All posts in category Fiction

What’s wrong with Sherlock Holmes

The other day, Aeon published an outstanding short essay by Professor Rima Basu of Claremont McKenna College. Professor Basu argues that, when applied to humans, the sort of detached, empathy-free reasoning dramatized in fiction by Sherlock Holmes is reliable neither as a source of factually accurate information nor as an incentive to morally acceptable behavior. Professor Basu writes:

Consider how upset Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters get with Sherlock Holmes for the beliefs this fictional detective forms about them. Without fail, the people whom Holmes encounters find the way he forms beliefs about others to be insulting. Sometimes it’s because it is a negative belief. Often, however, the belief is mundane: e.g., what they ate on the train or which shoe they put on first in the morning. There’s something improper about the way that Holmes relates to other human beings. Holmes’s failure to relate is not just a matter of his actions or his words (though sometimes it is also that), but what really rubs us up the wrong way is that Holmes observes us all as objects to be studied, predicted and managed. He doesn’t relate to us as human beings.

She continues:

This kind of indifference to the effect one has on others is morally criticisable. It has always struck me as odd that everyone grants that our actions and words are apt for moral critique, but once we enter the realm of thought we’re off the hook. Our beliefs about others matter. We care what others think of us.

I’m reminded of a little incident that took place five or ten years ago. I teach ancient Greek and Latin in a university in the midwestern USA. I was telling one of my classes, an ancient civilization class conducted in English, about family life in ancient Greece. My explanations usually tend to lean on the brutally economic side, so when I came to the custom of exchanging dowries, everything I said was about the role that dowry exchange played in underwriting joint business ventures between neighboring farmers.

One student who came up to me after this presentation was obviously struggling to restrain her anger. In fact, she was furious with me. She was from India, and when she got married, her family gave her husband a dowry. As she labored to keep herself calm, she explained to me that giving him a dowry wasn’t “about” the economic relationship between the households. It was “about” mutual respect between the families, it was “about” the idea of a common future, it was “about” a pledge to be available to each other in times of need.

Now, I had addressed all of those points in my presentation. But I had subordinated all of them all to the cold facts of the struggle for existence and the high stakes of trust in a subsistence economy. So at first, I just encouraged her to keep talking. After she seemed to have run out of things to say, I asked if she had reason to believe that anything I had said about the ancient Greeks was false. She thought for a second and said no, that it might all have looked that way in the cold light of economic analysis, but that the people inside the culture could never have looked at it in such a light. So I was missing the most important point of the whole custom by presenting it as I did.

The reference to Sherlock Holmes reminds me of an event in a story featuring one of the most appallingly wicked fictional characters ever to anchor a series of popular novels, Brigadier General Sir Harry Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE. In one of George MacDonald Fraser’s last Flashman stories, 1999’s Flashman and the Tiger, the old reprobate has managed to tangle himself up in some bad business with Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis Tiger Jack Moran. After Moran fails in the attempt, described in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” to assassinate Holmes, Flashman tries to escape arrest and disgrace by flopping down on the street and pretending to be a derelict in an alcoholic stupor. Two characters whom he does not name as Holmes and Watson come near:

If they’ve any sense they’ll just pass by, thinks I– well, don’t you, when you see some ragged bummaree sleeping it off in the gutter? But no, curse their nosiness, they didn’t. The footsteps stopped beside me, and I chanced a quick look at ’em through half-closed lids– a tall, slim cove in a long coat, bare-headed and balding, and a big, hulking chap with a bulldog moustache and a hard hat. They looked like a poet and a bailiff.

“What’s this?” said the bailiff, stooping over me.

“A tramp,” says the poet. “One of the flotsam, escaping his misery in a few hours of drunken slumber.”

“Think he’s all right?” says the bailiff, rot him, and blow me if he wasn’t fumbling for my pulse. “Going at full gallop,” says he, and blast his infernal impudence, he put a hand on my brow. “My goodness, but he’s feverish. D’you think we should get help for him?”

“You’ll get no thanks beyond a flood of curses if you do,” says the poet carelessly. “Really, doctor, even without close examination my nose can tell me more than your fingers. The fellow is hopelessly under the influence of drink– and rather inferior drink, at that, I fancy,” says he, stooping and sniffing at the fumes that were rising from my sodden breast. “Yes, American bourbon, unless I am mistaken. The odour is quite distinctive– you may have remarked that to the trained senses, each spirit has its own peculiar characteristics; I believe I have in the past drawn your attention to the marked difference between the rich, sugary aroma of rum, and the more delicate sweet smell of gin,” says this amazing lunatic. “But what now?”

The bailiff, having taken his liberties with my wrist and my brow, was pausing in the act of trying to lift one of my eyelids, and his next words filled me with panic.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “I believe I know this chap. But no, it can’t be surely– only he’s uncommonly like that old general… oh, what’s-his-name? You know, made such a hash of the Khartoum business, with Gordon… yes, and years ago he won a great name in Russia, and the Mutiny– VC and knighthood– it’s on the tip of my tongue–”

“My dear fellow,” says the high-pitched poet, “I can’t imagine who your general might be– it can hardly be Lord Roberts, I fancy– but it seems more likely that he would choose to sleep in his home or his club, rather than in an alley. Besides,” he went on wearily, stooping a little closer– and damned unnerving it was, to feel those two faces peering at me through the gloom, while I tried to sham insensible– “besides, this is a nautical, not a military man; he is not English, but either American or German– probably the latter, since he certainly studied at a second rate German university, but undoubtedly he has been in America quite lately. He is known to the police, is currently working as a ship’s steward, or in some equally menial capacity at sea, — for I observe that he has declined even from his modest beginnings– and will, unless I am greatly mistaken, be in Hamburg by the beginning of next week– provided he wakes up in time. More than that–” says the know-all ignoramus, “I cannot tell you from a superficial examination. Except of course for the obvious fact that he found his way here via Piccadilly Circus.”

“Well,” says the other doubtfully, “”I’m sure you’re right, but he looks extremely like old what’s-his-name. But how on earth can you tell so much about him from so brief a scrutiny?”

“You have not forgotten my methods since we last met, surely?” says the conceited ass, who I began to suspect was some kind of maniac. “Very well, apply them. Observe,” he went on impatiently, “that the man wears a pea-jacket, with brass buttons, which is seldom seen except on sea-faring men. Add that to the patent fact that he is a German, or German-American–”

“I don’t see,” began the bailiff, only to be swept aside.

“The dueling scars, doctor! Observe them, quite plain, close to the ears on either side.” He’d sharp eyes, all right, to spot those; a gift to me from Otto Bismarck, years ago. “They are the unfailing trade-mark of the German student, and since they have been inexpertly inflicted– you will note that they are too high– it is not too much to assume that he received them not at Heidelberg or Gottingen, but at some less distinguished academy. This suggests a middle-class beginning from which, obviously, he has descended to at least the fringes of crime.”

“How can you tell that?”

“The fine silver flask in his hand was not honestly acquired by such a seedy drunkard as this, surely. It is safe to deduce that its acquisition was only one of many petty pilferings, some of which must inevitably have attracted the attention of the police.”

“Of course! Well, I should have noticed that. But how can you say that he is a ship’s steward, or that he has been in America, or that he is going to Hamburg–”

“His appearance, although dissipated, is not entirely unredeemed. Some care has been taken with the moustache and whiskers, no doubt to compensate for the ravages which drink and evil living have stamped on his countenance.” I could have struck the arrogant, prying bastard, but I grimly kept on playing possum. “Again, the hands are well-kept, and the nails, so he is not a simple focsle hand. What, then, but a steward? The boots, although cracked, are of exceptionally good manufacture– doubtless a gratuity from some first-class passenger. As to his American sojourn, we have established that he drinks bourbon whisky, a taste for which is seldom developed outside the United States. Furthermore, since I noticed from the shipping lists this morning that the liner Brunnhilde has arrived in London from New York, and will leave on Saturday for Hamburg, I think we may reasonably conclude, bearing in mind the other points we have established, that here we have one of her crew, mis-spending his shore leave.”

“Amazing!” cries the bailiff. “And of course, quite simple when you explain it. My dear fellow, your uncanny powers have not deserted you in your absence!”

“I trust they are still equal, at least, to drawing such obvious inferences as these. And now, doctor, I think we have spent long enough over this poor, besotted hulk, who, I fear, would have provided more interesting material for a meeting of the Inebriation Society than for us. I think you will admit that this pathetic shell has little in common with your distinguished Indian general.”

“Unhesitatingly!” cries the other oaf, standing up, and as they sauntered off, leaving me quaking with relief and indignation– drunken ship’s dogsbody from a second-rate German university, indeed!– I heard him ask:

“But how did you know he got here by way of Piccadilly?”

“He reeked of bourbon whisky, which is not easy to obtain outside the American Bar, and his condition suggested he had filled his flask at least once since coming ashore…”

I waited until the coast was clear, and then creaked to my feet and hurried homeward, stiff and sore and stinking of brandy (bourbon, my eye! — as though I’d pollute my liver with that rotgut) and if my “besotted shell” was in poor shape, my heart was rejoicing.

(Pages 309-312 in George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Tiger, London, 1999)

(Someone called “Workshysteve” has recreated this scene in Lego here; it looks like this: )

by acilius on May 24, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Fiction, philosophy

Tagged flashman, george macdonald fraser, moral reasoning, rima basu, sherlock holmes

Posted by acilius on May 24, 2019

https://losthunderlads.com/2019/05/24/whats-wrong-with-sherlock-holmes/

Make-Believe Presidents

When you spend a lot of time hanging around a collection of books, particular items sometimes take up a place in your imagination whether or not you ever get around to reading them. For example, I spent a significant chunk of the 1980s in a used book store where a copy of Nicholas von Hoffman’s 1978 Make-Believe Presidents sat on a shelf. I never read that book; I’m not sure I ever opened it. But I can call the cover illustration to mind easily. It looked like this:

makebelievepresidents1

That book was apparently a study of the political realities that limit the actual power of US presidents. The title lingers in my mind as a heading, both for that topic, and for the genre of fictional works featuring imaginary characters in that office.

Since I posted something here the other day about another imaginary US president and his resonance with current events, I’ve spent a little time browsing through Wikipedia’s lists of hundreds of such characters. This guy sounds good:

President Geotekeezu-Chub’Chub-Pegaree (aka Andrew Wheatley/Geotkie)

President in George Morgan’s 1935 story Surprise in the White House
President Andrew Wheatley is elected in 2004 (a future date at the time of writing) after two terms as a Senator from Wisconsin. He is considered a mediocre politician, neither very Liberal not conspicuously Conservative, and no particularly noteworthy events are expected from his term – and so it seems in his first year. But in February 2006, a sensation does break out: Secret Service bodyguards apprehend Ward Bartolomeu, a White House confidential secretary, in the act of attempting to rape the First Lady, Mary Wheatley. When his trial opens in a blaze of nationwide publicity, Bartolomeu enters a bizarre plea: he asserts that the President and his wife are in fact humanoid extraterrestrials, descendants of the crew of an interstellar ship which crash-landed in Oliver Cromwell‘s England. Bartolomeu further asserts that the Presidential couple are in possession of a powerful unearthly aphrodisiac, produced under a formula handed down from their stellar ancestors, and that Bartolomeu had acted under its influence. Bartolomeu’s assertions are greeted with derision – until the President comes up as a defense witness, confirming all of these assertions and stating that Bartolomeu had unknowingly used a huge overdose of the aphrodisiac and was indeed unable to control himself. Thereupon, Bartolomeu is acquitted and Congress proceeds to impeach President Wheatley – some of its members believing that Wheatley is indeed an extraterrestrial, others considering him as suffering from major delusions and still others regarding him and his wife as grossly immoral – all of these divergent views alike being taken as grounds for impeachment. In the aftermath, the ex-President and his wife drop from view. An industrious journalist traces them to a hut at a fishermen’s village in Patagonia – but they refuse to talk to him. However, in 2011 the world is threatened by an imminent collision with a giant asteroid. Thereupon, the ex-President comes out of seclusion and offers to the League of Nations (still existent in this future) the knowledge of how to construct a powerful Repellor Ray Emitter,which is used in order to push the asteroid harmlessly away. Hailed as a hero and savior, he then runs again for the US Presidency in 2012 and is elected by a landslide – this time under his true name in his ancestral language, President Geotekeezu-Chub’Chub-Pegaree. In his inauguration, he pronounces the full name by its precise correct intonation. However, the public generally calls him “President Geotkie”. His wife – who has a similarly long, unearthly true name – becomes known as “First Lady Medgarie”. Geotkie serves three full terms (the story was written before the enactment of the Twenty-second Amendment), and becomes one of the most successful and highly-popular Presidents in American history. He makes available to the general public much scientific and technological knowledge passed down from his stellar ancestors – but is firm in suppressing and destroying the formula for the infamous aphrodisiac, which he considers too dangerous to unleash upon the world.

How many of President Geotekeezu-Chub’Chub-Pegaree’s real-life counterparts would even have the technical knowledge to build a Repellor Ray Emitter, I’d like to know. Probably the same number as would be willing to publicly admit to something embarrassing rather than let an innocent person go to prison.

Another book I’ve occasionally seen on shelves but have never read is The Canfield Decision, a novel by Spiro T. Agnew. Mr Agnew will long be remembered as the second Vice President of the United States to resign his office, and the first to do so in disgrace.* Due to its authors notoriety, The Canfield Decision sold well. Few who wrote about it were favorably impressed. Most reviewers focused on the novel’s dreary prose style and poor construction, while the many tactless remarks it contains about the relationship between Israel and American Jews and about the role of American Jews in shaping US public opinion gained a substantial amount of public attention, eliciting reactions ranging from disgust to outrage. I remember a mid-1970s bit on Saturday Night Live‘s fake news segment when a photograph of a fully robed Ku Klux Klansman appeared above the anchorman’s shoulder. The audience grew silent at this grim picture. The anchorman then spoke a sentence beginning “Former Vice President Spiro Agnew,” at which name they roared with laughter.

One of the kindest reviews of The Canfield Decision was written by John Kenneth Galbraith in the New York Times for 6 June 1976. Galbraith spends the first half of the review documenting the book’s literary failings and the bigoted views it expresses, and noting its author’s status as a convicted felon, a shameless demagogue, and an all-around blot on the national honor of the United States. But then he goes on to find some good things to say about it:

As the book proceeds, one does have the feeling that Mr. Agnew struggles less and gets better. Canfield, presiding over the Senate, has an excellent contest with the majority leader over clearing the galleries, one which ends with an adolescent getting pitched over the gallery railing. Canfield’s deeply compassionate concern with turning the incident to his advantage is also convincing. So throughout are his adverse comments on the press.

Mr. Agnew is admirable, as well on the details of Vice‐Presidential travel‐ a matter on which, as distinct perhaps from global conspiracy, he speaks out of experience. The procedures and folk‐rites of the Secret Service, air crew, staff advisers and assistants, speech ‐ writers, stenographers, welcoming committees, local politicians and especially the traveling press are described in sometimes loving detail, and he brilliantly establishes a truth that many must have sensed. It is that Vice‐Presidential movements serve no absolutely no‐public purpose of any kind whatever. Nor is there any reason why any paper or network should cover them, surplus funds or the distant chance of an aircrash or an assassination apart. And there is certainly no reason why the rest of us should pay for them. I contemplate a Vietnam‐type deduction from here on. Though Mr. Agnew establishes this important truth, he is not convincingly aware of it himself.

The “Canfield Decision” may not be a great novel. But Mr. Agnew reminds us of how many and diverse are the people who want to promote trouble between the Soviets and ourselves for their own private purposes. This reminder is especially useful right now as memory of the Vietnam debacle fades, and the Cold Warriors venture out again from under the stones… The book is also useful as a compendium of bureaucratic and other styles, although there is the problem of reading it. And no good citizen will urge Mr. Agnew, as he might another writer, to return to his previous way of life. All will want him to keep on trying. ■

*In 1832, John C. Calhoun resigned the vice presidency to accept a seat as US Senator from South Carolina. Agnew resigned as part of a plea agreement to avoid going to prison for bribery and tax evasion.

by acilius on January 30, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Fiction

Tagged john kenneth galbraith, nicholas von hoffman, President Geotekeezu-Chub'Chub-Pegaree, Spiro Agnew

Posted by acilius on January 30, 2019

https://losthunderlads.com/2019/01/30/make-believe-presidents/

Secret Agent Pope: An idea for a novel

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time reading about the scandals and controversies in the Roman Catholic Church. I’ve never been a Roman Catholic myself; I was an agnostic from childhood until a few years ago, and am now a moderately progressive Anglican.

Not being Roman Catholic, it doesn’t matter to me who the pope is, who his friends are, or what policies they favor, not any more that it would matter to a Roman Catholic who is elected to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church or what measures that Convention adopts. I’m against popes as such, even as Roman Catholics are unimpressed by the General Convention as such, and so no particular pope is going to change my position on the basic issue that divides us. Now, there are other concerns that justify paying attention to these matters. The Roman Catholic Church does command the allegiance of half the world’s Christians, and so all of the rest of us do have to take note of what happens to that institution. And I am a Latin teacher by occupation, so I hope that whoever comes out on top will revive the Vatican’s efforts to keep up interest in that language. Also, in the 1980s I used to watch Insight, a TV show produced by the Paulist Fathers; I wish they’d make that show more widely available, maybe posting all of the episodes in some streaming format. It’s uneven in quality and very much a product of its time, but the best episodes hold up really well. I would also point out that a lot of popes give themselves funny names, and whenever they elect a new pope I hope he’ll hang a moniker on himself that will give the world a much needed belly laugh.

The most serious reason for a non-Roman Catholic to care what happens in the Vatican is that the four distinct but closely interrelated scandals now coming to light involve great evils that everyone should oppose. We are learning more about the the already long familiar epidemic of sexual abuse of children by priests. We have been introduced to the topic of sexual harassment of young clergymen by their superiors, initially in connection with ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who apparently treated the seminarians and young priests under his authority the way Harvey Weinstein treated actresses whose careers he could make or break. We’ve also started to hear solid information about blackmail as a means of advancement within the hierarchy. Perhaps most serious of all these scandals is to be found in the concerted efforts by church authorities to conceal those misdeeds and to shield their perpetrators from punishment. So I want those four things to be stopped.

Not that scandal is unique to the Roman Catholics. We have our share of scandals in Anglicanism too; the Anglican Church of Canada had to declare bankruptcy in 2000 because so many survivors of sex abuse by priests had already proven their cases against it in court. I’ve mentioned that bankruptcy several times in discussions of what’s happening with the Roman Catholics. In 2000, the Anglican Church of Canada had never had a celibate clergy, it had been ordaining women for decades, and was notably friendly to sexual minority groups. So when my liberal Roman Catholic friends say that letting priests marry, ordaining women, and dropping the official anti-gay line will be sure to solve the problem, I have to caution that, while those actions may have good effects and they may be desirable in themselves, they may not accomplish what you think they will accomplish. Still, the sheer size of the Roman Catholic Church, its power and wealth, may have something to do with the scale to which these abuses have grown. It is natural to want to sweep problems under the rug, and when you have the world’s biggest rug whatever you sweep under there can grow to massive proportions.

One of the main things I’ve been looking at for news about the scandals has been Rod Dreher’s blog. He has something about it almost every day. His biases are very clear, but he is a professional journalist and does retract stories that have been proven false, which puts him in the top .0001% of people* who write about this topic on a regular basis. Yesterday I wrote a comment there which, as I think about it, includes the kernel for a novel someone might write. The novelist should be Roman Catholic, well-connected in the Vatican, an experienced journalist, and with some expertise regarding international espionage. I am none of those things, so I shouldn’t write it myself. But here is the comment, for what it’s worth:

@Siarlys Jenkins: “I don’t include Argentina, because no American intervention was needed, and I’m not sure the CIA knew who they really wanted to support there.”

I often think of something by a CIA veteran (Philip Giraldi?) I read some years ago in the pages of the magazine that maintains this website. Reviewing the CIA’s policy of paying bonuses to officers who recruit local informants, the author argued that the policy produced a large number of agents whose main qualification was that they were easy to recruit. He summed his point up by saying, not only that there ought not be the same bonus paid for recruiting an African police chief as for recruiting an agent who is placed in a genuinely sensitive post, but that there ought to be no bonus paid for recruiting an African police chief.

What brings this to mind is that what is true of African police chiefs might very well be true of Latin American bishops. They are generally pretty cozy with the same elements of the local elites who are most comfortable with overt US intervention, most of them are hated by the same people who most worry the CIA, and, as we’ve seen from all these scandals, bishops are not, as a group, entirely averse to associating with people who are in a position to provide them with a pleasant life.

So, it may not be unreasonable to wonder whether the situation at the top of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Latin America is altogether alien to the situation in the Russian Orthodox Church. If there is an analogy to be drawn there, even if Bergoglio was never a CIA agent himself, he would likely have been exposed to a great deal of information about his fellow bishops that he would find it more convenient to forget as completely as possible than to spend any time analyzing for its obvious implications.

Considering the ever-growing mountain of evidence that he and his henchmen have cultivated a habit of ignoring and forgetting information about the sexual proclivities of their fellow prelates, it would not be difficult to suppose that her and they have applied the same habit to other forms of compromising behavior they have reason to believe exists. Should it ever be proven that the CIA has deeply penetrated the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Latin America, it would raise a whole new dimension of doubt about Bergoglio’s motives.

This is an idea for a novel, not a proposal for an investigation, because I have no reason at all to suppose that it is true. As I put it in a follow-up comment, “there are these two secretive organizations that have, for their own reasons, created a vacuum of information that is big enough that a story like that could fit inside it without contradicting anything we do know.”

One sub-plot I would like to see in this novel would be a workplace sitcom set in the Oval Office of the President of the United States. The CIA is a headache for the president to deal with even when they are on a losing streak. One day in the early 2010’s he is informed that an asset of theirs has been elected pope. Ugh, thinks he. Now I’m in for it. And indeed the Director of Central Intelligence makes himself well-nigh intolerable around the uppermost echelons of the US national security state from that point on.

Perhaps the main character should be a liberal journalist who has been covering, let’s call him Cardinal Bocchini, for the several years he has been Archbishop of, let’s say Santiago de Chile. When Cardinal Bocchini is elected the first pope from the Western hemisphere (though his parents were born in Italy, and he has been an Italian citizen all his life, and he spoke Italian before he spoke Spanish, and his family has maintained such close connections to Italy that his sister settled there, his residence in Chile allows him to be presented to the press as a non-European pope,) she is apprehensive. He has made very harsh remarks about sexual minorities, leading a campaign identifying gender-neutral marriage with Satan. And he has made strongly nationalistic remarks supporting Chile’s territorial claims against its neighbors, remarks timed to heighten tensions between Chile and Peru and reflective of Bocchini’s connections with some rather dark elements of the Chilean military and security services. Bocchini also has a notably bad record on sex abuse; virtually alone among the world’s major archdioceses, Santiago has not publicized a single case of clerical sex abuse in the previous fifteen years. While some of Bocchini’s most fervent supporters say that this is because the Holy Spirit has protected Santiago to leave no doubt that Bocchini is the man to lead the Roman Catholic Church out of the era of scandal, the heroine’s investigations as a journalist reporting on the church have led her to believe that Bocchini is simply the most skilled of the hierarchy’s cover-up artists.

Bocchini is not only the first pope to have lived most of his life in the Western Hemisphere; he is also the first Jesuit pope. He takes the name Ignatius to honor both the founder of his order and Saint Ignatius of Antioch. The heroine is assigned to Rome to cover Pope Ignatius.

At first, she is pleasantly surprised by his apparently relaxed attitude toward sexual minorities and relieved that, having become a world figure, he has backed off his Chilean irredentism. She is swept up in the new pope’s popularity, and emerges as a favorite of his, frequently among the first reporters recognized in the impromptu press conferences he gives aboard airplanes. She allows herself to be drawn in sufficiently that she cleans up some of the remarks he makes in these notoriously freewheeling sessions. With every favorable story she sends out, she gains more and more access to the pope and his inner circle.

As time goes on, she notices more and more things that don’t fit with the benevolent image she has been helping to project. Five years into his papacy, scandals begin breaking all around Pope Ignatius. The pope’s inner circle turns to the heroine in the first rush of these scandals, hoping that she will spin them as effectively as she has spun so many of the pope’s indiscreet airborne comments. They are quickly disappointed in her, however. From her vantage point, she had seen all those scandals brewing, and had reached the conclusion that the pope was not committed to correcting the abuses at the heart of them. What’s more, her proximity to the pope and his top advisers has led her to suspect that he has a relationship with the CIA.

She presses her investigations as far as she can within the Vatican. She loses favor with the pope and his men, and finds herself called back to Santiago. Her paper assigns her to cover farm news. In between trips to chicken farms and agricultural board hearings, she continues to look into the pope’s past, and turns up information that is far more explosive than she had thought possible.

So, that might make a fat little paperback that will induce a lot of frequent flyers to part with their money in the bookstores at the airports.

*A rough estimate.

by acilius on September 26, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Current Events, Fiction, religion, Thunderlads at Large

Tagged rod dreher, spy vs spy, the pope

Posted by acilius on September 26, 2018

https://losthunderlads.com/2018/09/26/secret-agent-pope-an-idea-for-a-novel/

The dead end above us

A recent note on Slate about Tom Gauld’s Mooncop discusses Mr Gauld’s vision of life in a decrepit and soon-to-be-abandoned lunar colony as “the residue of an older fantasy,” of the Cold War-era dream of thriving human settlements on other planetary bodies.

No doubt there is an element of this at work in Mr Gauld’s imagination, and in other visions of a future in which settlements and stations in outer space are decaying, forgotten remnants of failed enterprises of expansion. Films such as Moon (2009) and The Martian (2015,) with individual space travelers alone on the surface of alien worlds, play to the image of outer space as a realm of abandonment. Yet such visions were part of science fiction before the end, or even the beginning, of the US-Soviet Space Race. Even the founding text of space travel-themed science fiction, Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865,) ends tragically, with its heroes forever separated from the rest of humanity, dying pointlessly in a metal ball orbiting the Moon. A work like Olaf Stapledon’s First and Last Men (1930) is steeped in an overwhelming sense of decline, introducing one species after another descended from humans, each of which meets extinction in its own way.

Some of the most prominent science fiction productions of the Cold War days also represent space travel as a dead end. Robert Altman’s film Countdown (1968) depicts a US project to land a man on the Moon. The film ends with a lone astronaut wandering the lunar surface, finding a crashed Soviet space-craft and the corpses of the cosmonauts. The final moments of the film are ambiguous, as the astronaut finds a device that may or may not enable him to escape back to the Earth. The overall sense of loss and futility is the same as that with which Verne’s novel ends. The relationship between the cosmonaut and the planetary being in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) develops the same feeling of isolation and helplessness, though where Altman contrasts the isolation his astronaut suffers on the Moon with the professional camaraderie and relatively satisfactory married life he had enjoyed in his life in Texas, Tarkovsky’s film is openly critical of the Soviet Union as a place where the kind of social isolation his cosmonaut suffers in space is commonplace on Earth.

Arthur Clarke, a novelist strongly influenced by Olaf Stapledon’s work, returned throughout his career to a story set a thousand million years in the future. He turned this story into novels twice, as Against the Fall of Night (1953) and The City and the Stars (1956,) and explored it in many of the unfinished tales published in The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001.) The heart of the story is that humans had once created a vast stellar empire, an empire fragments of which perhaps still existed in some remote corners of space, but that the Earth had been separated from this empire, and its people had forgotten the major points of the empire’s history. The abandoned empire, the isolated Earth, and the forgotten history of the conquest of space are also the background of a much more famous series, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels (1942-1993.)

The two most familiar products of Cold War science fiction are Star Trek (1966-1969) and Star Wars (1977.) The image of outer space as a realm of unkept promises figures in those as well.

The background of Star Wars is a fight, not to claim new territory or develop new settlements, but to restore the liberties of a lost Republic. We meet the hero, a young man unaware of his true parentage and his lofty destiny, in the grubby place of exile which he has grown up regarding as his home. Using battered ships, antique weapons, and a plotline recycled from 1930s movie serials, the good guys score a victory for their nostalgic cause.

While Star Trek is set in the early days of an expanding interstellar federation, in many episodes our heroes encounter the ruins of lost civilizations and other traces of abandoned developments. The initial pilot, “The Cage”(produced in 1964-1965,) shows us the ship’s captain as the prisoner of a species who have retreated underground after a war found millennia before, and while there have lost so completely lost their technological skills that they can no longer “even repair the machines left behind by their ancestors” and are faced with inevitable extinction.

Many other episodes show societies that have declined from extraordinary heights of technological development into primitive conditions, conditions that suggest either control of the population by a computer mistaken for a deity (for example, “Return of the Archons,” “The Apple,” and “For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky,”) impending doom (for example, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?,” “Miri,” and “The Paradise Syndrome,”) or disconnection between intellectual and carnal satisfactions, resulting in a society of casual sadism and implied cannibalism (for example, “The Man Trap,” “Return to Tomorrow,” “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” “Spock’s Brain,” and “Turnabout Intruder.”)

Nor does Star Trek present decline and abandonment as things that happen only in alien cultures. We meet such luminaries from the history of the Earth as a former ruler of India (“Space Seed,”) the inventor of faster-than-light travel (“Metamorphosis,”) the god Apollo (“Who Mourns for Adonais?,”) and Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan (“The Savage Curtain,”) all forgotten and imprisoned in the infinite void of deep space. Our heroes encounter nightmarish doppelganger versions of political entities such as the Roman Empire (“Bread and Circuses,”) the United States of America (“A Piece of the Action” and “The Omega Glory,”) and Nazi Germany (“Patterns of Force,”) showing that space is a realm in which not only individual humans can become isolated and powerless, but that whole human societies can be cut off, condemned to stagnation and historical irrelevance, by a misconceived response to technological development.

In developing an image of outer space as a realm of isolation, abandonment, decline, and helplessness, this line of science fiction writers from Jules Verne to Tom Gauld may be harking back quite far into literary history. It is often said that Lucian (circa 125-circa 180 CE)’s “True History,” a satirical tale recounting a journey to the Moon, is the first science fiction story. Lucian’s story is itself more than a little reminiscent of two plays by Aristophanes (circa 450 BCE- circa 386 BCE,) The Birds (414 BCE) and Peace (421 BCE.) In each of those plays, disreputable characters fly to the heavens and pull off unlikely schemes.

Particularly relevant to our discussion is the scene in Peace when Trygaeus, a poor farmer, arrives in the heavens, having flown there on the back of a giant dung-beetle. Trygaeus’ goal is to arrest Zeus and prosecute him in the courts of Athens for having allowed the wars among the Greek states to go on so long that Greece is weakened and in danger of a takeover by the Persian Empire. Once in the heavens, Trygaeus finds that Zeus and almost all of the other gods have abandoned their usual realm, going off deeper into space in their disgust at the warlike habits of the Greeks. Only Hermes remains in his usual spot, and he is a degraded figure, so impoverished that that Trygaeus can easily bribe him with a small bag of meat, so powerless that when the god of war and some of his minions come through, Hermes hides from them. The lower heaven from which the rest of the gods have departed is as much a realm of isolation, abandonment, decline, and helplessness for Hermes as any of the heavenly bodies are for the characters of the gloomier sort of science fiction.

by acilius on December 3, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Comics, Fiction

Tagged science fiction, slate, Star Trek, tom gauld

Posted by acilius on December 3, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/12/03/the-dead-end-above-us/

The man who has lived by truth leaves you with nothing

Just read the newly discovered Dr. Seuss book. Can't believe Sam-I-Am turned out to be a racist.

— Daniel Radosh (@danielradosh) July 29, 2015

When Harper Lee’s manuscript Go Set a Watchman, the story to which her novel To Kill a Mockingbird was written as an extended prologue, was published early this summer, I realized that I, unlike virtually everyone else who graduated from a high school in the USA in the last three decades, had never read To Kill a Mockingbird. So I borrowed the copy my wife’s tenth grade English teacher gave her and read that before our copy of Go Set a Watchman came in the mail.

I’m glad I read them back to back. The key passage in Go Set a Watchman is an imaginary conversation Jean Louise, a.k.a. Scout, Finch has in her head with her friends in New York after she comes home to Alabama and discovers that her adored father is the head of Maycomb County’s white supremacist Citizens’ Council:

New York. New York? I’ll tell you how New York is. New York has all the answers. People go to the YMHA, the English-Speaking Union, Carnegie Hall, the New School for Social Research, and find the answers. The city lives by slogans, isms, and fast sure answers. New York is saying to me right now: you, Jean Louise Finch, are not reacting according to our doctrines regarding your kind, therefore you do not exist. The best minds in the country have told us who you are. You can’t escape it, and we don’t blame you for it, but we do ask you to conduct yourself within the rules that those who know have laid down for your behavior, and don’t try to be anything else.

She answered: please believe me, what has happened in my family is not what you think. I can say only this- that everything I learned about human decency I learned here. I learned nothing from you except how to be suspicious. I didn’t know what hate was until I lived among you and saw you hating every day. They even had to pass laws to keep you from hating. I despise your quick answers, your slogans in subways, and most of all I despise your lack of good manners: you’ll never have ’em as long as you exist.

The man who could not be discourteous to a ground-squirrel had sat in the courthouse abetting the cause of grubby-minded little men. Many times she had seen him in the grocery store waiting his turn in line behind Negroes and God knows what. She had seen Mr Fred raise his eyebrows at him, and her father shake his head in reply. He was the kind of man who instinctively waited his turn; he had manners.

Look sister, we know the facts: you spent the first twenty one years of your life in lynching country, in a county whose population is two thirds agricultural Negro. So drop the act.

You will not believe me, but I will tell you: never in my life until today did I hear the word “n****r” spoken by a member of my family. Never did I think in terms of The N*****s. When I grew up, and I did grow up with black people, they were Calpurnia, Zeebo the garbage collector, Tom the yard man, and whatever else their names were. There were hundreds of Negroes surrounding me, they were the hands in the fields, who chopped the cotton, who worked the roads, who sawed the lumber to make our houses. They were poor, they were diseased and dirty, some were lazy and shiftless, but never in my life was I given the idea that I should despise one, should fear one, should be discourteous to one, or think that I could mistreat one and get away with it. They as a people did not enter my world, not did I enter theirs: when I went hunting I did not trespass on a Negro’s land, not because it was a Negro’s, but because I was not supposed to trespass on anybody’s land. I was taught never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself, whether he be less fortunate in brains, wealth, or social position; it meant anybody, not just Negroes. I was given to understand that the reverse was to be despised. That is the way I was raised, by a black woman and a white man.

You must have lived it. If a man says to you, “This is the truth,” and you believe him, and you discover what he says is not the truth, you are disappointed and you make sure you will not be caught out by him again.

But a man who has lived by truth- and you have believed in what he has lived- he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing.

I think virtually the whole of To Kill a Mockingbird can be explained as an attempt to clarify this passage. Throughout Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise’s father Atticus Finch is described as the perfect type of the Southern gentleman, truthful, courageous, gallant, modest, unfailingly courteous. Yet he does almost nothing in that book. To Kill a Mockingbird gives these words the force of actions that match them. And so, having read To Kill a Mockingbird, when in Go Set a Watchman Jean Louise reacts to Atticus’ addressing her as Scout with the furious thought that he had forfeited all right ever to use her childhood nickname, the reader’s heart breaks as it would not were Atticus merely the list of adjectives piled up next to his name in Go Set a Watchman.

What Jean Louise describes as “the way I was raised” by her father Atticus and their housekeeper Calpurnia sounds pretty dreary from some perspectives. Atticus lived by truth in that he, unlike other whites of his class and time, waited his turn when African Americans were in line ahead of him at the grocery. His African American neighbors may have appreciated the courtesy, but it certainly did not cost him much, and to reward him for it by citing it as evidence of his superiority to his “grubby-minded” white neighbors sounds almost like a joke.

Moreover, that Atticus and Calpurnia raised Jean Louise to be courteous to everyone who had been placed at a disadvantage to her, including African Americans, and to cite this as evidence that the Finches were better than were the ill-bred whites who exploited their advantages and whom she was therefore taught to despise is to accept as a simple fact that is not subject to change that African Americans are and ever will be at a disadvantage to whites in regard to “brains, wealth, or social position.”

Compare the Atticus Finch of Go Set a Watchman who teaches Jean Louise that her obligations towards African Americans are rooted in their status as her inferiors and that she has the same obligations towards her white inferiors as she has towards her black ones with the Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird saying that the lowest of all creatures is a white man who takes advantage of the ignorance of a Negro. In both cases, Atticus is teaching that whites are to regard themselves as noble by comparison with African Americans, that nobility creates obligations, and that the most profound moral failure is a failure to meet those obligations. In both cases, Atticus conceives the great moral drama of life taking place among white men, with white women as spectators and African Americans as props.

Seeing this in the abstract, as it is presented throughout Go Set a Watchman, despite the book’s many hilarious, touching, and gorgeously crafted stories of Jean Louise’s childhood, is to remain in the position of Jean Louise’s New York friends, looking down on her as an unconscious racist. If that were the only position the book allowed us to take, it would in fact be what some critics said To Kill a Mockingbird was, a Southern novel for people who hate the South. Coupled with To Kill a Mockingbird, however, we can see that this attitude, the very thing that put Atticus Finch at the head of the Citizens’ Council in the mid-1950s, was what led him to defend Tom Robinson in the mid-1930s. Indeed, the portrayal of Dolphus Raymond in To Kill a Mockingbird, and to some extent the portrayal of Atticus’ brother Dr John Hale Finch in Go Set a Watchman, suggest the man who could have emerged as an ally of the African American freedom struggle in the 1950s might not have been any more use to anyone in rural Alabama in the 1930s than was Atticus in the 1950s. Perhaps all of us are like that, heroes or villains as circumstances call for, and the lucky ones are those who rise to the occasion when circumstances call for the heroic side of their personalities.

Many have faulted Go Set a Watchman for its obvious lack of editorial revision; one review was titled “Go Get an Editor.” There are some parts where this lack is a serious problem. For example, when Jean Louise goes to call on Calpurnia on the occasion of Calpurnia’s favorite grandson’s arrest on a manslaughter charge that is likely to ruin him and blight the whole family’s prospects, she is shocked to find that Calpurnia and her family are looking at her, to whom Calpurnia was virtually a mother, and not seeing her, but seeing only “white folks.” That’s a poignant moment, and should be one of the centerpieces of the novel. However, the conversation between Jean Louise and Calpurnia is so jaggedly narrated that it is difficult to tell who is speaking to whom, and so abruptly phrased that it all collapses into Jean Louise’s regard for herself and her own feelings, feelings that apparently lead her to forget all about Calpurnia’s grandson and the rest of her family almost immediately upon noticing that Calpurnia isn’t particularly excited to see her. The rest of Go Set a Watchman doesn’t have trouble assigning lines to characters and doesn’t depict Jean Louise as a bizarrely self-absorbed person, so I’m sure that a rewrite would have straightened that scene out.

The ending of Go Tell a Watchman is quite disturbing, letting Atticus and the Finches off the hook almost completely. That’s a shame for a novel that faces up to so many of the challenges of the period, but it is no different from To Kill a Mockingbird. At the end of that book, Atticus has had some unpleasant afternoons, but he is reelected to the state legislature without opposition, still practicing law, still living in the same house, still welcomed by the same friends. I do wonder if people who claim that the sensibility of Go Set a Watchman is less progressive on race than is that of To Kill a Mockingbird were quite honest with themselves when they read To Kill a Mockingbird, or if to them it really was just a Southern novel for people who hate the South.

I wonder about some other things. Around the time Harper Lee was deciding to put Go Set a Watchman in a drawer and to write a novel about the childhood of its main character, Edmund Wilson was criticizing William Faulkner’s later novels for devoting too many pages to long speeches in which wise but flawed old men defend segregation, speeches which are supposed to make an international audience understand and respect the viewpoint of the white South, but which because of their length and because nothing in the plots of the novels highlights any of the weaknesses in their reasoning seem very much to reflect the author’s own views. The horror with which Jean Louise reacts to her discovery that Atticus is the head of the Citizens’ Council distances her and Harper Lee from Atticus’ and Dr John Hale Finch’s pro-segregation speeches, but the ending of Go Set a Watchman, together with the length of the speeches, does give it something of the same problem, and because the worst things Jean Louise learns about the Citizen’s Council are the speeches and writings it promotes, it would be quite a challenge to make Atticus and his brother understandable characters without giving them long, largely unrebutted speeches in self-defense. So perhaps one of the reasons she set the prequel in the 1930s was that the tacit understandings of that time would make such speeches unnecessary, and another part was that the 1930s were Faulkner’s heyday, at least in terms of critical acclamation, and a Southern novel set in that period might not raise the suspicions of Edmund Wilson the way a novel with a contemporary setting would.

Amasa Coleman Lee, who was not universally regarded as a Gregory Peck lookalike

Ms Lee’s decision not to publish Go Set a Watchman after the success of To Kill a Mockingbird is not so hard to explain. Atticus Finch was pretty clearly based on her father, Amasa Coleman Lee. On the set of the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, Ms Lee saw actor Gregory Peck made up as Atticus Finch and was moved to tears, saying “Oh Gregory, you’ve got a little pot belly just like my Daddy.” To which Peck, with the film star’s consciousness of his appearance, rather stiffly replied, “No Nell, it just looks that way because of my acting.” Anyway, having introduced her father to the world as the prototype of a character so beloved that thousands of boys would be named “Atticus” in his honor, it would take quite a bit of chutzpah to turn around and publish a novel in which she made it clear that whatever her father’s virtues may have been, his vices included a racism so disgusting that at times she couldn’t bear to hear him say her name.

So, if you read either book, I recommend you read them both. Treat To Kill a Mockingbird as an extended prologue to Go Set a Watchman, and the two books together will shatter complacencies you didn’t know you had.

by acilius on August 11, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Book Review, Fiction

Tagged harper lee

Posted by acilius on August 11, 2015

https://losthunderlads.com/2015/08/11/the-man-who-has-lived-by-truth-leaves-you-with-nothing/

In which I demonstrate that I am the world’s nerdiest nerd

In a recent email exchange with the cofounders of this blog, known here as VThunderlad and Lefalcon, I shared some thoughts about Star Trek, including a synopsis of an idea for a new Star Trek movie. Find the relevant bits below the jump.

(more…)

by acilius on July 12, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Fiction, Nostalgia

Tagged philip k dick, Star Trek

Posted by acilius on July 12, 2014

https://losthunderlads.com/2014/07/12/in-which-i-demonstrate-that-i-am-the-worlds-nerdiest-nerd/

the Help: A Book Review

Title: the Help Type: Fiction

By Kathryn Stockett

What I like about the book.

My favorite character is Aibileen, and my favorite relationship is the relationship between Aibileen and the little girl she cares for, Mae Mobley. I am delighted to discover that Aibileen is teaching Mae Mobley not to judge people based on their skin color. She does this by taking advantage of her special times alone with the little girl. During these times, she tells Mae stories that capture Mae’s attention. One such story begins on page 234 and is about two little girls who cannot figure out why one of them is black and one is white. The girls point out that they both have hair, a nose and toes. They decide that their skin color is all that is different about them, and that they will be friends. Telling Mae Mobley these stories is very brave on Aibileen’s part. I am sure real people in her position in 1960’s Jackson Mississippi were killed for a lot less.

Aibileen is also concerned about how Mae Mobley feels about herself. Most of the attention Mae gets from her mother is negative, and Mae Mobley has taken to saying “Mae Mobley bad”. Aibileen decides to try to boost Mae’s self-esteem by getting Mae to say good things about herself each day. Aibileen says, “’You a smart girl. You a Kind girl, Mae Mobley. You hear me?’ And I keep saying it till she repeat it back to me” (P. 107).

Even in times of sadness and stress Aibileen is careful to do what’s right. On her last day with Mae Mobley, Mae has a high fever, and both Aiboleen and Mae are crying. When Mae Mobley asks if Aibileen is leaving to care for another little girl Aibileen says, “’No, baby, that’s not the reason. I don’t want a leave you, but’… How do I put this? I can’t tell I’m fired, I don’t want her to blame her mama and make it worse between em. ‘It’s time for me to retire. You my last little girl’” (P. 520).

I wonder if there were a lot of maids like Aibileen in real life 1960’s Missisippi. Black women loving and caring for white children. Loving those children enough to risk their own lives to teach them that good people come in different colors. I wonder if some of those children grew up to have a positive impact on race relations and other aspects of society.

What I do not like about the book.

I am keeping this part short because I do not want it to take over this review like it took over the book. I hate the poop pie. I am very disappointed in Kathryn Stockett for putting it in what could have been one of the most interesting works of fiction on race relations. This book cannot be considered for such an honor now. I think I know Minny better than Kathryn Stockett. Do I think Minny would have gotten the better of Hilly? Do I think she would have taught Hilly a much needed lesson? I most certainly do, but Minny would not have committed such a crime to do it.

Note to Sociologists

This would make a great introductory to doing social research.

by believer1 on January 21, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Book Review, Fiction

Tagged book review

Posted by believer1 on January 21, 2012

https://losthunderlads.com/2012/01/21/the-help-a-book-review/

Justified True Belief

There are a couple of passages where Plato seems to define knowledge as “justified true belief.” So, if you have enough evidence that you have a right to accept a given proposition as true, if you do in fact exercise this right and accept that proposition as true, and if it so happens that the proposition is true, then Plato might have said that your belief in that proposition is an example of knowledge.

This definition was occasionally challenged in an oblique sort of way in the first 24 centuries after Plato put it forward, but it was still uncontroversial enough that philosophers could use it matter-of-factly as late as the 1950s. In 1963, Professor Edmund L. Gettier of Wayne State University wrote a very short, indeed tiny, article in which he gave two counterexamples to the definition of knowledge as justified true belief. Here is example one:

Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:

Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.

Smith’s evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones’s pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails:

The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.

Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.

But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones’s pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job.

Here Smith is justified in believing that “The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket,” and it is in fact true that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. However, the same evidence which justifies that true belief also justifies Smith’s false belief that Jones will get the job. In Smith’s mind, these two beliefs are so intertwined that the true proposition is unlikely to figure in any line of reasoning uncoupled from the false one. Moreover, since Smith does not realize that he himself has ten coins in his pocket, nor presumably that there is any applicant for the job other than Jones who has ten coins in his pocket, there is no reason to suppose that he would regard such a proposition as anything other than a statement that Jones will get the job. So, true though the proposition may be, and justified as Smith may be in accepting it as true, his belief in it can lead him to nothing but error.

This counterexample is of course highly contrived, as is Professor Gettier’s second counterexample. That doesn’t matter. His only goal was to show that there can be justified true beliefs which we would not call knowledge, not that such beliefs are particularly commonplace. Having given even one counterexample, Professor Gettier showed that justified true belief is not an adequate definition of knowledge. Needless to say, Plato himself would probably have been thrilled with these counterexamples. One can easily imagine him starting from them and proceeding to spin out a whole theory of justification, perhaps based on the idea that what we have a right to believe varies depending on the plane of existence to which our belief pertains, or that justification isn’t really justification unless the subject is approaching the topic in the true character of a philosopher, or some such Platonistic thing.

As it happens, Professor Gettier’s article was followed by a great many publications giving “Gettier-style” counterexamples, including many that are far more natural and straightforward than his original two. Evidently all that needed to be done was to give some counterexamples, and the floodgates of creativity came open. Professor Gettier himself did not write any of these articles, or indeed any articles at all after his 1963 paper.

Once you’ve read the 1963 paper, you may begin to notice naturally-occurring Gettier-style counterexamples. The first novel I read after I was introduced to this topic about 20 years ago was Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds. Trollope is not often called a philosophical novelist. However, a Gettier-style counterexample lies at the heart of this novel. Lizzie Eustace is the childless widow of Sir Florian Eustace. Among Sir Florian’s possessions had been a diamond necklace valued at £ 10,000. Lady Eustace claimed that Sir Florian wanted her to have the necklace, and so insisted on treating it as her own; however, the Eustace family lawyer claimed that it was a family heirloom, entailed to Sir Florian’s blood relations, and so that it should revert to the family in event of his death without issue. While this dispute was moving towards the courts, a person or persons unknown broke into a safe where Lady Eustace was known to keep the necklace. The burglary was discovered; the necklace was not there. Lady Eustace did not tell the police what was in fact true, that she had taken the necklace from the safe before the burglary and still had it in her possession. The leader of the police investigation is Inspector Gage, a wily and experienced detective who quickly arrives at the conclusion that Lady Eustace has stolen the necklace herself, likely in conjunction with her lover, Lord George de Bruce Carruthers.

In fact, Inspector Gage is mistaken not only about Lady Lizzie’s complicity in the burglary, but also about the nature of her relationship with Lord George and about Lord George’s character. For all that they seem like lovers, and for all that Lady Eustace would like to become Lord George’s lover, they never quite come together. And for all that Lord George’s sources of income are shrouded in mystery, he proves in the end to be thoroughly law-abiding. However, the collection of evidence on which the inspector bases his theory is so impressive that if it did not justify him believing it, one can hardly imagine how anyone could be justified in believing anything. So those three propositions could be classified as justified false beliefs. At the nub of them all, however, is a justified true belief: that the necklace is in the possession of Lady Eustace. Surrounded as it is by these false beliefs, false beliefs which would prevent the inspector from forming a true theory of the case, he cannot be said to know even this.

Cartoonist Zach Weiner devoted a recent installment of his Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal to laying out some thoughts about Gettier-style counterexamples:

I want to make a few remarks about this strip. First, it doesn’t seem right to say that Professor Gettier proposed a “philosophical problem.” To the extent that there is a “Gettier problem,” it is a problem with Plato’s proposed definition of knowledge. By finding a weakness in that definition, Professor Gettier may have reopened philosophical problems that some had hoped to use the definition to mark as solved, but his article does not in itself suggest any new problems. To jump directly from Professor Gettier’s challenge to Plato’s definition to a statement that “humans find the order of events to be cute” is to introduce quite an unnecessarily grandiose generalization.

Second, it’s clever that the irate child denounces “the Gettier ‘problem'” with a claim that “Maybe all the ‘problems’ of philosophy are just emergent properties that disappear when you simplify.” Professor Gettier’s 1963 paper includes just three footnotes. One refers to the two passages where Plato floats the definition of knowledge as justified true belief (“Plato seems to be considering some such definition at Theaetetus 201, and perhaps accepting one at Meno 98.”) The other two cite uses of the definition by Roderick Chisholm and Alfred Ayer, two very eminent philosophers working in the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy (“Roderick M. Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1957), p. 16,” and “A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1956), p. 34.”) Much of the analytic tradition stems from the suspicion that “all the ‘problems’ of philosophy are just emergent properties that disappear when you simplify,” and Ayer and Chisholm both had interesting things to say about this suspicion.

Third, by what criterion can brain cells be regarded as “small stuff” and consciousness as “big stuff”? I’d say the only person to whom that idea makes sense is one who has heard straightforward explanations of the basics of brain anatomy and woolly explanations of the metaphysics of consciousness. Everyone who is likely to read this strip either is, or has at some time been, awake. Consciousness is thus familiar to all of them, an everyday thing, the very smallest of the “small stuff.” Conversely, brain cells are knowable only to people who have access to a microscope or to findings arrived at by use of a microscope. They are, therefore, a relatively recherche topic, and most definitely “big stuff” to any truly naive subject. To connect the phenomena of consciousness with brain cells, or with brain anatomy, is not only an even more sophisticated topic, but is at present wildly speculative.

Fourth, it’s clever to have the irate child find that “the small stuff” is no easier to understand than “the big stuff.” I think Plato would have liked the strip, not for its defense of his definition, but for its illustration of the difficulty of separating “the small stuff” from “the big stuff.” After all, probability wobbles and the rest of quantum theory are, so far as we are concerned, highly abstract. We may use various images to make physics intelligible, but the deeper we enter into the subject the more thoroughly mathematical it becomes. As the final nose-flicking indicates, our experience of “facts” and “brain cells” and “stuff that happens” are also theory-laden, so that it is an empty boast to claim that one regards them as real and the ideas behind them as unreal.

by acilius on December 14, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Comics, Fiction, Language

Tagged anthony trollope, edmund gettier, philosophy, plato, smbc

Posted by acilius on December 14, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/12/14/justified-true-belief/

The careers of ghosts

One of Ambrose Bierce’s most famous stories is “The Moonlit Road.” Three narrators describe the same killing. The third narrator is the victim, speaking through a medium. Two of the victim’s remarks suggests that Bierce had worked out some sort of a theory about what it’s like to be a ghost:

Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated. We know this well, we who have passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in eternal dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even to ourselves, and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places; yearning for speech with our loved ones, yet dumb, and as fearful of them as they of us. Sometimes the disability is removed, the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate we break the spell — we are seen by those whom we would warn, console, or punish. What form we seem to them to bear we know not; we know only that we terrify even those whom we most wish to comfort, and from whom we most crave tenderness and sympathy.

A bit later, she elaborates on this:

You think that we are of another world. No, we have knowledge of no world but yours, though for us it holds no sunlight, no warmth, no music, no laughter, no song of birds, nor any companionship. O God! what a thing it is to be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an altered world, a prey to apprehension and despair.

A very similar theory seems to inform the lyrics of Lila Burns’ “Young Hearts, Young Minds.” A contender for “Ukulele Video of the Year” honors at Al Wood’s incomparable Ukulele Hunt, the song enlists our sympathies for those who are powerless to do anything but “float around town/ just sing out loud goin oo oo oo-oo oo-oo.” Whether Lila Burns has read Ambrose Bierce or developed her conception of the afterlife independently I don’t know.

While I’m at it, I should mention John Zmirak’s recent Halloween essay. Who likes Halloween? Radical traditionalist Catholics, that’s who likes Halloween. Zmirak expresses a measure of sympathy for anti-Halloween Protestants:

Some homeschooling friends of mine confessed to me that they felt torn over whether or not to let their son dress up and go trick-or-treating; their Protestant friends kept telling them that this holiday was pagan or even Satanic. And given their theology, you can see their point: The souls of the dead are either in Heaven — in which case they’re not walking the earth and need not be appeased, represented, mocked, or even commemorated, depending on which reading you give to the way we Catholics appropriated old pagan customs that marked this time of year– or else they’re in Hell, and not worth remembering.

Only if you believe in Purgatory, Zmirak argues, can you fit earth-haunting ghosts into the world of Christian imagination. Zmirak gladly claims the Addams family as rad-trad Catholics. “Indeed, I think I may have spotted several Addamses at the indult parish in New York City…” He urges devout parents not to dress their little trick-or-treaters as saints, but to give them costumes that display the eerie and frightening parts of life that Halloween is meant to confront. He does draw the line somewhere, though:

Now, I’m very much in agreement that two-year-old children should not be dressed as Satan. For one thing, it’s a little bit too realistic. Indeed, the fallenness of children, which Augustine bemoaned in his Confessions, is so evident to everyone that garbing the little tykes in the robes of absolute evil seems to overstress the point. Nor do we wish to trivialize the serious, deadly purpose of our infernal enemy — dragging each of us screaming to Hell. If you’re feeling puckish, it’s in much better taste to dress up your kids as Osama bin Laden, Annibale Bugnini, or some other of the Evil One’s lesser minions. If you must dress your boys as saints, choose military martyrs, canonized crusaders, or patriarchs from the Old Testament. One suggestion I made as editor of the Feasts and Seasons section of Faith & Family magazine was this: Dress up your daughters as early Roman martyrs, like Agnes and Agatha, and your sons as the Roman soldiers, gladiators, and lions that sent them to heaven. Stock up on lots of fake blood for the girls’ machine-washable tunics, and let the games begin! (Alas, this idea never saw print.)

Bierce grew up in Ohio in the 1840s and 1850s; his family and neighbors were staunch Calvinists. One of his sisters was so committed to that faith that she went to Africa as a missionary. She was never heard from again; many Ohioans thought that she had been eaten by cannibals. Perhaps she was an inspiration for the cartoons magazines used to run showing pith-helmeted figures in great pots of boiling water. Bierce himself was alienated from religion; at times he made a show of atheism, at other times he cultivated a reputation for the Satanic. The God in whom Bierce did not believe was the God of Calvin. When he turned his imagination to the supernatural, Calvinism would have been his starting point. Perhaps the isolated, helpless, misunderstood ghosts of Ambrose Bierce and Lila Burns represent a stage in the decay of Calvinist theology, even as the Addams family and other products Zmirak endorses represent the current stage of rad-trad Catholicism.

by acilius on October 31, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in Fiction, Halloween, religion, Ukulele Hunt

Tagged Ambrose Bierce, calvinism, ghosts, john zmirak, lila burns

Posted by acilius on October 31, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/10/31/the-careers-of-ghosts/

Books of short stories by Tatsumi

Looks like they’re putting out material by Tatsumi on a chronological plan. Each book below represents material from a stretch of 1 or 2 yrs.

I like the design for this series. These are really pleasing hardcover books. You might be able to check them out from a local library – but they’re worth buying outright ($19.95 each) if you believe you’ll be returning to them repeatedly.

These came out, respectively, in 2005, 2006, & 2008. The last couple yrs, D&Q has put out other Tatsumi stuff – but not in the specific format \ design used for these three volumes.