The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754-1762 III

As far as I've read, Rousseau is forty-seven and has spent two years in the rundown cottage in Montmorency, which was known as Petit Montlouis, because it was on a larger estate named Montlouis. Since Mme. Levasseur had moved back to Paris, he was alone with Thérèse. His health was poor because of urinary problems and a hernia, and the house was cold during the winter due to a lack of heat; he thought that he didn't have long to live. He became increasingly religious and said that he wanted to go to heaven. Initially he had few visitors and spent most of his time writing. His main work during this period was an essay titled A Letter to Monsieur d'Alembert on the Theatre. D'Alembert had written an article for Diderot's Encyclopédie in which he discussed Geneva and argued for adding a theater there to give a spark to the arts. The Calvinists had banned theaters because they thought that they had a corrupting effect on the population. Rousseau was on neutral terms with d'Alembert but was miffed because he hadn't been consulted. His essay supported the ban and included barbs against Voltaire and Diderot. At the time, Voltaire was living in Geneva, and Rousseau assumed that the essay was for his benefit, because a theater would allow him to stage his own productions there. The veiled criticism of Diderot had nothing to do with the article or Geneva and served only to solidify their split. Rousseau had been on cordial terms with Voltaire, but his essay caused a breach. Other than this essay, Rousseau continued to work on Julie and maintained correspondences, some of which pertained to copyrights and publishers who had cheated him out of money. At this stage he was entirely self-financing and paying rent.

Cranston is good at providing important biographical details, but I am finding him weaker when it comes to analyzing Rousseau's psychodynamics. Rousseau's behavior was considered unusual then, and it would be now. In the absence of discussion on this topic, I am piecing together a model to try to make sense of this. Some of Rousseau's antisocial behavior probably stemmed from his urinary problems, which made it necessary for him to urinate very frequently, making normal social interactions awkward. Part of it may also have had to do with the fact that Rousseau was not an extroverted person and tended to be shy. Another part may have had to do with the fact that he was not accustomed to urban living as he encountered it in Paris and felt uncomfortable there. He seems to have had a theatrical flair, so it may have been easiest for him to invent a persona as a hermit, an ascetic and a citizen of Geneva. One of the areas in which he was most confounding was in his reluctance to take ordinary steps to secure a sufficient income. He could easily have accepted an undemanding job that would have covered his expenses, or he could have found a suitable patron whose support he accepted graciously, but he did neither. I'm not sure whether he was stubborn, stupid, or both.

There were other complexities which are subtler and more difficult to resolve. He seemed to develop frictions with his friends among the Parisian philosophes, not always with clear causes. One aspect of this may simply have been male rivalry. His relationships with women were no less problematic, perhaps because he was more emotionally dependent on them than on men. For the time, Mme. de Warens had met his needs, though he cannot be said to have loved her as much as he loved Sophie, who was doubly unavailable as a spouse and mistress. His relationship with Thérèse seems to have been based primarily on sex until his mid-forties, whereupon she became a mere servant.

Perhaps what I like to speculate on the most about Rousseau are the inconsistencies of his ideas and his role in the Enlightenment, though ideas are not the main focus of Cranston's biography. I get the sense that Rousseau was not a great thinker, but that he was able to leverage the abilities he did have to the best possible effect. I think that he was unusually capable at looking inward and identifying what was most important to him, and then use this as a basis for his writings. That included an appreciation of nature and rural life. Though he probably made many blunders in writing Émile, he understood that a certain kind of life would be the right one for him and would allow him to express who he was; this countered the ideas of his more scientific friends, who, at the time, were thinking of humans as blank slates. In at least this respect, Rousseau was far ahead of his time. In other areas, I'm not so sure that he warrants much attention, except as a compelling writer, primarily in his autobiographical works.

The main incongruity that I see is Rousseau's endorsement of Calvinism while pursuing a completely improper relationship with Thérèse. That relationship was not one of equals, and I have seen no evidence that she had say in the disposal of the five children that they produced together. Would she have liked to have kept them? It is possible that she concurred with Rousseau that they couldn't afford them, but there is no record of her having a voice in the decision. Outwardly, Thérèse may as well have been a sex slave with no rights. Rousseau conveniently labeled himself a Calvinist while living in France, when his behavior would have landed him in jail in any puritanical jurisdiction. The moral high ground that he took in his writing is absurd if you look closely at his actual behavior. It should also be noted that while he was willing to accept charity at the expense of friends who could ill afford it, I see no evidence that he ever extended himself to help anyone else. Thérèse, his lifelong companion, lived in poverty just as he did. Arguably, she was an unpaid sex worker.

In regard to the Enlightenment, Rousseau did not seem to fit in well with it in a broad sense, unless you include his political theories. Compared to the other philosophes of his era, he was notably conservative and anti-scientific. I think perhaps that this was an early demarcation that still manifests itself in the rift between the arts and the sciences. Literary types and scientific types remain poorly integrated.

The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754-1762 II

1757 turned out to be an excessively melodramatic year for Rousseau, who was then forty-five. A sister-in-law of Mme. d'Épinay, Comtesse d'Houdetot, known to friends as Sophie, lived in a rented house near the Hermitage and Mme. d'Épinay's chateau, which was called La Chevrette. Although she had known Rousseau from earlier encounters, they struck out on a romantic relationship. She was eighteen years younger than Rousseau and nine years younger than Thérèse, attractive but not pretty, with a good figure and a warm personality. The relationship included a few encounters of an undetermined sexual nature, secret meetings in the woods, hiding letters to each other in a tree, etc. – all a little corny to me. Sophie belonged to an ancient aristocratic lineage and had three children, and, as was the norm for aristocratic women at that time, had a lover; he was named St-Lambert and was away at war. It appears that Rousseau's celebrity status had attracted her to him, and that he may have been drawn to her aristocratic credentials, but they still managed to form a genuinely close relationship.

Maurice Cranston makes a valiant effort to sort out exactly what transpired, and there are mountains of extant evidence in the form of letters, but the whole situation still seems murky to me. By current standards, Rousseau may have been going through a midlife crisis, with sexual boredom and early inklings of his death. Sophie became the model for Julie in his novel, and clearly he was obsessed with her. Unfortunately, Mme. d'Épinay took an interest in this and may have used Thérèse, who also must have been displeased, to intercept his letters to Sophie. Moreover, Sophie loved St-Lambert and didn't want to hurt him. The situation boiled out of control when Mme. d'Épinay decided to make a winter trip to Geneva to see her doctor, who was an acquaintance of Rousseau. She wanted Rousseau to accompany her, but he didn't want to go. This resulted in a flurry of letters full of recrimination, which left Mme. d'Épinay, her lover, Grimm, a fellow encyclopédist, and Diderot, who somehow got dragged into this, displeased with Rousseau's conduct. The turn of events may have been an early example of Rousseau's paranoia causing ill effects, and it seems to me that he could easily have prevented the outcome by exercising greater tact. If he had consulted each person face-to-face and stated his position plainly without any innuendos, it seems that the situation might have been salvaged.

That outcome, however, was ruined relationships. In a letter to Grimm, Mme. d'Épinay described Rousseau as "a moral dwarf on stilts." Grimm wrote to Mme. d'Épinay, "You know madmen are dangerous, especially if one panders to them as you have sometimes done to that poor devil through your ill-judged pity for his insanity." Diderot became involved with this fiasco, and his relationship with Rousseau was subsequently ruined. Though Rousseau managed to remain on good terms with Sophie and St-Lambert, in late 1757 Mme. d'Épinay's entourage departed for Geneva without him and he moved out of the Hermitage to a cottage two miles away in Montmorency. There was a side to Rousseau that was not at all flattering: on the one hand he seems to have been a sensitive soul who became closely attached to people, particularly maternal women, but on the other hand he was not always straightforward in his dealings with people and generated unnecessary confusion. I think that he may have unconsciously engaged in social climbing, and when confronted he took solace with sympathetic women without dealing effectively with the men. One might surmise that he does not appear to have been emotionally self-aware.

I should mention at this point that the aristocratic women who participated in the French salons of Rousseau's time seem remarkably sophisticated. By current standards they seem unusually intelligent, well-informed, sensitive and articulate, certainly more so than any American women I've ever met. One begins to get a sense of what was lost when the aristocratic institutions of France collapsed. When the hordes of bourgeoisie finally took over public life in France, the salons were replaced with boring social gatherings like those hosted by Mme. Verdurin in Proust's Swann's Way, and a little later Simone de Beauvoir avoided them like the plague. It would seem that one of the highlights of Western civilization has vanished forever. The apparent social equality that arose with the death of monarchies was accompanied by a kind of crudeness that came at an aesthetic cost.

The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754-1762 I

This second volume in Maurice Cranston's series starts where the first leaves off, in 1754. After returning to Paris from Geneva, Rousseau resumed his salon participation while living frugally without a regular job and supporting Thérèse and her mother, Mme. Levasseur, who was getting old. He sought a publisher for his Discourse on Inequality. At the age of 42, Rousseau's eccentricities become more apparent. In those days, publishing a book was generally not very profitable for the author, and his friends, such as Diderot, earned a living in the same way that many intellectuals do today, by writing commissioned articles for journals. Rousseau refused to engage in this type of work and, besides his income as a copyist, he depended on handouts that he would accept only when they didn't compromise his ascetic lifestyle. It seems that many aspects of his life as a principled philosophe were a bit of a sham, because Mme. Levasseur was constantly going behind his back and soliciting funds from people to support the three of them.

Rousseau disliked living in Paris, because it was congested, unhealthy and corrupt, and he preferred the outdoors. It seems that his plan had been to take Geneva by storm and retire there. His Discourse on Inequality was dedicated to that city, but, when it was published, it turned out to be flop in Geneva, which was not an intellectual hub. Furthermore, although he seems to have wanted to idealize Geneva as a utopia which reflected his ideals, in fact it was a patrician city with distinct classes that hardly demonstrated his ideas regarding equality. One of the Parisian salon hostesses, Mme. d'Épinay, had a house to the north of Paris in Montmorency, and she remodeled a building on the property, which she named the Hermitage, so that Rousseau, Thérèse and her mother could live there. In 1756, the three moved in. Generally, this arrangement suited Rousseau, and he began to write his first novel, Julie. His house was a mile from the nearest neighbor, and, far ahead of his time, he enjoyed walking in the country. He usually walked alone, since Thérèse didn't like walking.

When Mme. d'Épinay was staying at her house there, Rousseau socialized with her, though the conversation was not at salon levels, and sometimes he found her boring. She was not sexually attractive to him, and they did not become involved in that way. By this time, Thérèse was also unattractive to him, and although they seem to have had a good relationship, she came to resemble a servant and nurse in her household role. Despite the fact that Montmorency is close to Paris, in those days getting there often involved walking through five miles of mud, so Rousseau didn't get many visitors. He communicated with friends via letters, and, much as what happens today with emails, misunderstandings sometimes arose. In particular, Diderot, who was busy supporting his own family and secretly subsidizing Mme. Levasseur to assist Rousseau, didn't like to take time off to trudge through the mud, and this produced some animosity. He was probably irritated by Rousseau's "hermit" act because of the inconveniences it caused for everyone else.

My reading of this biography falls broadly into my analysis of intellectuals, and I am particularly interested in thinking about how much importance should be placed on their ideas after you have seen how they originated. In Rousseau's case, I identify with his appreciation of the outdoors and rural living and his disdain for being an employee, but I think that some of his ideas were simply idealizations of Calvinism and Geneva. In the case of all intellectuals, they may have some insights or special knowledge, but, in the end, they suffer from much the same ignorance and prejudice as everyone else. From the vantage point of the present, Rousseau had little or no understanding of what the effects of the Industrial Revolution and population growth would be. Regardless of what he thought, people were about to move to cities and take industrial jobs rather than work or live rurally. He advocated small, democratically-governed republics without recognizing that economies of scale would soon render such political and economic structures obsolete. Moreover, he engaged in a lot of fuzzy thinking regarding who would actually vote in his ideal republic. Certainly, he would not place illiterate servants or farm laborers on the same level as educated people like himself. Thus, "equality" coming from Rousseau had a specialized meaning which did not provide all people with identical rights. Nor, so far as I'm aware, did Rousseau delineate in a useful way the conditions under which rights should be restricted. Rousseau was one of the most original thinkers of the Enlightenment, but I think it is important to view even the most influential of thinkers as having thoughts of limited applicability, simply because, at best, they are likely to be only somewhat less ignorant than their peers.

Diary

The Rousseau biography is quite long – over 900 pages in small print – but I am finding it worthwhile and think it deserves a close reading. I apologize to those of you who have no interest in the subject, since I'm only about a third of the way through, and it will take a month or two for me to finish it at the current rate.

This is the perfect time to be settled indoors, as cold weather and permanent snow have arrived. From footprints on the roof, I can see that one of the mice that I blocked out in 2017 is still trying unsuccessfully to enter the house. Other than reading and an occasional walk, there isn't much to do. I have been following the Trump debacle and hoping that it will end soon. I think that he is hanging by a thread, and that he could be gone quite rapidly, depending on the Mueller findings. A possible scenario would be that Mueller provides proof of Trump's direct involvement in the obstruction of justice, which causes a drop in Trump's popularity and a loss of support by Republican senators. Under such a scenario, Trump would face immediate impeachment and would probably resign under pressure. Even if the Mueller investigation doesn't pan out, there are several separate investigations underway in the House of Representatives which will probably uncover damaging information about Trump and perhaps reveal crimes not examined by Mueller.

Some pundits think that the normal democratic process – presidential votes – should be the deciding factor in what happens to Trump. I disagree, in that Trump is a menace to society, and the risks associated with his remaining in office for two more years outweigh the desirability of normal electoral procedures. Even if I were able to convince myself that he had a coherent set of policies that are plausibly in the American interest, he has repeatedly demonstrated that he has very little understanding of his responsibilities or what actions he should take to exercise them. For those who somehow manage to agree with him on anything, chances are that he will be unable to fulfill his promises, because he is demonstrably incompetent. Beyond this, it seems possible that he will ultimately be found guilty of multiple crimes. The writing is on the wall: he will be regarded as the worst president in American history, and, with any luck, Congress will pass a law to prevent such a mistake from occurring in the future. Trump is unfit for the presidency, and I would prefer to see him dead or in prison. Allowing him to remain the most powerful person in the world is beyond absurdity.

Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1754 VII

A second competition was announced by the Academy of Dijon in 1753. The question this time was "What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by Natural Law?" Of course, Rousseau immediately began writing, and, although he didn't win on this occasion, he managed to produce his best essay to date. It was here that he set out his "natural man" theory for which he is best known today. Rousseau was usually a lyrical and literary writer, but he closely consulted Diderot, and the essay has a more scientific ring to it. In what might be called a pre-Darwinian description of the evolution of mankind, he articulated how humans evolved from less-sophisticated animals. He argued that, at some time in the distant past, man was morally good in comparison to his current state. The change began when agriculture became popular, along with the concept of private property. Eventually, man had to earn his living by wages, subjecting himself to the will of others, and society imposed new rules, such as monogamy, in order to maintain order. Rousseau argued that this was a corruption from the earlier state in which man was happy. The essay was published and drew much public attention. He sent Voltaire, an acquaintance but not a friend, a copy. Voltaire was then enjoying a bourgeois life and was not about to have his lifestyle challenged. In characteristic wit, he replied:

I have received, Monsieur, your new book against the human race, and I thank you. No one has employed so much intelligence to turn us men into beasts. One starts wanting to walk on all fours after reading your book. However, in more than sixty years I have lost the habit.

Besides Voltaire, the younger encyclopédistes of Rousseau's set were generally rationalists and not amenable to the religious undertones of the essay. Despite this, it was widely read and contributed further to Rousseau's fame.

In the summer of 1754, Rousseau traveled to Geneva with Thérèse and visited family members and old acquaintances. In order to do so, he had to renounce Catholicism and become a Calvinist again. Because of his celebrity, the Genevans made this easy for him, despite his living arrangements with Thérèse. The moral laxity of Paris was not accepted in Geneva, but Rousseau was able to meet the requirements simply by stating that Thérèse was his nurse. They enjoyed the summer and early fall there, spending much of their time walking outdoors before returning to Paris in October.

This brings to a close the first of three volumes. Although there is more detail here than necessary, I am enjoying the richness of the description. Though I don't take Rousseau completely seriously as a thinker, the information is useful for understanding the history of ideas. What I like about Rousseau is that he wrote from the heart, and that his ideas lack the opacity that pervades most academic writing. It is interesting to me that basic questions such as the rights of individuals and the meaning of equality have scarcely advanced since the eighteenth century. Academic writing usually consists of a regurgitation of what someone else said, and along the way the meaning of the original thought becomes lost. It is shocking how few original thinkers there have been throughout history, and when you find one like Rousseau, it is difficult, despite his limitations, not to marvel at his rarity. The valuable lesson from Rousseau is not primarily conceptual: it is his articulation of the visceral feeling that he had in response to nature and his repulsion to the aspects of civilization that made him feel ill-at-ease. Such observations do not generally arise in the circles of modern academics or intellectuals. When I think about my life, the most absurd and unsatisfactory aspects of it were usually related to my status as an employee. My caveat regarding Rousseau is that going back in time is not a real solution to human happiness. If other species are "happier" because they are not conscious in the same sense that we are, then so be it. I don't think that most people would like to revert to a lower state of consciousness even if they could. Nevertheless, I agree with Rousseau in his rejection of an economic system that subtly enslaves some people to others. Of course, the solution to such a problem was well beyond the scope of what Rousseau could hope to offer the modern world, but I have always felt that the state of being an employee is an unpleasant subjugation that I would have avoided if it had been tenable. Rousseau lacked the sophistication to provide a comprehensive outline of the shortcomings of modern capitalism, but he had the right reaction. Unfortunately, such questions also seem to be beyond the scope of contemporary writers such as Thomas Piketty – thus it is difficult not to admire Rousseau as a powerful writer.

Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1754 VI

During the late 1740's and early 1750's in Paris, the new breed of young intellectuals who had contributed to Diderot's Encyclopédie became respected participants in the salon set, and intelligence and wit became part of the package, perhaps for the first time. Rousseau did well at this, though he was shy and, since he never had much money, didn't like to dress up. His next big break came with the composition of the opera Le Devin du Village in 1752. At this stage, Rousseau was advocating the Italian style of opera over the French, and it caught on. The opera was first performed for the King at Fontainebleau and was a great success. This plunged Rousseau into the musical world, and before long he was getting into fights with Rameau, the elder statesman of French music who had criticized Les Muses galantes. Soon after, Rousseau staged a play that he had written much earlier at Chambéry, but it was more or less a flop.

In his late 30's and early 40's, Rousseau's final adult personality emerged, and it wasn't all pretty. In my opinion, he willfully remained poor long past the time that he had to be, and he refined his poverty as an odd sort of act. Because wealthy people were more than willing to help him once he became famous in Paris, he received a high-paying job as a cashier in an office of the Receiver-General of Finances. However, having a regular job made him ill, and he soon quit. The King so liked Le Devin du Village that he was prepared to offer Rousseau a pension. Somehow, Rousseau rationalized not accepting a pension on the grounds that it would compromise his integrity. This occurred while he was living in near-squalor, supporting Thérèse's parasitic and intrusive family and earning a pittance by copying music. This kind of obstinate impracticality eventually irritated his closest friend, Diderot, who seems to have been far more sensible.

What irks me at the moment is that while Rousseau could easily have increased his income substantially without much effort, he was sending what little money he had to Mme. de Warens, apologizing as he did that he wished that he had more to send. Apparently her financial situation had become dire when she lost her pension from Turin. Moreover, Rousseau abandoned all of his five children and never saw them again. It is hard to recognize this as some sort of principled behavior: he was simply a disingenuous friend and an irresponsible parent. He seems to have thought that by remaining poor he could never be accused of malfeasance. Unfortunately, for all his braying about equality, he didn't seem to think that he had to make any sacrifices for women, children or friends as long as he could stay poor or sick. In addition, he does not seem to have thought about or addressed the problems associated with Thérèse's family. As far as I am able to determine, Rousseau's ideas regarding personal austerity did not stem from the refinement of a belief system, but rather derived from the dogma that he had passively absorbed while growing up in Calvinist Geneva.

I am still reading this with great interest, but not because I want to emulate Rousseau. I merely think that he was a talented writer who lived an interesting, well-documented life during interesting times. Though he may have possessed excellent language skills and a reasonably good knowledge of music, a lot of his thinking seems half-baked, leading me to conclude that he was not as great a philosopher as some have made him out to be. This wouldn't be of much significance in itself were it not for the fact that he influenced later political thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson. Reading about Rousseau, it is no surprise that Jefferson, who lived in style, complete with French wines imported to Virginia at great expense, was in debt throughout his life and didn't treat slaves, women or non-landowning males as equal citizens. Furthermore, Jefferson had five illegitimate children with his slave, Sally Hemings: how enlightened was that? Some of the elements of Rousseau's legacy, it must be noted, are about as unequal as you can get.

I will make one more post on this book, take a short pause, and then start the next volume.

Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1754 V

Initially, life in Paris was good when Rousseau returned from Venice. A new friend whom he had met in Venice, the Spanish nobleman Ignatio Altuna, allowed him to stay with him in his Paris apartment and paid his expenses. However, Altuna returned to Spain in the spring of 1745, and Rousseau was then left to his own devices. He moved into a low-budget hotel, where he met Thérèse Levasseur, the illiterate laundress who was to become his lifelong mistress. There he composed his operatic ballet, Les Muses galantes. Though he managed to arrange for a rehearsal, the ballet never went into production. In 1746, he attended the salon of Mme. Dupin, and after they became acquainted he took a position as secretary within her household. The Dupins were wealthy dilettantes who were trying to make names for themselves in their writings, but, despite Rousseau's talent, they did not produce any memorable works. He received another small inheritance in 1747 when his father died, but his financial state remained weak, because he received little pay from the Dupins. By 1749, Rousseau was making contributions to Diderot's Encyclopédie, along with Diderot and d'Alembert. Rousseau provided entries on music while d'Alembert focused on math and science. This work, however, produced no immediate income.

In 1749 there was a crackdown on heretical writings in France by Catholic authorities, and Diderot was arrested and jailed in Vincennes. He was allowed visitors, and Rousseau visited him by walking about six miles each way from Paris. To occupy himself while walking, Rousseau read, and one day he noticed an article announcing a prize sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. The prize would be awarded for the best essay on the subject "Has the progress of the arts and sciences done more to corrupt or to purify morals?" Rousseau was immediately inspired and wrote the winning essay, which was to be a major turning point in his life. He took the more controversial anti-arts-and-sciences position, in which he seemed reactionary, but his essay won, and soon he was famous. While there were inconsistencies and flawed logic in his essay, it was widely debated in France, and Rousseau became a celebrity for the first time. He wrote that the arts and sciences "cast garlands of flowers over the chains that men bear, crushing in them that sense of original liberty for which they were born, making them like their slavery, and turning them into what is called a civilized people." The main thesis of most of Rousseau's subsequent work was that man is good but is corrupted by culture.

After living with the Dupins, Rousseau moved in with Thérèse Levasseur's family and provided most of their financial support. During the course of his relationship with Thérèse, she produced a total of five babies, all of which were sent to the orphanage. Rousseau is thought to have been their father, though there have been skeptics. Rousseau apparently had a birth defect which made it difficult for him to urinate, and he was subject to various infections and illnesses. While he later expressed regret about abandoning the children, the practice was normal then, when modern birth control didn't exist, under those conditions in which parents couldn't afford to raise them.

As I proceed through these books, I hope to comment more on Rousseau's ideas. At this stage in his life, he felt oppressed and abused by the wealthy, who, for the purposes of his essay, were the primary advocates of the arts and sciences. Clearly, in Paris at the time, there was a lot of unpleasant, competitive behavior among them, and their servants, Rousseau, for instance, often bore the brunt of it by being overworked and underpaid. I don't think that Rousseau's idea that life was better before civilization came along holds up well if you use conventional measures of the quality of life, but if you view his main point rather as an indictment of social inequality and its ill effects, his thoughts are still relevant today. Thus, I think that his ideas regarding inequality have held up, while his harkening back to an idealized past is mistaken. Although I frequently criticize the current state of the arts, I would never suggest, as he did, that they should not exist. Similarly, I think it would be idiotic to renounce all of science. However, in the history of ideas, Rousseau is worth considering, with the proviso that he wrote at a time when social science was in its infancy, and that he could not have known how our distant ancestors actually lived.

Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1754 IV

Rousseau arrived in Paris relatively well-prepared at the age of thirty, especially if you compare him to another writer, Stendhal, who arrived as an uninformed teenager a few decades later. He had the appropriate letters of introduction and already knew which salons he should attend. Though he still had some of the characteristics of a country bumpkin, Parisians cut him slack, since that was how they thought of the Swiss. His timing may also have been lucky, since he immediately met Denis Diderot, who was a year younger and had himself just arrived from the boondocks. They immediately became friends. Although he sometimes misread the salon hostesses, Rousseau did well in salons, because he was both eloquent and interesting in conversation. One must also note that, off the bat, he was incredibly ambitious and wanted to associate with the best people possible and make a good impression on them. His first major attempt to impress people was the presentation before an assemblage of luminaries a new system of musical notation that he had invented himself. They listened closely and set up a special committee to consider it further. Unfortunately, the committee didn't think that it merited implementation, and Rousseau was crushed. Rather than accept this verdict humbly, Rousseau wrote a book on the notation and published it at some expense to himself. The book didn't change matters, but many Parisians who had an interest in music read it, and at least it improved his name recognition and gave him some standing.

He seems to have had a knack for impressing upper-class women, and, since his financial status remained dire, he managed to enlist Mme. de Broglie, a marquise, to help him. In no time at all she had found him a position as secretary to the Compte de Montaigu, the newly appointed French Ambassador to the Venetian Republic. Rousseau arrived in Venice in September, 1743. Venice, with its gaiety, appealed to Rousseau, and he made friends. His job involved writing letters daily to Versailles and other diplomatic offices. The War of Austrian Succession affected France and Venice during his tenure. However, Rousseau seems to have been more competent than his boss, Montaigu, and he tended to exceed his authority. Montaigu didn't compensate him fairly according to the terms of his employment, and Rousseau's financial status remained fragile. In the summer of 1744, Rousseau and Montaigu were on very bad terms and had an argument in which Montaigu lost his temper. According to Montaigu, he "dismissed the man like a bad valet for the insolence he allowed himself." By the end of August, Rousseau was unemployed and on his way back to Paris. The episode with Montaigu and its aftermath had a lasting impact on Rousseau's thought. While most of the people he spoke to agreed with him that he had conducted himself properly, they accepted as a matter of course that Montaigu had to be shown deference in light of his aristocratic credentials and position. Rousseau wrote that this "sowed the seed of indignation in my soul against our stupid civil institutions, in which the real public interest and genuine justice are always sacrificed for the sake of any kind of apparent order which is actually detrimental to real order, and only adds the sanction of public authority to the oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong."

There is another event from the Venice period that is worth mentioning, as it is one of the few that I still recall from reading Confessions a few years ago. Rousseau had an awkward rendezvous at the house of a beautiful woman named Giulietta whom he had met at a party the day before. He noticed that one of her nipples was deformed:

I carried my stupidity to the point of speaking to her about her nipple. At first she treated my remark as a joke, and in her lighthearted way she did things that should have made me die for love. But as I continued to betray a residue of unease which I could not hide, in the end she blushed, adjusted her clothes, and moved without saying a single word towards the window. I wanted to sit there beside her, but she turned and sat on the sofa, then quickly rose and walked around the room fanning herself. Finally, she said to me in a cold, scornful voice: "Jacko, give up women and study mathematics."

When Rousseau went to see Giulietta a day or two later, she had departed for Florence.

Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1754 III

Mme. de Warens was living in an apartment in Chambéry with Claude Anet when Rousseau arrived. Anet was a few years older than Rousseau and had accompanied her since she had departed Switzerland. He was a herbalist who prepared potions for her, and he also watched over her financial affairs, as she was susceptible to unprofitable money-making schemes presented to her by charlatans. Rousseau got a clerical job at the Survey Office, which he enjoyed initially, but he soon found it repetitious, and he didn't like his coworkers, who were crude by his standards. Although Mme. de Warens was sexually involved with Anet, she had a good reputation in Chambéry, and mothers brought over their daughters for musical events. After a few months, in 1732, just before the age of twenty, Rousseau left his job and began to provide music lessons for the girls.

At about the age of twenty-one, Rousseau was approached by Mme. de Warens, who delivered a rather serious speech about sex. For reasons that are not entirely clear, she had decided that they should begin to have a sexual relationship. In all likelihood, she had noticed his attraction to some of his students, and she probably had well-formed opinions regarding the sexual needs of men and how they ought to be addressed. Thus, they entered a long sexual relationship that was awkward and problematic. It was awkward in the sense that Rousseau thought of her as his mother, calling her maman, and he probably had no lustful feelings toward her; similarly, she may have had no lustful feelings toward him. Furthermore, as Cranston speculates, Mme. de Warens's sexual relationship with Anet created a sexual triangle, which may have caused Anet to become ill or suicidal. There was probably a lot of sexual tension in the household, though Rousseau doesn't refer to this in his autobiographical writings. In 1734, according to Rousseau, Anet became ill and died. Thereafter, Rousseau took on some of Anet's responsibilities, though he had no success in keeping Mme. de Warens's life organized. Her financial situation, which had always been precarious, became more so.

In 1735 or 1736, they decided to lease a house outside of town in the rural area of Les Charmettes in order to escape their gloomy apartment in town during the warm months. This episode in Rousseau's life became a watershed for his intellectual development. Mme. de Warens attempted to earn money through agriculture, which included fruit trees, beehives and some livestock, while Rousseau read widely and increased his appreciation of rural life. They would return to the apartment in town for the winters.

After Rousseau turned twenty-five in 1737, he received a small inheritance from his mother's estate in Geneva. He used much of the money to buy books and build up his library. However, since he had been experiencing ill health for some time, he also decided to make a trip to Montpellier in search of medical advice. Though he disliked Montpellier and did not find any useful advice, he met an older, upper-class woman while on the road there; she took an interest in him, and they had a short tryst. While staying in Montpellier, he wrote letters to Mme. de Warens, though her replies were erratic. Upon his return to Les Charmettes, he found that Mme. de Warens had replaced him with a Swiss hairdresser named Jean-Samuel-Rodolphe Wintzenried, who was six years older than he was. Wintzenried was more physically robust than Rousseau and better-suited to farm-related tasks. Though Rousseau once again became part of the household, this was the beginning of the end for his relationship with Mme. de Warens. When she and Wintzenried moved back to town for the winter he remained in Les Charmettes and became somewhat of a hermit. He continued his studies and took an interest in astronomy. He acquired a telescope, and, seeing him outside at night, some of his neighbors thought that he was practicing witchcraft. Mme. de Warens and Wintzenried returned to Les Charmettes in the summer of 1739. Rousseau could not tolerate the living arrangements, and it was agreed that he would eventually leave. That did not occur until the spring of 1740. Mme. de Warens found him a position as a tutor in Lyon, and he subsequently spent a year there.

The time spent in Lyon was productive for Rousseau, though he decided that he was not cut out to be a tutor. His employer and Lyon in general were far more advanced intellectually than anything that he was used to, and in some ways Lyon was more like Paris at the time, a center of the early Enlightenment in France. Thus, when he decided to quit his job in Lyon, he chose Paris as his next destination. First he returned to Les Charmettes in late 1741, where Mme. de Warens was wintering at the time. She nursed him back to health from an illness, he sold all his possessions to raise funds, and in the summer of 1742 he headed for Paris. It is possible that he might have remained at Les Charmettes, but, besides the friction caused by the presence of Wintzenried, Rousseau, at the age of thirty, felt more strongly that he should make a career for himself. Moreover, Mme. de Warens's financial state was increasingly dire, and he did not want to become an additional burden on her.

Although the amount of detail in this biography sometimes becomes a little tedious, I am still finding the book extremely rewarding. The odd thing about Rousseau is that, despite having lived centuries ago, his life is so well-documented that you can know more about him than you are likely to know about any of your contemporaries. What appeals to me the most is the way that he developed at his own pace and formed his ideas organically rather than being force-fed information in an academic setting and then, at the age of twenty-two, following a boring career for several decades. On the negative side, science had advanced so little by his lifetime that religion still managed to have an undue influence over his thoughts. Still, the rebel in me finds much to like in Rousseau in our age of specialization and conformity. He lived the way many would now if given a choice.

Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1754 II

I am slowly plugging away at the book and will probably pick up my reading over the next few days. I hope that I won't bore my readers too much with Rousseau, because I'm going to be on him for a long time. With the wealth of information available to Cranston, along with his skill as an essayist, I am finding the work more engrossing than fiction. The reader gets a strong sense of what it would have been like to live Rousseau's life, including the altogether unfamiliar environment of eighteenth-century Europe. Some novelists, such as George Eliot, are able to pull off something similar in the form of a novel, but I find that the amount of knowledge necessary to do that effectively exceeds the mental capacity of most authors.

Rousseau's early years were full of naïveté and trial-and-error attempts to find his way in the world. There is a richness to the text, in that Rousseau himself was relatively honest in his autobiographical accounts and in that Cranston is there to correct him when he has misremembered an event or distorted or omitted one to create a certain image of himself. The trip to Turin seems to have been a complete fiasco. Rousseau converted to Catholicism with no religious conviction whatsoever and then took the only job for which he was qualified: domestic servant. He wasn't even good at that and eventually was fired. All was not lost, though, because he learned a little Italian and Latin and was exposed to wealthy, educated families. Turin was also a major cultural center compared to Geneva, and Rousseau heard good music for the first time in his life. While in Turin he corresponded with Mme. de Warens, and he ended up back in Annecy after about two years and lived in her house for a time.

Mme. de Warens herself could be the subject of a biography. She was an impetuous organizer who liked to help people but often lacked follow-through, and disastrous consequences sometimes ensued. She disliked her hometown, Vevey, a Germanic Protestant town northeast of Geneva, and had escaped to Savoy, abandoning her husband, to live in a French-speaking environment. The manner of her departure inadvertently ruined her husband financially, and he ended up moving to England penniless. Furthermore, even by our standards, she was sexually promiscuous. However, if she had not taken Rousseau under her wing, it would by no means have been certain that he would have gone on to his illustrious career. Cranston describes her as follows:

Mme. de Warens was a paradoxical person, and Rousseau did not always understand her. On the one hand, she adored practical organization; on the other, her mind was always dwelling on mystical ideas; she was both pure and sexually experienced; she was at once cunning and naïve, selfish and generous; and while she entertained liberally, she bought very few clothes for herself and ate almost nothing. 

When Rousseau returned to Annecy, she talked him into studying theology at a local seminary, but he had no academic skills and was soon expelled. He liked singing, so she then convinced him to learn music with a choirmaster. When the choirmaster decided to quit his job and move to Lyon, Mme. de Warens suggested that Rousseau accompany him, perhaps to get him out of her hair for a while because of some intrigue she had to attend to in Paris. Rousseau went to Lyon but abandoned the choirmaster and returned to Annecy only to find that Mme. de Warens had mysteriously disappeared. Soon after, Rousseau was recruited to escort one of Mme. de Warens's maids to Switzerland, which he did, followed by various misadventures there, among which he passed himself off as a music teacher. He also served as a translator for a man who presented himself as a Greek monk raising money for a charity but was actually a con artist. In attempting to locate Mme. de Warens, he worked briefly as a music copier in Lyon, though he wasn't competent at that either. Finally, when he was about nineteen, he reconnected with Mme. de Warens, who had moved to Chambéry, still in Savoy, because of a political upheaval. She was dependent on the King of Sardinia for the pension that she lived on, and Chambéry was an administrative headquarters for Savoy. Soon Rousseau had moved in with her again.

I've got a long way to go, as Rousseau lived to the age of sixty-six.

Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1754 I

I've barely started this first in a series of three volumes by Maurice Cranston (1920-1993) and am already enjoying it, because Cranston has a deep understanding of his subject and writes well. Furthermore, Rousseau was such an influential historical figure that there is more information available on his life than one could hope to find on most others who lived in his era. By way of an introduction, I should explain why I think Rousseau is significant. In one respect, he addressed a visceral feeling that I experienced on my own without having read him: a love of the outdoors and the appeal of rural living. I grew up in suburbs and did not experience rural life at all until I was eighteen. Up to then I had no way of knowing why I hadn't felt comfortable in the environments which I had inhabited. On my own, I also recognized the distortions and filters placed by society on reality, and, although I didn't get around to reading Rousseau for many years, he was the first writer I came across who explained this in a satisfactory manner. His ideas were echoed by Henry David Thoreau, but I found Thoreau to be a weaker writer and thinker.

On the other hand, some of Rousseau's ideas, which have been widely adopted, are in need of reexamination in light of advances in science and world changes since the eighteenth century. This is because he was writing in a comparatively unpopulated world a century before Darwin. In particular, Rousseau's idea of the freedom of the individual is badly in need of reexamination. I recently watched a 1952 interview with Bertrand Russell, in which he elucidated what he thought were the three major problems facing the world then. First, he thought that a world government was needed to control weaponry and resolve local disputes. Second, he thought that greater economic equality between nations was necessary to reduce the potential for wars. And third, sounding rather Malthusian, he suggested that the rights of individuals need to be curtailed somewhat, particularly when it comes to population growth. As you can see, not much has changed on these fronts since 1952, and you can now add climate change to Russell's list. Where Rousseau needs to be revisited is in his idea of individual freedom, which has become enshrined in modern democracies and, in my view, despite improvements in living standards, has wreaked havoc on the world from the Industrial Revolution to the present. I find it odd that none of Rousseau's successors, including Karl Marx, have presented a system which addresses the inequality and environmental destruction caused by capitalism or the failures of totalitarian regimes. Though Marx was cognizant of economic inequality, he seems to have been oblivious to the abuse of power by autocratic leaders. He seems to have thought that the proletariat possesses a mysterious virtue that is somehow absent from the bourgeoisie. What about Hitler and Stalin? By the same token, American reverence for the Declaration of Independence, an obsolete document reflecting some of Rousseau's ideas, seems inappropriately sentimental and alarmingly shortsighted given the current state of world affairs.

Rousseau was born in 1712 to a wealthy, upper-class mother and a middle-class father, who worked as a watchmaker. His mother died of puerperal fever two days after his baptism, and he spent his first years in her house in the wealthy, elevated neighborhood of Geneva overlooking the poorer neighborhoods near the lake. Rousseau was doted on by one of his mother's sisters, but, when he was five, his father, whose financial fortunes had deteriorated, sold the house and moved to the artisan quarter of St. Gervais. It is said that both of Rousseau's parents were spirited and independent, but also that his father was somewhat unstable. He insisted on carrying a sword, which was above his rank, and occasionally he got into fights. When Rousseau was ten, his father engaged in a quarrel which led to a trial in which he was tried in absentia and found guilty. He moved permanently to the Bernese territory at Nyon and left his son in Geneva in the care of his wife's brother, Gabriel Bernard.

Rousseau was promptly sent with one of his cousins to the nearby town of Bossey, then in Savoy, to be taught by the local Calvinist pastor. It was there that he first experienced the pleasures of rural life. Occasionally he was disciplined by his tutor's sister, and apparently he enjoyed being spanked by women. Later, due to some misunderstanding, both he and his cousin were severely disciplined by their tutor, and thereafter they disliked Bossey. After two years they returned to Geneva and lived at Rousseau's uncle's house. However, his uncle's family considered him a poor in-law and soon rid themselves of him. Initially he was sent to be an apprentice for a notary, but he was soon expelled. He was then sent to an apprenticeship with an engraver, and although he liked engraving, he disliked the engraver and his family. At the age of twelve he considered himself socially superior to them and couldn't tolerate their vulgarity, lack of reading or the beatings that he had to endure for disciplinary reasons.

In those days, Geneva was still a walled city with a gate that closed in the evening. Occasionally Rousseau would be beyond the wall with friends when the gate closed, and he would receive a beating from his master the next day. As he approached the age of sixteen, he had completed only three years out of five of his apprenticeship. One day, when he was locked out, he decided to leave Geneva and abandon his apprenticeship. He took refuge in Catholic Savoy, where he learned that he could receive support from the Catholic Church by converting from Calvinism. To this end, he walked to Annecy, where he met Mme. de Warens, who was twenty-nine at the time and liked young men. She was separated from her husband, a wealthy landowner, and assisted the Catholic church in recruiting converts. Europe abounded with grifters who specialized in taking advantage of church money for their livelihood on the pretext of conversion, and Rousseau soon found himself walking to Turin with a couple of them for religious training. He arrived in Turin with his possessions stolen, and his companions disappeared.

Of course, Rousseau returns to Savoy for his interlude with Mme. de Warens, as famously described in Confessions, but I haven't reached that episode yet. Cranston is good at comparing historical facts with Rousseau's recollections in his autobiographical works. Of particular interest so far is Rousseau's positive depiction of his father, who, in a practical sense, seems to have abandoned him at the age of ten.

Diary

I haven't been reading much lately or had much to report. Pretty soon I'll start on the biography of Rousseau that I mentioned earlier, and that should take a long time to complete. The weather pattern this fall has been more irregular than usual, so preparations for winter have been somewhat disrupted. There was rain throughout October, leaving soggy leaves on the ground, and then in November it suddenly began to snow. I barely managed to pick the last tomatoes, rake the leaves and mow the lawn one last time before the first snow. We've had a total of about a foot of wet snow so far. This morning I cleared it off the vegetable garden beds and dug out the carrots, which, fortunately, hadn't frozen yet. I've given up stargazing for the year because of the sustained cloudiness, and yesterday I brought in my small telescope. The first load of firewood arrived last month, I've installed snow tires on my car, and I should be all set to waste inordinate amounts of time reading or on my computer next to the wood stove for several months.

William, the cat, is three years old now, and his behavior is changing a little. He used to like going out for most of the night, but now he balks if it's raining or very cold. The problem is that he has a great deal of energy, and if he doesn't spend several hours a day hunting mice and voles (or moles, chipmunks, birds, snakes, toads, bats or insects) he becomes obnoxious indoors. If he's inside at night when I go to bed, I close the bedroom door in an attempt to prevent him from waking me up, but he has an insistent personality and makes loud noises pawing the door, and I wake up anyway. He is hard to play with, because his idea of playing is catching a mouse and carrying it around for a while: cat toys don't register with him. When there are no small rodents around, human hands suddenly become attractive to him. He has good moments, so I still appreciate him, but I don't like the interference with my sleep.

One of my hobbies is trying to determine whether anyone reads this blog. As far as I can tell, very few do. That is fine with me, because I'm not interested in dealing with lots of comments, based on years of unsatisfactory experience with them. According to the statistics at Blogger.com, I get a few hits every day. It seems that many of them are generated by high school or college students who are searching for material on Google for assignments. I don't intentionally give titles to my posts with the aim of being googled, and therefore the popularity of any given post is somewhat random. Actually, I am averse to popular post titles, because they are more likely to attract unwanted readers. My post, "Robert Hughes on Andy Warhol," is popular in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Hughes was Australian, so he probably has better name recognition in those countries. My guess is that students have been writing papers on Andy Warhol. I also use Google Analytics, which often shows completely different results from Blogger.com. When a specific pageview matches on both, you can be confident that it's real. However, in recent months, only on Google Analytics, I've been getting barraged on weekdays from unexpected locations such as Iraq, the UAE, Brazil and India. Just as I am typing this, I'm getting hits from Brazil, Italy, India, Spain, Portugal and South Africa. Since all of these hits show up as users of Windows and Chrome, I think that they are either a disguised visitor or the result of a technical glitch. It makes no sense that new visitors from all over the world would suddenly view my blog at about the same time of day on a weekday and all be using the combination of Windows and Chrome. Since I still get waves of hits identified as originating in Poland, Ukraine and Russia, perhaps various agencies also monitor this site, for whatever reasons. I suppose that at some point people will be getting PhDs in the activities on noncommercial blogs.

I am assuming, based on what a couple of readers whom I know have said, that this blog isn't getting boring.

Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are II

Approximately the first half of the book discusses Plomin's research with adopted children and twins, which he uses to identify the heritability of traits. The main finding is that what has typically been thought of as environmental influence is largely the expression of genes. For example, if a parent reads to a child and the child later becomes a proficient reader, rather than demonstrating a positive environmental effect, the actual situation is likely to be that the parent was a good reader and the child simply inherited the parent's reading ability. Overwhelmingly, children turn out more like their biological parents than their adoptive parents. This includes everything from adult weight to the amount of time spent watching TV: even when living in a different household from their parents, many of their characteristics mimic their parents' rather than the people in their adoptive households. Plomin's thesis, which I believe is correct, is that in the process of growing up, children should be encouraged to express their genes, because they are biologically attuned to specific stimuli and are not blank slates. The same studies also indicate that as people age they grow into greater concordance with their genetic heritage. Plomin finishes this section by saying that in a meritocracy, which is more or less what we live in (if you consider money important) some people are going to have a better genetic fit for high-paying jobs than others. He stresses that individuals should focus on meeting their genetic potentials, and, like Thomas Piketty, suggests that inequality should be balanced by taxation on wealth.

The remainder of the book switches to very recent studies which associate human traits with specific genes. After several false starts, rapid progress became possible with the advent of polygenic scoring, which links the presence of specific sets of alleles in single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with probabilities for specific traits, psychological disorders and illnesses. For example, future years of educational attainment could theoretically be estimated at the moment of conception on the basis of the genetic sequencing of an embryo. Probabilities for adult height and weight can be estimated, along with probabilities for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism and Alzheimer's disease. Polygenic scoring also indicates that different psychological disorders can be produced by the same alleles, meaning that the medical profession has been misunderstanding the underlying causes of disorders by focusing on symptoms rather than causes. This field is in its infancy, and it looks as if it will radically alter the fields of child development and disease prevention. The research already indicates that students at private, selective schools outperform students at public, unselective schools only because the students have higher academic potential to begin with: the quality of teaching is irrelevant to test score outcomes. Overall, Plomin is optimistic about the usefulness of this research, and I think he's right.

I do have a few quibbles, which I'll mention. Because he is working in the field of psychology, he uses many terms which I think are inadequately defined. For example, he accepts the g factor theory of intelligence, which I have always found spurious: it's another way of saying that smart people are just smart, and therefore they're good at everything. To be sure, there are some people who are good at a variety of intellectual tasks, but, in my experience, the range of actual skills in intelligent people is usually fairly narrow. Then, while saying that expensive private schools aren't worth the money, he overlooks the rather obvious sociological fact that having rich and successful friends – the kind of people you're likely to meet at expensive private schools – can and does improve people's fortunes.

My greatest complaint about the book is that Plomin has intentionally left out all references to evolution. This was probably a wise move to minimize hostile reactions to controversial material, but I think that seeing this through an evolutionary lens offers a wider picture. He has skirted the issue of what to do about poor minorities who inhabit dangerous neighborhoods. His position on the heritability of academic attainment seems to imply that poor minorities will never become wealthy by their own efforts, and that they should just be handed some money. This is a topic worthy of further discussion. If you take the long view of human existence, the traits that are the most beneficial change somewhat over time. Prior to civilization, the most important traits were probably social skills and the ability to hunt and gather food. When civilization arose, organizational and strategic skills such as those possessed by monarchs became the most valuable ones. During the Industrial Revolution, the Puritan work ethic and basic mechanical understanding sufficed. The kinds of skills that are valuable now, as noted by Plomin, are those associated with high educational attainment. I find this view a little myopic, because I think that we are in a transitional phase, and that the traits that seem essential at the moment may become less so in the future. The people who have been at the top end of the food chain recently, such as doctors and lawyers, are gradually losing their jobs to new technology, and this trend is likely to continue. Perhaps highly-paid software engineers will face a similar fate in the not-too-distant future. I have been thinking that the rise of the tech nerds may be brief: if further advances in technology obviate the need to hire them, their social deficiencies may become handicaps again. Since natural selection doesn't follow a path to a specific outcome, it is possible that social skills could make a comeback. Of course, this is all well beyond the scope of Plomin's book, but it's something to think about.

Plomin, it should be noted, is not a good writer – I found the repetition annoying – but the book is certainly worth reading, and you are definitely going to be hearing a lot about this topic in the years ahead.

Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are I

Robert Plomin, the behavioral geneticist, has written this book to sum up several decades of his research for general readers. So far, I've only read the initial chapters, which describe research on the characteristics of adopted children compared to their natural and adopting parents and unrelated siblings over time, and research on the characteristics of twins who were adopted into different families. The gold standard for this kind of research is identical twins who have been adopted into different families. Unfortunately, only a few such twins have been studied, and even though those studied indicate a very high correlation between characteristics of identical twins who have been raised apart, the number of identical (monozygotic) twins is too small to produce statistically significant results. The general findings indicate a relatively high correlation between the characteristics of closely related people, suggesting that environmental factors are far less important than genetic relatedness in producing characteristics in people.

Although adoption itself is not a subject that excites me much, I have often wondered whether parents who adopt know what they're getting into. I don't think so. Of the few instances with which I have some familiarity, the results have tended to be disastrous. This was because, as Plomin says, adopted children don't usually have much in common with the families into which they are adopted, and adopting babies, who haven't developed their adult personalities, doesn't improve the odds. Plomin correctly notes that nature significantly outweighs nurture in these situations.

So far in the book Plomin has not used the kind of language that I use to think about the issues associated with heritability, but it doesn't look as if we are going to have disagreements. For me, this goes way back to my adolescence, when I began to think about determinism. That had more to do with physics and Einstein's famous statement, "God does not play dice with the universe." For many years I hemmed and hawed over whether truly random events occur and even whether paranormal phenomena are real; my current thinking is that we do in fact live in a deterministic universe without true randomness, and that phenomena such as ESP are imaginary. Sean Carroll, my physics guru, apparently believes in determinism, and it makes sense to me. The hard part in physics is admitting that some of the techniques used by physicists to explain reality actually disguise the fact that certain aspects of it are not fully understood. Thus, I now think that true randomness does not exist; randomness is a fudge factor disguising the fact that we don't have the necessary techniques or computational power, and perhaps never will, to provide a detailed description of every event in the universe from the Big Bang onward. My own reasoning is that without a rigid coherence to the universe, it would be too unstable to produce stars and planets, let alone organisms. There is a deep coherence to the universe which I think would be shattered by truly random events.

I have also thought about determinism as it pertains to free will. Ultimately, I was unable to reconcile the existence of free will with the science now associated with Darwinism. Natural selection is a mechanism that produces organisms which survive in their environments, and all living organisms are comprised of certain characteristics that could not be otherwise. As the most cognitively advanced animals, we have a tendency to think that there is some magic ingredient that only we possess. That ingredient, it is said, might be consciousness or free will. My view is that our brains have simply evolved a few tricks that give us an advantage over other organisms, and that, in a broad sense, we're not that different from other mammals. I have little doubt that in due course all of the "higher" functions of Homo sapiens will be linked to ordinary evolutionary processes and DNA. The conceptual problems associated with consciousness will disappear when it can be described with greater precision as an evolutionary adaptation, or at least as a byproduct of an evolutionary adaptation.

Plomin only slightly touches on these topics, but he is engaging in an important demystification process that could eventually help produce better ways of organizing society by taking into account the innate differences between people. Later chapters, which I haven't read yet, look more closely at personality traits and DNA associations. Thankfully, Plomin, unlike some other science writers, is interested in the policy implications of this work, and I am looking forward to reading what he has to say. He has done groundbreaking research which will put to rest some of the ideas that have been circulating unquestioned for decades in politically correct circles, which are often composed of well-educated people who tend to ignore science. The book isn't that long, and I'll probably finish discussing it on my next post.

Diary

I was dragged into a household distraction regarding the midterm elections, and now that they're over it will be easier for me to think about other things. I am hoping that the demise of Donald Trump has begun, and that the day is coming when I won't have to hear his name so often. It is absurd that such an ignorant and self-centered person has been elected to the presidency: one wonders how anyone can believe in democracy. Of course, this all comes down to the fact, which a friend often reminds us of, that fifty percent of the people are below average. Now, finally, if Trump gets sufficiently out of hand he can be impeached by the House of Representatives, and there will be nothing that he can do to prevent it.

I have been pondering my split interest in literature and science. Occasionally I revisit the literary sites in which I participated a few years ago, and, after nearly five years of writing on my own blog, the quality of discussion on those sites now seems remarkably low. If you had been looking for substantive comments, you would have been going to the wrong places. They are either like support sites for introverted people who don't have real friends or like sites for more extroverted literary people who can only handle the most superficial interactions. There is also one literary blog that I used to read sporadically, but I have concluded that the reviews written there are shallow for the most part; the purpose of the blog seems to be to perpetuate the illusion that the blogger is a literary person; I don't think that he does real literary criticism, or, for that matter, anything of literary interest. On all of these sites it boils down to whether the writer likes something or not, and there is little useful information about particular works or why or why not someone should bother to read them. At least on this blog I summarize the works and explain what I like or dislike about them. To be fair, I haven't looked at comparable scientific sites, which might have similar weaknesses, but I wouldn't be surprised if the discussions there were a little more focused in terms of making distinct points.

Although I continue to admire a few literary works, the conclusion that I am arriving at more often than not is that in some sense literary people as a group are a little stupid. Science seems comparatively harsh and abstract, but its practitioners are usually more fearless about looking at things that might be unsettling or scary. If scientific people sometimes seem aesthetically challenged, literary people seem like escapists – the kind of people who wouldn't be of much use in an emergency. Since I believe that we may always be on the verge of some crisis, I am tending to lump in literary culture with people who can't face facts and would rather play video games all day. It is easy to justify much scientific work on the basis of its usefulness, and the same can't be said of literature. Many of the great works of literature derive their significance partly from the specific social and historical contexts in which they were written, and in my opinion there is a surprising paucity of masterpieces that have been written in the last hundred or so years, especially when you consider how much higher the volume of publication is today. This leads me to think that literature and poetry may be going the way of dinosaurs – subjects studied mainly by antiquarians or people who just can't cope with the modern world. Thus arises my reluctance to read much contemporary fiction.

I have ordered a new book, which will take a while to arrive from New Delhi – so I'm a little short on topics at the moment.

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.