Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: This is a biography by Anthony Gottlieb. It offers a fresh perspective on one of the 20th century’s most complex thinkers by framing his philosophical evolution against the backdrop of the industrial and technological revolution  

IN October 1911, a 22-year-old postgraduate student in aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester travelled by train to Cambridge. Intrigued by mathematical logic, he wanted to brainstorm and converse with Bertrand Russell, a newly arrived lecturer at Trinity College. A few months later, Russell amazed the young man’s eldest sister by telling her: “We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.”

And so, it proved to be. Ten years later, Ludwig Wittgenstein published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a book that he strongly believed had solved all the fundamental problems of philosophy. It hadn’t, of course: philosophical problems are by definition intractably insoluble. Yet even though Wittgenstein would come to recant much of the Tractatus, it remains one of the 20th century’s great books.

The Tractatus is essentially a treatise on the limits of language, which, Wittgenstein argues, is useful only for the stating of facts. It follows that a great deal of what we say is literally meaningless. When we talk – as we so often do, about issues of morality, matters of religion, or questions of aesthetics, we use language within these areas that it’s simply not equipped to deal with. We are, according to Wittgenstein, talking nonsense. And that “we” includes philosophers – for they deal not in empirical statements (as scientists do), nor in tautologies (as mathematicians do), but merely in pseudo-problems engendered by the ineluctable and slippery confusions of language.

It should be said that Wittgenstein was none too happy with this – unlike the logical positivists, a grouping of naïve science-focused luvvies, who believed and accepted that the Tractatus was the final word on everything. Wittgenstein didn’t think that the only things that matter are what we can talk about, rather than what we can’t. For all its minatory sound, the Tractatus’s closing line – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – isn’t a cry of triumph but a howl of anguish. Philosophy ends not with a bang but a whimper.

Fittingly enough, the Tractatus was translated into English in 1922, the year of The Waste Land and Ulysses, and Ezra Pound’s declaration that this was “Year One of a new era”. For Wittgenstein’s book was no less modernist than Eliot’s or Joyce’s, not only in thought but in form too. A series of brief, numbered, and crystalline statements, it has an incantatory attraction that makes it one of those rare works of philosophy that you can read for pleasure.

And then Wittgenstein ripped it all up, proposing instead a radically new set of arguments fundamentally opposed to everything set forth in the Tractatus. Alas, he died in 1951, a couple of years before the publication of his second masterpiece, the Philosophical Investigations. In it, he grounded our problems with language not in logic, but in our own strictures on how language is used in practice.

Wittgenstein did more than just think. As Anthony Gottlieb shows in his elegantly brief biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes, quite a lot went on between the publication of those two great books.   

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 to one of Europe’s wealthiest families (six days after Adolf Hitler; for a while, the two boys attended the same school). He was a peripatetic soul. Just as he gave up aeronautics to become a logician, so he gave up logic to train as an elementary-school teacher, gave up teaching to become a gardener at a monastery, and later gave that up to spend two years as a soi-disant architect designing a spookily perfect house, as austere in its design as the Tractatus, for his youngest sister, Gretl.

His love life was even less settled. One of history’s most tormented homosexuals, Wittgenstein was a tormentor in his turn. He was in the habit of proposing to women while being adamant that their marriage would be chaste. Nor were things easier for the invariably young men he loved, not least because he never told them he loved them. Wittgenstein said that David Pinsent, the dedicatee of the Tractatus, “took half my life away” when he died in a flying experiment a few months before the end of the Great War. Yet “there is no sign”, says Gottlieb, “that Pinsent was aware of such feelings… or that he felt them himself”.

And while the “boyish, kind, sensitive” Francis Skinner was assured of Wittgenstein’s love, Wittgenstein’s diaries reveal that he himself was none too certain: “Lay with him two or three times. Always at first with the feeling that it was nothing bad, then with shame.”

For all the flowing felicities of Gottlieb’s style, none of this is easy to read. Which is only right. Wittgenstein occupies such a prominent spot on the philosophical pantheon that it is good to be reminded that he wasn’t just the saintly sage as embodied in Ray Monk’s magnificent The Duty of Genius. He was human, all too human. Unimpeachably brilliant, he was also insufferably arrogant. As his no-less-brilliant friend Frank Ramsey groaned: “If you doubt the truth of what he says, he always thinks you can’t have understood it.” And for a man who argued that ethics can’t be meaningfully discussed, he spent a huge amount of time haranguing people moralistically. Norman Malcolm complained of “his tendency to be censorious”. Georg von Wright, one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors, said that talking with him “was terrible… like living through the day of judgment”.

To be sure, the person Wittgenstein was always hardest on was himself. Thoughts of suicide were rarely from his mind. More than one of his friends was made to listen while he read out a list of his lies and sins. And years after beating his pupils at a primary school in Austria, he returned to apologise to them individually. Before departing this world, he exclaimed: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Maybe so, but one is bound to close this wonderful biography thinking that the linguistic philosopher JL Austin summed him up best: “Poor old Witters.”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes by Anthony Gottlieb is published by Yale University Press, 232pp

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Arts, Books, Culture, Literature, Society, Theatre

Wokeism has lost its grip on the arts

THE ARTS

Intro: This year has been one in which the tenets of woke, for so long held unquestionably in the performing arts and literary professions, started to be questioned.

From the literary world to the theatre, we have seen a pushback against identity politics

FOR many arts critics’ 2025 was the year that wokeism perished. And not before time.

Everyone, of course, is entitled to hold their own opinions, with some still representing a section of the liberal bien-pensant opinion in the arts that believes wokery to be a commendable necessity rather than an outdated and invidious ideology. Julian Clary, for instance, when interviewed recently, made his customary and screamingly inappropriate remarks that easily surpassed any definition of satire.

Nonetheless, this year has been one in which the tenets of woke, for so long held unquestionably in the performing arts and literary professions, started to be questioned. Unsurprisingly, it was swiftly discovered that the emperor had no clothes.

The publishing industry has been the most striking example of the upturned order. Around 2020, there was a clear edict that the profession had been taken over by white middle-class gatekeepers, and that this had to change in the interests of social justice.

If you stood against this – on the grounds that a bad book was a bad book, no matter what the skin colour, sexual orientation, or social background of its author – you were accused of being “elitist” and your career was promptly curtailed.

Scapegoats were routinely found, most egregiously the teacher and poet Kate Clanchy, who was the victim of little less than a witch hunt. Her apparent crime was that of “cultural appropriation”. Clanchy was driven to near-suicidal despair, and her publisher Pan Macmillan took ostentatious delight and glee in washing their hands of her.

Five years later, Clanchy has received a long overdue apology from Pan Macmillan for the reputational damage she suffered; the publisher stated that the hounding represented “a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past”. A sympathetic and thorough BBC Radio 4 documentary, Anatomy of a Cancellation, examined the controversy afresh, interviewing those involved from all sides. Few would doubt that Clanchy emerged vindicated.

There have been other indications, too, that the wind is shifting. The Booker Prize for 2025 went to David Szalay’s Flesh, an unsparing account of the sexual and social coming-of-age of a taciturn young Hungarian man.

Szalay, the Stowe and Oxford-educated novelist of some standing, is a heterosexual white man – a category of people who are no longer supposed either to write or read novels – who has written a good book, rather than some piece of woke agitprop. There is every chance that it will endure far beyond flashier, less accomplished fiction.

So, too, should Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s stunning debut Shibboleth, one of the funniest and wisest satirical narratives available on the hopeless state of contemporary academia.

Away from publishing, the National Theatre remains in thrall to modishness under its artistic director Indhu Rubasingham, but the visionary regime of the RSC’s Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey has demonstrated that classical theatre done well, with great actors, is what audiences really want to see. The arts world will be hopeful that the incoming artistic director of the Old Vic, Rupert Goold, will bring similar rigour to the South Bank next year.

Opera and classical music are following the lead, prizing clarity and intelligence above trendiness. Vanity Fair declared approvingly in recent times that “the opera is having a woke renaissance”. How things change. “Misguided wokeism” has been criticised as being the philistine impulse on part of the small-minded who believe that amateurism, with the “right” motivations, was somehow more impressive than non-ideological professionalism. Most people should agree.

The battle for good sense is not yet won, and we should be mindful of this. There are arts apparatchiks with their vested interests, wielding their pronouns and non-binary statuses like weapons of war, who will fight what they see as anti-progress for their entire lives. Yet others, who have been tired and fed up with tokenism and the oppressive rise of being told what to think – or else – may breathe a natural sigh of relief.

Most of us should be happy to end 2025 by seeing those who embrace wokeism with the same élan as they did previously [as being] behind us in time-honoured fashion.

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Arts, Books, Christianity, Culture, Middle East

Book Review: The Vanishing and The Twilight of Christianity

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Janine di Giovanni provides a deeply personal and journalistic account of the rapid decline of Christian communities in the Middle East. As a former war correspondent, and a practicing Catholic, di Giovanni blends political analysis with oral testimonies and histories to document what she describes as a “vanishing” world

THE veteran war reporter Janine di Giovanni roams far and wide to find out why 2,000 years of Christianity and its history in the Middle East may be nearing an end. In trying to understand the exodus, she tours monasteries in Syria’s warzones, visits embattled enclaves in Egypt, and meets Iraqi Christians from Mosul, who had “N” for “Nazarene” daubed on their doors by Islamic State.

Yet, among the more poignant symbols she notes are not the bombed-out churches on the frontlines, but the crucifix tattoos on the young restaurateurs who serve her lunch in the tranquil northern Iraqi city of Irbil. The tattoos are not hipster affectations, but symbols of a creed whose adherents no longer know their place – “the garish link depicting a permanence belied by their current predicament”.

Di Giovanni spoke to them about their insecurities. She sought to understand how they had been separated from family during the ISIS invasion, how they fear the future, and how they are saving their wages in a quest to pay illegal smugglers to get them out of Iraq. “But once out, where would they go?” she asks. 

To quite a few places, actually. Such has been the turbulence in the Middle East over the last half-century that its Christians have been forced out: diasporas range from Chicago to Ealing in west London. The exodus is particularly marked in Iraq and Syria, where the Christian minority had traditionally enjoyed the protection of secular strongmen such as Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad. In Iraq, where an estimated 1.4 million Christians once lived, there are now only 250,000. In Syria, around 700,000 Christians of the pre-civil-war population of 1.1 million have departed.

The author, who has been covering the Middle East for more than three decades for high-end publications such as Vanity Fair, is well placed to chronicle the mass retreat – and astute enough not to blame it all on some sinister grand scheme by the region’s Muslims. In recent years, after all, some in the West have been quick to portray this as close to a genocide, underplayed by a liberal media that now finds Christianity a bit embarrassing. But while Christians have suffered at the hands of Sunni fanatics like ISIS, so too have many Muslims, Yazidis in northern Iraq, and other minorities: the reason they are fleeing is often just the general lawlessness, lousy government, and a desire to seek a better life abroad.

Still, di Giovanni makes it clear why many Christians in the Middle East feel their fortunes to be particularly on the wane. After 1945, they often formed an educated middle class, whose acumen in commerce, medicine, and teaching was appreciated by progressive-minded despots. For example, the courteous and urbane Christian Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s foreign minister, was for many years the acceptable face of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Even after Saddam’s 2003 downfall – which many saw as a US “crusade” – there were no organised reprisals against the invaders’ co-religionists. And while al-Qaeda’s Sunni extremists focused on murdering fellow Muslims, Christians in the region also suffered. Then, in 2010, Islamic State gunmen stormed Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad, killing 58. The group’s subsequent seizure of northern Iraq, including ancient Christian towns such as Qaraqosh, was for many the final straw. Many are leaving because there is no life and very little or no incentive to stay.

In Syria, things are scarcely better. Christians have had little choice but to rely on the Mafia-like protection of President Assad, himself a minority Alawite. A Syrian bishop tells di Giovanni that only Assad can hold Syria together – aware, presumably, that by taking sides, his flock may be tainted.

Indeed, the only Christians whose future seems reasonably assured in the Middle East are Egypt’s Copts, who, at up to 10 million, are perhaps simply too numerous to be pushed out. Ironically, it is here that community tensions seem worst. In 2013, mobs attacked 42 churches, and in the Christian districts di Giovanni visits, locals bitterly complain of being treated as second-class citizens.

Di Giovanni writes elegantly, her reporting and careful analysis informed partly by being a Catholic herself. However, the focus of this book is likely to surprise many readers’: nearly half of it is about Christians in Egypt and Gaza, where now barely 1,000 live. It is a source of amazement her editors didn’t ask her to concentrate mainly on Iraq and Syria, where the Christian decline has been at its most dramatic.

As such, it underplays some key chapters in the “exodus” narrative. The reason Christians first fled post-Saddam Iraq in droves was because their prosperity made them targets for criminal activity, and because they tended to turn the other cheek rather than form militias. There is no mention of how the Baghdad Christian enclave of Doura – once labelled “The Vatican” – was overrun by al-Qaeda in 2006, or how the Iraqi capital’s Christian flock is now among those most at risk of becoming extinct, having reached a tipping point where most Christian families have more relatives outside of Iraq than in.

On which note, it would also have been interesting to read about life for the diaspora in the “Little Baghdads” of Chicago and Ealing. The irony is that, by offering Christian sanctuary, the West is inadvertently hastening Middle Eastern Christianity’s demise all the more.

– The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the land of the Prophets is published by Bloomsbury, 272pp      

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