Neither Five Nor Three: The Alternate Universe
These thoughts were inspired by Adam Hochschild’s front-page book review in the Sunday Times (11/21) of The 1619 Project. Obviously I haven’t read it yet, but pieces of it were published in the Times, and I did read one of the excerpts at the time. And although much of the history is quite new to most of us, the purpose of its telling is to lead us to an truer understanding of our contemporary period. As to that, there’s really nothing new for anyone who’s been paying attention; and in fact, everything they say about the differential fates of black people today as well as yesterday can be found in an earlier book, American Apartheid (Massey and Denton, 1993)
I approached this topic, however, by way of a digression…that is not really a digression:
In one of his Last Poems, A. E. Housman wrote the following quatrain:
To think that two and two are four
And neither five nor three
The Heart of man has long been sore
And long ’tis like to be.
I don’t know that anyone has ever speculated on the context in which Housman intended that thought, but it has an interesting afterward. Before and during World War II, the novelist Helen MacInnes wrote several spy novels, of which the most well-known is her classic Assignment In Brittany.
After the War’s end, however, she, like other such writers of the period–Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household, Dorothy B. Hughes, Manning Coles, Graham Greene–had difficulty finding an antagonist to replace the world-shattering threat of Naziism. Then the Cold War ensued, and provided them with an alternative: the Soviet Union, or more generally “Communism.” (IMHO not at all a satisfactory substitute, but that’s another story.)
Helen MacInnes was one of them, and her contribution–at least the only one I‘m familiar with — was titled Neither Five Nor Three. It’s quite inferior to the WW book, because it treats Communists with about the same level of sophistication as might have been given to “Japs” and “Huns” during the War. But its theme, its accusation, is that Communists throw over the commitment to rational human knowledge (that Marx, e.g., certainly possessed) , and replace it by diving into the realm of falsehood–within which two and two might not only not equal four, but might as well equal five–or three.
That is to say, under Stalin’s rule industrial or collective farm managers would routinely overstate or falsify production results, generals would do the same about military preparedness, conspiracies were invented where none existed–e.g, Jews, Trotskyites, agents of the capitalist West; school curricula or teachers that didn’t demonstrate the inevitable rise to power of the Soviet Union were dealt with.
What does this have to with American politics today? A lot in fact. To If Helen MacInnes were around to rewrite Neither Five Nor Three, she wouldn’t be writing about Stalin or even Hitler. We have our own version.
To clarify this assertion, though, Housman needs a little elaboration. The most important point is that our entire understanding of the universe, even including quantum theory or the General Theory of Relativity, is built upon the formulation that two plus two equal four or that one plus one equals two; or that everything we know or say about the material world can be represented by either one or zero.
To insist instead that two and two equal five is not exactly to lie, because to lie is to pervert the truth: and 2 + 2 =5 does not pervert the truth because it is not a false statement of fact; it’s a deviation from the conceptual formulation upon which all our empirical knowledge is built. If you learn the ten digits and the various places and the multiplication tables, then you can’t believe that 2 + 2 = 5, because that’s an utterly meaningless statement. Inductive truths can only be deviated from by falsifying them; deductive truths can’t be deviated from at all, because they are what they are. To deny them is to be senseless.
But as for applied math, such as statistical analysis or the simple counting that leads to inductive knowledge, the problem is a little more complicated. The results of genuine empirical findings can be questioned on the basis that they’re misstated or misinterpreted; but, if they’ve been reported correctly, not on the basis that you know better, or that they’re “biased.” The same is true of the reports of events. To paraphrase Chico Marx, “what d’ya want me to believe, the evidence of my own eyes, or Tucker Carlson?”
In other words, conclusions based on empirical evidence can indeed produce real truths: in what is actually a dubious construction, we call them “true facts.” To say that “the Greenland Ice Cap is not melting” can only be explained in one of two ways: either it’s uttered out of ignorance based on someone else’s statements, which of course is no justification at all; or it’s a lie. If words–“Greenland,” “ice,” “melting — mean anything at all. then the statement is not impossible in the sense of 2 + 2 = 5, since it’s not a deductive statement, but yet it can’t be “true” in any meaningful sense. To all intents and purposes, it’s like saying, 2 + 2 = 5–except with the conscious intent or purpose of falsifying the known facts; the true facts.
As is by now unhappily apparent, the present roster of statements about the material world by a Republican Party spokesperson and the doyens of Fox News fall into this category; including those about the American racial order. By way of contrast, here’s an empirical account by a practitioner (public defender Sarah Lustbader) writing in Friday’s Times:
“To get a sense of the way racism pervades our criminal justice system, I would recommend paying less attention to blockbuster cases and instead visiting a local criminal court on a random day and witnessing the parade of low-income people of color shuffled before the court, most of them accused of minor, victimless offenses. Pay attention as a judge decides, within minutes, how much money will be required for each person to get out of a cage. Listen to the defense lawyer describe the life circumstances of each client. And then ask what can be done. What structures, literal or figurative, must be dismantled, built or changed….?”
To this knowledge, which appears to most of us as the equivalent of 2 + 2 = 4, the Republicans of the Right counterpose the unfortunately-named bogeyman of “critical race theory” as a kind of alien body in a world that none of us recognize, in which 2 +2= 5; or maybe 3, because who cares, it doesn’t matter.
About what I will now call “The Alternate Universe,” there’s nothing that can be said, because you can’t explain why two plus two equal four to someone who doesn’t understand or care about the structure of knowledge; nor can you explain how we know that the structures of racism endure in the United States, from professional football to the criminal law, or the condition of public health, or counting the results of a presidential election, to someone who benefits from and celebrates that structure.
One might think that there’s a limit to what even the most ill-intentioned person (Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbot, Dan Patrick, Lauren Boebert)) can believe about the real universe. As I put it a few months ago, “In Volume I of Capital Marx remarked that you understand the Law of Gravity when the house falls down around your ears.” As we try to understand the Pact of Death between DeSantis and Covid19; or the adoption of Nazi Replacement Theory to apply to non-white immigrants from everywhere; or the rush, if only symbolically, to join with the insurrection crowd of January 6th: how can it be explained?
Here’s the best recent attempt I’ve seen, from John Nichols in The Daily Nation; it describes what is now the base of the Republican Party as a cult, and continues:
“The thing about cults is they inspire devotion among their members. That devotion is powerful. Cultists show up early, stay late, and stay on task, where more rational human beings get distracted by having lives. Cultists turn over substantial portions of their personal fortunes to maintain the infrastructure and the power of the clan they have joined. Cultists are so convinced of the purity of their vision that they adopt a win-at-any-cost approach so vicious that it turns churchgoers into Capitol Hill rioters, and members of Congress into unaccountable misogynists. This makes the cult of Trump politically potent within the Republican Party, and beyond its boundaries.”
So Housman is both right and wrong. No, you can’t really think, or believe, that two plus two equals five; you can only get there working out an elaborate lie, or unthinkingly adhering to that lie, in the construct ion of an Alternate Universe, in which Down is Up, Much is Little, Losing is Winning, Wrong is Right, and Death is Life. And you’re totally on board with what anyone not a cultist sees as pathology; and ready to drink the Kool-Aid, or aim an AR-15.
I know someone whose daughter has declared for Donald Trump. Our Hitler. What does he say to her? Nothing….
