How we think about history and guilt: Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis

 It is to my own discredit that I had not read this novel before.  A few months ago, Martin Amis passed away, and so began the international chorus of accolades for one of the last literary giants of Britain.  One cannot read everything, but the most obvious work that I needed to read was Time's Arrow.  The novel follows the life of Odilo Unverdorben, from the perspective of an observer inside his head experiencing time backwards.  The observer has a basic sense of Unverdorben's emotional state, but not Unverdorben's thoughts.  Upon Unverdorben's death, the observer awakens with a range of knowledge, factual and linguistic, but nothing about the world, and then watches the world run backwards through Unverdorben's eyes.  Unverdorben was a nazi war criminal-- a doctor who performed experiments under a Mengele-like character, nicknamed Uncle Pepi at Auschwitz.

Run the Holocaust in reverse.  Ovens call down ashes from the sky to build a new race, baked in ovens, and restored to life in shower/gas chambers.  Uncle Pepi imbues life.  You begin to get a sense of what Amis is doing.  Yet most of the novel does not take place at Auschwitz.  It follows Unverdorben backwards, as he experiences unexplained nightmares of who you eventually learn is Uncle Pepi.  You observe him practicing actual medicine, and even distributing medicine to brothels and practicing surreptitious abortions in red light districts after he fled Germany to America after WWII.  You watch the war approach.  You watch the Holocaust approach with some impending dread, but of a very different kind.  Eventually, you see Unverdorben's childhood, and the inevitable end of the narrator.

This is not a novel for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.  The nazis, like most villains, saw themselves as heroes.  This is one of the core lessons of the world.  Few can conceive of themselves as villains.  Everyone needs to see himself as the hero of his own story.  However cruel, however vile, however sadistic, the human mind will almost always find a way to rationalize it because humans are better at rationalizing cruelty than nearly anything else.  One of the observations that Stanislaw Lem really nailed in my favorite of his books-- The Futurological Congress-- was that the successful company that provided people with fantasies of brutal violence needed not just to give people the opportunity to indulge their most vicious impulses, vicious and evil as humans are (I do not respect humans at a moral level), they needed to do so in a way that indulged a sense of self-righteousness.  I am brutalizing you and torturing you because I am right.

This, of course, is why my favorite philosophers inveigh against vengeance, in favor of mercy.

If you want to get at the core of how people enjoy their most sadistic impulses, it is self-righteous cruelty that people enjoy most.  Cruelty and self-righteousness are inextricably linked.  That is why the more cruel people are, the more determined they become to tell themselves that they are right, to justify their actions to themselves and even to their victims.

And similarly, those with the most unshakable self-confidence in their righteousness are invariably shitbags.

What does it take to make the worst evil in history into the righteousness that it saw itself to be, despite the nightmares that plagued Unverdorben to the end of his life?

Run time backwards.  Consider.  Everything about good and evil flips when you reverse time because you reverse cause and effect.  That which heals instead kills.  That which hurts instead cures.  A reference Amis repeatedly makes is that an act of domestic violence, to the time-reversed narrator, appears to induce calm and tranquility.  Unverdorben, the doctor, hurts or kills, but Unverdorben, the nazi war criminal participated in the great work of building a new race.  Reverse time, and you flip cause and effect.  Flip cause and effect, and you swap good and evil.

As the prayer goes, dayenu, that would have been enough, but Amis actually does have far more to say.  The narrator goes through life, beginning with the pain of elderly life and gradually experiencing more vigor.  He looks about him wondering why people don't appreciate that process, not understanding that they experience forward time, and hence don't appreciate what they have.  A nice observation about the importance of gratitude and how that changes your outlook.  The book is filled with those kinds of observations.  Economics and who gets money from whom...  Beautiful.

Yet of course, at the core one cannot look away from the moral commentaries created by reversing cause and effect.  At first glance, it is the kind of piece that looks like stunt writing from an author of technical skill just pulling a trick.  Stunt writing may be fun to read, but if it is merely a stunt, you stop thinking about it after you finish the book.  The question of whether the book is mere stunt or true insight derived from taking a different perspective is whether you must continue to contemplate the implications beyond what is stated directly in the text.

Amis does not write about cause and effect in scientific terms.  He does not write, as we instruct students about causal inference, that for A to cause B, A must precede B, and that all of causation is therefore dependent on time and time order.  He does not dwell on the basic philosophical divide between consequentialism and deontology, yet within either, one can parse the role of time.  Consequentialism is a moral philosophy based on consequence, on cause, on effect, all of which relies on order, on sequence.  My actions are good if they cause good outcomes.  Time, time order and directionality.

Even deontology presumes time because it presumes that an action can be evaluated based on a rule, based on a sort of contract of mutuality, of universality of obligation.  No action is the same if reversed.  It becomes its own opposite.  Guilt and innocence reverse.

Were this mere stunt writing, Amis could not implicitly pose questions about the nature of good and evil in moral philosophy, in the context of the nature of causation.  His intent, clearly, is not to invoke sympathy for the devil, but merely to clarify your perspective on actions and history.

And so in retrograde fashion, appropriately enough, I will conclude by noting something to which Amis returns throughout the novel.  Run time in reverse, and it appears to the narrator in Unverdorben's head that people walk around always looking back at where they have been, but never at where they are going.

True enough, and yet finding a clear view, or a new insight from history eludes most.

Lost Tribe, "Cause and Effect," from their self-titled debut.