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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diary

I'm officially out of winter mode and into spring mode. The transition is so abrupt here that it's almost startling, with the plants suddenly erupting from the ground and the colors changing from browns and grays to greens in a matter of days. At a distance the mountains briefly turn yellow and then become green, as they are named. Right on schedule, the hummingbirds show up on May 8 or 9. This summer should be a good one for tomatoes, because it is expected to be hot.

When I live in the same place for several years I gradually address various issues and eventually have nothing left to do. The first few years here were a little arduous, because I painted the house, garage and shed, mouse-proofed the basement and removed several elms that had died from Dutch elm disease. The yardwork has become considerably less of a strain with the purchase of a lawn tractor last year. This spring I'm down to repairing a damaged screen door and attending to carpenter ants. Now all I'm left with are trivial consumer decisions such as how to replace a fifteen-year-old tube TV with a large flat screen TV. If I'm not careful I'll become a fat, torpid couch potato.

For some reason I seem to reevaluate this blog at this time each year, perhaps with an awareness of change induced by the outdoors. As part of that I wonder who is reading this blog and why. With so few readers it is possible to know a lot about some of them, but I know nothing about others. I'm still at four readers whom I've actually met. Two of those are regular readers and two are occasional readers. One reader whom I know but haven't met, iteres from Alberta, seems to have dropped out, or at least she rarely reads this anymore. I have a couple of unknown regular readers and a few unknown irregular readers. With the tools available, it isn't easy to decipher the unknowns with any certainty. Because of Tor, other identity-protection techniques and an assortment of technical glitches, it is hard to have much confidence in the data provided by Google on pageviews. I think I may have a few unknown readers who have followed me from 3 Quarks Daily, and possibly from elsewhere. I've had pageviews from Oxford and Cambridge, UK, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Caltech. The Russian government, Russian criminals or someone in Russia – or someone anywhere using Tor – seems to like the blog sporadically. Also, because I have accumulated so many posts now, I've started to get pageviews from people who find the blog by chance on Google searches; they tend to be non-repeats: probably this is a blog that most people would rather not stumble across.

For the time being I've settled on the format of alternately reviewing books and blabbing, which seems to work well enough for me. I prefer the in-depth thought processes of books to typical online content. For example, I enjoyed delving into the thoughts of Czeslaw Milosz on my last two posts, and I subsequently came across a thread on the same topic at World Literature Forum, which, as is typical of Internet discussion, provided no detailed examination of Milosz's ideas. To me, most of the discussion on the Internet is discussion about what someone thinks might be interesting, but without any articulation of exactly what would be interesting about it. Thus, though you may agree or disagree with me on my posts, you do find out what someone actually thinks about something, and if I were to come across a blog like this I would find it more substantive than most Internet content. It is possible that there are many interesting blogs out there that remain undiscovered.

This blog is somewhat amorphous, i.e., the format and subject matter aren't fixed. I am always open to feedback, and if you have any but don't know my personal e-mail address, I can also be reached at doubttheexperts@gmail.com.

Native Realm II

I've finished the book and will continue where I left off. Milosz's high school was Catholic, and his Roman Catholic background was reinforced there, particularly by one teacher who taught his pupils that sex was repugnant. Milosz had strong heterosexual drives and did manage to find sexual partners later on, but as far as I am able to ascertain he did not have a serious relationship with a woman until he was in his thirties. After high school he studied law in Vilnius and began to associate with intellectuals. He joined the Vagabonds, a group that disdained snobbery and fraternities, and they arranged wilderness outings for themselves. In June of 1931 they traveled to Prague and bought a used Canadian canoe, transported it by train to Lake Constance in Bavaria, and set off down the Rhine, hoping to follow its tributaries to get as close as possible to Paris. However, they didn't consult their map carefully enough, and their canoe capsized and sank when they unexpectedly passed through rapids and struck a rock. They were thrown out of the canoe along with their knapsacks and were able to recover two of them and the canoe, but the one containing their passports and money was lost. Nevertheless, they did manage, after many delays and the help of others, to make it to Paris by other means.

After college, in 1934, Milosz got a scholarship to study literature in Paris for a year. He spent time with a distant uncle there, Oskar Milosz, an eccentric poet who became a Roman Catholic mystic late in life, whom he had met on his first trip. This may have reinforced Czeslaw's fledgling self-image as a Catholic poet, and throughout the book Milosz's inner conflicts seem to contain a religious element that, while not a straightforward presentation of church doctrine, represents how he sees the good part of himself. When he returned to Vilnius he became a bureaucrat, a job that he didn't like at all:

...it was not long, however, before I had made up my mind (later my conclusions were verified) that bureaucrats are parasites, paid not for what they do but for being in this or that room, behind this or that desk, from morning to evening. Every month they receive salaries that have nothing to do with any completed achievement but depend on their place in the hierarchy.  

In 1940, when the Soviets controlled Lithuania, life in Vilnius had become miserable and, with the help of a woman he knew, he devised a complex, risky and perhaps foolish plan to escape to Nazi-occupied Warsaw. At the last minute Sophia said that they would have to take along a third person, a pharmacist, in order to pay the guides at each stage of the journey. The pharmacist was completely inept, unkempt and terrified during the trip, and Milosz nicknamed him "Slob." One of the most harrowing events of the book, but also one of the funniest, occurs when they cross a large swamp between Lithuania and Prussia on foot in the middle of the night:

I felt at home in such swamps, and I have always been affected by their somewhat melancholy beauty. The smooth sheet of water shone with an oily gleam between clumps of vegetation, and here and there on it a motionless piece of dry leaf floated. We broke into it and sank up to our knees, then up to our thighs. Slob still strained our tempers because he splashed, caught himself in bushes, and fell behind, forcing us to go back and pull him out of the brambles. When the water reached our waists, he managed to go under, calling out in a hoarse gurgle for help. In the moonlight I caught a glimpse of his exhausted, inhumanly mud-smeared face. Sophia preserved her sense of humor. In a mutual effort we rescued her from a treacherous quagmire where she had sunk up to her shoulders and was afraid to move for fear the mud would suck her in. Almost naked in her clinging dress, she smiled, "I lost my panties."  

He eventually made it to Warsaw, where he stayed for most of the remainder of the war and met his first wife. As fate would have it, after the war Milosz became the Second Secretary at the Embassy of People's Poland in New York and Washington, D.C., where he lived with his family for several years (though he doesn't mention them here). I was fascinated to read his description of the area where I moved with my family a few years later:

...I liked New York, I liked to melt into her crowds. Most of all I got to know the American countryside, which restored me, after a prolonged interval, to my boyhood. Like all Europeans I had painted for myself a false picture of technology's reign in America, imagining that nothing was left to nature. In reality her nature was more luxuriant even than the wooded regions where I grew up, where the farmer, plowing with a wooden plow, had for centuries been wreaking effective destruction. Outside of New York City, the asphalt highways were like swords thrown into the thickets to signify that man belonged to a different order, that he was fundamentally a stranger to the snakes, turtles, chipmunks, and skunks who perished under the wheels of cars trying to cross the unnatural band; the place where their line of march intersected the line of the driver's will somehow resembled the encounter of human destinies with the intentions of the godhead. I plunged into books on American flora and fauna, made diplomatic contracts with porcupines and beavers in Pennsylvania, but I was most drawn to the Northern states: Vermont and Maine.

In these early years, before he had defected from Poland, his view of Americans was mixed, to put it mildly:

Americans accepted their society as if it had arisen from the very order of nature; so saturated with it were they that they tended to pity the rest of humanity for having strayed from the norm. If I at least understood that all was not well with me, they did not realize that the opposite disablement affected them: a loss of the sense of history and, therefore, of a sense of the tragic, which is only born of historical experience.

All their aggressiveness had been channeled into the struggle for money, and that struggle made them forget the bloody lessons of the Civil War. Later on every one of them had so trained himself to forget, that during the depression he regarded unemployment as shameful proof of his own personal inability. I esteemed these men; I was an admirer of their America. At least no one here could justify his laziness by sighing: "If only nations were not predestined, if it weren't for the Czar, if it weren't for the government, if it weren't for the bourgeoisie..." But, paradoxically, that triumph of the individual had wrought an inner sterility; they had inner souls of shiny plastic.

This book is a good companion to his better-known work, The Captive Mind, which was written a few years earlier. In that context, Milosz describes himself as a practitioner of Ketman, i.e., the presentation of conformity outwardly while holding entirely different thoughts privately when living in a totalitarian regime. In the years described in this book he lived under Soviet ideology, Nazi ideology and then communist Polish ideology before escaping to the West. He doesn't specifically describe his feelings in terms of survivor's guilt, with so many of his friends and acquaintances having perished, but it is difficult to think of his personal conflicts outside that context. He at least recognizes that his innate survival skills served him well, but at a cost to his integrity as an intellectual. He tended to look at Eastern Europe in historical terms, with the Lithuanians, Poles, Russians and Germans each having their own cultures and distinct views of the others. Where he sees himself falling short is in his inability to adopt any of the prevailing ideologies while failing to come up with a coherent substitute of his own. This makes him seem to lack real character when compared to those around him who were willing to take more definite stands at the risk of their lives in some instances.

I don't at this point feel that I have enough information about Milosz to draw much of a conclusion about him as a person. The book, he states, is not a diary. It is difficult to disentangle his inborn characteristics from his cultural background and the horrendous times that he lived through. I suspect that he was always introverted and had developed escapist habits before his trials started. While it is hard for me to understand someone who selects poetry as a career, in this instance it allowed him to maintain a healthy distance from the widely-accepted dogma favoring Marxism that was mindlessly lapped up by other intellectuals well after its tenability as a desirable system of governance had been discredited. Milosz may have been in over his head philosophically, but the only criticism I have of him is that the Roman Catholic Church seems to have been his most important resource. If he could see through Marxism, why couldn't he see through religion? That would perhaps be too much to ask of him, and in any case nothing can diminish his stature as one of the finest chroniclers of the great crises of the twentieth century. I might add that A Book of Luminous Things, a much later work, is the only decent poetry anthology I've been able to find; it contains an excellent collection of world poems and inspired me to take a second look at poetry after I had given up on it. His comment about plastic American souls rings true today, and I don't know of any of our current crop of American writers who have the insight or courage to say as much.

Native Realm I

For a number of reasons my reading has been curtailed a little over the last few days, but I am making progress in Native Realm, by Czeslaw Milosz, and finding it quite worthwhile. I'm a third of the way through the book, which is a memoir about his life and development from his childhood to the 1950's and includes a lot of history as a result of the time and place. Milosz's background was Lithuanian, from a landowning family that had seen better days. This put him in a class that is almost nonexistent in the U.S., because he was aware that he came from a better family than most, and in his culture the lack of money did not diminish his self-conception; like some Europeans, he considered the pursuit of wealth vulgar and lower-class:

My "place" did not correspond in the least to what is known as the "bourgeois way of life." Along with my feeling that one should know who one is went a pinched pocketbook and enforced curtailment of my personal needs. My material existence was so primitive that it would have startled proletarians in Western countries....If the urge to earn and spend money testifies to the acquisitive spirit, it was the opposite attitude that took root in me – a passive vitality. When I was down to my last penny, I preferred to go to bed. That way the organism consumes less, and one can go without dinner and supper. This may have been largely a question of personal pride, but it was surely not unrelated to the scale of values considered proper for my social group, which had inherited, if not privileges, at least the strong persuasion that wage-earning was somehow below a man's dignity....

Besides, I was a poet; that is, a so-called intellectual. Although such a profession depends on strictly personal factors, my choice was not made, or so I think, without some social motivation. A society that clearly distinguishes an individual's social status from the amount of money he is worth – i.e., when the one does not determine the other – is applying a scale of values that is, in one sense or another, aristocratic. Thus, for the Eastern European the drive to gain recognition in the sphere of literature, science, or art has all the earmarks of a search for identity formerly conferred by a coat of arms. Nowhere outside of this part of Europe does the artist, writer, or scholar enjoy such exceptional privileges, and this is not the result of transformations brought about by the Communist Party, which understood just enough to make use of such a setup. Exceptional privileges and a high income do not always have to go together, because money can be replaced by fame; nor must they necessarily go with freedom, for the state, even as it tames and subjugates an artist or scientist, by this very effort pays homage to his role and his importance. It is interesting that only in France is there a similar respect for the intellectual – but, as has often been remarked, the ways of the cultural milieu of Paris resemble the behavior at a royal court. In the bourgeois world one islet has survived where poverty is not a disgrace: when it is decorated with a title; that is, publicity.

Although the era described is receding into ancient history – much of the book covers the period between the World Wars – some of the same cultural phenomena exist today, but not noticeably in the U.S. To find an American intellectual who accords with Milosz's description you would probably have to go back to the nineteenth century: Henry David Thoreau comes to mind. Milosz did not move to the U.S. until 1960, after this book was written, and it would be interesting to know what impression he had of intellectual life here. Notably he was at best a minor contributor to the New York Review of Books, which inclines me to think that his worldview had little in common with their editor's. From my vantage point the NYRB looks like a cut-and-dried bourgeois publication, though I suppose it is possible that Milosz himself became more bourgeois in his later years. Perhaps he did his best work – essays – before arriving here: I can't say that his poems impress me.

Milosz doesn't devote much space in the book to his parents. His father was a civil engineer who worked for Czarist Russia before the revolution, and sometimes he took the entire family with him in a covered wagon or an army railroad car while he worked on construction projects in the Russian hinterlands. He was energetic and loved the outdoors, hunting, etc. His mother seems to have influenced him more deeply:

The tangle of contradictions I see in myself becomes clearer when I try to understand the principles that guided her up to her calmly accepted death in the typhus epidemic during the mass migrations of 1945. Seemingly weak and frivolous, she used superficiality as a mask and delighted in playing a role because it led the people off the track. Her relationships were formed at the least cost to herself, and showed her not as she really was but as others expected her to be. Doubtless this mimicry was the result of a disbelief in her own worth and a complete inability to take command, or, possibly, of pride: "What I know is not for others." Under the surface there was stubbornness, gravity, and the strong conviction that suffering is sent by God and that it should be borne cheerfully. Still another trait of hers was patriotism, but not toward the nation or the state – she responded rather coolly to that brand. Instead, she taught me a patriotism of "home"; i.e., of my native province.

Milosz spent his high school and college years in Vilnius, which was under Russian control before World War I, under German control during the war and then intermittently controlled by Poland, the Soviet Union and Lithuania. In 1922 Poland annexed Vilnius, and it remained Polish until the Soviets returned it to Lithuania in 1939. Later on, in the years of the Holocaust, nearly the entire Jewish population of Lithuania was killed by Nazis and Nazi collaborators. The variety of cultures and languages present in Vilnius influenced Milosz's development:

In a certain sense I consider myself a typical Eastern European. It seems to be true that his differentia specifica can be boiled down to a lack of form – both inner and outer. His good qualities – intellectual avidity, fervor in discussion, a sense of irony, freshness of feeling, spatial (or geographical) fantasy – derive from a basic weakness: he always remains an adolescent, governed by a sudden ebb or flow of inner chaos. Form is achieved in stable societies. My own case is to verify how much of an effort it takes to absorb contradictory traditions, norms, and an overabundance of impressions, and to put them in some kind of order. The things that surround us in childhood need no justification, they are self-evident. If, however, they whirl about like particles in a kaleidoscope, ceaselessly changing position, it takes no small amount of energy simply to plant one's feet on solid ground without falling....Where I grew up, there was no uniform gesture, no social code, no clear rules of behavior at table. Practically every person I met was different, not because of his own special self, but as a representative of some group, class, or nation. One lived in the twentieth century, another in the nineteenth, a third in the fourteenth....Modern civilization, it is said, creates uniform boredom and destroys individuality. If so, then this is one sickness I've been spared.

As you can see, Milosz was an excellent writer and thinker, at least before he moved to the U.S. I'll continue later when I've read more of the book.

Diary

I've begun to read Native Realm, by Czeslaw Milosz, and though I like Richard Feynman the transition from his memoir is a little jarring. Milosz can't write about himself without including Lithuanian history, whereas Feynman is barely aware of his own. Milosz represents the Old World, with an appreciation of literature and the catastrophes of Europe, while Feynman seems like a kid in a candy store, having the time of his life and omitting reference to the consequences of the development of thermonuclear weapons. This contrast mirrors my disappointment with American literature, which leans toward the lighthearted and generally lacks seriousness. It is easier to find gravitas in Europe, which provides fertile soil for meditation on the meaning of life, than it is in America, where the lack of history seems to generate pointless, trivial narcissism in the arts. The thought occurred to me that Americans delude themselves about why they seem to be admired throughout the world. The admiration is probably real, but it isn't based on, say, the sagacity of the Founding Fathers, the wisdom of the Constitution or the liberty of the individual. Really most of the admirers around the world would just like to be equally attractive and have all that cool stuff, and they don't care at all about our system of government, our economic model or our beliefs. To them the "shining city upon a hill" represents little more than material excess. It is simply attractive to those who don't know any better.

Speaking of Feynman, I was looking into the intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews and came across this amazing research paper. The paper was published in 2005 and speculates that high intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews is the result of natural selection and is associated with certain diseases in much the same way that sickle cell anemia is associated with survival from malaria at the cost of other health risks. As of the time of writing, there was insufficient study of the Ashkenazi population to confirm or deny the hypothesis, but, not being a scientist myself, I am inclined to think it is correct. It is a long and technical paper, but you can get the gist of it by reading the Introduction and Conclusion. I had not read much on intelligence for many years, and although it is a murky topic progress seems to have been made. As a measure of intelligence IQ can hardly be considered precise. What I didn't realize is that Ashkenazi IQ's are well documented to be the highest of any ethnic group. The paper explains in detail how this situation may have developed as the result of natural selection for high ability in mathematics and language in the Ashkenazi population over several centuries. Interestingly, the same IQ phenomenon does not exist among Sephardic or Oriental Jews.

I had read previously that IQ is thought to be mostly inherited, and this paper supports that view. One of the examples provided is that programs such as Head Start tend not to work because even when children get a boost in cognitive performance at an early age they tend to revert to whatever their innate intelligence was, and in adulthood no benefit is detectable. The authors say "The phenomenon of heritability increasing with age is characteristic of many quantitative traits in mammals." In other words, the IQ of a child is likely to end up similar to that of its parents regardless of early stimulation and enrichment. This whole paper sounds so politically incorrect that at first I found it hard to believe that it was legitimate. However, the authors seem to have done due diligence, their argument has merit and presumably they still have jobs. Particularly intriguing to me is the idea that one group is inherently more intelligent than others. This contradicts current thinking in public policy, which proclaims that social inequality can be rectified by providing educational opportunities to all groups, giving everyone access to high-paying jobs. If the hypothesis of the paper is correct – and I think it is – some people will never be able to get high-paying jobs because of their inherently lower cognitive abilities. Ashkenazi Jews and others will continue to hold the most intellectually demanding jobs, which are usually the ones that pay well, meaning that it is a dereliction of duty for the government to present education as a panacea for economic inequality.

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Though I'm ill-versed in physics, not having studied it since high school (1966-1967), I found this book by Richard Feynman extremely enjoyable to read. I've had a little exposure to physics through my interest in astronomy and geology, but what is really entertaining about Feynman is his wide range of interests and his honesty. The book is a series of long anecdotes that Feynman dictated to a friend and includes several of the major episodes of his life. There is also a commencement speech that he gave at Caltech. He refers to his work as a theoretical physicist throughout the book, but is light on technical details. Feynman's unique personality comes through clearly.

The title refers to one of his most memorable and representative episodes. He was a down-to-earth, unpretentious physics student who had just graduated from M.I.T., which in those days wasn't as competitive as it is now, and had ventured completely out of his element when he moved to Princeton to pursue his Ph.D. Princeton was pretentiously modeled after Oxford and Cambridge, complete with American interpretations of English affectations:

So the very afternoon I arrived in Princeton I'm going to the dean's tea, and I didn't even know what a "tea" was, or why! I had no social abilities whatsoever; I had no experience with this sort of thing. 

So I come up to the door, and there's Dean Eisenhart, greeting the new students. "Oh, you're Mr. Feynman," he says. "We're glad to have you." So that helped a little, because he recognized me, somehow.

I go through the door, and there are some ladies, and some girls, too. It's all very formal and I'm thinking about where to sit down and should I sit next to this girl, or not, and how should I behave, when I hear a voice behind me.

"Would you like cream or lemon in your tea, Mr. Feynman?" It's Mrs. Eisenhart, pouring tea.

"I'll have both, thank you," I say, still looking for where I'm going to sit, when suddenly I hear, "Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman."

Joking? Joking? What the hell did I say? Then I realized what I had done. So that was my first experience with this tea business.    

What stands out about Feynman is his extraordinary accomplishments in quantum physics coupled with his frankness and plebeian interests. He grew up in an ordinary neighborhood in Far Rockaway, Queens, and was encouraged by his father from an early age to figure out how things work and think for himself. He was naturally inquisitive and developed the habit of thinking things through in his own terms, which were not necessarily the same ones that were taught in school. This helped him to excel in math and science, and by the time he was in his late twenties he was well-known in the physics world from his graduate work at Princeton and his participation in the Manhattan Project. Major universities went into bidding wars to hire him; he started at Cornell but later moved to Caltech, where he remained for the rest of his career.

Feynman may have been a little socially awkward, but he was fairly gregarious and enjoyed people very much. However, he detested pomposity and pretension and quickly became impatient with sloppy thinking from anyone. This put him at odds with many academics, particularly those in the humanities; he describes the people in the philosophy department at Cornell as "particularly inane." His dislike of sloppy thinking came to a head in the early 1950's, when he was invited to an interdisciplinary conference in New York whose topic was "the ethics of inequality." He became outraged by some of the ridiculous statements made by other participants:

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read – something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn't read any books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means."

So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read."

Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became kind of an empty business: "Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio," and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.

This side of Feynman means a lot to me, because it reinforces what I've thought for years, and right up to the present I become disturbed by the nonsense writing that I encounter everywhere. In fact the only way that I've found to solve this problem for myself has been to scrupulously limit my reading to carefully selected material: randomly foraging on the Internet – even at the so-called high-end intellectual websites – was starting to drive me nuts.

Feynman led a full life, was always curious and loved to pursue pretty women. He met women in bars and restaurants from Buffalo to Las Vegas to the Sunset Strip. He became a regular at a topless restaurant near Caltech, where he would work, meet people and sketch the dancers. In his spare time he tried all kinds of hobbies. While in Brazil he learned Portuguese and samba music. While in Japan he attempted to learn Japanese. He became interested in drawing and painting and actually did some good amateur work under the name of Ofey. He also became a proficient drummer and performed in a group called "The Three Quarks." Another time he ad-libbed with a cowbell for a rock group in Vancouver, and the bandleader said "Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on that cowbell! He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing!" Feynman got around, and he somehow became a participant in John Lilly's experiments in sensory deprivation tanks. In his later years he occasionally became somewhat reluctantly involved with government affairs. As always, he was outspoken about incompetence wherever he saw it, whether in the California school textbook selection process or in NASA.

Feynman is also a case study in intelligence: one of his biographies, which I haven't read, is titled Genius. The part of his intelligence that I can identify with is his extreme intellectual independence, but it was his scientific accomplishments, which put him in the ranks of the top twentieth century physicists, that made him famous. You might call him a patron saint of this blog, because he was all about doubting experts throughout his life. His intelligence took on a practical character, which may have had to do with the fact that he grew up during the Depression. He never read widely beyond technical literature and perhaps lacked confidence in his writing skills: why would he have dictated his memoirs to someone rather than write them himself? M.I.T. was of little help in this regard, because they allowed an astronomy class to partially fulfill his humanities requirement for graduation. As to his native intelligence, probably his Ashkenazi genetic and cultural heritage played a role there. Even so, in light of my comments about AI, Feynman himself is an example of how human mental capacities are becoming obsolete. One of his strongest skills was the use of approximations and shortcuts to make complex mathematical calculations, and that was a critical advantage during his early years as a physicist, when electronic calculators didn't exist and mechanical calculators were crude and unreliable by current standards. It isn't hard to project into the future and imagine the mental apparatus of Feynman or anyone else being eclipsed by AI at some point. But that doesn't detract at all from Feynman the man, who certainly would have been an interesting person to know.

Diary

I've started to read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" at a leisurely pace and will comment on it when I finish. There's not much to report otherwise. I've planted tomato seeds for the season, and the first one germinated in just four days. I now use a heating pad under the container, and this accelerates the process considerably. Most of the vegetable garden belongs to my partner, and she is way ahead of me with the cold-weather crops. Although we had a warm winter and the spring has also been warm so far, the plants are still emerging very slowly and it is only just starting to turn green outside.

For most of the time we've lived in Vermont I've fed the birds year-round, though technically you're not supposed to because bird feeders attract bears when they're not hibernating. We had some trouble in 2014, when a bear bent the metal pole holding the feeders, ate all the suet and crushed the tube feeder to eat the sunflower seeds. That happened twice, and I began to bring in the feeders at night, which worked for the remainder of that season. We didn't have any more trouble until this April 20. At 2:30 A.M. I heard noises in the yard and turned on the light to see a large black bear lying next to the bent pole and finishing off the sunflower seeds from the broken tube. It had eaten the suet first. I opened the sliding door and banged on it to get the bear's attention, and when it saw me it ambled off. Until November I'll be feeding the birds nyjer only, which the bears don't seem to like. The woodpeckers and chickadees will have to find food elsewhere, but they shouldn't have much difficulty now that insects are out. Fortunately the suet feeder is indestructible and the tube feeder manufacturer sent me a free new tube. I was able to fix the bent pole by breaking it off from the stand, removing the stub inserted into the stand, cutting off the damaged portion from the pole and reinserting the pole into the stand. The hummingbirds will be returning soon.

In other news, I sold my entire comic book collection in one lot for $1000. The buyer, who is a professional dealer, will make quite a profit from them, as I think he can sell them individually for more than $2000. Since this isn't really a hobby for me and the overall condition of the comics is poor, I didn't want to bother with putting in the time and effort to eke out the maximum possible profit. I bought the comics for a total of about $25 and they have been sitting in bags since I stopped reading them in 1964. When I was in high school I went with friends to Palisades Park in New Jersey, at which time I cut out several coupons from the comics, and this negatively impacted their value. My most valuable comic was Justice League of America #1, which I bought in 1960 for 10¢. If I had immediately put it into a plastic case and kept it for 56 years in good atmospheric conditions, I could have sold it now for more than $5000. If I had bought 100 of them for $10, they would now be worth $500,000! I always find it interesting how arbitrarily collectibles come to be valued. On the one hand this indicates how sentiments and emotions such as nostalgia influence perceptions, and on the other hand it shows how difficult it is to predict the future accurately. The unpredictability of comic book values can be seen as convincing evidence that no one is able to predict certain aspects of the future with much accuracy – if people were able to we would currently be witnessing not just more billionaires but a few trillionaires.

Human Relations

When I read The Selfish Gene several years ago, I was struck not particularly by Dawkins's presentation of the work of W.D. Hamilton and others, but by the conceptual leap from species-centered evolution to gene-centered evolution. I don't follow these topics in any detail and am more interested in broader themes that influence one's worldview. Accordingly, I have increasingly focused on the conceptual limitations of humans and why at any given time we tend to have some ideas rather than others. My current impression is that, though still significant, genes as described by Dawkins are just one of several elements of importance in the understanding of life. Other elements might include the physical properties of the local universe, symbiosis and the nature of ecosystems. I don't think genes are everything, because basic Darwinism is still intact, at least in terms of the logic of evolutionary processes, and Darwin knew nothing about genetics. More telling to me is the fact that all species eventually become extinct, and with them many or all of their genes, indicating that genes are far less immortal than Dawkins seems to suggests in that book. Large mammals like us are carrying around loads of genes that serve no purpose and probably never will.

Even so, realizing that you can think about life without thinking about species was an eye-opener to me. This, along with newer scientific research, makes it possible to see humanity quite differently from the way we did just fifty years ago. It is currently estimated that only about ten percent of the human body is distinctly human, and the other ninety percent is made up of microorganisms, so we really are walking blobs of protoplasm that trillions of microorganisms call home. The biological processes behind all of this are one thing and our cultural conceptions of ourselves are something else entirely. I like thinking about what it means to be human, and increasingly science seems to be saying that we may not be what we think we are, and that some of our ideas may have more to do with instincts and cultural influences than with true self-understanding or an accurate assessment of human nature.

Human relations always seem to be fraught with problems, yet we habitually idealize them. When we think of castles and knights in shining armor we think of romance and damsels in distress, but the reality is that people lived in castles for protection from those who would kill or enslave them, or, conversely, to enslave those who lived outside their walls. I have noted that war seems to be here to stay, with groups like ISIL still around and Hitler on the rampage not that long ago. Recently I have been thinking about what actually underlies contentious relationships. What I'm finding is that if you look closely enough, nearly all relationships are contentious to one degree or another. As I've said, the typical work environment is particularly fake, because employees understand that they must control their behavior in order to secure an income. They make conscious efforts to suppress behavior that might lead to their dismissal and act friendlier than they may truly feel. But what about personal relationships, where on the surface two or more people spend time together ostensibly because they enjoy each other's company? This realm of thought can become unsettling if you apply it to your personal life.

I still like to think in the context of hunter-gatherer models, which refer back to a time when we were basically the same as we are now but didn't have any of the benefits or conceptual changes that later accompanied civilization. We lived in small eusocial groups that were culturally and genetically homogeneous and survived in a large part due to cooperation. Even then there would have been animosity and violence, with competition for mates and social status. Small groups of males must have been cooperative among themselves, but were protective against unaffiliated males, which is reflected in modern enthusiasm for team sports. I have always found male friendships somewhat superficial; they tend to revolve around some shared activity and evoke a tribal feeling that makes them seem like male bonding rituals. Men seem to be geared toward solving problems and achieving objectives in small groups. Women, in contrast, seem to be geared to cooperate in activities that are related to childrearing: they are more concerned with maintaining a network of female friends for work-sharing. Caring for babies is work-intensive, and women have had to evolve cooperative behaviors in order to succeed at it. This may sound sexist, but based only on my experience the majority of men and women follow these patterns. To say that men and women tend to exhibit different behavioral patterns is not to say that there is no overlap in their potentialities, but that men and women tend to have different preferences based on earlier specialization related to survival requirements.

That brings me to monogamous male-female relationships, which I think are the most important ones to the majority of us but also the most problematic. Apparently there is a deeply embedded distrust between the sexes, in that estrus has no external manifestations in humans. The standard interpretation for this phenomenon is that women have been sexually promiscuous for a long time, and in order to avert male wrath and infanticide they have evolved this feature. That seems plausible to me, and I'm sorry to say that I don't think romantic relationships as portrayed in the media have much to support them scientifically. The way I think of it, men and women once had so little attraction to each other that in order to reproduce, more than for any other species, sex became incredibly intoxicating to both. Men and women typically have such different interests that cohabitation often becomes problematic. Among the most conspicuous changes that have occurred during my lifetime, improved birth control and female financial independence immediately led to a high divorce rate, delayed marriages and an increased proportion of single adults. As soon as remaining single became plausible for women its popularity took off. Having been dumped twice myself, I can attest that women can be as hard, insensitive and lacking in conscience as the most thuggish of men when it suits their purposes and they have the means available. Evolution has masked female aggression by giving women baby-like voices, producing the appearance of vulnerability when in fact they outlive men on average. Contrary to their outward appearances, women hold no monopoly on empathy.

The reason why I always return to eusociality and other biological sources in order to explain human behavior is that the ideas that one encounters in the public domain are invariably misleading if not outright false. The ideas that humans are inherently good or that God is watching us to make sure that we make the correct moral choices are so absurd that it can be intellectually challenging to live in a country like the U.S., where so many take them seriously. Flawed reasoning and the denial of empirical evidence underlie everything in the U.S. from its constitution to its conception of its role in the world, and our politicians are expected to espouse ridiculous jingoistic and religious nonsense in order to win popular votes. Inclusiveness is fancifully expected to solve the problem of inequality while ignoring the destructive effects of capitalism, and the very mention of overpopulation is taboo when that is clearly a major factor behind many of the problems in the world today.

I have been particularly disappointed by the emphasis that philosophers have placed on reason as the basis of morality. To be sure, many aspects of our behavior can be seen to contain rational elements, but rationality is not the source of our behavioral predispositions, and it is misleading to discuss morality, religion or political systems without reference to our evolutionary characteristics. We say that we love liberty but neglect to mention that the price of liberty is often someone else's servitude and that insufficient constraints on liberty may render the planet uninhabitable. We say that we love equality while vigorously supporting an economic system that discourages it. We say that we want world peace while provoking violent opposition worldwide with economic and military intervention. It must also be stated that we have the same human nature as the members of ISIL, and as abhorrent and crazy as their behavior may seem, under the right circumstances we might behave exactly as they do. On some level they are acting instinctively to vanquish a perceived enemy that threatens their group. Because of our evolutionary past, any threatened group might theoretically behave in the manner of ISIL given the right conditions.

Obviously I'm not going to solve the world's problems in one little blog post, but at least I can emphasize what I think would be some steps in the right direction. The currently popular "American values" theory of foreign policy has to go. American values promote over-consumption, waste of natural resources, pollution, overpopulation, marginalization of minorities and disregard for disruptions caused beyond our borders. If anything, America is a bastion of personal gratification, something that should never be copied anywhere. As world leaders, rather than promoting ourselves as a model, we ought to be looking at how to transition out of capitalism, reduce consumption, control population growth, reverse environmental destruction and institute a system of governance that fairly restricts undesirable behaviors and eliminates the vagaries of participatory democracy along with the poor outcomes that it generates. A good start would be the public recognition that human nature is not what it's usually made out to be, that we are organisms governed by irrational impulses over which we have limited control, that what benefits one group often has negative consequences for another group, and that the future of mankind contains more unknowns than we should willingly accept.

Diary

The lull continues, though my activities are slowly moving toward summer ones. Although it's only April, if you stargaze at four A.M. the sky is now arranged the same as it will be on a summer evening, with the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way prominent to the south. I just took a quick look at Saturn, which is currently near Antares in Scorpius. When you familiarize yourself with the night sky you begin to feel as if you are living inside a giant clock, and it is easy to understand our ancestors' fascination with it. I'll be planting tomato seeds soon.

We continue to follow the presidential campaigns, and if you are able to stay awake through the Democratic debates they are surprisingly substantive compared to past years. One thing that I find interesting is that the media approaches the Democrats differently from the Republicans. They tend to ask more serious questions to the Democratic candidates, because that is how Hillary and Bernie have consciously framed their campaigns, but the Republican debates are designed to evoke controversial and grandiose statements, since Trump is politically ignorant. I was recently encouraged by hearing Wolf Blitzer of CNN ask Bernie Sanders a fairly sophisticated question about minimum wage increases. If minimum wages are raised, won't this lead to wage inflation and eventually push prices up to a level where those who had low wages will once again have low wages due to inflation?  I think the answer is yes, and this reveals some of the shortfall in Bernie Sanders' analysis. Bernie is not an original or deep thinker and looks a little like an FDR copycat. However, I still far prefer him to Hillary Clinton, who seems like the George H.W. Bush of the Democratic Party: she lacks "the vision thing," without an original idea in her head. While she is good on details and is generally cautious, her incrementalist approach, which mimics that of Barack Obama, is doomed to fail when large systemic changes are required. In my view, Obama has been a mediocre president in part because of his insistence on making decisions through an inclusive process of consensus. This approach absolves the president of responsibility for poor policy decisions and provides greater influence than is warranted to self-interested parties. The same accusation of weak leadership that has been made of Barack Obama would be made of Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders may have gaps in his understanding, but he clearly has greater leadership ability than either Clinton or Obama.

I've ordered books by Sean Carroll, Frans de Waal, Richard Feynman, Czeslaw Milosz, Simone de Beauvoir and Stendhal, which I'll read in due course. I am particularly enjoying the ability to buy used books online at very low prices. The low prices are psychologically freeing, because I feel less compulsion to finish books that I don't like. In the past I would have forced myself to finish books by George Saunders, Tom Perrotta and Virginia Woolf, but now I just stop reading them and set them aside without hesitation. I also seem to have outgrown whatever attraction I ever had to libraries and bookstores, and I rarely go to them anymore. Once upon a time, when books were hard to come by, Borders seemed like a godsend, but how quickly it became obsolete. Many still enjoy rummaging through bookstores and libraries for the surprise find, the sensory presence of books or the feeling of community that they inspire, but as a practical matter if you know what you like there is no sacrifice required when you bypass them entirely. You can find anything online, and if you knew what others were reading in those bookstores and libraries you might well be shocked to discover how little you have in common with them.

Diary

There isn't much to report today, but there isn't much to do either, so I'm returning to my writing habit to occupy my mind. It's a dreary, rainy day in the middle of mud season and I don't have on hand any books that I want to read. On top of that I have no desire to socialize, because I'm still recovering from a talkative weekend visitor. Fortunately she was articulate, knowledgeable and polite, making her presence on the whole desirable, but unfortunately she seems to have used up my reservoir of social receptiveness for the month, and I'm ready to retreat to my solitary habits.

The visitor lives in Washington, D.C. and confirms something I've observed repeatedly: city dwellers are more socially adept than rural dwellers. I find it a little ironic that I can be in social situations and notice this incongruity while not being particularly social myself. A high percentage of the people I've known who have lived only in rural areas really have behaved like hayseeds compared to city people, who obviously have acquired a variety of skills and increased their social awareness simply by living in environments that require it. I don't think the two groups understand each other very well, and perhaps I do better than most because I have spent considerable time with each. I haven't always enjoyed it, because rural people really are yokels in the sense that their worldviews cannot be the same as mine, and, to the extent that I am able to understand a variety of worldviews, the urban dwellers aren't much better. In political terms you might think of rural people as red-staters and urban people as blue-staters. I don't identify with either, but consider blue-staters more socially aware.

The interesting thing to me is that if you look at either group closely from a sociological standpoint, one cannot be considered inherently superior to the other. While the rural do suffer from a lack of exposure to ideas and ethnicities, the urban suffer from overexposure to an ideological interpretation of reality that eases the tensions created by the complexity and stresses unique to cities. In cities you are routinely exposed to others who, on an instinctive level, arouse suspicions and fears which, if left unattended, may generate an assortment of pathologies. Thus cities develop implicit rules of conduct to reduce tensions, and those who inhabit them absorb them as part of the culture. It would be unrealistic to expect rural people to know or understand that ideology, because they have little exposure to it beyond what they see in the media.

What I find is that there are limits to how well I can relate to city dwellers, because their cultural exposure tends to confine them to their particular ideological orientation, which, though broader than what one finds in rural areas, still has limitations. For example, it is cities, not the countryside, that foster political correctness. One of the reasons why I like having my own blog is that it permits me to clarify my ideas without having to defend them against the ideological intrusions of those who don't know why they think what they think. Although I realize that even my own ideas have originated in cultural contexts over which I had no control, I am still surprised that so few people are able to recognize how ingested and derivative their ideas may be. When people don't know why they think what they think they take on the character of automatons. If you are able to step back a little from the cultural indoctrination that you've been subjected to the world is a messier place than you ever imagined and certitudes begin to resemble nonsense.

Fiction or Memoir?

Some time ago I had a brief exchange with John in which he said that he found memoirs preferable to fiction. Reading Le Clézio reminded me of the benefits of memoirs, but it is still a thorny issue for me to decide what to read. The appeal of fiction is related to our innate attraction to stories, folklore and oral history, which all predate written language and contribute to the fabric of culture. Modern fiction performs some of those functions, but, whether in purely commercial or literary form, it now contains unrelated elements that divert it from some of those earlier purposes. In the simplest terms, fiction's appeal can lie in entertainment, information or aesthetics. Popular fiction consists mainly of the first two, and literary fiction, in theory at least, consists primarily of the third. A memoir could be any of the three, depending on who wrote it and how well it is written.

The problem with fiction is that once you've read enough of it it becomes increasingly less compelling for those who dislike repetition. For example, I have never read any works by Charles Dickens, and at this stage I'm not going to bother, because from what I can gather his novels are excessively sentimental; I'm sure I've already read better ones, and it would probably be torture for me to read Dickens now. Many adults lose interest in fiction and turn to nonfiction, which is more useful in most cases. Some readers like fiction for its information value, where the author knows a lot about a subject or has done extensive research on it. These readers find it more enjoyable to absorb information that way, but I would rather go straight to the sources in nonfiction and skip the extraneous when I'm curious about something. Under these conditions I am confined to aesthetic fiction, which tends to be the most contrived type. You're probably sick of hearing what I have to say on this topic, but the reason I go on about it is that it's my best hope if I'm going to read fiction at all. In general it suffers from deficiencies similar to those that I find in modern art. The works skew toward literary fashions and the pretense of whatever the leading critics, creative writing programs or publishers happen to considered meritorious at any given moment. What I have usually found is that I don't share their taste. Commercialism directly or indirectly places an upper limit on the quality of new fiction, and although literary fiction isn't as commercial as other types, the literary establishment, which is accountable to no one, has been falling down on its job for as long as I've been reading.

At first glance it appears that the reading of memoirs might avert some of these problems. However, there is still a minefield to contend with. These days a memoir is likely to meet the specific agenda of the author and relate to objectives that don't interest me at all. Politicians write them to promote their political careers. Businessmen write them to promote their business careers. Writers write them to promote their literary careers. Many people would be fine with rewriting their life story in order to make themselves appear more desirable than they actually are. Even so, though I haven't as of yet read many memoirs, I think that they have the potential to offer the kind of writing that would suit me best. That would be the writing of an author who has lived a little, has thoughtful observations to make, is articulate and isn't dull and unimaginative or constantly alluding to the works of others. This sounds simple enough, but I can't say that I've come across much writing that meets these criteria. Rousseau's Confessions is a favorite; I liked The African and an excerpt that I read from Julio Ramón Ribeyro. Technically Walden is a memoir, and I liked that. I could have done without Dreams from My Father. Otherwise I've read memoir-like fiction, which sometimes works, e.g. The Mandarins. But fiction lets the author off the hook through the mechanism of the fictive voice; when that is the only voice in a work the author may never be held accountable for misconceptions and untruths present there, which can conveniently be attributed to artistic license; elements within that fiction can be factually incorrect with impunity for the author. Depending on your point of view, an extended fiction can be construed as a lie. I would prefer writing in which the author says "I think that...," taking full responsibility for every word. Frustratingly for me, it is difficult to find honest first-person writing that has been written by someone who has genuine insights, whose motivation is not primarily financial or professional, and who possesses true eloquence. You are more likely to find it in nonfiction, where there is a basic accountability with respect to facts, but the price you pay for that is nonfiction's often impersonal, dry narrative, in which the technical nature of the writing makes it unpalatable at times.

My next reading project will be to identify suitable memoirs or autobiographies to read.

The African

In my quest for good writing I came across The African, by J.M.G. Le Clézio, a short memoir written mainly about his father. The family was split up at the outbreak of World War II, with the mother and children living in Nice and the father working as a rural doctor in Nigeria. After the war they reunited in Nigeria, but by then Le Clézio was already eight, and his father was a stranger to him. The memoir is a thoughtful effort by a son to understand his father, which in this case requires a deep understanding of Africa and the effects it can have on those who live there.

Along the way, Le Clézio seems to have absorbed much of his father's love of the continent and a simmering disapproval of colonialism:
When I read British "colonial" novels of those years, or the years just prior to our arrival in Nigeria – for example Joyce Cary, the author of Mister Johnson – they are completely unfamiliar to me. When I read William Boyd, who also spent part of his childhood in British West Africa, I can't relate to it either. His father was a D.O. (in Accra, Ghana, I believe). I never experienced what he describes – the cumbersome colonialism, the ridiculous antics of the expatriate white society on the coast, all of the pettiness that children take particular notice of, the disdain for the native people, of whom they knew only the faction of servants who had to indulge the whims of their masters' children, and above all, that sort of clique that both unifies and separates children of the same blood and in which they are able to glimpse an ironical reflection of their defects and their masquerades, and that, in a manner of speaking, forms the training ground for racial awareness that, in their case, takes the place of the school of human awareness. Thank God I can say all of that is completely foreign to me....

Where does that sense of deeply rooted repulsion I have felt for the colonial system since my childhood stem from? I must have picked up a word, a thought about the ridiculous behavior of administrators such as the district officer of Abakaliki whom my father took me to see and who lived among a pack of Pekingese dogs that were fed filet of beef and biscuits, and given exclusively mineral water to drink. Or else the tales of Great White Hunters traveling in convoys on lion and elephant hunts, sporting rifles with telescopic sights and exploding bullets who, when they encountered my father in those remote lands, took him for a safari organizer and questioned him regarding the presence of wild animals. My father would answer "In the twenty years I've been living here, I've never seen one, unless you're talking about snakes or vultures."

His mother seems to have shared some of that sentiment:
I can't recall what she said to my brother and me, when she spoke of the country where she'd lived with my father, the place we would join him in one day. I only know that when my mother decided to marry my father and to go and live in Cameroon, her Parisian friends had said to her, "What, with the savages?" and she, after everything my father had told her, simply responded "They're no more savage than the people in Paris."

Parts of the book remind me a little of my childhood, though the contrasts in mine were far less spectacular than his. Le Clézio's father was strict and taciturn, and the rules that children had to follow were more confining than those that exist today:
He was full of idiosyncrasies and conventions, about which I hadn't the slightest inkling: children should never speak at the table without being authorized, they should not run, or play, or laze in bed. They could not eat between meals, and never eat sweet things. They should eat without laying their hands on the table, could not leave anything in their plates and should be careful never to chew with their mouths open.

One cannot help but be moved by Le Clézio's account of the jolt that Africa gave him:
...I remember everything I received when I arrived in Africa for the first time: such intense freedom that it burned inside of me, inebriated me, gave me so much pleasure it was painful. 

I don't mean to speak of exoticism: children are absolute strangers to that vice. Not because they see through beings and objects, but because they see nothing but them: to me a tree, a hollow in the land, a column of carpenter ants, a band of turbulent kids looking for a game, an old man with blurry eyes holding out an emaciated hand, a street in an African village on market day, were every street in every village, every old man, every child, every ant. That treasure is still alive deep within me, it cannot be eradicated. Much more than simple memories, it is made up of basic truths.

This writing has a quiet intensity that, for lack of a better term, some might call "heartfelt." One doesn't often encounter it in literature, and the only other writer whom I can think of offhand who exudes a similar emotional energy is D.H. Lawrence in his early works. Le Clézio is struggling with his past and trying to make sense of it, as must everyone to one degree or another. If, for contrast, you compare this writing to Proust's, Proust seems like one of those spoiled and insular colonial children and has chosen to concentrate on describing social protocol; after several thousand pages, he still hasn't quite figured out what Charles Swann, Robert de Saint-Loup or most of the other characters are all about – will he ever? For me, Proust seems as if he is sleepwalking through life. Although there is something to be said for stylistic elegance in which a certain ambiance is captured or an unusual effect is made, these are not substitutes for real insight. There is as much humanity to be found in this little book as you may ever find elsewhere, and it is encouraging to me that the Nobel Committee for Literature gets things right once in a while.

Diary

As you get older, particularly when you have no pressing duties to perform, your mind may begin to wander and delve far back into your past. I am almost as old as my mother was when she began to display Alzheimer's symptoms; before she became incapacitated she went through her possessions and mailed various items that she thought belonged to each of us. Perhaps I'm preparing for death too, because I have been pondering the past and going through my possessions. If you look closely and remove the adult filters to which you've become accustomed, the past can be deeply unsettling.

Part of my interest in the past is simple curiosity. Although I was never close to my coworkers, I am interested in their lives and the fates of the companies for which we worked. While you are working, it is difficult to see beyond the present, but over several decades the arcs of people's lives become visible and the life cycles of industries come into focus. When I started work in printing, LP record albums were at a height in popularity, and there were large plants in Terre Haute and Indianapolis that printed record jackets. I worked at both of those plants before moving to Louisville to work at a smaller commercial printer. With the popularity of cassette tapes in the 1980's, sales of vinyl LP's began to decline, and when CD's came along the demand for LP records plummeted. The record jacket plants continued to print record jackets for several years, and they printed cassette inserts while cassettes were popular. However, the printed packaging requirements for recorded music continued to decline, and the two plants gradually switched to other kinds of packaging such as folding cartons and blister cards. My recent investigations show that the two record jacket plants and the Louisville printer have all permanently closed down. What I found interesting is that a new packaging plant has opened in Indianapolis, and some people whom I used to work with from the other three plants now work there. One of those people is John Barnes. When I knew him I was his supervisor in Terre Haute, and he was a long-haired pot-smoking hippie. He went on to become the plant manager in Terre Haute! Most of the people from that era (1979-1987) have retired or died, and I find it uncanny that some of them are now working together at a common location.

After I left Louisville I worked in an altogether different printing environment, commercial web printing, at four different plants in Illinois. Web printing constitutes a much larger segment of the printing industry, and it has also been undergoing a long period of consolidation. From that period (1987-2007), only one plant at which I worked has closed. At least four people I knew in Dixon have died since I left, but many of my former Illinois coworkers are still working. One of them switched industries entirely and now works in medical devices. My final job was at RR Donnelley, the largest printing company in the world, and it is in the process of breaking up into three separate companies.

A different part of my brain has been activated by looking at my old comic books. I still have about 200 comic books that I collected from the late 1950's to the mid-1960's. They have been sitting in bags since then, and every once in a while I get them out and look at them. Since I'm not interested in collecting comics and they've gone up in value, I'm going to sell them. One that I bought for ten cents in 1960 could be worth over a thousand dollars now. I'm in the process of inventorying them and will send them to a dealer in Massachusetts for appraisal.

It is even stranger to look at your old comics than it is to investigate your previous employers and coworkers. My mental processes have changed completely since I first read comics, and I'm not the same person that I was then. Personal identity has some basis in genes, memory and cultural associations, but the proto-you is still fundamentally a different person from the current you. In a sense personal identity is a man-made construction that we generate in the context of our cultural environments. When I return to earlier mental states, it reinforces in me the idea that I have an identity beyond the one that has been assigned to me by civilization, and this partially explains my tendency to be independent and my preference for divergent thinking.

Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life

I've finished reading this latest work from E.O. Wilson, and though as expected I agree with him on just about everything, I found the book a little tiresome despite its brevity. The main idea is relatively straightforward: biodiversity is shrinking, and as a precaution we ought to set aside half the planet as a protected wilderness:
For the first time in history a conviction has developed among those who can actually think more than a decade ahead that we are playing a global endgame. Humanity's grasp on the planet is not growing strong. It is growing weaker. Our population is growing too large for safety and comfort. Fresh water is growing short, the atmosphere and the seas are increasingly polluted as a result of what has transpired on the land. The climate is changing in ways unfavorable to life, except for microbes, jellyfish, and fungi. For many species it is already fatal.
Among the facts he presents, we have identified only two million out of the estimated eight million species on Earth, and the rate of extinction is currently estimated at 877 times higher than what it was before humans came along. Wilson's primary argument is that biodiversity stabilizes the environment and that we don't know what will happen to us if the current wave of mass extinctions continues; if half the Earth is protected, that should be enough to preserve at least 80 percent of the existing species.

I interpret Wilson's position as an update of the warnings made by Thomas Malthus two hundred years ago. Essentially he is saying that our species may become extinct because overpopulation may make it impossible to sustain ourselves, and he is adding that our destruction of the environment is creating an even larger challenge than the prospect of running out of food. The shortcoming of the book is that it meanders over this turf without sticking to a controlled argument and leaves the reader distracted by an accumulation of superfluous information. Much of the information is interesting in its own right, but its presentation detracts from the pointed subject matter summed up by the title. Half-Earth is getting little attention in the press, and if Wilson wasn't marginalized already as a thinker, he is clearly becoming so now. At 86, and having suffered a stroke, it is remarkable that he has the stamina to continue working at this pace – this is his thirty-second popular book – but you have to question his efficacy at this point.

Like many of Wilson's books, portions of the text are devoted to descriptions of unusual organisms, and in this instance they don't particularly support his argument. He also describes in detail regions of the world that would be suitable for preservation as wilderness. He often inserts personal anecdotes about his experiences in the wild. These parts of the book seem more like recruiting tools to attract people to his profession, because he is keenly aware that true naturalists like him are becoming a rarity. The jobs now available to young biologists are far more specialized than they used to be, and it seems unlikely that future generations will produce generalists like him.

Wilson is somewhat more effective when he describes just how destructive humans have been to ecosystems. This is particularly true of isolated islands:
Hawaii, universally acknowledged as the extinction capital of the world, had the most to lose when the Polynesian voyagers first came ashore, and with the later help of Europeans and Asian colonists, they extinguished most of its native bird species. Gone are the native eagle, a flightless ibis, a ground species the size of a turkey, and more than twenty species of drepanidid honeycreepers, the latter small pollen feeders, many with brilliantly colored plumage and long curved bills that probe deeply into tube-petaled flowers. And many more – in excess of forty-five species – vanished following the arrival of the Polynesians before A.D. 1000, and twenty-five followed the entry of the first Europeans and Asians two centuries ago. Oddly, the feathery remains of some of the most colorful extinct species are preserved in the cloaks of the old Hawaiian royalty. 
He devotes too little space to countering the arguments for "new conservation" put forth by "Anthropocene enthusiasts" such as Erle Ellis, who says: "Stop trying to save the planet. Nature is gone. You are living on a used planet. If this bothers you, get over it. We now live in the Anthropocene – a geological epoch in which the Earth's atmosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces." Wilson's refutation of this position is muted and haphazardly scattered throughout the book. His main argument, as far as I can make one out, is that ecosystems are complex beyond our current comprehension, that we don't know how most of them operate, and that it is sheer unfounded arrogance to state that we can somehow "manage" the environment to ensure human survival in the future.

He does get in a few jabs at scientists and environmentalists who embrace "Anthropocene ideology." He aptly compares some of them to contemporary economists who use complex mathematical models to explain economic behavior. I didn't think that he exploited this criticism enough, because it has been apparent in recent years that even the most sophisticated economic models produced by leading economists have been of little value for macroeconomic forecasting. Economics, insofar as it is a science, attempts to predict certain aggregate behaviors of one species; if it is doesn't work for one species, who would expect that, using similar techniques, conservationists would be able to predict the behaviors of millions of species, most of which haven't even been discovered yet? When it comes to the world's ecosystems, we have only the flimsiest understanding of them. The argument that humans are incapable of managing all of the living organisms on the planet in order to produce the outcomes we want is pretty much a no-brainer, and Wilson would have been more effective if he had devoted more space to that. In reading the book, one repeatedly senses his outrage at technological arrogance and the shortsightedness of capitalism, but many of his readers won't come away from it feeling that he has succeeded.

Because my worldview was already quite similar to that of Wilson, I am still able to see his proposal as a bold one that should be given credence. However, as it stands, the book is likely to be "shelved" literally and figuratively. I can only speculate that he was attempting to pull his punches a little so as to gain acceptance from a wide audience. In particular, he must be wary at this stage in his career of offending the large number of people who never warmed up to his ideas about sociobiology. Unfortunately, in America, that group still includes a majority of the public, as well as a majority in business, politics and academia. Whatever his weaknesses, Wilson is a truly courageous thinker whose ideas are definitely worth considering.

Work

I have thought a lot about the nature of work, perhaps because I never fully adapted to the workforce. It is difficult to say exactly why that was the case, and my theory is that I have an innate preference for natural relations with others, i.e. the same kinds of relationships that our distant ancestors used to have, perhaps as far back as the hunter-gatherers. Whenever I had a job, I distinctly felt that my relationships with my supervisor and coworkers were contrived. After observing forced collegiality for over thirty years, I still think that my work relationships were based on false behavior. That partially had to do with my immediate recognition that I was not the same as the others, that we were not really a cohesive group, and that I didn't care in the slightest about career or organizational goals. Beyond the income provided, I didn't think it would matter in the least if any of the companies for which I worked ceased to exist. Actually, most of them have since shut down, and I doubt that anyone is mourning their loss. The crux of the matter probably relates to the fact that my work environments existed exclusively within the context of free markets and that the primary objective of the companies for which I worked was to make a profit. From my point of view it seemed as if other important factors such as whether the employees liked working there or whether the goods and services provided by the companies were desirable beyond narrow economic parameters were never examined or discussed at all, making the enterprises seem mindless and potentially foolhardy to me.

If you are critiquing this post as you read it, you may be thinking at this point that I just happen to have worked in a commercial environment that didn't suit me, and that perhaps I would have been happier doing something else. I've thought about that too, but haven't been able to come up with a solution, because the free-market economy directly or indirectly affects how nearly everyone makes a living. For example, I liked science in high school, so perhaps I ought to have had a scientific job. If you look closely at that, the jobs of most scientifically-trained workers are little different from those of others: they work at for-profit companies. If they are doing research they may have to jump through hoops to get funding; much of that funding comes from corporations or corporate-influenced government agencies. Engineers and medical doctors also work in environments with economic constraints and competitive infrastructures.

What if I had been an artist or writer? We recently watched a documentary on the painter David Hockney. For a modern painter, he isn't bad in my opinion. He worked hard for many years, was competitive and persistent, and he prevailed. However, to succeed at his level, you also have to be an entrepreneur, which instantly associates you with ordinary capitalists. Although I like some of his paintings, he is no Vermeer or Bruegel, and with comparable effort I could probably paint just as well as he does. Or perhaps I could have been a writer. As a writer I would never have been able to produce work fast enough, would not have fit in well in a writing program, would immediately have detested the literary establishment, and, with no entrepreneurial spirit, may well have ended up writing for pleasure without remuneration.

When I look back on my working years, I can't honestly say that I found them enjoyable, but they provided me with enough wear and tear to know something of the world. If I had to do it over again, rather than take the approach of finding a field that would be satisfying or in which I would be more likely to make important contributions, I would most likely take a vocational approach and try to find a path in which the least amount of stress and annoyance would result in the earliest possible retirement.

As an independent thinker I am immune to most of the mythologizing that accompanies those who have successful careers in any field. I know enough not to get carried away with hero-worship, and it is even difficult for me to identify people whom I might count as role models. Different people have different drives, over which they have little control, and admirers who seek to emulate the successful may not realize that success may require compromises that they would be unwilling or unable to make. Moreover, success often has unintended consequences for both individuals and society. I'll use Henry Ford as an example. Though he is revered as one of the greatest industrialists in history, his relationship with his only son, Edsel, was irreparably damaged by his drive for success, and he did not foresee the destructive effects that automobile manufacturing would have on the agrarian Michigan that he cherished; global warming is also in part his legacy. Regarding successful artists and writers, many have led uninteresting lives that wouldn't warrant a biography, and some have had psychiatric conditions with which I'd prefer not to be afflicted. In my experience, whenever I have looked closely at any highly successful person there is usually a prominent caveat that others seem to overlook. Finally, another aspect of work is its relationship to social status; in this society, one's job almost defines one's social standing. As I've said, social climbing is not in my blood.

Don't construe my views on work to be entirely negative. I think we all need to work at something, but whenever possible that work is best separated from the models imposed on us by the economic structure that we happen to inhabit and the pressures that we encounter daily from prevailing social norms. The psychological needs met by work can be satisfied by something as simple as painting a shed, installing a new mailbox or posting on your personal blog. Working without compensation has been a liberating experience for me.

Basic Income

On several posts I've made allusions to the likelihood that technology will eventually make earning a living extremely difficult, but I haven't said much about how this problem could be resolved. Fortunately, there have been people thinking about this for quite some time, and I suspect that some form of basic income may eventually come to be used in all developed countries, because there may be no better alternatives. At present, basic income is being discussed seriously in Europe, where Switzerland is holding a referendum on it this June. Worldwide, there is discussion of the topic, with supporters and opponents ranging from serious thinkers to cranks. In the U.S., basic income is occasionally presented as a potential replacement for the current welfare system. As you might expect, most American economists have a highly blinkered view of the subject and can scarcely think beyond traditional labor economics. I stopped paying attention to economists such as Paul Krugman several years ago, because like most mainstream economists he appears to be unable to envision a future in which capitalism implodes. In my view, capitalism will inevitably end simply because economic competition entails a powerful incentive to decrease labor costs, and that trend has been unmistakable over the last fifty years.

One of the main causes of the current insurgencies in both American political parties is the prolonged state of low income growth. Real incomes for the middle class have remained stagnant for decades, and there is nothing on the horizon indicating a change in that status. The topic is usually discussed in terms of income inequality, and economists such as Thomas Piketty advocate higher taxation on the wealthy in order to rebalance equality. As an economist, Piketty is far from radical, and, like Krugman, he doesn't seem to find economic competition inherently problematic. In my view there is in principle no reason for economic entities to discontinue the driving down of wages. If you are running a for-profit corporation, it is your fiduciary responsibility to move jobs overseas when labor costs are lower there and to install computers, software and robots whenever they reduce operating costs compared to hiring people. Although this inevitably leads to a scarcity of jobs and lower wages, this manner of operating a business is fundamental to the capitalist model, and it can't be changed without degrading the very idea of economic competition, which carries almost religious status in the U.S.

The principal irony I find in capitalist mythology is that here, precisely while we are witnessing the success of large corporations, these same corporations are toying with their future demise by creating a large underclass which one day may be unable to afford their products. That hasn't happened yet, but you can see signs of it in the falling quality of many consumer products. Because most consumer products are designed to be sold to the middle class, there is an upper limit on their price, and with falling incomes the middle class can only afford cheaper products. We already seem to be in a race to the bottom in product quality. What we now call food deserts in inner cities may expand to suburbs, and deprivation of other goods and services will increase when businesses have no economic incentives to locate in poor neighborhoods. I see no hope for places like Ferguson, Missouri.

The primary drawback to the concept of basic income is that its time may not have come. For now it could work well in a wealthy developed country with a large population of unemployable citizens. For me, its real interest lies further out, when technology has made it almost impossible to find a job, when an economy becomes so automated that there is no need for economic competition and little demand for human labor of any kind. Barring an unforeseen disaster between now and then, from that point onward capitalism may be viewed as a driver of technological change that outlived its usefulness.

Reading

As someone who adopted reading relatively late, I have always been intrigued by how people think about it and what types of writing they prefer. For as long as I can remember there has been a "reading is good" mantra, and it contains an ambiguity that still puzzles me today. There is nothing natural about reading, which is evidenced by the fact that almost none of our ancestors were literate. Books were not widely available until the nineteenth century, and the oldest systems of writing are only about five thousand years old, making it understandable that learning to read may come with difficulty to many who have no impairments in a biological sense. On the other hand, our facility with language is comparatively old; something resembling modern language was probably present seventy thousand years ago, and simpler linguistic communications were probably extant in our hominid ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Like many things, I tend to view reading through an evolutionary lens. In its greatest impact, literacy led to a sudden, unanticipated acceleration in technological development that started by the Middle Ages and has continuously changed civilization up to the present. Without written language and reading, the dissemination of knowledge would have been stunted, perpetuating the isolated and redundant reinvention of similar tools and methods. Without written records and communications, life today might resemble life in the fifteenth century; perhaps Europeans would never have colonized the Americas, the automobile would not have been invented, etc. For what it's worth, on the positive side, the world's population would be far lower than it is today and there would be no anthropogenic global warming or nuclear weapons.

While these unanticipated consequences are certainly something to think about in a historical context, to most of us reading is a personal matter that relates to three specific areas: our vocation, our social life and our private entertainment. I recall hearing that by attending a liberal arts college I would "learn how to learn" and be set for life. In hindsight that sounds like promotional material for a product. When I look at my college peers, the main impact of college seems to have been that they became literate enough to get jobs, and after that they pretty much stopped learning, at least insofar as reading is concerned. The impression I have is that the human mind has little desire to learn for its own sake, and my college acquaintances don't seem in their subsequent lives to have become vast repositories of learning; though they do know more than they used to, most of that additional knowledge was derived from practical experience, not books. Of course, some college students do end up becoming academics, but even there, with a life of books and reading, there is the narrowing effect of academic specialization. One of the reasons why I was never cut out to be an academic was that I developed a sense early on that many academics tended to be playing a career game that ultimately had nothing to do with understanding.

For most people, particularly younger ones, an important aspect of reading has to do with how it integrates their social lives, or, more precisely, their perceptions of their social lives, since actual engagement seems in some sense to be a thing of the past. I can't comment on this with much authority, because I am profoundly indifferent to social media, but Sherry Turkle and others have shown how smartphones and social media have altered how young people perceive reality. From my vantage point, that environment, though superficial to the extreme, allows its participants to communicate rapidly and precisely according to the social standards that currently prevail, but the texting world has no appeal to me. Here I think the social setting that has arisen in conjunction with commercial interests is unstable and is unlikely to be sustainable without further development, because it doesn't meet the psychological needs of those who inhabit that culture. However, that evolution is ongoing, and it is still possible that social media will one day become effective at meeting psychological needs at a deeper level than they currently do.

A third domain of reading is private entertainment, which I suppose applies to aesthetic works such as poetry and fiction as well as nonfiction. There is an aspect of literary fiction that overlaps with vocational choices, as in academic careers, which I think has a tendency to degrade the purely aesthetic aspects of writing in those instances where the actual motivator is a paycheck. I've already made several posts on the pitfalls of the literary establishment, so I won't harangue you any more about that. What prompted me to write this post in the first place was my awareness of how writing, in the form of prose, fiction and poetry, including that found on the Internet, fills needs beyond work and socialization. Private entertainment interests a segment of the population in which bibliophiles and web surfers converge to form a population whose lives hinge vicariously on the written words of others. This is a group that I have often complained about, because on the Internet they usually show no interest in reciprocal communication, and ostensibly they don't seem to think beyond their personal gratification. For some, reading may become a private experience that makes up for the absence of a social life. That category includes socially inept people who can't be bothered with or don't know how to develop actual relationships, for whom reading becomes a substitute life, and perhaps also a small number of people who simply love the written word for its own sake regardless of its vocational or social benefits. The most private may be the hardest to engage, because they may have no desire to communicate with others, thus contributing to some of my Internet chagrin.

Because reading did not come naturally to me I grew to expect a lot from it if I were to make the effort, and thus I arrived at my current status as a picky reader who finds much writing unsatisfactory. I have gradually retreated to this blog, where I can at least make an attempt to write things the way I would like to read them, and where perhaps I can strike a chord with a reader, known or unknown, who may or may not be communicative. In fully engaged writing there is a certain intimacy that one may never experience elsewhere in life; the written word may allow you to come as close as you ever will to inhabiting someone else's brain. Even so, there is still an element in me that rebels against reading, because I recognize, as did the mad poet Laura Riding, that there is a "silent half of language" that precedes words. There is knowledge that exists independently from words and language, and we can access it through the parts of ourselves that predate language.