Daniel C. Dennett - Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Penguin, 1995) ****

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett passed away earlier this year. He is one the four riders of the apocalypse, together with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, called like that for their outspoken and often militant atheism. This was a good reason to read one of Dennett's initial books on Darwin's theory of evolution. 

Thirty years after publication, the book is somewhat outdated, luckily, but unfortunately also very actual. Many of his references about genetics, quantum physics and artificial intelligence are of course no longer entirely correct, and would have been presented in a very different way today, considering the incredible progress that was made in the last decade and years. But the essence of what he writes is still valid. The idea that life is the result of random chance events, with some basic rules that continue to be subjected to chance, and the organsism's fitness to survive in an often hostile environment, is something that - my guess - roughly 90% of the world's population would still reject today. 

"Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe. 

Right from the beginning, the cost of doing something is running the risk of doing it wrong; of making a mistake. Our slogan could be: No taking without mistaking. The first error that ever was made was a typographical error, a copying mistake that then became the opportunity for creating a new task environment (or fitness landscape) with a new criterion of right and wrong, better and worse. A copying error "counts" as an error here only because there is a cost to getting it wrong: termination of the reproductive line at worst, or a diminution in the capacity to replicate. These are all objective matters, differences that are there whether or not we look at them, or care about them, but they bring in their train a new perspective. Before that moment, no opportunity for error existed. However things went, they went neither right nor wrong. Before that moment, there was no stable, predictive way of exercising the option of adopting the perspective from which errors might be discerned, and every mistake anybody or any­thing has ever made since is dependent on that original error-making pro­cess. In fact, there is strong selection pressure for making the genetic copying process as high-fidelity as possible, minimizing the likelihood of error. Fortunately, it cannot quite achieve perfection, for if it did, evolution would grind to a halt. This is Original Sin, in scientifically respectable guise. Like the Biblical version, it purports to explain something: the emergence of a new level of phenomena with special characteristics ( meaners in one case, sinners in the other). Unlike the Biblical version, it provides an explanation that makes sense; it does not proclaim itself to be a mysterious fact that one has to take on faith, and it has testable implications. (p. 203)

This core idea cannot be repeated enough. It's a message of humility. It's a message that requires collaboration and pragmatic solutions among people for the complex problemas that we are confronted with, instead of relying on age-old and unworkable rigid ethical concepts. 

A large part of the book consists in refuting concepts of other academics whose writings and viewpoints are no longer a point of discussion today. If you can live with this, the book is still easy to recommend, and Dennett's knowledge of various scientific disciplines and the rigour of his approach are an absolute pleasure to read. 

Our world has lost a great mind. 

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt - L'Evangile Selon Pilate (Albin Michel, 2000) **

Because I had read all the books I brought with me on a rainy holiday, I took this book from a 'book swap box' on a street somewhere in France. It describes the doubts of Jesus the day before his crucifixion in the first part, and in the second part Pontius Pilate starts his search for the missing body of Jesus. Schmitt is certainly not the first to re-imagine and re-write with a more modern perspective the stories of the New Testament. It's always an interesting exercise, especially when it's presented as here as a police investigation. Schmitt leaves many aspects hanging in a veil of uncertainty. Pilate remains doubtful, yet his wife Claudia is convinced and becomes a Christian. 

Schmitt presents the story with style, but in my opinion with little conviction. Pilate does not ask the right questions in my opinion. Many aspects remain untouched, as if Schmitt wants to use doubt as a possibility that the resurrection actually occured as described in the later gospels (of Matthew, Luke and John), but not in the earliest gospel of Mark, in which the tomb is just empty. And for reference, none of the four evangelists actually ever met Jesus. It is all based on hearsay. 

Many of the modernised versions of the bible have only one goal: to convert the doubtful to christianity, in the hope that the language and style of today might be more effective than the real scriptures. I think Schmitt's book does not fall into this category. It has literary merits. 

Paul Harding - This Other Eden (Penguin, 2023) ****½

In "This Other Eden", Paul Harding fictionalises a historical event, the removal of a few families from Malaga Island, located in the New Meadows River in Maine, United States. 

Harding is known for his exquisite penmanship, which is also the case here. With a deep tenderness and lyricism he describes the lives of the people living on the island, originally outcasts who developed their own secluded little world, as a kind of metaphor of this world, with its horror and beauty, its humanity and its cruelty. 

The few dozen characters all have their own personal story, their strong personalities and special traits, some of them with special and unique talents, but also with their problems and issues, which makes their interaction even more powerful. They are partly descendants of a freed slave and are of different complexions, in the words of a visitor to the island:  "There was white Negroes and coloured white people. Some of them were grey. Some of them pink, like they were raw or something. And some of them were yellow, like waxy cracked old piano keys."

Despite the poverty, the malnutrition, the bugs on the island and the lack of prospects of its inhabitants, you fill sympathy for them, and especially when the bureaucratic outside world of politics and religion starts to intervene. Harding's book has been criticised for not being truthful to what actually happened, or for using elements that come more from myths around the island than from fact. I do not think that this matters to appreciate the novel. Harding has written a beautiful, heart-rending and lyrical novel that juxtaposes different communities, both with their strengths and weaknesses, without actually judging about right and wrong. Even if the bureaucrats and the teacher are clumsy and disrespectful, their intentions - and especially at that time in history - are somewhat understandable. 

It's a nice piece of literature. 

Teju Cole - Tremor (Faber & Faber, 2023) ****

A political and poetic view on our modern day world, its art, its wars, its people is presented as a kaleidoscopic narrative consisting of little fragments that allow the reader to co-create the story. 

The lead character, Tunde, is a West-African photography professor, who walks into an antiques shop at the beginning of the book, identifies African masks, a native American story, and then reflects on art and links Bach's cello suites to some modern day television series. But it also has to do with his relationship with his wife and daughter, with the professionals colleagues he meets around the world.  

"They were sitting on the sofa during this conversation. He came closer to her and held her as she tried to find her words. At first she was startled, unable to trust his sudden alertness, but soon she eased herself into the knowledge that the things between the words were being heard. No there was no language yet for the little despairs nipping at her heels but now she knew he could receive that inarticulacy. His earnestness, his determination now to be better, felt like warmth." (p.65) 

It is about racism, it is about art, it is about politics, in the United States, Africa, Asia, the Middle East. But above all it is literature of a very high level, without being too preachy about his own opinions, but like a good novel does, to even deeper levels, that are usually absent from any other work of art. 

"The work I do takes me to places where I am received as a guest of honor, places where I try to think and speak and where I try to avoid speechifying. All of this is true but none of it is where reality is. There is another reality, the personal one. And then there's the secret one that is as dark as the blood beating in my veins, a cold river flowing undetected far from view, a place of uncertainty and premonition. Some­thing is moving there that does not need me for its movement and that is taking me where I cannot imagine. A darkness to which the eyes can never become adjusted. (p.230)

Throughout the book, art works are described as part of the plot almost, like characters adding perspective and background, often linked to historical events: the Benin bronzes, expressing the 1897 massacre by the British army, Turner’s "Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying" and the Flemish master Herri Met De Bles’s mysterious "Landscape With Burning City", amongst others, and the French series he describes on the pages 202 and 203 but doesn't mention by name is "Bureau Des Légendes", on the espionage and politics in the Middle-East. 

Cole mixes all these kaleidoscopics snippets of information, the personal stories, the art, the human horror into a meditative, at times even poetic and coherent narrative that is trembling with heartfelt emotions, both tender and loving on the one hand, and shocked and disgusted on the other. The tension between both creates the tremor, I assume. 

Martin Amis - Einstein's Monsters (Vintage, 2003) ***

As a completist for some authors (Roberto Bolaño, Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Haruki Murakami, Thomas Pynchon, George Perec, Philip Roth, ...) this little book by Martin Amis was still missing. It was originally published in 1987 and brings us five stories that are all related to nuclear power and the consequences of the arms race. We were in full Cold War at that time, and  with Reagan as president, he wanted to play it hard. Not that Reagan features in Amis's stories, but nuclear  destruction of the world was then very high on everybody's agenda. 

The stories are more a kind of exploration of different situations, narrated with power and stylistic try-outs. Not everything works, possibly because at times the plot development is a little immature ("The Immortals"), or silly ("The Puppy That Could"). It lacks the acid cynicism and deep humanism that pervades his later work, but because it's Amis, the end result is still above the average. 

Ignaas Devisch - En Nog Een Goede Gezondheid (VUBPress, 2023) ***½

Het is altijd verfrissend om filosofen een diepgaandere analyse te maken van de zaken waar we dagelijks mee bezig zijn, in mijn geval de belangen van patiënten te behartigen. 

Hij probeert volgende twee vragen te beantwoorden in dit ongeveer tachtig bladzijden dikke boekje: 

1. Welk gezondheidsbegrip overheerst in onze samenleving en hoe bepaalt dat ons individuele handelen? 
2. Hoe kunnen we de relaties begrijpen tussen dat gezondheidsbegrip, politieke macht en de individuele verantwoordelijkheid in deze context? 

Hij analyseert het spanningsveld en de vele paradoxen die er zijn in de context van onze gezondheid, zoals het belang van preventie kennen, maar er niet naar handelen, of gezondheid zo belangrijk vinden dat het een prestatiegericht doel wordt, of de maatschappelijke verantwoordelijkheid en financiële bijdrage van iemand die rookt versus iemand die zijn been breekt bij het sporten, of nog het verschil in toegankelijkheid en gelijkheid. Hij brengt ons, met de hulp van vele andere filosofen, van Aristoteles over Nietzsche tot meer hedendaagse denkers, tot de grenzen van onze gezondheidsvraag. 

Hij legt fijn uit hoe het concept van gezondheid 'vloeibaar' is, en wat we nu belangrijk vinden verschilt doorheen de tijd en dat we binnen vijf jaar waarschijnlijk al weer een heel andere maatstaf gaan hebben. 

Gelukkig hebben we vandaag - en dat is mijn mening - een sociaal en solidair systeem vanuit de organisatie van de zorg, toegankelijk voor iedereen, dat tegelijk ook zeer liberaal is, want iedereen heeft de vrijheid van handelen en keuzes te maken (burger, patiënt, arts, ...). Deze beide peilers behouden lijkt me essentieel. Het is wel nodig om de patiënten meer en beter te wapenen om hun keuzes te maken. 

Niemand kiest ervoor om ziek te worden. Ziekte is dus iets waar mensen niet mee bezig willen zijn en liefst zo weinig mogelijk geld aan willen besteden, dit in tegenstelling tot zaken die hen wel onmiddellijk genot of aanzien verschaffen. Ook daar kan mijn inziens een verschuiving plaatsvinden. 

Martin Amis - The Zone Of Interest (2) (Vintage, 2014) ****½

After watching the movie with the same title, I read a review that mentioned it was inspired by Martin Amis's novel. Since the plot of the movie did not immediately resonate with me, I bought the book, only to realise that 1. the movie is not entirely faithful to the novel and 2. that I had already read the novel, which proved to be true, ten years ago, in 2014. This is my earlier review of "The Zone of Interest" in Dutch. Here is a translation of my review at that time. 

"Finally another Martin Amis novel that is good. Paul Doll is the boss of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, and dissatisfied with the orders and bureaucracy of his leaders, married to Hannah who is no longer to have anything to do with him (and whose first love, a communist, has disappeared off the face of the earth). They live in a beautiful villa a long way from the camp, along with their two young daughters. Hannah is courted by Gollo Thompsen, the Aryan, Nazi and protégé of his Uncle Bormann. Finally, there is Szmul, a Jewish prisoner who must help the Germans do their jobs.

The story is told from the perspective of the four characters, and Amis succeeds wonderfully in giving each of them their own voice and approach, and this is Amis at his best, slightly overplaying the tone each time, to emphasize the characters a bit more, as well as their views on Nazism and camp activities. All four of them are "ordinary" people, in the sense that they are in a system that they can't really get out of, and so just go along with it, without really also being one hundred percent behind it, without also questioning it very strongly.

Amis is a satirist, a stunning stylist who dips his pen deep into vitriol to expose the folly of men. And he does just that here, and exceptionally well at that. It is easier to write sarcastically about third parties. Here the sarcasm is ingrained in the four narrators' own accounts, without them really being aware of it. They present their own pettiness on a leaf. These trivialities, and their petty desires and frustrations are juxtaposed against the greatest horror humanity has ever known, and yet deemed more important.

Amis' image of humanity is not softened by it. The "Zone of Interest," then, is not just the place where Jews are gassed. So the "zone of interest" is indeed the "me, me and myself" of the petty citizen who thinks only of himself.

A strong novel."

J.M. Coetzee - The Pole (and other stories) (Harvill Seckers, 2023) ****

Coetzee keeps amazing us with his generous mind, his stylistic skills and his sense of balance in telling a story. The central story in this novella is Beatriz, a Spanish woman in her late fourties, who invites a 70-year old Polish pianist for a recital in Barcelona. An unlikely relationship buids up, including a joint holiday, and a trip to Poland. Things turn a little awkward - it actually was from the start - yet human and tender at the same time. There is something paradoxical in their relationship: tender and distant, adventurous and cautious, shameful and irresistible, selfish and altruist ... the ideal field of tension for a great novelist to thrive in. There is no real narrator, but the distant author himself, who literally enumerates - yes, with numbered paragraphs - in a very descriptive way what is happening, as if he is observing his characters from a distance. 

"4. Where do they come from, the tall Polish pianist and the elegant woman with the gliding walk, the banker's wife who occupies her days in good works? All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at last, has their time come?"

The "other stories" in the book are all about Coetzee's Elisabeth Costello, whom we of course know from the novel with the same name. The fact that she is also a woman with adult children gives a sense of coherence to the entire book. 

Easy to recommend. 

 

Gabriel García Márquez - Until August (Viking 2024) ***

Would I recommend this book if it was not written by the grandmaster? I'm not so sure. Is it good that the book is published, even when some claim that Garcia Marquez never wanted it to be published? I guess it is. The story is about a woman with adult children, a workaholic husband and the opportunity to meet a man on the island where her mother his buried, and that she visits every year in August. The island and the month become her annual escape from the predictability of her life. 

It's a story of loneliness, freedom and the lack of it, of adventure and routine. It's a nice enough book and well enough written. And anything Garcia Marquez has written is above the average. This is further explained in the note at the end of the book, written by the editor and summarising the discussions he had with Garcia Marquez on the different versions and reviews of this book. 

It's short and good. Give it a try. 

Amanda Svensson - A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding (Scribe, 2023) ***½

This was for me a great novel to read during the holidays. With its more than 500 pages, and its interesting  and carefully developing plot, it pushes the reader to keep reading out of curiosity and sympathy with the lead characters. The novel balances the stories of adult triplets, who all three have different lives and personalities. Sebastian works as a cognitive scientist in a mysterious research lab in London. Clara has left Europe for Easter Island to report on a group of people (a cult?) who prepare the end of the world as a result of global warming, and Matilda lives in Berlin and is in a relationship with a stepson.

The relationship between the three siblings is far from ideal, they have grown apart, but the disappearance of their father forces them to connect again. More and older family secrets become known as they dig deeper. I will not disclose them to avoid spoiling the fun of reading. 

Svensson's novel is well balanced, with bizarre happenings at time, exotic issues that arise, and a plot development that makes you want to keep reading. 

On the back cover we read: "A joyful family saga about free will, forgiveness, and how we are all interconnected". I wonder whether the publishing company actually read the book because it is anything but this description. It is dark, dealing with issues such as depression, alienation, dysfunction, ethically questionable research, the feeling of doom that will end our world, or at least humanity. It is written in an easy-to-read way, but that does not make it less dark. 

Munir Hachemi - Living Things (Fitzcarraldo, 2024) ****

 

Four students from Madrid travel to France during the summer holidays to work in the vineyards to harvest grapes. Things do not go as planned. They get different jobs from the same agency, working on chicken farms and feed farms. The four friends behave like young men do outside of the control of society and their parents: drinking, smoking weed, quarelling, making noise and litter in the camping where they stay, while at the same time discussing literature, philosophy and societal issues. 

Hachemi's style is very direct, and as he himself writes: there are no metaphors or symbols. It says what it is and what it does. He refers to Borges for the philosophical aspects, to Roberto Bolaño for the literary style, which is close to the reading experience of the latter's "Savage Detectives", while at the same reflecting on the value of writing and the relationship between reality and its written reflection. 

"I always assumed telling the story of what actually hap­pened would be easier than writing fiction (after all, reality is more painstaking than even the most exhaus­tive inventions), but I'm beginning to notice that's not the case. Reality is under no obligation to be interesting - neither is memory - while literature is. I can't seem to clear enough room in my memories to make space for mystery and surprise. True, I could shutlle them around, but doing so would be untruthful in its own way. I believe Borges followed a similar thought process when he wrote 'Funes the Memorious', a short story about a guy who can't forget and therefore can't think (let alone invent). Borges's story - like all good fantasy stories - isn't con­cerned with rigour. A while ago I tried my hand at fixing 'Funes the Memorious' and wrote a piece of flash fiction called 'Ireneo's Memory', which later won a prize."

Here is a litter paragraph, just to illustrate his writing style. 

"In fairness, the campground owner is right. Toss a couple of syringes on the ground, snap a photo, and you could use the image in one of those 'Say no to drugs' pam­phlets the state hands out all over Madrid. Our campsite looks like a settlement in Las Barranquillas. We've got into the habit of drinking late into the night (around here any hour after midnight is considered late, even though the heat keeps us from doing much until sundown) and leaving beer cans strewn all over. There are also a few cig­arette butts on the ground and the remnants of a campfire we could swear we didn't light. On top of that, our books are scattered all over the site: La saga/fuga de J. B., a vol­ume ofJuan Gelman's complete poetry, and Ender's Game. We've gone from boredom to despair in the space of a single day, and only now does it cross our minds that pissing on the side of a tree night after night in lieu of walking 30 metres to the toilet might not have been the brightest idea. Darkness, as we know, magnifies distance. The smell doesn't bother us because our clothes still reek of chicken - damp chicken now - overriding the stink of piss. We hang our clothes up to dry and sit down for another coffee. Too embarrassed to go topless, I decide to throw something on, but the others remain half-dressed. It's 9.30 a.m., the other campers have started to rise, and flash us looks of hatred, revulsion and disbelief. Guess we must be ruining their holidays."

The reading is fun and fast, because of the self-reflection and self-criticism of the writer's voice, his economic use of language and action while at the same time often trying to explain the psychology of what is happening, like Bolaño often using alternatives or even complete paradoxes, as if the manifestation in reality is the result of conflicting or vague internal drivers, or at least hard to fathom for outsiders. This questioning of society also happens when they are actually inside the corporate world with its bizarre self-laudatory jargon and self-esteem, suspected to cover up practices that should not be known to the external world. While touching on all these subjects, Hachemi is sufficiently smart not to give answers of clear-cut messages or opinions, but rather to stay with the question, assuming this is already a sufficient platform for the reader to make up his or her own mind. 

Easy to recommend, and great that it's translated. 

Robert Sapolsky - Determined - Life Without Free Will (The Bodley Head, 2023) ****½

After I read neurologist and biologist Robert Sapolsky's brilliant "Behave" some years ago about all the aspects that determine our behaviour, his new book "Determined - Life Without Free Will" presented itself to me. It got ordered and shipped to me. It was lying on the shelf for a few months, waiting to make me sufficiently interested and with sufficient time to start reading it, which happened when the holidays decided it was time to start. The book is a real sequel to "Behave", and the words, paragraphs and chapters filled my brain with their insights and facts. 

Did I at any point take a decision to buy or read this book? Not if you believe Sapolsky, who claims with an incredible amount of facts and study results that free will does not exist and that everything we do is the result of our neurons and other aspects of our brain, our body, our life, our culture, our history co-determining what we do and when we do it. Intuitively I could agree with him, in the sense that our body creates an illusion of self, which we call 'I', the agent that determines our choices and actions. If you accept this, then obviously 'free will' is also an illusion. Sapolsky reasons that the concept of 'free will' is by definition impossible, since there is no immaterial agent that intervenes in all the aspects of our behaviour, but the exact opposite, our hormones, neurons, determine the choices we make, and hence create the illusion of free will. 

He gives a lot - hundreds of studies - at each level of our possible influence. Here are two examples. 

 "Stick a volunteer in a brain scanner and flash up pictures of faces. And in a depressing, well-replicated finding, flash up the face of someone of another race and in about 75 percent of subjects, there is activation of the amygdala, the brain region central to fear, anxiety and aggression" (p.97)

or: 

"What happens when the dlPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) is silenced is really informative. This can be done experimentally with an immensely cool technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which a strong magnetic pulse to the scalp can temporarily activate or inactivate the small patch of cortex just below. Activate the dlPFC this way, and subjects become more utilitarian in deciding to sacrifice one to save many. Inactivate the dlPFC, and subjects become more impulsive: they rate a lousy offer in an economic game as unfair but lack the self-control needed to hold out for a better reward. This is all about sociality - manipulating the dlPFC has no effect if subjects think their opponent is a computer." (p. 101)

His arguments and evidence are more than convincing, but as a reader and human being, I often wondered whether this is all a matter of semantics? My illusion of the "I" helps me function in this world, and the decisions made by my neurons are made by "my" neurons, based on "my" experiences, and "my" physiology, and "my" education, and "my" culture. This broad base that I call "me", is also "me" for all practical purposes and dialogue, and all the decisions is the result of my will. 

In the last part of the book, Sapolsky takes his findings a step further, and implying that if there is no free will, people cannot be held moraly and legally responsible for the actions of their bodies. Again, he gives a lot of convincing arguments, and interesting case studies that shed an unexpected light on both judgment and punishment. 

Interestingly enough, at the very end of the book, Sapolsky gives a long explanation of his own personal abhorrence for antisemitism. 

"I was once asked if I would take on that role working on the case of a White supremacist who, a month after attempting to burn down a mosque, had invaded a synagogue and used an assault rifle to shoot four people, killing one. "Whoa," I thought. "WTF, I'm supposed to help out with this?" Members of my family died in Hitler's camps. When I was a kid, our synagogue was ar­soned; my father, an architect, rebuilt it, and I had to spend hours holding one end of a tape measure for him amid the scorched, acrid ruins while he railed on in a near-altered state about the history of anti-Semitism. When my wife directed a production of Cabaret, with me assisting, I had to ac­tively force myself to touch the swastika armbands when distributing cos­tumes. Given all that, I'm supposed to help out with this trial? I said yes-if I believed any of this shit I've been spouting, I had to. And then I subtly proved to myself how far I still had to go". (p. 383). 

I can accept that our "will" is the choices made by our body and brain based on everything we've been conditioned to do. I can accept that "I", my consciousness is an awareness of things that were decided microseconds before by my brain, and I can accept that despite the conditioning and determinisms, the word "free" means that you are entitled to your own thoughts and actions (as compared to being the robot in somebody else's power), and I do believe that the concept of "free will" is still for all practical purposes a useful term. Just like Sapolsky himself does in the excerpt above. Whether you want to or not, we humans are driven by emotions yet we have to accept that a huge number of elements come into play when our brains make decisions. 

The whole essential question revolves around the study by Benjamin Libet from 1983, in which study subjects only became aware of their choices after their brain gave the signal of their choice. I fully agree with Sapolsky that there is no immaterial agent at work. We are not passengers in our own bodies. But the question is whether our consciousness (an effect of our brain's activity) and our choices (an effect of our brain's activity) coincide, precede or follow each other. For sure, we do many things that we are not conscious of, and life would be unmanagable if we were, but it could still be that the neurons in our brain consciously weigh options before making a choice.

Things that I found missing in this book is the loop that is possible between different parts of our brain. Even if free will does not exist, our brain has the incredible capacity for self-reflection, improvement in thought processes, acquiring the skill to evaluate options based on increased knowledge and the like. How are the changes in our brain steered? 

Like Sam Harris's opinion about the absence of "free will", Sapolsky takes it a level further, less philosophical but more scientific. The subject is counter-intuitive yet there is much to say for their view. Even if you are not convinced, as I was when I started to read, I can only recommend that you read it too. The quality and the passion of the writing, the many real-life examples will at least make you think and will make you doubt. And that's possibly already a great achievement. 

Bart Van Loo - De Bourgondiërs (De Bezige Bij, 2022) ****

Wat een klepper! Al die bekende namen uit onze geschiedenislessen, zoals Filips De Goede, Karel De Stoute, Maria van Bourgondië, Filips De Schone komen in dit ongelooflijk goed gedocumenteerd boek weer tot leven, en uiteraard veel menselijker en beter gekaderd dan ooit op school mogelijk was geweest. Voor mij was die sterke verwevenheid tussen Vlaanderen en de Lage Landen enerzijds, en het huis van Bourgondië anderzijds nieuw, en zeker het feit dat vele van deze heersers zich in Vlaanderen ophielden, of hier opgroeiden en zelfs soms onze taal spraken. 

Wat ik wel wist, maar niet in deze mate, was de grote rivaliteit tussen de steden Gent en Brugge die elkaar naar de kroon staken als rijkste plekken van Europa. Ook het politiek opportunisme van de Bourgondiërs om bondgenootschappen te sluiten met wie het hen op dat moment het best uitkwam - Frankrijk, Engeland, de Habsburgers - en hiervoor soms duizenden mensenlevens vergooiden in oorlogen en veldslagen om dan plots hun kap te draaien en weer bevriend te worden met de vijand, ongeacht de horror die de gewone mens hiervoor moest ondergaan. Hetzelfde geldt voor hun feesten. Het kon niet groot en uitbundig en rijk en extreem genoeg zijn. Van Loo geeft tot in het kleinste detail een overzicht van alle gerechten, gerechtsculpturen en vertier dat bij deze zwelgpartijen voor honderden genodigden plaatsvonden, niet voor het genot zelf, maar vooral om rijkdom en macht te tonen aan de buitenwereld. 

Van Loo geeft ook een heel knap beeld van de kwaliteit van onze Vlaamse en Hollandse kunstenaars van die tijd en de meesterwerken die ze op vraag van de Bourgondiërs maakten, uiteraard schilderijen in de eerste plaats, maar ook graftombes, beeldhouwwerken en andere wandtapijten met sterke tips waar je die kan gaan bezoeken. 

Het is een meesterlijk boek, goed geschreven, grondig gedocumenteerd, met veel oog voor de menselijke kant van de zaak en met een duidelijk perspectief naar de context van vandaag. Het enige euvel is mijn eigen geheugen dat worstelt om al die stortvloed aan informatie te blijven bewaren. Het is veel, heel veel, maar gelukkig kan ik altijd terug grijpen naar dit exemplaar. 

Ik ben ervan overtuigd dat u er evenveel leesplezier en kennisverrijking aan zal hebben als ik. 

Sorj Chalandon - L'Enragé (Grasset, 2023) ****

 Sorj Chalandon has had a very tough youth, especially in relationship with his father, a theme that comes up in almost all his novels. "L'Enragé" (the enraged), is based on the real story of Jules Bonneau, one of the 55 adolescents who escape a prison for juvenile delinquents in 1934 on an island near the coast of Brittany in France. The boys, whose guilt is questionable and who are mostly from a poor background, orphans, or with parents unable to raise them properly, revolt against the harsh discipline and abuse they suffer at the hands of the directors, teachers and staff in their 'institute'. 

All inhabitants of the island are recruited to catch the boys and return them to their jail for the round price of 20 French francs, which is so lucrative that even tourists engage in the hunt. The story is also the inspiration for the poem "Chasse à L'Enfant" (The hunt for the child) of French poet Jacques Prévert. 

Chalandon writes in his typical style, direct, action-focused, emotional, rich. The main character tells his story and his challenges to control his emotions, and we can understand his anger, his revolt, his rebellious attitude when you have been humiliated, punished, disciplined for no reason at all. Like all other young boys, he tries to lay low, not to show is fear or uncertainty. You have to be tough to survive. 

"Jamais de ma vie je n'avais pensé au mot ami. Jamais je ne l'avais employé pour personne. Je suis né sans proches, ni parents ni amis. Ni les baisers d'une mère, ni les ordres d'un père. Pas non plus d' enfant à mes côtés, de copain à l'école, de camarade aux jeux. A peine un voleur de pelle, un compagnon de fugue, un incendiaire, quelques garçons rendus mauvais. A la colonie, je me suis isolé. Je n' ai voulu aucun autre que moi dans mes pas. Seul, Bonneau. Seule, La Teigne. Encaisser les coups, les rendre, tenir jusqu'à demain. Et surtout, ne pas se mêler de la souffrance des autres. Ne pas la provoquer, ne pas l'apaiser non plus."

 Or with deepl translation:  

“Never in my life had I thought of the word friend. I had never used it for anyone. I was born without loved ones, parents or friends. No mother's kisses, no father's orders. No child by my side, no friend at school, no playmate. Hardly a shovel thief, a runaway companion, an arsonist, a few boys made bad. At camp, I isolated myself. I wanted no one but myself in my footsteps. Alone, Bonneau. Alone, The Moth (nickname). Take the blows, give them back, hold out until tomorrow. And above all, not to interfere in the suffering of others. Don't provoke it, don't soothe it either.”

Luckily he is the only one to escape, thanks to the luck of being welcomed by a fisherman. The boy has trouble to adjust but the fisherman luckily has a very generous and lenient nature, which is an absolute eye-opener to the boy who now encounters totally different ways of human interaction. 

Like other books by Chalandon, you cannot but feel incredible sympathy for the predicament of the powerless boy in a brutal and unjust world. 

Excellent. 

Witold Gombrowicz - The Possessed (Fitzcarraldo, 2023) ***½

I have become a true fan of the Fitzcarraldo publishing company. Almost without fail they have been able to translate and publish excellent literature that would otherwise never have been known outside of the borders of the original language. "The Possessed" by Witold Gombrowicz fits well in this category. Originally published in 1939, it tells the bizarre story of a young tennis coach who accepts to train a young female tennis talent, who lives with her wealthy parents in a castle in rural Poland. 

Then everything spins out of control and we are in the middle of a gothic novel, with ghostlike events, a closed castle, doubtful characters, mysteries and evil. Gombrowicz has fun in writing his story, and in mixing different genres into a new literary tapestry. 

It is a unique and very memorable novel, even if some aspects are a little outdated, and his knowledge of tennis is clearly subpar, but that should not keep you from reading it. Pleasure is guaranteed. 

Paul Lynch - Prophet Song (One World, 2023) ***½

This is one of the most dystopian possible scenarios that I have read in many years. Paul Lynch describes how an extreme right political party won the Irish elections, and it turns the democracy within a very short term into a dictatorship, with fully controlled media, a ban on any organisation that does reflect the state ideology, the intolerance to other opinions, and a strong police enforcement of the new rules. 

Lynch illustrates this dystopia through the eyes of Eilish Stack, mother of four children (adolescents and baby), whose husband - a trade unionist - suddenly disappears. Nobody can give her answers, no official government agency can help or is willing to help and she receives the signal to stop asking. 

In this context she is trying to keep her family together, even this is an incredible challenge, and to keep functioning in a society where you no longer know who you can trust. The whole novel is written in the simple present, as if you as the reader is actively witnessing the action first-hand, and without too many paragraph breaks which gives it also a sense of urgency. 

You can read the novel on two levels (or maybe more), but at least as a perspective change to make us, readers in the Western world experience what it actually means to live in a country like Syria or Afghanistan. Anybody living in those conditions would flee and emigrate to safer and democratic places (Canada in the novel), helping us to have a better sense of empathy with the people who are in this situation today. The second level is of course how fragile our democratic systems are, and once extremists get in power, they will use the democratic system to turn it into a totalitarian autocracy. 

The vision is dark, gloomy, but realistic. To me this threat of anti-democratic powers in our societies is the biggest potential problem to our world. If we see what is happening in the United States, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia ... we are near the tipping point to turn our world into full-fledged totalitarianism led by Russia and China. The novel never goes into these larger current geopolitical power plays, but it helps us reflect that his scenario is not impossible, even in a democratic country like the Republic of Ireland. 

Books Of The Year 2023

Books of the Year 2023

One of the books I feel most happy about to have bought, is The Voynich Manuscript, of which we do not know whether it's fiction or non-fiction - but to all expectations the latter, a book you cannot read but just browse through and try to identify any possible sense of recognition, patterns or meaning. I never thought I could spend so much time on something that is impossible to understand. The other great winner in my opinion is Simon Sebag Montefiore's "The World - A Family History", a majestic overview of the horror of mankind throughout our common history. In the Fiction department, I had several contenders, of which "The Maniac" also borders on the non-fiction, whereas "Solenoid" and "Orbital" are close to be each other's opposites: the former massive, mad, personal, fantastic, the latter precise, controlled, precious and poetic. Not all of these books were actually published in 2023, and I have still a pile lying here that will be read next year, I hope. 

Non-Fiction

1. Simon Sebag Montefiore - The World - A Family History  *****
2. Siddharta Mukherjee - The Song Of The Cell ****½
3. Kit Yates - How To Expect The Unexpected  ****
4. Thomas Hertog - On The Origin Of Time  ****
5. Andy Clark - The Experience Machine  ****
6. Robert K. Massie - Catherine The Great  ****
7. Mark Solms - The Hidden Spring  ****
8. Patrick Loobuyck - Wetenschap & Religie  ***½
9. Joren Vermeersch - Vlaanderens Waanzinnigste Eeuw ***½
10. Andrew Doig - This Mortal Coil - A History Of Death  ***

Fiction

1. Benjamín Labatut - The Maniac  ****½
2. Samantha Harvey - Orbital  ****½
3. Mircea Cărtărescu - Solenoid ****½
4. Hernan Diaz - Trust ****
5. Georgi Gospodinov - Time Shelter ****
6. Alejandro Zambra - Bonsai ****
7. Edmund De Waal - Letters To Camondo ****
8. Tim Winton - The Shepherd's Hut  ****
9. Virginie Despantes - Vernon Subutex 3  ****
10. Bret Easton Ellis - The Shards  ***½

Kit Yates - How To Expect The Unexpected (Quercus, 2023) ****

Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Mathematical Sciences of the University of Bath, UK, and Co-Director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology, amongst others. 

In this excellent book he introduces us to our human strategies to predict the future based on past events, or on support material such as religion, rituals, and other tactics. He gives multiple examples of how our way of reasoning fails because of our failures in adequately assessing the complexity of a situation and the probability of things to happen. In this sense the book is relatively predictable because certainly not the first on the subject, but Yates writes well, gives excellent examples and adds additional strategems to make logical mistakes or to help manage a situation better. 

In the end, of course, there's only so much science and mathematics can do to predict what will happen. Our world is in a state of chaos, and "chaos puts fundamental limits on how far we can peer into the future (...). The ubiquity of uncertainty and chaos mean we shouldn't try to make definitive predictions too far off into the future. And if we do cast our predictive nets a long way forward in time, we should be careful about how we interpret their haul" (p.395).  From my professional perspective, I always liked looking back at the corporate long term strategies we developed even five years ago with the executive committee, only to identify how many false assumptions were made, and how science and technology had indeed progressed without any possibility for prediction. It was a sobering experience, and I can recommend corporate archivists not to throw away these strategic documents. 

Yates is also sufficiently open-minded to allow alternative strategies to intervene and even if they do not actually function as assumed, the result may be beneficial. During my years at university, I used to play with the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, not that I believed in its predictions, but they gave me something to reflect on. 

"For hundreds of years, the Naskapi people of eastern Canada have been using a randomised strategy to help them hunt. Their direction­choosing ceremony involves burning the bones of previously caught caribou and using the random scorch marks which appear to deter­mine the direction for the next hunt. Divesting the decision to an essentially random process circumvents the inevitable repetitive­ness of human-made decisions. This reduces both the likelihood of depleting the prey in a particular region of the forest and the probability of the hunted animals learning where humans like to hunt and deliberately avoiding those areas. To mathematicians, using randomness in this way, to avoid predictability, is known as a mixed strategy."(p.129)

He also presents the work of British mathematician Thomas Bayes, who lived in the late 18th Century. 

"This was Bayes' idea in a nutshell: that he could update his initial belief with new data in order to come up with a new belief. In modern parlance, the prior probability (initial belief) is combined with the likelihood of observing the new data to give the posterior probability (new belief). As much as a mathematical statement, Bayes' theorem was a philosophical viewpoint: that we can never access perfect abso­lute truth, but the more evidence that accrues, the more tightly our beliefs are refined, eventually converging towards the truth." (157)

"Despite the continued scepticism and its unfashionable nature, there were many distinct successes during the period that Bayes' theorem spent in the hinterland. In the late eighteenth and early nine­teenth centuries, artillery officers in the French and Russian armies employed it to help them hit their targets in the face of uncertain environmental conditions.75 Alan Turing used it to help him crack Enigma/6 significantly shortening the Second World War. During the Cold War, the US navy used it to search for a Russian submarine that had gone AWOL77 (an event which inspired the Tom Clancy novel and subsequent film The Hunt for Red October). In the 1950s, scientists used Bayes to help demonstrate the link between smoking and lung cancer.78 The vital premise that all these Bayes adherents had come to accept was that it was OK to begin with a guess, to admit to not being cer­tain of your initial hypothesis. All that was required in return was the practitioner's absolute dedication to updating their beliefs in the face of every piece of new evidence that came along. When applied correctly, Bayes' theorem would allow its users to learn from estimates and to update their beliefs using imperfect, patchy or even missing data. The Bayesian point of view does, however, require its users to accept that they are attempting to quantify measures of belief - to cast off the black and white of absolute certainty, and accept answers in shades of grey. Despite the paradigm shift required - thinking in terms of beliefs rather than absolutes - Bayesian reasoning didn't fit the subjective, anti-science label its detractors had pinned to it. In fact, Bayes absolutely typifies the essence of modern science - the ability to change one's mind in the face of new evidence" (p.159-160)

"We must be wary about overweighting our prior beliefs, too, though. The feeling of confidence in our convictions might make it tempting to ignore small pieces of information that don't change our view of the world significantly. The flip side of allowing ourselves to have prior beliefs as part of the Bayesian perspective is that we must commit to altering our opinion every time a new piece of relevant information appears, no matter how insignificant it seems. If lots of small pieces of evidence were to arrive, each slightly undermining the anthropogenic climate-change hypothesis, then Bayes would allow us to - indeed, dictate that we must - update our view incrementally"(p.167)

 Yates also gives wonderful examples from international policy, and the subsequent excerpt could be as handy for Vladimir Putin as it once was for Nixon. You don't want to negotiate with a madman. 

"In the context of international diplomacy, sticking to a pure strategy - having a preordained response for any given situation -might reduce the ability of a negotiator to bluff, bluster or manipulate an opponent. Conversely, when negotiating with a despot who is employing a mixed strategy - someone who might, for example, have their finger on the nuclear button one minute, while advocating for total disarmament the next - an opponent might find themselves making more concessions than they would to an actor whose rational actions they find easy to predict. One particular mixed strategy, a form of brinkmanship known in political science as the Madman Theory, was the basis of much of Richard Nixon's foreign policy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The aim, as the name would suggest, was to convince Nixon's communist opponents that he was more than a little unhinged. He reasoned that if his opponents judged him to be an irrational actor, they would not be able to predict his plays and would thus have to make more concessions to avoid the risk of accidentally triggering him into retaliation". (p.197)

And one other fun example as a last illustration from the book: the strategy of Kleptogamy or the "Sneaky Fucker" strategy. 

"Kleptogamy is derived from the Greek words klepto, meaning 'to steal' and gamos, meaning 'marriage' or, more literally, 'fertilisation'. Natural selection suggests that if only the alpha males were reproducing, then the variation in male fitness in future generations would become limited. The evolutionary game theorist John Maynard Smith came up with the theoretical idea of kleptogamy to explain how a wide range of male fitnesses could be sustained over time, although he and his colleagues preferred to call it the 'Sneaky Fucker' strategy. And in some species, the evidence is there to support his hypothesis. A study of the mating habits of grey seals on Sable Island, off the coast of Canada, found that 36 per cent of females guarded by an alpha male were, in fact, fertilised by non-alpha males". (p.189).

As you notice, there is a lot to learn in this book, and a joy to read, and a great frustration that courses such as this one never actually found their place in the curriculum of all schools and colleges. I think our world would be a better place if people truly understood how poorly they reason. 

Patrick Loobuyck - Wetenschap & Religie (Pelckmans, 2023) ***½

In dit inspirerende boek geeft godsdienstwetenschapper en moraalfilosoof Patrick Loobuyck een mooi historisch overzicht van de interactie tussen geloof en wetenschap. Sinds 2006 is hij hoogleraar aan de Universiteit Antwerpen, en sinds 2016 is hij gastprofessor politieke filosofie aan de Universiteit Gent.

Net als velen is hij religieus opgevoed, maar heeft hij zijn geloof verloren, maar hij blijft verrassend genereus in zijn benadering van godsdienst. Hij begint zijn boek met de verschillende soorten interacties tussen religie en wetenschap in kaart te brengen, van de "battle-field positie" die stelt dat geloof en wetenschap niet compatibel zijn, over de 'nothing in common' positie, die ze naast elkaar plaatst - het ene voor begrip, het andere voor zingeving - tot de 'togetherness' positie, die ervan uitgaat dat beide ook kunnen samenwerken.

Het boeiendste stuk van zijn boek is de lange tocht doorheen de geschiedenis van het ontstaan van het formeel geloof tot vandaag, met alle gekende spelers, van de Griekse filosofen, de christelijke kerkvaders als Augustinus, de moslimdenker Averroës, de opkomst van het humanisme, de grote ontdekkers Galilei, Kepler, Copernicus, over Francis Bacon en Darwin tot de hedendaagse tijd. 

Loobuyck is wetenschapper en docent, en dat blijkt uit zijn boek: hij houdt zich op de vlakte, is open over zijn eigen atheïsme, maar neemt voor de rest geen standpunt in. Dit geeft ruimte aan de lezer om zelf een oordeel te vormen, wat in deze tijden een welkome verademing is. Hij is geen strijder voor het grote gelijk, maar een deskundige die de mogelijke opties voorlegt. 

Ik ben zelf nogal een groot adept van de 'vier ruiters van de apocalyps': Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett en Harris. Wetenschap is geen geloof, maar een methode. Die methode houdt in dat theorieën kunnen worden getoetst aan evidentie en als die wordt tegengesproken, moet de theorie worden herzien. Wetenschap is fundamenteel open voor kritiek. Het geloof staat voor het omgekeerde: het primaat van het 'boek' en de enig mogelijke interpretatie door de 'Kerk'. Geloof is fundamenteel afkerig van kritiek. De basis van elk geloof zit al fout. Als deel van onze realiteit moet godsdienst zich ook kunnen onderwerpen aan wetenschappelijke analyse. De waarheid en fictie van de Bijbel en Koran moet kunnen worden onderzocht en blootgelegd op wetenschappelijke manier, zoals bv Bart Ehrman en vele anderen het Oude en Nieuwe Testament hebben gefileerd. Zaken zijn slechts waar als je die ook kan bewijzen en herhalen. Zeggen dat sommige zaken 'bovennatuurlijk' zijn en dus niet onderworpen aan de wetten van de natuur is onzin. Als je daar van uit gaat, kan je werkelijk alles verzinnen. En geloven. Denk maar aan de Mormonen, Scientology en andere Moon-sekten. Er is dan geen reden waarom zij minder geloofwaardig zouden zijn dan de meer gevestigde godsdiensten. Of zoals Dawkins het graag zegt: in jouw ogen is elk geloof in een andere god ook niet meer dan goedgelovige fantasie.

Wetenschappers die elkaar geen gelijk geven, zouden met rationele argumenten en feiten elkaar moeten kunnen overtuigen. Bij gelovigen wordt die discussie al meteen emotioneel en vijandig, omdat er geen rationele argumenten en feiten te vinden zijn. 

Het is duidelijk dat religie in de samenleving een belangrijke rol heeft gespeeld voor een reeks aspecten van het menselijk bestaan die redelijk fundamenteel lijken: begrijpen wie we zijn en hoe alles ontstaan is, moreel besef hebben en ernaar handelen, deel uitmaken van een gemeenschap, troost vinden, controle krijgen over onze omgeving, en transcendente ervaring. Godsdienst probeert op elk van die domeinen een rol te spelen, maar voor elk van die domeinen loopt ze achter, als een verouderd mechanisme om met de realiteit om te gaan. De samenleving verandert, de mens verandert. Voor elk van deze punten zijn andere vakgebieden of benaderingen een stuk doeltreffender om voor veel mensen een echt verschil te maken. Er is geen domein waarin religie een aparte rol zou kunnen hebben die niet beter kan worden uitgevoerd door seculiere specialisatie. 

Dat we mensen die geloven moeten respecteren, zonder enige twijfel. Maar dat wil niet zeggen dat we het geloof als instelling niet mogen ontbloten en zeggen dat de keizer geen kleren draagt. 

Ook al is mijn opinie duidelijk scherper dan Loobuyck, is dit boek toch een aanrader voor iedereen die in het onderwerp is geïnteresseerd, al was het maar voor het vele historisch materiaal dat wordt aangehaald, zoals het feit dat het tot 1835 heeft geduurd voor de werken van Galilei en Copernicus van de Index werden gehaald, zo'n 200 jaar later. 

Een kleine discussie terzijde: Wanneer werd god uit de wetenschap geweerd? 

"Zowel Boyle als Newton verdedigde het idee van een al­machtige God die ook nu nog kan tussenkomen. Zij kozen de kant van de 'voluntaristische' theologie, in die zin dat God de materiele wereld kan blijven sturen zoals hij dat wil. (...) Maar Newton sloot niet uit dat God nog direct kan ingrijpen in de werkelijkheid. Dat was trouwens ook nodig in het newtoniaanse sys­teem om de planeten in hun baan te houden. Newton doet dus iets wat vandaag erg ongewoon zou zijn: hij gebruikte het ingrijpen van God in de natuur als onderdeel van de weten­schappelijke beschrijving van hoe de werkelijkheid functio­neert. Het verband tussen een voluntaristische theologie en een mechanisch wereldbeeld hielp ook om de experimentele methode te legitimeren. Niet door van aan een schrijversdesk aan filosofie te doen, maar door te experimenteren kon men Gods wil te weten komen. Als de natuur de vrije wil van God reflecteert, is het empirische onderzoek de beste manier om die te ontdekken. 

De Duitse wiskundige, natuurwetenschapper en filosoof Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was een van de belang­rijkste tegenstemmen in dit debat. Leibniz denkt niet dat God nog kan tussenkomen en kosmische reparaties moet uitvoeren aan zijn schepping. Gods vrijheid ligt besloten in het feit dat hij van alle mogelijke werelden gekozen heeft voor "de beste van alle mogelijke werelden". Volgens Newton geeft een wereld­beeld waarin God afwezig is en niet meer kan tussenkomen in de werkelijkheid aanleiding tot een atheistisch wereldbeeld. Voor Leibniz is het andersom. In zijn correspondentie over deze kwestie schrijft hij dat een God die moet tussenkomen te veel lijkt op een gebrekkige ambachtsman "die zijn uurwerk nog van tijd tot tijd moet opwinden". Dit idee van een on­volmaakte God zou de religie kunnen ondermijnen. Hoewel Leibniz zelf nog ruimte probeert te maken voor de vrije wil, is zijn wereldbeeld voor het overige deterministisch ingevuld: de dingen die gebeuren, gebeuren noodzakelijk en met mede­weten van God.

Het determinisme van Leibniz werkte in de achttiende eeuw door bij Diderot, d'Holbach, Condorcet en de La Mettrie. Anders dan bij Leibniz kreeg het determinisme bij hen een atheistisch-naturalistische invulling. (p. 134,135)

Over dit onderwerp was de minnares van Voltaire, de wiskundige Emilie du Châtelet (1706-1749), een heel belangrijk figuur. Ze vertaalde Newtons werken naar het Frans. Ze was iemand die tegelijk kritisch was over sommige aspecten van het werk van Newton en Leibniz, en voor verschillende van de door haar voorgestelde verbeteringen bleek ze nadien gelijk te hebben (bvb dat vuur geen gewicht had, of dat de energie gelijk is aan de massa maal het kwadraat van zijn snelheid of (e=mv2), een kleine voorloper van Einsteins gekende formule).

"The fourth objection, and one particularly identified with Newton and his adherents, concerned the dissipation or conservation of force (energy) the universe. This issue had occasioned the argument between Leibniz an Newton, and it was with Newton's followers that she argued explicitly. She could not accept the metaphysical connotations of his hypothesis in the last query of the Opticks, that, given the loss of force in the universe because of the infinite numbers of impacts "our System will sometimes need be corrected by its Author". In Newton's world, the Creator had to replenish the force periodically and in perpetuity. From Du Chatelet's perspective, ac­cepting this image of the Supreme Being and his "continual miracles" under­mined any claim to certain knowledge of the workings of nature's laws. As she had argued in chapter II, there could be no '"science" in a universe subject to unpredictable intervention by a deity, however benevolent and reasonable. In contrast, in Leibniz's world of forces vives, there was no need for God to intervene, for the German philosopher believed that this force was conserved in the universe. In fact, Du Chatelet explained to Maupertuis, "all things being equal," the conservation of force "would be more worthy of the eternal géomètre". (Judith P. Zinsser : In Emilie du Châtelet, Daring Genius of the Enlightenment, 2006. p. 189)

Of nog

"On the one hand, such a God negated her image of his necessary perfection, and, on the other, it raised the chi­mera of unpredictability. No law, not even Newton's, would be fixed if always subject to "the will of God." Thus, there could be no certain knowl­edge, no science, of the workings of the universe"(p.177)

Of, om het anders te zeggen: je kan in wetenschappen niet een hele wiskundige en fysische redenering opbouwen over de banen van de planeten in ons zonnestelsel om tussenin een zinnetje te hebben dat zegt dat God af en toe tussenkomt om de planeten terug op hun juiste baan te brengen. In haar ogen moet God uit de wiskunde en moeten betere wiskunde en begrip van de astronomie dat gat opvullen. Vandaag zouden veel wetenschappers nogal opkijken mocht in een artikel staan dat God plots tussenkomt om het experiment te laten lukken. 

Andere aan te raden boeken over wetenschap en religie

• Amir Alexander - Infinitesimal - How A Dangerous Mathematical Theory Changed The World (Oneworld, 2015)
• Stephen Greenblatt - The Swerve (Norton, 2012) 
• Carl Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Ballantine Books,1997)
• Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion (Mariner, 2006)
• Sam Harris - The End Of Faith (Simon & Schuster, 2006)
• Daniel Dennett - Breaking the Spell (2006)
• Christopher Hitchens - God is not Great: The Case Against Religion, (Atlantic Books, 2007)

Philippe Claudel - Crépuscule (Editions Stock, 2023) ***½

"Crépuscule" is the story of a village in a remote part of the empire where the catholic priest is murdered one night. The time is somewhere in an imaginary past, in a geography covering a large part of Europe, where different religions live together, and in which the muslim community is a minority. The names of the characters sound Serb or Croatian. 

Claudel uses this village as a metaphor of our world today, with all its intolerance, bigotism, violence, including the violation of reason and human dignity. His characters are all too human, vulnerable, impotent against the great forces of evil that keep oppressing the weak, but also vulnerable to the personal character deficiencies of individuals. In its core theme, there is barely any innocence to be found, except among children and the feeble of mind, who are the first victims of this crushing society. 

The captain of the police, who is asked to investigate the murder case, is caught between the stupidity of his hierarchy who couldn't care less about the remote village, the anti-muslim sentiment in the population who already identified why anyone would kill a catholic priest, and the rich nobility of the region. 

 "La mort brutale du Curé lui apparut soudain un événement dérisoire. Car ce qui comptait desor­mais était ce que certaines forces a l' oeuvre avaient décide d' en faire. II eut le sentiment qu'un rien ferait basculer l' enquête, dont il avait pensé pou­voir se régaler, vers une dimension au sein de laquelle ni la vérité, ni ses déductions, ni l'identité réelle du coupable, ni lui-même n' auraient la moindre importance, et tout en pressentant cela il ne parvenait pas à imaginer la manière dont il pour­rait s' opposer au cours impétueux des choses. II se sentit ridiculement petit et sans pouvoir. Alors il serra ses poings maigres, appuya plus encore son front contre la vitre froide, presque a la faire éclater, et ferma les yeux." (p.132)

The powers that be are not too happy with the captain's investigation, because they see more value in following the initial intuitions of the population, as this would be more politically acceptable than following the road of reason and evidence. 

« Mais nous disons la même chose, il me semble, monsieur le Rapporteur. Je suis autant que vous désireux de découvrir la vérité sur le meurtre du Cure Pernieg. 

« La vérité, certes, trancha le Rapporteur, mai laquelle? Une vérité acceptable par la majorité de notre communauté, ou une vérité qui irait contre son sentiment au bénéfice d'une extrême mino­rité? 

« Il n'y a pas deux vérités. 

« Je n' en suis pas si sûr que vous, Capitaine. Car après tout, est vrai ce qu' on décide qui le soit. Pour le bien commun." (p 150)

Even if Claudel's political message is blatantly clear from the start, he manages to keep the suspense until the very end, with some unexpected twists in the plot, and a bunch of memorable characters. 

It's a good novel, but readers without knowledge of Claudel, I would still recommend to read "Les Âmes Grises" and "Le Rapport de Brodeck" first.