The Prime of Life V

I got so tired of the remainder of the book that I skimmed it. The period in this section includes the German invasion and occupation of northern France and Vichy France to the south, from 1940 to the end of the occupation in 1944. Sartre initially joined the army, was captured and was subsequently released. He wrote the philosophical treatise Being and Nothingness and the plays No Exit and The Flies. By the end of the war de Beauvoir and Sartre had begun to travel in wider artistic circles. They socialized with Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet and befriended Albert Camus. Sartre became more politically-minded than he had been previously and hoped to steer France in a socialistic direction after the war. This is the same territory covered at the beginning of The Mandarins.

Because de Beauvoir's descriptions in this volume seemed inadequate from the beginning, I looked briefly into other biographical sources in order to get a better sense of what actually went on. Although she makes veiled references to it, she has elided practically all of the considerable sexual activity that was taking place within her circle at the time. I can understand to some extent why she would do this. There is the element of privacy, and most of the people were still alive when she wrote the book. However, this is supposed to be a memoir, and I find it unacceptable that she glosses over facts that more clearly illustrate the nature of her relationship with Sartre than she succeeds in doing otherwise. She repeatedly states that the relationship was at the core of her life, yet in the book he comes across as some guy whom she sees – every once in a while – to discuss their writing. Fortunately, their literary executors have since released many of their letters, which reveal that Sartre had a tremendous sexual appetite for pretty young women, preferably virgins, and that de Beauvoir played a significant role in finding and grooming them for him. De Beauvoir herself had sexual contact with them but does not seem to have been a lesbian or bisexual, though one author speculates that she may have had erotic interactions far earlier with her childhood friend, Zaza. Apparently Sartre had as many as nine mistresses at a time, and some of them were unaware of the others. Sartre and de Beauvoir themselves stopped having sex early in their relationship, and it is possible to stretch things a little in order to portray them as advanced thinkers in this realm, but one must consider that de Beauvoir has deliberately covered up Sartre's activities and that some of the women who became sexually involved with him later said that they had been used and discarded. I have no interest in pursuing this vein further and am content to agree with Louis Menand's assessment in this article. The most plausible explanation for de Beauvoir's authorial choice in how to handle the activities in question is that she was playing the traditional role of supportive wife in a patriarchal society, which, though out of keeping for the author of The Second Sex, reflects who she was.

The sex part, per se, has little influence on my opinion of de Beauvoir, and I am more concerned that she chose to saddle herself with Sartre, whom I don't admire at all. I would have liked her more if she had attached herself to someone less seedy and manipulative. Beyond her academic abilities she may not have been as smart as you may think. Unfortunately, I am going to have to kick her out of my personal pantheon, where George Eliot still resides, because she reminds me too much of a Jackie Kennedy or a Nancy Reagan in her willingness to bolster a man of little merit: Kennedy was unfaithful and Reagan was not very bright. She demeaned herself by making sacrifices for Sartre, who, in my opinion, wasn't worth it. I have lost all enthusiasm for her writing and may not read any more of it. On the positive side, she is occasionally perceptive and always articulate, but on the negative side she is lacking in imagination, and, above all, the compromises that she made for Sartre found their way into her work, which diminishes her in my mind.

The Prime of Life IV

In 1938 both de Beauvoir and Sartre obtained new teaching positions in Paris. They continued to live separately while seeing each other frequently. That year Sartre published his first novel, Nausea, which met with critical and commercial success. De Beauvoir worked on She Came to Stay, which was not published until 1943. By 1939 the imminent war affected everyone in Paris, and de Beauvoir describes her daily life in some detail. I had thought that she must have been drawing from her diaries to write her memoirs up to that point, but apparently she did not keep a diary before then. The diary entries that she reproduces are slightly condensed compared to the preceding text but are otherwise little different. Now, three quarters of the way through the book, I am becoming overwhelmed by minutia that doesn't interest me much. To be sure, World War II was an important event and still has major repercussions over seventy years in its aftermath, and de Beauvoir's chronicles might be useful to a historian of the period, but that isn't why I chose to read this book and I am increasingly finding it boring. I am looking forward to finishing it and moving on to something else.

De Beauvoir's limitations as a writer and thinker are beginning to weigh on me in a manner that makes it difficult for me to continue reading this book and accept her at face value. I will soon finish reading it and make a final comment. My problem as a reader is that she does not provide enough breadth of perspective to leave me feeling that her portrayals are sufficiently accurate. I had somewhat the same feeling while I was reading The Mandarins, but in that book any deficiencies were made up for by some of the dialogue between the characters. Such dialogue is not present in The Prime of Life, leaving it, for me anyway, somewhat empty. The earlier Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter was also more readable, but in that case it was because it contained a sharper focus and the emotional energy was less opaque. In The Mandarins and the present book, Sartre is an important figure, but I don't see why he is important beyond the fact that de Beauvoir has assigned him that position.

None of my reading of de Beauvoir so far has included much philosophy, and the writing has essentially all been autobiographical. However, in the background of this writing is a credo that she adopted at an early age and mentions now and again. I am finding myself in philosophical disagreement with her, but because she evades the explicit statement of her views in favor of a literary approach I am left with a gnawing feeling that makes her writing seem avoidant. The impression I have is that both she and Sartre are extreme Cartesian dualists, which in their case prompts them to see themselves as free beings who happen to inhabit their particular bodies. She seems to think along the lines that she has a duty to be free from the social pressures associated with the fact that she happens to inhabit a female body. This is a significantly different view from standard American feminism, which focuses more on equal rights and can ultimately be resolved by legal means. For me, Cartesian dualism is conceptually incorrect: you are your body, and therefore both Sartre and de Beauvoir look like fools to me. This foolishness then becomes exacerbated by their insistence on spending their entire lives in Paris with the same closed circle of friends, which is a perfect way to form and maintain a delusional bubble.

Sartre and de Beauvoir are starting to look like naïve college students who never grew up. Specifically, they thought that they could read anything, master it and then write brilliantly on the subject. I first noticed this in The Mandarins. De Beauvoir thought she understood America very well because she had read a lot of American fiction, seen a lot of American films and listened to a lot of American music. In The Mandarins you can instantly recognize as a reader that there is a deep cultural incompatibility between Louis Brogan (Nelson Algren) and Anne Dubreuilh (de Beauvoir), but I am not at all sure that the author recognizes it as such. De Beauvoir strikes me as anthropologically and sociologically obtuse, perhaps because she came to these subjects via trendy, obsolete structuralism, and post-structuralism doesn't seem to me to have been an improvement. In retrospect, the intellectual movements that emanated from France during de Beauvoir's life, including existentialism, seem like fads to me. She did study psychology and seems handier there, but at that time the field was still under Freud's influence and it had not yet become a true science. Both de Beauvoir and Sartre seem to view science as having no bearing on their work, and I think this is a critical mistake which will relegate them to the status of minor historical figures rather than major thinkers of the period. De Beauvoir would have been an interesting person to know, but she is dead and I am beginning to think that all that is left is a flawed legacy.

Diary

I need to take a break from Simone de Beauvoir, because she simply writes too much. In her memoirs she is like a pre-Flaubert French novelist such as Victor Hugo who churns out page after page with little of substance to add compared to a postmodernist, whose meaning, if any, may be obscure, but who at least is concise. For my taste she is relying too much on a journalistic style, spending an inordinate amount of time on events and too little on analysis. I suspect that she is just transcribing her diaries and cleaning them up for public consumption, since both she and Sartre were famous by 1960. Her writing isn't as fluid or as evocative as Proust's, but, like him, she, in effect, withholds crucial information – such as that so-and-so is gay – for thousands of pages. Although there is precision to her writing, she, as a writer, seems to intentionally stop at a pre-defined level of depth as a matter of stylistic choice, when I would prefer it if she had dug further into the psyches of the people discussed. She spends far too much time describing her vacations in the manner of travel writing when I want to know what she really thinks about Sartre, Bost, Olga, etc. Her style makes her writing seem as if you are seeing everything through a filter that removes what is most intriguing in order to provide a predefined narrative flow that has been calculated to meet the needs of a hypothetical reader. In other words, unlike this blog, where I make a reasonable effort to tell you exactly what I think about something, de Beauvoir seems to consciously self-edit for reasons that she doesn't explain. For example, while she has firmly established that Sartre is a crucial element in her life, she has said nothing specifically about the strengths and weaknesses of their relationship, what she might have preferred, etc. She is holding back for some reason – Sartre was going to read it and she doesn't want to upset him, it might affect Sartre's public reputation, or, less likely, she didn't really understand Sartre. Similarly, as she describes the Sartre-Olga affair one might surmise that she and Olga were ultimately hurt, but it seems that Sartre has no accountability for his behavior. The impression I have is that she uses writing as a form of sublimation that whitewashes undesirable behavior among her intimates, which is a disservice to her readers. She may also be laboring under the "great man" delusion that is so popular in France. In my writing I try to be as clear as possible about people other than the ones whom I know are reading my blog. That way you get an unfiltered statement of my views, and in those instances where I think privacy is important you get almost no information, and I don't waste your time by dancing around facts or covering up with selected omissions.

In other news, it is starting to get cold here, and there may be a frost tonight. I am planning a very brief trip to Bar Harbor, Maine next month. As you can tell from the comments above, I am a little bogged down with The Prime of Life, but I will continue reading it and keep you posted. There are two more books in this memoir series plus three additional memoir-like books by de Beauvoir, but I'm not in a hurry to read them. I will eventually read the next two volumes, but definitely not in succession.

The Prime of Life III

De Beauvoir and Sartre saw each other frequently when they lived separately in Rouen and Le Havre. They developed friends and read a lot. De Beauvoir seems to have been interested in the latest styles in fiction and admired Faulkner and Kafka. They discussed why she didn't concern herself more with philosophy:

...I was well aware that the ease with which I penetrated to the heart of a text stemmed, precisely, from my lack of originality. In this field a genuinely creative talent is so rare that queries as to why I did not attempt to join the élite are surely otiose: it would be more useful to explain how certain individuals are capable of getting results from that conscious venture into lunacy known as a 'philosophical system', from which they derive that obsessional attitude which endows their tentative patterns with universal insight and applicability. As I have remarked before, women are not by nature prone to obsessions of this type....I wanted to communicate the element of originality in my own experience. In order to do this successfully I knew that it was literature towards which I must orientate myself. 

At this stage in my reading I am inclined to think that de Beauvoir was not original as a producer of literature either. She is good at clear and precise renderings of human interactions but adopted a style that reads more like nonfiction than fiction. She draws so directly from her life experiences that it's as if she simply changes "I" in her diary to "she" in her novels. There are close similarities between some of the people in this memoir to some of the characters in The Mandarins. Moreover, although I find her enjoyable to read, her writing is completely lacking in the kind of originality that one sees in writers such as Kafka or László Krasznahorkai. Her strategy as a writer seems to have been to sculpt her life so as to provide a sufficient stream of material for her fiction. There may even be an oddly calculated dimension to her choice of Sartre as a partner, because on close inspection they have little in common, and she may have seen him as a ticket to a colorful life. I notice that in her memoirs she is quick to compliment physically attractive men on their appearance, yet she leads us to believe that she also found Sartre attractive even though he was wall-eyed and practically a dwarf, features to which she never refers, perhaps to spare his feelings.

From 1933 to 1935 Sartre studied in Berlin, and he and de Beauvoir vacationed in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria. Fascism was prominent in Europe by then, and the Spanish Civil War was to begin in 1936. As you might expect, they were appalled by Hitler and Mussolini.

When he returned to his job in Le Havre, Sartre became depressive. He was extremely ambitious and was concerned, at the age of 30, that he would spend the rest of his days as an obscure philosophy teacher. He didn't like teaching and at least once had called an entire class stupid to their faces. De Beauvoir, though only 27 in 1935, was more worried about her age. Sartre was interested in dreams, and a medical friend recommended that he take mescaline in a controlled setting. Most people had found the experience pleasant, but Sartre had a classic bad trip: "umbrellas had become vultures, shoes turned into skeletons, and faces acquired monstrous characteristics, while behind him, just past the corner of his eye, swarmed crabs and polyps and grimacing Things." Although the effects of the drug quickly wore off, Sartre continued to experience hallucinations for months. It became a joke with de Beauvoir that he thought that he was being followed by a lobster. However, this was a serious episode of depression that took time to dissipate.

At the time their friends included Marco, a gay teacher and earlier acquaintance of Sartre who wanted to be an opera singer, Olga, who had been a student of de Beauvoir, and Jacques Bost, who had been a student of Sartre. Marco would dream up elaborate deceptions for fun, and once even Sartre and de Beauvoir participated. Olga was the daughter of a White Russian émigré and was being pressured by her parents to study subjects in which she had no interest. Bost was a good-looking, intelligent young man who appealed to both Sartre and de Beauvoir. Before long, Sartre got into a relationship with Olga, which did not exclude de Beauvoir, and they tried for a while, unsuccessfully, to live as three. Marco fell in love with Bost, who was not gay and rejected him. De Beauvoir had an affair with Bost. In the end, Sartre and Olga broke up, and Olga later married Bost. Perhaps out of discretion, de Beauvoir leaves out most of the details of what transpired, but she made use of the triad for her first published novel, She Came to Stay.

There was considerable controversy in de Beauvoir's life, and some of it began with Olga. Olga was the first of several young women whom she introduced to Sartre, and, depending on what you read, she was either an emancipated thinker or a pedophile-enabler who procured girls for Sartre's sexual gratification. I am reluctant to dig into this because it is time-consuming enough to read de Beauvoir's version and I am fairly confident that she would not be completely callous in these matters. What concerns me more is the possibility that de Beauvoir intentionally staged her life events, including her relationships, in order to generate material for her fiction. That seemed to be the case in her relationship with Nelson Algren as portrayed in The Mandarins. If I don't tire of reading her memoirs, that topic should come up in the next volume, which covers that period. She obviously had a formidable intellect, but I could hardly approve of her as a person if she intentionally toyed with people's lives in the interest of her personal success.

An aspect of writing fiction that you don't hear much about is the difficulty that writers face in coming up with fresh material. That can't be taught in writing programs, and this explains why, in the present day, the vacuous students who attend creative writing programs tend to produce interesting word usage more often than astute observations of any kind. De Beauvoir, for her part, knew her limitations as a writer and was intelligent enough to find a solution that worked in her case.

The Prime of Life II

Sartre tried to line up a teaching position in Japan to follow his military service, but he failed to do so and ended up teaching in Le Havre instead. De Beauvoir got a job teaching at a lycée in Marseille. She impetuously set about exploring the region alone on foot and by hitchhiking. Once two men attempted to abduct her, and she managed to escape. At the lycée she was so young that many thought she was a student. One of her colleagues, a married woman, tried unsuccessfully to seduce her. Before long she took a new position in Rouen in order to be closer to Sartre and Paris.

During this period their interests were eclectic. Sartre had lively friends in the theatrical world, and they read widely, always discussing issues that they deemed important. Their reading and entertainment included more lowbrow than highbrow material. They watched films with Buster Keaton and Sartre particularly liked detective novels. They closely followed crime stories in the news. De Beauvoir especially liked the works of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They managed to travel on inexpensive vacations to Spain, Italy and London. The pattern that they were to follow for the rest of their lives began to emerge.

It is at this juncture that, for me, the reader, the picture becomes a little myopic. While de Beauvoir's writing seems honest and open and she seems to be relatively perceptive, I am beginning to become a little uneasy with her point of view and feel the need for a second opinion, which you never get in memoirs. I can accept de Beauvoir's perspective, in which her life with Sartre meets all of her expectations, and that he may have been the only person who could offer that to her, allowing her to live free from the social constraints that had been the bane of her youth, but I don't get a sense that I would analyze the situation exactly as she did if I had been there, because she seems to be overreacting to her past and possibly is placing more faith in Sartre than is justified. My problem is that Sartre was not a great thinker, and, for that matter, not a great writer. He was constantly generalizing, but his theories were often bad or even stupid. De Beauvoir obliquely hints at this, and the impression I get is that, to her, Sartre was sort of a lifestyle choice more than anything else, and that ultimately ideas were not all that important to her. Rather than take a systematic approach to this problem, I am simply going to read Tony Judt's Past Imperfect, in which the French intellectuals of that era, Sartre in particular, are eviscerated. I'm not sure that I'll agree with Judt on every position, since both he and Sartre have different points of view from mine, but you can always count on Judt for a well-written, rigorous analysis.

The good part of de Beauvoir's relationship with Sartre, as far as I'm concerned, was their willingness to discuss everything in great detail:

Sartre sometimes upbraided me for my insouciance, just as I became irritated when he spent too long buried in a paper. To justify my attitude I invoked the theory of the 'solitary man'. Sartre objected that the 'solitary man' does not lack any interest in the course of events: though his thought may not depend on external supporting opinion, this does not imply that he opts for ignorance. Sartre's counter-attack shook me, but I persevered in my attitude. I wanted people to despise the futile contingencies of daily life, as I thought Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Van Gogh had done. The position I had adopted suited me somewhat ill; there was nothing in me of the visionary, or the solitary, or indeed of the lyric poet. I was really indulging in escapism, putting myself into blinkers so as to safeguard my piece of mind. For a long while I stuck obstinately to this 'rejection of humanity', which was also the inspiration of my aesthetic views. I liked those landscapes in which there was no apparent sign of man's presence, or else the sort of camouflage – local color, picturesque background – which concealed such presence from me. In Rouen my favorite spot was the Rue Eau-de-Robec: its shapeless, rickety houses, lapped by filthy water, looked very much as though they might be destined for some wholly alien species of inhabitant. I was attracted by those people, such as madmen, prostitutes, or tramps, who had in one way or another denied their own humanity.  

Certainly neither Sartre nor de Beauvoir can be accused of mental laziness. I identify more with de Beauvoir, because it was Sartre's "save the world" mentality that got him into trouble, putting him in way over his head, where he badly tackled issues that he didn't even understand.

Diary

I had hoped that by now I would have read enough to make another book post, but I haven't, due to several distractions. We had a rare string of four nights in a row with good stargazing conditions – the best in nearly a year – and I wanted to take advantage of them. I've been looking at objects such as M2, M5, M13, M27, M31, NGC 6207, NGC 6960, Burnham 1, and lots of other multiple star systems. Although it would have been possible to see several planets this summer, I didn't bother with my large telescope, because it is hard to find a place in the yard with a good view to the south, and they are close to the horizon, which is hazy. I prefer to view planets on my smaller refractor on the rear deck, and it is difficult to situate the Dobsonian there. The season is moving along, and if you stay up late enough you can already see M42, one of the most interesting objects in the night sky.

Perhaps further explanation is needed for my interest in stargazing, since I seem to be the only person I know who likes it. I do it partly for aesthetics, because many of the objects are attractive natural phenomena, and partly for knowledge, because, after all, most of the universe is out there, not here. And I like operating precision equipment. Other stargazers have different motivations from mine. Some are more socially motivated, and star parties are popular throughout the world. Others are even more interested in tinkering than I am, and when they find out how hard it is to see things well they take up astrophotography, which can occupy a technically-oriented person indefinitely. With newer cameras, long exposure times and new software it is possible to produce images that show far more detail than one can see with the naked eye even under ideal viewing conditions. There is also a competitive aspect to stargazing, which often centers around – you guessed it – who has the largest telescope. In stargazing culture, all of these motivations get scrambled up by the commercial element, which emphasizes product over knowledge. Many stargazers seem to have a checklist mentality; they want the right equipment so that they can go down a list and check off what they've seen, whether or not they know what the objects are. I prefer to at least have some astronomical understanding of what I'm looking at. The universe is a large place, and even many of the known objects are not well understood.

In other news, William the cat is improving over time. He was a little wild at first and is gradually becoming better adjusted. This is an excellent house for a cat, since there is space to run around, an old basement with crickets, and chipmunks, birds and rabbits to watch outside. The chipmunks seem to enjoy taunting him by standing right in front of him, separated only by a screen. He has a high level of energy which we hope will gradually subside.

The tomato crop turned out well, and we are at the point of giving them away. I've done more watering than ever before due to the lack of rain, but the absence of rain also meant a reduction in fungus, which has left the plants healthier than they usually are by now.

We continue to follow politics, but I'd rather not think about it. My unavoidable conclusion is that presidents are never up to the task, and in fact the U.S. seems to have had a series of mediocre presidents following FDR. Even in FDR's case there was a certain amount of luck involved in the sense that he held office during real crises that obviously required strong actions. In my opinion, if you exclude climate change and mass extinctions, there has been no serious disaster facing the U.S. since World War II, and, if anything, the greatest disaster since then has been American foreign policy. Arguably, China has produced the best leaders in recent years: Deng Xiaoping and now Xi Jinping. It is unfortunate that the whole world has become trapped in a vicious cycle of economic competition. A better solution may lie in the communist regimes that are willing to play the game for a while, rather than Europe and the U.S., where the current system originated. If you could take the corruption out of communism and improve the decision-making of its leaders, it might well provide a system of governance far more appropriate for mankind than the one in which we live today.

On my next post I'll be back to de Beauvoir.

The Prime of Life I

Because I'm far from entering my winter mode I haven't been doing much reading. However, I have made some progress in this central portion of Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs and am finding it quite rich. She describes her life after college in great detail, and there is so much to ponder here that in writing a few comments about it I can only hope to give you an impression of the things that interest me the most.

When she finished at the Sorbonne she got her first apartment and began to see Sartre regularly. They would meet in public and talk for hours in the sight of others, and word got back to her father. Since their relationship was obviously sexual, he went over to have a word with Sartre to prevent embarrassment to his family. Sartre was tough-minded even then and didn't back down, but thereafter they met in more private locations. She made money working as a private tutor and in temporary teaching positions and Sartre lived off a small inheritance. He soon had eighteen months of compulsory military service that allowed him to stay close enough to Paris that they could see each other often.

De Beauvoir was giddy with her newly-found freedom and luxuriated in her free time. Although she didn't have much money she didn't care at all:

Our puritanical education and the firmness of our intellectual commitment ensured that we remained immune to dukes, millionaires, owners of Hispanos, women in mink, and all such denizens of high society. We actually stigmatized this beau monde as the very dregs of the earth, on the grounds that it sucked profit from a régime which we condemned.

During this period they decided that they would not marry, but that their relationship would be their primary one, with "essential love," and that they would each be free to pursue "contingent" relationships. They also agreed to keep no secrets from each other. Their long-term plan was to travel and live as writers. Their worldview was still in a formative stage:

Sartre built his theories, fundamentally, upon certain positions which we both adhered to with some passion. Our love of freedom, our opposition to the established order of things, our individualism, and our respect for the working classes – all these brought us close to the anarchist position. But to be quite frank, our incoherence defied any sort of label. We were anti-capitalist, yet not Marxists, we glorified the powers of pure mind and perfect freedom, yet we rejected the spiritual approach; though our interpretation of man and the universe was strictly materialistic, we despised science and technology. Sartre was not bothered by these inconsistencies, and refused so much as to formulate them. 'When you think in terms of problems,' he told me, 'you aren't thinking at all.' He himself skipped from one conviction to the next, without rhyme or reason.

Her teaching jobs didn't always go well, as she recounts in this humorous anecdote:

To earn my living I gave private lessons and also taught Latin at the Lycée Victor-Duruy. Previously I had taught psychology to thoughtful, well-behaved secondary-school girls in Neuilly; and this new junior class of mine caught me somewhat off guard. Learning the rudiments of Latin is a grim business for ten-year-old girls, and I thought I would soften the grimness with a few smiles. My pupils smiled back; then they came clambering up on the dais to get a closer look at my necklace, and began pulling at the lace collar of my dress. The first time I sent them back to their places they sat more or less quiet; but in a very short while they were wriggling and whispering to each other incessantly. I tried to make my voice sound stern, and to instill a fierce gleam into my eye; but they still chattered and played up to me as much as ever. I decided to take a tough line, and gave the worst offender a black mark. She flung herself head first against the nearest wall, screaming: 'My father will beat me!' The whole class took this cry up, in reproachful tones. 'Her father will beat her!' they chorused. Could I, I asked, condemn her to parental execution in this way! But if I let her off, how could I then punish her classmates? I found only one solution, and that was to talk so loud that my voice drowned the row they were making. The result was that those who wanted to listen could at least hear me; and I fancy my class learned about as much Latin as any other. But I more than once was summoned before an irate headmistress, and my assignment was not renewed.

An early attempt at writing a novel didn't go well either:

I became vaguely aware that the magic wasn't working in my case, though this didn't prevent me from chasing it stubbornly, and for a long time....My work lacked all real conviction. Sometimes I felt I was doing a school assignment, sometimes that I had lapsed into parody.

I am finding it tempting to compare de Beauvoir at this age to George Eliot at the same age. They both started out deeply religious and evolved into powerful intellectuals. Despite their similarities, de Beauvoir's advantages are striking. She had led a privileged life and had consciously rejected it and worked out an alternative by the time she was twenty-one. George Eliot, in contrast, came from a considerably lower social rank, without a higher education; she had no choice but to live with her conservative, uneducated father until he died, and her writing career didn't take off until she was in her late thirties. Her pickings among men were also restricted, with her dowdy looks and humble origin. Instead of finding a Sartre she found G.H. Lewes, who, though admirable in many ways, also came from a modest family and was ridiculed by some of the intellectual elites in London for his physical appearance. Moreover, living in London during the Victorian era had to be more stifling than living in Paris in the late 1920's and early 1930's. In sum, there is no question that George Eliot led a more challenging life. De Beauvoir fits a more contemporary bohemian model, and elements of her worldview at that age are reminiscent of the beatniks and the hippies, though her puritanical side provided her with far more self-discipline than ever existed in either of those groups. George Eliot's circumstances preempted the possibility of an adventurous life in the manner of de Beauvoir, and in this sense de Beauvoir seems to have been quite lucky.

If de Beauvoir is a little less saintly than George Eliot, she still looks much better to me than my contemporaries among American women. Many of the ones I've known have been upper-middle-class, or roughly comparable to de Beauvoir in social background. Their educations did nothing more than enable them to continue living bourgeois lives, perhaps showing slightly greater sensitivity to social issues than their parents did, but never deeply questioning the desirability of this stifling capitalist system. Their take on women's rights was that they deserved more than they had been getting, even if they had nothing to offer in return. That in itself isn't surprising among ordinary people, and particularly among Americans, who tend to be conformists, but it becomes more telling with respect to intellectuals, a group that I once mistakenly thought might have something important to say.

I'm only a tenth of the way through the book, so you can be sure that you'll be hearing more about this.

Diary

A languorous summer seems to be drawing to a close with the arrival of cooler temperatures and rain. Occasionally we retreated to the basement, where the temperature peaks at seventy degrees, to cool off. I have had a greater sense of lethargy this summer than most. All I did was grow tomatoes and go on a couple of trips. The most recent trip was a road trip to Valatie, New York to see the garden of the author of a blog that provides some of the recipes that we use. I especially liked the sprawling, dilapidated old mansion that survives from the early mill days of the region. I also liked having the opportunity to drive at one hundred miles per hour, which awakens me from my torpor. The third annual world meeting of Doubt the Experts took place on August 16, and it may be the last one, because John's parents are selling their summer house in Weybridge and he may not be back. Actually, the meeting consists of two guys sitting at a bar drinking beer and talking.

I continue to think about why I like the writing of Simone de Beauvoir. It is no coincidence that I also like the writing of George Eliot. The emerging idea is that I find slightly masculine women more aesthetically appealing than masculine men or feminine women. My theory is that motivations that are biological in origin infiltrate people's conscious or unconscious goals, and that much of what men do, regardless of their age or vocation, boils down to attracting women (or men, if they're gay). They are competing and making ostentatious displays in order to get attention and win devotees rather than seeking truth or beauty as ends in themselves. You can see this everywhere, from Joseph Smith to Hugh Hefner to Wilt Chamberlain to Charles Manson to Jimi Hendrix to Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. The concept of the "rock star" is quintessentially male, and it can also be found in a slightly more subdued form in academia and the arts. In practice, what this means is that, even among male intellectuals and scientists, attracting bimbos may sometimes take precedence over seeking truth. Clear examples are harder to find among the intelligentsia, but think of Saul Bellow or Richard Feynman.

This idea came to me not on a theoretical basis but directly from noticing that there is a qualitative difference in the writing of George Eliot and Simone de Beauvoir that other writers are unable to match. Specifically, I perceive that they are trying to express truths, and that for them this takes precedence over entertaining their readers, increasing their incomes or becoming famous, though they may retain a peripheral interest in those aspects. Notably to me, they lack what I think of as male competitiveness: they are not trying to win. I think that cooperation is more present in women than in men, and that, particularly in literary and artistic pursuits, the desire to win tends to compromise the quality of a work. The emphasis is different in most female writing; there is less competition and the emotional takes precedence over the rational. If you've read much of this blog, you will have noticed by now that I'm not a big fan of emotional outpourings.

It is possible that a feminized male writer would also appeal to me, but I haven't found one yet. At first I thought Proust had potential, but I have since decided that he is missing a crucial ingredient: intelligence. So, when I read literature that is supposed to be good, the men usually seem to be showing off and exaggerating their knowledge and insight, and the women usually seem unduly emotional and unrealistic. Unfortunately, George Eliot did not write a memoir, but there is no doubt in my mind that if she had it would have been just as engrossing as Simone de Beauvoir's. Both George Eliot and de Beauvoir were more masculine than most women writers, and, ironically, they even attracted female groupies.

I've started de Beauvoir's The Prime of Life and will be commenting on that. My readers may not share my enthusiasm for de Beauvoir, but if they continue to read this blog they will just have to put up with it, because she has become my imaginary friend.

The Sixth Extinction II

The remainder of the book covers several additional topics, including forest ecology in the Amazon, bats with white-nose syndrome, the Sumatran rhino and the Neanderthals. The number of species per acre near the equator is much higher than anywhere else, and the extinction rate there is correspondingly higher. Many species are adapted to narrow temperature ranges at certain elevations in the tropical mountains, and global warming forces both animals and plants to migrate uphill over time. In more temperate regions without mountains, the migration is towards the poles. A chapter is devoted to the effects that humans have had on ecosystems by exposing them to organisms from which they had previously been isolated.

The discussion of invasive species interested me. Ordinarily we hear news about Asian carp or zebra mussels or Asian long-horned beetles, but these make up only a tiny fraction of them. It turns out that earthworms were extinct in New England following the last Ice Age and were reintroduced by colonists. If you look at your yard here, the grass isn't native and the dandelions came from Europe. Even Queen Anne's lace is European. The fact is that invasive species are ubiquitous, and not much attention is paid to them unless they are found to conflict with our preferences in one way or another.

The Anthropocene epoch, as Kolbert describes it, came about both directly and indirectly from the migrations of humans out of Africa that began about a hundred and twenty thousand years ago. The most obvious directly-caused extinctions were the result of hunting by humans of large animals that had slow rates of reproduction. Because of those slow rates, even without excessive hunting a species might become extinct over thousands of years. Other large species such as deer are able to reproduce fast enough to maintain a robust population. The indirect causes of extinction include the introduction of foreign species and the alteration of the atmosphere through the addition of greenhouse gasses. Kolbert says very little about greenhouse gasses or pollution and a lot about introduced species. Both frogs and bats are being killed by fungi that were inadvertently transported from one part of the world to another.

Kolbert discusses our relationship to the Neanderthals in some detail. Although we interbred with them, the evidence points to our causing their extinction. We also seem to have caused the extinctions of several other Homo species since we left Africa. Here Kolbert emphasizes the human resourcefulness that is not evident in any of our close relatives despite having almost identical genetic makeups. It appears that a few small mutations made all the difference.

Right up to the end of the book, Kolbert remains resolutely unphilosophical about the current extinctions. She goes as far as to quote Richard Leaky, who said "Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the Sixth Extinction, but also risks being one of its victims," and Paul Ehrlich, who said "In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches." Kolbert herself says this:

Obviously, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. But at the risk of sounding anti-human – some of my best friends are humans! – I will say that it is not, in the end, what's most worth attending to. Right now, in the amazing moment that counts to us as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. 

That is as close as she comes to taking a position, and I would have preferred it if she had gone on to suggest altering some of our current practices: what about controlling our population growth and reducing further destruction to the Earth's ecosystems? Kolbert has made a contribution to the discussion of our environment, but this is hardly a call to action.

The Sixth Extinction I

I'm slowly making my way through The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, and will break my comments up into two parts. The title refers to the fact that there have been five major mass extinctions over the last half-billion years and that we are in the early stages of a sixth, which is entirely man-made. The text jumps around between early scientific inquiries into the Earth's history and present studies. The chapters I've read so far cover current frog extinctions in Panama related to the spread of a fungus by humans, the disappearance of the American mastodon about thirteen thousand years ago, which presumably was caused by Native Americans, the hunting to extinction of the great auk in the nineteenth century, the asteroid that caused the fifth extinction and the acidification of the oceans resulting from the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Most of this material will be familiar to anyone who has attempted to maintain a basic level of scientific literacy, but, unfortunately, that group is in a minority and books like this are a necessary public service.

Although Kolbert is a clear writer with a precise literary style, I am not finding the book engaging. This is because she follows contemporary journalistic practices that eschew linear exposition and bold theorizing in favor of anecdotal reportage sprinkled with hard facts. She efficiently describes the appearance, offices, musical choices and speech habits of scientists and the exotic locations where they conduct their research, but to me this is merely a contrived technique taught to journalists that is meant to draw the reader into a story. I find that it makes the writing disjointed – it is harder to connect the main ideas, if there are any. I prefer to read scientists like E.O. Wilson who tell you what they think and why they think it instead of beating around the bush like this. At times Kolbert seems more interested in literary travel writing than in science. And if scientists are interesting people, you would never know it from reading this book.

Even so, Kolbert does manage to pack a lot of information into the book, which she has researched thoroughly. In fact, this extinction language is far more appropriate than the global warming language that has captivated the media, because global warming is really just one aspect of the ongoing environmental disaster caused by humans, and the enormity of the situation is better captured in the context of the major biological events that have occurred on the planet since the Cambrian period. Extinction language captures the full impact of human destructiveness, and this kind of long-term thinking underlies some of the positions that I have taken on this blog: as a species our self-conceptions are often radically at odds with the reality of what we are collectively doing at this moment.

Diary

Ruminating over Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, I've been considering why I prefer writers like de Beauvoir to others and am concluding that it's the seriousness that they offer. Most writing, even ostensibly serious nonfiction such as philosophy, is often little more than entertainment and amusement, as Professor Laporte noted. As I've mentioned previously, there are commercial and vocational aspects to writing which encourage publishers and authors to attract as many readers as possible, or, in the case of professionals, to advance their careers. Among voluntary readers, the tendency to prefer writing that makes you feel good is always going to be stronger than the tendency to prefer writing that startles or unsettles you. There isn't much of a market for disturbing books, because most people don't want to spend money on something that makes them feel bad. Even so, hardly anyone would be completely happy knowing that they live in a bubble, and if an author can provide just enough truth to leave his or her readers feeling in the know, but without causing them to drastically rethink their worldviews, everyone can be happy.

It is a little difficult to reframe what de Beauvoir does in an American context. She is criticizing her class, and the class structure in America is less defined than it was in France in the last century. Moreover, the language of social criticism in the U.S. has been channeled into narratives such as rich versus poor, white versus black or Native American versus colonist that hardly mention the internal shortcomings of the middle class. Generally, the middle class is held up as a model that provides a life without either poverty or the corruption associated with excessive wealth. Because of the popularity of religion here, there isn't much room for a narrative about an atheist who escapes the oppression of the religious bourgeoisie, which unfortunately constitutes a large percentage of the American population. There doesn't seem to be a de Beauvoir equivalent who trashed the middle-class establishment for trying to force her to live an intellectually bankrupt life: the closest the U.S. came to that was the equal rights movement, which never suggested that life in the middle class was stupid and merely asserted the right of every individual to live in a manner comparable to middle-class white males. From the point of view of someone like de Beauvoir, there isn't much depth to the emphasis on equal rights in the U.S., because it assumes without question that, not only is a bourgeois life desirable in itself, but that religion ought to play an important role in it.

To be sure, over the years in the U.S. there have been minor episodes in which American orthodoxy was questioned. During the 1960's and early 1970's, there were elements of anti-materialism in the hippie movement. However, in that case, the short-lived movement was led by the children of the privileged. More recently, the Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, made atheism a popular topic for public consumption, but they haven't made a dent in American culture as of yet. Even the best-known American radical, Noam Chomsky, finds it easier to rail against American imperialism than to critique the American consumer, whom he treats as a victim of corporate greed rather than an intellectually deficient conformist.

A country without a cadre of serious thinkers who are recognized as such by the public will predictably elect presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama and nominate candidates like Donald Trump; the literature will be second-rate, and the national heroes will be professional athletes.

Enough of that. I've started to read The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, which will probably be the topic of my next post.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter II

I've just finished reading the book and have to say, in the feeling of the moment, that it's the best memoir I've read so far. The ending, in context, with the tragic death of de Beauvoir's childhood friend, Zaza, is truly moving and perhaps crystallizes the outlook that de Beauvoir developed and held for the remainder of her life. Although there is some girlishness in the book that I don't care for, de Beauvoir's portrayal of the struggles she faced growing up in a bourgeois French family early in the last century is illuminating to me. Some aspects of her path to maturity are bizarrely reminiscent of the machinations in Jane Austen's novels of the previous century.

The atmosphere in de Beauvoir's household had deteriorated significantly by the time she began her undergraduate work at the Institut Sainte-Marie and the Institut Catholique, where she studied literature, languages and mathematics. She had already declared herself an atheist to her mother, and her father would have preferred a suitable marriage to her planned career of teaching at a lycée. His conservative bourgeois background became evident as soon as Simone began to buck the system. The conflict was exacerbated by the fact that she continued to live at home, even during the academic year, and was completely dependent on her parents financially. They disapproved of much of her curriculum and intrusively monitored her by reading all of her mail, while providing her with a small allowance. She was not permitted to dress fashionably or wear makeup. She fell into despair and desperately sought a meaning to her life.

In college she developed a temporary crush on her literature instructor, Robert Garric, and began a quasi-romantic relationship with her cousin, Jacques Laiguillon. Here is how she describes herself at the time:

Since my infancy I had always been headstrong, self-willed, a creature of extremes, and proud of it. Others might stop half-way in their quest for faith or in the expression of their scepticism, their desires, their plans: I despised their half-heartedness. I always carried my emotions, my ideas, my enterprises to the bitter end; I didn't undertake anything lightly; and now, as in my earliest childhood, I wanted everything in my life to be justified by a kind of absolute necessity. This stubbornness, I realized, deprived me of certain qualities; but there was never any question of departing from my fixed intention; my 'serious side' was the whole of me, and I very much wanted to remain a whole person.

Jacques was far less serious, less intellectual and less reliable than Simone, and he misled her repeatedly. It is difficult to see why she put up with him at all, and I surmise that she was still immature and wanted to leave the door open to a marriage that would satisfy her parents. Jacques and Simone carried on for several years without so much as a kiss, and finally, without telling Simone in advance, he arranged to marry a completely uninteresting woman who had a large dowry. It was all downhill for Jacques from there; his wife eventually kicked him out; he was penniless and died of malnutrition at the age of forty-six. De Beauvoir seems to have loved him: she bends over backwards in this memoir to highlight his positive attributes – which I don't find convincing in the least.

Zaza, encouraged by Simone, also attended the Institute Sainte-Marie and faced pressures from her mother, who pointedly wanted her to marry properly and disapproved of Simone's influence, which she thought had put Zaza on the wrong track. Zaza was far more volatile emotionally than Simone, and when she had a potential husband lined up, Jeanne Padrelle (a pseudonym for Maurice Merleau-Ponty), whom she had met through Simone, he evaded commitment, and this, in conjunction with pressures from her mother, was too much for her to take: she became ill and abruptly died. At the close of this volume, with Zaza's death, the feeling is that bourgeois life puts ridiculous pressures on women, and that they should fight back.

The doctors called it meningitis, encephalitis; no one was quite sure. Had it been a contagious disease, or an accident? Or had Zaza succumbed to exhaustion or anxiety? She has often appeared to me at night, her face all yellow under a pink sun-bonnet, and seeming to gaze reproachfully at me. We had fought together against the revolting fate that had lain ahead of us, and for a long time I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death. 

After the publication of this memoir, de Beauvoir was told that Zaza's parents had hired a detective to check Merleau-Ponty's background. They had learned that he was illegitimate and had forced him to back out of the marriage by threatening to scandalize his family.

Regarding de Beauvoir's take on the intrusiveness of bourgeois society, it is worth mentioning that for her the problem was not men per se:

Their friendliness prevented me from ever taking up that 'challenging' attitude which was later to cause me so much dismay when I encountered it in American women: from the start, men were my comrades, not my enemies. Far from envying them, I felt that my own position, from the very fact that it was an unusual one, was one of privilege.

De Beauvoir's life began to improve when she moved on to the Sorbonne and excelled academically, becoming, at the age of twenty-one, the youngest person ever to qualify to teach philosophy in France. More importantly, she had exposure to some genuinely interesting people for the first time in her life.

I was finishing for a professor called Laporte a dissertation for my diploma on Hume and Kant; from nine in the morning to six in the evening I was glued to my desk at the Nationale [library]: I hardly took half an hour off for a sandwich; sometimes I would half-doze in the afternoons, and sometimes I even fell sound asleep. In the evenings, at home, I tried to read: Goethe, Cervantes, Chekhov, Strindberg. But I had headaches. I sometimes wanted to weep for weariness. And philosophy, at least as it was taught at the Sorbonne, was not at all comforting. Bréhier gave excellent lectures on the Stoics; but Brunschvig kept repeating himself; Laporte pulled every system except Hume's to pieces. He was the youngest of our professors; he had a little mustache, wore white spats, and followed women in the streets: once he had accosted one of his own students by mistake. He handed me back my dissertation with a fairly good mark and some ironical comments: I had made the mistake of preferring Kant to Hume. He invited me to his home, in a fine apartment on Avenue Bosquet, to talk to me about my work. 'Great qualities; but very antipathetic. Style obscure; a false profundity: when one thinks of what one has to say in philosophy!' He considered all of his colleagues one by one, particularly Brunschvig, then all the old masters. The philosophers of antiquity? They were stupid fools. Spinoza? A monster. Kant? An impostor. That left only Hume. I objected that Hume didn't solve any of the practical problems: he shrugged his shoulders: 'There are no practical problems.' No. One must simply look upon philosophy as an amusement, and one had the right to prefer other forms of entertainment. 'So that after all it's all a matter of convention!' I suggested. 'I know,' he added, 'that scepticism isn't fashionable. All right: go and find yourself a more optimistic doctrine than mine.'  He accompanied me to the door: 'Delighted you came! You're bound to get through the examination,' he concluded, with an air of distaste. His attitude was probably healthier but less comforting than the vaticanations of Jean Baruzi.

I tend to agree with Laporte on Hume, but this anecdote is also interesting in that it shows that some Sorbonne professors were described as at least a little depraved well before Michel Houellebecq depicted one that way.

I was surprised that while at the Sorbonne de Beauvoir got into the habit of patronizing some real dives: she went, usually with Poupette, to bars and nightclubs, got drunk on gin fizzes and danced with whoever asked her. On occasion she put herself at risk, but apparently she always arrived home intact.

Eventually she came into contact with Sartre and his inner circle; they had the reputation of elitists and bad boys. They disdained most of the other philosophy students and avoided them like the plague. Of the three (Andre Herbaud, a pseudonym for René Maheu, Paul Nizan and Jean-Paul Sartre), she first got to know Herbaud quite well. However, Sartre was the most impressive to her: besides genuinely hating the bourgeoisie, he was the most intellectually energetic person she'd ever met and was not an academic type at all; he liked literature, the arts and contemporary American music as much as philosophy, just as she did.

How was it that I managed to fit in with them so quickly? Herbaud had taken care not to shock me, but when they were all together the three 'comrades' didn't pull their punches. Their language was aggressive, their thoughts categorical, their judgements merciless. They made fun of bourgeois law and order; they had refused to sit the examination in religious knowledge: I had no difficulty in agreeing with them on that score. But I was still, in many respects, the dupe of bourgeois humbug; they jabbed a pin in every inflated idealism, laughed high-minded souls to scorn – in fact, every kind of soulfulness, the inner life, the marvelous, the mysterious, and the precious all fell under their lashing contempt; on every possible occasion – in their speech, their attitudes, their gestures, their jokes – they set out to prove that men were not rarefied spirits but bodies of flesh and bone, racked by physical needs and crudely engaged in a brutal adventure that was life. A year before, they would have scared me; but I had made much progress since the beginning of the academic year and I very often felt the need for stronger meat than that to which I was accustomed. I soon understood that if the world these new friends opened up to me seemed crude, it was because they didn't try to disguise its realities; in the end, all they asked of me was that I should dare to do what I had always longed to do: to look reality in the face. It did not take me long to make up my mind to do so.

She soon recognized that "Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream-companion" that she had longed for since she was fifteen: "he was the double in whom I found my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence."

Thus the postwar generation of French intellectuals was born, for better or for worse. I have not been impressed much by what little I know of their serious oeuvres and don't consider Sartre or de Beauvoir to be major thinkers. Their lasting legacy is probably de Beauvoir's influence on the feminist movement of the 1970's. To me, existentialism isn't really a comprehensive philosophical position, and I feel no need to explore it further. Unfortunately, as boring as the practice of it may be, science continues to produce the most important ideas for mankind, and the type of thinking done by Sartre and de Beauvoir and intellectuals everywhere ever since is mainly a relic of the past. It must also be noted that de Beauvoir, by her own admission, is not a particularly imaginative writer. However, these caveats only slightly detract from her value to me, and I think that she is as intelligent a confidante as one could hope to find. I have yet to come across any American writer with de Beauvoir's perspicacity. On the contrary, Americans seem wedded to the idea that the bourgeois lifestyle should be made available to all, a belief that would make her cringe. Hence I plan in due course to work my way through the remainder of her memoirs no matter how long it takes.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter I

This book is the first installment in Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs and covers her earliest period. The going has been a little slow for me in part because the concerns of childhood don't interest me that much. I find the details of her recollections astonishing, because I know that I don't remember nearly as much of my early life; perhaps she kept a journal as a child. De Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908, and her family was relatively well-off until World War I, at which time her father's fortunes declined. He was a lawyer whose true interest was in acting. He was witty and good at impersonations and became Simone's main role model. Her mother was several years younger than her father and less-educated; she was a devout Roman Catholic and raised her children in that manner.

The harmony that bound my parents to one another strengthened the respect I felt for both of them. It allowed me to skirt one difficulty which might have embarrassed me considerably: Papa didn't go to Mass, he smiled when Aunt Marguerite enthused over the miracles at Lourdes: he was an unbeliever. This skepticism did not affect me, so deeply did I feel myself penetrated by the presence of God; yet Papa was always right: how could he be mistaken about the most obvious of all truths? Nevertheless, since my mother, who was so pious, seemed to find Papa's attitude quite natural, I accepted it calmly. The consequence was that I grew accustomed to the idea that my intellectual life – embodied by my father – and my spiritual life – expressed by my mother – were two radically heterogeneous fields of experience which had absolutely nothing in common. Sanctity and intelligence belonged to two quite different spheres; and human things – culture, politics, business, manners, and customs – had nothing to do with religion. So I set God apart from life and the world, and that attitude was to have a profound influence in my future development.

As the eldest child, Simone had many of those characteristics, which, as is common, sensitized her to her parents to a greater degree than it did her sibling. She had a sister who was two years younger, nicknamed Poupette, and during their childhood she took on a pedagogic role. Her parents had wanted a son, and this also may have inadvertently affected her identity in the family. Without the competition of a male sibling or the overt parental enforcement of gender roles, her self-conception was not confined to the prevailing norms of the period. She was a voracious reader and writer from an early age, though she was only allowed to read things that had been approved by her parents. She was not good at everything and was quite conscious of it at the time:

...in the pianoforte examinations I was always near the bottom. In solfeggio and musical theory I was hopeless: I sang either sharp or flat, and was a miserable failure in musical dictation. My handwriting was so shapeless that I had to have private lessons, which did not make any great improvement. If I had to trace the course of a river or the outline of a country, I was so clumsy that I was absolved of all blame for the messes I made. This characteristic was to remain with me all my life. I bungled all practical jobs and I was never any good at work requiring finicky precision. 

It was not without some vexation that I became aware of my deficiencies; I should have liked to excel at everything. But they were too deeply rooted in my nature to be amenable to ephemeral spurts of will-power. As soon as I was able to think for myself, I found myself possessed with infinite power, and yet circumscribed by absurd limitations.

I'm only about a third of the way through the book and will comment more later. I am looking forward to the sections on her young adulthood, when she went to college and met Sartre. For me, de Beauvoir's writing is a model in clarity, and she excels at observing people. Her writing is a little uncanny to me, because she tends to focus on the same things that interest me: the thinking and motivations of herself and others. Although that is how I also occupy much of my time, the activity seems so uncommon in the environments where I've lived that de Beauvoir stands out to me as a rare kindred spirit. When I complain about writers it is usually because they lack this most basic and essential skill.

Diary

The summer doldrums are beginning to set in. The weather in Vermont has been hot and dry, with a cool day on occasion. Ordinarily I would have done a lot of stargazing by now, but, despite the relatively low level of light pollution here, good viewing conditions are rare because of the turbulent atmosphere above, with moisture streaming up from the Gulf of Mexico. Then, if the moon is out, that makes it even more difficult to see faint objects such as galaxies, globular clusters, planetary nebulae and supernova remnants. As a consolation, you can usually see planets and binary stars even under poor conditions, so last night I looked at Albireo, one of the prettiest multiple star systems visible from Earth, 430 light years away, with gold and blue stars.

We have a new cat, William, who is about a year old. He is still kittenish and likes to run around. He seems very youthful compared to our previous cat, Winston, who was lethargic and grumpy most of the time. We chose William partly because he resembles my cat, Dusty, who died in 1980. William is polydactyl, which means that he has extra toes. His front paws look as if they have thumbs, so he can give a thumbs-up. Polydactyl cats are common on the East Coast and in parts of England and Wales. They were once popular on ships and were considered good luck.

Like many, we have been following the Republican presidential nomination process for amusement, though I can only take so much of it, because if you observe closely it can become quite disturbing. To me, the political ascent of Donald Trump is yet another proof that human beings are incapable of self-governance. If you look at the last two presidents, it isn't a pretty sight. George W. Bush was self-confident but had no idea what he was doing. Barack Obama is cautious but unimaginative and ineffectual. If Trump were to become president, he would bring nothing but political, economic and social ignorance to the job. Fortunately, the disunity in the Republican Party will probably be his undoing, even with a weak Democratic opponent. Everyone and his brother will be testifying to the emptiness, dishonesty and egoism of Trump, and while that alone may not be sufficient to defeat him, he will most likely lose the election. Trump may go down as the biggest bullshitter in American history.

When I think about the American political system specifically in relation to my views, the picture becomes absurd immediately. I don't accept many of the premises of being an American citizen, though technically I am one. First of all, I don't think that government positions should be filled by popular vote; algorithms could produce better results. Second, I don't favor nationalism of any kind; I would prefer a world government. Third, I think personal freedom should be far more restricted in the U.S. than it is currently. Fourth, I don't think the "land of opportunity" model is sustainable, and capitalism should be wound down in a coordinated global effort as soon as possible. Fifth, as an atheist, I find the religious ideology in both parties highly offensive, and I much prefer the idea of "freedom from religion" to the idea of "freedom of religion." There is little that I can relate to in American politics at the national level.

In most public educational systems you are taught a set of ideas about the nature of the society in which you live. Children usually internalize those ideas and don't seriously question them as adults. I remember thinking that I lived in the modern world, which was enlightened compare to the past, and I used to feel fortunate to have escaped a primitive, oppressive existence.  It is true that many of us have higher standards of living than our ancestors did – we live longer, healthier lives and have more free time – but I now think that far in the future our descendants will pity us for having had to live in this barbaric environment, where ignorance prevails.

I've started to read Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, by Simone de Beauvoir, and will probably comment on it in a few days.

The Big Picture II

In the end I found The Big Picture quite useful as a summary of how an informed person might view the world in light of modern physics. Carroll makes a strong case for physicalism and eschews superstition, theism and references to phenomena other than those detected by scientific methods. There remain conceptual challenges to combining the standard model of particle physics with general relativity, but together they provide a complete picture of the universe:

...we don't live inside a black hole, and the Big Bang was quite a few years ago. We live in a world where gravity is relatively weak. And as long as the force is weak, quantum field theory has no trouble whatsoever describing how gravity works. That's why we're confident in the existence of gravitons; they are the inescapable consequence of the basic features of general relativity and quantum field theory, even if we lack a complete theory of quantum gravity. 

The domain of applicability of our present understanding of quantum gravity includes everything we experience in our everyday lives. There is, therefore, no reason to keep the standard model and general relativity separate from each other. As far as the physics of the stuff you see in front of you right now is concerned, it is all very well described by one big quantum field theory. Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek has dubbed it Core Theory. It's the quantum field theory of quarks, electrons, neutrinos, all the families of fermions, electromagnetism, gravity, the nuclear forces, and the Higgs....The Core Theory is not the most elegant concoction that has ever been dreamed up in the mind of a physicist, but it's been spectacularly successful at accounting for every experiment ever performed in a laboratory here on Earth....

We can be confident that the Core Theory, accounting for the substances and processes we experience in our everyday life, is correct....The laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known. 

The picture that Carroll paints is of a deterministic universe that runs from the Big Bang up to the present. From one moment to the next, physics is theoretically capable of predicting exactly what will happen, but as a practical matter it is computationally impossible due to the complexity of the existing world.

Core Theory is at the center of the book, and Carroll makes an impressive effort to relate it to a broad array of topics. There are fifty chapters, covering everything from the existence of the universe, the Big Bang, probability theory, entropy, quantum mechanics, general relativity, string theory, evolution, biochemistry, neuroscience and artificial intelligence to minds, souls, consciousness and free will. In general he is a typical scientific skeptic-atheist, and I agree with his positions there, though some of his views are so obvious to me and so much has been written about them already that I don't see the point of repeating them. In some respects he seems to be attempting to be a kinder, gentler physicist, leaving room for alternative theories as long as they are internally consistent and are not contradicted by empirical evidence. He has an uncommon interest in philosophy, which puts him at odds with one of his idols, Richard Feynman, who, like many physicists of that generation, thought of academic philosophy as complete nonsense. Physicist Freeman Dyson, who knew Feynman, recently described contemporary philosophers as follows:

Compared with the giants of the past, they are a sorry bunch of dwarfs. They are thinking deep thoughts and giving scholarly lectures to academic audiences, but hardly anybody in the world outside is listening. They are historically insignificant. At some time toward the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers faded from public life. Like the snark in Lewis Carroll's poem, they suddenly vanished. So far as the general public was concerned, philosophers became invisible.

Although some regard Dyson, who is ninety-two, as a crank, I think he has a legitimate criticism and writes clearly on this topic. I couldn't agree with him more and think that Sean Carroll has been taken in by the philosophy establishment. To my way of thinking, most of the philosophers he mentions concern themselves with made-up problems that are of little or no intrinsic interest. They take old questions and dress them up with new terminology such as "qualia." In philosophical circles it is still popular to pretend that there is an unfathomable split between the mind and the body, that machines can't be conscious and that self-awareness is a unique feature of the universe. In my view all they're really talking about is the reality of subjective experience, which is simply a function of having a brain. If you remove the nonsense from the language of contemporary philosophy, the questions become simple and obvious: "Does Bob have a headache?" or "Is Jane angry?" We all have subjective experiences, including consciousness and self-awareness, which may be hidden from others, and they don't bring into question the nature of the universe. While Carroll tends to be unruffled by the so-called dualism and paradoxes cooked up by philosophers, he does his readers a disservice by bringing them up in the first place.

Rather than wasting all of that space on philosophy, I would have liked to see more on evolution and AI. Instead of providing a comprehensive view of our place in the universe, Carroll gets sidetracked and finishes up the book with a laundry list of platitudes. I find the big picture offered by E.O. Wilson more compelling, because it includes much more about our Earth-evolved predispositions and provides the right backdrop for all that we find meaningful. Regarding AI, Carroll only discusses it in relation to the issues manufactured by philosophers and says nothing about its potential role in our future. The book discusses ad hoc theories that Carroll believes will eventually gel into one final theory, and the feeling of human intellectual limits is palpable, yet Carroll does not go on to speculate that AI may in the near future be able to surpass our feeble little brains.

The Big Picture I

I'm moving along now in The Big Picture, by Sean Carroll, the theoretical physicist. The subtitle is On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. As it sounds, it is an ambitious book, and he took time off from his regular job at Caltech to write it with the assistance of a Guggenheim Fellowship. This kind of book is increasingly coming into demand, because the cumulative advances made in science are making it harder for laymen to understand it, and specialization even makes it hard for some branches of science to understand other branches. My favorite writer in this field is E.O. Wilson, but his perspective is primarily biological. In recent years, several theoretical physicists – Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene and Steven Weinberg, among others – have written popular books about physics, and Sean Carroll seems to be trying to make a name for himself in this crowded field. What differentiates Carroll from the rest is his interest in the philosophical issues associated with physics, and this produces both the strengths and weaknesses of the book.

As far as I've read, Carroll provides a summary of theoretical physics, including some relatively new concepts such as emergence and questions regarding the reconciliation between events at the atomic level with events at the macroscopic level. The thrust of his argument is that one may adopt different conceptual models to describe the same phenomena, and that there is not necessarily an advantage to adopting a single model. In the language that he uses he proclaims himself a naturalist, which is fine with me, as I consider myself one too, but then he goes on to qualify that by identifying himself as a "poetic naturalist." The gist here is that there are different ways of talking about the world that can capture elements of reality, and that by considering different models rather than striving for a unitary model we may come to a better understanding of the world than we would otherwise. His inspiration for the term "poetic naturalist" is the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who said "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

Although Carroll's intentions are good, at this stage in my reading of the book I'm a little skeptical of his approach. Partly that is because I don't share his confidence in the ideas that are being served up in philosophy departments these days; though I don't follow them now, my conclusion several years ago was that they are more often than not a complete waste of time. For example, the nature of consciousness is still a major question in philosophy, and I consider it a non-issue, because it is more about semantics than reality. While Wittgenstein was notoriously difficult to pin down in his ideas, I agreed with him the most when he suggested that the primary activity of philosophers was the distortion of the meaning of words from their ordinary usage. "Consciousness" started out as a word for self-awareness in people, and even though science shows that many species besides ours possess some form of it, philosophers have mistakenly elevated it to a mysterious element of the universe that is sorely in need of explanation, particularly if we are to make advances in artificial intelligence. To me, "consciousness" is no more useful to AI research than "aether" was to explain the transmission of light through space. If anything, it is a hindrance to the development of thinking machines.

Another reason for me to be cautious about Carroll is his implicit role as a unifier of the discordant scientific and humanities communities. He has more to offer than most scientists in this regard, because he at least has a solid grounding in the humanities and is less likely than others to make a fool of himself when he refers to them. Many scientists in the public domain are so arrogant about their superiority that they don't even bother to familiarize themselves with the thinking in humanities departments. However, Carroll could easily become, rather than an original thinker, a humanities double agent in scientific terrain who unwittingly opens the door to a flood of humanities nonsense and pseudoscience.

Furthermore, I don't think that theoretical physics is the best starting point for bridging the gap between the reading public and scientists. Whereas every person who ever lived has had daily exposure to events and processes that are biological in nature, nearly all of humanity – in the past and future – never has had and never will have any need to understand theoretical physics. As fascinating as the subatomic and cosmic worlds may be, we perceive them to have little relationship to our basic human needs, and, that being the case, we may feel no compulsion to familiarize ourselves with them. In contrast, biology is close to our hearts, because nearly everything that we care about is here in this tiny corner of the universe, where we can perceive it with our own senses. While there are short steps from the origin of life to evolution to eusociality to morality and the problems that humanity frets about, in the context of theoretical physics human problems become needlessly abstract and unsolvable.

Nevertheless, the book is well-written and informative, and I will reserve final judgment until I've completed it.

The Life of Henri Brulard

The Life of Henri Brulard is an unfinished autobiography that was written between 1835 and 1836 by Marie-Henri Bayle, better known as Stendhal. He began writing it when he was fifty-two years old but only got as far as age seventeen before giving up. It covers the period from his birth in Grenoble in 1783 to his arrival in Milan in 1800. Several aspects of it are interesting. First, he did not write it with the intention of publication during his lifetime, and it was in fact not published until 1890, 48 years after his death in 1842; this freed him from the constraints of pleasing editors and the public. Second, he was an unusually honest writer and took a closer look at himself and his environment than most writers are willing or able to do. Finally, from a historical standpoint, anyone interested in French literature would find Stendhal's observations about his times illuminating.

The major event of his childhood was the death of his mother when he was seven. He had been close to her and apparently she had an artistic temperament. His father was a conservative, social-climbing lawyer who took pains to appear more aristocratic than he actually was, and he had no rapport whatsoever with his son, who seems to have been a daydreamer from an early age. His father's aristocratic pretensions could not have occurred at a worse time – during the French Revolution – and his name appeared on a list when The Terror reached Grenoble. Luckily for him the revolutionary turmoil had become subdued by then. Henri's mother's sister, Séraphie, became his substitute mother, and he detested her. Somehow she and his father decided that Henri should lead a strictly controlled life consisting of studying Latin with Jesuit tutors and avoiding contact with other children. He was not allowed to engage in sports or go outside alone and was forced to walk under the accompaniment of adults. Séraphie was a religious fanatic, and in hindsight Henri speculates that she was mentally ill.

All was not bad, though, because his mother's aunt Elizabeth looked out for him. He came to associate her with "Castilianism," which he thought of as a kind of nobility and innocence that was incompatible with bourgeois society and nonexistent in his father. His mother's father, M. Gagnon, who was Elizabeth's brother, lived in the same house and had an even greater influence on him. M. Gagnon was a physician with literary interests, and he discussed literature with Henri throughout his childhood. However, M. Gagnon had a timid personality and did not intervene on Henri's behalf even when it became obvious that he was being severely repressed by his father and Séraphie.

Eventually Henri entered school, where he excelled at math. At the age of sixteen he moved in with relatives in Paris with the expectation that he would study for the entrance exam to the École Polytechnique. Henri is quite good at describing and summing up people, and here is what he says about his Parisian relatives:

M. Daru was a tall, rather fine-looking old man, with a big nose, which was rather uncommon in Dauphiné; he had a slight cast in one eye, and a rather false manner. He had with him a little shriveled old woman, thoroughly provincial, who was his wife; he had married her in past days for the sake of her fortune, which was considerable, and, in spite of this, she hardly dared to breathe in his presence.

Mme Daru was good-natured at heart, and very polite, with a dignified little manner which would have suited the wife of a sous-préfet in the provinces. For the rest, I have never met a creature more devoid of the divine fire. Nothing in the world could have stirred her soul in favor of anything noble or generous. In souls of that kind, an utterly selfish prudence, which is their boast, takes the place of all choleric or generous emotion.

This prudent, wise, but hardly admirable disposition formed the character of her elder son, the Comte Daru, Minister and Secretary of State to Napoleon, who had so much influence on my life; of Mlle Sophie, afterward Mme de Baure, who was deaf; and of Mme Le Brun, now Marquise de Graves.

The second son, Martial Daru, had neither judgment not intelligence, but a good heart; it was impossible for him to do a bad turn to anyone.

Perhaps Mme Cambon, the eldest daughter of M. and Mme Daru, had a noble character, but I only caught a glimpse of it; she died a few months after my arrival in Paris.

Despite having fantasized for years about escaping from Grenoble to Paris, Henri disliked Paris immediately. He lost interest in gaining admission to the École and preoccupied himself with implausible ideas such as that of becoming a comedic playwright in the manner of Molière or that of composing operas – even though he had no training at all in music. Before long, M. Daru confronted him about his idleness, and arrangements were made by Comte Daru to place Henri in a job at the War Office. Soon he was off to Milan, where the book ends.

Obviously, in this early stage of his life, Henri could have benefited from some good advice, but he never got it. I particularly liked this passage:

Ah! How much good a good piece of advice would have done me at that time! How much good the same advice would have done me in 1821! But devil take me if anyone ever gave it to me. I saw it for myself about 1826, but it was almost too late, and, besides, it was too upsetting to my habits. I have since seen clearly that it is the sine qua non in Paris; but I should also have had less truth and originality in my literary ideas.

What a difference it would have made if M. Daru or Mme Cambon had said to me in January 1800:
"My dear cousin, if you wish to have any standing in society, it is necessary that twenty people should be interested in speaking well of you. Consequently, choose a salon, do not fail to go there every Tuesday (if that is the right day); make it your business to be charming, or at least very polite, to all the people who frequent this salon. You will be somebody in society; you may hope to win the favor of a charming woman when you are supported by two or three salons. By the end of ten years of perseverance, these salons, if you choose them in our rank of society, will bring you all you want. The essential thing is to persevere, and be one of the faithful few who call every Tuesday."

While my knowledge of French literature is limited, Stendhal seems to me to occupy an important position in it. He was not famous during his lifetime, but his influence was significant. I place him between Rousseau and Balzac. This particular work seems to have been loosely based on Rousseau's Confessions, though, more accurately, the two writers had little in common. Rousseau's lasting influence has been in Enlightenment ideas, whereas Stendhal's has been more purely literary. Balzac acknowledges Stendhal as an influence, and you can see it in his sharp, caricature-like characters. I haven't read any other works by Stendhal, but would guess that he portrays people more precisely than Balzac. Thus, Stendhal fills the position of an early realist, a style that blossomed under Flaubert and still exists in a somewhat degraded form in modern fiction. By the time Proust and Kafka came along, fiction had become so stylized that basic perceptions had already taken a back seat to uncritical descriptions of the status quo. Though there is something to be said for Proust's linguistic elegance, his jarring vacuity on the psychological make-ups of his characters makes him almost unreadable to me. Oddly, basic psychological and sociological insights are almost nowhere to be found in modern fiction – thus my lack of interest in it.

Diary

I've returned from Lopez Island and have enjoyed the trip. Besides visiting relatives whom I don't often see, I liked living in a marine environment for a change. The surrounding waters of the seas north of Puget Sound keep the island cool and moist, resulting in the spectacular growth of plants. Many parts are thickly forested with Douglas fir and Western red cedar, though much of the interior has been cleared for farming. Unfortunately, a lot of the land abutting the shoreline is privately owned and filled with vacation homes, but there is still public access to some choice sections of the coast. On a clear day you can see snow-capped mountains to the east and south, the Cascades and the Olympic Mountains. The water is teeming with life: we saw crabs, jellyfish, herons, otters, harbor seals, sea lions, golden eagles, bald eagles and an orca. Some portions of the island are overpopulated with deer and rabbits. We especially liked Shark Reef Sanctuary at tide change, when you can see strong currents of water stretching for miles. I have good associations with the smell of the sea from my early years.

The permanent population of Lopez Island is only about two thousand, and most of the natives are very friendly – friendlier than Vermonters. There isn't much to do there besides enjoy the outdoors, so it is easy to run out of things to do, especially if you are encumbered with a toddler, which makes traveling beyond the island a challenge. The only unpleasant moments of the trip sprang from heated arguments about the merits of attachment parenting.

I have been following the Brexit vote and will say a little about that. I agree with the consensus among educated people that the voters made a colossal mistake, but don't think the long-term consequences will necessarily be significant. In the short term there may be fewer jobs in the UK, but sooner or later the UK will become integrated with Europe one way or another. What I haven't seen so far in the discussion is emphasis on the kinds of themes that I write about here. For example, everyone is quick to say that trade will be impaired, but they say little about the fact that on a greater scale it is trade itself that has caused wealth inequality in the UK and elsewhere. The lessons of Thomas Piketty don't seem to be coming up much. In other words, free-market capitalism is actually the underlying cause of dismay among the British working class. I'm also not hearing that the viability of democracy has been brought into question once again, with citizens voting en masse against their own interests. Commentators remark that "the people have spoken" and stop there because they'd rather not talk about how stupid those people may have been. As you might expect, I'm hoping that AI will one day take such choices away from those who lack sufficient understanding of the issues to vote sensibly on them.

While I was in Washington I read a little of Stendhal's The Life of Henri Brulard, and I hope to comment on it soon.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? II

I finished the book and became increasingly bored with it toward the end. De Waal discusses many aspects of animal behavior, including social skills, cooperation during hunting, empathy, future-orientation and the recognition of individuals. He balks on consciousness, correctly, I think, because the concept is too poorly defined for scientific study. Though there is a heavy emphasis on apes, there is also discussion of birds, monkeys, cats, dogs, wolves, crocodiles, dolphins, elephants, fish, octopuses, rats, orcas, squirrels, whales, wasps and other animals. I suppose this is meant to be some sort of general survey of his field, but I felt that there was an overkill with minutia and couldn't see the point. The final paragraph is a little too New-Agey for me:

...Animals should be given a chance to express their natural behavior. We are developing a greater interest in their variable lifestyles. Our challenge is to think more like them, so that we open our minds to their specific circumstances and goals and observe and understand them on their own terms.... True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are. In doing so, I am sure we will discover many magic wells, including some as yet beyond our imagination.

I agree with de Waal regarding the necessity of transitioning from behaviorism to evolutionary cognition in the study of animals, but think that he tends to sentimentalize his field by infusing his text with emotion-laden terms that have nothing to do with science. I also agree with him that animals shouldn't be studied as if even the most cognitively advanced of them inhabits an order of magnitude that is so far below that of humans as to make any comparisons ludicrous. My main agreement with him is that hubris does not belong in scientific study.

I had hoped that he would say more about eusociality, particularly when I saw that E.O. Wilson provided a blurb for the back cover. All he has to say about Wilson is this:

Our best studies about the evolution of cooperation stem from the study of animal behavior. Summarizing these ideas in his 1975 book, Sociobiology, E.O. Wilson helped launch the evolutionary approach to human behavior.

Excitement about Wilson's grand synthesis seems to have faded, though. Perhaps it was too sweeping and inclusive for disciplines that consider humans in isolation.

De Waal then goes on to deflate claims that some scientists have made about human uniqueness, but he hardly offers a resounding endorsement of Wilson and soon strays off into other subjects.

The kind of work that de Waal does is of little appeal to me even though I like to observe animals myself. He seems to me to be stating the obvious repeatedly, which may be understandable if he is still in the process of rebuilding from the wreckage caused by the previous generation of ethologists. On the whole he is writing at a level of discussion far below what would have captured my interest. For example, already knowing that animals can have emotions, social skills and empathy, I didn't reach the conclusion that we are all part of one big family and should have a group hug; rather, I prefer to examine how behaviors that came into existence through evolutionary processes influence our conceptions about ourselves, with the ideal of seeing beyond our evolutionarily-induced prejudices as a species. This seems to be a tall order and lies beyond the scope of de Waal's book. In places he seems to be attempting to take on a serious tone by quoting various philosophers, but the philosophers he quotes are so far off track as to render the mention of their ideas unnecessary.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? I

I've been working my way through this book slowly, because I haven't found it all that illuminating, though it does clear up some questions for me. Frans de Waal is a leading ethologist – a student of animal behavior – who specializes in primates. The book provides an up-to-date picture of research in animal cognition. He seems much like an old-school naturalist who prefers hands-on experience to grand theories and models, which makes him temperamentally akin to Charles Darwin, whose strength was also in close, unbiased observation. The problem I have with de Waal is that his writing style is almost chatty at times, and he inundates the reader with study after study, inserting personal anecdotes while remaining a little sketchy on the concepts. I don't know whether this is how he actually thinks or whether he has deliberately adopted the prevailing model of science journalism, which, like most current journalism, tends to turn every subject into a human interest story: the interactions with the animals, the personalities of the researchers, etc., seem to take precedence. As I've said, I would prefer a straightforward summary of the latest thinking among scientists and a concise statement of their research findings. A lot of nonfiction these days reminds me of television news coverage, in which the journalist walks toward the camera making irrelevant gestures while recounting how someone struggled against all odds and prevailed, leaving the impression that what counts is determination and the ability to overcome adversity, rather than the actual content of their ideas. Or on radio broadcasts the narration is commonly accompanied by background sounds which seem to serve no purpose other than to hold the listener's attention. Like ordinary journalists, authors of popular scientific books often seem to go out of their way to engage the reader by any means available.

Most of the points made by de Waal are so obvious to me that I don't find them particularly interesting. However, having a similar perspective myself, I find his critical references to ideology-driven science of the past instructive. For example, he says:

B.F. Skinner was more interested in experimental control over animals than spontaneous behavior. Stimulus-response contingencies were all that mattered. His behaviorism dominated animal studies for much of the last century. Releasing its theoretical grip was a prerequisite for the rise of evolutionary cognition.

De Waal also has serious disagreements with some philosophical theories, past and present. He mentions Norman Malcolm, who, interestingly, was part of the Philosophy Department at Cornell disparaged by Richard Feynman, regarding a speech titled "Thoughtless Brutes," in which Malcolm said that "the relationship between thought and language must be so close that it is really senseless to conjecture that people may not have thoughts, and also senseless to conjecture that animals may have thoughts." This concept has since been disproven by research on children which clearly shows that they are able to think before they are able to speak and by research on animals which shows their ability to evaluate situations and solve problems in an analytical manner without language. Similarly, de Waal is unimpressed by contemporary discussion of theory of mind and is skeptical about some aspects of cognitive science, which he thinks present faulty views of how thinking actually occurs in nature. Not many academics have the nerve to speak out against past academics who led their departments in the wrong direction for decades, setting back intellectual progress and, I might add, trampling the careers of those who might have done a better job.

Where de Waal shines is in his debunking of anthropocentrism and the idea that mankind is distinctly elevated above all other species in every important respect. Much of the first half of the book is devoted to explaining how other animals display reasoning not entirely unlike our own. One of his major points is that the ability to reason has evolved separately in species that aren't closely related. Not only are apes able to reason, but so are crows and other species that have learned how to use tools. This leads him to a rather important proposition: Every cognitive capacity that we discover is going to be older and more widespread than initially thought. While de Waal's exposition is a little sloppy for my taste, his ideas very much support many of the positions I've taken on this blog that take us down several notches from the level of importance that we've assigned ourselves.

The one skill where de Waal thinks we differ from other animals lies in our use of language. He has not found anything comparable in other species, which instead may communicate with body language and signals. The use of advanced symbolism seems to be exclusively human, but, as he explains, other species are able to engage in rational decision-making without it. De Waal shares my distaste for the idea of human uniqueness that descends, ultimately, from religious beliefs and remains unchallenged in contemporary humanities departments everywhere. Regarding language, he cites recent research indicating that the FoxP2 gene, common to both humans and songbirds, "affects both human articulated speech and the fine motor control of birdsong." "Science increasingly views human speech and birdsong as products of convergent evolution, given that songbirds and humans share at least fifty genes specifically related to vocal learning."

De Waal cites Ayumu the chimpanzee as an example of how research showing that an animal can have human competencies arouses outrage and criticism:

Ayumu is a young male who, in 2007, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touchscreen, he can recall a series of numbers from 1 through 9 and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers appear randomly on the screen and are replaced by white squares as soon as he starts tapping. Having memorized the numbers, Ayumu touches the squares in the correct order. Reducing the amount of time the numbers flash on the screen doesn't seem to matter to Ayumu, even though humans become less accurate the shorter the time interval.... One follow-up study managed to train humans up to Ayumu's level with five numbers, but the ape remembers up to nine with 80 percent accuracy, something no human has managed so far. Taking on a British memory champion known for his ability to memorize an entire stack of cards, Ayumu emerged the "chimpion."

The distress Ayumu's photographic memory caused in the scientific community was of the same order as when, half a century ago, DNA studies revealed that humans barely differ enough from bonobos and chimpanzees to deserve their own genus. It is only for historical reasons that taxonomists have let us keep the Homo genus all to ourselves.

Sifting through the book, I'm finding a few interesting ideas and examples such as these, which I think corroborate some of my views. I'm a little more than halfway through and will make a second post when I've finished.