The Pseudoscience Wars by Michael D. Gordin

Source of book: I own this.

 

I had this book on my list, and found a cheap used copy. I usually read books like this from the library, but our system didn’t have it, so I went the used book route. 

 Just to clarify at the outset: this is not a book about what is and isn’t pseudoscience. It isn’t a comprehensive look at the Pseudoscience Wars™ in general. Rather, it is a history of what is generally acknowledged as the original pseudoscience war, between the scientific establishment and Immanuel Velikovsky beginning in the 1950s. 

 Wait, WHO? 

 I imagine most of us, particularly my age or younger, will be saying that. Before reading this book, that was my thought too, although, as I read it, I reached back in the recesses of my memory to some of the Young Earth Creationist stuff I absorbed as a Fundie kid. Not that Velikovsky was a friend of the YEC movement or anything. He thought they were nuts. They hated him as an atheist even while citing his works as “proof” of catastrophism. Older generations might remember some of the controversy surrounding him, but basically, he fell off the map after his death in 1979, and his ideas have become just another flavor on the fringe. 

 So, who was Immanuel Velikovsky? And what did he claim? Well, let’s see. He was a psychologist by training, born in what is now Belarus. He lived in Israel and the United States later. And his claim to fame was a book entitled Worlds in Collision.

 In that book, Velikovsky made some rather bold and unorthodox assertions about history and science. The genesis (so to speak) of his ideas was his belief that the various stories in world mythologies were not mere exaggeration or local events, but accounts of global catastrophes that actually happened. In order to make this work, Velikovsky argued for a series of “alternative” timelines to various human histories - otherwise the dates failed to line up as he wanted them to. This meant, among other adjustments, changing the ancient Egyptian calendar and annals about 600 years so they lined up with the Hebrew Bible. (Velikovsky was Jewish, although not religious, and apparently believed that his people’s sacred book was the most accurate of ancient texts. Which sounds kind of familiar, actually…) With this new timeline, Velikovsky argued that the human race had a collective amnesia of the global trauma which still affected us, and caused mainstream scientists to react to him with anger and denial rather than acceptance. (Hey, that too sounds like Evangelical gaslighting…) 

 It gets better! These global catastrophes were caused by….wait for it….a giant comet which is now the planet Venus nearly hit the earth, causing it to spin on a different axis, prolonged a day (hello, Joshua!), and pelted the earth with hydrocarbons that both made the sky catch fire (multiple myths) and gave us our crude oil reserves. Whew! That’s a lot. Oh, and this also disrupted the orbit of Mars, which made its own near collision and set of catastrophes some years later. 

 To make at least an attempt at a scientific basis for this, Velikovsky proposed that “gravity” as such was a myth, and that the force we experience as gravity isn’t a function of mass, but of electromagnetism.

 Yeah, it starts getting a bit out there once you dig in. And the key thing here is that Velikovsky didn’t start with astrophysics and then formulated a new theory based on science. Rather, he started with psychology and anthropology, then sought a scientific explanation for the psychological theories he invented. In fact, the book literally began as a project about Freud’s last work and kind of...got away from the author into a totally different discussion. By most definitions, this puts it in the category of pseudoscience. The definition, however, is murky, as the author persuasively demonstrates throughout the book. Outright quackery is one thing, but pseudoscience thinks and often acts like legitimate science, and the border often only becomes clear in retrospect. 

 In the actual historical event, Velikovsky’s theories have aged very badly. As ludicrous as they were back then, subsequent scientific discoveries - and not just in astrophysics, but also the very historical and anthropological disciplines Velikovsky relied on - have consigned them to the dustbin of history. 

 So why was there such a huge kerfuffle? That is in large part what this book seeks to explore. 

 It is not an accident, according to Gordin, that the first true pseudoscience war occurred when it did. In the aftermath of World War II and the first atomic weapons, the reputation of science was at a high mark. At the same time, the cost of knowledge had skyrocketed. No more could dilettante aristocrats make earth-shaking discoveries in their labs. Science required money, time, and resources. Thus, when pseudoscience threatened to grab some of that money, mainstream scientists felt threatened. 

 But there was more to it than that. Not long before, a Soviet geneticist named Lysenko had managed to take over the Soviet academy with his unorthodox ideas (that genes weren’t inherited as much as they were changed by the environment - so building the ubermensch wasn’t just about Eugenics, but about creating an environment where good genes would develop and be passed on to future generations.) Lysenko then got the opposing scientists declared traitors and then fired and incarcerated. So, yikes. And then there was Joseph McCarthy on the warpath against anyone perceived as “communist,” and skeptical of science in general…

 There is a heck of a lot more too, but that’s why you should read the book. 

 In the actual event, Velikovsky managed to talk Macmillan into publishing the book in its science category. This was problematic because then the mainstream universities threatened to pull their publishing from Macmillan in retaliation (the book was eventually published by another publisher as a “popular” book), and a war ensued. Velikovsky was furious, and accused the mainstream establishment of censorship, and so on. The reverberations of this still echo today in any discussion of pseudoscience, pseudomedicine, and outright quackery. 

 

During the pseudoscience wars, doctrines that were relegated kicking and screaming to the “fringe” began to respond by deploying new arguments against the establishment, claiming not just that mainstream science was incorrect or incomplete, but that scientists were engaged in a conspiracy to suppress new knowledge.

 No pseudoscientist thinks he or she is one, of course. And drawing that line isn’t always as easy as one might think. 

 

Every discussion of demarcation at its core hinges around this fundamental tension between innovation and crackpottery.

 In addition to this, there is the question of resources, as I noted above. Should scientists spend valuable time refuting non-mainstream ideas? Ignore them? And what happens when the public takes a crackpot idea and runs with it? (Exhibit A: pretty much everything Il Toupee says…) As astronomer said about Worlds in Collision, “No amount if lying will alter the truth--but lying can alter the willingness of a people to accept the truth.” 

 And what about when the idea is so outside the mainstream as to make it difficult for any coexistence to work? As the author says about Worlds in Collision: 

 

The book was, and remains, an enthralling read. It also required, to account for the events described--near collisions of planets, comets the size of Venus, the transformation of a hydrocarbon/petroleum tail of the comet into carbohydrate manna for the Israelites--outright contraventions or at least severe modifications of the conventional understandings of celestial mechanics, physics, chemistry, geology, paleontology, and biology. 

In figuring out a response, mainstream scientists tried to define pseudoscience, starting with their analysis of Lysenko. The author lists four factors which are most commonly used to describe pseudoscience. After listing the factors, Gordin then shows their limitations. The factors are (simplified by me for this post): (1) claims that are sufficiently wrong to be pseudoscience (2) rejection of scientific methods such as controlled experiments (3) elaboration and justification of the conclusions in terms of philosophy or ideology (4) intervention in the scientific process by church or state or other outside, unscientific force. 

 Like current pseudoscientists, Velikovsky spent his life trying to gain scientific credibility. In one case, he leveraged his friendship with Einstein to that effect. The thing is, the two were friends - most likely because, as Jewish ex-pats who spoke German fluently, they shared a common language and experience. (And, of course, most German speakers had Nazi connections.) In any event, Einstein thought Velikovsky’s ideas were crazy. And told him so. 

 

Einstein answered that Velikovsky had “the stuff to thoroughly disprove even the table of multiplication with your historical-philosophical methods. Of the applause of the laymen, who have a secret grudge against arithmetic, you can be assured.” 

 And then...of course…the book talks at length about Henry Morris, and his relationship to Velikovsky. The parallels (as well as the differences) are fascinating. YEC has consistently been described as pseudoscience, and it fits pretty well. (If you want, go down the rabbit hole at Joel Duff’s blog, which is excellent.) Count me in the group of “liberal” Christians who believe that YEC has done a great disservice to the reputation and practice of Christianity by “detracting from the gospel of Jesus Christ by adding to it the human foolishness of pseudoscience.” 

 Gordin has done is research on YEC, by the way. I appreciate his discussion of George McCready Price, the Adventist founder of “flood geology,” and a big influence on Henry Morris. Price was arguably the first major advocate for the YEC viewpoint, arguing for a literal six day creation 6000 years ago, back in the 1870s. As Gordin points out:

 

At the time, this was decidedly a minority position among American Christians.

 Like a lot of the litmus tests for Evangelicalism (particularly white evangelicalism) that we take for granted today - abortion, social darwinism as economic policy, culture wars - Young Earth Creationism is a relatively recent phenomenon. 

 Speaking of recent phenomena, I was somehow completely unsurprised to find out that Velikovsky enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the 1960s among the Baby Boomers. If I were to pick a quintessential character trait of that generation (particularly the white, conservative ones), it would have to be the motto, “I got mine, sucks to be you.” But the susceptibility to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, “alternative facts,” and rejection of science sure is apparent as well. Obviously not all, but good lord, look at what shows up in my Facebook feed from so many Boomers I know. And that’s before you get into the Bill Gothard phenomenon, or Fox News, or the alternative “medicine” industry. 

 With time, Velikovsky’s ideas were adopted by others - mostly on the fringe, which did not make Velikovsky happy. He tried to police his own fringe, but with limited success. Fun in this context was the mention of Erich von Daniken, whose ideas inspired the train wreck of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. This part of the book is pretty amusing - things got weird really fast… 

 Whether it is with pseudoscience or even more fringy stuff, scientists are faced with an impossible choice, as the author notes. Astronomer Dennis Rawlins has the best quote on this issue in the book. 

 

“If one simply ignores the crank, this is ‘close-mindedness’ or ‘arrogance.’ If one then instead agrees to meet him in debated, this is billed as showing that he is a serious scholar. (For why else would the lordly establishment agree even to discuss him.) Irksome either way.” 

 This is so very familiar from my youth, when my family was immersed in both the Fundie subculture and its obsession with YEC, and also in pseudomedicine fads. It is that exact same Catch-22 that they deliberately place the establishment in. 

 So what is the cure? The book doesn’t really offer one, but does note that a number of advocates for Velikovsky eventually rejected his theories. Once they learned more of the actual science, they found the pseudoscience increasingly untenable. That is what happened to me regarding a LOT of the dogma I was taught - it didn’t survive a collision with reality. As Leroy Ellenberger said after he left Velikovskianism: 

 

“The less one knows about science, the more plausible Velikovsky’s scenario appears, especially when most of the discussion is hand-waving. Conversely, the more knowledgeable the reader, the easier it is to see that Velikovsky’s entire physical scenario is untenable. But unless a critic explains why something is wrong, the rejection is more ex cathedra than a credible refutation.” 

 This certainly matches my experience. As I learned more, the less I could believe of YEC and other dogmas. But also, it is hard to “refute” error when the person clinging to the error lacks the base knowledge to understand why the dogma is wrong. 

 The book ends with a look at our own time. Certainly pseudoscience hasn’t gone away. But Gordin draws a sharp contrast between pseudoscientists like Velikovsky and what he calls “denialists.” Velikovsky was wrong, but he was wrong in good faith. That is, he believed what he did genuinely, and without a nefarious agenda. 

 In contrast, denialists are hired guns for an agenda. They exist to protect powerful industries (such as the tobacco and fossil fuel industries), and use the tactics of the pseudoscience wars to create doubt - and achieve specific policy goals. While pseudoscientists are all over the place, and do not conspire or even often agree with each other, denialists are absolutely coordinated, centrally funded, and politically motivated. The lessons of the tobacco industry were learned well, unfortunately. The book is worth the read for this chapter alone. 

 This book is a little dense, and not the easiest read, because of its more academic purpose. It is thoroughly documented from primary sources, filled with direct quotes and historical events. It also intentionally remains fairly neutral in tone, focusing on the events rather than refuting Velikovsky. (As Gordin notes, plenty of books have already done that.) As a study of sociology and psychology as applied to pseudoscience, it is fascinating. 

 The Pseudoscience Wars was fascinating to me, and may be to you if you care about genuine science and how humans judge truth.

***

In addition to YEC, I will mention "Scientific Racism" as a modern day pseudoscience. Unsurprisingly, most of the white people I know who push YEC also have a habit of dragging out ideas from "scientific racism" when discussing protesters and police brutality.

 

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Source of book: I own this.

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. Space Opera was nominated by my wife, and won the vote this month. I was not really aware of this book, but was familiar with the author, who wrote a series of imaginative fairy tales for kids, starting with The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland. Space Opera has some similarities, but is rather a different sort of book. 

 As the author explains in the “Liner Notes” at the end, she was introduced to Eurovision in 2012, and thought it was a fantastic idea. Birthed in the aftermath of two catastrophic world wars, it aimed to provide a more positive outlet for national rivalries than warfare - and became a deliciously campy, over-the-top spectacle that is like nothing else. Valente started live-tweeting the contest; then one year, a fan joked that she should write a science fiction Eurovision novel...so she did. 

The basic premise of the novel is this: due to a wormhole incident (one yawned - they are like giant pandas in spacetime), tempers flared among the galactic civilizations, and catastrophic war resulted. After much was reduced to rubble, the survivors decided that they needed a better option for competition than intra-galactic war. So, they established a song contest to be held yearly (based on a rather longer year - hey, planets differ!) This contest would determine how the galactic resources were divided for the next period. Oh, and if any planets with potentially sentient life were discovered, they would have to participate as well...and if they came in last, they were annihilated as non-sentient. 

At the beginning of the book, then, Earth is discovered, and finds to its horror that they face the end of everything if they can’t manage to score at least next-to-last in a contest they have never heard of, involving forms of life with far greater resources to draw on. 

And, the galactic powers that be have already selected the musicians to represent them: has-been “glitterpunk” glam-rock group Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros. Never mind that they broke up years ago, and that one member of the trio is dead. The aliens are, well, a bit behind the times, and every other group on the list is dead, so the last group left standing gets the nod. 

Space Opera clearly draws a lot of inspiration from Douglas Adams, both in the inspired zaniness and the tendency to go off on rabbit trails about different civilizations or events. However, unlike Adams, Valente actually uses a plot, and the satire is more focused and less scattershot. This is both good and bad. One of the great things about Adams is that, at his best, his work feels like pure escapism, and you don’t really see the zingers coming. The satire is unexpected most of the time, and there is no plot or “point” to worry about. In contrast, Valente definitely has an underlying theme: the problem of sentience and xenophobia, particularly in our Trumpian age. After all, is a species which has spent its entire history at war with itself - often trying to annihilate slightly different humans - really sentient? Or is it more like an existential threat to other civilizations? 

The book got mixed reviews from our club, in large part because of the long digressions. Valente’s tendency to string adjectives together also made it a bit difficult to follow - particularly on audiobook. (I am trying to imagine how impossible Henry James would be on audiobook, with his page-long sentences…) In fact, I would say that those who read the book in print or electronic form liked it better than those who tried the audiobook - and that is despite the narrator sounding a bit like Douglas Adams himself. I thought the book was good fun, laughed at the satire, and considered it a fun escape from our currently trying times. 

I think I probably appreciated some of the jokes more having watched enough Eurovision (after the fact) to understand how over-the-top it is. (Valente isn’t exaggerating that much, shall we say.) I also “cheated” and read the “Liner Notes” early in the book, so I knew, for example, that the chapter names were all actual titles from Eurovision winners and runners-up. And that the names of the various alien races were taken from words in languages spoken by Eurovision nations. (Great examples: the Flus, a race of identical genocidal narcissists which fail to make the cut, come from the Maltese word for money. Voorpret is Dutch for Anticipation. Utorak is Tuesday in Slavic.) Looking this stuff up is easier when you can put the book down and grab a computing device. Also, since I could take notes, I jotted down some good lines for later. 

Here is one satirical zinger. The Esca (Italian for bait) are the race chosen to make contact with earth, using billions of holographic communication somethings to manifest and speak to all humans at the same time. As the emissary explains, this saves time:

I can’t wait for your monarchs to decide to hide it, lose control of the narrative, deny the evidence, call me a weather balloon, confess and resign, and finally leak a half-redacted version of what I tried to say to a newspaper friendly to one faction or another. Who has the time? 

I snorted really hard at this one. While it is a fairly universal characteristic of rulers, it is so very Trumpian you can’t miss it. Except for the resignation. Trump will have to be dragged from the White House by force someday - unless he dies choking on his own narcissism first. 

The Esca go on to explain the need for the contest:

Here’s the catch, kitten: whenever evidence of a new species with significant potential for expansion is discovered, we all get very nervous. Sometimes, the new kids are clearly on the up-and-up, bright scaled and bushy tailed sensitive sweeties who really have their shit together. But not everyone cleans up nice for company. Not everyone can be trusted to play nicely with all the other children. Sometimes, a species gins up the technology necessary to well and truly muck things up for the rest of us before they develop anything like self-awareness or complex reasoning or radical empathic perspective, before their philosophical digestive tract can handle something spicier than malice aforethought or semibenign neglect. 

In our own reality, it is pretty clear that the Hitlers and Trumps of our species do not meet this requirement - they (and their followers) are characterized by a pathological lack of empathy that cannot imagine the level of self-awareness, complex reasoning, or ability to see things from the perspective of other groups necessary to play nicely in the sandbox. They end up starting wars, trying to exterminate people groups, and obsess about keeping “those people” out. Which is, of course, why we need to be more careful to keep people like that out of power and way from the technology that allows them to muck things up for the rest of us. 

Valente also gets a good dig in at the way that humans love to think that they and those like them are “superior” because they happened to have access to resources others didn’t. In the book, the Aluzinar happened to be closest to the wormholes, and thus controlled space travel. This is certainly been the story of humanity. Those with the guns, germs, and steel, so to speak, can slaughter and enslave those without, and then use their religion to claim god loves them more. 

In the early days of the universe, whether or not a habitable planet happened to have a wormhole nearby was as consequential to the eventual political map as whether or not a particular group of humans happened to be born on a continent with domesticable animals on tap or on an island the size of a doorknob where the only source of reliable protein was a semipoisonous tuber. Wormhole or no wormhole had just as little to do with the inherent superiority and/or possibly divine mandate of the smirking bastards who won the cosmic draw as cow or no cow, and yet, everyone everywhere will do, say, and stab nearly anything if it means they get to believe that they are blessed and their neighbors are basically toad-people. 

Yep. And Christ had a lot of harsh things to say about that too, which it is so ironic that most of his supposed followers say the complete opposite to what Christ taught…

I wish I could quote ALL of chapter 13, which essentially explains how the test for sentience works. After rejecting cities, self-awareness, tools, problem solving, love, language, object permanence and other tests - which some animals can pass - before settling on this:

Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other reason than that it rocks?

And not just that, but also:

Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? 

Do you have soul? 

It is no accident that autocrats the world over, from Hitler to Stalin to...well everyone...crack down on the arts. The arts are not primarily “entertainment” - they are our prophets. (Hey, read the Prophets in the Old Testament - it’s great poetry!) It’s also why the United States has had such a love-hate relationship with popular music. Our unique contribution to art derives not from the dominant white people, but from the African American experience. Cult leaders like Bill Gothard, therefore, had to paint music with an “African” origin as demonic, insisting on the superiority of European art forms. It’s very much political, as all art is. It is the same reason that the GOP has targeted the National Endowment for the Arts for decades. While they like to parade out a few controversial artists, most of that money doesn’t go to controversy, but to a wide variety of programs which make art available to the non-moneyed classes. And that, of course, is anathema, because people who experience the prophecy and power of art have a transcendent experience they can share that is outside the pale imitation offered as “patriotism” by those in power. (I really need to write a post about this sometime. But for now, just read up on composers like Shostakovich and his subversion of Soviet politics.) 

As an alien later observes, “[T]he opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down.” 

I am reminded of two incidents here. The first is the way that facist-enabler Mike Pence got called out when attending a performance of Hamilton. The reeking hypocrisy of someone who stands for persecution of LGBTQ people and immigrants attending a play full of gay actors celebrating the life of an immigrant is foul indeed, and good for the cast for stating the obvious. 

The second is this: while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Olivier Messaien composed (and performed with other prisoners), an amazing work, Quartet for the End of Time, which in essence raised a middle finger to the Nazis, reminding them that judgment was coming for them when justice is done at the end of the world. 

Here is another way to look at art:

No matter how mad, bad, and dangerous to know a civilization gets, unto every generation are born the lonely and the uncool, destined to forever stare into the candy-store window of their culture, and loneliness is the mother of ascension. Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species. 

These are kind of the heavier themes, but the book as a whole is more lighthearted. I mean, other than the “will earth survive?” thing hanging there. Just before the big showdown, there is an extended scene set in a re-creation of a hotel lounge where the mixer from hell is going on. Valente has clearly been stuck in one before, and gets the details right. Well, almost right. Because the aliens who re-create it for the comfort of the newest contestant don’t quite understand how humans work. So there are a lot of drinks available, but nobody knows how to make one that won’t poison a human. It is not unlike those old American oddity shows where they put fake Native Americans on display in “traditional” costumes. Only a white person would think it looked right. (Or, think billionaire James Dolan trying to play blues…) 

As part of this scene, the digital race, the 321, have to manifest as...something so that they can be seen. So, with limited knowledge of human culture - and what they have from the digital realm, they choose, of all things, Clippy. Yep, the highly annoying digital “assistant” from past versions of Microsoft Office. I think everyone on earth hates him. Did anyone like him? Anyone? The 321 are a bit pissed that this went poorly for them. 

Printing a high-capacity three-dimensional corporeal interface isn’t as easy for us, you know. We have almost transcended the need for gross physical storage. We can’t just conveniently roll out of bed in a nice wash-and-wear body like the rest of these gooey bastards. Inasmuch as we have any home, we live in the rich router clouds of asteroid archipelago 192.168.1.1.

I can’t stop laughing at the reference to the default IP address for a router. 

There is one other chapter that would be great to quote at length, chapter 30, “Silence and So Many People.” (Portugal 1984) It brings up the idea of interspecies sex, and it is pretty hilarious. And also, realistically sex-positive, if that makes sense. It starts with “Everybody fucks. Well, almost everybody.” 

No force on this plane of reality can equal the drive to get a leg over, because it’s the nondimensional otherspace where all those nice, sophisticated fundamental forces meet and form a weird, wet, messy trashball: tension, friction, gravity, electromagnitism, thrust, torque, resistance, elasticity, drag, momentum, inertia, pressure, chemical reactivity, fusion, conservation of energy, self-loathing, humiliation, and loneliness.

Being ashamed of it makes about as much sense as being ashamed of the speed of light. 

Everybody is bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes they wouldn’t admit to their grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love. You are bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes you wouldn’t admit to your grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love. It’s a literal goddamned zoo out there, so this is the best I can offer you: don’t giggle when the other entity takes their clothes off, secure enthusiastic consent, don’t mix silicon and carbon without extensive decontamination protocols, tidy up your house if you expect to bring someone home, don’t expect anything you wouldn’t offer, remember that every person is an end in themselves and not a means to an end, don’t worry too much about what goes where and how many of them there are, don’t mistake fun for love, try your best, be kind, always make them breakfast, and use protection. Chromosomes are not nearly such picky eaters as you might think. 

That’s actually pretty decent advice, come to think of it. 

Finally, let’s talk about the songs. Well, there are actually two facets to the songs. First, the imaginary songs. Valente sprinkles band names and songs throughout the book, usually as part of the description of a species and how they make music. While there are some real groaners, I found some hilarious. Your mileage may vary. 

“I Can’t Get No Liquifaction” - sung by the viral species that creates zombies. 

“Gleams of Production” - by the Azdr (Armenian for “thigh”) who are locked in an oligarch/proletariat struggle.

“Abort, Retry, Fail” - by the 321 of course. (True story, every time I see that, I remember accidentally crashing a minor computer owned by the FAA as a kid while at work with my dad. Fortunately, the statute of limitations has long since run, no permanent damage occurred, and I was pretty young at the time.) 

And, my very favorite: “Clock Lobster” by Basstime Anomaly. Which is on my shortlist of best band names ever. 

Then, there are the real tunes. The ones the chapters take their names from. Most are available on YouTube, particularly if you translate the names. I’ve selected five to show the range. 

First, this one from 1969, back when Eurovision still had a live orchestra. The first chapter in the book uses this name. “Boom Bang A Bang”

Second, from Bosnia and Herzgovina in 2011, “Love In Rewind.” There is a lot to like about this - the old guy as frontman, the nostalgic instruments, the naive and earnest singing. I’d totally want to jam with this band. 

Third, from France in 1990, “White and Black Blues.” It is a reminder that France embraced African American musicians long before the United States let them stay in hotels and eat at restaurants and come in the front door of the theater. 

Fourth is a great example of how Eurovision has gotten completely over-the-top in recent years - and I mean that in the best way. Here is Austria’s Conchita Wurst with “Rise Like A Phoenix.” 

Last, in the category of Awesomely Campy is a song that is better than a lot of the pop I have heard on the radio lately, “Vampires Are Alive” - Switzerland 2007. 

These are just a few of the fun songs that the chapter titles will lead you to. Take the time and listen to each as you read….

No, it isn’t great literature. Yes, it can get wordy. But I had a fun time with it, and with taking a dive into the glitterpool that is Eurovision. Give it a shot.

How to Invent Everything by Ryan North

Source of book: I own this

This book was a gift from my wife this last Christmas. Ryan North is a rather eclectic writer, from his “choose your own adventure” style riffs on Shakespeare to Dinosaur Comics to The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. And then this book, which isn’t really like anything else. 

How to Invent Everything starts from the premise that it is a guidebook to be used by the time traveler - who has rented a recreational time machine from the company who made the guide - but something has gone badly wrong and they cannot return to their own timeline. (For which the company definitely is not legally liable…) In other words, if you find yourself somewhere back in human history, how do you make your world better? 

The book starts with a few frequently asked questions, then proceeds to the key question: where in time are you? A handy flowchart helps you figure it out. The book assumes that, for it to be any use, you have to have arrived at some time when humans have evolved to their modern biological state (about 200,000 years BCE to the present) and can thus invent civilization and stuff. If you find yourself before that, the guide is of some use, but one person can only do so much…

One thing that is quite fascinating is that biologically modern humans evolved long before culturally modern humans did. We appear to have spent the first 150,000 years of our biological existence living essentially like animals. Sure, certain “modern” behaviors appeared here and there in fits and starts - but they disappeared because they couldn’t be passed on to others. It was the development of language which set us on the trajectory toward civilization. 

The book starts its “how to invent” section with the five fundamental technologies for civilization:

Spoken language.

Written language.

Non-sucky numbers.

The scientific method.

Calorie Surplus.

It is hard to argue with this list, although in chronological time, the calorie surplus happend second, after spoken language. (This was NOT a coincidence.) As the book points out, it is embarrassing how long it took us to discover some of these things. In my opinion, the most embarrassing by far is the fact that we didn’t invent non-sucky numbers until about 650 CE. That is astonishing, honestly, considering all the stuff we did figure out. 

I loved the book’s concise (and slightly tongue in cheek) description of the limits of science. Science is:

Provisional

Contingent

Our best effort so far

This has been one of the longstanding beefs I have had with my Fundamentalist upbringing: the idea that “since science doesn’t deal in certainties and has changed over time, the beliefs of ancient peoples are true and science is a lie.” This is pretty obviously baloney, but it was taught as (literally) gospel truth. Sure, Relativity has replaced Newtonian physics at the planetary scale, but it doesn’t mean that the earth is flat. Isaac Asimov wrote what is still the best explanation of this phenomenon. Thus, the point isn’t that our current understanding is “wrong,” but that it can - and should - develop to be more right than it is now. 

Side note on science, from one of the endnotes: we have this weird mythology of science that says that it is a series of epiphanies, often discovered by accident. This isn’t exactly true - or even nearly true. 

Most cutesy stories for scientific invention are false, but they persist because we tend to love the “single moment of accidental insight that changed the world” narrative much more than we love the competing “it was a lot of hard work and study that took up a good portion of my life” storyline. 

The book has a generally snarky and humorous tone throughout, which some will like more than others. I found it amusing, and a useful technique to make a summary of human technology far from dry. 

For example, here is a bit from the section on domesticating animals, which answers (definitively) the ancient question about chickens. 

USES

Chickens are a delicious source of both meat and eggs. Plus, they’re omnivorous, which makes them easier to feed than cows.

To answer your question: the egg came first, as eggs evolved in other animals millions of years before chickens ever appeared.

To answer your second, newly clarified question: the chicken egg also came first. Inside the first chicken egg was a zygote carrying a mutation that allowed it to become the first chicken. This egg, with a mutated zygote inside, was therefore laid by a protochicken. Evolution!

Aristotle wasted a lot of time pondering this problem around 350 BCE and ended up concluding that both chickens and eggs must have always existed as two eternal constants in the cosmos. See? These are the conclusions you reach when you don’t know evolution is a thing.

In addition to the snark, the book is interspersed with a bunch of fun quotes, which are attributed to “~You (also [original author].” 

The book isn’t “original” in the sense of containing new information. Rather, North takes his information from a range of reputable secondary sources, all of which are endnoted. It was kind of fun to find reference to a book which I already read. For example, on the topic of how bread is made (and therefore beer and other alcohol), North cites the delightful A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage. The point in this case is that the invention of alcohol was likely what led humans to abandon the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and embrace agriculture. You can eat without farming, but you can’t make booze without it. And alcohol, despite what the Fundies say, is fundamental to civilization and religion - and that very much includes Christianity. 

Also on the topic of bread, the book points out (correctly) that there is no such thing as vegetarian bread. (Yeast is not a plant, and the way we use it is kind of similar to how we use animals - they do the labor, then we kill and eat them…) 

Pretty funny too was the section on salt. North points out that, until recently (when salt became really cheap), whiter salt was considered better. 

Whiter salt is typically more desirable, at least until white salt becomes cheap and commonplace, at which point everyone starts paying more for exotic colors and flavors of impure “raw” salt. That’s right: those expensive “red salts” you used to pay a premium for were just regular salts with some dirt in them!

How about another snarky bit on how to discover penicillin? 

CIVILIZATION PRO TIP: Sometimes all you need to do to become one of the greatest scientists in history is to pick your nose and wipe it on a petri dish.

Not all the snark comes directly from North, though. I loved this quote from Ghandi, of all people:

“My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who dod the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.” 

The book goes all the way through logic gates for building computers, and touches on pretty much every major technology - at least the fundamentals of it. While it seems impractical to build some of the things, it is apparent that knowledge of how things work could indeed lead to serious shortcuts around the obstacles that took humans thousands of years to solve. 

There are a lot of fun sections in the book, too many to mention. The summary of major religious and philosophical beliefs using the “high five” is marvelous, to name just one. While not exactly a deep scientific book, it is a fun diversion, and actually contains a great summary of the ideas and knowledge that civilization is built upon. 

The River of Doubt by Candice Millard

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

My relationship with Theodore Roosevelt is a bit complicated. His legacy, after all, is complicated. On a personal level, I identified a little with him from the first time I read a kids’ biography of him. We both were sickly kids who worked to become stronger through exercise and outdoor activity. Even today, I have a bit of a “damn the torpedos” approach to life. If I waited until I had no allergies to do things, for example, I’d never get out. I am not, however, reckless, which TR tended to be. 

Likewise, his public legacy is complicated. There is no doubt that he was prejudiced, particularly as a young man. His statements about Indigenous people are painfully awful. (Although, to be fair, there is evidence that he changed his mind about the worst of his beliefs as he got older - something rather the opposite from my experience with a lot of my parents’ generation, who seem to have gotten increasingly xenophobic over the last decade.) He was, alas, a product of his time, an era in which the supremacy of white people was taken for granted by most white people around the world. 

There were some good parts to his legacy, however. His distrust of big business led to the first real regulations on corporations and trusts - he is correctly considered the founder of the Progressive movement in the United States. In fact, while he was generally liked by conservatives during my childhood, as the American Right has veered strongly to the far right, he is now being disowned as a “communist” by a surprising number of people I know on the Right. These days, seeking the common good is controversial, it seems. For his time, TR was a reformer, and many of his ideas remain core parts of the progressive legacy. 

One thing that remains true about him is that those who knew and worked with him generally respected and liked him. As the book points out, in person he was a tremendously hard worker, generous with everyone, full of good humor, and self-sacrificing as a leader. And that goes for how he treated least powerful people as much as the best. The native Brazilians who did much of the hard labor during the trip this book describes were assisted by TR and his son Kermit, and TR gave away his own food, often to his own detriment. So, again, a complex, imperfect person, but someone who genuinely tried to be moral and generous. 

The River of Doubt is the story of a lesser-known escapade in Theodore Roosevelt’s life. As is better known, Roosevelt left office after a term and a half as president (he took over when William McKinley was assassinated), assuming that President Taft would continue the progressive agenda. When Taft instead started supporting corporate interests, TR was furious, founded his own political party (the Progressive Party, colloquially called the “Bull Moose” party after its founder.) This, unfortunately for TR, was a failure. He took a bullet, making a speech with the bullet still in his body (dude was a badass), but failed to win. With a split vote, Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats won the election. 

Nursing his bruised pride, TR decided to do what he usually did after a disappointment: find an adventure. What started as a tour of South America with a little moderate river exploration thrown in turned into an attempt to map an unknown and dangerous tributary of the Amazon. At age 55, no less.

The way all this came about is a bit of a shitshow of incompetence. Roosevelt was in contact with Father Zahm, a bit of an amateur naturalist who wanted to explore. Zahm enlisted Anthony Fiala, whose big claim to fame was nearly dying along with his expedition to the Arctic - in part due to Fiala’s disastrously incompetent leadership - to plan their supplies. This probably would not have been a big deal had they stuck with the original plan. A cruise of a known Amazon tributary to collect biological specimens would have been easy enough to accomplish, and the often bizarre packing decisions made by Fiala would have been merely amusing rather than life-threatening. 

Instead, the government of Brazil suggested that TR join Brazilian explorer Candido Rondon (perhaps the rare person even more badass than TR) in exploring and mapping the River of Doubt, an unknown river believed to drain to the Amazon via the Aripuana and the Madeira rivers. 

 Partway down, after the drowning of one of their number. I am not certain who the two on the left are, but from there (l-r):

Theodore Roosevelt, Candido Rondon, Kermit Roosevelt.

Even to get there required hundreds of miles of travel on land (with dirt tracks as the only road), followed by the descent of the river in dugout canoes. During the land transit, it became clear that supplies were grossly inadequate. As a result, the party was split in two, with Zahm and Fiala, among others, sent to descend a known - and much easier - river. It was left to Rondon, TR, his son Kermit, and 16 others to attempt the River of Doubt. (Now renamed the Roosevelt River.) 

After a few days, it became obvious that the dugouts were far from ideal, and would not be able to safely traverse rapids. Thus, portages were made necessary. This slowed everything down, and left the party badly short on food. It was by a combination of luck and grit that they made it out at all. By the end, one man had drowned, one had been murdered (and the murderer abandoned to the jungle), everyone except Rondon was gravely ill with malaria, dysentery, or something else, and TR was near death with both malaria and an infected leg. 

One could say, I suppose, that the expedition was a “success” in the sense that they made it out with most of them alive, and the river mapped. On the other, it was a disaster, and but for some really good luck (and the fact that the native peoples decided to leave them alone), it would have been deadly for all involved. 

For Roosevelt, it was particularly catastrophic in the long run. In an era before antibiotics, he never fully recovered from his illness, and was dead in less than five years later. Kermit, too, seemed haunted by the experience and the early death of his father, and struggled with depression and alcoholism for years afterward, before committing suicide during deployment in World War II. 

[Side note here: this is Kermit Sr. The legacy of Kermit Jr. is problematic for rather different reasons. He was the “mastermind” behind the CIA-engineered coup that destroyed moderate democracy in Iran. That’s a mistake that we are still paying for today.]  

In a weird twist of fate, Roosevelt returned from his trip to accusations that he had faked the whole thing - from respected naturalists and explorers, no less. So, barely able to walk and speak, the still ill TR made a series of presentations on the trip. These did serve to restore his reputation, but probably contributed to further ill health. 

Later, in 1927, George Miller Dyott settled things for good, when he made the trip himself and confirmed that Roosevelt and Rondon’s descriptions of plants, animals, and geographic features were indeed accurate. In 1992, a third expedition further confirmed the accuracy - and shot all but one of the rapids using modern equipment. 

This is the second book I have read by Candice Millard. (The first was The Destiny ofthe Republic, about the assassination of President Garfield - also a good read.) I like Millard’s writing. She avoids hagiography, presenting the complexities of the politics and culture of the time. Both books draw heavily from primary sources, but are written in a compelling prose style that makes them hard to put down. In both books, she presents the less heroic episodes in the lives of her subjects, which makes for an interesting look at complex figures. 

I figured I would end with a mention of the speech that Roosevelt gave after being shot, because it is phenomenal. You can read the whole thing here. In it, he lays out the case for progressivism. 

“Our creed is one that bids to be just to all, to feel sympathy for all, and to strive for an understanding of the needs of all. Our purpose is to smite down wrong.”

Roosevelt correctly notes that when the poor suffer, society is at risk. At risk of violent revolution, at a minimum. And this needed to be prevented now, by enacting legislation that addressed inequality and oppressive employment practices. 

“Now, friends, what we who are in this movement are endeavoring to do is to forestall any such movement by making this a movement for justice now - a movement in which we ask all just men of generous hearts to join with the men who feel in their souls that lift upward which bids them refuse to be satisfied themselves while their countrymen and countrywomen suffer from avoidable misery.”

The speech is pro-union. It is pro-regulation. It vehemently opposes child labor and long work hours for the most vulnerable (he specifically mentions 16-hour days for female industrial workers.) It calls for a uniform Federal policy to prevent states having a “race to the bottom” in terms of regulation. It addresses policy without making personal attacks. 

And it would be considered flaming Communist propaganda by today’s GOP. 

Times have changed. The GOP of Eisenhower is in many ways to the left of the Democratic party today. And the GOP is...not conservative at all. It is radically reactionary, viciously social darwinist, and on the payroll of the plutocrats. Historian Heather Cox Richardson lays it out pretty well here. And now we get to 2020, and we are literally hearing that the hoi polloi should be willing to sacrifice millions of their lives to keep the stock market high. Roosevelt was right: unless significant changes are made, this will not end well.