Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

When I read book reviews in The New York Times many years ago, I was often impressed by those written by Anatole Broyard. He didn't publish many books during his life, but I recently came across this unfinished memoir, which was published three years after he died in 1990. It includes vignettes of people he knew in 1946 and 1947 in Greenwich Village, during the period in which it became a haven for literary and artistic people following World War II. Besides the vignettes, there is discussion of the formation of Broyard's adult identity, the quality of the interactions he had, particularly with women, and an anecdotal glimpse of American cultural history.

While I was growing up in the suburbs, the Village still had a reputation as a hip place, though by then the Beat movement was mostly dead and folk music was more popular than jazz. Bob Dylan made a name for himself there in the early 1960's, and, as far as I know, the Village has been gentrified since then, with high property values. I haven't been there since 2003, when I visited Tony Judt in his office at NYU on Washington Square. As Broyard tells it, the area was poor after the war, and the dwellings consisted of walk-up tenements with DC electricity, which required humming AC adapters to run modern appliances. Though Broyard's discussion isn't particularly sociological, he describes the unusual circumstances created by the end of the Great Depression and the end of the war. With the GI Bill, millions of people simultaneously had opportunities to direct their lives in ways that hadn't been possible previously. Many of them ended up becoming doctors, lawyers, engineers or accountants, but people in the arts crowd tended to descend on the Village. Anïs Nin lived there, and much of the book concerns Broyard's relationship with Nin's protégé, Sheri Martinelli (under the pseudonym "Donatti"). W.H. Auden was in the neighborhood, as were Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas and many others. As I recall, Denise Levertov moved there in 1948, but she never liked the grunge.

I ought to provide a sample of Broyard's writing, which I think is very good, as good as that of any American writer:

One night in the San Remo Bar Delmore Schwartz invited me to sit in a booth with him. He was with Dwight Macdonald and Clem Greenberg. I was flattered. I knew Delmore because he had accepted for Partisan Review a piece I'd called "Portrait of a Hipster."

They were talking about the primitive: Picasso, D.H. Lawrence, and Hemingway; bullfighting and boxing. I was a bit uneasy, because my piece was about jazz and the attitudes surrounding it, and I didn't want to be typecast as an aficionado of the primitive. I wanted to be a literary man, like them. I felt too primitive myself to be talking about the primitive.

Yet I couldn't help showing off a little. I had noticed in taking strolls with Delmore that he was surprised and even impressed by what I thought were ordinary observations. He seemed to see American life only in the abstract, as a Platonic essence. Sometimes he saw it as vaudeville, but he always saw it through something else. He imposed a form, intellectual or esthetic, on it, as if he couldn't bear to look at it directly.

Like many other New York writers and intellectuals of his generation, Delmore seemed to have read himself right out of American culture. He was a citizen only of literature. His Greenwich Village was part Dostoyevski's Saint Petersburg and part Kafka's Amerika. 

I admired his high abstraction, his ability to think in noninclusive generalizations, but I pitied him too. I thought his was as much a lost generation as Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's—in fact, more lost. While the writers of the twenties had lost only their illusions, Delmore, the typical New York intellectual of the forties, seemed to have lost the world itself. It was as if these men had been blinded by reading. Their heads were so filled with books, fictional characters, and symbols that there was no room for the raw data of actuality. They couldn't see the small, only the large. They still thought of ordinary people as the proletariat, or the masses. 

I wanted to be an intellectual, too, to see life from a great height, yet I didn't want to give up my sense of connection, my intimacy with things. When I read a book, I always kept one eye on the world, like someone watching a clock.

Surprisingly to me, to the extent that there is a main theme to the book, it is Broyard's inability to connect with women, no matter how hard he tried. His writing about Sheri is nonjudgmental, yet her behavior seems bizarre to me, and though I couldn't tolerate someone like her now, Broyard expresses very well the angst that he experienced when he tried to develop a close relationship with her. In the end he broke up with her after she had made a suicide attempt without offering an explanation and after she had had him arrested for taking one of his own possessions from her apartment. As a reader, I was reminded of  Andy Warhol's "Superstars" and got the sense that people like Sheri may have prefigured the movement toward empty celebrity in the arts. Broyard doesn't try to outline Sheri's psychodynamics, but I found it difficult to see her as anything other than mentally ill in a significant sense. Though Broyard mentions in passing that he saw a psychiatrist because it was fashionable, mental illness never comes up as a specific topic in the book, but, in the postscript by Alexandra Broyard, his wife at the time of his death, it becomes evident that he found stability later, after he had moved away from Greenwich Village, raised a family and developed a career. My interpretation is that Broyard was very much a down-to-earth person who was thrown off when he placed himself in the milieu of artistic people with unstable personalities. As the first member of his family to take an interest in the arts or graduate from college, he had placed himself in an environment that took more adjustment than he realized was necessary.

There is a lot of discussion in the book about sex; it is done tastefully and usually is related to Broyard's difficulty connecting with women. This is striking to read now, when women are more often seen as the victims of insensitive, self-centered men. In this case, you can clearly see that, compared to Broyard, Sheri and some of the other women he knew were the ones who were emotionally unavailable and perhaps manipulative. Broyard also remarks how different it was before the sexual revolution and books like Portnoy's Complaint. Relationships between men and women were strained compared to later days, and that was an enduring problem for Broyard in this memoir

The style of writing in the book is elegant and literary, but not so literary as to fit Broyard's description of Delmore Schwartz's style. Though I usually prefer more analytical works, this one makes up for it by capturing Broyard's mental state at the time so well that it is absorbing enough in itself. I think this book would appeal more to men than to women, but those women who are interested in broadening their horizons in understanding men surely could benefit from it. My current position is that the gulf between men and women is unbridgeable, but that education and awareness can still improve relations between the sexes. I may read more of Broyard and comment on that later.

Diary

With no good reading materials on hand, a guest in the house, technical telescope issues to solve, tomato plants to attend to and a few hot days, circumstances haven't been conducive to writing new posts. The visitor has left, the temperature has cooled and I have a book on order, so eventually I'll resume my regular posts.

I had been thinking about writing a long post that would sum up the nonfiction that I've been reading over the last few years, with the title "The Disunity of Knowledge," which would connect my ideas more clearly than I have done so far. However, I get the sense that my very small group of readers isn't really interested in that kind of thing, so I'm going to skip it for the time being. Nevertheless, I feel an impetus to write something of the sort, because it is alarming to me how much new knowledge has accumulated in recent years, and that the implications of this knowledge are hardly discussed publicly; public awareness remains several decades behind the present in terms of the comprehension of potentially critical situations that have already begun or may arise within the next few years. For example, if you follow American politics, many of the "issues" are framed as if it were the 1990's, not 2019. Of particular interest to me are the economic effects of AI and the alteration of human cognition by digital media. Then, of course, there are well-documented events such as anthropogenic climate change; this is getting some attention now, but when you consider how disastrous the effects are already proving to be, the reaction in the U.S. makes it look as if the year is about 2010. One of the most striking aspects of the current period is the ineffectiveness of democratic processes, which has resulted in the routine election of incompetent politicians who make inappropriate policy decisions. As the complexity of the world has increased, the popular vote has become more vulnerable to manipulation by special interests, and at the moment special interests seem to be gaining the upper hand. If the goals of special interests were in alignment with the best interests of the public, I wouldn't care, but in most cases special interests are indifferent to the common good. Some of the ill effects of special interests occur as secondary results of seemingly innocuous activities, when, for example, businesses seek to increase their profits without violating any laws. To a certain extent, we got stuck with Donald Trump because he was a free source of reality TV for the news media. If the news media wasn't governed by the profit motive and instead followed responsible principles of journalism, Trump might have been exposed long ago and may never have been elected president. The media is in dereliction of duty to the extent that the encouragement of critical thinking has been marginalized by profit-seeking. Although in the past there was a sense that journalism and free speech could serve as counterbalances to private enterprise and criminality, truth seems recently to have taken a back seat to profit throughout all levels of American society, and a collective reality seems no longer to exist. The environment that we inhabit increasingly exceeds our ability to comprehend it, and there isn't anyone out there offering good advice.

The Monologue/The Woman Destroyed

These are the other two short stories by Simone de Beauvoir in the volume I'm reading. "The Monologue" is not to my taste, because it is written in the stream of consciousness style, which I generally don't like. It describes the point of view of a woman named Murielle, whose life hasn't been going well at all. Her daughter from her first marriage, Sylvie, apparently has died, and she is separated from her second husband, who has custody of their son, Francis. She is living alone in a noisy apartment and ruminating over her life and the people who have wronged her. I found it a little confusing to follow and couldn't see the point of the awkward presentation.

I suppose that this was an experimental attempt by de Beauvoir to emulate other writers, such as William Faulkner, whom I also dislike. For me, stream of consciousness was a literary fad that ran its course without adding much to literature as an art. The only writer whom I've found to have any real facility at it was Katherine Mansfield. It requires a psychological insight beyond the level that most writers possess and otherwise reads like a gimmick. I also oppose stream of consciousness on a philosophical basis, because what occurs in someone's head, mine at least, is mostly nonverbal and can't be simulated accurately with words, sentence fragments or sentences. For me, putting things into words is a process separate from the raw mental activities occurring in my conscious brain at any given moment, and I don't think that portraying those mental activities in a verbal format represents them accurately. Mansfield succeeded better than others only because she had an uncanny ability to divine the inner experiences of others.

Although I like certain aspects of de Beauvoir's writing, I don't think that she had the right attributes to be a great writer. While intellectually aware, she lacked the depth of George Eliot, whose knowledge had originated more organically over many decades through observation, thought and reading rather than through the more artificial protocols of universities and intellectuals. Furthermore, de Beauvoir's prose reads more like essays than creative writing. She had none of Kafka's creative imagination and did not produce sentences as elegant as those of Proust, though she probably surpassed both of them intellectually.

"The Woman Destroyed," the final story and the title of the collection, is a long series of diary entries by Monique, a fortyish upper-middle-class Parisian housewife with two grown daughters and a husband, Maurice, who is a medical researcher. Maurice has been seeing Noëllie, an ambitious young lawyer, and the entire story concerns the effect that this has on Monique. Maurice won't give up Noëllie and doesn't want to give up Monique either. Monique, for her part, wants Maurice to dump Noëllie, but she makes no progress, and by the end of the story he is getting a separate apartment for himself. Most of the discussion concerns what Monique did or didn't do right, speculation on Noëllie's character and support from friends, her children and a psychiatrist. By the end of the story, Monique has lost a lot of weight, is depressed and is heavily medicated.

The writing device of "The Woman Destroyed" is not as psychologically oppressive to me as that of "The Monologue," because it includes dialogue quoted from various people and therefore is not a completely closed monologue. However, Monique's obsessions don't interest me much, and no advice that I would consider practical emerges until the very end, when Monique visits her younger daughter, Lucienne, in New York City:

"You saw our life together," I said. "And indeed you were very critical as far as I was concerned. Don't be afraid of hurting me. Try to explain why your father has stopped loving me."

She smiled rather pityingly. "But, Mama, after fifteen years of marriage it is perfectly natural to stop loving one's wife. It's the other thing that would be astonishing!" 

"There are people who love each other all their lives." 

"They pretend to." 

In the end, Monique remains fixated on Maurice, with no hope on the horizon.

This story seemed realistic to me, because there are many women like Monique who encounter this situation. The only difference I see is that affairs are more likely to be taken in stride in France than in the U.S. In this instance, Maurice had already had several affairs unbeknownst to Monique, and Monique herself had had one affair. Unfortunately, neither Monique nor Maurice seemed interesting to me, and I had to wait for Lucienne to speak up to find a character who appealed to me.

Of the three stories, I would say that "The Woman Destroyed" is the best. Nevertheless, I even found that boring. The impression I have from this book and The Mandarins is that de Beauvoir liked to write about the travails that women face. She seems sympathetic, yet doesn't really offer solutions for aggrieved women. I don't currently plan to delve further into the biographies and autobiographies of de Beauvoir, but the sense I have is that she typically took a stoic position on the hurtful behavior of the men she knew. Here, in The Mandarins and in her memoirs, men behave badly and women get upset, but de Beauvoir is reluctant to criticize them, or, for that matter, provide any discernible lessons. She is good when it comes to accepting facts, but, as far as I can tell, she does nothing to prescribe responsible behavior. In "The Woman Destroyed," the question of whether Maurice's actions and his inability to justify them are acceptable remains open. The Monique-Maurice relationship resembles the Paula-Henri relationship in The Mandarins, and in both cases the men just do what they want to do while the women crack up. There may be no intended message, but de Beauvoir clearly sympathizes with the men. She seems to enjoy deconstructing the bourgeois follies of the women she knew.

The Age of Discretion

I've just read this short story by Simone de Beauvoir. It features a sixtyish couple, André and his wife, their son, Phillipe, Phillipe's wife, Iréne, and André's mother, Manette. The story is a narration by André's wife concerning events at the time of Phillipe's announcement that he has decided to change careers. André is a scientist, still conducting research, and the narrator is a writer. Phillipe suddenly shocks his parents when he informs them that he is not going to pursue an academic career and instead has accepted a high-paying job at the Ministry of Culture, which he obtained with help from Iréne's father.

The narrator goes off the deep end and has unpleasant spats with Phillipe in which she says that she never wants to see him again. She also becomes alienated from André when his reaction isn't as forceful as hers, and she ruminates over what is left for her in life. Initially she seems depressed and sees nothing more than an unsatisfactory relationship with André, old age and death. Her reaction to Phillipe's decision seems extreme to André, and also to me. In her mind, an intellectual career is unquestionably superior to an ordinary well-paid job. André recognizes that Phillipe may not have been cut out for an academic career, whereas his mother sees Phillipe's choice as a moral flaw.

After André leaves for a few days to visit his mother in the country, and the narrator later joins him, they manage to reconcile, and the narrator agrees that she should take a more conciliatory approach with Phillipe. Much of the discussion concerns the differences between youth and old age. André thinks that most scientists are finished by his age, but that his ongoing research is useful nevertheless. The narrator has just published a new book that is receiving a tepid reception, and she worries about her own decline.

At first glance, the narrator's high-mindedness seems puzzling, especially if you're used to living among philistine Americans. Besides that, she is more controlling than most of the mothers I've known. In fact, she exhibits a rather extreme insensitivity regarding which outcome would best suit her son. I can make a little sense of all this by looking at the ways in which French upper-middle-class culture differs from American upper-middle-class culture. The rules are somewhat different for educated French people, who are more likely to be sensitive to social issues than educated Americans, on average. There is also the element in which de Beauvoir may be imposing her idea of existentialism on the narrative. That implies some vague moral imperative that she derived from the writings of Sartre, which, unfortunately, I interpret as nonsense. 

This reminds me very much of The Mandarins, in which de Beauvoir invented Nadine as the imagined daughter she never had. In that context, Anne and Robert were much younger, but Nadine, their daughter, also seemed like an artifice placed there for some specific conceptual message. Because this is only a short story, Phillipe really doesn't get the chance to develop as a credible character, yet I can still see de Beauvoir's mind at work attempting to demonstrate some theory that suits her preferences. In the end, I am left with the idea that I had previously: de Beauvoir is a good thinker and writer, but she was not able to break out from her conceptual history in the cause of creating a truly transformative kind of art. In literature, creative artists have an advantage over intellectuals in the sense that the feelings that one gets from good literature are more durable than ideas, which tend to have more wooden characteristics and eventually rot, as I think existentialism did. In my opinion, the general criticism that ideology diminishes the value of art is valid, because ideology works better in essays, where the intent of the author takes precedence over aesthetic factors. I must also note that de Beauvoir's presumption that the intellectual life is always better than others seems to have blinded her to the shortcomings evident in her milieu. In reading The Mandarins, I got the sense that she thought that their lives were self-evidently superior, and, based on my research, I would beg to differ. Even so, I believe that some aspects of value are to be found in this story. It presents serious elements that are of interest to thoughtful people as they age. In my case, I don't find de Beauvoir particularly enlightening, yet one does not often come across a writer with a brain in these matters. De Beauvoir remains a kind of salve for me, because there are few options available in a country that in so many ways is intellectually dead.

This book has two other stories, and, after I've read them, I'll decide whether or not to comment on them.

Diary

I'm having a disorienting spring and hope to settle into something that resembles a familiar routine soon. First, I became a chauffeur, making five round trips to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in connection with an elective surgery; the hospital is seventy miles each way and requires crossing the mountains. There was still snow on the ground on the first trip, and later one of the roads was washed out by rain. Then the cold weather prevented me from planting my tomatoes, and I've just planted them – a week late. At the moment it's quite green outside and is starting to look like summer. The lilacs are in bloom, and I'm enjoying the fragrance of the pink ones next to the rear deck.

I've also been doing more genealogical research, with bits of information arriving in spurts. The online databases keep growing, and every once in a while something new and interesting surfaces. I have long been intrigued by the history of craziness in my ex-wife's family. On her father's side, they were sturdy pioneers who settled in Indiana before it became a state. The first family member in Indiana had grown up in Pennsylvania and had been indentured, because his parents couldn't afford to raise him; when he came of age he was given a horse per the agreement and headed west. After living in Kentucky and Ohio, he bought land in what is now Randolph County, Indiana. On her mother's side, there was a dark, hidden mystery that was kept secret, and I finally found out what it was. I learned last year that her great-great-grandfather, Jacob Kelley, a civil war veteran, had committed suicide. Her great-grandmother, Jacob's daughter, Mary Gertrude Kelley, was married and living with her husband and children in Jacob's house a few years earlier. The problem seems to have been Mary and her husband, Fred Ellis. Mary had become pregnant before she was married, and she married Fred prior to giving birth. The first child was Blossom Ellis, my ex-wife's grandmother, whom I met in 1973; she died in 1974. Fred and Mary went on to have three more children. The family secret is that Fred was a criminal, and a stupid one at that. He was a burglar and highway robber who robbed a relative who recognized him. Fred became a notorious criminal who appeared regularly in the Palladium-Item, the local newspaper. He provided fodder for the paper with a failed jail escape. He ended up dying in prison in Ohio at the age of forty-five. The climax with Mary occurred earlier, when Fred got out of jail from one of his prison stints. When he arrived home, Mary herself was in jail for adultery. She had been living with Neal Temple and had been neglecting her children. A newspaper article describes how the police crept into their house at 1:00 AM and caught them. Mary was released after agreeing to change her sinful ways, but shortly thereafter Neal accosted Fred on the street and slashed him with a knife, and Neal soon disappeared with Mary. At that time, Blossom Ellis was living with an aunt. She subsequently had a normal upbringing, went to nursing school and married a farmer. However, Blossom's younger sister, Lulu, was put up for adoption and two younger brothers were sent to an orphanage. Mary was never heard from again, as far as I know, and in later years Blossom told her children that Fred's mother, Lydia, who visited occasionally, was her mother and their grandmother. I think the mental illness comes either from Mary or Fred, or both.

I also recently got some Armenian genealogical news that finally allowed me to accurately identify everyone in the group photo taken in Athens in 1930. I contacted an amateur genealogist who lives in Brookshire, Texas and found out that a person whom I had thought was one of my great-grandfathers was actually Dr. Paul Donigan, who lived in Brookshire and had married my great-grandfather's sister, Rebecca. My great-grandparents later traveled from Greece to Texas in 1920 to attend a wedding. At that time there was an Armenian community in Waller County, Texas, west of Houston, and Paul Donigan, whose original name was Donigian, had moved there after he finished medical school. I have no blood relatives in Waller County, since Paul Donigan and Rebecca had no children, but my uncle moved to Texas after World War II, and I have two cousins living in the state now. Paul Donigan's wife, Rebecca, sponsored my uncle when he came to the U.S. She was his great-aunt. Since 1900, my Armenian relatives have lived in Turkey, France, Greece, South Africa, the U.K. and the U.S. They are much harder to track than my other relatives due to the lack of documents.

I have a couple of books lined up to read and am even going to try some fiction again. I am making an exception for Simone de Beauvoir, who has flaws as a writer which I am willing to overlook because she retains for me the aura of an imaginary friend.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis IV

The chapter on America evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. and the challenges it faces. While presenting a perspective that is primarily historical, unlike most commentators, Diamond frequently writes from the point of view of a geographer. The U.S., he says, became a major power in the world primarily because of its geographic characteristics. It has the largest land area in the world with good agricultural soil. This is the result of glaciation over the last hundred thousand years that has enriched more soil here than it has in China, Russia, Europe or Canada. Furthermore, North America is physically protected by oceans on the east and west, a sparsely inhabited region to the north, and a narrowing of the continent to the south. From an economic standpoint, it has better natural ports on both coasts than those in most countries, and the river network is also more suitable for navigation than those on other continents. The political system has offered some advantages, partly because each state serves as a laboratory in which various laws can be tested and later copied at the national level. A continuous inflow of financially ambitious immigrants has also helped bring prosperity to the country. On the negative side, he argues that political polarization and a decline in compromise are the principal problems facing the country, though competition from China also poses a threat. There is a separate chapter discussing other internal problems associated with flaws in the voting system, inequality and insufficient investment in the future.

The last chapter before the epilogue discusses global problems such as nuclear weaponry, climate change and inequality. There are several scenarios in which the deployment of nuclear weapons could intentionally or unintentionally wreak havoc. Climate change is causing a reduction in biodiversity and is starting to disrupt food supplies, in addition to raising ocean levels enough to flood heavily-populated coastal regions. Inequality in conjunction with population growth and a decline in natural resources is making the situation even more dangerous: the planet would be unable to sustain the current world population at the standard of living in developed countries.

The epilogue reviews the 12 crisis factors brought up at the beginning of the book in the context of the examples discussed in later chapters and answers a couple of separate questions that people have asked him. At the very end, he sums up the reasons he had for writing the book and preemptively rebuts critics:

Pessimists may respond to these suggestions by protesting: "How absurdly obvious! We don't need Jared Diamond's book to tell us to practice honest self-appraisal, to look to other countries for models, to avoid retreating into victimhood, and so on!"  No, we do need a book, because it's undeniable that those "obvious" requirements have so often been ignored, and are still so often ignored today.... People whose ignoring of "obvious" requirements threatens their well-being today include my fellow several hundred million Americans.

While as an individual reader I found the book a little tedious and overly cautious at times, it is obvious to me that this kind of book is necessary and beneficial. If the issues brought up by Diamond were widely discussed by the politicians in Washington, D.C., the national dialogue would be shockingly different from what we have now. I can only hope that some of the new Democratic candidates for the presidency read it. I have few substantive criticisms. I liked the fact that Diamond rebuked many of the wasteful, self-indulgent habits of Americans, such as driving SUVs that get poor gas mileage. He specifically debunked the myth of American exceptionalism, which is currently accepted as gospel by both political parties. However, in one instance, Diamond included widely-circulated information that seems dubious to me:

...pet cats that are allowed to wander in and out of their owners' houses have been measured to kill an average of more than 300 birds per year per cat....If the U.S. population of outdoor cats is estimated to be about 100 million, then cats can be calculated to kill at least 30 billion birds per year in the U.S....

As a long-time cat owner, I can tell you that pet cats that are let out do not on average kill 300 birds per year. I would estimate something closer to 10. William occasionally catches a bird, and I have noticed no reduction in the number of goldfinches that come to our feeder year-round. He usually catches juncos, which feed on the ground, and I haven't noticed a reduction in those either.

The main criticism I have of Diamond, which I alluded to earlier, is his assumption that humans are rational agents who are undoubtedly capable of collectively solving the crises that he discusses in the book by using tried-and-true democratic methods. That is certainly possible, and, in order to do so, books like this are necessary. In my view, as I've written in earlier posts, more radical approaches assuming intractable  human limitations are probably going to be necessary. Diamond correctly notes that China has an advantage over the U.S. with respect to its ability to make rapid decisions and implement them quickly. The Chinese have their share of problems, but they don't dawdle politically the way Americans do. The U.S., for example, is taking decades to deal with infrastructure repair, gun control and health care, and, under the Trump administration, the addressing of climate change has been put on hold. Many of the legislative delays in the U.S. are the result of intentional corporate obstruction. Gun laws haven't changed much because the N.R.A., a lobbying group for gun manufacturers, funds the campaigns of many politicians. Lobbyists for various industries have ample funds available to influence election results. There is probably no equivalent in China, and, even with a significant amount of corruption, China may be capable of operating a more efficient and effective government under an authoritarian regime. A point that I've made previously is that, in the long run, people are likely to prefer a functional authoritarian regime to a dysfunctional democratic regime like the one we have now in the U.S.

Looking to the future, I see a surviving model closer to the one currently in place in China than to the one mythologized in the U.S. As I've said, capitalism tends to subvert the best interests of the majority over time, in our case by undermining the democratic processes that Diamond seems to take for granted. As an old-fashioned academic, Diamond doesn't fully examine the corrosive effects of capitalism and seems to assume that mistakes can always be corrected within the capitalist framework with which he is familiar. One area of concern that goes unmentioned in this book is the long-term economic effect of automation. What's going to happen if there aren't any jobs and corporations control the government? At that point I don't think that Diamond's examples and recommendations are going to be particularly relevant.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis III

As I said, I'm not finding this to be the most exciting reading. After Indonesia there is a chapter on Germany, which focuses on the World Wars and the successful recovery after Germany's devastating defeat in World War II. Not much so far in the book has seemed quotable, but I liked this passage:

Differing geographical constraints have meant that bad leadership results in much more painful consequences for Germany than for geographically less constrained countries. For instance, while Germany's Emperor Wilhelm II and his chancellors and ministers were notorious for their blunders and unrealism, Germany has had no monopoly on poor leadership: the U.S. and Britain and other countries have had their share. But the seas protecting the U.S. and Britain meant that inept leaders doing stupid things didn't bring disasters to their countries, whereas the ineptness of Wilhelm and his chancellors did bring disaster on Germany in World War One.

A memorable aspect of Diamond's writings is his pointing to basic geographical facts to explain complex human outcomes, and this is a good example. However, as a geographer, he is probably overusing that methodology at the expense of other analytical tools. I am tiring of his persistent perspective in which humans are rational agents who can collectively solve their problems. Then, at the heart of his writing style is storytelling, which is effective for reaching mass audiences but less so for more critical readers.

Diamond also comments on the rigidity of thinking among Germans and points out that the elimination of Jews called for by Hitler was hardly questioned at all by the public. There is no rhyme or reason to German standards on child-rearing: until the end of World War II, corporal punishment of children was considered almost mandatory, and then, following the war, it suddenly became unthinkable. Groupthink seems to affect Germans more than it does other cultures.

After Germany there is a chapter on Australia that is reminiscent of a chapter on Australia in Collapse. While Collapse emphasizes environmental factors, which makes it seem more scientific, Upheaval emphasizes cultural and historical factors, which results in a more conventional narrative. Diamond describes how Australia's stubborn clinging to a British identity has hampered its evolution into a stable country. Australians suffered enormous losses in World War I in Europe in a conflict that didn't threaten them in the least, and when they needed help against the Japanese in World War II they were abandoned. Only now are Australians starting to recognize that it is in their best interest to become integrated with Asian countries, which are much closer than Europe. Implicit in Australia's past attitudes is racism towards aboriginal cultures and Asians, and, according to Diamond, this is beginning to change.

The last section of the book discusses the current world outlook. There is a chapter on Japan, which examines its strengths and weaknesses. The main strength is that it is a homogeneous culture that has developed a robust economy since World War II. The weaknesses include rigid traditions, opposition to immigration and a low fertility rate. These three are related. Because there is no inexpensive daycare, women take all of the responsibility for childcare and don't work as much as in other countries. Raising children is so difficult that many women choose not to have them. At the same time, traditional consultation to arrange a marriage is being replaced with Western models favoring romantic attraction, and the Japanese are ill-prepared for that. In a restaurant, a dating couple was observed sitting at a table looking down solemnly; on close inspection, they were texting each other – presumably because they were not psychologically equipped for face-to-face conversations. Although Diamond doesn't say so, this is probably also a problem occurring in other countries due to the spread of digital communication.

The next chapter is on the current situation in the U.S., which I'll probably have more to say about than the others. I should be able to finish up the book on my next post.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis II

This book is not as exotic as Collapse, which isn't necessarily a weakness, though reading it feels more like dutifully informing oneself on relatively recent world history. As a cautious academic, Diamond seems to be avoiding explicit political commentary in the manner of Robert Reich, the Berkeley professor, and is merely laying the groundwork for readers in order to draw parallels and highlight differences between events that have occurred in various modern countries. I am finding the book informative, and, though I would prefer a more conceptual approach, Diamond is providing ample information for readers to gain a sense of how national issues have developed and played out in the last century or so. The predictive value of what Diamond has to say, I think, is rather dubious, given that each national situation is unique in most respects, and that Diamond is not providing a template regarding human nature. It is a little exhausting to learn what has occurred in so many countries, but my sense is that Diamond's descriptions are reasonably accurate and therefore have value for understanding current geopolitical trends, if that is the sort of thing that interests you. I wouldn't place that at the top of the list of my interests, and I am plugging along mainly for general information.

There is a chapter on Japan, the contents of which I found vaguely familiar. Until 1853, Japan was still a medieval society, with shoguns and none of the modern technology that was then available in Europe. The Japanese were aware of what had occurred in China when British imperialism intruded there, so when Commodore Perry arrived in Edo representing the U.S. and made various demands, they began the radical process of national transformation which is now referred to as the Meiji period. They did an excellent job and copied various ideas that had been used in other countries, creating a startling change in little time. However, the Japanese leaders later became "hotheads" and engaged in a war with Russia and entered World War II. Nevertheless, Japan is currently in good shape economically and politically. Diamond rolls out his list of factors for each country undergoing an upheaval, and so far I'm not finding it very useful.

There is a chapter on Chile, a country with which I had little familiarity. It has a relatively homogeneous culture, since the natives interbred with Spaniards, and no other groups make up a significant segment of the population. However, the problems in Chile emerged primarily internally, with conflicting ideas about how to run the country. Salvador Allende, a communist sympathizer, socialist and Marxist, barely won the election in 1970, and was completely ineffectual as a leader. Following the nationalization playbook under Allende, the country soon fell into disarray, and the wealthy, along with international corporations and the U.S., soon sought his removal. In 1973 there was a brutal military coup, and Augusto Pinochet became the new leader. Law and order returned to Chile, and although Pinochet's regime engaged in the interrogation, torture and murder of thousands of Chileans, he was still somewhat popular. In this chapter, Diamond engages in psychological speculation about Allende and Pinochet and finds them both somewhat mysterious. My preferred way of approaching this subject is to identify the essential human weaknesses that cause undesirable consequences. Allende didn't understand that socialism can't easily replace capitalism, mainly because the active management of an economy is extremely difficult and no regime has been able to do it effectively for any length of time. As soon as there is an economic decline, people become worried and restless. The capitalist model works better not because it is intrinsically superior, but because markets have a tendency to self-correct, and even if some individuals become wealthier than others and there is corruption, the public on the whole are more likely to feel economically secure, and they will support capitalist leaders under the mistaken assumption that they are the ones who have a better understanding of economics. In the case of Chile, neither Allende nor Pinochet understood economics, and Pinochet masked his corruption by pretending to be pious; even if capitalism causes inequality, people are willing to overlook that when they come to associate it with order and prosperity as opposed to chaos.

I'm a little over halfway through the book and just finished the chapter on Indonesia, a country that was unfamiliar to me. Indonesia did not exist as a country until 1945; before then it was the Dutch East Indies. The area was too large to be managed as a Dutch colony, and the Japanese had used it as a source of oil during World War II. Much like Allende in Chile, Indonesia's first leader, Sukarno, had anti-colonial, pro-communist leanings that didn't work well for the economy. Suharto took over in a military coup that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. He was capitalism-friendly and corrupt, like Pinochet, and the economy eventually stabilized. Over the years, unification has been facilitated by an invented language, Bahasa Indonesia, which makes communication easier in a country of islands stretching 3400 miles and comprising over 700 indigenous languages. For me, it is hard to think of Indonesia as a country, given its geographic and cultural characteristics, and so far Diamond hasn't commented on what I often think about national unity: it seems like a fiction, especially in a heterogeneous country like Indonesia. Diamond's working hypothesis, that nations are real entities that can, through rational means, reliably be directed toward ends that satisfy the needs of all their citizens, remains suspect to me, and I'll comment on that throughout the remainder of the book.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis I

I'm reading this latest book from Jared Diamond. As in Collapse, he includes several case studies, but this time the main topic is modern national crises rather than an assortment of local population crises from various eras. He also includes a personal crisis in order to provide a concrete example of how they manifest themselves in individuals and how individuals deal with them. Diamond is an affecting writer and a good storyteller, which makes him pleasant to read, though I don't consider him particularly scientific in the terms that I prefer. I haven't read his best-known book, Guns, Germs and Steel, which describes the development of modern civilization as an accident of geography and the spread of ideas through cultural means. Diamond is a traditional humanist academic and does not appear to subscribe to the deterministic theories of human nature that dominate on this blog. For example, as far as I know, he completely ignores the works of Robert Plomin and David Reich, which I think are important. Nor is there any hint that Diamond is aware of works on the cognitive limitations of humans, such as those of Daniel Kahneman and Robert Sapolsky. Diamond's writing style seems like a cross between the Bible and the case study method used at Harvard Business School. In every instance, events involve a group of people with specific characteristics and the problems that they are forced to confront. The analysis includes looking at the decision-making processes of each group and how their decisions worked or didn't work. In Diamond's framework, the inherent competence of the group making a decision has nothing to do with its genetic background. To be fair, genetics are not always relevant in such cases, but, if you look at humans over periods of thousands of years, I think that there is evidence that they do have an impact. This constitutes my chief criticism of Diamond's methodology, because, indirectly, he is denying the existence of natural selection insofar as it pertains to humans.

The personal crisis recounted by Diamond is the difficulty that he encountered in graduate school. Although he had been a whiz student as an undergraduate at Harvard, when he moved on to Cambridge in England to pursue a Ph.D. in physiology, he soon discovered that he was dismal at setting up lab experiments and almost dropped out. He became so demoralized that he considered quitting and getting a job translating at the U.N. in Switzerland. However, he consulted his father, who recommended that he try physiology for one more semester, and he managed to overcome his deficiencies and went on to complete his Ph.D. Diamond produces lists of factors related to outcomes of personal and national crises, and this sets the stage for the remainder of the book.

As far as I've read, he discusses Finland's war with the U.S.S.R. from 1939 to 1944. It is an excellent piece of historical work and goes into some detail about Finnish culture and the strategies that the Finns adopted. Finland is unique in character in matters related to language, ethnic uniformity and its close proximity to Russia. As Diamond describes it, the Finns took completely pragmatic positions and aligned either with Nazi Germany or the U.S.S.R. when necessary. They have an extremely strong sense of national identity and will do whatever it takes to succeed as a country. Thus, even though they were ruined economically by World War II, they stuck together, and now they have a vibrant economy and are in better shape than most other European countries, with a high standard of living. Although, as in Collapse, Diamond richly describes the circumstances, I am doubtful that he will arrive at useful conclusions, since each situation is different, and it isn't necessarily possible to extrapolate from one to another. For this reason, reading Diamond is like reading history, and I find it hard to see what he does as having scientific relevance, other than in the generic sense that if a group sticks together and acts rationally for the benefit of all its members, they will have a better chance of surviving collectively than they would otherwise. This is E.O. Wilson 101. Nevertheless, there are chapters on several other countries, including the U.S., which should make for interesting reading, and I'll comment on the remainder of the book as I make my way through it.

Diary

The book I was reading, Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography, by Lesley Milne, was a disappointment. It consists mainly of summaries of his works and includes little biographical information. There is a brief description of his early life, but very few details are offered from letters, spouses, friends, acquaintances or other sources. For example, you learn that he was married three times, and that his third wife served as a model for Margarita in The Master and Margarita, the latter of which I already knew, but there is no explanation of the circumstances of his marriages and divorces. As far as I know, he was childless. Besides the fact that there isn't much information about his personal life, I didn't feel that his works were analyzed proficiently. For me, this was a typical medium-grade academic book in which it seems as if the author has accumulated notes on a stack of index cards, sorted them by subtopic and then copied them out as chapters. This type of writing usually seems incoherent to me and makes me grateful that I'm not an academic and therefore don't have to read it as a professional duty. At this point, I still think that Bulgakov would make a good biographical subject, but I am concluding that there is probably no good biography of him currently available in English. It is possible that one exists in Russia or Ukraine, because Bulgakov once had a following in Russia and grew up in Kiev. However, he was not the kind of writer whom Vladimir Putin would appreciate, and his works may be suppressed in Russia now. There is also a chance that at this stage there is insufficient material available to produce a good biography of Bulgakov, though I still think that more information must exist, and that it did not appear in Milne's book partly because her focus wasn't sufficiently biographical. For my purposes, I'm giving up on Bulgakov biographies unless something new and promising pops up. From the biographies I've read of George Eliot, I noticed that the early ones were terrible, and good ones didn't begin to appear until she had been dead for more than a century.

I have little going on at the moment and am awaiting a new book and the full-throated arrival of spring, which is still dark, gloomy and wet. Of course, I can't easily avoid the Trump controversy, which is like a festering wound. Or it's like a gigantic tumor growing on the top of your head: the first doctor tells you that it looks normal, and that you should just cover it with a hat if it makes you feel uncomfortable; the second doctor tells you that it does look serious, but that if you attempt to remove it surgically it will only grow back larger. Trump will be gone eventually, but it's still hard to reconcile his continued presence with the idea of an orderly government. But, then, if medical doctors are often quacks, charlatans or crooks, why would politicians be any different?

I'll make another post whenever I think I have something worthwhile to say.

Diary

I read a few more of the essays in Extremes but have decided not to comment extensively on them. There is an excellent summary of the global warming phenomenon, "Extreme Weather," by Emily Shuckburgh, which reminds me that British academics often produce much more lucid prose than American academics – even when they are scientists. The irony is that climate change is a solvable problem, yet little is being done about it at the moment in the U.S., thanks largely to the current president. Assuming that humans survive climate change, which will cause millions of deaths and trillions of dollars in damage, our descendants are going to wonder who was minding the store during this era. There is also an informative essay, "Extreme Longevity," by Sarah Harper, and a concise presentation of major astronomical events, "Extremes of Power in the Universe," by Andrew C. Fabian, which makes me think that, in a way, we're lucky to have such brief lives, given the gigantic, powerful and destructive events that occur periodically in the universe. Yet we're still not completely safe, because it is possible that a large solar flare such as one that struck Earth in 1849 could wipe out our electric grids and decommission our satellites. A much rarer – but possible – superflare would do considerably more damage to the planet.

The viewing conditions for stargazing have been bad for months, but last night I looked at a few galaxies in my small telescope. I saw the supergiant elliptical galaxy M87. It's a long way off, and its light took 53 million years to reach the telescope. It would appear more clearly in my large telescope, but I could still make it out. The reason why I chose this galaxy was that it is the location of the first photographed black hole, which was featured in the news recently. At this time of year you can see a cluster of galaxies in Virgo, some of which form a line known as Markarian's Chain. If we get better weather soon I'll set up my large Dobsonian telescope before these galaxies have moved out of range.

For new reading materials, I've been racking my brains for something that I would like. I'm going to try a biography of Mikhail Bulgakov on the theory that his life was more interesting than most. He was born in Kiev in 1891 and lived through the early years of the Soviet Union as an author of novels, short stories and plays. Little of what he wrote was published during his life, and he was best known mainly for one play, which Stalin happened to like. I was first exposed to Bulgakov in a Soviet literature class that I took in college. I read The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog and wrote a paper on his most famous novel, The Master and Margarita. I don't think that I would be as amused by his writing now, but at the time I was fascinated by his satire and the breadth of his subject matter. In fact, after years of being force-fed literature in high school (Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, etc.) and various unsuccessful explorations of my own (John Barth and Hermann Hesse come to mind), Bulgakov was the first writer whom I found engaging at all. My selection of Bulgakov as a biographical subject is partly derived from the theory that challenging lives are more interesting than safe, bourgeois ones. On that basis, he had a few things in common with Czeslaw Milosz: he was born before the Russian Revolution and suffered from its consequences – though, unlike Milosz, who ended up with a cushy job in Berkeley and a Nobel Prize, Bulgakov stayed in the U.S.S.R. and died almost unknown at the age of 48. Like Milosz, Bulgakov believed that writers have a civic responsibility during troubled times. As I've suggested quite often, the fiction produced during placid periods tends to be insipid, and the commercialization of literary fiction has made matters even worse. Writers tend to become more serious when they face real hardships. The biography that I've chosen may or may not be worth reading – I'll let you know.

Populism

I've been reading essays in a new collection called Extremes and will discuss some of them individually. I found "Extreme Politics: The Four Waves of National Populism in the West," by Matthew Goodwin, informative and will make a few comments on it. Goodwin describes four waves of populism that have occurred in Europe and the U.S. since World War II. His main thesis is that the fourth wave, which we are in now, began before the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession and is based on factors other than economic ones. Goodwin believes that, independent of economic concerns, there is a growing divide between populist nationalists and cosmopolitan liberals. For the most part, recent Western populists have been anti-immigration, anti-globalization, conservative, working-class and poorly educated. He sees a continuation of this trend with no end in sight.

While I concur with Goodwin's overall thesis, it is apparent to me that he is limited by the constraints of his academic specialization in politics. I still believe that economics occupies a central role in current populism, and that Goodwin is a little negligent regarding the explanation of how reduced economic prospects play out sociologically and support recent political trends. For example, he fails to link low educational attainment and changes in the demand for specific job skills with future job insecurity. My view is derived partly from my own experiences in a manufacturing environment that declined for workers over several decades as a result of new technology. As I've mentioned before, between the 1970's and the early 2000's, print production became increasingly mechanized, resulting in a need for significantly fewer employees. Besides this, since 2000, print demand has dropped due to competition from digital media. When I began to work in large printing plants in the late 1970's, first pressmen commanded very high wages that put them on a financial footing comparable to lawyers and other professionals who had college educations and advanced degrees. Now, there are far fewer first pressman positions, the pay is lower and many plants have closed. You can easily extrapolate from this single industry to others, in which jobs have disappeared and wages have declined in many of the positions that remain. I should also point out that a large number of manufacturing plants were built in rural locations long ago in order to escape the higher operating costs associated with urban locations. With the decline of manufacturing in the U.S., rural areas were generally hit harder than urban areas, since cities often have more mixed economies and a single plant closure has less impact.

Where I agree the most with Goodwin is on the importance of educational attainment. Apart from the vocational aspects of education, I find that highly-educated people generally have a better understanding of the world in which they live and are better prepared to plan their lives realistically than people who have little education and little experience of the world beyond their immediate environments. In my view, I would expect populist extremists to fit the profile of stressed organisms: there would be a natural tendency for them to be suspicious of other groups and to desire control of their environment by like-minded people. The underlying problem, as I see it, is that there is no mechanism in place to provide conditions for these populists that would ensure continuity into the future with what they became accustomed to in the past. Under circumstances like this, it is not unreasonable to expect some sort of natural selection to play out, and the process is unlikely to be pretty.

Perhaps because Goodwin's essay is short, he doesn't mention anything about how populism provides opportunities for unscrupulous politicians. Though he recognizes that Donald Trump may not be around for long and that Brexit may eventually be overturned in the U.K., there is every reason to believe that other opportunists will take advantage of the situation, leading to further instability. Instead, Goodwin prioritizes a change in message by the center-left in Europe in order to attract populists who are motivated by cultural protectionism rather than by economic protectionism. In my view, the underlying problems are economic, and political maneuvering alone is not going to remedy the long-term attitudes of protectionists. I also think that the problem of populism, to put it bluntly, is exacerbated by the stupidity of populist voters. To use Donald Trump as an example, he has been loyally supported by about forty percent of Americans for over two years even though he is demonstrably incompetent as president and shows no signs of creating any permanent solutions for his supporters. Most intelligent, educated Americans could spot this well before his election, and their skepticism has been borne out fully. Emmanuel Macron seems to be following Goodwin's playbook in France by outwardly embracing Michel Houellebecq, who has been repackaged as a disgruntled populist figurehead – though I doubt that Houellebecq has much of value to add to the political scene – and Macron could easily go belly-up in France without economic improvements for the working class.

Ultimately, there will only be high-paying jobs for people who are talented and well-educated, and there is no way around this. I think that complaints about uncontrolled immigration and the erosion of national identity are expressions of frustration that would not occur if everyone felt economically secure. Although it may still seem too futuristic, I think that real solutions are going to require higher taxation on wealth and some form of basic income in all countries undergoing this phenomenon. In these respects, Goodwin falls far short.

Diary

I may already be running out of books to read in the biography/autobiography/memoir category and am having difficulty finding suitable ones. In high school I was interested in Albert Einstein; I hadn't read about him in years and decided to have another go. At the moment I'm giving up on Einstein: A Biography, by Jürgen Neffe. I had thought that a German author might produce a better book than a popular American author, but I don't like this one much. Neffe dances around the facts without getting to the point. He seems to do an adequate job with Einstein's scientific ideas, while dawdling over and speculating about the irresponsible and salacious aspects of Einstein's life. In this case, the problem is partly Einstein himself. He had an unusual personality in the sense that he was brainy, an introvert and a divergent thinker, but in other respects he was utterly conventional for his period. His upbringing was completely bourgeois, and by our standards he was an unapologetic sexist. He had at least one illegitimate child and didn't take very good care of his wife or his schizophrenic son. He peaked in his thirties as a scientist, with the general theory of relativity in 1915, but lived another forty years. Part of the problem with Einstein as a biographical subject is that he became too famous for his own good. Many people were involved with the management of his public image during and after his life, and there is a cult-like reverence for him to this day. My feeling is that, aside from his scientific work, he was not that exceptional. In fact, once he became famous, he was an ordinary skirt chaser, like most men. In a way, Richard Feynman was more honorable in this respect, because he was honest about it.

It may be easier to find suitable biographical subjects prior to the twentieth century, which is when the cult of personality exploded. You can see hints of its development in the eighteenth century, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but nothing like what we have today. People need to be reminded occasionally that every person who ever lived was mortal and, therefore, could at most be only a notch or two above most others – and certainly never dwelled on Mount Olympus. As I continue to seek biographical writings about recent subjects, it may be best to look for ones about people who aren't conspicuously famous. If my readers are getting tired of my tendency to demythologize, all I can say is that someone has to do it. Hero-worship, delusional thinking and brainwashing all go hand-in-hand, and the record must be set straight from time to time. Although one might argue that it is a self-justifying rationalization, I feel lucky that I'm not famous and don't have to deal with the unpleasant ramifications of fame. The anonymous life has its advantages.

The crocuses are up and the daffodils will be flowering soon. We are in the middle of Vermont's mud season, probably the ugliest time of year here. I sawed off some gray birch limbs that were damaged by a late snow and placed a few of them in the path to the woods to provide solid footing through the mud. The snow thrower has been put away for the season, and in a few weeks I'll be mowing the lawn again.

Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies

This new book by Edward O. Wilson is extremely short, which is a plus, but I didn't find it particularly satisfying. I had a similar reaction to Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life, which was published in 2016. I guess this is to be expected, given that Wilson is now almost ninety. He seems to be a compulsive writer, and producing new books must be his hobby. Still, he always provides many examples from the zoological world, and in this case he roughly traces evolution from the earliest times to the present. The stages he lists are:
1. The origin of life
2. The invention of complex ("eukaryotic") cells
3. The invention of sexual reproduction, leading to a controlled system of DNA exchange and the multiplication of species
4. The origin of organisms composed of multiple cells
5. The origin of societies
6. The origin of language
The primary subjects discussed are social evolution, eusociality, group selection and the emergence of modern humans. If you are already familiar with the concepts, there is little new here.

Throughout nature, most species survive primarily with the selfish behavior of individuals. Although we tend to associate altruism with high status within the animal kingdom, it is no more than an evolutionary accident. There is a spectrum of cooperation that enters natural selection and varies from no cooperation to complete cooperation. Schools of fish, flocks of birds and swarms of insects protect individuals from predators and are one of the simplest forms of cooperation. In the extreme case of ants and termites, individual survival may be completely subordinated to group survival, and most individuals are incapable of reproduction. Under group selection, fitness may be conferred to a group as a whole rather than to individuals. Quoting David Sloan Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, Wilson sums up the difference between individual and group selection as follows: within groups, selfish individuals win against altruists, but groups of altruists beat groups of individuals. At times, I found that there were so many examples of adaptation that it was difficult to think of eusociality as a distinct process. Occasionally it is unclear exactly how a behavior is encoded in genes, and it may be triggered only under certain conditions. In this respect, Wilson isn't much clearer than Jonathan Losos in Improbable Destinies: the underlying processes are so complex that descriptions seem like oversimplifications.

I had been hoping that Wilson would have more to say about modern humans. There are a few interesting facts, but Wilson is not an anthropologist, and while he is fairly philosophical for a scientist, he isn't particularly philosophical by other standards. One reviewer criticized him for linking homosexuality to eusociality. Wilson may be correct, but from a research standpoint that view seems controversial. An area that interested me was research on aggression in chimpanzees and humans. Chimpanzees have been observed patrolling the border of their territory and capturing and eating babies from neighboring groups. There is a table listing archaeological and ethnographic evidence of human mortality due to warfare. Known groups of hunter-gatherers have always had a small percentage of adult deaths attributable to warfare. Thus, Rousseau's idea that life used to be better seems merely to be a variation of the Garden of Eden myth from the Bible.

In Wilson's explanation, modern humans developed on the savannas of Africa. He thinks that wildfires burned animals, and humans began to eat cooked meat this way. Soon they were keeping fires and eating meat regularly. Meat provides nutrition more efficiently than plants, and a carnivorous diet takes less time and effort than a vegetarian diet. Wilson thinks that meat consumption is associated with the rapid increase in the brain size of modern humans. I have often wondered why I like fires so much: it's probably because my ancestors sat beside them for hundreds of thousands of years.

Wilson does not engage in the kind of speculation about the future of mankind that I enjoy. He seems comfortable thinking of us as a type of animal and leaving it at that. To me, it isn't an idle thought to consider the conditions in which human existence might become more peaceful and sustainable. This could be facilitated by conditioning people to believe that they all belong to the same group, as I've mentioned before. A world government would help, but Wilson doesn't pursue such ideas.

Diary

After being engrossed with Rousseau for so long, I was having a hard time finding something new to read. At this stage in my life, I get bored immediately by most popular books, and I gave up on one that I had started. What happens usually in the case of popular nonfiction is that the main ideas in the book can be summed up in a few sentences. Quite often, after reading the introduction, there is no point to reading further. I find that there is so little information on most pages that I start to skim them quickly in search of new content. Often there isn't much there – for hundreds of pages. Rather than forcing myself to read something that I didn't like, I looked around and discovered that Edward O. Wilson is about to publish a new book. I've ordered it and will wait for that. Wilson is getting very old, but he has ideas that are more relevant today than ever.

I am still interested in the influence, or, more often, the lack thereof, of intellectuals in their societies. Rousseau, for instance, seems to have influenced aesthetic trends. He popularized the idea of individual freedom and the enjoyment of nature, which relate more to lifestyle choices than to anything substantive. He had no effect on the Industrial Revolution and very little on subsequent political systems. Much of the research in science that has been conducted since the beginning of the Enlightenment has been of service mainly to capitalism, and scientists themselves have tended not to become public intellectuals. My thought is that, with all of the anthropogenic changes taking place on the planet now, it would be appropriate for more biologists to speak out about the environment in the way that Edward O. Wilson has. I think that science has advanced far enough that, when articulated properly, it can serve to redirect public policies into directions that would be beneficial for everyone. Wilson's ideas have been unpopular in the humanities, but he knows what he's talking about and should not be ignored.

Part of the problem in the U.S., as noted by Tony Judt, is that intellectuals here do not play the same public role as those in France do. If there is a problem in France, it is that French intellectuals as a group are now of fairly low quality. Although, say, Michel Houellebecq doesn't have quite the same stature in France as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Foucault did, I wouldn't consider any of these four scientifically informed. Most public intellectuals in both the U.S. and France are drawn from the arts and humanities, which limits the scope of their knowledge. The U.K. seems to produce some scientifically-oriented public intellectuals, such as Martin Rees and Richard Dawkins, but Dawkins is an unnecessarily polarizing figure. Scientifically-oriented public intellectuals in the U.S. tend to be either advocates of capitalism, like Steven Pinker, or dogmatic atheists in the vein of Richard Dawkins.

My interest in public intellectuals dates back to my reading of the New York Review of Books, which, as I've said, was extremely disappointing. The writers there opposed the ideas of E.O. Wilson, did nothing to prevent the election and reelection of George W. Bush, and nothing to prevent the Iraq War. There were articles by Steven Weinberg and Freeman Dyson, but they tended to be apolitical and conservative. I haven't read it for several years, but they probably also did nothing to prevent the election of Donald Trump. As the premier outlet for public intellectuals in the U.S., the New York Review of Books has produced social results that can only be called pathetic. The sloppy thinking, laziness and stupidity that underlies the ineffectiveness of that publication is associated with its emphasis on the arts over the sciences and its knee-jerk service to academics in the humanities.

While my orientation is probably more towards the humanities than the sciences, I increasingly find that the humanities are more subject to the influence of popular trends that reinforce ideas with no scientific basis. It would be easy to write an entire book of examples, but I'll just mention a couple of critical ones. The most obvious fallacies perpetuated in the humanities are those stemming from political correctness. Thus, while scientific evidence continues to accumulate indicating that humans embody genetic determinism – just the same as other species – in the cultural environment at most universities, the myth persists that improved educational opportunities for the economically underprivileged could eradicate their lack of access to good jobs. Though I think that people should be treated the same, this doesn't mean that they are literally the same. For me, one of the greatest fallacies is that the democratic process is a panacea for social inequality. What I notice, particularly now that the Internet is altering the way in which human cognition functions, is that large segments of the population, whether liberal or conservative, are increasingly incapable of making informed decisions, even when those decisions have a direct impact on the quality of their lives. In my view, we are well past the time when science ought to be the basis for most public policy decisions, and the failure of traditional intellectuals with backgrounds in the humanities is beginning to seem astounding.

The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity IV

The epilogue consists of a summary of Rousseau's contributions and a description of the influence of his work over time. The material was drawn by the editors from essays and lectures previously published by Maurice Cranston.

Rousseau was a force in the backlash against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and it was no coincidence that he broke with some of his Parisian friends. Rationalism manifested itself not only in the sciences, but also in the arts. He opposed the formalism in the musical theory of Rameau, and his popular opera, Le Devin du Village, introduced a new musical style to Paris that later influenced Mozart. His novel, Julie, which became the main source of his popularity, was the first romantic novel and added a new kind of realism to literature, with an emphasis on the beauty of nature. Before Rousseau, people didn't generally hike, and they typically thought of mountains as forbidding and dangerous places that should be avoided. The Romantic poets of England and Germany were probably the most obvious adopters of Rousseau's ideas. Further on in time, he may indirectly have influenced Henry David Thoreau and the hippie movement. Very loosely, he might be linked to environmentalism. I think that his most enduring work is Confessions, which is still quite readable and marked the beginning of the modern autobiography.

In his political writings, it seems that Rousseau fizzled quickly. This was partly because his views changed over time, and even the later ones seem incoherent to me. He started out with Geneva and tried to make that his model, but his later modifications got him into trouble there. He read Hobbes and Locke, probably in an attempt to be intellectually thorough, but I think that he was out of his depth. His thinking on politics is so far from mine that I don't take him seriously at all. I fall within the rationalist school of thought, and, in my view, Rousseau and most political thinkers don't frame their questions properly. Although nationalism and patriotism are instinctively appealing, on an increasingly crowded planet they now seem like foolish ideas. To me, the main questions to be addressed are whether all people will be treated equally under the law and whether the governing body is capable of making sound decisions, without bias. If a government does this job, its form is irrelevant to me, and I wouldn't necessarily care whether it was a democracy, a monarchy, a dictatorship or a communist regime. The primary obstacles to good governance, I think, are incompetence and corruption. One need only look at the federal government of the U.S. to see how badly it works in these respects. The Constitution is largely obsolete. Many laws are poorly conceived and badly written, and congress, the supreme court and the president all make bad decisions. Beyond the cognitive limitations of humans there is the self-interest of individuals and groups. Though the Founding Fathers fell short with respect to equality, they wisely separated church and state and designed the branches of government in such a manner as to balance power, but in the long run they failed to prevent special interests from infiltrating and manipulating each branch. This is why I favor, when it becomes technologically feasible, an AI-based world government. Taking humans out of the process could be a vast improvement that would benefit everyone.

Rousseau can't be faulted for not knowing what the world would be like in 250 years. Who now knows what it will be like in 2270? I have enjoyed this biography even though it became tedious at times. It was possible to overcome Cranston's limitations as an academic by ruminating over the material that he provided. As I move away from fiction, I increasingly find a deep immersion into someone else's life more satisfying, whether I identify with the biographical subject not. There was a special flavor to Rousseau's life, because he lived in a time when people's worldviews were quite different from the ones we have now.

The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity III

The remainder of the book, apart from the epilogue, covers the period from 1765 to 1778, and the last chapter was pieced together from Cranston's notes and other sources by the editors after Cranston died. While there are some comments on Rousseau's character, the final chapter seems incomplete to me, though I'm not sure that Cranston would have had more to say.

Gradually, Rousseau's reputation as a heretic increased in Môtiers, aided by the local preacher. At first there were minor incidents on the streets, but then, in September, 1765, Rousseau's house was stoned, breaking windows, and he decided that he and Thérèse would have to leave. After weighing several possibilities, Rousseau moved to the Isle de St-Pierre on Lake Bienne, northwest of Bern. At this stage, he had some income from his previous publications and expected more to come from his forthcoming Collected Works and Dictionary of Music. He also accepted money from George Keith. Rousseau loved the island and imagined retiring there, but he was soon informed by Bernese authorities that he would have to leave because of his publications.

He initially traveled to Strasbourg with his dog and was treated like a celebrity. As had been suggested by friends, he decided in November to move to England with assistance from David Hume, among others. At the time, Hume was in Paris working in the office of the British ambassador, but his employment there was ending. While in Paris, Rousseau was mobbed, and he was worn out by a constant stream of social engagements. Intellectuals flocked to Paris in those days, because it was the only place in the world where they could count on being treated like royalty. A few years later, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson could be found living it up there. Rousseau had been working on Confessions in Môtiers and finished it while in Paris. Hume accompanied him to England in January, 1766.

Rousseau's English episode was truly bizarre, and I don't think it is adequately explained in the book. Immediately after arriving, Rousseau developed a persecution complex. After the usual fussing about not accepting gifts, he and Thérèse moved to the vacant Wootton Hall in Staffordshire. There isn't a very good record of what Rousseau did while he lived there, because he left no writings about it. It appears that he immediately began carrying on with the local aristocratic women, just as he had in Montmorency. He liked the house and the countryside, but Thérèse was rejected by the servants because she could not comport herself properly as the lady of the manor. His relationship with Hume was good up to a point, but it suddenly took an abrupt turn. A joke, which originated with Horace Walpole, had been circulating for some time. The joke was a fictitious letter from King Frederick II of Prussia to Rousseau. In the letter, Frederick offers to take in Rousseau and persecute him at his pleasure. The gist, of course, is that Rousseau likes to be persecuted. Rousseau eventually found out about the joke, and in his mind he linked it to Hume, who lived in the same house as Walpole. To make matters worse, the son of Dr. Théodore Tronchin, Rousseau's greatest enemy in Geneva, lived in that same house. When the joke appeared in the St. James Chronicle, Rousseau also noted that the editor was a friend of Hume. He immediately severed his relationship with Hume in an exchange of letters. Hume, wanting to protect his reputation, perhaps in a mistake of judgment, published the letters under the assumption that Rousseau would publish his. Thenceforth, Rousseau thought that he was the victim of a massive conspiracy conducted by all of his enemies, and that he was unsafe in England. He left England permanently in May, 1767.

The remaining eleven years of Rousseau's life are covered in fewer than fifteen pages, so there is far less detail in this section than there is for any other period. In 1767 he lived in Normandy under the protection of the Prince de Conti. In 1769 he moved to Monquin, near Grenoble, and married Thérèse. In 1778 he retired with Thérèse to a cottage in Ermenonville, near Paris. Throughout this period he continued to write, but produced only lesser-known works. One of them was an analysis that had been requested by Poland for its constitution. He died from a stroke on July 2, 1778 at the age of sixty-six. Initially he was buried in Ermenonville, but, after the Revolution, his body was moved to the Panthéon in Paris, where he still lies, along with Voltaire, who died a month before him. Thérèse survived him by twenty-two years.

There is hardly any discussion in the book on Rousseau's character. Since I don't find his ideas particularly interesting and think that much of his current importance comes from his vague association with the French Revolution through a few of his phrases supporting equality and individual freedom, I think that his psychological makeup is more worthy of attention. The only insightful comment in the book comes in a footnote quoting Jean Starobinski:

[Rousseau] never agreed to recognize the long-term effects of what he did. He pursued only immediate goals, hence, he never wished for all the embarrassing repercussions and dishonorable aftermath. He put his children in a public orphanage, but only because they were unwanted consequences of immediate pleasures savoured in all innocence with Thérèse.

I think that his unsupervised upbringing and extended adolescence with Mme. de Warens allowed him to develop habits that diverged considerably from social norms. No one draws attention to the fact that he was repeatedly fired from jobs and did not leave "home" with Mme. de Warens until he was thirty. While most people recognize that even if they don't like their jobs they have to support themselves, Rousseau decided that he should never have to be an employee. Furthermore, he decided that taking handouts from benefactors was a little like being an employee, so he wouldn't do that either. It also appears that, as in the case of Hume, if there were any whiff of disapproval, Rousseau would permanently disassociate himself from that person, especially if he or she wasn't an attractive young female. I think that one of the greatest omissions of this biography is the lack of follow-up on what the women in Rousseau's life who survived him had to say about him after he had died. In particular, I would have liked to know the final thoughts of Sophie d'Houdetot, the Comtesse de Boufflers, the Marquise de Verdelin, Mme. de Luxembourg and Thérèse, because they probably understood him better than others. Rousseau knew something was wrong with the way that he had handled his children, but his account of it in Confessions reads more like a rationalization than a mea culpa. Much of Rousseau's writing intentionally places him in a position of high moral authority, and it is possible that this was a cover for his actual laxity as demonstrated by his life. In that sphere he seems more like a hedonist who gave little thought to the consequences of his actions and valued relationships only when they served his needs.

There is a short epilogue that I have yet to read, and after that I'll be done.

The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity II

In 1763, George Keith, the governor of Neuchâtel, retired to Scotland, while Rousseau remained in Môtiers. Rousseau continued to write, and his next major work was Letters from the Mountain, which was directed specifically at the government of Geneva and was published in 1764. This caused him additional trouble in Geneva, and finally Rousseau gave up on effecting any changes there or making a return. Once again, Cranston is boring me to tears with superfluous details, which are doubly irrelevant as I don't care much about politics or Rousseau's political ideas. It appears that Voltaire actively worked behind the scenes to damage Rousseau's reputation in Geneva while outwardly pretending to like him. Cranston has yet to provide an adequate explanation of why Voltaire disliked Rousseau so intensely. One problem may have been incompatible personalities: Rousseau was charming and needy, while Voltaire, in Cranston's description, was witty and sarcastic. It may also have been a simple matter of professional rivalry, but I don't think that Cranston provides either a satisfying explanation or sufficient information for the reader to arrive at one. Some of Rousseau's contemporaries did think that Rousseau was crazy, but Cranston seems to downplay this possibility – he had a conflict of interest in the sense that, as a biographer, he presumed that Rousseau was worthy of study.

Life in Môtiers itself was a mixed bag for Rousseau. During the winters he became infirm, and he developed sciatica. Suffering pain, at one point he contemplated suicide. Then it seems that each year, when spring arrived, he began hiking, and suddenly he became robust again. Visitors could hardly keep up with him in the mountains, and he started a new hobby, botany, though he was only interested in it pictorially and not scientifically.  Thérèse didn't like Môtiers and thought that they were unpopular with the locals. Although in theory Rousseau should have liked them, as they would demonstrate the benefits of rural life, uncorrupted by cities, he actually preferred sophisticated people who were capable of engaging in stimulating conversation. Montmorency had been quite close to Paris, whereas Môtiers was in the middle of nowhere.

Rousseau continued old correspondences and started new ones. Cranston likes to draw attention to instances in which Rousseau demonstrated bad manners. With Rousseau in his fifties, friends were beginning to get old and die. He seems to have been terrible at letters of condolence, and in the ones he wrote he tended to change the subject almost immediately to the suffering that he was undergoing. He was particularly insensitive when writing to Mme. de Luxembourg after M. de Luxembourg had died. He also developed a flirtatious correspondence with one of his young female admirers, who went to the trouble of having a painting made of herself and then shipping it to him: he barely acknowledged its receipt, and the relationship collapsed for a while before recovering later.

Another area in which I find Cranston a little obtuse is in his lack of recognition that Rousseau loved attention whenever it associated him with higher social status. If Rousseau had been a true "hermit," as he had made himself out to be, he would have detested contact with the outside world. Yet, the more famous he became, the more visitors he wanted to see. Mind you, his favorite visitors didn't simply get brief audiences with him: they actually stayed with him in his house and ate meals with him prepared by Thérèse. A young, ambitious James Boswell, visiting from Scotland, stopped by and flirted with Thérèse, who was nineteen years older than he was. Someone representing Corsica wrote to request that he draft a constitution for the country, and he accepted with alacrity.

At this point in his life, with the mixture of fame and notoriety, and how he chose to handle it, Rousseau seems more interesting to me. Even so, his indifference to and avoidance of science, I think, made him a marginal thinker in historical terms. I will make two more posts before finishing and will try to wrap my final thoughts in the second post.

Michel Houellebecq

I came across this article by Michel Houellebecq and decided to comment on it in order to take a short break from Jean-Jacques Rousseau; I'll return to Cranston on my next post. At the moment I feel vindicated in preferring essays to fiction, because, in the case of an essay, the author can't attribute ideas to fictional characters, and he or she therefore has less wiggle room. Houellebecq's essay reads almost exactly the same as his novels, and now at least he is taking direct responsibility for positions rather than placing them in the mouths of imaginary characters.

The essay starts out reasonably well, and along the way Houellebecq admits that Donald Trump is a "pretty repulsive" person. He provides what I think is an acceptable short summary of the role the U.S. played during World War II and its actions on the international scene since then. America helped defeat Hitler and prevented the U.S.S.R. from advancing into Western Europe. However, America's international record since then has been dismal, if you only look at Vietnam and Iraq and don't even count Afghanistan or Libya. Houellebecq correctly notes that the quality of U.S. presidents has been amazingly low since World War II. I'm thinking that perhaps Eisenhower wasn't too bad, but all of the rest have been in the mediocre-to-inferior range. Houellebecq scorns American interventionism in a manner understood by many throughout the world, but which receives little negative publicity here. Beyond this point, I think the essay goes downhill.

As a foreign observer of America, I don't think that Houellebecq is fully attuned to the nature or extent of Donald Trump's ignorance. He misattributes Trump's treaty renegotiation strategy and "America first" slogans to a rare sagacity that is beyond the capacities of most politicians. He thinks that Trump's policies, besides getting the U.S. off the backs of other countries, will benefit American workers. At this point in the essay there is an explosion of Houellebecq's ignorance, something that simmers in the background of his novels but never shows itself in the light of day. Trump's trade war is disrupting international economic activities at no benefit to any country. Of particular importance, and contradicting Trump's campaign promises, American farmers are declaring bankruptcy in droves, partly as a result of low commodity prices exacerbated by the trade war. I should also mention that there is no evidence that Trump's policies will increase the number of manufacturing jobs or middle-class incomes in the U.S. To make matters worse, Houellebecq loves Brexit and the disbanding of the EU and NATO, mistakenly thinking that the end of globalization will bring prosperity to ordinary workers. Houellebecq has also bought into the somewhat improbable suggestion that Trump, through shrewd negotiating techniques, will denuclearize North Korea. Oddly, Houellebecq even seems to like Vladimir Putin.

Thanks to this essay, I have a clearer idea of Houellebecq's intellectual deficiencies. He doesn't recognize that, like Donald Trump, he has no understanding of economics. Also, far more important in a novelist, he doesn't realize that Trump's pathology and actual skills are a detriment to his being of service to anyone other than himself. Trump came to prominence by teaming up with criminals and bullying whoever stood in the way of his business interests. He only cares about activities that will benefit him personally. This is evident in everything that he does and has resulted in one of the most incompetent executive branches in American history and the careless and irresponsible violation of the U. S. Constitution. Houellebecq doesn't mention climate change, which is being denied by Trump. He also says nothing about overpopulation or repressive regimes; Trump supports overpopulation by opposing abortions, and his primary solution for asylum-seekers seems to be to let them die on the opposite side of a wall. Houellebecq clearly hasn't done his homework, or he would have known that Trump's tax cut mainly benefits the wealthy and has inflated the budget deficit for future generations. Perhaps Houellebecq's most conspicuous omission is the way in which Trump's right-wing populism echoes the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany during the 1930's.

Just to speculate a little, it may be that, now that Houellebecq has become internationally famous, he has started to follow in the footsteps of his friend, Gérard Depardieu, the tax dodger: Donald Trump may be just the man for nouveau-riche bourgeoisie who can never have enough money to satisfy themselves. I had been thinking about reading Houellebecq's latest novel, Serotonin, but I'm going to give it a pass. Whatever Houellebecq's motives, he is simply too ignorant to be taken seriously. After spending time reading about the French Enlightenment, it is disappointing to see just how far the standards have fallen. In order to qualify as a French intellectual, one once had to know something; today a cursory knowledge of blowjobs seems to be all that is necessary. Houellebecq is the last person anyone would want to consult regarding the problems currently facing the world.

The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity I

In 1762, after fleeing Montmorency, and having just turned fifty, Rousseau arrived in Yverdon, Switzerland, part of the Bernese republic, where he temporarily stayed with a retired Swiss banker whom he knew from Paris. His infamy, which derived from accusations of heresy in Émile and his criticism of the government of Geneva in The Social Contract, was about to relegate him to permanent refugee status. He was soon looking for a new domicile and found one in Môtiers, which was located over the Jura mountains in the principality of Neuchâtel. At this stage in his life, when he was quite famous, Rousseau had little difficulty enlisting assistance, though, as was his custom, he rejected pure handouts. Soon Thérèse joined him and resumed her role as servant and cook, and it was apparent that they sincerely enjoyed each other's company, despite the waning of sexual attraction.

Rousseau befriended George Keith, the governor of the province, an exiled Earl Marischal of Scotland who soon took on the same role as M. de Luxembourg and became his protector. The weather was cold in the mountains, and, as usual, Rousseau intermittently thought that he was about to die. He would have liked to return to Geneva and attempted to draw support there, but his opponents maintained an upper hand. Various friends made recommendations as to where he might go to avoid persecution, but, as far as I've read, he has rejected all of them. He might have visited David Hume in Scotland at that time, but he showed little interest. In Môtiers, he attempted to befriend the ordinary citizens by making ribbons with them, but he soon found their conversation boring.  He began to receive a stream of visitors and enjoyed walking in the mountains, as it was quite beautiful and reminded him of the mountainous regions near Geneva.

In his correspondences of this period, Rousseau sounds more mature than previously. Anecdotes from visitors make him seem lively, enthusiastic, friendly and a good host. In person, he never seems to have been a stuffy intellectual but rather preferred animated conversation. I have been thinking about how well he did as a public intellectual when you consider how limited his formal education was. He was remarkably well-read for someone who never attended a university. However, you have to put this in context, and if he were alive today his life could never have followed the trajectory that it did. Without the proper education, he may have found himself working in a more limited range, perhaps as a playwright but not also as a composer or philosopher. On the whole, I am inclined to think of him as an artist rather than as a thinker.

Rousseau above all conjures up the image of a romantic, a man who loves nature and language, leads a picaresque life and seems to represent high ideals. This is what seems to have made him appealing both to his contemporaries and to his readers up to the end of the nineteenth century. In comparison, Lord Byron seems like a decadent version of Rousseau, with fewer ideas. The impression I'm getting is that Rousseau was unintentionally theatrical and put an entertaining spin on his life. I'm still a little disappointed in Cranston's analysis of Rousseau as a person. He notes with surprise that Rousseau spoke highly of his father even though he had essentially been abandoned by him when he was ten, and doesn't connect this with Rousseau's abandonment of his own children. Cranston also has nothing to say about Rousseau's reaction to the fate of Mme. de Warens: she died in poverty in 1762 after years of little contact with Rousseau, and, given the importance Rousseau placed on her in Confessions, this seems incongruous with his emphasis on virtue. It seems possible that Rousseau went to extremes to obscure these unpleasant aspects of his life. He used poverty as an excuse for child abandonment and may have espoused lofty ideals in order to distract from his own questionable behavior. His sensitivity and support of morality were magnets for the aristocratic young women whose attention he craved. However, he was never able to snare them completely and had to content himself with the attentions of the less-polished Thérèse and older, less-attractive women such as Mme. de Warens and Mme. de Luxembourg. He certainly brought out the maternal instincts in the women he knew. Perhaps I'm being too hard on him, but I do get a sense of his life as an improvised act more than as a serious meditation. What is missing so far in Cranston is the recognition that, while Rousseau was charismatic and habitually presented himself as morally upright, he was more often a recipient of help than a provider of it; there is no mention that a modern reader might construe Rousseau as a self-indulgent navel-gazer.