Diary

With the help of the coronavirus, I'm having an unusually dull summer. So far, Vermont, which has an elderly population compared to most states, has done relatively well in containing the pandemic. Addison County has done exceptionally well. There was a surge in new cases in Chittenden County after Memorial Day, but that subsided fairly quickly. Besides making it necessary to curtail public activities, such as going to restaurants, the pandemic causes a variety of psychological stresses that accumulate month after month. The thing that bothers me the most is having to watch the slow-moving train wreck of the Trump administration and the Republican Party on a daily basis. When Trump is gone, I'll probably stop following the news so closely. While it was apparent as early as 2016 that the Trump administration would fail, few Americans realized or acknowledged that he was elected purely on the basis of propaganda, and that any perceived successes of the administration were essentially either nonexistent or, at best, dumb luck. What irritates me the most is how long it is taking for the public to realize that they have been duped. They misattributed the success of the economy to Trump for three years, and now it is taking months for them to realize that he has completely mishandled the pandemic, causing the preventable loss of thousands of lives and damaging the economy. If there is any justice in this, it is that many of the Trump-supporting states are increasing in COVID-19 cases because they followed Trump's anti-science lead and failed to take the necessary precautions. Moreover, they will have on their consciences the fact that they enabled the most incompetent and corrupt president in American history.

Another aspect of the current political situation that disturbs me is the extent to which so many political opportunists have tied themselves to Trump and continue to resist the notion that he isn't just a little bad as president, but a complete disaster for both the country and the world. Not only is he a menace to public health and economic stability, but he and his appointees are attempting to shred the Constitution and eliminate the balance of power in the federal government. As a rational person, it irks me to look on as millions of people continue to support a politician who, by every measure, does nothing but damage to the country. This situation is a perfect example of why faith in democracy is a misguided idea – thus my skepticism regarding Thomas Piketty, progressive politicians, etc.

On a more positive note, all of my astronomical equipment is currently up and running, and we have had a few clear nights. However, with the objects that I like to see, it has to be extremely clear and rarely is. I like galaxies and was able to see Markarian's Chain, a line of galaxies only visible in large telescopes. I could see them, but they were blurry. Perhaps I prefer galaxies because they're about as far from Earth as you can get. I find it comforting to know that humans are at best a footnote to a footnote in the scale of the universe.

The weather has been hot and dry recently, and, with heavy watering, the tomatoes are off to a good start. I've ordered a new book that sounds promising and will begin reading it soon. I wasn't that thrilled by Charles Darwin or Thomas Piketty and could use something a little different at the moment.

Capital and Ideology V

As expected, I finished the book. Part Four includes the chapters "Borders and Property: The Construction of Equality," "Brahmin Left: New Euro-American Cleavages," "Social Nativism: The Postcolonial Identity Trap, and "Elements for a Participatory Socialism for the Twenty-First Century." The latter chapter lays out some of Piketty's ideas regarding the specific structure and goals of future governments. He says:

The study of history has convinced me that it is possible to transcend today's capitalist system and to outline the contours of a new participatory socialism for the twenty-first century—a new universalist egalitarian perspective based on social ownership, education, and shared knowledge and power.

In the short concluding chapter, he writes:

Ultimately, this book has only one goal: to enable citizens to reclaim possession of economic and historical knowledge. Whether or not the reader agrees with my specific conclusions basically does not matter because my purpose is to begin debate, not to end it.

While, on one level, I respect Piketty's idealism, on another level he seems to be a completely naïve academic who, having accessed an international readership, is now freely expressing his childhood fantasies. Looking at his background, it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that both of his parents were once Trotskyites. That by itself wouldn't necessarily be bad, but his ideas seem shaky to me, and how he thinks they might be implemented seems completely unrealistic.

As mentioned earlier, Piketty has no interest in psychology and seems to be completely unaware of the problems that one would encounter in educating the public and making them sympathetic to his ideas. For example, although he seems to have some awareness of how Trump supporters think, he conveniently places them in his category of "nativist merchants," who have come to dominate the Republican Party and abhor the "Brahmin left," which includes people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who have come to dominate the Democratic Party. In Piketty's nostalgic version of socialism, there remains the fantasy of a well-educated and intellectually flexible public who are ready to implement enlightened ideas without any help from experts simply by following routine democratic processes. Looking at the electorate in the U.S., this seems like a pipe dream of the highest order. How are voters who don't even know how many branches there are in the federal government suddenly going to become progressive policy wonks?

I'm not going to attempt to summarize Piketty's proposals, because I don't see them going anywhere anytime soon. Perhaps they may get some support in the E.U., but elsewhere, particularly in the U.S., you may at best see some piecemeal versions of them in progressive platforms such as those put forward by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. In order to make any headway in the U.S., Piketty's ideas would have to overcome forty years of conservative propaganda and challenge the corporate mindset in a manner that hasn't succeeded in nearly a century. I should also mention that Piketty seems to have no sense of the future of capitalism: for him it will continue to function much as it has, but with greater taxation on wealth and high incomes. One of his pet projects is to improve educational opportunities for the disadvantaged; while on the surface this seems like a good idea, realistically I don't think it would be of much benefit in a shrinking job market. In fact, Piketty hasn't given a thought to how capitalism itself is likely to evolve over the next few decades. Like more conventional economists, he seems to think that capitalism can be an engine of growth indefinitely, and that it merely has to be regulated better so as to keep it in line with the public interest. He seems to have almost no sense of the cutthroat nature of capitalism, which has historically left winners and losers in its wake. Somehow, he thinks, the democratization of corporate boards will result in enlightened corporate policies – without affecting profitability. From reading this book, you would never know that corporations routinely disrupt democratic processes in order to gain competitive advantages. I don't see that behavior changing significantly until all major corporations are nationalized – which doesn't seem to be looming on the horizon.

From my point of view, Piketty is operating primarily from a pre-scientific schema, and he is willfully ignoring both behavioral economics and a biological understanding of human nature. He would benefit greatly from reading some of the books that I've discussed on this blog. Underlying his ideas is an idealized version of human nature in which everyone has the ability to reason clearly and make good choices. However, scientific research now says quite the opposite. I wish that I could give this book a more positive assessment, but, as it stands, I can hardly recommend it.

Capital and Ideology IV

I am finding that the book is structurally ill-conceived and far too long for the abbreviated conclusions that Piketty is likely to reach in the final chapter, which is only seven pages long. I looked over Part Three, which includes The Crisis of Ownership Societies, Social-Democratic Societies: Incomplete Equality, Communist and Postcommunist Societies, and Hypercapitalism: Between Modernity and Archaism. On page after page you see the social and economic histories of country after country, accompanied by Piketty's charts, which usually show changes in wealth and income inequalities over long periods of time. The main point of Piketty's last book was that capitalism tends to coexist with inequality, though he did not posit a causal relationship. That was an interesting idea at the time, since, particularly in the U.S., the prevailing mythology had been that "a rising tide raises all boats," or "trickle-down economics" dating from the Reagan-Thatcher era. However, although that book was popular among progressives, as far as I know, it has hardly made a dent in policy anywhere and is the butt of jokes in Davos. I think the current book will have even less of an impact, because Piketty does nothing more than tenuously link the state of inequality in a country with whatever the prevailing political ideas are at any given time. For Piketty, it seems that inequality is purely subject to the prevailing ideas in a country, and he has not so far presented a case for any particular set of ideas that ought to be applied generally in order to reduce it. Also, as I mentioned earlier, he has no interest in using the biological characteristics of humans to construct plausible models for future use. Thus, from my point of view, he has no interest in examining the underlying causes of intractable inequality. If he took that extra step, he might immediately see that humans are social animals, and that they expend much of their energy attempting to attain social prestige. In this era, that prestige is usually associated with greater wealth, and until wealth is replaced by some other characteristic, economic inequality is inevitable. This is such a simple and obvious idea that I am stunned that it hasn't occurred to Piketty. Rather, he seems to prefer to show off his historical knowledge and loosely connect it to economic history. As I said, I don't think that history is much of a guide to anything.

In other respects, if one is interested in social history, the book can at least provide some food for thought. Piketty makes a case that part of the ascendance of the economy in the U.S. was due to the fact that the American educational system surpassed that of most other countries early in the twentieth century. On the surface, this is an appealing idea, but I don't think that it holds up to scrutiny. Rather, I see this as an indication of Piketty's tendentiousness. I think that Piketty is a hopeless, ideological conformist in his belief that economic advancement is the result of the removal of constraints on the underprivileged. In this instance, he seems oblivious to the fact that increases in agricultural productivity led to a reduction in demand for farm labor; this precipitated a migration to industrial jobs that did not require an educated workforce. I doubt that education had much relationship to productivity in the U.S. until after World War II, when the GI Bill created a new generation of professionals.

On the other hand, sometimes Piketty offers descriptions which help clarify situations:

The neo-proprietarianism that has emerged over the past several decades is a complex phenomenon; it is not merely a return to the proprietarianism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it is linked to an extreme form of meritocratic ideology. Meritocratic discourse glorifies the winners in the economic system while stigmatizing the losers for their supposed lack of merit, virtue and diligence. Of course, meritocracy is an old ideology on which elites in all times and places have always relied in one way or another to justify their dominance. Over time, however, it has become increasingly common to blame the poor for their poverty. This is one of the principal features of today's inequality regime. 

This description applies to many countries at the moment, and, in the U.S., the Trump administration has turned it into a parody: Trump and his flunkies transparently demonstrate their utter incompetence on a daily basis, while unconvincingly posing as masters of economic and geopolitical skills. The problem, however, is quite real, and a slightly less offensive version of the same behavior infected the Obama administration. I also notice that some of the current heroes of capitalism, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, often seem quite vacuous if you examine them outside their particular areas of expertise.

I've (only) got 322 pages left to go and hope to blast through them and wrap up the book on my next post.

Capital and Ideology III

Part Two of the book consists of an exhaustive description of slave and colonial societies. There is so much material in this book – it could have been three or four books – that I'm going to comment only on things that particularly interest me. My interests do not necessarily match Piketty's, but I find some of the information interesting in its own right. In passing, Piketty mentions the basic pattern of international trade, and it struck me how little one ever hears about it, because it is ignored or distorted by the news media and politicians. When a country, such as Japan, increases its exports because labor is inexpensive, the workforce is young and it has a competitive advantage in pricing, the situation is not permanent and evolves over time, particularly when the workforce ages and the labor pool declines. Eventually, the workforce becomes smaller, and the wealth that has been accumulated is invested overseas, providing a replacement income for the income that has been lost from exports. Although the situation isn't quite so stark in the U.S., manufacturing and exports have similarly declined, resulting in fewer jobs. The workforce in the U.S. is also aging, but, unlike Japan, immigrants are filling vacant positions. Under this explanation, there is nothing wrong with trade deficits, and there isn't necessarily a reason to rebalance them. For example, Japan now has a trade deficit, but the Japanese have large investments abroad and are not financially imperiled. In order to regain lost manufacturing jobs in this scenario, it would be necessary to reduce labor costs either though automation or lower hourly pay. Thus, when Donald Trump or other politicians come along and say that they are going to rev up the economy and bring back jobs, as if it were 1960 all over again, they have no idea what they're talking about. There is a basic cyclical process in place that can't be bypassed. No doubt this will be listed in Trump's obituary, along with his other colossal failures. Piketty has yet to describe how improvements could be made in this kind of political environment.

I found the description of how slavery ended interesting. When the English ended slavery, the government compensated the slaveholders for their loss of property. The situation with the French in Haiti was quite different. There had been many uprisings in Haiti, and finally France agreed to let the slaves buy their freedom. Thus, Haiti incurred a debt in 1825 which was not paid off until 1950. The U.S. had confused and unsatisfactory results when slavery ended. There was a proposal to send the slaves to Liberia, which didn't work. An attempt to recompense the slaveholders was also unsuccessful, because the value of the slaves was too high to be afforded by the government. Perhaps some of the animus in the South lingers from the fact that the slaveholders were never compensated. The problem of slavery remains unresolved in the U.S., and we're still seeing it in the news. Of course, I don't have any answers, but I don't think that reparations to slave descendants, as currently discussed, are going to be politically popular. I find that movement a little odd, because life isn't fair and never has been. At this stage, the civil rights movement in the U.S. has worn quite thin and is on life support. Uneducated white people are now clambering for attention too, as their economic situations deteriorate. From my point of view, all Americans have become a bit whiny. Many of them seem to assume that they are entitled to a minimum standard of living even if they make little effort. Worst of all, the government, which is permanently underfunded because of low taxation, doesn't have the ability or desire to do much about it. I know it isn't an apt comparison, but I think more along the lines of the Armenians (three of my great-grandparents) who fled genocide in the Ottoman Empire. The idea that I would demand reparations from Turkey seems like the height of absurdity to me. If I were a slave descendant living in the U.S., my first choice would be to emigrate to a different country. I wouldn't waste my time waiting for the U.S. to become an enlightened country.

Also in Part Two are descriptions of the transitions from ternary societies to proprietary societies in Asia and elsewhere. There is so much data that I'm not going to try to summarize it.

Capital and Ideology II

The book includes a detailed description of the historical structure of society in several countries. The earliest widespread structure, called ternary or trifunctional, consisted of the nobility, the clergy and "the third estate," which represented ordinary workers of low status. In France, that system existed up to 1789, from where it gradually evolved into the next structure, which is called proprietary. England went through a similar process, but without a full-scale revolution. The propriety structure runs right up to the present, and, as the name suggests, is based on the ownership of property. Many of the examples of proprietary structure come from France and England and are a repeat of content from Piketty's last book. Once again he examines the unequal ownership of property and uses Balzac and Jane Austen for accurate descriptions of the early nineteenth century in France and England. He also includes data from the Belle Époch, which ran from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to World War I in 1914. As recounted in his last book, that period, though rich in the arts, was characterized by extreme wealth inequality. He also includes data on Sweden and other countries.

The book is quite long – 1041 pages – and goes into great detail, usually relying on data such as inheritance records. Besides being a little tedious to read, the early sections amount to evidence that he will use for his central arguments at the end of the book. Of course, this type of process is hardly concise and makes the book look like a major academic treatise. More than ever, Piketty comes across as a slightly pedantic academic who is forcing the readers to wade through minutia that may not be of much interest to them. Although the data is often rich, I am finding that I don't need most of it and would be much happier with "the short version," a concept which seems to barely register with Piketty. For this reason, I am passing across the pages far more rapidly than usual in order to finish the book in a reasonable amount of time. Moreover, I don't particularly like historical approaches, because they often seem arbitrary to me, and historians never seem to be good at summarizing conceptual issues. For these reasons, I am not going to dwell on anything and will move as quickly as possible without referencing the countless bits of information.

In passing, one issue came up that shows the difference between my thinking and Piketty's. Writing about the Aryan nobles in India and nobles in other regions, he says:

...the historical evidence suggests that classes mixed to such a degree that any supposed ethnic differences disappeared almost entirely within a few generations.

I think that Piketty embodies many liberal biases, because he is commenting on something without taking into account alternate views. With respect to the Brahmins, here is what David Reich, the geneticist, has to say:

The people who were the custodians of Indo-European language and culture were the ones with more relative steppe ancestry, and because of the extraordinary strength of the caste system, the ancient substructure in the ANI [ancestral north Indians] is evident in some of today's Brahmins even after thousands of years.

My point here is that Piketty, though roughly correct, has no interest in accurate genetic information which contradicts the unquestioned liberal assumption that all people and ethnicities have essentially the same capabilities. There are differences which, though small, should not be glossed over unless research disproves it. As I've said before, though a genetic view of the abilities of different groups may seem racist, in cases such as those put forward by David Reich, there is scientific evidence to back them up, and the default liberal academic trope that all people are essentially the same looks much like propaganda. It is apparent to me that Piketty comes with a lot of intellectual baggage which may not hold up well if you remove him from his particular academic bubble. Thus, while I admire him for his quest for the cause of equality, it is hard for me to overcome the aspects of his thought that amount to no more than academic received wisdom. There are real differences between people, and some of those differences are the result of their genetic backgrounds.

I am hoping to wade through another 200 pages before making my next post.

Capital and Ideology I

For a number of reasons, I'm out of my winter reading mode and will probably proceed through this book, by Thomas Piketty, very slowly. Like Capital in the Twenty-First Century, it isn't technical and is easy to understand. I am reminded of Charles Darwin, who similarly wrote accessible books, and thereby laid claim to the title of one of the greatest scientific minds in history. Like Darwin, Piketty is already rich and acclaimed from his popular first book.

I've only read the long introduction, which describes the main plan of the book. As with his last book, Piketty loves historical narratives in which he compares conditions in different countries at different periods. In this case, rather than focusing primarily on the economic aspects of wealth inequality in rich countries, he looks broadly at ideology and politics in all kinds of countries. I am already finding myself disagreeing with him when he says "Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political." It looks as if the main premise of the book is that inequality can only be addressed through political processes, and in this sense it seems that his ideas are similar to those of Jared Diamond in Upheaval: each nation must work to define its situation and find solutions through a democratic political process. In most respects, that is a conventional view today. However, as I've mentioned on previous posts, I have a very low confidence level in political processes and usually find prevailing ideologies stunningly simplistic if not simply incorrect. Piketty seems to abhor technical language when it comes to collective human thinking about how societies should be organized. I agree with him that natural language is our primary resource for resolving political and ideological disputes, but think that he has too much faith in the idea that humans can collectively solve their major problems simply by identifying and discussing them at all levels of society. I find myself frequently disagreeing with progressive intellectuals, who often seem to base their ideas on a faulty understanding of human nature.

Piketty's form of argument, while refreshing in some ways, is disappointing in others. It is indeed pleasant to read about social issues in narrative form, probably because our brains have evolved to work that way. Strictly scientific language seems cold and inaccessible, so it makes sense that people, including Piketty, prefer stories for digesting information. Most people, for example, would prefer reading a novel to reading a scientific treatise. The problem is that ideologies and political memes lack real substance if they're not measured against more objective standards. Several of the books that I've read since reading Piketty's last book show that human cognition is highly erratic in its performance, which results in irrational behavior on the part of practically everyone. Thus, the idea that the citizens of a country can simply buckle down, put their heads together and reinvent themselves through a process that is both orderly and rational seems naïve to me. That, unfortunately, seems to be the view of most progressive intellectuals these days. I am more inclined to let policy experts or AI make these decisions, because most people are simply incapable of understanding complex policy options. It looks as if Piketty is going to completely ignore behavioral economics, which, besides being a useful branch of economics, is probably one of the most important ones to develop over the last fifty years.

Although, as I've said, politics and ideology don't interest me much, I can use the current political situation in the U.S. as an example. People generally agree about what comprise liberal or conservative ideas, but perhaps the one interesting thing that Donald Trump has done is demonstrate that Republican conservatives now have no core beliefs. Because Trump has no real ideology other than narcissism, the Republican Party, for the first time since the early twentieth century, no longer represents fiscal conservatism or free trade. Notably, there has been no effort made by Republicans to reframe their ideological beliefs, and it seems that, almost overnight, the conceptual identity of the party was gutted, and the party itself became a tool for conceptually incoherent opportunists. To be sure, some of the previous practices, such as the removal of restrictions on corporations, are still in place, but, with Trump at the helm, there can be no intelligible ideological or political goals. I think Piketty will be commenting on the Trump situation later in the book, but this situation may contradict some of his ideas.

Diary

I had been hoping to start commenting on another book by now, but the one I was reading wasn't worth it. It was on algorithms and turned out to be too basic and, therefore, though it did cover the general history of algorithms, did not go as far as I thought it ought to have on how they should to be deployed in the future. It is already evident that algorithms control many aspects of human life, and that, well short of AGI (artificial general intelligence), it will be possible to use them to make collective decisions for large populations in a manner that benefits the majority and doesn't hinge on the intractable irrational impulses that often dominate human behavior. This is a rather obvious need at the moment, with poorly-informed populist leaders taking the stage and facilitating preventable deaths while ignoring established science. It is embarrassing to have to think about the ludicrous statements made by Donald Trump, when it is now common knowledge that, besides remaining uninformed on COVID-19, his only motivation is to be reelected in November regardless of the human costs. The cognitive weaknesses embodied by Trump become more dangerous when they are magnified by unrealistic expectations about the efficacy of democratic political processes. One need only look at Trump's political career to see that from the start he has been self-centered, dishonest and unprepared to act in the best interest of voters. Recently he has demonstrated that he is perfectly willing to have thousands of them die unnecessarily if he thinks that it will facilitate his reelection. Even as responsible news outlets expose him on a daily basis as the dangerous charlatan that he is, there remains a foolish belief that the usual political process is the only suitable recourse, regardless of the growing costs of his incumbency.

Speaking of algorithms, I think it would be fairly easy to construct ones that would predict the likely outcomes of political figures in office by studying the backgrounds of politicians and comparing them to their subsequent political careers. For example, although Obama was somewhat successful and was respected as president, it might be shown that his lack of leadership experience, conformity and a desire to please offset his ability to empathize, which had helped him get elected. In the end, his weaknesses rendered him ineffectual as president. The case is more obvious with Donald Trump. Politicians who promote flagrant lies prior to election, such as birtherism, are more likely to lie in office. Similarly, those who conceal their financial records are more likely to have engaged in illicit transactions. With Trump, there remains the possibility that he has bungled most of his business initiatives and is now heavily dependent on money funneled to him through Deutsche Bank from Russian oligarchs. A subtle analysis might reveal some of the more elusive Trump characteristics. He has been using a grifter strategy for his entire adult life and lacks the flexibility to learn or adapt in office. This has only become apparent gradually, because Trump is in the habit of believing his own lies. It didn't emerge until recently that although Trump clearly pressured the government of Ukraine to provide negative information on Joe Biden in return for military aid, he couldn't see anything ethically wrong with it, because he is accustomed to thinking that his transactions are all for his personal benefit, and that he has no responsibility for anyone else. Another Trump habit that has become more obvious over time is his use of new distractions to escape close scrutiny on other questionable actions that he's taken; this particular strategy isn't very sophisticated and is commonly used by con men, but Trump has used it effectively since he was elected, because it keeps his critics off balance. Thus, the Trump presidency has played out as an emerging pathology that, despite being spotted by psychologists at the start, never found its way to public consciousness until it was too late. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Trump has increasingly demonstrated that, not only does he disregard facts that conflict with his narrative, but that he also doesn't understand basic science and remains indifferent to the thousands of lives that have been lost due to his incompetence. I think that research along these lines, working from data on many politicians in many countries over many years, could reveal the predicted outcome for individual politicians in the environments where they work. If that information were publicly available, it would be much easier to avoid future Trump-like debacles. In the end, I think that AGI will be better at governing than humans, but this could be an intermediate step.

One bright spot at the moment is the emergence of Bill Gates as a potential new pundit. It seems that to a large extent competent people have been steering clear of political careers in the U.S. for some time now, because they recognize that they can make more money, do more interesting work, provide greater public service, etc., by pursuing other fields. Although I have been less than enthusiastic about Gates in the past, in this situation he is a breath of fresh air, and with any luck he will attract additional competent people to the realm of public policy. From my readings, the field of public policy, which has improved in recent years, is still in a state of disarray, partly because it doesn't all fall under one academic aegis and is splintered, and partly because much of it is subverted by the influence of commercial interests. For example, private companies have become adept at privatizing institutions such as prisons and schools, only to gut whatever was there and monopolize profits without providing any measurable social benefits. The active involvement of people like Bill Gates in public policy could improve the likelihood of wider implementation of science-based policies. The political process in the U.S. is severely antiquated and could benefit significantly from the help of technocrats.

I haven't had much luck finding any book that I really desire to read, and have settled on Capital and Ideology, by Thomas Piketty, even though it is very long and had mixed reviews. I appreciate the fact that Piketty emphasizes equality far more than most American economists and think it should be the focus of the field. I am also hoping that he will include various cultural and literary anecdotes, which I thought spiced up Capital in the Twenty-First Century and made up for often dull reading.

William has resumed his serial killer habits. This morning there was a dead chipmunk in the basement, and the other day he brought in a dead hummingbird and left it by the sofa while we were watching TV. Most mornings there are new mouse parts on the porch, but at least he hasn't been climbing the screens.

Diary

I'm glad to be finished reading about Charles Darwin, because he isn't the best subject for a biography. However, he fits the pattern that I see in most biographies, in which the person gradually becomes demythologized. That is not the case in hagiographic biographies, which I have attempted to avoid. With Darwin, it becomes clear that he inextricably belonged to a specific time and place, and that his strengths and weaknesses played out as they did only because his environment dictated what was possible for him. If he had been born a few years earlier, he probably wouldn't have thought of natural selection, and if he had been born a few years later, his ideas would have been considered passé among scientists. From my reading, there is no evidence that he was a towering genius who gazed over the millennia as no one else could. Even so, he still deserves a lot of credit for advancing substantive ideas that remain over the heads of many people in the world to this day. The problem occurs when readers attempt to emulate their biographical heroes, which is usually impossible, because all contexts are ephemeral and the same conditions will never arise again.

This spring has turned out to be very cold. Last Friday I mowed the lawn for the first time, and that night it snowed. Usually it is much warmer by now, and the hummingbirds have returned – they haven't. We are still burning wood in the stove to stay warm. Normally we would have run out by now, but a few months ago half of a large sugar maple blew over, and I cut and split it, a job that took several days. I bought a new chainsaw, because the maple had a larger diameter than what I usually cut. We also have some apple wood, which burns well because it is extremely dry. The very old Enos Severance apple tree was hollow in the middle, and the dead half of it recently blew over and was leaning on a telephone pole. I cut that too. The remaining half of the tree is more robust and should live for a few more years. According to the weather forecast, we should have a significant warm-up by Thursday. The coronavirus pandemic is having effects here, as everywhere, but is more subdued due to the low population density. As of today, Addison County has a total of 62 cases and 2 deaths. I would be at low risk of exposure, because I don't do the shopping, but I have been traveling to Chittenden County, to the north, quite often for treatment of a medical condition, and that is the hot spot in the state, with 432 cases and 37 deaths. It remains to be seen what the total effects of the pandemic will be. So far it hasn't had much effect on my family and friends. Everyone who isn't retired is still working or was already stay-at-home.

I am hoping that all the bad news will finally catch up with Donald Trump, who by now has unequivocally demonstrated that he is the worst president in American history. He sailed into a robust economy that was unrelated to anything that he did with the assistance of uneducated voters who had been taken in by right-wing propaganda, only to completely mishandle the first major crisis that came his way. Although he is now getting more long-deserved criticism in the press, he is still supported by the brainwashed true believers. In the long run, he will be seen as having mismanaged the economy and negligently permitted thousands of preventable deaths. When his legal protections are removed, he may well end up in jail, which is where he belongs. Future historians will be scratching their heads about how he was ever elected in the first place.

In other news, after giving up on Netflix and other streaming services, I recently subscribed to The Criterion Channel, which includes many good films that I haven't seen. They used to include Criterion films on Netflix, but it has steadily gone down-market over the years. Nearly all of the latest films and series are abysmal in my opinion. Some of the very old films on The Criterion Channel aren't that great, but I think that their overall catalog is far superior to any other of which I'm aware.

Charles Darwin: The Power of Place V

During his final years, Darwin seems to have scaled back on his work a little. He continued with plants, writing on insectivorous ones, and then switched to plant growth. His last book, on worms, turned out to be the best selling of all his books. His son, Francis, completed medical school but, like Darwin's brother, Erasmus, had decided not to pursue a medical career, and instead he worked with his father on his scientific projects. Another son, George, who taught mathematics, helped him with his math. Francis married and provided him with his first grandchild, Bernard, who was raised in Darwin's house when Francis's wife died shortly after childbirth. Although Darwin was modestly wealthy and his books had sold well for scientific works, as with comparable families in his social class, he had a large staff of about twelve people, which makes his household seem bizarre if you compare it to contemporary ones. He was thrifty in his expenditures, and by the 1870's this had put him at a disadvantage in his experimentation, since biological research had expanded considerably and he did not possess suitable laboratory equipment.

He wrote an autobiography, which was intended primarily as a family document, with no thought of publication. According to Browne, it offers a straightforward account of his life without referencing his emotional state or inner life. At Cambridge, "My time was wasted, as far as academical studies were concerned....we sometimes drank too much, with jolly singing and playing at cards afterwards." He said that in his later years he couldn't stand reading poetry or Shakespeare. According to Browne:

Looking back, he reckoned that he learned nothing at school; nothing from his father, who considered him "a very ordinary boy"; nothing from two universities except that which he performed under his own steam. Everything accomplished on the voyage was from his own hard work.

His depiction of himself as entirely self-made can hardly be accurate. If, for example, Henslow hadn't set him up for the Beagle voyage and he hadn't befriended Lyell, it would be hard to imagine him attaining either the necessary inspiration or the subsequent success of his scientific career. He also expressed harsher views on Christianity than he generally did among his friends and family.

In 1880, Wallace, who, besides becoming a spiritualist, was bad at handling his finances and was going broke. Darwin generously assisted him by going through channels to arrange for a government pension for him. Darwin's brother, Erasmus, died in 1881. Finally, Darwin himself died on April 19, 1882, probably from heart failure, at the age of seventy-three. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Summing up Browne's two volumes, I would say that while they are extremely thorough, they focus more on the details of Darwin's daily life than on the role of his ideas in the history of science. I don't think that she emphasizes enough how much change has occurred in the last 150 years of scientific research, and how viewing Darwin close up fails to highlight his strengths and weaknesses as a scientific thinker. From my point of view, as a dabbler in scientific readings, the ideas of Darwin and his peers seem primitive, though they were radical at the time. For example, Lyell, who is considered the founder of modern geology, had no knowledge of plate tectonics and little idea of the age of the planet. The fossil record in 1870 was minute compared to what we have today, and the evolution of the plant and animal kingdoms is vastly better-understood. Both Lyell and Darwin seem to have been wrong about gradualism, though Browne hardly explores this fact. For example, Darwin would be astounded to read Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution, by Jonathan Losos, which I discussed earlier. In that book, Losos demonstrates how evolution can occur in only a few years, rather than thousands or millions of years. There is also a tendentiousness in Darwin's thinking, which seems to include the idea that evolution gradually leads to perfect organisms. In his mind, contraception was a bad idea, because it prevented the development of superior humans. More fundamentally, he didn't understand that sexual reproduction works well mainly because random mutations produce fitter organisms over time. He thought that, in advanced societies, males usually select their mates, and that their choices ultimately determine the fitness of their descendants. The actual situation is far more complex than that, and it sounds as if Darwin was simply repeating orthodox views of the social hierarchy in his milieu. So, although Darwin seems to have been a clearer thinker than most, he understandably lacked the superhuman ability to transcend various Victorian ideas, such as that of progress, which I don't think holds up well under scientific scrutiny.

I was also a little disappointed that even though Browne's discussion is sometimes sociological, she doesn't fully contextualize Darwin as a beneficiary of class privilege. It is easy to imagine someone like Darwin, who was a poor student and avoided confrontations, not flourishing at all under different circumstances. Today, someone like him probably wouldn't be admitted to Cambridge, and without family and college connections it would have been difficult for him to befriend Lyell and others and become part of the inner circle of scientists who called all the shots in Victorian England from behind the scenes. Browne describes how Darwin was quite talented at pulling strings in order to achieve the outcomes that he desired. He was also good at recruiting surrogates, Huxley in particular, to defend him, and therefore was able to avoid nearly all public contact. I don't think that if you placed him in a modern research environment, where he would be forced to adopt a narrow specialty and follow specific procedures, he would have done well at all. Browne does touch on this, but I don't think enough, because Darwin's success hinged on certain aspects of his environment that do not exist today.

One other point I thought I'd mention is that Darwin's opposition to religion was not something that he dreamed up by himself. Both his father and his grandfather were similarly skeptical, as was his brother, and Darwin probably absorbed it from his family.
In the broadest historical sense, it seems possible that the Reformation, led by Martin Luther, Henry VIII and John Calvin, sufficiently reduced Catholicism in the U.K. and Germany to free up scientific inquiry that might otherwise have been suppressed because of theological dogma. It may be no coincidence that the Industrial Revolution began in the U.K., whereas Catholic countries such as France, Spain and Italy significantly lagged. Even today it is notable that the countries most resistant to Darwinism tend to be the most religious. I might add that Darwin seemed to believe that morality had its origins in evolution rather than in religion, which I think makes him a precursor of E.O. Wilson, who popularized the idea of eusociality.

On the whole I found these books rewarding, though I could have done without the excessive detail. That tended to make the reading a bit too much like a BBC miniseries when I think it would have been more interesting to get to the heart of Darwin's ideas with briefer excursions into social history.

Charles Darwin: The Power of Place IV

Though Darwin's health remained uneven, he continued to write books. His next one was The Descent of Man, which was published in 1871. This filled in another gap left by Origin of Species and directly discussed the process of human evolution from earlier species. We know far more about this today than Darwin could possibly have known, but at the time it cemented his position as the primary thinker behind the idea of evolution. As with his other books, he drew from his many correspondences and was helped in the editing by his family, in this case particularly by his daughter, Henrietta. The book sold well, and Darwin's celebrity increased. Besides his knack for writing popular books, he looked the part of a sage, with a tall stature, a long gray beard and a serious countenance. I noticed that Daniel Dennett, the contemporary philosopher, seems to be doing a perpetual Darwin imitation in his physical appearance. This book was followed by On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, which turned out to be his most popular book to date. It sounds lighter than the others and contained many illustrations, which made it easier for the public to absorb.

By 1872, the Darwin family had become a mini-industry, and his wife, children and siblings all played roles in attending to the demands that arose. Emma, for her part, did not share Darwin's views on religion, but this didn't cause a rift between them, perhaps because in those days feminism wasn't prominent and married couples operated more on a duty-based model than one based on equality. The children were open to the ideas of their father, and they became comfortable with his brand of skepticism. Darwin didn't particularly like being popular, and his family became adept at managing the growing stream of visitors arriving at their house, sometimes unannounced.

In 1869, Wallace had published an unexpected article in the Quarterly Review in which he partially rejected natural selection. Apparently he had been taken in by the then-popular worldview of spiritualists and mediums who had been staging séances. This came as a shock to Darwin, but didn't damage their relationship. What is interesting to me is that Wallace consequently forfeited some of his authenticity as a co-founder of the theory of natural selection. In this instance, Darwin's plodding, empirical method proved to be an advantage over people who were in some respects more intelligent than he was. Though Darwin was not given to psychological self-analysis, he recognized that he had an ability sometimes lacking in university people and intellectuals, because he doggedly stuck to empirical procedures. Apparently, Wallace got carried away in thinking that a separate layer of reality that was unrelated to most species had provided for the development of humans. This explanation left the door open to spiritual forces and a human consciousness that transcended physical reality. I have noticed a similar phenomenon myself, particularly during the 1960's and 1970's, when gurus were popular, though they usually turned out to be charlatans. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that people with high IQ's have a greater tendency to become unhinged from reality than practical, down-to-earth people. In person, Darwin was not a scintillating conversationalist, and he never dazzled those in his presence with the variety of his ideas.

The popularity of spiritualism during the Victorian era leads up to my favorite part of the biography, which includes G.H. Lewes and George Eliot. Darwin was on friendly terms with Lewes, who had written a favorable commentary on pangenesis, and Darwin had visited them at their house in 1868. He also attended one of their Sunday literary gatherings in 1873. Middlemarch was published in 1871, and George Eliot was at the peak of her fame in the 1870's. Though Lewes and Eliot were slightly disreputable, because they weren't married, they became acceptable for socializing by both men and women around this time. Emma was dying to meet George Eliot, and, as it happened, in January, 1874, Darwin's son, George, arranged a highbrow séance at Erasmus Darwin's house in London with the medium Charles Williams. In attendance were Lewes, George Eliot, Francis Galton, T.H. Huxley, Emma and Darwin, among others. Some of them were believers, but many were skeptics. Darwin described the event as follows:

We had grand fun, one afternoon, for George hired a medium, who made the chairs, a flute, a bell, and candlestick, and fiery points jump about in my brother's dining room, in a manner that astounded every one, and took away all their breaths. It was in the dark, but George and Hensleigh Wedgwood held the medium's hands and feet on both sides all the time. I found it so hot and tiring that I went away before all these astounding miracles, or jugglery, took place. How the man could possibly do what was done passes my understanding. I came downstairs, and saw all the chairs, etc., on the table, which had been lifted over the heads of those sitting around it. The Lord have mercy on us all, if we are to believe in such rubbish. F. Galton was there and says it was a good séance.

According to Henrietta Darwin, "Mr. Lewes I remember was troublesome and inclined to make jokes and not sit in the dark in silence."  Francis Darwin reported that his father said "it was all imposture." Not long after this, Charles Williams was exposed as a fraud.

If you're tired of hearing about Charles Darwin, your misery will soon be over. Darwin has only nine years left to live, and my next post will be my last on Janet Browne.

Charles Darwin: The Power of Place III

When Alfred Russel Wallace got home, he and Darwin developed a cordial relationship but did not seem especially close. Wallace moved in with his sister's family in London and, after spending several years living in exotic and remote locations, he disliked the crowded city. Furthermore, although Darwin introduced him to his scientific peers, such as Charles Lyell, Wallace was an introvert and felt uncomfortable in wealthy, upper-class society. One senses that Darwin deliberately distanced himself from Wallace as co-discoverer of natural selection, and he avoided being photographed with him. Behind the scenes in England there was always political infighting within the scientific community as one person or group tried to outflank another with the goal of domination. In particular, the Darwin-Huxley-Lyell-Hooker group was often in conflict with a group led anonymously by Richard Owen, which regularly produced articles critical of Darwin's work.

Darwin's further research at home occasionally resulted in books. Before Wallace came back, a lesser-known naturalist, Henry Walter Bates, had returned from the Amazon, and Darwin took a great liking to him. Bates was more complementary to Darwin than Wallace, because his research helped buttress Darwin's main theory without the potential for stealing it. Bates specialized in butterflies and had noticed that some mimic others in their appearance, and that this is an example of natural selection at work. Darwin was delighted to have a non-threatening naturalist offer examples that supported his theory, and he strongly encouraged Bates to publish, which he did. Nevertheless, Wallace remained a crucial ally of Darwin, and, in an 1864 article, Wallace became the first to explicitly advance the idea that natural selection had produced modern humans. In a peripherally related manner, within scientific circles at that time, the notion that some races are superior to others was widespread. Darwin had been disappointed that some of his friends, Lyell in particular, stopped short of linking natural selection to humans, and Wallace's ideas were therefore closer to those of Darwin.

During the 1860's, Darwin's health deteriorated further, and though he was only in his fifties he looked old. With his increasing fame, prominent medical doctors visited him in Downe (the spelling had changed from Down), but none of them were able to cure him. At times he was bedridden for protracted periods. Friends, such as Henslow, and two of his sisters died. However, Darwin continued his research. Because of his celebrity, he began to socialize at the highest levels of English society, and Emma was ecstatic about getting to know the Tennysons personally. His five surviving sons initially provided him with some consternation, as they showed no particular talents, but, like him, once they started in college they generally improved by applying themselves, in much the same way that he had earlier.

His research from this period resulted in the publication in 1868 of Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. In this book he attempted to explain how sexual reproduction actually works and allows traits to be passed from parents to offspring. He was not mathematically-minded and typically relied on the observation of physical attributes, which prevented him from developing a theory such as Mendel's, with dominant and recessive traits. He came up with a theory that he called "pangenesis," in which living matter contains unseen "gemmules" which carry inheritable characteristics from parents to offspring. This book was completely ignored and did nothing to enhance his reputation. In Darwin's defense, I suppose that you might say that it was a very early speculation about genetics, but it was of little value at a time when molecular biology didn't exist and the very idea of DNA was several decades away. In any case, Darwin was well aware that his theory of natural selection would remain incomplete without such understanding.

Other than the social and historical aspects described in the book, I am still finding it lacking in the sense that little is done to sum up Darwin's ideas in relation to modern science. The reader is left with the impression that Darwin had one important insight, which he maximized to the utmost by employing a pragmatic careerist strategy that made him the primary beneficiary of acclaim. In Browne's account, if you took away Darwin's privileged background and gave it to Alfred Russel Wallace, today we might be talking about Wallaceism instead of Darwinism, and Charles Darwin might be seen as an obscure Victorian hobbyist.

Charles Darwin: The Power of Place II

Origin of Species soon became widely discussed. One of the first major events in England occurred at the British Society for the Advancement of Science meeting held in Oxford in June, 1860. At that time, the public was unusually interested in science, and Oxford was in the process of catching up with Cambridge in scientific research. On this occasion, which Darwin characteristically didn't attend, Thomas Henry Huxley held a public debate with Bishop Wilberforce. As of then, Darwin had hardly thought about the religious implications of his work, but it didn't stop others from recognizing the incompatibility between Darwin's evolutionary time line and that presented in the Bible. Darwin had played down the idea that humans descended from earlier primates, though readers readily made that inference. Wilberforce may not even have read the book, but the publicity enhanced Darwin's reputation. Thereafter, Huxley became Darwin's primary defender in England. The book was also published in the U.S., where it was attacked by Louis Aggasiz, who then taught geology and zoology at Harvard. By current standards, Aggasiz would be considered a creationist. Fortunately for Darwin, his friend, Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist, became his main defender in America. With all the publicity, in the popular press Darwin was often depicted as an ape. Soon the book was translated into German and French. The translators, particularly of the French edition, took great liberties with the text. The German edition became popular, whereas Darwinism never really took off in France, which, at that time, was quite conservative.

On a side note, I should mention that I always find it interesting how scientists who are at the top of their field of research in one area are sometimes foolish and ignorant in other areas. Thus, Aggasiz, who discovered and illuminated the previously unknown eras of glaciation, was utterly wrong about evolution; his reputation has diminished considerably, and he is now considered a racist. A more current example would be Freeman Dyson, who died recently. He was a leader in the field of quantum electrodynamics, while in his later years he labeled anthropogenic climate change as a political movement that wasn't fully supported by science, which caused James Hansen, who is far more knowledgeable on climate science, to rebuff him.

Darwin remained aloof from the debates and took up new botanical hobbies such as the collecting of insectivorous plants and orchids. Although his research on plants was mainly amateurish, as in his other areas of interest, he was extraordinarily well-connected: his closest friend, Joseph Hooker, was then the assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He liked to experiment with organisms and theorize about their reproduction. Despite having a competitive nature, his shyness and lack of self-confidence made him reluctant to engage directly in public intellectual exchanges, and he was happy to allow others to perform that role for him. Emma developed a friendship with Huxley's wife, Henrietta, and they shared interests in subjects such as the poetry of Tennyson, quite the opposite of their scientific husbands. Darwin, it seems, had little interest in or appreciation of the arts, and while relaxing at spas he was satisfied by the best-selling fiction of the day, regardless of its quality. He liked living in a tranquil household with ample time to pursue his hobbies; demanding research and taxing debates didn't interest him much.

For her part, Browne is offering a perspective that is above all sociological. She doesn't have much to say about where Darwin's ideas fit in intellectual history and seems more concerned with the details of his daily life and how his social milieu enabled his ascent to prominence as one of the most important thinkers of the nineteenth century. So far, she has mentioned Malthus and Lamarck, Darwin's two main predecessors, without discussing their work in detail or comparing it closely to Darwin's. She has said nothing about where Darwin's theories stand in relation to modern evolutionary theory. With her particular emphasis, it is easy to see that though Darwin did have a deep insight into nature, he lacked many of the academic skills that would be necessary for him to succeed today. I'm as far as 1862, when Alfred Russel Wallace returns from Malaysia, which sets the tone for the next chapter.

Charles Darwin: The Power of Place I

This book starts where the other left off, in 1858, when Darwin was 49, and that year turned out to have an explosive effect on the remainder of his life. Darwin had been fussing over his researches and putting off a major exposition of his ideas, when in June he received a package from Ternate, an island in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). It contained a letter and an essay from the young Alfred Russel Wallace, with whom he was barely acquainted. The essay was on evolution and was better-written than anything that Darwin had been able to produce, and he immediately became worried that someone would beat him to the press. To make matters worse, the letter requested that he forward the essay to Charles Lyell for consideration. This created a moral crisis for Darwin. Wallace was from a poor family, had no college education and made a living finding exotic specimens for museums and collectors in England. He had no professional or academic credentials, and Darwin could easily have buried his essay so that it would never be seen by experts or the public. He decided to leave the matter entirely up to Lyell, and Lyell, along with Joseph Hooker, the botanist who was also a close friend, chose to present Wallace's essay along with a comparable essay by Darwin at the Linnean Society. This came at a bad time for Darwin, as various family members were ill from infections, and his youngest son, Charles, died on June 28. Darwin still managed to piece together an essay from his previous writings, and both essays were read at the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858. There was little reaction to the essays when they were read, and they were later printed in the society's Journal.

The situation with Wallace became a motivator, and Darwin immediately started work on what was to become On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin was not a good writer, and he prevailed upon Emma and one of her friends to help him improve upon the manuscript. He also solicited advice from his friends and scientific acquaintances. In those days, publishers and editors did little to correct manuscripts, and the burden often fell on the author. Darwin also carefully calculated who the audience would be, and the book was written both for the general public and the scientific community. He was pleased that his publisher, John Murray, chose to sell copies to Mudie's Circulating Library, which guaranteed a wide readership. The book was published on November 24, 1859, while the exhausted author was recovering from digestive problems and eczema at a spa in Yorkshire.

The first review, of an advance copy, appeared in the Athenaeum and was written anonymously by John Leifchild, who said "If a monkey has become a man—what may not a man become?" He considered the book too dangerous to read and thought that it should be handed over to theologians for safety. This review severely upset Darwin, and disturbed him for many years. On the other hand, as far as I've read, most of Darwin's colleagues found the book acceptable, though they may have had a few quibbles. The exceptions were the religious conservatives: Adam Sedgwick, the geologist, and Richard Owen, the naturalist, rejected his main thesis. Thereafter, Darwin and Owen broke off their friendship permanently. Another reader who objected was Robert FitzRoy, from the Beagle. FitzRoy wrote an anonymous letter to the Times, regarding which Darwin remarked privately to Lyell, "It is a pity he did not add his theory of the extinction of the Mastodon &c from the door of the Ark being made too small."

I've entered into the period in which Darwin became extremely famous. This is an era that interests me a lot, because it includes others with whom I'm quite familiar, such as George Eliot, G.H. Lewes and William Morris. Adam Bede, Eliot's first novel, was also published in 1859, and Morris was then living in Kent. My picture thus far is that Darwin was not particularly talented beyond having a deep conviction about how life operates, based on his direct observations, without intermediary qualifiers, well before most others. Someone could have done the same thing much earlier than he did, and you can do it yourself now without reading anything. Therefore, although Darwin deserves credit for presenting the first coherent and defensible theory of evolution, many other factors that had nothing to do with his insights came into play in a manner that permitted him to derive the maximum credit for the discovery. From Browne's meticulous account it is obvious that Darwin's high social rank and family wealth, along with his particular intellectual drive, were what made On the Origin of Species possible. One need only compare him with Alfred Russel Wallace to see how, under different circumstances, Darwin could easily have been a minor figure of intellectual history. I'll have more to say on this later, but thought that I should mention how Browne's biography both celebrates and demythologizes Darwin's work.

Diary

I suppose that most people are already tired of hearing about the coronavirus pandemic, but I ought to say something about it, since it is one of the most significant events of the last few years. So far it hasn't had much effect on me, since there are currently only eight known cases in Addison County and ninety-five in the entire state of Vermont. I'm sure that those numbers will increase significantly over the next few weeks, but I'm still unlikely to become infected. Social distancing has always been my habit, and I engage in it even more now that I'm retired. On a typical day I'm less than six feet away from just one person. If she gets it, I probably will, but she's being careful.

Of greater interest to me is how the pandemic relates to some of the thoughts that I've expressed on this blog. In my view, this is an excellent case study on the failure of human cognition, because it is readily apparent that conventional worldviews, particularly in the U.S., have blinded people to the actual fragility of their existence. The American model depends on events playing out according to a familiar script that everyone likes, but which contains significant elements of fantasy and delusion. Several of the problematic aspects of popular ideas are under test now, and I'll discuss a few of them:

1. Democratic processes, even when working properly, are no guarantee of competent leadership.

2. Capitalism alone is insufficient for maintaining social welfare, because the preparation for unlikely scenarios is not cost-effective and makes companies uncompetitive.

3. Countries that emphasize individualism are at a distinct disadvantage when a threat emerges that endangers everyone, because, rather than acting in unison, people follow whatever path they think is in their best interest.

1. As I've been saying for some time now, Donald Trump is an incompetent and corrupt president. First, he demonstrated that he was inept regarding economic policy; he started a trade war that is of no benefit to the country. He has also shown that he doesn't understand international diplomacy by, for example, cozying up with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un and receiving nothing in return, while alienating American allies. Currently, he is attempting to stage the coronavirus response in a manner that will help him get reelected, and in so doing he has demonstrated his ignorance regarding immunology and pandemics. Strangely, he still has an approval rating of about forty percent, which is why I think that the democratic model borders on the absurd. Trump is completely unfit for the job, and at most he should have a ceremonial position, not an executive position that makes him the most powerful person in the world.

2. The economic model in the U.S. requires most people to work for most of their lives. At the moment, retirees and wealthy people are not under as much stress as ordinary workers, who need immediate income to meet their expenses. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism in place to assist them when an unexpected event causes their simultaneous unemployment. The capitalist model limits the responsibilities of employers for their employees, and the only recourse during a crisis such as this one is government intervention. In this instance, the intervention is being conducted in a haphazard fashion, with states doing one thing, the federal government doing another thing, and poor coordination between states and the federal government.

3. A noticeable difference regarding the coronavirus is the response by Asian countries compared to the response by Western countries, particularly the U.S. Because there is less emphasis on individualism in China, the leaders were easily able to implement draconian procedures in order to slow the spread of the disease. Those procedures seem to be working, and the U.S. may soon become the new epicenter. There is no uniform response here, and one of the results has been a skyrocketing in gun and ammunition sales. In other words, in the U.S. it's every man for himself. As a result, many infections won't be averted, and the death toll will probably be much higher than it would have been under more austere measures. As usual, Trump is only making matters worse by hoping to end social distancing as soon as possible and create a robust economy by November, just in time for his reelection. Some prognosticators are already surmising that China, with its disciplined and coordinated economic and social policies, may soon permanently surpass the U.S. as a world power, and it isn't hard to see how that could happen.

Well, I don't want to bore you with my usual ramblings, so I'll stop here. Unless I can find something else to read, I'll probably return to Charles Darwin soon.

Charles Darwin: Voyaging VI

I've finally finished this volume. Janet Browne, the author, has been conscientious, but there isn't much evidence of psychological acuity, as I mentioned earlier. When you come right down to it, on a day-to-day basis, Darwin was pretty boring. What has emerged is that he had persistence and an intuitive sense about evolution along with far superior resources than most of his contemporaries.

A highly controversial and successful book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, anonymously written by Robert Chambers and published in 1844, set back Darwin for several years. The ideas in it were quite similar to his own at that point, but the book contained several errors and was strongly attacked in a review by Adam Sedgwick, the Cambridge geology professor and friend of Darwin. Among his professional associates, Darwin was the only nascent atheist, and they closed ranks on Vestiges in unison. In this situation, Darwin proved to be the opposite of a revolutionary, and he buried his dissent by withdrawing into a close anatomical study of barnacles that lasted until about 1852. Although the barnacle study seems like a form of escapism, Darwin managed to hone his observational skills while pursuing it, and in the end he emerged with a sense that hermaphroditic barnacles had evolved into sexual barnacles, and that sexual reproduction must play a role in natural selection. He had been intrigued by the fact that men have nipples, and while in that instance he would have been wrong to conclude that humans were ever hermaphroditic, it was still a sign that sexual reproduction has evolutionary advantages.

Emma continued to produce babies, with Henrietta born in 1843, George in 1845, Elizabeth in 1847, Francis in 1848, Leonard in 1850 and Charles in 1858. All of these children except the last survived to adulthood, so Darwin had in total seven surviving offspring out of ten. In 1848 his father died, and he received a substantial inheritance that left him wealthy for the remainder of his life. Much to Darwin's dismay, his favorite child, Anne, died from a disease in 1851. Darwin would be considered a male chauvinist today, because he was careful about sending his sons to college but made no such effort for his daughters. It is apparent that the Darwin household was fairly conventional for the time. Darwin himself was firmly in charge, and Emma managed the daily affairs while Charles continued his research and began to study pigeons, plants and seeds on the property, which included a large greenhouse. One of his pet projects was to determine how plants and animals became distributed across the globe. Darwin's health was always dicey, and he suffered from severe flatulence, which affected his social life away from home. He decided to take the "water cure" with James Gully at a fashionable resort for the rich, and he found it to be a success, despite the lack of real scientific evidence. Emma was more robust, and she thought that Charles was a hypochondriac. The social life in Down consisted mainly of visiting relatives, along with occasional stops by Darwin's colleagues. By the end of the book, Darwin has befriended both Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace, who are going to play pivotal roles in his future as he begins to publish on natural selection. As Browne points out, Darwin was talented at building a large international network of people who could help him both in developing his ideas and in obtaining samples for his research.

It is a little frustrating to me to have read so many pages (543) without even arriving at any of Darwin's most significant work. Yet there is some consolation in seeing how haphazard the process was and how difficult it was to overcome the prevailing belief system, including that of the scientific community. In hindsight, it seems to me that the ideas that Darwin was about to roll out were fairly obvious, even if you allow for the fact that DNA was yet to be discovered and that no one had heard of Gregor Mendel. At a minimum, this is a cautionary tale about how conventional wisdom can neutralize and destroy good ideas, even among well-educated people. For all their scientific zeal, Darwin's friends consisted almost entirely of conformists who took no interest in challenging the status quo.

As you may have guessed, I'm a little burnt out on Darwin at the moment and plan to pause before starting on the next volume. This will provide me with an opportunity to catch up on current events.

Charles Darwin: Voyaging V

Darwin soon rented a house on Gower Street in Bloomsbury, near University College London (the street, coincidentally, where I stayed on my last visit to London). He continued his geological research while adjusting to life with Emma. Their first child, William, was born in 1839. Their second child, Anne Elizabeth, was born in 1841 but only survived until 1851. Darwin was close to his children, while also maintaining a zoological interest in them. He was often in poor health, with headaches and stomachaches, and he was a little stressed out by their living expenses, since his father had not completely showered him with money. He didn't enjoy socializing much, and he and Emma gradually withdrew. Like most English people, he and Emma were not emotionally effusive, and they expressed care for each other by paying attention to each other's illnesses.

Darwin worked on a zoology series for several years, apparently in an editorial capacity, before and after marrying. Prior to marriage he had visited Glen Roy, an unusual geological formation in Scotland, and he wrote a long paper explaining its geology in Lyellian terms, as the rising of land from an ocean, with horizontal lines indicating previous shorelines. Adam Sedgwick helped him publish it and also nominated him for membership to the Royal Society. I found this situation remarkable, because membership to the Royal Society placed him among the top eight hundred scientists in the world, and Darwin's first professional paper as a geologist turned out to be completely incorrect. At the time, the work of Louis Agassiz was new and unfamiliar, but it offered a different and correct explanation of the geology of Glen Roy: glaciation. It took Darwin several years to admit that his interpretation was entirely wrong. In any case, this situation reflects how different science was in those days. Because of his family and college connections, he was able to become a leading scientist without an optimal academic background and through amateurish research. It would be impossible to replicate Darwin's career trajectory in the present.

Fortunately for him, there came the opportunity to contribute to a series of volumes on the voyages of the Beagle, with one section written by Captain King, a previous captain, one by Captain FitzRoy, and one by Darwin, in his capacity as naturalist. Darwin's contribution, taken from his journals on the voyage, proved to be quite popular. During its production, he and FitzRoy had new conflicts. FitzRoy thought that Darwin was remiss in crediting others aboard the Beagle who had assisted him. FitzRoy also held conventional religious views, and Darwin's suggestion that the Earth might be far more than six thousand years old irked him. Although Darwin's section was a smash hit, he made little money from it, and, as was common in those days, the publisher took most of the profit. The consolation to him was that he could send copies to a few select people and ingratiate himself with them in a manner that would enhance his professional reputation. He was elated to get a favorable response from Alexander von Humboldt, with whom he was not acquainted, but who was one of his intellectual heroes.

With a growing family, a dislike of Dickensian London and a host of minor illnesses, Darwin and Emma decided that they would prefer to live in the country. He prevailed upon his father for money to buy a house. His father offered a small amount that would be taken from his inheritance, and for which he would pay interest. In 1842, they found a suitable house in Down, Kent, about sixteen miles from London, and bought it. They had enough funds available to renovate it and even moved the road, which had been too close to the house. Later that year, Emma had her third child, Mary Eleanor, who soon died.

At this time, Darwin was already writing about natural selection, but was secretive about it. He knew that his work was extremely important and gave Emma special instructions on what to do with his manuscript if he died. I am finding that although many aspects of Darwin's intellectual and professional development seem haphazard and antiquated, he had the advantage of being able to shape a grand theory at his own pace, something that would probably be impossible to do in the current research environment. To be sure, scientific research is now advancing at a rapid pace, but I can't help but notice that the last two giants in science, Einstein and Darwin, were both solitary thinkers who probably would not function well on a research team. Increasingly, it seems to me that specialization tends to quash big ideas, which have always been necessary for framing reality and have historically allowed us to arrive at broad, empirically accurate worldviews. The absence of large, comprehensive theories which can readily be adopted by many people contributes to splintering and polarization within diverse populations. Without people like Darwin in the public sphere, we face a vacuum in our general conceptual environment.

Charles Darwin: Voyaging IV

After Tahiti, the Beagle made a long voyage to New Zealand, during which Darwin was often seasick. Especially compared to Tahiti, Darwin found the Maori natives violent and unpleasant. The settlers in New Zealand seemed dissolute, adding to his displeasure. From there they sailed to Australia, then Tasmania and then the Keeling Islands, where Darwin had an opportunity to explore coral reefs for the first time. Using Lyell's ideas, he was the first to correctly speculate that coral reefs were formed when land slowly submerged below sea level. From there they sailed across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, where Darwin rode an elephant. Their next destination was South Africa, where he met John Herschel, the son of the more famous William Herschel, the astronomer. John was there to make astronomical observations in the southern hemisphere. Shortly afterwards, the Beagle departed for England, where it anchored in Falmouth on October 2, 1836, nearly five years after it had sailed from Portsmouth on December 7, 1831.

At first, Darwin was almost a stranger in his own country. He disliked family gatherings and the usual chitchat. He decided to move to Cambridge and rented a house there, with the aim of sorting out the specimens from the voyage. Henslow had created quite a buzz about him, and he already had celebrity status in both Cambridge and London. Darwin gradually ambled toward the selection of a lifestyle that would suit him properly. He had never had any desire to be a clergyman, and the idea of being a professor also had no appeal to him. His role model became Charles Lyell, who was a successful gentleman geologist with no academic responsibilities. He soon moved to London, renting a house near his brother, Erasmus. He befriended Lyell and joined the Geological Society of London, where Lyell was president. On Lyell's prompting, he joined the Athenaeum Club, a prestigious men's club. He enjoyed Lyell's company, though he found him to be a social climber and a snob. Erasmus apparently was not practicing medicine and was living the life of a London intellectual while being financed by his father. He moved in the highest literary circles and was a close friend of both Harriet Martineau and Jane Carlyle; science, per se, was not his main interest, and he was known for his witticisms. Browne speculates that, since he never married and spent a lot of time with men's wives without drawing any suspicion, he was homosexual.

Darwin himself settled into a period of study. He found experts to identify his specimens, and they weren't always reliable. He had been negligent in identifying the locations where he had found some of the specimens, and it took a lot of work to rectify the problem. This was serious in the case of the finches from the Galápagos Islands, which later became a cornerstone of his theory of evolution. He was gradually working out a theory which, at the time, he called "transmutation," and from the start he knew that it would be controversial and should be handled carefully. He read Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, which, he realized, showed that death is one of the mechanisms by which the features of a species change over time. He was also interested in how farmers went about developing better agricultural products, whether plant or animal. Thus, it can be seen that, while Darwin lacked formal training in subjects that might have shed light on the theory he was working on, such as botany, zoology, anthropology and paleontology, he was able to synthesize a theory by drawing from multiple sources which were not necessarily academic. Malthus, after all, was a rural curate, not entirely unlike Darwin.

One of Darwin's decisions during this period was whether he should marry or not. He had a long conversation with his father, who accepted that he would not become a clergyman and promised to support him financially, as he did Erasmus. Insofar as marriage was concerned, he said that if Charles wanted to have children, he should have them before he got old.  Charles had made a list of the pros and cons of marriage that consisted mainly of cons: he didn't want to sacrifice much time for his wife and family. However, he then wrote:

One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless & cold, & childless staring one in one's face, already beginning to wrinkle.—Never mind, trust to chance–keep a sharp look out–There is many a happy slave–

He concluded that he ought to marry. His wife would not be an intellectual or a scientist and would not participate in his work. Furthermore, romance would not be part of the equation. There is no indication at this point whether he had any interest in sex, though one must keep in mind that it was then the early Victorian period in England. Needless to say, open discussion of sexuality was not popular then. Ironically, we seem to be in a similar situation now, because subjects such as gender identity have once again made discussion taboo. Historically, one of Darwin's primary revelations was that humans are animals, yet he was unable to discuss it within his milieu. The marital procedures of the time simplified matters a great deal for him, and his focus quickly shifted to Emma Wedgwood, a first cousin and the youngest daughter of his mother's older brother. Emma was a year older than him and the last available female in that branch of the family. In those days, before the effects of inbreeding were understood, it was common, especially in wealthy families, to marry first cousins. This had the practical advantage of keeping money in the family. Emma was receptive from the start, but Darwin was bashful. When he did finally propose, she accepted, and her father had no objections. They were married on January 29, 1839, two weeks before Darwin's thirtieth birthday.

The end of this book is in sight, and I should be able to wrap it up in one or two more posts. But then there is the SECOND volume. At this point, I can hardly fault Browne, because she is doing an excellent job. The problem may be that Darwin himself is a little boring, and it is possible that he simply happened to be in the right place at the right time with the appropriate resources available to him. He seems to have been quite agreeable and a deep thinker, but in context he wasn't all that revolutionary, because others had similar ideas. He had a steadfast resolve that helped and may have differentiated him a little, but I'm going to withhold judgment on his character and abilities until I've completed both volumes, which, at this rate, will take several more weeks.

Charles Darwin: Voyaging III

Darwin became enchanted by the tropical jungle that he saw when the Beagle arrived in Bahia in February, 1832. They sailed down the east coast of South America, stopping in Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo. Considerable time was spent in Tierra del Fuego, and there was also a trip to the Falkland Islands. Darwin made several long expeditions inland on the continent, during which he collected plant and animal specimens, along with fossils. He was well-liked by the officers and the crew, and this upset an ambitious naturalist who had come along in a more official capacity than Darwin, and the naturalist left the ship. Darwin accumulated crates of specimens and fossils that were shipped back to Henslow in Cambridge from various ports along the way. Besides this, he became more than ever before a full-scale outdoorsman, and he hunted game to supply the ship with food. He rode with gauchos on the Pampas and was stalked by bloodthirsty natives, reminding me of Blood Meridian. On that occasion, Darwin feared for his life for the first time.

For this voyage, FitzRoy had brought three Fuegians whom he had earlier taken to England, in order to return them home. While in England, they had been taught English, proper table manners, and dressed accordingly. Darwin became interested in them in a way that later affected his views on evolution. They had easily adapted to life in England, and Darwin was inclined to see them as members of his species. At the time, that was not a settled view, and others thought that various indigenous groups comprised separate species. It was a great shock to everyone on the Beagle to see the Fuegians quickly revert to their previous lifestyle, walking naked in that dismal landscape.

From June, 1834 to September, 1835, the Beagle sailed up the west coast of South America, stopping in Valparaiso, Copiapó, Iquique and Callao. On this leg of the trip, Darwin became more interested in geology. He and FitzRoy read recent works by Charles Lyell, who was revolutionizing geology at the time with the concepts of gradual change and the effects of subterranean pressures on the surface. It seems likely that this version of gradualism also influenced Darwin's theory of evolution. As luck would have it, they witnessed both a volcanic eruption and an earthquake. FitzRoy took measurements of a rise in the land following the earthquake and sent the information indirectly to Lyell.

While in Valparaiso, Darwin had an extended illness of uncertain origin and became homesick. At that time, FitzRoy was in a foul mood, because the Admiralty had censured him for overspending, and he threatened to resign his position. FitzRoy, who, according to Browne, showed signs of instability (manic depression?) throughout his life, had a violent row with Darwin then. However, by the time that Darwin had recovered and they had seen the volcanic eruption together, their friendly relationship had resumed.

After Callao, the Beagle set off for the Galápagos Islands, where they stayed from September to October in 1835. Darwin noticed that the species were slightly different from one island to another. They then set off for Tahiti, where they stayed for a few days in November, 1835.

As you can see, the voyage is taking far longer than originally proposed. They're already nearly four years into a trip that was supposed to take two, and they're not even halfway around the world. As noted earlier, Browne's account is quite adequate, but I would prefer a more succinct version with less verbatim use of original source material. For me, the main points could be made with far fewer words. Browne is also a little short on analysis, and I would find it more helpful if she had devoted more space to Darwin's psychological development and how his Beagle period informed his later theories. At least it's obvious that his voyage on the Beagle was a watershed experience that profoundly affected Darwin for the remainder of his life.

Charles Darwin: Voyaging II

The pace of the book is so slow that I find it a little tedious. After more than two hundred pages I'm only up to 1832, when Darwin was 23. So much detail is provided from letters, diaries and other documents that it reads almost like a novel. Part of the problem is that, so far, Darwin hasn't distinguished himself in any way, and it is a little painful to watch him develop into a functional adult. At the moment he is a mediocre student whose father has made futile efforts to start him in a career while showering him with money. Besides showing no vocational talents, Darwin also lacks social skills and is somewhat physically unattractive, in part because of his large nose.

During the 1825-1826 college year in Edinburgh, Charles had simply accompanied his brother, Erasmus, and neither of them mingled with people at the university. In the 1826-1827 year, without Erasmus, though Charles didn't like his medical studies, he socialized a little and made friends. He joined the Plinian Society, a student group which engaged in discussion of a wide range of topics, and he walked with friends along the shore looking for marine specimens. At the close of that school year, his father decided that, since a medical career wasn't in the cards, Charles should become a clergyman. To that end, a tutor was hired to brush up Charles's Latin, Greek and mathematical skills so that he might gain admission to Cambridge. In January, 1828 Charles began studies there at Christ's College, which his brother had attended.

The intellectual atmosphere in Cambridge was far more stimulating than in Edinburgh. Almost immediately, Charles began a friendship with John Stevens Henslow, a professor of botany and a mineralogist. Henslow became his mentor and was subsequently influential with respect to Charles's career advancement. This was a boom period in the natural sciences, and Charles met Adam Sedgwick, one of the founders of modern geology. In the summer of 1831 they traveled together to Wales on a field expedition. Of course, Charles took no interest in studying for the clergy, and he engaged in a lot of outdoor activities while in college. He took a horse with him and liked to hunt. He became proficient at shooting and often went out in search of game birds. He also developed a romantic interest in Fanny Owen, a potential wife who seems as if she came right out of a Jane Austen novel.

Having received his B.A. in 1831, his father's plan was for Charles to return to Cambridge in October for a D.B., or Bachelor of Divinity, which would qualify him for the clergy. Charles hoped instead to travel with friends to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, to study natural history, and his father opposed that idea. As luck would have it, unbeknownst to Charles, Henslow had put him forward for a position on the Beagle, which the Admiralty was preparing to embark on a geographical and hydrographic survey of Tierra del Fuego and then continue around the world on a voyage that would last two years. The position did not have technical responsibilities, and its main purpose seems to have been to provide a suitable companion for the captain, Robert FitzRoy. However, the companion would be permitted to collect specimens and record observations as a naturalist. Although FitzRoy was an aristocrat and a Tory and Darwin was not an aristocrat and came from a Whig family, FitzRoy took a liking to him when they met and he was selected for the position. Browne goes to some length explaining how Darwin benefited from the wide-reaching Cambridge network that was in place to dole out positions for the ruling class. In this case, it was an unpaid position, and Darwin had to pay all of his expenses, which were substantial. Of course, his father disliked the scheme and listed several objections. Fortunately, Charles prevailed upon an uncle to defend him and won the argument.

As far as I've read, the Beagle has made it to South America, Charles has often been seasick, and his potential girlfriend, Fanny, has dumped him by marrying someone else just as soon as the Beagle had departed.

Charles Darwin: Voyaging I

This is the first of two biographical volumes on Charles Darwin written by Janet Browne, who has spent much of her career studying Darwin's life and ideas. There are more than a thousand pages in all, not counting notes, so this may take me longer to finish than usual. It is fairly light reading but also thorough, and Browne covers Darwin's entire social background with perhaps more detail than I would prefer. I'm hoping that her knowledge and insights will keep the reading lively. Darwin was a prototypical naturalist, and I like the way that he developed his theories, but, as is already apparent, he was a product of his time.

Darwin was born into a wealthy family. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was a medical doctor who had trained at Cambridge and Edinburgh and was influenced by Scottish enlightenment figures such as David Hume and Adam Smith. Erasmus's first son, Charles (1758-1778), followed in his father's footsteps but died while studying medicine in Edinburgh. It then fell upon his second son, Robert (1766-1848), to study medicine. Robert also trained in Edinburgh and later married Susanna Wedgwood, a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the wealthy potter. Robert and Susanna settled in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, near the Welsh border, and raised a family. Robert was one of three doctors in the town, but he made most of his money through investments and was a shrewd person with good judgment. Although the family wasn't religious or ostentatious, they fit the model that is found in Jane Austen novels and, for example, made trips to Bath, like many families of comparable social rank. Charles had four sisters and one brother and was the fifth child, born in 1809. His mother died when he was eight, but his sisters seem to have made up for her absence, and he hardly remembered her after he grew up. His brother, Erasmus (1804-1881), was five years older and a friend and mentor throughout his childhood.

Charles was initially home-schooled but then accompanied his brother at Shrewsbury School, which was a boarding school only a mile from their house. Boys like Charles spent much of their time outdoors collecting insects, plants, rocks, or whatever they could find. Chemistry was a new and exciting subject in school, and he and Erasmus set up their own makeshift laboratory to conduct experiments. Erasmus was a much better student than Charles, and he left Shrewsbury for Cambridge. Charles was poor at languages and mathematics, and was therefore not well-qualified for the usual college curriculum. When Erasmus finished at Cambridge he moved on to Edinburgh in 1825 for a year-long course in medicine, and Charles left Shrewsbury to accompany him.

Erasmus completed the program in Edinburgh but disliked the university and the city. After Cambridge, he found the students crude. In those days, academic standards were almost nonexistent in medicine. There was no fixed curriculum for most students, and a degree wasn't necessary to practice medicine. The faculty consisted of independent agents who were paid by the number of students who enrolled in their classes, and they designed their classes to attract as many students as possible. Furthermore, they competed with freelance tutors not affiliated with the university. Besides this, the admissions criteria were loose, and the classes were filled with rowdy students as young as fourteen. When Erasmus left in 1826, Charles stayed and pursued a medical course until 1827. However, he disliked blood and, as far as I've read, he is on the verge of dropping out.

So far, the book is notably slow-moving, and I may have to pick up my reading pace to remain interested. By the age of eighteen, Darwin hadn't stood out much. He was introverted, unathletic and not naturally talented in the standard academic curriculum of the time. However, as I'm sure will become apparent later, his relaxed childhood and financial resources helped him develop into the leading scientist of his century.

The Sociology of Philosophy I

I had been hoping to start a new book by now, but it's coming from England and hasn't arrived yet. Therefore, I've decided to write a little about the sociology of philosophy, which falls within the broader topic of the sociology of academia and resembles the sociology of creative writing programs, which I touched upon earlier. I'm not primarily interested in the content of the academic fields discussed, and for me this is a more general analysis of human behavior in academic settings. The reason why I'm writing about philosophy is that I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate and attended graduate school briefly. This is not a topic that I would ordinarily think about much now, but I occasionally look at 3 Quarks Daily in search of new reading materials, and S. Abbas Raza, the editor, has a graduate degree in philosophy and likes to include articles by philosophers. I usually skip them, but occasionally I read ones by Justin E.H. Smith, and this keeps me peripherally aware of the field. I have also occasionally viewed videos or listened to podcasts with Daniel Dennett and Massimo Pigliucci, two other philosophers whom Raza likes.

This subject goes way back for me, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I became interested in philosophy and why I eventually became disillusioned with it. I think many people enter the field of philosophy because they have broad interests stretching from mathematical and scientific areas to literature and the arts, and they don't want to specialize and become scientists, engineers, writers or artists. This is the kind of information that never presents itself directly to you, and you have to sort it out by yourself over many years. After thinking about it for a long time, I decided that my undergraduate philosophy department faculty included a few confused pastors. In the four years that I spent there, no one told me that the only tenured faculty had studied theology at some point in their educations. They were good students who initially thought that they would become clergymen; most of them ended up attending divinity school and subsequently got Ph.D.'s in philosophy. Thus, through a series of unpredictable events, they became philosophy professors at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. I don't think that any of them were talented at philosophy, and it seems that they came to it by accident. Because of this, they were unable to deal with philosophy majors who had no interest in theology.  My own background was quite different, and I simply liked the college environment, wasn't a particularly good student and didn't want to specialize. I certainly had no interest in theology. By the time I arrived in graduate school, philosophy seemed like pointless rote learning centered on the writings of mediocre thinkers. This thought was completely beyond the scope of my undergraduate professors.

Just to give an example, let me repeat what I said earlier about moral philosophy, which, in my experience, is a complete waste of time. If you study it, you may learn about Kant's categorical imperative. I have concluded that it is nothing more than a warmed-over version of the golden rule, which has been around since the Bible. I now think that more headway was made by E.O. Wilson, the entomologist, than moral philosophers were able to make collectively over thousands of years. This was simply the identification of humans as a eusocial species and the establishment of a connection between moral behavior and DNA. A lot of what passes for philosophy is simply an extension of theological reasoning dating from the Middle Ages. In the case of morality and ethics, I think it best to start from scratch and begin with human genetic predispositions, because without them we wouldn't have any moral tendencies. Wilson himself has little interest in this field, and the task is left to others.

Another example of why I dislike philosophy is the case of Daniel Dennett. On the surface you would think that I would find him appealing, because he is very science-oriented and his theories are more empirical than those of most philosophers. However, I attended one of his lectures several years ago and found him to be a windbag. He has an excellent academic background and is extremely knowledgeable, but he hasn't really developed a distinctive worldview that might differentiate him from an ordinary scientist. Unfortunately, Dennett tows the line as an academic philosopher and spouts faddish philosophical terms such as "qualia," which strikes me as slightly idiotic. I find that philosophers habitually obfuscate fairly straightforward scientific ideas, and that it is better to go directly to the science. In this vein, I'm also unhappy with Justin E.H. Smith, who is one of the most elegant philosophical writers you're likely to come across, but whose writings never seem to have any practical applications; I see him more as an entertaining writer than as a substantive one. I am guessing that he drifted into philosophy because he liked to write, but writing alone does not make a good philosopher, and he consistently lacks the depth of a serious thinker.

Perhaps the person whose life best sums up my thoughts on philosophy is Ludwig Wittgenstein. He came from a wealthy Viennese family and had wide cultural exposure. For example, one of his sisters posed for Gustav Klimt. His interests tended to be technical, and first he tried aeronautical engineering and later architecture. Somehow he became interested in mathematical logic and found himself working with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. By then, Russell was already getting tired of philosophy and was happy to unload his research on Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's work was initially an odd combination of logic and mysticism, but after World War I and a stint as a schoolteacher in rural Austria it propelled him to rock-star status at Cambridge. However, as time passed, Wittgenstein increasingly became impatient with his philosophy colleagues, and his focus changed from logic to ordinary language. By the time of his death in 1951 he was recommending other fields, such as medicine, to his students. In my view, Wittgenstein was a frustrated artist, and none of his ideas are likely to be of lasting significance. I think that the same can be said of most philosophical ideas, and that the most durable ideas come from science. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with pursuing most academic fields, but that philosophy as an academic discipline has little to offer anyone.

My conclusion on academic philosophy is therefore much the same as my conclusion on creative writing programs. Yes, students can enroll in these courses and learn something, but they could just as well do something else and might end up happier. I see colleges and universities as economic entities in which the tenured faculty usually get good salaries and favorable working conditions while the students, particularly in fashionable subjects, may come away with nothing. I mean this not in the sense that the students are out a few dollars, but that the actual value of the education, in both technical and personal senses, can be quite low. Given my experience, it surprises me that intelligent people can still think that academic philosophy could be of value to anyone. The convoluted thinking that you have to go through just to make sense of it would drive most people mad.