I suspect that having a lousy summer (weather-wise) has finally got to me - and most everyone around me.  Fortunately, our annual holiday tied in with the only two weeks of decent weather to be had and, living on the high ground in the Weald of Kent, flooding was never an issue. The whole miserable thing was tolerated on the assumption that a bad July and August usually means an Indian Summer in September.  No such luck as we have sidled now into low temperatures and gloomy skies.  

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Peter Mahoney's events once a month on a Friday night at Treadwells are already stimulating the spirit - one wishes one could say more but the whole point (in my opinion) is that it is experienced and not talked about.  Whether I will stick the course, given the dangers of my dark side infecting a rather sunny programme of work, is a moot point but the whole thing is worthwhile and that opinon is clearly shared by others.

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The business of life can be enervating.  Two businesses to run and a domestic economy with all the juggling involved ... and we don't even have to worry about having any funds in Northern Rock.  Sometimes it is harder when it is going well (as seems to be the case now), simply because time then becomes available to do all those jobs that one put off as not so important - they then catch up on you and prove to be important after all.  So, it's away from living with the fairies and back down amongst the dark elves in sorting out insurances and pensions.  I am not that sort of anal personality that gets their bourgeois rocks off by listening to the money programmes on Radio 4 and studying interest rates in the personal finance columns of the Sunday Press, but I have to accept that the job has to be done - eventually.  And eventually is becoming now.

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Book reviews now go on my Facebook Virtual Bookshop but I have to commend (as a short sharp guide) the little book on "What Do Astrologers Believe" in the Granta Series by Nicholas Campion as a sound and readable guide to this contentious area.  I noted the odd accuracy of my 'stars' in my last entry but I retain an open mind - in both directions of scepticism and acceptance.  What I am prepared to accept in all these occult arts (or sciences) is that something is going on in a space that is within the mind and maybe within matter itself where interpretation and action, will and intellect, being and becoming, operate as a grey liminality.  Things are never as truly knowable as scientists and religions of the book may like to claim.  This space may not be quite what many of its believers think it to be, but, with its shifting boundaries and symbolisms, it has been too easily dismissed as 'non-sense' by our intellectual elites, certainly in the last 350 years.  It is not 'non-sense', it is 'different-sense'.

I still hold to my view that the secrets of this unknown space will never be uncovered by conventional means. - though conventional science may push the boundaries forward to isolate the phenomena. it will create doubt that intellectual explanations are sufficient for what remains.  Scientists may say that such-and-such falls within some Darwinian, neuro-physiological or physical framework but there is going to be a point where such claims are going to be matters of faith without serious recourse to scientific method.  

What will probably be uncovered will be fragile, shifting, subjective and dependent on time rather than space - and yet expressive of a reality no less for that.  The proven impossibility of knowing anything formal about the numinous and the subjective is surely going to make the latter more interesting as its boundaries become more defined.  At a certain point, rationalism will simply cease to deliver the goods and either have to cede ground or become what it despises - a religion of faith.

Traditional faith and science-based ways of seeing have not protected us from discovering just how little control rational elites have over the course of current and future events - and how the interpretation of past events is so often contingent.  The necessity of the present is generally drawn as a backward working from a fixed point when it might be equally fruitful to make imaginative leaps into the many possibilities that might have resulted from different decisions.  Re-thinking time as possibility as well as actuality may be the most liberating development yet in the human condition, enabling decision-makers to halt their cowardly determination to act like cogs in a machine, no longer digging deeper when they are in a hole of their own making.

Tags: general news, philosophy, religion
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: tired

I believe I promised to write on evil.  I was pulled up short the other day by a science fiction book.  I like the work of Ken Macleod and have written on this elsewhere - http://timinlondon.zaadz.com/blog/2007/4/macleod_and_300_-_two_responses_to_the_darkness - so it was interesting to discover a new writer, Charles Stross, who is recommended by Macleod and who has many similarities in style and sensibility.  There is a sudden rush of his books on the market, all very recent and published first in America (although he is a Brit).  I picked up what I believe is his second to be written and the first to be published here (The Atrocity Archive ) and had an enjoyable pulp read [see http://www.antipope.org/charlie/index.html for more on Stross]

Anyway this isn't a book review.  The book has many flaws but if you think in terms of a mix of H. P. Lovecraft, Len Deighton and Neal Stephenson (his assessment) and then add in a mix of hacker techno-nerdiness and BBC Sci-Fi humour (my assessment), you get somewhere close to what Graham Greene might politely call an 'entertainment'.  It is in the vein of Mick Carey's much-loved (by my family) Felix Castor novels - http://www.mikecarey.net/ - which have the sexiest demon-incubus you have never ever wanted to meet and is part of a wry relatively new English horror/sci fi style of cynicism, dark humour, nerdy manners and tributes to American and British genre pulp that seems to go down well in a reading culture that is at much at home with Marvel Comics as it is with Conan Doyle.  Think the peculiar but stimulating world-view of Alan Moore [from V for Vendetta through to Promethea] and you see the culture of angry radicalism bent to market needs that epitomises the new school.

No, I am not offering a book review but a single observation.  I am not giving the story away by saying that one of the key conceits of the book is that the mass murder of the Jews in the Second World War was the ritual sacrifice of millions to gain sufficient psychic energy from pain to call on an occult power, not unlike one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, to ensure a national socialist victory.  Aztec brutality is not mentioned but the cultural similarities between the blood rites of Tenochtitlan and those of the Ostreich offer a platform for the next step taken by Stross.  

The conceit pulls you up short - has the very real suffering of millions under a vicious regime now become mere fodder for a rather tasteless foray into alternative history?  Is this the point where the Holocaust has become released from lived experience (after once being 'that of which nothing may be spoken") in order that it might become the plaything of creative artists?  If so, it has been creeping in that direction for some time, yet this is the first mainstream book, published in America of all places, that I have seen, where the evil of the Holocaust has been so detached, first, from greed and power and, then, from ill-will and human malice to become the subject of occult forces beyond time and space?  How different this is, in terms of potential for a psychological denial of the truth, from the works of David Irving - not that I would ban either - is a moot point.

The point is that, at a certain time after an act has taken place, it seems that the act moves into a world where it is disconnected from reality and becomes fodder for fantasy.  Perhaps this is why I think that the conservative philosopher John Kekes [The Roots of Evil, Cornell, 2005] does us a service by returning to some of the great crimes of the past, not excluding the realpolitik of the Cathar Crusade, to lodge these evil acts back where they should be lodged - at the heart of the human condition.  I cannot entirely dismiss the environmental roots of evil acts as he seems to do by implication, but he is persuasive that not all evil can be optimistically wished away as something that is purely a matter of condition and that there is no evidence that, with improvement of condition, evil will be automatically banished from the world.  

The Catholic Church has a concept in which there are sins of commission and sins of omission.  This is useful here.  To wilfully order the murder of millions is a sin of commission.  To participate for careerist reasons in such a murder and go into denial about what is happening as one does so may be a sin of omission.  Our culture tends to punish the first far more than the last and yet there would be no large-scale evil (it would be mere vicious local gangsterdom or individual rapine and murder) if it were not for the complicity of the grey men and their wives who do their duty.   Charles Manson is rightfully incarcerated for life for his actions, yet Robert McNamara, the grey civil servant, continued to teach and write and speak (albeit admitting error) as if nothing had happened to civilians while he was working in national security - like German lawyers who practised before and after the Gotterdamerung of '45.  

McNamara's war (and I do not really want to single him out as much worse than thousands of such grey men in history, not forgetting our own imperial crimes and misdemeanours), in which he participated 'with good intent', cost the Vietnamese people an estimated 666 times (an interesting number in itself) the number of people who died in the 9/11 incident.  A suicide bomber is rightfully condemned, but the act of war that has lead to the murderousness of contemporary Iraq is treated by our establishment as if it were merely an honest mistake by well-meaning buffoons rather than as an act of irresponsible evil.  Those who have done their duty as military men or civil servants drive blame upwards to the 'buffone' yet refuse to accept their own complicity in carrying out their duty.  Fascinating!

You see, I think a sin of stupidity or denial that is complicit in the deaths of lots of people or creates widespread misery is much less forgivable than our culture allows.  We seem to want to forgive 'intent' ,so that if vicious things result from good intent then we are prepared to forgive the perpetrator.  This seems to be very culturally useful for our middle classes but philosophically absurd - and not from a utilitarian perspective either.  After all, if existentially we must take responsibility for our actions, then we must take some responsibility for the consequences of our actions.  It is not only that we do evil in actually undertaking some act but that we do evil when we fail to question what we do and when we fail to question what we have done after we have done it.  We do evil when we stop thinking.  

Real evil lies not so much in making the error in a sin of commission, but in persisting in the error after the costs and consequences have become clear.  Perhaps this is because, in the group-think of 'grey man evil', the alternative is always justified as worse.  But this is mere displacement and denial.  So, perhaps, the idea that Communists would overrun all of South East Asia (which did not happen and never was going to happen) justifies in these men's minds, supported at home by their wives, the massive use of terror tactics and of brutal methods simply because such tactics and methods are (using another more malignly self-deluding Catholic concept) the 'lesser evil'.

This may seem like a round-the-houses way of linking a popular novel to the thinking of the architects of death in our global elites.  Poor old Stross (and I certainly do not want to single him out at all) is just another writer reflecting his times, but there is a quiet potential evil in taking any real suffering and reifying it without thought into something abstract and unconnected to the fact of lots of very individual specific sufferings having actually taken place at a specific place and time - whether this reification be through the appropriation of the suffering by Zionists to justify state creation, liberals to justify political correctness or authors to justify a story.  

The best memorial to those murdered under such conditions (since nothing can ever bring them back , memory is no substitute for life really lived and their property has merely been restituted to occasionally tenuous bloodlines to 'make a point') is never ever to think about people in the way that their murderers did, as objects for use and manipulation.  Of course, a novelist has the right to do this - at the end of the day, I cannot really condemn Stross for reflecting our culture so accurately in his work.  Far from it - I very much recommend his book as a jolly entertaining travel read (if you can get through the bursts of Stephensonian techno-babble).  But actors in the real world do not have this right: if fantasy should not ever be limited in either its light or dark aspects, reality, well that is another matter altogether.  Or is that thought too heavy for the lightweight brains of our oh-so-well-educated grey men?

Tags: culture, philosophy
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: thoughtful

Now this posting had to wait 24 hours before I could put the experience into writing.  The LSE lecture given last night in the Secularism series was from such a self-evidently nice man, Professor Simon Blackburn, that I wondered if I had the heart to give my first reaction.  Blackburn spoke for traditional Enlightenment rationalism.  Absolutely nothing wrong with that, you say.  Of course not.  He has a right to his views.  But as the lecture progressed, I heard everything that was wrong with the intellectual class - this was decent, highly educated Cambridge Common Room philosophy with a Marxist tinge but it was not speaking for the world that I recognise as 'real'.  Many wise words were spoken.  The argument was logical.  The presentation was lucid.  So what was wrong?

Well, first Reason, good old reified Reason, ended up being really not much better than God only without God.  One questioner pointed out that his description of the immanence of commonsense reason might equally be used by a monotheist to refer to the God that he or she feels immanent but the point was never truly answered.  The traditional British philosopher lets his thinking drift far away from existence into abstractions that work in print and in a common culture but not in a fluid world of shifting identities and perceptions.  Yes, there is truth and reason but not too much should be claimed for either of them.

Second, his despair at contemporary society was the perfect mirror image of Scruton's only a week before.  Is it that contemporary society really is so dreadful that a man of the right and a man of the left can now agree in their gloom and we must accept itheir despair as representing the truth of the situation?  No, of course not.  Intellectuals like these were not built to have fun and their minds were not structured for new technologies and for rapid change.  Both are, however, speaking unconsciously for greater sociological truths - that the crisis of the Western bourgeois is truly upon us, that Common Rooms across the country are disturbed and unhappy and that thinkers from the age of print are becoming as irrelevant to us as thinkers from the age of manuscript were to be by the eighteenth century.  Good foundations for greater thinking perhaps but not the final storey let alone the roof of our cultural palace.

Third, at least Scruton has done his home work on Islam.  Blackburn's ignorance of the realities of Middle Eastern politics (which he admitted) should have made him cautious in trying to explain what drives a radical Islamist, let alone try and present Shinto in a few words.  It did not.  Niceness and decency cannot make up for lack of research.  And this is important because intellectuals are increasingly pontificating 'ab initio' on the new politics of identity without adequate understanding.  This can influence politicians and policy-makers in ways that may cost lives one day.  The extended and amusing philosophical riff on Bertrand Russell's sun-circling treapot as the basis for a full service religion almost made up for everything else - but it is a pretty thing when we go to hear philosophers in order to be entertained.  Still, he is (like Scruton) a decent and honest man - I just wish I had been challenged a little and I wish I felt that thinking had moved on from the Cambridge of my youth.

Tags: philosophy
Current Location: London (LSE)
Current Mood: annoyed

The LSE holds a surprising number of open lectures that are free to the public - www.lse.ac.uk/events  Last night it held the first lecture in a five lecture series (and conference) on Secularism.  Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton give his view on 'morality and public space' where he drew a distinction between the emergence of the territorially-based Christian-Enlightenment concept of public space and the faith-based law of religious community, much to the disadvantage of the latter.  The issues he raised are important and I expect to give some commentary in my next http://timinlondon.zaadz.com/blog posting but let us leave matters here by saying that he was a brilliant expositor of his argument but was ultimately unconvincing.  More elsewhere ...

Tags: philosophy
Current Location: London & Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: blank