The Fifth Season

Describing a book as "an instant classic" is usually the sort of thing reserved for breathless dust jacket marketing.  But the first book of the Broken Earth trilogy really deserves it.  N.K. Jemisin creates a complex multi-generational character (as it were) that you care about right from the start and who you can root for as she grapples with the end of the world.  The cataclysmic backdrop provides many page turning twists and maintains the pace of action despite allowing Jemisin to convincingly fleshing out an entire fantasy world.  You really can't ask much more than this from the genre -- a good story about people who are not quite us, in a setting that is not quite ours.  Our own world always comes into better focus when someone is able to double it like this.  So yeah, join the bestseller bandwagon and go read it.

On a side note -- I'm hard pressed to think of other sci-fi that takes gelology as its central science, even though I always feel like geology is already sci-fi all by itself; I mean, if the idea of Ohio being tropical isn't science fiction, then what is?  

 

#reread 

One Hundred Years of Solitude

I'm not sure how I managed to avoid reading Gabriel García Márquez's most famous novel for as long as I did.  Perhaps it was simply because I have some vague memory that Love in the Time of Cholera was only okay.  I enjoyed this one more.  There are a lot of beautiful and amusing descriptions, and despite their cartoonish outlines many characters are believable enough that you get drawn into caring what happens to them.  I guess this is how a good telenovela is supposed to work though.  In a sense, that's what mostly the book is. Passion. Intrigue. Mystery. Scandal.  Humor.  Drama.  It has it all.  And then it has it again with the next set of characters in a slowly evolving cast of Buendías.  The long multi-generational arc of the story is enjoyable, but don't feel too bad if you miss a few episodes in the middle -- you'll have no trouble picking it back up.

The End of the Myth

Greg Grandin is nominally a professor of history at Yale.  However, the fact that his book won this year's Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction should have tipped me off that it was not a history book.  And indeed, if the book deserves any prize, it should certainly have been in the category of "editorial writing".  Because it simply isn't a history book; it's an op-ed that was too long for the NYT to publish all at once.  

The basic thesis of the op-ed is pretty straightforward.  Grandin inverts Frederick Jackson Turner's grand frontier thesis of American history.  Turner claimed that the whole character of the US was created by the history of its gradual expansion across the North American continent.  The ever moving frontier bred the American belief in individual self-reliance, its focus on an egalitarian democracy (as opposed to an old European class system), and its suspicion of elite culture and too much centralized government.  From Turner's view in 1893, these were all good things that made the US the good place that it was.  

Grandin puts this theory on its head, the same way that Hegel put Marx on his head.  The pun is intended here, because whereas Turner thinks that the material and economic conditions of expansion created the character of America, Grandin thinks this 'American character' (whatever the fuck that is) has always been inherently racist and bloodthirsty, and that this national psychological character caused the material expansion.  So insofar as the book has a theory of history, it runs as follows.  America was bad from the beginning.  It expressed this badness by conquering it's inland empire, so to speak.  After that, the badness went off seeking further conquests like the Philippines and Puerto Rico.  Then, when there was no more land to conquer close at hand, whitey appointed himself a brutal chief of police for the world, which dovetailed nicely with the rapacious expansion of post-war American capitalism.  Finally, Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer, and the always malignant spirit of America turned in on itself to give us Donald Trump.  Befitting an op-ed, the thinking is pleasingly black and white, and lends an inevitability to our current political moment that Hegel's Prussian-State-as-ultimate-expression-of-Absolute-Spirit would be proud of.

As history, I think this is just drivel.  Turner's thesis already operated at a hugely abstract level, trying to convince us of the unified history and character of 63 million people (88% of whom were white).  But at least Turner offered an explanation of American spirit based on facts specific to American history.  Grandin is trying to work at a similarly abstract level with a nation of 330 million people, 40% of whom are now not white at all.  On top of that he's trying to reverse the equation and claim that all the facts of American history proceed from the bloodthirsty spirit of a white supremacy that extends unbroken and uncontested all the way back to angry settler mobs.  Beyond being absurdly reductive, this doesn't even count as an explanation at all because it never really addresses the original question of why (what he presumes to be) the Anglo-Saxon core of the US started off so damn nasty (I say presumes because he never mentions the other 2 early immigrant groups, nor the huge cultural difference between Angles and Saxons that Albion's Seed discusses).  

I can try to read more generously and turn Grandin's thesis into a real explanation.  Instead of arguing that the US is just inherently fallen, perhaps due to our twin original sins of African-American slavery and Native American genocide, Grandin could try to argue that the fearful and violent individualism that (partly) characterizes the country stems from its endless series of frontier wars.  The US started as a small and weakly fragmented state in a big continent so always felt itself under attack from Natives as well as larger European powers.  The result was a fragmented national character that only found unification in facing some external enemy (at first real, later imagined).  So to hold the union together and give its people any sense of social or national solidarity, it had to keep crossing the frontier, even as this kept moving, and going to war.  This history would account for the insecure, fearful, and violent streak our country possesses despite its current wealth and power, and is also meant to explain why we never developed enough solidarity to convert to what Grandin obviously sees as the one true political system and ultimately end of history -- Socialism, or at least Scadinavian style Social Democracy.  

The book doesn't really lay out that thesis explicitly.  As I said, it's fairly uninterested in causal explanation in general.  It operates mostly at the level of trying to capture the "national mood" of the past, as if what editors write in op-eds and politicians say in stump speeches was the most important component of history.  But -- "Americans are violent racists whose endless wars are both cause and consequence of their never discovering Socialism" -- is the thesis implicit in the story Grandin tells.  I think this is a lousy explanation of history, but at least it would count as something of an explanation and not just turn all of US history into a battle for white supremacy that for some reason we've been inexplicably "losing" for 250 straight years.

So it's a flimsy history book.  Maybe we should ask instead: what does this op-ed think we ought to do?  Of course, the book can't make any explicit policy prescriptions because it's posing as a history book.  But it's completely clear that the good guys are the Social Democrats of Europe, and the bad guys are, well, the inflexibly racist character of Americans.  So I guess if we were to read positive policy prescriptions into it, these would include better healthcare, social security, unions, etc ...  And of course it's easy to turn steps meant to vanquish the enemy into negative policy proposals -- less voter suppression of minorities, fewer foreign wars, less border and customs enforcement, etc ...  These are all fine ideas, but you hardly need to read this book to make you think they're important.  The book also leaves you with absolutely no reason to think that the US could ever change.  After all, Grandin's history is of a uniform descent from Native American genocide to Trump's wall.  So his opinion mostly just boils down to, "everything sucks" and his book to a long list of things that suck, followed by things that suck even more.  Naturally, Grandin is entitled to this opinion.  In many ways it's hard to argue with.  Right now, the US really does suck.  In fact, it sucks so obviously right now that they literally gave this guy a Pulitzer Prize for claiming that it has always sucked.  Sign of the times.  

But I ask you, for as much as the US indeed sucks, for as horrendous as Trump's presidency has been, do you really believe that it demonstrates a uniform downhill trajectory from slavery and genocide?  

The Mindful Geek

I know of Michael Taft as the canny editor who helped put together Shinzen Young's The Science of Enlightenment and as the host of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast.  I've gotten lots out of both of those, so when I happened to see that he was giving away a book of his own on his website, I figured there wasn't much to lose.  Taft is a long-time student of Young's, so a lot of what's in The Mindful Geek is just a beginner level introduction to his teacher's more complete system.  Nevertheless, it might be an even better starting place for the absolute beginner meditator.  

True to its title, the book is aimed at the geeky tech types who Taft often teaches in CA.  It contains not the least hint of the religious aspect of meditation.  It relies heavily on selling meditation as a general form of self-improvement whose effectiveness is increasingly documented scientifically.  Given my sympathy for Thompson's critique Buddhist modernism, you might have imagined that this way of looking at things would not appeal to me.  But Taft actually doesn't fall quite into the trap Thompson describes.  Perhaps, as his interview of Thompson suggests, because he is aware of it.

Yes, he does spend some time referencing the scientific research on meditation's physiological and psychological effects that was covered more extensively in Altered Traits.  This is fine though as far as it goes -- that is insofar as we understand that this research is still pretty preliminary.  I read through these parts fairly quickly, simply noting that the book is also intended to convince busy tech bros to give meditation a try.  In other words, since I already meditate, I was not the target audience for these discussions.   Mostly one can just ignore them, or read them at the level of the latest pop science regarding what supplements one should be taking.  Personally I use the ginger-psilocybin-lovingkindness stack to get shredded.

More crucially though, Taft evades the Buddhist modernist problem because he doesn't try to tell us that meditation shows us, "how things really are".  The book carries little religious or philosophical baggage.  It's a purely practical self help book.  Everything is phrased as, "try this and see if it makes your everyday life any better".  While this is a pretty limiting way of looking at Buddhism as a whole, and doesn't address a lot of the questions that come up once you've been meditating for a while, I actually think it's a great way to get started.  Since the book does not profess to be anything other than an introduction, it mostly stops short of where the problems with Buddhist modernism begin.  And as far as introductions go, I thought it was quite concise and useful.  Taft picks out just a few of Shinzen's techniques, teaches us how to do them, and tells us what we might hope to gain from these practices.  He even includes 10 and 30 minute guided meditations that cover these on his website.  I particularly liked the way he explained the practice of investigating subtle bodily emotions by relating them to body language and our ability to recognize emotions in another person.  

So while I don't think the book advanced my understanding a ton, I would still recommend it as a starting point for someone who fits its target -- a science minded religious skeptic who wonders what all the hoo-haa with meditation is about.  You can cut through most of the clutter surrounding the question for these folks by simply saying, "just try it".  You don't need to believe anything or change any of your opinions to try it.  Just do X and see what you think.

Why I am Not a Buddhist

Evan Thompson's new little book makes a wonderful foil to all the reading I've been doing lately about Buddhism.  It gives clear voice to a number of the problems and reservations I've encountered for myself in studying meditation and its accompanying theory.  However, unlike the Bertrand Russell essay from which the title derives, Thompson is quite sympathetic to Buddishm.  He himself has significant meditative experience and a deep knowledge of Buddhist history and philosophy (studying this is his profession after all).  In his introduction, you almost get the sense that he would like to feel comfortable calling himself a Buddhist, but for reasons of intellectual honesty and precision just can't get there.  Perhaps surprisingly, the problem for him lies less in the fact that he doesn't believe in the classic metaphysical concepts we associate with Buddhism -- karma, rebirth, enlightenment -- than in the fact that he doesn't believe in the philosophical underpinnings of the peculiar form of "Buddhist Modernism" that has arisen in the past century of East-West interaction.  These underpinnings turn out to be, essentially, scientific materialism.  So the subtitle of the book could almost have been "Why I am also not a Scientist". 

Consider his own summary of the book:

My argument has been that Buddhist modernism distorts both the significance of the Buddhist tradition and the relationship between religion and science.  Buddhism gained entry to Europe and North America in the nineteenth century by being presented as a religion uniquely compatible with modern science.  Now, in the twenty-first century, Buddhist modernist discourse is at its height.  But this discourse is untenable, as we've seen.  It's core tenets -- that Buddhism is a "mind science"; that there is no self; that mindfulness is an inward awareness of one's own private mental theater; that neuroscience establishes the value of mindfulness practice; that enlightenment is a nonconceptual experience outside language, culture, and tradition; and that enlightenment is or can be correlated with a brain state -- are philosophically and scientifically indefensible.

 

None of these points is really a critique of traditional Buddhist beliefs.  They all center on the blending of Buddhism and science that has become the default public face of a newly missionary Buddhism as it expands around the globe.  Thompson's point is not the simple political one that the West has culturally appropriated traditional Buddhism.  His first chapter -- "The Myth of Buddhist Exceptionalism" -- outlines a fascinating history of Buddhism, starting with its Indian philosophic backdrop, and explores the very real ways in which it evolved though its encounter with Western ideas.  The punchline though is that most of what we today call "mindfulness" was invented in Burma in the past 100 years.  Buddhist modernism is not a European or American invention; it's an import.  His point is not to complain about modern "inauthenticity" but to combat the conflation of religion and science that this globalization of Buddhism has produced.  

In addition to that historical chapter, the book has: a wonderful rebuttal to Robert Wright's misguided and forgettable Why Buddhism is True; a great discussion of various concepts of the self in both Buddhism and cognitive science that debunks "the self is an illusion" idea as an oversimplification; a compelling critique of the idea that meditation is a purely empirical "first-person science"; and an extended discussion of the philosophic problems you run into if you try to think of enlightenment as simultaneously some particular state of the brain and some transcendent means of being-in-the-world.  

I did find the final chapter of the book a little bit weak or insipid.  Thompson tries to move beyond critiquing the scientific and universalist tendency implicit in Buddhist modernism, and to offer a positive vision of what Buddhism actually can teach us.  His answer to this is actually fairly simple.

In my view, the significance of the Buddhist intellectual tradition for the modern world is that it offers a radical critique of our narcissistic preoccupation with the self and our overconfident belief that science tells us how the world really is in itself apart from how we're able to measure and act upon it.

I think this is a fine statement of what Buddhism offers.  But  it comes wrapped up in a long discussion of a philosophical vision he calls (following Kwame Anthony Appiah and others) "cosmopolitanism".  Maybe he didn't do the theory justice, but it sounded like a whole lot of why can't we all just get along, kumbaya, beautiful soul stuff.  Sure, it would be great if we all learned from different traditions and maintained an open and non-dogmatic mind about what the ultimate truth might look like.  We could see Buddhism as contributing some interesting ideas, science contributing others, with philosophy and art and other religions throwing things into the mix as well.  And when I'm sitting in my armchair I may even be able to juggle all these perspectives and look at the world through many eyes.  In fact, as a confirmed dilettante, I feel like I specialize in this sort of juggling.  I think it's an inspiring vision as far as it goes and we could really use more of this sort of "paradigmatic agnosticism".    But of course, we also have to act in the world.  And no amount of open and honest conversation is going to put to rest all the questions that arise when that action has to be based on your paradigm or my paradigm.  A dialog of differences without a clear hierarchy is a good first step, but you will not remove questions of power with nothing more than good intentions.

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.