The Republican War On Science
From the category archives:
Books
I’ve already reviewed Chris’s book “at length”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/30/the-republican-war-on-science/, and talked there about why I liked it. What I want to do in this contribution is to develop on what I argued back then was missing from the book. Short version: Chris presents latterday Republican science policy as the product of an unholy alliance between big business and the religious right. He laments the powerlessness of traditional moderate Republicans who believed that science and scientific truth was good and important. This allows him to get at an awful lot of what is wrong about the Republican party’s current approach to science. But it misses out on something important. There’s a strand of Republican thinking – represented most prominently by Newt Gingrich and by various Republican-affiliated techno-libertarians – that has a much more complicated attitude to science. Chris more or less admits in the book that he doesn’t get Newt, who on the one hand helped gut OTA (or at the very least stood passively to one side as it was gutted) but on the other hand has been a proponent of more funding for many areas of the sciences. I want to argue that getting Newt _is_ important.
I finished Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594200637/junius-20 at the weekend and very much enjoyed it. For those who don’t know it’s a novel about academia, loosely modelled on Forster’s “Howard’s End”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/014118213X/junius-20 , and centred on the relations between the Belsey and Kipps families. Howard Belsey, an post-modern art historian from an English working-class background is bitterly antagonistic to Monty Kipps a black conservative critic/pundit who has made a career out of baiting liberals. They are forced to deal with one another thanks to the involvement of Belsey’s son with Kipps’s daughter. There are no plot spoilers so far (you’d know all that by about page 6) and I don’t want to post any — just to recommend it. I liked it more than her “White Teeth”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375703861/junius-20 , which she didn’t know how to end, but like that book it is witty and well-observed and has much to say about the lies people tell to themselves about themselves.
(I wrote something like the previous paragraph yesterday, but when I pressed “publish” WordPress sent me to a login screen and then eat my post. So I had to do it all again. In between I’ve read a few of the online reviews and reader reactions at places like Amazon. And I’m astonished by how many people seem to have just hated the book. Now like Smith, I’m British, and I’ve noticed that many of the complaints are from Americans who thinks she gets America wrong in various respects (most of the action is set in Cambridge/Boston) and has a poor ear for American dialogue. I’d be interested to hear if any commenters had that same reaction. Anyhow, I thought it was terrific.)
Via “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007354.html#007354 I see that the Hugo nominees have been announced. They’re
Learning the World, Ken MacLeod (Orbit; Tor)
A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Voyager; Bantam Spectra)
Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (Tor)
Accelerando, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
For once, I’ve read all of them, and liked each of them quite a bit – it’s a very good field this year. That said, if I had to pick, it would either be McLeod’s _Learning the World_ or Wilson’s _Spin_. Both of these books see their authors reaching a new level of achievement. The McLeod book combines the political edge of his earlier work with a real degree of human warmth; it’s a little reminiscent of Vinge’s _Deepness in the Sky_ in its setup, but more subtle in how its plot plays out. _Spin_ strikes me as even more subtle, albeit chillier – using a gonzo science-fictional conceit and a slightly unreliable narrator to explore how we construct fantasies about an uncaring universe. As for the others, _Accelerando_ is very impressive, but I couldn’t entirely warm to it – I found that I was reading it more for the infodumps than the plot development. I prefer his “Merchant Princes” series which has less bells and whistles, but does a better job in my opinion of combining plotline with sociological speculation. More on this series later. That said, _Accelerando_ has some very nice sardonic touches. Most libertarian Singularities see the geeks inheriting the earth, but Stross’s version of the Singularity is dominated by feral intelligent financial instruments; hedge funds with stratospheric IQs run amok. _A Feast for Crows_ is a not-entirely-wonderful installment in a mostly wonderful series of books – the next should be better (it’ll have Tyrion). _Old Man’s War_ is great entertainment – I suspect Scalzi is getting a little tired of being compared to a modern Heinlein but there’s good reason for the comparison; he resurrects the feeling of golden age SF, but somehow manages to make it feel fresh. All good books in my opinion – feel free to agree/disagree in comments.
Several good books dealing with the American penal system and its effects on other aspects of American society are slated to appear this year. The first of them has just been published. Locked Out, by “Jeff Manza”:http://www.cas.northwestern.edu/sociology/faculty/manza/home.html and “Chris Uggen”:http://www.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/ examines the consequences of felon disenfranchisement laws for political participation and electoral outcomes. As might be expected, the United States puts much stronger restrictions than most Western countries on the voting rights of those currently imprisoned, on parole or probation, as well as on those who have served their sentences. When coupled with the fact that the U.S. has a relatively enormous segment of its population in prison, such laws may have political effects in themselves, as well as reflecting some of the deep effects of mass incarceration in modern American society. Here’s a map (from “Chris’s website”:http://www.soc.umn.edu/%7Euggen/felon_disenfranchisement.htm) showing felon disenfranchisement laws by state (for 2004). (Click the map for a larger, more readable version.)
In the book, Manza and Uggen find that about 5.3 million people were affected by these laws as of the November 2004 election. Of these, two million were African-American. In several states, as many as one in four black men is ineligible to vote. An “earlier article”:http://www.soc.umn.edu/%7Euggen/Uggen_Manza_ASR_02.pdf by the authors estimate that felon disenfranchisement is large enough to affect national elections when they are close: felons make up about 2.5 percent of the U.S. voting-age population (a steady upward trend from just under one percent in 1976). But there’s not much political hay to be made about this — who wants to say “70 percent of felons vote Democratic”? The racial history of these laws is more important: they are largely the outcome of racial conflict during Reconstruction. Moreover, according to the authors public opinion polls suggest 80 percent of Americans are in favor of allowing convicted felons to vote once they have completed their sentences. (Only a third are in favor of allowing prisoners to vote.)
Chris Uggen also “has a good blog”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/, incidentally. Today, for instance, I “learned from him”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2006/03/federal-lawsuit-over-financial-aid-for.html that students convicted of rape (for example) remain eligible for federal financial aid, but students convicted of misdemeanor drug possession are automatically ineligible. Anyway, I recommend the book.
David Brooks has discovered Annette Lareau’s book Unequal Childhoods
So what does Brooks get right?
Crooked Timber is going boingboing with all the ‘cool stuff!’ links. On we go. Amazon has piles of books slashed up to 75%. Mostly utter depths of crap, like you’d expect. But: The Locus Awards
I’ll tell you a secret about Belle. She’s loves Hornblower
Here’s a lovely little video that, near as I can tell, has not gone nearly so viral as it deserves. "Superman lay broken … La-da-da-da-Daa."
The naive beauty of it – part childcult, part cynicism about fight scenes – is what Daniel Clowes is getting at, I guess, in this interview.
As a kid, I was really attracted to superheroes, but I never read the comics. I’d buy every single comic, and I had some connection to it, but I didn’t like them, really. I remember talking to my other friends who read superhero comics, and they liked them on such a different level than I did. They were like, “Yeah, when Iron Man fights the guy, and punches him in the face, it’s so awesome!” But it had this pop-art iconographic quality to me that was really charming, and I just loved that aspect of it. I always gravitated towards that part of it, and I could never quite get past that, and that’s what I was going for. I wanted to create a story that lived up to the iconography, but also had something else going on.
If you don’t know who Clowes is, you should. (Go read wikipedia or something.)
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The phenomenon of “Biblically Correct Tours”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021700397.html is much in the news recently. (P.Z. Myers has a “summary”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/02/biblically_correct_tours.php). Essentially, a creationist named Rusty Carter leads people on tours around museums chatting away about how dinosaurs and people lived together, how the world was created in seven days, and how the earth is only six thousand years old, _ad nauseam_. So I thought I’d mention Martin Rudwick’s new book, “Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226731111/kieranhealysw-20/, a (very, very large) history of how scientists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries figured out that the earth was very, very old. Certainly much older than six thousand years. The problem of the age of the earth is a good one partly because because it’s so tangible, partly because it’s a good story (the French and English scientists are great, and Thomas Jefferson gets a look-in as well), and partly because it was solved[1] more than two hundred years ago. Richard Fortey “reviewed the book”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n03/fort01_.html in the LRB (subscription req’d) recently. He begins the review with an anecdote:
bq. … as I had anticipated, a caller from Kentucky duly declared that the world had been created in seven days, and what did I have to say to that? I invited the caller to ask himself whether, when his grandfather used the words ‘in my day’, he meant one particular day, or rather a season or a phase of life. I went on to say that the biblical ‘days’ could be better understood as whole eras, domesticated by a familiar terminology in order to make them comprehensible. Had I but known it, the same argument had already been thoroughly rehearsed by French naturalists more than two hundred years earlier. My creationist caller was restating a position which was already unfashionable in the late 18th century.
People like Rusty Carter make you appreciate scholars like Rudwick — not to mention the Enlightenment.
[1] I mean, it was established that the earth wasn’t just a few thousand years old. Sorry for the unclarity.
Couple days ago I posted some fine metaphysical poetry and extremely witty self-criticism by Conrad Aiken at the Valve. I like Aiken very much. (One of our commenters mentioned that Eliot praised him as "il miglior fabbro", but someone else noted he also called Pound that. So maybe he just carried around a whole tray of that one at parties.) There’s also a family friendship on Belle’s side. Warings and Aikens have been friends for generations, apparently.
Anyway, I’ve been reading poems from Aiken’s second book, Turns and Movies (1916), long out of print. One couplet – and that’s pretty much it – from "All Lovely Things" sometimes gets quoted, from the end of this stanza.
All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
And youth, that’s now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.
Since the book’s public domain, I’m tempted to make a nice CC edition. Be a bit of work. But here’s a start: the title poem, which you won’t find intact elsewhere on the web, although you will find bits. It’s got a certain something. "In Turns and Movies he willfully sacrificed his ability to write in smooth involute curves for a dubious gain in matter-of-fact forcefulness." Of the title poem in particular: "although immature and uneven … at least a crude vitality." So writes Conrad Aiken. I agree the metaphysical stuff he wrote later is better. But if Art Spiegelman decided he wanted to illustrate something like The Wild Party
The BBC reports a remarkable find:
A “lost” science manuscript from the 1600s found in a cupboard in a house during a routine valuation is expected to fetch more than £1m at auction. The hand-written document – penned by Dr Robert Hooke – contains the minutes of the Royal Society from 1661 to 1682, experts said.
It was found in a house in Hampshire, where it is thought to have lain hidden in a cupboard for about 50 years. The owners had no idea of its value. It will be auctioned in London next month. …
I always wonder how this kind of thing happens. I mean, I know its possible for very old and valuable books to appear in estate sales and so on, especially when the ones of interest might be hidden amongst hundreds of others or not immediately of obvious worth. But to be unaware of the potential interest of any handwritten manuscript that’s obviously hundreds of years old … I don’t know. Maybe some old homes are just drowning in antiques. And indeed, the report suggests something like this was the case — though in a way that does seem just a bit too formulaic to believe:
It was discovered in a private house where other items were being valued by an antiques expert and it was only as he left that the family — whose identity is being kept secret — thought to show him the manuscript. “The valuer was just leaving when this document was produced from a cupboard,” she said. “All the vendor knows is that the document had been in the family as long as she can remember. She doesn’t know how it got into the family.”
I suppose that once this discovery was made and the valuer was on his way out, he tripped over the hallway rug and noticed that the slate slab underneath bore the inscription “HIC IACET ARTORIVS REX QVONDAM REXQVE FVTVRVS.”
One of the lazy journalistic tropes I most dislike is the generation game. It’s essentially a young person’s game, so lately we’ve mostly seen people under 45 (the so-called generations X and Y) putting the boot into those aged between 45 and 60 (Boomers). The results have been reliably silly, and also repetitious – the complaints and responses are little changed from 30 to 40 years ago, when boomers were mouthing slogans like “Never trust anyone over 30” .
But the game is even sillier when played by those old enough to know better, like Richard Neville. In Salon, Gary Kamiya gently skewers the latest of the genre, a book claiming that the Boomers are a “Greater Generation” than the one that fought World War II by virtue of their struggles for civil rights, equality and so on. Crucial quote
Leaving aside the obvious definitional and chronological difficulties — many of the boomers’ achievements were set in motion by men and women from the Greatest Generation — is it really fair to say that a group consisting of millions of people “did” anything?
I look forward to a time when the idea that you can classify a person by the date on their birth certificate is accepted only in the astrology columns.
Two interesting perspectives on the James Frey affair.
First, “Scott McLemee”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/01/mclemee (who is celebrating his one year anniversary as a columnist at _Inside Higher Ed_ today).
bq. Why the furor over Frey? “I think the vilification he has been subject to in the media is extreme,” writes Farr, “and probably stems from some larger discomfort about dishonesty from sources who are (and ought to be ) culturally more responsible to the ‘ascertainable facts.’” There may be something to that. And yet it begs any number of questions. The man has made a small fortune off of fabricating a life and selling it — while loudly talking, in the very same book, about the personally transformative power of “the truth.” Oprah Winfrey endorsed it, and (at first anyway) insisted that mere factual details were subordinate to a larger truth… A personal truth….A truth that, it seems, is accountable to nothing and nobody. Suppose this becomes an acceptable aspect of public life – so that it seems naive to be surprised or angered by it. Then in what sense can we expect there to be institutions that, in Farr’s words, “are (and ought to be ) culturally more responsible to the ‘ascertainable facts’”?
Second, “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007215.html#007215 at _Making Light_.
bq. Echoing Maureen Dowd, Arianna Huffington is exercised over the fact that James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces, now comprehensively exposed as fraudulent baloney, is still listed by the New York Times on their nonfiction paperback bestseller list. … This is a silly argument because calling a book “nonfiction” has never meant any kind of certification that its contents are true. Edgar Cayce books are “nonfiction.” Immanuel Velikovsky is “nonfiction.” Self-published tracts about how bees from Venus are attacking Your Child’s Brain are “nonfiction.” All of these are packs of lies. They’re also not fiction, which is to say, narratives put forth under the rubric of “I’m now going to tell you a story which I made up.” Yes, there are books which fall into a gray area. (Into which category would you put Avram Davidson’s _Adventures in Unhistory?_ You have five minutes. Show your work.) A Million Little Pieces isn’t one of those books, any more than “this”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000C4SV2I/qid=1138715421/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-3450522-9649706?s=books&v=glance&n=283155 particular pack of lies. What’s more, as an editor devoted to the value of good fiction, I wouldn’t want the Times, or anyone else, to start using “fiction” as a dumping-ground for works of nonfiction which have proved to be full of lies. There’s a good discussion to be had of whether respectable book publishers should make a greater effort to ensure the basic truthfulness, or at least truthful intention, of work published as “nonfiction.” But using “fiction” as a synonym for “lying” isn’t the way to go.
As always in _Making Light_, there’s more meat in the comments (including the utterly wonderful news that Avram Davidson’s _Adventures in Unhistory_ is being re-released by Tor in December).
I missed this over the weekend, but here’s Garrison Keillor tearing a strip off of Bernard-Henri Lévy and his book about America. (The San Francisco Chronicle “liked it a bit better”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/29/RVGHUGQ7341.DTL&type=books, but only a bit.) Based on Keillor’s review, it sounds like BHL has a case of the disease that Bruce McCall brilliantly parodied in his travelogue “In the New Canada, Living is a Way of Life.” That article (which I’ve “talked about before”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/01/13/how-peculiar/) is written in the prose characteristic of the cultural tourist/feature writer touring around Russia, c.1982 for _Readers Digest_: serious, curious, with an outsider’s eye for paradox and an uncanny ability to miss the point altogether.
_Update_: I should add that I’m not taking Keillor’s review as gospel here. I’m a big fan of cross-national comparative work, but it’s hard to do it right. Keillor is pretty snide, and the substance of his criticism (that people over here are just ordinary, decent, straight-talking folks, working hard and doing the best they can, etc, etc) is itself a typically American trope. There’s a sub-Tocquevillean comparison to be made here, if we stretch things a bit. Lévy is a French writer and minor philosopher who behaves in the flamboyant manner of a major American media celebrity, while Keillor is a minor American media celebrity who would prefer to be taken seriously for his writing and down-home philosophy. So naturally they hate each other.
Any society that can make _both_ John Tyler Bonner’s “The Ideas of Biology”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486424197/kieranhealysw-20/ and “The Evolution of Complexity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691084947/kieranhealysw-20/ available to me for two dollars each on sale has to have something going for it. On the other hand, Kevin Trudeau’s “Natural Cures ‘They’ don’t want you to now about”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0975599518/kieranhealysw-20/ still cost eighteen bucks, and rather more copies of it were available.