Jews with force

Roger Cohen used the following fragments of dialogue from Philip Roth's novel Deception to bookend his recent New York Times opinion piece on anti-Semitism and Jewish identity.

The novel's protagonist, a middle-aged American writer, is speaking to his English lover.

"In England, whenever I'm in a public place, a restaurant, a party, the theater, and someone happens to mention the word 'Jew', I notice that the voice always drops just a little... [That's how] you all say 'Jew'. Jews included."

When he returns to New York, he tells her that he has realized he had been missing something. What? she asks.

"Jews."

"We've got some of them in England, you know."

"Jews with force, I'm talking about. Jews with appetite. Jews without shame."


Nicely observed. (Sits uneasily, by the way, with Cohen's worthy but rather contorted reflections.)

Anyone for chess?

This picture tells a sad story about priorities and cultural decline. In a corner of the mezzanine floor of the local library (or is it a community center now?), pushed up against an air-conditioning vent and adjacent to a fire extinguisher, sits a chess table and chairs. The pieces are set up - albeit that the kings and queens are on the wrong squares (white queen should be on white, black queen on black); and albeit that one pawn and one knight have gone missing! A tradesman has left a small paint brush on the table which nobody has bothered to remove.

When the chess table first appeared a few years ago it occupied a prime site within the library, but I have it on good authority that it was virtually never used.

In itself a trivial matter, but symbolic - and indicative not only of cultural trends but also of the pitfalls of public sector decision-making.

The boat sails on

The stand-alone pages (click under the Conservative tendency banner) are designed to sketch out in a concise way the political and ethical framework within which I am operating. But, since what I have written only imperfectly reflects my ideas, and also because my ideas are slowly evolving, there is a constant need to revise my notes.

I am reminded of Otto Neurath's famous image which compares our body of knowledge to a boat that must be repaired at sea: "We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry dock and reconstruct it from the best materials."

Today I put up a revised version of 'Conservatism without religion' under the new title, 'Modern conservatism'.

Sometimes I am tempted to go in a more scholarly direction. For example, I have been reading up on the philosophy of law. But, in some ways, such areas (the philosophy of mathematics is another that comes to mind) can be problematic. They appear rigorous and scholarly, but they lack a mechanism to create the convergence of views which characterizes scientific disciplines.

Debates between, say, legal positivists and supporters of natural law-based approaches - or indeed between legal positivists and legal positivists! - roll on for decades without any real resolution. Such debates produce divergence rather than convergence of opinion - growing lists of elaborate and more or less incompatible theories.

I have tried to avoid getting entangled in this sort of thing, stating my views as clearly and as plainly as I can. Not everyone will agree with what I say. There are facts and there are values, and values are necessarily subjective to some degree.

That's just how things are, and I am inclined to think that life would be a lot simpler and a lot more pleasant if that subjective element were more universally recognized and accepted.

The future of conservatism

Once upon a time - not so long ago really - the older generation knew things that the younger generation wanted or needed to know. There was a sense that certain customs, certain literary or artistic or cultural standards persisted through time and might be expected to persist into the future. Objective standards, if you like.

That Western cultural tradition, that thing which we felt as our tradition, is dead. There is no 'us' any more other than fragmentary groups with little prospect of self-perpetuation.

Nothing highlights the disconnect between today's culture and the past more clearly than the slow but relentless closing off of the channels of intergenerational communication. Young people are largely self-sufficient, communicating with and seeking information from one another rather than from older mentors. And, of course, digital technologies facilitate such intragenerational information flow, freeing it from restrictions of time and distance.

Declining fertility rates in many Western countries and in Japan seem to be linked to the failure of cultural traditions. Is it not possible that a loss of confidence in those traditions might be a contributing factor to low birth rates? Look at it from the point of view of the individual who identifies with and takes his values from a culture he sees as dying. Why go to the bother and expense of having a family when there is little chance one's children would carry forward one's values?

We have learned that genes play tricks on us (as it were) in order to encourage us to reproduce - them! But what do I care about my genes? What I do care about are people, certain values, certain cultural and intellectual traditions. I feel much closer to people who share my basic values (I am not thinking politics here) than to those to whom I might have a close genetic relationship but who do not share my values.

Let us assume, then, that traditional conservatism, predicated on the assumption that key values are embodied in certain institutions (the traditional family, churches, etc.), is in terminal decline. Is there any future for conservatism? Perhaps a new form of conservatism?

I am of the view that there is a set of values which might justifiably be called conservative which will always survive the demise of particular cultural traditions: values such as independence of thought, self-reliance, self-discipline and the generous spirit which expresses itself in good manners.

Such values are timeless and not dependent on particular traditions and so are resilient to social and cultural upheaval. They stand a better chance of being passed on than culture-specific values.

But the upholders of such values will be geographically scattered, constituting - if this is not too Romantic an idea - a kind of diaspora. Their promised land is not and never will be a geopolitical entity, but simply the prospect of meaningful contact and communication, a meeting of minds in the here and now, maybe hearing echoes from the past and radiating out into an indefinite future.

Summoned by bells

Schools run by, or under the auspices of, mainstream churches were once the mainstay of conservative values in many Western countries. The schoolmasters and schoolmistresses of times past were natural conservatives, valuing hierarchies of authority, almost military (or monastic?) routine, and a relatively stable body of cultural lore to be passed on - Christian texts, Greek and Roman texts, and various literary works in English and European languages.

In many ways this traditional amalgam of Greek, Roman and Christian ideas became a liability for the West because of the high prestige accorded to classical learning and literature, and the low status attached to science and technology. Nietzsche, steeped in the classical tradition, saw science as democratic and levelling. At the school I attended from the age of nine to the age of seventeen - an institution which carried the Middle Ages well into the second half of the 20th century - Latin and French were high-prestige subjects and, before some long-overdue renovations, our chemistry laboratory would have made any time-travelling alchemists feel right at home.

But there is no doubt that the West's shared cultural traditions helped to create a sense of social harmony at home and the sense of belonging to a wider world; that the widespread teaching and learning of Latin and Greek helped to create self-discipline and a sense of history; and that the tedium of regular services in the school chapel taught the invaluable but dying art of sitting still.

Back to the apes

Richard Dawkins has been having a little trouble lately with feminists. He may think back with nostalgia to earlier decades when the world was marginally saner and marginally more intelligent and he was an evolutionary biologist who wrote popular books on evolutionary biology.

I was browsing through one of these older books recently, an elegant little tract entitled River out of Eden: a Darwinian view of life. The book is full of fascinating material, but let me focus here on a section showing that we are all more closely related than most people think.

"You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so on. With every generation, the number of ancestors doubles. Go back g generations and the number of ancestors is 2 multiplied by itself g times: 2 to the power g. Except that, without leaving our armchair, we can quickly see that it cannot be so. To convince ourselves of this, we have only to go back a little way - say, to the time of Jesus, almost exactly two thousand years ago. If we assume, conservatively, four generations per century ... two thousand years amounts to a mere eighty generations... Two multiplied by itself 80 times is a formidable number, a 1 followed by 24 noughts, a trillion American trillion. You had a million million million million ancestors who were contemporaries of Jesus, and so did I! But the total population of the world at that time was a fraction of a negligible fraction of the number of ancestors we have just calculated.

Obviously we have gone wrong somewhere, but where? We did the calculation right. The only thing we got wrong was our assumption about doubling up in every generation. In effect, we forgot that cousins marry. I assumed that we each have eight great-grandparents. But any child of a first-cousin marriage has only six great-grandparents, because the cousins' shared grandparents are in two separate ways great-grandparents to the children. 'So what?' you may ask. People occasionally marry their cousins ... but it surely doesn't happen often enough to make a difference? Yes it does, because 'cousin' for our purposes includes second cousins, fifth cousins, sixteenth cousins and so forth. When you count cousins as distant as that, every marriage is a marriage between cousins. You sometimes hear people boasting about being a distant cousin of the Queen, but it is rather pompous of them, because we are all distant cousins of the Queen, and of everybody else, in more ways than can ever be traced."

Seeking to get one of his students to reason along these lines, Dawkins asked her "to make an educated guess as to how long ago her most recent common ancestor with me might have lived. Looking hard at my face, she unhesitatingly replied, in a slow, rural accent, 'Back to the apes.' An excusable intuitive leap, but it is approximately 10,000 percent wrong. It would suggest a separation measured in millions of years. The truth is that the most recent ancestor she and I shared would possibly have lived no more than a couple of centuries ago, probably well after William the Conqueror. Moreover, we were certainly cousins in many different ways simultaneously."

Classic Dawkins.

The ground of being

For almost the whole of human history - until, say, the 19th century - the intellectually curious could expect their culture's deepest and most universal explanatory systems to be not only intellectually but also emotionally satisfying. Mythic, religious or metaphysical systems provided explanations (albeit inadequate as we now see) of both the natural and the social/moral world.

Our best theories of physics, by contrast, omit - as they must - all the things our complex brains seem primarily designed to deal with. And the men (and very few women) at the forefront of research in physics and related sciences often come across as lacking in social awareness.

Writing style (in non-technical contexts) gives a lot away about a person, and so often, when reading autobiographical or semi-autobiographical books by leading scientists, I find myself making allowances for what seems to be a certain childish quality, a lack of critical or social or psychological awareness or sophistication - even sometimes a certain moral immaturity and recklessness. It seems almost as though - as with autistic savants - these people's brains are not 'wasting' any time or energy on the immensely complex processing involved in being socially (and morally?) aware.

There are exceptions, of course. Seth Lloyd's book Programming the universe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) is not only beautifully written in a spare and restrained style, but it is also saying something of profound importance. Lloyd takes the tradition of digital physics associated with such names as Edward Fredkin and John Wheeler and updates it to encompass the concept - and the reality - of quantum computing.

Wheeler suggested that the bit (i.e. information) was the fundamental building block of reality rather than the physical particle; Lloyd and his colleagues deal not in bits but in qubits (quantum bits). The cosmos is not a classical computer but rather a quantum computer - computing itself. A more recent work by Vlatko Vedral, Decoding reality (OUP, 2010), makes similar claims.

According to this way of thinking, in order to understand any complex system the most important thing is to understand how information is represented and processed within that system. But underlying all systems are just a handful of simple logical operations. There is something very beautiful about this, and I am sometimes tempted to devote myself in a serious way to learning more about these fundamental processes - and even writing about them. But I'm not sure the payoff would be worth it. Fascinating as these ideas are in general terms, I fear that the deeper one goes, the less interesting they become - except in a technical sense. The puzzles of quantum computing are fascinating - but no more so than any other complex joint problem-solving exercise. The fascination is not the emotionally satisfying fascination associated with a global understanding of one's place in nature.

My provisional conclusion is that ultimately our ordinary lives are more complex and interesting than these fundamental processes. To imagine otherwise is to exhibit traces of theological thinking, the old sense that there is something very wonderful at the heart of reality - God, the Ground of Being. But it's looking increasingly likely that there's just a whole lot of computing going on, willy-nilly, and without a master programmer.