Mind and Cosmos by Nagel

Commentary, Part Three, involving fantasyland, quantum mind, and Keats

PART THREE

Fantasyland

Would it be harsh to characterize the pre-E-NS as a fantasy? A fantasyland very much like the former Moon and the very long ago Earth, except for the cities, is quoted from Clute and Grant's The Encyclopedia of Fantasy : "A typical fantasyland will display - often initially by means of a prefatory map - a selection, sometimes very full, from a more or less fixed list of landscape ingredients that includes the following features : a continent (or two), one or more inland seas, and an ocean (or two), archipelagos, mountains, isolated islands, fjords, steppes, pastures, deserts, forests ... and a realm of ice, edifices and cities, usually ancient, sometimes abandoned."

Harsher still could it be to characterize E-NS as a fantasyland? The post-E-NS that can be drawn from the above diversionary concern for selenography is that E-NS, Darwin, Darwinism, any "synthesis" that attempts to save the appearances and what not do not escape the consequences of arrogant partisanship because they were once favored. In short, reality comes and goes, it is blurred and distinct. Mind persists, endures.

Mind is dependent on memory. Memory is not a faculty but a collection of processes. This collection can be lost. At least a significant portion can be lost as happened to Henry Molaison who became a professional experimental subject. The experiments were about memory and his is a distinctly odd case with his odd parents, no sufficient accounting for his seizures was undertaken but an irresponsible surgical intervention removed a part of his brain associated, as it turned out, with memory. He was studied for a long time and, once dead, his brain was sliced 2,401 times so that he could be remain a study subject.

It was a shameful business, a shameful science. But then shame isn't authentic these days. What is authentic could be real. What is real is a very big concern these days. Our present day science is real. Memory is real but Mind is alien. Our physics and biology lack acceptance of Mind. Both sciences go after memory to enable it to be fitted into their preconceptions. Each of the two sciences is heavily dependent on its use of time.

The physicists can proceed from process to process by process. To get from process to process they use time "t" of their equations. Of course, they must use mathematics. The biologists start with structure and need to get from structure to structure. Their use of "evolution" has been so trivialized that it has become superfluous as in the evolution pertaining to how to bake a cake. It means "change" in all its aspects. They use "natural selection" as the crux of evolution. It too involves time. No equations are necessary. No time "t" is involved, rather by induction they get millions and millions of years placed at their disposal.

Nevertheless, if the biologists ape the reductionism (and science must be served and descend to the molecular level) then natural selection's efficacy (among other things) is lost. Kimura and his compatriot showed that either natural selection and Darwinistic evolution don't work at the molecular level or they don't work, period. Physicists themselves have attempted to push reductionism into the quantum realm and have failed. No process there for them, only mathematics. The problem is that the time "t" they use is Newtonian or, at best, hyperNewtonian (relativity) and there is no time "t" in the quantum world. Absolute folly would ensue if the biologists tried to get natural selection workable at the quantum level.

Quantum Mind and Keats

Unfortunately, the quirks and the "common sense" of Mind are of the quantum level. With true mental "evolution", one could inherit Minds and add to them. But death intervenes, that particular Mind is cut off and a new one, somewhere starts up and does not replace the previous one. We are all irreplaceable. There is no process for death. There is no process for birth. Not for us, at least. We never know the start or the finish. In between, many hope for an adequate preparation for death. We can do nothing to prepare for birth. We can only prepare for death through living, that is, having regulation, having meaning. This meaning, being caught up in what is too much to grasp, derives from morals. They apply to life as process. Ultimately, this process is inscrutable, beyond reason, lacks reason. It becomes "God's will” involving hope, faith and heaven, hell. There is no part of science that can connect with this.

Science operates on current evidence. There is no evidence for religion. This is to say there are no scientific explanations for the realm of the involuntary, which is a surprisingly large realm. Scientists get along on journalistic procedures asking what, where, when, and how. They leave out who and why. Actually, they are quite good about ignoring the "who" but they slip up occasionally, but with more latter day frequency, about the "why?" They have no prayer of getting close to the accounting for the involuntary. They mistakenly think they have it well in hand or let others think that they do.

In reality, only something like Christianity has that prayer of a chance of getting at it. For Christianity there is no structure to be concerned with unless it is everything, the Universe. There is only process and á la Berkeley that process is thought. We are in the mind of God or the process is God or God is process. Humankind once sailed along with God as the wind. Now we are becalmed, dead in the water.

Scientists have no explanation of the involuntaries including, of course, thought. They do maintain that thought is composed of brain circuits and so is Mind. They have "explained" memory, for example, but that is the how, not the why. Ask not the why and your are free - and stupid. Thus, you avoid the burden of self-consciousness and reasoning and questing and greatness. The best they can do is a representation of Mind, a stand-in, but that isn't "it".

It all starts somewhere - with thought. Some of thought is involuntary thereafter like the fleeting memory of perception. The perceived can be put to use by Mind. As it does so it has no accounting for itself. This "it" does not have Beginning or End known to itself. Before we are "we" we were nothing. Before "me" there was no "me". After "me" there is no "me". This is obvious enough though some have thought, some Minds, were templates in place for us and then we came along. Also, as for after "me", there has been thought to be "soul" or somesuch. Though they know for sure that we once were not they can't for sure say we will be nothing again. The involuntary was, so to speak, before we came, it, as an entity, has various features that propel us along. Then death. The last of the involuntary? There is a peculiar reasoning, not logic, that thinks of the involuntary as a before and an after. How can we know? How can we, if it is involuntary? They assert that the brain dies and so the Mind dies. Does the Mind die? The brain is involuntary. Is the Mind involuntary? Is it not first to last independent of the brain?

The brain has structure but the Mind does not. Mind is process. Structure partakes of stasis. The ultimate stasis from a survivor's standpoint is death. Most don't want that and we can't experience it anyway. We can adopt Keats’ attempt to see and hear, to sense stasis and paradoxically be more alive. But that isn't the stasis we want. We want to get on with it - the doing, process. Doing something that doesn't repeat and is constantly pleasurable. We are pushed along. Memory does the pushing. The memory of memory is the arrow of time. Thought, as circuits in the brain, aren't flowing in the direction of the arrow. They aren't flowing electrons. They are electrons in transition, altered states. Neuroscientists, for their satisfactory "explanation" need to use quanta and then their circuits will go to hell. On the contrary, explanatory power lies in restraint, in not getting too cocky.

But those cocky biologists after Darwin’s time seized the millions and millions of years for their use, furthering their interest in E-NS. Right there, at the very beginning of E-NS others had it right in that the others were criticizing the biologists for using induction. The biologists couldn’t proceed without it. They didn’t have and still don’t have, the rates of evolution, of natural selection. The clocks aren’t there for timing going from structure A to structure B, or for any other structure. What’s the rate? But that would be for a process. What could carry along A to B? How much time would be needed for A to B to C to D and so on? Add them, does it equal "today"? Is, was, there enough time? Perhaps it would add up to too much time? Concurrent rates could supply the necessary specifics?

There is no natural selection of natural selection, no acceleration, like v as velocity and time “t" and have it "t"d again. You do not process from A to B, from fossil A to fossil B. It isn’t A then B. No time course is known to account for such. It is B after A. One implies, one supposes. In truth, one presupposes. One induces what is necessary. You have "it", the structures in hand, then you begin.

Gödel knew the "inside" of a system of ideas can’t explain it’s "outside", where it goes, traversing in the world of ideas, thought, Mind. In other words, origin(s). Multi-universes? A mix of chemicals for which the secret is in the boil? There would have to be a secret, the obvious was eliminated long ago. So the secret is still with us, has always been with us. We do not perceive the secret, we do not reason to it, and we only ask "why"? We don’t perceive other minds, nor any Mind.

Turn away from being highly conscious and try becoming a bear or a billiard ball, á la Keats, whose Negative Capability entailed giving up on identity for the sake of meaning. This didn’t mean a falling into a vacuum, not an action-filled stasis. The effort was to overcome the brevity of process. The sheer doing of whatever in process was to end stasis, or boredom. But, at the last, it would come out to be equated with structure. Personally, but also professionally, memories could become so tightly blended, solidified into structure and process could not flow. Mind would begin to fill with structure. A systematic structure of one’s own making leads nowhere.

Try to escape the self-made box and get back into the flow. Try imagination to establish an ideal, but the ideal is dead on arrival as is the future. Only perception, the fleeting memory asymptotically approaching the present garnered by memory, acted on by Mind, can have the objective of the battle of imagination to be the best one can make of the true past, for oneself and for others. Give up on certitude, a lesser knowledge is better than none. Structure can be pushed too much as symbol, a lock-in, a lock down and a lockout -. striving to empower ourselves, using facts (such as they are) added to the involuntary with the aid of memory. The Mind can do this and make of life an art of meaning and so have a restricted attitude, but this process does not pertain to Mind itself.

Reality is grounded in the involuntaries. The best we can do is not to escape reality, but to fabricate them too, counter them, imitate them, as you choose, or preferably, make an involuntary more powerful and surmount them. Philosophers like Apollonius of Keats’ Lamia can be restricted to reductive uses of Mind. There are then only pieces taken out of play, out of process, and into structure or into a limited flow of process. The original, the more complex, is Mind. Unknown it is and will always be so.

Reality can be said to be outside Mind, a game of chase, avoiding it, actually. Or try to come to terms with it. Be Mindful, harmonize reality to the greatest extent. Or, lastly, like Darwin and others, bend reality to fit desire. It is the unadmitted romanticism of Darwinism.

Mind and Cosmos by Nagel

Commentary, Part Two, involving meditation, mathematics, and the Moon

PART TWO

Meditation and Mathematics

Just you take care, carefully, to take out the meaning. You must know beforehand that you have passed on the effort, given up, resigned to the "better life" and certainly it would be always so except for greed, pain, cruelty, egoism, and so on. Then the better life can be chanting to yourself, thinking nothing, "in tune" or tuned out. In short, meditate yourself away. Away with it all. Except for the ever present involuntary, that is the noise, the static still picked up by you, your receivers, you still get transmissions, like it or not.

Time "t" is of the voluntary. It is conceptual while our time is based on the involuntary, and the involuntary is of process. The time "t" can be unsatisfactory, if it is of structure as "space" and "time" or "spacetime", also conceptual and structural. Einstein certainly made space and time into a structure. It is sad that we begin, at birth, not knowing what the hell is going on and die in the same way, that is, not knowing what the hell is going on.

Instinct is incessant. So, too, is the involuntary, but we impose (superimpose) pause, and reflection. Thought without sufficient process but having structure, is instinct and like the world of the idiot savant, in which is neither emotion, nor creativity. Neither emotion nor creativity is of structure. They are change of a special kind.

Mathematics, once the Queen of the Sciences, is the basis of science but mathematics is flawed with not enough fluidity and not enough interaction with process. Gödel showed its lack of fluidity, its rigidity. He showed time "t" is acceptable from a scientific standpoint. How else could it be so but not for our time, a "humanistic time"? Science, physics, puts structure after structure, placing structure B after structure A in time "t" and so motion (abstracted) and causality comes about so they say but Hume knew better, he showed they put B after A so truly that is not causality, not process, but conceptualization. At root, it is a space as concept and a time as concept, which is not causality. No fluidity, no process, they moved the structure in their minds. They conceptualized it to be so. Not "reality". They have left out emotion and creativity. Odd, they say how creative they are with their scientific theories. As opposed to undiluted science is intelligent design. Intelligent design is about structure, instinct, no fluidity, no creation. Yet behind it is "creation" as God's handiwork. If proof of God there be, it is not via the existence of structure but through process.

The Moon, not really a digression

No one has claimed the Moon as an example of intelligent design. We see, perceive, and know the Moon. It is a scientific Moon, the one pre-visit and after. The scientific Moon changes if there are new data. As you view it with a telescope, it is different at different magnifications. The unscientific Moon is one of lore, myth, and religion. It has been less than a century since we lost our connection to it. We knew moonlight did not reveal the Sun, it transformed it. It was an alchemical light, a gateway, an opportunity not like now when it is off-limits, kitsch, debased, and sentimental. Milton met Galileo and said Galileo was able "to descry new lands" and once Galileo saw them, all could see them. There is unadorned perception and perception thought of and Galileo was engaged in the latter, as were those to follow.

To find the newer Moon, you can quest for it by rocketry or you could have found the older Moon in Japan in the autumn when the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar occurred. For more than a thousand years, they celebrated viewing the Moon with the Tuskimi festival. Moon viewing platforms were built in ornamental gardens. The Japanese might have concurred with Anaxagoras and Democritus that the Moon was another Earth. Anaxagoras knew of the fall of a meteor in 467 BC at Aegospotami. Later, Diogenes of Apollonia read Anaxagoras and visited Aegospotami and saw it was like pumice. Pumice or not, others persisted in crediting the Moon with being not only a different Earth but a better Earth.

Now we can see the Moon to displace the virtual world we have now. The Moon can place us in a longer cycle than the false faster one we have imposed on ourselves. For Lucian, the Moon and its truer cycle had a purifying distance from us. It was in a moral dimension, a dimension out there never glimpsed by Einstein or Darwin. The Moon and much else, to be seen and known properly, required ethics to be a part of the process of understanding. A special understanding, the truth, would forever be absent unless the ethical pursuit be accomplished. Nagel's teleology lacks ethics. It lacks morals that would enable one to know it in a special way.

One of our Moons that had been known became much more distant, beyond its perigee and apogee, when Jan van Eyck made a true representation of the lunar surface for his Crucifixion in the early 1400s. Conversely, bringing the scientific Moon closer before Galileo was William Gilbert's naming, in Earthly fashion, features of the Moon. Harriot, after Galileo, drew and also put in commentary about what he had seen. Sir William Lower used Harriot's telescope or "perspective cylinder" to find it "confusedie al over". What they were seeing, knowing about the Moon, was not what we see and know. Galileo himself distorted and amplified what he had seen to make it more referential, that is, more like the Earth. Everyone was making discoveries about the Earth projected onto the Moon.

The excitement of the new and the news about the Moon were lessened as it was used to illustrate Newton's laws and became a clock for vessels at sea. Still, it was so that some persisted in volcanos on the Moon as did Herschel. Schroeter found much more and wrote about it in fantastically unreadable style even if it was honest observing to obtain extravagantly wrong conclusions, as Joseph Ashbrook put it. Gruithuisen, with the keen eyesight that was indispensable in that era, absorbed the Schroeter approach and kept alive Schroeter's belief in Selenites. He was direct about it - "We are still in love with the beautiful moon, and dry reports of observations are better able to hold our attention if we can somehow keep alive the possibility of Selenities." To concur, he would find the Wallwerk, which contained a temple for star worship.

Humboldt in his Kosmos wanted all of science placed in a magnificent perspective. In general, Mädler in his visual depiction of the Moon, aspired to Humboldt's completeness in the thousands of facts about the Moon he would draw. Mädler's Der Mond showed the Moon not as a copy of the Earth. Even so, the human visual orientation to the known details of the Moon's surface was slipping into an envelope of machine-like detail of such quantity that even Schmidt, the most obsessive observer who ever lived, realized that a telescope as modest as the six inch Athens refractor would show no end of features during all of a lifetime. The acquired data, Baconian in flavor, was in danger of going amok. A helpless, hopeless conglomeration of facts with no overall assembly of the effort had been underway. They persisted. Fauth found constant fresh oddities that made all lunar maps unexceptional. But this was not the allure of the old Moon.

For those disposed to science, the organization of the data was in progress in a geological context. The study of geology had become the most popular science in Britain. It was almost as popular as astronomy, though beetles absorbed the interest of many. Mostly, for geology, they were fascinated by the vast tracts of time in which they could speculate. The common Biblical influence put only thousands of years at the disposal of the geologists, but theory demanded millions of years. Later it became millions and millions of years.

With such a range and a conviction that present day changes of Earth could be induced to provide for modest but persistent geological change, there was forged the conviction that the very vastness of time itself could be put to any biological need for sufficiency in regard of changes in species. Biological speculation about change, using induction, could harness geological change to service the need for the room to carry out the structural necessities of the speculation.

This unalloyed vastness of geological time in service to speculation about or belief in aspects of E-NS was put into place despite "punctuations" (to borrow from Gould) in the text of E-NS that did not allow for commas for pause, periods for end, or exclamation points for emphasis. But de Beaumont and Cuvier and the later comets, asteroids, Kimura, and epigenetics did become a locus for examination of this unqualified acceptance of a broad unfocused and primitive uniformitarianism.

The Moon was asserted to be dead to change. Such an assertion was vital for the cause of upholding E-NS. Any dramatic changes that could be observed on the Moon could, at the very least, indirectly call into question the abject acceptance of the transference of geological time to biological time. The authorities in astronomy in regard to what was happening on the Moon were amateurs. The professionals of astronomy had other fish to fry. There was the old hope that the Moon could be more Earth-like coupled with the need to be taken seriously in one's amateurish activities.

Volcanos offered an agent for change on the Moon. The craters of the Moon could be the result of volcanic action or so it was thought by some amateurs. The maria and sinuous twists readily seen could be the result of lava flow. Even without them, Messier A and B plus Linne, all phantoms for change, provided, for a time the needed detection of change. In addition, Nasmyth and Carpenter saw volcanism abundantly evident on the Moon. Their models in plaster gave to devotees of a Moon a ragged, jagged, and slender spired concoction of a vision befitting science fiction fandom.

Sober scientists like G. K. Gilbert studied Coon Butte, better known as the Meteor Crater of Arizona, and was left with no choice but a meteoritic theory. There were many, many craters on the Moon, where was the like on Earth? The Moon and Earth would have been bombarded with equal intensity so then the Earth's portion of the onslaught must have been erased by water and wind, neither of which prevailed on the Moon. Added to Gilbert's conclusions were those of Baldwin who saw what many others could not - that the Moon's craters gave evidence for alignment and grooves or ridges going out across much lunar territory. Ferocious blasts of asteroids of long, long ago would fit the bill. The craters were fossil remains. They were fossils like bits of bone in long, long ago geological deposits on Earth.

The believers in E-NS could make good use of the sources of the craters in lunar orbit about us. The Moon's tides dramatically affected life on Earth. The Moon's influence on Earth's climate was also vital. Such an influence could not be matched by feeble Deimos and Phobos in their revolutions around the only other Earth-approximate world - Mars. Both Mars and Moon, once, broadly put, were in a romance that we put together. As for Mars, Ray Bradbury,in his Mars and the Mind of Man has it that- "I think it's part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality". Could our religious ties circa Darwin have been "romantic" but severed by E-NS in order to build toward reality?

Mind and Cosmos by Nagel

Commentary, Part One, involving geological time, molecular clocks, origin, Mind, and Berkeley

Mind and Cosmos, Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel, Oxford U Press, 2012

PART ONE

Nagel

Nagel - We must develop forms of understanding of which we have not dreamt. Intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to say we have a final reckoning... We need to recognize what can and cannot in principle be understood by certain existing methods. There is a comprehensive, speculative world picture reached by extrapolation from biology, chemistry, and physics that postulates a hierarchal relationship among subjects of those sciences and explains all through their unification. Most scientists practice science without a concern for cosmological questions that this materialistic reductionism answers. The more the details about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code is known then the more the standard historical account becomes untenable.

Exactly, see Kimura and his neutral theory of molecular evolution, and note Darwin's evolution is an historical anachronism and that natural selection is a macro phenomenon and breaks down at a micro (genetic) level. But once Mendel got into it, the reductionist itch became too great. Besides, "evolution" has become vacuous or baggy having the meaning of "change", any change at all. The greatest opposition to Darwin's notions was involved in the lack of allowance for change. Some people of that era wanted that God's creatures were, are, and will be as He intended. Therefore, acceptance of change in life forms, as species, was a big advance by biologists.

Nagel says it is highly implausible that life is a result of a sequence of physical accident and the mechanism of natural selection. It could be accidents, as seen from our perspective, but certainly the mechanism and all of science is mechanistic in that it left humanity at Galileo’s station from Day One, and traveled on to natural selection, an interesting idea, but not tested under Darwin's conditions unless very recently done and in controlled environments.

Nagel makes use of the available geologic time. Geological time is based not on biology (obviously) but since no biological clock is available, we use the geological one, the only biological clock pertinent to evolution and natural selection is the molecular clock of evolution. This molecular clock is based on rates of some molecules of evolutionary significance, not any other molecules and by itself it can only say if one time period is twice as long as another. There is a need to calibrate it with fossils. Then one gets concrete dates. The fossils are dated geologically. Ayala (1999) said the molecular clock can be confounded so as to have a limited application of the molecular clock. But workarounds sling at you "maximum likelihood" techniques and Bayesian modelling to get it done. Even so, divergence dates are inferred from a molecular clock statistically and not on direct evidence. The molecular clock flounders in very short and very long times. As Nagel states, one is dealing in highly specific events over enormous amounts of time for which the available evidence is very indirect.

Nagel notes that the advances in the physical and biological sciences are made possible by excluding mind. I know what he means but actually "mind" is present in all the physical and biological sciences. They wanted a quantitative understanding. It was decided that the mind would be used in a certain way in order to further science. Nagel thinks Mind is recent. How can he know this? For Nagel there is much before minds. This is a dangerous assertion and errors grow large. The minds read back into these events their presence, assuming the minds were already there. Darwin and others had guessed at what now looks like an excruciatingly slow gradualism to account for All. Still others see that it could not have been that slow so punctuated evolution and mutations ad nauseam are called on to get past such errors.

Nagel : Natural selection is inadequate for the origin of life.

Actually, "origin" is inaccessible via science in all forms. This isn't a proper topic to be introduced into a discussion about Darwin, his successors, evolution, and natural selection. It is unfair since "natural selection" as of science cannot be linked to considerations of "origin". Given that the origin is given up by them, they still deny our uniqueness whereas it is our uniqueness that accounts for mathematics, science, and "evidence" that we are not unique.

Nagel's focus should be on what is biological time (those millions and millions of years granted gratis to them) and the fact(s) about what is involuntary in our lives. Evolution and natural selection have become "history" but without clocks, except for an inadequate molecular clock. The fossils, derived from geological time, not biological time, as evidence for natural selection, are like glimpsing only a stop action of a second hand sweep of an otherwise unseen clock, a mechanical clock, not one supporting intelligent design.

Nagel : If our mental nature is not reducible to the physical, then meaning and value are gone.

I don't know about value, but why must Mind be reducible to the physical? Certainly Mind is based on the physical, but it need not be reducible to it and does not thereby lose "meaning". The mind, for itself, ourselves, determines meaning, and meaning may be apart from the physical. Evolution, Darwin’s or the synthesis or the otherwise latest version, can't account for consciousness. It is consciousness that "determines" evolution in that evolution is not existent except for consciousness. Actually, I don't accept the tripartite mind, consciousness, self-consciousness. All living things to varying degrees are conscious, and to extremely varying degrees all other things are conscious, including the atomic buzz, but few are self-conscious and only one has Mind.

Nagel: Mind is related to the natural order.

Yes it can be so related, though Mind need not be so related, what Mind is or has, is what is. If what is, is other than supposed, then Mind will be of that, whatever that is. He implies we can think without Mind. Nagel : Nature gives rise to conscious beings. No, not with Mind tacked on, nature itself is of Mind. Not nature, then Mind. Mind isn't "natural”. If it was, then why all these problems?

Nagel : Could the mind provide the fundamental level of explanation?

It already does, though this entails persistent uncertainty á al Keats, which is as good as it gets. Accept an explanation (God) and the attendant persistent uncertainty (overcome by faith) or the Great Quantum Hope must be enacted if Science must get at Explanation on its terms once and for all. That is, the scientific explanation lies at the quantum level and good luck with that and don't be too sure there isn't another level "underneath" the quantum world. The persistent uncertainty and God lie in the involuntary.

At the true startup of science, Nagel finds there was a need to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind as well as human purposes and intentions in order to get on with a quantitative description in space and time for shape, size, and motion. Actually, in the larger sense, what they chose to work with was also "subjective"; you cannot get outside of yourself and then machine-like set up experiments. What experiments to do and when and how they are interpreted are highly subjective. Of course, the human mind wasn't left out. Even the purposes and intentions were not gone. It is still subjective, with what purposes support mathematics and its use for space and time and shape, size, and motion.

Nagel : We are physical and composed of some parts segregated from us.

We are not summed by our physicality. We have a physical component in all cases involuntary but with non-physical components such as memory and thought, also involuntary. Only in the non-physical are we not wholly determined. In this there is a great significance.

Nagel: Evolutionary theory from the outset should have provided for the mind, and consciousness.

However, they are not subject to natural selection. They are not inherited. Only part of us is genetically determined and might have been evolutionary in Darwin's sense. We know this, we have found this out about ourselves, but many among us deny it.

To get to the mind, Nagel thinks the physical theory (Darwinianism) needs or needed an ahistorical component. It is ahistorical. As for Mind we can accept, allow for history or ignore it, as we choose. If historical, how "far back" is Mind? Is Mind then in the fossil sense going back Denisovan-like for maybe 400,000 years? What mind communicates to us from 400,000 years ago? The key is that we have no memory of it, them. Our memory begins and ends with each of us. If we do not record the memory, we do not know it. Why write to document if it was not going to be preserved? There is a density of population at work here to sustain writing. Or were hand signals used? When came language? What need of language if the very low population density had no need of it? No cities, no civilization until a population density could support them. No one now remembers the dinosaurs any more than they remember the Civil War.

Nagel: He thinks teleology has a place. There are changes over time tending to certain types of outcomes.

Certainly, among those outcomes one has Mindless teleology, tending to the Bomb, accelerated global warming, no morals, rampant boredom, no God and so on. If there has been natural selection, if evolution, why no consciousness, no Mind longer ago? Why so very recent geologically speaking? Natural selection had to be thought of, so why so late, geologically speaking? Why not think it All, all at once?

Berkeley

Berkeley said that the world, our world, not one of bats (á la Nagel) is the one we can understand. If it were to be beyond Mind, then what of it could we discuss? If it is of practicability and of Mind then it is practicable but if it is of Mind divorced from the world, then it is of Mind, exclusively. It is how we choose to relate, after an historical period, when we "come of age" mentally to the world that determines our individual reality, fantasy or no consideration of either or of others. If we enter into it, consensus must be dealt with and to rant against it is stupid. The "artists" must be left to their "creativity" and we must accept it or supposedly we don't know art.

Berkeley had only minds and their ideas. The involuntary are not of Mind. Maybe he made the involuntary to be of ideas. He found created minds or uncreated ones so I suppose we are created (involuntary) while God is the only uncreated one. He need not create Himself. Only God gets ideas from zero. We work from what is real or existent, we combine ideas or bring in data. What is new to a mind was not always new to another mind, this what is new could be ideas or data. But for evolution or natural selection, it, whatever, was new, a combination of something preexisting or not preexisting such as mutation. Evolution and natural selection (E-NS) are typically about structures, not a process, which is the territory of Mind. It is said the structure takes much geological time but Mind can be much faster than that.

Berkeley said all change is by the mind. E-NS seems to contradict this. But Berkeley was dealing in process, thought. E-NS is of structure. One can see change in structure (fossils) but not, usually, in process, of thought. Only speaking or writing give an indication, usually imprecise, about thought.

Berkeley would not accept material objects and non-material minds. Apparently, Berkeley wanted it all to be of the mind, it was not of consequence if it was material or not though I suppose it all came down to being non-material since Berkeley thought matter was a philosophical fiction. Mechanical causation is impossible. Minds are the only activity. God supports us, minutely. He must, because once there is a lack of Mind, there is no realm and no other choice unless hopelessness, waste, a shrug for "what is" be your guide.

Berkeley thought time was a succession of ideas. It is a succession of memory for you and I, for all of us it is an abstraction, a consensus process. It has no structure. Since it is a succession, it must then be determinative of "space", to give one space, so to speak, but more so to have space, not to be in space; space is not a container, independent of us. Because of this succession, we say how “long” is time. Thoughts are successive only in us, how do we get a space and time outside of us, or are they outside? Aren't there Others, with their minds? Could one say space and time are involuntary?

Is evolution involuntary? Is natural selection involuntary? No, consider Kimura. It isn't fixed, there is a freedom. There is no freedom in the involuntary. Species become extinct, the fixation of species is what some Christians wished to maintain in opposition to Darwin. But evolution and natural selection "carry with them" the involuntary so the truth of E-NS and Darwin is false.

Ayers in a commentary about Berkeley wrote that Locke thought, contrary to Descartes, that the essence of Spirit or Mind is not consciousness or thought itself, but is something unknown to us. We are aware we think and have experiences but we have no direct conception of the underlying processes of thought or of the nature of that which thinks. The best we can do is minute particles and the void.

I would add that Mind is not summed by consciousness nor can thought get to the bottom of itself, its thoughts, since one can think of thought thinking of thought....yet we do not arrive at infinite regress, there is a block. Today the physicists think we are, or it is, particles and fields, no void (not a vacuum in any case). There can be no something from nothing for us, not known to us, but unknown to us, namely we were nothing before birth, no not sperm and egg and indirectly in mom and pop or test tube but simply nothing, no forerunner, precursor, etc. E-NS has no workable origin, it, on its terms, could not be from nothing. Nothing obviously has no structure. But something from nothing is a process. Not "time" nor "space" is necessary.

Berkeley denied physical causality; he wanted natural science subordinated to theology and ethics. For Berkeley, analogy is the essence of natural explanation. Ayers said it all comes down to probability, and as an escape it is wrong since probability is a purported explanation that presupposes intelligibility with regard to numbers. This is not beyond objects or structure.

According to Ayers, Hume said universal causality must be based on induction. Induction is vital to E-NS, but Berkeley held that induction depends on a metaphysical supposition that the Author of Nature always operates uniformly. Not all of us, those of us closer to the animal state, can eat, drink, make merry and die without "laws", regularity, or uniformity, taking the lesser (in human terms, since "meaning" is of no concern like if the daughter dies, or the partner is tortured or your friends harm you, then that is "life" and crapola happens and c'est la vie and so on) route while here.

Do we know there are other minds or do we suppose so, believe so, or hope so? I think of them, I don’t know them and cannot know them. I cannot think for them nor them for me (though politically, religiously, socially this has and is being attempted) and only God and not Berkeley, Hume, Nagel or Ayers can do that. Without God (or other agency, and what, pray tell, would that be - a super robot, super thinking thing like a supercomputer, an alien?) for the imagination and anything else "intelligible" or otherwise, it is an impossibility or should we make it highly improbable, a shifting of the numbers, or let it be, make merry, die?

Prochnau on JFK

 

A column by William Prochnau was recently distributed by Reuters. It is about JFK. According to him, an assessment of JFK occurred the day of his death to the effect that JFK would not be remembered. This lack of remembrance was asserted because his administration did not last long enough and he had accomplished nothing. Others have said he was all starts and proposals. [Doesn't it all start somewhere, somehow?]

Prochnau denies that he was a great president. He wasn't much of a president but he was a hero. He was "modern, handsome and princely" with words and gestures others did not have. He was glamorous, a celebrity, and a media president. [Anything of substance is denied him. He didn't "detail" himself for the tube. Recall that "TV" as an entity was much different then.]

Jackie Kennedy created Camelot, a false view of the president and his meaning for us. She wanted to counter those who sought yet another false, bitter, view of him. Assassination conspiracy theorists created still another view that was less and less about him and more and more about them. [Who says gentle perversity or a raging lie is the last word on JFK? He set a standard as yet unequaled.]

Like TV was as an entity unlike today, Vietnam was an entity unlike how it is known today. Prochnau says JKF started it all for Vietnam. [Others affirm he would have stopped it. There was much, too much, that he wanted to change. Government was not the enemy, as Prochnau notes, and some feared his power to change what he said he would change. So he was murdered. The government not being the enemy worked against him.]

[Once upon a time, if you saw it on TV, that TV of long ago, it had to be true, "I saw it on TV". They used to ask, "Can I say that on TV?" Camelot and conspiracy were on TV. Even then, among those people then alive, neither Camelot nor conspiracy was fully accepted. Each had elements of truth and still do. Then and now if it is in print it must be worried over. The printed word is still accepted by some as what "is". It is reality. Reality then was never a Camelot. Did anyone ask them about it? They knew reality could be sordid, vile, dangerous, and horrid. Those today, idealists that think the contrary, indulge in a fantasy as stupid as the one they condemn. Reality never is a take-all and a cake walk and an endless torture chamber. Not, anyway, for most, then. But they have gone away. They can't tell you there was never a Camelot for them nor conspiracy, if wacko.

The intervening decades contain people born and raised lacking education - in school and life - such that they care little about "the nature of things" be it Camelot, Vietnam, assassination, Hollywood, reality TV, D.C., the Simpsons, housewives of La-La Land, nor any appreciation of style, grace, power, smarts, and the arts. They didn't have homes, family, and adventure. Hard work never accomplished anything for them. It was never about the loss of "innocence", it was about a loss of confidence in the trust of things wholly too large to know well.

Once is was, "Spring came on forever" - to borrow a phrase from the Civil War. We are in the autumn depicted by Keats. Winter is not far off.]

DeGroot, the Telegraph, and the death of JFK

 

Gerard DeGroot, in the Telegraph, comments on a group of books about the assassination of JFK.

DeGroot, given free rein, writes of Jim Garrison that he was "a paranoid fantasist, a publicity hound, and a crooked DA". Of course, not all sources, some reputable, agree with this attack. Though I would think "publicity hound" might have some credence.

If Garrison comes off badly as far as DeGroot is concerned, then Oswald fares perhaps worse, as he is characterized as being "a pathetic loser". But at least he was trying to get at the truth during his less than friendly association with the Dallas Police Department. His remarks and requests made while he was confined by the Dallas Police demonstrate that he thought he had a chance. But then he had no chance against Ruby. He also had no chance with the Warren Commission's portrayal of him.

The Warren Commission need not be considered to be a cover-up. Most, even those friendly to the Oswald-as-assassin notion, think the Commission was incompetent. In a light-year jump, DeGroot gives the assassination over to aliens. Any port in ignorance serves as well when it comes to assassination theory of any stripe. The latest on the Commission, taken to be a serious work, is "A Cruel and Shocking Act", and I am told it, makes much of Oswald's presumed trip to Mexico City. DeGroot dismisses the book because it maintains, according to DeGroot, that the CIA wasn't entirely truthful about what its agents knew of the assassination. So it is "Ho-hum". So I would say it is "everyone knows" the CIA agents are liars.

Wait, there's more, the movie, "JFK" by Oliver Stone, is termed "preposterous". If so, how or why is it preposterous? The death of JFK is accounted for in the movie. No mention is made in the film of JFK's letters and Oval Office recordings. The end of JFK isn't equated with an age of innocence. JFK, per DeGroot ,was cynical and boasted of sexual conquests. DeGroot indirectly asserts he was packaged and sold as a mythical deal worth millions despite his shortcomings. The corrosion of the American spirit cannot be the resultant of truth and lies as DeGroot wants it. It is either truth or lie and has been so for many years. When these become ancient times, JFK will still be known.

DeGroot is quite right about the ready market for JFK assassination books. So long as it may last, the mystery propels along the improbable, the impudent, the wildly improbable, and insults to one's intelligence. But then the lack of acceptance of the obvious record of the assassination - that one being the Zapruder film and the other films or photos of those seconds in Dallas- show multiple shooters were at work. Especially relevant is digital processing of the Zapruder emulsion in order to reveal the tracks of the bullets in the film.

Falling Into the Fire

(Mental illness, hysteria, Jesus, pseudoseizures, drugs, and eunuchs )

 

Christine Montross, in her book, Falling Into the Fire, has some applicable quotes -

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" - from Macbeth

and

"They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me." - Nathaniel Lee

and

"Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves." - from Troilus and Cressida

Not in her book are - "If she sums in analytic art, don't puzzle as by fluxions" - Eradacus Maximus, 17the century.

and

"If she can see herself in the mirror, don't move the mirror" - The Last and Greatest Maximus, 20th century.

 

There is madness among us and we "vote" in a sense to identify those who are mad. A diseased mind, self-inflicted, has yet to be reduced mathematically and can be seen only as a whole, like in a mirror, all at once. The author doesn't want to be seen there in the mirror beside the displayed self, whoever it might be. That would be falling into the fire. They do burn, she doesn't.

Without mirror or fire, Jesus was killed. Justin J. Meggitt, in a book soon to come out, asserts the Romans thought Jesus to be mad. Meggitt thinks he can then explain why the Romans did not hunt down the followers of Jesus. The "diseased" mind, wounded and not healing, was "outvoted" by the Romans. One can suppose their solution was a rational one from their side of things. From a futuristic standpoint, within a characterization of madness, they ended His suffering. The "cured" Him. It is doubtful they knew of any echoes of a Greek approach for algebra, not as art but as science; nor certainly not the infinitesimal calculus. Nothing like contact with the infinite figured into their calculations for His execution. It was simple arithmetic. It was subtraction for them but it lead to a replacement of them, all things Roman ended and, in addition, Christianity flourished.

Much later, and with Christianity no longer flourishing, the author attended an interdisciplinary conference about madness. The conference was decidedly not weighted toward the clinical approach. The literary types got it going that madness can be a good fuel for productive creativity. They saw "fragmented capitalist selves" or "existential radicals" among those mad. They did not ask if literature is real. Nevertheless, what if all those mad had had a "stiff dose" of phenothiazine, as O'C. Drury speculated might have benefited Joan of Arc? For à la Jesus, the Romans, those ancient psychiatrists par excellence, "treated" the wrongly styled "King" without phenothiazine. Nails and wood sufficed.

The author throughout the book relates patients she has encountered in her rather short few years of practice. A stereotype is an appearance by Jesus. In one case she was upset by his gaze. The parents of Jesus arrived from Chicago. They believed he had had a spiritual awakening although his behavior was a concern. He was joyfully happy. It did his soul good. He stunk and was unshaven. He endorsed such an elated mood but with slow speech supporting grandiose thought. He was expansive and poor in judgment. He failed to see a need for help.

The author adds that Oliver Sacks said to not celebrate good times if it is a departure from a person's typical self. George Eliot called it a "dangerous wellness". One can't be high for long, a crash is coming. In one doubtful example formulated by students of Biblical text, was it a crash right onto the Cross?

Some minds are granted time before madness overtakes them. During such time, they know they are going insane; they cannot stop it. They know there is no escape. They are rational until the greatest of existence is extinguished, burned out by the cruel banality of reality. The last embers of life worth living no longer glow, out in a wink. They can try to keep the mind's eye open, but sooner or later, they wink.

The irony of it all is that now, as 2000 years ago, you can be put to death or reduced to little better than death, for what you may be. Whoever you may be is always a mystery to others. There is more than a leading edge of sadness for everyone's last hurrah. Sliding along, is the best or better always before you or is it far away in time or space? If it isn't front and center, are you going to ransom yourself to be held in hock until time and space reverse? We once knew what we had to accept. Now we medically think faith produces agonizing self-debasement. The doctor, the author, ponders when to medicate. Is there a deity involved? Is God's message now being blocked while it was on a clear channel ages ago? She can talk it out with them, talking about it can be good or it can be an example of talking into it, which makes it worse.

A city can make it worse. There are syndromes named after cities - Florence, Paris, and Jerusalem. For the latter the involved persons have no history of mental illness. Once they leave Jerusalem, they are better. But while there they become agitated, anxious. They have a need to be clean, pure. They put on a toga. They shout verses from the Bible. Then they deliver a sermon "wholly unrealistic" about being moral. It all ends in shame, once they return to reality.

Meantime, the gawkers have a field day. It is not only there in Jerusalem in more modern times but also at other times that the author gives the community of readers-as-gawkers a fair share of material. Accompanying the gawking, the author allows for insider's jargon, wisecracks, and updates on clinical procedures and brain circuitry. Sternal rub, anyone?

Nathaniel Lee, quoted in the above, spent five years in Bethlem Royal Hospital socially known as Bedlam. Tickets were purchased so as to see the "incurables". Perhaps they were in a stupor, having interrupted neural circuits the better to be mute or lack pain. Some of the poor devils were caged. Like horses, some had metal bits in their mouths. Some were underwater for a time or spun wildly.

The author's cabinet of curiosities approach also yields a long list of what one woman of contemporary times intentionally ingests. When stressed, she swallowed. On another shelf of the cabinet can be found those labeled BIID, for body integrity identity disorder. They sense their bodies extend too far. Arms, legs and perhaps a torso should go away - cut away, blasted away, ripped away, or frozen away.

Clocks prominently occupy another shelf to time pseudoseizures. If the not so real seizure trips past five minutes, maybe it is the real thing and status epilepiticus is a bad deal. It doesn't help to call them pychogenic nonepileptic seizures. However named, they are psychological at the source and not neurological in cause. No electrical impulses are firing the brain. The EEG for them shows no seizure.

The author really cranks up with Charcot of the 19th century and his arc-de-cercle or arc-en-ciel, but first she backs up into the 2nd century AD on the subject of hysteria. She faults the treatments because it was said to be a problem confined to females. The majority of cases of psychogenic nonepileptic seizures, for example, occurred in females. For hysteria, massage of the genitals occurred in the 2nd century and much later when the massage was employed until "hysterical paroxysm" for relief of pelvic congestion occurred. But the time spent on doing a massage got to be a bit much so the vibrator was invented. The use of the vibrator was not related to sexual arousal. Even the sight of a speculum supposedly put some females into a lust for an exam. By 1906, the ten-minute vibrator session was substituted for the tiresome hour of effort for treatment of hysteria.

Not only the vibrator but also washes, removal of the stimulated rod or removal of the ovaries were all done. Counter evidence for effectiveness did no good as lobotomies more recently also "trundled on". Charot did get results, he said. Critics, few in number, said he had invented a condition, then and there in Salpêtrière. He fostered a culture of suggestion (à la Freud?) moving subjects from solitary vague unease to continual exposure to real weirdoes. Eventually they succumbed and exhibited symptoms.

Other nonsense had the uterus wandering about the body. But as the author astutely takes note, men don't have uteruses so they did not become hysterical. She says they were tabbed as being "nervous". WWI's shell shock was a warhorse of a different color. But for all their problems they were not castrated though unfairly the women had this and that removed.

Her emphasis is heavy on the gender definition of hysteria. The men got off scot-free. It was men removing the female body parts, damn it. How unjust, eh? Well then, justice was served when Origen castrated himself. Other philosophers, neo-Hellenistic or not, were castrated. After battle, to the victors belong the spoils. Usually the penis was left, but the rest was cut off. Birth control was affected. Eunuchic administrators of harems and bureaucratic activity sold for a pretty penny. Herodotus usually refers to eunuchs in terms of a high value placed on them. Dissent, across the ages, could get you castrated. The Chinese got thousands of boys transformed, voilà! Also, slaves of dark skin pigmentation had both major genital zones whacked for removal. Most died, in terrible agony, but the surviving remainder made for a profitable enterprise. Most of us already know of the castrati obtained so as to hit the high notes in choirs without women. Chemical castration now flourishes as punishment and as medicine. In other words, men did unto men and the women of the above suffered for reasons other than cruelty.

The author wants no part of cruelty. She participates in faith for the effort to cure the mentally ill. The use of "cure" is a strong term as is "treatment" which has a curative connotation that some IRBs will not accept. Anyway, their illnesses generate questions from their states of profound crises. They are people but they are minds too. The doctor, the author, has a mind, as does her partner and her two children. She, early on falsely compares her patients' minds to those of her children. She finds human similarities that are present because both the children and the patients are human. Less training is required for children, honestly, they do have compasses of a sort and a light touch steers them but patients are lost, gone into the fire, burnt to a crisp.

So then, toss pills into the fire. At least her profession sometimes does this. She does robotic, by the checklist, evaluation of those in the fire. She tries empathy, they insult her. It seems she tries to reason with them Try anti-reason, use mindful robots. They need like minds to feel the fire of powerlessness and the lack of response that could make sense to them. Only so much time can be given to them in the author's environment. Guess. Move them out. The system triumphs yet again. Empathy for the burnt evaporates and repugnance tries for the upper hand with many doctors. Go on, deal a deck, give me cigarettes, fatty food, Nazi science, Soviet science, limb removal, enlargement of organs, increased muscle mass, extremely reduced body weight, - in all, subtract from what you were, even if you get an increase, you have taken away what chemical practice, not of itself amoral, but put in the service of what you could have been – helps to light the fire.

In adolescence, once, so long ago, we were taught, yes actually taught, to strive to do good but to accept limitations. It was the striving, don't you get it, that made us not into imposters. Dalma Kalogiera-Sackellares labels a certain condition as being the double imposter. The patient strives to be a real patient, having real trouble and problems and the doctor of psychiatry strives to avoid failure, to be a real doctor. We didn't strive to be real. We didn't need to, we were real, they, the teachers, were also real. There was nothing difficult about it. Eras of enormous falsity have been perpetrated since then.

The author's partner insists on beauty and awe on a daily basis. Bravo! Unknown to us is when we will die, ponders the author. Beauty and awe today, say no more. She gets to the nub in a few pages; the rest of the book becomes of doubtful consequence when she admits to being opaque to the charm of medical science in terms of functional equations, vectors, ion channels, an EKG with a line mathematically representing an assertion of equating itself with a human being. The brain eludes them, mathematically speaking. Where is the mind? Feel the heat.

.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Post Suburbia

The Gray Flannel Suit

My contention has been that the Great American Novel was The Last Hurrah. Perhaps I have erred and it was The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit?

My edition of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was for 2002 with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen (he is perhaps more famous now). For this edition there is also an afterword by the author, Sloan Wilson. The afterword had been the introduction to a 1983 edition of the book.

I read the book to be informed as to why it was, and has been, regarded as important. Usually it is reported to be of value for what concerns the author had for suburbia and conformism and the significance of gray flannel suits. The latter was taken to be symbolic.

The book was a publishing success and became a movie starring Gregory Peck. Having Peck in the movie would have denoted seriousness. I don't know what seriousness the book had then. In any case, it was seized on as a defining element of "the 50s". (From now on I'll let "the 50s" and "the 60s" assume a diluted corporate status as persons.) I didn't find it to be so. The only outstanding characteristic it touches on, endlessly repeated as the 50s by others, is suburbia. To a lesser extent the book has to do with a quest to do something else, something important, something useful, though most of my sources found that they of the 50s had contentment in what they were doing. They had it made. After the Depression and WWII, "it got real good". Even then, some of them made the success of many into something ugly - "conformism", "consumerism" and corporations as evil. Some whined incessantly and perhaps the lopsided dominance of NYC whiners carried the day.

The whiners of the novel are weakly done as Tom and Betsy, husband and wife. Betsy is far removed from actuality. This is not a great fault of a genre, but are their actions to be believed? She doesn't like dullness. She is discontented and wants escape from what was to be a temporary residence and from neighbors who indulge in alcohol nearly ad libitum. Any contentment by residents of the area is regarded as contemptible. She mourns the loss of the short-term pre-WWII puppy love. But believably she suddenly turns the family around what with a self-improvement regimen of less TV, less dogs and burgers, church attendance, and puts the hated house up for sale. She easily accepts Tom's wartime screw in Italy who now needs money for Tom's boy. Betsy also gets active about converting land that comes with the mansion they inherit into a big profit and paves the way with helping to convince locals to pay more taxes to finance a new school that the present kids now need and the future kids, whose parents will have paid for and built on mansion land, will also need. Betsy and Tom have had struggles with lack of money that are soon to be overcome.

Tom never overcame his activities as a paratrooper in WWII. After the war, he wanted money but was not willing to give up weekends to get it. His status as a former paratrooper does not help with this. It would have been better had he died in the war or stayed in the Army. Korea was not an opportunity. He was committed to reading about that war on a train. There is no accounting for why he returned to civilian life. Tom's flashbacks and ruminations about his WWII jaunts verge on becoming mental illness issues. He never regarded his adventure with Maria as being a mistake. He accepted his wartime activities of killing. It was warfare and killing happens and so, apparently, do Marias. Actually Tom found the war to be incomprehensible and should be forgotten yet he was far from doing so. The memories persisted, remembered and lived again, and he countered by thinking he must be tough, such toughness being part of the 50s ethos.

Aiding him in dealing with his difficulties are his encounters with a local judge as a good guy, a villain who wants the mansion but who quickly folds his tent and is whisked away, and an estate developer who isn't a crook. But then there is the elevator operator in the United Broadcasting building (what a coincidence! oh please say it isn't so) where Tom works, who was a WWII warrior and was with Tom in the war and knows all about Maria, that false impossible life provided for as an asset of participation in WWII. This elevator guy can and does contact Maria in Italy.

There is the buildup developing - Maria is back, become a United Broadcasting gopher, low paid blandness at his current job, his wife's pressing changes of behavior, money worries, his preoccupation with WWII, his Dad, shell-shocked by WWI, had executed a deliberate car crash as a suicide; and Tom’s grandma's estate is threatened by claims of the housekeeper - all could have been momentum for a much different novel. A novel it could have been that connected Tom's mind to the complexity of his existence. Such a course received no support from the author. But all of these concerns are quickly sentence by sentence or by short paragraph by paragraph resolved without detritus, no chads hanging, and no clumsy, awkward truthful residue.

There is acknowledgement within the novel that Tom has four worlds - grandma, WWII, United Broadcasting, and his family. His WWII experiences are the core for him but not of the book. This is a fundamental falsity the author ignored or did not admit to perpetrating.

Along the lines of missed opportunities, only from my perspective, I realize long past the author's creative concerns then dominant, is a slight mention of United Broadcasting showing programs as bad as radio, only in it for the money and not to improve people's minds. Ah, echoes of very long ago and very lost times when some TV programming had to have documentaries and educational content with no glory in rape, murder, torture, and the like; with an FCC chairman declaring that the programming was a vast wasteland. But then the author tossed off this comment about United Broadcasting when his tongue was how far from his cheek? Another lost opportunity here, its effect not-on-Tom added to the list enumerated above. A great novel it might have been.

Does it represent the 50s? Hardly. It touches on suburbia. There are ashtrays in the offices. All the secretaries, but one, are extremely good looking. A tough, tough Betsy pushes the book to conclusion, relieving the author of, shall I say, a writer's duty, to get it going on another, undoubtedly for him, a difficult, complicated, messy plane. The head of United Broadcasting speaks the obvious with exclamation points, example - Glad you could make it!, to a mandatory company meeting. The calm and quiet punched up, business-speak of the time in contrast to becoming calm and quieter via a near lisp of a whisper like the early Jacqueline Bouvier or a recurring character on "Dobie Gillis". They, and anyone else, of the 50s-60s-70s-80s could succumb to greed, not conformism or consumerism. An excess that came too fast, unearned, a fallout of manna.

The novel has specifics about the gray flannel suits of NYC rushing around in frantic paths going nowhere and getting more money. Tom takes off the gray flannel suit when he decides to be honest with Hopkins of United Broadcasting and his wife. He resolves to be an optimist. At least the 50s were more optimistic than later decades. New found early money is imperiled by pessimism.

Such is not a concern of the author as he relates in the afterword that the gray flannel suit goes on - presumably that enduring symbol and the take away for many in the next decade. The author was surprised about where the appreciation of his book was placed. He thought the book had been largely autobiographical. But Norman Cousins and Orville Prescott had a differing view of WWII's aftermath devolving into conformity and suburbia. Somehow others got the idea that Tom was an ad man. The campus and street authorities of the 60s thought Tom was a "square".

The author recognized the suit was of a type, correctly, but incorrectly then the lessons of the book or the lessons put there by some reviewers and others, who must not have read the book, were that WWII problems (Tom’s problem came down to a kid in Italy) were repeated in Korea and Nam. The author characterizes his book as being about youth, not of an era, of a person that was a very angry man. But the youth, ill-thought out though they were, of the 60s ignored Korea and were dominated by the war in Nam too such an extent as to fuel anger, greed, and irrationality to forge an era dominated by Youth. The author readily accepts what the book was not about.

There was no mention of Youth by Franzen in the introduction. He thought Tom's suburban world was one of reassurance like Imperial Street in St. Petersburg and Victorian London - both quite a stretch. The features of Tom's world and of those of his associates are, for Franzen, taken up by quiet streets, commuters in fedoras, trains, and martinis by the pitcher, ugly domestic fights, and sexual activities that smell. Except for the fedoras, these features are found before and beyond the 50s. All eras, ages, decades - what have you - have their similar performances. The pretensions of the 60s cant took pains to show that they were removed from 50s conformism, as defined by those of the 60s, or seized upon by whiners, into their own conformism and also into their ever more feverish consumerism. They whined louder as they denied contentment. They became political as a social definition and discarded society as community. Tom was asleep, but with no dreams of career, improvement, or ideals. It was dull, no wartime edge, peace, domesticity, the purpose of the everyday and carrying on regardless never entered his agenda nor of those anti-Toms who didn't identity, like Tom, what was being lost but known in a chain, broken at times, of American life back to the Puritans.

Puritans and others had no Freudian umph! to offer pretended progress for engagement with daily living. From them, jumping into the gray flannel suit, Franzen saw a lack of household harmony when households were going to be in short supply and solitary pursuits of the self, divorce proceedings as often as changing socks, and the end of attempts at participating in truth, patriotism, justice, God, work, and fun -never mind harmony - were gone.

Franzen thought the nuclear family to be a cult, and the politics then was quiet, and, others said, elitism was going to be dissolved by activism. They, of the 60s, "won" in the social sense. And to the victors go the spoils. What was spoiled was what the 60s said was rotten. No effective defenders for the 50s, all were liberals. Money got to be a god-awful solution to all social problems, repudiated as "selling out" but buying equality, opportunity, and integrity.

Franzen wrote that the 50s gave the 60s its idealism and rage. Really, the 60s took the rage. The 60s and its minions wanted no obligation to the 50s and its minions. There was an erroneous homegrown idealism. There and then it came to be. To protect themselves from the worth of the 50s, they got it sealed off using the accusative plaster of hypocrisy, so many stereotypes came out of the pavement, and they became harassed and hassled and hustled.

One hustle was the universal acceptance of disgust, if not hatred, toward suburbia, which is now, our experts say, in decline. At long last, it, as it was, has the decency to expire. I am not one of them, of the 50s and 60s, though I knew both. I carry on alone that concern they gave more lip service to in the 50s, the last time, honesty, harmony, decency, truth, and accuracy were socially attempted. Like them, I am imperfect, all the stones to be the first to cast are too heavy and such is an allusion to the Biblical commonality in community that we lost. We forgo the realization of the obvious lack of enough intelligence we can command to explain. Either don't explain, and live the consequences, or realize God.

The real 50s as perceived by the 60s would be, I presume, Britain, its post WWII experience was much different from ours, the 60s outburst more intensive and concentrated at first. Many books by the Brits have documented the 50s and the explosion thereafter. Truly not our 50s, theirs, not our 60s, theirs (early on). Their religion, decency, honesty, conformism, consumerism, hypocrisy, and so on?

So outside the American 60s contract of criticism of the American 50s, it would be better applied to the Great Britain of the 50s, conceptually of course, and only in that sense. One could do so only for a short time since the Brits didn't wage war in Vietnam.