gogol?) wrote that “Russia is a blank sheet of paper waiting to be written on.” I do know, however, that it was Joseph Stalin who said, “Paper will put up with anything written on it.” The Russian people deserve better writers and better scripts than they have had thus far.

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¹ The Fox sisters were living in a reputedly haunted house in Hydesville, New York, a place which, according to Wikipedia, no longer exists but “was part of the township of Arcadia, in Wayne County, just outside of Newark.” This is relevant only because I was born and raised in Newark, NY, adjacent both to the birthplace of Spiritualism and to the birthplace of Mormonism (in Palmyra) a few miles down the road.

The Fox sisters invent rap 

² Skeptics say that the whole "Potemkin village" notion is a fable wrapped in a legend inside a myth. The truth may never be known, unless the creators of The Great somehow work it into their story line.

A "Potemkin village"--or is it?

Books Report

{2022 was a good year for reading books, for discovering authors (and ideas), for tapping into the Internet Archive, and for continuing my quest to Figure It Out. In the grand tradition of “end of the year” lists, here are brief summaries of five books which stood out for me this year, books which entertained, informed, and challenged me.}   

Bryan Appleyard, The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky

Bryan Appleyard does not trust the techno-futurists among us. In particular, he does not trust the much-hyped prospect of Artificial Intelligence; for that matter, he does not trust neuroscience, brain scans, functional MRIs, or any other technologies that serve to reduce human beings to their neurochemistry. Human beings, Appleyard insists, are irreducibly complex, as evidenced by our imagination and our creativity. Referring to art as “the highest expression of the human mind,” he concludes that literature, music, and the visual arts offer, at their best, “a complex solution to the complex problem of human existence.”

Appleyard also has a sense of humor, as befits a man who also wrote Aliens: Why They Are Here, a book which is on my must-read list for 2023. If you have any interest at all in the fate of homo sapiens in the Age of Technology, or even if you are merely curious about self-driving cars and "emotional support" appliances; if you, like Philip K. Dick, have ever wondered what distinguishes humans from their increasingly sophisticated simulacra; then you should enjoy The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky. 

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Ted McAllister, Revolt Against Modernity

Why in the world would any self-respecting Person on the Left want to read about Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin? It is a case of keeping your enemies close; you may not care about political conservatism, but political conservatism cares about you, therefore, prudence dictates you familiarize yourself with it.

Strauss and Voegelin are the protagonists of Ted McAllister’s book, supplemented by a host of philosophers and theorists both old and new, ancient and modern. What they—Strauss and Voegelin—have in common is a distrust and dislike of modern liberalism, secularism, and egalitarianism. The publisher’s blurb explains the book’s perspective this way: 

Like so many conservatives, Strauss and Voegelin rebelled against modernity' amorality—personified by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche—and its promotion of individualism and materialism over communal and spiritual responsibility. For both men, modernity's debilitating disorder revealed surprising and disturbing relations among liberal, communist, and Nazi ideologies. In their eyes, modernity's insidious virus, so apparent in the Nazi and communist regimes, lies incubating within liberal democracy itself.

It was the self-appointed task of Voegelin and Strauss to restore the intellectual credibility of conservatism at a time when conventional wisdom agreed with Lionel Trilling that conservative thought consisted of “irritable mental gestures”. Sadly, American conservatives today are barely capable of mental gestures at all; they have ceased to have ideas, only anger. Ted McAllister’s Revolt Against Modernity is instructive, but it has little or nothing to do with the smoldering rage of the contemporary Right.

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Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss

I doubt you can find a more entertaining history of the Frankfurt School than the one Stuart Jeffries offers here. In a nutshell: “In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Not only would they change the way we think, but also the subjects we deem worthy of intellectual investigation. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century.”

Conservatives today caricature the Frankfurt scholars as having set out to undermine Western civilization and to impose a reign of “cultural Marxism” upon us all. More accurately, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, et al, invented what we now call “cultural studies”: “By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.”

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John Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine

Sayeth the publisher, “John Higgs argues that before 1900, history seemed to make sense. We can understand innovations like electricity, agriculture, and democracy. The twentieth century, in contrast, gave us relativity, cubism, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics, climate change, and postmodernism.” One could argue that it is only in retrospect that earlier history seems understandable to us, and that many of us today don't know how either electricity or democracy works--but that is not John Higgs' argument.  

As Higgs tells it, the twentieth century represented “a chaotic seismic shift” in everything from the sciences to the arts to the social and political orders. To quote the book’s publisher once more, “Higgs brings a refreshingly non-academic, eclectic and infectiously energetic approach to his subjects as well as a unique ability to explain how complex ideas connect and intersect—whether he’s discussing Einstein’s theories of relativity, the Beat poets' interest in Eastern thought, or the bright spots and pitfalls of the American Dream.”

In contrast to Bryan Appleyard's misgivings about technology (see above), Higgs concludes his book on a note of techno-optimism, which, given how well he documents the bewilderments of modernity, is not entirely convincing. Our view of the future is, I suppose, more a matter of temperament than of facts; and, while hope is not a plan, neither is despair, and if I had to choose between the two, it wouldn't be difficult.   

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James Kallas, The Satanward View

This 1966 book (subtitled A Study in Pauline Theology) was based on lectures delivered by Kallas at the Pacific Lutheran Seminary in 1964. The only theologian ever to play for the Chicago Bears, Kallas further distinguishes himself, in this book, by claiming that Jesus did not come into the world to suffer and die for the sins of mankind; he came into the world to defeat Satan and his demonic minions. Eschatology and demonology were the heart of Jesus’ (and Paul’s) message: God’s kingdom would be inaugurated on earth just as soon as Jesus finished sweeping Satan into the dustbin of Eternity.

According to James Kallas, “Jesus saw himself as a divine warrior in action, setting men free from the scourges of Satan.” Jesus’ life was “a cosmic struggle against Satan.” The miracles related in the gospels “demonstrated the superiority of Christ over the demonic element of the world.” The Incarnation was, as C.S. Lewis described it, a divine invasion, an assault on enemy territory, and it ended in death—or in victory, depending on your point of view or on which ending of Mark’s gospel you accept.

Jesus' war on Satan tends to get swept under the various rugs of modern (mainstream) Christianity; after all, if Jesus took Satan seriously, then should Christians not do the same? To do so, though, would be an embarrassment; who in their right mind today can believe in a literal Satan with a literal spiritual army of literal demons? James Kallas deserves enormous credit for taking the New Testament seriously rather than recasting the gospel stories as metaphors or the evangelists as depth psychologists fleshing out Jungian archetypes.

In 1975, a decade after publishing The Satanward View, Kallas wrote The Real Satan, quite possibly as a response to the popularity of “The Exorcist”. In any case, Kallas’ two books, considered either individually or together, serve to remind us that the world of Jesus and Paul was (to borrow John Higgs’ title) stranger than we can imagine. 

Saturday Lecture: Revenge of the Absolutes

{From one of the best books I’ve read in some time, the following is John Higgs’ concluding overview of modernity, postmodernity, and of what might be called the Revenge of the Absolutes.}

John Higgs, from Stranger Than We Can Imagine:

With postmodernism now so widely derided, it can be hard to remember why it came about. It was not simply some embarrassing mistake, as its detractors paint it, or a foolish wrong turn that we should learn from and then move on. Looking at the breadth of its influence on recent history, it is clear that there was something more fundamental to the phenomenon than the squabbles of academia might suggest.

At the start of the twentieth century, relativity triggered a paradigm shift in the physical sciences. Einstein acknowledged that the ‘omphalos,’ the fixed central point from which we oriented our understanding of the universe, didn’t exist. The notion that there was ‘a center of the universe’ was absurd. The concept of one true perspective was replaced by a multitude of differing perspectives. Measurements were only valid relative to the observer.

The strange thing about what happened at the start of the century was that people in many fields, ranging across art, politics, music, and science, all made a similar leap at roughly the same time. It was not the case that artists and thinkers took inspiration from Einstein, but that they too were clearly grappling with the relationship between the observer and the observed, and with reconciling multiple perspectives.

As the century progressed, scientists and mathematician reinforced the non-existence of the ‘omphalos’ and instead stressed uncertainty, incompleteness, and our lack of a self-contained, non-paradoxical system. At the same time, artists and philosophers continued their exploration of the human psyche and came to much the same conclusion. The multi-perspective models they pioneered made possible the individualism preached by the likes of Aleister Crowley, Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, and the Rolling Stones. We were all separate, and different, and considered our own perspectives to be perfectly valid. Our worldview could only be absolute if we could force everyone else to share it, and not even Hitler or Stalin could achieve that.

Our personal realities, then, were relative. We simply did not have anything absolute by which to orient ourselves. The closest thing the people of the northern hemisphere had to a fixed point in their lives was Polaris, the North Star, the only point in the heavens that remains fixed over the span of a human life. And even Polaris wobbles a little.

We might not like this. We might curse relativity and crave an absolute position. But that doesn’t change the fact that we do not have one.

Postmodernism was not some regrettable intellectual folly, but an accurate summation of what we had learned. Even if it was intellectual quicksand from which escape did not appear possible, and which nobody seemed to like very much.

By the early twenty-first century, the entire edifice of postmodernism had become routinely rejected. That, unfortunately, tended to include all the insights that led up to it. Our current ideologies insist that ‘Of course there is an absolute,’ of course there is truth. The existence of absolute truth has been declared by Richard Dawkins, by Pope Benedict, by Roger Scruton (‘In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel’), by Martin Luther King Jr., by neoliberals and socialists, by terrorists and vigilantes, and by scientists and hippies. The belief in certainty is a broad church indeed.

All these people disagree on what form this absolutism takes, unfortunately. But they’re all sure it exists. This faith in absolute certainty is not based on any evidence. It can sometimes appear to stem from a psychological need for certainty which afflicts many people, especially older men. Cultural debate in the early twenty-first century has, as a result, descended into a War of the Certain. Different factions, all of whom agree about the existence of Absolute Truth, are shouting down anyone who has a different definition of that Absolute Truth.

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Postscript: To be clear, Higgs ends his book on a note of techno-optimism, sounding not unlike vintage Theodore Roszak, praising internet connectedness and social media “networks” as antidotes to the dead end of 20^th-century individualism. Higgs’ advice to oldsters hung up on obsolete concepts like personal privacy and physical social contact is to “get out of [the kids’] way and wish them luck.” (Bob Dylan, circa 1964: “The old road is rapidly aging / please get out of the new one / if you can’t lend a hand / for the times they are a-changing.”) Higgs’ concluding sentences are, depending on your perspective, either inspiring or chilling: “The network is a beheaded deity. It is a communion. There is no need for an ‘omphalos’ any more. Hold tight.”

OK, Boomer (not quite—Higgs was born in 1971), we get the point; and Stranger Than We Can Imagine is still a great book.

The Death of Consensus Reality

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." (William Butler Yeats, 1920)

Allow me to recommend an intriguing book from 2015: Stranger Than We Can Imagine, by John Higgs, an attempt at, as the book's subtitle explains, Making sense of the twentieth century. Rather than focus, as so many have done, on the astonishing carnage of the century’s wars, revolutions, and genocides, Higgs grounds his survey in what he believes to have been “a chaotic seismic shift” in the prevailing worldview of the West, a shift which “upended all linear narratives” and undermined all established authority. The change of consciousness took place across the board: in science, art, music, and literature; in the collapse of national empires and imperial dynasties; in politics, media, education, sexual mores, gender roles, and more. The shock of the new, as it has been called, changed everything; essentially, Higgs claims, we are all modernists now.

Think of Stranger Than We Can Imagine as an attempt to flesh out Virginia Woolf’s cryptic statement, “On or about December 1910 human nature changed.” John Higgs does not assign a date to the change in worldview he documents, but he estimates it to have begun early in the last century. The radicalism of the shift cannot be overstated: beginning with Einstein’s “General Theory of Relativity,” objective truth was replaced by multiple perspectives, objective reality became subjective realities, Schrodinger’s cat was simultaneously dead and alive, and the observer was understood to influence what was being observed. Consensus reality became a matter of opinion, and there was no accepted authority to arbitrate disputes over alternative facts.

Since the publisher’s blurb (at Amazon) provides a perfectly good summary, I see no reason to reinvent the wheel:

In Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs argues that before 1900, history seemed to make sense. We can understand innovations like electricity, [mechanized] agriculture, and democracy. The twentieth century, in contrast, gave us relativity, cubism, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics, climate change, and postmodernism.

In order to understand such a disorienting barrage of unfamiliar and knotty ideas, Higgs shows us, we need to shift the framework of our interpretation and view these concepts within the context of a new kind of historical narrative. Instead of looking at it as another step forward in a stable path, we need to look at the twentieth century as a chaotic seismic shift, upending all linear narratives.

Higgs invites us along as he journeys across a century “about which we know too much” in order to grant us a new perspective on it. He brings a refreshingly non-academic, eclectic, and infectiously energetic approach to his subjects as well as a unique ability to explain how complex ideas connect and intersect—whether he’s discussing Einstein’s theories of relativity, the Beat poets' interest in Eastern thought or the bright spots and pitfalls of the American Dream.

Higgs takes us on quite a ride, one that begins with a French anarchist, Martial Bourdin, who accidentally blew himself up in 1894 while enroute, with his homemade bomb, to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. Anarchism, for John Higgs, though a 19^th-century development, could be the key word of the 20^th century, anarchism being here defined as the absence of a fixed point of reference. Higgs quotes the famed avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp on the importance of “persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference.” Ultimately, says Higgs, the theme that permeated the twentieth century was this: “A single viewpoint was insufficient to express or describe anything.” Building on Einstein’s “revolution” of relativity, Western culture seized on (or was seized by) “the idea that there was no single perspective which can be considered to be correct or true, and that our knowledge of any subject is dependent on the perspective we take.”

In which case, the individual assumed increased importance, since every individual was (or might be) an omphalos, that is, a center of reality. Higgs notes that “support for individualism had been slowly building for centuries, but few people had been willing it to take it to its logical conclusion.” That conclusion? “When the bonds of hierarchy [and authority] were shattered, you were left with the multiple perspectives of a host of separate individuals.” Inevitably, in the modern West, “the self is the focus and is given precedence over wider society.” Were modern individuals autonomous or were they atomized, or were they both at once? Higgs suspects the latter, and he offers illustrative examples from the life and works of such notables as Aleister Crowley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ayn Rand.

The pitfalls of individualism were not difficult to spot, but its largest flaw, as Higgs explained, was that its proponents believed that “an individual was a self-contained, rational agent with free will.” Alas, Higgs informs us, “The truth turned out to be considerably messier.” And on the story goes, with Freud, Jung, and other explorers of the human psyche, especially of its sordid side, demolishing the pretensions of rational selfhood. Higgs continues tracing connections in all directions—science, philosophy, art, politics, etc.—before reaching, about one-third of the way into Stranger Than We Can Imagine, this juncture:

“Genocides arose during the perfect storm of technology, nationalism, individualism, and the political rise of psychopaths [Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao]. They revealed that human beings were not the rational actors they prided themselves on being, dutifully building a better world year after year. Rationality was the product of the conscious mind, but that mind rested on the irrational foundations of the unconscious. The original was more complicated than originally assumed; if there was some form of certainty to be found in the world, it wouldn’t be found in the immaterial world of the mind.”

I will leave it, for now, at that. Stranger Than We Can Imagine is a superbly written and engrossing look at how we got here—that is, to the twenty-first century, where reality is more fractured than ever, where perspectives multiply and shift, where we might be living in a simulation, where “the simple things we see are all complicated,” and where certainty is nowhere to be found.       

On the Bookshelf

{No, I haven’t read these books, but they’re on my current list of ‘must reads,’ which is practically the same as having read them. Besides, I’ve got the publishers’ summaries right in front of me, and I’m sure those are entirely accurate and objective.}

Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

According to its publisher, Empireland is “brilliantly illuminating” as well as “revelatory and lucid”. The author’s thesis is that “much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in its imperial past.” Every nation has skeletons in its closet, and Britain is no exception; what slavery is to the United States, colonialism and empire are to Britain, which no doubt explains why, for the most part, “empire itself is a subject that is shockingly obscured from view,” despite the fact that “Empire informs nearly everything, from common thought processes to the routines that shape everyday life, from the foundation of the National Health Service to the nature of racism in the U.K., from the British distrust of intellectuals in public life to the exceptionalism that permeated the campaign for Brexit and the government’s early response to the Covid crisis.”

Alas, the lesson Sanghera draws from his investigation is banal: “Cultivating a new, more honest relationship to the past is essential for moving forward.” I’m sure that’s true, and I’m sure that Empireland offers plenty of grist for the mill of revisionist history; but since most people side with Henry “History is bunk” Ford, I don’t know how far forward the book can move us. For that matter, I’m not sure how far forward most of us want to go. 

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David Corn, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy

David Corn is Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, a prominent left-wing publication. ¹ His American Psychosis purportedly “offers readers a brisk, can-you-believe-it journey through the netherworld of far-right irrationality and the Republican Party’s interactions with the darkest forces in America.” Corn “reveals the hidden history of how the Party of Lincoln forged alliances with extremists, kooks, racists, and conspiracy-mongers and fostered fear, anger, and resentment to win elections—and how this led to Donald Trump’s triumph and the transformation of the GOP into a Trump personality cult that foments and bolsters the crazy and dangerous excesses of the right.”

TBH, this sounds like Rick Perlstein redux (Before the Storm, Nixonland, and Reaganland), less a “hidden history” than a retracing of familiar ground. American Psychosis “covers the last seven decades. From McCarthyism to the John Birch Society to segregationists to the New Right to the religious right to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to the militia movement to Fox News to Sarah Palin to the Tea Party to Trumpism, the Republican Party has deliberately nurtured and exploited rightwing fear and loathing fueled by paranoia, grievance, and tribalism.” What a long, strange trip it’s been, and it’s not over yet by a long shot.

If you haven’t read Rick Perlstein, American Psychosis should live up to its billing as a “gripping tale” of how the likes of Donald Trump managed to be taken seriously by, at last count, 75 million American voters. The fact that Rachel Maddow praises the book should be sufficient imprimatur for Corn’s intended audience.

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¹ Caveat emptor: according to at least one reviewer, Corn has “a history of stretching the truth.”  

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Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

The story told from the outside by David Corn is told here by Tim Miller from the inside. In Why We Did It, “former Republican political operative Tim Miller answers the question no one else has fully grappled with: Why did normal people go along with the worst of Trumpism?” ¹

In Why We Did It, “Miller conducts his own forensic study on the pungent carcass of the party he used to love, cutting into all the hubris, ambition, idiocy, desperation, and self-deception for everyone to see. In a bracingly honest reflection on both his own past work for the Republican Party and the contortions of his former peers in the GOP establishment, Miller draws a straight line between the actions of the 2000s GOP to the Republican political class's Trumpian takeover, including the horrors of January 6th.”

It appears that Miller has joined the ranks of Republican operatives—e.g., Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, Michael Steele, and David Frum, to name a few—who have belatedly discovered that tolerating the likes of Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann only encouraged the idea that voting for Donald Trump made perfect sense. For years, Miller and the others had no trouble with Rush Limbaugh’s radio rantings, Glenn Beck’s conspiracist antics, or the lunacies of Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity; but, for them, Donald Trump was simply a bridge too far.

Anyway:

From ruminations on the mental jujitsu that allowed him as a gay man to justify becoming a hitman for homophobes, to astonishingly raw interviews with former colleagues who jumped on the Trump Train, Miller diagrams the flattering and delusional stories GOP operatives tell themselves so they can sleep at night. Why We Did It is a vital, darkly satirical warning that all the narcissistic justifications that got us to this place still thrive within the Republican party, which means they will continue to make the same mistakes and political calculations that got us here, with disastrous consequences for the nation.

If it helps, Nicolle Wallace likes the book.

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¹ Why do good citizens allow evil things to be done in their name? This scene from the film Judgment at Nuremberg is instructive:

(27) Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) - Burt Lancaster Monologue - YouTube

For those of you who favor the written word, here is the text: American Rhetoric: Movie Speech from Judgment at Nuremberg - Ernst Janning Confesses his Guilt to the Tribunal 

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Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland

Dr. Jonathan Metzl goes beyond the familiar “What’s the matter with Kansas?” meme and asks, “What’s the matter with white Americans?” It turns out that the demographic in question frequently allows politics to cloud its judgment on matters of health and safety: for instance, by rejecting Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan when it was repackaged as Barack Obama’s healthcare plan, by refusing Medicaid expansion, or by swilling hydroxychloroquine to ward off COVID while rejecting medically recommended methods of minimizing the risk of infection.   

Metzl’s narrative details how, “In election after election, conservative white Americans have embraced politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But the policies that result place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, Dr. Metzl examines how racial resentment has fueled pro-gun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. He shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates."

Recent studies (too recent to be referenced in Dying of Whiteness) have shown that white Americans’ resistance to vaccines and to pandemic risk-reduction measures led to unexpectedly (and unnecessarily) higher mortality rates, especially in “Red” (Republican) states. Such an outcome is sadly ironic for a political party that calls itself “pro-life.”

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Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Post-Modern

Stuart Jeffries is a British journalist who wrote Grand Hotel Abyss, a highly entertaining history of the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt scholars were pioneers of post-modernism, celebrated (or vilified) for bringing Marxism up to date and using it to radicalize cultural studies the way Marx had radicalized economics.

In other words, Stuart Jeffries knows the territory. That familiarity has enabled him to write “a brilliant history of a dangerous idea, [sketching] a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and continues to the present.” His working assumption is that “Post-modernity is the creative destruction that has shattered our present times into fragments. It dynamited modernism which had dominated the western world for most of the 20th century. Post-modernism stood for everything modernism rejected: fun, exuberance, irresponsibility. It was also the forcing ground of the 'post-truth', by means of which Western values got turned upside down."

For all that, writes Jeffries, the underlying reality of post-modernism has mostly escaped notice: “Beneath its glitzy surface, post-modernism had a dirty secret: it was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism.” Just as consumer capitalism (“Have it your way” and “We put you in the driver’s seat”) enshrined consumer choice as the ‘summum bonum,’ postmodernism—rejecting objective Truth, orthodox canons, and established narratives—enshrined epistemological variety, diversity of perspectives, and previously marginalized narratives.     

Can postmodernism be both Marxist and capitalist? Is consumer capitalism the same thing as postmodernism? Can't we have our cake and eat it too? We will just have to read Everything, All the Time, Everywhere if we are to sort that out.

How Wrong Can You Be?

{My disappointment with Dawn in Russia cannot be overstated. The comparison that comes to mind is my disillusionment upon reading the aging Maxim Gorky’s pathetic attempts in the 1930s to ingratiate himself with Stalin. Why does God allow smart people to write, say, and believe so many stupid things?}

Waldo Frank began Dawn in Russia musing about whether a collectivized society such as the Bolsheviks hoped to create would have room for an extraordinary individual like Alexandra Kollontai. By the time his tour of the Soviet Union existed, Frank had his answer:

Theoretically, the individual in Russia can scarcely be said to exist. The ideal of collective social progress is so dominant that it might be called the sole value. The value of immediate individual experience is discounted: and of course, at least theoretically, this deprives social value of Its fundamental integer, personal value. This fallacy is a heritage (like almost all the present ideology of Russia) from nineteenth-century bourgeois Europe: a heritage aggravated by the "war-condition" of Russia.”

In Frank’s view, the discounting of individuality was, like the Red Terror, a mere wartime inconvenience to be chalked up to the influence of “nineteenth-century bourgeois Europe”. However invidious it seemed, it would be just a passing phase: “But actually, this anti-individualism is not a danger,” Frank predicted, “for it is a theory that does not work.” In fact, he confidently declared, “Persons thrive better today in the true collectivism of Russia than they do in the false individualism of the United States. The Russian woman, in town and collective farm, is being freed of her immemorial slavery to Kinder, Kiiche, Kirche. The family is not disappearing in the Soviet Union; it is being spiritualized, it is becoming less a matter of a private kitchen where a woman endlessly presides over a private set of pots and pans, and more the human relationship between a man, his wife, and their children. Even if the child lives in a creche and the parents work in factories, the family need not die; particularly as the workers’ hours of leisure are increased. Family may become less an economic and sexual compulsion, more a flower of the conscious will and of active love: more intimate and more essential.”

Frank was correct; under Stalin, the Russian family did not disappear—merely millions of family members, never to be heard from again. Meanwhile, Frank foresaw a glorious future for the Soviet experiment:

I see no cause for fearing that a collectivist society would impede the growth of real individuals. Indeed, when I consider the aesthetic and spiritual genius of the Russian people, I am tempted to predict that their socialist society, if it be permitted healthily to evolve, will within a generation give birth to a new individualistic movement probably in literature, philosophy, and psychology. And this movement will be toward a true individualism, in which the social basis and texture of the real person will be understood. 

Soviet Communism was not perfect, of course; into every Utopia a little rain must fall. Waldo Frank warned that “The danger signals of the present time are the absolute centralization of power, the tendency toward piece-work payment, the economic privileges of the [elite], and the settling down of officeholders who already are called in certain places the ‘Soviet bourgeoisie.’ The argument that these evils are transitional can be answered only by time.” No mention of gulags or purges, of the starvation of millions, or of the boundless cruelties of a paranoid tyrant who resembled, more than anyone, Ivan the Terrible. Such dangers were unforeseen by Frank; he had his eye instead on the bourgeois officials who were “settling down” into staid bureaucratic routine.

The big question, of course, was, would Communism survive? Frank wanted it to, but he knew it would be a struggle, and not just against the capitalist nations. Maintaining revolutionary solidarity was essential; “What would happen,” Frank wondered, “if Russia lost the spirit of Communism, and hardened into an industrialized collectivist order, regimented by a new ruling caste?” He had an answer, which was not, as it has turned out, far off the mark: “Russia would become a menace: an engine of irresistible might (mechanized and well fueled) which its rulers could direct in conquest against Orient and Europe.” But Frank would not allow negativity to have the last word; “This supposition,” he wrote, “disregards the human nature of the Russian peoples. ¹ It disregards the truth that Russia has had a Communist Revolution because Communism bespeaks its native genius.” ²  

Despite his rose-colored spectacles, Waldo Frank was precisely right on at least one point: “If Communism fails of its promise, the nationalities of the Soviet Union would probably fall apart.”

We now return to our regularly scheduled Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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¹ But Frank had already told us that “Russian human nature” would change under Communism.

² To clarify: Russia had a Communist revolution because Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were more formidable, more determined, better prepared, and more ruthless than Kerensky, Milyukov, and Prince Trubetskoy; oh, and because the Germans helped finance the Bolshevik cause. If the revolution “bespoke” anything, it bespoke not the “Russian genius” but what Pushkin called “the Russian riot, senseless and cruel.”   

Where's Waldo's Brain?

{This is part two of my three-part look at Waldo Frank’s Dawn in Russia, his account of the Soviet Union circa 1931. Spoiler alert: I expected better from Mr. Frank.}

It is only fair to note that Waldo Frank’s visit to the USSR took place in 1931: before the worst of Stalin’s purges and show trials, before the Holodomor which starved millions of Ukrainians and reduced some to cannibalism, before Stalin’s pact with Hitler that helped embolden the latter to launch World War II. Frank certainly knew of the “Red Terror” that had followed the 1917 revolution, but he no doubt attributed that to the fratricidal frenzy of the Russian civil war. In 1931, Stalin was still riding the coattails of Lenin’s reputation, as it were; and Lenin, dead almost a decade, was the Soviet Union’s iconic, revered founder, the saint (or the god) of Bolshevism and, for those on the Left, the last best hope of mankind.

Keep in mind, too, Russia's strategic use of “Potemkin villages”: stage-sets, as it were, constructed and arranged to elicit the proper reaction—i.e., admiration— from visitors, especially those who, like Waldo Frank, were predisposed to react accordingly. The Soviets in 1931, as Frank noted, could barely keep the water running in a St. Petersburg “luxury” hotel; but when they put their minds to it, they could put on a show of progress and of proletarian achievements, complete with “model” factories and farms, as well as entirely disingenuous statistics. 

Frank can be forgiven, to some extent, for what were, in retrospect, rose-colored observations, which of course were influenced by his expectations: which is to say, he saw what he wanted to see. Nonetheless, his analysis of the Soviet Union and of the prospects for Communism, circa 1931, is frankly (!) embarrassing. While pondering whether a centralized economy, and the strong central government that it required, was unavoidable for modern industrial nations, he misread the Soviet leadership and the Soviet situation entirely:

There is of course the possibility that the ruling group may become a caste with many of the vices of the old bureaucracy. At present, however, Stalin and his associates are rigorous representatives, in culture, loyalty and will, of the proletariat, that is, of the comparatively small but fast-growing group of class-conscious workers in the cities.

Stalin never in his life represented or was loyal to anyone but himself, and the Soviet “ruling group” had, by 1931, easily surpassed the vices of the old tsarist bureaucracy. Frank notes without comment how various inconvenient elements of the populace had been dealt with; “The nobility, and bourgeoisie," he writes, "have been ruthlessly ‘liquidated.’” Frank conspicuously avoids using the word "murdered." He explains that “Many members of the middle class remain, but always in inferior positions save for the few who had already in 1917 aligned themselves with the radical cause. The muzhiks [rural peasants] of course are the majority class, and they are not in power. By force and persuasion, they are being driven into collective and state farms.” Class warfare had never been conducted so literally as it was under the Bolsheviks.

Despite that, Frank saw (or imagined) happy workers everywhere: “The class-conscious workers are happy. The office holders are happy when their background Is proletarian. The youth in town, farm, and school are happy.” Well, not entirely happy: “I detected signs of crisis in the youth: a certain unrest due probably to the fear that their personality is suffering. This is why there is much drunkenness among the young men; and explains a certain febrile over-compensation in their performance of Communist tasks.”

Russians of all ages had much more to fear under Stalin than damage to their personalities. If Frank failed to detect unhappiness among the Soviet citizenry, it was almost certainly because the citizens knew better than to let their unhappiness be detected. ¹

Frank reveals himself when he answers his self-posed question, “Is the Communist ideal natural and organic in Russia?” His response indicates he has swallowed whole every cliché ever uttered about sobornost: “Yes, to an amazing degree. Of course, the ideal will change, even as Russian human nature will change, with years of adaptation of the one to the other. ² The Russian people is, by feeling, monistic: it senses life as an interrelated whole, not like the North American view that sees it as a dualistic or pluralistic order. Russia's monism has no transcendental trend; it is naturalistic, yet it is suffused with mystic feeling.” Neither Lenin nor Stalin ever had a “mystic feeling” in their lives; as for ordinary Russians, their alleged mysticism was little more than superstition. ³

Before summarizing, let us pause briefly to consider Frank’s assessment of Russia’s two main literary icons: “Tolstoy's natural, ethical religion is more typically Russian, I believe, than the antinomian mysticism of Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was a city man, a bourgeois profoundly influenced, despite his Slavophilism, by Europe. Tolstoy, despite his internationalism and his intellectual debt to Stendhal, Schopenhauer, and Rousseau, was the archetypical muzhik, the true Russian genius.” Literary critiques do not necessarily predict ideological preferences (or vice-versa), but Dostoevsky, whom Frank belittles, was a staunch opponent of revolution and of revolutionaries; he and Frank would have been on the opposite sides of any proletarian barricades, which fact may or may not have influenced Frank’s literary estimate.

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¹ In fairness to Frank, he acknowledges that “The old muzhiks rotting in their villages are unhappy. The individualistic artists and thinkers are unhappy (those in Russia no more than those who have fled to Paris). The surviving bourgeois are unhappy.” The impression he gives, wittingly or not, is that the unhappy are bitter holdouts loyal to the old regime; nor does Frank indicate any sympathy for their plight.

² Frank’s confidence that “Russian human nature” would change is testament, one supposes, to his innate optimism.  

³ Frank asserts that “Marx and Lenin, despite the materialistic vocabulary of their day, were profoundly religious men. I suspect that the roots of Marxian dialectic, with its assumption of the universe as a rational organism are essentially mystic--Hegel, Spinoza, and the Hebrew Prophets ...” Frank must have been talking about a different ‘Lenin’ than the leader of the Bolsheviks. Lenin was a zealot, to be sure, but not in any religious or mystical sense; his contempt for religion and/or metaphysics was deep-seated and unwavering.

Saturday Lecture: The Realm of Aliens and Angels

{I am a Philip K. Dick devotee (in popular parlance, a "Dickhead"). His novel “Valis” redirected my thinking at a critical point in my life; in some ways, it switched back on a part of my brain that had been turned off for years—for better or for worse, of course.} 

Bryan Appleyard (from Aliens: Why They Are Here):

Philip K. Dick was not the greatest writer of his time, nor the Franz Kafka of the second half of the twentieth century. He was brilliant, original, dementedly imaginative, and heroically paranoid, but he was a sloppy writer. Even his best books cry out for a radical rewrite. But if there is some other form of greatness that consists of an excess of sensitivity to the age in which one is born, then as a man, as a life, Dick was unquestionably great.

For Dick, as he wrote in 1980, ‘The Martians are always coming.” Sadly, they never arrived. By the 1970s, though, Dick had created the content that was to dominate subsequent science-fiction. His futures do not gleam, they glow darkly. They are suffused with street life, innovative drugs, and uncertain realities. His robots do not know they are robots, and his humans suspect they may be machines. The supremely paranoid idea that reality is an artificial construct—the idea that inspired the Matrix films—was first refined by Dick.

‘We live in a society,” he wrote in a 1978 essay, ‘in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by government, by big corporations, by religious groups, and by political groups. I ask, in my writing, what is real? Because increasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.’

He had used drugs extensively and he had acquired a sense of the arbitrariness of the realities we choose. Modernity and its machines had intensified this reality crisis. Modernity had rendered materiality questionable. ‘Things’ were no longer stable, and now, as machines, they were taking on a life of their own. ‘The ultimate in paranoia,’ Dick wrote, ‘is not when everyone is against you, but when everything is against you. Even to the normal mind, objects sometimes seem to possess a will of their own; they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, they get in the way, they show an unnatural resistance to change.’

There was a tremendous struggle, both in Dick’s style and in his imagination, between the mental breakdown threatened by such visions and the urge to stabilize the world. He seemed to want to anchor the shifting planes of reality in some form of truth. God features a lot in Dick. But the postmodern God, if he exists at all, has been relativized, which would not be an issue for Dick at all if he were a rampant postmodernist (like his successors), content with a world in which truth had been abandoned as a quaint oddity. Dick, though, remained a modernist, paralyzed in contemplation of the ruins, rather than eagerly moving on. He wished to preserve what fragments he could of the human.

“Faced with the failure of all totalizing and redemptive schemes,” writes Eric Davis in his book TechGnosis, “Dick came down to nothing more than the drive to remain human in an often inhuman world. In contrast to the exhausted skepticism of the post-moderns or the juvenile glee of the post-humans, Dick never abandoned his commitment to the ‘authentic human,’ which he tentatively described as the viable and elastic being that can ‘bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new’.”

Dick downgraded the future, which in his work turns out to be at least as bad as the present. In fact, usually it turns out to be worse, because human failures and crises have been amplified by technology. ‘If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others’ was the title of a speech he gave in 1977. The film Blade Runner captured that overpowering Dickian sense that the future is much like the present only more so—more crowded, more greedy, more violent, and more baffling. Before Dick, dystopian visions of the future tended to portray a shiny, high-tech hell; Dick’s hell was dirty and chaotic, the life of the street but with androids.

Dick also glimpsed the centrality of the alien in the postwar world. He was himself a stranger in a strange land, a troubled drifter. In his madness, he lived in the realm of aliens and angels. The world was alien to him and he was alien to it. He understood the eternal truth that we don’t fit in the world, and he saw how modernity had heightened and dramatized our discomfort. In his Exegesis, he wrote, ‘You have to remember your real nature, the Gnostic gnosis: You are in this world but not of this world.’ 

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Bryan Appleyard - Wikipedia

Philip K. Dick - Wikipedia