Time After Time
Schirmer, Gregory A.
(Continued from page 310) and played by Anatol Rapoport, who might well be called the father of empirical research in this field. It is called "Tit For Tat." A strategy is a stable...
...He has a fascinating chapter on the live-and-let-live system in trench warfare in World War I, which the privates in the trenches developed with their respective enemies, much to the annoyance of their officers...
...These same qualities make his latest book an extraordinary reading adventure, no matter what your own beliefs...
...KiJng probes distinctly modern ones as well...
...The debt dilemma facing Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and other Latin borrower-nations, as well as the entire international monetary system, receives adequate, if uninspired coverage, and the final chapter, a historical overview of dubious banking practices, is more in the nature of an introduction than a conclusion...
...The principles that do seem to emerge from the formal experiment are that it pays to be "nice" -- that is, have a prejudice in favor of cooperation and being good...
...The implication of the whole model is that there is a certain prejudice in the whole evolutionary process towards being nice, towards cooperation, even though, of course, there may be niches in it for the nasty and the uncooperative...
...Her vision proves as infectious as it is distorted, restoring to each of the Swifts, for a while, the illusion of innocence untainted by the corruption of time: "Their youth was present to them, a mit age trembling in her flattery as air trembles close to the surface of summer roads...
...Is eternal life simply a psychological projection of mankind's instinct for self-preservation...
...But these niches tend to remain rather small...
...Swifts renewed and strengthened by Leda's invasion from the past...
...Once Leda makes her move, unveiling all the secrets that she has so cunningly extracted from each of the Swifts - - April's fondness for alcohol and marijuana, May's cleptomania, June's fascination with the young Catholic boy who helps her run the farm, and Jasper's interest in an apparently homosexual monk from a neighboring monastery - - the novel moves rather weakly to an unconvincing conclusion that finds the Banking on trouble IN BARKS WE TRUST Penny Lernoux Anchor/Doubleday, $16.95, 310 pp...
...MANFRED GROHE One of the world's most important theologians takes on humanity's most provocative question: Is there life after death ? Drawing on sources as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Hindu philosophy and the New Testament, Hans Kting confronts life after death as a medical, philosophical and theological problem...
...There are, for example, enough references to swans to bring to mind another Leda, the woman raped by a god-like swan in Yeats's famous poem...
...Joseph A. Puge p ENNY LERNOUX, Latin American correspondent for The Nation, has produced an engrossing yet exasperating account of financial and related evils perpetrated by the international brotherhood of bankers and other assorted villains...
...But the book neither hangs together as a coherent whole nor makes a convincing case against what it dimly suggests is a conspiracy involving banks, the Mafia, the C.I.A., the Vatican, and various fightwing terrorists and dictators...
...Once we introduce learning into the picture, however, what I have called "noogeaetic evolution" -- that is, the transmission of learned structures from one generation to the next through life experience -- the learning of new strategies becomes a very important element in the evolutionary system...
...If the first player starts by being bad, the second player responds by being bad...
...Perhaps the most important conclusion of the book is that "the foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship...
...As this passage suggests, Keane enjoys a considerable gift for evoking psychological suspense, for bringing to the surface the buried ambitions of a mind twisted by an obsessive clinging to the past...
...Axelrod gives a considerable number of very interesting economic, political, and social examples, which he calls cooperation without friendship, or foresight...
...The field which Axelrod has opened up suggests that large improvements could be made in the study of threat systems and the payoffs of organized violence...
...Gregory A. Schirmer T IME AFTER TIME is set in a large, dilapidated country house in the south of Ireland, the emblem of a class -- the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy -that once dominated nearly every phase of Irish life, but now exists largely as a tattered remnant of its impressive history...
...With calculated charm, Leda manipulates the family until she has the three sisters in her power and Jasper within reach: "They were hers - - three bridges back to her innocence...
...Interesting examples from economics involve various forms of moderation of competition in the market...
...Kting's writing identified by David Tracy in his New Republic review of Does God Exist...
...Time After "r;,ne is markedly selfconscious of the Anglo-Irish tradition to which it belongs...
...I don't know how she kept it up so long" - - bite humorously into the limitations and pettiness of this enclosed, upper-class world...
...If the first player, however, introduces a random strategy and does not follow the Tit For Tat behavior -unless his strategy is to always be bad (what Axelrod calls "all D" -- that is, all defecting) -- at some point or other the first player will be good and, of course, the Tit For Tat player will also be good...
...In familiar places," she says at one point in the novel, "memories are never absolved...
...Into this damaged, centripetal world comes a figure from that past, a halfJewish Austrian cousin named Leda, whose visit to Durraghglass fifty years before dazzled the Swift children with their first (and last) glimpse of the romantic, and left a provocative memory burned into the mind of each of them...
...Now an old woman, Leda brings to Durraghglass her own disability - - she is blind - - and her own family skeleton: a brief but disastrous adolescent affair with the Swift children's father that took place during her previous visit, when she was seventeen, and that ended in Leda's being summarily sent home and in the father's apparent suicide...
...Is reincamation compatible with Christianity...
...April's recollection of her mother's advice on "the loving obligations of marriage" - - " I t ' s a thing men do...
...is further proof thai Hans Kiing is, in Mr...
...another, better age while trying at the same time to ignore the various skeletons hanging in the family closet...
...In Keane's version, Leda is the aggressor, trying to violate the jealously guarded security of the present...
...Bowen once said that every Irish country house that has remained in the same family "is an island - - and, like an island, a world...
...What needs to be done now is to try to unite game theory of this kind with learning theory...
...This book suggests that there is a prejudice in the evolutionary process towards "niceness," even if the strategies of interacting organisms are fixed, which they tend to be in biogenetic evolution...
...DOUBLEI,~ psychological disabilities, manifest chiefly in their complacent entrapment in a futile present and their desperate and doomed efforts to forget the past...
...In Banks We Trust is as topical as today's headlines about pending defaults by Latin American countries unable or unwilling to pay the billions of dollars of interest they owe on colossal debts to banks in the developed world...
...Re-examining traditional questions, such as the nature of heaven and hell, Dr...
...She has returned to Durraghglass partly out of an irrational longing to recover the past of her first love, which she finds embodied in the ageless music of Jasper's voice, so like his father's, and partly by a desire for revenge on the family that once turned her out...
...and it pays particularly well for nice people to play with each other, to get together...
...she sees Durraghglass and its inhabitants not as they are, but as they once were, in the golden past o f lavish Sunday luncheons, fox-hunts, and country balls...
...The country house, called Durraghglass, is inhabited by four elderly survivors of a once-prosperous AngloIrish family: a bachelor named Jasper Swift and his three sisters, April, a widow, and May and June, both spinsters...
...Utilizing an episodic approach, Lernoux confronts the reader with a series of examples of banking misfeasance several of which would be likely candidates for book-length treatment...
...Part of the strategy is to start by being good...
...It crosses all the disciplines in the social sciences...
...A strategy is a stable relationship between a present decision and a perception or record of n previous events...
...But Keane's most obvious Anglo-Irish predecessor is Elizabeth Bowen, whose stories of the 1930s and 1940s used the fragile and isolated status of her class to describe the sense of alienation that is so much a part of the modern sensibility...
...Molly Keane belongs tO that world, and in this novel, her second written under her own name (she wrote eleven novels and four plays under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell), she creates a world poisonously folded in upon itself and its past, feeding on the memories of study...
...It is a very important contribution i- i,~elf to the general theory of human interaction...
...In Time After Time, Molly Keane has created such an island and, in the process, a world that explores with conviction and power the ways in which we are all shaped and controlled by the past...
...Unfortunately, the novel reaches its psychological climax relatively early...
...But the darkness of the novel is offset in part by Keane's equally considerable gift for comedy...
...Easily the most riveting of her chapters are those chronicling the emergence of Commonweal: 316...
...It also, however, suggests that the evolutionary process in this field of human knowledge is still in full swing and has a long way to go...
...This is work that still remains to be done in all the many fields that Axelrod has touched upon...
...Each of the Swifts is physically disabled -- Jasper lost an eye in a childhood accident, April is deaf, May is missing three and a half fingers from her fight hand, and June suffers from dyslexia -- and these defects suggest and reinforce the characters' more crippling Commonweal: 314 Death...
...In this experiment it does not seem to be possible to change strategies through a learning process...
...After "warming up" with descriptions of financial fiascoes perpetrated by Chase Manhattan and Citibank, she details the role of banks in the CIA's shadowy promotion of heroin traffic in Southeast Asia, in the Miami-centered drug trade, and in the strange links among the Vatican, a Masonic lodge called P-2, and neofascist assassins...
...Thus, if both players use this strategy and the first starts by being good, the other will be good, and both will be good indefinitely...
...In many ways, this is a landmark Poisoned swan songs TIlE AFTER TINE Molly Kesne Knopf, $13.95, 249 pp...
...Now an Image paperback: ON BEING A CHRISTIAN Hans Kiing's brilliant response to all who ask "Why be a Christian today...
...Axelrod has a very interesting chapter with William D. Hamilton on the evolution of cooperation in biological systems, a little reminiscent of the earlier work of Peter Kropotkin and Clyde Allee, not actually mentioned, and throws some light on the evolution of altruism even in the biosphere, certainly on the evolution of symbiosis...
...Do gravely ill patients and their doctors have the right to choose when life should end...
...It may well become a religious and spiritual classic" --New York Times Book Review A Book-of-ti . . . . . Jnth Club Alternate, at all bookstores now...
...This, however, is because both cooperation and trust come out of a learning relationship, and learning itself is a function of the durability of the relationship...
...Judgment...
...this is something that seems hard to put into formal experiment...
...Examples from politics include the development of cooperative relationships between the regulators and the regulated, cooperation among Congressmen, the possibilities of a disarmament race, the development of cooperative solutions to international conflict, like the Israeli-Egyptian problem, and the development of very complex forms of reciprocity in all social relations...
...In this very simple case the strategy is to start by being "good" and then do what the other player did the last time...
...Tracy's words, "the best exponent of contemporary theological concerns to the wider culture of our day...
...Some she might diminish (destroy was a word she forgot) when her power at Durraghglass reached its supremacy, when she would live and make love with the voice that belonged to someone else...
...Time's a joke," Leda says soon after her arrival, and her physical blindness makes possible a more dangerous one...
...it pays tobe forgiving, up to a point...
...You won't like it" -- and a neighbor's comment on May's relentless lectures to the local garden club - - "Her lecture was bliss...
...One hopes particularly that the people in the strategic sciences will follow this clue, for they frequently assume that nobody ever learns anything...
...ETERNAL LIFE...
...As its title suggests, Time After Time is about those memories and those skeletons, and, more generally, about the inexorable pressure that the past exerts on the present...
...There is a problem here that I do not recall Axelrod mentioning, that if both play Tit For Tat under these circumstances they both stay bad indefinitely, which is why it is important to start by being good...
...An instinctive sense for the heart of the matter and uncomrlaon common sense" are the qualities in Dr...
...Leda's perception is, of course, a mirage, and her flattery pernicious...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 10
