Intrigued by the frequency with which 20th-century theorists Bakhtin and Lukacs cite Balzac as the quintessential modern novelist, I decided to read some Balzac at last, and found this translation of Pere Goriot ("Father Goriot") by M.A. Crawford, entitled Old Goriot. I had amazingly missed Balzac altogether in my undergraduate French major. The very name causes a delicious shudder of the Iowa ladies in the musical play Music Man, so perhaps Balzac was too socially radical for my era in the Bible Belt. Curious.
I had a hard time getting started with the book, partly because protracted description of a boarding house in a poor area of Paris in 1819 failed to give me a clear picture or to make me understand why Balzac insisted it was dreary. The other cause of resistance was fear that it would be too pitiful, with innocents suffering either in silence or in page after page of mournful emotions. Somehow, however, I began to trust Balzac, whose authorial voice from the very beginning seems almost contemporary, sensible and serious, and even intimate. He stresses his intention to tell the story truthfully: "All is true!" he avers, writing it in English in the original for emphasis. "Will it be understood outside Paris? One may doubt it. Only between the heights of Montmartre and Montrouge are there people who can appreciate how exactly, with what close observation, it is drawn from life." I finally became enrapt with the story and with the narrator so much that I intend to read more Balzac, even perhaps tackling it in French!
A sketch of the story: young Eugene Rastignac has come to Paris from the provinces to study law and lives on the meagre support of his family who, although poor, have distant connections to nobility, and provide him with an introduction to a pivotal Paris socialite. He becomes dazzled and obsessed with wealth and success and infatuated with its elegant beauties, both the women and the lifestyle. Meanwhile he lives in the aforesaid "dreary boarding house" with an aged man, Goriot, who is "despised by all the others." "There always is such a laughing-stock" in social groups, Balzac observes. "By what chance had the oldest lodger drawn on him this half-spiteful contempt, this half-pitying persecution, this lack of respect for misfortune? Perhaps he had laid himself open to them by those vagaries and eccentricities which the world forgives less easily than vices. These questions go to the root of many social injustices."
When Eugene discovers and discloses that Goriot is, incredibly, the father of two of the most bewitching and extravagant young women Eugene has seen, the boarders change their attitudes toward the impoverished man who they had thought was simply dreary, probably dissolute, and certainly mindless, and the stage is nearly set.
In addition to being a counterpoint to young Eugene's personal ambitions with those same daughters, Goriot's relevance lies precisely in his "fatherhood." I question the translator's decision to call the English version "Old" Goriot: it is not Goriot's age that is at issue, but what the title "Pere" means in full. It means most directly "Father," and Goriot is an absolutely devoted father, his joys only those of his daughters and his personal griefs reduced to theirs also. A joking medical student interested in one of the century's early pseudo-sciences, phrenology, feels Goriot's skull for keys to his personality: "I've had a look at his head," says Bianchon. "There's only one bump on it—the bump of paternity; he will be an Eternal Father"(a joke on "Heavenly Father" as we say it in today's English). Already, when Eugene meets Goriot, the retired merchant had settled his fortune almost completely between the daughters to procure them good marriages, and been reduced by his own consent to living more austerely than any of the other boarders. We can also see "Pere Goriot" as "Pops" Goriot, and thus "Pere" can mean both a kind of old humble fool, as well as being a beatific symbol
As the story unfolds, the characters all take on more personality, and more influence in the plot. A fascinating temptation is laid out for Eugene by another most interesting lodger, a well-spoken rather bold and influential man. This Monsieur Vautrin outlines for him the endless drudgery that awaits Eugene if he should try to work himself up into the freedom and pleasures of the world he sees with such desire, the world of wealth and influence and beauty and leisure. On the other hand, he offers Eugene immediate access to that world, in a wife worth at least a million francs, a fresh young girl who is already half in love with him, if Eugene will only consent to share 200,000 of it, that and consent to the death which Vautrin assures him will instantly befall the only person who stands in the way, a selfish dolt, a simpleton.
What will Eugene choose? What awaits him as he attempts to win the hearts of elegant society beauties, women about whose happiness he is constantly asked by Father Goriot who begs Eugene to recount their social successes at a ball or at the opera, their clothes, their appearances What will become of Father Goriot? When does affection become foolish infatuation? When do principles represent only a shallow naivete?
It's a simple but intricate plot, and even the Countess Anastasie and Baroness Delphine, as well as several of the seemingly "untouchable" nobles, develop complexities of character that I did not expect. In short, this is indeed a "modern novel" and not a melodrama, although suffering is extreme. But the suffering is extreme because the social system is extreme: Eugene early learns that, in Balzac's words, "human beings are packed in strata, layer above layer, in the framework of society." The way these strata relentlessly press, influence, and shape human destiny is Balzac's real subject matter. and it is this "realistic" sense of class that marks Balzac as such an original writer at the time, prefiguring modernism at its full more than naturalism or the realism of mere verisimilitude.
Pere Goriot is one of forty-four Balzac novels published from 1828 until the author's death, in a sequence that Balzac designated in 1842 as "The Human Comedy" ("La Comedie Humaine"). He envisioned the eventual creation of many more with perhaps 4,000 characters in all, and explained this intention in a famous Preface, sketching the way he wanted to portray characters from every aspect of society during his era: from the civil wars of the French Revolution, to Napoleon, and the Restoration. He did not then know about the abortive Parisian Revolution to come in 1850, the year of his death and the year in which all hope of a society of equality for nineteenth-century France finally ended, perhaps. Or was that what killed him?
Friday, September 9, 2011
Monday, September 5, 2011
Bully for Brontosaurus, by Stephen Jay Gould. A review.
I was recently troubled to see Stephen Jay Gould described in an alleged "review" on goodreads.com as some self-promoting intransigent "Atheist," so I want to start my review of this 1991 book by citing its epigraph:
Pleni sunt coeli/ et terra/gloria eius. Hosanna in excelsis.
("Heaven and earth are full of thy glory: Hosanna in the highest.")
And in his essay on probability, logic and Joe DiMaggio's record hitting streak, Gould wrote: "The best of us will try to live by a few simple rules. Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with thy God, and never draw to an inside straight." (472, "The Streak of Streaks").
As I near the end of this year of reading Stephen Jay Gould's complete works (book-form), I begin to run out of superlatives. I am in fact in the same position as a 1941 Yankees fan after one of the games in DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak: such a fan could laughingly say of the game "Nothing new. Just another hit!" And I can say of Bully for Brontosaurus: "Nothing new. Just another hit!" It's hard to find adjectives to distinguish one book in such a long streak of excellent books. Gould's amazing feat is to have so many books all maintaining superior levels of intelligence, articulation, patience, scientific knowledge, literacy, history and compassionate philosophy. So here is "just another hit in the streak" of Gould's writing in natural history, logic and veracity, and related subjects like art, music, history, philosophy, architecture, poetry and sport.
I can also say that at least one of his books of essays should be required reading for any adult concerned with one of the following areas of needful thought.
1. Evolution. First of all, what is the scientific definition of Evolution and what does it mean? Many of us admit that we don't understand all the theorems of physics, let alone quantum physics, so we don't offer opinions about whether the law of inertia is "true" or not, and certainly can offer no thoughts about relativity. So why is every prating fundamentalist political candidate ready to reject what is not a matter for laypersons to decide? What IS science's theorem of evolution? Is it "Descent with Modification" or "Survival of the Fittest"? Does evolutionary theory entail Hobbes' "War of all against all"? Is "Survival of the Fittest" a struggle between individuals to see which can dominate? Is it gladiatorial? "Nature red in tooth and claw"?
Who is Herbert Spencer, and what relationship do his nineteenth-century philosophy and political applications have with Darwin and Darwin's theories? Why is it so important to know the difference? Do we begin a long moral slide to Fascism, specifically Hitler's Nazi propaganda and killing machines, when we subscribe to evolutionary ideas? Whose? Darwin's? Darwin, who said, "Talk of fame, honor, pleasure, wealth, all are dirt compared with affection"?
Understanding these issues might help to explain why honest and well-intentioned people like William Jennings Bryan for example (see below), and some misguided religious figures have campaigned inexorably against "it," mistaking capitalism, scientism, past German militaristic fascism, and Herbert Spencer's and Nietzsche's philosophical theories, for Evolution.
Editorial aside. After Michelle Bachman's recent (Fall, 2011) bald stump speech claim that "Evolution is not a scientific fact, just a theory, with gaps," I have to add that most such fundamentalists and conservatives who reject Evolution have no base of knowledge from which to make such claims and do so only to "be popular" (i.e., to appear more pietistically Christian), since their political and philosophical stances are certainly Spencerian "Survival-of-the-Fittest" and even Fascist in their eagerness to rid the world of inferior and lower-order people. The attorney general of Nebraska recently compared people on welfare to raccoons, and many rightwing political doctrines hold that all Arabs are Muslims are Ragheads are Terrorists are Evil and represent not just obstacles to our access to their oil but the anti-Christ. Hitler used the Jews and Gypsies and Commies and Degenerates (gays) as hatred-incentives; today's Hitlers use Arabs and Commies and Feminists and Gays and the poor. Gould would have said all this more clearly and more kindly. [End of editorial.]
2. Evolution and theology. Does evolution inevitably conflict with Christianity, or with Christian fundamentalism, or at least with the creation story in Moses' Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, mainly Genesis)? If we are not to believe anything except what Genesis tells us, how are we to believe that the earth circles the sun and that space probes do not locate the stars and sun and moon "above" us, but all around, infinitely all around? What is the main intellectual reason to deny "Creation Science," or now "Intelligent Design" a place in the science curriculum of public schools? Are all scientists who "support" evolution necessarily atheists? Is there an inherent contradiction between religion, morality, and science? Or are there simply different appropriate "fields" and methods of study? Science does not claim to explain or explain away what is not a question verifiable by scientific examination. Science itself offers no theological opinions, despite what individuals may or may not believe.
3. Social Policies and opinions that mask as Science. Aside from evolution itself, there is the problematic fact that some alleged scientists try to use science to justify class privilege, laissez-faire capitalism, and racial and gender hierarchies. History has provided a wealth of examples: Criminal types. Childish or effeminate races and cultures, with the clear understanding that child is of a lower moral order than an adult and that the masculine of anything is innately superior to the "feminine." (See St. Augustine for theology that pictures the infant and child as corruption and damnation and females as the source of sin.) People who are feeble, reprobate, degenerate, inferior. Supposedly scientific studies that predicate criminality, intelligence, depravity, on the 'innate' characteristics of social classes, races, genders, nationality, or physiognomy. Gould is an infallible guide to such charlatans and offers good guides for recognizing why these theses sometimes sound so good and authentic until they are closely examined.
4. Ignorance, or inadequate education.Finally, the underlying problem in all these areas besides dishonesty and self-interest: inadequacy of logic, clarity, statistical training, scientific methods (and knowing there are several), comprehension of such concepts as geologic 'deep' time. For instance, we do not realize the stars we see are essentially random distributions in space. We see patterns, and many societies have given those patterns 'meanings.' We don't know random when we see it! In another book, Eight Little Piggies Gould says of our easy mistakes about deep geologic time and human historical time, that we cannot grasp the right scale. In the scale of millennia, most species become extinct. But in the scale of human history, human existence here and now, that doesn't mean we should be careless about destroying the very habitat for which we are so fit, and which our children and children's children will rely on. We also don't understand statistics very well(and here Gould cites the wonderful Twain exclamation "Lies, damned lies, and statistics!"). For instance, an average or mean income of $5,000 for a "town" of 10 families could mean that nine families have nothing and one family has $50,000.
Gould addresses misunderstandings of the "Mean"(or "Average") here in one of his most personal essays, recounting how, because he works with statistics, tendencies, distributions and correlations, he was able to avoid despair in 1982 when –diagnosed with a rare and serious cancer at about age 40—he learned it was "incurable" with a median mortality of only eight months after discovery. Gould in fact survived another twenty years. If that sounds like a miracle, you need to read Section Nine of Bully for Brontosaurus on "Numbers and Probability" which is presented so lucidly you won't even remember why you didn't understand "mean, median and mode."
Probably one of the two most important contributions Gould made to evolutionary science was to comprehend and elucidate the misconceptions, even among scientists, of evolution as "Progress" based primarily on statistical and "tendency" misunderstandings. The "Progress" metaphor of history is seen primarily as a story of "advancement" toward complexity of organism, and is based, finally, on the image of "us" as the crowning glory. Oliver Sacks wrote of Gould, "No one has written of our illusions about progress in nature with more wit and learning." A way to think about the logical fault behind the idea of progress in evolutionary history is hinted at by considering a drunk who staggers along beside a wall and finally falls into the gutter on the other side of the sidewalk as "headed for the gutter all along" (in a non-figurative sense). Some events can only vary in one direction; no life form could ever develop that is "less" than one-celled. So the "distribution" is and must be skewed. That does not mean either tendency or intention. Think about it; read here, and maybe get the book Full House for a thorough statistical elucidation of tendencies (along with an explanation of why .400 hitting in baseball is a thing of the past).
The greatest of Gould's lifelong achievements, however, was perhaps social, and not scientific. He was an implacable opponent of demagogues and charlatans that falsely enlist bad "science" for social or personal gain, as well as a debunker of fuzzy thinking and the "unthinking emotionalism that can be a harbinger of fascism" so easily. Yet Gould was almost inimitable in his patient and—in my view—generous explications of falsehoods, their perpetrators and their camouflaged contradictions. One of the essays here was a paragon of such civil discourse, an examination of why William Jennings Bryan had spent the last decade of his life campaigning with fervor to abolish the teaching of evolution in American Public Schools.
The book's title refers to the complexities of, and rationale for, scientific taxonomies and the ticklish opposition between "Brontosaurus" (popular title) and "Apatosaurus" (technically correct), and there are less weighty topics considered in Bully for Brontosaurus: The unique adaptive traits and intelligence of Platypus and Echidna which are often ignored because the demeaning labeling of them as "lesser mammals" implies they are therefore inferior, when they are only distinct. The historical reasons we have the inferior QWERTY keyboard (all those letters, very common letters, typed by the weak littlest fingers) instead of a more ergonomically efficient one are located in the old key-jam tendencies of obsolete typewriter technology. The Cardiff Giant hoax of Cooperstown NY is compared to "that other one," Abner Doubleday's invention of baseball, and an interesting history of baseball ensues, arguing that it came from versions of stickball, from the "non-cricket" side of class divisions in England. In Dr. Gould's Cabinet of Curiosities are rudimentary limbs which are not "partial wings," a painter's theories of camouflage in nature, plus a literal buffet of topics: choral singing, Lavoisier, Kropotkin the" anarchist," and Voyager's trip out of the solar system. Justice Scalia and Jimmy Carter appear as guests whom Gould treats with warmth and welcome.
In his Preface, Gould notes that some people look down their noses at "popular science writing." He compares his style to vulgarisation, and claims that in France it has only positive connotations, unlike cheap or sensationalist dumbing-down which of course he opposes on all counts. But eloquently, wittily, with erudition and charm. And an intelligence that—because of his writing—has not passed away.
A Post-Script on William Jennings Bryan
Having been raised in Nebraska, where William Jennings Bryan is somewhat of a folk hero as a gallant Populist native son, I was surprised to read about the earnestness of Bryan's campaign against Evolution. Bryan? Who opposed war, argued for the independence of the Philippines, for women's suffrage, for the direct election of senators and the graduated income tax? Bryan the Populist, the champion of "the little man"?
Gould points out that from 1904 until WWI in Bryan's famous "Prince of Peace" speech delivered all over the world, he said merely, "While I do not accept the Darwinian Theory, I shall not quarrel with you about it" (420). What could have changed his mind so drastically? It is often claimed that Bryan's last years—he died just days after his "humiliation" by Clarence Darrow at the 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee—represent a degeneration in general. The Encyclopedia Britannica at one time lamented that this heated campaign was "inconsistent with many progressive causes he had championed" (Gould, 418).
Gould, however, honors Bryan's claim that his opposition to evolution after WWI was completely consistent with his lifelong beliefs, and Gould sets out to find out how and why he became so adamant. What Gould found is a lesson again in the necessity of separating a poorly understood scientific theory from its supposed social and political proponents. William Jennings Bryan listed three reasons for opposing evolution, all ideological: "For peace and compassion against militarism and murder. For fairness and justice toward farmers and workers and against exploitation for monopoly and profit. For absolute rule of majority opinion against imposing elites."
Why had Bryan interpreted the science of Origin of the Species as inimical to these causes? Gould found convincing evidence that two specific books had alarmed William Jennings Bryan toward the end of World War I, which one must remember he opposed so vehemently that he resigned from Wilson's staff in protest of U.S. entry into the war. First, a report of conversations of the German Great General Staff at their headquarters where American Vernon Kellogg was "tolerated" in the international and nonpartisan effort for humanitarian relief of Belgians. Kellogg reported that "The creed of the Allmacht (omnipotence) of a natural selection based on violent and competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals." He wrote that the Germans believed that the "human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage. . .should win in the struggle for existence" (Gould, 424). Thus Kellogg as well as the Germans, it seems, conflated this militant doctrine with Darwin's scientific theories about species. [The British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and even Belgians, along with Americans, had long practiced the theory in colonial conquest, slavery, genocide, and imperial expansion but without, perhaps, the jargon? jpr]
The other book, written by English commentator Benjamin Kidd, conveyed the same idea about Evolution but for a contrary reason. Kidd was a philosophical idealist and believed Darwin had created a terrible social force to liberate the "pagan soul" "previously (but imperfectly) suppressed for centuries by Christianity and its doctrines of love and renunciation"(425). It was not the science he objected to, but the "hold which the theories. . .obtained on the popular mind in the West." He thought that "everywhere through civilization an almost inconceivable influence was given to the doctrine of force as the basis of legal authority. . . "(425).
Thus a science about origin of species becomes conflated with, and blamed for, Nietzsche's nihilistic Ubermensch and Spencerian social ideology at a time of the most inflamed Imperialist struggle of the West (Europe & its "white" colonies both present and former) against the rest of the world. Germany, Italy, and Japan decide to use this ideology in extremis to wrest a share of the world's colonialized wealth. And suddenly we have an imaginary crusade for force and hatred by some "elite" powers to overthrow the former naive and innocent Christians of the world. I oversimplify as Gould never does, but then he is exemplary and I am impatient. I am already older than he lived to be, and have accomplished so relatively little that I admit to irascibility. It's mostly at myself and my social impotence, so please, Christians and anti-evolutionary readers, (if you've read this far) don't blame science, or Gould, for my little bursts of sarcasm. (Elsewhere Gould takes on Spencer, whom he uncharacteristically labels "that Victorian pundit of just about everything" and Spencer's crude and effective translation of imperial aims into "pseudo-scientific" doctrine. See The Panda's Thumb.)
"The Darwinian theory" which Bryan agreed to tolerate in 1904, he thus attacked after he became convinced of its viciousness by this equation of Spencer's bare-knuckles capitalism, German militarism and ideology, the glorification of force, and the potential overthrow of Christian "love and renunciation," with the innocuous science of Darwin and its insights about the origin of species. Bryan misunderstood evolution to argue that man reached "his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak"(421). He remarked that this conception "would weaken the cause of democracy and strengthen class pride and the power of wealth." All of this anathema proceeded from the mouth of scientists and intellectuals, supposedly, and Bryan's populism like all populism always skirted the danger of reactive anti-intellectual know-nothing politics. After Bryan read the direct testimony that Germany's aggressions were associated with precisely the social ideology Bryan feared, the one both they and he attributed to Darwin, he changed the "Prince of Peace" speech. "And fell into a declension...And all we mourn for" (Polonius, Hamlet).
Pleni sunt coeli/ et terra/gloria eius. Hosanna in excelsis.
("Heaven and earth are full of thy glory: Hosanna in the highest.")
And in his essay on probability, logic and Joe DiMaggio's record hitting streak, Gould wrote: "The best of us will try to live by a few simple rules. Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with thy God, and never draw to an inside straight." (472, "The Streak of Streaks").
As I near the end of this year of reading Stephen Jay Gould's complete works (book-form), I begin to run out of superlatives. I am in fact in the same position as a 1941 Yankees fan after one of the games in DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak: such a fan could laughingly say of the game "Nothing new. Just another hit!" And I can say of Bully for Brontosaurus: "Nothing new. Just another hit!" It's hard to find adjectives to distinguish one book in such a long streak of excellent books. Gould's amazing feat is to have so many books all maintaining superior levels of intelligence, articulation, patience, scientific knowledge, literacy, history and compassionate philosophy. So here is "just another hit in the streak" of Gould's writing in natural history, logic and veracity, and related subjects like art, music, history, philosophy, architecture, poetry and sport.
I can also say that at least one of his books of essays should be required reading for any adult concerned with one of the following areas of needful thought.
1. Evolution. First of all, what is the scientific definition of Evolution and what does it mean? Many of us admit that we don't understand all the theorems of physics, let alone quantum physics, so we don't offer opinions about whether the law of inertia is "true" or not, and certainly can offer no thoughts about relativity. So why is every prating fundamentalist political candidate ready to reject what is not a matter for laypersons to decide? What IS science's theorem of evolution? Is it "Descent with Modification" or "Survival of the Fittest"? Does evolutionary theory entail Hobbes' "War of all against all"? Is "Survival of the Fittest" a struggle between individuals to see which can dominate? Is it gladiatorial? "Nature red in tooth and claw"?
Who is Herbert Spencer, and what relationship do his nineteenth-century philosophy and political applications have with Darwin and Darwin's theories? Why is it so important to know the difference? Do we begin a long moral slide to Fascism, specifically Hitler's Nazi propaganda and killing machines, when we subscribe to evolutionary ideas? Whose? Darwin's? Darwin, who said, "Talk of fame, honor, pleasure, wealth, all are dirt compared with affection"?
Understanding these issues might help to explain why honest and well-intentioned people like William Jennings Bryan for example (see below), and some misguided religious figures have campaigned inexorably against "it," mistaking capitalism, scientism, past German militaristic fascism, and Herbert Spencer's and Nietzsche's philosophical theories, for Evolution.
Editorial aside. After Michelle Bachman's recent (Fall, 2011) bald stump speech claim that "Evolution is not a scientific fact, just a theory, with gaps," I have to add that most such fundamentalists and conservatives who reject Evolution have no base of knowledge from which to make such claims and do so only to "be popular" (i.e., to appear more pietistically Christian), since their political and philosophical stances are certainly Spencerian "Survival-of-the-Fittest" and even Fascist in their eagerness to rid the world of inferior and lower-order people. The attorney general of Nebraska recently compared people on welfare to raccoons, and many rightwing political doctrines hold that all Arabs are Muslims are Ragheads are Terrorists are Evil and represent not just obstacles to our access to their oil but the anti-Christ. Hitler used the Jews and Gypsies and Commies and Degenerates (gays) as hatred-incentives; today's Hitlers use Arabs and Commies and Feminists and Gays and the poor. Gould would have said all this more clearly and more kindly. [End of editorial.]
2. Evolution and theology. Does evolution inevitably conflict with Christianity, or with Christian fundamentalism, or at least with the creation story in Moses' Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, mainly Genesis)? If we are not to believe anything except what Genesis tells us, how are we to believe that the earth circles the sun and that space probes do not locate the stars and sun and moon "above" us, but all around, infinitely all around? What is the main intellectual reason to deny "Creation Science," or now "Intelligent Design" a place in the science curriculum of public schools? Are all scientists who "support" evolution necessarily atheists? Is there an inherent contradiction between religion, morality, and science? Or are there simply different appropriate "fields" and methods of study? Science does not claim to explain or explain away what is not a question verifiable by scientific examination. Science itself offers no theological opinions, despite what individuals may or may not believe.
3. Social Policies and opinions that mask as Science. Aside from evolution itself, there is the problematic fact that some alleged scientists try to use science to justify class privilege, laissez-faire capitalism, and racial and gender hierarchies. History has provided a wealth of examples: Criminal types. Childish or effeminate races and cultures, with the clear understanding that child is of a lower moral order than an adult and that the masculine of anything is innately superior to the "feminine." (See St. Augustine for theology that pictures the infant and child as corruption and damnation and females as the source of sin.) People who are feeble, reprobate, degenerate, inferior. Supposedly scientific studies that predicate criminality, intelligence, depravity, on the 'innate' characteristics of social classes, races, genders, nationality, or physiognomy. Gould is an infallible guide to such charlatans and offers good guides for recognizing why these theses sometimes sound so good and authentic until they are closely examined.
4. Ignorance, or inadequate education.Finally, the underlying problem in all these areas besides dishonesty and self-interest: inadequacy of logic, clarity, statistical training, scientific methods (and knowing there are several), comprehension of such concepts as geologic 'deep' time. For instance, we do not realize the stars we see are essentially random distributions in space. We see patterns, and many societies have given those patterns 'meanings.' We don't know random when we see it! In another book, Eight Little Piggies Gould says of our easy mistakes about deep geologic time and human historical time, that we cannot grasp the right scale. In the scale of millennia, most species become extinct. But in the scale of human history, human existence here and now, that doesn't mean we should be careless about destroying the very habitat for which we are so fit, and which our children and children's children will rely on. We also don't understand statistics very well(and here Gould cites the wonderful Twain exclamation "Lies, damned lies, and statistics!"). For instance, an average or mean income of $5,000 for a "town" of 10 families could mean that nine families have nothing and one family has $50,000.
Gould addresses misunderstandings of the "Mean"(or "Average") here in one of his most personal essays, recounting how, because he works with statistics, tendencies, distributions and correlations, he was able to avoid despair in 1982 when –diagnosed with a rare and serious cancer at about age 40—he learned it was "incurable" with a median mortality of only eight months after discovery. Gould in fact survived another twenty years. If that sounds like a miracle, you need to read Section Nine of Bully for Brontosaurus on "Numbers and Probability" which is presented so lucidly you won't even remember why you didn't understand "mean, median and mode."
Probably one of the two most important contributions Gould made to evolutionary science was to comprehend and elucidate the misconceptions, even among scientists, of evolution as "Progress" based primarily on statistical and "tendency" misunderstandings. The "Progress" metaphor of history is seen primarily as a story of "advancement" toward complexity of organism, and is based, finally, on the image of "us" as the crowning glory. Oliver Sacks wrote of Gould, "No one has written of our illusions about progress in nature with more wit and learning." A way to think about the logical fault behind the idea of progress in evolutionary history is hinted at by considering a drunk who staggers along beside a wall and finally falls into the gutter on the other side of the sidewalk as "headed for the gutter all along" (in a non-figurative sense). Some events can only vary in one direction; no life form could ever develop that is "less" than one-celled. So the "distribution" is and must be skewed. That does not mean either tendency or intention. Think about it; read here, and maybe get the book Full House for a thorough statistical elucidation of tendencies (along with an explanation of why .400 hitting in baseball is a thing of the past).
The greatest of Gould's lifelong achievements, however, was perhaps social, and not scientific. He was an implacable opponent of demagogues and charlatans that falsely enlist bad "science" for social or personal gain, as well as a debunker of fuzzy thinking and the "unthinking emotionalism that can be a harbinger of fascism" so easily. Yet Gould was almost inimitable in his patient and—in my view—generous explications of falsehoods, their perpetrators and their camouflaged contradictions. One of the essays here was a paragon of such civil discourse, an examination of why William Jennings Bryan had spent the last decade of his life campaigning with fervor to abolish the teaching of evolution in American Public Schools.
The book's title refers to the complexities of, and rationale for, scientific taxonomies and the ticklish opposition between "Brontosaurus" (popular title) and "Apatosaurus" (technically correct), and there are less weighty topics considered in Bully for Brontosaurus: The unique adaptive traits and intelligence of Platypus and Echidna which are often ignored because the demeaning labeling of them as "lesser mammals" implies they are therefore inferior, when they are only distinct. The historical reasons we have the inferior QWERTY keyboard (all those letters, very common letters, typed by the weak littlest fingers) instead of a more ergonomically efficient one are located in the old key-jam tendencies of obsolete typewriter technology. The Cardiff Giant hoax of Cooperstown NY is compared to "that other one," Abner Doubleday's invention of baseball, and an interesting history of baseball ensues, arguing that it came from versions of stickball, from the "non-cricket" side of class divisions in England. In Dr. Gould's Cabinet of Curiosities are rudimentary limbs which are not "partial wings," a painter's theories of camouflage in nature, plus a literal buffet of topics: choral singing, Lavoisier, Kropotkin the" anarchist," and Voyager's trip out of the solar system. Justice Scalia and Jimmy Carter appear as guests whom Gould treats with warmth and welcome.
In his Preface, Gould notes that some people look down their noses at "popular science writing." He compares his style to vulgarisation, and claims that in France it has only positive connotations, unlike cheap or sensationalist dumbing-down which of course he opposes on all counts. But eloquently, wittily, with erudition and charm. And an intelligence that—because of his writing—has not passed away.
A Post-Script on William Jennings Bryan
Having been raised in Nebraska, where William Jennings Bryan is somewhat of a folk hero as a gallant Populist native son, I was surprised to read about the earnestness of Bryan's campaign against Evolution. Bryan? Who opposed war, argued for the independence of the Philippines, for women's suffrage, for the direct election of senators and the graduated income tax? Bryan the Populist, the champion of "the little man"?
Gould points out that from 1904 until WWI in Bryan's famous "Prince of Peace" speech delivered all over the world, he said merely, "While I do not accept the Darwinian Theory, I shall not quarrel with you about it" (420). What could have changed his mind so drastically? It is often claimed that Bryan's last years—he died just days after his "humiliation" by Clarence Darrow at the 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee—represent a degeneration in general. The Encyclopedia Britannica at one time lamented that this heated campaign was "inconsistent with many progressive causes he had championed" (Gould, 418).
Gould, however, honors Bryan's claim that his opposition to evolution after WWI was completely consistent with his lifelong beliefs, and Gould sets out to find out how and why he became so adamant. What Gould found is a lesson again in the necessity of separating a poorly understood scientific theory from its supposed social and political proponents. William Jennings Bryan listed three reasons for opposing evolution, all ideological: "For peace and compassion against militarism and murder. For fairness and justice toward farmers and workers and against exploitation for monopoly and profit. For absolute rule of majority opinion against imposing elites."
Why had Bryan interpreted the science of Origin of the Species as inimical to these causes? Gould found convincing evidence that two specific books had alarmed William Jennings Bryan toward the end of World War I, which one must remember he opposed so vehemently that he resigned from Wilson's staff in protest of U.S. entry into the war. First, a report of conversations of the German Great General Staff at their headquarters where American Vernon Kellogg was "tolerated" in the international and nonpartisan effort for humanitarian relief of Belgians. Kellogg reported that "The creed of the Allmacht (omnipotence) of a natural selection based on violent and competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals." He wrote that the Germans believed that the "human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage. . .should win in the struggle for existence" (Gould, 424). Thus Kellogg as well as the Germans, it seems, conflated this militant doctrine with Darwin's scientific theories about species. [The British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and even Belgians, along with Americans, had long practiced the theory in colonial conquest, slavery, genocide, and imperial expansion but without, perhaps, the jargon? jpr]
The other book, written by English commentator Benjamin Kidd, conveyed the same idea about Evolution but for a contrary reason. Kidd was a philosophical idealist and believed Darwin had created a terrible social force to liberate the "pagan soul" "previously (but imperfectly) suppressed for centuries by Christianity and its doctrines of love and renunciation"(425). It was not the science he objected to, but the "hold which the theories. . .obtained on the popular mind in the West." He thought that "everywhere through civilization an almost inconceivable influence was given to the doctrine of force as the basis of legal authority. . . "(425).
Thus a science about origin of species becomes conflated with, and blamed for, Nietzsche's nihilistic Ubermensch and Spencerian social ideology at a time of the most inflamed Imperialist struggle of the West (Europe & its "white" colonies both present and former) against the rest of the world. Germany, Italy, and Japan decide to use this ideology in extremis to wrest a share of the world's colonialized wealth. And suddenly we have an imaginary crusade for force and hatred by some "elite" powers to overthrow the former naive and innocent Christians of the world. I oversimplify as Gould never does, but then he is exemplary and I am impatient. I am already older than he lived to be, and have accomplished so relatively little that I admit to irascibility. It's mostly at myself and my social impotence, so please, Christians and anti-evolutionary readers, (if you've read this far) don't blame science, or Gould, for my little bursts of sarcasm. (Elsewhere Gould takes on Spencer, whom he uncharacteristically labels "that Victorian pundit of just about everything" and Spencer's crude and effective translation of imperial aims into "pseudo-scientific" doctrine. See The Panda's Thumb.)
"The Darwinian theory" which Bryan agreed to tolerate in 1904, he thus attacked after he became convinced of its viciousness by this equation of Spencer's bare-knuckles capitalism, German militarism and ideology, the glorification of force, and the potential overthrow of Christian "love and renunciation," with the innocuous science of Darwin and its insights about the origin of species. Bryan misunderstood evolution to argue that man reached "his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak"(421). He remarked that this conception "would weaken the cause of democracy and strengthen class pride and the power of wealth." All of this anathema proceeded from the mouth of scientists and intellectuals, supposedly, and Bryan's populism like all populism always skirted the danger of reactive anti-intellectual know-nothing politics. After Bryan read the direct testimony that Germany's aggressions were associated with precisely the social ideology Bryan feared, the one both they and he attributed to Darwin, he changed the "Prince of Peace" speech. "And fell into a declension...And all we mourn for" (Polonius, Hamlet).
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
"Cutting for Stone," by Abraham Verghese. A Review.
Verghese is a new author to me; he has, understandably, only two previous books, for besides being a writer, he is a physician who also holds two appointments at distinguished medical centers in Stanford and San Antonio. This book only just misses my 5-star superlative rating, but it was compelling, intelligent and intricate, reflective and shot through with symbolism and analogy. Cutting for Stone is set primarily in Ethiopia, with India as the background, and the US—New York and Boston--as a third setting. It takes place in a panoramic twenty-five years of Ethiopian life, rich with detailed understanding of the people and culture and its geopolitical history. It is an intensely sensual novel—the smells, tastes, flowers, seasons and skies of Ethiopia especially. The narrator Marion Stone, one of two identical boy twins, even begins his distinction in medicine by his sensitivity to the smells of different medical conditions, a talent he shares with his obstetrician mother Hema.
The story proper begins when four people from India come separately to a medical clinic in Addis Ababa at a key moment in history: "It was 1947, and the British were finally leaving India; the Quit India Movement had made the impossible come about. Saintly Amma slowly let the air out of her lungs. It was a new world, and bold action was called for, or so she believed. "
In 1954 at the clinic are born identical twin boys and their lives become inextricably interwoven with the politics and history of Ethiopia, including a tragic failed coup against Emperor Haile Selassie, the struggles of the Eritrean people, a successful but disastrous military uprising and dictatorship, and finally a more stable and humane revolution. The novel is well worth reading if only for the vivid realities of Ethiopian life conveyed through its intersection with an understaffed and underfunded medical clinic run by a Christian matron who sets her jaw against the endless donation of Bibles and religious material, believing that their patients need medicine, not missionary zeal.
The people of Ethiopia themselves figure not just as exotic or pitiful "natives" but as complex characters, their humanity more fully realized than in most stories set in Africa and written by non-Africans. Verghese shows Emperor Haile Selassie as a dictator responsible for the country's poverty. His caprice and paranoia and resplendent lifestyle (20 are Rolls Royces among his 26 cars) are set against the results of his rule: rickets, malnutrition, joblessness, prostitution, and untreated diseases. Nor does Verghese spare some of the country's customs like genital mutilation ("female circumcision"), and the too-frequent tragedy of girls in labor too young, resulting in sometimes immediate death of baby and mother, or sometimes a lingering hideous condition leading more slowly to the same conclusion: a condition called "fistula," where a baby's head being ground against an immature pelvis in impossible labor destroys vaginal tissue, leading to ulcerations where the bladder leaks constantly into the diseased remains of a stinking vagina.
This introduces the second unique beauty of the book, although the word "beauty" may seem a strange word to use after a description of "fistulas," but what distinguishes the book above all, I think, is something which online reader chat cites as obstacle. It is what definitively rescues the story from being romantic or exotic: the intense language of physiology, details of medical procedures, of colon surgery, liver transplants, disastrous labors, babies dying, twisted colons, "Version" clinic in which women from the country are taught how to reposition breech babies. In these scenes, the body glistens and throbs, or it dries and fades, it leaks, it smells, while human language and skills survey, senses alert, and then intervene, cutting, clamping, removing, replacing, resectioning. In a brief prologue the narrator, Dr. Marion Stone speaks from Ethiopia of his career at age fifty: "I venerate the sight of the abdomen and chest laid open. I'm ashamed of our human capacity to hurt and maim one another, to desecrate the body." His language is that of reverence:
My fingers "'run the bowel' looking for holes that a blade or bullet might have created, coil after glistening coil, twenty-three feet of it compacted into such a small space. The gut that has slithered past my fingers like this in the African night would by now reach the Cape of Good Hope, and I have yet to see the serpent's head. But I do see the ordinary miracles under skin and rib and muscle, visions concealed from their owner."
Intense scenes of medical engagement function almost as a counter-narrative. Although often suspenseful and dramatic, they are written in the language of a densely precise science, arcane and esoteric to the layperson. It is also a historical language, recording the conquests of human anatomical challenges like the marking of ascents of Everest, and also ignoring the Sherpas:
There is a Chvostek's sign, a Bos's sign, a Courvoisier's sign, a Quincke's sign— no limit it seems to white men naming things after themselves. Surely, the world is ready for an eponym honoring
a humble compounder [Adam, an untrained Ethiopian] who has seen more relapsing fever with
one eye than you or I will ever see with two.
So writes Ghosh, the male third doctor at the Addis clinic, in a struggle from Ethiopia to have an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The third great beauty of Cutting for Stone is a deeply lodged poetic imagery, a resonance of sensuality and intelligence, of sympathy and anger. The title itself comes from the Hippocratic oath "I will not cut for stone," an enigmatic phrase, and "cutting for stone" continually unfolds new levels of resonance. One of the four expatriates of India is the Anglo-Indian surgeon Thomas Stone, a hidden character, self-withheld. The twin boys will be given his surname, and the middle name derived from their dead birthmother: they are thus named Marion Praise Stone and Shiva Praise Stone. One, Marion, will become a surgeon also, thus someone who lives "cutting," while the other is a savant who never completes schooling but nevertheless revolutionizes treatment of "fistulas," another kind of "cutting edge." The twins are physically linked in utero, but an instant decision to separate them—to cut them apart--in an emergency Caesarean section, has a long psychologically symbolic, and mortal, aftermath. They will search history for their antecedents, "cutting" to the bone.
The book is not short on humor, either: a panicked nursing attendant at the birth which sets the plot going cries out, "Japanese twins! Japanese twins!"—the hapless girl thus begins her role in the story getting things not quite right, always. But even she develops, grows, changes, plays her part. There are no caricatures here. Attitudes toward sexuality are consistent with the no-nonsense vision of the human body, its miracles, mysteries and its misfunctions, its dominant role in determining our lives.
It's a wildly adventurous story, but the adventures are never gratuitous. Ghosh is at one point arrested as an "acquaintance" of the first coup's leader, General Mebratu, who is based on a historical figure. Marion Stone has to flee Ethiopia through the underground of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. After a wild near-disastrous flight in a cargo plane, Hema applies a coercive maneuver to the pilot's testicles. Her move is not a crude self-defensive reflex: "she was thinking of the Frenchman's balls, of rugaeform folds, of the median raphe that separated one bollock from the other, of the dartos muscle, the cells of Sertoli."
She succeeds in immobilizing and overpowering him (she is equally tall). "The Frenchman, his eyeballs sinking in their sockets, nodded mutely. France had colonized Djibouti and parts of Somalia, and they had even jockeyed with the English in India before settling for a foothold in Pondicherry. But on this steamy afternoon, one brown soul who would never be the same again, and who had Malayalis, Armenians, Greeks, and Yemenis backing her, showed that she was free."
There is not very much anti-colonial talk in the book; there doesn't have to be, for the very heart of the book is Post-Colonial in flavor, philosophy, realism and determination. It was a grand experience to be taken into this world in which the US is a strange and dispiriting place of great wealth and great inequality and injustice. In a particularly moving scene, the mission Matron explodes at a Houston church visitor who is concerned that the mission should "teach Christianity." She points out the window: "When you look around Addis and see children barefoot and shivering in the rain, when you see the lepers begging for their next morsel, does any of that [sectarian] nonsense matter the least bit?" "God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by—by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace." The book also takes that view: Hema's pantheism, Ghosh's pragmatism, the Christianity of Sister Mary Joseph Praise, the Ethiopian Christianity of Gebrew the watchman, cheerful atheism: there are no doctrines that matter besides dedication to relieve suffering.
So why not five stars in my opinion? I don't really know. I think it's because almost all the main characters, and especially the ones we get to know best, are men. I'm a woman; I don't like to live in a world where one of the women characters is a beautiful dead girl, and one (an Eritrean named Genet) is always incomprehensible, her motivations and emotions unexamined, and she acts throughout as a kind of doom for the main characters, a constant irritation and emptiness and erotic stimulant who almost kills Marion. Hema, the strongest woman character, is eventually swallowed up in mothering, and Matron is a minor character. Maybe that was the small disappointment that haunted my reading.
I still plan to reread it, however, and I do strongly recommend it.
The story proper begins when four people from India come separately to a medical clinic in Addis Ababa at a key moment in history: "It was 1947, and the British were finally leaving India; the Quit India Movement had made the impossible come about. Saintly Amma slowly let the air out of her lungs. It was a new world, and bold action was called for, or so she believed. "
In 1954 at the clinic are born identical twin boys and their lives become inextricably interwoven with the politics and history of Ethiopia, including a tragic failed coup against Emperor Haile Selassie, the struggles of the Eritrean people, a successful but disastrous military uprising and dictatorship, and finally a more stable and humane revolution. The novel is well worth reading if only for the vivid realities of Ethiopian life conveyed through its intersection with an understaffed and underfunded medical clinic run by a Christian matron who sets her jaw against the endless donation of Bibles and religious material, believing that their patients need medicine, not missionary zeal.
The people of Ethiopia themselves figure not just as exotic or pitiful "natives" but as complex characters, their humanity more fully realized than in most stories set in Africa and written by non-Africans. Verghese shows Emperor Haile Selassie as a dictator responsible for the country's poverty. His caprice and paranoia and resplendent lifestyle (20 are Rolls Royces among his 26 cars) are set against the results of his rule: rickets, malnutrition, joblessness, prostitution, and untreated diseases. Nor does Verghese spare some of the country's customs like genital mutilation ("female circumcision"), and the too-frequent tragedy of girls in labor too young, resulting in sometimes immediate death of baby and mother, or sometimes a lingering hideous condition leading more slowly to the same conclusion: a condition called "fistula," where a baby's head being ground against an immature pelvis in impossible labor destroys vaginal tissue, leading to ulcerations where the bladder leaks constantly into the diseased remains of a stinking vagina.
This introduces the second unique beauty of the book, although the word "beauty" may seem a strange word to use after a description of "fistulas," but what distinguishes the book above all, I think, is something which online reader chat cites as obstacle. It is what definitively rescues the story from being romantic or exotic: the intense language of physiology, details of medical procedures, of colon surgery, liver transplants, disastrous labors, babies dying, twisted colons, "Version" clinic in which women from the country are taught how to reposition breech babies. In these scenes, the body glistens and throbs, or it dries and fades, it leaks, it smells, while human language and skills survey, senses alert, and then intervene, cutting, clamping, removing, replacing, resectioning. In a brief prologue the narrator, Dr. Marion Stone speaks from Ethiopia of his career at age fifty: "I venerate the sight of the abdomen and chest laid open. I'm ashamed of our human capacity to hurt and maim one another, to desecrate the body." His language is that of reverence:
My fingers "'run the bowel' looking for holes that a blade or bullet might have created, coil after glistening coil, twenty-three feet of it compacted into such a small space. The gut that has slithered past my fingers like this in the African night would by now reach the Cape of Good Hope, and I have yet to see the serpent's head. But I do see the ordinary miracles under skin and rib and muscle, visions concealed from their owner."
Intense scenes of medical engagement function almost as a counter-narrative. Although often suspenseful and dramatic, they are written in the language of a densely precise science, arcane and esoteric to the layperson. It is also a historical language, recording the conquests of human anatomical challenges like the marking of ascents of Everest, and also ignoring the Sherpas:
There is a Chvostek's sign, a Bos's sign, a Courvoisier's sign, a Quincke's sign— no limit it seems to white men naming things after themselves. Surely, the world is ready for an eponym honoring
a humble compounder [Adam, an untrained Ethiopian] who has seen more relapsing fever with
one eye than you or I will ever see with two.
So writes Ghosh, the male third doctor at the Addis clinic, in a struggle from Ethiopia to have an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The third great beauty of Cutting for Stone is a deeply lodged poetic imagery, a resonance of sensuality and intelligence, of sympathy and anger. The title itself comes from the Hippocratic oath "I will not cut for stone," an enigmatic phrase, and "cutting for stone" continually unfolds new levels of resonance. One of the four expatriates of India is the Anglo-Indian surgeon Thomas Stone, a hidden character, self-withheld. The twin boys will be given his surname, and the middle name derived from their dead birthmother: they are thus named Marion Praise Stone and Shiva Praise Stone. One, Marion, will become a surgeon also, thus someone who lives "cutting," while the other is a savant who never completes schooling but nevertheless revolutionizes treatment of "fistulas," another kind of "cutting edge." The twins are physically linked in utero, but an instant decision to separate them—to cut them apart--in an emergency Caesarean section, has a long psychologically symbolic, and mortal, aftermath. They will search history for their antecedents, "cutting" to the bone.
The book is not short on humor, either: a panicked nursing attendant at the birth which sets the plot going cries out, "Japanese twins! Japanese twins!"—the hapless girl thus begins her role in the story getting things not quite right, always. But even she develops, grows, changes, plays her part. There are no caricatures here. Attitudes toward sexuality are consistent with the no-nonsense vision of the human body, its miracles, mysteries and its misfunctions, its dominant role in determining our lives.
It's a wildly adventurous story, but the adventures are never gratuitous. Ghosh is at one point arrested as an "acquaintance" of the first coup's leader, General Mebratu, who is based on a historical figure. Marion Stone has to flee Ethiopia through the underground of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. After a wild near-disastrous flight in a cargo plane, Hema applies a coercive maneuver to the pilot's testicles. Her move is not a crude self-defensive reflex: "she was thinking of the Frenchman's balls, of rugaeform folds, of the median raphe that separated one bollock from the other, of the dartos muscle, the cells of Sertoli."
She succeeds in immobilizing and overpowering him (she is equally tall). "The Frenchman, his eyeballs sinking in their sockets, nodded mutely. France had colonized Djibouti and parts of Somalia, and they had even jockeyed with the English in India before settling for a foothold in Pondicherry. But on this steamy afternoon, one brown soul who would never be the same again, and who had Malayalis, Armenians, Greeks, and Yemenis backing her, showed that she was free."
There is not very much anti-colonial talk in the book; there doesn't have to be, for the very heart of the book is Post-Colonial in flavor, philosophy, realism and determination. It was a grand experience to be taken into this world in which the US is a strange and dispiriting place of great wealth and great inequality and injustice. In a particularly moving scene, the mission Matron explodes at a Houston church visitor who is concerned that the mission should "teach Christianity." She points out the window: "When you look around Addis and see children barefoot and shivering in the rain, when you see the lepers begging for their next morsel, does any of that [sectarian] nonsense matter the least bit?" "God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by—by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace." The book also takes that view: Hema's pantheism, Ghosh's pragmatism, the Christianity of Sister Mary Joseph Praise, the Ethiopian Christianity of Gebrew the watchman, cheerful atheism: there are no doctrines that matter besides dedication to relieve suffering.
So why not five stars in my opinion? I don't really know. I think it's because almost all the main characters, and especially the ones we get to know best, are men. I'm a woman; I don't like to live in a world where one of the women characters is a beautiful dead girl, and one (an Eritrean named Genet) is always incomprehensible, her motivations and emotions unexamined, and she acts throughout as a kind of doom for the main characters, a constant irritation and emptiness and erotic stimulant who almost kills Marion. Hema, the strongest woman character, is eventually swallowed up in mothering, and Matron is a minor character. Maybe that was the small disappointment that haunted my reading.
I still plan to reread it, however, and I do strongly recommend it.
"The Lying Stones of Marrakech," by Stephen Jay Gould. A Review.
Published in 2000, this collection of essays from Natural History Magazine is subtitled Penultimate Reflections in Natural History because the "millennial issue" of January 2001 was to carry the 300th in an unbroken series of Gould's monthly columns since 1973, which would be the last.
His "Preface" doesn't say why he was ending the series. Like John Lennon at 30 observing that he had, "goddess willing, a good 40 years of productivity yet," Gould had good reason to expect ample years for more writing and research in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, unless he knew then that a swift malignant cancer would soon snuff out his light in 2003.
Here, however, the brightness of Gould's searching brain assays the very foundations of science (especially paleontolgy and "evolution")and its nemesis, Social Ideologies founded on distortions and prejudice. He investigates the difference between questions which can or cannot be asked of science, the crucial difference between valid scientific methods and theories which are often demonstrated to be mistaken or misinterpreted, on the one hand, and fraudulent evidence, invalid methods and inappropriate topics like God's existence, whose religion is 'right,' and which human beings are 'more valuable' or 'more evolved' than others. It is in his probing analysis of the devastating effects of the latter that his light is most valuable.
Let us take Darwin's theory of "descent with modification" as a scientific thesis, and the fulminations of that "chief Victorian pundit of nearly everything "(as Gould calls him) Herbert Spencer, so-called philosopher when he should more rightly be called apologist to Capitalism "bloody in tooth and claw." Spencer took Darwin's findings and turned them on their heads: he devised the slogan "survival of the fittest" to mean that evolution is the history of Progress, and thus the struggle for existence is purification; Thomas Huxley called his theory the "gladiatorial" school of evolution. "As many historians have noted, this theory should really be called "social Spencerism."
Specifically, Spencer called for an end to all state-supported services--education, postal services, regulation of housing, even public sanitary systems. He thought that any social intervention in suffering is counterproductive because it promotes the "vitiation of the race through the multiplication of its inferior samples." Charities and philanthropists he calls "pauper's friends" who "defeat the sharp...spur to the lazy and so strong a bridle to the random."
Does his program sound familiar in 2011? Andrew Carnegie who had been troubled by a devout Christian conscience was vastly relieved that Spencer "reconciled God and capitialist society"; Carnegie had worried about the suffering of the poor, but now "I got rid of theology" and realized that "All is well since all grows better." He acknowledged that "while it may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race" and concluded that we should welcome the "great inequality of environment, the concentration of wealth...in the hands of a few" because it was "essential for the future."
Gould studies the interweaving of such social ideology with political slogans such as those that justified the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire tragedy of 1911 when the horrifying spectacle of human beings leaping from the upperstories of the Trade Center buildings to escape fire in 2001 was prefigured in the deaths of all 50 young women who were forced to jump from the 8th through 10th floors of the Asch building because all safety exits had been blocked. Another 110 women perished in the fire.
This fascinating and important lesson in the ideology we could call today neo-conservatism is only a fraction of the assets of this important book.
Highly, highly recommended
His "Preface" doesn't say why he was ending the series. Like John Lennon at 30 observing that he had, "goddess willing, a good 40 years of productivity yet," Gould had good reason to expect ample years for more writing and research in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, unless he knew then that a swift malignant cancer would soon snuff out his light in 2003.
Here, however, the brightness of Gould's searching brain assays the very foundations of science (especially paleontolgy and "evolution")and its nemesis, Social Ideologies founded on distortions and prejudice. He investigates the difference between questions which can or cannot be asked of science, the crucial difference between valid scientific methods and theories which are often demonstrated to be mistaken or misinterpreted, on the one hand, and fraudulent evidence, invalid methods and inappropriate topics like God's existence, whose religion is 'right,' and which human beings are 'more valuable' or 'more evolved' than others. It is in his probing analysis of the devastating effects of the latter that his light is most valuable.
Let us take Darwin's theory of "descent with modification" as a scientific thesis, and the fulminations of that "chief Victorian pundit of nearly everything "(as Gould calls him) Herbert Spencer, so-called philosopher when he should more rightly be called apologist to Capitalism "bloody in tooth and claw." Spencer took Darwin's findings and turned them on their heads: he devised the slogan "survival of the fittest" to mean that evolution is the history of Progress, and thus the struggle for existence is purification; Thomas Huxley called his theory the "gladiatorial" school of evolution. "As many historians have noted, this theory should really be called "social Spencerism."
Specifically, Spencer called for an end to all state-supported services--education, postal services, regulation of housing, even public sanitary systems. He thought that any social intervention in suffering is counterproductive because it promotes the "vitiation of the race through the multiplication of its inferior samples." Charities and philanthropists he calls "pauper's friends" who "defeat the sharp...spur to the lazy and so strong a bridle to the random."
Does his program sound familiar in 2011? Andrew Carnegie who had been troubled by a devout Christian conscience was vastly relieved that Spencer "reconciled God and capitialist society"; Carnegie had worried about the suffering of the poor, but now "I got rid of theology" and realized that "All is well since all grows better." He acknowledged that "while it may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race" and concluded that we should welcome the "great inequality of environment, the concentration of wealth...in the hands of a few" because it was "essential for the future."
Gould studies the interweaving of such social ideology with political slogans such as those that justified the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire tragedy of 1911 when the horrifying spectacle of human beings leaping from the upperstories of the Trade Center buildings to escape fire in 2001 was prefigured in the deaths of all 50 young women who were forced to jump from the 8th through 10th floors of the Asch building because all safety exits had been blocked. Another 110 women perished in the fire.
This fascinating and important lesson in the ideology we could call today neo-conservatism is only a fraction of the assets of this important book.
Highly, highly recommended
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, by Stephen Jay Gould (1987)
This book (1987) examines the ideological role of the opposed concepts of time as a straight line and time as a cycle in the evolution of "deep time." It concentrates on an explication des textes, dealing with three "seminal documents in the history of geology." They are Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth (1691), James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1795), and Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830-1833).
I thought this would be a banquet for me: Stephen Jay Gould and "Myth and Metaphor." The role played by cultural ideologies in the study of natural history is one of Gould's major preoccupations that stands almost equal in his work to his accomplishments as a scientist in evolutionary biology/geology. And of course it is a good book. Readable and literate, as always. Interesting. But he is more interested in his topic that I could get with my intellectual blindspots.
There is no science more closed to my imagination than geology: I cannot, cannot, cannot, grasp the import of "billions of years." Astronomy might seem just as closed for its likewise impossible infinitudes: it is just geology of the cosmos, one might say. But at least I can see sun, moon, stars, the planets occasionally, and from Mauna Kea this spring I looked at the Beehive Nebula, the Sombrero Nebula, and of course the Great Nebula in Orion. I saw the rings around Saturn; I saw 2 moons of Saturn. It's true that at Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado, and to a lesser degree at the Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska, I have seen fossils in situ and that made geological time almost comprehensible.
So it may be significant to say that even I found gems scattered liberally throughout the book. A satirical drawing by Henry de la Beche correctly attributed for the first time since its publication in 1830, for instance. One chapter tells of James Hampton, a Washington DC janitor who from 1950 to his death in 1964 followed the promptings of visions to build "The Great Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly" which can today be seen in the National Museum of American Art. It is built from junk, trash, cardboard, thrown-out furniture, insulation board, carpeting and everything aglitter with gold and aluminum foil. This book, Gould says, congealed during the ten minutes during which he first contemplated this folk sculpture, "stunned by the clear and intricate concept of the ensemble." Stained glass windows of churches in Canterbury, Norwich, King's College and Chartres also illustrate the depth of the symbolism of cyclical time in Christianity as Gould shows.
On the other hand, he is equally articulate about the degree to which the 20th century cannot even see either cycle or arrow very clearly as deep analogies, because European history has so dominated our vision that we are completely saturated with Whiggish (and he explains the adjective) ideas of time as not just a straight line, but a straight line of progress, leading to "US NOW" and explaining why "WE" must dominate. Must "spread democracy." Must "teach entrepreneurship and free market principles." (The quotation marks here mark my own ironic harvest of popular sentiment and political jargon, not Gould.
It is, of course, a rich and significant book. But more for geologists, I think, than the general reader. I don't think I could significantly read even Charles Lyell, Gould's great model, so how can I fully appreciate an explication of any of these texts, let alone a comparative one.
I thought this would be a banquet for me: Stephen Jay Gould and "Myth and Metaphor." The role played by cultural ideologies in the study of natural history is one of Gould's major preoccupations that stands almost equal in his work to his accomplishments as a scientist in evolutionary biology/geology. And of course it is a good book. Readable and literate, as always. Interesting. But he is more interested in his topic that I could get with my intellectual blindspots.
There is no science more closed to my imagination than geology: I cannot, cannot, cannot, grasp the import of "billions of years." Astronomy might seem just as closed for its likewise impossible infinitudes: it is just geology of the cosmos, one might say. But at least I can see sun, moon, stars, the planets occasionally, and from Mauna Kea this spring I looked at the Beehive Nebula, the Sombrero Nebula, and of course the Great Nebula in Orion. I saw the rings around Saturn; I saw 2 moons of Saturn. It's true that at Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado, and to a lesser degree at the Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska, I have seen fossils in situ and that made geological time almost comprehensible.
So it may be significant to say that even I found gems scattered liberally throughout the book. A satirical drawing by Henry de la Beche correctly attributed for the first time since its publication in 1830, for instance. One chapter tells of James Hampton, a Washington DC janitor who from 1950 to his death in 1964 followed the promptings of visions to build "The Great Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly" which can today be seen in the National Museum of American Art. It is built from junk, trash, cardboard, thrown-out furniture, insulation board, carpeting and everything aglitter with gold and aluminum foil. This book, Gould says, congealed during the ten minutes during which he first contemplated this folk sculpture, "stunned by the clear and intricate concept of the ensemble." Stained glass windows of churches in Canterbury, Norwich, King's College and Chartres also illustrate the depth of the symbolism of cyclical time in Christianity as Gould shows.
On the other hand, he is equally articulate about the degree to which the 20th century cannot even see either cycle or arrow very clearly as deep analogies, because European history has so dominated our vision that we are completely saturated with Whiggish (and he explains the adjective) ideas of time as not just a straight line, but a straight line of progress, leading to "US NOW" and explaining why "WE" must dominate. Must "spread democracy." Must "teach entrepreneurship and free market principles." (The quotation marks here mark my own ironic harvest of popular sentiment and political jargon, not Gould.
It is, of course, a rich and significant book. But more for geologists, I think, than the general reader. I don't think I could significantly read even Charles Lyell, Gould's great model, so how can I fully appreciate an explication of any of these texts, let alone a comparative one.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Opening Opining
I have always admired the word "opine," a verb for the opinionated; I just never saw a fit occasion to employ it. At last, this morning, having lunch with a writer friend, I admitted that although I write poetry, and have finished one novel, and had a play produced in a rather spiffy venue --Plays in Progress at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco--I now, on the verge of "elderliness," want to write mostly OPINION.
Personal essays. Sometimes motivated by the memoir form, but more often strictly and plainly "opining. "
Book reviews, most of which I will also post on goodreads.com. Movie reviews. Reflections on types of poetry, on the novel as a form, on the realistic play and postmodernism. Writing meditations on Buddhist philosophy and psychology. Biography--which is always, of course, opinionated. Once in awhile I'll blast out a diatribe or two when I fall completely off my Buddhist equanimity.
A lifetime as a university professor in theater didn't leave much time for armchair criticism, so I retired early in order to reclaim the benefits of working for oneself. In theatre everything is collegiality and cooperation and even coercion, but wildly interactive and social. If a director thinks of herself as an artist, as I did, the artistic medium is human beings. Visual design, music, oral poetry, dance...all made up of humans and their bodies.
Opinionating is just as demanding, but it's blessedly solitary. Solitude, I have learned, however, is like Custard Pie: there comes a point when too much is too much. I am not looking for income, and although literary fame was once my one great desire, it's late in the day to cast my longing eyes down that road. (Or up the road, perhaps.) I chose theatre and teaching as my best service to the world, and I served that goal bravely and with dedication for 30 years.
Thus a Blog. And the dare to keep it going.
Personal essays. Sometimes motivated by the memoir form, but more often strictly and plainly "opining. "
Book reviews, most of which I will also post on goodreads.com. Movie reviews. Reflections on types of poetry, on the novel as a form, on the realistic play and postmodernism. Writing meditations on Buddhist philosophy and psychology. Biography--which is always, of course, opinionated. Once in awhile I'll blast out a diatribe or two when I fall completely off my Buddhist equanimity.
A lifetime as a university professor in theater didn't leave much time for armchair criticism, so I retired early in order to reclaim the benefits of working for oneself. In theatre everything is collegiality and cooperation and even coercion, but wildly interactive and social. If a director thinks of herself as an artist, as I did, the artistic medium is human beings. Visual design, music, oral poetry, dance...all made up of humans and their bodies.
Opinionating is just as demanding, but it's blessedly solitary. Solitude, I have learned, however, is like Custard Pie: there comes a point when too much is too much. I am not looking for income, and although literary fame was once my one great desire, it's late in the day to cast my longing eyes down that road. (Or up the road, perhaps.) I chose theatre and teaching as my best service to the world, and I served that goal bravely and with dedication for 30 years.
Thus a Blog. And the dare to keep it going.
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