Peter Brown writes in his great (and short) The World of Late Antiquity of the years leading up to Christianity’s big break, when Constantine converted in 312:
The Christian Church differed from the other oriental cults, which it resembled in so many other ways, through its intolerance of the outside world. The cults were exclusive, and, often, the jealously guarded preserve of foreigners; but they never set themselves up against the traditional religious observances of the society round them. They never enjoyed the publicity of intermittent persecution. While the oriental cults provided special means to salvation in the next world, they took the position of their devotees in this world for granted. The Christian Church offered a way of living in this world. The skillful elaboration of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the sense of belonging to a distinctive group with carefully prescribed habits and increasing resources heightened the impression that the Christian Church made on the uncertain generations of the third century. Seldom has a small minority played so successfully on the anxieties of society as did the Christians. They remained a small group: but they succeeded in becoming a big problem.
For men whose confusions came partly from no longer feeling embedded in their home environment, the Christian Church offered a drastic experiment in social living, reinforced by the excitement and occasional perils of a break with one’s past and one’s neighbors.
The suggestion, with a nod to Hans Blumenberg, is that Christianity grew in part through a cultish, gnostic mentality that allowed it to offer a niche, elite appeal. This mentality then had to be discarded by Augustine and the Church itself once the movement had reached a critical mass of acceptance. Yet by Brown’s account, the preparations for such a prioritization of this world were there from the beginning, which is what enabled it to make the transition successfully.
Google+ invites available through this link: Join Google+ — it’s linked to my own account and there are something like 150 invites available through it before they run out.
I’m not a partisan of Google+, but for what it’s worth, I am fairly frustrated with Facebook’s privacy violations and I do think that Google+ is a better product. YMMV.
Rudolf Carnap, arch-positivist and analytic philosopher sine qua non, was also a committed socialist and pacifist, to the point of having to flee Austria in 1935 despite not being Jewish. This passage is from the introduction to his grand vision of logical positivist unification, the Aufbau, revealing the frequently overlooked space he made for emotions and irrationality, which he acknowledges to be unavoidable and even valuable, within their domain.
We feel that there is an inner kinship between the attitude on which our philosophical work is founded and the intellectual attitude which currently manifests itself in entirely different walks of life; we feel this orientation in artistic movements, especially in architecture, and in movements which strive for meaningful forms of personal and collective life, of education, and of external organisations in general. We feel all around us the same basic orientation, the same style of thinking and doing. It is an orientation which demands clarity everywhere, but which realizes that the fabric of life can never quite be comprehended. I makes us pay careful attention to detail and at the same time recognizes the great lines which run through the whole. It is an orientation which acknowledges the bonds which tie people together, but at the same time strives for free development of the individual. Our work is carried by the faith that this attitude will win the future.
The Logical Structure of the World
And yet:
Even if modem movements frequently underestimate the importance of science for life, we do not wish to fall into the opposite error. Rather, we wish to admit clearly to ourselves, who are engaged in scientific work, that the mastery of life requires an effort of all our various powers; we should be wary of the shortsighted belief that the demands of life can all be met with the power of conceptual thinking alone.
The ”riddles of life” are not questions, but are practical situations.
And this attitude is reflected in this humanist passage, from his autobiography many years later:
The transformation and final abandonment of my religious convictions led at no time to a nihilistic attitude toward moral questions. My moral valuations were afterwards essentially the same as before. It is not easy to characterize these valuations in a few words, since they are not based on explicitly formulated principles, but constitute rather an implicit lasting attitude. The following should therefore be understood as merely a rough and brief indication of certain basic features. The main task of an individual seems to me the development of his personality and the creation of fruitful and healthy relations among human beings. This aim implies the task of co-operation in the development of society and ultimately of the whole of mankind towards a community in which every individual has the possibility of leading a satisfying life and of participating in cultural goods. The fact that everybody knows that he will eventually die need not make his life meaningless or aimless. He himself gives meaning to his life if he sets tasks for himself, struggles to fulfill them to the best of his ability, and regards all the specific tasks of all individuals as parts of the great task of humanity, whose aim goes far beyond the limited span of each individual life.
Big Other’s Birthday Tribute to William Gass got me to thinking back on The Tunnel, which I read at a fairly formative time in my life. (Also at a time of total psychic collapse, for which it turned out to be the perfect companion.)
I had already loved In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. I had been introduced to Gass through John Gardner’s repeated recommendations, and Gardner’s professions of Gass’s utter superiority to Pynchon, Gaddis, Barth, and pretty much every other mid-century American writer made me feel obligated to track down Omensetter’s Luck, then out of print, and read it.
The Tunnel came out shortly after that, and having not known the history of its long genesis, and not knowing too much of Gass’s quasi-Wittgensteinian ideas about fiction and language (Gardner had mentioned them only to say that Gass’s actual fiction belied his theories), I had no idea what it was going to contain. And, well, it was different.
The book didn’t make much of a splash at the time. I got the sense that it was lumped in with Harold Brodkey’s wretched The Runaway Soul and perhaps even Pynchon’s fine Mason and Dixon as long-awaited Big Books that didn’t meet expectations.
Don DeLillo’s Underworld and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, in contrast, exploded into big events. Both certainly had a certain knowing hipness that was lacking in Pynchon, Brodkey, and Gass. (Pynchon might have had it had he not chosen to write about the 19th century.) But of those five books, there’s no question to me that Gass’s is by far the greatest.
It still retains a devoted set of fans (Stephen Schenkenberg has a representative enthusiasm) and detractors. Stochatic Bookmark’s expression of utter annoyance is a very legitimate response to The Tunnel. There is much in it that is intentionally and unintentionally off-putting. And the book’s hidden organizational structure, which Gass has only mentioned after the fact, is exceedingly abstruse.
In the best essay in Dalkey’s online casebook, Melanie Eckford-Prossor says the irony and metafictional gimmicks make the novel ethically repugnant. This is probably a compelling conclusion unless you see the novel as utterly pessimistic, which I did, in which case the mixture of moral and textual relativism with incessant brutality on all levels has a grim, forceful honesty to it.
But Schenkenberg quotes Robert Kelly’s review, which I still think was about the only thoughtful thing written about The Tunnel when it was published. Kelly is far from adulatory, but he took the novel very seriously and did not stop at surfaces. It was also well-written, one of the best reviews I read in the New York Times Book Review.
So I quote the parts that still resonate for me, even if I don’t agree with them:
“The Tunnel” is maddening, enthralling, appalling, coarse, romantic, sprawling, bawling. It is driven by language and all the gloriously phony precisions the dictionary makes available. It is not a nice book. It will have enemies, and I am not sure after one reading (forgive me, it’s a big book) that I am not one of them. Let me tell you what I can.
There was a little boy, an only child, raised in a bleak Midwestern town by an alcoholic mother and a verbally brutal father. It would not take a Dickens to borrow the reader’s sympathy and show us the little boy’s suffering, his slow escape from that abusive milieu, and to delicately sketch the paths of liberty the boy might find, or the hopeless mire into which he might, reader sighing, fall back.
But that is not William Gass’s way. Instead, he leaps ahead half a century and gives us the sex-besotted, verbally brutal professor the boy becomes, a gross character with fascist views and a taste for sly affairs with his students. He gives us the thick of the man, the dirt to tunnel through. To get, if we get, at last to the truth of him. In fact, it is not till more than 600 pages into the book that we learn anything like the full particulars of the boy’s youth. And when we get there, it is only to doubt that history is any more meaningful when it reveals origins than when it displays the blood and ordure of results.
But here the typographical games seem (unlike those in the novella) playful rather than evocative. And while Mr. Gass uses some devices Georges Perec or Harry Mathews might wield as strategies of composition, or grids of meaning, here the devices seem decorative, not so much claims on the reader’s puzzle-solving faculties as rewards to the writer for going on, allowing himself some smutty doggerel after a night’s hard noveling. [I strongly disagree.]
For the first few hundred pages not one of the few characters says anything at all except about the narrator. They have no selves except what they say about Willie young or old. The narrator has engulfed their reality, made their words his own. [I strongly agree.]
But when in the course of his endless bitter reflections on his failed marriage, Kohler exclaims “I’ve been in bedrooms as bad as Belsen,” we recognize only iniquitous nonsense. There is no bedroom as bad as Belsen, and to say so is to signal that you do not know what Belsen is.
While it is impressive that a novelist can pull off the tricks of creating such a sexist, bigoted, hate-filled character and of making the reader accept his vision of the real, there is a risk, one that every satirist takes. The risk is being believed, taken literally. To this day, we tend to think Jonathan Swift loathed humankind on the strength of Gulliver’s aversion. William Gass takes the risk, and it is no small achievement to make us take our bearings from Swift and Wyndham Lewis and those magniloquent sourpusses Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Samuel Beckett, ghosts who seem to hover, as James Joyce does too, over this novel. But it is not much comfort to lay aside this infuriating and offensive masterpiece and call it a satire, as if a genre could heal the wounds it so delights to display. It will be years before we know what to make of it.
That bit 600 pages in, the birthday party scene, is one of the most conventionally appealing (if pathetic) sections of the novel. It is held back for a very good reason. It’s only by being placed at that very late point that such a sympathetic story can register as an indictment rather than as a comforting avowal of humanity. That questioning of what we take to be our most human qualities is one of the core strengths of The Tunnel: trying to figure out what evil there is lurking in the good.
I recently ran across Hugh Kenner’s 1970 review of geneticist C.D. Darlington’s book The Evolution of Man and Society (1969). Darlington had done important work in genetics in the 1930s, but had revealed a penchant for troubling indulgences in “race science.” This was one of them.
Darlington’s book was an attempt to explain the entire history of humanity via genetic traits, with many excursions into racial generalizations and invocations of both Social Darwinist and eugenicist tropes.
Darlington had already gotten into trouble for making some very suspect remarks about race over the course of his career, and the excerpts I’ve read of the book show it to be loaded with the kind of pseudoscience that continues to plague us in things like The Bell Curve. (No, I’m not going to read the whole thing; I saw no signs of Robert Young’s review below being off the mark.)
Despite being deeply skeptical of the enterprise and explicitly disavowing the idea of racial superiority, I’m afraid Kenner still seems far too charitable:
Breezily confident that official historical motives are probably fraudulent, he often rises to majestic crankery. Like French farce, relying on one order of causation only, that which sweeps bankers to the doors of undulant blondes, such Swiftian reasonableness need not be wholly credited to be tonic.
But in looking up this happily forgotten book, I discovered Robert M. Young’s review, Understanding It All, which has an parable at the end that points out a fallacy common among scientists and other analytical types.
On the positive side, Darlington has raised very interesting issues connected with unconscious selection, sexual selection, monasticism, primogeniture, hereditary immunities, and the dynastic and social consequences of inbreeding (and incest) versus outbreeding. The book also touches on eugenic questions which cannot be answered with in the limits of science as now constituted. However, these matters are so inextricably interwoven with dubious assertions which are liable to reactionary and racialist interpretations that one would do better to start elsewhere
I have tried to convey the conclusion that in the opinion of one historian of biology this book is insidious, and its surface plausibility depends on ambiguities, premature conclusions and downright puns. At the end of the volume Darlington has listed ‘a succession of pioneers’; in the proof copy these were called ‘some precursors’. The list includes Paine, Malthus, Darwin, Marx, Galton, Bagehot, Tylor and Acton.
A psychiatrist colleague of mine turned up the other day to discuss problems of explanation in that confused discipline. I spoke of my preoccupation with trying to convey the problems raised by this book. ‘It is well-known,’ he said. ‘A specialised scientist stares down his microscope for 40 years and does very good work. Towards the end of his career he asks himself about the wider meaning of it all. He racks back the focus knob on the microscope, tilts the instrument back, and looks about him through its eyepieces. He stares hard for a time, a marvellous gleam comes into his eyes, and he exclaims, “I understand all!”’
This unfortunate sort of myopia, whose origins are rather apparent from this parable, too easily applies methodologies and principles applicable to one domain to any and all others. Kenner’s line bears repeating: this fallacy assumes that one purported causal order trumps any and all others.
The significance is not that this myopia is a privileging of the natural sciences above any other forms of understanding (although it is), but a privileging of one aspect of science above all other aspects.
The corresponding mistake made when attempting to address this fallacy, as with Edward O. Wilson in Consilience, is to think that unifications of scientific domains are unifications of methodology rather than of models. Unifying methodologies is the fast track to pseudoscience.
We are dealing, rather, with overlapping models, with overlapping “manifest images,” in Wilfrid Sellars’ term. So I conclude with a passage from Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, 50 years old, to show how little the best lessons of philosophy of science have been absorbed.
Our contrast then, is between two ideal constructs: (a) the correlational and categorial refinement of the ‘original image’, which refinement I am calling the manifest image; (b) the image derived from the fruits of postulational theory construction which I am calling the scientific image.
It may be objected at this point that there is no such thing as the image of man built from postulated entities and processes, but rather as many images as there are sciences which touch on aspects of human behaviour. And, of course, in a sense this is true. There are as many scientific images of man as there are sciences which have something to say about man. Thus, there is man as he appears to the theoretical physicist — a swirl of physical particles, forces, and fields. There is man as he appears to the biochemist, to the physiologist, to the behaviourist, to the social scientist; and all of these images are to be contrasted with man as he appears to himself in sophisticated common sense, the manifest image which even today contains most of what he knows about himself at the properly human level.
Thus the conception of the scientific or postulational image is an idealization in the sense that it is a conception of an integration of a manifold of images, each of which is the application to man of a framework of concepts which have a certain autonomy. For each scientific theory is, from the standpoint of methodology, a structure which is built at a different ‘place’ and by different procedures within the intersubjectively accessible world of perceptible things. Thus ‘the’ scientific image is a construct from a number of images, each of which is supported by the manifest world.
Those working deeply in a particular science should take time occasionally to deliteralize their studies, to prevent the apparent inexorable causalities of their field from enveloping the entire world. Economists, you too.
