James E Hartley

Wright’s Unbearable Rage

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death! That is truly one of the great rallying cries of all time.

(Trivia note: as you know, Patrick Henry is the source of that line. But, he probably cribbed it from Addison’s play Cato: A Tragedy which has the lines: “It is not now time to talk of aught/But chains or conquest, liberty or death.”)

Richard Wright’s collection of short stories could well have been entitled with Patrick Henry’s immortal line. Instead, he called it Uncle Tom’s Children. Five stories (plus an autobiographical foreword), all of which are tales of a regular person driven to extraordinary acts of endurance in the face of implacable evil.

Wright is an amazing prose stylist, so these are incredibly well written stories. If you want a violent tale of good vs evil, reading any one of these stories would fit the bill. Perfect for a high school class that wants a model of an old fashioned morality tale.

Actually, the closet approximation to Wright’s stories are superhero comic books. That isn’t a joke. The villains in these stories are straight out of comic books—really evil people doing evil things for no reason other than the fact that they are evil people who like doing evil things. These villains are evil all the way down. If you are hoping that maybe the Evil Villain will show a shred of human decency, you are going to be bitterly disappointed.

The problem is recurring. You read the first story and evil triumphs. Evil triumphs again in the second story. And the third. And the fourth. Are you still hoping Good will triumph in the fifth story? Rather foolish of you. Evil always wins.

As odd as it sounds, there is more nuance in a Marvel comic book than there is in any of Wright’s tales. That is, after all, his goal. You can see the anger dripping off of ever page in these stories. There is no room for nuance here. Wright is waging a Race War, and he will not take prisoners.

In Wright’s war, the heroes are black. So are all the good, noble people. So are all the people who struggle to do the right thing. White characters come in only two varieties: extraordinary evil people and dreamy, hapless communists. The latter never actually do any good, but at least they aren’t just totally evil.

If you haven’t read the book, you might think this assessment is rather harsh. But, you don’t have to take my word for it. Richard Wright thought less well of this book than I do.

I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of Uncle Tom’s Children. When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.

Even bankers’ daughters! He is right. Wright wants to convey his anger and you the Reader are also inevitably angry at the evil people in this book. But Wright didn’t want to focus the anger on the cartoon villains. He wanted those banker’s daughters to feel complicit in the evil, not weep over it and feel good about themselves because they wept. But the stories don’t have enough depth or nuance to ever generate any other reaction than a feeling of moral virtue because you are not that evil.

The most amazing thing about Uncle Tom’s Children is that it was written right before Wright wrote his masterpiece Native Son. Reading these stories, you would never imagine that this author would be capable of turning his magnificent ability to write prose into a vehicle for a book with depth and nuance. Instead of one dimensional evil people, Native Son casts Society itself in the role of the villain. Native Son’s protagonist Bigger is doomed not because of some evil two-bit sheriff, but because the entire society leaves him no place to turn.

What then do we do with Uncle Tom’s Children? Is there anything to learn from a collection of comic book stories written by a master of prose? Yes, but it really isn’t the lesson Wright wants us to learn. In the face of formidable evil, how should we respond? Wright’s anger is one option. In the last story, “Bright and Morning Star,” Wright lays out the other option. At the outset of the story, the protagonist is humming the song from which the story title is taken. Wright rejects the answer of that song. Wright castigates that answer as the voice of the wrong side in the Race War. But, that other answer offers a promise of a reaction to evil that is something other than Wright’s Unbearable Rage.

I’ve found a friend in Jesus, He’s everything to me,
He’s the fairest of ten thousand to my soul;
The Lily of the Valley, in Him alone I see
All I need to cleanse and make me fully whole.
In sorrow He’s my comfort, in trouble He’s my stay;
He tells me every care on Him to roll.

Refrain:
He’s the Lily of the Valley, the Bright and Morning Star,
He’s the fairest of ten thousand to my soul.

He all my grief has taken, and all my sorrows borne;
In temptation He’s my strong and mighty tow’r;
I’ve all for Him forsaken, and all my idols torn
From my heart and now He keeps me by His pow’r.
Though all the world forsake me, and Satan tempt me sore,
Through Jesus I shall safely reach the goal.

He’ll never, never leave me, nor yet forsake me here,
While I live by faith and do His blessed will;
A wall of fire about me, I’ve nothing now to fear,
From His manna He my hungry soul shall fill.
Then sweeping up to glory to see His blessed face,
Where rivers of delight shall ever roll.

Learning Goals and Oakeshott

In an old brick building, an aging Doctor of Philosophy shares knowledge acquired over a lifetime with a dozen young scholars just setting out on their own intellectual journeys. That is the image of higher education. It is also one of the many fatalities in the Age of Covid. Not everyone is mourning its passing, however. One of the byproducts of the move to on-line education is the triumph of the College Bureaucrats in their guerrilla war for control of the classroom. There is a serious danger that higher education will be permanently changed even after the students return to campus.

The battleground for the soul of the classroom is encapsulated in the idea of Learning Goals. They are all the rage in education these days; you can’t hear a college bureaucrat speak for more than 10 minutes about academics without an appeal to them. Now if you are not a college professor, you may not think that a discussion of learning goals is all that bad. After all, isn’t it obvious that there should be a goal for learning?

Ah, but saying there is a goal is not enough. Listening to the apostles of learning goals, one would think that the job of a professor is to establish specific learning goals for each class, show how the individual class learning goals relate to the department’s learning goals, and then show how the department’s learning goals relate to the college’s learning goals. Then, the class learning goals should be clearly specified on a syllabus, preferably with cross-references to the department and college learning goals. Every topic and assignment in the class should be explicitly linked to one of the course learning goals. Assessments should be designed to see if the students are meeting each specific learning goal. If students are not meeting a learning goal, the problem is clearly that the professor has poorly specified the learning goal, not properly instructed the students in the methods to be used to achieve the learning goal, or has not adopted the proper educational tools to assess whether students have met the learning goal.

I have been a bit befuddled by this request to establish measurable learning goals. The frequency with which these requests are coming is increasing exponentially. Thus far, I keep insisting that the learning goal for all my classes is “To teach students how to read Shakespeare for pleasure.” (By the way, I am an economist.) I am serious with that answer, but the bureaucrats never think I am treating the matter with enough gravity. The underlying puzzle for me has been trying to figure out how we got to the place where “learning goals” became the measure of education. Before the advent of the Bureaucratic College, how did learning ever occur? How did Socrates or Augustine or Aquinas or Hume or Smith ever teach anyone anything without first setting out learning goals?

My puzzle was solved while reading Michael Oakeshott’s “Rationalism in Politics,” a 1947 essay about European politics. Oakeshott describes the rise of Rationalism, the belief that the only authority and guide to solving all problems is Reason. With proper application of Reason, everyone will agree on the proper course of action. Experience and history are poor guides. “With an almost poetic fancy, [the Rationalist] strives to live each day as if it were his first, and believes that to form a habit is to fail.” There are many obvious effects of this mindset on politics.

Rationalism also has an effect on education. Knowledge, Oakeshott explains, comes in two varieties, technical and practical. Technical knowledge comes from learning the rules, the technique. A perfect example is learning to cook; master the ingredients and techniques and you too can bake a cake. There are similarly techniques to be mastered to learn how to work in a laboratory, apply the proper theory to interpreting a text, or manipulate a set of data to find statistical regularities.

In contrast, Oakeshott’s practical knowledge can only be learned in use. There are no rules to be followed, techniques to be memorized. “[P]ractical knowledge can neither be taught nor learned, but only imparted and acquired. It exists only in practice, and the only way to acquire it is by apprenticeship to a master—not because the master can teach it (he cannot), but because it can be acquired only by continuous contact with one who is perpetually practicing it.”

Now both sorts of knowledge exist. Indeed, in the traditional liberal arts college, both were vital. One mastered the technique of how to use a microscope or the library or a statistical software package. But the ends to which one could and should put those techniques were what the professors provided; students absorbed habits of thought by frequent contact with those who had devoted their life to acquiring knowledge and wisdom. That conception of the liberal arts is exactly what is under threat in the modern age. Akin to Oakeshott’s concerns about what was occurring in European politics in the late 1940s, the bureaucracy of the colleges has been staffed by Rationalists. The consequences for education are deep.

Rationalism is the assertion that what I have called practical knowledge is not knowledge at all, the assertion that, properly speaking, there is no knowledge which is not technical knowledge. The Rationalist holds that the only element of knowledge involved in any human activity is technical knowledge, and that what I have called practical knowledge is really only a sort of nescience which would be negligible if it were not positively mischievous. The sovereignty of ‘reason’, for the Rationalist, means the sovereignty of technique.

That is when the light bulb went on. Learning goals are, by their very nature, statements about technical knowledge, statements about technique. To set up learning goals for a class is akin to writing a cookbook. Students memorize the list of ingredients and the steps for combining those ingredients. If they follow the steps correctly, they get an A. Then they can move to the next cookbook. A department is akin to a cuisine; take 8 courses in Mexican food and you have a major. A college is a collection of cuisines. But, upon graduating, can any of these masters of cookbooks actually make a decent meal? Do they actually understand the principles of cooking? Do they even enjoy cooking?

Oakeshott’s distinction makes perfect sense of the modern college. It has abandoned practical knowledge. It really has no love of artistry and beauty. It merely takes 18 year olds and processes them until they become 22 year olds and then hands them a certificate of completion. The same thing is happening in classrooms. An increasing number of teachers are turning their classrooms into pure exercises of learning technique. Set measurable goals for the students and give them endless opportunities to redo the work until they meet those goals. Then you can pat yourself on the back and say “Mission Accomplished.”

Therein lies the difference between those of us who still believe in the virtues of the traditional liberal arts college and the modern educational technocrats who staff the bureaucracies. I don’t care if students remember whether a cross-price elasticity of demand equal to negative 3 means the goods are substitutes or complements. Nobody ever remembers whether increasing money demand shifts the IS or the LM curve and in which direction (and what is on the axes, again?). None of those things matter in the least decades later in life. What I want students who have joined with me in a class to remember is that learning things is fun, that there is a joy in discovery, that learning how to take complicated things and make little models of these complicated things is a marvelous way to gain insight. If I do my job well, then 30 years after graduation my former students will indeed pick up a copy of Hamlet and read it purely for pleasure. To attain that end, I have to model the excitement of learning. A classroom devoted solely to mastering technique is inimical to the wonder and joy of learning I hope to impart.

To return to the present crisis, which type of education is more amenable to an on-line education? It is not a contest. Technique can be taught on-line. Indeed, if the only thing you want to learn is a list of things on which you will be tested, there really isn’t any advantage at all to a live instructor. There is a YouTube video already out there showing you how to take apart your vacuum cleaner or take the derivative of a function. A quick Google search will allow you to discover the backgrounds of all the characters in the Divine Comedy or whether mixing two specific chemicals will cause an explosion.

As professors everywhere are scrambling to adjust their classes for on-line education, technique triumphs. Oakeshotts’ practical education cannot easily be shared on-line. That fifteen minute impromptu tangent in class, the half hour conversation in the office, the excitement arising from a random conversation about a topic unrelated to the course, none of those things occur in an on-line class. On-line education is the College Bureaucrat’s Dream; professors everywhere are being forced by circumstances to retrofit their courses around technique.

What happens when the students return? How sticky are the changes being made in class after class? If the College Bureaucrats have their way, they will be very sticky indeed. Having reformatted classes to become disciplinary cookbooks, what percent of the faculty will abandon those things and return to the messier but much more important task of modeling the practice of learning? Learning goals are less a passing fad and more part of the very nature of the rationalist bureaucracy which sees value only in technique. I fear this will not go away.

Physics in a Flash

“Faster than the streak of the lightning in the sky…Swifter than the speed of the light itself…Fleeter than the rapidity of thought…is The Flash.”

That’s pretty fast.

And it presents certain…problems.

The Flash was born in 1940 with that opening declaration. Jay Garrick had a nifty metal helmet with wings on the side and he could run really really really fast. Not fast enough to propel sales of his comic book, however. He vanished in less than a decade.

Fear not, speed fans! The adventures of Jay Garrick inspired Barry Allen to become The Flash after he coincidentally spilled just the right set of chemicals on himself when a lightning bolt crashed through the window, allowing him to run really really fast. Yeah that seems a bit improbable. But, it turns out it isn’t improbable at all! Just three years later, young Wally West was visiting his idol The Flash, when a lightning bolt came streaking through the window causing the exact same set of chemicals to spill on Wally! Kid Flash is born!

More years, more Flashes. They come and go. But, they all run really really fast!

Which presents certain…problems.

The Laws of Physics catch up to the Flash. You see, running faster than the speed of light is, well, a might bit difficult. Now, in Superhero Land, you do have to suspend disbelief a bit—people can do all sorts of impossible things in comic books. But Physics plays a really big role in the development of the Flash over the years. This is really apparent in The Flash: A Celebration of 75 Years. At various points you can see the writers realize that the laws of physics might have some weird effects on a guy who can run really fast.

First off, as Einstein (a real person! Not a comic book person!) showed, as something speeds up, it acquire more mass. If it moves at the speed of light, it would have infinite mass, which is a lot of mass. A fist, for example, moving at something close to the speed of light would pack a rather powerful punch. The Flash isn’t strong, but he is fast. Theoretically, if he swings his fist fast enough, he can hit harder than anything else ever could. One punch and he could lay out even Superman!

But, unfortunately, while the mass is rising to infinity, the energy required to move the object is also rising to infinity. So, it takes a lot of energy to move really really fast. To do so requires a source of energy. The Flash would need to eat a lot, a whole lot, to generate that much energy. (This is actually a plot line in one of story lines from the 1980s.)

But, wait, there is even more physics! As The Flash moves faster, time slows down. So, the Flash will age slower than all those slower mortals as long as he keeps running really fast. Move faster than the speed of light, and time goes all wonky (that is the technical term) in the governing equation—so who knows what happens? Maybe…time travel! The flash travels through time a lot. He even has special time travel treadmill because, you know, trying to run faster than light on the earth means you’ll run into something sooner or later.

But wait, if you can move really, really fast, then your molecules must be moving really fast too, right? So what if you just vibrated all your molecules really fast? You could take advantage of all the empty space between your molecules and between the molecules in a solid object (like, say the bars in a jail cell), and you could walk though solid objects. Quantum Tunneling!

Oh, and if you are running at the speed of light (or even faster) you are really going to need to be thinking really fast.

And, by this point in the list of all the nifty things The Flash can do, you realize it might be a bit hard to generate that much energy even if you do eat a lot. So, along comes the Speed Force, which is some mystical energy field that screams in huge Neon Letters “The writers just gave up trying to explain all this.”

And at that moment, all the excitement of the physics of The Flash dies. He cheats. He has the Speed Force and his time traveling treadmill and so has pretty much unlimited power to wander through time really fast and do whatever he wants to do. So what started out as a nifty little idea of a guy who can run really fast ending up meeting the laws of Physics which led to a guy whose powers seem to know no bounds because all he has to do is run really fast on his treadmill and go back in time and fix whatever mistake he just made.

Is there a lesson here? Of course there is: Physics is amazingly interesting. Lots of kids learned about Einstein and the theory of relativity from reading The Flash. You know all those people who complain that kids don’t like learning physics? Maybe they should read comic books first and then work backwards to figure out the physics behind it all. It is not the worst educational idea out there. It might just work.

A quick search on Amazon reveals this book already exists! The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios! Even more amazing: Kakalios is a Real Professor™.

I should probably read this book.

A Cautionary Tale

“You know these new novels make me tired….Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read ‘This Side of Paradise.’ Are our girls really like that? If it’s true to life, which I don’t believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I’m sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there’s a place for the romanticist in literature.”

Thus says a character is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. (Gotta love Fitzgerald having a character complain about Fitzgerald’s previous novel.)

Shoddy realism. That is not something the characters in this novel only want to avoid in their books. They also want to avoid it in their actual lives. Given the choice between a life mired in shoddy realism or a life imbued with romanticism, which would you prefer? It’s a pointless thing to contemplate, of course. You are stuck with realism, shoddy realism at that, in your life.

You are stuck with realism, but are the characters in this novel? They are Beautiful. As you know, the Beautiful are not like you and I. They have more Beauty. They lead Beautiful lives surrounded by Beautiful things and Beautiful people. And by the way, they are also Damned. (Note there is no “the” before “Damned” in the title.)

What’s the problem?

Anthony and Gloria, the Beautiful and Damned of the title, have it all. They have youth and beauty and money. The world sits before them, its wares on display and all for the having. They can do anything they want. Anything at all. What do they want to do? Ah, there’s the rub. Going to parties and getting drunk then moving to the country and getting drunk then moving back to the city and getting drunk, year after year after year after…well, it gets a bit old.

But, this is not a repetitive and dull book. I had the occasion to talk about it with a few former and current students. Every one of them found it terrifying. Why? Loathe as they were to admit it, they all recognized themselves in Anthony and Gloria. Graduating from an elite liberal arts college, full of the energy and beauty of youth, dreaming of a life where they can do what they will, they are faced with all the promise of being the Beautiful. Who could want anything more than my current and former students have?

Starting off the novel with a wonderful image of their future selves, seeing people living that perfect life to the fullest and getting exactly what they want, it is easy to remember only the first two words of the title and imagine this is going to be a story of glittering success. The descent starts slowly enough, but as it gains momentum, you became a bit alarmed. Anthony and Gloria are not alarmed, however; they just keep going on, leading their beautiful lives which are becoming less and less beautiful by the moment. By the end of the novel, Anthony and Gloria are still living in their world of dreams, and it is only the Reader who realizes the Dream is a Nightmare.

How did this happen?

“I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t got what I wanted things might have been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the work of it, and had some sweet vanity out of the success.”

Anthony says that, and he is exactly right. The problem was that Anthony did indeed have everything he wanted. He didn’t have to work for a thing; all of life was just handed to him. And, as a result, Anthony never developed that one thing which is indispensable to leading a life worth living: Good Character. It is not enough to have wealth and beauty. You also need a work ethic, a moral code, the willingness to sacrifice today to reap benefits tomorrow, a vocation, a higher purpose. Without these things, all the wealth and invitations to the right parties and the new toys are meaningless nothings. Without these things you can be the beautiful, but then you are also the damned.

It is not that Anthony and Gloria are unaware of the need for building character. In a rather amusing moment, when Anthony mentions that he has done some work and Gloria scoffs, Anthony points to an essay he wrote, exclaiming, “And what’s more Gloria, you know I sat up till five o-clock in the morning finishing it.”

If you didn’t laugh at that line, it is because you are a recent graduate of an elite liberal arts college. These colleges accept the Beautiful: the smart or wealthy or talented or (the gold mine) all three. We run them through a “rigorous course of study.” That “rigor” requires the students to occasionally stay up until 5 o-clock in the morning to do an assignment. Not finish an assignment—do the assignment. It’s not that the students do not work; they do stay up those nights before an exam. What most of them never do, however, is engage in concentrated effort on a single project over a sustained period of time. There are students who do senior theses and there are classes requiring substantive research papers and other classes with large high-stakes exams. But, it is a relatively easy matter to navigate the modern college and avoid all those things that require developing a work ethic which will enable the person to work for long stretches day after day on a difficult project. Don’t blame the students. It is the faculty who have switched away from the “high stakes assessment strategies” to the more “student-friendly” grading.

As a result, the students, both the ones who did work hard in college and the ones who did not, no longer view the world as a cruel and hard place where to succeed you must work very hard. They are truly like Anthony and Gloria. That is why this novel is so terrifying to them.

Dick: (pompously) Art isn’t meaningless.
Maury: It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.

There is the point of The Beautiful and Damned. The book itself is a meaningless romp watching some characters make a whole bunch of really bad decisions. What makes the book worth reading is that maybe, just maybe, it will remind you that life is more than getting the things you want. A Good Life is a Life with Meaning. What is the meaning of your life? What is your chief end? Answer that and you have a chance of escaping the fate of having your life be described by the title of this book.

Infinitely Weird

Remember math class? You instantly had either a flash of great joy or your soul just died. This is a story about math for the latter group. Trust me on this one.

First, why does the latter group exist? Why are there so many people, and let’s be honest, it is a very great number of people, whose experience learning mathematics was pure misery?

Over the years, I cannot tell you how many students have been in my office and said, “I can’t do math.” I invariably say the same thing: “Of course you can do math. What is 5+3? Sometime in your life you had a really awful math teacher who sucked all the joy out of the subject.” Invariably the student’s face instantly lights up with recognition, remembering that math teacher.

The fundamental problem is that mathematics is taught all wrong. Other subjects often start with amazing things that inspire, arousing wonder and curiosity. Mathematics starts with equations and lots and lots of repetitive tasks. Don’t get me wrong. The only way to truly learn mathematics is with lots and lots of repetitive tasks. But, in order for all that work to seem worth the time, isn’t it first necessary to arouse a sense of wonder? Why doesn’t math education start with weird and amazing things and then work backward to learn the mathematics behind all this weirdness?

It is amazing that something we can understand so instinctively can be so difficult to turn into rigorous mathematics. This can make mathematics seem frustrating to some people, impotent to others, and pointless to yet others. To me it is simply fascinating that our gut instincts can be so strong, and so difficult to understand with our brains. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try…

Eugenia Cheng wrote that in Beyond Infinity, an exploration of one of those incredibly weird and curious mathematical things. Infinity is an idea everyone learns about fairly early in life as the answer to the question “What is the biggest number?” Remember the moment you learned the answer to that was a number so big it couldn’t get any bigger? Remember when you learned you can’t even count to infinity because it is so big? Even a computer can’t count to infinity. Even Hermione Granger can’t count to infinity.

Then you learned that infinity is so big that if I have an infinite number of marbles and you have one plus an infinite number of marbles, well, you don’t have more marbles than me. In fact, if you have twice as many marbles as me, you have the same number of marbles as me. In fact, if you had infinitely more marbles than me, you have the same number of marbles as me. Honestly, you were amazed about this when you learned about it. Infinity is not just the biggest number possible, it is weird.

But then instead of capitalizing on all that weirdness and keeping you fascinated with numbers, tedium came along. If you made it to calculus, you learned that an infinite series of infinitely smaller things can add up to a finite number. That should be weird and amazing, but it was probably just a thing you had to figure out in order to pass your test. You learned you can calculate the slope of a curvy line by looking at infinitely smaller distances between the point on the line and the point next to it, which is also really weird, but again, you just memorized how to take a derivative. Math wasn’t weird anymore. It was just exam questions.

Unless you had a really amazing teacher, you never learned this in school: that first thing you learned about infinity, that it is the biggest possible number and you can’t get a bigger number, is wrong. There is a number bigger than infinity. The bigger number is also called infinity. Some infinities are bigger than other infinites.

How can that be? Well, imagine you had an infinite series of infinitely long numbers less than one. For example, start with

0.274539754312667532….
0.375631948857323456….
0.984452387503486328….
0.556633995846321885….
0.412386593658235702….
…..

Imagine that each one of those numbers is infinitely long. Imagine that instead of five numbers like that you have a list of infinitely many numbers like that. So, you have infinitely many numbers which are infinitely long. Right? (Make sure you understand that this is an infinite set of infinitely long numbers—ready to have your mind blown?)

There is a number less than one that is not in that infinite set of infinitely long numbers less than one. How is that possible? How do we know?

Take the first number in your list. Look at the first digit in the first number and add one. We now create the number 0.3. Now take the second digit of the second number and add one. 0.38. Now the third digit of the third number and so on. Using the five numbers above this is 0.38579…. Keep doing this. That new number you just created is different than every single number in your infinitely long series! Think about it—pick any number in your infinitely long series and compare it to the number you just created. Consider the 5789^th number in your series; the 5789^th digit in the 5789^th number is, say, 4; in the number you are creating, make the 5789^th digit 5. So, the number you are creating is not the same number as the 5789^th number in your infinitely long series. Or any other number you choose. There is no way that number you just created is in the original infinitely long series.

So, the series of numbers with the new number you just created and the series you started with must be larger than the series with which you started. Some infinities are larger than other infinites.

I took a lot of math classes in my life, but I only learned this fact about 15 years ago from a colleague of mine in philosophy. When I think back to my calculus class, endless tedium, it is amazing to think how much more excited I would have been about thinking about all those infinitely small distances if I had understood how truly weird infinity actually is.

Another example. Imagine the number 0.999999… where the nines just keep repeating forever. If you subtract that number from 1, what do you get? You get 0. That number 0.99999 and the number 1 are exactly the same number. How can that be? It’s weird. Take the number 1. Say that a number is smaller than 1 if there is some distance between 1 and that number. So 0.9 is smaller than 1 because it is 0.1 smaller than 1. Similarly, 0.99 is .01 smaller than 1. But now imagine the smallest possible distance between 1 and a smaller number. The distance between 1 and 0.99999… is smaller than the distance you just imagined. So imagine an even smaller distance than the smallest possible difference you just imagined. Same thing. In fact no matter how close to 1 you imagine a number has to be in order to equal 1, 0.9999….. is a smaller distance away than that distance. So if there is no distance between 1 and 0.9999…., then 1 must equal 0.9999…. Right? But that can’t be true. Right? Infinity is weird.

Another example. If you have 5 things and you add infinitely many things to it, then you have (5 + infinity) which equals infinity. You know that. But what if you have an infinite number of things and you add five more things? Well, you can’t really do that. In order to add five more things, you would have to add them to the end to your infinite series, but there is no end to your infinite series. So, while (5 + infinity) is a perfectly reasonable thought experiment, (infinity + 5) is meaningless. Which means (5 + infinity) does not equal (infinity + 5). Yeah.

Cheng’s book is an introduction to these sorts of weird things about infinity. Who is the audience? It is those people who really hated math class or those people who took calculus and thought it was boring. Infinity is many things, but it is not boring.

I would love to highly recommend the book to anyone who thinks math is boring. But, alas, while the book has a great many weird and fascinating things about infinity which you will surely enjoy learning if you don’t know them, you have to take the good with the bad. The bad: you have to put up with a lot of corny stores and examples. I was ready to murder the “evil smarty-pants” by the second mention, but he kept coming back for more.

Is infinity an infinitely interesting subject? Probably not. But it does have enough odd and intriguing features that pondering it will give you a finite amount of amusement. Added bonus: from now on when someone tells you something is infinite or forever or whatever, you can ask: Is that the normal infinity or an infinity that is bigger than the normal infinity?

Roth and Original Sin

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner wrote that line in Sanctuary, published in 1931. In this sense, Philip Roth is Faulkner’s heir.

Roth is a strange author to recommend. He writes beautifully, wrestles with deep questions, and his books are quite well described by his own definition of satire: “Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.” But, along with the good, you have to take a lot of ruminations about sex.

Fifteen years ago, I tried to read Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint) and about two dozen pages in, I gave up, thinking I would never return. Then along came one of those bright, fascinating students with whom every conversation was lively, fun, and thoughtful and she really wanted to read a Roth novel as part of an independent study. I figured I might as well give him another chance. The Plot Against America. Wow, it was good.

So, the next semester, she did another independent study and all we did was read Roth. Since then, his novels have been regularly on my To Be Read list. The Library of America has his complete works! (A curious thing about the Library of America Roth novels—the spines on the dust jackets are formatted differently than on every other LOA volume. It is strange looking. I have no idea why they broke the format for Roth.)

The latest read: The Human Stain.

First, the title. It shows up in the novel in a discussion about crows. A crow raised by humans escapes the house and finds itself attacked by the other crows.

“That’s what comes of being hand-raised,” said Faunia. “That’s what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain,” she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even with sadness. That’s how it is—in her own dry way, that is all Faunia was telling the girl feeding the snake: we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It’s why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity? All she was saying about the stain was that it’s inescapable. That, naturally, would be Faunia’s take on it: the inevitably stained creatures that we are. Reconciled to the horrible, elemental imperfection.

Roth is thinking about Oedipus (more about that anon), but another name for “The Human Stain” is “Original Sin.” Original sin precedes disobedience. Original sin encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. Try to explain Original Sin and you’ll see; it is very hard to make sense of how we all become permanently stained with original sin before birth. But we are. Augustine knew this, which is why he has that odd bit at the start of Confessions lamenting how sinful he was as a baby for selfishly crying for milk.

Original sin is in everyone. It is indwelling, inherent and defining. It is inescapable. It is a horrible, elemental imperfection.

It is interesting to look at the reviews of The Human Stain. Most of them miss the point entirely, largely because they neither noticed the title of the book nor the epigraph from Oedipus the King. Most reviews focus on the event that kicks off the novel.

Coleman Silk was a professor and the Dean of Faculty at Athena College, the fictional place in the Berkshires near where Roth’s alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman resides. Well, Silk, it turns out, is also an old Jewish man, so Roth has two alter-egos in this novel. Roth likes to put himself in his books. (He even has a set of books where the fictional protagonist is named Philip Roth.)

Silk is teaching a class on the Greeks late in his life. Fourteen students. Half-way through the semester, he had only seen 12 of the students. So one day he asks the dozen students who are there about the ones who have never shown up to class, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”

Career over.

The two students whom he had never seen were Black, and thus his comment was obviously interpreted to be racially motivated. He protested that “spooks” means “ghosts” and he had never even seen these students, so how could he possibly be using a racial slur? His protests fell on deaf ears. He ended up leaving the college. The novel picks up when Silk visits Zuckerman and asks him to write up the story. (Curiously, Roth later revealed that this episode actually happened at Princeton. A professor actually said exactly what Silk said in the novel and the furor ensued.)

So, at the start of the novel, you think you are settling in for a long tale of the academy. Easy target. But then there is a genuinely surprising development (well, surprising unless you have previously read a review or you read what comes next in this here blog post). Silk had lived his entire adult life deceiving everyone. He is Black. His skin is light enough that when he joined the army, he changed his race and when he got out of the army, he walked away from his family, and proceeded to live his life as if he was a white Jew. He got married, had children and none of them ever knew any different.

So, when the furor erupts at Athena College, Silk cannot say that he is not just some old white professor hurling racial slurs. He has spent his whole life trying to escape from his past. In the end, his attempt to avoid his past becomes the very reason he cannot solve the problems of the present. Cue Oedipus.

The story is set against the backdrop of the national news story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. And in a conversation Silk overhears in a local café, three young men are discussing how Clinton’s problem is that now that he was on the President, he could not escape his Arkansas past.

Once he became president, he lost his Arkansas ability to dominate women. So long as he was attorney general and governor of an obscure little state, that was perfect for him….What happens in Arkansas? If you fall when you’re still back in Arkansas, you don’t fall from a very great height…the scale was right in Arkansas. Here it was all out of whack. And it must have driven him crazy. President of the United States, he has access to everything, and he can’t touch it. This was hell.

Silk cannot escape his past. Clinton cannot escape his past. And as soon as you notice the pattern, you realize that nobody in this book can escape their past. Everyone is stamped with the Human Stain. “We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint.” There is nothing that can be done about it.

As the tale of Oedipus shows, it is impossible to cure ourselves of the fact that we leave that stain on the world. There is no purification possible. The attempt to cleanse is a joke. But, that is not enough for Roth. He goes even further: “The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity?”

Because Roth is thinking about the Oedipus story, this conclusion follows. Oedipus is doomed. Indeed, the whole of Greek tragedy teaches the same lesson. We are all doomed. Our flaws define us and we fall and there is nothing that can be done. It you attempt to cure the stain, you make things worse.

The Human Stain perfectly captures the underlying tone of all of Roth’s novels. There is a fatalism in Roth. He cannot escape his own past. He cannot escape the moral outrage he feels when seeing the effects of the Human Stain, of original sin. And so, he turns to satire, to that comic art, to being the clown talking endlessly about sex, but underneath the clowning is that outrage that we are all Oedipus and we are all doomed.

How deeply does the Human Stain mark us? Consider: What if Roth is wrong? What if there was a way to purify yourself from the Human Stain? Would you even be interested?