book reviews

Julian Barnes:
The Sense of an Ending

Occasionally strained, contrived, and far-fetched, but overall the evocation of the oversensitivity cum insensitivity of youth rings true even if the recovered-memory syndrome of an elderhood Julian Barnes has not quite succeeded in channeling (an ending not yet quite sensed?) does not.

Egocentricity never quite shaken, all efforts notwithstanding.

You can write a humorous book on laughable language laws, but not on anti-semitism, nor aboriginal rights, nor even on Franco-Canadian grievances and aspirations. Richler's (now much-dated) book, though it contains some relevant truths and insights, and is no doubt driven by some genuine anguish on the part of the author, is, in the end, an exercise in superficial stereotyping, insensitivity and bad taste. Everything that is true in it could have been said in an uncompromising way without the gratuitous offensiveness (but then it wouldn't have been good for laughs). But to keep it fun, most of the real core of the ethnic problems of Quebec would have had to be omitted. Perhaps a genuine outsider like Bill Bryson could have written about some of it in a detached, good-natured way. But clearly Mordechai Richler was not up to it. [And no, it does not help the book, nor the author's understanding, that he cannot speak (only reads) French, hence can only banter with bar-buddies, one-sidedly.]

Review of: "Robber Baron: Lord Black of Crossharbour" by George Tombs (ECW Press, 2007)

First, it cannot escape the reader's attention that in wooing his confidence to elicit information for his book, the author, George Tombs (in a far milder way) used wiles not unreminiscent of the ones that Conrad Black used to enhance his fortune -- but it is Conrad Black who now faces prison.

Fair enough. Black did it on an incomparably grander scale. So did just about everyone else in Tombs's book, as far as I can tell -- Black's partners and competitors, his supporters and detractors, his defense lawyers and the prosecution, to greater and lesser degrees. Humans are a deceitful and manipulative lot, to greater and lesser degrees, and when that degree passes a certain threshold, they need to be restrained or punished.

And Black undeniably passed that threshold. The only question is whether the proposed punishment is commensurate with his crime, and to this reader it is absolutely clear that it is not.

Conrad Black is a hero-worshipper (and his heroes -- numbering Duplessis, Nixon and Napoleon alongside Roosevelt and Churchill -- are not all admirable); he is a money-maker (skillful, lucky, but not especially creative, if one can be said to be creative at all in the direct quest for money, rather than the quest of something else, with money only a byproduct); he is an ostentatious spend-thrift on a grand scale (not a noble or admirable trait, when so many are so poor, but not in itself a crime); he is considerably more intelligent, learned and cultivated than average (and what intelligence he does not dedicate to money-making, he devotes to reading, writing and publishing on history and politics, likewise on a scale far above the average); his neo-conservative political views are not noble or admirable either (except to other neo-conservatives and money-makers), and, as always in such cases, they depend on a considerable degree of self-deception, alongside the usual quota of deceipt and manipulation.

Conrad Black's business ventures (consisting mostly of buying up newspapers and making them profitable by firing staff and tightening their efficiency) increased their revenues by billions, and he appropriated hundreds of millions for himself in the bargain, through both legitimate and inflated fees and inflated payments from "non-compete" agreements. His crime was pocketing those extra payments rather than passing most of them on to the share-holders of the private company that he had subsequently made into a public one (though I'll wager that he generated an order of magnitude more revenue for others -- "wealth creation" -- than the inflated fraction of it that he withheld illicitly for himself). He also wrote three thoughtful biographies (Duplessis, Roosevelt, Nixon), an autobiography, and a large number of newspaper articles, all in much the same neo-conservative vein. He consorted (and loved to consort) with the rich, titled, famous, and influential.

That's about the size of it. And the question is whether for that he deserves to spend years in a medium-security prison, alongside murderers, violent drug-dealers and mafiosi by way of punishment.

If we set aside our (justified) resentment at the unrestrained and remorseless pursuit of wealth and power (and Black's ideological celebration of that very pursuit), our glee at seeing a high-roller caught in the act of pilfering, our distaste (not untinged with envy) at the self-assured arrogance with which Black operated until his fall, and our (self-righteous) applause when corporate criminality is caught, exposed and punished -- can we really say that Black deserves anything worse for his crimes than to lose his fortune and prestige and to spend the rest of his days repaying his debts?

This urbane, knowledgeable, eloquent (if long-winded and hyperbolical) man was indeed caught in corporate crime that is on no account to be pardoned or permitted. But he was not violent, not psychopathic, and not (this must be stressed) purely venal either, being also an impassioned and resourceful advocate of a political position that I personally find revolting, but worthy of discussion and analysis, if only so that its iniquities can be exposed and rebutted.

I do not think anyone's interests are served, nor any useful example is made, by incarcerating such a man with violent criminals or even common Enron rogues. His assets should be seized to pay back his debts, but he should be allowed to write his memoirs in peace, exiled to his economic Elba, not the US penal system.

To punish Black any more than that would be to show exactly the same lack of understanding and empathy for those less fortunate than ourselves that Black himself showed in his single-minded pursuit of fame, power and fortune, and his benighted championship of that pursuit as the meaning of life.

There is no example to be set here, to warn off similar corporate malfeasance by others; there will never be another like Conrad Black, not even close.

(Tombs's book is fairly well-written, but quite repetitious, not always well-integrated, and with a number of undetected typos.)

Re: The God Theory

Yes, quantum mechanics has its puzzles, but it works, it predicts and explains, in every single case, no exceptions, whereas the arbitrary flummery the above book (for which I've only skimmed the blurb) favors merely fudges, feebly, after the fact.

There's nothing wrong with parameter-settings, by the way; they only seem arbitrary because empirical laws are not matters of necessity, the way mathematical laws are, but merely matters of contingency, in other words, "accidents". And asking "why" about them is only like asking "why" about 2+2=4 in the sense that with 2+2=4 the answer is always the same as the answer for any other mathematical law: "Because otherwise it would be self-contradictory." Whereas when we ask "why" the cosmological constant is what it is, or why the law of universal gravitation, etc., the answer is merely that if it were otherwise, according to the laws of the way it actually happens to be (as far as we know today) it would not work.

So contingencies are less satisfying than necessities. One must ask: why not? What is the function of explanation: to describe and predict correctly, objectively, or to give people a soothing subjective feeling? It's natural to ask for both, but the buck has to stop somewhere, and subjectivity is pretty restless except if it folds in on itself. So it never occurs to us to ask "why" about consciousness, or about god.

(Consciousness -- the fact that we feel -- is a cartesian "given" -- the given of all givens; god, of course, is merely an invention, without consciousness's privileged status of being, along with non-contradiction, the only other thing that is not open to doubt.)

But surely both are more arbitrary than the cosmological constants! Yet they
feel more like answers than questions -- to those who are naive and unexacting about such things...

I often wonder why the naive skeptic does not feel impelled to ask "why" even about the Platonic "law" of non-contradiction: Not, I think, because of either a profound grasp of or an abiding allegiance to logic, but rather because of the kind of subjective glazing-over and tuning-out that happens whenever we confront an argument that involves more logical steps than we can follow. We just say "yeah, yeah, whatever" -- too feeble-minded to either grasp or challenge.

So when we feel inclined to (completely capriciously) reduce all questions, answered and unanswered, answerable and unanswerable, to the one indubitable fact that we can always hold in mind all at once (as long as we are compos mentis, and sober), namely, the fact that we feel, we are simply confessing (without feeling it!) that when we asked for an "explanation" we never really meant, and would never have settled for, something objective, at all: When we ask "why" we are asking for the feeling that our question has been answered.

P.S. Although I'd never heard of him before, a few quick googlings suggest that the author is a fallen physicist, colloborator of another of the same ilk, "paraphysicist", and propounder of apparent voodoo about which a layman like myself can only say "yeah, yeah, whatever"... His "digital universe" -- in collaboration with wikipedia, apparently -- shows how closely "openness" cohabits with the quackery. (I sometimes think god has nothing better to do than to keep orchestrating cruel caricatures of my antics...)

From the fact that most adults and children believe in an immaterial, immortal soul, Paul Bloom, in Descartes’ Baby, concludes that this is somehow part of our evolved genetic heritage.

If so, then it would seem to follow, by the same token, that the belief in the divinity and supernatural powers of kings is likewise innate, and so are innumerable other beliefs, actual and potential, right down to Schultz’s Great Pumpkin.

More likely, our and our children’s belief in the soul arises from (1) our undoubtable (and undoubtedly evolved) Cartesian feeling that we ourselves feel (“cogito ergo sum” -- "sentio ergo sentitur"), (2) our less indubitable but nevertheless irresistible (and probably evolved) feeling that others that are sufficiently like us feel too (“mind-reading”), plus (3) our complete inability to explain either the causes or the effects of feelings physically (the “mind/body problem”), so that, when forced, the only explanation we feel at home with is telekinetic dualism (“mind over matter”).

I am not at all sure that this amounts to an innate belief in the soul, but if it does, we certainly didn’t need empirical studies of children or adults to demonstrate it: Descartes could have deduced it from his armchair by reason and introspection alone.

Paul Bloom also presents developmental data that he thinks bear upon the question of what is and is not art, and on why we prefer originals to forgeries or to misattributed works by lesser artists. The findings concern children’s ability to understand that a picture is a picture of an object, rather than just an object itself; that drawings they (or others) have drawn are drawings of what they meant to draw, even if they don’t look like them; that a deliberate artifact is different from an accidental one, or a natural object; and that whereas children may sometimes prefer copies of things to the originals, when it comes to their own teddy bears, they’d rather keep the original.

This tells us about children’s understanding of representation and intention, and their ability to make the artifact/non-artifact distinction, but not about the art/non-art let alone the good/bad art distinction. Nor do the findings on children’s attachments to particular things help, since the very same preference (for originals over copies or different objects) would apply to Eva Braun’s underwear (which would have some cult/fetish/collector value while believed to have been hers, none once proven otherwise); hence these findings are about authorship, not art.

As to "Descartes' Baby" -- an apocryphal story that Descartes was so grief-stricken at the death of his 5-year-old daughter Francine that he built a life-like robot of her that he took with him everywhere till it was discovered by a ship-captain who was so horrified by it that he threw it overboard: This is another example of our overwhelming (and no doubt innate) "mind-reading" tendency to interpret creatures that look and behave as if they feel as if they really do feel (even if the feeling that evokes in us is horror or disgust). This innate tendency of ours is put to more practical scientific use in Turing's Test.