Martin Gardner's fictional flight
About a week ago I stumbled across a reference to a novel written by Martin Gardner--best known for his popular works on mathematics and paranormal skepticism. Early in his career (considering he is over ninety now, his early career was quite some time ago) he wrote short fiction for magazines, so he does have some skill when it comes to narrative. The Flight of Peter Fromm, however, is his only novel. I was intrigued by its subject matter: it is slightly fictionalized account of Gardner's own intellectual journey from a theologically conservative youth to his present state as a "philosophical theist" with no particular religious affiliation. The public library has a copy, so I took the bus down that very day to check it out. Despite what I said about Gardner's background in writing fiction, this is not the sort of novel I would recommend to someone's Aunt Sally as a pleasant little diversion on a plane trip. At the same time, I don't want to give the impression that it is Serious Literature like Musil or Joyce. In some respects it is a "light read" in that is has the same deft journalistic touch Gardner brings to his science writing. Although the narrator isn't supposed to be Gardner's stand-in (he is instead a full-blown atheist, to provide contrast with the title character) he pretty much has Gardner's voice, as recognized from his other writings. The novel isn't satisfying to someone wanting a fun read because there is very little actual story or character development. In some chapters (many, in fact) nothing really happens, except that our narrator tells us of Peter Fromm discovering and reacting to some theologian or philosopher (Kierkegaard or Tillich) in his youthful reading. One chapter even has as the title "Karl Barth." These chapters read more like little essays by the real-life Gardner on modern theology. Taken out of context, and with a few excisions (taking out the fictional set-ups) they could probably be published as non-fiction articles. My guess is that these are things Gardner had always wanted to write about, but couldn't find proper excuses to do so in his Scientific American columns. He obviously didn't want to immerse himself in writing an actual novel, so he just used a few fictional props as the starting point to discuss how a liberal arts education erodes orthodox belief.
The narrator stops to give background on the things he talks about: "The Barthian movement has been called by many names: the Swiss school, dialectical theology, crisis theology. . . . I prefer to call it (following H. J. Paton in his book, The Modern Predicament), 'theological positivism.'"
The parenthetical citation is not a rare exception in this novel. We are always being told what books we can consult as representative works or critiques. "You can read all about this is a paperback book, Situation Ethics, written by Episcopalian Joseph Fletcher and published in 1966." There are even footnotes on some pages, and I mean unironic, non-postmodern footnotes.
Still after all this, I don't want to imply that I disliked the book. Actually I think it is a fascinating and easy-to-read discussion of Barth, Tillich, Niebuhr, Marx, et al. Further I tend to agree with Gardner (i.e Fromm) on his final position of nonsectarian theism that accepts an ultimate mystery behind things.
In probing around the web to learn more about Gardner, I found that he had written a review of The Mathematical Experience, a book I've had lying around half-read (though I enjoyed the half I did read) for a few years now. The only place I could find the full review was in his collection The Night is Large, which I got from the Beaverton library system. On the MAX coming home from Beaverton I read around here and there, and came across an essay Gardner wrote about mathematical relativism (the idea that mathematical truths are not lying "out there" in the world to be discovered, but rather are invented by human consciousness and thus could vary from culture to culture). In this essay, he talks about the argument that is sometimes made about color perception in antiquity and in certain primitive tribes. It is said, for instance, that some groups don't have clear words for blue and green, but only a single word for both hues. This was something I was familiar with through Owen Barfield's writings. Barfield claimed that the ancient Greeks saw colors differently than us and this is evidenced in their writings. Gardner is familiar with the sources Barfield must have been using. He traces the idea back to the mid 19th century when William Gladstone argued that the Greeks must have been colorblind compared to us moderns. Many "evolutionary ethnologists" signed on to this idea in the 1870s, but it came under attack by Grant Allen in 1879. He, and later researchers, found that among tribal groups with limited color vocabularies, tests showed they could tell the difference between shades, they just didn't have the words for it in their language. For instance, if there were a string of blue beads and one of green beads, though they may use the same word to describe them, they could certainly tell one from another, rather than seeing them as perfectly identical. I'm glad I stumbled across this, because ever since reading about that theory in Barfield I've wondered if it has held up to further scrutiny. Apparently it hasn't.