A Reaction to Netflix's adaptation of "The Sandman"

Recently I binge watched the whole first series of The Sandman, a dark fantasy-horror with tinges of psychological drama, actually quite a hard television program to generically classify, and in this post I wish to compare it to the source material, the comic book that was published between 1989 and 1996. I love the comic book and have written about it before in four posts – in my critique of it I shall be comparing the adaption to the original comics. However, first I wish to discuss my life and clear up some small errors in the previous post. In actuality some of the things I wish to say about my life are quite important to the life story I have been revealing in bis and pieces. Those readers who are interested in The Sandman should skim the first part of this essay; those who are interested in my life should focus on the first part. It is doubtful whether the various parts of this essay will at all cohere.

As people who read my blog will know, I am diagnosed schizophrenic and have been under a Compulsory Treatment Order since early 2014. If I were to tell people that I am under the Mental Health Act (I don't usually), they might assume that I was put under the Act because I was a danger to myself or to others, one of the two limbs legally required for being put under the Act. In fact, the main reason I was put under the Act was because I refused to take antipsychotic medication. There are possibly other reasons which I shall come back to in a moment. It is important to state, for the record, that I wasn't a danger to anyone in 2014 or at any time before or after. As someone subject to the Mental Health Act, I have certain rights. One right is that I am entitled to Independent Reviews, a process in which a solicitor, layperson, and psychiatrist from another DHB, in the presence of the patient, his or her psychiatrist, key worker, lawyer, and other family members (if they wish to attend) assess if the patient is 'fit to be released from the Mental Health Act'. The assessment is made based on a report written by the psychiatrist and on the testimony of the patient and the others who are present. I have had four Independent Reviews, the last being in 2018; after that last review and after my dosage was increased from (I believe) 300mgs a month to 300mgs a fortnight I gave up on requesting Independent Reviews because, rather than improving my situation, they just seemed to be getting me deeper into the hole, forcing the shrinks to double down on their diagnosis. Independent Reviews, rather than providing protection for the patient, seem to me to be just window dressing – the panelists are usually reluctant to admit that the other psychiatrists have made a mistake. Another right I have is that I am entitled to see a copy of my record. In 2015, I requested a copy and, after some time, was given a stack of paper about the size of the Bible. Notes about every interaction I'd ever had with my psychiatrist and key worker were included in the record. I only read the very beginning of the record because it was too dispiriting to read the whole thing, although I looked up and used the notes about a particular consultation, the consultation in early 2012 in which my dosage of Olanzapine was decreased from 10mgs a day to 7.5mgs a day, at the review I had later in 2015.

I have seen seven different psychiatrists since 2007. What I have come to realise is the obvious fact that they lack the time or motivation to read all my notes. Presumably there is a short summary of my life or personality or situation which they read before they see me, a summary that I myself have never seen. I recall a worker at the Taylor Centre talking about 'citations' last year– presumably when an interaction is considered significant enough, it goes in this summary, is 'cited'. Back in 2009, I remember mentioning to my then Key Worker that I thought my stepmother didn't like me; she said something about it being common for people to dislike their stepparents. What I realise now, and sensed inchoately at the time, is that Kate had decided that it was not important to record the fact that I had a bad relationship with my stepmother in my notes, even though it should have gone not just in my notes but in the summary that I conjecture existed. If the important information about me was contained in this short summary, it should have been the summary that I was given in 2015, not the enormous tome of notes. The Taylor Centre might have broken the law.

I cannot be sure what is contained in this summary but I can speculate with some confidence. First, I suspect that the summary contained the 'fact' that I am supposedly gay but don't want people such as my family to know. I don't know whether Fernando wrote down that I had 'come out' to him, perhaps at the beginning of 2009, or if he had some other supposed evidence. Second, I suspect that the summary contained the supposed 'fact' that I dislike my mother. (In the previous post I described when and how this error was made.) Third, I think it contained the 'fact' that I am a drug user. All of these supposed 'facts' are incorrect. Finally, it must contain details about how much medication I was on, when I was 'ill' and when I wasn't, and my attitude towards medication at various times, details that I also believe must have been wrong. I suspect that the main reason I was put under the Mental Health Act is because the way I presented myself to the psychiatrist I started seeing in 2013, Jennifer Murphy, did not conform with the picture she had of me from the summary. I was put under the Act because I said I was straight. I have said in previous posts that I believe I was somehow 'outed' in 2013; I conjecture now that it was this brief summary that was somehow leaked. There is one last anecdote I will share because it may be relevant. Over the summer of 2017 ad 2018, I undertook a research paper through the University of Auckland on narrative theory with Professor Brian Boyd (for which I received a B). At this time, my Key Worker was a woman called Debbie Smith. Debbie expressed an interest in reading the essay I had written but, mainly because I didn't think she would particularly enjoy a fairly abstruse discussion of the book The Rhetoric of Fictionality by Richard Walsh, I never gave it to her. Somehow my failure to show her a copy of this essay went into my notes as another mark against me. My feeling is that because of the summary, or perhaps as a result of the general attitude psychiatrists have towards their patients, I was regarded as stupid. Now, I'm not a genius but I'm certainly not stupid.

I have felt for a long time as if I was under a curse, a curse cast on me by the psychiatrists and by the Mental Health System generally. One effect of this 'curse' is that I sometimes make small errors in this blog, errors I sometimes only notice later. I recently reread the previous post and noticed some mistakes; one solution would be to go back to this previous post and correct them but I feel that the previous post has already been presented to the world and so I need to correct them in the next. There is one grammatical mistake that I picked up on. More importantly I implied some things that are not true. I implied that George W. Bush was one of my imaginary friends but, in truth I only conversed with him twice, once in January 2009 and once in January 2010. I do not want people to think I support Bush. I consider myself a leftist: for many election cycles I have voted Green and, if I was American, would be in the progressive wing of the Democrat Party (although I now disagree with some ideas pushed by the LGBT community). I may also have implied that I believe in God. In truth I have gone backwards and forwards about God, mainly because I thought that my soul was in danger and thought that perhaps converting to some denomination of Christianity might somehow magically save me. However, today, although I believe that there is a mystical dimension to the world, I do not subscribe to any kind of Christianity. Another error is that the synopsis of the film I presented is perhaps ever so slightly distorted, ironically because I'm the writer; there were other events in the film that I perhaps should have mentioned but didn't. Of course, the screenplay is available on the Internet so you can read the film rather than rely on the synopsis. Incidentally, it has occurred to me that a simpler explanation for why the film failed is that Jess lacked a character arc. I realised this weakness in the film when I wrote it but simply had no idea how, in a film about a young woman who suffers a psychotic episode and then recovers, I could provide such a character arc. People don't follow neat character arcs in real life. This thought, that The Hounds of Heaven failed because its protagonist lacked a character arc, was inspired by watching the most recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.

There is one last error in the previous post that I wish to correct. In October or November 2009 I had a conversation with Jon Stewart in my head, a conversation I described in the previous post. The conversation ran as follows. I was walking home from somewhere when I heard a voice say, "You're long-sighted" I replied, "No, I'm short-sighted". The voice said again, "You're long-sighted". I repeated myself saying, "No, I'm short-sighted – I see well at short distances!" The voice laughed and I realised that I was talking to Jon. He said, "There's no hope for you." In the previous post I somehow put down "help" instead of "hope". The point of the exchange was that Jon was making a joke, being ironic. He was saying that there was hope for me, that I wasn't gay, never had been gay, and never would be gay. Perhaps this small error I made in the previous post of accidentally substituting "help" for "hope" is trivial but it seems important to get these things right. 

At this point in the post I wish to change topics. I wish to compare the television adaptation of The Sandman with its source material.

As I said, I binge watched the whole series a couple of nights ago. Since then I have been obsessively combing the internet for reviews and reactions. Some reviewers have thought it was wonderful while others have hated it. The best reviews are the mixed reviews that can be found on Youtube. Some reviewers are familiar with the source material and some are not; there is no clear preference to be found among either group as to whether the TV series is good or bad. I myself am very familiar with the source material and know the comics inside-out. When I watched the series, I was mainly looking to see how well the adaption followed the plots, details, and themes of the original – when it didn't I phased out a little. I intend to discuss this first season. The series adapts the main story-lines of the first two collections, Preludes and Nocturnes and The Dolls' House. I have neither collection here with me in my apartment but believe I can remember them well enough to make some remarks comparing the adaption with the original series. In the following discussion, I shall assume the reader has seen the TV series but is unfamiliar with the comic.

It is necessary first to point out the obvious fact that the original stories were comic books, and comic books can depict characters, events, settings, and atmospheres in a way that only a very high budget film, like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings adaption, can. Although Netflex invested a lot of money in The Sandman, and although many reviewers praised its design with words like 'beautiful' and 'lavish', the TV series simply can't do as good a job. By adapting the comic book for TV, the focus has naturally shifted from fantastical visuals to character interactions and development, an example being the reimagining of John D, played brilliantly by David Thewliss, who in the original was simply evil embodied, as befits a TV program that is in most respects an episodic TV drama. A second important difference between the source material and the TV series is that there is far more horror in the original comic books. Neil Gaiman has always been good at writing creepy stories and is still writing them today. This claim, that the original comic book had more of a horror vibe than the TV series, may surprise viewers who were on the edge of their seats during the episode "24/7" but I shall back up this assertion in a moment. Another important thing to remember is that the comic books were released monthly between 1989 and 1996 and Neil Gaiman was basically making it up as he went along. For instance, I suspect that the fact that Morpheus claims Lyta Hall's child as his by right (an event that occurs in both the TV series and comic book) was thrown into the mix by Gaiman without him knowing precisely where it would lead in the future. Eventually, it becomes vitally important. The TV adaptation has both the advantage and disadvantage of knowing the conclusion that the comic book will eventually reach.

I turn now to the character of Morpheus himself. In the TV series, Morpheus is played, brilliantly, by Tom Sturridge, an actor who has both the voice and the presence to play the Dreamking. In the comics Dream always has an otherworldly quality (he sometimes has stars for eyes) but Gaiman and the other creators of the TV series realised early on that if they incorporated Dream's otherworldly quality into the program, his interactions with humans in the waking world would seem unbelievable. I can understand why it was necessary to make this change to how Dream was depicted. However, there are other real problems with the depiction of Morpheus, problems that do not arise from Sturridge's performance but from the writing itself, that I think are unfortunate. I shall single out two errors of aesthetic judgement. The first is that in the original comic book Morpheus is often scary. For instance, at the end of the first issue Dream condemns Alex Burgess, to "eternal waking" – the form this curse takes is that Alex is plunged into nightmares, awaking from each nightmare briefly believing that he has escaped only to find he is in another nightmare. In the comic, this "eternal waking" lasts some seven years. When I was watching the first episode, I was anticipating this moment and was disappointed when Morpheus condemns Alex instead to "eternal sleep", a punishment not nearly so nasty. Another example of Dream's vindictiveness  (an example that does somehow make it into the TV series) is that thousands of years ago he had condemned a lover who had rejected him, Nada, to eternal hell. A third example that shows Dream's sinister side is the scene in which Morpheus confronts Lyta, the only scene in which they are both present, telling her that because her child was conceived in the Dreaming, it is his and one day he will come to claim it; if I recall correctly, Lyta calls him "a monster". The fact that Lyta both hates and fears Morpheus becomes very important later – I might be wrong about this but I didn't think the TV series at all conveys Lyta's antipathy towards Dream even though it is a vital ingredient of the final collection, The Kindly Ones. So why did the creators of the TV series downplay the dark side of Dream? It is possible that they didn't include the sequence of Alex's "eternal waking" because of budgetary constraints. However, I think the main reason that they didn't include Dream's more terrifying side is because they kowtowed to the conventional wisdom that TV show protagonists should be sympathetic and felt that if they included Dream's more monstrous actions and behaviours, audiences wouldn't like and identify with him. I think this decision condescends to audiences. We might consider Tony Soprano as an example of a morally dubious character that audiences like, or Dexter. After all, The Sandman TV show is R18 and so it has the latitude to present evil, whether that evil be in the form of horror scenes or in the characterisation of a show's protagonist.

The second major error related to Dream's character is that the creators of the show fail to emphasise Dream's most important quality – his inflexibility. Dream is absolutely committed to the duties and responsibilities associated with his realm. The overarching theme of the whole comic is that sometimes people have to either change or die – this is the main theme in a nutshell. A closely related error is that in the comic Dream is absolute monarch of his domain but, presumably to up the emotional stakes, the drama, in the TV series Lucien is presented as Dream's lieutenant and sometimes argues with him or partly arrogates his power. The humanising of Dream in the TV series, the weakening of both his power and obduracy, creates a little confusion about his personality. In a ferociously negative review in USA Today, a critic said that in the series Morpheus lacks any kind of character arc. This reviewer obviously hadn't read the comic book because Morpheus does have a character arc – it just takes seven years to play out. Some reviewers have asked why spending (in the TV series) over a century in captivity hasn't changed him. In the comic the trauma has changed him, slightly, and the comic presents, usually in a subtle and nuanced way, the trajectory that leads him at last to his final conversation with Death. In the TV series the issue of presenting his inflexibility and the slight changes that have occurred as the result of his imprisonment are handled poorly – some reviewers have accused the writers of inconsistency. Sometimes Morpheus is good and sometimes he is bad and there seems neither rhyme nor reason as to why he is sometimes compassionate and at other times malevolently unforgiving. This, to reiterate, is not Sturridge's fault but the fault of the writers.

The first Sandman collection I bought was The Dolls' House, a book I read and reread obsessively when I was about fifteen. In the TV series, this storyline plays out over the second half of the season. Most reviewers I have read or viewed regard the second half of the season as weaker than the first. In the next couple of paragraphs I wish to compare The Dolls' House as it is presented in the TV series and as it presented in the comic and suggest some reasons why the adaption didn't work. I will first consider the plot line concerning Jeb, Lyta Hall and Hector Hall. In the comic Hector is a dead superhero, who calls himself the Sandman, who lives with Lyta (who is alive) in Jeb's subconscious mind, assisted by two renegade nightmares called Brute and Glob. In his real life Jeb spends his time in the basement to which he has been confined by his venal foster parents. Unfortunately I can't remember this plot-line perfectly and do not trust the Wikipedia summary enough to use it as a source but I will make an attempt at a summary. Somehow Morpheus tracks down Brute and Glob, who are returned to the Dreaming; he disincorporates Hector and tells Lyta that the child she has carried for many years in Jeb's dreams is his. In the TV series, however, the plot-line involving Hector and Lyta is separated from the plot-line involving Jeb, the only connection being that Lyta is a friend of Rose Walker, who is searching for Jeb. Hector is not a superhero but only the ghost of her former husband. The plot line involving Lyta, Hector and their unborn child in the TV series is very weak. Lyta is uninteresting and flat, and her dream life is different from the waking world only in that it contains a very nice modernist house. Lyta seems unsurprised that a god of dreams exists and seems pretty much unfazed when she becomes pregnant in real life. In the comics, in a world of superheroes, the problem of how real people react to magic or the supernatural, how they react to beings and things that are not of this world, is somehow evaded, but the TV series can't escape this dilemma. Lyta doesn't work and her reaction to the supernatural doesn't work. The plotline involving Jeb also doesn't work. In the TV series, in his dreams, Jeb imagines himself to be the Sandman, an illusion created by a nightmare called Gault who is protecting Jeb from the brutal reality of his life. Gault is trying to reform, to be a good dream rather than a nightmare; nevertheless she too is disincorporated by Morpheus. Obviously the writers of the series are trying to anticipate the most important theme in The Sandman, the possibility of change. But Gault strikes me as a clumsy sentimental addition to the story, another way in which the writers are condescending to their audience by oversimplifying things, by imposing on the story pathetic (in the old sense of that word) simplistic narrative arcs because that is what they imagine audiences want. Rather than present pure evil, the TV series gives all its characters understandable rationales for their actions. In the TV series, Gault is redeemed, as John D is redeemed. Even the Corinthian is somewhat redeemed as I shall discuss in the next paragraph. 

In the comic books, the Corinthian is introduced in the third issue of The Dolls' House. In the TV series, he is introduced in the first episode. I don't have a problem with this early introduction: Preludes and Nocturnes was aways the weakest volume in the Sandman library, the issues where Gaiman was still searching for his theme and voice. The importance of the Corinthian to the TV series is that Morpheus needs an adversary, an arch-nemesis, to give the whole first season some coherent shape. In the comic book, there is no way that the Corinthian can beat Morpheus but in the TV series he actively assists Roderick Burgess in keeping Dream confined and then later actively seeks out Rose Walker because he thinks that, because she is a vortex, he can somehow use her to destroy Dream. This means that in the episode "The Collectors" and in the immediately preceding episode we know that Dream wants to kill Rose while the Corinthian wants to keep her alive. This muddies the waters about who is the bad guy and who is the good guy. One of the reviewers I saw, for instance, said that she could sympathise with the Corinthian. If the TV series presents the Corinthian as being at all sympathetic it has well and truly failed to capture the character presented in the comic book because, in the comic book, he is the essence of evil. In the comic, the Corinthian has no idea that Rose is a vortex and he comes across Jeb more or less by chance. (Of course, because Rose is a vortex she attracts dreams to her willy-nilly.) There is also no question, in the comic book, that the Corinthian would kill Rose if he could. These subtle changes alter the complexion of the story.

One of my favourite issues of the Sandman is "The Collectors", the issue set at a convention of serial killers. Again the TV series gets it wrong. This issue of the comic is dark and menacing whereas the episode is, as one reviewer put it, twee. One reason for this, as I've mentioned, is the medium: the comic was able to create a frightening atmosphere, an atmosphere evoked by the illustrations, that the brightly lit convention centre in the TV episode couldn't replicate. Another reason is the fact that we're in 2022 and the original comic book would have been released in 1990: back then serial killers were a fixture of the collective imagination whereas today and for many years, we never hear about serial killers. The archetype of the serial killer was salient then as it isn't today. This is why Gilbert says, in the TV series, that the Corinthian has created a cult-like following; in the original comic the Corinthian is just one serial killer among many, although an especially respected one. In the comic, the various serial killers ask each other, "What's your score?" and receive answers like, "Forty-two". This is absent from the TV episode, as far as I can recall. Other moments in the episode also fall flat, such as the monologue by the serial killer explaining how he found his vocation. In the comic, this serial killer is a young man with whom we can identify, creating an uncomfortable feeling of sympathy with a monster. In the episode, the performance is such that we regard him as just a fucked up individual; the scene feels unnecessary, tacked on. In the comic, Gilbert tells Rose the original version of the Red Riding Hood story, which deepens the menacing atmosphere: I wish they had left this scene in. Also, in the comic Funland, after he tries to attack Rose, I believe, is rendered unconscious by Morpheus and given a dream by Morpheus that directly quotes "The Selfish Giant" by Oscar Wilde. In the episode, Funland is killed by the Corinthian. I wish that Stephen Fry, who plays Gilbert, had pushed for the original version. It is well known that Oscar Wilde is a pivotal figure in Fry's life.

Perhaps the most important way in which the adaptation fails is in its presentation of dreams. In The Dolls' House, in I think the final issue, we are shown the dreams of the various residents of the house in which Rose is living. Each dream is stylistically very different from the others and each dream is also very different from the dreamer's real life. For instance, we have the couple Barbie and Ken who are so simpatico in real life that they can finish each other's sentences. Ken's dream is a maelstrom of sex, money and power whereas, in Barbie's dream, she is a princess in a magical land embarked upon a quest. As Rose's influence expands, the barriers break down between the different dreams, leading to havoc. All of this is much easer to represent though comic book illustrations than through a live-action drama. This is not to say that the makers of the TV series didn't try: the depiction of Barbie's dream contain a CGI version of the creature Martin Ten-Bones that is very similar to the way it was drawn in the comic. But, on a whole, this portion of the TV series fails and this is simply the result of the difficulty in translating a story from one medium to another. Even if Netflix had thrown a lot more money into the production, they couldn't have represented Ken's dream on a TV screen.

There are two other ways in which the adaption fails: it often lacks the surprise factor of the original comic and often lacks the humour of the original comic. To take two examples – in the original comic, it comes as a surprise when we find out that the Sandman has to kill Rose. In the TV series, this is well telegraphed in advance. Similarly, in the comic, we don't find out that Gilbert is Fiddler's Green until the final issue when Rose is in the Dreaming. In the TV series, Gilbert voluntarily returns to the Dreaming to tell Morpheus about the Corinthian before then. Surprise is an important rhetorical device in story telling and Gaiman, who is a master of story telling and was involved in the production, should have remembered this, the devices that made the original work so original and compelling. Additionally the TV adaption lacks the black comedy of the original. In "The Collectors" there is a scene in which a panel of female serial killers discuss the politics of women who have their particular pastime. I can't remember this bit exactly and so will make up something roughly approximate to the original. A female serial killer with a name like Nightjay says, "I'm sick of women in our profession being typecast as either black widows or killer nurses." Sitting to her left is a woman who is quite clearly a black widow and, to her right, a woman who is quite clearly a killer nurse. This little scene is at once a Feminist statement and a satire on Feminism and is quite funny. In the TV episode, however, this scene becomes a woman giving a short diatribe on Feminism that could come directly out of an essay by a first-year student of Women's Studies, a spiel that has, in my view, no relation to where women are at today, at least in the Western world. The satire is excised.

In this essay I have been quite critical of the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman. However it is still very good in many ways and I shall watch future seasons– I have been critical of it mainly because it doesn't measure up to the original. Of course, no TV adaptation could match the comic books which were masterpieces. 

I shall now summarise what I have said so far. There are three major weaknesses in the adaptation when compared to the original. First, it often does not go far enough in the horror direction, particularly in its depiction of Dream and in the episode "The Collectors". Second, a TV series simply cannot capture the striking visuals of a comic book or its method of story telling, unless it has Peter Jackson's budget. The Sandman was a groundbreaking work that pushed the boundaries of what comic books could do and no pretty-much live action TV series could reproduce the original. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the creators of the TV series have made narrative and dramatic decisions based on cliches and conventions of TV drama, cliches and conventions I presume they think will make the work more appealing and easily digestible for the 'average' viewer. One example is their decision to iron out the problematic aspects of Dream's personality. Another is their decision to give the Corinthian the motivation of wanting to destroy Dream. I'll give one last example of this, an example that really bothered me at the time. In the comic, Rose is walking home and is suddenly beset by a group of men; Gilbert appears and saves her. This is the first time we meet Gilbert. In the TV adaptation, when she is attacked, Rose successfully fights off a number of the men with Gilbert's assistance and Steven Fry says something like, "It seems you didn't need my help!" The implication is that Rose is a feisty independent self-sufficient women who can single-handedly fight off a number of men much bigger than she is; a further implication is that audiences wouldn't identify with Rose unless she was capable of single-handedly fighting off a group of men much bigger than she is. But for me, the TV version of the scene simply didn't ring true, the original was better. For one thing, it said something important about Gilbert. I don't know whether the creators of the TV series are condescending to their audience or if they simply don't know how to tell a good story. This is all the more perplexing when we remember that Gaiman himself was involved in the production.

I'll turn now to another aspect of the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman – its politics. Much has been made of the fact that a number of black actors have been cast to play characters who were white in the original comic. A number of characters who were male in the original are played by females in the TV series. And, although the original comic already contained a lot of gay and transexual characters, the TV show has upped the ante by, for instance, making the Corinthian gay; the Corinthian's sexuality never comes up in the comic book. I'll discuss the issue of race first. When I was watching the TV series, the first character I noticed who'd had her race changed was Unity Kinkaid. The second was Lucien. In the original Lucien was a very tall white man. In the adaptation Lucien is a black woman shorter than Morpheus. When I watched the scene in which Lucien was introduced, I thought, "They'll probably make Death black as well." Sure enough, in the episode "The Sound of Her Wings" in which they introduce Death, she was played by Kirby-Howell Baptiste. Baptiste is a fine actor and, when I watched this episode, an episode partly based on perhaps the single most important issue in the whole run, I just accepted it because I knew that it was inevitable that changes would be made, that the TV series couldn't be completely faithful to the original. But then, lying in bed the night after I watched it, I asked myself, "Does it bother me that they made Death black? And, if so, does that make me racist?" And then I decided, "No". The character Death, like the character Delirium, really appealed to me when I was a teenager, and it was not because she was white but because she was a foxy teenage Goth girl in a black t-shirt with an ankh around her neck. I guess, when I heard that they were finally adapting The Sandman for TV, I worried that the adaption would replace or spoil the original. But even though the TV version is different I believe now that the original is untouched.

The casting of black actors to play characters who were originally white in The Sandman touches on a wider issue. Race swapping, casting black actors to play characters we would expect to be white, is common these days – examples of shows that do this include Bridgerton and Hamilton. However, there seems to be a tension in our culture today, a conflict between two different ways of looking at race. I enjoy watching Roy Wood Jr and one of the subjects he often tackles is the nature of black identity. Identity politics is very important these days and it seems to me that many black people are strongly attached to their black identities. The prominence of identity politics in modern Hollywood was tackled by Bill Maher a fortnight ago: in his piece, he talks about how actors now feel that they must 'stay in their lanes', that is, gay characters should be played by gay actors, transgender characters should be played by transgender actors, black characters should be played by black actors, latino characters should be played by latino actors, and so on. All this raises the question: is race (and more generally group identity) unimportant now as The Sandman adaptation seems to suggest? Or is race and group identity everything? It is this issue that Paul Beatty tackled in The Sellout. It seems that the only way we can attempt to reconcile the colour-blind ethics of a show like The Sandman and identity politics is to have a world in which it is acceptable and even encouraged for black actors to play white characters and unacceptable and even racist for white characters to play black characters. In film and other fictions, a kind of reverse-racism would be at work. (In arguing this way, I am aware that I sound like Douglas Murray.) For instance, a film like Tropic Thunder, released as recently as 2008, a film in which Robert Downey Jr dyes his skin so he can more realistically play a black man, would be unacceptable today, even though this was intended to be comedic.

The issue of gender is very important both to the original comic and to the adaptation. I have little to say about the gender swapping in the TV series. The substitution of Joanna Constantine for John Constantine does not bother me much: he only appeared in one issue right near the beginning. Gwendoline Christie, who plays Lucifer, is a fine actor but bears little resemblance to the character Lucifer in the comics, either in appearance or behaviour. Apparently Gaiman has said that he imagined Lucifer as resembling David Bowie but, in the comics, Lucifer is definitely a man and might have stepped out of a Renaissance era Italian fresco. Other fans of the comic may have more articulate criticisms of the portrayal of Lucifer in the comics and TV show but all I want to say here is that, once again, the comic was better.

I turn now to the issue of homosexuality and transsexuality. Although the comics often feature gay and trans people, the series, as I said, ups the ante. I want to start this discussion by considering the dream Hal, Rose's gay drag-performing landlord, a character in both the comic and TV series, has toward the end of The Dolls' House. Once again, I do not remember these couple of frames exactly and so shall provide an approximation. In the comic book Judy Garland as Dorothy from The Wizard of OZ rips off her face to reveal a man; this man then rips of his face to reveal the Wicked Witch of the West; the Witch then rips of her face to reveal Dorothy again. At the end of this brief sequence, Dorothy asks Hal if he can hold some of the faces for her because she is running out of hands. This nightmare can be interpreted as concerning a crisis or disintegration of personal identity, or, perhaps more accurately, as being a nightmare about the impossibility of maintaining multiple personalities simultaneously or concurrently. I suspect Gaiman and the artists who co-created the work in 1990 saw homosexuality and transsexuality in terms of a split or schism in personal identity; they did not as we do today regard the homosexual or transsexual identity as something complete and unified in its own right and as being present from birth. The short scene in the TV episode plays out rather differently. Hal, as a drag queen, rips off his face to reveal Hal as he normally is, and then rips off his face again to reveal his bones and subcutaneous tissue. Perhaps we could interpret the scene as also concerning the nature of personal identity but, if this is what the creators intended, they are far from successful  – this scene seems rather to be a generic, cliched, and ultimately unsuccessful stab at the macabre. Another obvious difference between the comic and TV show versions of this scene is that the former references The Wizard of Oz while the latter does not.  In the same way that in 1990 serial killers were a fixture in the popular imagination but no longer are today, in 1990 gay men were all stereotypically supposed to love The Wizard of Oz but no longer are today in 2022. This discussion leads to two provisional conclusions. First The Sandman deals in stereotypes, archetypes, myths, and tropes found in the collective imagination or unconscious and some of these stereotypes and tropes, particularly those surrounding homosexuality and transsexuality, have changed dramatically in the last thirty years. The TV series finds nothing adequate to replace them with. Second, for Gaiman, homosexuality and transsexuality present a problem, a problem requiring a solution.

We now must deal with one of the greatest ambiguities in The Sandman, its general attitude towards gender and sexuality. Gaiman is certainly not a male chauvinist, nor does he believe in the idea of gender complementarity, but there is a feeling in the comic that the men are men and the women women. The Sandman in part deals with archetypes of masculinity and femininity; characters who are ambiguous in gender or sexuality often tend to be coded as either villains or victims. The obvious example of this is Dream's transsexual sister Desire who is constantly conspiring to destroy Dream. I have discussed this aspect of The Sandman before, in 2017, in the posts "A Case Study of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman" and in three posts interpreting the collection "A Game of You", each interpretation being better than the last. In "A Game of You" Gaiman seems to be suggesting that the foundations of sexual and gender identity are laid during childhood through the stories we tell ourselves; because in the world of The Sandman dreams and stories are as real as the waking world, this is an idea that Gaiman at once presents and rejects. One of the foundational ambiguities in this collection is the apparent opposition between fantasy and reality. Another concerns politics. In the end, as I argued in those posts, the conservative right-wing ideology prevails – and this is what makes the story a tragedy. Gaiman's message in this collection seems to be that homosexuality and transsexuality are not innate or congenital and because of this he received some pushback from his LGBT and progressive fans – this is why, I think, in the later collection "The Time of Your Life", a collection starring Death, Gaiman has the character Foxglove, a successful pop star who is keeping her homosexuality secret from the public, say, "I'm a dyke. I've always been a dyke." Nevertheless, if "The Sound of Her Wings" should be regarded as the single most important issue in the whole run, "A Game of You" should be regarded as the most important storyline, a story that should be read and studied even by those who are not inclined to read the other collections. It is precisely Gaiman's ambivalence towards homosexuality and transsexuality that makes the comic, at least for me, so invaluable.

Is this ambivalence retained in the TV adaptation? I'm not sure. My feeling is that the TV show has gone Woke on this issue as it has on race. But it would be impossible today, in 2022, for a TV show to present homosexuality and transsexuality in the way Gaiman and his artists did in the 'nineties. With respect to this thematic, as with other thematics, the TV adaptation seems to vitiate the original, to take something subtle, evocative, and occasionally profound, and sap it of its complexity. This is not to say that the TV adaptation does not have its merits but, as I said above, it does not touch the original.

In the introduction to this post, I said that the various parts of this post might not cohere. There is though a possible common thread. People may wonder if there is a connection between my love of The Sandman when I was a teenager and my becoming 'mentally ill' at the age of twenty-seven. When I was young I knew adults who thought playing too much Dungeons and Dragons would cause kids to go nuts and kill people. Obviously this is ridiculous. But the reader may wonder if the recurring theme of homosexuality in the comic book may have partly led to me later deciding that the world was full of closet homosexuals. However I believe that my stumbling upon The Sandman when I was about fifteen helped me. David Foster Wallace once said that "Good fiction's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable," although he may not have been the first to say this. Perhaps I wasn't disturbed but neither was I happy. The Sandman has always been one of the truly positive things in my life.

The Illusion of Authorship and Other Matters

The world is full of mysteries, mysteries that are often right under our noses. An example is the phenomenon of dreaming, a process or picture-show constituting an integral part of all human and much non-human life experience, a nocturnal sensory parade or cavalcade that we often dismiss as unimportant because we usually forget much of the content of a dream a few moments after waking. The psychologists, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists are no closer today to understanding why we dream than Freud was. I have discussed dreams before in this blog; I do not intend to talk about them again in this post. I wish instead to discuss some other mysteries. I want to talk about a mysterious common symptom of psychosis, 'voice-hearing'; then I wish to resolve a mystery within my own life, the mystery of why I have been obsessed with narrative theory for so many years (a conundrum that I didn't realise constituted a mystery until quite recently); finally I wish to discuss one of the greatest mysteries of all, the problem of ghost stories and the paranormal generally. In discussing these mysteries, I am really trying to clarify the problems and my proposals are tentative, provisional; I do not pretend to have all the answers. Rather this blog is an exercise in meaning-making, an exploratory exercise that may serve to raise pertinent questions in the minds of my readers rather than definitively explain these enigmas.

I wish to begin with 'voice-hearing'. First, what do people mean when they say that they 'hear voices'? How can we explain this experience (or symptom) to people who have never heard voices? In this section, I want to make an important and controversial claim, that the standard psychiatric conceptualisation of voice hearing is wrong. Psychiatrists generally, and laypeople as well, tend to explain the experience of 'voice hearing' as terms of auditory hallucinations. We can imagine the following little fable or thought experiment to illustrate what they might mean. Jane is walking through the city when she hears, quite clearly, someone yell "rhubarb!" She turns to look in the direction of the voice. Why is someone yelling "rhubarb!" at her? Who is calling out and where are they? Perhaps Jane begins to experience these anomalous interruptions more frequently; walking through the city, she begins hearing voices, both male and female, both young and old, shouting words like "Tomato!", "Cucumber!", "Gherkin!" "Radish!" Jane begins to worry that she is being persecuted by a conspiracy of greengrocers, a coterie who are following her around and yelling the names of vegetables, fruit, and other condiments at her while remaining studiously out of sight, who are never visible when she looks for them. Perhaps, she wonders, she is receiving signs from the universe that she is a vegetable? Eventually, Jane arrives at the conclusion that these unwanted auditory exclamations are unreal and seeks medical intervention, receiving the (helpful) diagnosis of schizophrenia; she is put on antipsychotics and the crowd of malevolent greengrocers fades away.

The problem with this little story is that it tallies not at all with the actual experience of people who hear voices or have heard voices. For one thing, unless Jane is right in her crazed suspicion that the universe is trying to tell her that she is a vegetable, the utterances she is hearing have no meaningful content. In reality, I believe, the voices a voice-hearer hears are generally relevant to the concerns and interests of the receiver, a claim I shall back up in moment. Second, if the voices a voice-hearer hears are genuinely auditory hallucinations, we would expect the subject of the hallucinations to look around, to try to ascertain the source of the voice. In reality, however, people who experience voice-hearing do not seek to determine where in the world a voice is coming from; rather, they are always aware that the voice has its origin in their own heads. Thus it seems likely that the designation of the unreal voices as auditory hallucinations is incorrect; a better term would be 'thought insertion', a concept I shall explain in more detail shortly.

My central claim, that the voices most voice-hearers hear are not auditory hallucinations but rather examples of 'thought insertion', is, like I said, controversial. I recall that, a number of years ago, I discussed this issue with another patient, Seamus, who was adamant that the voices he heard were genuine auditory hallucinations. But my own experience suggests that, for at least for some people, voice-hearing is more a case of misattributing thoughts to others. My own experience of 'voice-hearing', as I've discussed a number of times in this blog, was accompanied by the delusion that I was telepathic: I would have conversations with George W. Bush, Jon Stewart, Barack Obama, the girl I call Jess, among others, in my head. I have circumstantial evidence that many other patients similarly experience 'voice-hearing' not as auditory hallucinations but rather as 'voices' in the person's own mind. Why then do so many people, including psychiatrists, continue to regard voice-hearing as a form of auditory hallucination? When people first become patients of the Mental Health System they learn early on that voice-hearing is considered one of the tier-one symptoms of psychosis. It is natural, therefore, for these patients to describe their experience of hearing or conversing with others in their own minds in terms of 'voice hearing' even though this description is technically inaccurate. I myself have committed this error – I have often, in this blog and elsewhere, talked about 'hearing voices' even though my experience almost never involved auditory hallucinations. Thus the error that voice-hearing is usually a form of auditory hallucination has been self-perpetuating.

This is not to say that auditory hallucinations do not occur at all. I have experienced an auditory hallucination three times, I think, over the course of my life: I shall describe the first and third now. In 2007, after I had left the Big House and moved home, and in the brief period between my first appointment with Antony Fernando and my agreeing to start taking antipsychotics, one night I was watching David Letterman interviewing Dr Phil. I thought that, during the interview, Dr Phil was 'coming out' as gay, not explicitly but, as it were, cryptically, sub-textually. I went into the bathroom and said, out loud, in shock, "Dr Phil!" I thought (wrongly of course) that Dr Phil was letting the world know he was yet another closet homosexual. The next night I visited the video store and, while I was there, I thought I heard one of the other patrons deliberately say the words, "Dr Phil" as he walked past me. I suddenly decided that this was evidence that I was under surveillance, that either I was being watched to ensure that I didn't 'out' any of the many closet homosexuals who I believed filled the world or that I was being gradually admitted into the secret of the Homosexual Conspiracy. The upset that this caused me was a major reason I agreed to start taking antipsychotics, although I didn't at the time believe I was delusional or hallucinating.  The third time I experienced an auditory hallucination occurred, I think, in 2019. I was attending an Anzac Day ceremony and thought I heard someone in the crowd around me say, "Silverfish". I briefly decided that this was evidence a.) that many people in the world read this blog and b.) that people could recognise that I was its author. However, unlike in 2007, I almost immediately decided that this auditory datum was somehow a mishearing. It wasn't real, I had made a mistake, it was an auditory hallucination.

Although I have only experienced auditory hallucinations three times in my life, all very briefly, I still maintain that I have extensive experience of 'hearing voices', if in the past, a claim that only makes sense if we suppose that my experience of 'hearing voices' did not involve auditory hallucinations. To clarify what I mean by all this I shall tell a couple of stories, some that I have told before, that are useful and revealing. I started 'hearing voices' in January 2009, after I had been on antipsychotics for over a year and a half. In 2008, I had spent a great deal of time attempting to derive Einstein's equation E=MC squared from Maxwell's equations and had at last succeeded. In late January 2009, I was lying in the bath and I considered occupying myself by going through the derivation again in my head. I had trouble getting started. Then I heard a voice in my head say, with a Texan accent, "Do you want George W. Bush to help you?" Deciding that the recently out-of-office president would be little assistance, I changed the subject. I asked him, "Are you straight?" He replied, "I think so." I asked him, "Do you believe in God?" He said, "No". I asked him how then we could be communicating. He said "Midi-chlorians". After I got out of the bath I continued talking with him. I asked him what the real reason was for the war in Iraq. He replied with some claptrap about the War of Civilisations. Of course, I know now that I wasn't really talking to the former president of the United States: I suspect that this strange mental dialogue was relevant to me because, first, in 2007 I had believed that Bush was a closet homosexual and, second, in my mind I associated George W. Bush with my father. But, at the time, I genuinely believed that I was talking with Bush.

Not all of my experiences of voice-hearing involved conversations with famous people. Sometimes it would just be thoughts that appeared in my mind that seemed to come from somewhere else – this is where the concept of 'thought insertion' comes in. I'll tell another story that is revealing. Sometimes in 2009 I would 'hear a voice' that said, "Maya is bigger than you." Now, Maya was my sort-of girlfriend from 2003 until 2008. This sounds disloyal to say but Maya wasn't particularly attractive and I wasn't in love with her. And she was literally taller than me. Prior to 2007, I had sometimes met gay men who were still in the closet and were in relationships with women that were, to any perceptive outsider, obviously fake – the significance of this little voice, its relevance to me, was that it was indirectly addressing my fear that people may have thought my relationship with Maya had been of this kind, was a fake relationship. But, at the time, I didn't interpret this mental interruption in this way. I had often thought, back then, that I was famous – I interpreted the meaning of the voice's utterance at the time as "Maya is more famous than you." I believe that my subconscious mind, (perhaps, if we accept the idea of the bicameral mind as proposed by Julian Jaynes and Ian McGilchrist, the right hemisphere of the brain), was trying to inform my conscious mind, my ego, of this fear, a fear that my conscious self couldn't directly confront and which my mind, as a whole, was protecting me from. The voice was imparting information to me that I both knew and didn't want to know at the same time.

I'll tell one last story about my experience of voice-hearing that illustrates what it was like for me. In around October or November 2009, I was walking home when I heard a voice in my head say, "You're long sighted." I replied, "No, I'm short sighted." It said again, "You're long-sighted". I repeated myself, saying, "No, I'm short sighted – I see well at short distances!" The voice laughed and I realised I was talking with Jon Stewart. He said, "There's no help for you." Once again, this exchange had indirect relevance to my own life. I knew that my reprehensible psychiatrist Antony Fernando had decided, perhaps arbitrarily, to diagnosed me as a latent or closet homosexual when, if anything, the truth was the exact opposite. Jon was making light of it, alluding to this knowledge in a facetious, mollifying way to make me more comfortable with it.

These stories demonstrate that for me, and perhaps for many other people who have experienced psychosis, 'voices' take the form of thoughts that seem to come from outside the self and have relevant content. This leads me to make some interesting and perhaps very important speculative claims about the nature of consciousness and psychosis generally. People (all people, not just those experiencing psychosis) talk to themselves in their heads all the time. We engage in 'self-talk'. In 2011, the clinical psychologist Simon Judkins recommended I read the book Madness Explained by Richard Bentall – Bentall spends a whole chapter arguing for this very conclusion, that everyone engages in self-talk all the time, and suggests that we can perhaps explain 'voice-hearing' as arising somehow from this natural activity or process of the human brain. At the time, I thought Bentall was stating a banal truism, a fact obvious to anyone who has read James Joyce's Ulysses or just thought at all about the nature of his or her own consciousness. However, we can perhaps arrive at a more profound conclusion if we go one step further. And to take this step I will enlist the help of everyone's favourite neuroscientist – Sam Harris. Sam, who is interested both in the nature of consciousness and meditation, often says on his podcast that, if we pay attention to the way we think, we are not authors of our thoughts but that rather thoughts just arise in our minds. That is, we possess the illusion of authorship. We imagine that our thoughts originate in our self but, in fact, thoughts just appear. However, perhaps Harris underestimates just how important the illusion of authorship is. What I would like to suggest is that a perhaps universal aspect of psychosis, perhaps even its cause, is a breakdown in the illusion of authorship. This breakdown possibly occurs when a person's core sense of identity is under siege, under assault. Perhaps psychosis occurs in the early stages of ego death and a person can recover from serious mental illness by reconstructing a new iteration of his or her ego. This last idea is very conjectural indeed but the important point is that, if we suppose that 'healthy' people possess the illusion that they are authors of their own thoughts and that this apparent insight is an illusion, we can perhaps view psychosis differently: it is not aberrant or abnormal but a potentiality in the human condition, a calamity that can occur to anyone.

If we look at psychosis in this way, if we say that everyone engages in self-talk and that the common feature of psychosis is a breakdown in the illusion that one is the author of one's own thoughts, certain things become clearer. As I've said before in this blog, I've never once heard abusive voices. Rather, I summoned up imaginary friends, first George W. Bush and then later Jon Stewart and the girl I call Jess (and for a period Barack Obama); these imaginary friends supported me through my ordeal. However, many people who experience psychosis often hear abusive voices. Abusive voices are so common that many laypeople, and very many psychiatrists as well, often simply assume that if someone hears voices, these voices must be abusive. This has often puzzled me. Why should so many people hear abusive voices? Why don't other people diagnosed schizophrenic also conjure up imaginary friends as I did? Consider, however, the following scenario. Imagine a man or woman who has suffered sexual or physical abuse, or neglect, in childhood; such a person may carry into adulthood a negative self image and may often engage in self-loathing self-talk. This could often be true even if such a person never experiences psychosis. However, if such a person does experience psychosis, the dissolution in the illusion of authorship overlays (as it were) the negative self-talk; the person is still engaging in negative self-talk but is now attributing these self-hating thoughts to others. This way of looking at the effects of adverse experience when young may go some way towards explaining the correlation between childhood trauma and later mental illness (a correlation the psychiatric profession, with its medical prejudices, refuses to acknowledge). I would hypothesise that a child may experience trauma, painfully construct a competent, capable ego (perhaps a better word would be the Jungian term persona) and then experience psychosis as an adult when the repressed returns. Perhaps, to misquote Jung, what we don't recognise about ourselves returns as fate. As with the idea I presented in the previous paragraph, this idea is also very conjectural indeed.

I'll finish this discussion of voice-hearing by talking a little about my most intense period of voice-hearing which occurred in December 2009 and January 2010. It was peculiar – I believe very peculiar. I suspect very few people who have experienced psychosis have had experiences at all like the ones I had during this period; I have mentioned it in other posts but it probably deserves a post of its own. As I've said, I had formed the delusion that people are all at least potentially telepathic. During this period, from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep, I would have conversations with a number of others, most especially Jon and Jess (although I also spoke with Obama). One peculiarity of my own experience of hearing voices, as the examples I gave above suggest, is that I often engaged in conversations with my voices. The particular peculiarity of this period was that I also mentally conjured up the situations of the people I spoke with. For instance, I knew that the real Jess, a girl I had met through a Hearing Voices Group towards the end of 2009, had sought refuge in a respite facility in Titirangi called Mind Matters. In my mind, I convinced her to run away, to catch a bus from West Auckland to Remuera and come to my house. Lying in bed, I would recommend songs by Tricky for her to listen to on her trip. At one point, I put the comic book MoonShadow in my letterbox so that, when she arrived, she'd know which house was mine. Naturally she never arrived because all of this was in my mind. Likewise, with Jon, when I spoke to him, I imagined or was told about his setting. I thought that he'd suffered a mid-life crisis and had left his wife for a half-Black, half-Native American woman he'd met at a buffet. He would lie awake all night in bed with her talking to me. Eventually, around January 10th, Jess and I convinced him to go back to his wife. One incongruous detail about this was that, in my head, I thought, wrongly, that Jon's wife was called Sara. (In real life his wife is Tracey.) The girl I'd been in love with for many years prior to the end of 2009 was also called Sara. The woman Jon had left his wife for shared the same name as the girl I call Jess in this blog. I was aware of these coincidences at the time, and sometimes spoke with Sara as well in my head during this period. Something that I realised relatively recently is that I was obviously projecting a major life change onto Jon – being something of a serial monogamist myself, in the sense that I fall in love with one woman at a time, I was rehearsing or acting out the major life transition of falling out of love with Sara and into love with Jess. There is one last thing about this period that seems worth writing about. Sometimes all the voices would fade out and I'd hear another unidentified voice that I addressed simply as, "O disembodied voice". This voice would ask me questions about the American military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. In an earlier post, I believe I said that Obama repealed this policy in February or March 2010, a claim I made based on faulty information. Nevertheless, it seems true that Obama had campaigned on the pledge to repeal it in 2008 and that it was finally formally repealed at the end of 2010.

I shall now turn to the second topic I mentioned in the introduction, a major reason I am obsessed with narrative theory. Obviously my fascination with this topic has a number of causes. I studied English Literature and have always been interested in Theory and theories. However, ten years ago I wasn't so single mindedly interested in narrative theory. I was interested in writing stories themselves. In 2012, I wrote a screenplay about my friend Jess as part of a Masters in Creative Writing through AUT. I have written about this screenplay before, perhaps most appositely in the post "An Interpretation of The Hounds of Heaven". In talking about it again, I don't think I am repeating myself much. As I said in that previous post, I gave the screenplay to a director friend at the beginning of 2013 who told me that it was very well written but that it lacked a story. At the beginning of this year, I gave it to my father's partner Nicola who told me that she couldn't see the point. All the evidence I've received from early 2013 until the present has indicated to me that the screenplay failed. What do I mean by this? I mean that people tend to judge fictional works as good or bad, as successful or unsuccessful. Some stories work and some do not, and the story I had written was in the latter camp. This issue, the issue of why some stories are good and others not, and the closely related question of what makes a story successful are both under-theorised by academia. The English departments of universities teach the Canon, that is works generally acknowledged to be good – Shakespeare, Nabokov, Joyce, Henry James, and so on. The issue of which stories are good and which aren't, the question of why some stories succeed and others fail, is pushed outside the scope of enquiry. The more specialised field of narrative theory has the same problem but arrives at it from the opposite direction. For narrative theorists, any report of a succession of events constitutes a narrative and all narratives are equally open to analysis through the narrative theory prism. The issue of why some stories succeed (that is, are enjoyable or satisfying) and why some do not again lies outside the scope of enquiry. The people who do theorise about this question tend to be people outside academia, authors or advisors giving wannabe writers advice about how to write, such as Stephen King in On Writing or Robert McKee in STORY: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. Personally I think narrative theory would benefit from incorporating the ideas of people like McKee into its conception of narrative but this might involve creating a whole new field.

I might have been interested in this problem anyway but an an important stimulus was my experience writing The Hounds of Heaven in 2012. When I started the degree, I was already halfway through a different film script, a story about two fourteen year old boys who steal a car and their adventures that night. In the middle of the year, I became dissatisfied with this story and abandoned it. It occurred to me suddenly that people generally, despite films like A Beautiful Mind, have no understanding of schizophrenia and it further occurred to me that I could write a film providing a more accurate picture of this 'condition'; I did not want to write about myself and so I sat down and wrote a scene featuring Jess in her psychiatrist's office. (It is important to note here that I had not experienced any psychotic symptoms at all myself since early 2010 and considered myself fully recovered, although I had told no-one my life story then; it is also important to note that I had no contact with the real girl while I was writing the screenplay about her and that, insofar as it was a true depiction of her, it was based on my recollections of the times we'd hung out the previous year.) One of my main intentions was to inform the public about what schizophrenia is. After Nicola read it, she objected to the amount of psychiatric jargon I had put in it; perhaps this was a fault but not only was I was trying to educate my audience, I was trying to present an intelligent young woman who had performed independent research into the condition with which she had been diagnosed, something both I and the real girl had done. A closely related question to "What is schizophrenia?" is "What is the cause of schizophrenia?" Now, films that concern schizophrenia, such as A Beautiful Mind and Benny and Joon do not usually ask or answer this question – in the same way that films like The Whole of the Moon by Ian Mune, a film that concerns cancer, do not attempt to answer the question "What is the cause of cancer?" and films like Supernova, a film that concerns Alzheimers, do not attempt to answer the question "What is the cause of Alzheimers?" this question is assumed not to be a problem. However, in my film, this question is very salient. Right before Plot Point 1, Jess is in the Auckland Public Library and she tells the audience (through voice-over) that there is contention between the psychologists and the psychiatrists about the cause of schizophrenia; she states that she agrees with the psychiatrists, that she believes schizophrenia to be genetic (a position I myself disagreed with at the time I wrote this scene and still disagree with today). So this question, the question "What is the cause of schizophrenia?", if my film had been successful, would have been a driving concern in the minds of the audience. However The Hounds of Heaven does not answer this question. One reason for this is that I did not know the root cause of the real girl's schizophrenia when I wrote the film and still don't know it today  – the film ends by suggesting that schizophrenia is as random and causeless as an earthquake or parental divorce. (This particular aspect of the film is something I talked about in more detail in the post "An Interpretation of The Hounds of Heaven.)

After I had written that first scene of Jess in her psychiatrist's office, I initially thought I would write a comedy. I thought that I would present the story of an appealing, intelligent, and eccentric girl and her ordinary (quotidian) life. A couple of days after I wrote this scene, however, a later scene occurred to me and I realised what the film would really be about – that it would present her ordinary life first and then her descent into and recovery from a psychotic episode. I was a little familiar with the stress-vulnerability model of schizophrenia, the theory that schizophrenia is episodic and that episodes are triggered by environmental stressors, and so I considered various possible stressors that might cause her to become psychotic. One idea I considered was that she might have an argument with her mother. And then I realised that there was only one possible stressor that was right for the story I wanted to tell – she would have a bad experience with a man. (I might note that, popularly and according to the psychiatric profession, the sole cause of a psychotic episode is a discontinuation of antipsychotic medication but, for reasons those who read my blog will appreciate, this was not something I wanted to put in my film.) The screenplay I wrote, only a draft and with a couple of spelling mistakes (one deliberate) is on the Internet but I don't expect my readers to fly away and read it and so I will provide a brief synopsis. The synopsis follows.

The film begins, of course, with Jess in the psychiatrist's office (wearing a hat) and then goes on to provide a picture of her ordinary life. She is twenty-five. She lives in a bedsit in Takapuna with only her cat Zoe for company, spending her time reading copious amounts of philosophy, literature, and poetry, and going for long walks. She visits the gym regularly (mental health patients are often encouraged to go to the gym because exercise is considered beneficial to mental health) and attends a weekly coffee group with other patients. Her parents are divorced – she has a good relationship with her father and somewhat ambivalent feelings towards her mother. She is intelligent but eccentric and a little naive, with an unusual view of the world; she is also perhaps a little 'avoidant'. At Plot Point 1, right after the scene at the library (at which she borrows a book about Gnosticism) she encounters a charmer called Rick at a cafe, a womaniser, who asks for her phone number. Several days later he calls her and she agrees, uncharacteristically, to meet with him. She goes out drinking and clubbing with him and several of his friends. It should become apparent to the audience as this sequence unfolds that, although Rick is attractive, he is really just interested in casual sex but it is unclear if Jess realises this. Rick has no knowledge of her 'condition'. At the club Jess says (in voiceover) "Because I first got sick when I was seventeen, there are lots of things I've never done before. For instance, this is my first time clubbing." (I hope the implication is clear.) Jess, a little drunk, ends up at Rick's apartment and then, perhaps sensing that she has got herself into a potentially dangerous situation, becomes increasingly anxious. Rick, assuming that if she has in his apartment she knows the score, makes a move on her which she rebuffs; he then asks her "Are you a dyke?" Unable to answer him, Jess flees the apartment. Over the next several days she imagines writing a long essay about Gnosticism and then, while shopping at the supermarket at night, she begins telepathically hearing the thoughts of the other patrons. In some distress, she starts walking home, gets lost and ends up at the flat of group of young men who are friends of her brother. During a long scene, these boys (but not Jess) smoke pot and discuss various conspiracy theories and other general spookiness, including the idea that humans and Neanderthals once interbred, and culminating in one of the boys expressing his belief that 9/11 was an inside job. Jess melts down and telekinetically causes one of the boys' beer bottles to explode. Panicked, the boys call her brother and take her home. During the next number of days, she descends further into psychosis, for instance removing all the lightbulbs in her house because she believes she is under government surveillance. The February 2011 Christchurch earthquake occurs; that night she is watching the Daily Show and Jon Stewart addresses her directly, telling her that she is responsible for the quake. Despite her evident 'unwellness', Jess has committed herself to seeing a talk about the causes of schizophrenia by a renowned psychologist visiting New Zealand and forces herself to attend. (Jess is the only actual schizophrenic in the room). This psychologist tells the audience that the cause of schizophrenia is childhood sexual abuse. On the bus with her brother on the way back from the lecture, Jess flips out completely. After a dream scene (a scene that marks Plot Pointt 2) we cut to several weeks later. Jess is in hospital and has recovered from her psychotic episode. The tone of the film changes back to the tone it had in the first act, with Jess explaining herself and her life to the audience through voiceover. Her father arrives and together they travel to Christchurch (her father is a civil engineer, a significant departure from my source material). Much of the last act describes Jess's view of Christchurch in the immediate aftermath of the quake and there are a couple of scenes involving a lonely and lugubrious hotel manager that I imagined played by Mikey Havoc. The film ends with Jess and her father eating dinner at the hotel restaurant. Jess's father says, "You know you're not responsible for the divorce? You do know that don't you?" Jess replies, "Of course I know that. I'm not stupid." And the film ends with an aftershock rattling the tableware.

The screenplay definitely had its imperfections. It had spelling and stylistic mistakes that I deeply regret. It uses far too much voiceover. I included a scene, when the stoner boys are driving Jess home, in which Jess recites a poem by John Ashbery from memory, a spiel that is probably pretentious. And if it had been made into a film much would depend on its direction and particularly on the choice of actress to play the leading role. (When I was writing it, I imagined Anna Hutchison.) However, the major reason why The Hounds of Heaven failed as a story was that it was founded on a faulty theory of human psychology – this is the insight that I had recently. Although the film was ostensibly concerned with schizophrenia, in reality it was concerned with sexuality. I was trying to prove that Jess, and by extension the girl Jess was based on, was straight. This theme in the movie, the question of Jess's sexuality, is not overt but there are touches that should ideally raise this question in the viewer's mind. Right near the beginning, immediately after the consultation scene, Jess runs into another patient, Andrew, a man who is obviously romantically interested in her but whom she rebuffs. This should signal to the viewer that Jess's relations with men is an important theme. (The other reason I put myself in the film is that I wanted to show that unlike most people who write about schizophrenia, including most psychiatrists, I know what I'm talking about.) A little later in the first act, when Jess is attending the coffee group, she says (in voiceover), "Katrina is very pretty but I try not to notice that." Obviously, Rick's blunt question, "Are you a dyke?" can be interpreted as a major reason why Jess becomes psychotic a little afterwards. So I was trying to subtly raise the question of her sexuality with the intention of answering it later. Obviously, the simple way to do that would have been to have her enter into a happy conventional relationship with a man – but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to depict this. Instead I thought that I could prove she was straight by showing that she and her father loved each other. My belief, then, was that the cause and evidence of homosexuality was a dislike for the opposite-sex parent. This idea, that I could show that Jess was straight by portraying how good her relationship with her father was, was present from my earliest plans for the story.

In this blog, I have often talked about my life. At this point in the post, I can kill two birds with one stone – I can talk about my life and also explain how I formed the erroneous theory that underlies my film. In January 2009 I became psychotic again and for the first time began hearing voices, as I mentioned before. I have discussed the triggers that made me 'sick' in a couple of posts, specifically "What Happened in 2007 and 2009" and "Corrections and Some More About My Life" but I think I can reconstruct a little more clearly what happened at the very end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 now, having thought about it some more. In 2008, for a long period I had weekly 'therapy' with a Scottish nurse called Avril, although no therapy ever happened. I did not talk about my life or family or what had happened to me at bFM in 2007 or any of the delusions I'd entertained the previous year. Instead I talked about Letterman and the American election. At the very end of 2008, I decided that I should at least try to talk about my family and told her about my dislike for my stepmother. It is understandable that I should resent my stepmother at least a little because, as I've said before, the childhood trauma that made me vulnerable to psychosis in the first place was my parents' divorce when I was seven. (Incidentally I have decided recently that although she has done wrong by me in the past I should forgive my stepmother.) The next time I came into the Taylor Centre I had the appointment with Antony Fernando and Avril (without my key worker or any member of my family present) at which they bullied me into taking antidepressants even though I had never complained of depression. Although this was upsetting and fed my paranoia it did not make me 'ill' immediately. At the next appointment with Avril, at the very beginning of 2009, she said to me, "You were telling me about your dislike for your mother." I said, "No, it was my stepmother I was talking about." But it was too late – a false statement that I supposedly disliked my mother had gone into my record. I believe it is still in the record today. Although my most serious grievance against the Mental Health Service is that the people treating me have thought I was gay when I'm not for nearly fifteen years and perhaps still do today, a secondary grievance is the idea that I might dislike my mother, a false inclusion in my record based on Avril's mistake. I love my mother, she is is my best friend. Although I have been living in my own apartment since early 2016, I have for years visited her every day. Of course, a popular if outdated theory of schizophrenia is the idea of the 'schizophrenegenic mother' or loveless mother but, at the beginning of 2009, I did not know this theory and did not believe I was diagnosed schizophrenic – rather I believed that I was diagnosed as either a latent or closet homosexual. Furthermore, I assumed that the psychiatric profession must know the cause of homosexuality. I immediately leapt to the conclusion that there must be some kind of supposed relationship between my supposed dislike of my mother and my supposed homosexuality. I felt, at that moment, in a way that is hard to describe, a sense that the walls of the Homosexual Conspiracy were descending around me. It was that night that I became psychotic again. As a result of this brief dialogue, for many years afterwards I believed that the evidence and cause of my heterosexuality was my loving relationship with my mother. And so, by analogy, I thought I could prove Jess straight by representing her loving relationship with her father.

The theory that I adopted was quasi-Freudian, the idea that sexuality has its roots in family dynamics. And if this idea had been correct, my screenplay would have been successful. But the truth was, of course, that this theory is wrong. I suspect that many of those who have read the script have been confused about why I devoted the whole last act to Christchurch and to portraying Jess's relationship with her father; this is why Nicola told me that she couldn't see the point. The sense among my readers that the film lacked a point strongly suggests that the theory was wrong because I think that, if it was correct, the film would just have felt right to these early readers even if they were not consciously cognisant of the theory. In depicting Christchurch in the aftermath of the earthquake, I was acting on another motive: although much of the film is fictional, the girl Jess is based on, the real girl, actually did decide she was responsible for the February 2011 earthquake. I thought that the film could persuade her that she wasn't. With respect to theories about the cause of homosexuality, these have been another recurring topic in this blog. Long ago, perhaps as early as 2013, I abandoned the idea that the cause of homosexuality is a dislike of the opposite-sex parent. Another theory is the notion of the 'gay gene' but, although the LGBT community often strongly promotes this idea, the postulation of a 'gay gene' does not stand up to serious scientific scrutiny, as I've discussed in other posts. I also gave up on this theory a very long time ago. The only solution, I believe, is to regard homosexuality as a choice that is not immoral, a choice often though not always made in early adolescence. This explanation may not satisfy but I think that I want to finally put this obsessive concern behind me. If you want a better explanation, you'll have to look elsewhere.

All this, my ongoing efforts to make sense of why The Hounds of Heaven failed, explains my interest in narrative theory. I believe, now, that some stories are successful and others unsuccessful. A successful story is a unified rhetorical argument in favour of some proposition, a proposition that the author and audience want to believe is true even if they suspect or know it is not. If the author's understanding of the world does not align with that of the audience, this is a recipe for failure. This brief exposition is incomplete but I might say more about it in later posts. Something that I have been thinking about recently is why audience love and consume stories that they know are fictive, stories like Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Hobbit. I do not know the answer yet.

Finally, I wish to talk about the paranormal. Most serious intellectuals pooh-pooh people's credence in the supernatural; in Rationality, Steven Pinker despairs at the fact that, by some metrics, young people today are more credulous than their parents. When I was young, I was very much in Pinker's mould, absolutely sure that ghosts, goblins, ghouls, and God were all easily debunkable phantoms of the imagination. But over the course of my life very many people have told me stories about their encounters with ghosts (and about other supernatural experiences). There is a simple argument to be made. If someone tells a ghost story that she says happened to her, there are only three possibilities. 1.) The person is lying. 2.) The person has hallucinated or is delusional. 3.) The person is telling the truth. When I consider all the ghost stories that have been relayed to me, some of which involved family members of my mother's generation, I have to eliminate the first possibility – I simply do not believe that any of the ghost stories I have been told, often by quite respectable people, are deliberate lies. This leaves the second and third possibility. Perhaps mental illness is far more prevalent than we realise. In the introduction to this post, I mentioned dreams: we naturally treat dreams as unreal but perhaps the line between reality and dreams is more porous, blurred. If so, if very many people have had hallucinatory or delusional experiences, this dramatically alters our view of people and the world.

I'll tell a story on this topic that is very relative to the themes of this post. In early 2016 I was staying with my brother and couldn't sleep. At about four or five in the morning I decided to take a walk around Oraki Basin. While I was walking, I began to get the feeling, as though information was being imparted to me psychically, that I would be in the newspaper that day. Then I changed my mind; I decided that Jess was going to be in the newspaper that day. In 2012 and through into 2013 Jess had unwillingly spent eight months in a psychiatric ward, something I found out about in early 2013. I have always thought some scandal, some malfeasance, was attached to that committal; I thought maybe the journalists were going to expose it. I went back to my brother's house and finally managed to doze off. In the middle of the day, I got up and read the front part of the paper looking for references to Jess, half-heartedly though because by that time I though my clairvoyance of the early morning might be bogus. Then I visited my mother. She said, straight away, "Your friend Jess was in the paper this morning!" (Of course my mother used her real name.) It was in the Canvas or TimeaOut section and, as best as I can recall, concerned a volume of poetry by her that had just been published. I do recall that in the article they compared her to Eleanor Catton. 

Although the topics I have covered in this post are mainly concerned with rational explanations of seemingly irrational phenomena, I have had experiences that do not seem to me to be rationally explicable. I have had a little experience of ESP, clairvoyance, and precognition. Yes, most of my experiences arose from my own imagination but sometimes little truths slipped through. This suggests to me that the mind, or soul, is something separate from the body and, if this is true, this raises the possibility of life after death. I find this thought comforting because it might mean that I'll get a girlfriend in the next existence. But there is a serious downside. If we allow a little supernatural into our lives, where do we stop? Recently I watched the Youtube clip "A Time Travel Story/ The Dodleston Messages from the past and future". The story it tells is profoundly disturbing. It is impossible that the people involved were delusional and so this leaves open only the first and third option: either it was the most incredibly elaborate hoax or the world is far, far stranger than even I guessed. Both options seem unbelievable. I recommend the reader watch it and make up her own mind.

In this post I have discussed three mysteries: the mystery of voice-hearing, the mystery of why the screenplay I wrote in 2012 was unsuccessful, and the mystery of people's apparent experience of the paranormal. I have gone some way towards explaining the first and second but not the third. As is often the case with this blog, the disparate topics I have covered seem to share a common thread. I guess what I am discussing is the power of the imagination. This is perhaps the most important unexplored subject in the humanities generally and perhaps something I will touch on again in later posts. But for now I'll finish up for now. Adios, reader.

Chance and Necessity

It has been a long while since I've written a post. One reason for this is that I am studying again, taking papers that will, one day, count towards a Masters in Philosophy. For those readers who have been following my blog I thought I would present an essay that I wrote for one of these papers, a paper on Classical and Medieval Philosophy, the focus being on the nature of time. It only received a B because, although the class was concerned with Aristotle (a little), Boethius, St Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, my essay dealt with these thinkers very badly. If you want to understand Aristotle and the medieval philosophers, this essay will be no help. I freely admit that for reasons of a technical nature I did not fully grasp the arguments of these scholastic philosophers. Why then publish this essay, you might ask? The reason I received a B rather than a lower grade is because, I think, I presented a theory of how humans experience time, my A theory, that may be original and may also be true, and it is this theory, a theory that I present early in the essay, that makes the argument worth setting out publicly. My attempt to relate this theory back to the typically Christian theologians we studied may be less than successful but I believe I am a competent enough writer that, even if my descriptions of these philosophers' positions is often incorrect, even if it is longer than most of my other posts, the essay is still altogether a good read. 

I may have readers who follow this blog because they are interested in my life, in schizophrenia and the Mental Health System, or in issues related to sexuality. It is possible that I have readers who are interested in interpretations of films and novels and in narrative theory generally. I am still interested in these topics myself but have had difficulty mustering up the enthusiasm to talk about them again in this blog. I have, however, discussed philosophy sometimes and this essay relates back most closely to two posts I wrote about the ontological argument for the existence of God: "The Ontological Argument: Why CosmicSkeptic and the Pseudo-Intellectual Are Wrong" and "The Modal Ontological Argument". What I am struggling towards is a theory of truth, reality, language, and literature that avoids the mistakes other philosophers have made, a theory to which I can declare my heartfelt allegiance. It is perhaps because I could not accept the underlying assumptions made by theologians like Aquinas and Ockham that I had so much trouble understanding their arguments. In the end I am studying philosophy to deepen, enrich, and rationally justify my particular world-view, a world-view that I have been arduously establishing over many years, often through exploratory pieces published in this blog. I am not studying philosophy to paraphrase arguments by other philosophers, arguments that are often, in my view, incorrect or only partially correct. One day I will unleash upon the world a theory of fictional narrative that will turn everything upside down! But not yet.

And now, to quote Sam Harris, "without further ado", the essay. [Note: in cutting and pasting this essay, the font has come out smaller than is normal for my blog. I imagine the reader can simply zoom in, and this will make it easier to read.]

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Chance and Necessity

Some of the fundamental problems in philosophy relate to issues concerning the apparent indeterminancy of the future as compared to the apparent determinancy of the past, to whether free will is compatible with determinism or, if one believes in the Judeo-Christian God, with God’s omniscience and omnipotence, and to what extent past, present, and future events can be seen as necessary or contingent. These issues have spurred debate since the ancient Greek philosophers and continue to be debated today. However, one issue in making sense of classical and medieval philosophy from a contemporary standpoint, it seems to me, is that some important terms in the debate have different meanings today than they did for theologians like Boethius, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. For example, people generally today (including many ostensibly religious people) accept that chance seems to play a role in determining events whereas the Christian philosophers of the medieval period, committed as they were to an omnipotent God, did not even seem to possess the concept of ‘chance’. Furthermore, the concepts of ‘necessity’ and ‘contingency’, of vital importance to the Christian philosophers, are understood quite differently today than they were for these earlier philosophers, although we can perhaps see Aristotle and the Christian philosophers as paving the way for future developments, such as the invention of modern modal logic. In this essay I shall present two models for understanding time, explicitly atheistic and derived from modern physics. I shall then playfully present an argument for the existence of God, suggested by these two models, which will pave the way for a discussion of the medieval philosophers. I shall discuss free will with respect to determinancy and chance, first from a modern perspective and then with respect to these ancient philosophers. I shall then discuss necessity and contingency, again first from a modern perspective and then with respect to these classical and medieval philosophers.  Finally, I shall relate the discussion of these philosophers back to the two models of time I presented earlier in the essay.

In 1908, John M.E. McTaggart published the landmark essay “The Unreality of Time”. In this essay, McTaggart introduced the concepts of the A-series of time and the B-series of time, concepts that not only have been useful going forward but as conceptual tools useful when looking back at classical and medieval philosophers. The A-series, which McTaggart argues is fundamental to the way we experience time, is a way of classifying events as past, present, or future. Our human perception of time is that future events become present events and then become past events. The B-series, by contrast, is a way of ordering events according to whether they occur before or after other events or, to put it another way, by attaching dates and times to them. Although we experience events as being in the A-series, the B-series, if we accept William Lane Craig’s interpretation of Aquinas, could be viewed as the way God perceives events; I shall come back to this idea later. I shall not attempt to critique McTaggart’s argument in this essay. However, the two models of time I shall present below can be viewed, analogously to McTaggart’s exposition, as an A-theory and a B-theory, the first an account of the way human beings experience time and the second as a way of describing what time, metaphysically, actually is.

Almost all the laws of physics are time-reversible, in the sense that almost all the laws would still hold true even if time were to start flowing backwards. The significant exception to this is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of a macroscopic system always increases. The second law provides, in physics, the direction of time’s arrow. Although this essay is not concerned with an extended discussion of entropy and I shall not define entropy here, there are two important points to be made about it. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was debate among physicists about whether the second law was an absolute law of nature or a statistical law. The second view won out. The second law of the thermodynamics today could be better rephrased in the following way:  “The entropy of a macroscopic system almost always tends to increase”. It is always possible, although extremely unlikely, for the entropy of a macroscopic system to spontaneously decrease. The second important point is that views can be found in the contemporary world that evolution and the development of human civilisation into ever more complex and organised forms somehow violate the second law of thermodynamics: this view is false. Overall and even in smaller systems considered separately, entropy not only tends to increase but usually increases dramatically.

The reason entropy almost always increases is that there are far fewer ordered states of a system than disordered states; so if a system is changing, it is almost always moving from a more ordered state to a more disordered state. Entropy can be considered a measure of disorder. This leads me to make what I think might be a very innovative and interesting claim. Because there are far fewer ordered states than disordered states, it is much easier to make inferences about the past than the future. Suppose I walk into my kitchen today and find a smashed egg beside the refrigerator – I will be able to infer that a human being almost certainly opened the fridge door, took out an egg and accidentally dropped it. It is possible however that a chicken flew into my kitchen and laid an egg from a height. Both inferences are possible although the first seems much more likely and it seems we can safely assume that it is the first that is true. However if I looked at the fridge yesterday, I could not infer with any certainty that either scenario would occur today. According to the theory I am proposing here, what I have termed my A-theory, the past, like the future, is indeterminate. It is simply that the past is far less indeterminate than the future. The theory I am proposing here contrasts sharply with the views of the important classical and medieval philosophers. Although Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham all hold that many facts about the future cannot be known with certainty, they all also hold that the past is absolutely fixed. An argument that comes up again and again throughout the history of philosophy is the ‘consequence argument’, the argument that a proposition expressed in the past about the future must necessarily be true or false because everything in the past is necessary, and that consequently the future must also be necessary. (The usual form of this argument is to move from God’s omniscient foreknowledge in the past to the necessary truth of future events.) William of Ockham complicates this picture somewhat – I shall come back to Ockham later in this essay.

I am arguing here that the past, like this future, is indeterminate. The difference is that the past is much less indeterminate than the future – the difference between the past and future is quantitative rather than qualitative. It might be objected to this that we can remember the past. I would reply to this objection by saying that our memory is fallible. If I ask you what you were doing at noon July 12 2010, it is likely you will not be able to recall. A friend and I might disagree about what happened when we met for drinks three months ago, and without independent evidence in the present, there is no way to settle this dispute. If we consider historical events that occurred before living human memory, the picture becomes even more indefinite. Without archaeological  evidence, we have no idea what Aristotle was doing January 12 370BCE. Whatever he did that day most likely might as well never have happened, unless whatever he did left some trace in the present. In the same way that there are multiple possible futures that are compatible with the present, there are multiple possible pasts that are compatible with the present; furthermore, the past only exists in the present through the traces it has left, for instance in our brains. As I have said above, this view contrasts starkly with classical and medieval philosophers. 

If the past and the future are both indeterminate with respect to how people experience time, does this mean that the present is also indeterminate? I would argue ‘yes’. My A-theory of time involves looking at time and the world from the perspective of an embodied consciousness. The same way that I lack absolute confidence about the past and the future, I lack absolute confidence about events that are occurring right now in the present in parts of the world outside my direct perception. I simply have no idea what Joe Biden is doing right now as I write this sentence. Thus my A-theory could be described as a psychological, phenomenological or perhaps epistemological account of how people experience time and the world.

In contrast with the A-theory, I would now like to propose another way of looking at time, the B-theory. According to the B-theory, the past, present, and future are fully determined. The B-theory, unlike the A-theory, is reasonably popular among many philosophers and scientists today. (For example the neuroscientist and popular public intellectual Sam Harris defends it). The motivating idea is that causes deterministically lead to effects and the metaphor that is often used, a metaphor originating with Descartes I believe, is that the universe is a kind of machine in which everything develops according to fixed laws of nature. (Today this idea is extended to the human brain which is considered a kind of material machine, an extrapolation Descartes himself would probably have opposed). The B-theory had become the prevailing theory among physicists by the early twentieth century but was seriously challenged by the development of the probabilistic interpretation of quantum physics. Although it is commonly recognised that the laws of quantum physics, such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, under the Copenhagen interpretation, entail that the future state of a system after a measurement is taken is underdetermined, it is less well known that, because the laws of quantum physics are themselves time-reversible, the past is also underdetermined – the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics thus supports my A-theory more than the B-theory. However it is possible to interpret quantum physics in ways that are compatible with determinism (such as for instance superdeterminism). For example, it could be argued that quantum physics does not necessarily entail that the universe is objectively uncertain but rather that these laws set limits on what it is possible to know about the universe. In the end, it is impossible to prove that the universe develops deterministically  – it is rather an article of faith that seems intuitively reasonable to many people in the same way that faith in God seems reasonable to the many people who believe in God.

The B-theory does not concern time and the world as they appear to embodied consciousnesses as the A-theory does but rather time and the world as they actually are. This leads to my argument for the existence of God which I shall present as follows:

1. Everything that exists exists in the mind of some consciousness.
2. The B-series exists.
3. The B-series, in its entirety, is not known to any living human.
4. Therefore, some non-human consciousness or consciousnesses must exist that together know the whole B-series.

The first premise is derived from George Berkeley’s Idealistic philosophy and is probably the most questionable link in the argument. However, I am not presenting this argument completely seriously but as a kind of experiment in natural theology. It does not lead directly to the conclusion that some single consciousness exists that is omniscient, that knows the future as well as the present and past, a consciousness that we can call God, but it takes a significant step in that direction. The argument enables us to move on to a discussion of some of the significant theologians we have looked at in this course: Boethius, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dun Scotus, and William of Ockham. These theolgians accept the existence of the Christian god and His omniscience (along with His other attributes such as omnipotence, omnibenevolence, simplicity, immutability, infallibility, perfect justice and so on) as axiomatic. Thus, setting out provisionally an argument for an omniscient being paves the way for discussing these Christian theologians.

At the heart of the problem these theologians were grappling with is how to reconcile God’s omniscience and omnipotence with human free will. Although these theologians accept that God is omniscient, they do not accept the B-theory I have presented above, the idea that all events in the future, like events in the past and, with the exception of Duns Scotus, the present, occur necessarily. Instead they insist upon people possessing free will. One reason for their rejection of total predetermination is the ‘lazy man’ argument originally set forth by Aristotle. According to Aristotle, if all future events occur necessarily, there is no reason to deliberate about our actions or plan for the future; the fact that we do seems evidence that we possess free will. (It could be argued however that we deliberate and plan because we possess the illusion of free will. I shall come back to this idea later.) The idea that we have free will is so deeply engrained in the minds of these philosophers (and still in the minds of most people today I believe) that Duns Scotus even jokes that a person who believes that the future is as necessary as the past should be tortured until he admits that he could possibly not be tortured. Other reasons for espousing the idea that we have free will arise from Christianity itself. If virtuous people go to heaven while sinners are condemned to hell but our actions are predetermined, this would suggest that God is not just. Additionally, if everything is predetermined and God is the ultimate cause, this makes God ultimately responsible for people’s sins, suggesting he is not omnibenevolent. Considerations such as these provide strong motivation for attempts by Christian thinkers to find some plausible account of free will.

It is important to note here that, although I have posed the problem as being how to reconcile free will with God’s omniscience, this is not how the major Christian theologians framed the problem. For Boethius and Aquinas, the terminology used is the distinction between ‘contingency’ and ‘necessity’. What we call free will is, for them, the self-evident truth that some facts about the future are contingent (although many facts about the future, and all facts about the past, are necessary). The concept of free will seems to emerge with Dun Scotus, although only in a nascent form. I shall discuss ‘contingency’ and ‘necessity’ in greater depth later in this essay.

I shall begin the discussion of free will by considering the contemporary understanding of this idea. Most ordinary people today, I believe, tend to uncritically assume that free will must exist without ever devoting much thought to it; among young philosophers and other thinkers however it is increasingly popular to reject the concept of free will entirely. Examples I can think of include popular influencers like Sam Harris, Alex O’Conner and Sabine Hossenfelder, who can be found on Youtube. One reason for this is the direct or indirect influence of the rather wonderful essay “The Powers of Rational Beings: Freedom of The Will” by Peter Van Inwagen (2015) and the types of arguments he presents in it. Another reason is the sophistication of modern science, particular neuroscience, and the concomitant acceptance that our actions originate in the brain, a physical organ subject to the laws of nature. (Neurobiology was of course completely alien to the medievals.) The weakening of the old religious notion of free will is evidenced by the modern debate as to whether many social phenomena, such as criminality, are best explained as being the result of nature or nurture; in either case we are assuming that such phenomena have deterministic causes. This contrasts with the views of religiously minded people that individuals freely choose between virtue and vice. The decline in belief in free will, I would argue, can be correlated with the decline in religion generally.

Even if we deny materialism and adopt some religious worldview, such as Cartesian dualism, the problem of free will remains. I can show this with an example. Suppose at time t, Jane is faced with a choice of either willing A or willing not-A. Suppose she chooses to will A. If we assume determinism, her choice is founded on reasons that wholly explain her decision; these reasons themselves follow from prior events and reasons which themselves follow from prior events and reasons right back to prior reasons completely outside her control, what Inwagen calls “untouchable facts”. If we are religious, we might have to say that the first cause for Jane’s decision, the ultimate untouchable fact, is God. Of course, such a regression is anathema to most Christians (unless they are Calvinists) and so they must reject it. The problem remains if we assume the universe is indeterministic. Suppose there are no reasons at all for Jane willing A or willing not-A and she decides to will A: it seems then that her choice is made on the basis of pure chance. Ingawen argues that a decision based on a chance event, a kind of neuronal coin-flip, can be considered as little under her control as it would have been if the world was deterministic. Inwagen does not justify this claim rigorously – such a justification would have to define what it means for an action to be under a person’s control, and counter the objection that a chance event that occurs inside a person’s brain is quite different to a chance event that occurs outside it. Nevertheless, Inwagen’s claim that free will seems to be incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism seems correct to me. The claim that all events either follow deterministically from prior events, result from pure chance, or occur because of an admixture of determinism and chance, strikes me as intuitively plausible; I also find it plausible that if all events are of this character, the idea of free will becomes incoherent. Everything is the result of either chance or necessity, and this leaves no room for free will.

Towards the conclusion of the essay Ingawen asserts that “It would seem to be an evolutionary necessity that beings like ourselves should believe in their own free will .” (p.215) However, in the end he rejects the idea that free will is an illusion – it seems that his own conviction that he possesses free will is too strong to be vitiated by the arguments that he has proposed himself earlier in the essay. Ingawen’s justifications for choosing to believe in free will are partly a modern restatement of Aristotle’s lazy-man argument and partly his strong sense that, if free will is an illusion, this would mean morality is also an illusion, an implication that he repudiates. In the end Ingawen says that free will is a mystery but is a mystery he is forced to accept.

Before I turn to the medieval philosophers, I wish to digress for a moment and discuss determinism as it applies to human actions because it is important to my general thesis.  I shall assume for the moment that causal determinism is true. The naïve understanding of causal determinism is that of a series of temporally ordered events in which each event is necessarily entailed by the prior event and necessarily entails the subsequent event. A necessarily entails B which necessarily entails C and so on. However this naïve understanding of determinism fails to explain human actions. Suppose I assert, “If my friend Warren dies tomorrow, I will attend his funeral next week.” The problem with this, from the perspective of naïve determinism, is that the consequent “attending the funeral” is not wholly determined by the antecedent “my friend Warren dies”. We have to say instead, “If my friend Warren dies tomorrow, I will attend the funeral tomorrow unless I catch Covid or get hit by a car or decide out of spite not to attend or the church burns down or the funeral is delayed for reasons x, y, or z, and so on.” If we accept determinism and say that our human actions are determined, we must also accept that there are a vast multitude of causes that determine a particular action. A concept that is useful here is the Buddhist idea of Pratītyasamutpāda or dependent arising, an idea that incorporates both the notion that everything has causes and the idea that everything is connected to everything else. Pratiyasamutpada enables those among us who believe in determinism to explain why it is, in practice, impossible to predict with absolute certainty the future actions of a person we know (although, as I discussed with respect to the A theory, it is much easier to work out the past actions of a person by for instance asking her and assuming she will tell the truth.) 

In the preceding passages I have discussed the key ideas of “free will” and “chance” and I shall now discuss these terms in relation to the classical and medieval philosophers. As I understand it, Aristotle believed that a person’s actions are engendered by his or her character and that people will be led to the right action by sound reasoning. The more modern idea of “free will” does not arise in Aristotle’s writing. Nor does the concept of “free will” appear in the writings of Boethius and Aquinas, although they are both very much concerned with reconciling God’s foreknowledge and future contingent truths. The concept of “free will”, as we understand it today (and which is subject to charges of incoherence by the determinists I mention above) seems to originate with Dun Scotus. Prior to Scotus, philosophers had believed that the freedom of the will consisted of a person being able to will A at one time and will not-A at a later time. Scotus’s major innovation was to propose that at the instant a person wills A, he or she possessed the potentiality or capacity to will A or will not-A. This potentiality or capacity does not occur temporally prior to the act of willing but naturally prior to it. We can perhaps imagine Scotus’s proposal in the following way: a line representing a person’s past life bifurcates at the instant of the present and then follows two different possible trajectories into the future – Scotus is asking us to focus on the instant of bifurcation. (Of course, this picture is complicated by God’s foreknowledge.) William of Ockham criticised Scotus’s argument by saying that a capacity or potentiality that is not realised is not a real potentiality. However, I believe Ockham’s criticism is self-contradictory. Ockham is committed to the idea that contingent truths exist in the future; to say a state of affairs is contingent is to say that it could be or could have been some other way; so, if it could be some other way, it must possesses the potentiality to be some other way. Despite Ockham’s criticism, Scotus’s idea of potentiality in the present I believe won out and underpins our understanding of free will today.

I consider now the concept of “chance”. I find it interesting that the idea of chance appears in Aristotle but is virtually absent from the Christian theologians who followed him. One reason for this is that for Boethius and the thinkers who came after God had a providential plan for humanity; everything happens for a reason. To believe in chance is to believe that sometimes events turn out one way or another for no reason at all, an idea that runs counter to the Christian dogma of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent Creator. It seems, furthermore, that in the same way that people are compelled to believe in free will, we are compelled to believe that events, especially our own actions, result from prior reasons. Even though I am a pessimist, I find the idea that I might stop writing this essay at this point and go for a walk as a result of a random quantum fluctuation in my brain difficult to believe even though it may true; I might invent a story in which I tell myself that the reason I decided to go for a walk was because I needed to think about the next paragraph. It seems to me that Scotus comes close to rediscovering chance: it is only a step from his idea of freedom of the will, from the idea of potentiality or possibility, to the idea of randomness, causeless events. Duns Scotus, however, does not take this step.

Duns Scotus famously believed that the concepts we use to describe humans could also be used to describe God; his discussion of human free will is a preliminary step towards discussing God’s free will. According to Scotus, in the same way that we act contingently (rather than necessarily) upon those things over which we have power in the present, God acts contingently (rather than necessarily) upon the world. The difference between divine free will and human free will is that the former is perfect while the latter is imperfect. As I understand this claim, Scotus is saying that all logically possible states of affairs are potentially realisable by God although he chooses to actualise only the world in which we live. However, if God can be understood in human terms, the idea that He has free will is also subject to Ingawen’s criticisms. Either an action by God, the actualisation of a particular possibility, is necessitated by reasons that are prior to the action temporally (if God is in time) or prior naturally (if God is outside time), or God’s action is the result of pure chance; if the reasons for God’s action form a chain under his control, at some point we must arrive at a causeless first cause that can only be random. This point can also be made by employing an old saw: why is there something rather than nothing?

As mentioned above, for Aristotle and the Christian theologians who followed him the key concepts are “contingency” and “necessity” and I shall now discuss these concepts first from a modern perspective and then as these ideas are elaborated in the medieval tradition. Consider the proposition: “Donald Trump could have won the 2020 American presidential election.” In English, this sentence is ambiguous. It could mean, “It is possible that Donald Trump did win the 2020 presidential American election”, a proposition that most people (although not all) would regard as false. It could also however be understood as a claim that there existed a potentiality at the time for Donald Trump to win the election – “Donald Trump might have won the 2020 election if more people had freely chosen to vote for him” perhaps. I suspect that many people would regard the second sense of the sentence as true. I contend that most people today would regard the proposition “Donald Trump lost the 2020 American presidential election” as a contingent fact because it could have been otherwise – even though it occurred in the past. The modern understanding of necessity and contingency is very much influenced by the development of modal logic by Kripke and Lewis: according to this modern understanding a fact is necessary if it is true in all possible worlds (examples include the facts that water is H20 and a human being is not a prime number) and contingent if it is true is some possible worlds and false in others. It is because we can imagine a possible world in which Trump won that we regard his loss as contingent rather than necessary. If we accept modern modal logic, if a fact is contingent at one time it is contingent at all times and if a fact is necessary at one time it is necessary at all times – Donald Trump’s 2020 loss was contingent in 2019, contingent when it occurred and still contingent today. Likewise if a fact is necessary, it is necessary whether we look at it as existing in the past, present or future. I cannot be sure that this way of looking at “contingency” and “necessity” is the mainstream understanding of these terms today but it is certainly the way I myself understood these terms.

One of the challenges I faced in studying these medieval philosophers is that they understood “necessity” and “contingency” rather differently than I do. For Aquinas and Scotus, many (although not all) facts about the future are contingent; when such a fact becomes present for Aquinas it becomes necessary and for Scotus it remains contingent; when it is past for both of them it becomes necessary. (This way of looking at facts, as a flow of events from future to past, is to some degree a B-theory perspective.) The deep conviction that the future is open, at least partly contingent, although the past is entirely fixed, necessary, is, of course, the reason why so many philosophers have fought against the consequence argument. The problem these theologians seek to address, as mentioned above, is how to reconcile future contingents with God’s omniscience or foreknowledge which might suggest that everything in the future is fixed. Aquinas’s solution is to put God outside time and space and to say that all history is perceptible for Him (the term he uses is scientia visionis) in the same way the present moment is perceptible for us: what is present to me is in a sense necessary at that moment and all time is present to God and thus in the same sense necessary to Him. According to William Lane Craig’s interpretation of Aquinas, an interpretation I think is fair, Aquinas is distinguishing between two different types of necessity: causal necessity and temporal necessity. Future contingents are contingent in the causal sense (they do not follow necessarily or deterministically from prior causes) but temporally necessary in the same way that my sitting in this chair writing this sentence right now is temporally necessary – at this moment, it could not be any other way. (Distinguishing between different types of necessity is not an uncommon manoeuvre among these theologians: William of Ockham distinguishes between necessity simpliciter and necessity per accidens.) Aquinas’s solution to the problem presumes that the present, like the past, is necessary, but I am not sure if this proposed solution really resolves the problem of future contingents because it does not address our core conviction that if something is contingent, it could be some other way . If God necessarily knows eternally that I will do something in my future, I fail to see how we could then describe my action as contingent. (Nelson Pike (1965) makes a very similar argument). We are forced to agree with Craig that Aquinas must be a B theorist of time (where B theory here refers both to McTaggart’s essay and my own B theory) and that, despite talk of future contingents, it entails the absence of free will. Importantly, because Scotus believes that the present is contingent rather than necessary, Aquinas’s proposed solution is not available to him. I admit it is not clear to me how Scotus reconciles divine foreknowledge with future contingency although he could perhaps be regarded as more of an A-theorist than Aquinas.

The more modern understanding of necessity and contingency is partly anticipated by William of Ockham when he distinguishes between accidentally necessary facts (facts which were contingent when they were in the future but are now past and so fixed, necessary), and facts which are are not strictly about the past and so can, in a sense, be described as contingent even if the propositions through which they are expressed prima facie seem to be concerned with the past. This is another major innovation. Another way of looking at this distinction is, as Marilyn McCord Adams discusses, to see it as being between “hard facts” and “soft facts”. Thus, for instance, “Julius Caesar died in 44BC” expresses a hard fact whereas “God believed eighty years ago that Joe Biden would win the 2024 Presidential Election”, if true, expresses a soft fact. In “On Occam’s Way Out”, (1986( Alvin Plantinga considers various difficulties related to how we can best understand accidental necessity, soft and hard facts, and the idea that some propositions are “strictly about” the past while others are not and concludes that the best way to define accidental necessity is as follows:

p is accidentally necessary at t if and only if p is true at t and it is not possible both that p  is true at t  and that there exist agents S1 . . . Sn and actions A1 . . . An such that (1) Ai is basic for Si, (2) Si has the power at t or later to perform Ai, and (3) necessarily, if every Si were to perform Ai at t or later, then p would have been false. (p. 261)

There are some problems with this definition. First, Plantinga is not clear in his essay as to why we require the idea of ‘basic action’. Second, Plantinga does not distinguish between necessity simpliciter and necessity per accidens – he is ostensibly defining the second but the definition also applies to the first. There is another significant problem. Suppose t occurs in the future? If it can then, according to the definition, there are three possible options. Either it is possible to have accidentally necessary propositions about the future, or no proposition about the future can be true, or all propositions about the future can potentially be falsified as the result of subsequent actions by an agent or group of agents. Consider now the symmetric case, the proposition “God believed eighty years ago that Jones would mow his lawn last Thursday”. If Jones did not mow his lawn, God’s belief was wrong which is impossible because God is infallible. Therefore Jones never had the power not to mow his lawn last Thursday which would mean that, by definition, the proposition is accidentally necessary. But does this mean that it was accidentally necessary forty years ago? The same three interpretations apply. Either the proposition was accidentally necessary forty years ago even though the mowing was then in the future, or the proposition was not true before last Thursday but became true when Jones mowed his lawn or Jones did indeed have the power forty years ago not to mow his lawn last Thursday despite God’s belief to the contrary. I suspect that Plantinga would reject the first and third option in both sets and embrace the second – Plantinga is following in Aristotle’s footsteps in saying that many propositions about the future are neither true nor false but become true or false when they become present, Aristotle’s own answer, according to the standard interpretation, to the consequence argument and the problem of logical determinism. But, although Aristotle’s solution is Plantinga’s solution, it is not Ockham’s solution. Ockham, as I understand it, believed in the law of the excluded middle as it applies to propositions about the future and believed that God has true knowledge about future contingents. Despite Plantinga’s claim that his essay has shown that “neither God’s foreknowledge nor God’s forebelief poses a threat to human freedom”, it seems to me that his way out is simply to deny that God has infallible knowledge of the future.

Consider, now, that it seems is reasonable to suppose that actions taken in the present can potentially affect the future; if so, it seems reasonable to alter Plantinga’s definition by saying that actions taken before t can potentially falsify p. If this is the case, then all true propositions about the past, present, and future are accidentally necessary except those that could potentially have been falsified by the free actions of agents either before or after. This would accommodate the modern view that Trump’s 2020 loss was contingent rather than necessary. But Ockham, as mentioned above, believed that was no such thing as unrealised potentialities: if there is no such thing as unrealised potentialities, all true propositions, according to both Plantinga’s original definition and the amended definition, must be accidentally necessary. It is not in anyone’s power to change the future, let alone the past.

In their writings, Ockham, and his inheritors Adams and Plantinga, argue that although the future is to some extent open, accidentally necessary facts, facts strictly about the past, are fixed, unalterable. I wish to now approach this idea first through the prism of the A-theory and then the B-theory. Consider the following thought experiment. Suppose a group of powerful authoritarian conspirators seek to erase all traces of Peter Damian from all the libraries and museums and so on, and forbid those philosophers familiar with Damian from talking about him or even mentioning his name. Within a generation, Damian will be forgotten. According to the A theory, this amounts to changing the past (even though these conspirators have acted in the present). To put it another way, if God intervenes tomorrow and erases all evidence that Damian existed from the world, including people’s memories (as God could, being omnipotent), He will then have changed the past even though He is acting in what is today the future. According to the A-theory, the past only exists in people’s minds as it can be inferred or reconstructed from the traces it has left in the present and so we can change the past by changing the present. This suggests that all facts, including those ‘strictly about the past’, are soft (in the sense, for instance, “Julius Caesar died in 44BC” could become false if God decides right now that the present shall be such that he didn’t). If, however, we espouse the B-theory, it is trivially true to say that all facts, including those about the future, are hard. Either way, the hard fact-soft fact distinction collapses.

I wish to conclude this essay by referring back to the A-theory and B-theory I proposed earlier. I have titled this essay “Chance and Necessity” because I believe the only options are indeterminism (in which chance plays a role in the world) or determinism. The A-theory is compatible not only with indeterminism but also, if we accept the argument I proposed above when discussing dependent arising, determinism; the B-theory is, by definition, only compatible with determinism. Can we reconcile these two theories? I would like to suggest, contrary to modal logicians like Lewis, that there is only one world, the actual world, and that it evolves deterministically, necessarily, even if no one but a possibly fictitious omniscient being knows all the facts of past, present and future. How then do we understand statements like “It is possible that the Covid 19 virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan in late 2019” or “It is possible that Joe Biden will win the American presidential election in 2024”? I would argue that when a person articulates such sentences today, she is asserting not that some possible world exist in which the lab leak occurred and others in which it did not, that some possible worlds exist in which Joe Biden will win and some in which he will not, but really rather that the claims these sentences present as possible are either definitely true or false and she doesn’t know which. Talk of possibility is really talk of either uncertainty or ignorance. For centuries, scholars have been spilling ink on the issue of how to reconcile free will with divine omniscience; it seems to me that the simple answer is to either give up on an omniscient God, give up on free will, or give up on both. The A-theory and B-theory are ways of doing just that.