Biography of Gladys Richard, an Uncommon Anthropologist

Uncommon Anthropologist:
Gladys Reichard and Western Native American Culture
By Nancy Mattina
University of Oklahoma Press  2019

Even among those who might be vaguely familiar with American anthropology in its pioneer days, Gladys Reichard is not a well-known name.  Nancy Mattina makes a convincing case that it should be.  With graceful prose, she describes a remarkable woman in a remarkable time.

All roads in American anthropology lead back to Franz Boas, who trained the next generations in the early 20th century.  Reichard remained close to Boas, even living in the same house for years, and remained faithful to his process of listening to the indigenous people they studied, without imposing theories or interpretations that conveniently supported those theories.  This put her at odds with several better known names, such as Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, all of whom (according to Mattina) undermined and denigrated her work.

I live in a part of the United States where many small Native American culture survived into the 20th century on their native land (and some still do.)  Boas and his first prize student Alfred Kroeber (Ursula LeGuin's father) were among the first to study these cultures and their bewilderingly various languages.  So it was natural that Boas (teaching at Columbia on the East Coast) and Kroeber (University of California at Berkeley) dispatched the young Reichard to study the language of the Wiyot, a very small tribe indigenous to the town where I now live, in far northern California. When Reichard visited them in 1919 their official tribal home was Table Bluff outside of Eureka, which today it still is.

Though Reichard spent much more time with the Navajo in the 1930s and beyond, and wrote several books on Navajo arts, religion and culture over the years, her work with the Wiyot set the pattern of intensive field work and immersion in the culture.  Eventually she would be the first anthropologist to live within a Native community for several years at a time, when she lived in a small and remote Navajo village.  Mattina suggests how well this life suited Reichard's cowgirl personality.

There are many jokes about anthropologists that American Indians still tell, and some residual bitterness.  That seems to be due to the general lack of respect by non-Native scholars and their dependence on their own theories.  Haida artist Robert Davidson told me a story about scholars heatedly debating what ancient Indians used a particular tool to do, without noticing that contemporary Indians were using the very same tool.  Today, Reichard's method of research is better accepted as the right one, but even in her time, her Native collaborators recognized that with her respectful approach, she was really learning something, and even revealing elements (of almost forgotten languages especially) that they found valuable.

Mattina notes that Reichard's study of the Wiyot language was "the first structuralist account of a Native American language written by a woman."  Reichard's pioneering as a woman researcher, writer and teacher is another major theme in this book.  The neglect of her achievements as the first head of the anthropology department at Barnard College is sad indeed.  But several of her books are available, in print and online.  Since reading Mattina, I've acquired and am reading one of Reichard's books on Navajo sandpainting.

Mattina is also revelatory in providing historical contexts, especially the attitudes towards indigenous cultures and specifically American Indians in any given decade.  She is also good on the inevitable and wearying, but significant, academic jealousies and infighting within American anthropology. She details several examples of prejudice against Reichard--even within the profession-- because she was a woman. However in the later chapters, she seems a bit reflexive at times in attributing problems to such bias.

For readers of biographies, Mattina is also very good at describing the details and the arc of her subject's life, and evoking her personality.  This is an admirable book of more than academic interest.

The Tripper's Dilemma

How To Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence

By Michael Pollan
Penguin Press

Best known as the author of the best-selling Omnivore's Dilemma and other food-related books in a food-conscious culture (at least among those with the income to buy books on the subject), Michael Pollan caught another wave with this comprehensive volume on a subject whose time has come back.  With the widespread legalization of cannabis, it was a good bet--but a risk nevertheless--that the total reign of silence on psychedelics was due to be broken.

Pollan did that with a revealing and objective account of the history of psychedelics in the 20th century and the revival of research and other uses in the present.  In between he narrates some of his own recent experiences with organic and chemically created psychedelics.   He makes deft use of figures like fungi scientist Paul Stamets who span the first wave of interest in the 60s and today's revival.  The result is a 450 page book that the New York Times has named one of the ten best published in 2018.

By the time Pollan was a college student in the late 1970s, the psychedelic period was largely over.   At the start Pollan seems perhaps too preemptively embarrassed  by that era's subsequent reputation, seemingly fearful of scaring readers away.  But he is judicious and forthright in the historical narrative: how the explosion of LSD, magic mushrooms and mescaline out of the research laboratory and into youth culture, as well as the messianic excesses of Timothy Leary and others,  led to a total ban of psychedelics, including scientific research, that's lasted for decades.  Where would soldiers from Vietnam come from, or willing cogs in the profit-making machine?  It couldn't be allowed.  This despite the unsurprising fact that most of the scare stories about LSD were untrue (nobody went blind staring into the sun on an acid trip) and that the research was promising, especially in treating addiction and mental illnesses.

However when I was in my senior year of college in 1967-68, that period was in full bloom, though on my perhaps backward Midwestern campus we were still mostly catching up with cannabis culture.  Nevertheless, we were listening to psychedelic music, seeing psychedelic art, wearing psychedelic clothes, and noting the mind-expansion enthusiasm of the Beatles and so many others.  In my off-campus house I carefully read The Psychedelic Experience by Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Albert (later, Ram Das)--all clearly labeled as Ph.D'--with its tribute to Jung and its programmatic LSD trip advice, particularly in selecting the right "set and setting" for the experience.  It was serious, if not sober, stuff.

The first opportunity I had to actually do LSD didn't come until the following winter of '68, and though I considered the decision carefully, in the end I unaccountably jumped in without any regard to set and setting or a programmed trip.  I was one of a group of younger and paradoxically more experienced students, who simply dropped acid and went about a normal Saturday night, that included going together to a movie.  I don't recall what movie it was, but it definitely contained violence that upset me, especially given the Vietnam and assassinations times. Going to this film seemed a terrible decision, and I realized I couldn't really trust the people I was with. So I deliberately brought myself down. That I was able to do so with relative ease made me suspect the substance I'd taken wasn't LSD, either wholly or at all.

I had three more subsequent experiences with substances I was told were LSD or mescaline, and they were largely the same.  I had a few experiential insights in a Colorado wilds on the supposed mescaline, and a fine time tripping to Abbey Road in Berkeley while trying to ignore the intense head trip discussion in the next room,  but in general the same two factors pertained: I doubted the substance was pure LSD or mescaline, and I couldn't trust my environment (or in one case I had to cope with somebody else's crisis.)  In terms of a psychedelic experience, I went farther in my senior year with too much Humboldt cannabis of a strength I wasn't used to, or it too could have been adulterated.  (Ironically perhaps, I've lived more than 20 years in Humboldt County now without so much as a toke.)

So it is especially interesting to me that today's trips tend to be controlled, with experienced "guides" in safe--if sometimes seemingly soporific--environments.  (Compare Pollan's descriptions of his trips with Sting's account of taking ayahuasca in Brazil in his autobiography Broken Music.) Purity of product can still be a question, although as with today's cannabis, there's more sophisticated control possible.

Pollan reviews the substantive research into what can generally be called the medical potentials of psychedelics in the 1950s and 60s.  Though such research was described in such readily available books as the 1967 paperback LSD: The Problem-Solving Psychedelic, the cultural myth of that time tended to emphasize CIA-backed mind control research and the clueless psychologists that questioned volunteer Ken Kesey, tripping his brains out at Stanford (as referenced in LSD's first and only literary classic of the period, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)

Pollan draws a government-broken line between that research and the now ongoing and growing research into the psychedelic potential for a range of psychological and even physical conditions. (Aging baby boomers may be particularly interested in the results being obtained with terminal patients who lose their fear of death.)

He reveals lesser known influences that outlived the 60s to extend their effects to today, such as the role these substances paid in the creative breakthroughs by Steve Jobs and others that led in part to the computer and tech explosion, and the inspiration they provided the legendary Bill K. to start his Alcoholics Anonymous program, the basis for many such programs since.

Pollan can't avoid the philosophical and (broadly speaking) spiritual effects of these experiences, though at times it seems he'd like to.  But eventually he comes clean, suggesting that even as psychedelics are useful in a wide range of medical conditions--even perhaps a miracle cure for some, or at least a radical redefinition of them--their utility transcends and perhaps redefines science.  That power to rearrange how the world is understood, more than anything, permeated the psychedelic 60s and early 70s, so that they changed the culture, which in turn suggested these insights and their effects to many of us whether or not we dropped that pure acid in the proper set and setting.

  Pollan is annoyingly, though understandably defensive at the beginning of the book, but it took some courage and discernment to tell this story as fairly and fully as he does. The evidence he provides more than suggests that psychedelics can be of great and perhaps transformative benefit, in medical settings and beyond.

 Because the fearful establishment of the 60s was right in one respect: psychedelics can foster big changes: in perception, attitude, consciousness, and relationships to the self, others, the world and all of reality. They can help change minds, and thereby, eventually, change the world.  Had they not been so thoroughly suppressed but allowed to mature, how different the past fifty years might have been.

Mary Catherine Bateson: With A Daughter's Eye

With A Daughter's Eye: a memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson
by Mary Catherine Bateson

Some months ago my partner Margaret was listening to an audiobook novel based loosely (and perhaps in part) on the marriage and lives of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.  She naturally wondered what was factual within the fiction.  Many years ago I bought Mary Catherine Bateson's memoir of her parents, With A Daughter's Eye.  I fetched it from the shelf where it nestled with books by and about Mead and Bateson.

Weeks after that, the book was returned to me.  In the interim I realized that I probably had never read all of it, and that now I wanted to.  One of the wisest things Norman Mailer ever said was that a book and a reader have to be ready for each other.

I began reading it, impressed with the author's care and eloquence.  I trusted her and her voice. I had the confidence you must have as a reader, so you can give yourself over to the book.  But  I was also thinking about her subjects.

Margaret Mead was part of the world I perceived as a child in the 1950s, when I saw her name and picture on magazines, including the women's magazines my mother read (Mead wrote a column for Redbook.)  She was frequently on television in the 60s, so my enduring image of her is in the grays of pre-color TV.  She was one of the elders supporting the antiwar movement and defending the youth of the late 60s, giving credence to our sense of ourselves (although I was interested to read here that she later believed that the Generation Gap she helped define applied mostly to exactly my age cohort, and it subsided later--which seems from my observation to be true.)

Gregory Bateson came most directly into my life later, especially during one or another of my periods of exile back in western Pennsylvania, intellectually bereft. One of my few oases was a shopping mall bookstore that had quality paperbacks shelved in psychology and social sciences, as well as paperbacks of at least classic novels.  (I read a lot of Austen and Melville.)  Another was the University of Pittsburgh bookstore, where I made infrequent forays that could last entire afternoons and evenings.

 I'm not sure when I first tried to read Steps To An Ecology of Mind.  I'd encountered some of his ideas elsewhere, and I was enormously proud of myself for getting through and basically understanding his explanation of the thermostat and homeostasis, the hardest reading I'd done since philosophy in college.  But I got no further.  I do however remember that it was in one of these exile periods that I found a copy of Angels Fear, formed as a set of dialogues between Gregory and Mary Catherine.  I read it with hunger and awe, and was nourished, and lived.  I understood some, absorbed intuitively more.  But as long as I remained within the rhythms of its words, I was waking into sanity.

All of this pertains to the insights Mead and Bateson had in common: the importance of pattern and of connection.  Mary Catherine describes their differences as well, but they both lived lives of connection.  Gregory was perhaps more solitary but maybe not--he developed his ideas in conversation and conferences, and in his later life was a frequent speaker.  As Mary Catherine describes her, Margaret's entire method of gaining insights began with observing and participating, and through conversation.  They were both great synthesists, Margaret more on the fly perhaps and Gregory more deliberately.

As I continue to learn of their ideas--Gregory's especially--they suggest connections from my past reading and experiences.  One can find summaries of these important ideas in this book and elsewhere.  But what I've written here so far is a real life example of how some of those ideas work, and work differently for all of us, because all our relationships (to people, ideas, places, emotions etc.) and all their feedback loops have an integrity that helps define what each of us are.

At the same time, their lives are foreign, exotic, right from the start. When as a young girl Mary Catherine asked her mother what she thought she would be when she grew up, Margaret replied, "Oh, you might be something like an embryologist or crystallographer."  This is not the kind of answer I would have received, since neither my parents nor I would have known what those professions are, nor would anyone we knew.  And even if we did know, they would have been unthinkable ambitions.  Margaret Mead's parents were academics.  Gregory Bateson's father William not only was a geneticist, he invented the term "genetics." Their confidence in essentially inventing their occupations must stem in part from this background.

One of the differences between her parents that she writes about with memorable insight is how they faced their deaths.  They were both diagnosed with cancer within months and died within a few years.  Margaret insisted her diagnosis was wrong and she wasn't dying, trusting in the promises of a natural healer. She insisted MC go back to Iran where she was living, and as a consequence, MC was not there when she died and couldn't even get back in time for her funeral.

 After a period of remission, Gregory recognized his impending death and accepted it.  He died in a Zen Center, with family members including MC and a group of meditating monks around him.  They were all involved in ceremony after his death, which included taking his body to the crematorium and standing outside watching the smoke rise.  Writing more generally about the pressure to spend the last days of life in the pain of medical procedures everyone knows won't change the outcome by much, Mary Catherine wrote: "We have the courage of activity, but rarely the courage of passivity."

When this book was first published in 1984 I suppose a lot of interest focused on the then recent revelations that Margaret Mead was bisexual, and indeed had a secret life in which (as MC writes) she was at all times involved in both a male and a female sexual relationship. (Mead and Bateson weren't married for long, and MC experienced them more as individuals.)  Mary Catherine deals with this in terms of her own learning about it, the anger at not being told, the understanding of the need for secrecy in those times.

But this aspect is one element that integrates narrative about the lives of her parents, shaped by the relation to her life, and the ideas that were important elements in those lives. All of this in contexts of the times that saw anthropology move from a field science developed  by a small group of people who all knew each other to an academic discipline involving thousands.  The result is an excellent book that I read with pleasure and reward.

More recently, Gregory Bateson's daughter by a different mother, Nora Bateson, made a film about her father's ideas called An Ecology of Mind, which is available now on YouTube.  It's very good, if you can deal with the commercials dropped in randomly, often in the middle of sentences.  Mary Catherine is featured in it, and she now looks and sounds (to me) a lot like her mother, maybe a gentler version, and this time in color.

The YouTube videos available on Margaret Mead herself however are almost all of the same kind, and scandalous in their bias. Mary Catherine mentions the beginning of the attack on Mead's work in Samoa by a right winger.  In the intervening years, others apparently have also found fault with the accuracy of Mead's findings on this first anthropological research.  But the material available on YouTube seems overwhelmingly intended to completely discredit Mead, especially from an extreme right wing perspective.  Her book on Samoa could be total nonsense and Margaret Mead would still be a major figure of the 20th century with positive accomplishments that have lasted and will last, as well as through the lives she influenced.
    

In 100 Years
Leading Economists Predict the Future
Ignacio Palacios-Huerta
MIT Press

A 1930 essay by legendary economist John Maynard Keynes made predictions for the next 100 years, mostly optimistic ones (especially considering the 1929 crash and ensuing start of the Great Depression.)  This 2014 book, following the economic smashup of 2008 and ensuing Great Recession, gets analyses and predictions from ten contemporary economists for the next 100 years.

These economists teach at the most prestigious institutions of MIT, Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the London School of Economics, with a lone rep from University Pompeu in Spain.  Among them are two winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics, and five past or present members of the Econometrics Society.

Often from the perspectives of their particular expertise, they discuss the issues of wealth and work, institutions, health, education and technology. (Notably there is little discussion of population, which used to be at the top of the list of the future's economic determiners.)

  Since the Keynes essay posited that increased total wealth will lead to more leisure and a less selfish society, some discuss ethics and human nature.  Most of the essays don't rely on jargon, so they can be read by non-economists.  On the other hand, it is painfully obvious that these are economists writing.  Their concerns, both abstract and narrow, don't adequately address the fullness of the future.  Nor are they up to the vision and writing of Keynes in his essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren."

People read these books of "predictions" basically to learn whether the future is brighter or darker, but there isn't much guidance here.  Most are guardedly optimistic, though mostly because they believe that present good trends will continue, change won't be overwhelming, and the challenges that scare everybody else will be somehow met.

For example, eight of the ten at least mention climate change, but only two call it the biggest threat and four minimize it as a problem.  Even the economist who devotes the most attention to it (Martin L. Weitzman of Harvard) ends up asserting a technological solution (sunshades.)  A review essay by Charles C. Mann in the September 2014 Atlantic suggests this is a pretty universal attitude among economists.  It also happens to (a) support the wealth of today's wealthy and (b) it runs counter to the findings of physical scientists and just about everybody else, who would consider this wishful thinking at best, or more pointedly, complacent ignorance and willful blindness.

Six mention income inequality as a problem, and five see it as an important one: a threat to democracy, for one thing.  But none puts these two together, climate crises and income inequality, which are likely to be happening at the same time, and will markedly affect each other.

They do attempt to at least summarize major factors and suggest how they might interact, but (with some exceptions) generally and blandly.  They mostly seem to apply conventional modes of thinking to a future that requires more imagination than this. Their discussions of technology are remarkably abstract and simplistic.  Even apocalyptic fiction, so prevalent these days, is more sophisticated in seeing how such factors might combine to affect the future.

Editor Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, who had the idea for this volume and solicited contributions, takes pains to discuss why he did so.  Apparently this is a very daring enterprise.  But the only precedent isn't 1930.  Such books were fairly common in the 1960s and 1970s, and even involved economists like Robert Theobald.  Back then (and in the more recent The Next One Hundred Years by Jonathan Weiner in 1990) such attempts acknowledged the folly of restricting the portrait of a complex future to the assumptions, observations, theoretical matrices and prejudices of a single discipline.

Perhaps I am unjust to the attempted breadth and subtlety of argument in these essays.  But all they basically seem to say is that, on balance, for their clients the future is a fairly good investment.

 That seems to be what economics is about now, and perhaps why economists by and large have a really bad record in predicting a year or even a month into the future.  Economics has possibly the least legitimacy of any claimant to actually being a science, though behavioral psychology gives it a run for its money.  

There was little or no awareness in these "predictions" that real scientists are demonstrating that humanity is using up the Earth and its resources at a much faster rate than replenishment.  Half the non-human vertebrae population of the planet that existed in 1970 was gone forty years later, in 2010, says the World Wildlife Federation study noted in the Washington Post.  Just about all of that depletion is a result of humanity.  We're destroying what sustains our lives, and ignoring that we're doing it--and we pay people handsomely for that ignorance, and we read their tedious books.  Until we realize that today and certainly for future the environment is the economy, all we'll have in one hundred years is the certainty of terminal solitude.

The Nostalgia Factory: Memory, Time and Ageing 
by Douwe Draaisma, translated by Liz Waters
 Yale University Press

 As a professor in the history of psychology, Douwe Draaisma seems perfectly placed to write about memory, the access we have to our own usually sparsely documented histories. This book is about memory and memories of the aging, the old. When people reach their sixties and seventies and beyond, what do they remember? And what do they forget?

 In this relatively short book, Draaima deals with both aspects of memory in the aging mind: the forgetting, and the remembering. He is reassuring on the forgetting. After reviewing various memory techniques (most of dubious value) he writes: “However active your lifestyle, however varied your existence, your memory will gradually decline with age. This is perfectly natural. Anyone who still has the memory of a twenty-year-old at the age of seventy is not entirely normal.”

 Everyone is annoyed by not being able to remember something, but the worry has increased with the increased awareness of various forms of dementia, especially Alzheimer’s disease. Draaima reiterates the statistics—for people over 65, less than 5% are likely to be stricken, and even having a parent who has suffered from dementia still doesn’t get you to 10%.

 The difference in symptoms is the difference between forgetting where you put your car keys and forgetting what your car keys are for. “The vast majority of people who turn up at memory clinics give such a detailed account of all the things that have slipped their minds recently that it is clear they have no reason to worry.”

 On the remembering however, Draaisma finds some anomalies and mysteries. He carefully reviews a number of studies (his and others) to conclude that yes, the old tend to remember the distant past better than the recent past, and more specifically, their most vivid memories cluster around their 20th year. Other memories that often remain vivid are of “firsts”--first kiss, first eclipse, first day of school etc.

 He is thorough on the phenomena: how the focus on the past increases with age, for instance. He writes about residents of an old folks home in their 80s and 90s who no interest in their present, not even people around them. Their listlessness turns to vibrant interest when shown obsolete artifacts and photos from their youth. They even begin to interact—members of such group found that they came from the same town and even went to the same school around the same time.

 His research affirms that when the reminiscence effect (as he calls it) "attains its full force, memories will return to which you have long been denied access. These are memories that really do slumber.”

 His research also suggests that as time goes on, memories emerge more and more as stories. He interviewed centenarians who hadn’t written autobiographies, “yet the stories of their lives have the usual cast of characters and twists and turns that we see in the autobiographical genre. The event that started it all, the moment that brought a complete change of course, the meeting that was to have important consequences, the lesson for life, even the insults that seem to make so much more of an impression in youth—they emerge of their own accord when the centenarians look back over their long lives.”

 Draaisma recognizes that evolutionary explanations for this phenomenon are inadequate, but doesn’t offer a persuasive alternative. A different kind of psychologist (like James Hillman) would suggest a search for meaning, a deepening of soul, a completion.  The anomalies are found in what people remember (or think they are remembering) and how they characterize the past.  The mystery is in why we are helplessly borne back into the past as our future disappears.

Quick Hits

How About Never--Is Never Good For You?
by Bob Mankoff
Henry Holt

With one of the more famous cartoon captions of recent times as his title, its author and now cartoon editor of the New Yorker writes a breezy history of New Yorker cartoons and the current process of creation and selection as well as his own career.  At best it's a Groucho-voiced tour with seldom a dull moment.  Since New Yorker cartoons are the most fabled in existence, Mankoff has a well of curiosity to fill.  So he pours it on.  An entertaining book--with of course lots of cartoons (his own and others.)

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Yale

The U.S. Congress barely meets, and does nothing when it does.  National politics is a Twitter war.  But governors have to govern at least a little, and according to Barber, the mayor's office is where the rubber meets the road.  And that's true in Bogata and Delhi as well as New York City.  But Barber doesn't stop with showing how mayors are functioning--he has ideas about how they can participate in global governance, the kind that addressing the climate crisis is going to demand.  Barber acknowledges the generations of scholars and writers on the city, and the existing scholarship for which he provides "a megaphone."  But his portraits of mayors throughout the world and his challenging ideas are their own significant contribution to the topic, as well as a crucial approach to the challenges of the present and especially the future.

The Gods of Olympus: A History
by Barbara Graziosi
Metropolitan Books

Graziosi follows these Greek gods from their origins through several eras of Greek history, showing for example how they were adapted to Athenian democracy.  They go with Alexander to the East, are merged with gods of Rome, suffer a mixed fate in Christian Europe and even make appearances in the New World.  Right from the beginning their nature is questioned, modified, adapted and yet they recur in story, image and imagination. They are also a bridge between cultures and times, and remain essential figures in the foundation cultures of civilization. She writes: "If the Olympian gods continued to flourish, it was because people valued the ancient cultures they inhabited.  From the borders of India to the British Isles, diverse societies continued to engage with ancient philosophy, literature, art, and science and thus constantly met up with the gods of Olympus." Graziosi's prose is engaging, her scholarship seems careful, and her story is fascinating.  Her Epilogue on the Olympians after the Renaissance is particularly succinct and witty.

The Rise of Nuclear Fear
By Spencer R. Weart
Harvard University Press

For readers born since 1990, nuclear fear may be a concept hard to access. Thermonuclear war is something out of cheesy old movies or video games, and nuclear power is a running joke on The Simpsons. Even older generations that saw those movies without irony— on any given day nuclear apocalypse was possibly just around the corner—don’t think about it much anymore. Even though the U.S. and Russia have enough hydrogen bombs still pointed at each other to set civilization back for decades.

But as Spencer Weart writes, “Sometimes the most powerful things in our heads are the ones we don’t pay attention to.” It takes just a few new events to resurrect fearful images: the Fukushima reactor disaster in Japan, the specter of a mushroom cloud over an American city from a terrorist bomb from Iraq or Iran. Those nightmarish images were created over many decades, and Weart produces a history of that imagery.

At first it was extremely positive: the discovery of radium and early theories of atomic potential led some scientists and journalists to proclaim unlimited power for almost no cost, leading to the rich and gleaming White City of the future. But even in the early 20th century the atom’s equally immense potential for destructiveness was the subject of warnings and science fiction tales of total devastation: the Empty City.

  Then in 1945 came the reality. “With the news from Hiroshima sensitive thinkers quickly realized that doomsday was no longer just a religious or science-fiction myth, but as real a part of the possible future as tomorrow’s breakfast.” Weart chronicles the oscillating hopes for utopia and fears of oblivion, and the highly instructive repressions, denial and numbing during the most obviously threatened decades from the 50s through the 80s. He does so in even greater detail (and with better sourcing) in his earlier book (titled simply Nuclear Fear) but in exploring what he calls the post-1990 Second Nuclear Age  in this book, he demonstrates how this imagery echoes—for example, in the pictures of the Twin Towers falling and the devastation around Ground Zero, with their powerful reminders of the mushroom cloud and the Empty City of Hiroshima.

Weart also links nuclear imagery with more ancient and archetypal images, particularly of alchemy (as did some early atomic scientists.) The failure of the climate crisis to inspire motivating imagery, he believes, is because it had not yet found that mythological depth.   

  While Weart suggests that nuclear fear may have helped prevent actual nuclear war, he sees more virtue in disengaging the imagery from the realities, especially when it comes to nuclear power versus fossil fuel pollution—particularly from coal-- that has already killed and sickened millions.

As Weart shows by his approach and this book's content, the response to atomic power involves facts and feelings, in many different combinations.  (Sometimes when the public felt they were being lied to, they were right.) Weart is frequently perceptive in both the more metaphorical areas and in the relationship of imagery to fact in both of the nuclear arenas--as well as in their relationship to each other. His writing voice is clear and with enough personality to carry reader interest and confidence.  Because he explores the topic to the depth required for understanding it--and our times--this is an important book.  Together with Nuclear Fear, and a few other books like DeGroot's The Bomb and  Lindquvist's A History of Bombing, it is indispensable to that understanding.         

Net Smarties

Net Smart: How to Thrive Online
By Howard Rheingold
The MIT Press

Howard Rheingold has a white moustache. He dresses like the prototype of an aging hippie, but he’s been involved in personal computer theory and practice for 30 years. His social network experience goes back to one of the earliest example, San Francisco’s legendary The Well. Younger readers may know him as the author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. So he’s positioned to speak to several generations on “how to thrive online,” including boomers.

  But this is not a simple how-to book, full of bullet points and illustrations (though it does include some cartoons reminiscent of R. Crumb.) Rheingold writes about how to use the net “mindfully,” which includes critically. Two of his five web literacies (along with attention, participation and collaboration) are net smarts and crap detection. Still, his stance is mainly positive on the benefits and the social change inherent in what he calls the shift from group to network.

  His approach is historical as well as theoretical, philosophical and practical. He pays attention to how adventures in cyberspace change individuals as well as society, and he considers several sides of those questions. He can be acerbic as well as inspirational.

  One of his main assertions is that “the emerging digital divide is between those who know how to use social media for individual advantage and collective action, and those who do not.” Originally the “digital divide” meant the distance between the individuals and communities who could financially afford to fully participate in cyberspace and those who couldn’t. That divide still exists, especially as full participation seems to require frequent new purchases of the latest devices.

  The author’s personal experience—as well as from his students and children—provides rare perspective on cyberspace. This is also a kind of guidebook to future practice, as Rheingold emphasizes the ethics of good networking and social collaboration. So part of his advice, in addition to how to manage information overload and survive on Facebook, is how to be a good participator and network citizen. Plus his emphasis on the skills of attention and critical thinking are useful beyond cyberspace.

    The book is pretty clearly written but it’s not a fast read because there is at least one interesting idea on every page, and depending on individual net experience, a number of challenging topics. It’s also meant to be read beginning to end, which is not exactly the Internet way. It’s about 250 pages of text plus lots of notes and a mediocre index, but what’s missing is a sorely needed glossary of terms as they are used in the book. Overall it’s that paradox of the instant-obsolescence computer age: a keeper.
                                                                    *

There are a few other books about these technologies and the real world for the computer literate on your shopping list this year.  Computing: A Concise History by Paul E. Ceruzzi (MIT) is exactly that: a clearly written history of computing, complete with names and places--and this one does have a glossary.  At 150 plus pages it's very handy, but still a solid and serious work.

Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age by Steven Johnson (Riverhead Books) is breezily written, with a point of view that's basically similar to Rheingold's, but of course it's a different book, with different perspectives, examples and elaborations. 

The Technology of Nonviolence: Social Media and Violence Prevention by Joseph G. Bock (MIT Press) is even more specific.  It is cutting-edge and global, with chapters on Countering Ethnoreligious Violence in Sri Lanka, Interrupting Gang Violence in Chicago and Crowdsourcing during Post-election Violence in Kenya.  It begins with theoretical frameworks and ends with evaluations and recommendations.  This is a thoughtful, sometimes provocative but well-presented and serious work, especially for those grappling with such issues in government, NGOs and even the corporate world, and for students interested in these fields. 
 

E. O. Wilson and Social Evolution

The Social Conquest of Earth
Edward O. Wilson
Liveright

In examining the relationship of humans to the rest of nature as well as human nature itself, Edward O. Wilson has been a defining presence for some forty years. He created the field of sociobiology in the 1970s. He won the Pulitzer Prize for On Human Nature in 1979, and with later titles (Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, and Biofilia) he added concepts (and buzzwords) to scientific and popular discussion.

His work has always been controversial, and assertions in this new book similarly attracted criticism from major figures. His rejection of “kin selection” in human evolution (a concept used to explain altruism that he previously championed) and his adoption of a form of “group selection” have received lengthy rejoinders from psychologist Steven Pinker and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (Dawkins also cites strong disagreement from scores of other scientists.)

  It’s not possible to even summarize these arguments briefly. But I can instead discuss what contending scientists largely do not: this book as a reading experience. Whatever the results of scientific debate, the central theme of this book is a bracing corrective to the run of evolutionary theory since Dawkin’s selfish gene thesis began to dominate. Wilson looks at human evolution, not as isolated every-individual-for-itself battles of one against all (let alone every gene for itself), but by recognizing the reality of humans as social beings. He has a word for natural selection that responds to the social context as well as the rest of the environment: eusociality.

In under 300 pages, Wilson discusses the latest of what’s known about biological and cultural human evolution, and focuses his theories on the origins of morality, religion and the creative arts. Lynn Margulis noted that previous evolutionary theorists failed to account for the role of symbiosis because they studied big animals, not the bacteria and tiny organisms she studied. Wilson uses his knowledge of social insects (his first area of expertise was ants) to challenge prevailing assumptions that might be equally blinkered. Recent science in animal intelligence as well as a more modest view of genes themselves argue for greater complexity than the previously dominant mechanistic theories allowed. So a different approach like Wilson’s fills a need.

Some of his scientific arguments get technical. Some chapters seem more cogent that others (I found “What is Human Nature?” disappointing.)  Clearly his assertions are debatable.  But mainly Wilson’s prose is clear, informative and at times provocative, though at times its directness risks sounding dogmatic. Readers might best approach it as expressing a scientific point of view that is not always as settled as the writing might indicate.

This can also be read as a kind of updated summary work, a set of big picture conclusions, by an elder scientist (similar for example to Jerome Kagan's latest in that regard.)  However controversial, he presents a refreshing and even hopeful synthesis, arguing that knowing our biological history is essential to saving our magnificently unlikely species at “the growing point of an unfinished epic,” as well as the rest of present life we have imperiled.

Psychology’s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back
By Jerome Kagan
Yale University Press

Contemporary psychological research is too flawed in its premises and procedures to really prove what it says it proves. So it may provide an errant basis for diagnoses and treatments, or the grand explanations of human thought and behavior derived from it, perhaps as expressed in such books as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (reviewed here below.)

Such a critique comes from a psychologist so eminent (and so old) that the castigation it invites from the operationally arrogant psychological establishment won’t hurt him. Since it’s by Jerome Kagan, Harvard professor of psychology Emeritus and a distinguished author, it might even be considered. Though I don’t think even he is counting on it.

Kagan isolates four problems, which come down to overconfidence in a fatally limited set of assumptions. He notes for example that psychologists often ignore differences in their human subjects, such as age, cultural background and class, as well as the setting. “Too many papers assume that a result found with forty white undergraduates at a Midwestern university responding to instructions appearing on a computer screen in a small, windowless room would be affirmed if participants were fifty-year-old South Africans administered the same procedure by a neighbor in a larger room in a familiar church in Capetown.”

This is not drollery: American university students of European background were the main subjects for more than 2/3 of the papers published in six leading journals between 2003 and 2007. There are usually a small number of participants, yet universal conclusions are offered.

  “Missing Contexts” is one such problem. Another is assuming everyone shares your definitions. Kagan finds that psychologists assumed that “happiness” always means the kind of self-aggrandizement that appeals to Americans. “Not one of the seven greatest pleasures listed by one American writer...referred to acts that helped another.”  Yet other cultures “celebrate states of serenity, the quality and obligations linked to personal relationships, and social harmony.”

  Another problem is inferring too much from a single measurement instead of a pattern. Psychologists too often ignore social class in assessing “symptoms,” and can be too quick to classifying a trait or behavior as an illness, regardless of origin or personal difference. This is more dangerous now that drugs with serious side effects are so quickly prescribed, and all but forced on some children whose high spirits may become hyperactivity, whose sadness is defined as depression, and whose shyness becomes social phobia.

Kagan is much more thorough and precise in this remarkable book. He has a chapter of positive recommendations, but as he notes, he’s not the first to point out these limitations, that have so far mostly been ignored. What he’s basically calling for is some humility, and acknowledgement of complexity, differences and connections.




I'll tell you why these conclusions particularly resonate with me.  One of the most famous and most often quoted lab psychology experiments of modern times is the Milgram experiments of the 1970s, in which participants were instructed to give electric shocks to people on the other side of a wall if they answer questions incorrectly.  With each incorrect answer the shock is intensified, and the victim can be heard screaming in pain.  The victims weren't actually getting shocks--they were in on the con.  The experiment was to see how many people will follow instructions and administer the shocks.  The answer was a shockingly high percentage of them.  I first heard it reported as being 100%.  Later the figure given for those willing to administer the most voltage (after the experiment had been repeated several times) was 64%.

This experiment was said to prove two main points: that people are willing to do what authority tells them to do, and that people will do so in that situation even if they believe that they wouldn't.  This in turn has led to a new conventional wisdom. For instance (based on this and other experiments) that people will take on characteristics of their role in a system regardless of their personal ethics--for instance, prison guards will always be sadistic towards prisoners.   

Though the Milgram experiments were conducted in various ways and places over the years, enough to apparently satisfy Kagan, I have good reason to doubt that they prove any of that.  For I was in New Haven in 1970, where and when the experiments were being done, and I answered an ad in the paper that (according to Elliot Aronson's description) was for participants in this experiments.  My motivation to answer the ad was that it promised to pay $25.  I was "out of college/money spent" and checking out the New Haven scene.   But I called first and asked questions about the experiment.  I was actually concerned about whether drugs were involved.  I believe I was assured they weren't, but the answers I got about the experiments were otherwise so vague and deceptive that I immediately became suspicious that this wasn't on the up and up.  (And in fact it wasn't--the object of the experiment was not what the ad said: investigating how people learn and remember.) 

So who were the participants?  They were people who (like me) needed or wanted $25, which leaves out a lot of people, but if you needed the money you might well be reluctant to refuse what you were being told to do to earn it.

But participants also were not people who (like me) decided not to participate because it didn't smell right.  In other words, they were people predisposed to put themselves in the hands of academic/scientific authority figures without question.  Hardly surprising that they would then do what these authorities told them.

  So I'm not sure this was a true random sample of the population.  Furthermore, the results never smelled right to me either.  They were supposed to show how nearly everybody will obey an authority figure, to the point of causing pain.  But this was 1970--during the Vietnam war, just months before the Cambodia invasion and the massive campus protests in New Haven as elsewhere, ending in deaths at Kent State and Jackson State.  Antiwar politics and radical politics were rife among students in New Haven. The Berrigans were spiritual leaders in New Haven. It was precisely the time and one of the places where refusing the dictates of authority was happening all the time. And it was precisely the time when causing people pain--bombing them, torching their villages, and sending naive young Americans to kill and die-- was a very big issue.

  So I have to wonder--just how many antiwar protestors, draft resisters and conscientious objectors answered that ad?  Nixon was President! Students were burning their draft cards. Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, SDS, sex, drugs and rock & roll were culturally ascendant-- If there was ever a time and place where disobeying authority was culturally, politically and morally prominent, this was it.

So it's more than just possible that a great many people who would laugh at the guy in the white coat, tear the wires out of the machine and spit on their clipboards before singing "Alice's Restaurant" on the way out, just didn't answer that ad.  And that's pretty much what that experiment proves. Missing context indeed.

Thinking, Fast and Slow
By Daniel Kahneman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

How does the human mind work? Each publishing season unleashes another cascade of books addressing that subject from a wide array of perspectives. This recent one got a lot of attention, partly because the author won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision-making.

Based on an experimental psychological approach, Kahneman’s premise is that we think basically in two ways: our “automatic system” of intuition and emotion (the “thinking fast” of his title) called System 1, and the more effortful system that employs logic, calculation and deliberation (“thinking slow”) called System 2.   

He narrates how these work very well at first. But then he explains that he doesn’t continue using the “more descriptive” term “automatic system” because it takes longer to say than “System 1” and so “takes up more space in your working memory” which might distract you. Really? And it is less distracting than the extra step of trying to remember what System 1 stands for, each time it comes up?

I also wonder if he’s playing fair. He gives a quick math puzzle and instructs the reader: “Do not try to solve it but listen to your intuition.” Intuition gives most people the wrong answer, and that prompts him a page later to use this as evidence of “a recurrent theme of this book,” that people “place too much faith in their intuitions.” Or maybe too much faith in following instructions?

Apart from such quibbles that may (or may not) have more to do with the experience of reading than of the science that is the book's subject, what’s his basic point? Because the automatic system usually predominates, people make bad decisions, basically because they don’t calculate risks or otherwise employ statistical thinking but go with their cognitive biases. This makes for poor business strategies, bad stock market choices and lousy vacations.

This has some explanatory appeal (maybe rationalizing Republicans, or economists) but he seems to treat as axioms the propositions that effortful thinking is basically statistical, and statistics are the royal road to truth and happiness. Both my Systems tell me this is too limited. Relying on statistics doesn’t always work that well for science, let alone life. Statistics tells you about probabilities and groups. They deal well with at most two or three variables. Life involves the unique interplay of much more.

There’s some healthy skepticism about “expert intuition” which he equates with guessing, but not a very sophisticated view of intuition as holistic apprehension.  Some of the studies are provocative but the methodology is often suspicious and the conclusions too sweeping, at least for the evidence he presents.  Some of his insights are very interesting but as a reader I'm not convinced by his argument, evidence or tone enough to have a general confidence in the content.  Even though he appears to be more self-aware than many who write on these topics, his writing persona can be pretty smug.

 Kahneman’s style can be engaging, and there’s much to explore in these many pages--and a lot to argue with-- if as a non-specialist you can see the point of navigating the math. Despite the generous if not fulsome praise by academic heavyweights displayed on its back cover (one placing this book in the company of Freud’s and Adam Smith’s landmark works, another calling Kahneman “one of the greatest psychologists and deepest thinkers of our time”) my statistically insignificant experience was of much ado about not enough.

Distrust That Particular Flavor
By William Gibson
Putnam

William Gibson is the first-generation cyberpunk fictionist (Neuromancer, “Johnny Mnemonic”) who coined the term “cyberspace” in a short story, first used “the matrix” to describe the web, and is credited with inventing the concept of virtual sex, all before any of this was realizable, and a decade or so before he even had a computer or an email address.

This is a collection of nonfiction pieces: short articles for big and little magazines, book prefaces and talks. At least one article (his 1993 portrait of Singapore for Wired Magazine titled “Disneyland With the Death Penalty”) is pretty famous, but since the newest piece is from 2008 (though there are brief contemporary notes added), they say more about their time than the future. But Gibson doesn’t believe in the future. “The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive postnuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely...more stuff.”

Gibson is an American baby boomer who has lived in Canada since the 60s. That’s my generation, and we’re used to finding the Future in science fiction (even though, as Gibson rightly says, sci-fi is mostly about the present, unless it’s about the past.) Gibson is undoubtedly perceptive and provocative on many subjects, including the relationship of technology to culture, from the most powerful interests to ordinary life. But the technological web requires a stable infrastructure and lots of electricity. The now inevitable Climate Crisis future calls those preconditions into question. Ahead of us there may be more than merely...less stuff.

Gibson makes a lot of sense about one aspect of the future, though: the prospects for humans becoming machines. On the one hand, he sensibly asserts that “our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware.” On the other hand, he suggests that we are already the Borg, and have been since at least the advent of television. He also has a fascinating take on why Japan is still the future (“more stuff.”)

Cumulatively, these pieces add vivid historical context (from the 19th century through the TV age) to our sudden Internet/Iphone revolution. They also testify to the perceptive powers of the imagination, inherent in storytelling.  Otherwise, this is an entertaining and enlightening book in the ways that the best collections of its kind are: it provides texture to the writer’s worlds on the page (and screen), it takes us places we’ll never get to, and shows us features of familiar places we missed. It suggests stuff we might want to check out, like Greg Girard’s photos, or a 1940 film serial called The Mysterious Dr. Satan.  Best of all, we get his voice.  That and the subject matter make it fun to read.

A Couple (of Books) in Search of Happiness

In The Great Disruption, Paul Gilding foresees that the onrushing climate crisis in combination with resource depletion and other factors will create catastrophes that force major changes, including (and especially) the transition to a no-growth, steady-state world economy. So in such a society, what will replace material acquisition and the joy of shopping as the definition of the good life? He calls his best case scenario “the happiness economy.”

Never out of style, redefining happiness acquires new urgency when contemplating these immense future challenges. The two books noted in this review are among recent examples.

Arthur Dobrin is a former Peace Corps volunteer and leader of the Ethical Culture movement. In The Lost Art of Happiness (Prometheus Books), he emphasizes the link between personal happiness and doing good for others that he finds reflected in founding religious texts and classic philosophers as well as the work of social scientists. He uses his own experiences with traditional cultures to relate their sources of happiness in relationships, moral behavior and appreciation for the beauty of the world.

Dobrin astutely summarizes research that shows the roots of empathy and altruism in animal and human evolution. These tendencies, strongest for close relatives and members of the band, can be extended to strangers. He reviews relevant research in modern societies, including the work of Samuel and Pearl Oliner in their work on Holocaust rescuers, particularly in The Altruistic Personality.

Though he skillfully weaves the research and writings of others to support his thesis, Dobrin’s book has a strong point of view, and is occasionally dogmatic. In contrast, Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (Yale University Press) by famed Harvard philosopher Sissela Bok is more scholarly in approach and more nuanced in its judgments.

Bok deals with even more philosophy, literature and neuroscience, and the complex and competing definitions of happiness. She places a greater emphasis on the individual (such as those who find value in solitude) in contrast to Dobrin’s brief for relationship as the source of happiness. But Bok as well as Dobrin explores the roles of morality, empathy and resilience in happiness. Like both Dobrin and Gilding, she sees happiness related to more equality (gender and racial, as well as economic) but not wholly residing in material wealth.

Dobrin skillfully makes his largely inspirational case, but Bok asks more questions and suggests more complexity, irony and subtlety. Both books are thought-provoking, well constructed and written. Both books—plus Gilding’s—suggest one important area of inquiry about how to cope with the challenges ahead. Once the reality of those challenges is accepted, one task will be to encourage the values, attitudes and virtues that will be needed in the oncoming future.

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Thomas Rodgers in Salon called this book "fascinating, well-researched," and readers who follow celebrities with a certain interest as well as angst may well find it fascinating. Unfortunately the people she writes about weren't all that interesting to me back when they were the most talked-about celebrities (which was probably a year or so ago), and they sure don't interest me now.

But then I have my own perhaps quixotic distinction between "stars" and "celebrities." Celebrities as such are just embarrassing, and as evidenced by many of the names in this book, extremely fleeting. Stars can be fascinating, because there is something special about them, and their world is surely different, and people respond to them differently. This book doesn't penetrate or even deal much with those mysteries. It's an academic work with an economic emphasis. So as it turns out I'm just not that interested in these facts or these insights. Doesn't mean you won't be fascinated, though. The author is a professor with a Ph.D in urban planning, whose previous book on celebrity was The Warhol Economy.

David W. Orr's noble attempt to confront the realities of an age of severe climate consequences is reviewed below.

Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse
By David W. Orr
Oxford University Press. 261 pages.

Because environmental studies professor David Orr’s book is gracefully written, with a lucid and comprehensive vision, it is easy to read. But because of its subject and its messages, it is very difficult to read. For all of those reasons, it is important that everyone reads it, because it is about your future, which is likely to be very different from the present.

Orr begins with a view of the future that close observers of climate change are increasingly coming to, and it’s a real difference from just a few years ago. Despite current denialist noise and other snowjobs, it’s not a question of “if” anymore. It’s how fast, how bad and how long.

For those playing catch-up: Even Al Gore’s expositions of the massive evidence, for example, were accompanied by suggestions on how to “solve” the Climate Crisis. For awhile there was a popular impression that changing light bulbs would do it. Though it’s true that a shocking amount of of carbon could be kept out of the atmosphere with some simple efficiencies, that wasn’t going to change what had already been set in motion. Some experts (like Mark Hertsgaard) cautioned that because of a 30 year or so time lag from cause (greenhouse gas pollution) to effects, the crisis was already underway, and we need to prepare for some consequences.

After more climate data was collected and evaluated, books by respected figures like Martin Rees and James Lovelock in the UK that foresaw more cataclysmic consequences were taken seriously but still seemed extreme. Then came observations of Arctic sea melts in 2007 that were far sooner and far more advanced than climate scientists had predicted. “Instead of the long, slow problem many had imagined climate change to be, we seemed to be staring at a dynamic system bent on flipping into some new state,” writes Bill McKibben. More urgent warnings followed, by the chief U.S. climate scientist, NASA’s James Hansen, among others.

So the dire situation that Orr outlines is becoming more generally accepted: Continued greenhouse gas pollution will result in an unrecognizably hot planet for hundreds of thousands of years, shorn of the life we know. “But a sober reading of the science of climate change indicates something else: we have already set in motion forces and trends that threaten the stability of the biosphere in a few decades and that will persist far longer.”

This is the growing consensus: severe and long-lasting effects are already in the cards. They may well be so overwhelming and persistent that they will absorb most of our attention and resources. Orr discusses some of the variables, and I’ve seen recent comments by climate scientists suggesting a time frame of from ten to thirty years before the cascade of multiple and interacting crises become painfully apparent. Orr writes: “Climate change, like the threat of nuclear annihilation, puts all that humanity has struggled to achieve—our cultures, art, music, literatures, cities, institutions, customs, religions, and history, as well as our posterity—at risk.”

“Climate change, in other words, is not so much a problem to be fixed but rather a steadily worsening condition with which we must contend for a long time.”

Orr looks at issues of governance and attitude as well as more specific ideas for getting through the coming climate collapse, and what elements of human civilization and human beings will help that process, while suggesting that the survival of these qualities—from inventiveness to compassion and community--are reasons for the human adventure to continue. For instance, we will need to understand and put into practice the home truth that the global economy is a subset of the biosphere. In this period of fear, anger and stress, personally and nationally, we will need to learn and employ the skills of peace, or we will lose what chance we have to survive.

“The long emergency ahead will be the ultimate challenge to our political creativity, acumen, skill, wisdom and foresight,” Orr writes. Though he doesn’t dwell on the worst implications—like deaths in the millions or worse—he realizes that such crises in the past led to war, tyrannous gangs, barbarism and the haunting ignorance that characterizes a Dark Age. In a coda, he even suggests the added difficulty of keeping a cool head in a hot world, when the heat itself is bending and breaking the world we assume and depend on.

He titles one late chapter "Hope at the End of Our Tether," which is a pretty direct reference to H.G. Well's last book, Mind At the End of Its Tether, in which he found humanity fated to fail because it was too late to save itself. (The expression, by the way, means to have exhausted one's options, like an animal tethered, unable to go farther than the rope will allow. It goes back to the 16th century, but became an expression with this meaning early in the 19th. Like a lot of cultural metaphors from agriculture, it's pretty much lost its referent, except of course for dog-walkers.) He ends this chapter with this paragraph:

"At the end of our tether we must imagine the unimaginable: a world rid of nuclear weapons and a world powered by sunlight, safe from the possibility of catastrophic climate change. Utopia? Hardly. But those are the only realistic options we have."

That's a powerful, present-tense restatement of how far we've stretched our possibilities. In 1960 and especially in his 1961 Inaugural, President Kennedy noted that humanity now had the power to abolish poverty, and also to abolish human life. Humanity could choose utopia, or it could choose oblivion. But as Buckminster Fuller and others soon suggested, the power of nuclear weapons etc. really meant that either we choose Utopia or we get Oblivion. It's an either/or. Orr stretches the tether even tighter, by noting that resource problems and catastrophes from the Climate Crisis make nuclear war more likely and therefore more dangerous. So we don't have much of a choice--though as Orr notes, even if we save ourselves from our two principal scourges, without losing civilization in the process, we still won't wind up with Utopia, the perfect society. That at least forestalls the objection that he's asking for perfection, which is by definition impossible. He's just saying the just about impossible is just about essential.


“There is no historical precedent, however, for what we must do if we are to endure,” he warns. And though he admits “I know of no purely rational reason for anyone to be optimistic about the human future,” he opts for hope—but of a particular kind: “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. Hopeful people are actively engaged in defying the odds or changing the odds.” He quotes Vaclav Havel’s definition of hope as “an orientation of the heart” and “ability to work for something because it is good.” Orr believes the only thing that will save us is “people behaving heroically.”

Orr begins his book by noting that UK scientist Martin Ree’s 2003 book (Our Final Hour) which suggests that humankind has about a 1 in 2 chance of surviving the 21st century, was almost entirely ignored. Orr’s book has been out since last spring, I believe, and has also been pretty much ignored. In one sense it’s not surprising: even if the science is admitted, the message is so apocalyptic that it cries out for a grief response, starting with denial and anger, and maybe moving up to bargaining (i.e. technological fixes that few believe will change the immediate future, even if they work.) I had a tough time with this book myself, and only copious amounts of high-quality chocolate and some sleepless nights got me as far as this review.

But while this is one of the first books about how to contend with the coming “long emergency,” (and this phrase devised by Jim Kunstler looks like it will stick) it won’t be the last. For instance, Bill McKibben’s new book to be published in April, bears the subtitle: “Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.” Maybe it's groupthink, but I don't think so: these sentiments are becoming pretty common among those closely observing climate and climate science.

If we keep hearing this, and evidence piles up (and we have the wit to understand it--for instance, that the northeastern snows this month support global heating theories, they don't contradict them), sooner or later we’ll move through depression to acceptance, and then maybe we’ll get to work salvaging a civilization. Meanwhile, we ought to be grateful for writers like Orr who are preparing us for this future, as well as the scientists and scholars who are bringing their skills to bear on these topics, regardless of the terrified barbarians at the gates.

And this future doesn’t include continuing global failure to cut greenhouse gases, which makes the farther future even bleaker. “I also write with the assumption that we will succeed in reducing atmospheric CO2 below the level that would cause runaway climate change,” Orr adds, “otherwise, there is no point in writing anything other than an elegy or funeral dirge.”

How hard it is to read and then write these words, because it’s real now: very probably, the world we’ve known is ending, and humanity faces its greatest challenge, including the dual tasks of living in this harsher world while still doing what is necessary not to make things worse. Ending greenhouse gas pollution is still necessary, but it alone is no longer enough. We enter the age of consequences.

The Atmosphere of Heaven is one of a trio of related books that combine biography and cultural history to be considered for gifts this year, described in the post below.

Gift Books: People in History

They're a combination of biography and cultural history, and all the more fascinating for that. Moreover, read in sequence they have a lot to say about the nineteenth century, particularly in England. All three deal with science and scientists, while two relate directly to the arts and politics of the day.

The most obvious pairing begins with The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiment of Dr. Beddoes and His Sons of Genius by Mike Jay (Yale.) This is a detailed and fascinating look at the earlier part of the century, when the effects of the French Revolution were shaking up English politics and culture. Though centered on the relatively (and unjustly) unknown Thomas Beddoes, the cast of characters includes Coleridge, James Watt, Thomas Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather. Beddoes, Darwin and several others were polymathic Renaissance men by today's standards, and they deeply influenced the arts as well as sciences.

Author Jay quotes Darwin writing that Beddoes epitomized this era's "age of wonders." The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon) by Richard Holmes more or less takes up where Jay leaves off historically, following the mid 19th century Romantic poets (especially Shelley) and their connections with the science of their day, reflected in their work (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, not the least.) Holmes is the better known and more reviewed book. The two make a fine pair.

The scientific figure who tends to focus the mid 19th century for today is of course Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution by natural selection remains arguably the most consequential theory even in the 21st century so far. There were lots of books on Darwin this year, the 200th anniversary of his birth, but I particularly liked The Young Charles Darwin by Keith Thompson (Yale) for its clarity about a part of Darwin's life that hasn't been widely examined. It provides a more focused look on the science of the day.

All three books suggest what an adventure it was to be involved in the arts and sciences then, with opportunities for insights and achievement as new discoveries cascaded, science was changing rapidly and was defining itself. These books suggest what was gained but also what was lost now that science and art are so separated, and it is so much more difficult for anyone to have any comprehensive sense of significiant discoveries, how they relate, and what they mean in the larger sense.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy
Jean Decenty & William Ickes, editors
The MIT Press 255 pages

Why We Cooperate
Michael Tomasello with Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms & Elizabeth Spelke
Boston Review/Yale University Press 206 pages

Science has its own dogmas. Sometimes the dogma is a powerful prevailing theory with a superstar and institutionally well-placed adherents, or more often a set of biases based on a longstanding theory that determines how science is organized and done.

Lately, the prevailing dogmas of neo-Darwinian evolution that continued the bias towards the "struggle for survival" of individual organisms has been challenged in a number of life sciences. The growing power of neuroscience is beginning to shake things up as well. The outcome so far is an impressive if still fairly primitive movement towards recognizing what we call empathy, altruism and cooperation that have long been observed, though those observations were often ignored or discounted.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy collects reports on multidisciplinary research with neuroscience heavily in the mix, as these sciences (including various branches of psychology research) to some extent reorganize themselves. These reports generally support the existence of empathy, often through neurological research, for example following the discovery of "mirror" neurons.

Why We Cooperate presents a report by evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello on his research with chimps and human children, and a series of responses by another anthropologist, two psychologists and a professor of logic and philosophy. Tomasello's basic finding is that altruism and the urge to cooperate exist naturally--not just culturally.

Both of these books seem to be part of a movement--a slow or a fast one, depending on your point of view--away from a strictly individualistic (and perhaps baldly genetic) bias towards recognition of the importance and function of the social in survival.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy is more technical, a bit more densely written though still accessible to the careful reader. However it does appear to be more of an insider challenge, and a resource for scientists and science students. This intent is reflected in the physical book--sturdy binding, slick paper, it's built to last on the office shelf and be passed along through a few generations of students. It is an impressively useful volume, readable in its efficient prose and relatively modest length.

Why We Cooperate is even more accessible to the general reader, and clearly is meant to be. As a book, it is small and handy, about the size of a quality paperback but a sturdy and handsome hardcover. It's the kind of book you want to carry around. The prose within it answers this invitation--from Tomasello's essay to the responses, it's close to conversational, though it's a logical and informed conversation.

Readers will find entering that conversation inviting, or at least this one did. There is some eye-opening research presented in both these volumes, though the limitations of such research are also exposed. Of all the motivations for children cooperating in games, for example, I didn't detect much awareness that they are doing it because it's fun. A game without rules everyone cooperates in maintaining just isn't fun. Lots of animals play. Even scientists. Maybe they could augment their laboratory experiments by playing with children, and later, reading some literature. Lots of science I read in this field seems to be painstakingly and awkwardly coming to conclusions that storytellers came to long ago, and then announcing it timidly, as it is might be received as heresy.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy will interest students of neuroscience and psychology. It's also one of those landmark books that's apt to become a kind of classic in the field, until (and if) the next steps are taken. Why We Cooperate is for an intelligent but at least somewhat wider readership, as well as those in fields of psychology, evolution and child development. Together they are part of a dogma-slaying new paradigm with far-reaching implications for how humans think about themselves and their roles in the world.