Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 II

One of the benefits of Russell's acquaintance with Whitehead was his nomination to the Apostles, the Cambridge debating society reserved for those who were considered the most intellectually astute. Through the Apostles, Russell met his closest friends. Another rising star was G.E. Moore, whom Russell also befriended, but Moore was even less worldly than Russell, and, his conservative, Victorian moral outlook soon put them at odds. Moore is an interesting case for how certain intellectual fads become almost unintelligible to later generations. He became the rock star of British moral philosophy when he published Principia Ethica in 1903, and it is difficult for me to see how anyone saw any value in him as a thinker. Wittgenstein had the same reaction when he arrived in Cambridge a few years later.

Russell continued his mathematical studies until 1893, when he took the exam and passed with good but not spectacular results. Surprisingly, he had lost much of his interest in mathematics by then, and he immediately sold all of his math books. This had to do with the fact that he liked well-rounded people who could engage on a variety of topics, and he had found that the faculty and students in mathematics were too narrow in their outlooks for him. In particular, he seems to have noticed that some students were quite proficient in math but not in anything else. At that point he switched to philosophy, and distinguished himself to a greater degree, such that he was nominated to become a fellow at Trinity College after he completed the exam in 1894. His initial interest in philosophy concentrated on Spinoza, and he particularly focused on pantheistic monism in search for a religious model more satisfactory than Christianity.

Throughout his university years, Russell was interested in advancing his love life, but had little success. He had met Alys Pearsall Smith in 1889, and that relationship began to flourish in 1893. Uncle Rollo had his own house in the country, and the Russells usually spent their summers there. Among their neighbors were the Pearsall Smiths, a family of wealthy Quakers from Philadelphia, and Alys was a daughter five years older than Russell. She attended Bryn Mawr College and studied English and German literature. For the first few years, Russell let no one know of his interest in Alys. 1893 was a crucial year for him, because he reached the age of twenty-one, and Lady Russell and Uncle Rollo ceased to be his guardians. Furthermore, he inherited £20,000 from his father, and in those days that provided income sufficient for financial independence. Russell let Alys know of his interest, and they slowly pursued a relationship under the watchful eyes of Lady Russell.

It is a little embarrassing to read their letters, in which they refer to each other as "thee" and always try to maintain the highest moral tone. However, Russell was obsessed with sex, and the most amusing anecdote so far in the book concerns Russell letting Alys know his favorite Walt Whitman poem in Leaves of Grass. It was quite explicit for the time in its expression of sexual passion, though Russell would have been horrified to know that it may have referred to homosexual passion. What is amusing is that Alys was personally acquainted with Walt Whitman, and he had given her a copy of Leaves of Grass, from which she had removed the section containing that poem, because she thought that those poems were improper. In some respects, Alys and Bertrand had little in common; not only was she religious, but she was also an active participant in the temperance movement.

Lady Russell did everything in her power to keep Alys and Bertrand apart and disapproved of their proposed marriage. Her first line of argument was that Alys wasn't an aristocrat. From there she delved into family history, arguing that if they had children, they would suffer from mental illness. She brought up his father's epilepsy and his uncle's schizophrenia. She also revealed to him for the first time that his Aunt Agatha, who lived with them at Pembroke Lodge, had never married her fiancé because she had come under the insane delusion that he had murdered Lord Clanricarde. There were also suspicions about Alys's uncle. When her arguments failed to persuade Alys and Bertrand, she brought in medical advice on hereditary insanity. At that point, Alys and Bertrand agreed not to have children, but then Lady Russell's medical advisor said that contraception was unhealthy. Finally, Alys and Bertrand agreed not to have sex and to sleep in separate rooms. Bertrand's impression was that Lady Russell was just opposed to sex. Actually, Alys herself had very little interest in sex and was certainly less enthusiastic about it than Bertrand. Finally, they did get married in December, 1894, though Lady Russell, Uncle Rollo and Aunt Agatha did not attend the wedding. Bertrand's best man was his brother, Frank. They honeymooned in The Hague, where, with the predictable fumbling about, they had sex for the first time.

Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 I

I'm getting off to a very slow start on this biography by Ray Monk. That isn't because I dislike it, but because I go through periods in which I don't feel like reading. So far I am finding it very interesting, and Monk is a good writer. As a philosophy professor, he is also in a good position to evaluate Russell's ideas. The biographies I read of Rousseau and Darwin were sometimes lacking in this respect, because the authors weren't as ideas-oriented as Monk seems to be.

Bertrand Russell came from an aristocratic, wealthy family. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, he distributed the lands among the aristocracy, and Bertrand's ancestors were major beneficiaries. Bertrand's grandfather was John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, and served as Prime Minister. Earlier in his career he had met Napoleon. Like Charles Darwin's family, the Russells were Whigs, roughly the equivalent of current liberals. Bertrand was a son of Lord Russell's eldest son, John Russell, Viscount Amberley. He had an older brother, Frank, who was born in 1865, and a sister, Rachel, who was born in 1868. Bertrand was born on May 18, 1872. The children were initially raised at their family's house, Ravenscroft, in Monmouthshire, Wales. However, in 1874, when Bertrand was only two, both his mother and Rachel died from diphtheria. Viscount Amberley, who was said to be introverted, depressive and epileptic, himself died from bronchitis on January 9, 1876. This left Frank and Bertrand orphans, and they soon came under the care of their paternal grandmother and moved to Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, now part of London. Their grandfather, Lord Russell, was still alive then, but died in 1878.

There was a notable difference between the atmospheres at Ravenscroft and Pembroke Lodge. Ravenscroft was extremely liberal, and Viscount Amberley allowed his wife's lover to live with them in the house. They were not religious, and John Stuart Mill became Bertrand's godfather. Lady Russell at Pembroke Lodge was not especially conservative, but she was religious and insensitive to the needs of Frank and Bertrand. Bertrand managed to fit in, because he was introverted and non-confrontational, but Frank was extremely rebellious. As a consequence, Frank was eventually sent away to Winchester College, while Bertrand was educated at home by tutors. Frank considered Bertrand a prig, and they don't seem to have been on friendly terms. The house was also occupied by their uncle Rollo, whom both Frank and Bertrand disliked. Rollo is described as being both introverted and ineffectual.

One of the developing themes that interests me is the variety of mental illnesses within the family. Besides Rollo, Viscount Amberley had another brother, William, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic early in his life and lived most of it in an institution. As noted, Amberley was disposed toward depression. Bertrand felt detached from people and had difficulty relating to his environment. Frank was highly temperamental and often got into conflicts. After Winchester, he enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford. However, he became embroiled in a mysterious scandal when a friend from Winchester visited him, and there were rumors of homosexuality. Because Frank remained vitriolic, he was expelled from Balliol, an unusual measure at the time, and never returned. These kinds of things have interested me for many years, because there has always been what I think of as a unique English oddness that is never quite defined, but which probably exists as a result of an unusual collective psychiatric state that has a genetic basis.

It sounds as if Russell was very stiff and uncomfortable growing up, and the lack of exposure to a variety of people probably hampered his social development. In his teens he studied mathematics at a school in London and found the other students very crude. He was interested in girls and sex, but was extremely awkward in establishing relationships. Similarly, he enthusiastically sought friendship with another boy whom he thought was just like him, but that proved to be a mistake. He developed a rich private life in which he came to appreciate the poetry of Shelley. However, his real talent was in mathematics, and, like many mathematicians, he was attracted to the field because it conveyed greater certainty than other fields.

As far as I've read, Russell has been tutored for the Trinity College, Cambridge entrance exam and passes it. Arriving in Cambridge in 1890, he immediately makes friends and is greatly excited to be able to engage in conversations with intelligent people. He gets off to a very good start, because Alfred North Whitehead, a fellow at Trinity, immediately recognizes his talent and recommends him to others. Of course, his aristocratic credentials are also highly beneficial for him, though it seems that he still would have done well without them.

Diary

I had been reading a book on AI that seemed promising at first, but the further I got into it the methodology seemed inappropriate. The author teaches law, and, with a perspective that emphasizes legal theory and analytic philosophy, he constructs arguments about what counts as good. The beginning of the book argues that work isn't good by examining several propositions and includes some empirical research, and later in the book he apparently writes about how the absence of work could enable a utopia. However, I got tired of his reasoning process and gave up before the halfway point. My default method for thinking about these kinds of things rests on knowledge of human behavior, particularly behavior that is encoded in our genes, and a book about humans that relies primarily on abstract propositions and logical arguments from those propositions reminds me of a bad philosophy class. It is possible that I would have appreciated the author's ideas more if he had presented them differently, but I found it difficult to take his arguments seriously. His manner of presentation rendered his ideas unconvincing. This author was on a podcast with Sean Carroll, which I didn't listen to. It is surprising to me that people such as Sean Carroll, who otherwise seem exceptionally intelligent, are unable to see the limitations of contemporary philosophy. I have yet to find a truly compelling book on AI, but the popularity of the subject is increasing, and there will probably be a better one sooner or later. It is such an important field that people from various academic disciplines are attempting to colonize it and take over. I'm rooting for the zoologists, not the physicists or the philosophers.

As things stand, I will be reading a long two-volume biography of Bertrand Russell. Russell is interesting to me because he had a life that spanned many periods. He was alive in 1872, when Charles Darwin, George Eliot and G.H. Lewes attended the séance that I mentioned, and he was still alive in 1970, when I was an undergraduate in college. Although he is considered one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, his significant work in the philosophy of mathematics was completed when he was quite young, and no one pays much attention to it now. When I was in college it wasn't covered at all. His purely philosophical work is probably part of mathematics, and Russell wouldn't have been famous if it hadn't been for his popular writings and political activism. I am confident that I will enjoy this particular biography, because it is written by Ray Monk, who wrote a good biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which I read about thirty years ago. I am a little hesitant to read about analytic philosophers, but I now feel that I have a strong enough understanding of the strange context in which they wrote that I can properly assess their work.

Finally the heatwave has ended, and we are getting a satisfying preview of fall. There are too many tomatoes at the moment, and we will probably have to give some away. The variety of Brandywine tomatoes that I grew this year is quite good, and I plan to grow them again next year. I have grown tomatoes intermittently for about twenty-six years and am always looking for ones which both taste good and fit the environment in which I live. I have more or less finished my outdoor chores for the season and am awaiting leaves and snow. All of the firewood from the property has been cut, split and stacked, and there will also be kiln-dried firewood coming from Pittsfield in October and November. We will have more than enough for even the coldest winter.

Over time, weird things happen on this blog. For unknown reasons, there is a web crawler that shows up as being from Hong Kong that has been visiting this site constantly for over three weeks, with 3600 hits. Also, all of a sudden, I got several hits from Facebook on my Meliorism post. There may not be any meaning to any of this, but it still captures my attention.

Because the number of COVID-19 cases here remains low, we have been socializing a little more. We recently invited an elderly friend over for dinner, and we were invited to dinner with friends in town. We also picked apples at the property of some other friends in Cornwall who have eight acres of apples which currently have no commercial market. The college has opened for the fall, and so far they have only two cases of COVID-19. There is a chance that the pandemic will intensify after Labor Day – we'll have to wait and see. Life is easier when you don't spend all day every day with the same person.

Diary

In some respects, this summer feels like winter. The coronavirus restricts social activity, and the high temperatures keep us indoors in a manner similar to low temperatures. But there is still quite a bit of outdoor activity. The electric company decided to finish off the Enos Severance apple tree, because they thought that the rest of it could fall over and knock down wires. They left large logs for me to deal with, and I have been cutting and splitting them gradually. Between this and the maple that blew down during the winter, there are about two cords of firewood, but I haven't finished splitting the apple tree yet – the work is physically demanding without a log splitter. I was a little irritated that they cut down the apple tree, because it was still alive. Fortunately, there are new shoots growing out of the stump, and it will probably regrow.

I've also been touching up the paint on the house, as I do most summers, and found some rotten wood that required someone with greater carpentry skills than I possess. It is hard to find carpenters here for small jobs, because they don't think they're worth their time. Even if you know them and they've done work for you before, they don't even bother to call you back, and you have to search for someone new. I find this a little ironic, since most of the ones we've had are not all that proficient: they're usually a little sloppy. This time I found a man who, though he didn't reveal himself fully, was probably desperate for work. We never discussed it, but I looked him up, and he was in the newspaper last year for voyeurism. He normally works as a massage therapist, and he was found guilty when female customers noticed that he had installed a camera in his room, which, it turned out, he used to record them in various stages of undress. I think that he was efficient and skilled as a carpenter – he did a good job.

The high temperatures, along with heavy watering, have been good for the tomatoes. This is another high-yield year. Each year the insect pests and fungal attacks vary. This year there have been fewer hornworms, but there have been some stinkbugs, and there is an average amount of fungal damage. The hornworms get very large if you don't remove them in time. If left alone, they can do serious damage to plants. They eventually metamorphose into hawk moths, which are so large that they resemble hummingbirds. The stinkbugs damage individual tomatoes by making them inedible. They haven't been a serious problem this year. It is interesting to note the changes in insect populations from one year to the next, because you can get some sense of a highly complex ecosystem. For example, the hornworms have gradually increased in number over the last few years, but, starting last year, the numbers have declined, probably because they are being attacked by parasitic wasps which lay eggs inside them; the wasp larvae eat the hornworms and form small white cocoons on their exteriors. Those wasps first appeared last summer. The stinkbug population varies for unknown reasons and usually doesn't present much of a problem. It may be that they prefer hot, dry weather.

I am also observing what I hope will be the denouement of the Trump administration. As each week passes, it becomes increasingly apparent how appallingly bad a president he has been. This is turning out to be an excellent example of the corrosive effects of capitalism on human well-being. I think the main picture that is emerging is that Trump has no qualifications for the job, but that he was identified and developed as an asset for Fox News and other right-wing media purely for their profit. Peripherally, it could be argued, the entire news media have been complicit in the ascent of Donald Trump. Time has shown that Trump has none of the skills necessary for the job, and that there was ample evidence of this four years ago. The primary attribute of Trump is that he became a cash cow for the news industry, and, with the profit motive driving news coverage, there were no news outlets with an incentive to encourage or accelerate his removal. However, the case is now incontrovertible that Trump, as president, is a menace to society and the world. Trump is like a defective consumer product that should have been taken off the market long ago. Because he is ideologically incoherent, it seems that his wealthy backers are primarily interested in money, and that their so-called conservative principles are a sham.

I have a suitable nonfiction book lined up to read and will be starting it shortly.

Bouvard and Pécuchet III

I finally got around to finishing the book. After philosophy, Bouvard and Pécuchet become interested in religion. Bouvard, who is more or less an agnostic, doesn't exhibit much enthusiasm for the topic, but Pécuchet becomes a complete fanatic, and Bouvard observes him flagellating himself in private. Pécuchet begins to harass the local priest with theological arguments, but, as in every other episode, his enthusiasm soon dies out. Next, they both become involved with the adoption of two children, Victor and Victorine, whose mother is dead and whose father is a jailed convict. To no avail, they attempt to instruct them, exposing them to many of the works that they have found important, and they employ various educational concepts from sources such as Émile, by Rousseau. Although at first the children seem to respond somewhat positively, Victor becomes violent, as he had been previously, and boils a cat that they give him as a pet, killing it. Victorine is less problematic initially but she soon becomes pregnant by one of the locals. Because of the pregnancy they are later forced to give up the children, whom they hadn't formally adopted. Bouvard eventually agrees to assume financial responsibility for Victorine.

In the meantime, Bouvard and Pécuchet decide that the layout of Chavignolles is improper, and they take it upon themselves to survey the town with the goal of remodeling it, in much the same way that Haussmann redesigned Paris. This would involve tearing down much of the center of town. They engage more in village life, and Bouvard becomes a highlight of the local café, where he debates whomever he meets. Both of them take on a pedagogic role in Chavignolles, and they hold public lectures for its benefit. This precipitates their downfall, unleashing all the grievances that have been building up among the townsfolk. By this point, Flaubert himself had died, and the remainder of the novel is his summary of what he intended to write. Pécuchet's lecture is pedantic and criticizes the local government and administration. Bouvard's lecture is more conventional but also meets with disapproval.

The next day, Bouvard and Pécuchet discuss the lectures at home. Pécuchet takes a gloomy position on the future of mankind: "America will conquer the earth....Widespread boorishness. Everywhere you look will be carousing laborers." Bouvard, on the contrary, believes in progress and thinks that the cultures of Europe and China will converge. He thinks that "philosophy will be religion," with "communion of all people." While they are still talking, the police enter the house and serve them with a warrant for "desecrating religion, disturbing the peace, seditious rhetoric, etc."

After this, Bouvard and Pécuchet give up their studies and revert to their earlier habits. They begin copying documents together at the close of the book. The edition I have includes the Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, written much earlier, and the unfinished Catalogue of Fashionable Ideas. I don't think these add much to the text and may not have been planned to appear with it, though the choice of including them does give the impression that the novel was intended to be facetious.

As a reader, I have mixed feelings about the book. Understandably, the villagers found that Bouvard and Pécuchet were pedantic and dismissive of local practices. What is striking to me is how insensitive the two were to how people reacted to them and how unprepared they were to anticipate ideas that didn't match theirs. There is no evidence that either of them engaged in self-criticism, and that includes their obliviousness to the fact that sometimes the subject under study remained beyond their comprehension. Flaubert seems to be making Bouvard and Pécuchet look like fools, but I did not see signs of a wider, more inclusive view of reality, and this makes it unclear to me what his point was. In the case of Madame Bovary, the novel seems realistic, while highlighting the tragic follies of the protagonist. Sentimental Education is also realistic, but has an autobiographical tone that seems straightforward, without exaggerated characters. Therefore, since Bouvard and Pécuchet seem like aberrations, and the realism is less palpable, I am less confident in assessing Flaubert's objectives. All I can say is that Flaubert may have thought that conscientious study can be a naïve pastime, perhaps because the answers aren't really there. It is possible that Flaubert was making a case for human limitations, even in an era of progress. In this instance, book learning comes across as ineffective. The assessment is further complicated by the fact that the context for the events that occur in the book is well in the past, and this potentially renders some of the satirical intentions that Flaubert seems to have had less clear than they would have been at the time – 140 years ago. Certainly, he establishes that Bouvard and Pécuchet are eccentrics, but, since they themselves never seem to find a path to more intelligible behavior and nowhere does the narrative offer much guidance, the overall effect for the modern reader is somewhat ambiguous. For this reason, I was less impressed with this novel than I was by the other two mentioned and found the going a little tedious at times. On the whole, I think it is best suited to French literary specialists, especially those who have an affinity for Flaubert.

Bouvard and Pécuchet II

I'm not finding this novel exceptionally exciting, though, to some extent, it is satisfying at least in the sense that French culture, in many respects, is vastly superior, despite some weaknesses, to American culture. In comparison, life in the U.S. sometimes seems like a low-budget Western. After geology, Bouvard and Pécuchet take up archaeology and start a museum in the house. Archaeology gradually evolves into history and historical novels, and before long they are trying to write novels. Gradually they become familiar with the citizens of Chavignolles, the town in which they live, and socialize with them. In 1848, their usual lives are disrupted for a period by the overthrow of King Louis Philippe and the beginning of the Second Republic. After this, they lose their zeal for learning and become depressed temporarily. Bouvard begins to court Mme. Bordin, a widow, and Pécuchet, who had been a virgin, has a brief affair with one of the servants and contracts a venereal disease from her. Nothing comes of this, they decide to give up on women, and before long they embark on a new hobby, gymnastics. That doesn't last for long, since Bouvard is fat and, at their age, neither of them is cut out for a lot of exercise. Following this, they take an interest in séances and the occult, and then they move on to philosophy and read Spinoza, Locke and other philosophers. Their relationship with the townspeople is somewhat unclear. One would guess that they are considered eccentric and amateurish, though they are generally accepted. It is probably evident to the locals that Bouvard and Pécuchet are more than a little dilettantish and are putting on airs, though the townspeople themselves are not particularly sophisticated. As far as I've read, there are signs that Bouvard has been imprudent with his money and may face financial difficulties in the future. He has acted a bit like an ordinary, uneducated person who has won the lottery and is spending injudiciously in order to achieve sophistication and worldliness, with the corresponding social status, all of which he is unlikely to attain. However, Bouvard and Pécuchet are not complete fools and seem to absorb much of the material that they study, though their lack of focus makes them seem frivolous. Their main flaw seems to be a lack of awareness of their limitations. Of the two, Bouvard seems more extroverted and worldly, while Pécuchet seems more introverted and inexperienced. They do not fit well into a modern context, because it is now generally accepted that one cannot successfully study as many fields as they do and gain sufficient mastery of each. They are repeating this mistake countless times without changing their behavior. This situation may have been more common in Europe in the late nineteenth century, when social status could be reached with general learning, as part of the process of moving from a lower class to a higher class. However, Flaubert does not accentuate class consciousness. Of course, this all contrasts wildly with current life in most of the world, where it is now possible to be completely crass and ignorant and still attain high social rank simply by being conspicuously wealthy. I will try to finish up the book on my next post. This is sort of a diversion for me, and I generally prefer more serious books. Although I like Flaubert and think that he does a good job portraying his environment realistically, I still don't find fiction to be a particularly effective vehicle for understanding the world. Still, I like this period in this part of the world, and, despite many drawbacks which I probably would have felt if I had lived there, in some respects the quality of life would have been better than what we have now. In particular, we seem to be living in an age of crass materialism while, as Tony Judt argued, we are collectively demonstrating a puzzling incapacity to secure favorable future living conditions for ourselves and our descendants, even when such a process lies well within our reach.

Bouvard and Pécuchet I

I'm in my usual summer lull, in which I don't read much, and have chosen this novel by Gustave Flaubert because, for literature, it is fairly light reading. On the surface, it is simple, about the lives of two middle-aged French copy-clerks who take up various hobbies and, after failing at one, simply move on to another. The tone is that of a farce or comedy, but I am hoping that something more substantial will emerge – it may not. So far, in some respects, it isn't entirely different from Madame Bovary, in the sense that a person's obsessions can be a sign of poor judgment, and, if never examined, can lead to tragedy. I was never sure how sympathetic Flaubert felt toward Emma Bovary as she pursued a life of folly until it did her in. Something of the same mood exists in this book, but, since Flaubert never finished it, dying at the age of fifty-eight, there may be no clear answer. It is possible that, like me, Flaubert noticed the role of stupidity in people's lives, and that he wanted to sum up his thoughts on the topic in a literary fashion. Now as much as at any time in the past, it is easy to identify the blunders that people make and the sometimes-disastrous consequences. However, I'm not counting on that from Flaubert and am just taking the book as I read it. Flaubert did an enormous amount of research for this book, because he wanted to familiarize himself with the subjects that Bouvard and Pécuchet pursued. It is a bit of a challenge to contextualize much of the action, given that most of the books available to someone at that time would have been riddled with inaccuracies. But it is still relatively simple to identify the conspicuous blunders made by the protagonists. 

Bouvard is a widowed bachelor who runs into Pécuchet, a never-married bachelor, one day on the streets of Paris. They discover that they both have a passion for exploring new fields, and when Bouvard inherits a large sum from his deceased father, he and Pécuchet retire in order to pursue their ideal lives. Bouvard buys a manor house and farm in Normandy, near Caen, and farming and gardening become their first hobbies, though they had some experience with gardening in Paris. They rush headlong into the latest techniques that they've read about, and one plan after another backfires. Though they do consult local farmers, their farming experience culminates in a huge fire, apparently caused by spontaneous combustion, which destroys their haystacks. After this, they turn over the farming to a tenant and become interested in medicine. That leads them to try out cures on the locals and eventually brings them into conflict with the town doctor, who threatens to have them arrested for practicing medicine without a license. Their next hobbies become geology and natural history, which result in their causing a landslide while digging for fossils on a coastal bluff. Since Flaubert was a contemporary of Darwin, it is interesting to me that he knew something about evolution and modern geology – yet Bouvard and Pécuchet are unable to persuade a priest that the biblical flood doesn't explain some geological formations. After hearing the priest's arguments, they give up on geology.

I still have seven chapters left and will comment as I go. It occurs to me that Flaubert lived at a time when the phenomenon of the amateur hobbyist was at a peak. As Thomas Piketty has noted, during the late nineteenth century in France and England there was excessive wealth. Hobbyists in England were churning out inventions and scientific ideas at a phenomenal rate, and I assume that the same occurred in France. I am reminded not only of people like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, but of literary people such as G.H. Lewes. After working as a failed dramatist and novelist, although he lacked the resources to become a full-time hobbyist, Lewes undertook private research in marine biology. It seems likely that Flaubert was acquainted with many such hobbyists, and perhaps, in combination with a personal skepticism regarding scientific progress, he found them to be a good topic for satire. Some reviewers think that Bouvard and Pécuchet represents the first postmodern novel, but I think it is more likely that it is a satirical skewering of some of Flaubert's contemporaries. Even so, Flaubert usually portrays his characters sympathetically.

In any case, Flaubert writes with such precision that he's always a pleasure to read – even in translation. Describing Bouvard and Pécuchet during their brief infatuation with chemistry, he writes:

What a marvel it was to find that human beings were composed of the same substances as minerals. Still, they felt a kind of humiliation at the thought that their persons contained phosphorus like matches, albumen like egg whites, and hydrogen gas like street lamps. 

Diary

I finished reading Mary Trump's book and didn't find it enlightening at all. From reading it, you would never know that she is a Ph.D. psychologist, and the book was obviously rushed to press: it contains typos. I think that her level of analysis is crude, and too much of the book is devoted to salvaging the reputation of her father, Fred Trump, Jr., and blaming Fred Trump, Sr. From the information provided, I think that Fred Trump, Sr. was a fairly typical entrepreneur, not a sociopath, as she describes him. Successful entrepreneurs tend to be miserly, scheming and slightly dishonest, and that more or less sums him up. The fact that he had a cold, Germanic personality, I think, is incidental. Though his wife was Scottish, everyone in the family, including Mary, seems cold and tone-deaf. At times she also tries to portray Donald as a victim of abusive parenting, offering the standard theory used in developmental psychology. I think that the primary cause of coldness is in the family's genes.

The actual story of interest, which Mary doesn't describe accurately, is simply one of management succession in a family business, and in this respect the Trumps were hardly unique. The only one who knew the business – or cared about it – was Fred, Sr. The eldest son, as is usually the case, was the designated successor, and, as is quite common, he took no interest in it. Fred, Jr. grew up wealthy and liked rich-kid hobbies such as flying and boating, which his father considered frivolous. Fred, Jr. also seems to have been psychologically weak: he married badly, became an alcoholic, and died at the age of forty-two. Although Donald was not by disposition suited to running a real estate company, his father propped him up and allowed him to be the front man for the company, which was about all that Donald was good for.

Mary doesn't mention another obviously problematic real estate company succession example: the Durst family. The Dursts were far more prominent in New York City real estate than the Trumps and had done well in Manhattan, where Fred, Sr. hadn't. As a family, if anything, the Dursts were more dysfunctional than the Trumps. The successor to Seymour Durst was expected to be his eldest son, Robert. However, Robert didn't like the work and dropped out of management there. The current head of the Durst Organization is Robert's younger brother, Douglas. Rather than dying young from alcoholism, Robert went on to become a probable serial killer and is currently on trial, at the age of seventy-seven, for the murder of his friend, Susan Berman. Although the Dursts have their share of problems, on the whole they seem more sophisticated than the Trumps.

Mary Trump's book does include some new information, such as the fact that Donald hired someone to take the SAT for him, which helped him gain admission to the University of Pennsylvania. She also discusses Donald's attempt to assume full control of the Trump Organization by adding a codicil to Fred, Sr.'s will – which failed. There is also some discussion of probable tax evasion by Fred, Sr. and his children, which came to light earlier in the New York Times. Where Mary is accurate, I think, is in her depiction of Donald as a narcissistic person who eschews details and is used to getting his way by bullying. She makes clear that Donald was never a success in business and was propped up financially by Fred, Sr. for years. As soon as he started his own initiatives, such as his casinos in Atlantic City, they began to fail. His depiction of himself as self-made is a lie. The more that you look into Donald's background, the more obvious it becomes that he could never be anything other than a completely incompetent president.

In other news, I've been doing a little more stargazing and looked at the comet NEOWISE. It was larger than expected, and you can see it with the naked eye, but it shows more detail in binoculars. This comet was only discovered in March and won't be back for 6766 years. If you look north after sunset, it sits below the Big Dipper. It can be seen whenever it's dark, but will soon be moving out of view. Since it's far to the north, it may not be visible from the southern hemisphere.

I also came across these photos, which I think are very good. Most were taken locally in Addison County.

Diary

I've been reading Carl Zuckmayer's autobiography, A Part of Myself, which was published in 1966, to fill in some of the details left out of his wife's book. He is far more specific than Alice is about their New York and Los Angeles periods. Their journey to the U.S. was greatly facilitated by Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist whom Zuck had met in Germany. She was extremely well known at the time and was married to Sinclair Lewis. When they arrived at Ellis Island, they were initially quite apprehensive, but they soon discovered that Dorothy had arranged for Franklin Roosevelt to recommend their entry. Furthermore, Dorothy was the person who introduced them to Barnard, Vermont: she had a house there and invited them up.

Zuck and Alice eventually got an apartment in upper Manhattan, and while in New York they visited many friends and acquaintances from Europe. Soon Zuck traveled alone to Hollywood, where he also had several friends. However, he was not impressed with the environment:

In Hollywood, too, there were many invitations at the beginning, but in contrast to New York, life was very expensive. In order to count for anything you had to live in a top-class hotel or have your own showy home. To prove yourself, you had to frequent the expensive restaurants of the movie industry's upper crust. Moreover, if you wanted to 'belong' permanently, you had to be issuing invitations yourself. You had to act as if you were rich and happy—nowhere have I heard the word 'happy' so often as in that anteroom to hell called Hollywood. And since nobody was, everyone drifted into drinking even when he was in no mood for it, and ended up in a morass of joyless, humorless, and dreary night life.

Some weeks after 'happiness' had come to me in the form of a contract and a weekly paycheck, I happened to be attending a Sunday afternoon party at Max Reinhardt's house. Almost the entire German colony was present. 'I'm not staying here long,' I remarked. 'This is no life for me.' Those words provoked roars of laughter. Everybody, I was told, had said the same thing after three weeks, everybody in this room, but they were all still here—some of them had been for many years. The check...Where else in America could you drift so comfortably?

...In spite of the check, in spite of the presence of so many friends, Hollywood did not make me 'happy.' Never have I been so wrapped in the mists of depression as in this land of eternal spring, in whose irrigated gardens, with their chlorinated swimming pools and dream castles perched on the slopes of canyons, short-lived pleasure is at home, while in the depths sprawls a dreary, murderous wasteland: the city of Los Angeles, one of the ugliest and most brutal metropolises in the world.

Alice also spent time on the West Coast, and they stayed briefly in San Francisco. However, Zuck gave up on a Hollywood career when he discovered that there was no demand for his work, and that the only work available to him was hack writing for the studios. Back in New York he found a low-paying job teaching in the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, and by the spring of 1941 he was planning to move to Barnard permanently and become a farmer. He received a generous advance from Alfred Harcourt but saw no future in writing for American audiences. Their financial condition wasn't good at that point, and Alice was depending on hand-me-down clothing from Dorothy. The farming plan actually proved to be quite efficient, because, after an initial outlay for equipment and animals, they paid only $50 per month rent for the house and one hundred eighty acres. The play that Zuck wrote during this period later turned out to be a great success.

I find it interesting that Zuck had much the same reaction to the U.S. as Czeslaw Milosz did immediately after the war. Of course, I've lived here longer than either of them and had much the same reaction when I came to understand it. My affinity for Vermont is much the same as Zuck's.

I don't have much of a personal nature to report at the moment. A bear came last night, pushed over the bird feeder pole and ate the nyjer seeds in the tubes by breaking them open. That is the first time that a bear has eaten nyjer seeds here. It could be because there aren't enough berries to eat due to the dry weather, or perhaps because the bear population density is increasing. I'm going to stop feeding the birds until December, when the bears go into hibernation. The stargazing conditions have been poor, with the moon up at night, though I did get glimpses of Jupiter and Saturn. So far this year there hasn't been an extremely clear night. But both telescopes are still set up. I am at a loss for good reading material and will be reading Mary Trump's Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. There probably isn't much reason to comment on it, but I felt that I would like to know what an insider who also happens to be a psychologist has to say about her uncle. Even though Donald Trump has nothing but deficiencies, we are stuck with him, and this is going to be the Trump era whether we like it or not. With any luck, he will disappear from the news in a few months.

The Farm in the Green Mountains

This memoir, first published in Germany in 1949, covers the lives of Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her family while they lived in Vermont during World War II. Alice was born in Austria to a wealthy family. Her second husband, Carl Zuckmayer ("Zuck"), was born into a wealthy German family. They met in Berlin and married. She had a daughter from her first marriage, and they soon had another daughter. Zuck was a successful playwright, and he had also written the screenplay to "The Blue Angel," the popular film starring Marlene Dietrich. Zuck had served during World War I in the German army, but he became out of favor as Hitler rose to power, because one of his plays was a satirical portrait of the rise of militarism in Germany. They lived in Germany and had a house in Austria, but in 1938 they moved to Chardonne-sur-Vevey in Switzerland because of Nazi pressure. In 1939, when they were officially exiled from both Germany and Austria, they decided to move to the U.S. Ironically, although they both had Jewish ancestries – a fact that doesn't come up in the book – that apparently had nothing to do with their exile.

During their first three years in the U.S., which are not described in detail, they spent summers in Barnard, Vermont and had an apartment in New York City. Zuck apparently also spent time in Los Angeles, but, although no details are provided, he seems to have given up entirely on the idea of writing screenplays in Hollywood. Thus, in late 1941, they decided to move from New York City and live for the duration on a rented farm in Barnard, known as Backwoods Farm, which was different from the ones they had occupied on the previous summers. The U.S. entered the war that year, and most of the book describes the details of life on the farm, where they lived until 1946, at which point they returned to Switzerland and lived in Saas-Fee.

I was interested to know what life was like in Vermont then. Barnard is located in Windsor County, which is adjacent to Addison County, and we drove through there last fall on the way back from Woodstock. Their farmhouse was primitive by current standards, and all of the heating was done with wood and coal. Although they had enough money to build large new chicken coops and send their daughters away to school, they do not seem to have grasped how much labor would be involved when they purchased chickens, ducks, geese, goats and pigs. Operating on a European model, they must have thought that cheap labor would be available when they needed it, but it wasn't. Then and now, most small farms, with the exception of dairies and orchards, require no employees, as nearly all of the work can be done by family members. The physical labor at times became overwhelming, and during wartime there were even fewer adults available to help them. Nevertheless, Zuck enjoyed the lifestyle and even managed to write a play, which became a hit when they returned to Europe. Although they were Germans living in the U.S. during the war, there was no stigma placed on them, and they were merely required to remove the shortwave components of their radio and were not permitted to own guns.

They were shocked by the severity of the winters, which were extremely cold, though I think the temperatures are exaggerated a little, and the snow made travel difficult. Mud season was also bad for travel, since few roads were paved. The chapters each describe specific events that occurred during their stay. Perhaps the most harrowing was the sudden and enduring attack by Norway rats, which chewed their way into the chicken coops and ate the chicks. Eventually, with poison, they killed most of the rats, and finally the remaining rats left. They relied heavily on the USDA for information and found it quite helpful. Many of their household items were purchased from the Sears, Roebuck catalog.

Portraits emerge of the Vermonters who helped them, and they sound much the same as Vermonters today. Their telephone was on a nine-party line, and they got to know their neighbors quite well. My theory is that a sort of natural selection occurred in Vermont, with the people who stuck around being less interested in acquiring wealth and more interested in quiet country lives than those who moved off because they were more financially ambitious. Most of the people who moved here from the late 1700's to early 1800's seem to have moved west by the mid-1800's.

At times it seems that Alice was rather depressed, though she describes this only obliquely. Her relationship with Zuck is never examined closely, though on the surface it seems harmonious. One of her hobbies was making solo trips to the Dartmouth College library, which were harrowing experiences during the winter. I think that she wanted to be a literary person, like Zuck, and the stated origin of this book, as letters to his parents written after the war, seems contrived. However, there can be no question that their Vermont experience was truly moving to both of them, and they briefly attempted to live here again after the war but gave up due to various practical considerations. As I've mentioned before, the U.S. has been alluring to many, but those who have other options often choose not to stay. Certainly there are better places to live for civilized people, and everyone seems to come here for money.

Alice's writing is occasionally rather poetic:

That was the house in which I was to live now, and around the house were the meadows, and around the meadows the woods with their uncut underbrush.

There was a pond out of which dead trees stretched their arms like drowning people.

A brook flowed steeply down into a wood in which raccoons climbed up the trees, snuffling porcupines scraped and slid through the bushes. There were sometimes lynxes that crouched with glowing eyes on the rocks and screamed shrilly. 

There wildcats spat, there wild rabbits ran, there skunks shuffled and stamped, there a bear sat in the bushes and ate raspberries. In the autumn cranes flew over the woods to the pond, in the summer the hummingbirds whirred in front of the windows, unfamiliar birdsongs came from the trees, and in the shed giant spiders with mighty bodies sat in their webs.

At night the moon stood like a half-lowered sickle over the landscape with its strange animals.  

Zuck, much later, also wrote a memoir, which I have ordered. I'm not sure whether I'll read it closely, but I am curious as to some aspects of the story that Alice seems to have glossed over.

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.