Gilles Deleuze's ABCs: The Folds of Friendship

Shit Sandwich.

I grabbed a cheap used copy of Charles Stivale's book because I discovered a very interesting "quote" from Deleuze's L'Abécédaire interviews in it.  Stivale subtitled these interviews for the English edition, and I thought that this book was mostly going to be excerpts of that.   Unfortunately, since Deleuze prohibited their publication as a transcript, Stivale is forced to summarize Deleuze's comments rather than truly quote him.  In itself this wouldn't be so bad, and there are a number of useful summaries like this in the book.  But even more unfortunately, Stivale is not content to merely indirectly quote Deleuze, or relate the comments in the interviews to his publications, but instead feels that he has to play the philosopher himself.  This is how Continental philosophy gets a bad name.  Hack professors try to ape the difficult style of the subject they're writing about and end up producing something closer to a parody of the original.  I'm sure Stivale speaks French real good, but his commentary did not improve my understanding of Deleuze's philosophy at all.  This is the sort of book that makes me want to become a philosophy professor as a sort of public service, so that no one else has to be subjected to this level of academic wankery ever again.  

Sex at Dawn

How could I resist?  I heard this was a best-seller; it has a blurb from Dan Savage on the front cover; it was cheap at the used bookstore with all the cats; and it has "Sex" in the title.  I like sex.  It can be a natural, zesty enterprise.  All of which is to say that I went in with low and prurient expectations and was pleasantly surprised.  The book has many problems, but it stimulated a lot of thought.

Most of Sex at Dawn is taken up with refuting the idea that humans are a naturally pair-bonding monogamous species.  The "dawn" in the title accordingly refers not to a time of day but to our long prehistory as recently descended apes foraging in small bands.  Ryan and Jethá (the couple co-authors -- please don't call them married) argue that before the advent of agriculture human mating was promiscuous.  Chimps and Bonobos, our closest relatives, are both promiscuous species where females sleep with many males (and vice-versa).  Bonobos in particular seem to use sex as a tool for cementing cooperative bonds and defusing tensions within a group.  They are not worried about keeping track of paternity, and women and children are not treated as property of the males.  The authors think early humans behaved much the same way, and that this is our 'natural' state.  Then civilization came and fucked us up.  

I'm sympathetic to this counter-cultural perspective, and not just because I've long considered sex a very friendly sort of activity.  I've read a number of things in the past decade that have convincingly painted the Neolithic Revolution as a quality of life disaster.  This distrust of the innate greatness of civilization and progress is the message of books like: Against the Grain, Sapiens, Why the West Rules -- For Now, Dirt,  and Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers (any of which I would recommend).  And if we follow Deleuze -- with his propertyless nomads and monstrous paternity of interbreeding Ideas -- the strictures of civilization are even a quality of thought disaster.  Maybe, provisionally, the scientific and industrial revolutions have finally made the whole enterprise of civilization look like it was worth it.  5,000 years later.  Maybe.  Provisionally.  If we can adapt to some of the strains that our imperfect self-domestication has created. 

Sex at Dawn extends this same theme about how much better life was before agriculture.  Not only were humans better fed, healthier, more cooperative, and less oppressed by a surplus-harvesting elite, but even the sex was better and more plentiful.  Truly, they contend, it was the good old days.   Naturally, this sounds almost too good to be true, and one has to guard against some idealization of the noble savage.  Also, as anyone sympathetic to revisionist history is already aware, if you criticize civilization like this it will criticize you back.   So it's not surprising that the book has been the subject of some controversy, including a whole 'nother book rebutting it.  Given that I'm not a primatologist, anthropologist, or evolutionary biologist, I'm poorly placed to adjudicate a scientific dispute.  Certainly, the pop science tone in which Sex at Dawn is written does not make it able to do much more than make suggestions and ask rhetorical questions.  Nothing is being proved here.  In fact, there are plenty of gaping holes and missing nuances in their argumentation.  But then, that doesn't make it wrong either.  We should be equally wary when we see scientists circling the wagon to defend their discipline against interlopers, especially when there is a charged political question at stake.  For example, a review of Sex at Dusk (the refuation) seems to contain many valid specific points, but also some bullshit about how Ryan and Jethá, "suffer lacunae in even rudimentary understandings of evolutionary theory".  I'm sure that's what the Social Darwinists said to anyone who objected to white supremacy.  There's nothing in the book that merits this sort of sneer; their entire theory of the pre-history of human sexuality may be substantially wrong, but then so might the vast bulk of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology.  In fact, in the latter case, most of it has already been wrong. 

Ultimately though, the point of reading a book like this is not to figure out the truth about 'human nature'.  Not least because there is no such fucking thing.  Some things change fast, some things change more slowly.  That's it.  With our limited imagination and experience, we call the slow stuff 'natural'.  The distinction between natural and artificial is only useful when we understand it this way.  We normally lose this perspective though, and instead lend whatever status quo we are accustomed to the force of a natural moral inevitability.  The best thing about Sex at Dawn is that, in throwing the history of our species' sexuality into question, it enables us to imagine a world in which sex and power are distributed differently than our own.  You might say that this is purely an imaginary exercise, a pipe dream about a new and different kind of ape society.  But then again, so was civilization back in the day.  The deeper question is not which of these visions of society is more accurate or realistic, but about how we might move from one to the other, and what the change might feel like.  

On this front the book unfortunately falls totally flat.  They spend 268 out of 312 pages trying to call into question the "standard narrative" of human sexuality that centers around the differential investment strategies of men and women.  Eggs cost a lot, while sperm is cheap.  Therefore, game theory dictates that women should look for sap guys who will help raise children, but cuckold them with genetically superior strangers.   Men, in turn, should try to control a woman's sex life to ensure that they are really the father of any kids they care for, while slipping out the back door to hit it and quit with the ovulator next door.  As a result, monogamous pair-bonding is an uneasy but evolutionarily necessary detente that dictates distinct steroptypical attitudes towards sex for men (horny and casual) and women (frigid and calculating).  The book spends the bulk of its time giving grounds to doubt this story about the 'natural' inevitability of these attitudes, and providing reasons to think they may have instead originated with the 'artificial' imposition of agriculture.  

Then, with their last 44 pages, they try to imagine what men and women might think about sex if their views had not been poisoned by civilization.  And they pretty much don't know.  They have a puzzling chapter about the 'inscrutability' of female desire, which, despite their attempt to level the playing field, they agree is not the same as male desire (even in what they assert is its 'natural' pre-civilizational state).  Basically, they assert that female sexuality is complex and contextual.  They also have a weird chapter about what men would be like in this brave new (old) world.  Here, they do have a clear vision; men would be the same but they wouldn't feel guilty about sleeping around.  And maybe, since they would never need to pull up in a Ferrari to impress chicks they'll never get to control anyhow, they would stop stressing over, you know ... having Ferraris.  After spending so much time taking down the standard narrative of sex, would they offer in its place feels a bit anticlimactic.  Jajaja.

Now, don't get me wrong.  Everybody (consensually) getting what they want sexually without having to be ashamed of what that is, sounds like a fine idea to me.  And functioning as less of a tournament species sounds like a great idea all around (especially since I don't own a Ferrari).  I have no sympathy for people who dismiss possible changes in sexual behavior as unnatural or immoral or just plain hippy pie in the sky.  The future is always 'impossible' until it happens.  But how are we going to get there from here, and how does their 'naturalization' of promiscuity help us do that?  In fact, all you can say for this is that it renders the concept thinkable for those who don't do a lot of thinking.  Do we really believe that the polayamorous hoards would be unleashed if only they were to realize that monogamy is 'unnatural'?  Do we really want to base ethical and lifestyle choices around this concept at all?  Wouldn't we rather just have people think about whether a different set of sexual mores might be right for them?  Go read Esther Perel, or consider becoming an Ethical Slut, or a full blown practical polyamorist.  Why would you take science's word for what should happen naturally in your bedroom?  I know there's a critical mass of societal disapproval to overcome here if we want to try these ideas out more thoroughly.  So perhaps breaking the spell of natural inevitability that clings to our current arrangement serves a larger purpose.  But I'm deeply wary of the desire to let what will always be a fairly dubious science of evolutionary prehistory -- whether it be the standard or the alt narrative  -- be the guide to our present day actions.  In this sense, I think it would have been more useful if Ryna and Jethá had written in less polemic fashion.  If they weren't busy trying to prove to us how 'natural' promiscuous sex really is, they might have been able to spend more time telling us if studying this science might actually help us recreate this world in detail.  

P.S.  I took a moment to look back at Richard Prum's recent book The Evolution of Beauty.  He argues compellingly that sexual selection is a far more pervasive force in evolution than strict Darwinian adaptationists have given it credit for.  Most of the book is about the evolution of the amazing mating displays in birds, but it also contains several chapters about the evolution of human sexuality.  While his discussion neither refutes nor confirms the hypothesis of Sex at Dawn, it does fit well with its political agenda of increased female sexual autonomy.  It's also a much more tightly argued with respect to the science of evolution -- Prum is an expert, though with a very out of consensus view.  While Sex at Dawn is a quick thought provoking read, I would definitely recommend The Evolution of Beauty as the better book overall, and hands down the more scientifically accurate.

The Fixer

I read Bernhard Malmud's Pulitzer Prize winning fictionalization of the Beilis Case simply because it was quoted in the initial lines of Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.

       "Let me ask you what brought you to Spinoza? Is it that he was a Jew?"
       "No, your honor. I didn't know who or what he was when I first came across the book-they don't exactly love him in the synagogue, if you've read the story of his life. I found it in a junkyard in a nearby town, paid a kopek and left cursing myself for wasting money hard to come by. Later I read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a whirlwind at my back. As I say, I didn't understand every word but when you're dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were tak­ing a witch's ride. After that I wasn't the same man ..."
        "Would you mind explaining what you think Spinoza's work means? In other words if it's a philosophy what does it state?"
        "That's not so easy to say ... The book means different things according to the subject of the chapters, though it's all united underneath. But what I think it means is that he was out to make a free man of himself-as much as one can according to his philosophy, if you understand my meaning-by thinking things through and connecting everything up, if you'll go along with that, your honor."
        "That isn't a bad approach, through the man rather than the work. But ..."

The novel is the well written, if almost unremittingly bleak, story of the unjust imprisonment of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman in 1913 Russia.  Because the Czar is busy scapegoating folks of his ethnicity, he gets falsely charged with the ritual religious murder of a Kiev youth, and is jailed without trial for several years.   Potential readers are warned that the constant anxiety Bok feels before his arrest, the ludicrous charges leveled against him, and the brutal conditions of his imprisonment are all related in more than enough detail to keep you constantly alternating between despair, rage, and nausea.  It's almost as bad as reading the New York Times these days!  Truly, this is back when Jewish lives did not matter.  I hope we see more progress in the next 107 years.

From a literary perspective I felt like the writing was well crafted, but not really blow-you-away great.  In this respect, the most interesting parts were the way he handled the mixing of memory, hallucination, and real life as Bok spent more and more time in solitary confinement.  Also, PS. Spinoza appears as a name nothing more.  No attempt is made, by either Bok or Malmud, to grasp his philosophy beyond some vague stuff about atheism and freedom.  

Loving Kindness

I mostly picked up Sharon Salzberg's Loving Kindness simply because it was our shelf already.  It's a perfectly nice book with all kinds of thoughtful suggestions about how to have a more positive perspective on your self, others, and the world.  If you are primarily interested in meditation as a means of reducing stress and other negative emotions, it might especially appeal to you.  Since that's no longer really my primary motivation with meditation, the book didn't strike that much of a chord with me. 

In addition to the fairly general how-to-relate-to-the-world-more-positively type thoughts, the book details the basic phrase-based loving-kindness meditation, and gives various exercises surrounding it.  Maybe I'm overly focused on meditation technique these days, but these exercises seemed to me the most valuable part.  For example, I had not spent a great deal of time reflecting on the directedness of metta -- the way you are asked to orient your loving-kindness towards yourself, then towards a benefactor, a friend, a neural person, and a difficult person, and finally to all beings.  This always seemed to me like a sort of obvious great chain of being way of approaching the mystical oneness of the universe.  As if it was just the same metta drawn with a bigger and bigger circle.  While on some level, yes, that's the whole point, I found that following the exercises actually made me much more aware of a sort of spectrum of metta, as if it had different flavors or frequencies as the circles expand and contract.  Surely, there's a great deal of resemblance, but the good will you feel towards a friend is not the same as you feel towards a benefactor.  The idea of exploring these distinctions will be the biggest thing I take away from the book.

Growth

I've enjoyed a couple of Vaclav Smil's other books, so I was excited to dig into his latest, especially with it's promisingly broad subtitle: From Microorganisms to Megacities.  Unfortunately, while there's tons of interesting facts, and some interesting analysis, the book as a whole was a bit of a disappointment to me.  

The first problem may strike many netizens as churlish and old fashioned now that we live in the yolo age of tweets and gifs.  But the book is riddled with orthographic and grammatical errors and suffers from a lot of just plain shitty writing!  It's got the level of careful proofreading and editing of my blog (I mean not this, my original, blog, but the compromised second draft)  Which is to say none at all.  Now, with a live blog, you get what you pay for, but with a book I expect more.  This is annoying enough when it's just a simple typo that doesn't distort the meaning.  But that is merely a symptom of a more serious underlying condition -- nobody ever read this thing to make sure that the information and arguments were clearly presented!  Many sections are needlessly confusing.  They read as if each paragraph has simply been added in the order in which the author read the study that it cites.  Bob Loblaw said XXXX (Bob Loblaw, 1986), but this was based on some questionable assumptions.  Lorem Ipsum said YYY (Lorem Ipsum, 1973), but Bob Loblaw (Loblaw op. cit.) thought this was incorrect.  Eventually Foo Bar (Foo Bar, 1999) reestablished that YYY was actually a good approximation under certain conditions, but now that we've got more data we think ZZZ is true.  So, you know, the point is in fact ZZZ.  I am not exaggerating this.  Again and again it's liek readint he guy's wroking notes.  mAybe funnny as a one liner, but not something you;d like to spend 500 pages doing.

Even setting that objection aside though I still feel like the good lord gypped me a little with this one.  True to its title, the book is a survey of the growth trajectories of all kinds of different things.  First there's an introductory chapter on the mathematics of growth -- distinguishing linear, from exponential, logistic, and hyperbolic growth.  This is followed by successive chapters looking at the growth of various characteristics of natural organisms (the mass and size and populations of microbes, plants, and animals) the growth of human energy convertors (size and efficiency of waterwheels, windmills, various engines, all the way up to PV and nuclear energy sources) the growth of human-made artifacts (tools, buildings, modes of transport, electronics) and the growth of human societies (the size and extent of human populations, cities, economies, and empires).  While there's an enormous wealth of interesting detail in all these chapters, a survey so broad can't help but feel a bit summary and even somewhat arbitrary; you just can't cover everything.  

By the time you get to the last chapter, What Comes After Growth, the logic of what Smil chose to cover is already evident.  Exponential, and especially hyperbolic growth simply cannot go on for very long on a finite planet.  Every curve he's shown us in the past 400 pages is some variety of S-curve.  Some, such as the growth of transistors per chip or the output of the largest gas turbine, can look exponential over a surprising number of orders of magnitude.  Like 12 in the case of Moore's Law to date.  Which is pretty impressive growth.  But eventually, even this growth has its range and its limit.  And while we can debate what limits might apply to the growth of a completely human construct like GDP, insofar as there are physical constraints -- like mass and energy consumption and waste products and yields of photosynthesizing crops -- growth always comes to an end.  The points in his survey intend to show us the bounded growth and eventual plateau of everything humanity crucially depends on for its survival and comfort.  The inescapable conclusion is that all forms of human growth will also eventually come to an end.  We won't ever grow to be 12 feet tall.  There can't be 100m people on the planet.  We can't indefinitely continue to convert old dinosaurs to new heat, light, and motion, in order for ever more of us to consume ever larger houses and cars and Carl's Jr. ½ lb. Guacamole Bacon Thickburgers.

Which, but, really?  You needed 500 pages to tell me this? I mean, maybe some of the singularity obsessed tech brethren need to hear this stated as a long technical argument about the limits to the dematerialization of the economy.  Not that this is likely to convince them that the singularity has left the building.  For the remainder of our society, which is indeed unhealthily obsessed with growth, a book like this is not going to change their outlook.  Not least because they won't understand it.  So who, then is the book aimed at?  

Not me at least.  I needed no convincing.  I was instead hoping to gain a better understanding of mechanisms of plateau, of maintenance, of managed decline.  Or perhaps to at least understand exactly which limiting factors might bite first, so as to contemplate the consequences in detail rather than simply wave my hands around and warn that society will "collapse".  Smil at least cannot be accused of falling into this facile trap.  Since his discussion of growth was driven by quantitative data, he would like his discussion of "collapse" to be as well -- which variables collapse, and when and how, according to what mathematical function?  Unless you're going to describe all 9 circles in detail, hell is just a fairy tale to scare children.

Unfortunately, Smil is actually pretty vague on what comes after growth.  He only emphasizes that fitting curves and extrapolating unchanging trends has proved to be a terrible way of predicting the future.  This is an improvement on the hyperventilating Club of Rome view, which he heavily criticizes while sharing their concerns, but it doesn't leave us with much else to go on.  The closest he comes to exploring the issue is a few pages reflecting on Japan's "economic stagnation", which actually is entirely a function of their population decline and lack of immigration -- per capita GDP growth in Japan has been almost identical to the US over the past 30 years.  So I respect his caution and neutrality.  I too think that it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.  Yet the future always happens.  But what he offers us here seems like nothing more than a prequel to a longer discussion.