Narcissism in the Digital Age

One of the most notable features of this era is the facility with which people can inhabit a reality that is far narrower than they would have been able to only a few years ago. Sherry Turkle touches on this topic in her books, but I think that she only scratches the surface, noting the change for the worse in the quality of communication and in the reduction in face-to-face social engagement. I continue to think about this, because, in particular, I have noticed an increasing gap between myself and the millennials. This gap is not simply a change in social norms, but a deeper change that includes cognition, resulting in what amounts to the widespread growth of alternate views of reality that are often fundamentally incompatible with each other.

In the public domain in the U.S., this plays out the most conspicuously in politics. With social media and targeted news, an individual can simply go online and find viewpoints that match their own and engage with a group, whether virtual or real, that holds views that are never challenged and are upheld as norms. This phenomenon extends well beyond politics; it also affects personal identity and individual perceptions of the nature of society. Traditional standards regarding the responsibilities of citizenship become eroded when people define themselves as members of a segment of society, real or imagined, rather than as members of society as a whole.

Subtler aspects of the phenomenon show up clearly in the disputes that arise in the sphere of political correctness. In some groups, it appears to be the norm that all people are identical, or at least it is forbidden to bring up any differences between individuals or groups that might in any way suggest that one is better than another. This development is highly problematic, because people are in fact different, and some people are better at some things than other people. In the more open-minded domains, there is willingness to discuss these differences in terms of historical inequality, which often has relevance, but other kinds of differences – particularly those based on genetics – are still taboo. My problem with this scenario is that politically correct people habitually preempt the possibility of the use of critical thinking to gain a better understanding of reality. More than just turning thoughtful conversation into a minefield, political correctness inhibits understanding the world. It is odd that such a restrictive outlook is prominent in colleges and universities, which purport to be centers of learning. Academia thereby becomes, not a beacon of knowledge, but the producer of a narrow worldview that serves as a foil to the equally limited worldview of poorly-educated nativists and racists. The educated class, which consists largely of those who have been raised in privilege, becomes a source of rancor when it dismisses the less-educated while adhering to its own unsupportable beliefs.

Because of the narrow range over which millennials are willing to engage, and because they prefer to see the world in the same image that they've come to see themselves, their outlook is similar to narcissism. When you assign yourself to a poorly-defined social group that may or may not exist, you have to tread lightly when you interact with others. You don't always know which group they may belong to, and it is safest not to engage in any value-laden discussion at all. If you are a smartphone addict, chances are that your best friend is your smartphone, with all the magical properties that you attribute to it. Although this is probably a worldwide problem, the U.S. may be one of the countries with the worst symptoms. It is no surprise that the scientific awareness of the public is weak here relative to that found in other developed nations. In the U.S., scientists are increasingly being marginalized at a time when they are the best-equipped people to solve the major problems facing mankind. As Czeslaw Milosz commented after arriving here in 1946, there was already a mind-numbing lack of critical thinking in public life: the advent of new gadgets that can be used to promote docility should be viewed with trepidation.

Significant generational changes have been ongoing throughout the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Farmers gradually transitioned to trades and manufacturing, and, more recently, to service jobs. The need for additional education became more critical to employment. Thus, from one generation to the next, there have been changes in the outlooks of families for more than two centuries. The current change may be the most significant of all, yet the discussion of its consequences is almost nonexistent as far as I can tell.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity

I strongly recommend this short new book by Martin Rees, the British astronomer. There probably isn't a better one addressing the major challenges currently facing mankind. He identifies the problems and offers strategies for dealing with them, writing with clarity while remaining concise. It is difficult to dispute anything that he says.

The first chapter focuses on climate change and the need for clean energy. The second covers advances in biotechnology, cybertechnology, robotics and AI. The third discusses mankind in the context of the universe. The fourth examines science and its limits. The fifth, addressed particularly to scientists, recommends how they ought to respond to the challenges.

Most of the text is fairly serious, but Rees's take on some subjects can be amusing. For example, he doesn't think much of cryonics:

I was once interviewed by a group of 'cryonics' enthusiasts – based in California – called the 'society for the abolition of involuntary death'. I told them I'd rather end my days in an English churchyard than a California refrigerator. They derided me as a 'deathist' – really old fashioned.

More often, he is quite serious, as when he discusses space colonization:

...don't ever expect mass emigration from Earth. And here I disagree strongly with [Elon] Musk and with my late Cambridge colleague, Stephen Hawking, who enthuse about rapid build-up of large-scale Martian communities. It's a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth's problems. We've got to solve these problems here.

In the whole book he makes only one claim that seems questionable to me. Although he is doubtful about the limitless extension of our biological lives, he thinks that it may be possible for humans to become immortal as electronic entities. Some such transition may become possible in a technical sense, but in my view it would be no different from death, except in the sense that a facsimile of the original person would continue to exist.

Perhaps the most interesting section for me is the one describing the current state of our cosmological understanding, and how it may advance in the coming years. We are only able to observe a small section of the universe, which may or may not be infinite in extent. There could be a multiverse or there may have been an infinite number of Big Bangs. Like Sabine Hossenfelder, he suggests that we may be close to our cognitive limits, and that AI may play a significant role in such advances.

The main strength of the book, I think, is the final chapter, which realistically proposes how the problems discussed in the earlier chapters ought to be addressed. Because nation-states are ill-suited to leading global initiatives, the responsibility falls on international organizations and academics like himself. There is no mention of the U.S. or the Trump administration, which makes an excellent example of how national politics can easily lead to policies which increase risks for mankind. When you stand back from politics, it is easy to see that scientific solutions exist for all of the current threats. Thus, it is important that organizations such as the UN and the WHO take greater initiative in the future. In this vein, it is also important that public intellectuals follow the lead of academics such as Martin Rees and Edward O. Wilson in publicizing both the threats we collectively face and their potential solutions. This failing of public intellectuals is something that I've been writing about for some time now.

The intractable geopolitics and sociology – the gap between potentialities and what actually happens – engenders pessimism. The scenarios I've described – environmental degradation, unchecked climate change, and unintended consequences of advanced technology – could trigger serious, even catastrophic, setbacks to society. But they have to be tackled internationally. And there's an institutional failure to plan for the long term, and to plan globally. Politicians look to their own voters – and the next election. Stockholders expect a payoff in the short run. We downplay what's happening even now in faraway countries. And we discount too heavily the problems we'll leave for new generations. Without a broader perspective – without realizing that we're all on this crowded world together – governments won't properly prioritize projects that are long-term in political perspective, even if a mere instant in the history of the planet.

Much of this is obvious to educated readers, yet most of the public remains dangerously oblivious.

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray II

Lost in Math, I think, is of the greatest interest to working theoretical physicists, because it examines the main challenges currently facing them. If you are not yourself a theoretical physicist, you may at best get a glimmer of what their work entails. In my case I have some familiarity with the aspects relevant to astronomy, such as dark matter and gravitational lensing, but I'm not as interested in particle physics. What I find the most interesting, however, is Hossenfelder's description of theoretical physics in terms of the routine vocational dysfunctions that occur in other fields. This makes a nice contrast to the mythical depiction of physicists as geniuses who think at a level so much higher than that of ordinary mortals that you dare not suggest their fallibility.

Although sociological and psychological analysis of the field is only loosely scattered throughout the book, Hossenfelder does a reasonably good job showing that physicists face the same hurdles that people in other fields do, even when they are seeking nothing more than scientific truth. Conformity, groupthink and the status quo tend to squelch original scientific inquiry, and getting funding for novel ideas is difficult. Because particle accelerators are the experimental backbone of quantum physics and are prohibitively expensive, it is more financially feasible to hire string theorists, whose work can be done in the absence of experimentation. Hossenfelder specifically compares physics to economics in terms of overusing mathematical models at the expense of experimentation. She herself had considered switching to economics, where the math is much easier than what she's used to, if only to provide a more stable career. She brings up some of the ideas that I've discussed before while commenting on books by Daniel Kahneman and Robert Sapolsky, but without going into as much detail, and perhaps not fully recognizing the futility of attempting to remedy the situation. Sapolsky in particular is acutely aware of the intractable limitations created by our biological provenance. I don't think that she has been exposed to some of these developments in biology.

Hossenfelder spends a lot of time asking why beauty is so important to physicists, and she provides some answers without fully settling the matter. Usually this boils down to people using equations which work fairly well, but not perfectly well, to describe a phenomenon, requiring a messy sort of "fine-tuning" that no one likes. For many physicists, according to her, beauty is a stand-in for meaning, because it provides a sound structure without ad hoc fudge factors. Her position seems to be that one must adopt the best model available whether it's pretty or not, and that one should always favor models compatible with the latest experimental data. Currently, it seems as if there are too many models and not enough data to eliminate a lot of them. She also discusses the intrusion of philosophy into physics, saying that philosophers usually have nothing of value to add in solving physics problems, though physics itself does require philosophical assumptions. I agree with her here, and think that academic philosophy is mostly a useless and obsolete subject.

Probably my favorite idea in the book concerns AI:

I try to imagine the day when we'll just feed all cosmological data to an artificial intelligence (AI). We now wonder what dark matter and dark energy are, but this question might not even make sense to the AI. It will just make predictions. We will test them. And if the AI is consistently right, then we'll know it's succeeded at finding and extrapolating the right patterns. That thing, then, will be our new concordance model. We put in a question, out comes the answer – and that's it.

If you're not a physicist, that might not be so different from reading about predictions made by a community of physicists using incomprehensible math and cryptic technology. It's just another black box. You might even trust the AI more than us.

But making predictions and using them to develop applications has always only been one side of science. The other side is understanding. We don't just want answers, we want explanations for the answers. Eventually we'll reach the limits of our mental capacity, and after that the best we can do is hand over questions to more sophisticated apparatuses. But I believe it's too early to give up understanding our theories.

I think this captures our situation well. Unless a method to combine our brains with sophisticated AI is developed, there is an upper limit on how much we can comprehend. Even so, without such an enhancement, it may be possible for AI to translate its findings into terms that will be intelligible to us; it could decode the laws of nature in language that we understand. It is possible that theoretical physicists as a group are already operating close to a cognitive boundary that they will never be able to cross.

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray I

In order to have some idea of what is going on in physics, I periodically read popular books on the subject. I read A Brief History of Time, by Steven Hawking, in 1988. Later, I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. More recently, I read To Explain the World, by Steven Weinberg, and The Big Picture, by Sean Carroll. When I was growing up in the 1960's, physics was the preeminent science, and biology hadn't yet made its ascent. Einstein was alive until 1955, atomic weapons were perceived as a greater threat than they are now, Wernher von Braun, the original "rocket scientist," was working for NASA, Richard Feynman was still active, space exploration became a national priority under John F. Kennedy, and the standard model of particle physics was established. Physics had the aura of attracting the smartest people, and I thought that I should pay attention to what physicists had to say. With a slowdown in its progress, you don't hear as much about it now, except perhaps in cosmology, which is not a widely-followed subject.

Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist, has written a unique and interesting critique of current practices in the field. She melds conventional popular science writing, such as interviews with top physicists, with her concerns about how research is being conducted and a blog-like openness about the bleak career prospects for physicists like herself. Her primary idea is that concepts such as beauty, elegance, symmetry and naturalness have subverted the scientific method in physics, whose practitioners increasingly create mathematical theories that have no obvious connection with empirical data. There is a dearth of new data, and this seems to have led to a kind of paralysis. The primary case in point is the failure of the Large Hadron Collider, operated by CERN near Geneva, to find interesting new particles other than the Higgs boson, which was first hypothesized in 1964 but not confirmed until 2013. Progress in the field of theoretical physics has been so slow that a researcher might easily spend an entire career without proving anything, perhaps working on a theory that ends up being abandoned. Moreover, as Hossenfelder interjects periodically, there isn't much job security except for a handful of rock-star physicists.

I like the fact that Hossenfelder's interviews read like real shop talk between physicists, but she engages in some deceptive oversimplification, in the sense that words such as "symmetry" and "naturalness" actually have specialized meanings that are more intelligible to PhD physicists than to lay readers. Books like this breeze past advanced mathematics in a way that might cause some readers to become ridiculously overconfident. Even so, as far as I've read (halfway), she has made a compelling case for some of the sociological factors affecting the behavior of the physicists in question, which mirrors what I have said about academics in other fields such as economics and creative writing. Academics in all fields are likely to continue the themes that they wrote about in their theses for the remainders of their careers, like broken records.

Speaking of music, Hossenfelder touches on some biological aspects of humans that show up in their preferences. Citing a 1975 study by physicists which finds that all popular music is similar with respect to maintaining a balance between predictability and unpredictability, her interpretation is that we like to be surprised, but not too much. This concept of humans preferring material that balances familiarity with novelty applies not only to music, but to all of the arts and even the sciences. To that I would add the psychological effects of advertising. I have long been puzzled why people pay attention to advertising. In this context, the answer is that the product being sold, whether a retail item or a politician, is unconsciously planted in people's brains as something that is familiar and safe, whether it is or not. Hossenfelder argues that the current generation of physicists, which grew up with the concepts of simplicity, naturalness and elegance, is having a hard time embracing real novelty, and that it has inadvertently sidelined the scientific method, which itself holds none of these prejudices.

There is another aspect of human behavior that I've been thinking about that Hossenfelder hasn't mentioned yet. This has to do with mate selection. Our conceptions of beauty are probably affected by our instincts regarding the identification of suitable mates. As I recall, a symmetrical face is preferable to an asymmetrical face, since it suggests genetic fitness. Similarly, there are universals in what constitutes the shape of a beautiful woman's face. And, of course, fertility goddesses are an indication of what people think a fertile woman's body might look like. I've only read about this anecdotally, but research has been done. Thus, it isn't a stretch to say that theories involving symmetry and curvature may literally appeal to physicists on the basis of their sexiness rather than on more objective scientific criteria. When you think about it, calling an idea or theory sexy when it has nothing to do with sex is really quite absurd.

Hossenfelder is quite a talented writer, and I like her dry, self-deprecating humor:

...I find a door that reads "Prof. Steven Weinberg." I peek in but the professor hasn't arrived yet. His secretary ignores me, and so I wait, watching my feet, until I hear steps in the corridor.

"I'm supposed to speak to a writer now," Weinberg says, and looks around, but there's only me. "Is that you?"

Always keen on new opportunities to feel entirely inadequate, I say yes, thinking I shouldn't be here, I should be at my desk, reading a paper, drafting a proposal, or at least writing a referee report. I shouldn't psychoanalyze a community that neither needs nor wants therapy. And I shouldn't pretend to be something I'm not.

Weinberg raises an eyebrow and points to his office.

His office, it turns out, is half the size of mine, an observation that vaporizes what little ambition I ever had to win a Nobel Prize. I don't have, of course, all those honorary titles on the wall. Neither do I have my own books to line up on my desk. Weinberg has now made it up to a dozen....

So I'm finding the book both informative and entertaining, and I'll make more comments when I've finished it.

Diary

I have been going through another drought with nothing suitable on hand to read, and some new books have finally arrived. I should begin commenting on them soon. The weather has changed rather abruptly, from hot and dry to cold and wet. There haven't been any frosts yet, but the leaves are turning and it should be much colder within a few weeks. I haven't bought any firewood and am gradually preparing for winter now. The first snow is usually in November.

One of my pastimes has been genealogy. For several years I had been misidentifying a person in an old photograph, whom I thought was one of my great-grandfathers. Through my DNA match, I have received actual photographs of that great-grandfather, who is a different person. To identify the unidentified person, who appears in an old photograph with my grandfather, which was taken in about 1910 in Richmond, Indiana, I have contacted a historian who has written a book on the Starr Piano Company and Gennett Records, where my grandfather was working at the time. I'm not sure whether he will be able to help.

Of course, I've also been following the Brett Kavanaugh nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court. As far as I'm concerned, he has already demonstrated his unsuitability for the job with his hysterical performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Moreover, the last thing this country needs is another conservative Roman Catholic male on the Supreme Court. I hope that he isn't approved.

Another distraction, which is unwanted, has been a crisis precipitated by infuriating behavior on the part of someone who is connected with this household but doesn't live here. As most people who reach my age know, managing relationships with partners can be extremely difficult, and the problems never disappear. At this stage, I don't expect people to understand me or share my interests, and I am satisfied simply by having a relationship that includes some degree of companionship. I don't mind being around people whose preferences or worldviews are different from mine as long as there is no open conflict and compromises can be reached through discussion. What I have found, though, on multiple occasions, is that few people have the mental flexibility to engage in such discussions, and most of them, when under stress, simply revert to some sort of instinctive tribal outlook that they share only with their immediate biological relatives. Thus, from time to time I am forced to ponder whether I ought to just live alone, and, since I already know that I would find that unsatisfactory, I try to make do. However, I am aware that I have the psychological and financial resources to live alone, and, if pressed far enough, I would pursue that route, though I would prefer not to. I have spent half of my life dealing with mentally ill people, so this isn't exactly new territory for me. In any case, the current conflict seems to be subsiding, and I don't think that any changes will be necessary.

Diary

I've been reading an academic book on poetry by William Logan, Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past. Logan discusses particular poems both in technical terms and in contextual terms, referencing the lives of the authors and what a poem might have meant to them. This is more or less how I look at poems, so I like the way Logan goes about his job, but, unfortunately, there aren't many poems in the book that register much with me. I have had the same approach with poems such as "A Woman Meets an Old Lover," by Denise Levertov. Taken literally, that poem is about Levertov meeting a former lover, one who got her pregnant. They did not marry, she had an abortion, and they each married someone else, continuing their affair for decades. The poem is about seeing him late in life, when he is ill. It is hard to know how far one ought to go contextualizing poems this way, but to some extent it is necessary if you want to understand a poem fully. The risk of this approach is that you might strip a poem of its artistic effectiveness, thus there are limits to the usefulness of this kind of deconstruction. I will keep the book on hand and peruse it occasionally, but I won't write a full commentary on it.

I've ordered Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, by Sabine Hossenfelder. I think this book will be relevant to one of my favorite topics, namely, the sociology of academia. So far on this blog, I've written about the sociology of American literary culture, but the same concepts can be applied to all areas of academia. Ever since I read Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty, I've been thinking about why economists have focused on exotic mathematical models while often eschewing basic empirical research such as that conducted by Piketty. When I was a philosophy student, I wondered what formal logic had to do with philosophy, and when I was in graduate school, I saw little connection between mathematical logic and philosophy. I now think that there are multiple reasons for the insertion of mathematics into other disciplines, some valid and some not. Most of the valid ones are obvious: you can't do engineering without math, and statistical models are useful in many fields. The problems arise, I think, when the perception of precision becomes paramount. Thus, in philosophy, in Principia Mathematica (1910), Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell attempted to create a basis in formal logic for mathematics. This work was largely ignored by mathematicians and later disproven by mathematician Kurt Gödel. I'm not sure what purpose, if any, Principia served in philosophy, yet formal logic is still considered an important component in the field. Generally, I think that the perception of precision has driven the ascent of mathematics in many disciplines, which would not be a problem in itself were it not for the fact that mathematics alone is insufficient to advance many of those fields. In a sociological sense, my theory is that the members of various professions actively protect their jobs by becoming the gatekeepers with respect to the requirements for entering their fields. Even if knowledge of advanced mathematics plays little or no role in being a productive member of a field, it can become a useful screening tool for those who are already established and part of the status quo. Moreover, a focus on higher mathematics might disguise the fact that other difficult conceptual problems aren't being addressed at all. There is also the inappropriate attribution of prestige to fields that are mathematics-intensive, with the presumption that only the most intellectually talented people can do that sort of work. My view is that different people have different intellectual skills, and that mathematical skill doesn't preempt the others, though it may be necessary in many fields. I have no idea what Hossenfelder will have to say about this, but I have no prima facie reason to doubt that even physics may have become too mathematical.

The more I think about it, the more the idea of the sociology of academia seems interesting to me. It seems fairly clear that the stakeholders in American literary culture have set themselves up as the gatekeepers who determine what is good and what is bad writing; they entrench themselves in various ways, which makes their removal problematic. In economics, universities seem to favor mathematically proficient PhDs who eschew empirical research and favor economic models that are agreeable to outside sponsors. Economists as a group show little or no interest in the welfare of the public and are wedded to philosophical ideas dating from Adam Smith that seem increasingly obsolete as we enter late-stage capitalism, with a systemic reduction in the number of jobs available due to technological advances. My point here is that what is often presented as pure research in one form or another, one discipline to the next, is not at all exempt from various prejudices, individual or organizational, which reflect, ultimately, our biological provenance. Being in a field which requires clear thinking does not necessarily imply that the organizations that engage in it are pursuing their objectives in an entirely rational manner. If you compared English departments to economics departments and other departments, there is no reason to think that you wouldn't find something like oligopolies at work. In retrospect, I find it odd how the selection of faculty in various academic departments at my undergraduate college occurred. There was a religious leaning in the Philosophy Department that I wasn't able to comprehend fully until later; in a sense, the emphasis was on theology, not philosophy, and no explanation was ever given. And in that department, as in many others, the instruction suffered as a result of the backgrounds of the faculty: for the most part, they were good students who liked the academic environment but had no particular training or talent in teaching. The sociology of academia is a wide-open field that might one day answer broad, challenging questions such as how universities came to become bastions of political correctness.

We're getting some really cool weather, and the vegetable garden barely escaped a frost this morning. The temperature was 35 degrees in the yard, and there was frost on the field below us.

The Garden Party and Other Stories

This volume, which includes several of the later short stories of Katherine Mansfield, has turned out to be better than I expected. Mansfield is unusually strong in the observation of people and in the divining of their thoughts, while also rendering physical details with precise language and an economy of words. I found the opening paragraphs of At the Bay a pleasure to read:

Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was a beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling – how far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again...

Ah, aah! sounded the sleepy sea. And from the bush there came the sounds of little streams flowing, quickly, lightly, slipping between the smooth stones, gushing into ferny basins and out again; and there was the splashing of big drops on large leaves, and something else – what was it? – a faint stirring and shaking, the snapping of a twig and then such a silence that it seemed someone was listening.

I think what makes Mansfield especially compelling to me is her talent that realistically combines physical description with the thoughts and feelings of her characters. Most of them are girls or young women, though she throws in a few boys, men and older women. She captures fleeting situations with stunning accuracy. When Mansfield was writing, the short story was going through a metamorphosis. The short stories of the nineteenth century were often quite long, like short novels. In Mansfield's day, very short vignettes became popular. These stories don't have real plots, and most of them are like snapshots of an era. The lengthier ones engage in slightly longer sequences of events, but show no signs of breaking out into narratives that might become novels. I think Mansfield does a much better job showing how her characters are relating to their environments than most writers are capable. Actually, I liked some of the shorter ones best: Miss Brill, Mr. and Mrs. Dove, The Voyage and The Singing Lesson. The title story, The Garden Party, isn't bad; it contains a coming-of-age episode, in which a girl has an unsettling first exposure to class differences.

Mansfield grew up in an upper-middle-class New Zealand family, completed her schooling in England and moved there. Apparently, she led a rather wild and reckless life in England, sleeping with all kinds of people, both men and women, and marrying twice, finally contracting tuberculosis, which killed her in 1923 at the age of thirty-four.  You would never know it from these stories, which seem careful and conservative by current standards. It seems a little odd that someone who felt stifled by bourgeois life in New Zealand, as did Simone de Beauvoir a few years later in France, would dutifully record it with such respect. I suspect that if she had lived longer she would have written more radical things. There is probably no way of knowing whether she might have produced a good novel. However, on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, I think she is as good as Flaubert or anyone, and certainly better than most of the writers with whom I'm familiar. She probably did not have the intellectual range of George Eliot, but her writing had an elegance that I'm sure George Eliot would admire. I think that Virginia Woolf was rightly jealous. Mansfield expressed herself eloquently without resorting to any of the gimmicks that have become commonplace in contemporary literature.

Diary

The arrival of fall is palpable here. Suddenly the nights turn cool, dew drenches everything and the skies are clear again. Last night I got my best view ever of Mars, which is close to Earth at the moment. I could clearly see the ice sheet at its south pole. Many of my favorites are visible now, and Orion is up by 3:00 AM. I am planning more viewing tonight. Hurricane Florence is headed this way, and the clouds will be back in a few days.

Although I don't read it that much and rarely post comments on it, I have come to further appreciate 3 Quarks Daily. S. Abbas Raza makes excellent selections of math and science articles, Morgan Meis makes good literary selections, Azra Raza makes good medical selections, and Jim Culleny makes good poetry selections. They have a significant advantage over websites that only post articles written for pay. I believe that the fact that contributors there don't get paid makes their selections less inbred and better rounded than those on sites attempting to sustain commercially profitable operations. At 3 Quarks Daily, the articles are considered on their own merits, independent of the fact that some editor has space that needs to be filled, a particular image to maintain and egos to soothe. Thus, I decided to donate $500 to them. I received a nice email from S. Abbas Raza, who invited me to visit him if I'm ever in northern Italy.

On the genealogical front, I have resolved a disagreement over the identity of a person in the old group photograph. He is definitely my great-grandfather. I have two photographs of him. In one (the one posted here), he is near the center, the patriarch, with his wife, four children, their spouses and the grandchildren, in Athens in about 1930. In the other, he is posing with my grandfather in Richmond, Indiana in about 1910. I was able to find the passenger log with a detailed description of his trip from Bursa, Turkey to the Starr Piano Company in Richmond, Indiana on September 20, 1910. People who research their family histories often look for some glorious past. In my family, this great-grandfather would be my claim to fame. He started multiple businesses, became wealthy, kept my grandfather out of the Turkish army, orchestrated the escape of the family from the Armenian massacres in Turkey in 1915, and became a philanthropist who helped Armenian refugees in Greece. My cousin also tells me that this family once included a bishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Over the years, I have come to identify more with my Armenian side than with my English side. This has little to do with cultural heritage and more to do with ethnic characteristics and intelligence. While my English side had some business successes, my Armenian side was wealthier and more sophisticated. When my mother moved to England, she was appalled by her mother-in-law, whom she considered crude and vulgar. Moreover, there is an ineffable toughness and resourcefulness in the Armenian side that I don't see in the English, or, for that matter, amongst most Americans. I feel more at home with tough-minded people and become impatient with English milquetoasts and American conformists. I have found that, although I am not an aggressive or ambitious person, I was better able to weather the few adverse circumstances I faced than most. In fact, my fate seems to have been to pair up with less-stable people and provide them with ballast. At times I get fed up with people who are feeble or mentally ill – who would be more interesting to me if they could fend for themselves better and display less of their baggage.

I have been reading a little Katherine Mansfield and will probably comment on that next.

Diary

One of the disadvantages of buying cheap used books online is that they take a long time to deliver. I have a couple on order that should arrive soon. Because I've become pickier about what I read, I am more often lacking any book that I want to bother with. For most of my life, I finished every book that I started, because I didn't have complete confidence in my reading ability, knowledge or taste; there was always the chance that a book would be of value in a way that I could not anticipate. More recently, having had ample time to survey the terrain, but still recognizing that I am not omniscient, I have become less tolerant of a writer's inadequacies and stylistic tics when they don't appeal to me, and I don't hesitate to stop reading a book if I decide that it has a significant deficiency of one sort or another. Probably my preference for clear, thoughtful prose, my distaste for literary fads, and the increasingly lower quality of editing have all contributed to my growing impatience. If you like my writing style, you may still occasionally find me too opinionated, but you will have to recognize that I make a real effort to get to the point, and, if nothing else, this is a courtesy to readers, whom I try not to torture with incoherent rambling. In any case, I am now finishing only about 70% of the books that I start, and this leaves me with reading downtime. I also have growing piles of books that I dislike and am donating to the library unfinished.

At the moment, I'm in a flurry of genealogical activity. When I first had my DNA analyzed, I was able to identify two distant living English relatives, whom I contacted, but no Armenian relatives. My closest match, other than my sister, did not reply to my email, which went to her husband. I recently figured out who she was by googling her husband and finding out his wife's name. From there I found information about where she works and who her parents are. She is an assistant professor of Spanish in California. Her father is a retired businessman who was born in England and grew up in South Africa. Her mother was born in Greece, but her family moved to South Africa in 1946. After her parents married and had children in South Africa, the family moved to Southern California in 1981. The real clincher for me was a photo of her mother, who looks a lot like my mother. It turns out that the assistant professor is the granddaughter of the next girl to the right of my mother in the Athens family photo that I posted earlier. Her maternal great-grandmother was my maternal grandfather's sister. We are still debating about who everyone is in that photo, but I think I have it figured out.

I have been attempting more stargazing, but this has been the worst year for viewing since I started five years ago. On a good night, you can see the Milky Way clearly, and that has happened only twice this year. Nevertheless, I always enjoy viewing on a clear night, and we had one recently.

It looks as if we are having the last hot day of the year, and I'm looking forward to a cool fall.

Diary

I am alone in the house again for a few days, though I may have preferred going on a short trip myself. Since 2016, when I visited Washington and Maine, I haven't left Vermont at all except to chauffeur my partner to and from the Amtrak station in Port Henry, New York, on the opposite shore of Lake Champlain. Possibly we will make a trip to Montreal soon. It is only a two-and-a-half-hour drive from here, and it would make a nice change to be in a French-speaking environment again. The only drawback is that it's a city, and I tend to avoid those now.

August turned out to be fairly normal here weather-wise, and my tomatoes are exceptionally healthy after a hot July. The lack of rain protected the plants from various fungi that usually would have affected them by now. At the moment it looks as if they're going to be churning out tomatoes into October. There have been bear problems in the area this summer, and I just noticed that our bird feeder pole was slightly bent; on close inspection, there are indentations on both sides of one of the nyjer tubes that resemble bite marks; they are about five feet off the ground, which an adult bear could reach standing on its hind legs. There are also some droppings in the yard that could be from a bear. For the last few years I've stopped putting out suet and sunflower seeds from April to December, since the bears like them. I leave nyjer out all year to feed the numerous goldfinches, and the bears haven't shown any interest in it. However, bears have good memories and return to places where they've found food previously. It is said that they remember garbage pickup days in different locations and use that information when searching for food. Fortunately, black bears generally avoid contact with humans, but if they become habituated to food sources near people, they can become dangerous.

I just watched the eulogies delivered by George W. Bush and Barack Obama for John McCain. Surprisingly, Bush's was much better-written, and he delivered it quite effectively, though obviously he didn't write it himself. Obama's speeches, though less rambling than those of most politicians, are rarely succinct, and he tends to cover the same terrain from one to the next. He uses a slightly preachy tone that I don't appreciate at all. I'm not a McCain fan, given his militaristic point of view and his conservatism, but at least he represented social cohesion and didn't practice the kind of polarizing politics that now dominates Congress. People with military training often seem to think like automatons and are ill-suited to other careers; coming, as McCain did, from a military family, involves multigenerational brainwashing, which, I think, is an irremediable disaster. Fortunately, both Bush and Obama made veiled references to the fact that John McCain was a vastly better person than Donald Trump. I can imagine him watching them on TV and seething; in situations like this, there is nothing that Trump can do to make up for his absence of character. Moreover, one senses that his opposition is beginning to gain momentum, and that the drumbeat for Trump's removal is becoming audible. Bernie Sanders is having a rally on the green in Middlebury on Monday – perhaps I'll attend.

I haven't had much luck coming up with anything to read. Journals and diaries don't seem likely to pan out. Therefore, I've decided to fill in a gap in my knowledge and read some short stories by Katherine Mansfield. She only lived to the age of 34, and therefore didn't produce much of an opus. However, she was a contemporary and acquaintance of both D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf and is supposed to be an early practitioner of modernist fiction. I'm not sure whether I'll like her writing, but have read descriptions that make it seem appealing. I don't like Virginia Woolf at all, and Mansfield may be more interesting. I've put off reading Rousseau's biography until winter.

The Political Scene

Politics isn't exactly one of my favorite topics, but the current situation in the U.S. seems extraordinary, so I'll continue to comment on it occasionally. The scene here in Vermont isn't dramatic and can even be amusing at times: in the Democratic primary for governor, a transgender woman just defeated a fourteen-year-old boy and two others to win the nomination. However, the conditions in Washington, D.C. aren't as sanguine. The recent death of TV personality Robin Leach reminded me of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," which I used to watch years ago. Adnan Khashoggi, the billionaire Saudi arms dealer, was a quintessential subject for the program; his grotesque lifestyle was said to cost $250 thousand per day. Khashoggi was no doubt a role model for Donald Trump, who also appeared on the program. Subsequent to a reduction in Khashoggi's wealth, Trump bought his yacht, and, of course, renamed it after himself. Looking back, you can also see how Trump had an affinity for the Gambino crime family, with which he had business connections. Although Trump seems to have been a shameless social climber, he never graduated from the ranks of con artists and crooks, and his self-professed business acumen doesn't stand up to close examination.

I don't have any special insights or information about Trump's probable fate, but it seems unlikely that his presidency will end well for him. He has the looming Mueller investigation, possible criminal charges in New York, potential impeachment after the 2018 midterm elections, and, if he survives long enough, the 2020 presidential election, which I doubt he would win. Before it's all over, we may learn that the Trump Organization is propped up by money laundering for Russian oligarchs. Trump held the illusory belief that he would somehow escape the close scrutiny that all presidents face, and that his indiscretions could be suppressed indefinitely. In most respects, Donald Trump is demonstrably stupid. On the whole, Trump merely seems like an anomaly to me, a sign of dysfunctional times. He is fundamentally less interesting than the conditions that allowed him to be elected. How, one asks, did voters elect to the presidency a candidate who lies constantly, surrounds himself with criminals, has little understanding of foreign or domestic policy, economics or law, and has never shown any interest in public service?

This plays into my narrative about the inadequacy of traditional democratic governmental structures in a capitalist society. The two critical parts that cause failure are the stupidity of voters and the amorality and greed of private interests. At the most basic level, what has happened is that corporate media companies such as Fox News have become proficient at convincing disgruntled white males that Donald Trump can improve their economic status. In a classic case of voter misattribution of cause and effect, Trump has been given credit for the strong economy in the U.S., which would have occurred anyway without him. The reality is that Trump's ideas are obsolete or discredited ones from the 1970's and 1980's, and that his advisers are amateurs and opportunists who lack both the ideas and the skills to produce the results that his supporters expect. Trump's tax cut mainly benefits the rich and will lead to larger deficits in the future, which will restrain economic growth. Trump's tariff strategy is reducing prices of agricultural commodities and hurting farmers, while raising costs in some industries and disrupting international commerce in a manner that is unlikely to benefit anyone. His support of the coal industry, which is economically doomed regardless, may increase global carbon emissions. Trump's supporters fall into two main groups: a majority who are ignorant and a minority who seek immediate financial or political gain from his policies. This is not to say that voters who dislike Trump and vote against him are making better decisions, but that voters in general are ill-equipped to deal with complex national and international issues.

For these reasons I return to the idea that self-governance ought to be replaced by an algorithmic form of government. A sophisticated algorithmic constitution based on principles of equality, fairness and protection of the individual could replace the current U.S. constitution, leaving no room for interpretation or manipulation. The current system of government permits a continuous assault by special interests, both domestic and foreign. Because human status or rank is always relative, people compete to own larger houses and properties, and there is no theoretical upper limit that would prevent them from owning, say, larger planets, if it were possible. If capitalism has in fact played a role in human progress, one can now almost safely say that it has outlived its usefulness. The current trajectory, with an incompetent American president like Donald Trump, is moving us toward a needlessly overcrowded world characterized by pointless competition, which in the long run may benefit no one.

Honest Writing

As I've said, I have a hard time finding things that I enjoy reading, mainly in areas other than nonfiction that is written specifically to inform readers on a topic that I think is significant. Thus, a lot of the books that I've found worthwhile over the last few years have been popular scientific ones. However, high quality, nontechnical writing about people is equally important to me, and my efforts to locate it have become increasingly difficult. At this point I have almost completely given up on fiction, and I usually find poetry too narrow in scope to sustain my interest. I used to think that literary journalism had appeal, but I've given up on that too. I have had some success with biographies and memoirs, but, according to my criteria, there aren't many people whose biographies or memoirs are worth reading. At the moment I'm considering journals and diaries to see what I might find there.

I thought I'd write about the specific kind of nontechnical writing that appeals to me and why it may be rare. The main ingredients that attract me are honesty and reflection, and, surprisingly, you don't find much of that in published works. The main obstacle, it seems to me, is that the authors are constrained by market forces. Regardless of what an author or publisher thinks, a book may not be financially viable if it doesn't meet criteria established externally by a market. The market may be anything from the general reading public to academic specialists, but without a specific market in mind, no publisher is likely to print and distribute a book. Therefore, from the beginning, a writer who anticipates publication must think about how whatever he or she writes might sell. I was surprised recently to read that even authors of private journals and diaries want to learn how to follow formats that readers would like. The implicit goal of acceptance by a known or unknown readership, I think, can have a corrosive effect on the quality of writing. For example, in reading, The Life of Henri Brulard, by Stendhal, I detected an honesty and openness that I did not detect in Calypso, by David Sedaris. Stendhal, I think, was more admirable a writer, because he engaged in pure expression in a manner that left him vulnerable, whereas Sedaris has made many conscious calculations and compromises in order to ensure popular success. When I read Stendhal, I felt that I was seeing him as a person through his own eyes, but when I read Sedaris, I felt that I was dealing with a persona. Compared to most other contemporary writers, Sedaris may be more open, but that is also part of his shtick. Stendhal's book wasn't published until years after his death, whereas Sedaris is making boatloads of money from his bestseller. I have had the same basic experience when reading literary publications. When Tim Parks first began publishing online articles at the New York Review of Books, I thought to myself, "This guy is quite knowledgeable about literature and writes well," but after a couple of years I realized that he wasn't particularly honest or thoughtful, and that he was just churning out this stuff to supplement his income, in much the same way that Czeslaw Milosz did in Paris after World War II. Parks has become a hack writer for America's premier intellectual (or perhaps pseudo-intellectual) journal. The literary journal writing formula, I think, is a lot like a recipe for preparing a salad: you throw in a few ingredients, each of which seems to have potential, toss them around a little, and with any luck someone will find the article thought-provoking. Usually it isn't.

Even in the case of a memoir that I thought was good, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, by Simone de Beauvoir, I had doubts about the author's honesty and spontaneity. After delving quite far into this in subsequent readings, I decided that although de Beauvoir was relatively honest and forthright, she had blind spots regarding the men in her life and protected them when they didn't deserve it. This became apparent in her later memoirs, in which she elided much of Sartre's unseemly private behavior, leaving him solidly placed on a pedestal that I don't think he deserved. Still, I respect de Beauvoir as a writer and attribute this lapse to her weaknesses as a person. She never cared about money, and probably didn't write anything with the thought of becoming rich or famous. Everyone has gaps in their understanding, and I find that more palatable than the conscious production of written material with the explicit goal of financial gain. Falsity of material in the personal voice of an author is probably my greatest concern with regard to fiction, memoirs and essays.

As a result of my reading experiences in recent years, I am thankful to be living at a time when science is making progress at an astonishing pace, yet I am tempering my expectations in the aesthetic realm. Of course, people also write popular scientific books that aren't worth reading, but the research behind the scenes still progresses and makes its way into the public domain eventually. The low quality of contemporary literary production is a byproduct of capitalism and mass culture, which seem to have a deleterious effect on everything they touch. Although there is nothing that I can do about it, understanding what's going on makes the situation easier to bear.

Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution II

The bulk of the book is devoted to describing experiments that have studied evolutionary changes in specific species over short periods of time. Ever since it was noticed that peppered moths, which before the industrial revolution had an appearance that allowed them to blend in with tree bark, had become dark-colored and blended in with sooty backgrounds, there has been scientific interest in the timeframe of evolutionary change. Several of the experiments included in the book study the effects of predators on the physical characteristics of their prey. When predators were introduced to the habitats of light-colored guppies that stood out against a dark background, the guppies soon became dark-colored. When predators were introduced to the habitats of Anolis lizards that lived near the ground, the lizards quickly evolved shorter legs, which permitted them to live higher up in trees. Other environmental changes also induced adaptations. Grasses that were exposed to different soil conditions tended to evolve different characteristics according to their specific soil composition. E. Coli made rapid biological adaptations according to the food source available. There are also descriptions of experiments with stickleback fish, deer mice, fruit flies, yeast and other organisms.

Losos's discussion is loosely framed around the differing views of evolution presented by Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. Gould is taken to emphasize chance as an intrinsic element, whereas Conway Morris is taken to emphasize the likelihood of convergence in similar environments. Gould seems to be saying that a one-time change in the distant past may fix certain aspects of the course for all descendant organisms, whereas Conway Morris seems to be saying that organisms from different lineages may be shaped by the environment to become similar organisms. The experiments seem to show that both are partly right, but that convergence is not a universal phenomenon. Gould's views are often confused by his use of stylistic flourishes in Wonderful Life and other books. All of the experiments are limited by technical and conceptual problems. Experiments done in the wild lack controls, since the exact composition of each ecosystem isn't known or replicable. Even in more controlled lab settings, it is possible that, for example, unintended minor variations in vial temperatures produce different results.

The conceptual problems are more serious. From a scientific standpoint, there is always the stipulation that correlation does not imply causation. Thus, particularly in the field experiments, the actual physical causes behind each biological change may not be known. In a lab experiment in which there is a unicellular organism of known genetic composition, causation may be easier to determine, but there are still enough variables to make that difficult. Another basic problem has to do with the repeatability and predictability of an experiment; in biology this is far more problematic than in physics or chemistry. Finally, specific to biology is the question of phenotypic plasticity, or an organism's range of physical variability within its species. For example, a chameleon has the ability to change its color without becoming a different species, while most other organisms do not. Without an intimate knowledge of an organism's genetic makeup, including the genetic basis of its specific phenotype, it may be impossible to know whether an immediate environmental change has caused an evolutionary adaptation, as opposed to a variation within an existing genome.

Losos uses New Zealand as an example against convergence, since it contains no indigenous mammals or animals similar to mammals, though mammals flourish in other parts of the world in similar environments. Thus, the environment doesn't necessarily cause specific life forms to evolve. The experiments seem to show that something resembling convergence may occur when genetically similar organisms are placed in similar environments. However, organisms with significantly different evolutionary histories seem unlikely to respond similarly to the same environmental pressures. Therefore, as a general thesis, Conway Morris's version of convergence seems incorrect.

On a theoretical level, I have been thinking about how the very concept of species may itself be a man-made idea that simplifies the world for us but actually has less applicability than we think it does. Species that reproduce sexually have somewhat arbitrarily been defined as organisms in which the males and females produce non-sterile offspring. Sexual reproduction itself is a primary vehicle of evolutionary change, because parents do not have identical genomes, and one parent may confer a genetic advantage to offspring that the other does not. This aspect of evolution is hardly discussed in the book, because it would be more difficult to test experimentally than the purely environmental tests included. Large organisms such as humans can be seen as symbiotic collections of trillions of microbes. If humans were to become extinct, many of the species of microbes in our bodies would survive and continue to evolve. In that case, one might argue that environmental pressures arose and only the best-adapted microbes survived: perhaps this was merely a habitat change for the microbes. At this level of evolution, humans can be seen as a sort of meta-organism or superorganism made up of symbiotic microbes. Although we have many legitimate reasons to think of ourselves as a species, the fact is that, with the exception of identical twins, every person is different from every other. When you get down to the nitty-gritty of evolution, the processes are so complex that our categories seem inadequate. Ultimately, I think that determinism is at work, but in such a complex manner that we are unable to comprehend it at the subatomic level, and that we cover this up by using terms such as "species" and "randomness," though they can't really do the job.

Overall, I found the book interesting and informative, but its use of conventional publishing gimmicks to avoid scaring off sciencephobes doesn't really change the fact that it is probably of greater interest to evolutionary biologists than to the general reading public. Significantly, according to Losos, evolutionary biologists sometimes have to avoid using the e-word so as not to offend people whom they encounter while conducting their research. One would have hoped that by now science would have come out of the closet.

Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution I

I'm moving along in this medium-length book by the evolutionary biologist Jonathan Losos. Losos surveys current research trends in the field and highlights the change in emphasis that has occurred over the last few years. In 1989, Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, published Wonderful Life, perhaps his best-known book, which describes the research of Simon Conway Morris, the British evolutionary biologist, on the fossils in the Burgess Shale of Canada, dating from the Cambrian period, about 500 million years ago. Gould thought that the creatures found in the Burgess Shale were bizarre one-offs that had no current descendants and provided an example of the boundless variety of life forms created by evolutionary processes. Since then, it has been determined that some of those fossils do have living descendants, and Conway Morris has shifted his focus to convergence, in which evolutionary processes create similar organisms that each adapt to specific environments and come to resemble each other in multiple ways. A general example of convergence is the similarity in appearance of three completely different large ocean predators, the shark, the ichthyosaur and the dolphin. A specific example of convergence is the beaked sea snake, which earlier was thought to be a single species; recent analysis has shown that it is two separate species, one of which evolved in the seas of Australia and the other in the seas of Asia. The two species are almost identical in appearance and behavior, but are genetically unrelated.

Convergence is not a new idea and can be traced to Charles Darwin. However, until recently it was difficult to study, and the prevailing view on evolution was that its process was governed by randomness, with no such thing as an optimal organism, and each species haphazardly evolving toward survival in some niche within an ever-changing environment. Convergence can now be better understood by observing the real-time evolution of a species on different islands with similar ecosystems, and this is what Losos has been researching with lizards in the Caribbean. Additionally, DNA analysis now makes it easier to determine relatedness and keep track of speciation.

Some of my views on evolution are probably a little dated, because until now I was unfamiliar with this research. However, I am a little leery of the direction in which Conway Morris is taking the field. As far as I've read, he seems to be pursuing something that resembles teleology, with the evolutionary production of optimal organisms that eventually display perfect adaptation to an environment, as if demonstrating the will of God. Losos discusses a hypothetical scenario in which, if the asteroid that struck the earth about 65 million years ago had missed, the dinosaurs may not have become extinct, mammals may never have become a dominant class, and the dinosaurs may have evolved into a human-like form. The reasoning is that evolution favors higher intelligence, which requires a large brain in relation to body size, and that standing upright with a large head balanced on top of the spine is the most efficient configuration for this to work. Most reptiles have long, horizontal bodies, with small heads on one end and tails on the other for balance; with a large head, this configuration would be physically untenable. Thus, if dinosaurs had remained dominant, we might still be small, furry mammals scurrying around in the woods, and the descendants of dinosaurs might look similar to us.

I don't think Losos is going to end up endorsing any extreme views, and I'll write about that when I finish the book. Losos is a clear writer, but he seems to be consciously writing for a young audience and goes out of his way to present himself as a grown-up high school science nerd: this deviates from my ideal nonfiction writing style, but his content is quite worthwhile nonetheless.

Diary

The visitors have departed, my bout of shingles has almost healed and I am just about back to normal. However, it is still hot in Vermont, and now my grass pollen allergy is affecting me again. The tomatoes are still catching up after a cold June. This year I'm growing a Sun Gold, two Brandywines, two Fantastics and a Ten Fingers of Naples. I have a new book to read, which I'll start soon.

Since the visitors were family members, I have been thinking about how difficult it is to maintain high quality communication with anyone else. It seems that in the U.S. most relationships become impoverished, and the best one can hope for is a modicum of closeness with one's offspring. The prognosis is not good for those who have none. For most there is just work, material accumulation and death, with little pause for reflection and certainly not much commiseration with others. Even this blog sometimes seems like a voice in the wilderness: not many read it, and who knows what they think? One must resign oneself to chatty relationships of the superficial sort and hope that that will be sufficient. I remain appalled by the destitution of life in the public domain, in which intelligent people unanimously agree that Donald Trump is a dangerous and incompetent president, yet he remains in office. No amount of commentary by the news media or biting satire on TV seems to make a dent in his presidency, when it has been clear from the onset that he is unfit for the job. Donald Trump is, so to speak, one of the great problems of our time, and what is being done about it? The congenital inability of Americans to engage in meaningful discourse has been an enabler for Trump, and the media still assists him by pretending that the uninformed views of his supporters should be given credence. There are signs that the Trump presidency is beginning to implode, but the process seems to be occurring in slow motion. I look forward to his exit, though that won't fix the problems that allowed him to be elected in the first place.

Diary

I have officially entered what might be called the summer doldrums. It started with a heatwave that left me enervated, not wanting either to go outside or to stay inside and read (I just watched France win the World Cup, though). It didn't help that I tried stargazing a few nights, which at this time of year entails staying up late, since it doesn't get really dark until almost midnight, and before you know it you're tired. My mind begins to wander, and I return to the question of why I am different from others in my selection of reading materials and why I am often critical of what I read. The answer, I think, starts with the fact that I didn't like reading when I was little and didn't read for pleasure until I was in my thirties. In contrast, literary culture, especially in the U.S., is dominated by people who were early readers and developed a hedonistic outlook in literary matters by the time they were ten. There is probably a gender element to this, in that females are more hedonistic than males, and males are often more analytical, hence less inclined to literary reveries. You hear again and again of female authors who were voracious readers as children, whereas literary men often seem embarrassed by that kind of identity. The fact is that literary matters are hardly ever serious, and there is often an element of escapism in them. Most of the prose produced, with the exception of some nonfiction, is written by and directed toward people who view the purpose of writing as entertainment, and this runs the gamut from children's literature to adult fiction and literary journals.

Lately I've been wondering whether my disinterest in escapism derives from being male or perhaps from Armenian influences that I inherited from my mother. The theory here is that people who have been persecuted for a long time tend to be more practical about how they occupy themselves and are disinclined to engage in pointless activities that make them feel good temporarily. I have noted that, compared to my father, my mother was extremely practical, and, in general, her family was more practical than my father's. This could have been the result of specific challenges that they faced during their lives, but I think that the English have long shown impractical tendencies, and I was reminded of this recently while reading about William Morris and his friends. I have also been thinking about Vladimir Nabokov, who has been identified as a favorite writer by some American literari, e.g. Mary Gaitskill. I only read one of his novels, Lolita, and didn't think much of it. I read it as a harsh, unperceptive satire of life in the U.S., in which he expressed, above all, a hatred for his life here. The characters were cartoonish to me, and he showed little or nothing of their inner workings. Literary culture has made it unseemly to extrapolate from a novel to an author's life, but I usually find the connection inescapable. Nabokov, a Russian aristocrat, hated having to work for a living and resented the crass people to whom he was beholden – this is transparent in Lolita. It could not be a coincidence that as soon as Lolita became a bestseller and Nabokov had some money he moved permanently to Switzerland. Perhaps Lolita was an escapist novel in which Nabokov took a childish revenge on those whom he perceived as his persecutors. However, we are force-fed the literary propaganda in which Nabokov somehow, in a burst of creativity, produced an important work of art ex nihilo. This is the naïveté that makes it difficult for me to take literary culture and its products seriously. Current research on human cognitive limitations sheds an unflattering light on this sort of literary mythology. Nabokov was a childish, self-centered author who pulled the wool over the eyes of his gullible American audience. Really, the book only sold because the subject was pedophilia, which was controversial at the time but was probably just a gimmick that Nabokov used to express his dissatisfaction.

Anyway, my complaint, which is familiar on this blog, is that I have a hard time finding things to read. Actually, I am looking forward to a detailed account of Rousseau's life, but that is better suited to winter reading, which is months away.

Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, and Radicals Moved to Vermont

I found this book, by Yvonne Daley, informative regarding this period in Vermont. There isn't much analysis, and it consists mainly of vignettes of people who moved to Vermont in the 1960's and 1970's. The chapters include "The Hippie Invasion," "Life on the Commune," "Higher Education," "Food...and Revolution," "Entrepreneurship—Hippie Style," "Political Transformation," "Creativity," "Drugs," "Women's Work Reimagined" and "The Children of the Counterculture." The title comes from the Canned Heat song. In the appendix there is a list of appropriate soundtracks for each chapter. A few of the people mentioned, such as Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders, Patrick Leahy and David Dellinger, are well known. My neighbor, Jim Douglas, even makes an appearance: he was a student at Middlebury College in 1970, when they ended the semester early and canceled finals after the Kent State shootings; he was the campus Republican club president then and demanded a tuition refund. I spoke to Jim a few months ago, and, thankfully, he does not consider Donald Trump a Republican.

At the time, Middlebury was not a hotbed of antiwar activity. The hippies, radicals and artists were more closely associated with Goddard College, near Montpelier, Marlboro College, near Brattleboro and the now defunct Windham College in Putney. Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf School of English were considered elitist even then. Besides protesting the Vietnam War, nuclear reactors in Vermont and New Hampshire were targeted; in hindsight, the protesters may have been misguided, because more nuclear plants may have meant less coal consumption and less climate change – Daley overlooks this fact. There were assorted communes all across the state, whose members varied in beliefs and activities. Some proved durable while others did not. One was quite libertine, with the leader encouraging a "ten-day-marriage" between members; in a very non-back-to-nature manner, he spent his winters in Florida and returned each spring. It sounds as if the divorce rate was about 100% for young people who moved to Vermont then. Bernie Sanders, for example, got divorced after moving here with his first wife, had an illegitimate son, Levi, with a girlfriend, and later married his current wife. Some parents handled their children irresponsibly, turning them into conservative adults. Conditions for stable households were not optimal, since the hippie men usually had little income, the women were having babies and feminism began to take off in the 1970's.

The wave of people who arrived here then were part of a broad social movement that affected the entire country. Most of the migrants to Vermont were from middle-class families in Massachusetts and New York. Many had been here before on family vacations. Some, like me, were instinctively enchanted by characteristics such as the low population density, the beautiful natural environment and the pleasant but not ingratiating people. A similar history occurred elsewhere, but did not leave as lasting a mark. I am reminded of my summer in Bloomington, Indiana in 1970. I started making homemade bread. There was pot smoking, a food co-op, popular music, and some of my friends from Pelham, New York stopped by in an old school bus on their way out west. I was staying in an apartment with a friend who had dropped out of college and was trying to become a writer. An English instructor who had married a student and left his job brought his wife and moved in with us. They arrived in a VW Microbus, and he got a temporary job at a restaurant while his wife had an affair with my friend. Others were attempting to launch careers as artists. One became a pot dealer and later got arrested; now he's an electrician. Another became homeless and eventually became a Hindu monk. One friend who had led a college protest got married and divorced and later became an architect. In Indiana, as in other states, the hippie movement and antiwar protests tended to be concentrated in the large university towns and did not have much permanent impact on the state – Indiana remained conservative.

The difference in Vermont, which Daley touches on but does not explore in detail, has to do with several factors. First, Vermont had never been an industrialized state, and the anti-establishment attitudes of the hippies had little impact on the locals, who were already used to tourists. I think the lack of factories and the harsh winters made Vermonters more independent than Hoosiers, who, living in the Rust Belt, were used to walk-in high-paying jobs and were more sensitive to anti-corporate rhetoric, which could cause plant closings. The winters also helped screen out the most frivolous of hippies, if only because surviving them required resources and planning: this is not a good place to be homeless in January. Over time, the convergence of tourism and progressive ideas led to the current Vermont brand, which itself is of economic value to the state, allowing businesses to charge premiums on the presumption that Vermont products are healthier and more sustainable than those made elsewhere. The absence of large corporations also freed the state and local governments from the influences of lobbyists, leaving the door open to more radical candidates such as Bernie Sanders. Because of the small population and corporate indifference, it was much easier for someone like Bernie to gain traction here than in other states. I think that this is probably the easiest state in which to become a U.S. senator or governor, because you can practically meet all of the voters and no one is spending millions of dollars trying to defeat you. In fact, although Bernie is often in Washington, he is seemingly omnipresent in Vermont and is likely to show up in your town regularly.

Daley's approach borders on the sentimental, as the book really is about her life and the lives of her friends and family. Conceptually, much of the minutiae that she provides doesn't add much. She tries to stick with the more positive stories without mentioning many negative ones. Drug use must have been a problem, but she devotes several pages to Paul Lawrence, a crooked undercover cop who planted drugs to get convictions. There is no mention of Robert Durst, the probable serial killer who moved to Ripton in the early 1970's, when Vermont was trendy, and opened a health food store in Middlebury. Although she does touch on the dissimilarities between the locals and the newcomers, I don't think that she underscores adequately the fact that the two groups continue to carry on independently and remain segregated. While Donald Trump is more unpopular in Vermont than in any other state, he has supporters here. Daley also says nothing about the quality of the work of the artists and writers who were part of the wave that she describes. As I've said, I don't think that the quality of American writing in general is very good, and Vermont's is probably no exception. I have seen some of the artists' works and find some of them to be above average, but others are more formulaic and suitable for the tourist trade. This is not to say that the book isn't worth reading if you are interested in the topic, which is relevant where I live.

Diary

As usual, I have been scrounging around for something to read. I started Calypso, by David Sedaris, but don't think I'll finish it. Several years ago I read his Me Talk Pretty One Day and liked it, but I later started another of his books and didn't finish that either. Sedaris did not come up through the regular channels to literary fame, hence showed some promise initially. He is a fairly good writer, but his books have developed into a genre that depends on anecdotes from his life and family, which aren't that interesting, or at least there is insufficient material to be mined for a full career. Perhaps to gain new material, he tried moving to France, and then England, but that hasn't helped. Furthermore, he does little soul searching or deep analysis and obviously is attuned to what will sell. I can understand why he doesn't want to delve too far into private matters concerning himself and his intimates, as that would put him in an awkward position, but in this situation, if he had any integrity, he would simply stop writing for publication during his lifetime. His target audience seems to be middle-aged people who are beginning to think about their deaths. Much of his subject matter now pertains to new houses that he's purchased recently. When I veer off into bestselling books, I usually find that the enthusiasm of the masses is misguided, and this book is no exception. I've ordered Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, and Radicals Moved to Vermont, by Yvonne Daley, which is more up my alley, as it covers local history and also caters to my utopian fantasies. I have liked Vermont since I first visited it in 1974, and I think that if I had been more prescient I would have dropped out of society and moved here sooner. Of course, this is no utopia, but I can't say that the thirty-nine years I spent between graduating from college in 1972 and moving to Vermont in 2011 were particularly worthwhile, as they involved activities such as finding out that I didn't like graduate school and working in jobs and places that I'd just as soon forget. I was a good candidate for dropping out of society by my late teens, and when I was twenty-two I considered moving to New Zealand. If this book fails, I've also ordered a three-volume scholarly biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Maurice Cranston. Rousseau was one of the few intellectuals who led an interesting life, and although I think many of his ideas were stupid, he was profoundly influential in political theory, and his obsolete thoughts on freedom are still quite popular.

I have been avoiding discussing Donald Trump, both because he is a depressing topic and because anyone who bothers to read this blog is likely to agree with me already. From time to time there are rumblings about what might lead to his departure, but so far Republicans have been loyal to him out of political self-interest. While it is readily apparent that Trump is dishonest and uninformed and operates at an intellectual level that precludes the possibility of understanding the issues at hand, I have to keep reminding myself that George W. Bush, who wasn't that much better, was reelected. In Trump's case, however, there seems to be a good chance that either the Mueller investigation or the midterm elections in November will result in his removal or weakening. There are other things to worry about, but Trump himself seems like a dark cloud enveloping the whole planet. If it were possible to make legal contributions toward a Trump assassination, I would be an enthusiastic donor. Unfortunately, the best assassins are probably Trump supporters. In any case, even if Trump manages to leave office intact, I don't see him coming out of this with a reputation that anyone in his right mind would want.

Finally, though you've probably seen it and I don't find the lyrics intelligible, I think that this video is well-executed and effective.

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past II

Later chapters discuss the state of affairs of ancient genomic studies in regions other than Europe. The Indus Valley received migrations of farmers from Iran 9000 years ago, and they spread south into the heart of India by about 5000 years ago. 3000 to 4000 years ago, India split into two main population groups with one in the north and one in the south. The northern group was strongly affected by descendants of the same Yamnaya group that had entered Europe, and these genes show up conspicuously in the caste system, with the Brahmins exhibiting the most European genes. The genes correspond with the spread of Indo-European languages in the region. There are parallels between the Rig Veda, composed over 3000 years ago, and the slightly more recent Iliad and Odyssey. Across India, the caste system has created many different genetic bottlenecks related to inbreeding, which have caused an increased frequency in several diseases. These bottlenecks have effects not unlike those seen in Finns and Ashkenazi Jews. In the Americas, Native Americans are hampering progress in research because they believe that it violates their cultural traditions, even when ancient remains are not those of their ancestors. Research is now underway in China, where the Han constitute a majority. In China and elsewhere, "ghost populations," i.e. large ancient groups that have no archaeological identification, have been found. Tibetans appear to be related to Asian hunter-gatherers and Han Chinese.  Africa is one of the least studied regions in DNA research. This is partly the result of the deterioration of human DNA in tropical environments. Europe is currently the location of the most intensive DNA research, because that is where most of the technology has developed.

I found one chapter, "The Genomics of Inequality," somewhat disappointing. Reich discusses the inherent biological advantage that men have in spreading their genes, in that women can have only a few children whereas men can have many. For example, Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol Empire who died in 1227, is thought to have millions of living descendants who are identified by a unique feature of his Y chromosome. Reich, oddly I think, describes the historical events associated with high levels of male reproduction as inequality. For example, a study has shown that, among African Americans, the men have 38 percent European ancestry while the women have 10 percent: These numbers imply that the contribution of European American men to the genetic makeup of the present-day African American population is about four times that of European American women. In other words, many male slave owners, like Thomas Jefferson, were having children with their slaves, and their wives were not. A similar pattern is evident in ancient DNA studies of the Yamnaya. It is true that an inherent social inequality is present when men are free to have as much sex as they like with women from lower social strata, but Reich seems to go out of his way to frame the phenomenon in politically correct terms when, from a scientific standpoint, it could just as well be described as natural selection at work. Whether you like it or not, natural selection is a numbers game, and nature doesn't care whether a larger population comes into being as a result of equality or inequality. For that matter, all species eventually become extinct – what's fair about that? I'm cutting Reich a little slack, because he walks a thin line in which his lab at Harvard could be bombed if he inadvertently offended someone.

This book is a short summary of research in what is rapidly growing into an enormous field. Some aspects of the research are simply interesting in themselves as new tools for exploring human history. There are also more practical aspects, such as the understanding of the genetics behind certain diseases. The field will eventually provide a much clearer picture of the role of mutations in our evolution. Above all, since this is a scientific enterprise, I am hopeful that it will someday put to rest much of the mythological nonsense that underlies the thinking in all societies and makes the world a far more dangerous place than it needs to be. When you frame human history in millenia rather than in decades or centuries, ethnicity and race become ephemera, as does the claim to ownership of land.

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past I

This book, by David Reich, summarizes research in the new field of the genomics of ancient human DNA. I'm about halfway through, and at first I thought it would be boring. However, it is turning out that this is science at its best, and Reich and his colleagues are making serious headway in areas that have been of interest to me for some time. By analyzing the DNA of archaeological human remains representing different populations at different locations at different times, a far more detailed picture of human migrations and interbreeding is emerging than was available a few years ago. Improvements have been made in DNA extraction, its processing and the use of statistical models. The first major result has been the demonstration that humans and Neanderthals interbred directly and that Neanderthal genes now comprise about two percent of the genome of most modern humans. Modern humans are one of five known human populations that have lived on the planet during the last seventy thousand years. The others were the Neanderthals, the Siberian Denisovans, the Australo-Denisovans and the "hobbits" of Flores island. There is evidence of interbreeding directly and indirectly between these groups. With carbon dating of the remains and genome sequencing, it is possible to map the distribution and prevalence of certain genes by location and time and associate them with specific populations, earlier and later.

The main picture that has emerged so far has been that human populations have been on the move constantly and have interbred, producing non-sterile hybrids along the way. The people whom we associate with certain geographic locations commonly have lived thousands of miles away within the last few thousand years and have interbred with other populations repeatedly. It is even possible that, contradicting the prevailing theory that most of the evolution of modern humans occurred in Africa, some of the evolution may have occurred outside Africa, with non-African populations returning to Africa over 300,000 years ago.

The appearance and disappearance of populations in Europe has been common until recently. Early groups of hunter-gatherers and farmers in Europe were replaced by descendants of the Yamnaya people from the steppe of eastern Europe about 5000 years ago. The Yamnaya were early adopters of wheels, carts and horses. The Yamnaya's descendants were the Corded Ware people, and until recently these two groups had been thought unrelated due to differences in their artifacts. However, genomic studies indicate their relatedness, which also applies to most modern Europeans. This genome is associated with Indo-European languages, the exact origin of which is unclear. Reich speculates that they may have originated in Armenia or Iran.

I skipped ahead to the chapter, "The Genomics of Race and Identity." Here, Reich attempts to sort out the controversies that arise from racist-sounding language in a politically correct environment, and he finds errors in both camps. He chides not only Henry Harpending, one of the authors of the study of Ashkenazim intelligence cited earlier, for making an unsubstantiated racist statement about Africans, but none other than James Watson, one of the discoverers of the double helix, for assuming that Ashkenazi Jews are smart. On the opposite side, he criticizes Richard Lewontin for popularizing the idea that all living humans are essentially the same, an idea that is not supported by current evidence yet is defended with such great fervor that unbiased scientists such as Reich have to edit their language carefully for fear of being attacked. Reich, himself an Ashkenazi Jew, does not believe that the Ashkenazims' susceptibility to certain diseases is related to intelligence, but he leaves the door open to the possibility that a genetic origin for high intelligence may be found. There is currently little evidence connecting specific genes with intelligence, and the genetics of cognition has not been studied thoroughly, though this is not to say that connections won't be identified in the future. In Reich's view, there are significant genetic differences between populations; the problem is that, in a reaction to the ideological oppression of political correctness, some writers have overstated their cases without sufficient evidence, hence betraying racist biases. To show that differences aren't necessarily bad, Reich uses the example of men and women as people who are very different genetically yet are able to get along. At first this seemed useful to me, but on reflection it seems like a poor example. I find that the interests of men and women are usually at significant variance, and were it not for certain biological imperatives, such as the need for sex and the desire to procreate, men and women might have little reason to interact. There are millions of men who would prefer women to live obediently in harems, and there are millions of women who think of men as ATM's. In my experience, men and women spend most of their lives complaining about each other. Gender differences aren't really the best model for a harmonious society even if men and women do manage to cooperate.

Reich does not specifically mention The 10,000 Year Explosion, which I discussed earlier, though Harpending was one of its authors. It appears that the general thrust of that book may be correct, but that many of the details may be wrong. The Yamnaya and Corded Ware cultures were not farmers, yet they seem to have displaced farmers. It is possible that they were immune to the bubonic plague or other diseases, while the earlier farmers in Europe were not. It is possible that evolutionary changes may have given the Yamnaya an advantage, but this may not have played out exactly as described in that book.

There are other chapters of interest left, and I'll have more to say when I've read them.

Diary

I seem to have been preoccupied with mundane activities, not leaving me with much of interest to say. The carpenter ants are out and require attention, and the lawn needs mowing again. Troubleshooting plumbing problems (literally plumbing the depths) isn't much fun. The spring has been relatively cool, not ideal for growing tomatoes, and mine are still quite small. My new car has sophisticated warnings that alert you to minor system failures, requiring me to drive forty-five minutes each way to the dealer in Burlington to have it checked, and I've recently made three round trips and waited a total of four hours. Nevertheless, with the snow gone I am enjoying occasional drives over the mountains on winding roads. I've started to read a new book and will begin commenting on it soon, but so far am finding it less thrilling than expected.

The problem of locating compelling reading material seems intractable. Over the last few years I think I've found biographies to be the most satisfying. In a way, they are a substitute for a satisfactory social life, one that doesn't require the recitation of a series of platitudes or boring chitchat. In a biography or memoir, one has an opportunity to engage with a person, no matter how distant in time or place, who is not leading a superficial, materialistic life. Memoirs, however, are more susceptible than biographies to the interweaving of fiction. The main problem with biographies, I find, is that not many people merit one, so there aren't many good ones. Still, they can be better than fiction, which I am increasingly equating with lying. At the heart of my objection to fiction is the feeling I get while reading it that the author, for one reason or another, is bamboozling me. What, really, is the point of making things up when life is already insurmountably confusing? Adding fiction to confusion is not a promising recipe. Moreover, in my reading, linguistic skill is not the most important aspect of fiction, and writers such as Joyce and Proust receive far more credit than I think they deserve. Nonfiction in general is more reliable, though one must be careful with historical works, because the human brain has a way of interweaving fiction with history. Then, though I often appreciate the information provided in scientific nonfiction, that is usually narrow in scope and offers no emotional satisfaction. I still have some interest in poetry, but the interest is centered on the unexpected surprise one may find in it, which, in my experience, is extremely rare.

After ten years, I've finally given up on Netflix. Since it became popular and began to produce its own programs, the quality has deteriorated significantly. Much of the problem has to do with the fact that it would be nearly impossible to provide a stream of programming that I would find satisfactory. In their early years, they had several decades of films to draw from, and now there is practically nothing left besides new material. For the time being, we are watching Kanopy, which is a free library-sponsored streaming website that attempts to obtain high quality videos.

The stargazing opportunities have been extremely limited since last fall. Jupiter has been prominent in the sky, but the viewing conditions have been far from ideal. You can still spot double stars, and Albirio is back for the season.