- Crichton, Michael.
Next.
New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
ISBN 0-06-087298-5.
-
Several of the essays in Freeman Dyson's
The
Scientist as Rebel (June 2007) predict that
“the next Big Thing” and a central theme of
the present century will be the discovery of the fine-grained
details of biology and the emergence of technologies which
can achieve essentially anything which is possible with the
materials and processes of life. This, Dyson believes, will
have an impact on the lives of humans and the destiny of
humanity and the biosphere which dwarf those of any of the
technological revolutions of the twentieth century.
In this gripping novel, page-turner past master
(and medical doctor) Michael Crichton provides a glimpse
of a near-term future in which these technologies are
coming up to speed. It's going to be a wild and wooly
world once genes start jumping around among metazoan species
with all the promiscuity of prokaryotic party time, and Crichton
weaves this into a story which is simultaneously
entertaining, funny, and cautionary. His trademark
short chapters (averaging just a little over four pages)
are like potato chips to the reader—just one more,
you think, when you know you ought to have gotten to sleep
an hour ago.
For much of the book, the story seems like a collection of
independent short stories interleaved with one another. As
the pages dwindle, you begin to wonder, “How the heck is
he going to pull all this together?” But that's what
master story tellers do, and he succeeds delightfully.
One episode in this book describes what is perhaps the worst
backseat passenger on a road trip in all of English fiction;
you'll know what I'm talking about when you get to it. The
author has a great deal of well-deserved fun at the expense
of the legacy media: it's payback time for all of those
agenda-driven attack reviews of
State
of Fear (January 2005).
I came across two amusing typos: at the bottom of p. 184,
I'm pretty sure “A transgender higher primate”
is supposed to be “A transgenic higher primate”, and
on p. 428 in the bibliography, I'm certain that the title
of Sheldon Krimsky's book is
Science in the Private Interest, not
“Science in the Primate Interest”—what a difference
a letter can make!
In an Author's Note at the end, Crichton presents one of the most
succinct and clearly argued cases I've encountered why the patenting
of genes is not just destructive of scientific inquiry and medical
progress, but also something which even vehement supporters of
intellectual property in inventions and artistic creations can oppose
without being inconsistent.
- Epstein, Robert.
The Case Against Adolescence.
Sanger, CA: Quill Driver Books, 2007.
ISBN 1-884956-70-X.
-
What's the matter with kids today? In this exhaustively documented
breakthrough book, the author argues that adolescence, as it is
presently understood in developed Western countries, is a social
construct which was created between 1880 and 1920 by well-intentioned
social reformers responding to excesses of the industrial revolution
and mass immigration to the United States. Their remedies—compulsory
education, child labour laws, the juvenile justice system, and the
proliferation of age-specific restrictions on “adult”
activities such as driving, drinking alcohol, and smoking—had
the unintended consequence of almost completely segregating teenagers
from adults, trapping them in a vacuous peer culture and prolonging
childhood up to a decade beyond the age at which young people begin
to assume the responsibilities of adulthood in traditional societies.
Examining anthropological research on other cultures and historical
evidence from past centuries, the author concludes that the
“storm and stress” which characterises modern
adolescence is the consequence of the infantilisation of teens,
and their confinement in a peer culture with little contact
with adults. In societies and historical periods where the young
became integrated into adult society shortly after puberty and
began to shoulder adult responsibilities, there is no evidence
whatsoever for anything like the dysfunctional adolescence so often
observed in the modern West—in fact, a majority of preindustrial
cultures have no word in their language for the concept of adolescence.
Epstein, a psychologist who did his Ph.D. under B. F. Skinner at
Harvard, and former editor-in-chief of
Psychology Today magazine,
presents results of a comprehensive test of adultness
he developed along with Diane Dumas which demonstrate that in
most cases the competencies of people in the 13 to 17 year range
do not differ from those of adults between twenty and seventy-one
by a statistically significant margin. (I should note that the
groups surveyed, as described on pp. 154–155, differed
wildly in ethnic and geographic composition from the
U.S. population as a whole; I'd love to see the cross-tabulations.)
An abridged version of the
test is included in the book; you can
take the complete test
online. (My score was 98%, with most of the demerits due to
placing less trust in figures of authority than the author deems
wise.)
So, if there is little difference in the basic competences of
teens and adults, why are so many adolescents such vapid, messed-up,
apathetic losers? Well, consider this: primates learn by observing
(monkey see) and by emulating (monkey do). For millions of years our
ancestors have lived in bands in which the young had most of their
contact with adults, and began to do the work of adults as soon as
they were physically and mentally capable of doing so. This was
the near-universal model of human societies until the late 19th
century and remains so in many non-Western cultures. But in the West,
this pattern has been replaced by warehousing teenagers in government
schools which effectively confine them with others of their age. Their
only adult contacts apart from (increasingly absent) parents
are teachers, who are inevitably seen as jailors. How are
young people to be expected to turn their inherent competencies
into adult behaviour if they spend almost all of their time
only with their peers?
Now, the author doesn't claim
that everybody between the ages of 13 and 17 has the ability to
function as an adult. Just as with physical development,
different individuals mature at different rates, and one may
have superb competence in one area and remain childish in another.
But, on the other hand, simply turning 18 or 21 or whatever
doesn't magically endow someone with those competencies
either—many adults (defined by age) perform poorly as
well.
In two breathtaking final chapters, the author argues for the
replacement of virtually all age-based discrimination in the
law with competence testing in the specific area involved.
For example, a 13 year old could entirely skip high school by
passing the equivalency examination available to those 18 or
older. There's already a precedent for this—we don't
automatically allow somebody to drive, fly an airplane, or
operate an amateur radio station when they reach a certain
age: they have to pass a comprehensive examination on theory,
practice, and law. Why couldn't this basic concept be
extended to most of the rights and responsibilities we currently
grant based purely upon age? Think of the incentive such a system
would create for teens to acquire adult knowledge and behaviour
as early as possible, knowing that it would be rewarded with
adult rights and respect, instead of being treated like
children for what could be some of the most productive years
of their lives.
Boxes throughout the text highlight the real-world achievements of
young people in history and the present day. (Did you know
that
Sergey Karjakin
became a chess grandmaster at the age of 12 years and 7 months?
He is among seven who achieved grandmaster ranking at an age
younger than Bobby Fischer's 15 years and 6 months.) There are
more than 75 pages of end notes and bibliography. (I wonder if
the author is aware that note 68 to chapter 5 [p. 424] cites a publication
of the
Lyndon LaRouche
organisation.)
It isn't often you pick up a book with laudatory blurbs by a collection
of people including Albert Ellis, Deepak Chopra, Joyce Brothers,
Alvin Toffler, George Will, John Taylor Gatto, Suzanne Somers, and
Buzz Aldrin. I concur with them that the author has put his finger
precisely on the cause of a major problem in modern society, and
laid out a challenging yet plausible course for remedying it.
I discovered this book via an excellent
podcast
interview with the author on
“The
Glenn and Helen Show”.
About halfway through this book, I had one of the most
chilling visions of the future I've experienced in many years. One of
the things I've puzzled over for ages is what, precisely, is the
end state of the vision of those who call themselves
“progressives”—progress toward what, anyway?
What would society look like if they had their way across the board?
And then suddenly it hit me like a brick. If you want to see what
the “progressive” utopia looks like, just take a glance
at the lives of teenagers today, who are deprived of a broad spectrum of
rights and denied responsibilities “for their own good”.
Do-gooders always justify their do-badding “for the children”,
and their paternalistic policies, by eviscerating individualism and
autonomous judgement, continually create ever more “children”.
The nineteenth century reformers, responding to genuine excesses of
the industrial revolution, extended childhood from puberty to years
later, inventing what we call adolescence. The agenda of today's
“progressives” is inexorably extending adolescence
to create a society of eternal adolescents, unworthy of the
responsibilities of adults, and hence forever the childlike wards
of an all-intrusive state and the elites which govern it. If you want
a vision of the “progressive” future, imagine being back
in high school—forever.
- Frankfurt, Harry G.
On Bullshit.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
ISBN 0-691-12294-6.
-
This tiny book (just 67 9½×15 cm pages—I'd
estimate about 7300 words) illustrates that there is no topic, however
mundane or vulgar, which a first-rate philosopher cannot make so
complicated and abstruse that it appears profound. The author, a
professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, first
published this essay in 1986 in the
Raritan Review.
In it, he tackles the momentous conundrum of what distinguishes
bullshit from lies. Citing authorities including Wittgenstein
and Saint Augustine, he concludes that while the liar is ultimately
grounded in the truth (being aware that what he is saying is
counterfactual and crafting a lie to make the person to whom he
tells it believe that), the bullshitter is entirely
decoupled (or, perhaps in his own estimation, liberated) from
truth and falsehood, and is simply saying whatever it takes to
have the desired effect upon the audience.
Throughout, it's obvious that we're in the presence of a
phil-oss-o-pher doing phil-oss-o-phy
right out in the open. For example, on p. 33 we
have:
It is in this sense that Pascal's (Fania Pascal, an
acquaintance of Wittgenstein in the 1930s, not
Blaise—JW) statement is unconnected to a concern with the
truth; she is not concerned with the truth-value of what
she says. That is why she cannot be regarded as lying; for
she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore
she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she
presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a
belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that
it is not true.
(The Punctuator
applauds the use of colons and semicolons in the passage quoted above!)
All of this is fine, but it seems to me that the author misses an
important aspect of bullshit: the fact that in many
cases—perhaps the overwhelming majority—the bulshittee is
perfectly aware of being bullshitted by the bullshitter, and the
bullshitter is conversely aware that the figurative bovid excrement
emitted is being dismissed as such by those whose ears it befouls.
Now, this isn't always the case: sometimes you find yourself in a
tight situation faced with a difficult question and manage to bullshit
your way through, but in the context of a “bull session”,
only the most naïve would assume that what was said was sincere
and indicative of the participants' true beliefs: the author cites
bull sessions as a venue in which people can try on beliefs other than
their own in a non-threatening environment.
- Pyle, Ernie.
Brave Men.
Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, [1944] 2001.
ISBN 0-8032-8768-2.
-
Ernie Pyle is perhaps the most celebrated war correspondent of all time,
and this volume amply illustrates why. A collection of his columns for
the Scripps-Howard newspapers edited into book form, it covers World War
II from the invasion of Sicily in 1943 through the Normandy landings and
the liberation of Paris in 1944. This is the first volume of
three collections of his wartime reportage: the second and third,
Here is Your War and Ernie Pyle in England,
are out of print, but used copies are readily available at a reasonable
price.
While most readers today know Pyle only from his battle dispatches, he
was, in fact, a renowned columnist even before the United States
entered the war—in the 1930s he roamed the nation, filing
columns about Americana and Americans which became as beloved as
the very similar television reportage decades later by
Charles Kuralt who,
in fact, won an Ernie Pyle Award for his reporting.
Pyle's first love and enduring sympathy was with the infantry, and few
writers have expressed so eloquently the experience of being “in
the line” beyond what most would consider the human limits of
exhaustion, exertion, and fear. But in this book he also shows the
breadth of the Allied effort, profiling Navy troop transport and landing
craft, field hospitals, engineering troops, air corps dive and
light bombers, artillery, ordnance depots, quartermaster corps,
and anti-aircraft guns (describing the “scientific magic”
of radar guidance without disclosing how it worked).
Apart from the prose, which is simultaneously unaffected and elegant,
the thing that strikes a reader today is that in this entire book,
written by a superstar columnist for the mainstream media of his
day, there is not a single suggestion that the war effort, whatever
the horrible costs he so candidly documents, is misguided, or that
there is any alternative or plausible outcome other than victory.
How much things have changed…. If you're looking for this kind
of with the troops on the ground reporting today, you won't find it in
the legacy dead tree or narrowband one-to-many media, but rather in reader-supported
front-line journalists such as
Michael Yon—if you like
what he's writing, hit the tip jar and keep him at the front; think of it
like buying the paper with Ernie Pyle's column.
Above, I've linked to a contemporary reprint edition of this work.
Actually, I read a hardbound sixth printing of the 1944 first edition
which I found in a used
bookstore in Marquette, Michigan (USA) for less than half the
price of the paperback reprint; visit your local bookshop—there
are wonderful things there to be discovered.