Poetry, Politics, Collapse

Please Switch Over to My New Substack, For Blogging Is Dead...

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 21:00:00 +0000

My new SUBSTACK channel is called simply:

Jamey Hecht, Author.

I invite you to click over to there, and subscribe.

Its subject is the same as what this blog has been covering since 2008: literature, philosophy, and the search for wisdom, with reviews of books and theater among my most common topics.

Thanks for all the good times we've had here at Poetry, Politics, Collapse for the past 17 years.

Probably most of the 310,153 hits the blog has had were from bots... but not all. It doesn't matter. What matters is staying human in an age of machines, groupthink, relentless quantification, and despair.

Stay lyrical. Romanticism is not dead, and "they" will always claim that it is; they are wrong. Keep reading poetry. Keep going to live theater. Keep having face-to-face conversations. Honor your elders.

Hang in there.

APsA, Racism, Antisemitism

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 05:18:00 +0000

An April 2025 article in Harper's described the recent unrest within the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA):

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/04/the-social-turn-psychoanalysis-maggie-doherty/

APsA posted a reply, which Harper's conscientiously printed.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/06/letters-june-2025/

The following excerpt from the Harper's article is about 20% of its total length:

The Nazi Party came to power in the Thirties, threatening psychoanalysts—many of them Jews, Communists, or both—with annihilation. Freud died on September 23, 1939, twenty-two days after World War II began, and didn’t live to see the war’s devastating effect on the psychoanalytic community. Many European analysts were imprisoned and killed. Others fled to the United States; the influx of émigré analysts was one among several reasons that psychoanalysis took off in America after 1945. But anticommunist sentiment had forced some analysts to suppress their leftist politics. González described this moment of collective repression to me as one of several traumatic moments in the history of the discipline that must be worked through. “What’s needed now is the psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis.”

“Psychoanalysis can go burn!” said Sameer Khan. “We’re here to serve patients.” The future of the profession writ large was not Khan’s concern.

Khan, a psychiatrist in New York, is a friendly man in his forties with long, dark hair and an easy smile. We met in between sessions on the penultimate day of the conference. By that point, change was in the air. In panels and plenary addresses, speakers encouraged the audience to try out new clinical approaches, and to resist change at their own risk. During one event, Kerry Sulkowicz, APsA’s president, a slick figure who works in leadership and organizational consulting, took the stage to announce that a ballot measure loosening APsA’s membership requirements had passed with 81 percent of the vote. Before, it had been the case that only M.D.s, Ph.D.s, and social workers who had completed psychoanalytic training at an APsA institute could become full members of the association—but now others (therapists, academics, and researchers) who were trained in psychotherapy at APsA or equivalent institutes could join the association with full membership. The change “helps ensure our future,” he said, to raucous applause.

Khan was skeptical of all this celebration. “Is change nice?” he asked, rhetorically. Psychoanalysts, he told me, tend to romanticize change, fear, and uncertainty, as if they were always productive. He seemed to doubt the social turn—not because he objected to training more analysts of color, or to adjusting treatment plans to better reflect the patient population, but because he didn’t think it would change the profession very much. (Another skeptic declined to speak with me on the record, fearing being branded as conservative or racist. Some others I contacted refused to speak altogether.) For all this talk of the social, there wasn’t as much talk about how to make psychoanalysis more affordable to patients. APsA represented people who often earned six figures a year. “It’s like, yes, we want to do good, but also, how much do these pants cost?” he asked, gesturing to the pair he was wearing. (They cost three hundred dollars.)

“You’re supposed to get people to talk about things so that everything can be metabolized,” Khan said. But during many discussions, analysts of color were careful and controlled, as they had been in the discussion group on social and historical factors. They were inhibited. Such self-censorship was pragmatic: those in power would resist change if they felt themselves threatened. What we had witnessed at the meeting might be reform rather than revolution—or, worse, simply a self-congratulatory discussion of things that might never come to pass.

Not long after the New York meeting, the American psychoanalytic community erupted. During planning for the June meeting, several committee members proposed inviting Lara Sheehi—an assistant professor of clinical psychology at George Washington University known for her work on Palestine—to participate in a panel. Sheehi was being investigated by her own university (and would later be investigated by the U.S. Department of Education) after StandWithUs, a pro-Israel advocacy group, filed a complaint with the department’s Office for Civil Rights alleging that there had been anti-Semitic discrimination in her classroom. APsA’s executive committee, headed by Sulkowicz and president-elect Dan Prezant, forbade extending the invitation, claiming that organizers wouldn’t be able to “contain” reactions to an event with Sheehi. In response, the program committee ultimately refused to plan a June program entirely. The executive committee then disbanded the program committee. APsA’s email list promptly went nuts.

Discussion on the email list was vicious, with some posters supporting the executive committee’s decision and others supporting the program committee. People leveled accusations of racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism at one another. APsA members on both sides claimed to feel “unsafe.” One member characterized those angry at the executive committee as “birds of prey” who were “willing to rip [APsA] apart.” Another member told me that it felt like everyone had to pick a side.

The weeks that followed were chaotic: it seemed the June meeting wouldn’t happen, then it was back on. (It did, in the end, take place as planned.) The program committee was gone for good—then, suddenly, reinstated. In a stunning reversal, the executive committee offered an apology to Sheehi, who had recently been cleared of wrongdoing by George Washington University, and, in late March, invited her to present at the June meeting after all. (She declined, and has since been cleared by the Department of Education’s investigation.) Less than two weeks after that, Sulkowicz, although a self-described proponent of the social turn, sent a letter to membership resigning from his position as president of APsA and pointing fingers at an “illiberal, extreme left” that had “asserted its exclusive occupancy of the moral high ground” and that aimed “to transform APsA from a professional organization into a primarily political activist organization.” He worried for the future of psychoanalysis: “Our tendency to turn against ourselves represents a social defense against psychoanalytic progress vis a vis the outside world, and may be our greatest risk.”

Well, I don't know Dr. Khan, and I have no personal quarrel with him. But when I hear someone with that last name glibly announce that the profession we share (Sigmund Freud's work, which the Nazis damned as "Jewish science") "can go burn," I don't feel I am hearing a reliably enlightened discussion. It sure ain't his fault that another psychoanalyst from a different generation, the defrocked, notoriously Jew-hating homophobe Masud Khan, had that same name. But if that were my last name, I think I might be a bit more careful about announcing that anyone or anything Jewish "can go burn."

The Harper's article isn't bad, but it misses what for me is the main thrust of what happened in the period it recounts. Yes, earnest efforts to redress racial grievances of Black-identifying analysts and candidates eventuated in the Holmes Report. It did valuable work, and probably helped improve some aspects of some Black people's experience in the psychoanalytic community. It certainly occasioned much self-examination in those who participated in its construction, and in its eventual readers. I was in the big meeting hall on the day narrated in the article, when the Report was released and its architects presented onstage.

In the minds of its critics, the Holmes Report unjustly scorned those who identify as white---not me---in some of the same ways as did Donald Moss' notorious article "On Having Whiteness" (JAPA, 2021 April, Vol. 69 No. 2: pp.355-371). That paper's abstract runs thus:

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has-a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which "white" people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one's body, in one's mind, and in one's world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts' appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness's infiltrated appetites--to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning ("never again") or as temptation ("great again"). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

Apart from its shocking eagerness to medicalize race, and that in quite hateful rhetoric, the trouble with this discourse is that it attacks its target while sealing off the exits from the condition it despises. If you want to change people's consciousness and behavior, you give them an opportunity to move in the direction you want them to go. You do not nail them down permanently into the despicable category where you say they are, and then hurl degrading insults at them in perpetuity. Unless, of course, improving them or the world is not really the point, and your actual goal is sadomasochistic, ahistorical, moralistic grandstanding.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it was explained to me many years ago at Brandeis University, "gave people who identified as Southern whites a way of remaining so which did not include the racism which they had inherited, and which he and his multi-ethnic movement deplored." Like Ibram X Kendi, Donald Moss never invited his targets to be white in a different, better way, let alone suggest---as the great James Baldwin did---that they might simply stop being mythical "white people" altogether, and go back to being historical persons like everyone else, by becoming one or another kind of European-American: "So long as you insist upon being 'White,'" Baldwin famously wrote, "I have no choice but to be Black."

See the invitation to move in the direction Baldwin wants his audience to go? See how the ideal reader need not lose face in order to improve along Baldwinian lines? Donald Moss, by contrast, insists that you remain white, so he can pour venomous contempt on you and on himself. That is how moralistic virtue-theater works. And this man ran the Program Committee at APsA for years.

The Holmes Report says this:

The American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) was started in 1911 by British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones and seven American physicians, all white men. Membership was limited to physicians and psychoanalysis was characterized as a medical treatment in order to gain public acceptance. As the Nazis rose to power in Germany, there was a large backlash in the United States against Jewish refugees and comparatively few were allowed to immigrate to this country. In this context, the analyst refugees fleeing Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were not always welcomed at American psychoanalytic institutes as they were perceived as heretical competition and many were nonphysicians (lay analysts) and/or were women. This led to splitting and schisms as psychoanalytic institutes struggled to accept the progressive ideas that came with diversity.

More importantly, it also says: "The Commission study did not study the intersectional differences for white Jewish or white Christian participants" (p. 131). Excuse me? Six million of my people were expropriated, raped, loaded onto cattle cars and tortured to death because they were racially not white enough, and you get to tell me I'm "white Jewish" when it serves your interests? And in the same sentence, where you admit you ignored my experience, you pair me with "white Christian" persons?

Some of my family was murdered by the Nazis and their European collaborators, but most of my family survived. We survived Europe. Our culture, our genetics, our history, is all from Israel. Jews are indigenous to Judea; Arabs are indigenous to Arabia. Half a billion Arabs immigrated into the British Mandate of Palestine from 1933 to 1945, during the alliance between Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany and the Islamist Arab "Grand Mufti" of Jerusalem, Amin Husayni, who worked with the butchers in the SS.

The Holmes Report innocently states: "As the Nazis rose to power in Germany, there was a large backlash in the United States against Jewish refugees and comparatively few were allowed to immigrate to this country." Comparatively few, huh? The United States, Britain, and Europe closed their doors to the Jews, and in the years directly leading up to the founding of the State of Israel, these millions of displaced refugees had nowhere else to go but back to their ancestral homeland. Zionism was not one option among others; it was the only option. If you oppose it---like so many of Lara Sheehi's admirers, the psychoanalysts who vehemently deplored Israel for two years on APsA's internal listserv after the October 7th Massacre of Israelis by Hamas and their Gazan supporters---if you oppose Zionism, you either wish the West had opened its doors to the Jews a century ago, or you wish we all had been killed then, not just 30% of us. Which is it? I can usually guess.

Prof. Haviv Retig Gur on "The Great Misinterpretation: How Palestinians View Israel" 1/21/2024

Jews are indigenous to Judea. Genetics proves it. Archaeology proves it. Culture proves it. History proves it. Zionism is the only successful decolonization project in history.

Contrary to the endlessly-repeated lies of antisemites of both the left and the right, world conquest of any kind is totally alien to Jewish life. World conquest by bloody force is, by contrast, the proudly announced core mission of Arab-Islamic culture and scripture and history, with the Jews as the special target of their explicitly genocidal rage and hatred. Why? Because Jews were the first to refuse the Prophet's message (peace be upon him). But that's not the only reason.

The big reason, deeper than any other, is because Judaism is the main cultural source from which Islam was developed, and nobody wants to be reminded that they, or their culture, came from anybody or anything else, and therefore would not exist without that predecessor. Japan's brutality to older Asian cultures in WWII fits this; Amerindian denial of the Berring Straits land-bridge hypothesis fits this; every claim to autochthony fits this. Even Genesis 2:23 fits: "She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." Of course that's exactly backwards: all human beings come out of the bodies of women. Nobody is "taken out of man." But some men need to deny that, ergo this myth about the rib.

It's a defense we see again and again, the world over: the repression of an unpayable existential debt, through claims to supremacy that entail total entitlement and domination. And Christianity, of course, stands in roughly the same relation of unbearable cultural debt to Judaism. Big chunks of its theology were improvised for the purpose of repressing that debt and inverting it. And as for psychoanalysis, the "Jewish science"---the great Francois Roustang once summed-up Jacques Lacan's great usefulness to France: "Come, let me de-Judaize psychoanalysis for you..."

Every single Islamic prophet was Jewish---except that last one, who decapitated Jewish men by the thousands, and sold their wives and children as slaves and sexual playthings. It's all in the Holy Koran and the Hadith and the history books, even if you feel upset about that fact. Sure, there are the "verses of peace," but these are generally ignored in favor of the "verses of the sword."

If you want to call these remarks "Islamophobia," remember that phobias by definition are irrational, unfounded fears. "Islamophobia" is a university-hatched word, a term of blissful ignorance, wielded by people privileged with such insular safety that they cannot dream of the magnitude of the violence done by Islam to Jews since 622 C.E., and the jihadis' daily oaths to destroy us all. Islamophilia, this uncritical, Bambi-eyed reverence for a monocultural imperial project of global scale is, of course, the very opposite of multiculturalism, which was until recently the supreme value professed by the sort of Disneyland utopians who utilize the word "Islamophobia" and wear keffiyehs on both sides of the Starbuck's counter.

Back to the Homes Report: "The Commission study did not study the intersectional differences for white Jewish or white Christian participants." Whoever wrote this appalling sentence is apparently captive to the naive belief that Judaism is just another "Abrahamic religion," like Christianity and Islam, two universalist faiths directly responsible for centuries of forced conversions and mass slaughter in explicit pursuit of world domination. But "world domination" is exactly what their worst antisemites accuse the Jews of pursuing, because the heart of bigotry is projection.

In projection, I disavow what I cannot tolerate in myself, and project it onto you, as if onto a screen, where I can safely attack it.

Projection is the heart of the current wave of antisemitism, as of every previous such wave from antiquity through the medieval, renaissance, modern, and contemporary eras. Every day, countless groups within the jihadi world openly vow to murder every last Jew on Earth, but the Jews---some 15.8 million people, amid 2 billion Muslims, and even-more-numerous Christians---are accused of genocide. Israel has achieved the lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of urban warfare, but the Jews are accused of genocide. Israel trucked-in over 1.5 million tons of food to the people who attacked it, but the Jews are accused of genocide.

See "Deconstructing the Genocide Blood Libel," by Ari Rosenbaum.

For the Gaza War that Hamas started with the October 7th Massacre, Hamas' entire strategy was, and is, to maximize Gazan civilian casualties, so as to turn the world against Israel. So, Israel's strategy has been to keep those casualties as few as possible: with phone calls warning of incoming airstrikes, with leaflets specifying when to leave, with the massive operation of moving over a million people out of Rafah so the IDF could attack Hamas without mass civilian casualties, and with the endless stream of food convoys (food which Hamas stole and sold to the Gazans at huge markups). But the Jews are accused of genocide.

See "The Genocide Libel," by Norman Goda.

That genocide libel is the accusation made by Jennifer Mullan, founder of "Decolonizing Therapy," in her "Open Letter: End the Mental Health Field's Complicity to [sic] Genocide," which is a tissue of pro-Hamas, anti-Israel propaganda that puts Jewish lives at risk, while jeopardizing the livelihood and safety of myself and my Jewish colleagues in the field we share.

Here's international lawyer Natasha Hausdorff in debate at the Oxford Union, refuting the genocide lie. But at the mention of her name, antizionists will do what they do: the moment they hear names they recognize as their opponents'---Natasha, Rowan Osman, Douglas Murray, Gad Saad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Melanie Phillips, Einat Wolf, Mosab Hassan Yousef, Haviv Retig Gur, anybody who dares oppose the tsunami of lies and bigotry deluging Israel and the Jews today---they label them "right wing" or "propagandist," and presto! There's no further obligation to hear what any Zionists have to say. Well, listen:

Natasha Hausdorff at the Oxford Union, 28 November 2024.

This "genocide" lie is the same old blood-libel we heard from the Czarist Secret Police who forged the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and from the KGB, and the Nazis, and the KKK, and now, the crowd of respectable cosmopolitans who seem to think themselves supremely compassionate. Jews don't count.

Palestinianism is an abysmally cynical exploitation of an Arab population with an identity invented by the Egyptian KGB asset Yassir Arafat in 1964. Its real motive is found in the Hadith that says "Every shrub and every tree will cry out: O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me! Come and kill him." It is not about land, except that Islamists cannot tolerate a square inch of territory they colonized ever returning to the control of the indigenous people from whom they originally stole it. Arabs are indigenous to Arabia. Jews are indigenous to Judea.

Either the "right of conquest" confers legitimacy to a territorial claim, or it does not.
If it does, Israel won the six wars Arabs started against it since 1948, so the Jews own Israel.
If it does not, then the 7th Century Arab Conquest of Israel is not legitimate, and the Jews own Israel.

Islamic colonial conquest destroyed myriad cultures and populations all over the world through murder, rape, forced conversion, and expulsion. Arab Islam was the main force responsible for over 1,300 years of the enslavement of Africans--between 10 million and 18 million people---and, indeed, of many Europeans. Arab enslavement of Africans continues to this day.

None of that matters to the American left, to D.S.A., to all those supposed "progressive" organizations I used to love, who no longer seem interested in progress, nor in history, nor in reasoned discourse. They have no use for the heroes of the progressive past---the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY), Medgar Evers, it's all forgotten now. For the Democratic Socialists of America, it seems Black Lives Matter until and unless that mattering might make Islam look bad. As for Jewish suffering, Jewish indigeneity, and the Zionism by which the latter heals the former, well, Jews don't count, and that's it---because for Tik-Tok warriors, and for much of APsA, it seems---the only lens through which to view the world is oppressor-vs-oppressed.

Though the Jews have been subject to abuse for thousands of years, and suffered the worst genocide in history, we are too successful (as Thomas Sowell pointed out), too creative, too joyful, too wealthy, and too strong to be fit into the victim role that today's Progressives regard as the heart of virtue. Therefore we must be demonized, yet again, as the all-powerful villains of history. Conversely, anyone who has suffered at European hands must be infantilized as magically innocent and incapable of harm. It is a worldview which benefits the narcissists who dress themselves in it to parade their supposed virtue; it benefits corporations who deploy "BIPOC" iconography to wash their environmental and social sins away under cover of melanin-rich beauty in ubiquitous advertisements; and it benefits the brutally racist, monocultural, antisemitic, Gay-bashing, intensely woman-hating Islamists who strive for worldwide Sharia by jihad fast and slow, in stages.

As one of my favorite memes asks:

If we run the whole world, why can't we get you to leave us the fuck alone?"

As for the American Psychoanalytic Association, it did try to keep the professional peace and hold itself together. Eventually, the most militant of the Palestinianist psychoanalysts "resigned in protest," as if the remainder were likely to miss them. But the damage was done, and the tone deaf Holmes Report did not help Jews feel as if our safety or our identity was of much importance to APsA anymore. It costs about $1,300 each year to renew a Membership, and after about a decade of doing so, I let mine lapse this year. Maybe I will join APsA again someday, but for now, I'm taking a break.

"The Eyes Have It: The Porters of Hellsgate's Oedipus," by Steven Leigh Morris. LA WEEKLY, 3/4/2011.

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 01:01:00 +0000

Jamey Hecht's new translation of Oedipus the King just opened at North Hollywood's Sherry Theatre in a lucid, traditional rendition called Oedipus the Tyrant, presented by the Porters of Hellsgate and directed by Thomas Bigley. The Porters of Hellgate opt for a staid togas-and-sandals approach, with Jessica Pasternak's silky earth-tone costumes. A female chorus recites in unison Sophocles' meditations on the action, sometimes performing to Taylor Fisher's choreography of arms flung from torsos simultaneously, or the percussive effect of punctuating a line with a group stamp of the foot or slap of the palm. Combine that with Nicholas Neidorf's subtly brooding sound design and original compositions, plus a performance style that gets to the translation's formality with an emotional spontaneity and truthfulness, and what transpires is absorbing. This is remarkable, given the dangers lurking in the artifice---the symmetry of Bigley's staging and Fisher's art design, the inherent possibilities of overacting and self-parody. These dangers almost never become manifest to choke this earnest endeavor.

In the title role, the youthful Charles Pasternak makes for a sometimes relaxed sometimes tempestuous monarch, with a charm that makes it apparent how he could have wandered into Thebes after a road-rage incident and stolen the heart of Queen Jocasta (the powerful Kate O'Toole). Dylan Vigus has a thunderous presence as the Priest who opens the play, and Hecht cuts plausible distinctions between his jaded Teiresias and his callow Messenger. The strongest aspect, which should please translator Hecht no end, is the commanding articulation of the poetical prose.

Book Review: "Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up" by John Allen Paulos (2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 05:08:00 +0000

This bad book has three nontrivial merits. It is quite clear about the moral equality of theists and atheists, and the moral neutrality of one’s stance on the question of God. Though arrogant, it is not hateful. And it makes the rare but important point that God’s existence or nonexistence is not a matter of probability (pp. 135, 137). Dawkins’ 2009 London bus advertisement campaign said “There's probably no God”; Steven Unwin wrote a theistic book called The Probability of God, and my previous post here reviewed God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of God, by Robert Nelson. That theism vs. atheism is not a matter of probability is an important point, one which I make from the theist side in the book I’m now writing. It was good to see an atheist assert the same.

Apart from that, however, Irreligion is a sleepwalking mess of a book. The phrase “question-begging” has deteriorated in public discourse so that it now means “begging for a particular question to be asked,” but it originally referred to a specific fallacy of reasoning that assumes the very proposition that’s supposed to be at issue. J. A. Paulos engages in this fallacy quite often, and the habit is diagnostic of a materialist frame of mind that tends to produce the same two types of character again and again: either a Dawkins-esque tiresome firebrand, or a Wildean jester, smiling on the foibles of naive mankind from somewhere above the fray (Christopher Hitchens’ unusual charm, erudition, and moral authority made him a rare combination of the two). Thankfully, Paulos is decidedly of the latter type, but it can get pretty tedious, pretty quickly, especially if you’ve read similar books before. Question-begging is common to both types. Here is Paulos on Hume’s argument against miracles:

That is, the whole weight of science is the prima facie evidence against a miracle's having occurred. Carl Sagan's remark "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is germane and, incidentally, can be formalized by a use of Bayes' theorem. This doesn't mean scientific laws are always correct. Whatever evidence exists that a certain phenomenon miraculously violates a particular scientific law is evidence as well that the scientific law in question is simply wrong. If before the invention of the telephone, for example, someone heard the voice of a friend who was hundreds of miles away, one might consider this a miracle. The evidence for this miraculous event, however, would also be evidence that the physical law that the event appears to violate (regarding how fast sound travels in air, let's say) is wrong or doesn't apply.

Note that this is no mere exposition of Hume, but a set of assertions about the world. As I’ve often pointed out, a good response to Sagan’s famous remark is this: People who say "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" have a habit of ignoring extraordinary evidence. The rest of the paragraph begs the question whether there are or are not supernatural events, since if there are, the laws of nature do not apply to them but do continue to apply to nature. It will not do to insist that every rule must apply in all cases, since some rules have what are called “exceptions.” The ambition of scientific laws is to include all cases and exclude none, but that is aspirational, and to disregard that limitation is hubris, whether or not the hubris remembers to present itself as humility.

Paulos quotes the mathematician Leopold Kronecker: “God made the integers, all the rest is the work of man,” but insists that “even the whole numbers were the work of man.” This unsupported claim runs counter to the views of the great mathematicians, but it is a good bit of instruction as to how an atheist ought to sound. If the market for the book is atheists-in-training, it’s an appropriate remark to make, though it begs the question of whether numbers and other mathematical structures are invented or discovered.

Either everything has a cause or there's something that doesn't. The first-cause argument collapses into this hole whichever tack we take. If everything has a cause, then God does, too, and there is no first cause. And if something doesn't have a cause, it may as well be the physical world as God or a tortoise.

This level of theological ignorance is striking. Paulos’ quite reasonable logic applies to any entity you might want to put in the “first cause” position, except for God, the only relevant candidate for the job, whom the question is about. It is not part of the definition of “a tortoise” that it is eternal, uncaused, beyond the human intellect, and uniquely adequate to the ineffable fact that there is a world at all. The author seems remarkably uninformed.

On page 4, Paulos asks, “Why cannot the physical world itself be taken to be the uncaused first cause?” Because the physical is what must have a cause, and God is not physical.

On page 6: “Placing God outside of space and time would also preclude any sort of later divine intervention in worldly affairs.” Nope. Panentheism is the name for the view that God is both immanent throughout the universe and infinitely transcendent of its boundaries. The Creation is no more a complete exhaustive container of God’s existence than the number one hundred--for all its beauty of symmetry and structure--is an exhaustive image of infinity.

On page 8 is a particularly weak paragraph:

Why did He create the particular natural laws that He did? If He did it arbitrarily for no reason at all, there is then something that is not subject to natural law. The chain of natural law is broken, and so we might as well take the most general natural laws themselves, rather than God, as the arbitrary final "Because." On the other hand, if He had a reason for issuing the particular laws that He did (say, to bring about the best possible universe), then God Himself is subject to pre-existing constraints, standards, and laws. In this case, too, there's not much point to introducing Him as an intermediary in the first place.

Again, one feels one is dealing with a stranger to the territory to which he claims to be a guide. “Arbitrarily for no reason at all”? Theism is not an impersonal hypothesis about the world that has nothing to do with the creatures who are persuaded of it; it is a form of life, a stance toward our own existence that attributes it to a Divine origin. To take seriously the idea that God is real---and far more real than waking embodied history (just as the latter is more real than dreams or fiction)---is to consider that the Divine motive for creating the universe, and us within it, may have been to experience relationship with conscious beings capable of freely engaging in such a relationship.

Next, note that the “might as well” clause makes little sense. If “there is then something that is not subject to natural law,” why wouldn’t we turn to that greater power, rather than try to salvage the broken authority of a compromised naturalism?

The paragraph ends with a version of Einstein’s question of whether God had any choice in making the laws of nature the way He did. Paulos insists---as if it were a matter of course---that if God, too, were bound by laws like those that describe the electroweak interaction, or gravity, or even the apparently ineluctable logic of arithmetic and the syllogism, this would amount to a diminution of His omnipotence. But it certainly need not. Why should God be in any meaningful way limited by the fact that He cannot, say, die or make a mistake, or conjure a stone so heavy that even He can’t lift it?

On page 12, we find a strange assumption that pops up elsewhere in the book: that a “creator would have to be of vastly greater complexity …than the life-forms it created.” Need God be complex? For Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Idealist tradition, the noumenal world is not plural. Since number only pertains to the phenomenal world, Schopenhauer says somewhere of the noumenon that it isn’t even unitary! Long before those 18th and 19th Century philosophers wrote, medieval mystics noticed that the heart of monotheism---Hashem echad, “God is One”---might not even be the whole story of God’s freedom from plurality and number, as the Inventor of the integers themselves. So no, God need not be “more complex” than the organisms he creates.

Paulos’ chapter on the Argument from Design ignores evolutionary convergence, brackets-out randomness where randomness is the issue under discussion, and fudges its dismissal of Michael Behe’s argument from “irreducible complexity.” Paulos does a good job of evoking the way complex systems can grow into place as simpler antecedents are gradually enhanced and expanded. His excellent example is the global supply chain with its mines and forests, factories, ports, shipping lanes, distribution hubs, and grocery stores with their fully stocked shelves, all humming along as if designed at the same time and implemented onto a blank slate. Of course these complex webs of industry and commerce developed gradually from simpler versions, step by step. Of course complex organisms and ecosystems can be thought of in a similar way. But Behe’s famous example of the bacterial flagellum has still not been explained away (I write this in 2025, seventeen years after Irreligion appeared), and the briefly successful attempt to do so (by appealing to the injectosome as a supposed transitional precursor of the flagellum) has been discredited.

The chapter on the Anthropic Principle seemed to me quite unconvincing, while the chapter on the Ontological Argument just showed how inadequate are the left brain’s tools of logical discourse for the kinds of ultimate questions theism entails. Paulos the mathematician is good at debunking numerology, in a well-argued chapter critiquing supposed “Bible codes” that purport to find hidden messages in sequences of equally spaced letters in the Bible. I have no use for numerology. But he also accuses theists of confirmation bias (to which we are indeed susceptible), though he engages in plenty of it himself.

In the middle of the book, in a chapter called “The Argument from Subjectivity (and Faith, Emptiness, and Self)", we get the following frank admission: “Still, one shouldn't reject the insights and feelings of those with perfect pitch simply because one is tone-deaf. Or, to vary the analogy: It wouldn't be wise for the blind to reject the counsel of sighted people (my emphasis, p. 77).” This is very much the case with atheists who write books like this one about how illogical faith is, without realizing that logic does not encompass every kind of truth. How delightful to find an atheist with the imagination, and the humility, to realize this and state it with the analogy of atheism as blindness and faith as sight! Yet, a moment later, we are admonished:

The undermining disanalogy in this response is that a sighted person's observations can be corroborated by the blind. A sighted person's directions, for example, to take eleven steps and then to turn left for eight more steps to reach the door of the building can be checked by a blind person. How can an agnostic or atheist learn anything from someone who simply claims to know there is a God?

If the theist “simply claims to know,” then he or she can teach very little. But with the motivation and the wherewithal to be of help in the matter, he or she may be able to teach a great deal of it. William James, Huston Smith, Iain McGilchrist, Karen Armstrong, Ann Lammot, Raimon Panikkar, and a thousand other authors have written books that helped struggling agnostics pivot into a faith they had been yearning for. This is a completely different accomplishment from the futile and absurd endeavor to convince a committed atheist of anything.

A chapter on prayer asserts that there are no scientific studies establishing its effectiveness (p. 87). Though they are of widely varying quality, there are many such studies, some much harder to impeach than others (see, for example, Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe). On page 146 he expresses a wish that American atheists had some sort of civic organization to advance their cause and advocate for their preferences---but Paul Kurtz had already founded the Council for Secular Humanism in 1980, and the Center for Inquiry in 1991.

Paulos’ know-nothingism extends to other chapters and subjects as well, often with ugly results. In an effort to demonstrate how unreliable are historical claims about Jesus, a single paragraph on p. 91 contains the following cluster of bullshit stories:

A bit more than forty years ago, in the full glare of the modern media, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and we have only a hazy idea of the motivation of the killer or, possibly, killers. And a bit more than thirty years ago, the Watergate controversy erupted before a phalanx of cameras and microphones, and we still don't know who ordered what. And only a few years ago, well into the age of the Internet, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, the United States responded by invading Iraq, and we have yet to learn the complete story of the attack, the training of the attackers, the lead-up to the war, and so on.

These bogus claims are not only ahistorical, they are not even anecdotal: they are proverbial. It is a piece of cliche “conventional wisdom” that “we” know nothing significant about these three deep events (see Peter Dale Scott) in American History. Indeed, there is now very little of any significance that “we”---people who actually study these historical episodes---do not know about the assassination of President Kennedy. Though much has been learned since 2008, even then there was a near-complete picture of who played which roles, with which motivations, at various levels of the successful Dallas plot, and of the plots in Tampa and Chicago that did not succeed. To say of 11-22-63 in 2008 the phrase “killer or, possibly, killers” is obscenely negligent, irresponsible, and glib. Spend a few months studying Watergate or 9/11 and you are likely to feel similarly about Paulos’ use of these events, too, as emblems of supposedly inevitable and universal ignorance.

Some 17 pages later, Paulos goes back to this subject and performs a more egregious feat of intellectual poverty:

Because of its momentous nature, people searched for a suitably momentous reason for the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill suited for the job of giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was the charming [sic] superstition that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators.

This is not just a trite meme that has been redeployed in print by hundreds of intellectual prostitutes (like Gerald Posner---whereas Paulos is simply being lazy, not whoring himself) since it was spawned in CIA internal memoranda, long since released. It is a pernicious insult to people who did get off their asses and investigate, with results that turned up momentous bad actors motivated by momentous stakes. “Charming”? STFU, Sir.

Now, I ain't no Christian, but it seems a little disingenuous to say “the New Testament accounts of Jesus” were “written many decades afterward (between 70 and 100 CE).” If he ever existed, and if he was murdered by Rome around 33 CE, then the year 70 CE may have been less than four decades later, which is not quite “many.” And the Letters of Paul, which comprise more than 48% of the New Testament, were written by a man who claimed to have had a vision of Jesus only two years after the Crucifixion, and who was himself murdered in 64/65 CE.

J. A. Paulos’ comparison of the deaths of Socrates and Jesus, while unoriginal, is poignant in its way. But its questions are either disingenuous or awfully naive, given that the author has undertaken the book that he has. Paulos is rightly criticizing Mel Gibson’s hateful movie "The Passion of the Christ," which actually dares recycle the old Christ-killing charge against “the” Jews:

Assume for the moment that compelling historical documents have just come to light establishing the movie's and the Bible's contentions that a group of Jews was instrumental in bringing about the death of Jesus; that Pilate, the Roman governor, was benign and ineffectual; and so on. Even if all this were the case, does it not seem hateful, not to mention un-Christian, to blame contemporary Jews?

My fellow 21st Century Jews can appreciate this compassionate distinction between us, who cannot possibly be guilty of Jesus’ killing, and our ancestors, who were innocent of it, too. Gibson’s movie is, of course, a lot worse than Paulos’ grotesque little thought experiment, in which, for the sake of argument, we are to imagine that our ancestors’ Jewish leaders---the Sanhedrin in charge of Roman-dominated Jerusalem---were somehow responsible for Jesus’ torture and murder. Only an ignoramus can indulge in this offensive fantasy, because it is well known that Pontius Pilate had already been recalled by Rome from previous similar assignments because his crowd control tactics were excessively violent and provocative of avoidable civil unrest among subject populations. He was by no means “benign and ineffectual.”

It is just not interesting to point out the mere illogic of Christian bigotry. What is interesting, is to explain how and why the anti-Judaism---of the Gospels, and of Paul’s letters, of John Chrysostom and Luther and Pope This and Pope That---got in there in the first place. But that takes research and time and effort, not just armchair speculation and musing.

It is refreshing to read Paulos’ comparison of Jesus’ execution to that of Socrates, asking “what zealous coterie of classicists or philosophers would hold today's Greeks responsible?...It would be absurd, not to mention un-Socratic, for anyone to attribute guilt to contemporary Athenians” (p. 93). But it is not so refreshing to hear the next question, novel though it is: “Would a cinematic account of [Socrates’] death focus unrelentingly on his clutching his throat and writhing in agony on the ground after drinking the hemlock?” (p. 93). The “Passion” of Jesus’ Crucifixion was a death by torture, an ordeal that went on for at least six hours, designed to be humiliating, agonizing, and prolonged. Socrates, by contrast, was executed not by a brutal military power from an alien culture, but by the magistrates and citizen-jurors of his own city-state. He drank the mandated poison in the privacy of a prison cell, surrounded by his ardent admirers and friends. Apparently, death by hemlock ingestion is typically traumatic, but brief---though it can also be sudden and painless, and according to Plato, it was so for Socrates. The lack of drama, the philosopher’s peaceful acceptance of the court’s verdict, and of the brevity of embodied life (with or without capitol punishment) was part of the point of Plato’s story about the wise old man whose gifts Athens squandered.

“Whatever one's beliefs or lack thereof,” writes Paulos, “Socrates and Jesus (at least as portrayed by Plato and the authors of the New Testament) were great moral leaders whose ideas constitute a good part of the bedrock of our culture.” Tell that to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas constitute a good part of the bedrock of modernity. Nietzsche (mostly) despised both of those men as ruinous corrupters of the noble cultures of Classical Athens and Rome, a pair of con-men who swindled people into trading strength for weakness, achievement for idleness, and healthy competition for a race to the bottom. Nietzsche lost his mind in 1890 at the age of 56 and died in 1900, long before the darkest of his widely varying ideas took root in European soil, and were realized in unprecedented horrors on a vast scale. I do not agree with his critiques of Jesus and Socrates. But Paulos is mistaken to claim that “Whatever one's beliefs… Socrates and Jesus were great moral leaders.”

All in all, this is a mediocre example of a mediocre genre that appeals to smug nihilists. I don’t hate the book, but I sure don’t like it, either. I read it for the same reason I read its myriad equivalents: to find out whether they have any strong arguments for atheism.

Book Review: "God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of God" by Robert H. Nelson (2015) Cascade Books.

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:20:00 +0000

True to its title, this book provides five rational ways to think about the question of God. An introductory chapter called “Thinking about God” explains: “it is the most important questions — dealing with issues at the greatest historical and social significance — that are the least suitable for applying the formal methods of social science quantitative analysis.” This is a generous admission from an economist, and Nelson is preeminent among scholars for his multiple books exploring the unacknowledged religiosity with which members of his profession espouse and apply their doctrines. His frank admission of the bad fit between the methods of economics, and the question of God, is a promising overture to what is sometimes a sensitive and insightful book. Though it’s well worth reading, the text seems hobbled by habits of thought—quantitative, evidence-oriented, and always probabilistic—that seem almost intractable.

The first of Nelson’s five rational ways is the subject of chapter 3: “God the Mathematician: The Miracle of Mathematical Order in the Natural World.” That highly stimulating subject is often discussed by physicists, not least by Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, whom Nelson deftly quotes. But just as it has proven unfeasibly difficult to explain how mathematics “governs” the physical world, it also seems quite difficult to explain why exactly this is a mystery in the first place. A parallel development has occurred in consciousness studies, where the Hard Problem of Consciousness remains more or less intractable—while alongside it, there has sprung up what is now called the Meta-Hard Problem of Consciousness: why exactly the original Hard Problem has the grip on us that it does.

Throughout this book, whenever Nelson discusses the relationship between mathematics and the physical world (which he does quite a bit), he uses the language of active authority, governance, control, and so on. But as some commentators have recently pointed out (in response to the ubiquity of such language on this question), the mathematical laws of nature do not reach out and “govern” events. They are inferences of abiding patterns which great scientists have hit upon from observations of nature, in the field and the laboratory.

Something more sophisticated is meant, despite how often we are told plainly “The physical world than is miraculously controlled by this non-material, mathematical world…” (66). This brings to mind the strange book by Robert Pepperell, recently reviewed here, called What Matter Feels: Consciousness, Energy and Physics (2024)---a panpsychist work in which the author insists that physicists across the centuries should be taken at their word when they say a stone “experiences” a force when impacted. For Pepperell, this means that a rock has a rudimentary but real proto-consciousness that feels things like impacts and the cold. But for most of the scientists he quotes about objects “experiencing a force,” the phrase is, of course, a metaphorical use of that verb. Nevertheless, Dr. Pepperell carries it with him into philosophical waters where that metaphoricity readily dissolves.

Something similar may be happening when matter is said to be “controlled by” and “governed by” mathematical laws. Except it isn’t only popularizers and synthesizers like Pepperell, or Nelson, or myself, who use such language. As Nelson shows, some of the finest scientific and mathematical minds have been explicitly astonished by the power of math over the physics of nature, including Kurt Godel, Heinrich Hertz, Cheng Ning Yang, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Frenkel, Roger Penrose, and others. This makes them Platonists on this issue, which has plenty of adjacent entailments of its own, some of which (can) extend all the way to theism and the dualist picture of an immortal soul animating the mortal body.

I hold those spooky ideas myself, so I dearly wish to catch sight of just why everyone deeper than I is so very surprised at nature’s conformity to mathematical regularities. I am surprised by the fine-tuning of the cosmos for life, and that’s comprised not only of the values of constants like lightspeed, the gravitational constant, and the mass of the proton, but also of the formulas that pertain to those values and activate them. Perhaps those are what is meant---yet it still feels as if something more profound is at issue that I still don’t get.

When three apples are placed on a table, it is not a mystery where the number three came in from. The threeness is an aspect of the event at hand, not an outcome directed by Mathematics in an act of will. Of course, the situation is different when the math in question is not arithmetic but, say, the Universal Law of Gravitation. Many are reluctant to suppose that God actively governs the universe by driving the mystery of gravity’s “spooky action at a distance.” They are less reluctant to think of God as framing that law of nature, and the others along with it, as designs for the Creation which He implemented “in the beginning.” That is where the “fine tuning” argument slots in. The values of the constants of nature (the mass of the electron, the ratio between it and the mass of the proton, etc.) appear to be exquisitely specific to the requirements of life’s eventual emergence from a lifeless physical universe. This abundance of satisfied narrow requirements, in turn, suggests the designing hand of a Creator.

Efforts to refute that theistic inference proceed along the same general lines of argument that have proven so successful in biology: rather than direct creation by a designing God, complex organisms evolved from simpler ones through natural selection, a continuous competition among organisms whose differences result in differential rates of survival and inheritance. Those differences are themselves caused by random variation.

That account of biology is hotly contested, but the point here is its awkwardness as a model for cosmogony (the part of cosmology that deals with the universe’s origin). If a random process called genetic mutation accounts for the differences among competing organisms, what could ever be its cosmic equivalent, that could result in the life-friendly universe we in fact do observe? How could multiple universes compete to produce this one, as multiple bacteria might compete to produce one “fittest” strain? The universe cannot have competitors. The universe is unique by definition.

In other words, what strikes me as strange about most arguments against the fine tuning argument is that they assume the nature of the universe is somehow inherently probabilistic. The values of the constants of nature are assumed to be the eventual results of some originary random process of variation. But there cannot have been such a process, as Nelson explains:

The fine-tuning has to precede the workings of the universe which is itself then fundamentally shaped in part by this fine-tuning—so something about the physical universe that would already require the fine-tuning cannot itself be said to have caused the fine-tuning that we observe. The physical universe was seemingly created out of nothing, there is no series of intelligible previous events to explain it, and it is thus an altogether unexplained miracle—or explainable only in supernatural terms—that the specific constants of nature of our universe are fine-tuned with such extraordinary exactness as to support life, and now finally the existence of human beings on earth such as me (41).

Yet elsewhere in the same book, Nelson seems to take for granted that metaphysical truths about ultimate reality are probabilistic, just like truth claims about events in the physical world:

Although the best rational argument for the existence of God, and the best argument for the existence of other minds, may be philosophically analogous, it is still conceivable that one is correct and the other is incorrect, perhaps by random chance (it is after all a matter of probabilities), although human beings would not be able to resolve this issue by their own rational analysis ([my emphasis] p. 22).

I submit that the existence of God, like the existence of other minds, is not a matter of probabilities at all. To be fair, Nelson’s book is subtitled, “Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of God,” and this commitment to rationality makes probability an almost ineluctable feature of the his approach. Conversely, it also entails the rest of the left-brain’s standard epistemic equipment: a pursuit of certainty, driven by evidence and argumentation under logical rules of non-contradiction. I would be foolish glibly to attribute such limitations to a genius like Richard Feinman---but Nelson quotes him, too, calling the issue of God’s existence a probabilistic one: “He finds that in any case the question of God's existence is one of probabilities-as Feynman says, ‘is it 50-50 or is it 97 percent?’” (87). Perhaps I can dare frame a response from a safe distance away.

There really is a side to theism vs. atheism that concerns objective reality---the immanent side, not the transcendent side (William James was particularly effective on this subject). But the objective side of the question is continuous with the side that transcends the objective-vs-subjective duality, and this can be hinted at using an analogy with music. The person who weeps in the private darkness of the concert hall, swept up in the sublimity of Chopin or Satie or Beethoven, is saturated with an affective and spiritual reality to which a tone-deaf bean-counter is utterly oblivious, no matter how well informed he or she may be with the details of the printed score, the compression waves in the air, the acoustics of the violins, and the physiology of the eardrum and the temporal lobe. Is the difference between the worlds of these two very different people a probabilistic one? Is there any sense whatsoever in calling it a matter of probability as to which world is more true than the other (“Is it 50-50 or is it 97 percent?”)? Only one of the two worlds includes both, and it is the world of bittersweet tears, not that of value-neutral information.

Nelson’s fourth chapter, on the limitations of Darwinism, includes a fine description of the intellectual poverty of militant atheist Richard Dawkins, and an homage to Lynn Margulis, the great evolutionary biologist whose intellectual independence proved crucial to the advancement of biological science at the close of the 20th Century. It notes how little of Darwin’s Origin of Species actually explains the speciation problem, and how little progress has been made on it in the intervening century and a half, despite the staggering achievements of molecular biology, genetics, embryology, and the growth of the fossil record.

Chapter Five, on consciousness, was what motivated me to read the book, and for the most part it’s quite well done. Writing in 2015, Nelson repeats (p. 161) David Chalmers’ 1990’s claim that consciousness serves no discernible function for the organisms endowed with it. Since then, however, the claim has been strongly disproven by Mark Solms in The Hidden Spring (2021), who identified the function of consciousness as actionable feelings that give the subject appropriately prioritized motives for meeting multiple needs whose relative urgencies are always shifting in novel circumstances. Consciousness is feelings, whose purpose is to tell the organism how it’s doing, and what to do next. It isn’t Nelson’s fault that this was discovered some years after his book’s appearance.

Another limitation is Nelson’s rather breezy engagement in the all-too-common practice of eliding the deep differences between Jewish and Christian theologies, with terms like Abrahamic, Judeo-Christian, and “the Jewish and Christian God” (162). The dim view I take of that practice, and my predecessors in that dim view such as Gershom Scholem and Arthur Cohen, will be familiar to readers of my book reviews on this blog and elsewhere (a particularly egregious offender is Anthony Kronman’s book After Disbelief (Yale U.P., 2021), my review of which is currently under consideration at Jewish Action).

Nelson does readers good service in emphasizing the role of fear in the rhetoric of materialism, and the hidden terror that pervades much of the most sweepingly materialist discourse found in consciousness studies and adjacent disciplines. People who don’t believe in the soul are oddly afraid of it, and this can be hard to notice if we expect fear to come exclusively from dualists who are scared of getting extinguished into oblivion by a death in a physicalist universe. This other fear---of being wrong on the other side, with a false negative about the soul and, with it, perhaps, the Divine---is driven by the unconscious worry that one might have to answer to a Creator for the ethical aspect of one’s metaphysics. If I am the creature of a Creator of whose existence I am unpersuaded, is my intellectual error a type of ingratitude?

As Nelson discusses the nervousness of his materialist opponents, he cites two fascinatingly equivocal figures, the philosophers John Searle and Thomas Nagel, each of whom repudiates materialism and theism alike. What they do believe is much harder to sift out, but their frankness and intellectual independence are refreshing, with a revitalizing effect on the debate at large. Yet at some points Searle strikes a false note, adduced by Nelson thus:

As Searle explained, there had once been a widely held ‘Cartesian view that in addition to physical particles there are 'immaterial' souls or mental substances.’ Such views were often associated with a belief in God as the source of the soul. Whatever large problems he had with his fellow philosophers, Searle did agree with them that ‘nowadays, as far as I can tell, no one’ of any high professional reputation in the philosophical study of the mind ‘believes in the existence of immortal spiritual substances except on religious grounds. To my knowledge, there are no purely philosophical or scientific motivations for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances’ such as souls (177).

Perhaps not. But to take “high professional reputation” as some sort of meaningful criterion of philosophical seriousness is to write as if Thomas Kuhn never wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is to forget the history of science and the sociology of knowledge, as well as the rivers of blood and ink that have been spilled over intellectual controversies like the Arian Heresy, the monophysite and monothelite controversies, the Albigensian Crusade, and all the other doctrinal wars and feuds between duelling experts, and between authorities and and insurgents, with both fools and sages to be found on each side. Moreover, Searle and those who quote this passage with uncritical approval (Nelson is not among them) are ignoring plenty of figures whose dualism or religious faith have not entirely prevented them from enjoying a measure of “high professional reputation.”

If dualists thinkers like David Lund, David Ray Griffin, Freeman Dyson, or Bruce Greyson are said to have legitimate academic credibility, then the statement which asserts other wise is false. But if they don’t, then the statement is circular, since those who disdain their achievements generally do so on the grounds that they are dualists in the first place. Reputation aside, Searle has also written as if there were no vast fields of anomalous evidence for which dualism can account where materialism cannot: “To my knowledge, there are no purely philosophical or scientific motivations for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances’ such as souls.”

I will close with a salient moment from Nelson’s discussion of the published encounter between Searle and Nagel:

While rejecting Dennett and other scientific materialist reductionists, Searle still maintained that any future correct argument about consciousness must be scientifically grounded in material fact and theory. As Nagel concludes, however, this is not viable, leading Searle to disguise what is really "an essentially dualistic claim [as developed in his 1992 book] in language that expresses a strong aversion to dualism"—and thus even Searle himself also falls prey to the philosophical contortions that have plagued the philosophy of mind in desperately seeking to uphold the naturalist orthodoxy (180).

I would add that Nagel disguised what is really an essentially theistic claim [as developed in his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos] in language that expresses a strong aversion to theism.

Eno River Players' MEASURE FOR MEASURE

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 23:43:00 +0000

(2/15/25—3/1/25, at the Doxsee Theater, 232 52^nd Street in Brooklyn)

I’ve just come from some of the best Shakespeare I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a bit. Measure for Measure is a hard play to mount, and they crushed it (in the good sense). Director Leo Egger builds a frame story that contains the show, a device Shakespeare might’ve smiled at, given his love of metatheater (Hamlet’s Mousetrap, Midsummer’s Pyramus and Thisbe; Brutus’ “How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport…”, etc.). The conceit is that this play’s actually being put on in a psychiatric hospital, where patients, staff, and doctors daily cope with trauma, physical and otherwise. Early on, we’re given Brian Linden—who shines as the Duke and his alter ego Friar, those two faces of one kindly, privileged asshole—janitorially mopping up a streak of blood. “You should have gloves on,” he is told, by one who passes him a pair. We groundlings, too, are about take on the several agonies of M for M, and this frame story helps us handle them, as gloves help vulnerable hands.

The first thing we see is Richard Brundage as Hospital Security Guard, passing the time in ecstatic enjoyment of operatic music. A love of the performing arts—the real thing, this love, and not a pose, since nobody’s watching this guy’s graveyard shift, and the watchman is himself—is found in this hospital. That makes it plausible that they would purge themselves of pity and terror by “producing” drama for a change, instead of just enduring it night and day. Periodically throughout the show, the fourth wall breaks—but not the whole fourth wall: it’s still a hospital, so when Brian Linden’s Duke-Friar-Janitor asks the front-row for a program, we’re an audience in a psych ward. This whole device works like a dimmer on a lamp in the Director’s hands, to raise and lower the immediacy of pain the tragedy supplies us with, till sweet relief comes at the end of Shakespeare’s just-so story. And as you’ll see, this time its sweetness isn’t saccharine; it’s bittersweet. It smarts.

I’d never heard of the Eno River Players. A third are Equity already, and I reckon the rest will get there too, if they so choose. It’s rare that a whole cast can handle blank verse well, and rare for everyone to have the acting chops to use it in. These people do. There’s no weak link. If anyone steals this near-unstealable production, it’s Chani Reese in the small role of Mariana, Angelo’s jilted bride. I was in tears just a few lines into her performance, and she sustained what she achieved. Reese is a powerhouse up there.

Natasha Portnoy’s Isabella had my face wet more than once, not least with the brilliant choice to stay morose under the thumb of patriarchy’s choices as she resigns herself to marriage with the Duke. Most directors wrap the ending in the broadest joy they can; their Isabellas are delighted with their noble savior’s offer of his golden handcuffs. Not this Isabella, whose religious vocation is genuine—which is much of why she’s not despicable (if indeed she’s not, and I’m rather pleased to find I can’t decide) for refusing to save her brother’s life by “going through Hell” like Jennifer Connolly in Requiem for A Dream. Only with heartbroken reluctance does she doff her wimple and let down her hair, all but marrying the Duke already in that gesture. Her misery is like St. Mary’s in the best of all those paintings from the 15^th Century, where the holy girl seems none too pleased to be the vessel of a child her husband didn’t sire, and raise him to perish in a destiny she never chose. The same appalled chagrin on the face of Ms. Portnoy’s Isabella says that same futile aversion, and still-incomplete surrender.

Angelo is a hard role to master, mastered here by Alex Roe. The character’s arc has him become such a shit of a human being that a big part of the job is keeping him as sympathetic as possible, for as long as you can. This, Roe and Director Leo Egger have pulled off, and in sharp focus. The result is worlds apart from a simple villain like Don John in Much Ado, or a complex but evil villain, like Iago. Angelo’s not evil, till he crumbles: he’s too militantly virtuous to be good. Real goodness doesn’t work that way—a timely theme!—and Shakespeare knows this best.

Given power’s dangerous excess of freedom to do damn near anything to anybody, Angelo’s load of iron principles are too much to sustainably uphold. Virtue like his is brittle iron, not the steel he thought it was, because it is unmixed with any crucial pinch of sooty carbon—ordinary human lust—to forge resilient wisdom from useful experience. As Mao Zedong learned in his “Great Leap Forward,” iron principles alone just ain’t the recipe. Angelo’s rigid temperance has never properly been tempered; like iron and unlike steel (stick with me now), it has compression-strength aplenty, but no tensile strength, and amorous desire is the tension that undoes him. When he falls for Sister Isabella, a crush and its lust are overwhelming and disarming, as all the feelings seem entirely new to him. If that doesn’t make his conduct any less despicable, it sure does make his slide to villainy more interesting.

I’ll be watching this company. You should, too.

Nicholas Wade's "The Faith Instinct" (2009): A Good Writer's Bad Book

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 05:27:00 +0000

Of the several thousand books I’ve read, one of my favorites is a summary of then-current knowledge about the Paleolithic by science journalist Nicholas Wade, called Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (Penguin, 2006). So I am reluctant to write this rather sour review of his next book, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (Penguin, 2009).

I’m doing so anyway, because The Faith Instinct is a particular kind of unhandsome volume that I consider bad for the public because it encourages people to think they know what they don’t know at all. In the opening pages, Wade quite helpfully admits “That the mind has been prepared by evolution to believe in gods neither proves nor disproves their existence” (p. 5), and “Religious behavior can be studied for its own sake, regardless of whether or not a deity exists” (p. 6). While this is welcome circumspection, the book repeatedly opposes “the supernatural world” to what it calls “the real world” (e.g., pp. 94, 109, 117, 127, etc.), begging the question of whether the rites of the devout have any actual referents outside their own minds. It continually suggests that they do not.

“The existence of special neural circuitry in the brain dedicated to moral decisions is further evidence that morality is an evolved faculty with a genetic basis” (p. 22), writes Wade, with the vague implication that no evolved faculty can disclose eternal verities. Well... the existence of special neural circuitry in the brain dedicated to arithmetic is evidence that mathematics is an evolved faculty with a genetic basis—but numbers are nevertheless an indestructible part of reality. Though mathematicians differ as to whether the integers are invented or discovered, our evolved capacity to calculate is valuable because it connects us to essential features of the universe, features whose physical embodiments are just one aspect of their ultimate nature.

Wade repeatedly throws out bogus generalizations as if no reasonable person would question them. Several examples follow.

The dubious “conflict theory” of the Neanderthal extinction is cited as an obvious truism: “But the people of the Upper Paleolithic were hardly pacifists. They would not have been in Europe in the first place had they not wrested it from the grip of the fearsome Neanderthals and driven them to extinction” (p. 50). But Clive Finlayson’s superbly humane reconsideration of that story showed what an open question it really is, in The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived (Oxford, 2009).

Wade writes about the brutal male dominance hierarchy of chimpanzees of the species pan troglodytes, to draw inferences about humans’ differentiation from a common ancestor we surely share with them. Very well, but he ignores the other chimpanzee species, whose social habits are markedly different, and far less conducive to Wade’s inferences. This was already popularized in Jared Diamonds 1991 bestseller, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (Hutchinson Radius, 1991).

On p. 95 we hear of “the brain’s outer cortex, the seat of consciousness…” Fairness to Wade’s 2009 book restrains me from citing Mark Solms’ great work The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2021), which only appeared a dozen years later, and discredited this “cortical fallacy.” Consciousness is not the exclusive possession of the mammalian neocortex, and is enjoyed by all vertebrates by virtue of a much older evolutionary achievement we call the brainstem.

The Faith Instinct is primarily about religion, not primatology or neuroscience, but it makes several big errors there, too: “Modern religions like Judaism or Christianity emphasize creeds and intellectual belief over rituals and emotional engagement” (p. 87). Millions of Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, Quakers, and Chassidic Jews can be properly offended by this silly claim about emotional engagement. But the glib conflation of “Judaism or Christianity” as interchangeably emphasizing “creeds and intellectual belief over rituals” is appalling ignorance. Ritual and right conduct are the heart of Jewish piety, grounded in a covenantal relationship with the God that chose the Hebrew people to receive the Torah which enumerates His commandments. A great gulf separates this religion of deeds from Luther’s religion of “faith alone,” which explicitly disavowed the importance of “outer works” and “the law,” sweeping them away with an almost gleeful contempt.

And Wade steps in this same pothole elsewhere: “Christianity promises admission to heaven for obeying divine law, eternal damnation for defying it” (p. 54). No one who has read any theological work of the Protestant Reformation could hold such a view, and Lutheran theology—firmly based on the ancient Letters of Paul—is the precise opposite of what Wade says here.

“In advanced societies, control of religion often rests with a religious hierarchy which monopolizes access to the supernatural” (p. 40). Can anyone name an example of this? Jews and Catholics and Protestants and Muslims all have their mystics at the margins of the community, but they also have their mainstream practices designed to give common people firsthand experiences of the holy in their everyday lives.

Sometimes Wade contradicts himself, as if he’d rushed to publication without time to reread the work. On page 32 he cites sociobiologist Richard Alexander thus: “Only in humans is the major hostile force of life composed of other groups in the same species.” But later on, we are told: “‘The greatest enemies of ants are other ants, just as the greatest enemies of men are other men,’ observed the Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel” (p. 52).

That is quite enough about The Faith Instinct.

Book Review: What Matter Feels: Consciousness, Energy and Physics by Rober Pepperell, 2024.

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:12:00 +0000

What Matter Feels: Consciousness, Energy and Physics (How Science can Explain Minds) by Robert Pepperell, PhD.

Reviewed by Jamey Hecht, PhD, PsyD

This strange book demonstrates competence and expertise in the several disciplines upon which it draws, including neuroscience, philosophy, and information science.

The author begins by embracing what is surely panpsychism, but with only the briefest mention of that tradition's name. That choice may have been motivated by a desire for a fresh hearing, but it does little to jettison the conceptual baggage which panpsychism has accumulated. At points he seems at pains to disavow the panpsychist tradition as if it always and everywhere required matter to be conscious, like a wakeful human---whereas most panpsychist reasoning is quite prolix about how minimal, rudimentary, and basic must be the form of elemental experience which its authors dare attribute to trees and (even) stones.

Pepperell starts by embracing panpsychism, but with only the briefest mention of that tradition's name. That choice may have been motivated by a desire for a fresh hearing, but it does little to jettison the conceptual baggage which panpsychism has accumulated. The central problem with panpsychism in the context of consciousness studies is one that I have critiqued elsewhere (notably in my review of the 2024 book by Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World, which is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association). Simply, one cannot have one's proverbial cake and eat it, too. Theorists of consciousness who wrestle with the Hard Problem---of how matter can produce mind, how brains can be conscious---are motivated to appeal to panpsychist ontology by one reason: it provides a ready-made but partial solution, by declaring that all matter, not only healthy brains, is already somehow mental. If this seems absurd, the remedy is to imagine an ever more basic form of mentality until there remains only the dimmest glimmer of sentience in the bowling ball, or the lump of coal, or the proton, that is your exemplary physical object. Let the proton's level of "mind" be low enough, and you can secure the prize of explanatory power without paying the price of an utterly counterintuitive solution. Brian Eno mocked this sort of thinking in the last verse of his 1974 song, Put A Straw Under Baby: There's a brain in the table, / There's a heart in the chair / And they all live in Jesus, / It's a family affair.

Of course, such mockery is as easy as solving the Hard Problem is difficult. The "psychophysical parallel of experience and energy" at the heart of this book is not what troubles me; it's the insistence that the well-known unsolved problems of panpsychism have been overcome by a distinction between "consciousness" and mere "experience" that seems to me semantic, a distinction without a difference. And if we do develop the difference, say, by citing Damasio's more robust distinction between self-consciousness and core consciousness, well, we can find sophisticated panpsychists who already had such distinctions in their arguments decades ago.

Now, I don't regard panpsychism as a trivial position. It has been held by some brilliant minds in various disciplines and centuries, including Christ Koch, Galen Strawson, and (arguably) Leibniz and Ernst Mach. But it is often called a "slippery slope," and this doesn't only refer to the way one can find oneself widening the scope of "the mental" until it includes quite all material objects---and even all of spacetime, including the empty spots. The slipperiness lies in the way panpsychist thought can seduce us into holding two contradictory ideas at once. On the one hand, we attribute some super-basic degree of mentality to everything, even to stuff we cannot quite respect as in any way experiential, like rocks. But on the other hand, when we go to deal with that deep-seated prejudice, we finesse-away the trouble with a sleight of hand that find us claiming rocks can be "mental," or "subjective," or "experiential," or "inward," or "intrinsic," without being conscious.

Mark Solms, by contrast, is not a panpsychist, and together with Karl Friston he has developed a theory of consciousness called "Felt Uncertainty" (see Solms' superb 2021 book, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness). It begins with the axiom that consciousness is not fundamentally cognitive nor perceptual, but affective: feelings are the basis of all experience. They are always motivated feelings, grounded in every organism's evolved need to behave in ways that will optimize survival. What will help me survive feels good; what will endanger me feels bad, urgently motivating me to change my relationship to the threat until I enjoy the sweet relief of renewed safety. And dangers consist in departures from the normal parameters within which alone I can hope to live and thrive---thermoregulation, for example, is the art of staying not-too-hot and not-too-cold. Temperature, blood pressure, oxygen levels, energy supplies, social connection---whatever the parameter, homeostasis is the name of the game by which we act to remain within the parameters that our survival requires. So Solms is absolutely clear and explicit about the central pillar of his theory: consciousness is feelings, and feelings are conscious by definition. Such a theory has no use for panpsychism, not even for its more subtle flavors, such as pan-proto-psychism, which bets everything on that little Greek root proto, loading it with the implication that a sufficiently thin sliver of mind can slip past the binary distinction between consciousness and its lack.

I have seen this troubling equivocation before, in Koch's 2024 book and elsewhere (such as in the panpsychist text by Clarke that I reviewed in my previous post on this blog). Pepperell's new book does the same business by "distinguishing between unconscious and conscious experience." That way of putting it creates the impression that the two modifiers are not equally modifying the noun "experience," but they are. So we have to ask what could possibly be meant by "unconscious experience." Blindsight comes up, as does the unconscious nature of plenty of brain processes entailed in cognition and perception. But the bulk of Pepperell's handling of the issue takes the form of quotations from original texts in the history of physics where psychological language is employed metaphorically to describe events in the physical world, like collisions in dynamics, or heat transfer in thermodynamics, or the behavior of light in optics. A mass "experiences a force" when acted on gravitationally, et cetera.

When Pepperell is at the task of establishing the reasonableness of panpsychism, he enlists this abundant metaphorical usage of the term "experience" from the history of physics and insists that it should instead be taken literally. That way, Sir Isaac Newton, too, is among the panpsychists (and What Matter Feels includes ample evidence suggesting that Newton was a panpsychist indeed). But when it comes time to enhance the credibility of Pepperell's own theory by "distinguishing between unconscious and conscious experience," we are asked to keep on going with our acceptance that rocks quite literally "experience" collisions, while quietly subtracting precisely the bit that made the word literal instead of metaphoric, namely, consciousness. If I eat the cake, it is gone; if the cake is still there, I have not eaten it.

The main new thing in Pepperell's unusual book is a system of new terms describing what the experience of an inanimate object might be, if panpsychism were true. If we shelve What Matter Feels in the part of the library where Conceptual Art belongs, then the book appears as a creative gesture with ample cleverness and novelty. As a contribution to consciousness studies, it seems to me bizarrely naive about the circularity of its own procedure.

Why? Because the author starts by establishing a "psycho-physical parallelism," where a unit of energy (one joule) corresponds to one unit of experience (one "emp"). Whatever experiments we devise for testing the hypothesis will be the same old physical experiments, this time with new labels that posit, hidden in the billiard balls, experiences that exactly match the observable events of the experiment. We have not actually rendered the inner feelings of a bowling ball "measurable"; we have merely insisted that for every joule of energy beaten into it by a hammer, it experiences a corresponding number of emps of distress at being suddenly pushed out of its previous state of peaceful stasis.

The parallelism defines the physical and the psychological as exact quantitative equivalents, so the measurements of the one are always easily flipped into serving as identical measurements of the other. Dual aspect monism is an ontology, not a piece of empirical methodology, because it says the mental and the material are two aspects of one underlying entity that remains mysterious. Transposing units of measurement from the material side to the mental side does not diminish the mystery of that elusive third thing. Only on pages 92-93 is there a hint of some eventual falsifiability or experimental testing of the book's ideas, whereas this is promised on many pages, quite repeatedly.

Another odd lacuna is the total lack of reference to Arthur Schopenhauer, in a book that continually attributes "Will" to non-biological objects. Further, the author claims that consciousness is the subjective aspect of a process of energy transfer, so that a static system could not be conscious. This implies that a stone only possesses "Will" if it is being actively impinged on by some event, whereas Schopenhauer seems to have regarded the will as an intrinsic property of everything that exists, regardless of circumstances, and without which no entity could exist at all.

Last, I note that Pepperell adopts from Freud, Solms, and others the notion that pleasure is primarily associated with homeostatic equilibrium and its restoration, which Freud sometimes called "nirvana," and Pepperell calls "Repose." But there are also pleasures of arousal and the disequilibrium we call excitement, while repose can sometimes be stagnant and boring.

Pepperell is quite a good writer, and his history of science has real merit in my view. It is stimulating to learn about geniuses like Mach and Faraday--but Schopenhauer is so precisely the needful predecessor here that it was almost painful to search in vain for any mention of him.

It's hard (for me, at least) to see just how any experimentalist could utilize Pepperell's innovate but bizarre set of new quantitative units for the unobservable "experience" of material objects. What Matter Feels is a unique work that succeeds rather smashingly in what I see as an artistic ambition to invent and depict an impossible science of panpsychism. Whether the author believes himself to have made such an artwork, or instead to have constructed such a science indeed---I cannot tell.

I heard of this book because it quotes an original scientific paper by my own father, the physicist Eugene Hecht. But the quotation contains the word "experience," and Pepperell has taken advantage of this to create a misleading impression that my Dad shares his panpsychism---a metaphysical view that Pop would not endorse in a million years (or at least, a few thousand). Endearingly, it turns out that this eloquent British polymath has even gone the length of creating a painting in tribute to my father's insight, and this I appreciate, and respect. Here is the image, with the quotation:

I posted a somewhat crankier draft of this review on Amazon earlier this month, and to his credit, Pepperell reached out to me directly, apparently unperturbed, and invited correspondence. So I set to work, and I've just sent him a 5,000 word essay about his book. With his approval, perhaps I'll post it here.

Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude, by D.S. Clarke (2003), a brief review.

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 04:05:00 +0000

3 stars out of 5.

While there is much to respect here, I found myself irked by several features of this book, which I'll list in order of importance. (1) It is weighed down by longeurs that felt digressive and tedious, without much direct relevance to panpsychism. (2) Its appreciation for "the religious attitude" seemed to me quite limited and superficial, with the marks of religious inexperience and an overly concrete style of thinking. Last (3), its cultural competence left a great deal to be desired. Consider this passage:

To use 'God' as a form of address links supplicants to the members of communities worshipping the God of Abraham, David, and Jesus in the past. But it does not link them to those within Islamic communities in which 'Allah' has been the form of address (168).

This is just silly; all three Abrahamic religions worship the same God, and the name "Allah" is simply an Arabic word for "God," cognate with Hebrew "El." Moreover, all three named persons are Jews, and this goes unremarked. Abraham, the first monotheist, was also the first Jew (some people feel the need to paper-over this inconvenience by insisting, quite ahistorically, that "Abraham was a Muslim," which is rather like insisting Jesus was American). David was the Jews' greatest King, who governed the ancient Jewish state at its height. Jesus was a charismatic young Rabbi and itinerant healer who was tortured to death by the Roman military garrison, like so many other victims of Roman imperial violence (he was no Christian). The good Dr. Clarke is typical of Gentile intellectuals in his breezy use of the term "Judeo-Christian," a mildly obnoxious coinage consistent with others like "Old Testament." Jewish scholars like the great Gershom Scholem and Arthur Cohen write essays and books about the rudeness and wrongness of these terms, but it is mainly Jews who ever read them. Forgive my digression--the same fault I found with this book at the top of this brief review--but lately this issue is on my mind.

Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude is an intelligent book, but it did not further my thinking. One of its uses is that it unwittingly illustrates what it was like to think about the then-missing function of consciousness before Antonio Damasio and Jaak Panksepp and Mark Solms figured out what its function was. Consciousness evolved (at least, embodied consciousness evolved) as an organism's capacity for feelings that give each of its bodily needs a distinctive quale, so that the organism can sift these qualia in order of urgency and meet the needs in an appropriate sequence. An urgent need to flee a predator takes precedence over a less urgent need to eat, or a much less urgent need to reproduce. The system called consciousness successfully maintains homeostasis because each of the different needs feels significantly different to the living organism. While this 2003 work of Clarke's does quote someone who refers generally to homeostasis as the purpose of consciousness, there was in these pages no fuller account than that. I don't know whether Damasio and others had articulated it yet or not, but it seems not to have pervaded the discipline back then the way it has in the meantime (see Solms' superb 2021 volume, The Hidden Spring).

Biden Should Go, So Trump Can Be Defeated

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 22:41:00 +0000

Today someone posted to Facebook this very impressive list of President Biden's accomplishments:

Lowering Costs of Families’ Everyday Expenses
More People Are Working Than at Any Point in American History
Rescued the Economy and Changed the Course of the Pandemic
Rebuilding our Infrastructure
Historic Expansion of Benefits and Services for Toxic Exposed Veterans
The First Meaningful Gun Violence Reduction Legislation in 30 Years
Protected Marriage for LGBTQI+ and Interracial Couples
Historic Confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson & Federal Judges of Diverse Backgrounds
Rallied the World to Support Ukraine in Response to Putin’s Aggression
Strengthened Alliances and Partnerships to Deliver for the American People
Successful Counterterrorism Missions Against the Leaders of Al Qaeda and ISIS
Executive Orders Protecting Reproductive Rights
Historic Student Debt Relief for Middle- and Working-Class Families
Ending our Failed Approach to Marijuana
Advancing Equity and Racial Justice, Including Historic Criminal Justice Reform
Delivering on the Most Aggressive Climate and Environmental Justice Agenda in American History
More People with Health Insurance Than Ever Before

I mostly agree with this assessment of President Biden's remarkable record. I also agree with Professor Heather Cox Richardson's framing of Biden as the first president to undo the "Reagan Revolution." Since 1981, "supply-side economics" has been a disastrous norm of domestic policy in which taxes on the wealthy are deeply cut, resulting in the massive polarization of wealth that has done so much to destroy our culture, emiserate our people, and drive the rise of the populist Right and its lawless orange Lumpenfuhrer.

But unlike the Facebook poster and, I imagine---though I hope I'm wrong---unlike Professor Richardson, I'm disheartened by the administration's tepid support for Ukraine and Israel. The Congressional Republicans have Ukrainian blood on their hands for their yearlong blockage of necessary weapons and equipment, but Biden hurt the Ukrainians with his refusal to sell them the MGM 140 ATACMS (long range ballistic missile systems), and with his insistence that they not destroy the Kerch Bridge to Crimea, a structure vital to the Russian war effort.

And I'm much more upset about the 9 billion dollars the President sent to the murderous regime in Iran, "earmarked for humanitarian purposes." The earmark was a silly fantasy, typical of American magical thinking. Iran promptly spent that money funding Hamas and Hezbollah for the murder of Jews; paying its Morality Police to execute Gay men and to beat Iranian women for wearing their hijabs improperly; and building more weapons, including myriad rockets and, probably, its nuclear program. The regime is still in power, Israelis are still dying, and the Persian people are still miserable.

Supposing I were a Gentile and had the luxury of forgetting about the Iran issue, I would be less ambivalent about President Biden's achievements. I would still be just as staunchly against the loathsome Republican nominee, former President Donald J. Trump, a 34-count convicted felon, a thief, a rapist, a compulsive liar, and a nearly illiterate failed businessman who bears all the marks of being a Russian asset whose Project 2025 is an explicit blueprint for the end of American democracy.

Make no mistake: I am 100% opposed to Trump, and would not vote for him in a million years.

However... Facebook and Instagram are now flooded with reposted memes and original remarks whose point is to shame anybody who's even concerned about President Biden's fitness for office. Those who see the situation this way are making a leap, from the genuinely apocalyptic danger of Trump's likely reelection, straight to the urgent need to stifle every word of criticism of Biden, and any speculation about his stepping aside. I find this disingenuous, impractical, and self-defeating.

I believe it may well lead to the dystopian Trumpistan we Democrats and Independents are trying to prevent. They claim it is "absurd" to reconsider the nominee "because of one hour of debate," as if what we saw last week was not a damning vision of exhaustion and cognitive decline. As if that appalling hour of ineptitude and dissociation somehow doesn't matter.

But we all saw it with our own eyes, and hectoring us to forget about it feels like gaslighting---a fashionable word for a form of abuse in which the perp uses shame and threats to convince the victim to ignore his own or her own direct experience.

It does not matter that Joe Biden did much better at his recent State of the Union speech; and at the rally that followed the debate; and maybe even at the next debate (only two this year!) on September 10th. What matters is that he was capable of performing so badly, and that he will be older still as his second term transpires. This is not ageism; there are plenty of men and women older than the President who are far more lucid, intellectually nimble, and vigorous than he. I say this with gratitude for his superb achievements, compassion for him, and respect for his office.

But as we saw during the nominating process in 2016, 2020, and 2024, the Democratic National Committee has become a ruthlessly cynical, exclusively top-down organization. Its older methods of candidate selection---which involved factional jockeying and favors and threats, with plenty of cynical opportunism---did not completely preclude all challengers. The Kennedy campaign of 1960 may have had a "ruthless" underside, but it was also genuinely idealistic and genuinely insurgent. In 2016, Donna Brazile and Debby Wasserman-Schultz helped Hilary Clinton destroy the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, which offered the population a lifeline to prosperity. Madame Secretary did not even pretend to offer anything more than a brand. The arrogance and hubris and entitlement of the DNC machine was breathtaking. And now they---and we---are paying the price, because that rigid, top-down machine has already produced its candidates, Biden and Harris, who have already shown they almost surely cannot win this election, despite the horrific evil and incompetence of the Republican opponent. In today's DNC, there is no surviving process for a challenger to rise to the top.

I will not vote for RFK Jr. He has been an excruciatingly contradictory mixture of brilliance and stupidity, insight and delusion, pragmatism and absurdity, charisma and ugliness, idealism and cynicism. He would have electrified the debates had he been permitted to enter them, and he did have the necessary polling numbers---but CNN, the Coalition on Presidential Debates, the DNC, and the RNC had no trouble breaking their own rules to exclude him. I can't vote for him because his judgment has been so bad, making verbal gaffes that were sometimes true but utterly imprudent; because he is too soft on Russia regarding their criminal war against Ukraine; because he let his CIA daughter-in-law run his campaign, after that organization murdered his father and uncle, ruining the country; because his paper-thin gun control policy makes no sense; because his vaccine positions range from the reasonable to the disastrously foolish, and do not fit together; because he gave his VP slot to his biggest donor; and because he thinks the free market, by itself, is enough to fix climate change.

In his defense, Kennedy alone has focused attention on the urgent issue of regulatory capture, where giant corporations abuse the public, privatizing the profits and socializing the costs, then stacking the government's regulatory agencies with their own lobbyists---effectively neutering the only institutions that have any hope of protecting the public. They poison the food, soil, and water with glyphosate, causing a cancer epidemic; they dump dioxin and PCBs and "forever chemicals," ruining public health; they strip-mine mountains and wreck waterways, until the tap water in fracked Flint, Michigan is actually flammable; they hobble small business, letting Amazon and big-box stores rule with impunity; they allow Blackrock to buy up all the housing until nobody can afford a home. When the injured public sues, the corporations either out-lawyer them, or pay a trivial fine and keep on going. RFK speaks out about this, having fought it his whole adult life in the courts. That is why his inclusion in the debates would have enriched the national conversation and vitalized the election. Some polls indicate his candidacy will help Trump; others indicate it will help Biden. These are just observations. I didn't tell him to run, and I'm not voting for him.

I don't have a solution. A coup is underway, and it includes Trump, Putin, the Russian intelligence assets and mafiosi named in the Muller Report and the ensuing legal proceedings, Manifort, Chesebro, Eastman, Giuliani, Alex Jones, the January 6th rioters, the poisoned Supreme Court of Alito and Thomas and Barrett and, yes, Roberts, Mitch McConnell's utterly disingenuous refusal to allow a vote on Merrick Garland's nomination to SCOTUS, and McConnell's appalling sabotage of the January 6th impeachment trial. It includes the Congressional Republicans' relentless sabotage of the 117th and 118th sessions of the U.S. Congress since 2021. And it includes about 63 million of our fellow citizens, who prioritize "owning the libtards" over equal protection under the law, healthcare, education, women's rights, clean air and water and soil, civility, and any chance of the Earth not burning into a lifeless Venusian inferno.

The DNC has a chance to run someone else. They can try to do it in a thoroughly insulated way, top-down and centralized, or they can try to do it with an open convention, as in the old days of chaos and something more closely resembling representative democracy. But they ought to do it one way or the other, and immediately. I don't have any knowledge of who is electable and who isn't, except that Michelle Obama has just come out on top in a poll that shows her, and only her, beating Trump. She has never held public office, and to me she represents President Obama's politics of neoliberal perception-management, bad-faith virtue signaling that helps nobody, and de facto economic conservatism (so does Gavin Newsom). But I don't know what she would actually do in the Oval Office, and she would certainly be a hundred times better than Trump.

I wish Jamie Raskin was the nominee, or even the young House Minority Leader, Hakim Jeffries. But it seems to me that the old DNC playbook---pick the guy ourselves, then verbally abuse everyone who asks questions---is a recipe for failure, and with it, endless tyranny.

We are living through a poignant, ironic, tragic crisis. Waves of unintended consequences are crashing together on our collective heads, flowing from the misguided and contradictory efforts of warring factions, each of whom was sure they had the solution to all our woes. Just when the most dangerous coup since the Civil War is blazing its trail through our ossified institutions, we are stuck with an aging chief executive and his politically inept Vice President, amid several hot wars and a renewed cold one, even as climate change wreaks ever-faster havoc on our cities, coasts, crops, and oceans. This is a nail-biter, full of worry and dread and bitterness. We will need courage, dialogue, and whatever well-being we can give each other in all this upheaval.

Nov. 30, 1968: The BBC, The Rolling Stones, and a Near Death Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 20:01:00 +0000

Yesterday on YouTube I larked into a performance of the Rolling Stones' new hit song, "Sympathy for the Devil" on The David Frost Show, from November 30, 1968, on the BBC.

The band is young and beautiful, still innocent and nervous, and not yet bereaved-and-freaked-out by the death (a likely murder), some 7 months later, of Brian Jones, who plays piano con brio here. Mick Jagger's youthful androgynous loveliness is quite striking, and he's apparently feeling shy about taking off his shirt, which he does in stages, hunched over as if to conceal himself. The performance is just different enough from the studio record that it's pretty clear it's not a lip-synch, though the lead guitar sounded pretty much the same to me (superb, that is). But the lyrics are among the best Jagger ever penned, and because he vocalizes in that special, yelling way of his, it's not always clear exactly what the hell he's saying. The song was new at this point, and I wish he had sold it better on The David Frost Show. Well and good.

After the performance we learn that the other guests include the young Shakespearean actor Nicol Williamson, who in 1969 would star in Tony Richardson's excellent film of Hamlet, opposite Mick Jagger's then-girlfriend, Marianne Faithful, as Ophelia, with Michael Pennington as Laertes, and Anthony Hopkins as Claudius.

Here on the David Frost show, Williamson is feeling cranky, coming off as young and rather insecure, taking issue with everything anyone else has to say. He does a decent reading-aloud of a scary passage from Samuel Beckett about death, the subject of the segment, which had apparently been a troublesome obsession for him at this period. Other guests speak briefly and unremarkably... and then, at about 11min40sec, something wonderful and delightful and now entirely obsolete takes place:

Frost, the host of the show, invites the audience to express their personal opinions. He doesn't charge at them with a microphone, as American talk show hosts have done since the 1980's. The audience members simply raise their hands and he calls on them. "The lady in the front row" is a lady indeed, in a modest dress, handsomely middle-aged, looking self-assured and entirely in her element as a proper member of the British public who knows how to behave and expects others will do the same. Which they do. Before she begins to speak, Frost offers her a drink (!), which she declines, and then, in endearing plain talk, tells of her husband's having had a blissful and transformative near death experience---it's a misnomer, since like many patients, he was temporarily dead, but that's what we call them.

This forms a stark and happy contrast with the famous young actor's dismal terror of oblivion. Then the man next to her makes a quick point, expressed in a slightly clumsy way that nevertheless gets his meaning across, and it's a good one. The world appears to be infinite; it is real even though infinity is not rational; therefore we, too, might be infinite as well, without that being a special exception made just for us.

The whole thing is incredibly civilized, humane, easy, and pleasant. I feel envy (not jealousy; I want what they have, but I do not want to destroy it) and admiration. Something has been lost in the long meantime. I was born May 13th, 1968. Dr. King was killed April 4th; Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY), June 5th. But those were American traumas. They touched the British, too---"I shouted out, Who killed the Kennedys?" goes the song on this very show---but Vietnam was our disaster, not theirs. I get the sense that in 1968, the social fabric was tearing slightly slower in England than here. Civility and discourse; time to think and space to converse; norms of social behavior that provided scaffolding for interactions with strangers that made it relatively safe to roll the dice on humanity and have a chat in a pub with someone you didn't already know. Something has been lost, and this quaint, humbling, forgotten moment of British television encapsulates it.

Bionians, at Play in the Fields of Their Lord

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 04:38:00 +0000

Here are three short excerpts from a single, randomly chosen spot (pages 4 to 5) in a fairly recent book of Bionian psychoanalysis called Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2016). By "Bionian," I mean deeply influenced by the work of analyst Wilfred Bion (1897-1979). Quotations from the book are in red here, with yellow highlight on the errors therein.

Harris (2013) wrote about Bion’s well-known ideas about death in life in the context of his advice to analysts to work without memory or desire: 'This is Bion’s famous instruction to the analyst: work in the present moment, without reference to history and desire.' (Bion, 1967, p. 612)

This is wrong. The phrase Bion used was "without memory and desire." He was drawing upon T.S. Eliot, who was drawing upon Chaucer, who was drawing upon Lucretius (as usual with Bion, he gave no attribution to those sources).

But let us introduce another Bion quote to add to the complexity of Bion’s relationship to temporality. To wit: 'I died on August 7th, 1917, on the Amiens-Roye Road. (Bion 1982, p. 265.)'

No. The date Bion specified was August 8th, 1918, not August 7th, 1917.

James Grotstein, Bion’s analysand, thinks that Bion remained stymied, stuck, hopelessly lost in the wake of the death of that beloved friend in 1917. Grotstein ends his discussion of Bion’s memoir with this comment: 'Someone once said that Bion was “miles behind his face.” I take this to mean that he was withdrawn, lonely, and unreached.' (Grotstein, 1998, p. 613)

Also wrong, in at least three ways. First, James Grotstein adulated Bion for 35 years, praising him in hyperbolic, fawning language in publication after publication, as part of a successful effort to build a kind of cult around the man he idealized. He never called Bion "stymied, stuck, hopelessly lost," and that view does not fit at all with the myriad assessments Grotstein did make of his hero.

Second, the soldier who died horribly in the foxhole he shared with Bion on August 8th, 1918 was a private whom Bion pseudonymously calls "Sweeting," apparently taking the name from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night ("Trip no further, pretty sweeting"). This hapless soldier was by no means a "beloved friend" of Bion; at any rate, there is no evidence of this in the memoir or elsewhere, and the text seems to suggest they hardly knew each other. This supposed close friendship is a bizarre invention.

And third, as mentioned, the year was 1918, not 1917.

The point of my fault-finding is not to cast aspersions on the work of distant colleagues, whom I'm not even naming here because I'm reluctant to dent anyone's afternoon. Nor is it to impugn the editorial rigor of the publisher. The point is to illustrate, one more time, the anti-scholarly textual practice of the Bionian subculture. Those who toil in the Bionian field consistently present a markedly low standard of accuracy in their productions and, oddly enough, this trait is itself a legacy of Dr. Grotstein (1925-2015). Afraid of competing with the Master, Grotstein neutered himself in several ways; the major form this took was the obsessive praise of Bion that drives, and suffuses, Grotstein's work. Somewhat less obviously, Grotstein also inflicted upon himself a mental block against accurate quotation of anyone except Bion. Check any literary quotation in his entire oeuvre, and you will find it contains at least one error. Getting things wrong is simply part of the Bionian style. For a while I thought this was due to a repressed contempt for poetry, an alien resource they tend to deploy as a kind of credibility-enhancing decoration. But in some cases, it seems, the habit of misquotation and making-things-up affects even their presentation of the Master himself. Live and learn.

Iliad Book IX: The Embassy to Achilles

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 19:57:00 +0000

AN AUDIOVISUAL FORM OF AUDIOBOOK. I think this video of Iliad Book 9 is the best acting performance I've done so far in my life (that's not saying much; only about 25% of such acting as I have done was good, I believe; and Ive only been in 15 productions). It's an epic poem and I'm not off-book, but the project is so big that it seems to have developed its own form, wherein it's natural for my eyeballs to be continually checking in with the book in my hand. It's storytelling as theater, rather than theater as storytelling. I guess it isn't theater, since it's not live. But it's not a movie, in that it's not a visual depiction of the story. It's an audiovisual form of audiobook, in 24 movies.

This is Book 9, the Embassy to Achilles, where the Greeks (aka Achaeans, Danaans, Argives) plead with Achilles (aka Aiakides, Peleion) to give up his anger against Agamemnon (aka Atreides, meaning "son of Atreus"), accept the abundant reparations Agamemnon is offering to him, and consent to defend the overmatched Greeks from the fierce Trojan defenders, especially their greatest fighter, Hector---whose wife and baby son we met in Book 6.

We may detest the Achaeans for making war against the innocent but wealthy Trojans; we may root for Troy, as do Apollo and Aphrodite. But we are also subject to the love Hera and Athena feel for the Achaeans, who include "Patroclus, who was strong and gentle..." In Book 16, Patroclus' death will break our hearts; for now, a domestic scene of peace, where the man who soon will slaughter others all day and die under Hector's spear is quietly serving bread to the great, unwise, angry young man whom he loves.

Book 9 is all about the missed opportunity for Achilles to stop the tragedy from unfolding by giving up his anger. Instead he refuses, and the mission (the "Embassy") fails. Especially moving is the plea of the aged Phoenix, Achilles' godfather, who reminds Achilles of his childhood.

Free download of my book How To Write about Homer (Infobase, 2010).

Note from a Dark Day in the United States, Not Long Ago

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 21:46:00 +0000

I posted the following essay to the Member's Message Board of the American Psychoanalytic Association, during the night of the January 6th 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. The post begins as a response to an eminent psychoanalytic historian, Peter Loewenberg.

Dear Peter,

Thank you very much for the passion of your post about this mad coup attempt, which I share. But it seems to me your experience of outraged bewilderment at "incompetence" among the gendarmes is only one option among several. You wrote, "It reminds me of the Dallas Police who let Oswald, the one person who had unknown answers to the assassination of President J.F. Kennedy (Russian stay, trip to Cuba), be murdered in the Dallas courthouse just hours after the event."

"One person"? Suffice it to say, this begs the question; there were many people who had answers that were "unknown" at the time, and became well known later; people did talk. Decades of FOIA releases, depositions, and other vetted sources populate the current understanding of 11-22-63, best codified in JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James Douglass, S.J., among many other superb accounts.

The active role of the Dallas Police Department in 11-22-63 is well documented, but in some circles, it's still not respectable to discuss it. C. Fred Alford's Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power is a brilliant analysis of why that is.

I was for several years (2003-2006) the editor and collaborator of such a whistleblower, a former LAPD officer whom the CIA had attempted to recruit in the late 1970's. He refused when he learned their mission involved participating in the narco-economy in his precinct (Mid-Wilshire) and beyond. Michael Ruppert (1951-2014) was eventually driven to suicide, partly due to the strain of advocating for a dissident narrative with a detective's passion for evidence and argumentation, rather than the mere resentment and fantasia that we all deplore. Gary Webb met a similar fate. Some dissident American journalists, historians, and whistleblowers are incarcerated; others are more fortunate, living to work and thrive, by the mysteries of resilience and the love of friends and family. We increase the safety of them all, and our own, when we take their positions seriously.

Part of the reason Capitol Hill is currently under siege is the Forty Year Assault on the Public University; part is the work of right-wing think tanks shaping the public airwaves; and part is the complacency of American intellectuals who allowed the national security state to get away with domestic political assassinations for fifty years. This happened because the social and professional price of political truth-telling was and remains high, the world over.

America is no more immune to the quiet, complacent pressures against reasoned dissent than it is immune to state crimes against democracy. I believe what is happening tonight is a right-wing populist insurgency, saturated with racist ideology, information, misinformation, and abundant disinformation, continually egged on by Trump, Giuliani, and their authoritarian allies. The insurgents are, it seems, incompetent, poorly organized, enraged, thoughtless, and terrified of weakness, which inspires their sadism. But to emphasize the "incompetence" of the police is, in my view, to risk excusing their cynicism and their deceptively passive participation, as if dangerous inaction against the insurgents were due to the armed authorities' lack of skill or training.

The FBI established back in 20o6 what the Black community and aspiring allies had known for many years: U.S. law enforcement, federal and otherwise, is (to a limited but alarming degree) pervaded by white supremacists. Surely the failure to purge police departments (and other armed authoritarian elements of the domestic national security state such as I.C.E.) of these persons is the work of more than incompetence, inertia, and faceless structural forces. And of course, the militarization of American police installations across the country can't be pinned on a "lone nut."

Much of the reason these pro-fascist insurgents will believe anything they are told, even if hateful and/or demonstrably false, is because the public state and its institutions abused the public's trust so many times, promulgating official falsehoods from 11-22-63, to 4-4-68, to 6-5-68, to Iran-Contra, to the WMD hoax of the Bush-Cheney administration, and so on. Leo Rangell's enduring work on Watergate: The Compromise of Integrity is exemplary of how psychoanalysis can bring its ethical commitments to bear on public life without falling prey to the seductions of disinformation (including official discourse at its worst), nor to its mirror image in misinformation (good-faith efforts at research that come to grief one way or another). That is, arguably, one of the vocation's responsibilities.

The "deep state" (a formerly obscure idiom from Turkish political science, recently appropriated and rendered useless by the MAGA right) triumphs over the public state when "anything can be believed, and nothing can be known." All this shock that a coup d'etat could possibly "happen here" is, I feel, rather obscene, since one succeeded 57 years ago, to the destruction of millions (mostly children, it seems), who perished in the ensuing regional conflicts in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Latin and Central America and Africa. There is plenty of outrage to go around.

This is essentially my first foray into public discourse on APsA's listserv, having graduated as an analyst last July. I had no wish to marginalize myself by posting such a position, but I do myself a moral injury if I keep silent on this point. And Dr. Katz' posting of today's Black Lives Matter statement is a welcome harbinger of more frank public discourse---in which I repose my civic and, I suppose, even my professional hopes. If that BLM statement is intuitively acceptable to APsA members, as it seems to be, perhaps this one will be, too, since it is by no means unconnected (see, e.g., John Potash's bookon COINTELPRO, that I blurbed in 2007).

Civic debate can be hollowed out from above and from below, neither by omnipotent but unprincipled authorities acting alone, nor by rightist mobs out of nowhere---but by a long history of relationships between our best governing institutions, and those whose cynicism leads them to exploit these from within and from without, using deception and violence. Much of the liberal class makes this possible by complacently repeating the phrase "conspiracy theory" (which, I note, has not been done here) without noticing that it precludes discussion of any and all deliberate crimes against the public, except those committed by collective abstractions, by some "lone nut," or by accident. The phrase should be discarded.

I believe (1) Truth and Reconciliation---especially about the domestic political murders of the American 1960's to the present---is a necessary ingredient in any stable recovery of our political culture in the United States, along with (2) the active deconstruction of the toxic fiction of "whiteness," by European-Americans and others with white privilege, partly through (3) reparations for Black Americans and American Indians. The work of national recovery will fail unless it reckons with these extremely divisive issues, which must surely be named if they are to be addressed.

I hope my voice is not unwelcome here, though it may be unfamiliar in more than one way.

I usually talk about other things. Not tonight.

Thank you.
Jamey Adam Hecht, PhD, PsyD, LMFT ca/ny

VIDEO: The ILIAD of HOMER: Book Five in Performance (Lattimore translation)

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 18:05:00 +0000

In Book V, an astonishing theophany (or, "Divine appearance") occurs: Athena's visitations to Diomedes prompt him to the wounding of an immortal, the Goddess Aphrodite, as she tries to rescue her own son, Aeneas. Sarpedon, son of Zeus, has what we today call a "Near Death Experience," though the many of the modern NEDs, like this ancient one, include a brief period of being actually dead. Unlike Aeneas, Sarpedon is a son of Zeus himself, and though other Gods rescue their favorites directly, Zeus never personally visits the battlefield.

So far, Aeneas is the only other hero to be rescued from a death which he has momentarily (but actually) died already. But it took two Gods to do it---Aphrodite (his own Mother), and Apollo the Healer (who sees to his recovery after Aphrodite is wounded by Diomedes). The next time Sarpedon dies, killed by Patroclus in Book XVI, no God prevents or fixes it, because Zeus Himself cannot break Fate, or if he does, the cosmos might become a chaos.

VIDEO: The ILIAD of HOMER: Book Four in Performance (Lattimore translation)

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 02:59:00 +0000

In the Fourth Book of Homer's Iliad, the fragile truce (that had temporarily reduced the Trojan War to a duel) is broken, and the carnage begins. Whereas in Book Three, Paris was saved from Menelaos' spear by Aphrodite, here in Book Four, Menelaos himself is saved from Pandaros' arrow by Athena. Agamemnon rouses the Achaean princes, and the two armies clash.

My many thanks to the brilliant John P. S. of Massachusetts for support of this blog.

VIDEO: The ILIAD of HOMER: Book Three in Performance (Lattimore translation)

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 19:28:00 +0000

In the third book of the Iliad, an attempt is made to stop the war and hold a duel instead, between the two claimants to Helen's hand (and her possessions): Menelaos (King of Sparta/Lacedaemon, and her original husband) and Paris/Alexander, who carried her away to Troy. The duel is foiled by Divine intervention.

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:39:00 +0000

I've been sculpting in Plastilina for about 3 months now, and I usually put the heads onto public things like old cast-iron fireboxes or other street-common vertical surfaces. The photographs documenting the project are on my instagram, jameyhecht. Here are some shots of them, either new-made or new-installed on Brooklyn streets. Thank you, New York. 💞

VIDEO: The ILIAD of HOMER: Book One in Performance (Lattimore translation)

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 18:51:00 +0000

Enjoy this performance of Book One of Homer's Iliad, most of it produced in quarantine as an effort to keep the crisis creative.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the clinical value of this story lies in its viscerally felt linkage between rage and misery; competition and bitterness; loss, and the revelation that there are things far more important than being right, or vindication, or even victory. For this wisdom, the tragic drama of ancient Athens is among the best sources in the world (though King Lear, for example, teaches some of the same lessons about shame).

Homer's epic poem, or "made thing," is among the deepest works of our species. It represents the collective labors of over four centuries of bards, who span the gap between the Trojan War itself (c.1185-1175 BCE), and the emergence of a vast epic tradition that has kept its human images alive. Those labors were woven together, and presumably linked by improvised poetic transitions, by the mind of an individual blind genius, touched by poetry's Divine origin.

Iliad I (traditionally, the "books" or chapters of the Iliad are noted in capital Roman numerals; those of the Odyssey, lowercase) includes a Divinely sent opportunity to put aside anger. Though Achilles' reprieve from his own rage proves all too brief, each of us may be more free than we suspect; free, for example, to let go of old resentments, of old yearnings for retributive justice, or for a great day of reckoning.

The non-tragic outcome is surely still possible for you and me, in part because the tragic consciousness is already is still available to us---only (or as I prefer to think, especially) if, as Nietzsche said, we still have some connection to the past and the ancient world.

I made the first portion (lines 1-92) in 2013; the rest in the Spring of 2020. It was a great experience----a real reward for playing hooky from the daily regime of anxiety about wasting time; or about being too expressive; or about failing to monetize every minute of each day, or meet other American expectations that are levied daily at the expense of each human spirit who buys into them for lack of support. The latter includes love (rather than isolation), as well as connection--not only to a partner and the community, but to the to the past and the cosmos.

Art exists to help us live our lives---as everybody says, in a chorus that includes Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer; Shelley and Nietzsche ("hey, those are my guys"). Living with the help of art does not make you Don Quixote. It can put you in touch with much more of reality, and not (usually) less.

Sure a Poet is a sage, a humanist, physician to all mankind.--John Keats.

Enjoy some Homer, today.

VIDEO: The ILIAD of HOMER: Book Two in Performance (Lattimore translation)

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 18:45:00 +0000

Book 2 of the Iliad of Homer contains the famous "Catalogue of Ships," from kata+logos, a "down-telling," or listing, of all the contingents of soldiers who came to Troy from Hellenic, Greek-speaking places. A similar catalogue of Trojans and their allies ends the book, with the besieged Trojan people and their friends all marching out to meet the horde of Hellenic invaders. Note that the Hellenes (or Greeks, as the Romans later called them) are also called Danaans, Achaeans, and Argives, with broadly similar meanings for the poem. Book II also contains some of the most archaic poetry in the epic.

It's an especially touching poetic text for the brief anecdotes of fate and loss that are strung along its length like harmoniously spaced beads on a string. The micro-story of the brothers Protesilaos and Podarkus is a gemlike example, here silently (visually) mapped into a modern parallel for the vividness of its heartbreak.

Here and there, I have speeded up the movie, never omitting a word of Lattimore's translation, but increasing the playback speed to tighten what the modern ear might feel to be longueurs.

Homer's darkly beautiful epic poem, or "made thing," is among the deepest works of our species. It represents the collective labors of over four centuries of bards, beginning with the Trojan War itself c.1180 BCE, and eventuating in a vast epic tradition that has kept that war's human images alive. Around the 740's BCE, the most resilient of the fragmentary poetic results of those labors were woven together, and presumably linked by improvised poetic transitions, by the mind of an individual blind genius, touched by poetry's Divine origin.

My 2010 book about Homer will soon be available for free on Scribd. I haven't had time to scan and upload it just yet, but it's coming soon. Meantime, Chapters 2 & 3 are downloadable here: https://ncpsychoanalysis.academia.edu/JameyHecht .

Enjoy the show! And may the bittersweet wisdom of the ancient world make your time in this one more fruitful and engaging.

Some Aphorisms from a manuscript I'm calling "Box of Darts"

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 15:14:00 +0000

A Defeated People

The humanities faculty at American universities constitute a defeated people.

Contingency

One day, when you’re still a kid but not for much longer, you realize that you live where you do and attend school where you do for the sole reason that this was where your parents happen to be making their living. If they had different jobs, you might never have met your best friend, nor all your little enemies; everything could’ve been completely different—and so, consequently, could you. Pull too hard on that thread, and what unravels is the illusion of necessity, a sheltering bubble that had made it all seem ordained and important.

History Rhymes

Note the parallel between these two fifty-year periods: between the second Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BCE and the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE (49 years), and between the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE and the end of the Babylonian Captivity in 538 BCE (48 years).

Oxymoron: the Educated Consumer.

Picking out which of the limes in the grocer’s basket is the greenest, the ripest, the worthiest, you finish off the thousands of man-hours that went into making them all identical. Agribusiness has taken the three tasks of planting, harvest, and distribution and added a fourth, namely the struggle to erase every difference between the specimens. It has done so precisely because mass-market produce is aimed at a faceless public of interchangeable consumers, who have forgotten both the variety of nature and the possibility of living a unique life: and you need to pretend that one of the limes is perceptibly better than the others, because those limes in the basket are eerily reminiscent of the milling crowd in the store, and—to the degree that what passes for individuality these days is a kind of hoax we play on ourselves—that greenest, ripest lime is you.

The Sphinx

The Sphinx has a desperate need not to be understood. Oedipus comes along and solves the riddle, and suddenly there is someone who understands her; she promptly kills herself. Others need to be understood and die for lack of it; she needs to mystify and dies when she’s understood. The Sphinx is a composite beast, “a winged girl-faced lion,” and hearing the riddle one might expect it to be about a composite animal, too: “There is on earth a being two-footed, four-footed, and three-footed that has one name; and, of all creatures that move upon earth and in the heavens and in the sea, it alone changes its form. But when it goes propped on most feet, then is the swiftness in its limbs the weakest.” But it is not a composite animal; it is the human. and why don’t the Greeks notice that “it, alone, changes its form” is untrue, as tadpoles turn to frogs and caterpillars to butterflies?

Bion and Shakespeare

When Bion free associates to Shakespeare’s “Golden girls and boys all must / Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust,” it’s an unconscious allusion to the origins of psychoanalysis in Anna O.’s talking cure, which she called “chimney sweeping.” Which is also a sort of sexual reaming-out. I wonder what sexual jokes and locutions men have invented in three hundred years of reaming out chimneys, rifles, and cannons with ramrods.

Silence

Silence is Time pleading its lovesuit to Eternity.

Review: Broken Glory: The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy by Ed Sanders

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 19:55:00 +0000

Broken Glory: The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy by Ed Sanders
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm grateful whenever anyone has the courage to write a book that tells dangerous truths, especially about American history during and after the creation of the CIA at the end of WWII. Like so many, I have a deep passion for the authentic leaders of the 1960's whose lives of prophetic courage were snuffed out by the lawless militarists they dared to oppose. President Kennedy, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY) were murdered by the U.S. national security state. Evidence, investigations, and legal proceedings in each case were grossly sabotaged by the FBI and the on-site urban police departments (Dallas, Memphis, NYC, and L.A., respectively), in support of a bogus official narrative that protected the actual planners and perpetrators. Some of those went unidentified; all went unpunished, and to this day there are a few thousand intellectual prostitutes whose "respectable" task is to repeat the official lies and marginalize (ignore, mock, trivialize, pathologize, pity, or revile) their dissenting opponents.

These histories form major elements of my worldview, and the tragically charismatic figures at their centers have shaped my sense of human nature at its best. One of my own books is a poetry collection, fifty 14-line elegies for President Kennedy called Limousine, Midnight Blue. Another is my blank verse translation of Sophocles' Three Theban Plays (Oedipus, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus), which is dedicated to the memory of Robert F. Kennedy. So when someone writes a long POEM about the murder of RFK, I become immediately interested. With his new book "Broken Glory: The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy," Ed Sanders does the USA a service by telling the truth: that the RFK Assassination was not the mad act of yet another lone nut; it was, in the words of former FBI Agent William Turner, "a CIA hit, from start to finish." For Sanders' courage in telling this truth--and for his clear and compelling account of the King Assassination, in this same book--I have great respect, and gratitude.

As a literary work, however, "Broken Glory" is a disappointment. Almost all of it is simply expository prose, lineated as verse. Most of the book comprises chunks of other people's discourse, quoted directly from historical documents (speeches, FBI reports, interviews, depositions); these are mostly well-chosen and well-assembled, but it's not at all clear why Sanders chose to put it all onto the page as verse. It's prose. Maybe Sanders thought he was emulating the political-historical poetry of Peter Dale Scott, who is both a real historian and a real poet, whose many works in both genres (i.e., books of historical scholarship, and books of poetry about history) are brilliant and important. In "Minding the Darkness," "Listening to the Candle," and other works of historical poetry, Scott often quotes from prose documents and lineates those quotations as verse, which Sanders does throughout "Broken Glory." But Peter Dale Scott's historical poems always have many dimensions: personal experience, philosophical reflection, religious thinking, ethical wisdom, and above all, poetic language. By contrast, Sanders' "Broken Glory" offers very little poetry, and is marred by the impulsive sloppiness ("first thought, best thought," remember?) which the Beats and the Yippies associated with authenticity. A few examples:

p. 68, "the upmost loyalty..." The word is utmost. Upmost is not a word.
p. 70, "the doursome J. Edgar Hoover..." The word is dour. Doursome is not a word.
p.132, "sleazesome..." I guess this word is a deliberate invention, but it's lost on me.

When Sanders does go for poetry, the results are not strong. Of 4-4-68, the day of Dr. King's execution, he writes: "The dire day of Dream-Doom / whirls with hidden fury / years & years later, / for an evil that Evil wants kept in the cauldron / evil'd forth that bright spring Southern day..."

The book's finale occurs on its final two pages, with a sudden switch to short lines:

Sung

Oh, won't somebody please tell me why
the guns aim so often to the left

It wounded the nation
in countless ways,
wounded her history
the rest of her days.

It wounded the future
Like Lincoln amort
Or Roosevelt sinking
and the A-bomb's retort.

Tell me again why the guns
always aim to the left?
with gun powder ballots
& voting with knife-heft

I'll stop there; you get the point. This is a mess--the capitalization, the lineation, the punctuation, and the meter are each in disarray. The word choices are unfortunate (amort... knife-heft).

Each of us is a product of his times, and I know Ed Sanders is a very different sort of poet from Peter Dale Scott, or Robert Lowell, or Yeats--poets who have tried to write a poetry of public life (epic) in an idiom of privately felt passion (lyric). Surely his artistic aims and his ideas about poetry are so different from mine that I am making the mistake of judging his good orange as a bad apple. It seems to me his style might be best appreciated by readers who love Allen Ginsberg or William Burroughs, writers whose breezy contempt for craft was widely regarded as liberated and liberating, rather than lazy and vain. That said, I'll put aside my criticism of Sanders' poetry and close with some recognition of the politics, where I think this book succeeds.

The flap copy has a bio of Sanders which notes, "He was also a founding member of the satiric folk-rock band The Fugs as well as the Yippies." Now, I was born in 1968. Sanders was at the heart of the counterculture which I only glimpse in books and films. I don't know what I'm talking about. But from my perspective, the Yippies were a very white, middle class, male bunch of folks who believed that the best way to stop the War in Vietnam would be a relapse into the pseudo-political surrealism and Dada which the French had enjoyed fifty years before then. Ancient Rome's insane Emperor Caligula was thought to have appointed his favorite horse to the Senate--a tyrant using an absurd gesture to mock the powerlessness of the old aristocracy. The Yippies outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated a pig for President--in doing so, they were apparently mocking the militarist juggernaut which the presidency had become since the murder of JFK. But weren't they also emulating Caligula, mocking the whole process instead of working to reform it? Eight years later, the Yippies nominated "Nobody for President." RFK once reminded his audience that Plato used the word "idiot" to refer to people who had no interest in the political life of their own cities. RFK was serious. Fred Hampton was serious. Helen Caldecott was serious, and she still is. Bernie Sanders was serious, and he still is, though he can laugh when the time is right. I wasn't there; I was a baby. I don't claim to understand what it was like to be a draft-age man in 1968. But from my perspective, it seems as if things might've gone better if more folks shifted their focus from dropping acid (which the CIA fed them through Timothy Leary) to investigating the political assassinations (as did Vincent Salandria, Peter Dale Scott, Mae Brussel, et al.) that had made possible the whole disaster. That respect for structure and institutions--as necessary and stable frameworks for a living charisma, not dead substitutes for it--might also have spared us a few million lines of distastefully uninhibited "free verse." But I digress.

On page 124, Sanders seems to transcend his youthful identity with a wise hindsight born of experience: "On May 7 / RFK won his first primary in Indiana. / The Yippies in New York, / eager for confrontation at the Democratic Convention, / I remember were glum that Kennedy was able to reach out to the people / in ways that war-painted dope-jousters / could not..." Wow. Interesting.

I'm very impressed by the sobriety, the moral imagination, and the introspective courage it must have taken for a (former?) Yippee to celebrate, with love and grief, the life of Senator Robert F. Kennedy--a suit-wearing, wealthy, erudite, populist aristocrat who had once been the chief law enforcement figure in the U.S. government, later transformed by loss and agony, and compelled into a prophetic vocation by the depth of his nature.

View all my reviews

Review: "The Billy Collins Experience" by A. M. Juster (Kelsay Books, 2016)

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 18:33:00 +0000

The Billy Collins Experience by A.M. Juster
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A brilliant send-up of a beloved figure in contemporary American poetry. Every poet, even the titans of English literature in the 16th, 17th, and early 19th Centuries, has a sort of literary underbelly where parody can and perhaps should attach. A.M. Juster's satire of Billy Collins is spot-on, unsettling, and hilarious. That might look easy, but it requires special equipment, and this guy has it. It's as if the underlying message of The Billy Collins Experience was something like:

{{Look, I'm not BC, and yet my own array of poetic powers happens to include the same ones he's been using to write these rather precious books of endearing, harmless, graceful yet somehow complacent little poems. Whereas I (a parodist here, legit poet elsewhere) have both a broader range and a more profound sense of mission which transcends Collins' tremendous success, I have not succeeded as he has. Well, maybe his abundance of fans, money, access, and opportunity is linked to the worldly nature of his goals, which I consider thus compromised, and either cynical or naively shallow. This takes the sting out of being both an even better poet than the formidable Billy Collins (a nontrivial, but not necessarily hubristic level of self-confidence) and a far more obscure one. So screw him.}} ...Did I get that right?

Perhaps the most popular American poet since Robert Frost, Billy Collins is also held in one or another degree of contempt by several very different classes of people/poets/critics. Hipsters (postmodern flarfulent bougie whiteprivilegical) tend to disdain his Frostian, popular, coherent, often deeply moving poems, because their own poems make no sense and they like it that way. Next, those whose consciousness is fully and primarily oriented toward social justice can often be found rejecting Billy Collins because there's almost nothing directly political in his large body of work. Poets whose literary identities include deep suffering may turn away from Collins because the tragic strain in his poetry is not as broad as that in, say, Larkin or Jeffers or Plath. I get as much out of Collins at his best as I do out of Frost, and I love them both. I'm also very fortunate to have a blurb from Billy Collins on the back of my first book of poems, Limousine, Midnight Blue : Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film (Red Hen Press, 2009):

"Ovid himself might have taken notice of this volume. It’s one thing
to turn a woman into a tree, another more advanced thing to transform
fifty frames of the Zapruder film into as many sonnets. Limousine,
Midnight Blue is a radical display of poetry’s ability to freeze time, to
catch fugitive—and here, disputed—moments in the amber of form."
—BILLY COLLINS

For your enjoyment, and to add a cornflake of context to this review... My new book of poems, Dodo Feathers: Poems 1989-2019, includes an "Homage to Billy Collins," a tiny poem whose mix of tribute, warmth, and irony is rather different from A.M. Juster's.

HOMAGE TO BILLY COLLINS

Billy Collins could not be here this morning,
so I am writing his poem for him.
In it, a dog sleeps beside a tree,
while that little girl from the painting
by de Chirico chases her almost silent hoop.
And you are there, and from his window
Billy Collins sees you and, too busy writing
a much better poem than this one,
wonders for a moment: how you got here,
and why you are wearing his bathrobe.

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Review: "Klingon Tamburlaine" at the Complex Theater in Hollywood

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 03:11:00 +0000

"...he tampers recklessly with sacred things..."

Sophocles' definition of HUBRIS in Oedipus the Tyrant line 89

Behold, The Klingon Tamburlaine. I first heard of it this summer, when it played as part of the Hollywood Fringe Theater Festival. The instant I saw the phrase, I had strong feelings. You see, Tamburlaine is a play by Christopher Marlowe, the man who invented blank verse. Since Marlowe's murder in 1593, no human being---except for his friend and exact contemporary, William Shakespeare---has equaled him in sheer mastery of the mother tongue we share. "Marlowe's mighty line" has been a catchphrase among those passionate about poetry in English through four centuries. The phrase comes from Ben Johnson's great elegy "To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare," which says:

.....how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us...

Marlowe was a brash atheist, and a proudly hedonistic homosexual, at a time when both were capital crimes. He survived by serving as a spy for the English Crown. The title of Harry Levin's excellent 1964 study The Overreacher is the most apt term for what Marlowe was, this utterly fearless author of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. That play's about a genius whose unbounded hubris ultimately damns him for eternity. Faustus plainly is Marlowe in important ways, a man whose deal with the Devil granted him immunity for the fiercely transgressive behaviors and traits that defined him.

Note the contempt for danger in Marlowe's use of words: fearless, he will say anything, no matter how hubristic, in the service of his truth, "good or bad." For example, Doctor Faustus includes actual Latin incantations to conjure up the Devil, and records show Elizabethan audiences were terrified. One legend holds that during one night's unique performance, there appeared a "super-numerary devil," one more devil than usual, though all the actors were present, in make-up, and accounted for. Apocryphal or not, the legend's meaning is loud and clear: the impact of Marlowe's art was shockingly strong. Contra Auden, his mighty line "made things happen."

If you've got an ear for poetry (Matthew 13:9), you marvel at Christopher Marlowe's stride; the heavy silk and airy iron of it, his floating gossamers, his darts of solid steel! Stamina, momentum, swinging forward on a sort of phonetic steed that banks, keeping to the curvature of the thoughts girding up the overarching story; the shifts of gears he pulls off, steering the verse, tracing the curvature of his thinking as it traversed the ready myth; Marlowe's musical hammers falling, syncopated, offset by footsteps, heartbeats; come to think of it, hoofbeats. Faustus quotes Ovid as the final hours of his life slip away and Damnation is imminent: O lente, lente, curite noctis equii! "Slowly, slowly run, O horses of the Night!" The faster the horses drive the Night ("nightmare" is a very interesting word to research), the sooner Damnation will torment Faustus forever. And notice the onomatopoeia in Ovid's Latin line that Marlowe quotes with such terrible new pathos. It's one of the best examples of that literary trope ever written: the meter of O lente, lente, curite noctis equii! [rhymes with Oh went he, went he? Heard him say not his exit.] is the rhythm of a cantering horse! But not a racing one.

Here's one of my essays about Marlowe, in this book:

I have little interest in artistic transgression for its own sake, which often proves to be little more than a stunt meant to build a brand. That's not what Marlowe is doing; he's coming forward about the side of the human spirit that terrifies the rest of the community: the manic side, the fearless, unprincipled, grandiose and dangerous side of each person. That universality is inseparable from its opposite, when a unique individual goes the distance with ultimate questions and is consumed by his choices in their power.

So I felt both dismay and amusement when I chanced on The Klingon Tamburlaine, a production in which some of my fellow Americans were "doing theater" in an unusually oblivious way. The school of directing in which an entirely alien "concept for this production" is fitted onto an old play like a condom on a banana---to demonstrate... something, I guess. It's irreverent, but what it disrespects is exactly what I respect the most. I'm not much interested in anybody's irreverence toward, say, Dante (or Marlowe, both of whom I revere), since irreverence toward dominant and illegitimate institutions of power and privilege is more meaningful than a snarky diss tossed at the Great (I said it) artists like Dickinson and Shakespeare who make life bearable and even blissful.

So excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, but no: fuck smearing Star Trek all over Tamburlaine the Great. Because that actually is "cultural appropriation." Though I know the work of some of the KT production's actors from their fine performances with other theater companies' productions in which they shone--I could find nothing to appreciate in this mess. "The Klingon Tamburlaine" should never have happened. I heard about it. I wrote a sonnet about it. I saw the production. It verified my impression.

New Video on YouTube channel "Blank Verse Trance": Eloise Klein Healy poem

noreply@blogger.com (Jamey Hecht) — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 05:58:00 +0000