Reviews for The Flight of Peter Fromm

The average rating for The Flight of Peter Fromm based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-18 00:00:00 nigel melas The Origins of Deplorability Martin Gardner was a mathematician and writer about mathematics who wrote only one novel*, this one; and an exceptionally good novel it is. It is the hidden mathematical connection that makes it good - as both a novel and a moral tale for our time. The narrative line of The Flight of Peter Fromm is that of the evolution of American fundamentalist belief and its adaptation to the world beyond the tribal society in which it has been formed. Why should a well-known mathematician engage himself in such a project? The answer, I am convinced, is: because American religious fundamentalism emerged in a period, around the turn of the 20th century, when a parallel debate about the fundamentals of mathematics was also taking place. While Christian religious belief had been under intense fire by historical criticism and biblical exegesis during the latter half of the 19th century, mathematics was simultaneously being challenged to demonstrate its own rationality. From the 1870's onwards, biblical scholars and historians like Julius Wellhausen and Albert Schweitzer had succeeded in revealing some very uncomfortable facts that undermined much of conventional scriptural interpretation. Issues of authorship, chronology and intentions in the Old and New Testaments rolled out like ingots from (mostly German) academic word-mills. Many Christian theologians put up a fierce but ultimately futile battle against both the scientific rigor as well as the sheer common sense of these new 'revelations.' This powerful criticism brought into question not just particular doctrines but the entire Protestant Reformation with its dictum of 'Everyman his own interpreter of Scripture'. In America, this threat was arguably more acute than elsewhere since the social cohesion of the Westward expanding country had been provided not so much by civil government as by Methodist peripatetic preachers and the self-forming Baptist congregations that moved forward with the frontier. If biblical truth was not self-evident, what chance the derivative truths of American democracy? The situation provoked a response among American Christians that became known as Fundamentalism, that is, the adherence to a specific and fixed set of doctrinal 'fundamentals' regardless of scientific, historical internal biblical evidence which might seem to contradict them. This movement grew in membership and political power throughout the 20th century and remains the voice of today's evangelical Christians, particularly among so-called Red State Republicans. Gardner's fiction is a description of the state of that movement and its development from WWII to the early 1970's. In remarkably close parallel with the emergence of biblical criticism, mathematics underwent similar developments. 19th century mathematical researchers like Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind (more Germans!), started working on problems in set theory and infinity. One of these problems, the so-called Continuum Hypothesis** was particularly thorny since it seemed to undermine confidence in the reliability of even basic arithmetic. The initial response of the mathematical community was not unlike that of the American Protestants. Bertrand Russell with his colleague Alfred North Whitehead threw themselves into providing the axiomatic fundamentals needed to formally demonstrate the integrity of the system of numbers. The result was the Principia Mathematica, originally published in 1910, precisely the same year as American Baptists and Presbyterians published their first version of The Fundamentals (The Catholic version, the papal bull Pascendi, appeared in 1907; popes can act more quickly than councils). Russell's Principia had a run of growing popularity for about 20 years until a mathematical smart aleck named Kurt Godel demonstrated not only that Russell and Whitehead were wrong, but that the very objective of their project, the establishment of the inherent rationality of numbers, was futile. Godel showed that no axiomatic system could ever account for its own rationality. No arithmetic rationality equals no secure foundation for the so-called science of mathematics. Godel' s Incompleteness Theorem has caused about as much consternation in mathematics ever since as The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has done in physics. Similarly, religious fundamentalism in America seemed to have reached a peak of influence (right along with the Ku Klux Klan) by the beginning of WWII. Education was eroding the credibility of primitive religious beliefs generally; the expansion of the federal government was providing a cohesive American self-image which was independent of the local, historically religiously-based identity; scientific and philosophical research in language began to show the inherent conventionality of words and their problematic relation to things. So religious fundamentalism was feeling exactly the same pinch as its mathematical sibling: if even language was unreliable, what hope could doctrinal pronouncements, necessarily made in language, have for expressing the purported truth of religion.*** Gardner picks up his story at just about this historical point. His first person narrator is a Unitarian minister, Dr. Homer Wilson, who teaches at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Wilson makes a number of jokes at his own expense, generally about the somewhat slim claim that Unitarians have to be Christians, or even theists for that matter. Unitarians, very much like mathematicians, are aware of the fundamental irrationality of their adherence to their calling. They nevertheless maintain a view that there may be something, call it divine, hiding behind the boundary of the irrational. Peter Fromm, a hick from the Oklahoma Bible Belt, and offspring of true blue fundamentalist parents becomes Wilson's student in Chicago. Peter is on a mission: to bring the notoriously humanist and liberal Chicago divinity faculty to its spiritual senses and back to the Ol' Time Religion. He is energetic, passionate, and skilled (he had preached routinely as a teen-ager). But of course he fails; he fails not only in converting his colleagues but in maintaining his own evangelistic certainties. It is this failure that is the real subject of Gardner's novel, how it affects Peter but also Gardner's prognosis about its impact further along in history. It is here that the book makes an important contrast between the religious and mathematical responses to failure. And it is here that one can see the reason for the persistence and sheer bloody-mindedness of American Fundamentalism. The issue he seems to be putting forth is: Can we make a rational response to a situation which is literally fundamentally irrational? Mathematics is often put forth as the Queen of the Sciences, the ultimate carrier of truth. But it has also always carried a religious tinge from the days of the ancient Greeks (the Dionysus of Pythagoras) to the 21st century (the Supreme Fascist of Paul Erdos). Indeed numbers have been historically described as not just the words of God but the essence of the divine. It would seem that human consciousness, unable to entirely understand itself, is vulnerable to almost anything it can find to fill the chasm of irrationality that it perceives in itself. Some solutions are innocuous; others have horrendous consequences for one's fellow humans as well as the rest of the planet. Gardner's novel implicitly shows the alternatives and their consequences. Not all mathematicians are acutely concerned with its irrational boundary or with lies 'beyond' it. Like Homer Wilson, they accept this fundamental uncertainty and get on, more or less pragmatically, with a life filled with numbers. Some, however, find this intellectual dead end troublesome and try to address it, even if only to move it only slightly into the beyond. Only rarely do they become obsessed with the beyond itself; and even more rarely do they make claims about the mathematical beyond that they then attempt to impose on other mathematicians as truth. Similarly not all human beings, mathematicians or not, find the mysteries of human existence - ultimate causation, ultimate purpose, consciousness, free will, etc. - problematic. But some do and they often turn to religion or philosophy to provide some reasonable explanation for these apparently unreasonable questions. Having formulated some answers (or more likely heard some answers fifth-hand by someone who says 'Trust me, I've seen the beyond), the Peter Fromm character in them either stops looking for other answers... or he goes mad. Actually even the first alternative is a kind of madness since it destroys communication with those who might share his concerns but insist on continuing their search. In short, Fundamentalism, the establishment of fixed religious or philosophical doctrines, isn't bad because it promotes wrong doctrines. Rather, it is disastrously destructive because it is an inhibition of the very human impulse to understand, a closure of the process of education, a betrayal of the capacity that human beings have to think and act together. It is wrong because it tries to stop not just thought but the society which makes thought possible. Mathematics is the hidden metaphor in Gardner's novel for an alternative to fundamentalist tribalism, an alternative that expands the community of 'believers' indefinitely. Forget the rash of recent books about the forgotten Americans who have found Trump. For those people Trump is quite literally an Incarnation of their Prosperity Gospel, the latest version of American fundamentalist psychosis. The Flight of Peter Fromm, although written almost an half century ago, is for my money a far better analysis of the existing cultural situation. Hillary Clinton's electioneering remark about the Trump's Deplorables is accurate but not accurately explained. I contend that they are largely the seekers who have stopped seeking, nihilists who move from absolute to absolute because they can't tolerate the fundamental uncertainty of being human. They have demonstrated their fundamentalism with no regard for evidence, or logic, or their fellow human beings for the past year. It will be interesting to see where they alight next after their current fundamentals fail. Postscript: it strikes me that the themes of Gardner are remarkably reinforced and demonstrated as significant in Pankaj Mishra's recent The Age of Anger: * This is not strictly true if his 1998 book Visitors from Oz: The Wild Adventures of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman is considered as a novel. **The problem can be stated simply: Does the set of all sets contain itself? The answer seems to be both Yes and No which is the kind of self-contradiction that gives mathematicians dyspepsia and nightmares. *** By the time of WWII, Reinhold Niebuhr, the premier American Protestant theologian, could write a 600 page book, Human Nature and Human Destiny, with not a single mention of the central Christian belief of the Resurrection.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-18 00:00:00 Karen Stolfo This book tells the story of Peter Fromm, a seminary student, who starts out as a teenage (boy wonder) Pentecostal fundamentalist preacher and then decides to attend a liberal seminary (University of Chicago). Consequently his beliefs begin to move incrementally in a liberal direction. Peter explores, adopts and gradually tires of numerous theologies along his path of changing beliefs. Each step along the way Peter studies and ponders with deep emotional feelings the various religious, philosophical, and scientific ideas. In general theses steps include the theory of evolution, German higher criticism, Roman Catholicism, Karl Barth/neo-orthodoxy, Paul Tillich/Richard Niebuhr/situation ethics, Communism, military service, historical biblical criticism, secular humanism, atonement theory and atheism. Peter's personality is described as follows:"... he had one rare, refreshing trait, a constitutional inability to accept any form of intellectual evasion."(9)The story is narrated by a mentor professor/preacher who virtually adopts Peter during his years at the seminary as an extended member of his family. The professor is a Unitarian minister, but in private conversations admits that he doesn't believe there is a God. Early in the book the professor explains the demands on his profession as,"To be a Protestant minister today, in the typical church of a prosperous suburb, one must be as skilled as a politician in the rhetoric of ambiguity, circumlocution, and double-talk." (9)The problem for Peter near the end of the book is that he has finally arrived at the end of his studies with a PhD in theology, and he now has to face the prospect of entering a profession where he will be expected to deliver a weekly sermon to a church congregation."I feel the way young Barth must have felt...The good people of my flock will be sitting there, looking up, expecting me--expecting me!--to talk to them about God, to tell them what they should believe and what they ought to do. How can I do that when I don't know myself what to believe or do?" (207)His professor/mentor explains his choice."...you have to choose between being a truthful traitor or a loyal liar." (208)Peter has arrived at a point where intellectually he's a secular humanist but he still possesses remnants of the former Pentecostal within his heart. These dissident feelings lead to a climatic ending where he experiences a psychotic break while delivering an Easter sermon (or maybe it's an ecstatic spiritual experience; it would make a heck of a movie scene). The book ends after Peter has recovered from his climatic break with a conversation between him and his professor friend about faith. Peter says, "Faith is Quixotic. Faith is absurd. Who can pretend to understand it? There's a deep mystery about it. It's tied up with the enigmas of God and free will, with the incredible fact that a world exists and we're in it and we know we're in it and we know we'll soon not be in it. Faith is a kind of madness. I don't deny it. I can't explain why I believe. I only know I can't not believe." (271)The professor says he believes that Peter is evading all the dilemmas of theism by calling them mysteries. Peter answers, "I don't think it's evasion. It's just an honest confession of ignorance. Thinking about anything has to end finally in mystery. And why not? After all, we didn't make the world any more than the jellyfish did." (272)I have given the book five stars because I admire the skill of the author to explore this subject in such depth in a readable novel. However, this book isn't for everybody. People who haven't passed through a similar faith journey will find the book to be nonsensical. This book is a novel, however it is set within a real historical setting with many references (sometimes including page numbers) to real theological literature and their authors. As such this book is more about theology than it is fictional literature. But of course, I know there are many of you readers out there who consider those two as being the same thing. Wikipedia has an interesting article about Martin Gardner, the author of this book. He is known primarily as a mathematician who was a long time contributor to Scientific American magazine. The following cartoon has nothing to do with this book. It just happens to be my favorite thological cartoon, and I'm using this book review as an excuse to share it. Perhaps Calvin will grow up to be another Peter Fromm.