C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, The Third Culture, Big History, and 2001

Posted on 10 May 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” is the famous 1959 lecture and then essay about the divide between the scientific community and the literary ‘intellectual’ community, an essay much referenced in books about the acceptance of science in modern culture (with, for example, several references in Steven Pinker’s ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, which are what prompted me to buy a copy of Snow and read it for myself). The essay comes in a little book, shown here in a 2013 printing just 58 pages long, that includes additional topics.

The principal essay is short and to the point. The Wikipedia entry for the lecture, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures, quotes a key passage, about how traditional intellectuals have no idea what the second law of thermodynamics might be about, nor care; yet would consider a scientist who’d never read Shakespeare to be uncultured, even uneducated. He notes p4 that “at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, who incidentally while no one was looking took to referring to themselves as ‘intellectuals’ as though there were no others.” As if the work of scientists like Rutherford or Dirac or Einstein was not intellectual.

Snow describes how he was trained as a scientist, but had become a writer, and so had interactions and friends among both groups. He discusses how scientists are thought unreasonably optimistic and unaware of the human condition, while the literary intellectuals lack concern about the future and would deny the progress of science and technology. An apt quote, p15:

They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture’, as though the natural order didn’t exist. As thought the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man.

There are worlds of commentary about this essay, easily found via Google, from critical responses at the time, to later re-evaluations, to references in contemporary books.

But I’ll make a couple points myself anyway: Snow lays the situation primarily at the English educational policies of the time, especially those of Cambridge and Oxford, with their high degrees of specialization. He notes that the educational systems in the US, and USSR, are not so severe. He discusses how the ‘intellectuals’ barely noticed or understood the industrial revolution (Ibsen among writers being an exception), how the poor gravitated toward the factories to improve their lot (a point Pinker makes also, to those who criticize the industrial revolution). And in the final essay of this slim book, he realizes how the industrialized nations are getting richer (and how ‘intellectuals’ don’t appreciate this rate of change [that rate of change being a central theme of science fiction]) and how the poor nations have noticed and will take any help they can get – and if the West doesn’t help them, Russia will. And so the gap between the cultures must close.

*

This theme about the problems of specialization we’ve seen in essays on SF from the same general era as Snow’s, e.g. three separate essays in Bretnor’s MODERN SCIENCE FICTION (here http://www.markrkelly.com/Blog/2018/01/19/sfnf-bretnor-modern-science-fiction/).

*

Since Snow there have been a couple prominent developments in this conflict, one relatively recent.

First, the gap between the cultures — at least among the curious lay public — began to shrink, I think, as books by scientists written for the general audience became popular, especially THE COSMIC CONNECTION and COSMOS by Carl Sagan, Hawking’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, and E.O. Wilson’s ON HUMAN NATURE, not to mention numerous works by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould and others.

So by 1995 editor (and agent) John Brockman could publish an anthology of essays, THE THIRD CULTURE, claiming that the culture had indeed shifted, from the literary, classical, and philosophical ‘intellectuals’ to “those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings our lives, redefining who and what we are” (p17). Brockman explores this idea in his introduction, and then fills the book with essays by representative key thinkers on various themes: evolution, the mind, cosmic origins, algorithms, and the singularity. Contributors include Gould, Dawkins, Margulis, Minsky, Dennett, Pinker, Penrose, Rees, Smolin, and many others, and what’s fun is how Brockman lets his contributors comment on each other’s essays. Even as the modern scientific intellectuals agree on the large-scale outlines of evolution and cosmology, they emphasize varying parts, bicker about the importance of details. That’s how science works.

And in 1998 E.O. Wilson published one of his most ambitious books, CONSILIENCE, subtitled “The Unity of Knowledge,” that attempted to show how recent understandings in the physical and biological sciences could illuminate issues in the social sciences, in art, in ethics, in religion. (Meanwhile, as one of Brockman’s contributors points out, p27, when traditional intellectual Mortimer Adler compiled a ‘Synopticon’ index, his entry on consciousness referenced Aquinas, Montaigne, and Aristotle.)

*

Second, more recently, a movement known as ‘Big History’ has appeared, which attempts to put all of human history into the context of cosmological history – everything from the Big Bang, to the origin of stars and planets, to the development of life on Earth, the evolution of mankind, and eventually the growth of culture and modern human history. This grand scope was written about at least since Bill Bryson’s A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything), and more technically by David Christian in MAPS OF TIME in 2004, with its sections that steadily zoom in on narrowing, more recent slices of the cosmic timeline. The movement has crystallized into a “Big History Project” led by Christian, with a website (https://www.bighistoryproject.com/home), a TED talk, a comprehensive coffee table book, endorsements by Bill Gates, and a forthcoming narrative account by Christian called ORIGIN STORY (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316392006/), which of course I’ve preordered.

And of course, the opening credits of the TV series “The Big Bang Theory” is big history in popular culture.

The point about ‘big history’ is that it places the history that the traditional ‘intellectuals’ know about, the art and literature and philosophy of the past two or three thousand years, into a grander context, one only discovered and appreciated in the last 50-75 years. If you want to know what we know about the age and extent of the universe, or about human consciousness and the mind, don’t look to Mortimer Adler’s references; look to Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene, to Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker. The best books about what collective humanity knows about the world, through systematic investigation [science], are the latest books, not the most ancient. Because the early philosophers, though their intuitive speculations are fascinating in retrospect, have turned out mostly to be wrong.

*

Finally, just today, as I’m working my way a chapter at a time through Michael Benson’s history of the making of the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, I came across this passage that captures how science fiction is a kind of third culture, a blending of art and science, and how 2001 in particular captured that combination. P. 264-265:

At its best, science fiction takes our post-Enlightenment way of understanding the world and extrapolates, using the findings of science and projections concerning the future of technology and putting them at the service of truths expressible through fiction. By the midsixties, astronomy and astrophysics had radically expanded the universe’s dimensions, and the emerging science of paleoanthropology—a discipline rooted in Darwinism, paleontology, and biological anthropology—was starting to revolutionize our understanding of human origins. But rarely had the findings of these broad disciplines been incorporated into artistic expression. Instead, science had effectively been over here, and the arts elsewhere.

It was one of Kubrick’s and Clarke’s great achievements, and a wellspring of 2001’s lasting power and continuing significance, that they took the complex, sometimes haunting, sometimes magnificent truths revealed by modern science, polished them with all the care given an expensive piece of Zeiss glass, and used them as a window to view the human condition within that staggeringly vast universe. Projecting back into the past, 2001’s authors examined human origins. They weren’t particularly doctrinaire about it. This was fiction, not a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature. But they always deployed scientific research—and its miraculous offspring, technology—to define their story, refine it, and expand it to its farthest possible limits It’s how they reached the border between the known and unknown—that place science is always probing like a tongue exploring a broken tooth. It’s where they wanted to take their audience, because beyond it, sometime like magic prevails.

Posted in Culture, Science, science fiction | Leave a comment

Richard Feynman’s Meaning, and Being Savvy

Posted on 3 May 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a short book of three essays first delivered as lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle, in 1963, gathered into a book published in 1998. Feynman, of course, was a famous CalTech physicist influential for work in quantum mechanics, inventor of pictorial diagrams to describe the behavior of subatomic particles that later became known as Feynman Diagrams. He won the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics.

This book is subtitled “Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist,” and the lectures addressed a lay audience, not an audience of fellow scientists or of students.

My quick take: Feynman addresses issues of science, religion, and public credulousness that are all too familiar; not much has changed from 1963 to 2018.

The first lecture, “The Uncertainty of Science,” reviews the idea of science in three aspects: as a method, as the content of its results, and as what it can produce, i.e. technology. In the method, “observation is the judge of whether something is so or not,” and exceptions test, or ‘prove,’ the rule. Science requires objectivity, and thoroughness. The more specific a rule, the better. It doesn’t matter where ideas come from, or the background of any individual scientists; relations among scientists are good. Imagination is important, yet it’s difficult to imagine something truly new, that’s consistent with all past rules and observations. Why to the laws of science change? Only when the ‘sieve’ becomes smaller. Some uncertainty always remains; doubt is not to be feared. When people wonder how one can live without certainty, Feynman responds, “how you get to know is what I want to know” p28.0

The second lecture is “The Uncertainty of Values.” We must admit we don’t know the meaning of life; the worst times of history have been when “people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.” p33-34.

And so he talks about religion, reflecting on how students come to university (i.e. CalTech) and gradually give up belief in their fathers’ God. Most scientists don’t believe. Why? They most plausible idea is reflection upon learning the facts of the universe: its size, the relationship of man to animals, and so on; “Can the rest be just a scaffolding for His creation?” These scientific views “appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate” p39.8.

And yet moral values are not affected by loss of religious belief; they are thus independent. Yet he admits that Western civilization has two great heritages: the adventure into the unknown, and Christian ethics, and that the latter remains the source of inspiration.

(And then he trails off into a discussion of Russia and US, how the US government isn’t great, but it’s better than any other, and how Russia is backward, with discussions about Lysenko and others, and how governments should never impose any answers.)

The third lecture, “This Unscientific Age,” is a ramble in which Feynman admits he covered his planned topics in the first two lectures. So here he discusses various “uncomfortable feelings” he has about the world. Though we live in a scientific age, how few people understand even the basics of science. (It’s always been so, was my thought.)

He discusses ‘tricks’ about how to judge an idea. People who have quick answers to complex problems are dishonest — most politicians. Uncertainty again, and how we can be pretty sure about many things without being absolutely certain. E.g., how to test a supposed mind reader, at Las Vegas resorts; how experiments reading cards [he’s referring to J.B. Rhine, notoriously known a few decades ago and now mostly forgotten] became less impressive as tests were refined; how in contrast hypnotism turned out to be valid.

Flying saucers: ordinary people argue about what’s *possible*. That’s not the point; it’s whether the idea of alien spacecraft is *probable*. How the Catholic Church goes about proving a saint. How an anecdote, or one or two occurrences, prove nothing; “Otherwise you become one of these people who believe all kinds of crazy stuff and doesn’t understand the world they’re in. Nobody understands the world they’re in, but some people are better off at it than others.” p84

Some problems are due to lack of information, e.g. astrology, prayers, faith healing, Biblical prophecy: “I think it just belongs to a general lack of understanding of how complicated the world is and how elaborate and how unlikely it would be that such a thing would work.”

He visits a John Birch Society center in Altadena, which promotes tenants about “ancient principles of warfare” such as the 10th, paralysis, which the host claims is behind so much wrong in the world. It’s like paranoia; it’s impossible to disprove. Again, Feynman says, it’s about a lack of a sense of proportion. “And so it is with these people. They don’t have a sense of proportion.” p105. He humors the host by agreeing with her, to absurdity. (It’s very 2018.)

And he trails off discussing radiation from nuclear tests, the Mariner and Ranger probes, where scientists get their ideas from, Arabic science in the Middle Ages, the chaotic spelling of English, the many non-technological advances of man [i.e. humanity] such as economic systems, accounting, laws, and government organizations, future potentials of fusion and biology, and how he admires the encyclical of Pope John XXIII (i.e. what’s known as Vatican II]

\\

My takeaway from this book is his recurring thought that much gullibility about pseudoscience (and religion) is based on “a general lack of understanding of how complicated the world is and how elaborate and how unlikely it would be that [any such thing] would work.” A lack of a “sense of proportion.”

This aligns with the past three posts, about the value of education, about how the religiously-home-schooled teenager in Equus had nothing real to base his worldview on, and about the susceptibility of some to conspiracy theories and intuitive physics.

I’ve been thinking of the word ‘savvy’ as the quality of having this “sense of proportion” and this “understanding of how complicated the world is,” and, currently, the added understanding of the cognitive biases that have been identified in the past couple three decades, which cause one to reassess anything one might ‘believe’ to think about why such a belief might be held, as opposed to whether it is a valid belief, or understanding, of the world as it actually exists. I’ll be developing this theme.

\\

Richard Feynman
Feynman diagram
Simple English Wikipedia: Feynman diagram
Second Vatican Council

Posted in Meaning, Science | Leave a comment

Arguing with a Flat Earther

Posted on 30 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Vox: How to argue with flat-earthers, subtitled, “But not necessarily convince them.”

People committed to the belief that the Earth is flat (or that the universe was created 6000 years ago) will have answers to all your challenges, all your supposed evidence. Partly this is motivated reasoning — to find fault with anything doesn’t support your previous beliefs — but these arguments also illustrate the idea of ‘moving the goalposts’ — demanding higher standards for evidence than anyone would ever do in any other context of life. The writer here refers to “epistemic contextualism,” and gives an example from the sitcom Friends, “in which if there’s a hint of doubt about something — any possibility that you might be wrong — then you don’t know it at all.”

The piece makes the point that for virtually everything we “know” we’re relying on the testimony and experiences of others. There’s a deep philosophical pit here, but it’s unavoidable for getting through day to day life and at the same time having any idea about the world and universe around us. There’s also the cognitive bias that favors immediate experience — what I’ve been calling “intuitive physics” — over any evidence or demonstrate that the world works in non-intuitive ways. (For example, that heavy objects don’t fall faster than light objects.)

The flat-earther’s argument is framed in a context where you can’t set aside the possibility that there’s a pervading global conspiracy — albeit one which somehow intermittently leaves glaring errors which give them away. In that context, you don’t know the Earth is round. But in that context, nobody knows much at all and so this conclusion is simply unsurprising.

In the more everyday contexts that we care about, we can rely on testimony. We can rely on the fact that every educated physicist, cartographer, and geographer never pauses to think the earth might be flat. And we are correct to rely on these things. If it was incorrect, we’d never get treated at hospitals — for in a context where we can’t trust the established laws of physics, how could we trust the judgments of medical science?

The process of learning how to judge the world around us and not succumb to intuitive physics and conspiracy theories takes some basic education to ground it — as in the quote from “Equus” in the previous post. And as echoed in the Richard Feynman lectures I just read (next post).

Posted in Psychology, Thinking | Leave a comment

Equus, part 2

Posted on 30 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Scene 25. The psychiatrist, concerning the worship of a 17-year-old stable boy raised in isolation by his religious mother:

I only know it’s the core of his life. What else has he got? Think about him. He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make the world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except for television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He’s a modern citizen for whom society doesn’t exist.

This pairs with the previous post.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Steven Pinker on Knowledge and Education

Posted on 19 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

From Steven Pinker’s ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, chapter 16, Knowledge, p233:

The supernova of knowledge continuously redefines what it means to be human. Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life depends on partaking of the vast and ever-expanding store of knowledge. Though unlettered hunters, herders, and peasants are fully human, anthropologists often comment on their orientation to the present, the local, the physical. To be aware of one’s country and its history, of the diversity of customs and beliefs across the globe and through the ages, of the blunders and triumphs of past civilizations, of the microcosms of cells and atoms and the macrocosmsm of planets and galaxies, of the ethereal reality of number and logic and pattern — such awareness truly lift us to a higher plane of consciousness. It is a gift of belonging to a brainy species with a long history.

p235, on the vindication of the Enlightenment:

So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for now better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. No least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories — and, in a backhanded compliment to the power of knowledge, stifle the people and ideas that might discredit them.

Posted in Steven Pinker | Leave a comment

Kingsley Amis, NEW MAPS OF HELL

Posted on 18 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Next in my series of reading nonfiction books about science fiction, proceeding in roughly chronological order, is this short book of six essays, originally presented as lectures at Princeton in 1959 and collected into book form in 1960. It’s by an author who was at the time well known outside SF for a couple three satirical novels (e.g. LUCKY JIM), but had not written any SF himself. (Later, he would, an acclaimed alternate history novel called THE ALTERATION, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1977, http://www.sfadb.com/John_W_Campbell_Memorial_Award_1977, over Frederik Pohl and Kate Wilhelm.) Because of his appearance as an outsider passing judgment on SF, as numerous notorious magazine essayists had done in the 1950s, Amis is quick to advise, in his very first sentence, that he’d been a devotee of the field since the age of 12. So he wasn’t a novice, or an unsympathetic outsider prepared to express snobbery about SF.

On the other hand, his discussions show such marked attention for certain authors, especially Frederik Pohl and Robert Sheckley, with barely passing mentions of others, like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, that you have to wonder whether his reading of the field was really thorough, or whether his tastes were so specific that he misrepresented the field as it has become to be known. Not necessarily relevant, but SFE advises that Amis was assisted by one Mark Rose (http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/rose_mark), a UC Santa Barbara academic who later wrote his own book, ALIEN ENCOUNTERS, published in 1981. I have that book too; it has more references in its index to Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, than to Pohl or Sheckley.

(I do not have a first edition of this book; I have the 1961 Ballantine paperback edition, shown in the pic, with its Richard Powers cover. I bought it used in 1978 and have read it twice now, so it’s about to fall apart.)

So then. Amis’ six lectures/chapters run thusly:

1, Starting Points. He compares SF to jazz, in that each form is somewhat disreputable, yet has a devoted audience. He defines SF as “that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin.” Then he discusses some of the very early examples of SF, as cited in L. Sprague de Camp’s SF HANDBOOK (read just previously and discussed here), but dismisses most for their “accidental similarities” to the modern genre; he might include Gulliver, but the first real SF writers were Verne, even with his bad writing and implausible themes, and Wells, who established several basic categories of SF, and wrote it for its own sake, not as allegory or satire.

2, The Situation Today. Gernsback, 1926, and how SF grew along with two adjacent fields: fantasy, and space opera. He describes the latter with reference to BEMs, van Vogt, Haggard, and Burroughs. Early SF was barely literate (he provides examples) and hidden behind lurid magazine covers. Now, in 1959, there are some 20 magazines, and 150-200 books each year. He describes the contents of a typical magazine, and then in detail the contents of the October 1958 Astounding, noting that all the stories involve some kind of moral concern and commit no grave offenses of style. Astounding has 100,000 subscribers, and the readers are attentive, in its letter columns. He discusses clubs, conventions, types of readers, types of writers; mentions SF in movies and TV briefly. And concludes that SF’s importance is that it is “a means of dramatizing social inquiry, as providing a fictional mode in which cultural tendencies can be isolated and judged.”

3, New Light on the Unconscious. He begins to examine SF (and fantasy) for how it reveals the wishes, hopes, and fears of its writers and audience – not the ideas of SF themselves, but the emotions behind them. First subject is sex: not much in SF, though in fantasy he discusses Charles Finney’s “The Circus of Dr. Lao” and two stories by Bradbury, “The Man Upstairs” and “Skeleton”. (Readers familiar with these works will note they are not about sex at all, per se, but about various horrors of the flesh which were perhaps the only ways writers could allude to sexual matters in the ‘40s and ‘50s; stories actually about sex would become frequent in SF within the next decade following Amis’ book.) Then, issues of doom, the end of the human race: stories by Clarke, Sheckley, Brown, Pohl, Bradbury, Heinlein. The dangers of technology: PKD, Sturgeon. And that theme’s counterpart, the nostalgia for a simpler past, as even in Anderson’s BRAIN WAVE but especially in the works of Simak, Wyndham, and Brown. He spends two or three pages on a story, “Of Missing Persons,” whose author he doesn’t even mention (it’s by Jack Finney). [This story evokes several Twilight Zone episodes on similarly nostalgic themes.]

He notes that in SF going into space isn’t about escape (alluding to the common charge that SF is escape fiction); it’s about being part of a larger positive goal of mankind to explore the universe. He discusses how SF has confidence, almost complacency, about the future; scientists are never at fault, but are always saving the day despite the politicians. There aren’t many artists in SF, and not much religion, but discusses those few (and famous) religious stories by Blish, Boucher, Asimov, and del Rey (and in a footnote, Miller’s CANTICLE). SF’s religious impulse seems more present in stories about super-intelligence or super-moral aliens; again Simak, with a long example.

4, Utopias 1. Sf as an instrument of social diagnosis and warning. Sex again: Wylie’s DISAPPEARANCE; works by Charles Eric Maine and John Wyndham. Colonization: works by Katherine MacLean and Poul Anderson. And politics: Simak, Heinlein, Pohl, Knight, Tenn. Van Vogt’s Null A, and Tenn’s Null P. Another Sheckley example, at length. And then a discussion of Bradbury, from one unnamed, to “Usher II”, to FAHRENHEIT 451, which Amis says is in ways superior to Orwell’s novel.

5, Utopias 2. Economic and technological issues. FAHRENHEIT 451 again; Mrs. Montag’s indulgences and neuroses. And then he gets to Frederik Pohl, whom Amis (notoriously, in the many reviews and discussions of this book following its publication) calls “the most consistently able writer science fiction, in the modern sense, has yet produced” (p102.3 in the Ballantine pb). He discusses “The Midas Plague” at length, for its inventiveness, and uses the term “comic inferno” to describe this and similar tales: “The Wizard of Pung’s Corners”; “The Tunnel Beneath the World”. He mentions that most SF writers don’t have much range; they keep plowing the same themes over and over, and then claims Pohl & Kornbluth’s THE SPACE MERCHANTS as having “many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far.” (This was 1959.)

He cites Edmund Crispin to generalize that characters in SF are usually unexceptional, so as not to detract from the story, which is usually about human beings and other things, not about how human beings interact among themselves. And how SF is not so concerned with thematic resolution, as about identifying problems.

6, Prospects. Cosmic disasters are less popular than before, though he discusses John Christopher’s THE DEATH OF GRASS. He discusses Philip Latham’s “The Xi Effect” as an example of a story in which the idea is hero, and how SF is better at short length, while too many novels are padded. Among the few truly successful novels are Ward Moore’s BRING THE JUBILEE and Hal Clement’s MISSION OF GRAVITY. He discusses stories by Katherine MacLean, Poul Anderson, Chad Oliver.

He draws to conclusions. SF needs to consolidate what it already has. Bring sex into focus — but not with love stories. Avoid the horrible humor (citing Bretnor’s Feghoots). The field needs writers who are less rushed by deadlines, in order to write and revise more carefully. And it needs new authors who are not unfamiliar with general literature. (As with stories about sex, these would arrive in spades within the following decade.) And it needs fewer cranks, citing Campbell, Bretnor, van Vogt, and Hubbard. Some of this is happening, and he notes Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES and a story by George P. Elliott as being SF stories by outsiders not identified as SF.

Finally, on the value of science fiction:

• “a medium in which our society can criticize itself, and sharply.” (e.g. how only in SF is the advertising industry so criticized)
• “a form of writing which is interested in the future, which is ready, as I put it earlier, to treat as variables what are usually taken to be constants, which is set on tackling those large, general, speculative questions that ordinary fiction so often avoids.”
• And in the final lines, how we “could do with more, not less, of that habit of mind which will look beyond the attempted solution of problems already evident to the attempted formulation of problems not yet distinguishable. That is the path which science fiction, in its faltering way, is just beginning to tread, and if it can contrive to go on moving in that direction, it will not only have secured its future, but may make some contribution to the security of our own.”

\\

Given the book’s slightly disreputable reputation, I liked it better reading it again than I thought I would. I like the way Amis identifies the themes and motivations that underlie much SF (while being aware that much has changed since he wrote). He’s aware of previous commentators and is willing to disagree with them.

My biggest issue with the book, though, is its random selection of works cited. Amis clearly sees SF as most interesting for its satirical and dystopian values, thus his valuation of Frederik Pohl, and so cites his work and Robert Sheckley’s to a degree unwarranted by the judgement of history, or even common assessment of the time. Both were significant writers – indeed, Pohl took a break with editing during most of the 1960s, then came back as a more mature writer in the 1970s with GATEWAY and many others that followed, almost a book a year for some 20 years – but not as popular or as highly regarded as were Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, at the time. Furthermore, Amis often cites obscure stories to make some point, sometimes without bothering to mention their titles, or authors. This is cherry-picking, not a fair assessment of the field as it existed at the time.

There is also the occasional issue of Amis’ prose style, which is at times rotund; his background is literary, perhaps academic. He often avoids making some plain statement in preference to wrapping it in several layers of qualification. Here’s a sample from the last page, embedding one of the conclusions cited above:

…one is grateful that we have a form of writing which is interested in the future, which is ready, as I put it earlier, to treat as variables what are usually taken to be constants, which is set on tackling those large, general, speculative questions that ordinary fiction so often avoids. This is no less true when all allowance has been made for the shock and pain felt by some when they find these questions answered in a way that does much less than justice to their complexity. Most answers to anything are overwhelmingly likely to be crude, and I cannot bring myself to believe that the most saturating barrage of crude answers really menaces the viability of the sensitive and intelligent answer; if that were the way the world worked, it would long since have stopped working altogether. But perhaps this is just an instance of my own sentimental, science-fictional optimism, so I will go on to observe as coldly as possible that I must not be taken as implying that every writer of science fiction is hopelessly limed in crudity.

The main value of this book is that it was the first example of how science fiction was taken seriously by a literary figure who was respected outside SF.

Posted in Science Fiction Nonfiction | Leave a comment

Recent Links Saved from Facebook

Posted on 14 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Steven Pinker’s favorite books
http://www.vulture.com/2018/03/steven-pinkers-10-favorite-books.html
include title by Gamow, Dawkins, Deutsch, and his wife

Sean Carroll’s correctives to Jordan Peterson’s fandom

Cleaning your room is good; using pseudo-intellectual babble about archetypes to identify culture with masculinity is…

Posted by Sean M. Carroll on Monday, March 19, 2018

(with links to three essays about Peterson)

Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/human-existence-will-look-more-miraculous-the-longer-we-survive/554513/
Why Earth’s History Appears So Miraculous: The strange, cosmic reason our evolutionary path will look ever luckier the longer we survive

Paul Giamatti and Stephen Colbert talk obscure science fiction

WaPo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2017/11/22/at-yale-we-conducted-an-experiment-to-turn-conservatives-into-liberals-the-results-say-a-lot-about-our-political-divisions/
At Yale, we conducted an experiment to turn conservatives into liberals. The results say a lot about our political divisions.

For example, over a decade now of research in political psychology consistently shows that how physically threatened or fearful a person feels is a key factor — although clearly not the only one — in whether he or she holds conservative or liberal attitudes.

David Brin on the Basic Human Dilemma
https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-basic-human-dilemma-and-some-brin.html

Harper’s: Crowley reviews Le Guin

The Whole Household of Man

Video showing the full rotation of the moon, on Brian Cox’s page
https://www.facebook.com/groups/professorbriancox/permalink/1793476167343953/

None of this really happened – some perspective on historical and religious myths

None of This Really Happened

Why even intelligence doesn’t necessarily protect you from delusional beliefs
https://imperfectcognitions.blogspot.com/2018/02/rationalization-why-your-intelligence_13.html

WSJ: Steven Pinker on the Enlightenment (a gloss on his new book)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-enlightenment-is-working-1518191343

LA Times: the rationales of flat earthers
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-colorado-flat-earth-20180115-story.html

Why are conservatives more susceptible to believing lies?
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/11/why_conservatives_are_more_susceptible_to_believing_in_lies.html

The answer is 63
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/11/12/562802511/the-answer-to-life-the-universe-and-everything-it-s-63

Baptist News: the death of Christianity in the US

The death of Christianity in the U.S.

Aeon: The good guy/bad guy myth: Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?
https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and-evil

David McRaney on fake news (via Geoffrey A. Landis Fb post)

Interesting.

Posted by Geoffrey A. Landis on Friday, January 26, 2018

Science fiction for economists
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.pe/2013/05/science-fiction-for-economists.html
novels by Vinge, Doctorow, Le Guin, Stross, Niven/Pournelle, Bacigalupi, Heinlein, Sterling, Egan, Stephenson, Martin, Atwood, Effinger, Brunner

Richard Feynman quote

The immensity of the universe
http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-immensity-of-the-universe-and-our-place-in-it

How the religious right wins converts, to atheism

Here are 8 ways the religious right wins converts – to atheism

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Links from NYT recently, with Comments

Posted on 12 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Op-ed by Amy Sullivan in the New York Times, April 1 (posted March 31): Trump’s Christian Soldiers

The recurring, amazing fact that the self-righteous evangelicals support someone like Trump.

You could open a publishing press devoted to the theological and sociological explanations for this phenomenon — from the unlikely belief that Mr. Trump found Jesus on the campaign trail to the idea that his presidency is all part of God’s plan to the role persecution narratives and Christian nationalism play in the evangelical worldview. But the ultimate answer may be the simplest. Mr. Trump owes his continued high standing among white evangelicals to the fact that nearly 40 years after the Moral Majority’s founding, the partisan meld is complete. Decades of fearmongering about Democrats and religious liberals have worked. Eighty percent of white evangelicals would vote against Jesus Christ himself if he ran as a Democrat.

She mentions this curious fact in passing:

But no one is pro-abortion. The crucial difference is not between those who view abortion as good and those who don’t, but between vastly different approaches to reducing abortion rates. One party maintains the fiction that overturning Roe v. Wade will end abortion; the other promotes policies that have actually reduced the abortion rate to its lowest level since 1972. (That more Americans don’t know about this accomplishment has much to do with the fact that national Democrats don’t recognize “pro-abortion” as a slur and have steadfastly refused to take credit for plummeting abortion rates.)

\\

And from an editorial the same day, At Pruitt’s E.P.A.: No Studies, No Data, No Rules:

There’s another word: Fear. From the top down, the people who run this government seem absolutely terrified of scientific inquiry and the ways in which it could threaten Mr. Trump’s promise to ease regulations on fossil fuel companies and increase their profits, no matter the cost to public health and the planet. Think of it from Mr. Trump’s point of view. Why would he want a science adviser telling him that the link between climate change and the burning of fossil fuels is incontrovertible, that he should stick with the Paris agreement on climate change, that it’s a grave mistake to repudiate every one of President Obama’s efforts to slow the dangerous warming of the earth’s atmosphere?

Yet another example of how conservatives deny or ignore science (among many other fact-based professions) that would threaten their myths or, in this case, their business interests. (And more generally, an illustrated of the cognitive bias against taking long-term threats seriously.)

\\

Noted: The Evolution of One of Fiction’s Gay Liberators, about Alan Hollinghurst. I’ve read two of his previous novels; he is, as commentators say, one of the most beautiful stylists writing in English today.

\\

Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, with an op-ed in NYT on March 18: Stop Apologizing for Being Elite:

Our current political discourse is corrupted by two equally flawed narratives about the relationship between social class and politics. The first is a fable accepted by many intellectuals, who have found themselves guilty because just enough white working-class voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin handed Mr. Trump his Electoral College win in 2016. Many fear that this year’s midterm elections will once again result in a rejection of “elitism” by the same voters.

In a second, equally flawed narrative — adopted by a segment of both blue-collar workers and intellectuals — the American working class is so victimized that almost none of its members are capable of accepting the responsibility of civic self-education.

And

While some studies have indicated that people cling even more strongly to their deepest beliefs when challenged by contradictory evidence, it is also true that human beings frequently do change their minds — about everything from sexual behavior to marijuana to gun laws — if they are treated respectfully by those presenting the evidence.

And among her recommendations,

Second, educators must help turn students into educated voters. Too many schools fail to provide students with tools of logic that would enable them to assess the quality of information they absorb from every screen. All schools, for example, should have a curriculum that teaches children how to evaluate online information. …

\\

Science corner: Carl Zimmer on how ancient DNA helps us refine the history of humanity spread across the globe: David Reich Unearths Human History Etched in Bone, subtitled “The geneticist at Harvard Medical School has retrieved DNA from more than 900 ancient people. His findings trace the prehistoric migrations of our species.” With a cool map.

\\

New York Times Magazine, Jan 30th, Michelle Dean: It’s Getting Harder to Sort the ‘Credible’ from the Incredible

This piece struck me as capturing something essential about our age–something happening slowly enough we don’t realize how utterly different things are becoming. It’s the transition from a shared, consensual reality…

When I was at university, some 20 years ago, learning about the world was a tactile, toilsome sort of experience. I got up in the morning, put on my boots and, yes, trudged through snow to the library. I went through the stacks and pulled down texts older than I was. I don’t remember ever wondering how authoritative those texts might have been. After all, here they were, in a library — and a library, we were taught, was the High Church of “credible” authority. People who published books were assumed to be correct. They had proved themselves worthy of it, had cleared hurdles to put their words and ideas into wide circulation.

… to an era in which the internet makes the ‘credibility’ of anything problematic. There is no there there; no way of assessing any given propostion in a way that most people will agree upon. All Trump has to do is cry “fake news” and his followers (the millions of American who can be fooled all the time) will disbelieve it. Back to the essay:

The business of the country is now conducted like an argument on an unmoderated internet message board — an unceasing thread of squabbles, reversals and revisions.
…
It is easier than ever to address the world and say something true. But it is equally easy to tell the world something false. I remember what it was like before — being in a brightly lit library, feet on the floor, books in front of me, the High Church of authority very much intact. There seemed to be such clear limits on what was worth believing and what wasn’t. This is precisely the opposite of how it feels now, scrolling through the news each morning, the incredibleness of things screaming at you before you’ve even had coffee.

I need to write about re-reading Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four recently. In Orwell’s world, the government manipulated the official version of history, and current affairs, by constantly reprinting old newspapers and current books to reflect the new official reality. (Often at random, to distract people’s attentions from day-to-day problems.) People would change their understandings automatically; to do not so would be a “thought-crime.” Indeed, some autocrats do work this way in the real world: blatantly denying that this or that genocide or extramarital affair ever took place, for example, and expecting their followers to believe them. This is what Trump does. But something even more insidious is going on, in the modern world. There is no single reality, even if a fictitious one: there are innumerable versions of reality, depending on which political or religious tribe one belongs to. The old ways of being savvy, of understanding how the world works, how things happen in the world and which claims were more or less likely to be true, seem to no longer apply.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Evolution, Politics, Psychology | Leave a comment

Tim Crane, THE MEANING OF BELIEF

Posted on 11 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View

This is a small volume that appeared in 2017 and was well-reviewed in the New York Times. The author is a philosopher, and as the subtitle indicates an atheist (he denies the existence of a transcendental realm, and therefore God and an afterlife), and not a humanist (on Peter Singer’s grounds that other beings than humans might deserve moral consideration).

His thesis is that the conceptions of the “new atheist” authors – Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and later A.C. Grayling, who published books beginning in 2003 challenging religious beliefs and practices, on various grounds – of religion as being defined by cosmological, supernatural beliefs – God, an afterlife – as too limiting. What makes religion endure is more than that, which is why arguments to counter the supposed proofs of God make no difference to the vast majority of humanity who are believers.

Religion, Crane says, has four elements: it’s systematic, it’s practical, it’s an attempt to find meaning, and it appeals to the transcendent. The very idea of religion, or the supernatural, is a relatively recent concept – earlier cultures made no distinction between these ideas and their absence. [An effect of science, and the Enlightenment.]

The most interesting section of the book for me is chapter 3, discussing how religion is as much about identification as about supernatural claims. It’s about belonging to a group of shared believers, it’s accumulated culture wisdom about how to live, it’s part of one’s identity, like being part of a family or a nation, something one can’t necessarily renounce. He discusses the idea of sacrament, of the sacred vs. the profane, and how people attribute to objects access to things that don’t have to exist.

Now all this strikes me as perfectly obvious, but Crane many times claims that the various atheistic authors mentioned above ignore these points. Which might be true; I’d need to check. He goes on to challenge their identification of religion with much of the violence in the world – conflicts between Sunnis and Shiites, Pakistanis and Indians – claiming instead that such violence has many other causes, with religion being only an obvious distinction between opposing groups. Perhaps so.

And so I acknowledge many of Crane’s points. I’ve said many times that I’m sure people are not religious because they find the claims of a (micromanaging) God or an (eternally boring) afterlife the least bit plausible; they identify with a religion because their family or friends do, and their shared religion forms a social bond, a way of defining a community, or more cynically defining their in-group against all the out-groups. No one ever sits down to study all the religions and comes to a conclusion about which one is true on the basis of any kind of rational analysis, or evidence from the real world – because there is none. Religions represent social and tribal history; they are arbitrary cultural traits, like languages or cuisines, which don’t have any basis in empirical reality. (Unlike the accumulated discoveries of science…) They represent human psychological needs.

Yet Crane equivocates. He addresses the idea that religion derives from human psychology’s willingness to accept “counter-intuitive beliefs” but dismisses the idea on abstruse grounds (p47-48); he hasn’t read Jesse Bering. For me that is still the key. Crane’s style is too often that of the lawyerly philosopher more concerned with parsing the meanings of words than in reaching a conclusion.

And at the end he discusses how the decline of religious belief is wishful thinking, that atheists need to accept the reality of religion, even if such tolerance does not entail approval, or respect. Fine, but he has no recommendations for this tolerance should be implemented, beyond following the rule of law, and not making fusses at social faux pas (he reads at times like an advice columnist).

And what he doesn’t do is address the evidence that many prosperous, well-educated countries – especially in Northern Europe – do in fact have far lower rates of religious faith than less prosperous and educated countries. (On this point the US is an outlier.) Or that scientists are far less likely to be religious than the general population – a point he mentions and denies, despite the much evidence I’ve seen.

It may be true that human nature is inescapable, as long as we remain the humans we are (pending taking control of our genetic identity and making modifications), and that human nature entails a propensity for some kind of belief in the supernatural, and with its attendant tribalism, the idea of religion.

But the evidence is not all in one direction. And here’s where this topic dovetails with the speculations of science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, in particular, liked to imagine futures in which religion was obsolete and humanity had attained a peaceful maturity that understood that religion was an artifact of its primitive past. And indeed, the vast majority of science fiction – that imagines future civilizations, galactic empires – takes no account of religion. The few works that do, by Miller and Blish and a few others, are so few they are easily counted. Even fantasy, in a way the opposite of science fiction, more often assumes the supernatural perceptions about ghosts and elves, about simplistic worlds of good vs. evil, than they assume the reality of any particular religion. (Some early works by Zelazny are curious exceptions, but they explored various religions in Sfnal ways.)

Posted in Atheism, Book Notes, Religion | Leave a comment

de Camp & de Camp, SCIENCE FICTION HANDBOOK, REVISED

Posted on 10 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: “How to Write and Sell Imaginative Stories”

This is more of a curiosity now, than an essential book of criticism or history, though it does reveal some attitudes of its time. I have a 1975 revision, show here, of the original 1953 edition, so while it wasn’t a book of SF history or criticism, it was certainly one of the earliest nonfiction books published about science fiction.

The first two chapters spend 1/4 of the book summarizing the history of SF, all the way from Homer and the Greek playwrights, to Gernsback and Campbell, to Tolkien and the New Wave, and making a casual attempt to define what he calls “imaginative fiction” – “stories that could not have happened.” He concludes this section by noting that “imaginative fiction is escape fiction. It is primarily designed for the entertainment of the reader.” And he repeatedly throughout the book invokes “the reader” as the ultimate customer and judge for a writer’s work.

Then follows some basic information about editors and publishers, readers and writers, a writer’s talent vs. technique, where writers get their ideas, how to plot a story, how to write it in terms of action vs. description, dialogue, how to depict old or alien languages, and so on. Some of this expands on Sprague de Camp’s essay in Modern Science Fiction (notes here), such as remarks that it takes de Camp a week or two to conceive and plot a story, a month or two to outline a novel. (Which seems extraordinary, compared to writers like Asimov – and Hubbard! – who apparently could write clean copy as fast as they could type, with no lengthy mulling beforehand; I suspect they were the exceptions.) And how to sell it, and how to keep records of sales and of resales of subsidiary rights. (This last chapter is by Catherine Crook de Camp, we’re advised, who became Sprague’s business partner, and kept track of these matters. A situation Sprague recommends.)

Some of this is dated, though much is still valid, especially basic considerations of how to write fiction, and certainly business habits of keeping records. Here’s a passage that is a tad dated, his description of a magazine editor’s office:

Most editors work in small, glass-partitioned offices amid mountains of manuscripts, letters, galley proofs, proofs of covers and illustrations, back files of magazines, advance copies of next month’s issue, a couple of typewriters, stationery, a pot of paste, scissors, ash trays, and the other clutter of the trade.

Pot of paste? Later he describes how to make corrections to a (typewritten) manuscript, e.g. retyping a paragraph and gluing it over the old one, rather than retyping the whole page! Even in 1975, it was an era of typewriters. (And, ash trays? I suppose, even in 1975, but not in 2018.)

Two more curious passages, which strike me as dated as well — characterizations of when reading and writing science fiction wasn’t an element of popular, and even literary, culture as it is today. His characterization of “who reads this stuff?”, readers, p73:

Because many science-fiction fans are adolescents, and because some adolescents are given to exhibitionism and gaucherie, fans as a group have sometimes been scorned as eccentric. Actually, the average fan displays high intelligence, a voracious appetite for reading, and a personality type that often finds it hard to get along with other people.

And about writers, p75:

If they have any common characteristic besides their intelligence and word-mindedness, they probably tend toward the introverted type called the schizoid personality. Many started out as precociously intellectual but under-muscled children, bullied by their peers. Contrary to a common impression, writers are not necessarily fascinating companions, or staunch and helpful friends, or promising matrimonial material. They have a rather high suicide rate.

He mentions, near the end, that there are only 150 – 250 writers of imaginative fiction, and only a minority of those make a living at it. (These numbers strike me as high for 1953, low for 1975, so I’m not sure how to understand these statistics.)

The book ends with a substantial bibliography of recommended SF works (updated for the 1975 edition) and of general reference works, for the author who aspires to write anything about science, engineering, history, and mythology. He mentions in the text that his personal recommendation is to read 1/3 imaginative fiction, 1/3 realistic fiction, and 1/3 nonfiction, mainly science, history, and biography. And to take notes, and keep clippings. (Which I do! Though these days clippings are links.)

Posted in Book Notes, Science Fiction Nonfiction | Leave a comment