Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter I

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diary

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Picture II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Picture I

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Life of Henri Brulard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.