Oil!

Much of my sense of humor is grounded in naiveté. Naiveté is acting as if the world is the way it ought to be. And sometimes the way the world ought to be clashes so harshly with the reality, the effect is comic. That’s probably why Catholic sexual abuse is so funny. Religion is already an absurdity that defies explanation and whose various rituals, paraphernalia, and collateral effects are shocking and pervasive; how ghastly it must be then, seeking asylum in a priest, to find that the office that should provide an inviolable moral guardianship has been perverted into an opportunity to manipulate those who are most vulnerable. What qualifies the hilarity is the reality of Catholic sexual abuse.

The reality of abuse is also the only thing that separates it from the best and most hyperbolic examples of satire. I find this interesting since satire relies so heavily on the exaggeration of reality in order to make its point, yet reality often seems like a caricature of itself. What would happen if you wrote a satirical novel about life, a novel that eschewed exaggeration in favor of a realistic portrayal of society? You would end up with a novel that is as funny as any piece of satire, its realism even enhancing the hilarity of some things, while adding a tinge of tragedy to the book as a whole. In its realism the novel, though motivated by a love for humanity, might inspire more defeatism than activism. The closest thing I have read to this novel is Upton Sinclair’s Oil!

Oil!’s narrative arc is indeed tragic, though at any one point in the book there is always comedy. It may be the funniest book I have every read. It is fairly realistic, and in focusing on an oil-baron and his son, covers all aspects of life that are influenced by money, a proxy for power, which might as well be everything. It is a catholic skewering of life. So naturally the book takes a rather critical view of religion. Bunny, the oil-baron J. Arnold Ross’s son, meets the boy Paul, a son in a family of devout Christians, who is questioning his faith at the beginning of the book. Their first conversations point out some basic inconsistencies in the logic of religious faith in a way—simple, incisive, and hilarious—that only the naive can do.

Paul questions the incongruity of God’s creation with his perfection: “Why, if there is a God, and he loves his poor human creatures, why did he have to make so many weeds?” (Sinclair, p. 46).

He questions the necessity of faith for morality: “Gee, kid, but you’re lucky! You never knew you had a soul at all! You sure missed a lot of trouble!” (p. 46). “She married a Romanist, and Pap calls her the Whore of Babylon…but she’s kind” (p. 47). “I think a fellow can be decent without no devil” (p. 47).

Since the novel is so concerned with the power dynamics of society, it discusses the power of religion. At one point J. Arnold Ross invents a religion (p. 117). He says of the preacher he has unleashed upon his oil tract and Southern California: “‘Eli was a lunatic, and a dangerous one, but a kind that you couldn’t put in an asylum, because he used the phrases of religion’” (p. 123). Despite this, religion’s power is always measured in relation to the influence of money, and at at least two points in the book, the transformative effect of capital is compared to magic, one of these at the beginning, this comparison an apt frame for the entire book: Bunny, marveling at the highway, wonders, “…What magic had done all this? Dad had explained it—money had done it” (p. 5). The second comparison of money to magic invokes the image of a magician’s routine and its implicit similarity to the ministrations of a preacher, emphasizing the illusory and dependent quality of magic and religion, assuring capital’s place along with the other laws of physics as the only truly potent forces in the universe. After all, “What is a magician who pulls rabbits and yards of ribbon out of his sleeves, compared with one who can pull out a couple of dozen oil-derricks, and as many miles of steel casing, and tanks, and fleets of motor trucks, and roads for them to run on?” (p. 60).

Power and its most common manifestation, cash, is indeed an immanent factor in society, and is either the direct motive of behavior or what motivates those with capital to encourage other common behaviors that serve the status-quo. Magical thinking—the idea that elbow grease and optimism might change hard-wired and lamentably tautological human psychology—is shattered by the helpful intervention of money. People then show what really makes them tick. This is the master-principle of the book, and informs every other theme.

One of these themes is that higher education is a farce. Though I have read many great books critical of the liberal arts in the past year, they can all be summarized in the following brilliant passage from Oil!: “Aunt Emma tried to get Mr. Eaton [Bunny’s tutor] to say something in defense of poetry and history, but the tutor kept a discreet silence—he knew who held the purse-strings in that family! Bunny understood Mr. Eaton didn’t mind about it; he was preparing a thesis that was to get him a master’s degree, and he used his spare time quite contentedly, counting the feminine endings in certain of the pre-Elizabethan dramatists” (p. 69). Education is not good for its own sake but as a class indicator. “The one thing he [Bunny] had got at college was a clue to some worthwhile books; he wanted to read them—but you could do that better at home” (p. 291). (This sounds like my college experience.) Universities do not encourage truly original thinking, but only conformity. Bunny “was going to be a boy like other boys, and have a good time, and wear athletic sweaters, and shout at football games, and be part of a great machine” (p. 108). “It was hardly reasonable to expect that Bertie [Bunny’s sister], who was going to school in order to learn to admire money…should be moved to admiration by a man [Paul] who insisted that you had no right to money unless you earned it” (p. 71).

After getting to this point in my post and realizing that I have about ten pages of journal filled with equally brilliant quotations from this book, I have realized that I cannot hope to encapsulate the comprehensive genius of this novel, and I implore anyone who is even faintly interested to start reading Oil! immediately.

I would like to end my thoughts of Oil! with another quote: “Ruth has had to learn that the world is the way it is, and not the way she’d like it to be” (p. 490). With all that happens in Oil! it is difficult to come away from it without some defeatism, which seems odd considering that Upton Sinclair was a tireless activist. But I have nothing to offer in contradiction; I have reached a point in my life where life does not only seem absurd, but irremediably so. Realizing you have no capacity to effect significant change, you start to become detached. Instead of feeling righteous indignation, you start to laugh about the way that things are.

If, however, after reading Oil! you need some cheering up, check out The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. Though it makes no attempt to vindicate our obscenely and increasingly large income gap, it does point out that the value of any unit of currency—the amount of man-hours of labor it can buy—has been rising since the dawn of civilization. It is the most sincere and convincing defense of capitalism I have ever read, and all the more comforting since I don’t think there will ever be a society able to surmount the obstacles delineated in Oil!.

On Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

The problems with stereotypical Asian parenting are fairly obvious. Learning is made rote and mechanistic, and passions can be stultified. But there is also a fairly obvious and tantalizing benefit - certainly for a recent college graduate with a worthless degree. The benefit is financial security, something that is not given enough credit. What makes this possibility even more tantalizing is the realization that having a soul and being pragmatic are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, this is an assumption that is often taken for granted in discussions about the subject, an assumption that makes the discussion so interesting for many people. Who, after all, would care about a parent that tells their child that being an engineer, doctor, or investment banker is a good career move and yet encourages them to foster a love of literature, cinema, etc. on the side? Most of the anecdotes about Asian parenting involve behaviors that are hyperbolic, and though more representative than ultra-politically correct people may think, are certainly not the entire story. But they get the attention.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is a good example. In fact, the title itself - the first thing you notice about a book - is provocative. I was not interested in the book at the time it ignited controversy because it was so obviously tendentious. It would surely only represent the extreme end of the Asian parenting spectrum, at which you find a state of mind that’s logically untenable. I only became recently interested in the book after reading a New Yorker article, “The Tiger Cub Speaks,” in which it is revealed that Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, daughter of Battle Hymn author Amy Chua, is a double major in philosophy and sanskrit, has joined a sorority, and hasn’t boycotted Starbucks. For one, I found it unbelievable that Amy Chua could not have prevented such a catastrophic mistake as a declaration of not one, but two liberal arts majors, an event that effectively nullified all of her parental efforts hitherto, and which has grave implications for Amy Chua’s intelligence. Joining a sorority is a sign of character weakness; it’s clear that Sophia was not inculcated with a conception of relationships based on authenticity. And anyone who has pretensions to being cultured would not be caught dead drinking a soy-decaf-carbonized roast-vanilla-pumpkin/peppermint spice-mocha-frappuccino-caramel macchiato or whatever Starbuck (The character in Moby Dick is named Starbuck, singular, not Starbucks, so I’ll take the liberty of correcting the name.) calls their glorified milkshakes. With Amy Chua’s idiocy put in stark relief, I decided to give the book a whirl (checked out from the library to deny her any profit, of course).

As the hype would suggest, Battle Hymn isn’t so much a reasoned defense of Asian parenting as a provocation. The content of the book, regardless of its stated purpose, is designed to capture attention. The bulk of the book is a paean to Chua’s daughters, arguably appropriate in a defense of Asian parenting, a regime whose redeeming quality is improved success in children. But this is specious for a subject where anecdotal evidence is not preferred; besides, it’s clear that Chua relishes the vicarious ego boost her children give her. In fact, Chua regards praise as fundamental to the enjoyment of an activity: “Once a child starts to excel at something…he or she gets praise, admiration, and satisfaction” (Chua, p. 29). To be sure, this is true to an extent, but Chua seems to elevate mastery as a way to elicit praise over proficiency that fortifies latent interest. I got this impression from her prescriptions on what children should take up as an avocation. One of Chua’s prescriptions says that one should not allow their child to “play any instrument other than the piano or violin” (p. 4). Why should this be the case? Mastering an instrument serves no practical purpose; it only serves to elicit praise. A prescription to master only the piano or violin only augments the prestige accorded to virtuosity, as these are stereotypically high-class and extremely competitive instruments. Achievement with these instruments is more impressive. Chua briefly mentions the cultural value of playing the violin or piano. This is unconvincing because it runs counter to the nominal utilitarianism implied by being a “tiger mother,” unless the term cultural value is taken literally and you see it as a kind of elitist capital. And her daughter goes to Starbucks. Some cultural elite. In any case, I do not see the value of having an inflated ego per se. The best jobs usually come with quite a bit of prestige, but prestige does not come with a lucrative job. Chua depends on the lazy reader’s confusion of correlation and causation to veil her vain boasting.

Chua does not just speak of the heavenly transports induced by Sophia’s piano playing. She goes into the darker side of her family’s lives. There’s even an arc in the book about her death struggle with her younger daughter Lulu about playing violin, a struggle that Amy loses. But in her confrontation with her own cultural preconceptions, she runs away. She doesn’t learn anything about the experience. Although she eventually relents in letting Lulu quit the violin and take up tennis, she only does this after a prolonged struggle, with much reluctance, and cannot help mentioning when Lulu expressed regret at leaving the orchestra, and takes pains to describe that Lulu is not a very accomplished tennis player. The idea that she has to excel is never abandoned. In line with Chua’s obsession with appearances, she makes an exception to her aversion to sports expressed early in the book by only letting Lulu play a sport played mostly by elites. If the book were about actual reconciliation or penitence, it would not have been titled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The book is not penitent, it is not even self-consciously defensive. It is an affirmation. The lurid parts of the book are not so much part of an apology as a deliberate display; it shows the reader that Amy Chua means business. The stakes in raising children are high, and a mother who really cares about her children will put them through hell if it means they will succeed. Well, success is not really the objective for Amy Chua, but that’s beside the point. Chua also knows that putting this in will heighten the drama.

Because Amy Chua does not think of life holistically, she does not think of why she makes her children do certain things. A person susceptible to dogma and who suffers from anxiety when not working is not a rational person, they are a person whose personality allows them to thrive in a competitive world. A rational person would not force their child to practice an instrument for three hours a day and have recourse to a lazy cultural relativism to defend their craziness. A rational person would force their child to succeed to the extent required to live a comfortable life. At the same time they would teach their child how to live comfortably. And they would say that comfort is the most important part of life. Since there is no point to life, it only makes sense to have a pleasurable one.

On Love and Robots, Part Two

Her has a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It has been nominated for an Academy Award for best picture. How, I don’t know. It was a thematic mess. Science fiction has a convention of comparing humans and robots to explore the essence of humanity. Human to robot relationships are often involved. It seems formulaic, so formulaic that a movie with a premise like Her is (well, I thought it would be) pretty predictable. And yet, the formula works. You want to stick to the basic formula, because the philosophical issues raised are so interesting. Her did a terrible job at sticking to this formula. In an attempt to be original, she shot herself in the foot.

So, what is the formula? Take a robot of comparable intelligence to a human, like a cylon (Battlestar Galactica treats this formula with particular brilliance.) or a replicant, and put them around humans. See what happens. What happens is reassessment. Robots like this are, for practical purposes, humanity expressed in purely materialistic terms; the plot device of humans versus robots is not necessary to imagine the possibility of or think of the implications of materialism, but it puts these questions in a narrative form that makes them more compelling. Robots make us rethink all the things we hold dear, the things that we attribute mystical qualities to, like consciousness and love. At once the hallowed and romantic is brought down, and the material and vulgar is elevated. Any rationale we have for distrusting robots is a reflection of why we distrust each other. How can you trust something with hardware, without a soul? Well, if there’s no reason to suspect that humans have souls, then it merits wondering why we trust each other. The extreme end of this issue begs the question: is the universe solipsistic? Have the people that Blogger says have visited my blog actually done so? Or is this a projection of a mind in a tank? More reasonably, can we trust the sincerity of anyone? It is a sign of misinterpretation if you think evolutionary-psychological explanations of social behaviors that speak in terms of acts in accordance with cost/benefit analyses (e.g. people do each other favors in order to increase their social capital) are literal and not metaphorical. Then again, we can never be sure what others are thinking. And certainly - though they may be in the minority - some people act consciously in a tit-for-tat manner. On the other hand, the knowledge that we act with sincerity, even if a logical analysis would tell us otherwise, suggests that biology does not impose iron-clad limits upon us. The beauty of a prefrontal cortex is that it allows us to transcend our instinctual impulses. Those impulses are not always bad, either. Experiencing the use of skills that we cannot seemingly account for - the automatic ability that comes with experience - makes it hard to denigrate the subconscious fruits that a battery of 200 billion interconnected neurons makes possible.

What do robots tell us about love? They tell us that love is no more than engorged sexual organs, and the instinct to pass on our genes, among other things. And yet they tell us that it is so much more than this. Physical contact augments emotional connection; the two are intertwined. One complements the other, to form an exalted unity. But this is a bit glib, and ignores the interesting contradictions and cognitive dissonances that arise from something that can only be more than material, and yet is consummated with a singularly material union. The feeling that love cannot be material is in fact what makes its material nature so incredible. As misleading as it is to say that materialism in no way implies vulgarity, and so can be embraced without hesitation is as misleading as the romantic notion that love does not require, and is in fact enhanced by, the complete lack of physicality.

Her made the mistake of buying into the latter conception of love, the Hallmark conception. I think every problem in the movie is exemplified by one scene, where the protagonist Twombly “has sex” with his operating system girlfriend. This scene holds the honorable distinction of being the worst sex scene I’ve ever “seen.” (Whether I can say I saw this scene is a question that must be asked for reasons that will become clear.) Yes, even worse than the pony-tail sex scene from Avatar. Anyway, this was supposed to be the climax of a blossoming relationship, and would’ve been completely justified had Samantha been in possession of a physical body. But since she doesn’t, and just to drive home the point that love is not in thrall to petty physicality, they have phone sex. What else can you call it? They talk and moan and then Twombly comes. Conveniently, as their conversation gets more intense, the screen fades to black, simultaneously enhancing the “beauty” of this scene for the average viewer, and covering up the decidedly unromantic image of a middle aged man masturbating to a voice in his bed. Sorry, but I don’t think you can fall in love with a voice, just as much as you can’t fall in love with a real doll. It would have been interesting to have something patently ridiculous spun into love from the other end of the spectrum. I’m sure audiences wouldn’t have responded as well to a movie about a guy who, after a routine session of having sex with his real doll, decides to have a stimulating conversation with “her,” discussing the physical and spiritual aspects of love while having tea and scones. If there’s anything edifying about this scene, it’s the prevalence of the Hallmark school of thought when it comes to love. In a land known for its repression of sexuality, I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise.

The end result was an unbelievable movie, which asked none of the questions a movie of this type should’ve asked. There was no questioning of their love. The movie made it clear, this is love and you’re gonna believe it or else. Spike Jonze was so confident in the unalloyed beauty of their love that he made clear to emphasize it in every scene by packing as many excruciatingly slow panning shots across stereotypically beautiful landscapes (beaches) as he could into the movie, turning a half an hour plot into a two hour audio/visual tranquilizer. This movie might be more boring than Ender’s Game and that movie with George Clooney where they smoke and play jazz while talking about how great being liberal is for two hours. I could not accept this, and I could not sympathize with any of the characters as a consequence. How could a character, a supposedly well-adjusted man that had a long term relationship with a woman without any major physical or psychological defects become a Manti Te’o, and still be realistic? Actually, the point where Samantha temporarily “dies” (which, by the way, was an extremely lazy way to elicit an emotional response from the audience) had me jumping with joy. If a movie makes one happy at the deaths of the characters, something must be wrong with it.

As a much better example of human and robot love, Blade Runner is a must see. Although the love of Deckard and Rachael is basically initiated by rape, this movie sticks to the science fiction formula (actually based on a piece of science fiction canon that pioneered this sub genre, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), and addresses it with verve. It addresses the questions that humans and robots relations elicit, with an aesthetic that would make this movie worth watching if it were a silent film with no plot. Since it does have a plot, what you get is analogous to Tron, at least if Tron had a compelling story to boot. The movie combines film noir with science fiction dystopia, in visual and audio, with a  haunting soundtrack by Vangelis that deserves to be called a piece of art itself. Vangelis has a knack for exploiting the suffusive drone of synthesizers, exemplified by “Blade Runner Blues.” Of special mention is the combination of his aloof but beautiful synth textures with the raw, filthy, and Barry White-esque sensuality of the saxophone in Blade Runner’s “Love Theme.” The unique aesthetic of Blade Runner make it the best rain movie I’ve seen, hands down.

Love and robots can also be found in the Buggles song, “I Love You Miss Robot.” As well as Vangelis, the Buggles tap the potential of synth to express aloofness in a way that complements the melancholy theme of the song quite nicely. The song describes the perfection of robotic love, ruefully tempered by the lack of trust engendered by a synthetic being, and its conditional aspect. This melancholy of this song also serves to contrast it with the rest of the album, The Plastic Age, which is relatively upbeat. The songs definitely deserve to be experienced sequentially, as the album is fantastic.

Passing mention should go to Kraftwerk’s song, “Computer Love.” Though spare in lyrics and consequently in interpretations, this song is quite good. Kraftwerk’s pioneering sound, expressive yet sterile and minimalistic, deserves its own post.

On Love and Robots, Part One

I have never understood texting. Calling has always seemed more efficient, giving you the ability to relay information and get feedback in real time. Oddly, nobody seems to agree; texting is ubiquitous. My friends are no exception, and this means that I risk undermining too many relationships if I stubbornly refuse to reply to the boilerplate text, “U called? What’s up?” So, I have developed a cyst of apologetics to isolate my principles from my relationships: In addition to ignoring the fact that texting costs money (a once explicit extra cost now buried in ever more complex data plans and nominally “free”), until recently I assumed that my bias in favor of phone calls was mainly borne out of exclusive use of a numeric keypad. Surely, using a qwerty keyboard is not nearly as time consuming, I thought. And now that I’ve experienced an iPhone keyboard, I know that it isn’t as time consuming. But it’s still annoying, and appreciably slower than calling. But at least texting is useful when you know someone is busy. Or maybe not. Even this inoffensive defense falls apart under determined skepticism: if someone is busy, they should not be dividing their attention between a text message and the task at hand. If this expectation is reasonable, the concomitant delay in response makes texting no more useful than calling. You would see a missed call, and attend to it. So why is texting so common?

Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other goes about answering this question by describing how our expectations of what technology can do for us limits what we expect from personal relationships. Divided into two parts, the first part is concerned with our relationships with robots. At first I was bemused by the inclusion of this part. Given the primitive state of contemporary artificial intelligence, which precludes a serious comparison between human to robot and human to human relationships, I figured Turkle would tackle the rich moral and philosophical issues inherent in relationships between humans and human-like (i.e. practically identical) robots, an interesting issue (which I hope to treat in a future post) only found in science fiction and consequently irrelevant for a book that I thought would be about how texting is stupid. Then bemusement mixed with dread as I realized that Turkle is a “psychoanalyst;” I braced myself for a romantic, quasi-mystical anti-materialist paean to the transcendent beauty of the human spirit, something that robots - no matter how sophisticated - will never match. To my relief, and boredom, part one only contained the rather banal observation that contemporary artificial intelligence is primitive, to say the least. This is repeated ad nauseam and I recommend skipping to the second part of the book after reading a couple of chapters or so. Still, these couple of chapters or so are worth reading because the banal themes presented, corollaries to the banal observation, complement the second part in ways that are surprising.

Yes, artificial intelligence is primitive, but it is advanced enough to fake certain human behaviors, most relevant of which is empathy. As any therapist knows, to erect a sympathetic facade is as simple as to “take strings of words and turn them into questions or restate them as interpretations” (Turkle, pp. 23). Of course, truly convincing faux-sympathy involves more sophistication, but that the above passage is a description of the computer program, ELIZA, programmed in the 1970s, is a testament to the potential for fakery in modern A.I. And then again, the sophistication of A.I. is almost beside the point; as Turkle takes the reader through the examples of “kind of real” toys and robots, it becomes increasingly clear that people project their desire for sympathy and connection onto what is clearly ersatz. In a way, the liminal nature of being quasi-empathic and yet obviously fake allows for venting without the pain and disappointment that goes with real relationships. A relationship with a “kind of real” entity is also one-sided. This does not prepare us for reciprocity. These relationships are cheap, and even if relationships with quasi-empathic entities are not widespread enough to have affected human relationships, developments in A.I. parallel developments in communications technology, that make it easier to distance ourselves from each other while presumable enriching our social networks.

Social networking, texting, and the like all fit into the optimistic technophile’s utopian vision of unlimited connectivity. Who wants to be bored? Who wants to be alone? The easy answer is nobody, and so any technology that increases connectivity improves our social lives, and in a way analogous to meeting face-to-face. Ignoring for now the fact that texting and even skyping are not equivalent to meeting face-to-face, this technophile answer is not just easy but politically correct. Who wants to say they want to be alone? Maybe for your own sake this is acceptable, but if you consider that giving time to yourself means taking yourself away from your friends, this becomes unacceptable. Being alone is something that people find hard to acknowledge. In the past the fact that solitude is nice did not have to be acknowledged, and if it was, there was no obvious conflict. But now, to isolate yourself is a statement. It’s weird. At the same time, these all-important connections are fundamentally changed by the ways we communicate, in ways that parallel current human to A.I. interactions. Namely, we become more selfish: texting creates an expectation of instant gratification. Constant communication makes it harder to cultivate intimate friendships, as you have to divide your time between multiple people, and friendship becomes an exercise in management. Our reliance on communication technology that is eminently editable has gotten to the point where calling, which requires one to talk in real time, is anxiety provoking:

“All the Richelieu sophomores agree that the thing to avoid is the telephone. Mandy presents a downbeat account of a telephone call: ‘You wouldn’t want to call because then you would have to get into a conversation [my emphasis].’ And conversation, ‘Well, that’s something where you only want to have them when you want to have them.’ For Mandy, this would be ‘almost never…. It is almost always too prying, it takes too long, and it is impossible to say “good-bye…”’ Awkward good-byes feel too much like rejection. With texting, she says, ‘you just ask a question and then it’s over’” (pp. 200).

I have to say, reading the chapter, “No Need to Call” was shocking, and I hope Turkle was suffering from a sample that was far to small to be representative. Because I really cannot fathom the pusillanimity it takes to be afraid of a phone call. I used to think of texting versus calling in terms of efficiency, but now I see there could be a rather freakish psychological phenomenon behind the reluctance to call. To be completely fair, whenever I call someone it’s not to have a conversation 99% of the time, but would it really matter? I have a hard time believing the people Turkle interviews in this chapter, but then again, it makes sense in light of the predominance of texting in the face of calling’s obvious superiority, and cultural preoccupation with awkwardness and the almost pathological obsession people have with “awkward humor,” as if epochal catastrophes like conversational silence and breaches of etiquette are fit for cutting oneself over.

Another outgrowth of the optimistic technophilic vision of interconnectedness, and the other shocker of the book, is a disturbingly ahistorical (The publication of 1984 was not even a century ago, and the NSA’s domestic surveillance program is ongoing) embrace of a lack of privacy, as if this is a good thing. Superficially, privacy isn’t good. If you have something to hide, it can’t be good. Unless you want to keep to yourself. But then you’re a freak. (By the way this theme is explored rather drolly in Dave Egger’s novel The Circle, about a Google-esque company.) It’s easy to think that the stereotype of unworldly technophiles is largely true, that the bulk of computer programmers and such are high-functioning-autistic-idiot-savants, when you hear Turkle’s experience with “one Web luminary,” who “spoke to me [Turkle] with animation about the wiretapping controversy. To my surprise, he cited Michel Foucault on the panopticon to explain why he was not worried about privacy on the internet” (pp. 262) For anyone who knows anything about Michel Foucault, this is an egregious misreading of the panopticon section of Discipline and Punish, which cites the panopticon as the personification of an increasingly discipline obsessed European society. Conformity takes precedence over freedom and privacy. That’s tyranny. It may seem counterintuitive to claim that the internet - an incredibly diverse network, to put it mildly - encourages conformity. Of course, the internet is not homogeneous per se, but interfacing with the internet, and the vast population it puts you in contact with encourages putting on your best face. If you care about Facebook, editing your profile becomes very important. And even for people like me, who are casual Facebook users, self-censorship is definitely a factor.

On the topic of self-censorship, I just thought I’d mention another example of ignorance caused by technophilic myopia. Turkle mentions an A.I. researcher (I neglected to take note of the page number) who believes in a ridiculously reductive neurological materialism: apparently programming a robot to imitate a human behavior means they feel that behavior. In a disturbing reversal of science fiction’s motif of robots brought to the level of humans, humans are inevitably brought down to parrot-computer programs. Being fake is being human.

Review of "Social Sciences as Sorcery"

I recently read the books Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt and Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Both point out instances of gross misuse of scientific concepts in the liberal arts. Through my experiences as a college student and a Religious Studies major, I have become intimately acquainted with sophistry. So after coming upon Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (a genius who deserves a later laudatory post) recommendation of Fashionable Nonsense in one of his books (I forget whether it was in Antifragile or Fooled by Randomness), I found reading anything purporting to tear apart postmodernism at its logical foundations irresistible. I was not disappointed. Fashionable Nonsense by itself is a hilarious and yet coldly logical dismantling of the bafflingly inappropriate use of such scientific and mathematical fields as topology and quantum physics as metaphoric fodder; however, the hilarity of the book is enhanced by association with a legendary case of academic hijinks, the Sokal Affair.

Back in 1996 Alan Sokal, inspired by Higher Superstition, wrote the paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” “It asserts an extreme form of cognitive relativism: after mocking the old-fashioned ‘dogma’ that ‘there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole’, it proclaims categorically that ‘physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct” (Bricmont, Sokal 1998, pp. 2). Pi and Newton’s G are social constructs. It was published in the journal Social Text and was revealed as a hoax soon afterwards. Sokal was trying to emulate a soft-science tradition. As described by the sociologist Stanislav Andreski, “The recipe for authorship in this line of business is as simple as it is rewarding: just get hold of a textbook of mathematics, copy the less complicated parts, put in some references to the literature in one or two branches of the social studies without worrying unduly about whether the formulae which you wrote down have any bearing on the real human actions, and give your product a good-sounding title, which suggests that you have found a key to an exact science of collective behaviour” (Andreski 1972, pp. 129-130).

This is where Stanslav Andreski’s Social Sciences as Sorcery comes in. I saw the quote above in Fashionable Nonsense, along with other quotes from and references to Andreski. I believe he is also mentioned in Higher Superstition. I got the impression that he was a genius, a witty asshole, and a true pioneer in his debunking, his book predating Higher Superstition and Fashionable Nonsense by more than 20 years. I had to read their spiritual predecessor. Andreski’s almost mythical stature in my mind was only inflated more after finding out how rare Social Sciences as Sorcery is. But I finally found it in the Los Angeles Library, which by the way, is incredible. It’s like a subterranean, art deco Minas Tirith, whose levels are filled with books.

Anyway, Social Sciences as Sorcery was as good as I was hoping it would be. As suggested by the few quotes of Andreski I had seen beforehand, the book was chock-full of incisive and sardonic commentary on what has gone wrong in the field of sociology. I did not write down where all the good quotes are (there are too many), but here’s one of my favorites, which is representative of the rest of the book: “Top universities can usually get the best people in the fields where there are firm criteria of achievement; but at the present stage of development of the social sciences the process of selection resembles, as often as not, a singing competition before a deaf jury who can judge the competitors only by how wide they open their mouths” (Andreski 1972, pp. 86). I also enjoyed his “Equation of Jargon-Mongering,” which is (A/K)-1=V, where A=ambition, K=knowledge, and V=verbosity. He explains the -1 by saying that “when the knowledge matches the ambition, there is no verbiage” (Andreski 1972, pp. 83). Though his equation doesn’t make any sense when there is no ambition, that’s not the point. The rhetorical effect is quite funny. At bottom all three books have the same message concerning epistemology and intellectual honesty, yet Andreski attacks the problems of intellectual honesty on a wider plane, extrapolating less from specific examples like the other two books. The end result is a more philosophical book, a good primer for Higher Superstition and Fashionable Nonsense.

Andreski starts the book by discussing the problem of imputing intention. Andreski theorizes throughout the book about the causes of sloppy thinking and superfluous but impressive sounding verbiage, and when talking about behavior where competition is involved, costs and benefits of certain behaviors must be explained. For purposes of clarity, Andreski writes as if the people involved are aware of certain circumstances, which makes his reasoning easier to understand. Unfortunately it also makes sociologists seem like conspiratorial, cynical manipulators. You find the same problem in evolutionary psychology. Well, this whole problem is rhetorical, but for those who insist on imputing cynical intentions on academics, Andreski has this to say: “In any case, the most deadly agents of cultural infections are not the brazen cynics, but the sectarians prone to self-delusion and the timorous organization men anxious not to miss the band-waggon [sic], who unquestioningly equate popularity and worldly success with intrinsic merit” (Andreski 1972, pp. 10). The point is that “in the study of human affairs evasion and deception are as a rule much more profitable than telling the truth” (Andreski 1972, pp. 12).

Part of Andreski’s theory is basically that verbiage and the scientistic insistence on quantifiable measurements preserve social scientists by allowing them to repackage the same banal platitudes about sociology in infinite permutations of impressive sounding jargon. I would type an example of inane verbosity, but I am too lazy. It’s enough to say that Andreski’s translation of a 16 line excerpt from Talcott Parsons’s Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives is “that although every individual is in many ways similar to other human beings, he is also unique in a way which is predetermined neither by the properties of his organism nor by the state of the culture,” something that’s “hardly a revelation” (Andreski 1972, 60). An insistence on quantifiable measurements misleads by imbuing banal data with a pseudoscientific imprimatur, by obscuring its banality, and by suggesting that less “rigorous” methods are unfit for use in sociology as they are not “objective.” Furthermore, restricting the ability to research anything truly original combined with the potential to hide ideology in nominally neutral language has the side effect of not pushing the buttons of anyone in power. Andreski calls this “promiscuous crypto-conservatism.” Looking at conservatism as a defense of the status-quo makes it clear that people labeled as “conservatives” don’t think as a bloc. It depends on what they’re defending. Conservatives from different societies or people who are conservative concerning different issues could easily have contradictory opinions. Promiscuous conservatism derives from the desire to placate those in power. It is based in self-preservation; to try to justify this brand of conservatism ideologically would result in an incoherent ideology. Lastly, academics form cliques, propping each other up with laudatory reviews and appointing each other to positions of power. It’s a vicious circle.

Attending some of my first Religious Studies classes made me wonder whether the professors were playing Devil’s advocate or not. I soon came to find that they believed what they taught, but regardless of whether they were honest in their convictions or shamelessly cynical, I can’t help but think of an anecdote in the conclusion of Social Sciences as Sorcery: “Some years before the First World War, a Parisian periodical asked some of the most prominent French figures in the…social sciences…about what they regarded as the most essential method in their field. While other respondents sent back learned methodological disquisitions, Georges Sorel replied in one word: honesty” (Andreski 1972, pp. 232).