The Belly of the Earth Opened Up and Man Made Bacon
Being somewhat of a Darwin enthusiast, when Mr. Darwin’s Incredible Shrinking World: Science and Technology in 1959 caught my eye, I picked it up eagerly to scan its contents. The title is slightly misleading; although Darwin’s life acts as a loose scaffolding, the author Peter Macinnis’s real thesis details the sweeping transformations that were engulfing the planet at this time. Like a chuck and auger, industrialization and colonization were de-terraforming continents, yielding a massive surplus of new material goods and inventions in their wake.
While techno-futurists opine sanguinely on our techno-orignis, Macinnis takes a more elegant and neutral approach: his enthusiasm paints an accurate and detailed picture, untainted by proscriptive moralisms. But that is not to say his depiction is without style; delineating the industrial age’s burgeoning material culture and transportation modes would be difficult to trudge through if it were not for this author’s ability to illuminate interesting connections. At times I was reminded of Jules Verne’s oceanic descriptions in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
While spanning everything from artificial limbs, new methods for casting molds, the emergence of novel sports and modes of leisure, the best moments in the book examine three main transformations taking place in the world: materials, transportation and the varied effects on the populations of humanity. In the opening pages we are reminded of the familiar tales of rubber plantations and this material’s wide application. But what is probably unbeknownst to most readers (I, for one) is this curious material from Southeast Asia called gutta percha. Perhaps it is lesser known because the Europeans who were greedily draining the sap from these trees – for book binding, clothing and fashion developments, controls on musical and navigational instruments, and dentistry – nearly made the plant extinct through their entrepreneurial spirit. Steamships and iron-clad vessels hurried these products along pathways familiar to the HMS Beagle, around the coasts of Queensland, Tierra Del Fuego and the Galapagos. At the same time they were paving the way for massive improvements in postal delivery that couriered the famous correspondences and field samples from the four corners of the globe to Darwin’s study in Down House, assisting the piecing together of his great theories. Some ships were carrying a much more deplorable cargo, as slavery was a massive industry at the time. While the waning decades of the 19th century would see this institution crumble, it would not be without residual human rights abuses, especially for child labour, indentured servants, a growing population of specialized laborers, and for native peoples of newly colonized lands. These stories are known and not so surprising, but what Macinnis delivers is insight into the wages, education, and social tensions regulating the lives of citizens and politicians as they contemplated such future prospects as embracing for war. This is best illustrated in the dynamics of cotton leading up to the American Civil War: one aspect that made the South hesitant to rebel was out of fear that their biggest client, the British, were largely abolitionists and could possibly aid the North.
Perhaps a bit too reliant on Scientific American citations at times, this text is a dazzling time machine into the detail of the many catalytic elements ushering in the industrial era. It is also serves as an unfortunate reminder that we have a long way to go in educating ourselves as a society: new technologies, for all of their promise, are often gleefully adopted without much consideration for their wide ranging and long lasting effects. In that respect, as someone growing up in the age of the internet, my new found knowledge of the industrial era seems eerily familiar.
Nature versus random masturbatory egoism
I went to art school during the 1990’s. As with other young artist-types, my naive curiosity was an open vessel for the turbulent waters of Postmodernism that seemed to be seeping into every literature and art history course. Friends returning from grad school would bedazzle us with tales of Derrida and Deconstructivism; Art reviews were integrating Baudrillard’s ideas of simulation and Foucault’s ruminations of institutionalization; Professors led us from chapters on Le Corbusier and Pollock with postmodern lanterns – moralizing texts festooned with big words, sentences that spanned entire pages, and thoughts and sentiments that broadcast not so much academic rigor as intellectual brilliance. Postmodernism’s deepening roots found fertile soil in the 90’s , as an almost organic symbiosis fused this growing philosophy with emerging digital/net culture. Rhizome (taken from Deleuze/Guattari’s Mille Plateaux) was the name for the new media/computer art hub in New York City. My mind was intoxicated with the same elixir: in 1998 I cofounded a web design company called the Rhizomat.
But it was not only the exhilaration in the air that oversaw this gluttonous digestion of Postmodernist concepts and buzz-words; no other alternatives seemed to be available (besides past movements and manifestos – and the avant-guarde will have none of that). Relying on such tools as ‘the rhizome’ and ‘the panopticon’, we were taught what was ‘bad’ (or at least banal and passé, which in the art world is worse than bad): linearity, objectivity, scientific determinism, nature over nurture, and anything within arms length of being a white male.
As with many critics of Postmodernism, I am quick to add that I am closely aligned with many of their political aims. But what nobody told us during the 90’s, is that conjuring ostentatious egoists do not hold a monopoly on anti-racist, anti-colonial, pro-environmental and otherwise humanitarian empathies. This understanding that has slowly been revealed through my amateur interest in science (and evolution in particular), has been neatly exposed in the book I just finished reading: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectual Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. If only this was made required reading when I was at university!
Sokal and Bricmont immediately excuse themselves from critiquing Postmodernism’s commentary on art, architecture and literature. Why they feel compelled to refute Postmodernism, is where the movement (quite often it seems) makes contrary claims, and indeed attacks, against scientific thinking. Their approach is quite methodical: they bring up flagrant and extravagant instances where Postmodernists try to talk about things of which they possess no proper grounding or understanding. The lineup includes those most widely quoted and venerated by academics from a massive range of disciplines: Lacan, Kristeva, Latour, Virillio, Delueze and Guattari, among others.
I can recall reading some of these theorists in school, along with the uneasy sensation of not comprehending the discourse between back to front covers (indeed, the order of reading seemed to make no difference). Again and again I would dive into such masterworks as Mille Plateaux, The Order of Things and Simulations, maniacally underlining important bits and writing notes, hoping that such studious efforts would torture the meaning from out of the pages. When this failed, I would inevitably quietly scan my mental abilities, fearing that I was lacking the amount needed to decipher these golden tablets. Well, I am in good company: Sokal and Bricmont (along with other luminaries like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker) hold PhD’s and they understand this subject no better than I. And after reading Fashionable Nonsense, I have also become convinced that the Postmodernists may also be guilty of not understanding (at least parts) what they write.
The most useful proposition offered in the book is outlined near the beginning, that science is just a more ordered and systematic extension of the everyday toolkit all of us use on a daily basis to navigate our lives. Yes, we can never be sure of anything else beyond our own consciousness, and that there are problems with making predictions about future events. But once we move beyond these platitudes one is forced to realize sensible modes of behaviour: we all act in accordance that others are also conscious, and that we will place great certainty in scientifically elucidated facts like the hour of the sun rise, tidal changes, weather predictions and the safety of an airplane flight.
Another important position is that many postmodern texts critiqued in the book are accompanied by a certain air of pride and pretension. The cited postmodernists may be relying on dense obfuscation with the aim to erect impenetrable and illogical fortresses that can’t be assailed, especially amongst a group of peers who are non-experts in science and mathematics. With such a disconnection, the audience is unable decode or rebuke the menagerie of terminology that has been misappropriated. Sokal and Bricmont’s first example, Lacan, is perhaps the most blatant: they point out quite specifically how his pseudo-mathematical ramblings are a idiosyncratic word salad, without even a glint of metaphoric purpose. Really, the quotes they produce are quite enough to wonder how anyone could take him seriously:
“Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part of lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalend to the √-1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).”
Sokal and Bricmont have no short supply of such fodder; perhaps they have too many. It was enough that these texts were suffered during art school. Trudging through them, while the authors do their best to ring forth some drop of understanding gets to be laborious; they’re beating a dead horse chapter 5. But, some of the references are so damn comical! If only these people were not so cemented in the foundation of the humanities, it would indeed be hilarious!
Bruno Latour
In his often cited book, Science in Action, claims “First, the opinions of scientists about science studies are not of much importance”. And towards the end, asks the modest question: “Did we teach Einstein anything?” Probably not…
Jean-François Lyotard
“Postmodern science – by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, ‘fracta,’ catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes – is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical.”
Gilles Deleuze
“In the case of science it is like a freeze-frame. It is a fantastic slowing down, and it is by slowing down that matter, as well as the scientific thought able to penetrate it with propositions, is actualized. A function is a Slow-motion. Of course, science constantly advances accelerations, not only in catalysis but in particle accelerations and expansions that move galaxies apart.” Well, of course!
And what could the French intellectual be meaning with this gem? “We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis.”
How is it that these charlatans have become the collective oracle of the humanities? An exercise in egoism is one: if you can’t present a clear and logical arrangement of ideas, another approach as old as history is to beguile a curious populous with bovine excrement. Another reason could be the persistent turf war between the sciences and humanities. Anyone working in academia understands that resources are scarce (and these days, constantly shrinking). It’s hard to make an argument for a new English professor versus a researcher who’s trying to develop a cure for HIV. And speaking as someone who was once caught up in the zeitgeist of postmodernism, I’m sure most of the movement has been a progression of a few accidental and punctuated catalysts. Art, design, film, and literature are vital and interesting aspects of our culture that attract many scholars and fans. Once the avant-garde is established, it is very risky to ignore, much less criticize, famous adherents nor momentum gathering tenets.
Unscientific America
While this book doesn’t lend any awe-inspiring insight, it does provide a nice compendium on the history of science in the USA, along with the contemporary challenges facing the current state of affairs. It answers the questions: Why is science important in society? What sort of impediments face the mobilization of scientific discovery? What political and social forces shape the permeability of science-informed policies?
The book can be summarized as making the following points:
- The problem is multifaceted, not just the popular lamentation; that scientists are confounded by a moronic public
- discovery is only part of the issue: how it is conveyed and publicized is equally important
- scientists are often guilty of hermetically avoiding the public sphere
- The USA has special historical problems
- the successful Republican conquest of the South by encapsulating policies with moralistic rhetoric
- a unified and mobilized creationist movement (enshrouded in good sounding pseudo-science)
- poor scientist stereotypes in the media
- the non-sensationalist nature of science and the fallout in popular media
- A call for new approaches
- cross-disciplinary positions and fields need to be established
- scientists should consider the larger picture in gaining public trust: the layperson can’t be expected to rely on evidence alone
- Dawkins’s and Harris’s aside, we need new Sagan’s
I think the authors have some good points. While I love Dawkins’s writings I often question the global effect that works like The God Delusion may have -and how it may counter the excellent science delineated in his other less-polemic works like The Ancestor’s Tale. On the other hand, fierce, incalcitrant voices, while having no potency for the pious, may be quite influential for young unsure intellectuals. In other words, I think it is a too broad to simply say that Dawkins and the ‘New Atheists’ are simply indulging their egos. And there are plenty of others who fall beneath these high-tide marks as more subtle gradients, even besides the great Carl Sagan. But something needs to happen: there is a real urgency with this issue. Having just toured around the US, I can feel the unsteady, reactive burbling of an ignorant populous fueled by the resurgent powers of mass media and the unfiltered quagmire of misinformation which is the Internet. Such a chemistry, without heed for the canons of the scientific method, can only lead towards massive destruction, waste, pollution, war, etc. Or, in the most rosy of scenarios – Ideocracy becoming non-fiction.
Pie Euclid domine, dona eis requiem…Whack! (a review of Anathem)
What if two thousand years ago, the capricious forces of social emergence selected an equally charismatic, yet more mathematically inclined, political recalcitrant as one of its figureheads? What if, for instance, Pythagoras’s inchoate cult was not squelched in 530 BC, but grew as a great memetic conflagration. So that, by the time that John the Baptist was mucking about Galilee, no one paid a second glance, nary for that of his young follower Jesus of Nazareth. What would have been in store for the Middle Ages – and would they ever have been labelled as ‘Dark’ by some?
Well, things would have been wildly different for sure, but a more secular Middle Ages, where illuminated manuscripts are decorated with the coronation of algorithms over the aureole of Augustine, is exactly what I think about when reading the opening chapters of Anathem. Neil Stephenson weaves his story upon the world of Arbre, where a caste of scholarly ‘monks’ work at deciphering the nature of the universe through the tools of science, consecrated in ceremonious experiments, research and creative expression. All of the ritual and regimen are there, just not the hairshirts or sacraments – at least on the inside of these ‘concents’ (monasteries). The outside ‘Saecular’ world is only a slightly distorted version of the world we have today: radical zealots, clueless politicians, and obtuse popular culture full of networked gadgets (jeejahs). And amongst the detritus are actually a few sensible folk. In fact, this world is so familiar, that one begins to wonder if Arbre isn’t some future version of Earth. The plot begins to develop as the world leaders (the Avout and the Saecular) are forced into partnership in saving the planet from a sudden anomaly in the heavens: Is it the return of God? Have ancient astronauts returned to Arbre? Is this an imminent attack by aliens?
While I sluggishly made it through the Baroque Cycle (it was enjoyable, just a bit of a marathon), I found this book quite refreshing. Overall it is a nice return to highly imaginative sci-fi scenarios framed by an amazing amount of scholarly research, philosophical speculation, and an embedded critique of humanity with all of its recurring and unresolved predicaments. Anathem not only thoroughly entertains, it also illuminates the human meta-narrative within an artistically crafted prose.
The Greatest Show on Earth (is not on television)
“Evolution is just a theory.” -”There are gaps in the fossil record.” – “There are flaws to carbon dating.” These claims represent some of the reasoning I’ve encountered over the past couple of years in discussions on the topic of evolution. Sidestepping the mournfully ignorant venture that a theory is somehow saddled with dubiety, let me move on to the topic of this post, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins; an excellent book which will serve as a touchstone for evolution as fact.
The data is irrefutable; where I think evolution runs aground in becoming a more widely accepted fact is that it can’t be summed up in a tidy snapshot like the orbital trajectories of the solar system. Evolution is procedural and counter-intuitive. The Greatest Show on Earth draws together an impressive amount of evidence, and paints a clear portrait of evolution; perhaps the best as is able for something that is so obliquely proportioned to our common sense.
Starting with a bit of background, Dawkins takes us on a detour to some of our cultural origins. The histories of religion and (ancient) science reveal the prototypical belief that metaphysical blueprints bestow essence to Earthly form, albeit through inaccurate copying. Dawkins performs a commendable job assaying this damage wrought by Plato et al, as such thinking found its way into the mottled veins of the Western tradition. A much more thorough dismantling of this corrupted foundation is performed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume 1. Nevertheless, this section provides a good primer on the steep cultural incline that science had to climb in order to get past such superstition.
The most irrefutable evidence for evolution that should be posed to any history-denier (as Dawkins calls them) would be to point to animal and plant husbandry. Indeed, this was the first domain heavily investigated by Darwin, and it is the first bastion of proof that Dawkins presents. All the species of dogs are varied experiments of breeding descendent from wolves. Breeding lineages are well documented as well as their visual and behavioral outcomes. In fact, our own design goals aside (hunting, shepherding, etc), it appears that the mere act of domestication produces exaggerated morphological effects (see Belyaev’s experiments with silver foxes). It is easy to understand the (basic) process of evolution through the lens of dog breeding; simply replace the relatively fewer generations of persistent and guided breeding with the blind hand of nature, amplified by thousands of generations. Several botanical examples are given too, including a tidbit about spinach, cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage: they are all descendants from a common ancestor and are all the result of human cultivation.
While the carbon dating and molecular clock chapters are engaging (although perhaps a bit hard to follow for the layperson – I had to reread the chapters as well as look-up external references), the best examples in the book are the real-time, evolution-in-action, experiments. A team at Michigan State University conducted one such experiment. Without going into all the fascinating detail, they basically set up an experiment to view E. Coli bacteria evolve various design patterns, until one of these patterns emerges to exploit a chemical compound in their habitat, causing a population explosion. The experiment is really eloquent, isolating the variables precisely and creating a frozen track record of each substantial stage. A less detailed experiment, but a bit closer to our own scale of mass, space and time, is the account of the Pod Kopiste and Pod Mrcaru lizards in the Mediterranean. Originally the same creature, the Pod Mrcaru evolved a larger head to exploit the greater plant-based diet available on its new island. And of course, one can’t forget the various species of amphibians and birds strewn across the Galapagos archipelago. This area served as prime inspiration for Darwin on the HMS Beagle, and Dawkins recounts the lessons learned there quite vividly.
The only disappointing aspect in the book, and one that I thought was going to be avoided after reading the first few chapters, is Dawkins’s relentless tirade against the religious. I usually agree with him on these accounts, and I get a chuckle here and there the way that he mentally bullies some of his less agile interlocutors. But ultimately I think his writing is lowered a notch when he indulges himself to wax thusly: “What pseudogenes are useful for is embarrassing creationists.” The worrying thing is that it won’t embarrass them, nor leave them to re-examine their convictions, mainly because they are too stimulated to battle against these vitriolic diversions. As such, I question how much direct contribution this volume will have in elucidating the 50% of Americans who think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. Perhaps more anodyne efforts, such as this one from PBS will be more fruitful.
Consilience
This is a good introduction for anyone who is interested in exploring a worldview greatly illuminated by biology. Being someone whose university experience was largely defined by a ‘nurture’ centric view, or what Wilson calls an exemptionalist view, I feel greatly nourished whenever I probe deeper into this territory. Exemptionalism is the mentality that has dominated human history – what has recently been defined as the anthropocene era of geological time. This view, whether reinforced through religion, art, or sociological theory, holds humans in a special mental space apart from animals. Clearly we deserve such a distinct position for analysis, but Wilson properly criticizes the overstatement of such distinction. He constructs this view while simultaneously building the case for a consilience between seemingly divergent fields; essentially, advancing new methods bound together by scientific grounding. Supporting this consilience are a host of recent discoveries in ethologogy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and the genetic sciences: we are unique, but we are also intrinsically, molecularly, genetically and socially connected to the other life forms that exist around us, as well as the multitudes that have been made extinct.
The introduction is quite good, even if rushed. The part on the 17th century and the age of enlightenment is excellent, with detailed overviews of such personages as Descartes, Newton, Bacon and Condorcet. Sewn together with this overview are keen insights into the political struggle between schools of thought, each competing for funding, ego or a place in history. For instance – Rousseau and Romanticism, through to post-modernism, we see the oscillating resurgence of the Dionysian, overtaking the Apollinian, in shifting the explanation for what it means to be human. He also gives examples of how the complexity of world events can derail momentum gaining trends, such as with the highly intriguing, yet abruptly disappearing, International Congress of the Unity of Science (in this case, vacated by WWII).
Wilson’s thesis is a good attempt, perhaps even a seminal attempt, in terms of sketching all of this out. I was surprised to see how someone who has been doused with water for his expressing his views, was largely diplomatic and respectful for a wide variety of belief systems (although he does have a few justifiable disparaging rants). But here lies my criticism: for such an enormous topic, that draws examples from religion, art, artificial intelligence, biology, and the social sciences, how can he only use 300 pages to do so? I think this would have been more successful as a multi-volume work: an intro addressing the origins of culture and religion; another section on the emergence of science; and a final volume closely examining the current flux and impediments to his consilience.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about the book. While being a fan of the content, I think it comes up short on its aim. Other books, such as Donald Brown’s Human Universals does a better job, in less pages, while probing deeper into a single domain. Or, Dawkins’s Ancestor’s Tale, uses many more pages, to give a bio-materialist account for the world while staying mostly focused on biological processes. But if little else, there are some spirited, well written sections, and loads of references for further reading that compensates for an overall feeling of paucity in terms of novel contribution.
The perils of Wonderbread
Andrew Whitley is a baker and one of the founders of the Real Bread Campaign in the UK. He reckons modern bread is less nutritious, and is causing health problems like Coeliac disease and gluten intolerance. Aired on RadioNZ today.
K.R. Popper – The Open Society and Its Enemies
When I was in undergraduate school, The Republic was one of the first great tomes to be propped beneath the unstable leg of the blank, yet optimistically repairable, surfaces known as the Freshman class. This was a traditional Catholic liberal arts school, and here, Plato was equally optimistically repairable. Because contrary to what Popper constructs in this masterwork, catechismal pedagogy transforms Plato’s usable features into properly Christian dogma: knowing one’s place, the concept of a metaphysical Good radiating existence to our imperfect Earth, and the Platonic jurisprudence that beckons human morality to be best sought in altruistic deeds.
I don’t regret my undergraduate years at all: it was a great introduction to the classics. And it also provided me with a good understanding of the orthodox approaches to interpreting such works (in a way that smells of dust and sounds of echoey corridors reverberating with the heavy steps of pedantic priest-academics). But…Popper has so much more to teach us.
The most startling realization I took away from this book, is that Plato has been completely misrepresented in Western culture. A lot of the things I took for granted, such as the state described in the Republic as a satire against totalitarianism, are in fact nestled in much greater complexity – a complexity that Popper takes great pains to detail by interrogating the political milieu and personal dilemmas that influenced Plato’s great dialectics. This environment, in fact, pushed Plato towards a desperate yearning for totalitarianism. His vision was one of a perfect past that was morphing into a steady decline through the progression of human history. Socrates stood as a sort of gatekeeper between the liminal worlds of tribal order (Sparta) and democratic chaos (Athens), and as a sort of alter ego in a struggle between personal freedom and the good of the state.
In understanding Plato’s position, Popper takes us through all of the nuanced details of the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Tyrants, Sparta, the birth of Democracy, and the laconophilia that is sourced in Plato’s admiration for Sparta. These details provide the framework for Popper’s analysis, presenting it as ever more convincing, while leading us to a more ultimate argument that holds considerable significance, even today. This primary thesis arrives at the danger of considering Utopian planning, or any form of social engineering, no manner how seemingly benevolent or anodyne. Popper urges that a more productive approach, as governments or citizens, is to try to form piece-meal solutions that ultimately attempt to combat tyranny and suffering, rather than try to prescribe an ideal society to ensconce cultural development. In essence, it is a call for bottom-up solutions, versus a top-down approach. Hence Popper’s argument is a major divergence from more popular analyses of Plato, such as the Catholic integration, which obviously yearns for top-down explanations, because these are traceable back to divine origin.
For me, this book resonated with all manner of current-day topics: the Democratic/Republican divide in the US, Kurzweil and transhumanism, religious motives, Globalism, etc. This book, 70 years later, still has a lot to offer our contemporary crises.
When data is not enough (review of Calculated Risks)
Perhaps the casualty of a title mishap, this book is not a practical book on personal investment strategy. Or, perhaps it is, but in a way much more reality jarring, and less about saving for college or deciding on an insurance policy. Today we find ourselves swarming with data: not only specialized to firms and research centers, but even just at our fingertips in connection with the Internet. But what does all of this data mean? According to Gigerenzer – not even the experts are to be trusted.
Calculated Risks steps through its thesis with easy to follow examples. The underlying foundation for the book is that there is a monumental, yet often ignored, difference in cogitating data through Natural Frequences or through Probabilities. Mental processes often fail in trying to decipher scenarios outlined as probabilities. Researchers, most notably Kahneman and Tversky, have built careers, and won nobel prizes, around studying the alarming defectiveness in human probability reasoning. People quickly surmise absurd conclusions in attempts to use probabilities related to their field. One hilarious example describes a newscaster who declared a 50% chance of rain on Saturday, and a 50% chance of rain on Sunday, equals a 100% chance of rain for the weekend!
Natural Frequencies, meanwhile, describe data in spatial and temporal ways that are well matched to how the human mind operates. Instead of describing the statistic of .008 people as having a disease, we use a scenario: for everyone 1,000 people, 8 people are found to have a disease. Is this simply statistical semantics? Are there really differences to how we describe and analyze data? Yes! Sadly, Gigernezer goes through countless specifics, ultimately presenting such cases where thousands of women receive mastectomy’s with zero added benefit to their health while considerably compromising their quality of life. We are also told of the doctors, realizing their malpractice, committing suicide when realizing they unwittingly destroyed the lives of hundreds of people. The reason for these errors range from: illusion of certainty, ignorance of risk, miscommunication of risk, and clouded thinking; four principles, followed by elaborated prescriptions, that should be nailed to every hospital door. But the problem is, of course, larger than simple naive innumeracy; Gigerenzer also recounts examples of where capitalism fails us once again – stories featuring the robotic arm of corporate economics filling humanity’s IV plunger with the toxic cocktail of greed.
It is a misconception to treat the sum of today’s technologically infused health care as uniform in their contribution to today’s quality of life. While discoveries like penecilin and x-rays have vastly extended length and quality of life, several sectors, especially the wildly popular cancer screening, should be viewed otherwise. At the conclusion of this book, I began to envision them as a shambling 18th century physician, advancing with a leech in one hand and a vial of mercury in the other.
Ending is better than mending (review of Brave New World)
An interesting critique of the future, some of which has come to pass. I found it a bit slow and a strange cliche in the beginning, but as the story and characters developed, it became clear why this is a classic. My favorite part is when Bernard and Lenina descend on a ‘vacation’ to the savage reservation, only to build further excitement when they emerge, bringing John along with them into the “brave new world.” The conclusion draws a fascinating image evoking current day reality TV, with John trying to meagerly eek out an existence that somehow avoids civilization, but finds himself instead constantly dogged by helicopters and reporters.
Huxley’s mastery resides not only in the narrative, but the meta-narrative; sculpting a bizarre future world that pairs nicely with Orwell in competing visions of cultural extremes. At this point it appears that Huxley’s distortions, generated through the positive feedback algorithms of consumer culture, resolves into the harsh fractal that more resembles Brave New World than 1984. The producer of our favorite design fetishes, Apple, banished Orwell’s model with spectacular pageantry in their famous Super Bowl ad of the same year; a perfect metaphor, as the corporate giant sounded the capitalist bugle a few years before the fall of the Kremlin and Berlin wall. But where are we now? Did capitalism lead us away from all manner of coercive governments, or only those so oblivious to do so without a glossy chimera of freedom dosed with ample amounts of soma?