First published, 2nd May 2014
The universe is the mind in which we live. That’s all I could think of writing for this month’s blog and really, I didn’t much care to write that down either (or up, or do with it whatever one is supposed to do with words. Ideas). But I decided to write it anyway on a screen, copy it onto the internet to sit anonymously with all the other meaningless unread bits and pieces in that swamp.com of crap. The digital age has ushered in the acceptability of cerebral masturbation, the products of which provide a platform for advertising at least. Digitisation of materialism … stuff.
I’ve got into reading book reviews as texts sort of talking to themselves. I attempt some sort of discourse analysis. I’ll give you an example of what fascinates me. Take two review excerpts for The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt:
“A modern epic and an old-fashioned pilgrimage…Dickens with guns, Dostoevsky with pills, Tolstoy with antiques. And if it doesn’t gain Tartt entry to the mostly boys’ club that is The Great American Novel, to drink with life-members John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth et al, then we should close down the joint and open up another for the Great Global Novel – for that is what this is.” (Alex O’Connell The Times)
Or,
“God The Goldfinch is bad. As if Bohemian Rhapsody was a good story line and could be padded out to 800 pages, with the same disjointedness. Basically Mama, I killed a man. Tartt seems to have thought: they like my descriptions, they like my writing, here have a whole giant slew of it. I’ll drag descriptions out for pages for no particular reason, repeat stuff ad nauseam, give you painterly descriptions of bloody everything, then have such a poorly conceived structure that I’ll suddenly add something the reader should have known 500 pages earlier because there is a sudden logical gap or things wouldn’t make sense without adding this little fact. NY Times called it Dickensian. Only on his very very worst day.” (Michele Harrison).
All I could glean from that particular exercise was that probably Ms Harrison had read the book (with as many pages as Amazon reviews), Mr O’Connell probably hadn’t. But hey ho.
With an equal sense of boredom, I have found myself watching the various atheist vs theist debates on YouTube. Santayana’s, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” springs to mind, most particularly when Professor Richard Dawkins gives that wonderful puzzled look of his (like he’s thinking: “fucking hell, what century am I in?” – You’re in the Biblical States of America, sugar, so wise up…).
I did, briefly, wonder why there was such a shortage of philosophers in these debates. With the exception of Daniel Dennett, genuine, trained campus philosophers seem to be conspicuously absent. Well, of course, they’ve read their Santayana and they’ve also possibly clocked that these debates tend to be sponsored by right wing Christian organisations like the dreadful Discovery or Larry Taunton’s Fixed Point Foundations.
Christopher Hitchens knew his American politics and certainly would have approached these debates and these organisations with some greater degree of cautious awareness than Dawkins. He’d have understood that Christianity in America is as much about right wing politics as it is about mediaeval cosmology. Anyway, look, the only people qualified to explore religion and the religious mind are psychiatrists (possibly cognitive psychologists too). The religious mind is not something to be debated with but studied – being one form of the psychotic state.
Mind you, it’s to be wondered where this brain – that keeps trying to screw things up – comes from. We need, as a species, still to understand this destructive mind of man. The rigid, dogmatic bigot. But also the way these individuals still seem best able to rise through the ranks. Certainly, the failure of democracy in Germany in the 1930s and now America should be prompting us to look at alternative ways of controlling the corruption of power and the power of corruption in society.
After watching the debate between Christopher Hitchens and the neocon toad Dinesh D’Souza late one night, I rolled over to fall asleep and vaguely wondered why there was always a connection between religious and right wing political organisations. Well, the answer wasn’t so hard to come by that I wasn’t able to fall asleep within minutes: fear of change. The socio-economic élite, the oligarchs who now (officially) run America, are, of course, terrified of change. They have to hate the idea of evolution as much as upward (and more’s the point, downward) mobility. The idea of a cosmos in a constant state of flux is as horrifying to the one percent as it is to the monotheist.
Monotheism and conservative politics are blood brothers. The right wing Christian foundations make it their business to muscle in on the education system in America to ensure that the next generation learns to accept creationism and that its individuals live in a sort of feudal universe where everyone knows his or her place in an immutable caste system. Current quoted estimates suggest round about 63% of American vassals now accept ID (a euphemism for God creating life on earth towards the end of a hectic week). Only 36% left to go! Hey ho.
I dreamed, then, briefly, of whether Richard Dawkins et al., should be so bothered about trying to help save America from itself (as if they were so many Byrons setting off to save the Greeks). Of course, actually that’s not Dawkins’s mission. I think he still just genuinely gets riled by the corruption of truth, regardless… Hmm, that there is a hidden political agenda maybe doesn’t occur. If it did, I’d like to think he’d back off with an “Oh fuck it.” Slam front door, go to rear of house and on to cultivate his garden.