Skepticism

I have always had a somewhat anti-authoritarian, divergent way of thinking about a variety of subjects. In graduate school I was chastised by a professor for ridiculing some of Aristotle's views in a paper I wrote. Although I didn't study much science or pursue it as a career, I have preserved a level of scientific skepticism throughout my life. For this reason I was delighted to see that Steven Weinberg, the theoretical physicist, also exhibits a healthy skepticism regarding the works of Plato and Aristotle. Within the context of the history of science, he views them as poets rather than as scientists or mathematicians. He sees them as elitists who thought that experimentation and the verification of theories were beneath them. In particular, regarding Aristotle's theory of planetary motion, Weinberg says "We would have to conclude that on his own terms, in working on a problem that interested him, he was being careless or stupid." Weinberg finds the Hellenistic period centered in Alexandria far more productive than the earlier period in Athens, though he admires Plato's writing style.

You will have noticed from some of my previous posts that I frequently question conventional wisdom in a range of topics. For example, I recently brought into doubt Lincoln's competence as president, and I haven't offered much praise for the American literary, academic and intellectual communities. It will also have become apparent that I'm not a fan of capitalism or democracy. American popular culture is hardly even worth discussing.

Over the last year or so I made an effort to reassess my skepticism regarding academic philosophy and concluded that nearly all of it is arbitrary bunk. I see this problem, like many others, mainly in terms of the inherent limitations of human beings. Once a body of work is established in written form and a community of scholars has assembled to discuss it, that work may become immortalized through ritual processes that willfully overlook its inherent lack of significance. A body of work may become a de facto religious text and the focal point of one academic cult or another. This pattern can be seen in the early evolution of modern universities, which began as theological institutions with no special interest in objective analysis. Philosophy used to be called natural philosophy, which included science, but the sciences began to break off from pure philosophy in the nineteenth century, and much of what now remains in philosophy departments, I think, is detritus from accumulated theological reasoning. It is obvious to me that many philosophical questions are best answered by reframing old philosophical concepts in the context of the ongoing scientific study of man, but that idea may be identified as heresy within philosophy departments. Philosophy, like many fields in the humanities, seems to have drifted off into a netherworld run by sentimental adult hobbyists.

In my opinion, much of what passes for normal within academic and commercial environments effectuates an unrecognized injustice to both science and art. For many people science is no fun, because, besides being difficult to learn, it shatters their illusions. In both the humanities and commercial culture, people gladly seek refuge from the hard and potentially disturbing facts of science. They would rather not know that their entire lives are insignificant episodes within the biological froth that has been roiling over the surface of the earth for billions of years. As a fellow human being I have some sympathy for them, yet my conclusion is still that people ought to grow up sooner or later. The corruption of art operates a little differently from that of science. In the case of art, I don't think that good art requires much explanation. Thus, I don't adorn my quotations from Emily Dickinson, Denise Levertov or Patrick Chamoiseau with superfluous comments stating what's good about them. Ideally a genuine work of art speaks for itself. In my view, the academic experts who take it upon themselves to explain to us what is good about a work of art are often the least qualified to describe the ineffable characteristics which are effortlessly recognized by those who are aesthetically aware. If you will pardon my use of a somewhat unfair cliché, those who can't do teach; in this context they teach philosophy, art history, creative writing, poetry, literature and quite a few other subjects. On the commercial end of scientific and artistic marginalization and degradation, one need only recognize that money tends to distort people's motives when their true goal becomes that of selling a product or service.

Quote of the Day

It is not that the modern scientist takes a position from the start that there are no supernatural persons. This happens to be my view, but there are good scientists who are seriously religious. Rather, the idea is to see how far one can go without supposing supernatural intervention. Only in this way can we do science, because once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained and no explanation can be verified. This is why the "intelligent design" ideology being promoted today is not science–it is the abdication of science.


—Steven Weinberg, from To Explain the World

Introversion

One of the few worthwhile concepts to be popularized by Carl Jung was that of introversion. I had never thought about it much, but in 1985 when by chance I read Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, I became intrigued. The book discusses the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and contains a test that indicated that my type is INTJ. That was somewhat of a surprise to me because the description was fairly accurate and, according to the authors, it is one of the rarer of the sixteen types, hence isn't familiar to the more numerous types. The "I" in INTJ stands for introversion, and thereafter I had a framework for understanding how I'm not the same as most people.

After playing around with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator for a few years and applying it to various people I decided that it had limited usefulness, but it does explain some basic personality differences. The most useful part, I find, is the introversion-extroversion scale. Basically, I enjoy being alone and enjoy being around people who also enjoy being alone. This is an important thing to know, especially in the U.S., where extroverts dominate practically everything. They do to such an extent that shy children are often seen as needing therapy or treatment. I suspect that introversion is more common in Europe and Asia, so it may be less likely that introverts will feel out of place there. For most of my life in the U.S. it has seemed to me that introverts are considered defective.

To put this into perspective, I like to think in terms of aptitudes that permit either introverts or extroverts to excel in various fields. Generally speaking, introverts are good at things that require a great deal of concentration over long periods of time, which typically involves solitary activity. I think that this gives introverts an advantage in science and writing. My guess is that Newton, Darwin, Einstein, George Eliot, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and D.H. Lawrence - some of my favorite people - were introverts. Extroverts may do well in some kinds of writing, such as travel writing, journalism or popular fiction. The strong areas for extroverts are ones that involve a lot of contact with people. That would include politicians, business leaders, performers and professional athletes. However, not many people are completely introverted or completely extroverted, which means that these profiles don't necessarily work well in all situations.

Two prominent extroverts are Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bill Clinton. Neither is particularly introspective, and Clinton is probably more intelligent in the conventional sense. What they have in common is a need for approval and to be around a lot of people most of the time. Both are gregarious and able to connect well with people, but Roosevelt is more effective at public speaking. Clinton's weaknesses as a person get him into trouble in office, and the same could have happened to Roosevelt, who lived in a more private era. Whatever intellectual advantage Clinton may have was irrelevant to his presidency, because he is not an original thinker and simply adopts the ideas of those around him. Both Roosevelt and Clinton married opposites - Eleanor and Hillary are introverts - and this led to significant marital problems in both cases. Extroverts can benefit from the thoughtfulness of introverts to round out their decisions, but the two types are not deeply compatible. Introverts sometimes cluster around extroverts, who may have superior leadership skills, although extroverts are occasionally socially inept themselves.

While it seems to be a rarity to have extroverted people seek introverted roles, it is fairly common to find introverts seeking extroverted roles. Especially in the U.S., which is an extrovert paradise, introverts often think they're supposed to be extroverted. Some children are groomed to be social overachievers whether they like it or not. For this reason people like Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett become talk show hosts. People like Richard Nixon and Barack Obama become presidents. Millions of people attempt to become effective public speakers even though they hate it. Most of the time this is harmless, but in many cases the people might be happier if they accepted themselves for what they were.

Particularly bothersome to me is the case of an introvert taking a significant public role that he is not equipped to perform well. It is obvious to me that Barack Obama was not cut out to be president. He was not, is not, and will never be an inspiring public figure, which is perhaps the chief responsibility of the president. Even though I occasionally agree with his policies and reasoning, he has been unable to break out of the straitjacket that the Republicans have put him into because he doesn't know how to win people over. Compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt he is a political dunce of the worst kind. Bill Clinton was probably not a very good president, but people will always prefer him to Obama because they like him. In my opinion, introverts do not belong in the White House. In this vein, I've been thinking about Abraham Lincoln, another introvert. Although he is generally lauded as one of the greatest presidents ever for keeping the country unified and ending slavery, I have come to think that he made a colossal mistake by not allowing the Confederacy to secede from the United States. Part of the dysfunction in Washington to this day can still be attributed to North-South grievances dating from the Civil War. It is by no means obvious that if the Confederacy had become a separate country we would be in a worse condition than we are today. Slavery would probably have ended one way or another by about 1900, the economy of the South would have collapsed, and a war would have been averted. A case can be made that Lincoln had no idea what he was doing and does not deserve praise. The history books preempt the possibility of a thorough analysis, and it is now impossible to know with certainty what the outcome would have been without a Civil War.

There are probably evolutionary reasons for the population to contain a mix of introverts and extroverts. The extroverts are good at creating a sense of group unity, and the introverts are good at figuring out details. Either type can be creative, but I suspect that progress in both the arts and the sciences has been dominated by introverts. Besides the advantages of these kinds of specialization, it is possible that introverts have survived as an element in the gene pool simply because they historically tended to live in small groups and survived when disease afflicted large groups, causing higher mortality rates among extroverts.

I get the impression that there is a genetic component to introversion when I look at my family. My Armenian grandfather was extremely introverted. He was so shy that when his parents arranged his marriage he hid on his wedding night. Later in life he lived in a separate portion of his house, away from the rest of the family. Although my mother seemed social and was not particularly introverted, she didn't mind spending enormous amounts of time alone. Two out of her three children are introverts. I married an introvert, and our children are introverts. Of course, this is only anecdotal, but I suspect that research would bear out that introversion runs in families. As far as I'm concerned, introversion is normal, and no stigma should be attached to it. For one thing, it is not to be confused with timidity, and many people don't understand that there is a difference.

Racism in the U.S.

Upon request, I'm writing about racism in the U.S. This isn't a natural topic for me, since I'm a WASP living in one of the whitest states and have not spent much time around blacks. I probably didn't even see a black person until I was about seven. I'll give you a short rundown of my background and then offer you some of my views on the subject.

The first recognizable racism I heard about directly occurred while I was in college in Indiana. Indiana borders on the South, and was still quite racist in the 1960's. Some of the students at my college were black Africans who were afraid to drive to Bloomington because they were scared of what might happen if their car broke down near Martinsville, where a black woman had been killed in 1968. That murder was not solved until recently. Indiana had been a strong Ku Klux Klan state in the 1920's, and people there were still racists in the 1960's and 1970's. My father-in-law in Richmond, Indiana referred to black men as "boy" and my mother-in-law didn't want her daughter seen in public with one of my friends, who was half black. Blacks were implicitly banned from membership to their country club. I did spend the summer of 1972 in a poor black neighborhood in Ft. Wayne, Indiana living above a liquor store. On that occasion an old gay black wino made an unsuccessful advance on me at the local pool hall and I cashed a bad check while working in the liquor store, infuriating the owner, but that was about it for the experience. I noticed that the blacks were different in Louisville, Kentucky when I lived there from 1985 to 1987; they didn't have as much "attitude" as northern blacks.

The only black I had any exposure to after college was a black executive. At that time the company offered significant incentives to their managers to hire minorities. He was super-ambitious, and I thought he was a jerk because he never cared about anything besides advancing his career. He was the director of the printing plant where I worked, even though he didn't know anything about printing. By the time he was through with it, the plant was shut down and just about everyone, including me, was permanently laid off. Fortunately I was able to find a new job immediately at a different company. A few years later this man, Calvin Butler, left the printing industry for the utilities industry, and he is currently the CEO of Baltimore Gas and Electric. I don't think much of him. Although there is probably some racism, along with sexism, present in corporate life, at the company where I worked with Calvin minorities had a significant advantage if they could talk the talk. I'll never forget the charming Croatian woman named Nadia who could hardly speak English and didn't know anything about printing but got the job anyway.

My daughter lived for four years in a bad black neighborhood in Baltimore near the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, which her husband attended. They got along well enough with their neighbors, but it was a high crime area, complete with murders. We have had numerous discussions about how historical conditions have limited the horizons for blacks. She is more sympathetic than I am, but I see her point. I tend to view racism with respect to blacks from a socio-cultural point of view. Basically, it takes a long time for a culture to reorient itself when it makes a transition from slavery to freedom. The same was true in Martinique, which I just finished reading about in Texaco (one of the best novels I've read in several years, by the way). The blacks and lower classes in Martinique were also living inhuman lives until they were freed in 1848, but the old economy collapsed, and many of them were soon forced to live in shantytowns, which was not much of an improvement.

The problem I have with American blacks is about the same as the problem I have with Americans in general: I don't like their culture. This is a crass country that focuses on consumerism, materialism and spectacle. I don't have much in common with Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears, Usher, Eminem, Justin Timberlake or Sean Combs. I don't care about professional sports. Race doesn't have anything to do with it.

I suppose the obvious question for blacks in the U.S. relates to what happened in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere. Although this is not exactly a phenomenon that I think about much, I have some ideas. The problem I notice is the disconnect between the message of early civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., probably the greatest orator in American history, and the recognition of current economic reality in 2015. You get the impression from the media that fairy dust was sprinkled on blacks by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and somehow they were all supposed to have become prosperous by now. Everyone is just scratching their head and saying, "Well, I guess it must be racism." Sure, there is still racism, but the lack of prosperity among blacks has more obvious causes related to changes in the economy since 1964. The factory jobs that permitted the middle class to take off economically in the 1950's and 1960's are no longer there.

I first noticed serious distortion in the perceptions among blacks during the O.J. Simpson trial of 1995. Simpson was respected and wealthy and living the good life when he intentionally killed two innocent people for no good reason, but the black community decided that he was a victim of racism, and that was all there was to it. They were delusional then, and they're delusional now. Michael Brown, the Ferguson victim of police brutality, was himself a reckless criminal, though not on the scale of O.J. Simpson. There is probably a certain amount of racism in police profiling, but what do you expect? When you stick a police officer in a neighborhood where most of the crimes are committed by black males, do you think they won't make generalizations that seem like profiling? Is it financially feasible in poor neighborhoods to hire police officers who have advanced training that permits them to perform their jobs according to all of the latest legal interpretations while being fully sensitive to the current issues in a particular community?

What disappoints me is the reaction by the media and black leaders. The media provides a third-grade analysis along the lines of "Are white people still being mean to black people?" The black leaders, Al Sharpton, for instance, stick to the obsolete white guilt narrative that worked well fifty years ago. Leaders like Barack Obama stress education, which, though it worked for him, is unlikely to be much of a solution for most blacks in the future. The real problem, I think, is that capitalism favors the wealthy, and that conditions for minorities can't improve without the forced equalization of the economic system - something far more radical than anyone is willing to discuss.

I think that even though racism may never evaporate, underlying economic problems are the true driving forces in places like Ferguson. Without major changes, the middle class in America isn't going to do as well as it did in the postwar years, and the lower middle class, which includes a lot of blacks, will do even worse. Crime levels will increase in poor neighborhoods whether or not the police have passed the latest political correctness tests. The traditional civil rights approach in these places isn't going to solve anything. The education approach offered by people like Obama won't work either, because without structural changes competition in the workforce will continue to intensify. The model used to be showing up at a factory and being hired for a job. In the future, the model could be getting a Ph.D. in software engineering until competition drives down wages, then getting a Ph.D. in advanced robotics until competition drives down wages there, and so on. A true solution can only come through significant wealth redistribution. By emphasizing education rather than economic restructuring, people like Obama are playing into the hands of corporate interests.

Finally, I should mention that racism in the U.S. isn't confined to blacks. My son-in-law is a Tibetan refugee, and he experiences it all the time. Unfortunately it is part of human nature to reject those who, for whatever reason, are perceived as belonging to a different group.

Quote of the Day

The oil tankers had a crew of more or less raucous sailors. These bandits would take advantage of the boat's stopover to go down in City, to see the hookers on the edge of Bois-de-Boulogne. They would spend lots of money, speak seven languages, bear nine afflictions, drink like the Mexicans in the movies, and return to Texaco reduced to ashes by alcohol's embers. Then they would confide in everyone, would describe things encountered throughout the Caribbean. They spoke of galleons stuffed with gold, glassy like jellyfish, which crossed the bows of their tankers stirring up exhalations of bitter algae, roughneck soldier songs, laughs of ladies glimpsed in the bowsprit portholes from which escaped music gay and sad. They spoke of sharks surging in their wake, white and pink like broken coral; their jaws would snap as they had for centuries around slave galleys which had thrown off whole cargos for them, to such point that, poisoned by a rumor about souls, these fish would spell anguish in thirteen African tongues. Nightmares (the drunk sailors would say) haunted this Caribbean Sea which is pensive like a cemetery; abysses latched onto the oil tanks to occupy their steel with a hosannah of millions of people dissolved into a horrible rug which remembered Africa in the submarine nights, a fabric bristling with balls and chains and joining the islands in an alliance of corpses. They spoke of Christopher Columbus at the bow of the Santa Maria which had turned opaline with the glint of age like very old ivory; she was the crystal formed out of the dust of Aztec peoples, Inca peoples, Arawaks, Caribs, the ashes of tongues, skins, bloods, collapsed cultures, out of the dust of that immense killing field spread out among the plantations of the world called New; since eternity, well before he arrived, ghosts were judging the Discoverer now petrified at his bow before an opaque Indies, they were judging him in vain because the Baneful One always escaped them, as if amnestied by irremediable history which he was forced to mutter endlessly...And all that made the tanker sailors more disgusted, more loony, more convulsive, and would contaminate our little nightmares in Texaco; these horrors they evoked while going through our huts, we felt, alas, my dear, that they filled us too.


—Patrick Chamoiseau, from Texaco

The False Allure of Commercial Writing

Almost everything that you read was produced in a commercial environment. Even if the intentions of an author are purely personal, artistic or altruistic, chances are there is someone in the infrastructure between the author's keyboard and your eyes who is attempting to make money. This situation dates back to the earliest days of publishing, and now, with technological developments, extends more broadly to "content." At this moment, thousands of companies are scrambling to fill the pages not only of printed publications but of online websites. The demand for all kinds of media has grown dramatically in the last decade, and streaming videos, for example, can hardly be produced fast enough to keep up. This creates challenges for discerning consumers of print and other media.

If I were less self-confident, I might be inclined to confess that many of the complaints that I have about writing amount to excessive pickiness. However, I am not making it up when I say that something that I just read seems like regurgitated filler that some editor squeezed out of a hack writer for a price. As I said in an earlier post, over a period of years I gradually became disgusted with The New Yorker, then The New York Times and then The New York Review of Books. Occasionally one might find something in one of these publications that strikes an intellectual or aesthetic chord, but increasingly that became a rarity for me. On the contrary, clickbait is used everywhere on the Internet and is simply a technological update of former sensational headlines in newspapers. What has been disappointing to me is that even the so-called reputable organizations engage in the same tactics, if only with greater subtlety.

The pattern toward disillusionment that I experience with printed or online publications usually goes something like this: initially the title of an article looks promising; the first paragraph or so looks good; as I delve further into it, a lot of extraneous information begins to emerge, often in the form superfluous name-dropping; and finally there is a vague conclusion that seems to leave you back where you started. The New York Times is ostensibly just a news source, but basic news actually takes up only a small fraction of its space. The rest is really filler designed to bring in additional advertising revenue. I don't think I've ever found any of their long articles satisfactory. The New Yorker attempts more thoughtful, in-depth articles and occasionally succeeds, but I find there such a strong emphasis on fashion, whether in ideas, clothes or writing, that it is difficult to take the magazine seriously on any level.

It took me the longest time to figure out The New York Review of Books, probably because it is less mainstream and its editorial policies are opaque. The NYRB is managed so privately that I have had to make guesses and seek outside sources to get a rough idea of what is going on there, and even then it is still hard to know with much certainty. My current theory is that most of the problems there reside in its editor, Robert Silvers. Although Silvers is highly intelligent, extremely well-read and quite discerning, he has specific expectations of what the publication should be and wields dictatorial control over everything that it encompasses. He is said to be the quintessential micro-manager. The impression I have is that his true vocation is editing the articles of writers and thinkers so as to improve upon them in a manner that suits his aesthetic tastes, even when they are better writers or thinkers than he is. What you end up with is a hodgepodge of academics, literary writers and journalists who are willing to put their writing through the Silvers sieve. The result, I find, is that their articles tend to be blander than they might otherwise be. The long essay format of the NYRB is impressive when you first see it, but it rarely produces ruffled feathers or changed minds. The articles leave one feeling that one has encountered a reasonably wide-ranging account of whatever the topic may be, that it is written competently, but that it serves little purpose beyond providing an overview of what the so-called cognoscenti happen to think about a topic at that given moment. Possibly the problem is that Silvers is too entwined with the status quo to rebel much. Thus, at a time when American literary culture is promoting one mediocre writer after another and holding them to the low standards of academia and the publishing industry, Silvers has advanced the careers of Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Marilynne Robinson, and Francine Prose. To be sure, there may be some entertainment value to be found in the works of these authors and others featured by Silvers, but I have never found any of their articles in the NYRB useful, insightful, provocative or thoughtful. In the end, Silvers is an accomplice to literary mediocrity. Part of Silvers' limitation as an editor must reside in his style, but perhaps a part also resides in his age: he's eighty-five.

The NYRB is not the best example of the point I'm making here, because most of its production seems to follow old-fashioned methods. They produce very few articles per month, and the only change in recent years has been their addition of the NYRblog. That is now looking like an afterthought: they wanted to go trendy to avoid looking like the fuddy-duddies that they are, and then decided that it was too much of a hassle to have a real, interactive blog and accordingly stopped accepting comments. So the NYRB is not as commercial as it might be and its true limitations may relate more to the fact that it is saddled to the preferences of one editor who has vested interests in a network of people and a bygone era that I just don't care about. My guess is that the typical NYRB subscriber is an eighty-year-old retired academic in the humanities.

An alternative to commercial writing is the writing in diaries and blogs. At least there you don't have to worry about the corrosive effects of money even when it remains hard to fathom the motives of the writer. Diaries can't usually be read in real-time, so they are comparatively inaccessible. In theory there could be lots of good blogs, but it might be difficult to find them, given their number. The Internet is already full of dead blogs that people gave up on. The advantage of a blog, like this one, is that the writer has no pressure to fit a specific format or please a wide audience. In my case I am writing about things that interest me and I can tell the truth without worrying about any financial ramifications. No one can fire me. If I get my facts all wrong, I would be delighted to have someone straighten me out, but that hasn't happened so far.

No doubt there are plenty of good books to read that are available, but they are increasingly difficult to find because of all the background noise. The commercial connections of the publications mentioned above make the books reviewed in them somewhat suspect. My conclusion is that nearly everything they have to say about American fiction is an obfuscation, a lie or a manifestation of poor literary judgment. In any case, the bright spot for me is nonfiction. I am less likely to become disgruntled about biographies or science books, because in their case it is easier to determine in advance whether a book is good or not, inasmuch as that depends less on subjective opinion than is the case with fiction. To me it is more than a little ironic that some of today's best science writers are better writers than those who are supposedly the best fiction writers. I actually enjoy reading E.O. Wilson, Freeman Dyson, Steven Weinberg and even Richard Dawkins, because they write well. It is an unsupported myth that fiction writers have a monopoly on good writing. For this reason, the next book on my reading list is To Explain the World, by Steven Weinberg. Science writers and biographers may still have commercial motives - their publishers certainly do - but more often their love for their subject takes precedence over the venality one finds in commercial fiction.

Geometry

Our bedroom has a large skylight facing west. You can see out of it while lying in bed, and a couple of times I've tried stargazing with binoculars in bed when I wake up in the middle of the night (which I often do, since I rarely sleep continuously for more than four-hour stretches). In the winter I am able to see the Pleiades setting. Sometimes on a clear winter night the moon shines in through the skylight like a giant floodlight and wakes us up. Fortunately the window has a shade for such occasions. I was thinking about why the moon only shines through the skylight during the winter and realized that it's just a simple problem in geometry and astronomy.

As the solar system was forming 4.6 billion years ago, it took the shape of a rotating disk. All of the planets and the moon still orbit around the sun in approximately the same disk shape, which is the plane formed by the orbit of the earth known by astronomers as the ecliptic. Another important fact is that the axis on which the earth spins is not perpendicular to the ecliptic but is off by about 23.4°. That angle is responsible for our seasons. When the axis is tilted toward the sun in the northern hemisphere, more photons of light from the sun strike the surface of the northern hemisphere than when it is tilted away from the sun, and this causes summer. It is easy to notice the change of the seasons by observing where the sun rises and sets on the horizon every day. At the summer solstice, the sun rises and sets at its northernmost points on the horizon; it is the longest day, and the north gets its greatest daily sun exposure then.

At the winter solstice, the northern hemisphere is angled the farthest away from the sun, and the least amount of sunlight strikes its surface. However, at that place in the orbit the situation with the moon is different. The sun, moon and earth are all on about the same plane year-round. At the winter solstice, while the earth is tilted away from the sun in the north, during the night, if the moon is opposite the sun, the northern hemisphere reaches its maximum tilt toward the moon. Therefore, the moon reaches its maximum distance above the horizon in the north at night at the time of winter solstice, the opposite of the situation with the sun. Since the moon has its own orbit around the earth, it may not be exactly opposite the sun during the winter solstice. Our skylight is situated such that the moon only rises high enough to shine through it during the period near winter solstice. The moon reaches its lowest point above the horizon when it is opposite the sun around summer solstice in the north. However, I should also point out that, if the moon were visible during the day, it would also reach its highest point above the horizon during the summer solstice. Similarly, if the moon were visible during the day on winter solstice, it would also reach its lowest point above the horizon.

I find it interesting that simple geometrical facts like these can have such a large impact on our lives. If the tilt of the earth's axis were 0°, like that of Mercury, we would have no seasons. The evolution of life on the planet might have been completely different from what occurred. If the tilt were 97.8°, like that of Uranus, the seasons would be far more extreme. We would have six months of light followed by six months of darkness. Give or take a few degrees from our current angle, we might not exist at all.

Nationalism

My family created a minor identity crisis for me by moving from England to the U.S. when I was seven. I gradually became Americanized, though somewhat less so than my younger sister, who was only two when we arrived. Later on I realized that I wasn't all that American, and I became interested in England. However, in recent years I've decided that I wouldn't fit in well in England either.

English people are often caricatured as good at administration but not much else compared to other Europeans. There is some truth in this that may even, as some have argued, have a genetic basis, arising from conditions under which the ruling class out-bred the lower classes during periods of disease and famine over the centuries. The success in the governing of Britain goes hand-in-hand with Britain's success during the Industrial Revolution and as a colonial power.

When I was in college I studied Anglo-American philosophy, which, coincidentally, I thought might tie me to my English roots. However, as it turned out, English philosophy confirmed to me the stereotype of small-minded people squabbling over minor details while entirely missing the big picture. I resisted this fact for several years, finally recognized it, and reassessed the situation recently only to come to the same conclusion. Philosophy as an academic subject is given much higher status in the U.K. than it is in the U.S., even when people like me, who have studied it and are now grown adults consider most of it utter nonsense. For better or for worse, Americans are more practical than the British, and academic philosophy here is doomed even as it flourishes in the U.K.

To put England into perspective, I like to recall the early twentieth century, when it had a little artistic and intellectual heyday. Present were Bertrand Russell, G.H. Hardy, G.E. Moore, John Maynard Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group. Russell, Hardy and Keynes were certainly notable intellectuals, but to my way of thinking Moore was a lightweight and a disaster. His best-known work, Principia Ethica, was treated like a Bible by Bloomsbury and became the model for British analytic philosophy. However, the next intelligent person to arrive on the scene, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian, used Moore as an example of how far someone could get in life with "absolutely no intelligence whatever." Although he succeeded Moore in his chair at Cambridge, he treated him like a servant, because he didn't think he was much good for anything else. Regarding Bloomsbury, it has always struck me how nearly all English art is derivative of art produced on the Continent. With the possible exception of Virginia Woolf, I don't think Bloomsbury left behind much memorable work.

The topic here is national identity, or having a feeling of belonging to one country rather than another. In my case I have lukewarm feelings about both the U.S. and the U.K. This is mainly the result of having a multinational background. I grew up in the U.S. and was born in the U.K. My mother grew up in Greece, and her father grew up in Turkey. This geographic mobility frees one from prejudices about the virtues of one country over others. One would hope that in time people would come to realize that they have no entitlement to any particular geographic location, that people are essentially the same when you allow for cultural differences, and that we are all citizens of the world. However, there are evolutionary reasons why that transition in outlook will be difficult to make.

I apologize for being a broken record on our evolutionary past, but there is no way to avoid bringing it up if one intends to have a serious discussion about many of the problems currently facing the world. The fact is that we are hunter-gatherers who think tribally. Until recently in human history there was enough room on the planet for people to lead nomadic lives without often coming into conflict with other nomadic groups. The end of the last Ice Age changed everything, making agriculture and civilization possible. The world population has since grown by more than 700 times, nomadic life is generally unfeasible, and national borders restrict free movement. We are all fighting over scarce resources.

One thing we have going for us is our tendency toward eusocial behavior. Theoretically, if we could convince ourselves that we all belong to one big group, all global conflict might cease. However, in the eyes of many, the world is inherently composed of incompatible groups that are bound to remain in conflict. This state has been exacerbated by the history of imperialism and by the ideology of capitalism, which creates winners and losers with the unequal distribution of economic benefits. Moreover, the economically successful countries unrealistically expect that poorer countries will immediately fall into place once they receive the benefits of economic growth. In my view, capitalism is little more than an ideology and has a basis no more fundamental than Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, monarchy, democracy, fascism, communism, socialism or anarchism. It is a system that has been adopted but might just as well be replaced by any of several others simply as a matter of choice. One might call it the religion of money, and it is popular at the moment if only because it forces people to participate in it if they don't want to starve.

Nationalism is a modern expression of tribalism, but it often provides few of the benefits that tribalism once did. When you belonged to a tribe, it was possible to know everyone, and you could count on them in a crisis. If a real crisis such as the fictional one depicted by Cormac McCarthy in The Road were to occur now, you would be completely on your own fending off cannibals, while the president of the U.S. and his friends were living the high life in an exquisitely furnished bunker at an undisclosed location. Furthermore, nations don't trust each other, and this can be dangerous when they are heavily armed. Fortunately the countries in the EU have a semblance of cooperation, but you don't have to dig far to find mistrust, and a true political union is still a long way off. There remain a few powder kegs, with Israel and Iran, Russia and Ukraine, and of course there is the Islamic State.

Over the years, political leaders have taken some positive steps, first with the League of Nations and then the United Nations. The UN is mostly ineffectual at resolving world conflicts because of its voting structure, but over time it, or a successor organization, could theoretically evolve into a true world government. However, with my views on human nature, I do not expect a rational world order to fall into place without many years of contention, if at all. How long, for example, do you think it will take for the Israelis to trust the Iranians and the Palestinians? I'm not holding my breath. This is why, in my fantasy futuristic world, computers and robots will run everything and instantly put a stop to any disruptive activities caused by humans. Imagine, for example, how the Islamic State might be dealt with: an army of robots would move in and kill all of its members within a day or two, and they would never be heard from again. If people still wanted to express their tribal, competitive and destructive instincts, they could do so through less harmful means such as sports. Nationalism has outlived its usefulness, and I wish others discussed this more often. I can only suppose that that would be considered unpatriotic, hence a vocational risk to professional writers.

Texaco

I have been reading Texaco, by Patrick Chamoiseau, and it is helping me to define for myself what kinds of fiction I prefer and how to break fiction down into useful categories. This is not the kind of novel that I would normally read, but I am finding it worthwhile nevertheless.

The oldest recorded fiction is epic narrative such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, which were originally oral verse describing real and imagined events in Mycenaean Greece. Early oral poetry served as entertainment and provided a method for recording history. The language is often beautiful, filled with mnemonic tricks to aid in recitation, since there was no written language at the time of its composition. Texaco is written in a similar style, imaginatively recounting the history of Martinique from the last days of slavery up until the late twentieth century, told in the voice of a native woman. I classify The Iliad, The Odyssey and Texaco as fiction that emphasizes storytelling and poetry. Two other elements of fiction, observation and thought, do not play as much of a role here.

The kind of fiction that I prefer tends to emphasize observation and thought. My favorite authors are good observers and good thinkers. Observation was popular at the time of George Eliot, Flaubert and Dostoevsky, and these three were analytical about their characters. They lived at the time when modernity was arriving, and writers had things to say on new subjects that did not have historical precedent. This kind of realism tends to be unpoetic, and even though it must tell stories, that element may fall within the broader purpose of explaining a changing world. Storytelling is still important in much of modern fiction, but the further you get into modernism and postmodernism, the less essential it becomes. As far as I know, poetic writing is almost nonexistent in fiction these days.

Analyzing writers according to these four categories (observation, thought, poetry and storytelling), it becomes fairly easy for me to see which ones I like and why. I don't like Henry James because he has distorted observation, tendentious thought, no poetry and sloppy storytelling. D.H. Lawrence has some observation and thought, a lot of poetry and some storytelling; he is one of my favorites largely because of the poetic aspects of his writings. Proust has a lot of conventional observation, not much notable thought, a lot of poetry and little storytelling; his weakness in analyzing his environment counts against him in my eyes. Kafka is not much of an observer or thinker, but he arguably has a precise poetic style, along with condensed storytelling; I like his writing but don't think he has much of interest to say. Lorrie Moore has feigned observation, very little thought, some poetry, and storytelling that is nonexistent in her short stories and botched in her novels.

Probably the majority of popular writers today emphasize storytelling because it is the quality that is most likely to satisfy large audiences. Those who deviate from strong story lines may target smaller audiences that prefer, or that have been brainwashed into preferring, modern, storyless formats. What stands out to me is the apparent absence of appreciation among American writers for genuinely talented writers like Chamoiseau. Not only does he write better fiction than any contemporary American writer that I'm aware of, but his linguistic skill also makes him an exceptional poet by American standards. I'll close with a few snippets from Texaco that I find quite compelling. Keep in mind that this is translated from French and Creole and may have lost something in the process:

The donkeys moved along on rocky ground, swaying like blackgirls on high heels.

Magnetized by the moon, thousands of minnows deserted the ocean to wriggle up the river. Scintillating waves of them shook the fresh water or washed up on the sand. The other campers raked about with buckets, bags, nets, basins, sheets, or other things. The night was but phosphorescent lightning, milky glow, sparks. The silver commas spurted out of all the containers, jumped around ankles, glued frenzied mirrors everywhere.

His hand bewitched the mandolin's neck, cast a spell on the mandolin's belly, and the strings lent a music, as knotted as rabbit grass, to the beauties of his song.

The women had to face the rest of life, including the duty of finding food for a swarm of little ones, and all without a garden. Each mama, you hear me, had to sow in herself a small plot of cunning, and look after the harvest, ill luck or no.

Internet Discussion II

Over the last year, most of what little writing I've done has appeared on this blog. Occasionally I've posted comments on other sites, but I've come to prefer posting here because it is more peaceful and I don't get the unsettling sense of looming chaos or confrontation that I often encounter elsewhere. My posting experience goes back almost nine years to mid-2006, during which time I've posted on a wide variety of websites, and I am now inclined to restrict myself to my own. The heavily-moderated sites such as the NYRblog once seemed promising, but the fact of the matter is that most of the articles and comments there were not particularly interesting to me and the time lag between posting, moderation and appearance of the post made the process painfully slow. Moreover, the editorial policies at the NYRB encourage a special kind of pretentiousness, and they have very little going on there that captures my interest, especially since Tony Judt died. In any case, they have now completely stopped accepting comments, which means to me that they don't really care about their readers and probably don't care much about the discussion of ideas either. I am privately hoping for the imminent deaths of Robert Silvers and his publisher.

Since leaving the NYRblog, I've regularly been reading 3 Quarks Daily. This is an improvement over the NYRblog, but it has its own set of limitations. Overall I think their selection of articles from across the web is quite good, but the commenting and discussion there are not noteworthy. On Mondays they feature their own authors, who, in my opinion, are substantially less interesting than those who appear on other days. Several Monday contributors seem to be second- or third-tier academics who are attempting to use the site to advance their careers. S. Abbas Raza, the founding editor, is doing a good job, but there is a disproportional representation on the site of his friends and relatives, which makes it seem insufferably cliquish at times. Very few people comment there regularly, and the regulars each seem to have different agendas that don't complement each other. One commenter regularly attempts to lure readers to his blog with links. Another commenter always presents a formal academic facade and lists references with each post; his avatar is a photo of himself wearing a jacket and tie, as if he were on his way to a job interview. As with all websites, any discussion tends to be weak and uninteresting, often with very little real communication between participants.

Another disappointment I've had has been with The Chronicle of Higher Education website. When I first chanced upon it about a year ago I was impressed. The level of discussion was better than most. The scope of the site is constricted by its focus on academic topics, but the articles are generally of good quality, and the comments, at least initially, seemed above average. However, the site apparently has little or no moderation, and in the course of a year the comments have turned into a free-for-all. The impression I get is that at any given moment there is an enormous pack of Internet hooligans frantically searching for an outlet to vent their frustrations and inform the world of their innate superiority. The presence of shrieking brats on an education-oriented site triggers a serious case of cognitive dissonance in me, and I have no reason to put up with it.

I used to think that it would be possible to construct a widely-read website that had good articles and good comments that were posted in a timely manner. It now looks as if there are forces working against that. Predictably, capitalism, particularly in the U.S., creates products that are compromised in design from their inception when the underlying goal is profit maximization. It is difficult enough to create a website that generates profits, but practically impossible to create a website that appeals only to a few discerning, well-behaved readers and still run a profit. In this general area you have at one end the NYRblog, which has clearly indicated its complete indifference to its web readers, probably because any money spent there is not money well spent, and at the other end you have The Chronicle of Higher Education website, which has caved in to a rowdy mob of web readers rather than make an effort to maintain a minimum standard of quality. I think it would probably be possible to design and manage a very high quality website that had excellent articles and comments, but no one has much incentive to do that because it would most likely lose money.

Therefore, for the time being at least, I intend to confine my writing exclusively to this blog. If you know of or come across a site that you think I might like, please let me know, and I'll take a look. Since I will no longer be posting elsewhere using my Disqus account, which shows this blog address, not many new people will find out about this blog, and it will probably remain very cozy indeed.

On Being Old

It's official: I'm old; today I turned 65. Up until recently I didn't think much about age. When you turned 30 you thought of the phrase "never trust anyone over 30" - not exactly words of wisdom. When you turned 40 you thought that was supposed to be a marker for middle age - so what. By 50 you were definitely in middle age and by 60 you were supposedly at or near the end of middle age. But 65 is a little different. That used to be the standard retirement age, and you were expected to die within a few years. I'm already on Medicare and Social Security and now qualify for all of the senior citizen benefits, including discounts and tax breaks. The local newspaper would refer to me as "an elderly man."

My grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles are all dead. At least six people whom I knew in college are already dead. I've started reading obituaries with greater interest. One becomes habituated to death, and it is less disconcerting over time. The worst part of old age may be having to listen to others discuss their ailments and medical procedures ad nauseum. One friend, a lifelong smoker, had cancer, and we got blow-by-blow accounts of his progress for several years, including the misplaced encouragement from his doctors, before the inevitable occurred. An acquaintance died suddenly of a heart attack at age 60, a better way to go. Rest assured that on this blog I will not discuss any illnesses that I develop in the future.

Fortunately I don't yet seem to have any ailments. I weigh less than I did when I was 25 and am probably in better shape. I haven't noticed any cognitive decline. Research shows that if one is not impecunious or sick and enjoys one's life, the later years are the best of all. My inner elitist snob rejoices in no longer having to take orders from cretinous bourgeoisie. Rural Vermont suits me perfectly. I have sufficient resources to pursue hobbies without worrying about destitution. Children and a grandchild provide a basis for interest in and optimism about the future. Whatever additional benefits technology may bring, I don't think I'm interested in immortality.

Joseph Battell

Since moving to Middlebury and researching the history of our house, I've become interested in local history. This is a relatively well-documented subject, because most of the settlement did not occur until after the American Revolution, and Middlebury College was founded in 1800, providing an educated population to document whatever transpired. History of the Town of Middlebury, by Samuel Swift, published in 1859, goes into great detail about who lived here and when. Swift interviewed an early settler, Mary Kirby, from Litchfield, Connecticut, who in 1791 had married another settler, Samuel Severance, from Northfield, Massachusetts. Samuel was the elder brother of Enos Severance, who built our house in about 1798 and died in 1842. Three of the four old Severance houses mentioned by Swift are still standing in our neighborhood. Compared to most of the U.S., it is much easier here to get a sense of continuity with the past.

Yesterday we went to hear a talk at Middlebury College about Joseph Battell (1837-1915), a well-known figure in Middlebury history. He was an eccentric character and a good example of the dominant cultural values in America during the Victorian period. Battell was a grandson of Horatio Seymour (1778-1857), an early settler, judge and U.S. Senator, and grew up in Seymour's house, which is a landmark downtown. He attended Middlebury College and while still young inherited a fortune from his father's brother, who had worked in the steel industry. He lived the rest of his life in a manner that might be described as spoiled, marriage-averse, whimsical, fatuous, opinionated, imperious, philanthropic and repressed.

Early on he adopted a detached way of dealing with women. Rather than pursue them, he objectified them first by viewing them at a distance through a telescope and later by taking chaste photographs of them in stiff poses. He never married, and although there is no clear evidence, it would be reasonable to assume that he was a repressed homosexual, not unlike his contemporary, Henry James. In no photograph does he look happy.

Battell had several hobbies. He took an interest in the Morgan horse and is said to have saved the breed when he built the Morgan Horse Farm in Weybridge. He was an amateur writer whose first book was so bad that his sister bought all of the unsold copies and burnt them. His most notorious book, called Ellen, or the Whisperings of an Old Pine, involved a Socratic dialogue between a girl and a wise tree in which, among other things, Darwinism and the wave theory of sound are supposedly refuted. Though it didn't help his literary reputation and was universally regarded as unreadable, that didn't stop him from printing a second, deluxe, edition.

In most practical matters Battell fared somewhat better. He decided to host a summer retreat in Ripton, Vermont, near the pass over the Green Mountains. Named after nearby Bread Loaf Mountain, the inn grew into a large, popular hotel that drew people from across the country. In conjunction with the hotel, he purchased thousands of acres of land along the summits of the Green Mountains from Bread Loaf to Camel's Hump. He also bought the Middlebury newspapers and published the news for many years. As a newspaperman, he used his paper to rant against things that he opposed. He hated cars and printed stories of car accidents from around the world. For a time he managed to block car traffic on the road, now Route 125, to the Bread Loaf Inn. He ran for and was elected to office in the Vermont House and Senate, but was not able to win when he ran for governor.

Battell's legacy is visible today. The Morgan Horse Farm is intact. The commercial building downtown that he built and inhabited, called the Battell Block, is still occupied. The stone bridge over Otter Creek on Main Street that he insisted on building is still in active use. His Bread Loaf property was given to Middlebury College and still hosts the writers' conference that dates back to Robert Frost. For a time, Middlebury College must have had the largest campus in the world with the 30,000 acres it received from Battell. Most of that is now part of the Green Mountain National Forest. He also provided funding for some of the current buildings on the Middlebury campus.

As a Victorian, Battell shared some similarities with another contemporary, Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). Although Roosevelt was more specifically raised to be a high achiever and to contribute to the public good, Battell also thought that it was his duty to make lasting contributions to society. Both valued preserving the natural environment, with Battell planting hundreds of thousands of trees in the then-deforested Green Mountains and Roosevelt creating the National Park and National Forest systems. Both were eccentric, but in different ways. Battell was part Luddite and Roosevelt was part imperialist. Another difference was that Roosevelt belonged to a large clan and Battell did not. The realization of Victorian ideals is probably best seen in Theodore Roosevelt's fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose early role model was Theodore.

Quote of the Day

Last night the [Alfred] Knopfs gave a box party at Carnegie Hall to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and a supper later at their city apartment, 400 East 57th Street, in honor of the conductor, Koussevitzky....Willa Cather surprised me by saying that [Mahler's Ninth Symphony] was too much for her, but that she liked the Ravel. The latter was a very cheap piece of trash....

After the concert...we went to [the] Knopf apartment....A lot of miscellaneous introducing. I got but one drink–a small straight Scotch. Dashiell Hammett, the writer of detective stories, came in drunk, and became something of a nuisance. After we left, so Blanche told me today, she had to get rid of him. William Faulkner, the Mississippian, who came in late also got drunk. At 4 A.M. Blanche and Eddie Wasserman decided to take him to a speakeasy to dispose of him. Unfortunately, all the speakeasies in the neighborhood were closed, so they had to haul him to his hotel. He still talked rationally, but his legs had given out, and he couldn't stand up.


—H. L. Mencken, diary entry, November 27, 1931, New York City

Positive Thinking

One reason why this blog won't become popular is that it isn't optimistic enough. Everything from the Bruegel painting, which depicts the downward path of blind men, to the commentary on American culture, which identifies its weaknesses, seems to suggest pessimism. Even though I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, by contemporary standards it is easy to become labeled a pessimist simply by not being extremely optimistic. People go to websites for their daily fix in order to make themselves feel good, and they won't find accommodation here.

By nature I am a skeptic and tend to analyze enthusiasms more than engage in them. The first optimist I knew was my father, and his failures made me cautious from an early age. First, we had to move to the U.S. because there was "music in the elevators," and then, as his career floundered, there was always a lucrative group insurance policy that he was about to sell that subsequently never materialized. We were going to have televisions on the ceilings and sail to Florida in a private yacht, but we never did. My father, I concluded, wasn't sufficiently realistic. On the opposite end of the spectrum I was exposed to successful optimists in the business world. Larry, the president of the company that I worked for in Dixon, Illinois, never made any negative comments and was quite successful as a manager. People respected him, he made good decisions, the plant did well, and the community benefited. His management style came directly from Dale Carnegie, and the only management training that he offered to his employees was a Dale Carnegie course. I didn't take the course, but later read How to Win Friends and Influence People in a departmental training program at a different company. To Larry's credit he was an effective person who knew how to get things done, and he was usually fair. However, from my point of view, Larry was extremely limited as a person. By conventional standards he was a success: he had an important job, a high salary and multiple homes. But to me he was something like the ninety-pound weakling who didn't want bullies kicking sand in his face and worked out in order to become musclebound and intimidating. His weapon was positive thinking, which allowed him to meet his career goals but did not make him well-rounded. Because most of the managers that I've known have been ineffective, Larry stood out to me. The techniques that he used were not taught in business schools, but, from a practical standpoint, they were more important. He was quite good at motivating those around him, and he did this by consciously eschewing negative statements and infusing subordinates with optimism about their role in the company and the success that would follow. He did not in the least believe in participatory management but was careful not to frame his statements autocratically, which he knew would alienate people. He said "we" instead of "I." This way he got what he wanted out of everyone while maintaining his distance.

American society is saturated with positive thinking, which has a long history tying it to both religion and business through the Puritan work ethic. Other societies encourage optimism, but they rarely institutionalize it the way it has been in the U.S. As a meme, optimism probably has a net beneficial effect on populations from an evolutionary standpoint. Negativity, even when realistic, often fosters passivity and despair. Optimism encourages action, even foolish action. Just as talk of failure can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, talk of success can effectuate it. The problem for someone like me, who lives relatively comfortably and has no material goals, is incorporating myself into such a culture. The American Dream, for example, means nothing to me. I don't care whether or not I become richer. American values, which contain that "hayseed" element mentioned by Kenneth Tynan, may appeal to, say, refugees escaping from crime and poverty in Guatemala, but why would they appeal to me? Oddly they still appeal to many wealthy Americans, which may have to do with the mythology in which they have been immersed. If wealth gives you spiritual gravitas, being richer makes you a better person - or so the thinking goes.

Just as pessimism can produce undesirable results, such as giving up too easily when there are solutions at hand, there are undesirable consequences to optimism. American society seems to have become a cult of optimism that engages in little self-reflection. From the standpoint of those who are poor, unemployed, homeless, etc., optimism makes sense, because there really are things that they can do to make substantial improvements in their lives. But making it a mantra for everyone is a mistake. In the somewhat mindless capitalist system that envelops us, the wealthy typically express their optimism by wasting resources on conspicuous consumption. They build impressive new houses that they don't need and give contributions to politicians who will help make them even richer. Meanwhile the country pollutes the environment, exacerbating global warming. We brazenly offend other countries with our ridiculously distorted worldviews such as American exceptionalism.

Optimism has its place as a positive psychological force that can produce good outcomes and a sense of well-being. But it must always be tempered with reason, because it can easily go awry. Studies have shown that males routinely overestimate their skills, which may be good if they unexpectedly succeed, as did Vincent van Gogh, for example. However, the more powerful a nation, and the more arrogant its citizens, the greater the costs when someone in power fails as a consequence of overestimating his skills. Arguably none of the presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt have been up to the task. Did George W. Bush have an adequate understanding of the Middle East when he decided to invade Iraq? Did Dick Fuld know what he was doing when his choices led to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and precipitated a global financial crisis?

Even at the street level in the U.S., optimism must be viewed with caution. Will a new strip mall or industrial park really benefit the community? Is a degree in English from an elite university going to lead to a fulfilling life? I often find that the outlooks held by optimistic people are too simplistic. It may be true that you have to start somewhere, but at some point trial and error is no longer appropriate and you had better settle on an attainable path with knowable results. Thought must be given to unintended consequences, an area that usually gets little attention. Optimism lends itself to naïveté, not a flattering characteristic in adults. It can be associated with infantilism and the American culture of youth.

I ask myself where the serious thinkers are. It is hard to imagine that they have much of a presence in government. They rarely show up in the news media. There may be a few of them in academia, but you scarcely hear from them. Certainly there is little evidence of them in the arts and entertainment. In the meantime the optimists are daydreaming or advancing their agendas and no one seems to be minding the store.

Quote of the Day

American talent does not survive sophistication. It needs to preserve a certain naïveté, a hayseed element, even a touch of the child, and the primitive, if it is to retain its juice and energy. This is true of Huckleberry Finn, of Scott Fitzgerald (always an outsider in Paris and the Côte d'Azur), of Hemingway (with the boyish braggarty of his virility cult), of the out-of-towners who founded and wrote for The New Yorker, of Ring Lardner's ingrained and obsessive provincialisms, of Whitman, Sherwood Anderson, Runyon, John Ford...When urban sophistication lays its hands on the American artist, it is like frost on a bud–witness the aridity of Edward Albee's recent work and the nonexistence of Truman Capote's. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, so different in almost every respect, have more in common with each other than either has with–say–Nabokov. When US talent goes elegant, New York really becomes what Spectorsky calls it–"a road company Europe." Exception: Cole Porter is about the only one I can think of.


—Kenneth Tynan, diary entry, October 19, 1971, New York City

Swearing Off American Fiction

All in good faith I recently took yet another stab at American fiction. If there is one illness that I have it is evident in my continued belief that some American fiction might actually be worth reading. This time around, in a discussion I had about Michel Houellebecq on 3 Quarks Daily, people recommended Tom Perrotta and George Saunders. I got about two thirds of the way through Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher before deciding that I was being aesthetically and intellectually abused. At first I withheld judgment, because I noticed that Perrotta made a compelling case for born-again types by showing how they are weak individuals who can find no other way to be functional adults. However, by the time I had quit reading it, I recognized that both of the protagonists, Ruth and Tim, are simply too uninteresting to warrant my continued attention. Ruth is a politically correct schoolteacher and mother who overreacts to the evangelicals who encroach on her suburban town and Tim is a dysfunctional rock musician and addict who requires externally imposed discipline in order to prevent implosion. At this point the novel was already too protracted and Perrotta, who at least seems to have done his homework, apparently has intentionally created a topical novel that will sell well and perhaps also become a movie based on his screenplay. I couldn't face finishing it and don't care about the denouement.

More surprising than this disappointment was the collection by George Saunders. He has been called one of "the 100 most influential people in the world" by TIME and received a MacArthur Fellowship. The book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was described by Thomas Pynchon as presenting "An astoundingly tuned voice–graceful, dark, authentic, and funny–telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times." I found the title story childish, implausible and poorly-written, containing none of the characteristics that I believe are worthwhile in fiction. I skimmed the rest of the book and then permanently set it aside. Saunders is somewhat reminiscent of other American authors whom I dislike: Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor and John Kennedy Toole. I also detected a note of Bob Dylan in his phraseology.

I had high hopes for Saunders, because he had actual real-world experience and spent his formative years outside the American literary community working as an engineer. A few years ago I had a similar disappointment when I read The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam War veteran whose book was also critically acclaimed. My thinking was that people who spend significant portions of their lives in non-literary environments may have outlooks or insights that will breathe life into their fictional work, in contrast to what typically emerges from creative writing programs and the publishing industry. My interpretation now is that writers like Saunders and O'Brien do in fact have richer backgrounds than most literary people, but there are so few of them and they face so little competition within the literary sphere that it is relatively easy for them to succeed. This situation is exacerbated by what I think of as a shocking lack of discernment or willingness to challenge the status quo among members of the American literary establishment. They even use static formulas for "stunning new voices."

If you have been following my writings about my literary preferences, you will have noticed that I don't think much of most American writers. This has also been corroborated by my reaction to another book I'm reading, New York Diaries, edited by Teresa Carpenter. The anthology is comprised of diary entries made by miscellaneous people who happened to be in New York when they wrote them, covering the period from 1609 to 2009. I'm most of the way through the book and can tell you that I have not found the entries by Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Edgar Allan Poe or Mark Twain the least bit interesting. In comparison, the entries by Alexis de Tocqueville and Simone de Beauvoir stand out as perceptive and well-written.

Often I have been misled by positive, uncritical reviews of new fiction that have been written by people who ought to know better. Almost any review that you come across is likely to be suspect. For example, I recently read a review of a new novel by Miranda July, The First Bad Man, in which the reviewer admits that the author "doesn't know that much about narrative structure" yet goes on in the next and final sentence to praise her. In my framework this is coded language for "the book is crap, but my job is to sell it." My guess is that Miranda July's work can be summed up by three facts: she is too young to remember life before PCs and Macs, too old to have grown up using handheld devices, and she was raised by parents who taught at Goddard College. All else follows from that.

If you get the impression that I'm displeased by certain aspects of American life, you're right. It is no coincidence that I live in the state with the lowest number of Americans other than the one in which Dick Cheney resides. As a bonus, it borders Canada, handy for hasty retreats. Regarding American fiction, my nights are better spent seeking intelligent life beyond the solar system whenever the skies are clear and the temperature is above zero.

How Aliens Spend Their Time

Ever since my youth I've had a passing interest in what intelligent aliens might be like. Though I didn't read much science fiction, I was exposed to plenty of it on TV and at the movies. I saw the 1953 film version of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, in which Martians attempt to conquer the Earth. In the famous 1960 Twilight Zone episode, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, crafty aliens create mayhem by stoking fears in a clever parody of McCarthy-era politics. Then there was the 1962 Twilight Zone episode, To Serve Man, in which seemingly friendly aliens are actually taking humans back to their planet in order to eat them. Unseen aliens occupy the background of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. For unknown reasons they have placed black monoliths at various locations in the solar system in order to accelerate the evolution of humans. The Alien series, which began in 1979, features creatures which, though possessing intelligence, operate on the basic model of catching and feeding on members of advanced civilizations that have had the misfortune of encountering them during space travel. Of course, there are other well-known films that feature aliens, but I don't count those produced by George Lucas or Steven Spielberg as worthy of consideration. The same goes for Superman, Star Trek and most TV science fiction.

My perspective has changed somewhat in recent years while I've had plenty of time on my hands. My children have grown up, and I no longer have significant responsibilities. This has affected how I think about intelligent aliens. I've also been thinking about where evolution might lead and the potential effects of super-intelligence on mankind. It seems that the aliens portrayed in the above films and TV programs are unlikely to exist, because most of them are based on anthropomorphic models. For example, we might like the idea of conquering the inhabitants of other planets, but if we were sophisticated enough to do that we would probably be sophisticated enough to solve whatever problem we had without leaving home. The Alien creature is perhaps the most plausible of the group, because it follows a Darwinian model with no evidence of anthropomorphism, making it among the scariest of all space monsters.

I have often thought since the 1972 Pioneer 10 mission that the idea of sending a message to intelligent aliens might be a bit naïve. There are some elements of anthropocentrism here, at least to the extent of presuming that intelligent aliens would analyze our information in a manner similar to us. Many people seem to think that we will have a great deal in common with aliens: they will be glad to hear from us, and we will be glad to hear from them; we will feel happy that we are not alone in the universe. It is possible that we will come into contact with such beings, but when I think of extremely advanced beings, I don't think that that will be the case at all.

With billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars, and with most of those stars orbited by planets, it is highly probable that countless other planets have life on them. We have had civilizations on Earth for about 10,000 years, which is an extremely short period in the history of the universe, so we cannot know what a civilization might look like after 100,000 or 1,000,000 years. My guess is that many highly advanced alien species exist now and many have already reached extinction.

Putting this in a Darwinian context, what would it be like to live in an extremely advanced technological society? If you assume that such beings cooperate or live separately, none of the aspects that we associate with survival would be relevant. Everyone might essentially be immortal. No one would have to work. The infrastructure would be self-maintaining. Energy, food and shelter might be limitless. Children, if desired, could be designed and created with little effort, though there may be no reason to have them anymore if everyone were immortal. It seems likely to me that none of the challenges that we associate with living, other than psychological ones, would come into play. It also seems plausible that such beings might arrive at a boundary in their understanding of the universe, leaving them with nothing interesting to discover. Cosmology, physics and all of the other sciences might reach an explanatory limit that could never be surpassed.

This situation would be so foreign to us that we can hardly contemplate it. What would people do if they had no struggle? It is possible that they would find ways to entertain themselves for eternity, but at that point choosing not to exist might also become an attractive option. Perhaps advanced civilizations voluntarily go extinct. This is a far cry from our current worldview, but it is something worth thinking about. Possibly we have not come into contact with intelligent aliens only because most of them have decided to die.

Tibet II

In contrast to my last post on Tibet, any similarities between Tibet and Britain at the start of the twentieth century would be difficult to detect. After its medieval period, Britain went through the Industrial Revolution and became a major world power, while Tibet, comparatively speaking, remained stuck in the Middle Ages. During the sixteenth century England had broken from the Roman Catholic Church and closed its monasteries, while Tibet still retained its ancient system of Buddhist monasteries, with the high lamas participating in government. Most of the population in Tibet lived like serfs and had few rights or economic opportunities. Only monks and aristocrats received educations, and the majority of the population was illiterate. Tibet had little contact with the outside world.

Thubten Gyatso, the thirteenth Dalai Lama, reigning from 1879 to 1933, was the first Tibetan leader to face bringing Tibet into the modern era. In 1904, when the British foolishly invaded Tibet in the misguided belief that a Russian military buildup was occurring there, he fled to Mongolia and sought help in vain from Russia. He fled to India in 1910 when the Qing Dynasty invaded, and he later restored relations with Britain. He attempted to institute reforms in Tibet, but made little progress.

The fourteenth and present Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, who has reigned since 1950, has faced even steeper challenges. Initially his relationship with Mao Zedong looked promising. Tenzin Gyatso recognized that Tibet needed reform, and he accepted socialism. Mao knew that it would take many years to modernize Tibet and didn't want to rush it. However, China badly mismanaged its economy under Mao's Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961, eventually causing disastrous famines that resulted in 35 million deaths. Later on, the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, fueled fanaticism in Tibet that resulted in the destruction of most of Tibet's remaining cultural artifacts, including monasteries, books and statues. Nearly all of the monasteries had already disbanded by then.

At first the peasants in Tibet were positive about communist rule. Their land had been owned by the monasteries and the aristocracy, and their work went to support both. Now, without private ownership, they were on equal footing. However, when communal farming failed, they became skeptical, and they eventually took out their frustrations on the Chinese administrators and Tibetan aristocrats who still held high positions in government. They remained loyal only to religious leaders such as the Dalai Lama. This came to a head in 1959, when riots caused the Dalai Lama to move to India, where he had been offered asylum. The CIA, which had been backing Tibetan rebels against the Chinese, assisted during the trip.

Unlike many exiled Tibetans, the Dalai Lama did not support a CIA-sponsored rebellion in Tibet. By 1972 this became a moot point when Richard Nixon met with Mao and reestablished relations with China. Gradually, China's centrality as a world power made support of Tibetan independence diplomatically untenable because of China's strong stance in controlling Tibet's sovereignty. As of 2011, the Dalai Lama has retired from his position as the leader of Tibet's government-in-exile in Dharamshala, India.

Based on what I know, Tenzin Gyatso is not destined to become a significant historical figure. Ironically, much of his influence is indirectly related to the popularity in the West of the 1937 film Lost Horizon and, ever since the 1960's, Eastern religions. Spiritual hunger is still a real phenomenon throughout the world, and Tibetan Buddhism, at least in a simplified version, appeals to many. It also helps that a few Hollywood celebrities have endorsed it. However, it does not appear that he will have any long-term effect either on Tibet or the world. Most of his public statements are platitudes that anyone could think of, and Tibet as a political unit is far too weak to have much control over its own destiny.

If mistakes were made in Tibet, they were made long before Tenzin Gyatso was born. It would be preposterous to expect a feudal society to acquire power equal to that of developed countries. For hundreds of years, all of Tibet's resources were poured into its aristocracy and monasteries, and inequality was accepted at a level that does not exist in modern democracies. Tibet would not be able to defeat a well-equipped army, and its last chance of becoming an independent nation has probably passed. At the present time, much of the culture of old Tibet has already been destroyed and may never be restored. The economics of supporting its former network of monasteries will never again be feasible. Theocratic rule is in the process of becoming obsolete worldwide. From a strategic standpoint, I think Tibet should give up all ideas of independence from China and focus instead on its cultural heritage. Here it could learn from the history of England. England too has passed its prime and is now a shadow of its former self in world affairs. While it still has a robust economy compared to most European countries, with a strong financial services industry, it has managed to hang onto its cultural heritage by in effect becoming a gigantic theme park for tourists from all over the world. It would make sense to me if Tibet were to adopt a similar strategy.

News as Entertainment

One of the most noticeable cultural changes during my lifetime has been in the area of news consumption. When I was growing up people tended to read The Daily News, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal when commuting to or from work. Some subscribed to the local newspaper, The Standard-Star, for which I had a paper route, and most people watched the evening news on weekdays. Today some people still read physical newspapers and watch the evening news, but in reduced numbers. I haven't seen any recent statistics, but I suspect that most people now get their news somewhat haphazardly in various digital formats.

I was never a big newspaper reader and got into the habit of watching the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite until he retired in 1981. When Eric Sevareid appeared on the program, he added incisive commentary of a kind that has completely vanished today. Occasionally I would read the Sunday New York Times. Journalists like Cronkite and Sevareid got their start during World War II and gave serious presentations in which they attempted to bring up all the hard news. The contrast between Cronkite and, say, Diane Sawyer, who recently retired from ABC World News, is astounding. Network news now consists of a series of feel-good moments designed to hold the attention of a geriatric audience just long enough to brainwash them with pharmaceutical ads. I doubt that many people under the age of sixty regularly watch the evening news anymore.

The purveyors of news and the media in general are now obsessed with content, and the role of news in the important sense of keeping the public informed enough to make sound voting choices within the democratic system is largely nonexistent. Part of the decline in interest in real news can be ascribed to commercial competition from businessmen like Rupert Murdoch who have long catered to the lowest common denominator in order to attract more readers and viewers. However, there are other reasons for the public to be less interested in the news now than they were in the 1960's. First there was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, then there was the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Racial unrest hasn't gone away, but there is currently nothing like the Watts riots of 1965 or those following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The protests against the Vietnam War, which claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans, were far more significant than any in recent years. In those days large numbers of people watched the news, and the CBS Evening News had a correspondingly enormous budget. Without any immediate excitement, competition for viewers and readers has devolved to providing light entertainment for the largest audience possible.

In recent years I have stepped up my reading and have become aghast even about the quality in higher levels of journalism in the U.S. After following editorials at The New York Times for several years, I finally decided that they rarely are insightful or thoughtful, and it is difficult not to see them as page filler for an uncritical and gullible readership. The same goes for The New Yorker, which isn't really of much interest beyond fashion, whether it's fashionable plays, movies, fiction or ideas: this is the last place to look for interesting perspectives. Most recently I had a complete falling out with The New York Review of Books, which markets itself to quasi-intellectuals and bon vivants. The editor, Robert Silvers, seems to have developed his own formula: recruit writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Simic, Martin Filler, Pico Ayer and Lorrie Moore after they have already made names for themselves, milk them for a few years to perpetuate the myth of high quality at the publication, and then, as they sail off into obscurity, replace them with people from the ranks of the latest falling stars. Editorially, the NYRB is a niche player that concentrates on pabulum for intellectual poseurs.

As bleak as this may sound, there are bright spots now because of Internet publishing. On any given day there are bound to be several new and interesting articles to be found there, and the problem is mainly in finding them. In this frontier, I think 3 Quarks Daily is doing a reasonably good job, and it seems likely that there will eventually be competitors in the field of gathering interesting articles from across the web.

My news and journalism consumption habits have changed a lot over the past few years. For the most part I don't pay much attention to the news anymore. In the morning I look at the headlines on The Wall Street Journal and check up on the investing scene. I then scan 3 Quarks Daily to see if there is anything that I would want to read. In the evening we usually watch PBS NewsHour, which is mainly a ritual associated with our cocktail hour. The reporting is better than what you find on the networks, but the reporters rarely ask hard questions, and, like most journalists, aren't that bright. We like Mark Shields as a foil to David Brooks, but I'm sick of both of them and wish they'd retire. David Brooks is the kind of professional journalist who knows exactly how to enhance his career but whose opinions are essentially worthless. In any case, I don't care about domestic politics, and that is usually their main topic. Often it is too painful to watch the entire program, and we prefer the shorter version on the weekends with Hari Sreenivasan. Lately I have become interested in local news and very much enjoy reading the Addison County Independent, which I think is an amazing publication for a county with a population of only 36,000.

Despite my general indifference to the news, technically its low quality and limited influence on public life are problematic for a country whose existence is predicated on the presence of an informed public. However, in keeping with my views on capitalism and democracy, I do not expect this situation to improve. Rather, as I have said, the capitalism plus democracy formula is unsustainable and will end one way or another at some point in the future. Capitalism, democracy or both will sooner or later change from their current forms.

Tibet I

Since my son-in-law is one hundred percent Tibetan and my grandson is fifty percent Tibetan, I decided to investigate Tibetan history and am currently reading Tibet: A History, by Sam van Schaik, in an effort to acquire a basic knowledge of Tibet's historical background. I'll comment a little on that in this post. I am also interested in the Dalai Lama and the current situation in Tibet, which both seem distorted by the American media. I will make a post on that later, when I've finished the book.

The Tibet of the seventh century reminds me of Britain at the time. Tibet was filled with various tribes, clans and local deities, and so was Britain. However, Tibet was already becoming a recognizable political unit under the tsenpo, or divine ruler, Songtsen Gampo, who ruled from 629 to 649, while Britain consisted of several kingdoms made up of various indigenous Celtic tribes and Germanic tribes which had arrived since the departure of the Romans in 410. Christianity was growing in popularity in Britain, especially after Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 597, whereas Tibet had yet to embrace a modern religion. The practice of intermarriage between the ruling families of clans was popular in both Europe and Asia as a method of reducing conflict. In both Tibet and Britain, progress was impeded by the lack of a standardized written language. Written English evolved over many centuries to its present form, whereas Songsten Gampo created the characters of the Tibetan alphabet with the help of Tonmi, a Tibetan selected to travel to India for that purpose.

When Trisong Detsen became tsenpo in 755, he played a defining role in making Buddhism the state religion of Tibet. The reasons why he chose to support Buddhism aren't entirely clear. Though Tibetans also had exposure to Christianity, Islam and Manichaeism, by this time Buddhism had gained a following. Trisong Detsen recruited Buddhists from Nepal and Pakistan and began building a network of Buddhist monasteries. During this period, Buddhism was unpopular in the Tibetan court, and there were doctrinal disputes. After a debate arranged between Chinese and Indian scholars, Trisong Detsen declared that the Indian form of Buddhism would henceforth be the model followed in Tibet. Subsequently, Buddhist scriptures comprising the equivalent of three hundred volumes were translated into Tibetan. Incongruously, during his reign Trisong Detsen also waged major military campaigns that extended the Tibetan empire to its largest geographical range ever, lasting through the eighth and ninth centuries.

Whatever one's religious perspective, it is easy to see that the modern religions have evolved in conjunction with modern political systems. When large nations come into existence, there must be some ideological basis that keeps people "on the same page." Without this cohesion, countries that encompass extensive geographical areas are more likely to collapse. Thus theocracies have played a significant role in the transition from the predominance of clans and warlords to the modern state. From my point of view, the specific religion in each case may not be all that important. Christianity worked in Britain and Buddhism worked in Tibet. In both cases regional gods and spirits gave way to a unifying religious theme. Their centers of religion became their centers of literacy and education, affecting cultural values for centuries.

Seen in this light, I think it is a mistake to make a point of looking for better religions, since the real purpose of religion has more to do with social unity than with any meaningful truths. Politically speaking, we are on the road to a secular state that will render all theocracies obsolete. In this regard the Islamic states and Israel are on the wrong side of history, though religious conservatives in the U.S. don't seem that far behind. Whether you want to consider secular humanism a religion or not, in historical terms that seems to be a more promising belief system than any of its predecessors.

Social Snubs

In a continuation of the general theme of my last post, I thought it would be beneficial to discuss a specific type of negative act inflicted on others and the damage that it causes. For obvious reasons, people don't like to think about these sorts of things, because they recall painful experiences. In looking back at my life, however, I have found it advantageous to examine in some detail the major social snubs I've received, because it has the same therapeutic value as psychoanalysis - and you can do it at your leisure without paying anyone!

The first major social snub that I underwent was in fifth or sixth grade. During recess, a boy told me that Mrs. Davis had told Mrs. Fischer that I was a "hood." Mrs. Davis was the mother of Teddy Davis, one of my classmates, and they were a wealthy family that lived in a large house in a rich part of town near Long Island Sound. I had spent the night there once, and Mrs. Davis had complimented me on my manners, so I was shocked and puzzled when I heard this. Mrs. Fischer, by the way, was the mother of another classmate, Mark, whose father was a doctor. In those days, being called a hood was a real insult. This was the peak of the doo-wop period in popular music, and there were in fact many lower-middle-class Italian immigrants living in the area who looked like classic greasers. Some of them even rode motorcycles, belonged to gangs and had connections with organized crime. I had no exposure to, let alone participation in, any of that, and after thinking about it for years, I decided that the insult must have had to do with the fact that we had moved to an apartment building. Prior to then, I hadn't known that there was a stigma associated with living in an apartment. I have since noticed that, especially in the suburbs, it is seen as a sign of being incompetent, irresponsible, lazy or lower class. Later on, in seventh and eighth grades, I was a borderline juvenile delinquent for a while, but never in my life did I deserve the label "hood."

After sixth grade Teddy Davis went to private schools, and I never saw him again. The Davises became for me the quintessential snobby Wasp family. It is impossible to know what prompted Mrs. Davis to make the statement, if in fact she did, but it certainly had an effect on my social self-image for many years. From that point on I became aware of the stigma associated with having less money than other people. Throughout high school I was conscious of the fact that nearly all of my friends had wealthier parents than mine. I didn't then and still don't care about being wealthy, and this set me on a path that led to my current tendency to be a social critic.

The next big snub, which is not how I thought of it at the time or how most people would, occurred when my wife divorced me in 1985. Because of the fuzziness of her thinking, it is often difficult to make out her motives. There was no obvious reason for the divorce: no infidelities, abusive behavior or alcoholism. I had been unemployed early in the marriage but by the time of the divorce I had a steady full-time job and was enrolled in a part-time M.B.A. program. After thinking about this for many years, I now believe that the divorce is best seen as a social snub. To figure this one out, I had to do an analysis of my ex-wife in absentia.

As mentioned in an earlier post, my ex-wife had a somewhat incoherent outlook on life because it contained two incompatible elements. On the one hand, she wanted to be a free-spirited hippie who didn't conform to parental demands, and on the other hand she wanted to have an upper-middle-class lifestyle in which her milieu would bestow high social status upon her. When we were married she worked as an R.N., and by the time we had our children she had developed a crush on her obstetrician, who delivered both of them. I think in the back of her mind she wanted to be like her Aunt Helen, who was married to a successful surgeon, lived an artsy upper-middle-class life and was a stay-at-home mother. Never mind that Aunt Helen was totally subservient to her husband, and that when he was at home it was as if God were present. My ex-wife's infatuation with doctors continues to this day in the form of making her medical care a full-time hobby, complete with medical tourism across the continent. As a practical matter, though, it hasn't worked out well at all: not long after the divorce, a doctor attempted to date rape her, and she hasn't dated since.

In this case, because my ex-wife was unable to explain her intentions well, I am drawing the conclusion that I was rejected socially because I did not provide sufficient prospect of supporting her in the manner that she expected, including social status, which a doctor might readily do. Our friends, her parents and I opposed the divorce, so it seems to make the most sense to see it as a move on her part to upgrade her social image by discarding an element which she thought detracted from it. For my part, I don't bear a grudge personally, but I do hold it against her that she was an incompetent mother. Even there I am willing to cut her slack, because I consider her mentally ill. She has paid a price by having the remainder of her life turn out far less ideal than she could ever have imagined.

A third significant snub occurred when my current partner suddenly and unexpectedly dumped me in 2002. We had known each other for a year, had been getting along well and had been on vacations together to Quebec and Venice. Soon we reconciled, but things were intermittently rocky until 2004, when we permanently reconciled. We have been living together since 2007. In this case, oddly, the snub was precipitated by a friend of my partner, otherwise I wouldn't be discussing it here.

This snub was reminiscent of my first snub, because it involved a Waspy person from Connecticut (though her ethnic background is Italian). Her nickname is Tweed, and she lives on the wealthy North Shore of Chicago. She is married to a lawyer, and my partner came to know her socially many years ago. Her ex-husband is also a lawyer and the husbands once worked at the same firm. I met Tweed at a Thanksgiving dinner at her house, and she later privately advised my partner, who had been dating various people after the divorce, telling her to dump me because I didn't measure up. In this instance the likely deficiency was money. Although my partner's ex-husband doesn't have much of a personality, lacks social skills, didn't care about raising children and would rather work than go on vacations, he had a high income and a respectable job, and those, apparently, are what count. I could have used Tweed's husband as another example in my post on uxoriousness. To my way of thinking, Tweed is out of control, and her husband doesn't have the nerve to do anything about it. Like a classic uxorious male, he follows her commands. Here, again, I think early compromises may play a hidden role. The main parameters are that Tweed is an attractive Waspy person with East Coast panache and her husband is a short Jewish guy from Iowa, probably harboring insecurities about all three. Technically we are on good terms with Tweed and her husband, and we attended the lavish wedding they held for one of their daughters in Cooperstown, New York the summer before last. However, there will probably never be any reason to see either of them ever again, which suits me. They strike me as superficial people who have adopted a lifestyle that was never of interest to me.

On the basis of these examples one might conclude that social snubs often have something to do with money. They have made me especially wary of Waspy people, and when we moved to Vermont I was a little concerned about running into a lot of them. Fortunately it appears that Vermont Wasps are more likely to be interested in frugality than conspicuous consumption, and that Vermont isn't the most attractive venue for social climbers. Overall I think money plays somewhat more of a social role in the Northeast than it does in the Midwest, because there has been more of it here for much longer. Most Midwesterners lived on farms up until about a century ago, and, living there myself for forty years, I detected far less emphasis on snobbery than I did growing up in New York, which has plenty of old money. I feel that I am fortunate in having the ability to ignore negative social pressures such as the ones mentioned here, but I think they are more problematic for most people, who are less secure and less aware of the workings of their social environments.