Evil!

by Jeremy Griffin

The Science of Evil by Simon Baron-Cohen

Some folks may recognize Simon Baron-Cohen (uncle of Sasha Baron-Cohen, better known as Borat) from his research into autism. Speaking very broadly, Baron-Cohen believes that the causes of autism are rooted in gender differences, namely  the disparity between the degrees of empathy that either gender is capable of experiencing. Empthy is the key word here, because while the title of this book might suggest something of a more philosophical nature–think Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape–what you really have is a very cut-and-dry investigation into what empathy actually is, its neurological underpinnings, and what could happen when those underpinnings fail.

Interestingly, the author’s theories regarding psychopathy–largely the focus here–stem from his research into autism. Baron-Cohen maintains that folks at the severe end of the autism spectrum and folks who fit the clinical definition of “psychopaths” are often joined by a lack of empathy. That is, they are unable to grasp the concept of others’ feelings and wants. In some cases, this is “balanced out” by a greater-than-average propensity for systematization, as well as an ability to spot patterns that most folks overlook–what Baron-Cohen calls Zero Positive empathy, otherwise known as the autism spectrum–while other times this lack of empathy leads to a view of other people as “things” whose sole existence is to facilitate the wants and needs of the individual–what Baron-Cohen calls Zero Negative empathy, and which he says is a major cause of severe cruelty.

This is fascintating stuff for the armchair psychologist in most of us, though the writing itself could use some work. Not that most of us expect general-audience nonfiction to be necessarily Shakespearian, but we do usually expect some degree of style and fluidity that, in this case, just isn’t here. And this in itself might not be a problem, were it not for the fact that it contributes to an oversimplification of many important concepts–for example, the very concept of “evil.”  Baron-Cohen addresses it at the beginning of the book and makes it clear that he believes the typical religious conception to be inadequate, but to attribute such a complex concept to little more than “a lack of empathy,” as he does, doesn’t seem much better. And yes, I realize that he’s not writing some treatise on moral philosophy but rather a succint overview of a very complex psycho-biological matter. But it does seem that even this kind of work demands a more thorough investigation into what “evil” actually means, perhaps because of how easily a statement like this opens itself to so many fickle philosophical objections (Aren’t people objects? Couldn’t we say that we do, in fact, treat everyone like an object in some form? How are humans supposed to be treated?). Another part of it just that this seems to let “evil” off the hook a bit too easily; Baron-Cohen illustrates his conception of evil by referencing the Nazis, but there’s something just a bit heartless and obtuse about implying that all the Nazis really did was treat people like objects.

Still, this doesn’t diminish the book’s overall impact. At the end of the day, you still have a thoroughly scientific perspective on an issue that most folks are content to chalk up to a Michael Bayish notion of “good vs. evil.” To look at concepts like cruelty with a scientific eye requires us to set aside some of our most long-standing beliefs. This is no easy feat, but at the very least, Simon Baron-Cohen provides us with a good entry point.

Those Who do so Human a Thing

by Weston Cutter

         Marcianne Blévis’s Jealousy is somehow both a disturbing and deeply, deeply relieving book. Blévis is a psychoanalyst, and the book’s ten chapters are each a look at a different patient and his or her various issues re: jealousy (that sentence is sort of like describing Mos Def as “a guy who makes hip hop”: true, but woefully inadequate). The disturbing aspect’s got to be somewhat simple and clear: each chapter presents a person with (usually) incredibly complex and thickly-laid jealousy problems, and it’s quite simply uncomfortable to read that much about someone’s problems (there is, of course, the fine schadenfreude line, and, sure, sometimes it’s great to read about people’s problems, but not in the depth that Blévis gets).

         The relieving aspect might say more about this reviewer than this book, but here it is: I’ve thought, until recently, that I was a jealous guy (re: romantic stuff), and this book’s disabused me completely and forever of that notion. Here’s why: the last chapter in this book features a man who was, no joke, jealous of the flowers Blévis kept in her office (it’s more complex than that, and the flowers act as a sort of stand-in or construct for the guy’s ideas of romance and control and masculinity, but still). I have never, ever, been jealous of flowers. I have nothing near the problems the people in this book have.

         So: relieving and disturbing. There’s a third current running through this book, and I don’t really know how to describe it other than to say that if you read the book quickly, in one sitting (eminently doable), you’ll maybe feel, by the end of it, that Blévis is a bit…well, single-minded, maybe. It’s maybe easier to use her words here:

         “Let’s consider the jealousy suffered by a child who is very small, almost a baby, and hasn’t yet learned to speak. The child, fascinated by the image of its mother breastfeeding another child, is filled with rage. All of jealousy’s future blows derive from this first clash with a rival.” p. 63.

         Stuff like the above’s not necessarily common in Jealousy, but it’s not necessarily rare, either. What I think it is is that there’s an aspect of psychology here that’s so stridently unironic and self-serious that it’s almost hard to read—which, let’s just be clear, is likely as much about me as it is about the book and Ms. Blévis (because, really, isn’t an inability to take totally seriously stuff like direct psychoanalytic writing a sign of irony-poisoning? Isn’t my own inablity to snickerlessly read stuff like the above a sign that I’m maybe too jaded for my own or anyone’s own good)? It’s a weird, constant struggle in the book, or at least it was for me: Blévis writes about things that happen—like, for instance, the bisexual patient whose inner wildcat is, during a session, set free, and whose inner wildcat thereafter is clawing at the walls…—and they’re real and serious things, and Blévis treats them as real and serious, but there are times when the real seriousness of things gets almost top-heavy, feels as if it’ll tip over.

         Regardless of all the above, the book’s still a wonder-inducing dazzler of a read. Everybody who’s got any touch of jealousy within them will find an echo in here. Amazingly, those who claim to have no jealousy will find a chapter within for them, too. It’s a fascinating, scary little mirror of a book, and I almost never use this as metric, but it bears mentioning given the times: this thing’s $14.95 for the hardcover. Seriously? You need more reasons?

Math and Race, Respectively

by Weston Cutter

Lewis Carroll in Numberland by Robin Wilson

 

            (This first one’s another of the Missed in 2008 series—the book originally was released in November by Norton.)

            Can I just go ahead and admit I’m a huge sucker for math stuff? There’s something wildly satisfying about math, specifically arithmetic, linear math: I’m a hopeless algebra junkie, and the best math provides an aesthetic click not much different from great fiction or poetry. So, all that as preamble: Robin Wilson’s Lewis Carroll in Numberland is a dynamite, knock-yr-socks-off book that’s about as satisfying a book as any I’ve read in ages—and I really specifically mean satisfying, the satisfaction that comes from being curious about an answer to something and then getting an unambiguous answer (it’s akin to the sort of satisfaction one gets on reading, say, a good mystery).

            Carroll, of course, wrote the Alice books and may or may not (not at all, according to Wilson, though others’ve disagreed) have been a little too keenly interested in little Alice Lidell (for the coolest explication of that relationship, the place to go is F. Prose’s dynamite Lives of the Muses).  Carroll was also, maybe less well-known, a dynamite mathematician, and spent his life at Oxford writing far, far more mathematical books than kids books.

            What Mr. Wilson offers the reader in Numberland is the same playful madcapper who wrote the Alice books, but we’re given this insider-ish view of the logician behind the kiddie tale. What’s funniest and most amazing/interesting about the Alice books is how rigorously logical they are, and how many logic games and puzzles are in play therein, all of which Mr. Wilson does a fantastic job of highlighting and, when necessary, explicating.

            I don’t have many friends who get amped up to read math books, and while I get that most people equate reading about math with unaesthetized dental work, I’d argue heartily that books like Lewis Carroll in Numberland—unthreatening but smart, uncondescendingly helpful—are the exact sort needed to bring the (gulp) fun of math to more people.

 

Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss

 

            It’s appropriate, given that it’s Oscar weekend, that we acknowledge that most contests and prizes are garbage; how many prizes can you think of that’ve always been given to what you believe or consider to be fully worthy? VVoice‘s Pazz and Jop always misses some hugely important release, and the annual NYTimes list of ten books can’t possibly contain all the awesomeness each year offers, and do we even need to talk about National Book Awards and Pulitzers and Nobels and etc.?

            However, don’t lose faith! Don’t lose hope! Graywolf, America’s absolute best publisher, has a Nonfiction prize, and the winning book’s released every spring, and if you want pure amazement, get the books that’ve won that award: Kate Braverman’s dazzler about LA started things off, Monson’s freakishly great Neck Deep won it the next year, then came T. Svoboda’s almost-shattering Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, and now Eula Biss’s No Man’s Land is this year’s champ. That, for you Sabermetricians, is that rarest thing—a perfect batting average.

            I can hardly speak of this book, honestly: it’s heartrendingly amazing and so completely/complexly itself that the idea of trying to encapsulate it’s laughable. What it is, for sure, is this: it’s Eula Biss wondering about and poring over and looping back on/through ideas about race and self and home and America. I know that that process—someone at the wheel, driving into the big dark map of self/race/America—is only fully magnificent in the hands/words of a few artists, but let’s here be totally clear that Eula Biss is one of those artists, someone whose work, if made mandatory consumption for the country, would enrich and enlarge each of us to a point of fullness that’s almost scary. It’s really that good a book, seriously: buy it for yourself, and then buy ten copies, hand them out to friends, start petitions to get a national Eula Biss day (and, of course, as always: stand in slack-jawed amazement at Graywolf—their whole spring catalog’s freaky good).

Bergmann’s Getting Ghost

by Weston Cutter

            I was probably as excited to read Luke Bergmann’s Getting Ghost as I’ve been to read any book recently, and of course excitement translates easily into expectations, and so now, a week after finishing the book, I’m still not totally sure how I feel about it.

            Simple stuff first: imagine Random Family except in Detroit, and centered around two young men (one aged 16, one aged 19), and less about the continual, generational struggle to make it out of a swamped sort of life and more about how Detroit’s become something like an incubator for the lives these young men end up living (and stress that ‘end up living’: the feel all through Getting Ghost is not one of agency or choice but entrapment, the feeling of decisions-made-with-backs-against-walls [which is obviously why people are gonna set this next to Random Family so quick and easily]). What Bergmann does incredibly well—best, really—is detail how Detroit has become this place in which lives such as the ones herein examined (the 16 year old’s named Dude Freeman; the 19 year old’s named Rodney Phelps) are not just lived but created and made inevitable. Bergmann panoramically casts throughout Detroit, offering glimpses of the ingredients (dissolving neighborhoods, plus a startling lack of African American agency among+in A.American neighborhoods, plus no jobs elsewhere, plus a city that tears down city blocks and then erects sports facilities with ease but which lets inner-city lots go vacant for decades) that make this soup.

            The troubling part of Bergmann’s book, for me, has to do with his self-consciousness, his self-awareness. To some degree, he’s got to include aspects of that self-awareness and self-consciousness (and, in fact, a friend told me that one of the reasons she didn’t like RFamily was because, at the outset, ANLeBlanc seemed almost voyeuristic by not being upfront with her own complicity+presence in the lives she was tracking): he’s writing this book not as some strictly anthropological unblinking eye, but as someone looking to fit the pieces together to try to understand things. It’s just that, well…here, p. 218, top left:

            “Where prevailing sociological preoccupations with young urban drug dealers in the inner city emphasize spatial circumscription, the Dexter Boys’ sense for the parameters of their community is fundamentally tied to a spatial transgression not simply of the policed order of their neighborhood but of the broader cultural and political divisions between city and suburb in the Detroit metro are. For the Dexter Boys, community identity is connected to a geography that is at once bound by four discrete corners and that crosses and flaunts well-worn social spatial boundaries and borders across metro Detroit.”

            So maybe it’s not even strictly self-awareness/-consciousness that’s troubling; maybe it’s better/smarter to just talk about language, and bemoan Bergmann’s relatively consistent use of phrases that all but beg to be cited in sociology journals. But the problem’s weirder and dicier and harder than that: Bergmann’s making sentences that you know, as you read the book, that the folks he’s documenting couldn’t understand. There’s almost this classist vibe coming off in waves from certain paragraphs and sections, and the feelings it engenders are both frustration and confusion. I’ll fully submit that the frustration might just be my own feeling (I really, really don’t like grad. school writing), but the confusion part seems inescapable.

            One gets confused reading sentences like those because, despite the weird sort of classist and nerdy/grad-school vibe of the sentence, not for a single sentence throughout this book does it seem for a minute that Mr. Luke Bergmann doesn’t completely, deep down, conflictedly love his subjects. Rodney and Dude both clearly try LBergmann’s patience and push credulity sometimes re: stories of incarceration and future plans, but never ever does LB himself seem like anything other than maybe the most patient human you can imagine.

            Aside from the language issue, the book’s a bracing and ravishing and sometimes terrifying read: Bergmann does well fitting the seemingly disconnected variables of turn-of-the-century Detroit into one staggering, damning equation, an equation that seems almost destined to, with its brutal math, keep churning out young, fraught, freakishly-circumscribed lives, lives balanced between stretches lived in shitty houses dealing drugs and stretches in juvenile (and then adult) detention. Bergmann’s done a tremendous and tremendously sad service: he’s been honest and clear about a city’s failures and, most achingly, he’s given those failures voice, name, and story.

The Tour Guide Dilemma

by Weston Cutter

            One of the real fun parts, for me, about any article that talks about the Kindle, or the Sony Reader, or digital reading and writing in general, is that books are almost impossibly complex pleasure-inducing things. We may like to think that we come to books simply for the story or characters or conflict, but that’s just patently ridiculous: there’s a physical element to reading that’s hard to dice out fully (if you think this is bogus, try to imagine the last time you read a book you loved that you didn’t want to keep and hold onto after you read. Better yet, ask anyone about where s/he was when s/he read her/his fav. book and 8/10 times s/he’ll remember. If that doesn’t seem significant, ask the same person where s/he was when s/he heard her/his fav. song. The shortest possible way to say this is that books engage us on levels nobody’s quite figured out—which, yes, is sort of obvious, but I think still worth acknowledging).

            That’s just the outsides of books, too. Once you get within the actual narrative, you’re dealing with a picture infinitely more webby and messy. Elements like character and tone and location/setting are so interwoven and deep-rooted throughout even the simplest story that to try to disentangle things into constituent parts seems like not just a bats activity but perhaps even a dangerous one.  Maybe the most impossible-to-pinpoint aspect of a book is voice. Easy example: is it a matter of voice if a book’s narrator can’t help but point out the color purple each place it turns up? Run any number of mental exercises on this, and (I submit) you’ll get the same answer every time: a resounding maybe. Plus it gets weirder and harder to track once the voice, as most of us understand it, disappears or is highly subdued in writing: what’s John McPhee’s voice, for instance?

            What I’m most curious about, and what this whole thing’s about, is about nonfiction stuff that’s overtly voice-driven: I’m talking about the sort of next-generation nonfiction folks, people who’ve (from what I can tell) taken about equally from Wolfe/Mailer and DFWallace (the list is shaping up in my head largely masculine, and I think that’s probably a reflection of something significant, though let’s just skip that for now). I’m talking about dudes whose nonfiction relies, fundamentally, on the author: ostensibly about, say, coaching HS debate (Joe Miller’s Cross-X), or about stuntmen (Kevin Conley’s The Full Burn), these books survive or don’t, I propose, based on the author and his voice/person. I’m only trying to talk about books in which the author/narrator, as participant, matters in the narrative (but, course, it’s impossibly hard to parse this stuff out). For instance, Sarah Vowell is in this category, as is, to some degree, Alain de Botton; I’d say Thomas Frank and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc much, much less so. If I had to guess, I’d say the rise of the sort of nonfiction I’m trying to get at took off (again) when DFWallace did his two most famous pieces for Harper’s, the cruise ship one and the state fair one (‘again’ because this nonfiction’s not fundamentally different from the New Journalism stuff of the late 60′s and 70′s).

            (I’m even bothering to go into all of this stuff because it’s become such a fraught thing, for me. It’s not fair to the author—or to me, as a reader—to have to think about whether or not I’d fundamentally like the author if I met him/her, but I think those are the stakes in much contemporary nonfiction [C. Klosterman's the guy I think this stuff really took off because of, though I'd argue all he did was codify some of the nebulous elements that'd been cast airborne when Wallace explodingly began the hypernerdy, hyper self-conscious schtick with his early nonfiction]. Maybe I’m an absolute anomaly and totally alone on this one, but I feel like, more and more, in the real voice-driven stuff, that aspect’s all but unavoidable: I feel like I’m just as often being buddied up to as I’m being given a narrative, which is a hard pairing to deal with, the oh-like-me impulse mixed with the oh-get-this impulse [a good argument could be made that those two things are incompatible].).

            All this even comes up because in November I got two books on the same day from Da Capo (a phenomenal press: they release so much cool shit it’s absurd, plus they do the Best Music Writing every year [of course NHornby's is incredible and my fav], which is reason enough to love them), one of which was about jetpacks and one of which was about karaoke. I was curious about them both but was much, much more excited to read the one about jetpacks, simply as a matter of taste (if I met two people, one of whom was a master of jetpacks and one of whom was a master of karoake, it wouldn’t even be a decision). Yet by the time I’d finished them both, I was over the moon for karoake and at very best lukewarm for jetpacks.

 

           The books are Mac Montandon’s Jetpack Dreams and Brian Raftery’s Don’t Stop Believin’. Montandon’s has 40 pages on Raftery’s, and Jetpack came out in hardcover while Believin’ was a paperback original. They’re both first-person accounts of something vaguely culturally-related (jetpacks we know from The Jetsons and Boba Fett in Star Wars; karaoke we know from half the goddamn bars in the country, plus also maybe like 15% of all the goddamn romantic comedies), and both books are about the narrator tracking down little snippets of the story relating to the larger cultural thing. Also, Raftery and Montandon are similar in all sorts of fairly mundane (esp. re: book-writing) ways: NYC-based, white, 30-something. They also both, obviously, have their cultural markers down cold (Jetpack, page 8: “the single coolest character perhaps ever, George Lucas’s bounty-hunting Boba Fett, blasted off at the drop of a Wookie scalp with his clunky, dusty, and most righteous jetpack”; Believin’, page 4, after discussing where he [Raftery] has seen karaoke featured while writing the book, “And with the exception of Garfield (who’s still haughtily commenting on the ever-pressing social matters of 1986), not one of these entities mocked karaoke.”).

            And yet Raftery’s book is, for my money, a much more enjoyable book, and I’d like to here posit that it’s because he is, fundamentally, a better, more honest, less ironic tour guide. That is, after all, what nonfiction writers like these have become, isn’t it? They’re tour guides. Raftery takes yr hand and walks you through the world of karaoke; Montandon walks you through jetpacks; Fatsis takes yr hand and walks you through competitive scrabble (though Fatsis shouldn’t, I don’t think, actually be included in the comparison: he’s significantly different, and in his books he’s after significantly different stuff).

            What I’m pretty sure it came down to, for me, was that Raftery has written a book that, unless he’s just flat-out lying his ass off, he wrote because of and for love: dude’s been truly knocked sockless by karaoke, and he’s not doing Bobby Brown’s “On Our Own” ironically; he means it, all of it (don’t believe me? That’s his mug on the cover, clutching mic, eyes shut, mouth wide.). Montandon, in contrast, has written a book because of, well…First sentence, first full paragraph, page 5: “So that’s how it began: with a premature midlife crisis.” Whatever he may mean in the book, it’s got more to do with himself and his concerns re: mortality than jetpacks.

            Which may, at the end of it all, be the big/only/real reason behind the difference between these two books: one stemmed from pleasure, one from pain, and they both wended to their ends from such different starts that, obviously, the books are wildly different. Yet there’s more to it: Raftery’s out to explain/feel more of this thing that’s caused/offered him joy, while Montandon’s out to understand why we don’t all have jetpacks. Look at the construction of both of those: feel more of one thing vs. understand the absence of another. (Given the set-up, Montandon’s book was bound to be more about him, about his feelings and his ideas about jetpacks, while Raftery’s book, though clearly/obviously about his life and friends and experiences, is not, fundamentally, about him, but about karaoke.). Given those as foundations (feel more of one thing vs. understand the absence of another), it feels almost unfair to compare these books.

            Yet in tone and style, Jetpack Dreams and Don’t Stop Believin’ are too similar not to compare, and they’re just two of the (at least) dozens of books written by and for folks in that demographic (in fairness, my demographic, which may be why I’ve got the response I have). They’re both fine books, but Raftery’s is the one that’s fucking hysterical and great and makes you keep reading even though it’s way, way late at night and you’ve got to get up early the next day to catch a flight. Both books are, in their way, about topics of interest for dorky subsets of society, yet, at least in my case, the topic I figured I’d care less about was the one that really stuck and moved. Both books have clearly been written by incredibly culturally aware and well-versed dudes (at both high- and low-brow ends), but in the end, the book that sticks is Raftery hilariously sincere embrace of karaoke. I’m sure plenty of this is about taste and expectations and, hell, maybe some of it’s about cover-art or what I’d eaten before I’d read each book, but I can’t help but think that the joy I felt reading Raftery’s Don’t Stop Believin’ but didn’t feel in Mac Mondanton’s Jetpack Dreams had much to do with irony and self, had much to do with preferring the story of one dude unapologetically digging the shit out of something instead of one dude lamentingly reaching for a (still unrealized) token of youth. Further, I can’t help but think both that books like these—written by white dudes, focused on dorky cultural subsets (how long until a book on obsessive Star Wars action-figures collectors? until a book on righteous Betamax holdouts [with, obviously, a chapter on the dudes who never moved up from record players][nothing, obviously, against records]?)—are starting to show their age, and also that we’re gonna need a new style here, soon, that’s predicated less on irony and nostalgia and more on actual and deeply-felt emotion and guts. I can’t help but think Brian Raftery’s Don’t Stop Believin’—unlikely though it may seem that anything having to do with karaoke might provide an ‘answer’—is a fine example of what’s gonna have to come next for this sort of nonfiction to stay worthwhile.