Satantango

As a writer, László Krasznahorkai has accurately, I think, been compared to Kafka, Gogol, Bulgakov and Beckett. To that list I might add Maxim Gorky, whose play, The Lower Depths, also paints an unflattering portrait of the bottom classes. The novel is set in rural Hungary on a failed communal "estate" during the communist period. It begins in late October as the farm laborers are being paid their shares from the proceeds of their summer work and the inhabitants are settling in for the winter.

Most of the characters are leading abject lives and would rather live elsewhere, but they have nowhere to go. They entertain themselves by spying on their neighbors, and most of the men lust after Mrs. Schmidt, who sometimes accommodates them. During the winter months the residents have nothing to do except drink. In the worst family, the Horgoses, the two elder daughters are prostitutes, the young son is an unsupervised juvenile delinquent, and the young daughter, Esti, is learning disabled. In the saddest chapter of the novel, which I found difficult to read, Esti, who is mistreated by her mother and brother after being rejected by the special school to which she had been sent, kills herself with rat poison. The setting is utterly depressing, with continuous rain, mud everywhere and constant bickering. All of the buildings are falling apart, with windows and doors that don't close; some rooms have weeds growing in them and others are full of spiders.

The novel revolves around the return of Irimiás and his assistant, Petrina. Irimiás had been credited with bringing success to the estate a few years earlier but had inexplicably disappeared along with Petrina, and both were thought dead. When word gets out that the two were seen on the road heading toward the estate, the inhabitants become ecstatic and party all night – hence the tango – hoping that Irimiás will set things straight again. Irimiás agrees to help them by employing them at a new project a few miles away, but shortly after they arrive there they learn that the deal, if there had really been one, has fallen through, and that he has arranged to break them up and send them off to new positions that he's found for them at various other locations. They become part of a mysterious plan that he is presenting to the authorities, perhaps to form some sort of spy network under his direction. One of the most humorous sections in the novel describes the attempt by bureaucrats to rephrase Irimiás's candid, colorful descriptions of the people in order to create a proper document for the project, whatever it is.

There are structurally interesting aspects to the novel. In places, the same scene is recounted several times, each from the point of view of a different character. I didn't notice it initially, but the chapter numbers go from one to six and then backwards from six to one, rather than from one through twelve. Standing above the fray for the first few chapters is a reclusive, obese and dissolute doctor who observes the other inhabitants from a window in his run-down house and takes copious notes. At the end of the novel, when most of his neighbors have moved away, he decides to write a novel instead, which, of course, is Satantango. Thus, the novel turns back on itself, like a serpent eating its tail or the hands drawing themselves in the M.C. Escher lithograph.

The main tension of the novel has to do with whether Irimiás represents good or evil: is he Satan? Certainly he has more intelligence and cunning than the others, yet he is also highly secretive, and one can never know his true motives. Some of the characters are religious or superstitious, and events occur, such as the unexplained sound of a ringing bell, that they interpret as signs or omens. However, in the course of the novel, Irimiás plainly states that he is an atheist, and any hints of the supernatural are explained by natural phenomena. If anything, Irimiás is an offhand force for good who faces obstacles and limitations of his own that impede his ability to meet his goals: he too leads a troubled life, but is somewhat more competent in his execution of it than the others.

What interested me about the novel, aside from its successful artistry in both language and form, is its perceptiveness of human nature. It reminded me of the printing plant where I once worked in Dixon, Illinois. Some years before I arrived there it had been a failing company that was poorly managed by the son of the local newspaper scion. In order to save money on heating they used to turn off the heat on weekends, and then on Monday mornings during the winter it would take several hours to start up the presses because the ink was all solid. The plant was built on the previous town circus site. Eventually the facility was sold to a Chicago-area businessman who hired a new president to run the operation. That person, Larry Dussair, was the most effective executive I ever met, and, like Irimiás, he was excellent at manipulating people, and you never knew what he really thought. He even had his office set up such that his desk and chair were elevated, so when you spoke to him he looked down on you. One of his interview techniques was to suddenly stop talking without explanation and then watch you squirm in silence while he stared intensely at you. In hindsight, Larry just knew how to get things done, and he had developed an arsenal of techniques to that end; sometimes he seemed above the law and sinister, but in the end he was just an ordinary but talented person working very hard to succeed at his job. The reason why I mention Larry is that he had the same effect on some of the local people in Dixon that Irimiás had on the people on the estate. They attributed an almost supernatural power to him, and I recall one employee telling me that someone she knew who visited the plant had sensed a strong power there. Thus, superstition isn't restricted to the likes of rural Hungary.

Although, as I said, in some respects the book is highly depressing, it is still rather refreshing to me, given that literary fiction in this part of the world tends to be contrived in order to fit current literary fashions – such as those favoring identity politics. For example, rather than depicting Mrs. Horgos as stupid, lazy and irresponsible, as Krasznahorkai does, here she would have to be described as an innocent victim of prejudice and discrimination whose cultural values have been unjustly denigrated. In the U.S., calling anyone stupid, lazy and irresponsible is almost tantamount to a hate crime. Ideally, I prefer a balanced portrait of people that shows all sides of their personalities – which are there whether or not writers choose to acknowledge them.

As to whether or not I recommend the novel, it depends on who you are and what kind of fiction you like to read. If you are unfamiliar with the authors mentioned in the first paragraph and read mainly for light entertainment, you may as well skip it. However, if you have a serious interest in literature as an art form, Satantango is de rigeur; I think that it may well be one of the most important novels of the twentieth century and that Krasznahorkai may deservedly win a Nobel one day. Although my natural preference for novels lies with ones about educated and intelligent people, Satantango is a fine work of art, and I'm glad to have read it.

Diary

We finally got a small dose of winter, with a temperature of minus eighteen, but that was short-lived, and we're back to warm temperatures and no snow, with the exception of the mountain elevations, where it's slightly colder (these aren't exactly the Himalayas). Winters are bad for stargazing here, and this one has been no exception, but Jupiter is back and the Great Red Spot, the storm more than twice the size of Earth, is said to be more distinct this year; I'll be viewing it whenever the skies clear. I've started to read Satantango and am enjoying it so far, but will withhold comment until I've finished, because, unlike The Mandarins, it is a story with twists and turns that reads like a true novel as it unfolds; the meaning or lack thereof may not emerge until the end, whereas in more realistic fiction you always have some sense of where you are at each point in the narrative. For now I'll just say that the quality of the prose is quite high – higher than that of any of the other living writers I've mentioned.

I seem to be benefiting from my Internet detox program. There is a hysterical addictive quality to the Internet that younger people may be unable to escape, which explains why they fall victim to the pathologies described by Sherry Turkle. One of the advantages of old age is that it provides awareness of models of cognitive self-preservation that younger people may never have been exposed to. With a little self-discipline I am now able to avoid sites that might just draw me in, waste my time and finally irritate me without providing any noticeable benefits. I do feel as if I'm missing out on a few things, but have enough experience and confidence to know that this is the saner course. My switch to reading printed materials isn't working perfectly, though it is an improvement. The advantage of deriving more from reading books and magazines is partially offset by the fact that some of them are always deficient in content. Of the things I currently read, Archaeology is a bit light and the stargazing magazines are too devoted to advertising, though still useful for astronomical news. Nautilus has better-written and more informative science articles than most – and little advertising. For some reason I'm still receiving Nature, and I don't mind that much as long as I'm not paying the $199 per year subscription fee. The literary magazines, Boston Review and Bookforum, are so alien to me that I'm going to let my subscriptions drop. Somehow I have developed a gag reaction to American literary culture and it is best to avoid it entirely in all forms; I am able to find suitable literary reading beyond the Anglo-American world, but only with great effort.

It seems to me that contemporary culture seriously undervalues the benefits of experience, particularly the accumulated experience of thoughtful people, who always seem to be in a minority. I have been thinking about my father's experience, and how I am now fifteen years older than he was when he died. When I see him in photographs taken not long before he died he looks young to me, and I can't help but think that I know more than he did. The transition from dependence on parents to independence and the reaching of a mature understanding of the world, is, I think, one of the major processes of human life. I have little sympathy for adult children who ceaselessly blame their parents for deficiencies in their upbringing, because everyone is dealt a hand that is bound to be problematic in one way or another, and few of us get optimal guidance and preparation before setting off.

Convenient Fictions

With the death of Antonin Scalia, I return to my long meditation on how some highly intelligent people are not immune to errors in their thinking when held to simple empirical standards. I'm not referring to constitutional law, in which I have no expertise, but rather to the disappointing similarity of Scalia, who was a devout Roman Catholic, to Marilynne Robinson and W.H. Auden, among others, with respect to his religious faith. Though, strictly speaking, agnosticism is the appropriate position on God given that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of such a being and that there remains the possibility that God exists but is undetected or undetectable, my view is that atheism is the more appropriate position to adopt in connection with the Abrahamic religions, since, besides having no empirical basis, there are compelling anthropological explanations for them that do not require the existence of an actual divine being.

I think that religions are precipitated by our social and psychological needs, and that these are the primary reasons why we have them. When I studied Greek mythology in college, I was surprised to find it more interesting than Christianity while serving the same functions. In the absence of knowledge about lightning, why not say that Zeus is angry about something or other and hurled a lightning bolt? The Greek gods were understandable because they resembled humans, had similar emotional baggage and additionally had the ability to help or hinder us behind the scenes: they played favorites. The Greek gods were everywhere, making daily living an exercise in magical realism, while Christianity is comparatively boring. You are supposed to believe some guy who may or may not have lived two thousand years ago and supposedly said that there is only one God, with whom he happened to have a connection. Then, six hundred years later, along comes Muhammad, who also claimed to have an inside track to God, whom he called Allah. The Christians didn't recognize Muhammad or Allah, the Muslims didn't recognize Jesus Christ or God, and war ensued intermittently for a thousand years. That was only the beginning of the confusion, because before long each religion began to splinter into different sects. Christianity divided into Eastern and Western branches, and then along came the Reformation. Islam split into Sunni and Shiite branches. Both religions continue to generate new sects, of which al-Qaeda and ISIL are among the more recent. Ideologically, the links between the original tenets and the latest iterations become increasingly tenuous.

There are many good reasons to adopt a religion, but adopting one makes the most sense when one has grown up with it and it permeates one's culture. At a minimum, being, for example, Christian, may permit you to set aside a host of questions and doubts, enabling you to focus on other aspects of your life that more directly influence your well-being. Instead of wasting years trying to understand the universe, which you would probably never succeed at anyway, you can file away that topic under "God" and, for example, go to law school and become a Supreme Court justice. If you are Antonin Scalia, your family will be very proud of you; you will also make a lot of money and have nine children, fulfilling Darwin's prophecy, if not God's. For someone like Scalia, there may be no penalty for adopting a religion, but negative consequences may be created for others. For example, Scalia seems to have believed in a version of American exceptionalism that contains traces of the idea that the U.S. is favored by God, a notion that I consider ludicrous. It is plausible that Scalia was an originalist because he considered the Constitution a divine document. If Scalia had taken a different path and chosen to become, say, a nihilist, he may well have died young, friendless and childless, and that is why I think adopting a popular religion usually has evolutionary benefits.

For me, people like Scalia are due credit for their contributions to society, but if you're going to be a purist about their ideas you can't ignore the fact that they fall seriously short. They do well in their lives by conforming to a fiction that has no basis in reality. On broad questions about the universe, I think it is more honest to say that you don't know, and that mankind may never know. My view is that we are all finite creatures whose brains were not evolved to answer such questions, and try as we might we are bound to fail. That may apply equally to science; even if science eventually explains all of the workings of the universe to our satisfaction, it will still be a limited enterprise. In the best case scenario science may provide an accurate, mathematically sound model that meets all of our needs as organisms, but the models themselves will be limited by our inherent limitations as biological entities. For example, scientists often remark that they find the beauty and symmetry of mathematics in nature, but that may be only because that is our favored way of understanding; there may be deeper, more elusive ways of understanding that are completely beyond our comprehension. For this reason, rather than worship at the altar of religion or science, I am content to say "I don't know" and accept the true mystery in which we all live.

Automated Art

A new economics book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by Robert Gordon, analyzes productivity growth in the U.S. Economists associate productivity growth closely with the long-term standard of living in a country, and Gordon finds that U.S. productivity growth peaked in the 1950's and is unlikely ever to reach that level again or even come close. Gordon believes that there will be almost no growth in household incomes through 2040. This flies in the face of rhetoric in the media and politics proclaiming that with the right political leaders and policies in place the U.S. could return to1950's-like conditions in which nearly everyone lives well. I don't think I'll read the book, because its thesis seems rather obvious to me, but I thought I'd mention it because it relates to my thoughts about technology's effects on how people earn their livings. There doesn't seem to be much research underway on what people are likely to be doing for work in fifty years, and it seems that the work environment, if it still exists then, will be radically different due to advances in technology.

The technology-related changes during my career in printing were enormous. As of the late 1970's, most print preparation involved pasting set type onto a board in the correct position and then photographing it. Black and white photographs were manually converted into halftones by placing a screen over the negative and photographing it again. Color photographs were once manually separated into four colors with filters on a large camera, and later a color transparency was electronically separated using a scanner, which was quite expensive in the 1980's. Once all of the image components were in negative form, a stripper would place them in the correct positions and manually align all four color negatives. These "flats" were then placed in step-and-repeat machines to make lithographic printing plates. Stripping and platemaking departments used to employ a relatively large number of people, but now, with the electronic processing of images, stripping is obsolete, and a sizeable plant can operate with just one platemaker per shift. Similarly, improved electronic controls on printing presses have made it possible to operate them with smaller crews, and newer presses run much faster than earlier presses, reducing the amount of labor per sheet. On top of this, Internet advertising has been cutting into print sales. The net result of new technology is the disappearance of thousands of jobs in a once thriving industry.

I bring this up because the same phenomenon has occurred in all manufacturing industries and has been spreading to white-collar jobs for some time. With advances in AI it is easy to imagine a state in which one doctor, lawyer or engineer will do the work that twenty once did. Some manual labor and customer service jobs may survive for a few more years, because low wages obviate the need for expensive technology, but if the cost of technology falls low enough, those jobs could go too. I like thought experiments and speculate that some of the last vocations to fall may be in the arts. This will come about because technology will be able to mimic human behavior and skills even if we never arrive at a singularity. Though I think something resembling a singularity will probably occur, that would not be necessary for reconfiguring art as we know it; it could happen before then if machines began to pass the Turing test with the art they produced. All this means is that people would be unable to distinguish a painting, sculpture, novel, poem, film, musical composition, etc., created by a machine from one created by a human.

You can see the early beginnings of this transition in the algorithms currently used to determine what films a Netflix subscriber would enjoy. Despite the fact that Netflix's recommendations for me are almost always wrong, they seem to have identified some of the characteristics that I like in a film. For instance, they know that I like suspenseful psychological movies, foreign movies, thrillers, understated movies and cerebral movies. That isn't much, but it's a start. Why couldn't a sophisticated computer analyze a large body of art, identify the characteristics that appeal to people and then formulate new works based on human preferences?  Several kinds of fiction-writing software already exist, and there is no reason to assume that a completely automated novel that satisfies most readers couldn't be produced in the future. With the right software, a computer could sift through a large database to identify themes and subplots that appeal to people and generate writing styles that would be agreeable to specific groups. The result would not necessarily be robotic, because the program could be calibrated to insert random events that simulate events in novels written by humans. As a matter of fact, it is soothing, repetitive qualities that draw many readers to fiction, and repetitive qualities are the ones that would be easiest to detect through analysis.

One art that would be particularly amenable to automated creation would be painting. Ever since Warhol, the critical standards for what constitutes a good painting have fallen frighteningly low. There is little reason to suppose that an extraordinary number of mediocre paintings couldn't be deemed brilliant and fetch large sums if promoted in the right way by the right people. Capitalism has infiltrated the art world to such a degree that aesthetic values are often predefined by the financial interests of members of the relevant art community and never subjected to the judgment of independent experts who have no conflicting interests. For example, it might be possible to create what looks like a Warhol painting and sell it for a million dollars if it were marketed properly by insiders of the art world. We usually think of artistic value as a private experience, often in terms of the beauty of an object, but art's commodification in recent decades seems to have redefined it so as to place an emphasis on market value as the dominant factor.

Perhaps the fundamental question here is whether creativity, vision and skill can be automated. Certainly skill can be, as machines are already capable of performing with greater physical precision than humans are capable in some areas. With the current state of technology, creativity and vision can be simulated, perhaps convincingly enough to fool some people as to their authenticity, but without escaping the notice of more sophisticated observers. However, if you believe, as I do, that humans are not the ne plus ultra of the universe, an allowance must be made for the possibility that our best art could one day be matched or surpassed by superintelligence.

Diary

This winter in Vermont has been dull from a weather standpoint. We have had very little snow and the temperature hasn't even been down to zero yet. I didn't turn on the heat until December 29. Without snow, the landscape here looks dead and ugly. Fortunately the forecast calls for more snow and lower temperatures. I prefer a certain amount of adversity and have not been getting much of it recently.

We just began to watch the popular Netflix series Making a Murderer. It concerns the legal battles of Steven Avery, whose family owns an auto salvage business in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. Avery was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault in 1985 and spent 18 years in prison before being exonerated in 2003. Two years after his release, Avery was charged with the murder of a female photographer, and in 2007 he was found guilty and sentenced to life without parole. As far as we've watched, the documentary focuses on Avery and his family and the improper investigations conducted by the Manitowoc police. Avery's nephew, Brendan Dassey, was also implicated in the murder and later found guilty of being party to a homicide.

In the presentation of the documentary, Avery was clearly innocent in the 1985 conviction, but there are many unanswered questions regarding the 2007 conviction, which we haven't come to yet. Avery knew the dead woman and was scheduled to see her on the day that she died. Her vehicle and the remains of her body were found on his family's lot. However, as he is presented in the documentary, Avery does not seem to be a likely suspect. The case may have been irreversibly compromised by the Manitowoc police, who seemingly planted evidence at the scene and coerced a false confession from Brendan Dassey. The themes within the documentary include the vulnerability of stupid, poor people like Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, the bias, incompetence and lack of accountability of the police and judiciary, and the sheer mystery of what happened in the case of the dead woman. Figuring out the latter now seems to have become a major national pastime. I've barely looked into it myself, but there is the possibility, for example, that the death was a murder committed by a known serial killer who happened to live nearby at the time but has since died. No doubt this case will be in the news for a long time, and Steven Avery and his nephew may well be acquitted with the help of massive publicity and free legal support.

Most people seem to react to stories like this in the context of inequality and the lack of justice in the U.S. There is a tendency to think in terms of the oppressed and the oppressors without examining the premises of democracy, which is what usually occurs to me. The main things that stand out to me in this documentary are the palpable levels of stupidity. Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, two incredibly stupid people, are victimized by people who are more intelligent and better educated, but still rather stupid themselves when you consider that the facts are going to catch up with them sooner or later and that at a minimum their reputations will be destroyed. Of course, they're going to get better treatment than Avery, but that isn't really the point. The point is that self-governance is and has always been a pipe dream: if you look closely enough at any democratic system you will always find errors, incompetence, unfairness, self-interest, bias, etc. In this respect the documentary has nothing new to say. It is simply a fact of human nature that all existing democratic systems are bound to coexist with miscarriages of justice.

At the moment I'm not reading much. Next up on my list is the novel Satantango, by László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian writer, followed by Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life, by E.O. Wilson, which will be published next month. I haven't read any literature from Central or Eastern Europe for quite some time now and am hoping that Krasznahorkai will make a nice change if he's as good as people say.

Diary

I think I've read most of what Hughes has to say on topics that I care about, but will continue reading and let you know if anything else strikes me. For the fishermen among you, Hughes was an avid angler and has a good chapter on that, "A Jerk on One End."

Somewhat reluctantly, I have been following the presidential campaigns here. Bernie Sanders is making his mark, and the Democratic debates have probably been of the highest quality in my lifetime. He has successfully backed Hillary Clinton into a corner, forcing her to sound like the liberal that she never was. In contrast, the Republican debates have been a humorous spectacle. If I had to guess, I'd say that Rubio will get the nomination. Trump's campaign is beginning to implode after he made up a story about Ted Cruz rigging the vote in Iowa. Sooner or later his bloated ego, lies and lack of political experience are going to catch up with him. In my opinion, none of the Republican candidates stand a chance. Whoever gets the Republican nomination will be obliterated in debates with the Democratic nominee simply because they are all either wacky, ignorant or both.

As a Vermonter, I am following Bernie's campaign with some interest. He has injected a much-needed populist fervor into the debate, and he has done well so far, but I don't think economic conditions are severe enough to encourage a sufficient number of people to vote for him. This is fundamentally a conservative country, and it took the Great Depression to make FDR a popular president. Hillary is a professional politician par excellence who, besides being able to parrot the most popular prevailing views at any time, has built up a formidable résumé over the years. Bernie will continue to do well among young, well-educated voters, but that won't be enough to get him the nomination. In any case, he has already made his point by forcing Hillary to adopt anti-Wall-Street language.

As for the Clintons, I'll never like them. I'll always think of Bill as white trash with a high IQ and Hillary as an ambitious know-it-all teacher's pet. They make it embarrassing to be a baby boomer. I remember becoming disillusioned with Bill Clinton when he displayed his pro-business agenda shortly after taking office in 1993. While there may have been some secondary benefits to society that came from their work, the Clintons have been the chief beneficiaries of their political careers. Why, for example, would they move to New York? It certainly wasn't for its cultural benefits or because of family ties. Clinton had friends on Wall Street, Robert Rubin, for instance, who helped fund Hillary's subsequent political career and the Clinton Foundation. It is no surprise that Senator Clinton became markedly pro-Israel and supported the Iraq War. She has learned from Bill how to go with the flow and extricate herself from accusations when tides change, though Bernie Sanders has been calling her out with some success.

One of the reasons why it is hard for me to care about politics is that politicians routinely take credit for things that have nothing to do with them. No matter what they say, presidents typically have very little effect on the economy, particularly while they are in office. As someone who has lived through several economic cycles, it grates on me to hear presidents describe their legacies. A large inflation cycle began in late 1972, and presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter were unable to stop it during their terms in office. However, Carter appointed Paul Volcker Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1979, and that made all the difference. Volcker, who remained Chairman until 1987, raised interest rates radically, killing inflation and gradually setting off an economic boom. A change for the worse occurred when Ronald Reagan replaced Volcker with Alan Greenspan, who served under Reagan and Clinton and held the position until 2006, when Ben Bernanke took over. That didn't stop Reagan and Clinton from claiming credit for reviving the economy, though they had little to do with it. The fact is that Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, with the help of Alan Greenspan, set the stage for the Wall Street excesses of the 1980's, 1990's and early 2000's that culminated in the Great Recession. Within the media you are still more likely to hear about the economic foresight of Reagan and Clinton than the final economic collapse that they helped precipitate. History will judge them as economic lightweights and political opportunists.

In my opinion, the job of president of the United States has long been too difficult to be performed by mortals. I don't think "Hope and Change" Obama is going to fare much better than his predecessors in the history books, and while I agree with Bernie Sanders in his promotion of social democracy similar to that of the wealthy countries of Northern Europe, I don't think he is prepared for or has even thought about how a transition to a post-capitalist society ought to be managed.

Art School

I've been jumping around in the Hughes book and have found the reading good. Some sections were written in about 1980 and some were written as late as 2011, making the perspective a little confusing at times. So far I've read about Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Edward Hopper and low ethical standards among the artists, dealers, critics and museum curators of New York City. I'm not very familiar with recent painting, but agree with Hughes that Pollock and Hopper were the most original American painters of the twentieth century. It took a long time for them to grow on me, but I now actually like Hopper and generally consider Pollock better than his abstract successors. These two now seem to be part of the American art "canon." Sometimes Hughes sounds as if he has a score to settle, though I can't blame him considering the environment in which he worked. He genuinely loved art and had a strong background in European art history, and it is easy to see how he could have become frazzled working in Manhattan; "philistine" is one of his favorite words. He came to the U.S. from Australia via Italy and England, giving him the kind of outsider perspective so essential to good criticism yet so often lacking in the arts here.

Art is a murky area for discussion, and complete objectivity regarding the value of an art object is probably impossible to establish. Art, literature and "genius" do not exist beyond the parameters of locally defined cultural references, making their appraisal contentious, especially over short periods of time. For example, the paintings of Vermeer, who is now recognized as one of the greatest painters ever, were almost unknown until the late nineteenth century. The Lacemaker was sold for seven pounds in 1813, and it was sold again to the Louvre in 1870 for a mere fifty-one pounds. To his credit, Hughes focuses on aesthetic merit as best he can, which automatically puts him at odds with the careerists within the field.

The passage that I've found most interesting up to now concerns the undesirable consequences of the teaching methods employed by art schools and universities. Happily, this dovetails with what I've been writing about the ill effects of creative writing programs:

For nearly a quarter of a century, late-modernist art teaching (especially in America) has increasingly succumbed to the fiction that the values of the so-called academy – meaning, in essence, the transmission of disciplined skills based on drawing from the live model and the natural motif – were hostile to "creativity."

This fiction enabled Americans to ignore the inconvenient fact that virtually all artists who created and extended the modernist enterprise between 1890 and 1950, Beckmann no less than Picasso, Miro, and de Kooning as well as Degas or Matisse, were formed by the atelier system and could no more have done without the particular skills it inculcated than an aircraft can fly without an airstrip. The philosophical beauty of Mondrian's squares and grids begins with the empirical beauty of his apple trees. Whereas thanks to America's tedious obsession with the therapeutic, its art schools in the 1960s and 1970s tended to become crèches, whose aim was less to transmit the difficult skills of painting and sculpture than to produce "fulfilled" personalities. At this no one could fail. Besides, it was easier on the teachers if they left their students to do their own thing, and not teach – especially since so many of them could not draw, either. A few schools, such as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, held out against this and tried to give their students a solid grounding. But they were few.

Other factors contributed to the decay of the fine-arts tradition in American schools in the sixties and seventies. One was the increased attachment of art teaching to universities, which meant that theory tended to be raised above practice and making. Thinking deep thoughts about histories and strategies was more noble than handwork, and it produced an exaggerated drift toward the conceptual. This interlocked in a peculiarly damaging way with reliance on reproduction of works of art instead of direct contact with the originals....

In the slide or reproduction, no work of art appears in its true size or with its vital qualities of texture, color, and the recorded movement of the shaping hand intact. A Klee, a Pollock, or a lunette of the Sistine Chapel – all undergo the same abstraction, the same loss of presence. Impartially, they lose one of the essential factors of aesthetic experience, the size of the artwork relative to our sense of our own bodies: its scale....

A slide gives you the subject, the nominal image of a work, without conveying a true idea of its pictorial essence. You cannot think and feel your way back into the way something was made by looking at a slide: only by studying the real thing. And no tradition of making can be transmitted without such empathy. Did this foster the dull blatancy of so much recent American painting, all impact and no resonance? Have the falsifications of the reproduced image fed back into the new originals, cutting out those whose very qualities which, by their nature, cannot survive reproduction – subtleties of drawing, touch, and brushwork, of color and tone, that slow up the eye and encourage, beyond the quick look, a slow absorption?  

If, as Hughes argues, American teaching methods in the arts had a negative impact on the quality of contemporary painting and sculpture circa 1990, mutatis mutandis, a similar pattern may be at work in creative writing programs with respect to the quality of contemporary American literature. Recent history points to a reduction in aesthetic richness and depth when training in the arts becomes captive to academic pedagogues.

Robert Hughes on Andy Warhol

I've begun to read The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings of Robert Hughes. Hughes lived from 1938 to 2012, and these essays cover a variety of topics over a long period of time. Rather than reading it straight through, I'm going to jump around and read chapters that interest me. Perhaps because I hadn't been paying much attention to art journalism, I didn't notice Robert Hughes until recently. As he speaks in The Mona Lisa Curse documentary mentioned earlier, Hughes writes robustly and eloquently and displays a deep knowledge of his subject. He reminds me a little of Frank Rich, who used to write opinion pieces for The New York Times: he writes vigorously and reinforces each point. However, Hughes seems more interested in finding the truth than Rich, who often came across to me as a bombastic, ideological bully. I was particularly interested in reading what Hughes had to say about Andy Warhol, who was a key figure in the transition of the art world to a predominantly commercial enterprise. Hughes is worth reading for his prose alone, but he is even more valuable for his understanding and insights. I'll give you a few examples.

On the Factory, Warhol's famous studio, he writes:
Its silver-papered walls were a toy theater in which one aspect of the sixties in America, the infantile hope of imposing oneself on the world by terminal self-revelation, was played out. It had a nasty edge, which forced the paranoia of marginal souls into some semblance of style, a reminiscence of art. If Warhol's "Superstars," as he called them, had possessed talent, discipline, or stamina, they would not have needed him. But then, he would not have needed them. They gave him his ghostly aura of power. If he withdrew his gaze, his carefully allotted permissions and recognitions, they would cease to exist; the poor ones would melt back into the sludgy, undifferentiated chaos of the street, the rich ones end up in some suitable clinic.

On publicity:
Warhol was the first American artist to whose career publicity was truly intrinsic. Publicity had not been an issue in the forties and fifties. It might come as a bolt from the philistine blue, as when Life made Jackson Pollock famous; but such events were rare enough to be freakish, not merely unusual. By today's standards, the art world was virginally naive about the mass media and what they could do.

On the avant-garde:
Warhol did his best work at a time (1962-1968) when the avant-garde, as an idea and a cultural reality, still seemed to be alive, if not well. In fact it was collapsing from within, undermined by the encroaching art market and the total conversion of the middle-class audience; but few people could see it at the time. The ideal of a radical, "outsider" art of wide social effect had not yet been acknowledged as fantasy. The death of the avant-garde has since become such a commonplace that the very word has an embarrassing aura.

On Warhol's talent:
The perfunctory and industrial nature of Warhol's peculiar talent, and the robotic character of the praise awarded it, appear most baldly of all around his prints, which were recently given a retrospective at Castelli Graphics in New York and a catalog raisonné by one of his German enthusiasts. "More than any other artist of our age," it gushes, "Andy Warhol is intensely preoccupied with concepts of time"; quite the little Proust, in fact. "His prints above all reveal Andy Warhol as a universal artist whose works show him to be thoroughly aware of the great European traditions and who is a particular admirer of the glorious French Dixneuvièm, which inspired him to experience and to apply the immanent qualities of 'pure' peinture." No doubt something was lost in translation, but it is difficult to believe that the author even looked at the prints he speaks of. Nothing could be flatter or more perfunctory, or have less to do with those "immanent qualities of 'pure' peinture," than Warhol's recent graphic efforts. Their most discernible quality is their transparent cynicism and their Franklin Mint approach to subject matter. 

On the Iranian art market:
One of the odder aspects of the late Shah's regime was its wish to buy modern Western art, so as to seem "liberal" and "advanced".... Not since the death of Tamerlane had there been so much kissing Persian arse.... The main beneficiary of this was Warhol, who became the semi-official portraitist to the Peacock Throne.

On Warhol's embrace by the Reagans:
Great leaders, it is said, bring forth the praise of great artists. How can one doubt that Warhol was delivered by Fate to be the Rubens of this administration, to play Bernini to Reagan's Urban VIII? On the one hand, the shrewd old movie actor, void of ideas but expert at manipulation, projected into high office by the insuperable power of mass imagery and secondhand perception. On the other, the shallow painter who understood more about the mechanisms of celebrity than any of his colleagues, whose entire sense of reality was shaped like Reagan's sense of power, by the television tube. Each, in his way, coming on like Huck Finn; both obsessed with serving the interests of privilege. Together, they signify a new moment: the age of supply-side aesthetics.

As you might expect, I agree with all of the above. I knew that there was something wrong with Andy Warhol even when I was a teenager during the 1960's, but I would not have been able to articulate it as well as Hughes does here. Although Warhol didn't create pop culture all on his own, he was the central figure during its inauguration as a public norm. Hughes acknowledges that Warhol had genuine artistic talent as a commercial artist but laments his subsequent effect on the art world. The tradition of hawking dubious art to the wealthy is still healthy among the nouveaux riches in China and throughout the world. What is refreshing to me is that Hughes highlights qualitative changes for the worse and contextualizes them sociologically, unlike most commentators, who are reluctant to draw attention to the fact that an actual aesthetic decline has occurred.

Diary

Not to boast, I have two characteristics that give me advantages over some others: self-awareness and self-discipline. Addictions are not a problem for me if I just pay attention. Thus, for example, contrary to some dubious theories about weight gain, I have never been overweight, unlike the current 68.8 percent of adult Americans who are. If you watch your weight and don't overeat you'll never get fat, no matter what anyone tells you. I used to smoke Camels, but in 1976 I recognized that smoking was unhealthy, that cigarettes didn't taste good, and that they were a waste of money, so I quit and haven't smoked since, other than a cigar on rare occasions. Whenever I notice that one of my habits is affecting me adversely I try to do something about it.

Over the last two years I've spent a lot of time thinking about how the Internet disturbs me and have taken steps that seem to be working to remedy my malaise. One part of the problem is the sheer volume of information that is available, and I decided that I am better off not even attempting to stay remotely up to date. I still use it regularly for shopping, news and specific research, but I've cut out scanning for random articles that I might find interesting. This means that I hardly ever go browsing on 3 Quarks Daily or other sites that I used to peruse regularly. That part of the change deals with information overload, and I decided that even though it might be nice to have an infinite amount of knowledge, my brain simply can't handle it. The other part has to do with Internet discussion, which I've already written about. Here the problem is that websites can harbor a false sense of community; you delude yourself into thinking that you've found a group of like-minded people, but once you scratch the surface you discover – repeatedly – that there is no group cohesion and you have little in common with most of the others. As I said, I've stopped posting on sites other than this blog. I have been in a better mood since I made these changes.

I am also making headway on a different problem that has occupied me for even longer: what literary works should I read? Thinking about The Mandarins has helped me put this into perspective. I liked Middlemarch a lot, and that had made me think that novels would be my preferred form of literature. The Mandarins is ostensibly a novel, but actually it is a memoir. I remembered Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, which is an autobiography. These are three of my favorite literary works, and one thing they have in common is realism. Middlemarch is fiction, but it includes characters that contain elements of actual people. George Eliot herself appears both as Dorothea Brooke and Mary Garth. G.H. Lewes inhabits Will Ladislaw. Edward Casaubon is a composite of several scholarly men known by George Eliot. In all three of these works real people provided a basis for the text. I already knew that I preferred realism, but I've just recognized what it is beyond realism that sustains my interest. In these three works, the clincher is that I think the same way as the narrator, and this creates far more intimate communication than I am able to find in other works. There are different literary works that I enjoy, but I'm not crazy about them because I don't think quite like their authors. I enjoy D.H. Lawrence and Emily Brontë, but I don't think the same way they do. Gustave Flaubert comes closer, but there is still a difference. Marcel Proust is an excellent writer, but I'll never get past what I think of as his obtuseness.

So it appears that a crucial ingredient for me in literature is like-mindedness. It is probably no coincidence that George Eliot was inspired by Confessions and that Simone de Beauvoir was inspired by The Mill on the Floss. From this vantage point, it would be fair to say that there may not be enough literature in existence that would meet my requirements. Confessions was published in 1789, Middlemarch was published in 1874 and The Mandarins was published in 1954. On this basis you might estimate that a literary work that deeply affects me is published once every 80 to 85 years, so there may not be a new one out until about 2034 – 18 years from now! The prognosis is even worse if you include other factors. The Mandarins is not currently a popular work and probably isn't on the "to read" list of anyone who is or plans to become a writer. Technology, in my opinion, is dumbing down people so drastically that the number of potential writers alive who think, feel and express themselves in a manner that I would find agreeable is likely to be in steep decline, and any market for their work is becoming minuscule.

My current plan for finding literature to read is therefore essentially to give up. I'm going to stop complaining about what crap American fiction is and start ignoring it completely, in a disciplined way. If I had more scholarly proclivities than I actually possess, I suppose that I could look into other works by Rousseau and de Beauvoir, since I've already read all of George Eliot's fiction. However, based on my experience with George Eliot, it is probably best to stick to the masterpieces. If you get carried away with reading a writer's oeuvre, your reading soon begins to resemble biographical research, which is not the same thing as enjoying and appreciating literature.

The Mandarins VI

I'll summarize the final third of the novel and then make some comments. Against the advice of Robert, Henri publishes an article in L'Espoir exposing the Gulag system, and consequently the two have a major split. Similarly, most of the intellectual community objects to the article and sees it as an endorsement of capitalism. Paula goes into a psychological tailspin that lands her in a mental hospital, where she eventually recovers, and she slowly adjusts to life without Henri. Henri's relationship with Josette ends abruptly when he discovers that she has lied to him about consorting with the Germans during the war; he puts himself at risk by assisting her accuser in order to prevent charges from being brought against Josette and her mother. Before long Henri is seeing Nadine again; she becomes pregnant, and they marry, seemingly in love with each other for the first time. Their daughter, Maria, appears at the end. By that time Henri has given up L'Espoir, Robert has given up the S.R.L. and politics in general, and the two reconcile. Anne's relationship with Lewis continues via correspondence and summer vacations in North and Central America. During the second summer vacation Lewis admits that he no longer loves Anne and confesses that he isn't cut out to love anyone. Anne is devastated, and shortly after returning to France considers suicide, but decides against it.

Throughout the book, political machinations dominate, at least in terms of page count. I had hoped that it would be more of a novel of ideas than it is, and while it does contain many ideas, the political ones often strike me as pointless, shortsighted or incorrect. Since these ideas are the ones with which the male characters are obsessed, it makes me wonder whether de Beauvoir is trying to be realistic or whether she has intentionally included a subtext about a male predisposition for stupidity and violence. Certainly, if these are supposed to be the leading French thinkers of the time, they come across as misguided and ineffectual. Looking at them from the present, they seem to have little sense of how geopolitics would play out over the next fifty years. Although it is already quite obvious to one character, Scriassine (Arthur Koestler), that Stalin is nothing more than a brutal dictator, the rest are in denial and more anti-American than the facts warrant. They seem to have bought into the inevitable triumph of communism without taking a close look at what Stalin actually represents. The lesson for me is that if intellectuals can't see a mere fifty years into the future, why should anyone pay attention to them? Framing this in the context of some of my other posts, the wisdom of contemporary intellectuals should be viewed with even greater caution. Because of enormous technological advances and increased specialization within science and academia in general, it is now harder than ever for anyone to speak authoritatively on the subjects that were once the province of a few thinkers. If Sartre and his gang weren't up to the task then, the prospects for contemporary intellectuals are even bleaker. For this reason, my own thought has evolved from a general disappointment with current intellectuals to the view that intellectuals are now mainly historical artifacts. Intellectuals are better equipped to engage in what amounts to human interest stories for the well-educated than in imponderable subjects such as the future of mankind. Especially when it comes to the humanities crowd, their purview should be restricted to the arts, where they are likely to do the least amount of damage. The increasing complexity of civilization has placed the tasks once associated with great thinkers beyond the reach of mortals, and, as I've said, the next step is inevitably going to be AI, which may turn out very well or very badly for mankind – we don't know yet. In the meantime it is appropriate to regard the words of the reigning cognoscenti with skepticism.

The primary inquiry made in this book has to do with what strategy a middle-aged woman looking ahead to her physical deterioration ought to adopt for the remainder of her life. Specifically, Anne is in a relationship in which she feels appreciated but not loved. Robert and Anne live well together, but she sees that he could live perfectly well without her, happily occupying himself with his work. During her first trip to America she is seeking a new relationship before she even meets Lewis. While on the East Coast she makes herself available to another man she's met, Philip, but he turns her down. As a reader, I found Anne's relationship with Lewis completely unsustainable from the start. Lewis is a classic brash, anti-intellectual American, and his variety of socialism is the Depression-era socialism of Woody Guthrie, not the refined socialism of a French intellectual like Sartre. Lewis has a cantankerous personality and does poorly in his relations with others. Furthermore, the cultural backgrounds of Anne and Lewis could not be more dissimilar. As the relationship declines, Anne asks Lewis, "Why are all your best friends pickpockets, or drug addicts, or pimps?" When you add to this the fact that Lewis has no desire to live in France and she has no desire to leave Robert, the exercise looks completely futile. The Anne-Lewis relationship may have appealed to French readers who were curious about life in America, but, to me, the affair may just as well have occurred in Texas instead of Chicago and the outcome would have been the same: she was Lookin' for Love in all the wrong places.

Within the narrative, the collapse of Paula's relationship with Henri echoes Anne's romantic travails with Lewis. However, Paula really goes off the deep end, and, despite an apparent recovery, Anne remains doubtful about the quality of Paula's mental state:
"Have you seen him again, I [Anne] asked."
"Oh, no! And I won't see him again," she [Paula] said spiritedly. "He took unfair advantage of the situation."
I kept silent. I was quite familiar with the kind of explanations Mardrus [Paula's psychoanalyst] had used; on occasion, I myself made use of similar ones, and I valued them for what they were worth. Yes, to release Paula it was necessary to reach back into the past in order to destroy her love. But I thought of those microbes which can't be exterminated except by destroying the organism they are devouring; Henri was dead for Paula, but she, too, was dead. I didn't know that fat woman with the sweaty face and the bovine eyes who was swilling Scotch beside me.
To my taste, de Beauvoir's highest skill as a writer resides in passages such as this one: they are the heart of the novel.

More generally, I would say that the book has strengths and weakness, while on the whole it is very good. I felt that it didn't have to be as long as it was and might have been strengthened with some judicious editing. I suspect that there must be some overlap between The Mandarins and The Second Sex, but I'm not curious enough to explore them further. In some ways it seemed to me as if Nadine was an invented character who combined the girl of de Beauvoir's youth with an imagined version of herself in a slightly more emancipated state.

The Mandarins V

The novel continues to recount actual historical events. While on an idyllic bicycle holiday in the French countryside, Paula, Robert and Henri are shocked to learn of Hiroshima, and they come across a small village just as its inhabitants are commemorating the local deaths that had followed a German parachute invasion. Information leaks out for the first time about Stalin's Gulag system of forced labor camps and causes disagreement within Robert's group regarding whether they ought to publicize it or not. That thread of the text, which covers the calculation that goes on in the French political background, still fails to capture my interest. Meanwhile, Nadine continues to provide plenty of comic relief, and Henri's play proves to be a great success, at least among the Parisian glitterati of the day. The story of Henri's breakup with Paula is gradually playing out.

A major theme in the novel doesn't commence until the second half. Anne is invited to the U.S. to speak at various psychoanalytic venues and flies to LaGuardia on a trip lasting several months. This corresponds with de Beauvoir's actual trip to the U.S. in 1947. Anne sees the trip as possibly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn about America, and she assiduously explores the locales to which she has been invited. She is not interested in typical sightseeing and prefers to observe ordinary people in their own neighborhoods. To this end, when she visits Chicago, a mutual acquaintance sets up contact with Lewis Brogan, an emerging writer who is well-versed on Chicago and lives in a slum, in order to have him show her around. Both Lewis and Anne are socialists, which makes Lewis a good fit for her. In the novel, Lewis is a fictionalized version of Nelson Algren, who, like de Beauvoir, was not well known at the time, but went on to win the National Book Award for Fiction in 1950. This novel is dedicated to Algren.

De Beauvoir has cleaned up events a little in the story. She has Anne meet Lewis in Chicago, return to New York, and then go back to Chicago for a second visit expressly to see him again. They do not become intimate until the second visit. In reality, within hours of meeting for the first time they became intensely attracted to each other and slept together. That was when she experienced her first orgasm, at age 39. This may seem odd if you look at de Beauvoir's background, but the fact is that her relationship with Sartre, who was four foot eleven, had been platonic for several years by then. Unlike Robert and Anne in the story, they were unmarried and lived in separate apartments. I expect that the remaining third of the novel will include the ultimate demise of de Beauvoir's relationship with Algren.

The sudden shift from the preoccupations of an intellectual woman in a rarefied Parisian atmosphere to a head-over-heels romance in a humble Chicago neighborhood is quite a surprise. It's almost as strange as it would be if, say, Iris Murdoch had fallen in love with Studs Terkel. De Beauvoir humanizes herself by eliminating every trace of the abstract in this episode. Although he is reasonably well-educated and intelligent, it is Lewis's spontaneity, warmth and body that excite Anne. She misses him when she returns to France and hopes to continue their relationship. It seems to me that de Beauvoir mixes the abstract with the concrete to make a powerful potion that accentuates both.

The Mandarins IV

I hope I don't end up boring you by spending too much time on a book that you probably haven't read, but I prefer to proceed slowly. The novel is definitely worth reading, and there is much for me to mull over in it, because de Beauvoir certainly does open a window to the intellectuals of her milieu.

As far as I've read – I'm only halfway through – the male characters are still not very compelling. They seem like automatons running on obscure programs that don't necessarily make much sense. Some are obsessed with punishing Nazi sympathizers and some are obsessed with ensuring that the political future of France turns out precisely the way they envision it. The theoretical basis for most of their thinking looks shaky to me. Although Marxism was popular in Europe at the time, I think much of it looks obsolete now. In a post-industrial society, the purported schism between the so-called bourgeoisie and the so-called proletariat seems contrived. The U.S. today looks more like one class, the bourgeoisie, which could be subdivided into the 1% and the 99%. The 1% are the winners and the 99% are the losers, as Donald Trump might say. Leona Helmsley liked to refer to the 99% as "the little people." In American thinking, just about everyone wants an opulent lifestyle, and it is hard to make out any real cultural distinction between your local plumber and a billionaire; both of them want a big house and prefer pizza to gourmet food. It is easy to imagine hiring someone like Donald Trump to install a new boiler in your house, because class distinctions here are minuscule compared to those in Europe.

Henri (Camus) is still looking better than most of the men. In his work, he seems to place a lot of emphasis on honesty and integrity, and, more than the others, he seems like a pure artist in need of self-expression. However, he is hell on women, and for that matter he might just as well have been a Houellebecq character. After a ten-year relationship with Paula, he's ready to dump her. To be fair, she is partly to blame. She has dreamed up a ridiculous fantasy about their undying love for each other just as he has started to see her as intrusive and out of touch with his feelings. To make matters worse, he has agreed to take on a beautiful young actress, Josette, as the lead character in his new play in order for her mother to guarantee its production. Henri immediately falls in love with Josette, who is 26, making poor Paula an undesirable old hag at 36. To be sure, Henri would rather not hurt Paula, but to his way of thinking he has a duty to pursue his personal freedom and does not feel bound to her.

I had hoped that this group of intellectuals would come out looking better than the ones I'm familiar with in the U.S. Unfortunately they don't. The only difference I can see is that, as public intellectuals, they are far more engaged with the population than American public intellectuals are now. They write articles that are read by thousands of factory workers, unlike, say, an article in the NYRB, which might be read by fifty retired college professors and quickly forgotten. It is also disappointing to me that in both cases the majority of the intellectuals are mere journalists. They are simply well-read people who write for a living, and the absence of interest in science and technical subjects is conspicuous. I don't think the writings of either group will have much long-term significance. As thinkers, these kinds of intellectuals seem to me to be of limited value, and if they are remembered at all in a few hundred years it will be only for their literary productions.

I am beginning to see similarities between Simone de Beauvoir and George Eliot. As a child, de Beauvoir was inspired by The Mill on the Floss, and she seems to have made a conscious effort to place herself at the center of the intellectual currents of her time, like George Eliot. During her life, George Eliot was overshadowed by the fame of her one-time boyfriend, Herbert Spencer. Spencer is now considered a minor thinker and is associated with the discredited concept of Social Darwinism, while George Eliot's prominence as a major novelist hasn't faded much. Perhaps a similar pattern will emerge leaving Simone de Beauvoir as a greater cultural and intellectual influence than Jean-Paul Sartre. For example, besides her fiction, de Beauvoir's The Second Sex was a seminal text of the women's movement, whereas I doubt many people have ever bothered to read Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

The Mandarins III

I thought I should provide an example of the writing that I appreciate in this novel. Anne, who is a psychotherapist, is invited to a gathering at the home of her wealthy friend, Claudie. Here is a highly abridged version of the text:

We had declined at least three of her invitations; among the people I recognized in that mob, there were very few to whom I felt obligated. They believed us to be haughty, misanthropic, or poseurs. The idea that we simply didn't enjoy going out in society I don't suppose ever dawned on those people who eagerly came here to bore themselves. Boredom was a scourge that had terrorized me ever since my childhood, and it was above all to escape it that I had wanted to grow up; I had in fact built my whole life around that avoidance. But perhaps those whose hands I was now shaking were so used to boredom that they didn't even feel it; perhaps they didn't even know that the very atmosphere could have a different tang....

There was a moment at Claudie's when she announced that the bores had left, although the order of departure varied from one time to the next. 
"I'm terribly sorry," I said, "but I'm afraid I have to leave with them." 
"What! But you must stay for supper," Claudie insisted. "We're going to set up small tables; it'll be very nice. And I want you to meet some people who are coming later." She took me aside. "I've decided to take you under my wing," she said eagerly. "It's ridiculous to live like a savage; no one knows you – I mean in the milieu where there's money to pick up. Let me launch you. I'll take you to the best dressmakers, I'll show you off, and in a year you'll have the plushest practice in Paris."
"I've got more patients than I can handle right now."
"Half of whom pay poorly, and the other half not at all."
"That isn't the question."
"It is the question. With a patient who pays ten times as much, you can work ten times less. You'll have time to go out, to dress up."
"We'll talk about it again."

I was astonished at how little she understood me, but as a matter of fact I didn't understand her very well either. She believed that, for us, work was nothing but a means to achieving fortune and success, and I was vaguely convinced that all those snobs would have gladly traded their social position for intellectual talents and accomplishments. When I was a child, a teacher seemed to me a much greater person than a duchess or a millionaire, and through the years that hierarchy had not changed appreciably. Claudie, however, believed that the supreme reward for an Einstein would be to be received in her salon. We could hardly reach any real understanding.  

The Mandarins II

I'm a third of the way through the novel and will probably have comments to make all the way up to the end. The politics, unsurprisingly, are a little tedious, but that is made up for by engaging dialogue, usually between the women, and particularly when their private thoughts are included. One of the most entertaining characters is Nadine, whom de Beauvoir has invented as the daughter of Anne (de Beauvoir herself) and Robert Dubreuilh (Sartre). In reality de Beauvoir and Sartre never married or had children, so perhaps this was an amusing exercise for de Beauvoir. Nadine is, in turn, unusually precocious for an eighteen-year-old and childishly impetuous in her daily life. Some of her moodiness can be attributed to the fact that her boyfriend, Diego, who was the son of a Spanish Jew, had been captured and presumably executed during the war. Even by contemporary standards Nadine is quite a libertine. Besides generally sleeping around, she takes up with Henri Perron (Camus), who is in his mid-thirties and a colleague of her father. This is obviously not a Puritan society, as no one, including her parents, bats an eye. Henri himself isn't even attracted to Nadine and only goes along with her to humor her. It interests me that what was considered passé in Paris seventy years ago might still cause an uproar in the U.S. today: Henri might be denounced as a pedophile, Nadine's parents might consider legal action against him, etc. At least in this group of intellectuals, sex is a private matter between individuals and carries no implications about a relationship beyond that. In this case, even Henri's live-in girlfriend, Paula Mareuil, doesn't mind. As you might expect, the relationship between Nadine and Henri quickly disintegrates, and in hindsight anyone who had made a fuss about it would look foolish. To me, it is far more civilized to live this way than to bow to the rigid and generally idiotic dictates of political correctness. At times Nadine seems implausible as a character, but I think she acquits herself well in the context of the novel.

I gather that de Beauvoir is seen by some as too cool, too detached and too serious to write good fiction, and while this may be an inescapable matter of personal taste, I find that I often think exactly as she does. My impression is that most people don't spend a lot of time examining their relationships with others and are simply guided by the social norms that they have been immersed in for all of their lives. Thus, the model for many people is to fall in love, get married, have children and continue their spousal romantic love until death. I appreciate de Beauvoir because she goes a step further than the many novelists who simply lament the development of problems in relationships between men and women and stupidly ignore the question of whether the expectations that people held were ever realistic. De Beauvoir actually thinks these things through both in her novel and in her personal life and arrives at reasoned conclusions that permit her characters and herself to live without depending on questionable concepts of someone else's making. Like de Beauvoir, I favor the realistic adjustment to facts over sentimental lamentations when delusional thinking doesn't produce the outcomes I expect.

As for the politics, there is little to theorize about here. Robert (Sartre) backs the socialist S.R.L. party, which is in a power struggle with the other party of the left, the Communist Party. At heart most of the leftists are communists, but because of geopolitics they don't consider communism a viable solution for France. The Cold War is only beginning, and clearly either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. is going to become the dominant power in the world. While he may not yet have been fully cognizant of the crimes of Stalin, Robert thinks France must stick with the U.S. even though he dislikes and mistrusts American imperialism. To this end he encourages Henri to commit his small, intellectual newspaper, L'Espoir, to the S.R.L. The communists are also courting L'Espoir, and Henri, who would prefer to remain independent, is put in a predicament. As far as I've read, it appears that he goes with the S.R.L., which pleases Robert and perhaps will improve L'Espoir's financial situation.

I had hoped to encounter some deeper discussion of political thought in the book, and perhaps I will later on. Thinking about some of these issues myself, I can see why communism would have been appealing to the characters. In the end I think something resembling communism may well become the preferred form of government. If you look at world history over the last three hundred years, the dominant forces have been economic, not political. The idea of a classless society may never have come into existence if there hadn't been centuries of inequality caused mainly by the growth of capitalism. To a certain extent the evils of communism as expressed in American propaganda represent a straw man that discredited communism before any attempt was made to understand it. The early failure of communism in China and the later disintegration of the U.S.S.R. had more to do with economic mistakes than anything else. The combination of economic failure in one part of the world and economic success in another part of the world is almost enough to topple the political regimes that preside over the weakest economies. Moreover, a strong economy is necessary for a strong military defense. In my view, China under Mao, the Soviet Union under Stalin and Cuba under Castro were simply early experiments that failed. However, in China since Deng Xaioping, communism has changed course and China may soon have the largest economy in the world. Russia is a different story, and because it still depends on oil rather than a diversified economy for economic growth, it has fallen far down in rank as a world power. As I've said repeatedly, if you were able to remove corrupt or incompetent politicians from power and replaced them with competent leaders or, ideally for me, AI, the world's future might look a lot brighter than it currently does.

The Mandarins I

Despite the continued presence of houseguests, I've managed to make a small dent in the novel. So far I'm enjoying it a lot and it could end up becoming one of my favorites. The characters are intelligent, emotionally sophisticated, observant, articulate and free to a much greater degree than the characters in other novels that I've read. I feel as if I am reading the first adult novel since I finished Middlemarch, and Simone de Beauvoir is already becoming an imaginary friend.

The novel begins as World War II ends, and the characters are in the process of moving on after their lives have been disrupted and curtailed for four years. The men, loosely representing Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Arthur Koestler, embark on new writing projects, while the women in their lives, though far more independent than the women you are likely to find in other fiction, mostly seem to frame their lives around the men. What strikes me is the frankness of the conversations and the self-awareness of the women, which exceeds that of fictional characters I've encountered elsewhere. I think all fiction writers should be required to read The Mandarins if they have any pretensions about describing people who are not morons. Only a few pages of this were enough to confirm my view that American fiction is fundamentally children's writing produced by emotionally stunted authors for sale to infantile readers. In American literary fiction, style, if you can call it that, has replaced substance.

I'm not as impressed with the male characters. Koestler seems cold, calculating and manipulative. Sartre seems wrapped up in questionable ideology. Camus is the most natural and appealing, though at heart he seems to be no more than a carefree writer. As a thinker, Sartre is the heavyweight of the three, but his serious philosophical works have not held up well. I am hoping to compare this group to current intellectuals who, I think, are narrower as people but perhaps no better or worse in terms of their ideas.

One phenomenon that is of interest to me is the dominance of socialistic thought among intellectuals throughout the twentieth century. You can still see remnants of it in Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky. I tend to agree with them with respect to capitalism, which has now been documented as a source of inequality, but I have been unable to understand the unquestioned faith in self-governance that dominates leftist thought. My skepticism has become one of the themes of this blog, because I have no confidence that people will ever be able to self-govern without causing significant ill effects like the ones we live with today. The question, to me, is not how to increase freedom, but how to circumscribe it fairly and rationally. I suspect that Sartre got this wrong and that his successors still do.

Diary

I don't have much to report because I'm distracted by the arrival of visitors who disrupt my thoughts by their mere presence and strain me with their one-way conversations and humorlessness. I am waiting this out calmly.

I was just out for a walk and ran into Jim Douglas as he embarked on his; we discussed politics, since I had read his memoir and he used to be the governor. One of the things I like about Vermont is that a quiet, thoughtful, low-key person like Jim Douglas can actually win an election here. Of course, Vermont Republicans don't exactly fit the profile of Republicans in most states. He doesn't like Donald Trump and thinks Marco Rubio is too inexperienced.

I've started reading The Mandarins and think I'll enjoy it, if only for the glimpse it provides of the intellectuals of a different era. Unlike most intellectuals today, they went through difficult times and engaged each other in the café culture of Paris. Most of them didn't depend on faculty positions and lived more freely than our contemporary equivalent. It remains to be seen whether their ideas were any good – perhaps not – but certainly they don't exude that academic stench that pervades the so-called intellectuals in America today.

It may be a few days before I post again.

Cartoons

For some reason I received an e-mail from Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor at the New Yorker, recruiting me to assist in a new process for winnowing down entries to their caption contest. Presumably I was selected because I was a finalist in the contest several years ago, but I was a little surprised to hear from him because I hadn't entered since then. For the last few weeks I have been participating in the process and enjoying it. I can see why they want help, because it would be tedious to sift through thousands of entries each week. Most of the entries aren't funny, and there are usually multiple similar ones. On top of that, I find that the pictures sometimes have little potential, and that makes finding a good caption even harder. Anyway, this isn't a bad diversion for me and it takes only a few minutes each week. I like thinking about humor and agree with Wittgenstein, who once said that "a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist only of jokes."

I realized that though I've discussed my early interest in comic books I haven't mentioned anything about cartoons. As I said, I didn't start reading books until about halfway through college, and comics such as Superman and Batman influenced my imagination as much as anything until then. During my adolescence we often had copies of the New Yorker at home, and I developed an interest in their cartoons quite early. They have a universal appeal and have probably always been what sells the magazine. The cartoons of Charles Addams had the strongest effect on me. Not only did they possess a dark humor, but they also contained elements of social criticism and satire. Addams was effective at making fun of the middle class in postwar America and had an appeal to subversives like me. In contrast, the TV program, The Addams Family, was humorous but lacked satire; John Astin, who played Gomez Addams, turned him into a kooky eccentric, and Charles Addams's bite was nowhere to be seen.

I still have some reluctance to read the New Yorker, but it seems to have improved a little over the last few years with a new editor and a better staff. The cartoons, when I read them, are still pretty funny, though they are not the final word on cartoons. I think that kind of work is highly demanding and requires more creative skills than most people possess, thus I respect Gary Larson for retiring from The Far Side series after fifteen successful years. Larson would have been good at the New Yorker or anywhere, and he must be upholding higher artistic standards than most successful artists in any field. Although the New Yorker cartoonists seem to maintain their standards well, I can't understand why the cartoonist Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury didn't retire thirty years ago, because he was never in their class. As far as I can tell, Bob Mankoff is doing a good job, though as a personal matter I would prefer edgier cartoons. It amuses me to think that, for all of the stylish appeal of the New Yorker, it is the cartoons, not the short stories, poems or even the journalism that make it what it is.

Diary

I decided to add a new kind of entry, which I'll call "Diary," in order to allow myself to write about anything without naming a specific topic. I've got into the habit of writing something every few days, and it's a lot easier for me to do if I don't have to come up with a topic each time. This will be my way of blabbing a little for fun. Strictly speaking, it won't be a real diary, because there will still be certain areas that are off-limits, since anyone can read this. As in my other posts, I won't say much about household members or their families, particularly my living relatives. Ex-wives, ex-girlfriends and ex-anything are still fair game, since those bridges have already been burned, though I don't think I have much left to say about them at this point. Not many of my family members know about the blog, and although I doubt most of them would be interested in it, I'd rather not risk estranging them if at some future time they were to take issue with something I wrote.

As I said, I'm reading things on the Internet at a reduced rate and am spending more time reading printed books and periodicals now. Coming up on my reading list are The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings of Robert Hughes, and The Mandarins, by Simone de Beauvoir. Hughes is that rare critic who writes well and has strong convictions, and though it may turn out that I don't always agree with him I find it intensely refreshing to hear passionate people speak their mind without kowtowing to editorial hucksters or academic prima donnas. I'm not sure whether I'll like The Mandarins, but am taking the chance. I am attracted to smart women, and de Beauvoir certainly was that. This novel is a roman à clef whose characters represent Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren and others, and I hope it will provide some insight into intellectual life in Paris of that period, though it may not work well as a novel. I don't think I'll burn through these books fast, so it may take some time before I comment on them. I recently resumed Proust again out of a sense of duty, but he puts me to sleep after a couple of pages – making good bedside reading. I think of him as a writer who lived in a culturally rich time and place and who explained himself thoroughly and eloquently, but these positive attributes are not enough to compensate for the fact that he is an entrenched social climber and an airhead who indulges himself at the expense of his readers. I don't find him insightful in the least, though he has more to offer than fellow windbag Henry James.

We are having a dreary, warm winter so far, with no snow. Usually we turn on the boiler in mid-November, but it hasn't been necessary yet and we are heating entirely with wood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas, as I will be spending it here with non-family members, and I have no common interests or rapport with most of them despite knowing them for fourteen years. I had thought of going to Montreal by myself for a week to escape them but decided not to be petty. As you can tell, I don't have much holiday spirit at the moment.

Sherry Turkle II

I've finished reading the book and have gradually become more disappointed in it for reasons that I'll explain later. Even so, Sherry Turkle has done her homework and provides ample documentation of the way lives have recently been altered by technology. The main areas that she examines are solitude, self-reflection, family, friendship, romance, education and work. I have found her anecdotes informative, because I don't otherwise get this exposure, and I'll copy a few more quotes that are interesting and instructive to me.

In spring 2014 Kati is interested in politics, the Italian Renaissance, and training for the Boston Marathon. When she goes to parties, she reports that there is a lot of texting. Here is what she tells me: At any party, her friends are texting friends at other parties to figure out "whether we are at the right party." Kati says, "Maybe we can find a better party. Maybe there are better people at a party just down the block." Kati is describing how smartphones and social media have infused friendship with the Fear of Missing Out – now a feeling so well known that most people just call it by its acronym, FOMO. In its narrow definition, the acronym stands for tensions that follow from knowing so much about the lives of others because of social media. You develop self-doubt from knowing that so many of your friends are having enviable fun.

Arjun, a college senior, gave me another way to view why people turn away from a friend and to a phone. For him, the phone not only serves up comforting friends; it is a new kind of friend in itself. The phone itself is a source of solace.

Comments from teachers about the students at a competitive, private middle school:
Students don't make eye contact.
They don't respond to body language.
They have trouble listening. I have to rephrase a question many times before a child will answer a question in class.
I'm not convinced they are interested in each other. It is as though they all have some signs of being on an Asperger's spectrum. But that's impossible. We're talking about a schoolwide problem.
They are talking at each other with local comments, minutia really, short bursts, as though they were speaking texts. They are communicating immediate social needs. They aren't listening to each other.
The most painful thing to watch is that they don't know when they have hurt each other's feelings. They hurt each other, but then you sit down with them and try to get them to see what happened and they can't imagine things from the other side.
My students can build websites, but they can't talk to teachers. And students don't want to talk to other students. They don't want the pressure of conversation.

Women talk about being on dates with men and going to the bathroom to check their phones to see who else has contacted them. They say that they feel a little guilty, but over time, acting on the impulse to check your phone – to check your options – comes to feel normal. Consider Madeleine, thirty-two, a financial analyst in New York. She's out to drinks with a group of friends, including a man who seems interested in her. But, phone-enabled, she is clear that "drinks do not imply the entire evening." Messages on her phone mean "things could go anywhere." In this world, she says, "if I get a message from a guy who interests me and I want to leave the group of friends I'm with, I do. I usually go to the ladies' room to set things up so I'm not sitting at the table where people can look over my shoulder as I get too specific about my next plan."

When we think we are multitasking, our brains are actually moving from one thing to the next, and our performance degrades for each new task we add to the mix. Multitasking gives us a neurochemical high so we think we are doing better and better when actually we are doing worse and worse. We've seen that not only do multitaskers have trouble deciding how to organize their time, but over time, they "forget" how to read human emotions.

It was only when Elizabeth returned to the university that she saw the full effect of years spent multitasking, a life lived in hyper attention. Now, as a graduate, she has been assigned an excerpt of Plato's Republic for an ethics class. "I had skimmed the chapter, as was my habit, then, realizing that I hadn't retained much, reread it again and even made a few notes. Unfortunately, on the day of the class, I did not have that notebook with me, and while I remembered the overall gist of the chapter (moderation – good; desire for luxury – bad), I struggled to recall the specific ideas expressed in it. Without access to my cell phone to refer to the article or read up on Plato on Wikipedia, I wasn't able to participate in the class discussion. Having access to information is always wonderful, but without having at least some information retained in your brain, I am not able to build on those ideas or connect them together to form new ones."

This senior physician is sad as he considers his students' discomfort: "They don't want to take responsibility for the things that might come up in a conversation, things that would come out during a full-patient history. They don't want to hear that their patients are anxious, depressed or frightened. Doctors used to want to hear these things. They knew that the whole person got sick. The whole person needed to be treated. Today, young physicians don't want to have that conversation. My students welcome the fact that the new medical records system almost forces them to turn away from the patient and keep the interchange about relevant details. They don't want to step into a more complicated role.

As I was concluding work on this book I attended a large international meeting that had a session called "Disconnect to Connect." There, psychologists, scientists, technologists, and members of the business community considered our affective lives in the digital age. There was widespread agreement that there is an empathy gap among young people who have grown up emotionally disconnected while constantly connected to phones, games, and social media.

While I think that Sherry Turkle is to be commended for examining and publicizing the effects of new technology on human lives, I also think that her analysis falls short in several respects. The tone of the book, from start to finish, is that of a psychologist who has seen an increase in troubled patients and has pinpointed the source in addictive new technology. Her prescriptions read like a self-help manual: the patients are to put away their smartphones and start having face-to-face conversations with those around them, whether at home, school or work. If only it were that simple. Like Turkle, I would prefer to be surrounded by sensitive people who were interested in interacting with me and were capable of articulating their ideas, but the obstacles to that are far more significant than she suggests. She repeatedly harks back to memories of her grandmother, who lived under conditions considerably different from those we live in today. She also idealizes more recent times that I am old enough to remember. I have lived in the U.S. for nearly sixty years, and I recall having the open-ended discussions that she relishes, mostly as an undergraduate liberal arts student. Outside that period, I have generally found people to be too private, too scared, too inarticulate or too uninterested to have what I would consider to be a satisfactory face-to-face discussion of any depth. My early home life, and, as far as I can tell, the home lives of most of my contemporaries, did not provide the conversational opportunities that Turkle seems to think were flourishing then. When I entered the workforce, conditions worsened, with coworkers tending to be too protective of their source of income to take many risks. The baby boomers I've known have their own set of undesirable characteristics. Thus, for most of my life I have had to content myself with at most one or two people who are willing and able to participate in a decent conversation. Turkle's thoughtful and articulate people have always been a rarity in my life. As I suggested in my last post, Turkle seems to inhabit a humanistic academic bubble that isn't representative of broad American culture. Her research and writing seem to focus on elites who have the resources to address concerns that everyone else puts up with quietly.

From my point of view, a deeper analysis of Turkle's subject matter would include a closer look at its sociological aspects. For example, the gadgets and apps that seem to be causing many of the problems would not necessarily exist if we didn't live in a capitalistic society. Turkle's stressed-out, insensitive multitaskers might be more relaxed and happier if they lived either in an agrarian or a post-capitalist society. There is no reference in her book to this fact, and I find a more significant, if more abstract, account of the origins of modern tensions in works such as Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Without capitalism, there would be no Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, or any of their products. In the absence of a highly competitive job market it would be much easier for people to act spontaneously and lose that unpleasant robotic veneer. Here I think Turkle may have a conflict of interest in the sense that she does not want to alienate corporate leaders who currently provide her with access that is crucial to her work.

On the whole, Turkle remains firmly planted in the humanities camp. That isn't surprising if you consider that her earliest research was on Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. Although she is careful not to blaspheme against AI and robotics, she obviously sees them as parts of the problem and allows little or no place for them in any solution. This, I think, is where her imagination fails her. To be sure, her long presence at M.I.T. has made her fully cognizant of the past failures of AI and robotics with respect to human interface. However, in my opinion, extant anthropocentrism in the humanities precludes the possibility of her allowing that AI may one day surpass human capabilities across the board, even as it demonstrates positive emotional capabilities that are in no way inferior to ours. At that point researchers like Turkle, rather than defending human uniqueness, may well join the technological bandwagon and acknowledge that posthuman life may actually have more to offer than the lives to which we're accustomed.

Sherry Turkle I

In case you were wondering, I haven't had a stroke or died. I started reading Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle. I had heard of her before in reference to her previous book, Alone Together, which was published in 2011, and was interested in reading about the ongoing effects of digital media. Turkle, a professor at M.I.T., seems to be one of the few public intellectuals writing nontechnical books on this subject, which I think deserves far more attention than it gets. As I've said, the brains of younger people who have access to the latest technology are being organized in ways that defy historical precedent, and there doesn't seem to be much discussion of the potentially significant negative consequences, both to individuals and to society at large.

Turkle has a background in sociology and psychoanalysis, hence, from a scientific point of view, the research cited tends to look murky and subjective compared to that of some other disciplines. However, this is just the kind of book that I was looking for, because it is filled with relevant anecdotes regarding the behavior of people with whom I have very little contact: educated Americans in roughly the five-to-thirty age group. Like most quasi-scientific popular nonfiction, the book is a little bloated, repetitive and too informal in its argumentation to generate much of a punch. Moreover, Turkle, at the age of 67, is a pre-digital person like me, and some of her thinking seems old fashioned, particularly in the area of psychoanalysis, which I consider obsolete. Still, I am finding the book useful for understanding younger people, and there are surprises. Apparently older people, me included, engage in some of the questionable behaviors encouraged by digital media. For now I'll just mention some of the points I've come across that I find interesting, and perhaps I'll follow up with another post later on.

Recent research shows that people are uncomfortable if left alone with their thoughts, even for a few minutes. In one experiment, people were asked to sit quietly – without a phone or a book – for fifteen minutes. At the start of the experiment, they were asked if they would consider administering electroshocks to themselves if they became bored. They said absolutely not: No matter what, shocking themselves would be out of the question. But after just six minutes alone, a good number of them were doing just that.

Interviewee Eleanor:
Let's say we are seven at dinner. We all have our phones. You have to make sure that at least two people are not on their phones or looking down to check something – like a movie time on Google or going on Facebook. So you need sort of a rule of two or three. So I know to keep, like, two or three in the mix so that other people can text or whatever. It's my way of being polite. I would say that conversations, well, they're pretty, well fragmented. Everybody is kind of in and out. Yeah, you have to say, "Wait, what..." and sort of have people fill in a bit when you drop out.

One of Eleanor's friends explains that if a conversation at dinner turns serious and someone looks at a phone, that is her signal to "lighten things up." And she points out that the rule of three is a way of being polite even when you're not at the dinner table. When "eyes are down" at phones, she says, "conversation stays light well beyond dinner."

In order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee solitude. In time, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves is diminished. If we don't know who we are when we are alone, we turn to other people to support our sense of self. This makes it impossible to fully experience others as who they are.

Developmental psychology has long made the case for the importance of solitude. And now so does neuroscience. It is only when we are alone with our thoughts – not reacting to external stimuli – that we engage that part of our brain's basic infrastructure devoted to building up a sense of our stable autobiographical past. This is the "default mode network." So, without solitude, we can't construct a stable sense of self. Yet children who grow up digital have always had something external to respond to. When they go online, their minds are not wandering but rather are captured and divided.

...if we don't have experience with solitude – and this is often the case today – we start to equate loneliness with solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness.

Cara, a college student who has been using an iPhone app called the Happiness Tracker, has a different problem. How much should you look at the "output" of a tracking program to clue you in on your feelings? Over several weeks, the Happiness Tracker has asked for Cara's level of happiness as well as information about where she is, what she is doing, and who she is with. Its report: Her happiness is declining. There is no clear link to any one factor. When she gets this result, Cara finds herself feeling less happy with her boyfriend. The app did not link him to her declining happiness, but she begins to wonder if he is the cause of her discontent. Uncertain of her feelings, she ends up breaking up with her boyfriend in partial deference to the app.

These days, neuroscientists speculate that when parents caring for children turn to their phones, they may "effectively simulate a still-face paradigm" – in their homes or out in a restaurant – with all the attendant damage. It is not surprising if children deprived of words, eye contact, and expressive faces become stiff and unresponsive with others.

As you can see, Turkle provides much food for thought. She has exactly the same reaction that I had to Victoria in my earlier posts: here is a dysfunctional child who is not on track to becoming a full-fledged adult in the sense to which I'm accustomed. The book is a rallying cry for preventing children from becoming robotic zombies who never understand themselves and live in a trance in which they sail through their lives as if belonging to a subhuman herd of nervous mammals. Turkle proposes what amounts to talk therapy that gives kids a slap in the face in order to wake them up from their stupor, which she links to a lack of emotional development and an inability to empathize with others or understand themselves.

For the most part, I am saying "Yes!" and giving high fives as I read this, but on reflection I am a little worried that Turkle may be too invested in old paradigms. I completely agree with her that this media environment has given rise to the fearful reactions of college students who make their campuses hotbeds of political correctness because they lack the self-confidence and intellectual maturity to deal with ideas and behaviors that don't fall within their narrow comfort zones. And she is obviously correct about the irresponsibility of parents who lazily allow digital devices to subvert time-tested, biologically necessary childrearing methods. However, when I think of these phenomena in the context of what I've written about anthropocentrism and AI, it may be that this digital herding is the vanguard of the future. I'm not so sure that a later form of AI couldn't lead to an improvement over the world as we know it. With the chaotic circumstances that keep surfacing in our human-controlled present, I don't see how anyone can dismiss out of hand an orderly world in which people are prevented from engaging in wars and terrorism or despoiling the planet so as to ruin it for future generations. You might say that the algorithms currently used in smartphones are primitive precursors to ones that may one day work much better and encourage richer personal development while simultaneously reducing world disorder and instability. What would be wrong with that? Possibly Turkle is stuck in obsolete Enlightenment thinking that places mankind on a pedestal and denies the existence of our recurring deficiencies.

Another criticism I have of Turkle is that psychoanalysis and talk therapy have historically not been terribly effective at changing behavior on a large scale. Through much of its existence, psychoanalysis seems largely to have been a fashion statement of the rich: they could afford to hire a very expensive personal advisor to consult on demand. Because it didn't usually work, most people couldn't afford it and drugs were a lot cheaper, it more or less died out. Even if it still exists, its popularity is probably confined to well-heeled and highly-educated people like the ones Turkle runs into in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this regard Turkle may be addressing a very small audience. Beyond formal psychotherapy, she seems oblivious to the fact that in most families childrearing has never been a controlled process in which parents have the luxury of following all of the latest recommendations offered by the current gurus.

On a personal level I am benefiting somewhat from Turkle's mention of the failings of adult users of digital media. Although I don't fall into the category of serious abusers, there are still behaviors to watch out for. I do have a smartphone, but I mainly use it as a phone – about once a week. I don't have digital service and it is connected to our home Wi-Fi; I get beeps when I receive e-mails or messages, but that usually occurs only a couple of times a day. Occasionally I use the smartphone on public Wi-Fi while on trips. This means that I am nothing like the people discussed by Turkle, who are actively engaged with their smartphones day and night. However, I am guilty of one of their sins, which is that of constant editing. I genuinely love having the ability to edit my written communications, and I frequently do it on this blog, sometimes even after I've made a post. But my motivation is somewhat different from Turkle's target: I like being able to improve on whatever I've written. Turkle criticizes people who are obsessed with controlling their public image, and although I can't honestly say that I am completely indifferent to my public image, I genuinely don't care that much what people think of me, and I have no interest in getting "Likes" or "Thumbs Up." Even so, I do to some extent inhabit a bubble. The fact that I have withdrawn from commenting on other sites could be construed as an attempt to avoid disagreements and gain control over my environment so as to eliminate anyone who disagrees with me. From my point of view, I have retreated to this blog only because I have given up on finding substantive, interesting and civil discussion on other sites, which tend to be populated by the same narrow-minded, inflexible and intolerant people whose behavior Turkle finds problematic.

I'm only about a fourth of the way through the book and will probably have more to say later.