Poetry

As you may have noticed, I've started posting poems that I like. I have mixed feelings about poetry for several reasons. I was first introduced to it by an English teacher in high school who seems to have caused me to permanently revile nearly all English teachers, English majors and English departments. This teacher adopted annoying English affectations, though he was from Ohio. To make matters worse, my freshman roommate in college was an English major from Michigan who also adopted annoying English affectations. He once presented me with a poem that he had hand written on a piece of birch bark. By the end of my freshman year I was ready to become a serial killer of English majors.

There were other problems that I had with poetry. I often felt that there was no point to its ambiguity, and when it wasn't ambiguous it often struck me as uninteresting. Although my reading skills have improved since high school, I tend to react to poetry the same way that I used to. If a poem expresses an idea, it can usually be expressed more clearly in prose. If it expresses an observation, the same can be done in prose. I consider the concept of prose poetry an oxymoron. For me, poetry works best as an artistic formulation that combines language, perceptions, ideas and emotions in a way that can't be done well in prose, but sometimes can in fiction. There is some overlap between poetry and fiction, depending on the writing style of the author. This leaves a very narrow range for poetry, and in order to bother reading it at all I feel that it has to be of unusually high quality. The finer points of good poetry seem ineffable to me, and I doubt that they can be taught. In this regard I lump poetry in with fiction and dismiss the value of writing programs.

During my fiction-reading period that started in the late 1980's, I also delved into poetry somewhat. I read a couple of anthologies and found little to like. The first poet who struck me as good was Denise Levertov. However, after reading several volumes of her poems, I decided that I only liked a handful. I also liked Emily Dickinson's oddness and consider her a genuine poetic genius, if there is such a thing. But even in her case most of her poems are duds in my opinion. There was part of the poem "Come, Words, Away" by Laura Riding that intrigued me for some time, but I don't think her work holds up well. Years ago I read some Shelley and Rilke (it was recited at my wedding in 1974) and thought they were good, but I don't think they're as good as Levertov or Dickinson. After moving to Vermont I read most of Robert Frost's poems, a couple of which were familiar from high school, and though I liked two or three of them, I think he was essentially a linguistically awkward poet who could have said almost everything better in prose if he knew how to write.

This last comment on Frost ties in with a lot of what I think is wrong with contemporary poetry. The impetus behind writing poetry is the desire for self-expression. Especially now that formal structure is unnecessary in poems, every Tom, Dick and Harry (or Megan, Caitlin and Heather), regardless of their knowledge or skill, can write a poem and be praised for it. While it might be possible to pick out amateur poems from a collection that also included poems written by major contemporary poets, I think the standards are low, and the published poets may in many cases simply be lucky or have out-marketed their competition. Although I can't be counted among the cognoscenti of poetry, I often find what is expressed in the poems of leading poets to be of little or no significance or interest. They frequently pick pedestrian subjects and seem unperceptive to me. On rereading "Daddy," Sylvia Plath's most famous poem, though I acknowledge that she exhibits some skill there, the poem is essentially a childish rant that probably doesn't do her father justice at all. I'd rather not hear from angry brats.

My theory is that there is a certain amount of serendipity involved in creating a good poem. It may not be possible for many poets to write five good poems in a lifetime. In a way a poet is like an op-ed columnist who has to crank out something new each week, and there isn't enough happening in their total environment for this to work consistently. I think everything worked when Denise Levertov wrote "Living," but that that was not a common occurrence in her life. I won't go into detail describing what works in that poem, because it would feel like a desecration to me.

Living

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.

A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.


—Denise Levertov

Economic Development in Vermont

One of the very few people who have responded to my poll requested that I write about a topic that often comes up in local discussion: the shortage of well-paying jobs in Vermont. It is difficult to find them here because the state has relatively little industry compared to the surrounding states. There is a large IBM plant in Essex Junction, but the primary state industry is tourism. Some counties are agricultural; Addison County, where I live, has significant dairy and beef farming, and apples and maple syrup are produced in several counties. Wood and mining industries still flourish, and in recent years craft breweries and whiskey distilleries have been growing, but none of these employ many workers. Most of the jobs are tourism-related and don't pay well.

There are historical reasons for the current state of economic affairs in Vermont. Few came early on compared to other states, as the remote, landlocked location was not optimal for industrialization. Many of the early settlers were farmers from nearby states; they soon found out that the soil and climate are not optimal for most crops and joined the migration to the Midwest. Not many industries thrived here, and the rate of population growth significantly lagged behind that of the surrounding states. The population here has multiplied 4.1 times since 1800, compared to 33.1 times for New York, 15.5 times for Massachusetts and 7.2 times for New Hampshire.  As the economy boomed along the coast, Vermont became a vacation retreat. In the 1960's, Vermont gained a counterculture image, and wealthy people from other states began to move here, shifting state politics from conservative to liberal. As in other parts of the country, liberals emphasize protection of the environment and quality-of-life issues, while conservatives emphasize economic growth and wealth creation. To be sure, few Vermont political conservatives resemble Tea Partiers, and they don't correspond closely to the contemporary Republicans in Washington, D.C. A liberal political environment makes it harder to attract new businesses here than to pro-business states.

As a retiree transplant, I oppose wholesale economic development in Vermont. First, speaking as an individual, I came here for the low population density, the pleasant physical environment and the like-mindedness of the people. Having seen firsthand what happened when economic development hit areas such as Indianapolis, Indiana and Schaumburg, Illinois, I would definitely move somewhere else if that were to happen here. I would vote against strong economic growth purely out of self-interest. As far as the status of the unemployed or underemployed is concerned, it has been a fact of life for centuries that people go to where there are jobs, not vice versa. The breadwinners in my family, including me, have done that for generations, so I don't think of it as a punishment to impose it on others. Those who insist on living in a place without jobs are behaving like narcissists if they think they have a right to both a good job and the living situation of their choice. That privilege has been a rarity for most of recorded history.

Second, on a more fundamental level, this topic touches on what I perceive to be serious flaws in our economic and political systems. Neither democracy nor capitalism deals with the consequences of economic development on a long-term basis. Because of economic growth and population increases, the U.S. is not the same country that it was in 1776. Economic growth has historically damaged the environment and contributed to overpopulation across the globe, and the warnings of Thomas Malthus have generally been ignored only because the human race has thus far managed to survive in spite of them. Few seem willing to admit that the country and the world might be better places if they more closely resembled Vermont than New Jersey. It is certainly no coincidence that many of the retirees here moved from that state.

Most of my childhood was spent in a suburb of New York City, and though I didn't understand it at the time, I felt that I was not getting enough exposure to the outdoors. After leaving for college, I developed a sense of relief at being able to live in uncongested places with woods and fields, which, it now seems to me, more closely approximate the kind of environment to which we are adapted. I think the same is true for most people, whether they realize it or not. This takes on significance when you consider that it is a fact that has been almost ignored since the country's inception. Most of the population now lives in or near cities.

Policymakers and economists chuckle to themselves whenever someone suggests that less economic growth would be beneficial. However, economic growth is usually accompanied by population growth. Currently, the world population is projected to reach about 9 billion by 2050, almost ten times the estimated world population of 1800. Ten thousand years ago, a blink of an eye in geological terms, it is estimated that our ancestors inhabited a world with a population of only 4 million. The fact that we have survived this growth does not imply that it is desirable. Rather it has contributed to an illusion of normalcy where none should exist.

I view the world as our deteriorating habitat, with diminishing pockets of habitability. Though I feel fortunate to be able to live in a desirable state within a major economic and military power, I see no reason to support American ideology, which I have never believed. Directly or indirectly, many of the world's woes are connected to conflicting groups that have been forced into contact with each other by overcrowding. Small groups can't wage wars with people whom they don't know exist, neither can they seriously deplete world resources or create global warming. When people aren't forced to live and work in cramped quarters, they can have environments in which they feel comfortable and never encounter conflicting ideologies.

Finally, I am not opposed to all economic development. Here in Middlebury a process is in place to create a small number of jobs that do not impinge upon the existing nature of the town, which still operates much as it did in 1800.

The Meaning of Human Existence

I just finished reading the book of the above title by Edward O. Wilson. He is my favorite science writer because he writes well, has the perspective of a naturalist, tends to be honest, and is willing to address big questions. There is little new here, and several of the chapters appeared earlier as separate essays. However, this is a good summary of his views on humanity if you're unfamiliar with them.

Wilson's primary competence is in entomology, and he is a world expert on ants. This led him to study social behavior in the animal kingdom, and eventually he connected his findings to humans. He has noted the evolutionary advantage held by eusocial species and how it relates to us. Eusocial insects make up most of the biomass of all living insects, and humans have similarly come to dominate the planet.

As a writer of popular science books, Wilson has a history of running into trouble with both the general public and the scientific community. He has been accused of overgeneralizing ever since the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, in which he first drew the connection between insects and humans. People don't like being told that they have instincts similar to ants or how they evolved to their present state. In the early years, he was a victim of political correctness. He was accused of supporting misogyny, racism and eugenics, none of which was true, and a protesting Marxist once poured a pitcher of water on his head. More recently he has been criticized by the evolutionary biology community for discarding their sacred principle of inclusive fitness and replacing it with what he calls group selection or multi-level selection. In the appendix of the current book he summarizes research that supports his position.

Some chapters are more convincing than others in this book. While it is sprinkled with interesting facts about various insect species, the main subject is humans. One of Wilson's more recent ideas is that people tend to be both good and evil in the traditional senses in a predictable eusocial way. We are usually altruistic when it comes to defending our group against other groups, but within our own group we may act out of self-interest. This seems somewhat plausible to me. For example, some people travel to distant regions where they will be killed thinking that they are defending their own country, while at home they may lie on job applications, cheat on their income taxes and steal their best friends' girlfriends. Within the U.S. itself there are sub-groups that compete, such as the Tea Party and the Democrats. Wilson places a great deal of emphasis on the role that group affiliation plays in behavior, and it rings true. Perhaps the most convincing passages, to me anyway, have to do with religion. I completely agree with Wilson, who says that religious groups, insofar as they engage in destructive activities, are currently one of the most disruptive forces in the world. Basically, most religious ideas regarding the nature of the universe represent utter stupidity in light of the findings of science. Here, Wilson hopes that the differences can someday be talked out, but that seems highly unlikely. He laments, as I do, that all political discourse in this country requires respect for conventional religious views, no matter how ridiculous they are.

Wilson's newest ideas aren't necessarily his best. He devotes a chapter to what he thinks intelligent extraterrestrials are like. In this vein he assumes that the chemical and biological processes of the habitable planets within a few hundred light years from here will produce intelligent beings, if they do so at all, that are quite similar to us. Those that we may eventually come into contact with will not be interested in our science and technology, and he seems to think that they will be cultural hobbyists who will derive pleasure from finding out about us. Colonization would not be on their minds, because of the risks on Earth associated with organisms and ecosystems to which they are not adapted. Furthermore, he does not believe that it is advisable, either to us or to aliens, to physically enhance ourselves to excess. It is possible that Wilson is right about this, but he is so speculative that I put little credence in his views here. We seem to be approaching evolutionary crossroads, and do not yet know whether some humans will turn themselves into superhumans, which would contradict Wilson's expectations. Similarly, I think it is quite possible that intelligent extraterrestrials may have no interest whatsoever in humans; they may not want to visit Earth, remotely or in person. I agree with Wilson, though, that they probably do exist.

Another point that Wilson brings up that is of interest to me is the current dichotomy between the sciences and the humanities. This was the main topic in his earlier book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. As a scientist, he is most charitable towards the humanities and thinks that they are our future, because scientific knowledge is accumulating so rapidly that it will soon slow down and become less relevant to our daily lives. However, he doesn't give a free pass to those who study the humanities either. He traces, correctly I think, a schism between the two domains that dates back to the Romantics in the early nineteenth century. They diverted the path of the Enlightenment and created the "two cultures" described by C.P. Snow in 1959. From Wilson's point of view, scientists need to round out their perspective by studying the humanities, and those in the humanities need to understand science better. Although I have interests in both camps, in recent years I have been deeply disappointed by the lack of engagement with the real world by practitioners of various disciplines in the humanities.

I have to say that Wilson is one of the few public intellectuals for whom I have great respect. Although he has and admits to weaknesses as a human being, he rose to his current sphere of influence through honest hard work and a genuine sense of curiosity. Frankly I don't see anyone comparable in the conventional cohort of public intellectuals, including the contributors to the NYRB. Most academics are comparatively worthless when it comes to discussing the big-picture questions and problems facing humanity. Considering that this type of discussion rarely occurs on TV, and never among politicians or well-known public figures, the state of affairs is scandalous. It is appalling to me that so few people attempt to address them. When Wilson, who is 85, leaves the scene, there may be no one to replace him.

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides—
You may have met Him—did you not
His notice sudden is—

the Grass divides as with a Comb—
A spotted shaft is seen—
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on—

He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn—
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot—
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone—

Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me—
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality—

But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone—


—Emily Dickinson

Entrepreneurs

My Missouri friend, Greg, and his wife, Frances, just visited us for three days. They arrived in a gigantic pickup truck pulling an Airstream trailer that is as large as some people's houses. We showed them around the area, and one of the activities was a tour of the Maple Landmark plant, which makes wooden toys and is a leader in the U.S. wooden toy market. It is a small family-owned business, and Frances saw parallels with the spa business that she and Greg own in Missouri. Entrepreneurs occupy an important role in American society, and I thought I'd take this opportunity to say something about them.

Frances began her spa business in Jefferson City, Missouri several years ago, and when Greg retired from his job managing the Missouri Medicaid program he joined in. The business grew gradually, and they opened a second spa in Columbia, Missouri. The company has been successful and now employs about 50 people, including Frances's daughter from a previous marriage, Kim, and Greg and Frances's daughter, Ariel, who is now a Vice President. They have been engrossed in running the business since its inception, and are now trying to wind down somewhat and prepare for a generational transition. This is proving to be problematic, partly because Kim is dysfunctional and married to an irresponsible, unreliable, unemployed husband while incompetently raising three children, ensuring the continuation of the white trash tradition in the next generation of the family. Frances and Kim have ongoing feuds and confrontations, with Frances usually on the losing end. She would like to help her grandchildren and see them often, and provides Kim with a job, but Kim routinely threatens to deny her access to the grandchildren. As I said to Greg, if it were me, Kim would be history, but this isn't my family. Ariel seems competent enough as an employee, but does not seem particularly interested in taking full responsibility at the company. Her husband has a well-paying job, so they don't need the money. During their visit, Greg and Frances were frequently interrupted by issues that were arising at the spa in their absence.

Despite some of the negatives associated with the spa, Greg and Frances seem to derive a great deal of satisfaction from it. Although they were well off without it, they are now becoming quite wealthy and are spending their money according to predictable nouveau riche patterns. In their case, that has involved extensive home renovations and the purchase of the Airstream, the truck, a tractor with attachments and two BMW's. Most of their drive to conspicuous consumption seems to have originated in Frances, who grew up poor, while Greg did not.

Frances enjoyed seeing the toy factory partly because it operated like one big family. It was started in the late 1970's by a local Vermont man who had taken up woodworking when he was a boy. The business continued to grow, and his mother and his grandmother, who is 95, still work there. We met them on our tour, since they have only 40 employees. Some of the jobs looked boring and highly repetitive, but many of the employees multitasked, which would reduce the tedium. Overall, they seemed happy. Their products are far more specialized than you might expect, and they are beating the competition, including China. From the outside, it looked like a pleasant place to work. Part of the appeal to Frances was the communal feeling and having three generations working together. She took a picture of the grandmother and sent it to Ariel to show her how fulfilling working in a family business can be.

My take on entrepreneurship isn't as sanguine. Americans tend to look at it at the individual level, in which it is possible to develop products and services in order to better the economic circumstances of themselves and their families. That in itself isn't necessarily bad, but when an entire economy is operated on that basis, many of the long-term consequences are, in my opinion, undesirable. Unnecessary goods and services come into existence, and successful small businesses tend to grow and merge, ending up as large, impersonal corporations. Most small businesses fail, and in the process become a waste of labor and materials. To use the examples here, I don't think it would make much difference to the country or the world if there were two less spas in Missouri and one less toy maker in Vermont. At the macro level, it seems risky and arbitrary to allow individuals to "grow their businesses" in order to meet their personal economic goals when the benefits to society are so marginal. Admittedly, an entrepreneur-friendly economy does lead to a certain amount of innovation which might not occur otherwise, but most of that innovation is of questionable value, and the end result seems to be large corporations which, unlike the cheerful family operations mentioned, take little or no responsibility toward people and systematically fire employees in order to reduce costs. The logical outcome of this kind of arrangement is the wealth inequality documented by Thomas Piketty in Capital. The fact is that the cumulative effects of the American Dream fantasy have been global pollution, national overpopulation, corporate manipulation of governance, high unemployment, and an emerging society of rich and poor. Furthermore, the capitalist model followed by the Western powers is associated with ideological conflicts and wars throughout the world.

On a personal level, I have always found entrepreneurial people somewhat offensive, if only because they tend to be aesthetically retarded. Although I like and appreciate Greg and Frances in certain respects, it is impossible for me to relate to many of their interests. Greg barely made it through college and reads low-grade science fiction for entertainment. He is still interested in UFO's, which is something I outgrew in high school. On vacation, Frances seems to have no interests beyond sightseeing and tourist trinkets. She is indifferent to the arts, which have strengths here, and local history. Neither of them ever does serious reading, and they show little interest in anyone outside their immediate families. To me, the scope of their thinking would feel like imprisonment.

George Eliot

Although I am off fiction for the most part, I can't have a blog without saying something about George Eliot. When I lived Dixon, Illinois, which is of little inherent interest unless you want to plumb the depths of how the character of a mediocre American president might have formed, in my spare time I began catching up on literature that I had never read and surveying newer fiction. This lasted for over two decades and extended almost to the present.

American literature did not impress me at all. I tried Henry James, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. More recent writers included Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, John Kennedy Toole, Carson McCullers, Vladimir Nabokov and Sylvia Plath. I also read contemporary fiction by T.C. Boyle, Jane Smiley, Sheila Schwartz, Lorrie Moore, Anne Tyler, Alison Lurie, Francine Prose, Cathleen Schine, Mona Simpson, Michael Cunningham, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Dan Chaon, Alice Munro (Canadian), Carol Shields (Canadian), Carl Hiaasen, Marilynne Robinson, Lauren Groff and Dave Eggers. Recently I read a short story by Willa Cather. Of the entire American group, I would say that The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers, is the only outstanding work. I could write an essay on what is wrong with Lorrie Moore, but would rather not. My overall perception has been that the U.S. has made less of a contribution than one would expect to the arts in general compared to many other countries, when you take into consideration its size and wealth, partly because it is a relatively new country, partly because of its emphasis on commerce and partly because its patrons have tended to be the nouveaux riches.

In European literature, I read some Dostoevsky and James Joyce that I had missed. I spent a lot of time on France, reading Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola and Proust. The only French contemporary whom I've read is Michel Houellebecq. British writers, besides George Eliot, included Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence (I had read two novels by Thomas Hardy much earlier). Recent British writers were A.S. Byatt, David Lodge, A.L. Kennedy and Jeanette Winterson (I skipped Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and others). I also read a lot of Kafka, some Milan Kundera and a little Witold Gombrowicz. I have little interest in German, Spanish or Italian culture, and therefore skipped those countries. While I find flaws in all writers, my favorites are George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Brontë and Gustave Flaubert.

As for the other continents, I've read very little. Last year I read a novel and short stories by the Peruvian Julio Ramon Ribeyro and thought some of his short fiction was very good. If I were to delve further into fiction, I suspect that South America may have a lot to offer. Yet, besides not being interested in fiction, I am not particularly interested exploring unfamiliar cultures. The above list does not include fiction that I had read earlier. For historical context, I wasn't inspired at all by any fiction until my junior year in college, when I studied early twentieth century Russian fiction, not mentioned here.

While discussing their preferences in fiction, few people go to the trouble of summarizing everything they've read, which admittedly would be cumbersome. I listed some of that information in order to provide the context of what I know and what I don't know. Thus, if someone wants to challenge my position that, say, Jack Kerouac, is not the greatest writer in history, they have an obligation to first read George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. One of the reasons why I'm reluctant to read fiction is that people, reviewers in particular, plug books that I almost invariably end up deciding are a waste of time if I read them. If every review included access to a list of all of the books ever read by the reviewer and which of those books he or she found to be excellent, it would be much easier for me to determine whether I should read the book under review. You can apply that same standard to what I say in this post. Fiction is a vast topic, and everyone's knowledge about it is bound to be limited in one way or another.

In an earlier post I discussed the difficulty of establishing aesthetic merit. That applies here too, so I'll mention some of the factors that go into my literary tastes. I think what I like best is long fiction that realistically interweaves the lives of people in a well-defined environment and covers a long time period. Obviously this is something that can't be done well in short fiction, which is why I often see the characters in short stories as stick figures who may never be able to break out of their comic book existences. Because of mobility, population growth and development in much of the West, it has become increasingly difficult to approximate the comparatively stable environments that existed up to the late nineteenth century, which is when the novel probably peaked for my purposes. That period also stands out because by then the novel had had time to mature as an art form. Beginning with World War I, the world descended into instability, and the art world changed its focus from the transition away from agricultural life to the transition to post-industrial life, which then became modernism. The modern world has a less static basis than the world of the past, making it much easier to fudge on realism: fewer people know what's going on, and a writer can now just make things up with little accountability. When challenged, they can call it artistic license, and when all else fails they can drum up critics who will call them artistic geniuses. The public, not knowing any better, takes it all in, hook, line and sinker.

For someone who prefers realism, most modern fiction is a disaster. I don't care about the nuances of one person's perceptions of Dublin, especially if he is a jaundiced literary person, so James Joyce is of little use to me. Kafka's imagination has its merits, as do his writing skills, but I find him repetitive and uninformative; in a way, his life and works are a testimony to his never having figured things out. Postmodern fiction has even less to say for a number of reasons; it often isn't well-grounded in real places or people and simulates them in a wholly unsatisfactory way, much like the empty visual art of Andy Warhol.

* * *

During my fiction period, I read that Virginia Woolf had called Middlemarch, George Eliot's best known work, "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," which captured my attention, since, in case you haven't noticed, I have a serious streak. When I began to read it, I became enchanted. I think I can say that it is the only novel I've ever read that creates a realistic world containing a variety of plausible characters who each have their distinct problems and are making their ways through life. The narrator seemed so omniscient that I sometimes felt as if the book were written by God. Moreover, it convincingly portrayed the lives of a broad swath of people, from peasants to the bourgeoisie to criminals to intellectuals, something that I had never seen before. It became my favorite novel, and I went on to read all of George Eliot's fiction and several biographies.

Most of her fiction, including the earliest, still holds up well. Her writing style, with long, convoluted sentences, appeals to me, as it did to Proust, but is not compelling to the majority of contemporary readers. As pre-modern fiction, you don't enter people's heads and access their thoughts directly, but that is made up for by close observation, which is at the heart of George Eliot's skill. Her earliest works were so accurate that readers could easily identify some of the actual people on whom her characters were based. To me, George Eliot's life is a valuable study in what I think it takes to be a good writer, and once this is understood there isn't much of a puzzle left about why I find most fiction unsatisfactory.

I attribute much of George Eliot's success as a writer to the fact that she had lived a full life, encompassing a variety of experiences and challenges, before she began to write fiction at age 36. Her father was an estate manager in Warwickshire, where she was exposed to a variety of people when she accompanied him on his rounds. Because she was not pretty, her father provided her with a better education than was the norm, perhaps in anticipation that she would not attract a husband. This prompted a lifelong intellectual curiosity that eventually led her to become an editor at the Westminster Review.

Her love life seems to have been choppy and difficult due to her preference for intellectual men. She was deeply hurt when Herbert Spencer dumped her, but soon developed a relationship with G.H. Lewes. Lewes could not marry her because he could not obtain a divorce from his wife, Agnes Jervis, who had cuckolded him with his friend Thornton Leigh Hunt, who fathered four of her children. Lewes was technically complicit in his wife's adultery, because he had knowingly accepted one of Hunt's children as his own. George Eliot and Lewes scandalized Victorian society by living together unmarried as man and wife until Lewes died in 1878. Lewes's encouragement and skill as her agent played an important role in her eventual literary success. In 1880 she created more gossip when she married an admirer, the not-so-intellectual John Cross, who was twenty years her junior. On their honeymoon in Venice, Cross jumped from a balcony in their hotel rooms into the Grand Canal. The official explanation was that he had had a sudden fit of depression. Others, Gore Vidal in particular, think that Cross was gay and perhaps had misjudged his responsibilities as a husband to his then-elderly wife. George Eliot became ill later that year and died on December 22.

I visited her grave in Highgate Cemetery in 2002. 

If a Lion Could Talk I

Ludwig Wittgenstein made many statements that became famous in philosophical circles. At the conclusion of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he wrote "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." This is the odd ending to the quasi-logical tract that he wrote while he was a soldier and prisoner during World War I, which later became his Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge. Towards the end of his career he wrote, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." This was published posthumously in Philosophical Investigations.

The "If a lion could talk" statement occurred in the context of Wittgenstein's thoughts about language games. Although it is an ambiguous sentence, it is generally thought to mean that the frame of reference of a lion is so different from that of a human that lion language would be unintelligible to us. The theory is that meaning is related to the use of words, and that lions, if they could speak, would have entirely different uses for language than we do.  I have tended to agree with this idea but was thinking about it again recently and am no longer sure that I do. Language involves more than words and grammar: it contains symbols. Most other animals have little or no capacity to understand symbols, but some do. I found it instructive that no animals besides humans, including all other primates, understand the meaning of pointing, with the exception of dogs. Wolves don't either. Among humans, pointing is a symbolic shorthand used to indicate that an object worthy of attention is located in a specific direction. In the case of people it might be the location of a gas station. In the case of dogs, it might be the location of prey. For all intents and purposes, a pointing dog might be saying "There are quail in these bushes."

What is different about the case of dogs is that, through habituation and breeding, they have interacted with humans enough to understand some basic symbolic communication, which I consider a form of language. Thus, in theory, if a dog could speak in sentences, we might understand some of what it says exactly. I'm sure many dog owners would agree. Some cat owners would probably be able to understand at least part of what their cats were saying if they could speak: "I'm hungry" or "I want to play," for example. Mutatis mutandis, the same might be true for lions, making Wittgenstein technically incorrect.

This brings me to Noam Chomsky, whom I recently saw speaking in a video about artificial intelligence. Apparently he thinks it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. He believes that humans have unique genetics that support language, and that we are nowhere near figuring out how it works. Since language is central to our thinking abilities, Chomsky is also skeptical about our ability to create meaningful artificial intelligence that might actually rival our own intelligence. According to him, there may never be a singularity. I am not up to date on research in the fields of language simulation by machines and artificial intelligence, but I suspect that Chomsky will be proven wrong. For example, if computers can be taught to reconstruct languages based on their exposure to grammar and word usage, it seems to me that they might be able to use language just as well as humans. One of the advantages of computer learning is that if a process works at all, it can be sped up and developed rapidly simply because of the processing power and memory capacity of a large computer. While an infant might pick up grammar and usage gradually over a period of years through real-time experiences, a computer might work its way through an enormous database in a short amount of time, permitting more rapid language acquisition than humans. Once computers are able to perform a broad range of learning activities comparable to humans, it seems probable to me that they will quickly surpass humans in cognitive functions.

Whether that will happen or not remains to be seen. At the moment I am interested in the reasons why Chomsky, more so than Wittgenstein, thinks that human language is unique. It seems to be because we are the only animal that we know of that has true language. Certainly language has given us an enormous advantage, but Chomsky seems to project a sort of hubris about it. If you look into Chomsky, he is quite an odd fellow. By contemporary standards he is an off-the-charts radical who advocates anarchism and the end of the nation state. The reality is that he is a dyed-in-the-wool Enlightenment thinker who still thinks that man is the center of the universe. I think this is a better explanation for his minimization of the potential value of research in artificial intelligence than any particular knowledge that he may have of the subject. What I have noticed over the years is that even when an intellectual legitimately reaches prominence through hard work and important discoveries, once he is given a pulpit from which to speak, his ideas for the public often bear no relationship to his research and in fact may be ideas that he arbitrarily absorbed as a teenager. In Chomsky's case, he was strongly influenced by a radical uncle when he was growing up. Most of his political ideas originated then and have nothing to do with his research. Thus, as I suspect is true in the case of many public intellectuals, there is no direct link between their areas of expertise and the public opinions for which they are known.

The Obama Persona

I haven't written much about politics or news events, because I don't pay much attention to them other than reading headlines and watching the PBS NewsHour. However, I did see Barack Obama's speech on ISIS last night and will take this opportunity to make a few comments.

I had high hopes for Obama based on his 2004 convention speech for John Kerry. In 2008 he was obviously a better choice than John McCain. But over time I have come to find him unbearable. It seems impossible to know, and it is therefore essentially irrelevant, what his true worldview may be. His speeches lack authenticity to the extent that they are carefully scripted, and are off-putting to the extent that they may accurately convey his thoughts.

Obama's speeches are always laced with words, phrases and thoughts that I find offensive. He is fond of invoking evil and American values and using religious language to make his points, and I find it jarring. His job isn't to combat evil, which, in my opinion, is primarily a social construct. American values are not something that the U.S. has a right to impose on others. And religion should be removed from all political speeches, because this is a secular country.

Even if you accept the premise that the U.S. has a responsibility to maintain world order, I don't think that Obama frames issues such as ISIS appropriately. There is always an allusion to potential attacks on U.S. soil and a suggestion that this must be prevented at all costs. I don't think, for example, that each American life potentially saved is worth, say, one billion dollars. Obama, as far as I know, never discusses estimates of potential American casualties that might result from inaction. Furthermore, he, and politicians generally, do not mention that prolonged attempts to stabilize parts of the Middle East may never succeed regardless of any actions we take. It always seems to come down to good guys versus bad guys and killing or destroying the bad guys. In this respect, Barack Obama isn't much different from George W. Bush.

In my view, the assassination of Osama bin Laden, while technically justifiable, was primarily a publicity stunt. As a strategic matter, it was irrelevant that bin Laden died, because he had no operative function at the time. It immediately became an Obama talking point used to highlight his leadership skills and effectiveness in bringing bin Laden to justice, despite the fact that there was no trial and that it violated Pakistani sovereignty. As in the case of countless drone strikes, Obama was the judge, jury and de facto executioner. Should he be applauded for actions like these?

One aspect of Obama's new initiative that disturbs me is that it may have been precipitated in part by public opinion. Apparently it isn't that big a deal if thousands of Syrians and Iraqis are dying, but the entire U.S. policy in the Middle East must change instantly when Americans become upset about the beheadings of two American journalists. It is true that Obama may merely be using this as an opportunity to present his plan, but I find the linking of major foreign policy initiatives to small-scale events that happen to have had an emotional impact on the American public inappropriate.

Whenever I see Obama speak, I sense that everything he says has been concocted. Is he religious? I don't know. Does he think that the American model of capitalism is good for the world? If so, I disagree with him. Does he think that America's unemployment problem will be fixed by providing people with better educations? If so, he is probably incorrect.

The overall impression I have is that Obama is a mask. He acts as if he is attempting to channel the beliefs of the American public and to speak for them, but is that his role? I don't think so. In the process he often seems to suspend critical judgment, which might show just how irrational the public is and how public opinion can be wrong. Obama almost seems to have an identity disorder that prevents him from voicing his own views, and this signifies to me a lack of responsibility, or at a minimum brings into question his suitability for the job. The president is supposed to make decisions, not seek consensus. He seems to search for the view least likely to receive strong public criticism and then promote it, rather than make his own analysis and convince others of its merits, and as a consequence many justifiably see him as a feckless president. He exhibits the kind of behavior that could be simulated by an algorithm that rates ideas based on their popularity - or the number of "likes" they get on Facebook. Such predictability indicates a weakness in originality, and, more seriously, a deficiency in understanding.

Notes on Feminism

Throughout most of my adult life, it has been politically incorrect to say anything negative about feminism. Feminism is a broad topic that covers a long time period and a large geographical area, but I think of it mainly in terms of its second wave in the U.S. during the 1970's. When I was in college in the Midwest during the late 1960's and early 1970's, attitudes were still patriarchal, and even though political activism and sexual liberation were in vogue, men still behaved in what would now be considered a sexist manner, and most women went along with it. For that reason, it was difficult to argue convincingly against the basic concepts of feminism, which had been around at least since Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.

In my current thinking, equality is one of the few organizing principles that continue to be valid for humans. I think it has a basis in evolutionary biology, and belief in equality can be considered a basic human trait that stems from our predisposition to belong to cooperative groups. If E.O. Wilson is correct, natural selection for humans is based on groups, not individuals or selfish genes. The theory of group selection has its detractors, but I agree with Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, who support Wilson when they say that "in the human species, a pro-social psychology arose by cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution." This can be construed to make a strong case for equality, while other popular ideas such as democracy or capitalism seem comparatively arbitrary, transient and weak. Democracy is primarily a political system that attempts to enforce equality among conflicting groups. Capitalism is an economic system that is perceived as natural to many people only because it tends to break down society into different groups, allowing one group to feel justified in exploiting another. Earlier, slaveholders exploited slaves, and now corporations exploit workers. In a realized state of equality among all people, neither democracy nor capitalism would be necessary. It could be argued that the remaining world conflicts are related to the difficulty of convincing all people that they belong to the same group.

Although I support feminism to the extent that it advocates equality, it is difficult for me to overlook some of the destructive effects that it has had on my life. I think it helped generate interpersonal chaos in my generation. Previous generations were pressured to marry and remain married, and they usually did. Greater equality for women has allowed more women to enter the workforce and attain economic and social independence without male support and approval. In my experience, many women in the transitional group of the 1970's unconsciously absorbed both the old and new ways while they were growing up. On one hand, they saw their fathers as solid breadwinners who took care of their mothers in an unequal system that bestowed greater authority to males. On the other hand, they thought that they could live independently and make free choices without male interference. The upper-middle-class women with whom I became familiar sometimes developed unrealistic expectations as a result of exposure to both systems. They thought that they could have the security and social prestige accorded to their mothers with the support of their uxorious fathers, while simultaneously disdaining dependence on men.

In the case of my ex-wife, she deeply resented parental pressure to follow their guidelines. She was forced to study nursing under the unstated presumption that she would meet and marry a successful professional and not work. That was the model of her parents' generation. She rebelled and married an unconventional philosophy major, but when it became apparent that this would not lead to socioeconomic status comparable to what her mother had, she got a divorce. Later, when her idealized picture of life as a single mother with two children didn't materialize and her relationship with her daughter deteriorated, she defaulted to a strategy that centered on self-preservation. In her later life she is still single, with no partner and strained relations with her siblings and her daughter.

While feminism corresponded with necessary social changes, on a personal level it was disruptive to my life. I find that many educated American women in my age group retain elements of both pre- and post-feminism ideology, though the two are not compatible. In my opinion, this impedes their ability to have good relationships with men, a problem that was less common among their mothers, who in hindsight often seem happier and far more realistic.

Panic Attacks

In 1997 I had lived in Dixon, Illinois for ten years. Since I had little in common with anyone there, for my mental health I used to participate in the UC Berkeley summer programs in Europe. That year I spent three weeks in Oxford studying cathedrals and abbeys. It was my second trip to Oxford, having studied Anglo-Saxon archaeology in 1993. In 1997 I met Kimberly there; she was studying historical English journals.

We were both looking for changes in our lives. I was sick of Dixon, and it wasn't a good location for my daughter, who had just finished tenth grade at Dixon High School. Staying there, she might have turned out the way some of her friends later did, becoming a topless dancer or an unwed mother. Kimberly had worked for ten years in the Religious Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara and had recently broken off an engagement.

In the early fall, Kimberly visited us in Dixon. During that trip, she suddenly had a small panic attack. I don't recall what precipitated it, but it was the first of many to follow. Nevertheless, we began to develop a tentative plan to pursue the relationship. I started to look for jobs in the Chicago area, and I planned a trip to see Kimberly in Santa Barbara over the Christmas holidays. As it happened, I got a job offer in Wheeling, Illinois, near Chicago, and accepted it over the phone while I was in Santa Barbara. In January, 1998 my daughter and I moved to Lake Forest, Illinois. Kimberly soon quit her job, moved to Wilmette, Illinois and shortly thereafter found a new job nearby at Northwestern University in Evanston.

The next panic attack that I distinctly remember occurred when Kimberly came over to our apartment in Lake Forest to watch a movie. We watched River's Edge, starring Keanu Reeves, with a humorous cameo by Dennis Hopper. I had seen the film previously and liked it. It is a dark film, but very well done, and an observant study of teenage culture in a small Western town. However, it was too upsetting for Kimberly to watch, and it triggered a panic attack. She couldn't stand watching it, became extremely agitated, and finally asked me if I had ever killed anyone.

The relationship lasted for about three years, and was punctuated by panic attacks, which diminished in intensity over time as she became accustomed to me. One of the things I liked about Kimberly was that she knew herself well and provided specific instructions about what I should do on occasions such as birthdays, Valentine's Day, Christmas, etc. She knew exactly what might upset her and had learned to speak up about it in advance whenever possible. I came to see that she suffered from an anxiety disorder and tended to resolve her issues by being a control freak, but I appreciated having much of the guesswork taken out of the relationship, because women are often far more capricious in their expectations.

Although I attempted to accommodate Kimberly as best I could, it wasn't really possible to save the relationship. My daughter at that time was in the process of stabilizing after a rebellious adolescence during which her mother had in effect kicked her out twice. Kimberly was ill-equipped to deal with children. She was unable to develop rapports with them and was easily disturbed by unruliness. At that time, my son was having difficulties living with my ex-wife, and Kimberly was troubled by him too. Shortly after the Columbine High School massacre, he was visiting in Lake Forest, and the three of us went to a Cubs game. My son's behavior seemed to precipitate a small panic attack roughly based on the idea that he might become a murderer because he played violent video games. By then I was getting a little fed up with Kimberly, who obviously had led a sheltered life and hadn't been challenged much. She had never lived with anyone, never been married and never had children, though in 1999 she was 43. After a bad experience as a schoolteacher, she had avoided demanding jobs and lived like a college student. Although she was very frugal, she was subsidized by her father, who was a retired engineer.

There were other things that Kimberly didn't like about the relationship, but she tended to discuss them with female confidantes, clergymen and psychologists rather than with me. Religion was of considerable interest to her, and she had played at being a Roman Catholic and an Episcopalian. I, on the other hand, have been an atheist continuously since about age 14. Ordinarily this did not produce a conflict, because she only had half-baked religious ideas and was pretty smart; I suspected that at the back of her mind she knew that it was all bunk. As part of her control freak strategy, it suited her to think that God was providing order to the apparent chaos of everyday life.

In August, 2000, during the final build-up to the end of the relationship, we went on a two-week vacation to Switzerland, with side trips to Annecy, France and Tremezzo, Italy. There were things I did that upset her on the trip, but she said nothing at the time. Apparently it bothered her a lot that I had walked ahead of her in the hills around Gruyere when she had a leg cramp. Later, in November, it came to a crescendo. She had thought over the relationship and discussed it with others, and then went through a major anxiety episode, during which she became an insomniac requiring medical attention. Shortly after that, she unilaterally broke off the relationship without discussion.

While I was hurt and saddened by the breakup, I was assuaged by my awareness of her apparent mental illness, and there was in fact little surprise, because there had been clear intermittent warnings of the potential demise of the relationship ever since its inception. However, I misjudged the severity of Kimberly's self-protective regimen that ensued. I mistakenly thought that we would still see each other occasionally and discuss aspects of the relationship in a way that might increase our understanding so that we might each benefit from that knowledge in the future. That was not to be, and I haven't spoken to her since November, 2000. We exchanged a few e-mails, but she no longer replies to mine.

What has stuck with me over the years is Kimberly's unwillingness to communicate. In this context I find it completely unacceptable. How does one honestly erase three years of one's life without any accountability? It is deep hypocrisy to espouse Christian or similar values while blotting out a person who is at odds with your personal mythology. If you've ever read Martin Buber, Kimberly has made me an It.

As far as I know, Kimberly now lives alone in a condominium on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Genius

When I was growing up, I got the impression that a genius was a person who had an extremely high IQ and could figure things out much better than most people. A model genius was Isaac Newton, who made astounding advances in physics and developed a new branch of mathematics in the process. I thought that you either had it or you didn't, and if you had it you would get high grades and high SAT scores and go to an elite university. A girl in my high school class was like that; she skipped the twelfth grade and departed for M.I.T. In those days I didn't read much, and I wasn't fully aware that someone might also be called an artistic or literary genius. In any case, genius then seemed to me to be an innate characteristic.

Over the years I came to realize that genius is largely culturally defined and, particularly in the U.S., the term shows up in many different areas of human success. There are business geniuses such as Steve Jobs and pop music geniuses such as Bob Dylan. This really complicates things, and you have to look closely at each "genius" to see exactly what is going on. I think Jobs was an extraordinarily ambitious marketing guy with good aesthetic sensibilities and psychopathic tendencies. Bob Dylan was an extraordinarily ambitious musician who fortuitously resorted to his innate linguistic skills when he saw that his musical skills, physical presence and voice would be insufficient. Both of these men were single-minded and probably would not have been particularly successful without that trait.

I've spent a lot of time ruminating over Bob Dylan. He stood out as a pop artist mainly because he had good lyrics. However, on close examination it becomes apparent that during his rise to success his lyrics were tailored to meet market demand, and his persona was sculpted from elements stolen from other performers. In short, he was just an act. Within a full social context, Dylan closely resembles Steve Jobs, and there is a point at which their talent is inextricable from their will to succeed commercially.

As mentioned in an earlier post, aesthetic merit is something that is hard to pin down, and that becomes nearly impossible when you elevate it all the way to a "genius" level. In my view there are two different aspects to great writing. One is a pure linguistic facility, which varies greatly among writers and reaches a peak in writers such as Shakespeare and James Joyce. The other is a facility for reaching depth, and that is far more elusive. To me, poetic genius skirts around deep enigmas without being explicit. I wouldn't expect everyone to agree with me, and I don't read much poetry, but I've seen it in snippets of Emily Dickinson and Denise Levertov. In fiction I've seen depth in George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Flaubert and a few others. According to my taste, very few writers deserve to be called geniuses, and I would not include in that group Shakespeare or Joyce or the merely fluent and linguistically creative.

If you read my previous post, you will have seen that in the visual arts, genius has become entirely subject to contemporary cultural definition. Thus, while some collectors consider Andy Warhol a greater artist than Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Hughes won't hesitate to tell you that he thinks Warhol was an idiot. In this sense, "genius" means little more than "of great cultural significance." To my way of thinking, that diminishes the importance of genius to such a degree that it isn't even worth discussing.

I think a case can be made for genius in film-making, but it would be hard to reach a consensus. Moreover, film production is a group effort and usually occurs in a factory-like setting. Nevertheless, I think some of the subtle films of Eric Rohmer can be called works of genius; not so for any American director, except perhaps Stanley Kubrick (who moved to England!).

Music is probably the art that best accommodates the use of the word "genius." It can comfortably be applied to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, but after that it gets fuzzy quickly. Is Stevie Wonder really a genius? I'm not sure.

With all this ambiguity I am tempted to revert back to my earlier understanding of "genius." However, that doesn't work either. It's fairly obvious that most of the smart people streaming into the top universities aren't much like Isaac Newton, even if they have good grades and high IQs. The majority of them go on to lead ordinary lives, while perhaps living in a higher socioeconomic bracket than most people. Similarly, if you look at the current crop of college professors and intellectuals, you probably won't find many Newtons or Einsteins in that group. Science is now much more of a cooperative activity than earlier and has few solitary players. In the writing programs there probably aren't any Flauberts or Dickinsons. As for the public intellectuals, on the whole they have been an enormous disappointment in recent decades.

The conclusion, then, is that, while genius may still be construed as a special talent that is confined to a small number of individuals, there is an irreducible element to it that at any given time depends on the prevailing social values. Thus, under the current conditions of late-stage capitalism and conspicuous consumption run wild, genius isn't what it used to be.

Critics

Not long ago I watched the Robert Hughes documentary The Mona Lisa Curse. I can't convey the extent of my affinity for Hughes; I grew up in New York during the period discussed and in fact first saw the Mona Lisa at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1963, which is Hughes's point of departure. The main idea of the film is that money has destroyed the art world by transforming art into an investment for the wealthy, controlled by dealers who are out to make a profit. To me, Hughes is a model critic: he knows his subject well, is passionate about it, and has the courage of his convictions. I can't say that I always agree with him, but, unlike most critics, he has useful knowledge to impart. At the end he directly challenges an ignorant, wealthy art buyer, which is not something that you often see these days. It is telling that this was not shown in the U.S. when it was released. Like Hughes, I am appalled by the art world, and I have completely lost interest in modern art. As far as I know, Hughes, who died in 2012, has no successor.

What strikes me is the apparent absence of critics like Robert Hughes. Not only do they seem to have disappeared from the world of paintings, but they seem to be in thin supply across all of the arts. Criticism seems to have become a self-serving job for whoever manages to obtain one. As mentioned in an earlier post, Lorrie Moore's short story collection, Bark, which documents her continued stagnation and decline as a writer, nevertheless received many favorable reviews. The book was shortlisted for The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, which, thankfully, it lost. I can't understand how anyone with good literary judgment could have recommended it. Where were the critics?

I don't follow architecture, but was gratified to see that Martin Filler, the architecture critic for the NYRB, recently got his comeuppance. He usually has little of value to say, and he tends to write biased articles. However, in this instance he was called out by the Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, who forced him to make a retraction. Filler works under an editor who feigns intellectual substance but is more precisely a graying impresario presiding over a decaying literary publication. Though I don't know enough about Zaha Hadid to say anything in her defense, I appreciate the steps she took to bring accountability to Filler.

In recent years I have had to develop convoluted, time-consuming methods to determine what art, fiction, music or film I might enjoy partaking in. I have found that reading a review - or several reviews - is no guarantee that I will have sufficient information to determine whether I would find a particular work worth reading, hearing or seeing. Thus, after a concentrated effort over a number of years, I now refrain from wasting my time on reviews, except to read them for entertainment.  My expectation is that if something of great artistic merit should materialize, I may only come across it by accident. What does this say about the value of critics?

Money has obviously corrupted the visual arts, but what about the others? It seems that it has done damage there too. If there is any good new fiction, I haven't seen it, though I must confess to liking Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory, which, not coincidentally, is a satire of the art world; Houellebecq may have been influenced by Hughes. The same goes for music, which, as far as I can tell, is going nowhere. Film is a more problematic area to sum up, because it seems to have become the central art form of our time. Thus, auteur directors such as Eric Rohmer, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and Milos Forman have become de facto major artists, while mainstream directors such as Steven Spielberg and James Cameron have enormous box office success and still gain the approval of most critics. Film critics are showing us their penchant for touting the blockbusters: that's where the money is. It is easy to understand why a critic might not be effusive about Eric Rohmer, yet in my opinion he is one of the best filmmakers ever, even with his limitations.

Stargazing

One day when I was a kid, my father brought home a small telescope. At first I thought it was very interesting and tried looking through it. There was some enlargement and the stars were a little brighter, but that was all that I noticed. You could see rainbows in the stars, which I recently learned meant that it was incredibly cheap, with extreme chromatic aberration. We never discussed the telescope and I lost interest in it. Later I found out that my father had given it away.

In college I took two courses in astronomy. I thought it was quite interesting, and the college had its own observatory with a 9.53" refractor that had a high quality lens. Once we went out to the observatory and looked at the sun through it with a filter, and you could see the activity on the surface. I learned the basics of astronomy, but at that time it was taught in the math department, and the instructor, like nearly all of the math instructors I've ever had, had no teaching ability. Out of curiosity I just looked him up, and he died on August 16, 2014 in Champaign, Illinois, where he was living in retirement.

When we moved to Vermont in 2011, I assumed that I would be doing a lot of hiking. Although I have hiked a fair amount in the vicinity since arriving, it has not been as major a preoccupation as I had thought it might be, for a number of reasons. The best hiking is in the mountains and generally involves an ascent of at least one thousand feet, which means that it is somewhat time-consuming and strenuous. You also have to drive to a trailhead, which takes additional time. Anne is fairly involved with other hobbies such as knitting and gardening and is a world-class mosquito magnet, so her enthusiasm for hiking is considerably less than mine. Usually I just go for short walks on the dirt road by our house.

Noticing that there is relatively low light pollution here, especially for the East Coast, I decided to take up stargazing as a hobby. Last year I bought a 130mm (5.1") refractor of very high quality, with an electronic German equatorial mount that includes motors. This was somewhat extravagant for a novice, but I have never liked buying cheap stuff (which my parents often did). I wouldn't say that it has outlived its usefulness, and I will keep it, but the aperture of the telescope is simply too small to see many deep sky objects in much detail. At this stage, some refractor owners take up astrophotography, which, with long exposure times, permits you to take detailed photographs of distant objects while using a small-aperture telescope. Since I have no interest in photography and prefer real-time viewing, I purchased the 18" F/3.7 reflector pictured in the column to the right. The telescope design is Newtonian, and the mount is John Dobson's alt-azimuth design. It is also fitted with electronics and motors.

The viewing conditions since I first set up the new telescope have generally not been good, but on the few nights that they have been good, the results have been excellent. The light-gathering is so much greater than with my other telescope that it is easy to see more detail. I have ordered special nebula filters in order to see the Orion Nebula and other objects better. There are thousands or millions of things to look at, and the view changes with the seasons, so this hobby will not exhaust itself quickly. There is also plenty of astronomical news, and discoveries are pouring in.

One of the reasons why I like astronomy is that it can serve some of the purposes of religion without being a religion. Throughout my life, I have often found it useful to take a "this too shall pass" attitude toward my surroundings. If you have jobs, living conditions, relationships, etc., that you don't like, you can always find solace in the fact that whatever you dislike will end at some point. In this stage of my life I take it a step further. If you have complaints about human existence in general, you can think about times when humans didn't exist or the distant future when they won't exist.

In fact our daily lives are focused on a tiny scale within the larger universe. People live in the moment more than they realize, and they elevate the importance of contemporary life far beyond its true significance. Everything is forgotten if you wait long enough. At some point everyone who has ever lived will be forgotten, and most of them already have been - it's just that some take longer than others. Jesus may be remembered in a thousand years if he's lucky. I'd give George Washington five hundred years tops. My sense is that the great scientists - Newton and Einstein - will be remembered the longest, because they are part of the tradition that is most likely to be seen as having significance in the distant future. As for me, I may have a grandchild who will remember me in one hundred years. Given that there may already have been millions of civilizations across the universe that are now completely forgotten, I'm not worrying about it much.

College

A subject that has intrigued me ever since I was in high school is the nature of colleges and universities. Perhaps because of my background, it was by no means obvious to me what college was all about. My parents had not attended, and at a deep psychological level they were operating on an ancient model predating civilization: my father was a warrior and my mother was a prize of war. In my mother's mind she was akin to Helen of Troy; she even formalized that idea by legally adding the middle name "Helene" late in her life. I was named after King Paul of Greece, a childhood acquaintance of my grandmother and a first cousin of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Thus, I was raised with an imaginary high social rank, whereas my friends, like most Americans, came from families that were advancing their social status through the conventional means of education, and their families had lingering memories of humble pasts. They were better adapted to the environment than I was.

Because I never cared much about money or linked college to having a career, I thought that it should be something like a Platonic academy where wise people discuss the world with little concern for practical matters. Of course, that was a naive point of view. Colleges and universities have always been practical concerns, starting first as training centers for the clergy and eventually becoming inextricably connected to the professions and government. Generally speaking, the older a university, the larger its endowment and the closer its ties to the corridors of power. From a socioeconomic standpoint, the success of a university is identical to the financial success of its graduates. Pure thought may occur there, but it is at best a secondary activity.

When I arrived at college in 1968, it gradually dawned on me that it was a complex sociological phenomenon that only tangentially related to learning. Yes, there were professors, students and academic subjects, but I always felt something was missing. The majority of the students at the college were upper-middle-class children of first-generation college graduates who had done well financially after World War II. Although it wasn't a well-known, nationally ranked college, it served the purpose of bestowing sufficient status on the parents while affording their children an acceptable route to adulthood. Many of the students, me included, weren't really sure why we were there. I simply enjoyed being far from home and living in an environment that was more intellectually stimulating than what I was used to.

It soon became apparent that, from a sociological standpoint, the college was a place to find spouses and carve a position in the social hierarchy that would benefit you in adulthood. This pattern became blurry over time, because it was the 1960's, and the students soon branched out from beer-guzzling frat parties to smoking pot and posing as hippies. Many of them ended up becoming the self-indulgent, narcissistic Baby Boomers so familiar these days. The most progressive among them transferred to less conservative colleges. Of those who stayed, I and many others married someone we met there.

What I've been thinking about lately is the actual quality of the academics and of academic quality in general. The faculty had good credentials, but it is hard to say that the classes were anything more than what a student might expect to encounter at a mildly demanding finishing school. I recently asked friends whether they had enjoyed any of their courses there, and they said no. I liked a few of mine, but that occurred randomly: Twentieth Century Russian Literature, Greek Mythology and Homeric Greek - nothing that led anywhere. Most of the classes were boring and poorly taught.

I was a Philosophy major and now hold a low opinion both of that department and of the field in general. The department offered good introductory courses but seems to have been unprepared for and uninterested in advanced classes. I was corresponding with one of my former professors until recently but finally gave up. He would make an excellent caricature of a misguided intellectual, along the lines of Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch. Educated at Princeton and Yale, he has always struck me as a quintessential egghead: he picks apart sentences to extremes that few people could comprehend, yet his ideas are all derivative, and he has published little or nothing. Finally I realized that it would be impossible to engage him in the kind of discussion that occurs on this blog. I think he is stuck in a narrow kind of analytic philosophy that bears no relationship to actual life. His working ideas for day-to-day living were all absorbed uncritically through osmosis by living in an academic environment for his entire adult life. Like Casaubon, he thinks he has found a key to deep meaning, but from the exterior he is simply delusional and out of touch. After corresponding with him for several years, I decided that he had nothing interesting or useful to say.

The same goes for many academics, in my opinion. Entering an academic position often has little to do with mastery of a subject or teaching ability. I get the impression that most tenured faculty are just good students who got PhDs and then by default became college professors because that was the only job for which they were qualified. Being a good student often means little more than liking to read and having good work habits, a good memory and above average intelligence. These traits alone are not a guarantee of in-depth understanding or teaching ability. What is often missing is creativity, and by nature creative people are not attracted to teaching, with the possible exception of those extroverts who enjoy having a captive audience. The most productive academics typically abhor teaching and avoid it whenever they can.

Where does this leave the undergraduate student? In the current economic environment, they would be well advised to learn a trade and study liberal arts in their spare time. Otherwise they will need a graduate degree to ensure employment, exposing themselves to the array of boutique degrees of questionable value now marketed by universities to keep up their cash flows. Caveat emptor.

Thomas Malthus

Having for years heard the word "Malthusian" used to describe a gloomy future for mankind, I decided to look into the ideas of Thomas Malthus. He is best known for An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, With Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, which was first published in 1798. The crux of his argument is that, while population grows geometrically, food supplies grow arithmetically, resulting inevitably in overpopulation and famine. War and disease may temporarily decrease the population, but lower reproductive rates are recommended. To that end, Malthus proposed the exercise of chastity.

At the time of its writing, Malthus's outlook was credible, because modern agriculture had not yet come into existence, oil was not used in internal combustion engines, and famines occurred regularly. He wrote the essay to counter the then-popular optimism about human nature that marked the beginning of Romanticism, which was inspired in part by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom his father admired. Malthus falls well within the tradition of British empiricism, though by vocation he was a clergyman. In his travels he noticed poor and suffering people in rural areas, a far cry from the bucolic idylls of Rousseau. Moreover, he had a mathematical bent and attempted to compile actual data. Thus, although he lacked significant data and did not adopt a proper scientific method, he represented the then-current standards in the proto-fields of demography and economics.

The Essay was controversial from the start, and was soon attacked by the Lake Poets, who at that time were writing rhapsodic poems about Tintern Abbey and similar places, extolling the virtues of man in harmony with nature. Some saw in Malthus wealthy elitism seeking to suppress the lower classes by reducing their numbers. Eventually economics came to be known as "the dismal science," based on Thomas Carlyle's assessment of Malthus. Nevertheless, Malthus appealed to scientific thinkers, and Charles Darwin was inspired by him. Malthus later came under attack when his ideas were unfairly tied to eugenics and social Darwinism. Hitler is said to have read Malthus and found in him a justification for the elimination of Jews. In the present day, Malthus has become popular among environmentalists, who have extended Malthus's cautions from population growth to anthropogenic climate change.

It is a little difficult so see why Malthus has received so much attention over the last two centuries. Although his ideas aren't particularly startling today, they represent an opposite pole to the optimism about human potential that has been going strong ever since the Enlightenment. Malthus comes across as an empirical party pooper even though his work has been superseded by modern science and may just as well be ignored. In a way he has been absorbed by the culture wars between conservatives who believe that all problems can best be solved by free markets and scientifically literate liberals who are concerned about the consequences of our protracted neglect of the environment. While he is hardly recognizable as a scientist in the modern sense, Malthus stands for science and reason over faith and dogma.

Some critics of Malthus say that he clearly was wrong in that agricultural output has in fact kept up with population growth. This is a facile argument, because when you factor in all of the negative impacts that Homo sapiens has had on the environment over the last two hundred years, the net result - the possibility of human extinction - parallels the possibility of death by starvation. In sum, Malthus looks like a run-of-the-mill empiricist who has become a straw man for capitalist ideologues and religious fundamentalists to attack.

Within the realm of the history of ideas, Malthus deserves credit for portraying us as a natural phenomenon that needs some controls simply to ensure its continuation. In this sense I am Malthusian. Although I often favor the works of artists and writers - Confessions, by Rousseau, for example - over the works of scientists, as a practical matter ignoring science is likely to be a big mistake for those who live long enough to see their delusions come unraveled.

Victoria III

Victoria and her grandfather have just departed for England. I may not hear much about Victoria in the future, so I'll attempt to sum up my thoughts about her now. I think that at heart Victoria is a relatively normal 17-year-old girl and that all of her aberrant behavior can be attributed to environmental factors. Her shyness, which is a common characteristic among English people, especially when compared to Americans, makes her weak points stand out more than they might otherwise, but it does not in itself signify any sort of pathology or disability.

According to the standards of educated people in developed countries, Victoria has been poorly raised. Within her household, there are no family discussions, people eat in separate groups, and most of the time spent at home is spent privately by each family member. Apparently the family never socializes in the sense of having visitors whom the family greets collectively or social occasions during which the family visits as a group. As far as I am able to determine, the only family activities, other than occasional visits to close relatives, are family vacations, which are planned by Victoria's mother without any discussion. This seems to explain why Victoria is unable to engage in the kind of sustained social conversation that most of the people I know consider obligatory. People who don't engage in it are rude, dysfunctional or ignorant, and the latter seems to be the case with Victoria.

What we noticed about Victoria is that if someone persists in pursuing her on various topics, she will simply ignore anything that doesn't interest her but become slightly responsive when something does interest her. Thus it takes a great deal of trial-and-error to connect with her at all. Then, after an initial connection is made, she has almost none of the follow-through that might put people at ease in the sense of acknowledging that some minimal level of communication has in fact been reached.

It is second nature to me, and I think to many people, to have a story line about yourself and your interests when engaging socially. It is also de rigueur to display some inquisitiveness about others, particularly when they are your hosts. Victoria was a complete blank in these two important aspects of social life. To say that she had no story line would be an understatement. We still don't know why she visited after spending hours trying to extract information from her. All of the activities that we planned for her were based on speculation about what we thought she might like, not on what she said she would like. During the visit, she did not express any curiosity about any aspect of the U.S. or any of the people whom she met here. Her cousin, Christian, was the most energetic in entertaining her and at least got her to participate in some outdoor activities. Otherwise she would probably have stayed inside all day without even looking out of a window.

Another part of the puzzle, which I alluded to earlier, is the world of electronic communication. On the surface, people of Victoria's age have simply found new ways to remain in touch with their friends on a more continuous basis than was possible in the past. However, I believe that an unintended consequence of this new technology is to draw people inward, not in a spiritual sense, but in an environmental sense. Their consciousnesses are less attuned to their physical surroundings than was the case for people of previous generations, and their sense of reality has been permanently altered. The danger here is that developing minds that are not looking beyond the soothing confirmations of a like-minded, immature peer group will be inhibited from gaining the broader experience that has historically been obtained through direct contact with the unmediated world.

At this stage in Victoria's development, on first glance it seems probable that she will follow a trajectory similar to that of her sister, Elizabeth. Her critical thinking skills may have been inhibited by her upbringing and her narrow social network. Based on her current demeanor, she would have little chance of success at anything that required an interview, from college admissions to jobs. Nevertheless, although it is hard for anyone to escape their background, there is hope for Victoria. She seems to have been a favorite in her family, which may have given her some self-confidence. She is also the third of three children, which means that she may eventually become more rebellious and less conventional than her siblings (read Born to Rebel, by Frank Sulloway). And one can still hope that by the time she has absorbed her experiences from this trip her horizons will have broadened a little.

Victoria II

Having spent a few more days with Victoria, this time in the presence of her cousins, I now have a somewhat better sense of her nature. She has behaved more normally with her cousin, Christian, with whom she had corresponded previously, and with whom she seems to have developed a slight rapport. I am tentatively ruling out a genetic connection related to the Asperger's-like symptoms, which are obvious in her cousins, as an explanation of her behavior. However, with Victoria's food preferences, Asperger's can't be eliminated entirely. All three of them are highly successful academically, but her cousins are more technically oriented, concentrating on computer science and mathematics. Victoria is competent in all areas and is currently interested in art, but that could change. I won't go into detail here, but Victoria strikes me as conventionally heterosexual, whereas her cousins are not.

The picture I have now is that Victoria has been isolated by living in a slightly disconnected part of England in a family with poorly educated parents and financial constraints. She has been further isolated by the texting technology that allows her to communicate constantly with her two close friends in England as if she were still at home. In a way, her texting world may be more real to her than the physical world or the broader social world that lies beyond her experience. On top of this lies an inherent shyness that inhibits exploration.

Victoria is the baby of the family and has probably been treated differently from her brother and sister since birth. She seems defensive of her mother, who clearly has significant psychiatric issues, whereas her sister was less so when she visited. I don't detect any of the anger that her sister displayed.

One thing that makes this difficult to think about is that Victoria is very young and isn't fully formed; her identity seems to be taking shape in real time. If I look back to when I was 17, although I was ostensibly the same person, my knowledge and outlook were completely different. I was vulnerable in the same way that Victoria is now, and then proceeded to make a series of mistakes, if you want to call them that, that shaped me as a person and contributed significantly to my current worldview.

We are concerned that Victoria will make mistakes in her academic and career choices. The English system is oddly barbaric in the sense that students are required to make irreversible choices well before they are likely to have sufficient judgment to make them. My partner ended up in law after someone told her that archaeology was out of the question. She became a lawyer without ever caring for the profession. Elizabeth, Victoria's sister, liked to write as a child and chose English, and she now has a temporary position as a schoolteacher. To say the least, these are not optimal outcomes for Cambridge graduates. Although Victoria is good in all subjects, she was told at school to "do what you love" and chose art. Now, although she is still in high school, the possibility of changing to a science is severely restricted. We would hate to see her bumble along based on misinformation when she has so many opportunities. Academic options in American universities are comparatively flexible, and we have mentioned this to her.

I am reminded again of the random elements that dominate lives. To a very large extent, they have the greatest impact on people of Victoria's age. Especially in the U.S., how you prepare for college and where you attend college set the tone for the rest of your life. This may influence what career you have, who you meet and marry, where you live, and your socioeconomic status during the remainder of your life. There is a small window during which the choices seem overwhelming. Yet it can be argued that the model student with the model life is often, broadly speaking, no better off than many others whose lives were less well planned. Lots of helicopter parents may be hovering over their children to no avail.

Victoria I

This is the first installment in what may become a minor inquiry. It relates to the topics of shyness, intergenerational changes, adolescent females, isolated subcultures, mental illness and inadequate parenting. Victoria is 17 and the daughter of my partner's brother, Martin. Like my partner, Victoria is growing up in Hoyland, South Yorkshire. I have been intrigued for several years by the apparent otherness of Hoyland, because my partner, who was born in 1954, has often seemed culturally like someone who was born closer to 1940. Except for some late exposure to contemporary culture while she was an undergraduate, my partner somehow managed to miss the 1960's and early 1970's entirely. As a child she hardly knew anything about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones and was never aware who Bob Dylan was or that he performed in nearby Sheffield in 1965 and 1966. She probably did not hear about him until the 1970's. I was attracted to my partner in part because, not only was she completely unlike educated American women of my age group, who often seem to possess a narcissistic sense of entitlement, but because she represented a kind of puzzle to me.

For someone who is about to apply to universities, apparently with excellent credentials, there are some things about Victoria that are quite odd. It is difficult to pry out any opinions from her, and her food requirements seem bizarre. From what I can gather, her mother is obsessive-compulsive, cleans constantly, and prepares an unimaginably narrow menu for her family. Victoria has never eaten the skin of a potato. The only green vegetable that she will eat is peas. She will eat unflavored chicken but dislikes turkey, meat and fish. For someone who has led an isolated life, this is not necessarily unusual, but I am struck by her almost complete unwillingness to experiment. By 17 one would expect the beginnings of individuation and a desire to diverge from the habits of one's parents. Her elder sister, Elizabeth, who visited us a few years ago at about the same age, at least recognized that there were limitations to the quality of her upbringing. Elizabeth's favorite poem then was This Be The Verse, by Philip Larkin:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Victoria is one of the most passive people I've ever met and only reacts when something that she dislikes is proposed. If asked a question, she typically replies "I don't know." When pressed, she will offer only the most basic information and not elaborate. My partner, my sister, my brother-in-law and I have all tried to help her, but she doesn't seem to know that she needs help or that we might be able to help her. This weighs heavily on my partner, who above all is a helper.

One of the most surprising things to me about Victoria is that she has no questions about anything. Apparently she was confused about the air conditioner in her room in Connecticut but never brought it up at the time. I only found this out later when I asked her whether she had been hot. She did not provide any input into the itinerary that I proposed, and she had no questions and made almost no comments about any of the places that we visited.

Usually when we arrive at a house, Victoria will go to her room without saying anything and remain there until someone gets her. Some of that time may be spent texting her friends in England, but, if so, I have no idea what she writes about. I initiated all of the conversations with her in the car and was not once satisfied by her response. On the way back I gave up and there was complete silence. Victoria is now spending some time with her cousins here, but overall her behavior is not noticeably different.

I am hoping to come across new information about Victoria that will allow me to put to rest some of the ideas that are whirling around in my head. Does Victoria represent a rare case of shyness of a magnitude that I've never witnessed before? Is living in Hoyland like being brought up on a Neolithic island? Is Victoria an abuse victim? Have Victoria's parents' worldviews made her completely unadapted to modern life? Is Victoria mentally ill? Will Victoria suddenly grow up and radically change her behavior? There is so much uncertainty here that I am bothered and will continue to work on it. I'll keep you posted on any news, new theories or conclusions.

Manhattan

Next week I'll be away in Connecticut and New York showing around my partner's niece, who is visiting from England. We'll be taking the train from Westport to Grand Central Station on three days. Her niece, Victoria, is 17 and has never been to the U.S. before.

I'm not sure how well the trip will go, because Victoria is not exactly the bold and adventurous type. She exemplifies the kind of English timidity and insularity that I have come to find tiresome over the years, primarily as a result of exposure to my partner's father, with whom I spend several weeks every year. In addition, she seems to be afflicted with the gadget addiction that young people have these days. My impression is that they are unable to see and appreciate the world around them because their consciousnesses have been channeled into alternate cyber-realities. In general, they find the natural world unfamiliar and scary. Victoria also displays a food-pickiness that did not exist in my generation but seems common in hers. She will eat a banana sandwich but balks at anything green or unfamiliar. She is young and naive, so I'm cutting her some slack. My partner's family is very brainy academically, and I'm hoping that that will kick in at some point.

Manhattan is one of my favorite destinations. From a cultural standpoint it is easily the best place in the U.S. Growing up nearby, I became interested in science at the American Museum of Natural History and art at the Metropolitan Museum. As a teenager I loved walking along Fifth Avenue between Central Park and Washington Square. During two summers, in 1968 and 1969, I had a job on Wall Street, and my family moved to East 58th Street from 1969 to 1971. However, since then I've only been back twice, in 1986 and 2003.

If one were a billionaire with multiple dwellings, keeping an apartment in Manhattan might be an attractive option. On a permanent basis I prefer to live here in the country.

Soccer

Although I have always been somewhat athletic and played soccer in high school, by the time I was 18 I had completely lost interest in all sports. Practice and exercise were boring, athletes tended to be uninteresting, and I had a low need for affiliation or popularity. Nevertheless, I am still susceptible to some of the hysteria associated with sports. I happened to be living in Terre Haute when Larry Bird, "The Hick from French Lick," led Indiana State to the final game of the NCAA basketball playoffs. I lived in Bloomington, Indiana when coach Bobby Knight won and in Louisville, Kentucky when they won. It's all quite stupid, really, but one can't escape being human.

As it happens, I've been watching parts of the World Cup this year, and have comparisons to make between American football and soccer, which, while perhaps obvious, don't seem to get much attention. The first thing that I notice about international soccer players is that they are extremely fit, agile, skilled and attractive to the eye. In comparison, American football players seem oversized, slow, muscular, dull and visually unappealing. Each soccer player needs a variety of skills, whereas football players tend to be more specialized, and in many cases their main attributes are physical bulk and the ability to move it in the right direction at the right time.

Beyond these superficial differences, soccer and football reflect broad cultural divergences. World Cup soccer highlights the strengths of individual players who combine their talents in order to represent their countries. Football, in contrast, is not an international sport, and it is permeated by the corporate mentality that dominates American thinking. Individual football players have less noticeable personas for multiple reasons. You can't see them well under their uniforms, they each have limited functions, and their behavior often seems predictable and scripted. The coach and quarterback resemble corporate managers who issue instructions, allowing little opportunity for the players to improvise. Soccer coaches have comparatively less influence over the game while it is in progress, and each player must be hyper-alert at all times in order to respond instantly to moment-by-moment developments.

There are several ways in which football seems more corporate than soccer. While in both games scoring goals and preventing the opponent's goals are the objectives, football is structured more like a planned campaign to systematically move the ball down the field, relying on consultations and specialists at each stage, and the process for scoring tends to be slow and mechanical, with fewer surprises than in soccer, in which the ball can crisscross the field several times before a goal is suddenly scored. Moreover, football has numerous time-outs and pauses that permit advertisements. Advertising plays a less obtrusive role in soccer. I might add that football is specifically designed to minimize delayed gratification for its viewers compared to soccer, because goals occur with greater frequency.

Our interest in team sports represents a primitive drive to belong to a group that succeeds against competing groups. As a species, we have already out-competed several other Homo species, which are now extinct. Group competition seems deeply ingrained in our nature. For the purposes of this post, I am interested in how American sports culture differs somewhat from that of other countries. On the face of it, soccer is a more inclusive game than football, because one need not be unusually large or tall to play it well. The basic equipment needed is inexpensive, thus almost anyone can afford it. Football, on the other hand, requires special equipment reminiscent of armor used in military campaigns. If you take football as a metaphor for American culture, it is telling that Americans prefer it to soccer. One might say that Americans are gratified by organizing into technologically superior groups that systematically obliterate opponents, and they are unappreciative of the spontaneity and individual talent that one might encounter in soccer. Stretching the metaphor to its limits, Americans understand conformity, militarism and brute force better than they understand spontaneity, individuality and artistry.