Sunday, December 14, 2003

A Lens On Life?

I was always DEEPLY influenced by a Wallace Stegner essay—"Fiction: A Lens On Life"—and here comes an echo. If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia, so be it.



[x Evolutionary Psychology]
Literature Teaching Us About Life, and vice versa
A Scream Goes Through The House. By Arnold Weinstein. Random House: New York, 2003; ISBN 0-375-50624-1.
Reviewed by
David P. Barash, Psychology Department, Box 351525, University of Washington, Seattle, Wa. 98053, USA.

Arnold Weinstein's A Scream Goes Through The House isn't an obvious choice to be reviewed in Evolutionary Psychology. After all, C. P. Snow's famous warning - now half a century old - that the humanities and the sciences constitute "two cultures" between which there is lamentably little communication, remains true today. On the other hand, perhaps this lamentable separation is all the more reason to encourage evolutionary psychologists to take account of Professor Weinstein's (and literature's) Scream.

Moreover, Scream is explicitly concerned with bridging that infamous gap between art and science—or, more accurately, between art and human beings as embodied, organic creatures. It is, in some ways, a feast of literary cardiology: "The heart of this book," writes Weinstein, "is precisely the human heart: the pump that keeps our body alive and the feelings that course through us and link us to others. Literature and art live in these two ways, as a bloodstream that connects us to the world, as a mirror for our emotions; and as a magic script that allows us both to sound our own depths and also to enter the echoing storehouse of feeling that goes by the name of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, Munch, Proust, and all the great writers and artists whose work exists to nourish us. I see the great books as a feast for the heart."

He goes on:

"For too long we have been encouraged to see culture as an affair of intellect, and reading as a solitary exercise. But the truth is different: literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community; a community composed of buried selves and loved ones, as well as the fellowship of writers over time. Literature and art provide intercourse of a unique sort. Through art we discover that we are not alone." That picture of connectedness, of a universe that is umbilical and strange - a picture that no camera can take - takes the measure of our true lives.

And after all, isn't that what an evolutionary perspective on human beings also seeks to achieve: to take the measure of our true lives, to reveal the extent to which human beings are not alone, neither as atomized individuals nor as a specially created species disconnected from the rest of the organic world?

Scream is subtitled "what literature teaches us about life," and it proceeds to examine literary representations of our lives as embodied, organic creatures, various "narratives of exposure" whereby our bodies are revealed, diagnosed, and understood (or misunderstood), various depictions of plague - both biological and metaphoric - and of death. It is a brave undertaking for any denizen of the scholarly humanities, especially in these days of postmodernist nonsense, when literary texts are seen as arbitrary orderings of components within their own semantic system, disconnected from anything so perverse as reality, and in which everything is supposed to be "socially constructed" and human nature, a chimera.

By contrast, both evolutionary psychologists and Scream proceed from the eminently reasonable assumption that biological reality exists independent of anyone's rhetorical flourishes, cultural constructs, or subjective experiences. Even solipsists look both ways before crossing a street and postmodernists, I suspect, submit their appendicitis to a surgeon, not a semiotician. Weinstein - a professor of comparative literature at Brown University who has long taught courses that conjoin literature and medicine - is a very savvy literary surgeon; he is to creative fiction what Richard Seltzer, Sherwin Nuland, and Oliver Sachs are to modern medicine. He is especially effective pointing out how literature is a "storehouse of emotions and insights about body and mind," a treasure trove depicting and reconfiguring our most basic, shared feelings.

Throughout this astonishingly erudite yet accessible book, Weinstein shows that "[w]e are somatic creatures, living in bodies, having emotions, bathed by sensations, at time bubbling and simmering, at times dawdling and eddying, hot and cold, nervous and calm, fearful and yearning, hungry and satiated." He also shows that he is dude who can write!

Although there is nothing overtly "sociobiological" about Scream, it doesn't take an overpowering imagination to perceive the evolutionary themes underpinning its arguments. For example, when discussing Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Weinstein notes how this play reveals

the astonishingly interactive, virtually incestuous life that all of us lead. Theater, given its case of characters, is the social art form par excellence, and it is egalitarian in a way that neither poetry nor fiction can be: it grants life to the whole consort, and asks us to see just how porous, how interdependent, how infected, our private "agenda" really is.


Kin selection, anyone?

Finally, a personal disclosure: I am currently in the final stages of writing Madame Bovary's Ovaries, a co-authored exploration of what might be termed "Darwinian literary criticism," which (to reverse Scream's subtitle) seeks to reveal what life teaches us about literature. I very much hope that my daughter Nanelle and I will succeed in our enterprise as well as Arnold Weinstein has succeeded in his kindred endeavor. His ideas are fresh and cogent; his writing, superb. If you fear that you have labored too long in the vineyards of biology or psychology, becoming - ironically - a stranger to the scratch and scream of life while seeking to comprehend precisely that life, then you ought to consider doing yourself a favor and reading Weinstein's book.

Sometimes I have wondered how professors of literature can devote their entire professional careers to explicating the works of others, even when those others are certifiable geniuses. Maybe it requires a suitably diminished ego, which in turn might generate willingness to engage in the kind of intellectual subordination implied in making someone else's creativity one's own life work; or maybe it is precisely the opposite, insofar as attempting to be Boswell to another's Johnson may itself indicate a degree of ego-strength not possessed by those of us who insist that we'll make our own way, create our own science, our own art, thank you very much. Or, maybe it is simple realism, since who among us can realistically claim to be demeaned by seeing oneself as a commentator upon the likes of James Joyce, William Faulkner, or Shakespeare? (Presumably, evolutionary biologists are not simply commentators on Darwin, but rather creators in our own right, albeit we all labor in his shadow.) But who would disagree with T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, when he announces "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be"? Or refuse to be counted as being, at best, among the "attendant lords"?

In any event, A Scream Goes Through the House offers brilliant literary analysis and humanistic wisdom, filtered through a biologically sympathetic sensibility, and served up with gorgeous writing to boot. Arnold Weinstein—one of our most worthy attendant lords—thereby offers yet another answer to my own egotistical dilemma: in writing about the great literature created by others, he has created great literature himself.

References

Barash, D. P. and Barash, N. R. (forthcoming). Madame Bovary's Ovaries: Charles Darwin meets Charles Dickens ... and Gustave Flaubert ... and William Shakespeare ... and Jane Austen ... and Jonathan Franzen .... New York, NY: Bantam Books.

Weinstein, A. (2003). A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life. New York, NY: Random House.

Copyright © 2003 Evolutionary Psychology

Robert Heinlein's First Novel

Ah, Robert Heinlein. Supporter of both Upton Sinclair and Barry Goldwater. Only in America. If this be (fair & balanced) admiration, so be it.



[x CBC]
Heinlein novel imagines a future America patterned on Alberta
By Robin Rowland, CBC News Online | December 9, 2003

Long-lost first work surfaces

TORONTO - The American science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein is known for such classic novels as Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

A new book reveals that Heinlein, at least early in his life, was a Socred, a believer in the Social Credit movement that came to power in Alberta in 1935.

Heinlein's long-lost first novel, For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs, is scheduled for publication in January. It imagines a future America patterned on 1930s Alberta.

Heinlein wrote the novel in the late 1930s. It tells the story of a U.S. Navy officer named Perry Nelson who is killed in a traffic accident and is somehow transported, alive, to the California of 2086.

The book was rejected by a number of publishers, probably because much of the story is actually a series of lectures on how Heinlein felt the future should look. In later works, Heinlein would use fictional characters for the same purpose.

In Heinlein's America of 2086, the country did not enter the Second World War, remaining isolated. (Hitler commits suicide after the collapse of the German economy, Mussolini just retires and the Duke of Windsor becomes king of a united Europe).

In the novel, in the 1950s, Fiorella LaGuardia (mayor of New York when Heinlein was writing) begins a series of economic reforms, starting with a banking system based on the Social Credit theories of Socred thinker Clifford Hugh Douglas. In the novel, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds these changes. In reality, in Canada, the Supreme Court rejected them.

In For Us, the Living, later presidents complete the reforms. These reforms then give people a basic income that bridges the gap between production and consumption, which then allows the Americans of 2086 to do what they really want, free of economic fear.

Robert James, who is writing a biography of Heinlein, says in the afterword that there was an active social-credit movement in Los Angeles at the time. According to James, Heinlein had to leave the U.S. Navy after he contracted tuberculosis. He then worked for Upton Sinclair's political campaign. The muck-raking author of The Jungle had long pushed for social reform in the United States.

In 1934, Sinclair ran for governor of California as a Democrat on an EPIC (End Poverty in California) ticket. Sinclair was crushed by the Republicans and the conservative California newspapers. Heinlein continued in the EPIC movement and was editor of the movement's newsletter. In 1938, he stood for the California state assembly in a district that included Beverly Hills and part of Hollywood, losing to a Republican.

After that, Heinlein turned to writing, and quickly became the star of the science-fiction pulp magazines, making enough money to pay off his mortgage. His first successful novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, about a trip to the moon, was published in 1947.

Heinlein then went on to write a series of juvenile novels, which drew many young people into the science-fiction world, followed by his adult fiction.

James quotes Heinlein as telling another science-fiction writer about the later changes in his political philosophy: "I've simply changed from a soft-headed radical to hard-headed radical, a pragmatic libertarian." James also says the events of the Second World War and the Cold War, including the threat from communism, influenced Heinlein's change of political philosophy. He supported Senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 (some political analysts consider Goldwater the first neo-conservative).

Heinlein, however, opposed what today is known as social conservativism. In the new novel, his first draft of future history includes a take-over of the United States by what he calls "Neo-Puritans" led by the televangelist Nehemiah Scudder, a character who is also prominent in his 1941 novella If This Goes On. The novella is the story of the second American revolution, when libertarians finally overthrow a dictatorship of the religious right.

For Us, the Living also includes one chilling incident, a surprise attack on the island of Manhattan by two giant helicopters that flood the island with poison gas, killing 80 per cent of the population. The helicopters are based on aircraft carriers and the attack comes when the United States is at war with Argentina, Brazil and Chile in December 2003.

Copyright © 2003 CBC


What's In A Meme?


In 1976, Richard Dawkins—an Oxford University zoologist—published The Selfish Gene, a revisionist look at Darwinian theory. Dawkins argued that evolution was not competition between biological organisms, but genetic competition. Individual organisms are doomed to die, but genes hop from creature to creature and survive almost indefinitely. Needing an analogy to describe this process clearly, Dawkins introduced the notion of the meme. A meme—to Dawkins—was a unit of cultural transmission. Anything that spreads from person to person as people imitate one another. Memes include tunes, ideas, catch phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots, or of building arches. The familiar seven-note jingle: Shave and a haircut, two bits. The miniskirt was a meme. Cameron Crowe sparked a meme with Jerry McGuire, when Cuba Gooding cried: Show me the money! Memes, Dawkins argued, behave like genes. They thrive by jumping from host to host. Meme spread like wildfire over e-mail. Blogs have already proven particularly adept at spreading a meme that's had little success over the past 25 years: the meme meme. Richard Dawkins coined the word in 1976, but it didn't catch on with the general public until recently, when it became a watchword among bloggers. Fair & Balanced is a meme. Consider yourself infected. If this be (fair & balanced) etymology, so be it.

What An Idiot!

Saddam hides in a hole. A Nuremburg Trial? Nothing is surprising anymore. Saddam is a clown, not some fearsome monster. He has done bad things, unthinkable things. As Hannah Arendt wrote of Adolf Eichmann: The Banality of Evil. If this be (fair & balanced) incredulity, so be it.



Saddam Hussein Captured in Iraq Hideout
1 hour, 40 minutes ago, AP

Without firing a shot, American forces captured a bearded and haggard-looking Saddam Hussein in a dirt pit across a river from one of his former palaces near his hometown of Tikrit, ending one of the most intensive manhunts in history. The arrest was a huge victory for U.S. forces battling an insurgency by the ousted dictator's followers.

Saddam Timeline