Review: The Forest, by Edward Rutherfurd

If nothing else, I want this to be a testament that I do, in fact, every once in a while, remember things and eventually get around to them. The Forest was a reading recommendation back four or five years ago, in a context I've forgotten, from one of the (unintentionally neglected) quiet friends, and it's one of those which has been hanging onto the back end of the list since that time. I do so appreciate reading suggestions, and a belated thanks for it.

England's New Forest is a patch of woods and towns on the southern shore of the island opposite the Isle of Wight, a boggy and largely open woodland falling off the southeastern edge of the Salisbury plain to the sea. The people living there today, picking up on Rutherfurd's subtext, exist in a kind of cheerful state of anachronism, protective of the natural beauty and remaining medieval spirit of the area, and just maybe laying it on a little extra for the tourists. In the novel, Rutherfurd traces that old spirit forward in a series of set stories, placed every couple hundred years starting shortly after the Norman invasion, following generations of a handful of families, and weaving their lives into historical events that took place in the area.

The New Forest itself was surprisingly hard for me to wrap my mind around. It's small for one thing, about 15 miles across it's longest diagonal, hardly a nip out of north central Massachusetts where I live, which has a similar density of people and trees, and smaller than the couple of national forests you'll find in New England. And Rutherfurd, really oddly to my mind, doesn't describe it as very forest-like. It's strange to me that he focuses most of his descriptive energy on the open spaces in the woods--the heaths and plains--sometimes on individual trees, sometimes on houses and towns and shores, but for a novel that's titled The Forest, I hardly ever get the feeling of being in the woods. I kind of expected the setting to be pulled up to the level a ubiquitous extra character, and I expected to encounter some lyricism in the description. As a dork who's devoured some quantity of fantasy, I've read a pretty good number of writers who really try to evoke this kind of primeval magic (it's exactly what they ever do well), and it's as if Rutherfurd doesn't know he's competing against them (aaand iiiit's... Tolkien! with yards to spare).

Instead it's character and plot that tend to sustain the thing. Family characteristics are preserved, but varied, across the years, and the substories are novella-length almost entirely self-contained. They are not especially deep and thoughtful stories, but he has a good ear for the sometimes everyday drama of human affairs--love, death, friendship, family--which, when they are put up against the bigger historical drama (the killing of William Rufus (son of the Conqueror), and especially the trial of Alice Lisle at the time of the Restoration) adds compelling dimension to these events. There are a couple of tokens that pass through the storylines, but it's not extensive, and it's unfortunately not subtle. (In fact, Rutherfurd has a way of occasionally stepping without warning from a contemporary point of view into a sort of modern narrator voiceover, which doesn't officially stray into anachronism, but is nonetheless a little jarring until you get used to it. And I didn't need him, for example, to put his hand on my back and explicitly remind me who carved that letter A. It was his more touching plot, not so long back. I remembered it.) With the small plots and subplots, the repeating character types, it all comes off strangely like a well-written TV miniseries, and although it's 750 pages long, it reads quite fast.

There is theme of permanence in the novel. The families' status and success drifts over the centuries, but we are following, basically, archetypal gentry, commoners, functionaries, and other sorts, all of fairly ancient origins. A considerable amount of text is given over to how the administration of the forest operates, relatively autonomously, as a system of inherited and variously bargained resource rights. It seems a very English notion of environmental preservation, the way in which roles and rights are designated by class, and accepted by them, where each is of equal worth, but clearly different status. If there's a little breeding and occasional friction between castes, we are still unable to imagine the barely domesticated Puckles, the lowest commoners, doing the kind of job the Albions do. They're every one of them slaves to their heredity, and I personally find the idea pretty damn unsavory. If America is hindered by the tatters of its 17th century vestments too, questions of heredity and class form the running argument of our own imported culture, an embattled rebuke to the English style, but one which, like the notions of rebellious children, doesn't actually stray as far from that set of ideas. We clearly abandoned the attendant notions of land sustainability though, and maybe it takes centuries of habit to find a stable equilibrium between culture and environment.  Harder to come by when both the trees and the old families on these lands get razed to the ground every once in a while.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Maybe it's just because I've paid attention to a few of them by now, but it seems that each presidential campaign ushers in levels of intellectual dissociation unimaginable even in the last unholy go-round.  I don't expect the truth exactly, but I suppose there's a piece of me that anticipates something like honest rationalizations.  Or if I'm being scammed, then I expect at least enough effort on their part to willingly suspend disbelief and let me participate in the process.  Veracity is a tall order, in other words, but for god's sake, verisimilitude doesn't seem like too much to ask.

Some brands of doublespeak we're used to.  I mean, it's not as if the war machine has slowed down under Barack Obama's tenure, and if it's horrifying that we're all so inured to the serial bombing approach to foreign policy that the president can riff comfortable Newspeak ("riffing Newspeak" is an oxymoron, of course, but in 1984, Orwell didn't really predict the American style of saying nothing) before the Nobel Peace committee.  And anyway, it's not as though the trust was founded by the Swedish defense contractor who invented dynamite or anything--wait, it was?--well at least we can claim that there's a consistent equilibrium of irony when it comes to matters of death and war. 

I'm not intending to be centrist here.  There's a political party in this country that habitually speaks within the allowed contradictions (which is the definition of "conservative," but surprise, it's the other party), and then there are the sick fucks who want to take it all up--actually, take it back--to a more impoverished (intellectually and otherwise) level.  The former can be caught rationalizing for good intentions and consistency, but the other spews nothing but bullshit--the difference, as has been noted, is that with bullshit, the truth simply doesn't matter.  Nothing is believed by these guys.  You can pull apart the Romney campaign and try and piece together what the dude's convictions are, but, once you get past "wealth is good," the rest is merely expedient.  And even that is something he can't quite hold onto.  I mean, I don't fucking like politics, and yet some things crystallize with such bizarre bipolar clarity, it's impossible not to appreciate the absurd perfection of it.

I saw on the morning news the other day a regrettably earnest analysis of the claims made by a new group called Swiftboat Veterans for Truth  Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc., accusing president Obama of not killing Public Enemy Number One all by himself, as he would totally prefer you to believe.  Here's a news source, but all I only saw clips of the video itself, which I won't link to.  It had an (alleged) Navy SEAL growling (with Batman-like menace), "the work that the American military has done killed Osama bin Laden. You did not."   "You did not kill Osama bin Laden.  America did."  I mean yeah, we can spot the hypocrisy of this by imagining how Deadeye George would have handled things if it happened on his watch, and lots of bloggers have done that by now, but even that falls short of the contradictory perfection of the charge.

Mr. Smith, folks, is championing the Labor Theory of Value.  It (a) proposes that the "producers" are the people who actually do the work, supposing that the worth of any object or service correlates directly to the amount and quality of labor, the efforts of the people that had their hands on the hammers, and (b) explicitly downplays (or at least coughs up apologies for) the role of deciders and funders in that estimation.  It struggles to justify, you know, capitalists--Karl Marx was all over this--and it undermines hiearchies, such as the military (not that history's commies had a tough time with that particular contradiction, however).  This video, meanwhile, features soldiers who are disowning their commander in chief, and supporting a presidential campaign that is headed by one guy who's an Ayn-Rand-loving capitalist true-believer, and another guy who's Mitt friggin' Romney.  You have to admire the churchbell-sized opppositeness of it all. 

I mean yeah, Mitt, let's run with this.  You didn't create all that wealth, it was the workers who did.  Maybe you should have paid them instead.  Holy fuck, do they have any idea what they're inciting?

One thing I like to observe from time to time is that even if you're sold on various market theories as accurate descriptions of economic dynamics, people still use social measurements to estimate the success of one strategy or another.  The selling point of unregulated capitalism is that it's supposed to make people live longer and happier lives, permit societies to reach greater heights of achievement, use resources most efficiently, and so forth.  These are the kinds of things that the military's alleged to protect as well.  And of course, by 2012, the body of evidence for the American model is a tad inconvenient for those beliefs, and it's down at this point to the integrity of the brand itself, the consistency of the argument.  That the modern Republican party of the last 30 or 40 years could embrace some form of populism was always a shade ironic, but outright pulling for labor over management is a new feat of disingenuousness.  Despite myself, I'm impressed.

UPDATE:  I guess there have been some problems with the captcha thingie in the comments.  I obviously have no control over how it works, and I've just turned it off for the time being.  It's kind of fortunate, because it gave me a chance to soften my crimes against scholarship and the English language in the above post!

Vegetable Innuendo

Yeah, I know sparse blogging, etc., but man, the world's a depressing place lately, and I gotta leave the horrors of war, climate, corporate governance and Mitt Romney to people of better wit and stronger stomach than me. Instead, let me take you to a place that's really more my wheelhouse: gluttony, amusingly-shaped food, and sausage jokes. I have admitted that I love those gristly meat wands beyond their value as a perpetual straight line, and while I feel no shame in massaging that vein, I constantly find myself wishing I had a place to actually put some.  Hey, if it's impossible to leave all the girthy double entendres out of the discussion, then I say ram 'em in wherever they're allowed.

Zucchini is almost as funny as sausage, but it's not remotely as tasty. It maybe has a little more of the herbal and a little less of the soapy flavor of yellow summer squash, but that hardly makes up for its general blandness and, as I find, the very slightly gag-inducing quality it possesses, which gets even worse when you let it grow big and knobby. I really do like the stuff, but if you could concentrate whatever that essence is, it'd make a fine emetic. Unfortunately, at this time of year, zucchini moderation is not much of an option, as I manage to always find myself overrun with the stuff. Perhaps you, like me, want an easier way to choke it down. I am here to help.

And okay, I actually hate to be offering up a casserole on general principles, but this one is, at least, an exercise on how young garden vegetables are just plain better than the supermarket garbage you're stuck with for the rest of the year. I make this one on rare occasions in the winter, and it amounts to little more than the uninspired American cuisine we all regret growing up with. But we had some awesome little fennel bulbs from the CSA recently and more baby zucchinis than I could carry out on my back, and loading it up with quality veggies pretty well transformed this thing. Hell, maybe next time I'll just do it up as a ragout and serve it over some obscure starch so as to preserve what's left of my culinary dignity. Given the whole running theme here, it should clearly be ladled on top of gently simmered wheatberries. Maybe I can somehow find blue ones.

So anyway, my zucchini and sausage casserole. My favorite wine to have with this is an inexpensive New Zealand Savignon Blanc called Vavasour, and not just because of the giant cock on the bottle. (It was a delightful find on the discount rack a few years ago, and I'm giving away a guarded family secret by telling you about it.) No, this stuff has an aroma and slight flavor of pepperoncini peppers, which maybe isn't something you want every day, but it's perfect for this dish, so go out and pick up a couple of magnums already. Here's the recipe:

1 box of bowties (or your favorite casserole pasta)

olive oil

1 lb. turkey sausage (or else, you know, good sausage)

1-2 large onions, chopped

2 smallish fennel bulbs, cored and chopped

maybe 1.5 teaspoons salt

maybe a little red pepper (if you have turkey sausage, it might need even more help)

about 4 cloves garlic, minced

2-4 cups chopped zucchini

1-2 tablespoons flour

1/2 - 1 c. chicken stock (you really just want a little sauce to coat the pasta here)

about 1 c. crumbled feta cheese
about 3/4 c. sliced pepperoncinis

freshly ground black pepper

1 c. grated cheddar cheese.

Preheat the oven to 400 °F. Cook the pasta in boiling water and drain.

Heat some oil in a large skillet or pot. Remove the sausages from their casings (if that's what you got), and add them to the skillet with the onion and fennel and some salt, crumbling them as they brown. As the vegetables get soft and the meat gets cooked, add the garlic and cook for another minute, then add the zucchini and saute until it's as soft as you prefer. Mix in the flour, adding a little more oil if necessary. (The zucchini will evolve a lot of water, and I try to let it mostly evaporate off, but I can't say I've ever had a problem mixing in the flour at this point.) Whisk in the broth and simmer a minute to thicken. Then toss in pasta, feta, and pepperoncini.

Add it all to a large baking dish and top with the cheddar cheese. Bake for about 20 minutes.

#

What, you say you still have a monster ton of summer squash left over? Well, pickles are pretty funny too (especially gherkins!), a natural, zesty enterprise if you will, and so let's go with that.

Here's a recipe for pickled squash, I think based on a magazine article at some point or other, and it originally had green beans in there too, so add that if it floats your boat. I find it's good for about a once-a-year thing, and you can make a few pint jars and leave it in your refrigerator for awhile, serve them alongside some grilled shrimp or something, and drink heavily with whatever's on hand. Or better yet, pass them off on your friends, who will be delighted to add to their own reluctant stockpile of squash (but these aren't preserved pickles, and must be stored cold, so don't kill anyone). I think this recipe makes about 2 pint jars.

2 c. rice vinegar

2/3 c. sugar

1 tsp. salt

Several green or yellow squash, cut into spears

1-2 thinly sliced shallots

1 tablespoon sesame seeds

1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper

black peppercorns

small handful of cilantro sprigs

about 1/2 in. ginger root, julienned

Stuff the squash spears, shallots, and whole herbs and spices passionately into a couple pint jars. Combine vinegar, sugar, and salt in a saucepan and heat until the solids dissolve. Pour the hot, wet vinegar into the jars and cover. Refrigerate for 8 hours, turning (on) occasionally.

Review: Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn

To say that the novel Eifelheim rolls together a handful of science fiction mainstays doesn't really do the book justice. Yes, there are a few going on in there: the bulk of the story is both an alien first-contact tale and a culture clash with moderns and medievals, and that, in turn, is conducted within a present-day Big Discovery sort of frame story, as two modern researchers try to piece together a best guess as to just what happened to disappear the village of Eifelheim back in 1348. But even if the pieces are recognizable, it's better than a patchwork of conventions, and this book comes together as something impressive and original, excellent both as an idea novel and as a character experiment.

The background is researched to a degree of sincerity that's impressive, but which, unfortunately, is most unwieldy at the very beginning. In chapter 2, we're introduced to a an academic couple who unwittingly find themselves working different angles of the same project. Tom is a "cliologist," a man who uses mathematical tools to study history, and while he seems like a sharp guy, he's even more bizarrely confident in his highly processed conclusions than is the average econometrician. (The doubt quotes, however, are because I can't tell if this field actually exists outside of fiction. I clearly don't possess Michael Flynn's commitment to background research.) His girlfriend Sharon is a theoretical physicist working out some implications of a higher-dimensional universe, and I can't really say how valid her conjectures are either, but that's because Flynn's physics kludges are at a pretty high level for sf, and he makes it easy to suspend my disbelief and pique curiosity about the underlying ideas. The problem with the frame story is that neither Tom nor Sharon start out as very compelling characters, and giving a gusty voice to the contemporary narrator (one of Tom's colleagues; the other sections are told in the usual third person omniscient--the author's own voice, which is better) only weighs them down more. Flynn tries to capture these two in a smart-person's lover's dialogue, but it's a bad vehicle for getting us up to speed--if there are people who talk about the high-level intellectual grounding of their work this much when they're off the clock, then I don't really want to spend any time with them. Their manner becomes more credible as they sink into their mutual obsessions, but they start off as just plain bores. It's the sort of thing that might carry the distance of certain kind of sf short (one of those purer "idea stories"), and that is in fact what the book grew from, but in a longer novel, it's not the best opening move.

And the novel is NOT a bore, not by any means. It's really engaging, and I'd rather convince you to keep reading it. Most of the story takes place in the middle ages, and with just a little faith, we're diving right into the heart of the Black Forest, with that earnestness now helping to paint things very sympathetically. Over the years, I've read a couple other novels set in a similar milieu, and I think that Flynn, at last, gets us down to the fact that we're dealing with people who are intelligent and capable on their own terms. I think more than most writers, he's really curious about their worldview more than about how they lived, going as far to claim the time of William of Ockham as a rare triumph of reason among the epochs, before better minds reverted to the romantic mysticism (as one character labels it) of the Renaissance. And while I doubt he has the accredited scholarship of Umberto Eco (and there's also no smokin' cool labyrinth, etc.), the comparison with the The Name of the Rose is too tempting. Flynn plays a very similar trick that Eco does (distilling Roger Bacon, Ockham, Buridan et al. to get a modern-style rational protagonist) with similar intentions (to dissect the middle age intellectual universe), but the author does not (as Eco so irritatingly did) treat the medievals with gigantic heaps of modern smugness. He admittedly cheats a lot with the main character, Pastor Dietrich, letting him correctly derive a lot of advanced concepts (right down to the etymology, and even though that's really a game he plays with the reader--do we usually think much about where words like "electronic" or "protein" or "microphone" come from?--it was a little too much for me) with the tools he has at hand, but Flynn has a great deal of respect for those tools, up to and including the theological ones, and the discussions of Christian morality (revealed truth to Dietrich and his flock, but one they are constantly working with as part of both their moral and natural philosophy) are as interesting as the technological ones. It ends up creating an interesting connection between their understanding and ours, and he lets Dietrich be persistently wrong about some things too, and at times lets his misunderstanding lead to profundity.

I think it works because Flynn takes two groups that are well-known strangers to the reader, common science fiction objects of scrutiny, and lets them investigate each other from mutual disadvantage. The aliens--big grasshopper-like creatures--are technologically advanced (only a couple breakthroughs past 2012 level) but seriously impaired, stranded with a broken vehicle in an unknown and possibly hostile or unsupportive environment, and with a deterioriating group dynamic. The villagers meanwhile, are as smart and inquisitive, and as charitable and suspcious, as any cross-section of human society, but when it comes to unforeseen problems like demonic visitors, even though they're in the midst of a scientific revolution of their own, are obviously inhibited by it being such an early one. They're also in sniffing distance of the Black Death, to which the reader is cued from the beginning, and slaves to a couple other known, if minor, historical events.

There are those interesting scientific and theological discussions between Dietrich and the visitors, but there's a satisfying cultural interaction to decode as well, and Flynn has a lot of space to get into both worlds. He adds some richness to medieval life (the local priest keeps a lot of contacts, and for just a little more scope, he's got an interesting backstory of his own too), and gives the aliens enough problems to get into their sometimes confusing society too. They're not quite human in the way they interact with each other, but they're fucked up in ways we can appreciate. With varying success, and with no shortage of ambiguity and difficulties, the groups interact and learn from each other (or fail to), get closer despite themselves, all for what may ultimately be no purpose at all. Their respective problems are left open. If there's a point to them meeting, it's maybe to be found hundreds of years later. It's a positive and fanciful story, well-informed, hopeful, and yet tethered to the complications of life. What more can you ask for?

Lies, Damn Lies, And Now Statistics

We've been at the game at least since Democritus, and god knows I've made it a pet subject on the blog over the years. At what point, we wonder, does a pile of stuff instead become collection of tiny things? When is it appropriate to break something up and consider it in terms of little constituent parts, and when are the small-parts contributions better thought of as a collective whole? Once you get past the philosophical wankery (and let's face it, I'm unlikely to), then I suppose there are really only two practical answers to that: when you can't avoid the quantized nature of things, and when the math is easier. I think it's a little bit funny that a few centuries of science based on analog mathematics (with continuous, nicely differentiable functions) finally coughed up everything digital (breaking it up into approximate chunks), and I have often found it fascinating how the same systems can be usefully described as discrete, continuous, and then discrete again, depending on what scale you dial in at, or what you're trying to prove. Electronics, for example: you start with quanta (electrons), which average out to make analog structures (semiconductor devices, let's say), and then put those together to make a logic network that'll do it all bitwise, allowing only ones or zeroes (I'm using one to write). And sometimes your semiconductor theory gives you localized states to deal with; sometimes the analog nature of a transistor or diode is important. I think one reason that things like macroeconomics and evolution appeal to me is they're large-scale ensemble effects that are logical extensions of (well, evolution is anyway), but seemingly independent phenomena from, the things that make them up, which in those cases are our very lives.

Maybe you'll forgive me for dipping into this well yet again. I had to sit through a weeklong industrial statistics class earlier this month, and this is the sort of thing that I was daydreaming about (well, once I got tired of thinking up wiseass comments and imagining people naked). It was an effort to fuzz over the whole mind-crushing boredom of it all.

Most people loathe stats for the terminally dull math it throws at you, and that's a reputation that's probably deserved, but at least digging through the justifications and proofs has a way of adding a kind of legitimacy of knowledge. Getting through it makes you feel like a smart person. That's not the class I took the other week. There we were training with a computer program to run through all the equations behind the scenes--elegantly enough if you stick to the problems it was designed for (but what kind of engineer would I be if I did that?)--and the practical application got taught without drumming up even the mathematical gravitas you'd need to count back change. It's a well-oiled teaching method that got across how to use a mathematical tool without an underlying idea of how the math might work, and okay, knowing how to use it is the take-home you'd want even if you did take the time to watch the gears turning, and he did a good job of getting across what he tried to. But it's a special kind of tedium to spend a 40 hour week absorbing the knowledgable huckster routine from someone you're pretty sure isn't as smart as you. Christ, it reminded me of those long ago nights of sitting through driver's ed.

(Full disclosure: I had a stats class back in college that taught nothing of perceivable relevance whatsoever. It taught some math, but I didn't learn any of that either, or at least none of it stuck in my head beyond the final. I didn't feel the least bit smart, but still got an A. Not sure how that happened.)

Anyway, the dorky daydreams. It struck me that when you hit that border between chunky and creamy, where you can't really decide whether to count things up or do clean math on some variable, then that is exactly where you have "statistics." Implying a distribution function is exactly the point when you know damn well the data consists of tallied events but you're going to call it a smooth curve anyway, and statistical analysis is supposed to be what tells you if that's worth doing and how legal it really is, when things go one way or the other. In the manufacturing world, one primary concern is sampling and measurement: it's an important question whether you can compare results from measurements that will vary, that is, whether the data are really telling you anything. We're all used to thinking like this, but most scientists I've known aren't terribly rigorous about considering error in the experimentation and data-gathering, although then again, we are usually more about understanding relationships that come from somewhere.  More curve fitting, fewer t-tests.

Statistical understanding gets buried under a lot of science and engineering anyway, without always thinking about it as such.  One advantage of spending a decade and a half as a technical whore is that I got exposed to a variety of interesting fields and thinking (a disadvantage is that I got to be a whole lot better at bullshitting my way around ideas than studying and implementing them).  The very basis of band theory, which is used liberally to design solid state devices, is a smooth approximation of entities that are known to be discrete, assigning effective properties, imagining a continuous density of electrical states, generating a smooth probability function to populate them.  When you can't quite get away things so easily, when you have to admit you're counting electrons or photons, or doing signal processing in general, then you have to fall back to the statistics.  It's interesting to consider how shot noise will plague you in low-signal collection (when just a few electrons are passing through, they are less likely to be representative), or derivations of signal to noise on a larger scale, and any kind of diagnostics will also require a statistically-derived decision based on the quantity of signal.  I spent a few inadequate efforts in past years thinking about the implications of size distributions of small particles, and I'm getting lately into something like that again.  It's a case when it's not just the size of the the little guys govern properties, but the shape of the distribution will affect what you measure too, and if spread out, it'll behave much differently than if they're all the same size.  You might call this a property of your sample, or you might call it the properties of differently-behaving individuals.

But it's important to remember that science and statistics aren't really the same thing. One remarkable part of that course (and, I think this is the hollow heart of certain fields which rely on statistics, some of which happen to control the world), is that you can sometimes get to feel you are evaluating things astutely, while knowing fuck-all about what's going on down there. I think that makes certain kinds of people feel very smart indeed, but it scares the shit out of me. When you can study something in detail while remaining relatively ignorant of it, you have a good opportunity to lie to yourself and others.

I'll leave the economist-bashing aside today and note that as researchers, if we're chasing something like the scientific method, then we have some working assumptions and models going in. We have some prior experience, sometimes whole fields of it, of how things tend to relate, might relate, or fucking well better relate. One of the most annoying things that got pushed in the class, and I know is used in industrial research, is the development of "models" though statistical design of experiments.  The idea of that is to throws a bunch of ingredients together in a way to best infer dependencies, which is a neat scientific tool, and sometimes exactly the right one, but the problem is that it also offers no real understanding.  It is meant to address the what, but utterly leaves off the why.  [I feel better about things like evolutionary algorithms, where a solution is chased down through randomly mutated generations, and maybe you don't know the intimate details inside there either, but it's a really clever approach at that higher level of granularity]  If it's formulation work you're doing, then you end up doing chemistry with a completely optional understanding of, well, chemistry, and this just annoys me on some level. You really should have some fundamental understanding of how materials are known to interact. The instructor called these sorts of insights, a little dismissively, as "local knowledge," but if it's science, the local knowledge is what you are getting at.

Initiation

Not long ago, I found an old letter to the editor that I wrote, and (thank god) never sent, from back in my college days, defending that redoubt of callousness and misogyny, the greek fraternity. The argument wasn't that godawful--amounting to "it's different for a bunch of socially inept nerds in engineering school, we need to drink irresponsibly, waah!"--but I know the style, the sort of precocious, self-affirming, fake-earnest crap that I'd later associate with bullshit-reasoned libertoonian writing, and I'm embarrassed that it ever came out of me. I have strong thoughts about going back and burning it, but on the other hand, it's my moral duty to belittle this kind of thing, maybe even more so now that I've gone and caught myself doing it, twenty years ago. In my limited defense, my conscience was making noises even in that one about people who might live beyond a bubble of other straight middle-class white dudes, and, generally speaking, I tried to talk to people sometimes at that age, cultivate some empathy, read freely, and accept that I might be wrong, and some would say that I generally grew the fuck up over time. Also in my defense, even if the fraternity system in general can be a hiding spot for a whole lot of college-guy nastiness, I think it was much better in my microcosm, and these sorts of things make a more easily assailable target than, say, college sports. The basic thing is that if you get a collection of pigs in one place, then they'll act like a bunch of pigs. A bunch of drunken geeks like we were? Some were better people than others, but I mostly spent those days sitting around with my friends making sarcastic jokes at their expense and mine. Good times.

People have made a lot of assumptions about this over the years, and one that's galled (because it's true), is that an organization like this is pretty inauthentic at its core. The design of a fraternity isn't really to accomplish anything other than pulling in students before it knows them especially well, and jam them into a sort of friend-making boot camp. I can't come down on whether this is fundamentally a bad thing or not. Some of them became real friends and some didn't, and if an opportunity comes your way to get to know people you have a good chance of getting along with, then why not take it? Especially if you're a dork in engineering school. (And there's the 2012 version of the argument.)

The trick to indoctrinate new guys is to build experiences together, make them hang out with each other and also with the people in the group. That was most of the hazing we gave, and the purpose of all of it, and if I had to show up and fetch beers for a month, or if I got encouraged to try and get away with things that were funny and harmless, then hell, it was nice when it was my turn to drink and laugh. It's pretty obviously a knockoff of military initiation, or gangs, or the clergy, or high school, or any group that makes a case for its bureaucratic existence rather than just its members. And the format of the rite is similar. Set a group of people apart from the rest, push them into a shared experience that's hard to understand in any other context, and let them join fully when they start to bond. It's team-building, in the horrible corporate sense. If my fraternity had conducted this with anything but mock-seriousness, then I'd have been deeply offended, but when it comes to human organizations, mockery is the exactly appropriate response to an abundance of seriousness. (And this may be how they got to me, the sneaky bastards.)

It's an adage that as empires crumble, life tends to go on for most of us--meet the new boss and all that. I hate to take that one too far: it's terrifying how much they can take down with them (and have taken down), but there's truth too that the failure of power structures most seriously threatens the empowered. [It's a thought that often pops up with me whenever the "ready flow of credit" is allegedly held at gunpoint by the financial establishment, but of course it applies generally to straight middle-class white dudes too.] I don't want to beat on Debt much more than I already have, but I find the historical contention interesting that when externally imposed institutions or governments lost their local grip, as he says they did for much of the middle ages in much of the world, then civilization tended to replace them with persistent hierarchical arrangements, where people were guided by tradition into castes, instead of by institutions. The roles in that arrangment are passed on by collective habit, and over time become difficult to confront. Inequality is assumed instead of coerced, and you learn it at birth. I'm not convinced this makes a better world, and in fact, it unnerves me that this is the only alternative that's much panned out on a civilizational scale, but the argument was that it was somewhat less violent.

You can't really escape it, and it's a topic that I periodically wander back to, maybe moreso than your typical engineering nerd. We are initiated into the game before we even get a chance to question it. The fact that we share non-genetic information from one generation to another, one group to another, that we pass it on, is the very essence of what makes us human. We're pulled into existing conversations before we even know how to talk. To really re-think things, you'd need to make a clean and thorough break from ten thousand years of evidence of other people existing, and who'd get to be the architect of that experiment anyway? In the real world, if there is a better and more fair way to organize humanity, it will be because a tradition of such practice emerges slowly, and we will still have to initiate people to get up to speed with that improved starter packet of information. Even if the guiding idea is a rejection of system, you still have to initiate people into the tradition of challenging it. You have to be conditioned to reject authority. Is it any wonder this species is so fundamentally confused?

Review: Vortex, by Robert Charles Wilson

[Probably contains some spoilers.]

Vortex is another loosely-tied sequel to the big-sweeping science fiction novels Spin and Axis by Robert Charles Wilson, and much like before, I picked this one up while pretty desperate for a read, and Wilson is a reliable satisfaction. You can follow back to those other reviews, but the short version is that I'd found Spin to strike a near-perfect balance of big, cool sci-fi mystery and sensitive, humanist storytelling, while Axis, although well-conceived, somehow managed to lose a lot of urgency. With Vortex, I'm on the train again, and I made the uncharacteristic move or reading the whole damn thing over the space of a day or two. The novels can't be called a series but they're connected. Although they share a broad plot arc of a deepening puzzle on a celestial scale, each one resolves neatly enough on its own terms. (The titles themselves don't signify a heck of a lot.) It's more as though Wilson writes each one in the same universe, more or less, and enough time passes in between both the events and the publication that the remembered details fuzz up. I think there might be some subtle contradictions in the descriptions of the connected worlds and their makers among the books, even if the general idea remains the same.

And the general idea, I will reiterate, is really well put together for a science fiction conceit. Human society has been visited by some unknown and gigantic technological presence, one that (in Spin) isolates the planet, holding it in a temporal bubble as the universe ages around it. Wilson wisely leaves the how as perplexing as the why. At the end of the first novel, earth finds itself linked to other livable worlds through huge archways, and with Axis, we learn that the makers have some use in sampling and preserving (and swapping at long intervals in time through another series of arches) the information that these oddly fostered societies tend to generate. The "hypotheticals" themselves are an enormous and slow-growing network of tiny self-replicating machines, the sort of devices that short-lived biological civilizations tend to generate at some point in their development, and the von Neumann devices of hundreds or thousands of such worlds have, over impossible eons, grown, merged, and evolved into a system that is symbiotic with the more frenetic societies that rise and create and fall. What's really brilliant about this, and I mentioned it before, is how Wilson imparts on them the function an impersonal and mighty god (and related subplots ensue, not unsympathetically). He gives us a watchmaker that's real, and it's as insensate as an ecology, and we are left to learn, again, what it is to be alone(-ish) and also to be Chosen in a universe that's more complex and wonderful and humane than anyone would have ever guessed. Vortex eventually sees life, the universe, and everything right through to the end, shows us an earth scoured, inadvertantly, by humanity's own efforts, to the stars winking out, to expansion and cooling of space right on through to its impending heat death. And he still gives us to care about the people in it. It's why I love his writing.

Vortex tells two stories simultaneously. One is a mystery set amid interesting times in 21st century Texas, where a state psychiatrist and a cop try to understand why a strange boy is writing unsettling journals well above his intelligence level, narratives that are loaded with information that, despite the gonzo setting, contain elements that relate to contemporary crime activity. It's a frame that is just compelling enough to keep the story moving and the tension up, characters just compelling enough to give a damn about, and which lets things get revealed at just the right pace.

The other half is contained in the journals themselves. It begins on the other side of the temporal gate that erupted at the end of Axis, that also absorbed Turk Findley (among others), who wakes up ten thousand years later to a world that's unrecognizable. Wilson leaves the other holdover character, Isaac Dvali, the child prodigy who's been loaded up with human attempts to interact with the hypotheticals off until near the end. Turk is one of two cobbled-together ambassadors to the reader, and they're both of them compelling ones. (And if Turk is not quite the same Turk in the last novel, and if maybe the problem with the character all along was that he couldn't be any more random, then Wilson gives himself a fine excuse for all of this.) They are relateable person in a new community that's integrated beyond current capabilities, and literally adrift in the next-door world (that's dying), floating on its way to the arch to get to earth (which is dead). Our almost-mundanes are in a good position to observe how all the bizarre new technology doesn't prevent human pettiness, zealotry, visciousness, love or decency. The 31st century technology does eventually offer the characters some tools to confront, and, since there is really nothing there to talk to, finally start to use the hypotheticals as a medium to bring all the threads together.

It takes Isaac to do this, to connect it all, and while he have been strange enough to leave out of most of the story, it's his simple and strong motivations that give us, the readers, the story at all, revised, just a bit, to allow a moment or two of grace.

[Sorry about the continued sparse posting, by the way. It's been a sinister combination of time and motivation. I have some other stuff I want to get to at some point or other.]

Review: Debt, by David Graeber

(Full title: Debt: The First 5000 Years)

In these very pages, over the last several years, a sufficiently masochistic reader can dig in to find me struggling toward some basic criticisms of the modern study of economics. One of the basic complaints I've raised is that the field which claims to predict human behavior ignores far too much relevant humanity. Rather notably, it assumes away the dynamics of power and control, and as well presents a distorted and jaded view of the positive human motivations by which we estimate value. David Graeber has problems with this too, and he takes it further than I ever would have thought to. The central claim in Debt is that the majority of the economy, for the majority of history, actually arose from these interpersonal relationships and values, and not that truck and barter shuck and jive. The discussion relies less on neatly-tied case studies, or on any ideological paradigm (although he does make ethical judgments), and more on a broadly scoped anthropological and historical understanding of how lives were lived across time, among different classes, in different societies. There's a fair amount of jigsaw work in the earliest examples (as their must be when it comes to understanding very old or remote societies), and like all history, it's qualitative (although admirably inclusive), but holy fuck is it ever refreshing to read someone base his ideas about human economic interaction by observing human interaction, instead of burying it in a mountain of assumption-fudging artificially precise quantitation.

The opening bombshell (which I've linked to once or twice) is that, unlike the textbook discussion, there has never been any historical barter economy worthy of note, and that exchange using impersonal coin tended to arrive centuries after institutionalized credit arrangements. Most economic affairs were more typically conducted using a more or less elaborate organization of debts and favors, where members of a community would lend and borrow with varying levels of formality, and with individual cultural character too. It's also observed that community- and family-minded people are motivated by a "baseline communism" (as he cautiously calls it, meaning that at some point, we're all in this together) and tendency for hierarchical organization, most of which tends to get underplayed by the various modern economic theories.

Graeber divides the economic history of the globe broadly into pre-monetary times, ancient urban societies and the following imperial ages, the middle ages, and the capitalist era (not failing to speculate on whatever the hell it is we've transitioned into now). In discussing the early development of money, Graeber utilizes what he can in that period of history between writing and coin (the earliest writing known, after all, is ancient Sumerian credit accounting). He also leans heavily here on isolated cultures as they had been encountered and studied by Europeans, and the social and economic ways they reacted to the contact. (It tended to go badly for them.) Precious money-like objects, when actually used, tended to be reserved exclusively for social, human exchange (that is, for the not easily quantifiable--for men to woo women, in most cases), and while tokens have also been frequently used to keep track of debts and favors, this too was built on interpersonal trust and a sense of community. It's a recurring theme that it has historically taken a violent disruption of that social network that to turn these habits into more impersonal varieties of monetary exchange.

[As an aside, I think this is an interesting way to consider the evolution of western thought too, and it calls into question some of the things that were left on the table when the select pieces of the canon were going into the sociological scrapbook. Which was the bigger mark that ancient Athens left on the European world? Was its philosophical schools (the rediscovery of Aristotle), or was it the acceptance of slavery and the subjugation of women, right down to the veil (which count be more as an evolutionary initial condition)? Also, I wonder how much resistance there's been in European thought to universalizing human behavior by studying groups of people that Europeans were butchering and enslaving, literally by the boatload. My comic book understanding of the history of philosophy is not really up to the task, and admittedly they didn't know a lot about them yet, but it does seem the colonial-age thinkers argued a lot more with hypothetical primitive people than actual ones.]

The basic theme here is in fact a moral one. Slavery (which was rather a sudden concern for some of the African people he mentions), punitive state power, and imperial war were highly correlated with the transition to and away from currency, right up until the modern era. It took a powerful government to make the stuff official, and if there really is intrinsic value to gold, it's that it can be stolen and anonymized. Generally, Graeber writes, the estrangement of debt and finance from human connectedness made the tragedies worse (he doesn't make a more disturbing case than the Conquistadors, who kept at it because of a fucked up finance system that kept those vicious fuckers in debt too--how is the systematic destruction of a civilization more moral than not paying back your sponsors?). Adam Smith's contention that the economic sphere was separate from the human social one (and was in fact to the good), was as radical as it was utterly ahistorical. It's taken a lot of violence to get to the point where that's the default assumption, Graeber notes, and even then, the moral imperatives of debt aren't even equally applied. And really, who's doing more for the world, the one who impoverishes himself in misery to pay off his creditors, or someone who spreads happiness among his family and friends?

One interesting aspect of this viewpoint is the picture it makes of the middle ages. Graeber paints a different environment than we usually imagine, in large part because he expands it beyond the borders of violent and backward Europe. But even there, yes, it was indeed horrible in the usual respects, but people were also by most measures unprecedentedly free. Slavery was not reinstituted in any of the world civilizations following the previous imperial age, and (again despite the popular conceptions), regular people were largely left alone by greater powers. The world didn't revert to barter, but it did revert to credit. [And you know, this sort of quiet utopia is pretty close the sort of community relationships that Wendell Berry idealized in rural America too.] It's interesting to point out too, that the closest the world has seen to a free market (that is, an ungoverned one, that still works), was in the Islamic world of this time, which esteemed its merchant-adventurer class, and it succeeded because, according to the author, it was both anti-capitalist (usury was forbidden in spirit and cultural practice), and built on personal trust and community connection.

Does it all hold up? Graeber presents a great deal of compelling correlations, and some good causal hypotheses--the arguments for the origin of money are convincing--but now and then I think he goes a little too far. I wasn't quite convinced, for instance, that materialist thought was really generated from contemplating the economic nature of things, although no doubt the ideas of the time got swapped liberally around. The author frequently resorts to etymology (which must be an anthropologist's trick) to showcase various points, and while it's interesting how these thinkers of the time (and Graeber is quite good at linking thinkers to their times) found commonality in the ideas, it still feels like a stretch to state, say, that a sense of mind/body duality arose because coins have two sides. The institutions of the various imperial eras--savery and organized war--that originated coinage and then went hand in hand with it, have in my less expert opinion, much to do with resource availability and population density, and call it an emergent property of urbanization perhaps. For example, I don't think the middle ages would have evolved the Medicis and the Renaissance without coal. It seems an important additional ingredient to universalize our imperial economy (which runs on de-personalized credit) with the ancient ones, but then again, that's just my hobby horse. So far as the utopian qualities of the middle ages or rural subcultures go, I'm skeptical. You don't choose your communities, after all, but you're stuck there. As an alternative to the slavery/coin/military complex, people developed strictly hierarchical societies, a perversion of a different one of the human metrics presented in the book. (And fuck the communism of the rich, anyway.) It seems that history tells us we're left to pick our poison, a tradeoff of one kind of evil for another. Being tied to a small-town underclass is a different sort of hell. Maybe the next age will give us a genuine reimagining of social and economic organization. Here's hoping.

Review: Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart is a novel of loss and cultural contact. It tells the story of a west African village community some time around the turn of the last century, from the point of view of its prominent citizen, at an especially transitional time. The plot moves from the drama of local life to the drama of its disruption by British colonials and missionaries (evidently penetrating further up the Niger than the slave trade did). It's told from the African perspective in the vehicle of an English-language novel, which is an interesting contrast on its face. If it works as a window on traditions that are unfamiliar to most English speakers, that hardly seems to have been the intent. I don't believe for a second that it was written with the edification of the colonialist culture in mind, and Achebe's defense of writing in English includes his schooling and habits, and the fact that the native Igbo written form was drained of its lyricism when the Brits went and standardized it. The author himself grew up among the Igbo communities in Nigeria, but as a recognizably bright kid, quickly found himself moved into the European educational system. The novel could be a chronicle of his parents' or grandparents' generation.

It is a short, compact book. And while it's recognizable as a "novel," the happenings of the plot move on without a overburdening heap of western literary tradition. There's not much in the way of foreshadowing, for example, and no quasi-scientific psychological churnings, but the actions make sense both in the context of the setting, as well as in a broader human one. You can get a sense of an African storytelling tradition in there (or at least to the extent I've been exposed to it--this amounts to some folktales I read in grade school and since, and some writers who were enchanted by them), and the early characterization runs short and sweet like that, introducing the outlines of the characters, and then filling up the narrative with story elements that illustrate their traits. In that sense, the people often feel like archetypes, but if they are, they are not simple ones, and there is not a lack of depth to them. It is just revealed simply, which is a powerful thing to pull off.

The story is told in two broad parts. The first is the rise and fall of Okonkwo, the protagonist, within his own community. Okonkwo is a fairly complicated man with any number of uneasy conflicts at his core (that could certainly offer plenty of material for agonizing psychoanalysis were this a different kind of book). The product of a difficult childhood, he rebels by becoming ten times the man that he felt his father was, which brings him relentlessly close to tradition, and perpetually on the verge of violence. His anger, his work ethic, and his discipline conflict with his actual affections, and if he makes some progress toward reconciliation, it takes an arbitrary loss to bring him down the first time. I'd describe the first half of the novel as a tale about the costs of ambition and the fragility of success.

Against a cultural invasion that has grown in momentum (and force) during his exile, however, Okonkwo finds he is much less well prepared. Missing some expected literary tells, I didn't quite predict the dramatic arc, making the climax that much more unexpected, even as, looking back (starting with the title, so maybe there's one cue, duh), it seems inevitable. But until Okonkwo meets the new authorities, the culture shock is delivered in the second half of the book in small, relentless sparks. I was reminded suddenly at the end that Achebe had been gauging the story for its moral impact as well, and it hit me like a hammer.

The sometimes fable-like quality of the telling lends to that feeling of universality. Transporting the reader to a less modern setting seems like it can be a perilous exercise, one that can lurch into spectacle, judgement, piety, or insincerity, but Achebe avoids all this. Tribal life is different from mine, but it's given matter-of-factly, on its own terms, with obvious room for joy, loss, failure, decency, deceit, frustration, respect, and so on: all the range of human drama that we will find anywhere. The author doesn't really romanticize the culture left behind (there is surely sadness and fondness in the memory, but it's implicit) or brought in (there are good and bad missionaries too, also trending toward archetype), and although the mind and motives of the African characters is accessible, they don't betray modern thinking at moments convenient to the plot (like you might get in any number of mediocre speculative fiction novels).

If it seems a little sacrilegious to compare it to sf, please bear with me: it is the genre with which I usually associate stories of first contact and (you might blame Tolkien for this one) decline of an older, more firmly rooted culture. It's full of writers that try very hard to represent the subversion of different societies, with wildly mixed results. It's enough to get a sense for just how bloody hard it is to develop an understanding that is both accessible to a wide audience and which comes off as authentic. I found myself brewing up similar comments for this review, for example, as I did about Mission Child, also impressed at the skill it took to present an intimate portrait from the point of view of the invaded, but someone like McHugh has exceptional works like this one in her canon to draw from. Achebe's not inventing the world he writes about, and is instead portraying directly his own experiences of two cultures, living in one, and remembering the other with humanity and regret.

Down With Disease

I want to defend--in a completely irrelevant context, pointlessly after the fact, and to a totally different audience--something I said recently. After a little nudge in this direction, I've been trying over the past few months to expand my musical horizons a little (comically, maybe, at my age), and I've been asking around here and there. I have been soliciting, more than usual, stuff that will feed a taste that I usually describe to people as "upbeat, but pissed off." Mysteriously, I caught mytself putting a Phish song in that category, and although it's a ludicrous description on its face, I think I must stand by it.

For the minimal effort of keeping my conversations separate-ish and my blog posts less redundant, I am not going to back up here too much. Suffice to say that one of the great things about music is its ability to play off of expectations, to establish them by virtue of tradition, even-numbered tempos, or harmonics, and then to delay or reward that expectation at will. That it's so effective is still pretty much magic to me (in other news, goddamn you talented people anyway), much as I like to pretend to puzzle it out* (boring whoever will listen). And when it comes together it's indelible. I've needed other moods served too, but my favorite is still something that takes frustrated energy and gives it any kind of positive conduit. And if it gets me to sing along or run in double-time, then it's very special indeed. The blues is the legendary embodiment of this kind of thing, except that in my preference, I'm not so much about channeling misery into a perverted joy. Or maybe it's better to call it a different kind of misery that I need to channel, something that's keyed in the middle ground between defiance and defeat, a little closer to the brand that I am forced to live in, or that I create prodigiously my own damn self.

There are about three or four Phish songs on my forever playlist that evolved only slowly since the Napster days. If Down With Disease** had an ancient cameo on this-here blog once, that's because my eternal rotation only contains forty-two tunes. I can't help it. I fall into music like friendship, and I have a difficult time with casual acquaintance.

Me and Phish never did quite became BFFs (er, BPhPhs), but I've always gotten along with them well enough. They are a band that defies my rule of thumb that good recording artists tend to be terrible live ones, but then I understand that their live shows, with their lengthy and tight jams, really eclipse the experience of popping in a CD and getting caught up wondering if the lyrics mean anything at all. And I'll get to find that out for myself next month. My brother has supplied me with about 4,032 continuous hours of concert bootlegs in preparation, and hopefully by the time the damn hippies get to Worcester, I'll be properly brainwashed. (My hair is still long, so at least there's that.) They do sound great live, and I'm looking forward to the show. Upbeat? Sure, it's delightful. But I've never heard anything less pissed off in my life. Phish, of all bands, has none of this negativity going on. They find a groove, and just stay happily there, making it look effortless. I think they've been in the same one for almost 30 years. It's like if the Grateful Dead were happier, and did funky jazz.

But I can find something in Down With Disease. It's a little pissed off. It's explicitly about being pulled off your game (by these demons in your head), about being held down when you want to move on. It ain't deep by any means, and Wikipedia tells me that it was, just like it sounds, the writer's (and non-band-member Tom Marshall's) ode to the joys of mononucleosis. The fact that it's performed with those zippy riffs and silly chants makes for an odd juxtaposition, but here, it doesn't amount to nonsense. It captures the giddiness of being feverish in an entertaining way.

But if you want to map it to deeper frustrations you can, and by a fingernail, that's what grabbed me. There's a fuck-you solidly embedded in the joyous sentiment, looking forward to a perfunctory goodbye. It's delivered with an open smile, mind you, and the smile's as sincere as the irritation is temporary. But somewhere in this unlikely song too, in that weird dichotomy, is a secret that I can only find those rare times when I'm actually on my game: how to channel that churning internal conflict into a positive life-affirming force. How, in a strange way, they're both the same thing. I do my best to write that way, or write about that kind of subject, and do a lot less well to live it, but at the end of the day, it's still alchemy to me, and I struggle to even spot the thousand barefoot children that I know are out there.



*Been at it for some time, speaking, as I was, of my own underwritten schtick. The CD I was listening to with my daughter when she was nine, by the way, was The Cult's Sonic Temple, which is still awesome. And yes, I did manage to warp her. We used to groove to this Phish song too.

**Evidently the only video they ever made, for painfully obvious reasons. Back in 1994, they forced you to.

Review: Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon

Manhood for Amateurs is a collection of essays on fatherhood and masculinity from Michael Chabon. I'd come across it originally when August (he among the quiet friends) had quoted some select bits, and years later, I had the presence of mind to snatch it up from the bargain bin when I saw it there. It wasn't, as things turned out, the ideal time for me to read this book, although it's not because it failed speak to me easily. It did. It was great in its way. In fact, Chabon's humor is familiar, his self-effacement is similarly backhanded, and his values, while not quite identical, readily map to mine. I've gone so far as to write, not only on the same themes, but on some of the very same subjects as he does in this collection (Legos, for just one instance). Nope, my mild peckishness comes from a couple places: (1) Chabon's a zillion times a better writer than I am, and it's not a whole lot of fun reading a worlds-better version of your own schtick, which, I'll add, in Mike's case has also got him gainfully employed and all kinds of attention; and (2) I've been turning the corner a bit too often lately from ironic bemusement into a fairly devastating self-analysis.

I'll dwell on the second point a bit longer. Chabon often finds himself comically awkward and ineffectual, but let's not pretend he's not also charmed by this, that he doesn't likewise expect others to find it charming. He's managed to forgive his own faults, for the most part, or at least make peace with them, and he is generally a whole lot more sensitive to his younger self than I've been lately to mine. In one essay, he describes the failure of his first marriage, in the context of discovering the not-very-deep limits to his misery. Even his bitterness, as he tells it, comes with a certain ironic detachment. In one of the opening bits, he goes on about the low expectations and over-praising that fathers who pay minimal attention to their children tend to receive, and okay, it's a good bit, and true. It goes on to suck up, however, just a little bit, to the women who deal with these things as stoically as society expects them to, and while that doesn't seem so out of place in that essay, by that point, somewhere in there, I'm noticing that his family is successful and wealthy, his (current) marriage preternaturally respectful and sustaining, that he lives in an absurdly supportive liberal community (Berkeley CA), and the burdens placed historically on women aren't much shared by any of the group. Somewhere in there, and throughout the book, is the acceptance of male and female roles as they currently are. It's an unsettled and questioning acceptance to be sure, and it's happy how far they've evolved from his parents' day, but there you are.

Or maybe I can define this by contrast, citing an essay that really worked for me. A later one reveals his younger self as enamored with the role of a Henry James style affable cad, and how, while working with capable women, he was forced to identify and outgrow, with some chagrin, that brand of misogynistic little-shitness. We men often start out with all kinds of affirmation of that little-shit behavior, he observes, and indeed it's a bizarre sort of tragedy that learning how completely unwarranted it is, remains an optional exercise. That thought seemed to come from a more sincere place than remembering everything that dear old Mom went through. Or again, maybe it's just a reflection of where I'm at these days.

I wasn't in a mood to read a cautious celebration of nuclear fatherhood either (I don't feel like a failure at it, but I'm royally sick of the all the sitcom conventions that pervade our conceptions of the job) but lots of these thoughts got right to me. One of his early essays managed to win me by the second sentence: "Almost every day, at least one of my four children comes home with art... And almost every bit of it ends up in the trash." It seems to me that faking our way through fatherhood, uncomfortable with our own authority, is a nobler and more selfless struggle than trying to figure out girls, and I'm glad that Chabon is uncomfortable with the romance of it too. Here, his slightly childlike enjoyment of relationships and culture shines more brightly, and fits into place more snugly. With kids, a mild and jokey push against authority is just the level you want. (And I did think a lot of my own father while reading these sections).

And Chabon is funny in a comfortably self-mocking way. That goes on here in spades. He's got a sense of the bittersweet that I can't help but share. Thematically, it offers a powerful message that we always muddle by in an odd juxtaposition of youth and age, men and women, past and present, expectations and reality, memory and hope. It's never a wholly bad exercise to get yourself caught up in the heartbreaking beauty of now.

The Invisible Hand ...of God!

Maybe because we're soaking in it, free market economics can be a satisfying thing to make fun of, or you know, at least mockery is healthier than drinking heavily. I've had several problems with the whole discussion these last couple years I've been trying to think about it very independently, starting with the basic premises. The "free market," for one obvious thing, is a whopping misnomer. It's not a spontaneous human enterprise, but rather a carefully-drawn set of rules and proscriptions established by the authorities (if that's somehow not the dreaded state, then it's the church, the mafia, Mom and Dad, or the fuckheads running the company store). Nor has it ever seemed right to me that assessing and swapping goods a fundamental human concern that is separate from the authority-defined marketplace. Economic-minded people are weird about glorifying that hustle and bustle. (I mean, is that how you interact with your social group? In the book I am currently reading--Debt, the First 5,000 Years, which is great--David Graeber makes a convincing case that this behavior only arose in human history when the hierarchy got sufficiently centralized, large, powerful, and impersonal. Spontaneous pre-monetary barter is a myth.) Considering that the practice of economics is intended as the reduction of a huge set of human behavior to quasi-scientific principles, it seems important to get the relevant aspects of human behavior right.

Perhaps the most annoying free market trick of all is a little bit more derived, though. The Libertarian-style question-begging argument is something that drives me batshit. You've probably seen it: the tendency to discuss hypotheticals and gedanken experiments instead of evidence and data, discussions where some desired outcome is defined (for today's example, let's posit that the highway system should work (via)), the method is given (the highway system should be private, because free markets!), and the rest is figuring out how the known solution will lead to the desired outcome, often using a lot of circular reasoning and, to throw 'em off the trail, a really big thesaurus.

[In other news, I'm really glad they didn't have blogs when I nineteen.]

There is a disturbing tinge of theology to that, something resembling Intelligent Design. We know God did it, and let's demonstrate how. Since it's God, then it's clear that everything is made just-so, and to bring us even closer to the near-perfect state, we must make less contribution. It's the same kind of reasoning you get in climate denial, which, coincidentally, is yet another conservative darling. It's optimism in the old sense: nature produces the best possible result. And evidently, it's explicitly central to the field of economics. I guess I didn't quite realize it went so deep.

Recall here what Smith was trying to do when he wrote The Wealth of Nations. Above all, the book was an attempt to establish the newfound discipline of economics as a science. [...] Smith was trying to make a similar, Newtonian argument. God--or Divine Providence, as he put it--had arranged matters in such a way that our pursuit of self-interest would nonetheless, given an unfettered market, be guided "as if by an invisible hand" to promote the general welfare. Smith's famous invisible hand was, as he says in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, the agent of Divine Providence. It was literally the hand of God."

--from Debt: The First 5,000 Years

As I've probably said before, I respect greatly the urge to quantify and rationalize things. I don't really have any problem working with the best intellectual tools of the times, nor is there any issue when the analogies that lead to improved understanding later turn out to be bad ones. If some of the central assumptions of economics are flawed, they can be revised if the theories still work. Adam Smith was by all accounts a great thinker, more nuanced and decent-minded than his dumber followers two centuries later, and Isaac Newton was a wonderful man to emulate.

But the problem is, there seems to have been little impetus to revise or question these central thoughts. Smith wrote a century after Newton, and that kind of optimism was already getting colorfully leveled by his contemporaries. (Poor Liebniz: a brilliant man who got stuck with a pair of the best antagonists in history.) Secular philosophy has reduced the anthropic principle to the level of fallacy. And even if it remains a matter of faith or motivation to some scientists, the modern pursuit of science no longer torques itself up to include "god did it" in its explanations of the universe. And we can argue that economics, similarly, abandoned this approach as well, but as far as I can tell, it's never much had much of a conversation about it.

The idea of economics as a field independent of other human behavior, that is only connected to authority in the sense of a bargain among equals, originated, according to Graeber, with Adam Smith himself, that it's in fact his major contribution. It's pretty far down the chain, but here we reliably have libertarian, erm, thinkers today, perpetually arguing, as a matter of faith, that things will be great, spontaneously, if this system is somehow made more true. Even though it is never true. This bothers me.

Perspective II

I recently read the novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (a longer review is forthcoming), only to find myself unsettled, a little, by some of my reactions to the first part of it. It tells the story of a transitional time in west African tribal culture near the end of the 19th century. It had survived more or less intact from the days of the transatlantic slave trade (or at least the communities in the novel had), but was now facing cultural imperialism by the British. Achebe presents tribal life with hardly any explicit moralizing (one reason it's such a powerful little book), and as he got into Igbo life, my mind kept rebelling--what an unsatisfying way to live! Not, I mean, in terms of abstracts--in those areas, the Igbo peoples had the Europeans squarely beat, even in terms of whitey's own stated secular values. The tribal organization that Achebe describes put modern notions of democracy and egalitarianism to shame. The villages weren't ruled by kings or caste, and titles are awarded through accomplishment and are more tokens of respect than actual authority. The closest thing they had to government were priests (who advised on superstitions), and occasional meetings among decision-making elders. It's presented in the book as ideal a non-authoritarian society as humans have yet produced, ruled for a thousand years by traditions rather than by people. Nor does Achebe communicate that these folks lacked intellectual or emotional sophistication. The book itself, though parable-like, is a walk through that very landscape.

Nope, I was thinking more shallowly in terms of the habitual western quality of life. The Igbo villagers could expect a lifetime of toil, of violent superstitions (infanticide, circumcision, threat of exile, conflict with other tribes), and believing things that are tragically untrue. Their diet sucked--yams are on the high labor and low nutrient side for a staple crop--and outside of domestic labor, they don't have a fuck of a lot to do. Women, like in many cultures, could look forward to lives of drudgery, sexual obligation, and the occupation of lesser social spheres. It's almost enough to make you understand missionary zeal. Those poor bastards live in dirt huts!

The Christian missionaries that sailed up the Niger River no doubt had the best intentions, but they brought their own corruptions, including, as Achebe states it, a government too. The moral argument for the new Christian faith varied greatly with the missionaries who made it, and Achebe appears to harbor some sympathy (as I do) for those inspired to great humanity through faith, and to acknowledge some universality of all belief. The British that came to semi-fictional Umuofia brought in a religion that accepted society's rejects, and although it won converts by refuting local gods through empiricism, it still was a faith (and this is the very definition of faith) that was apart from available evidence. (It's just that Christianity by then had learned to scope itself outside worldly cause and effect.) History tells us that the Igbo would soon fall for Christianity in huge numbers, but was it an improvement? Hard to really say.

You'll have to forgive me here. I've been wrestling with a gigantic post for some time, about 20% of which (the part about life expectancy) came out a couple years ago in one big installment that was boring enough to scare me straight, and yet here I am again, about to liberate another chunk of it. It's trying to address a paradox of modern times: the world has improved, right? But human nature has remained the same.

Improved for whom, you might first ask? And by what measure? And for how long? The global metric I prefer is, more or less, better lives for more people, sustainable for longer—these are things that morally justify our social nature. What else is there, really?

Technology and organization let us achieve more spectacular evil, but they also seem to palliate some burdens of living. In my past blatherings, I've attributed the general condition of the species to population density, resource availability, and the level (or manner) of technological development (for which "improvement" isn't linear, or a given). Modern America may net a better score than the colonial powers of the late nineteenth century, a hideously overrated time if there ever was one. Igbo social taboos arguably existed to accommodate high-impact slash and burn agriculture and to manage a sustainable population (even amidst horrifying infant mortality). However, at least to hear Chinua Achebe describe it, they avoided the iron rule of oligarchy better than most societies (although maybe tell that one to the women), and offered a simple and satisfying life. Could the more egalitarian parts of Igbo tribal culture really survive with modern scientific inquiry, population level, and global communications?

If I had to define "standard of living," I would put in terms of how difficult it is to do the stuff that we want to do. If we have few impediments to performing those things that our minds suggest are fulfilling and feasible (travel, eat, surround ourselves with beauty, enter and exit places freely, accomplish entertaining tasks), then our standard of living is high. If, however, we can afford few of the comforts we can conceive, then it's not so high; if we can't get our hands on the necessities of life (nutritous food, sanitation, optimum health), then things are officially squalid. If we're looking across centuries or across cultures, I'd take a normalized standard of living as a measure of, given the known options and preferences, how much of it a can body hope to enjoy.

As an economic term, it normally refers to, more or less, how much stuff we have. GDP per capita is a measure that is often connected to standard of living, and it's imperfect for the various ways that Wikipedia describes. [If you must go that route, I think energy consumption is probably a better scorecard than currency. Kilowatt hours describe how much we actually do per capita, not like these things aren't correlated.] By this measure, standard of living suffers from inevitable fallacies of small or large numbers; when we are measuring our happiness in stuff, there are rapidly diminishing returns at play. Attainment matters immensely when we have next to nothing, but there's also some threshold at which we don't--or shouldn't--experience a greatly increased standard of living due to additional television inches, or housing square feet, or asset valuation. And of course we're about due for a horrifying lesson in the environmental consequences of overconsumption as well.

In a way, standard of living is always subjective, and based on what we think is possible, that in turn increases with existing understanding, scientific knowledge, and social precedent. Innovations eventually become necessities because we know that they are available. Medical care, for example, wasn't a necessity back in the barbarous days of medieval barbering, but now that medicine is sufficiently advanced to improve health more than damage it, it has become an important component in the equation, as reasonable to expect as shit-free drinking water, which is to say, because we know better. That's not to say that people wouldn't already imagine a better life without cholera (or cancer, or oppression, or aging, or managers, or the aristocracy, or…), but it's another thing entirely to believe existence is without them is attainable. What did the Igbo people think of infant mortality? They imagined life without it, and believed (falsely), that they could reduce it drastically through superstition. Did that wrong belief further reduce their standard of living? (I'd say yes.) Would they have been happier with improved medicine? (Probably if it didn't come with the British district commissioner. It's not so clear the British could have provided it in 1900 either, mind you.) Would a people in possession of improved medicine be wrong to withhold such information (probably), and is it hopeless paternalistic to intervene with it, assuming without nuance what another group of people can and can't imagine, and what they do or don't value? Or, for that matter, is it hopelessly paternalistic to assume that we understand very well what we think we know now? (Please, let's take a moment to laugh at the Victorians again.) Anthropologists must make for terrific basket cases.

Qualitative changes exist though, differences in kind, not number, that really do improve the game at a basic level. Incremental technical innovations can be oversold, but there are a few that really did change the human experience: agriculture, air travel, telephones, washing machines, that sort of thing. It's grown, and increasing the options for human happiness might be a good argument for increasing accurate knowledge in general. Better to devote energy to understanding how electricity works than to appease the proper gods, right? But there's more too. A counterargument is that technical progress has always increased the options for human misery as well. Another is that it rules out simpler, more isolated options.

Mostly we Americans accept obligations for all of the other things, continuing to do so even as productivity (measured per unit American anyway) increases. There is an ideal where productivity shoots to infinity (zero man-hours to make all the shit we feel we need), in which people would at least not want for things, feeling free to waste their days wreaking their philosophical havoc. Let's posit infinite energy, and look at fun literary experiments from Player Piano (suggesting it's deeply unfulfilling to violate our natures like that) to The Diamond Age (or that we'll find other ways to ensure inequality) to Steel Beach (or maybe find new ways to be a bunch of useless gadflies, so long as we can prevent our nearly omniscient helper from being too much like us) to The Cassini Division (when the means of production is trivial, Communism will finally work). I love reading this kind of stuff.

Modern America, Europe, Japan, all look great in terms of standard of living, at least if you take the self-affirming view that those regions tend to, and exclude people who don't fit the story. Here in modern America, a young black man was killed--a sadly unremarkable fact in itself--last week in a manner that managed to highlight, even in our cynical times, a class of people that half of this allegedly Enlightened country would still prefer to exile. (There's little doubt that the arrest, investigation, and the interpretation of "self-defense" would have been different had Mr. Martin been white.) A small wealthy group consolidates its power at the expense of most of the rest of us, fighting hard to define obligations which preserve their financial wealth, and dismantle any state mechanisms that share the wealth. And even the reasonably well-off waste their lives unhappily in front of a computer instead of in front of a hoe. As well, the U.S. is doing its level best to recreate the British experience in Afghanistan, inspired as much (and as little) by revulsion at their backward religion as the colonial British were. Even our staple crop, maize (which Igbo people also grew at the time of the novel), is another nutritionally inferior one, no matter how much we can creepily over-engineer the stuff. Our own times tend to overestimate themselves.

Happiness, satisfaction, contentment--these things are what really matter. Forming gigantic social groups may have allowed the technological development that has improved our chances of finding these things. On the other hand, advanced civilization also takes happiness away just fine.