Book Review: "The New Wilderness" by Diane Cook

The New Wilderness (2020)
Diane Cook (1976)
398 pages

An enduring fantasy in reaction to the challenges of modern life has been that of escaping to a form of living more closely aligned with the rhythms of the natural world. It can be easy to imagine that exchanging the concrete dissatisfactions of one’s daily life for the seeming simplicity of a more rustic existence could be a worthwhile trade. But is this perhaps rather more a case of needing to be careful what one wishes for?

In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a couple of dozen people make precisely this choice, volunteering to leave their established lives behind and move to an uninhabited area to live off the land as nomads. Nominally taking part in a study on the impact of people on the wilderness, the group, known as the Community, must follow strict guidelines outlined in a book called the Manual; to ensure they leave no impact beyond taking what’s needed for food, clothing and shelter, a team of Rangers closely monitors their activities.

Cook motivates the situation by setting the story in a not-too-distant future of worsening ecological conditions and growing economic disruption. She implicates a combination of global warming and increasing pollution as the culprits but leaves ambiguous the origins and extent of what has happened to the world. The members of the Community make clear, however, that they had found their lives, in a place referred to simply as the City, becoming increasingly intolerable, and so had eagerly embraced joining the study and moving to a region called the Wilderness State.

The novel opens several years into the Community’s time in the wilderness, by which point they have already lost several members, with some dying in accidents and others giving up and returning to the City. The group has also worn out most of its original clothing and equipment, settling into a life of producing what they need out of what they can make for themselves from hunting and gathering. Along with the ongoing challenges of the natural world, however, they also find themselves repeatedly at odds with the Rangers, whose aggressive tracking of the Community’s impact on the Wilderness State represents a constant irritation for the Community, never allowing it to settle down or find peace.

Within the broader context of these daily challenges faced by the Community in the Wilderness State, the story develops around the relationship of two its members, Bea and her nine-year-old daughter Agnes. Agnes had grown up sickly, her body unable to cope with the heavily polluted air in the City. When her stepfather, a professor of archeology, learns of plans for a study involving a group living in the wilderness, he and Bea decide to volunteer in the hope that the fresh air will offer Agnes a chance to become healthy.

Now, four years later, Agnes only dimly remembers her former life in the city; she has grown up in the Wilderness State and feels comfortable and in-tune with the nature around her. For Bea, however, life in the wilderness with the Community has been a mixed blessing: though happy that her daughter has become healthy, she misses her own mother terribly and remains conflicted about the sacrifices she’s made, reflecting that although “she loved Agnes fiercely, … motherhood felt like a heavy coat she was compelled to put on each day no matter the weather.” (18)

Agnes, for her part, recognizes this ambivalence within her mother.  Late in the novel, when the two are speaking about Agnes’ childhood, Agnes realizes that “she didn’t need her mother to tell her that it was both nice and not nice to have a child. It was always there on her face.” (327) 

Too young, however, to make sense of her mother’s feelings – and her mother unwilling to explain them – Agnes struggles to understand her mother’s choices and behavior. In the structured life of the City this may have led to the typical kind of mother-daughter drama, boiling at or near the surface, until eventually Agnes would have grown up and moved away. But here, Bea’s cryptic behavior leaves Agnes ever more trapped between her love for her mother and a deepening alienation from her, exacerbated by Agnes’ own growing connection to and harmony with the natural world. With the engagement and cooperation of the entire Community required in the constant struggle to survive, the estrangement between the two inexorably comes to a head.

The disastrous environmental changes that define the world of the novel have apparently occurred in the relatively recent past and seem to have worsened quickly. While Bea describes her mother as having grown up in a house and community that seems very much like our present day, she herself seems to have no direct memory of that time. Even her familiarity with the current world outside the City and the Wilderness State seems surprisingly limited, as if the ongoing environmental and social decline has narrowed her focus down to her local, daily life – or, more ominously, has been actively curtailed by the ruling elite, through a government referred to cryptically as the Administration. Thus, when Bea and Agnes one day see geese at a pond near which the Community has settled, and Agnes asks whether there are geese in other places:

Bea assumed there must be geese elsewhere, just not in the City. But now she didn’t know. And what of those other lands in heavy use? The cities of greenhouses, the rolling landfills, the sea of windmills, the Woodlots, the Server Farms. What of the lands that had long ago been abandoned? The Heat Belt, the Fallow Lands, the New Coast. (79-80) 

This uncertainty is reflected too, in the repeated speculation among the members of the Community about rumored Private Lands, where those rich enough to avoid the deteriorating conditions in the City supposedly live in clean and comfortable conditions.

Cook’s ambiguousness about the origins of this dystopian future and its full implications recalls her approach to many of the wonderful stories in her collection Man V. Nature, which I described in my review (linked to at right) as a delightfully strange brew. In those stories, like that of The New Wilderness, Cook introduced a dystopic alternate reality or future without revealing much about its causes or full implications – dropping a reader into a kind of Twilight Zone setting. As was done in that old TV series, Cook focuses more in her stories on exploring the reactions of the characters to the world in which they find themselves, the impact on their lives and relationships, rather than explaining how that world came about.

However, what worked so engagingly in the short story setting – a twisted present with little or no indication of how it came about – disappoints in
The New Wilderness: the world that Cook creates supports the psychological drama that plays out but seems distractingly improbable. Certainly, dystopian stories that leave the details of their origins hazy or even completely undefined are legion – in author Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight, as a particularly extreme case, the main character finds himself alone at an Arctic outpost with no hint at all of what has happened to the outside world beyond that he appears to be the last remaining survivor (my review linked to at right); Brooks-Dalton leaves what has happened to the rest of the world completely to the reader’s imagination.

But what we learn about the world Cook has created in The New Wilderness seems oddly unconvincing. Thus, although some kind of developing environmental catastrophe is occurring, Cook’s description of life in the City is an odd combination of seeming normality along with intense pollution, worsening lines for food and other extreme situations. And then there is the implication that there is only one City, which is not explained and seems unlikely in any reasonable scenario. Are there truly no other cities? How could such a civilizational contraction occur without a complete collapse of society? The story suffers a bit from what could be called the uncanny valley problem: different from our present-day society, but sufficiently similar that the differences subconsciously distract.

Taken as a psychological drama of characters struggling to survive the whims of nature and their fellow man, however, The New Wilderness works well, an engaging story of a group of people who carry on against difficult odds. Beyond this strength of will, however, Cook paints a dark future for our civilization. The world she has created has a haunting resemblance to the disturbing future historian Yuval Noah Harari warns of in his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Harari worries that current advances in “biotech” (medicine and genetics) and “infotech” (data mining, AI and robotics) risk, if we are not careful, pushing us toward a society in which biologically enhanced super-rich isolate themselves ever more completely from the rest of humanity. Those others who gradually become less and less needed to perform the work the super-rich need to live will discover themselves to have become irrelevant, in Harari’s words, and so the recipients of declining civic and economic support. (My review to Harari’s book at right.)

For Harari’s bleak, if startlingly plausible view of our future, the world of Cook’s novel, with its increasingly dysfunctional City and mythical Private Lands, seems a disturbingly fitting and all too imminent waypoint.

---

Other notes and information:

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "This America" by Jill Lepore

This America: The Case for the Nation (2019)
Jill Lepore (1966)
150 pages

In her essay This America: The Case for the Nation, historian and author Jill Lepore proposes rehabilitating the term nationalism from the extremely negative connotations it has come to have. Allowing the current pejorative image of nationalism to dominate has had the consequence, she argues, of sullying by association the concept of the nation, and so undermining the critical role of the nation-state in defending common, civic values.

Historians have been culpable in enabling this situation, according to Lepore. In the mid-1900’s, having witnessed a long series of destructive civil wars and international conflicts enflamed by national pride and prejudice gone mad, scholars hoped to help this dominant, destructive form of nationalism disappear by ignoring it. In its stead, they turned their attention to studying and writing about globalization and the growing interconnectedness of the world, as well as groups and identities within or across national boundaries. But, Lepore notes: “Nations, to make sense of themselves, need some kind of agreed-upon past. They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will.” (19-20) And so, as scholars left the writing of the stories of nations to those who invent and promulgate historical narratives tailored to their goals, the void was filled with narratives built around destructive images of nativist purity and hatred of others, and calls for violent action to defend a mythical heritage.

Having established her concern about the current nature of nationalism and its impact on our social and political situation, Lepore looks back, to the origins of nations. She notes that, originally, nations formed around people who shared a common descent and lived in a fairly contained region. Gradually, however, nations came to be defined more in a geographic sense, often encompassing people of varied, at best loosely related, backgrounds. To govern these nations of peoples, political communities then arose, leading to the idea of the nation-state.

Turning her focus on the United States in particular, Lepore points out that the US turned this typical origin story of the nation-state on its head: the government (the state) came first, with a national government established to rule the original, fairly independent, thirteen colonies, and the concept of a nation having to be developed in the wake of the creation of the state. Thus, she writes, the US originated, in a sense, as a state-nation.

As a consequence, in the early 1800’s, the original “nationalists” in the US were those who sought to develop and enhance federal power over state’s rights. By creating a story of the nation as centered around the founding of American democracy, they aimed to generate a feeling among the distinct populations of the states of belonging to a single, common polity. With the growing political and social conflict over slavery and finally the Civil War, however, this concept of nationalism split into two opposing strands: “liberal or civic nationalism, an attachment to a set of civic ideals, [and] illiberal or ethnic nationalism, nativism, racism, and recourse to aggression.” (58)

Lepore argues that both strands have remained present over the past century and a half. Describing their evolution, she notes that, on the one hand, a “race-based nationalism … endures, a scourge to the country and the world” (59), leading to the justification of violence and terror toward anyone not considered part of the “true” America, as the country has witnessed coming to a head again now, in early 2021.

On the other hand, a liberal nationalism, as embodied by, for example, Abraham Lincoln, has also remained present. It has defended civil rights, and supported an on-going expansion of these rights to a broader set of groups within the country. Admittedly, she notes, these advances have come in fits and starts, with whole segments of American society – Native Americans, women, blacks – having to agitate and fight to have their past honestly told as a part of the story of the nation, as well as to be acknowledged as active participants in forming its future.

In This American, Lepore argues that it is high time for scholars to re-engage in the defense and support of liberal nationalism, to write the true history of the American nation, telling a comprehensive story of the good and the bad that has occurred in American history. In so doing, historians can make the case for the importance of the nation to engage as a defender of the values of civic liberalism for its citizens, as opposed to continuing down the destructive path of illiberal nationalism.

For while it may be, she notes, that at some point in the future nations no longer exist – that civilization arranges around some other structure – for the moment and the foreseeable future nations are here to stay. And so the nation, and the political states that govern them, remain the best hope for realizing and protecting the civic goals of “equality, citizenship and equal rights” (137) for a nation’s people.

---

Other notes and information:

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "This Brilliant Darkness" by Jeff Sharlet

This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers (2020)
Jeff Sharlet (1972)
320 pages

In her solo work and as part of the group Dead Can Dance, the wonderful musician Lisa Gerrard’s bewitching and incantatory voice animates her many amazing songs. Among them, her performance of the melancholy piece Sanvean: I Am Your Shadow has always created in me one of two wildly disparate moods: I experience it either as an exaltation of the first dawn of the first human on Earth (for whatever reason visualized as the closing scene of George Lucas’ film THX-1138), or as a requiem to the world, performed as the first explosions of a global, thermonuclear holocaust mushroom into the sky. Somehow Gerrard’s powerful voice and the rich melody manage to engender, in one song, a profound sense of either hope or devastation.

In reading author and journalist Jeff Sharlet’s This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers, consisting of a set of intensely personal portraits of people he has met in his recent travels, I’ve discovered this same quality to evoke powerful and quite opposite feelings.

Sharlet opens by explaining that the book grew out of accidental meetings with random people as he drove regularly through the night between his hometown and that of his ill father, worked late at night public places, or traveled on organized reporting trips. He used the camera on his phone to take pictures of strangers he met, to which he then added accounts of his discussions with them. Thus, he writes, out of

two years of reporting, … this is a book of other people’s lives, lives that became, for a moment – the duration of a snapshot – my life, too.” (5)

In some cases, his accounts constitute extended captions to the accompanying picture, a couple-few paragraphs; in a few others, however, he provides a deeper, more extensive narrative.

In these encounters, he asks those he meets about their lives in a clear-eyed and direct manner, but, critically, without any hint of condescension or rejection. For all the natural and inquisitive questions Sharlet asks, he has the compassion and awareness to not ask that last question, the one that shifts from engaging fairly with someone, to humiliating them – transforming them from a human being into an oddity in a zoo.

The result is a series of portraits of people who live at or, more often, beyond the margins of society: people working the night shift, hiding from ‘normal’ society or wandering the alleys, visible but somehow at the same time easily overlooked and ignored. Instead of passing on by, however, eyes averted or giving a perfunctory nod, Sharlet has stopped to not only acknowledge but engage these strangers.

And here, then, the challenge of this book, the disparate emotions experienced while reading it. For, on the one hand, these portraits too often reveal the seemingly boundless depth of our society’s inhumanity: our willingness to allow entire segments of the population to be left behind, whether as homeless or scraping by at a low paying job to stay just ahead of the threat of homelessness – or worse to violently suppress them as a dangerous other. On the other hand, we witness the intense humanity of these lives, the hopes and desires Sharlet discovers even in people with lives filled with struggle and heartache. As I read Sharlet’s descriptions of the people he met, my feelings oscillated between these poles of despairing the inhumanity of their situations and celebrating their powerful humanity.

Granted, Sharlet’s vignettes about these strangers provide readers a certain distance. We are spared those potential aspects of such encounters that might trigger the typical response of turning away – the smell of a life on the streets, the slightly unsteady or even frenzied look in an eye; through Sharlet, we are able to look closer, to follow along as he engages with people, without the threat of directly facing that reality. But, not having these strangers in front of us, in person, we do miss out on the opportunity for the more fundamental connection that engaging someone in person allows; we must rely on Sharlet’s ability to build that connection for us, through his prose – which he does brilliantly, even if it can’t completely make up for not being there. Perhaps, though, it’s the best possible compromise for all those readers unlikely, for whatever reason, to actually go out and meet such strangers, as Sharlet has.

Sharlet hints at this connection he is providing readers in an epigraph to the book that comments on the quality of pictures a phone camera can take (versus a professional one). Reading that note again after completing the book, it captures well the nature of his role in writing the vignettes of the people he has met.

The phone camera comes close enough for the viewer to guess [at what I saw that made me snap the picture], and in between that guess and the light-as-it-was stands me. The mediation. Perfect camera tech creates the illusion of unmediated vision. That amazing picture that looks like it’s real? That’s a deception. This – sort of what it looked like, something like what I saw, something like what I felt – is the truth.

This mediation is what readers get, not only in the photos Sharlet includes of the people he encounters, but more importantly in the accompanying prose of his discussions with them, the discoveries that ensue. “The deception,” in this case, would be the “perfect” newspaper or magazine article that describes the challenges of working the night shift, or living on skid row, or being caught up in social support services: readers learn some facts, but can miss the humanity. Instead, Sharlet’s narrative presents us individuals, distinct people, with particular histories; yes, with challenges, but also hopes and, more critically, the drive to live on one more day, and then one more.

There is no denying, however, the powerful effect on readers of Sharlet’s narrative, particularly of his encounters with the people struggling most to carry on. And, toward the end of the book, he acknowledges how what he has seen, heard and experienced has irrevocably impacted him: the growing recognition of the fragility of our lives, and that the world, our civilization, “is like an ocean and our seemingly stable lives are little boats we mistake for land.” (288)

Beyond the individual impact he felt, came the implications of the reality he discovered for his role as a parent. Considering what he has seen of the precarious nature of so many lives, he acknowledges the fear he is left with, one that must needs lurk in any parent’s heart:

I don’t have the words: The fear that comes with the love that as soon as you have a child you can lose the child, that you can do all the right things and still it won’t matter.” (288) 

These words may seem obvious read here, in isolation, but read them late in Sharlet’s book and they become much more freighted with a profound melancholy.

This fear that Sharlet describes for his children’s future recalls an exchange in Miranda July’s novel The First Bad Man. The protagonist, after her friend’s challenging pregnancy and then delivery, meets with the attending physician; she wants to understand the potential impact on the baby of what has happened during the pregnancy, but the physician gives little solace:

“… as with any child, you won’t know if he can run until he runs.”

“Okay, I see. And besides running? Should we keep an eye out for anything in the future?”

“Oh, the future, I see.” A shadow fell over the doctor’s face. “You’re wondering if your son will get cancer? Or be hit by a car? Or be bipolar? Or have autism? Or drug problems? I don’t know, I’m not a psychic. Welcome to parenthood.” He swiveled and walked away.

Perhaps not the best bed-side manner, but the hard reality, nonetheless.

And the author Jennifer Senior also brilliantly captured this fear for our children’s future, during an interview on Fresh Air (4 February 2014) for her book on parenthood All Joy and No Fun:

I think Christopher Hitchens described having kids as 'your heart running around in somebody else's body,' and that feeling is so powerful it's almost scary, because there's almost like an implied sense of loss about it, it's like you love somebody so much that you are almost automatically afraid of losing them, that this connection is so deep that you can't think of that connection without thinking of that connection being broken.

For some in Sharlet’s book that “loss” is the death of their beloved child; for others, however, it is the similar, terrible fate of losing a child who has slid irrecoverably beyond the margins of society. (Complete quote here.)

In This Brilliant Darkness, Sharlet invites us to consider such fears squarely, by meeting people who those with “stable lives” too often push out of consciousness – and asks that we look them squarely in the eye. In writing filled with deep compassion but without a sugar-coating of the reality, he reveals the hard edges of the society we’ve created, and the humanity of the people who struggle to survive out along, and beyond, its edges.

---

Other notes and information:

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Berlin" by Jason Lutes

Berlin (2018)
Jason Lutes (1967)
577 pages

Germany’s Weimar Republic teetered on the brink of collapse as the 1920’s came to a close. Successive administrations proved incapable of righting a decade long decline in the economic situation, and equally powerless to tamp down increasingly violent skirmishes on the streets between partisans of the National Socialist and Communist parties. Actively attempting to undermine the existing government, the leaders of these organizations fomented conflict, rallying their members toward ever more polarized positions and training them for combat. Stuck in the middle of this power-play: a besieged population left to fend for itself.

These conditions were particularly manifested in the capital city of Berlin. A large and growing metropolis in the heart of the continent, Berlin attracted all manner of immigrants from throughout Germany and across Europe as those desperate for work, grasping for power or simply escaping their past poured into the city in search of a new beginning. And, while some arrived with extreme political ideologies, others contributed to radically new and disruptive social, cultural and artistic mores and practices that for many, particularly in the middle class, seemed a piece with the deterioration of order on the streets.

This chaotic mixture of uncertainty and change has been captured brilliantly by Jason Lutes in his graphic novel Berlin, which is set in the period from late 1928 up through the installation of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in early 1933. Lutes’ gorgeously drawn scenes evoke both the grandeur and the grit of Berlin during the final, dramatic years of the Weimar Republic. Whether presenting streetscapes in which political violence disrupts people going about their daily business, or interior settings that reflect the variety of conditions under which people lived in the city, Lutes’ richly rendered drawings pull readers into this turbulent moment in Berlin’s history.

And he complements his artwork with an engaging story that explores the confusion, anger, and hysteria of the time through an extensive cast of characters representing the messy diversity that constituted Weimar Berlin. Beyond hardcore partisans of the National Socialist and Communist parties, Lutes builds his narrative around characters from groups caught up in a situation beyond their control: middle and upper classes looking to protect their position amid growing violence and a dysfunctional government – averse to the Nazi’s brutish populism, but receptive to their promises of a return to order; a working class barely scraping by and feeling abandoned by the ruling Social Democrats – perhaps disgusted by the violent methods of the communist party, but finding nowhere else to turn for support; and an educated elite of journalists, artists and others, eager to separate from the old ways, and yet disturbed by the growing political breakdown.

Lutes artfully weaves together these many lives around the central character of Marthe Müller, an “art student and daughter of a middle-class family from Köln (Cologne)” (as described in a helpful Character list at the back of the book). Marthe arrives in Berlin in September 1928 to attend art school, but more generally looking to escape the limitations she perceives within the middle-class life of her parents, and so to start her life anew in the big city.

On the train to Berlin, she meets Kurt Severing, “a writer for Die Weltbühne (The World Stage), a weekly magazine of politics and art,” who is returning home from an assignment. The two become friends and then lovers, and – the ingenue artist and the grizzled, world-weary journalist – our guides through a Berlin in which, as Kurt describes to Marthe on the train ride in, “many factions … clash in the streets with increasing frequency. Communists, socialists, nationalists, democrats, republicans, criminals, beggars, thieves and everything in between. All mixed up together.” (10)

An early scene of such a “clash in the streets” captures perfectly the character of the violence, as well as the confusion of a populace resigned to its presence in their lives. It opens with a young Jewish boy selling copies of a Communist newspaper on the street; when three neighborhood boys whose sympathies lie with the National Socialists first verbally and then physically assault him, he must run for his life. In the next frames, a friend of Marthe’s, looking down from an apartment window, describes to her the confrontation occurring below. When Marthe asks, “Why do you think they were chasing him?”, the woman waves her hand, saying, “Maybe they’re Sozi’s and he’s a little Nationalist.” She’s gotten the motivations exactly backwards, but then, for those in the center, the reasons for such skirmishes could seem opaque and the details unimportant, their personal political outlook often guiding what little explanation they could be bothered to discern.

Avoiding overly simplistic generalizations, however, Lutes brings to the depictions of his characters the complexity of real human lives. In the pages shown at right, for example, a woman is being interviewed in the summer of 1929 by Severing, who asks her why she had participated in the Communist party’s recent May Day march; she concludes her reply by saying that she attended not out of any desire for violence, but “to demonstrate my objection to the way things are going.” (247) After the interview, the woman returns home to her husband and their evidently comfortable, middle-class existence. Later, in a scene from the following summer, the husband has just witnessed yet another confrontation between the Nazi’s and the Communists on the street below their apartment, and declares, over his wife’s unease and objections, that the two of them will vote for the Nazi’s in upcoming elections, because “they’re the ones keepin’ order.”

This complexity of the last years of the Weimar Republic in Germany, and particularly Berlin, has provided a rich palette of source material for many writers. For example, the chaos and conflicts the Severing reports on and describes to Marthe have formed the background of a series of noir novels by Volker Kutscher centered on the fictional detective Gereon Rath, among them The Fatherland Files (Die Akte Vaterland). 

The pre-war noir novels of Philip Kerr series featuring detective Bernie Gunther have also had Weimar Berlin as their setting, including the stories in Berlin Noir. (My reviews of these stories linked to at right.) Lutes, however, with his richly drawn graphic novel, brings a powerful evocation of the physical reality of the moment that even the best descriptions in such novel leaves to readers to summon.

Beyond noir, an engaging and disturbingly realistic account of the human cost of the period can be found in journalist and author Ernst Haffner’s novel Blood Brothers (Blutbrüder). Haffner describes the lives of a lost generation of German youth in the wake of the destruction of families and livelihoods in World War I. Homeless and fighting for survival on the streets of 1920’s Berlin, his characters encapsulate the abandonment of a generation who would come to fuel disorder, as well as a desire for security – for those with nothing, a life free from the rough streets, while for those in the middle class, protection from a pack they consider beggars and thieves. (My review of Haffner’s book at right.) 

While in Haffner’s story the political dynamics remain in the background, in Berlin, Lutes focuses directly on the trumped-up excuses for violence that come to destroy the Weimar Republic. Late in the story, Lutes has one of the real, historical figures he includes, the poet Joachim Ringelnatz, wandering the streets of Berlin pensively. Observing the escalating violence and reflecting on the Nazi’s significant gains in recent parliamentary elections, Ringelnatz recalls a poem by William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, that includes the lines 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
More anarchy is loosed upon the world.
…
The best lack all connection, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. (504) 

This vision – that “anarchy is loosed upon the world” – permeates Lutes’ graphic novel, both visually and through its narrative.

Lutes produced and published the stories collected into Berlin over the past couple of decades, so beginning before the most recent political events in the United States; but his completed novel seems nonetheless a cautionary tale for our times. Although we have yet to witness anything like the levels of violence and disruption that afflicted the Weimar Republic, Lutes’ story makes evident the parallels some find between that period and our present worsening social and political environment of seemingly unresolvable partisanship and polarization.

Certainly that is the case in the United States for the growing unrest over our current economic situation and direction. From economist Thomas Piketty’s analysis in Capital in the Twenty-First Century becomes clear, for example, the dramatic swings in wealth concentration over the past century. The extreme concentrations of wealth capitalism generated in the late 1800’s dramatically declined in the wake of the destruction of World War I and the progressive policies implemented after the Great Depression, but this proved a temporary reprieve from the logical extremes of unfettered capitalism, as Piketty also notes that over the past several decades wealth concentration has again steadily risen, returning to levels last seen a century ago.

This growing inequality has helped fuel populist uprisings over the past decade. And, though the wealthy elite have thus far managed to redirect that anger at other targets – racial divisions, immigrants, urban liberals – the anger is real, and may, as witnessed in the Weimar Republic and its aftermath, be difficult for any group to control over the longer run. Though the details may be different, the words of a worker being interviewed in Lutes’ story ring familiar in our current moment: “The November revolution [in Germany, 1918-19] started something that must be finished. The old nobility, the Kaiser and his barons, have just been replaced by the middle class, the landlords, the bosses.

Things are better than before, but the doors is closin’. We need t’drive a wedge in there an’ keep it open.” (231) 

As workers and the middle class today watch the doors of economic opportunity that had opened, at least for some, in the middle of the 20th century close again – parents see their children ending up worse off than they were – is it not surprising that some eventually decide it is time “t’drive a wedge” into the system, and to fight for a better future?

---

Other notes and information: 

Lutes lists an extensive “References & Inspirations” at the end of the novel, including fiction and nonfiction books, as well as “visual references” and films. Among this latter set of titles is director Wim Wender’s remarkable movie Wings of Desire (Die Himmel über Berlin), which presents the story of angels moving among the inhabitants of Berlin, with one in particular longing to become human and experience life directly. The angles can listen in on the random thoughts of people as they go about their quotidian lives, and Lutes nods to the movie at various points by giving readers a look into the thoughts of passersby going about their daily shopping and business in his story. 

In her 17 January 2021 editorial in The New York Times (The Inevitable), journalist Michelle Goldberg highlights the modern American version of the tension illustrated in Lutes' story between the Nazi's role in creating violent disorder and their promises to reestablish order:

An animating irony of Trumpism – one common among authoritarians – is that it revels in lawlessness while glorifying law and order.  "This is the central contradiction-slash-truth of authoritarian regimes," said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and N.Y.U. historian and the author of "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present."  She cited Mussolini's definition of fascism as a "revolution of reaction."  Fascism had a radical impulse to overturn the existing order, "to liberate extremism, lawlessness, but it also claims to be a reaction to bring order to society."

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Connections: Agustín Fuentes and the Stories of Free Market Capitalism

 Connections: Agustín Fuentes and the Story of Free Market Capitalism

Discussions about economic issues in the United States suffer from two debilitating limitations, neither of which shows signs of abating any time soon.

First, and perhaps most evidently, increasing social and political polarization has meant that such conversations too often descend into a cacophony of competing claims; a fundamental unwillingness to even listen to opposing points of view dooms them from the outset as participants stridently argue for and defend their particular position as being the only reasonable one.  The situation is captured brilliantly, if unintentionally, by a front page headline in the New York Times from June 16, 2019: Lost in Abortion Noise: Nuance, a headline applicable for most any fill-in-the-blank topic at this fraught moment.

A second, more subtle limitation – present even when people do manage to engage in a sober conversation about our economic future – arises out of the unwritten rules about what can reasonably be discussed, a concept referred to for politicians as the Overton window: “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.”  Discussions about economic policy are constrained to an extremely narrow Overton window: falling within it are considerations over whether and how to regulate capitalism; on the other hand, considering alternatives to capitalism lies decidedly beyond its edges.

The implications of this second limitation, and the ways in which the mainstream both subtly and overtly enforce what is considered acceptable, were highlighted recently in an interview by Krista Tippett for her program On Being.

Although I’m a big fan and occasional supporter of On Being, and I find Tippett’s interviews deeply engaging and enlightening, I’ll admit upfront that in what follows I’m going to be rather unfair to her.  Tippett generously provides listeners podcasts of her unedited interviews with guests – the hour and half or so of raw material that goes into the final, officially released, hour-long program – and I’m going to take advantage of her generosity here by quoting directly from one of these unedited releases.

The interview in question was a fascinating discussion with biological and evolutionary anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, entitled This Species Moment, (the final program is linked to at right, along with the transcript of the final version, and the unedited interview).  In what follows here, the portions quoted in normal font are from the official transcript, while the parts quoted in italics are my transcription from the unedited interview.

In the final, released show, Tippett introduces her interview with Fuentes by noting: “We’re exploring his spacious perspective on human nature, and capacities his intelligence for working with the insights 2020 has laid bare.”  She goes on to highlight in particular their discussion on “modern economic theory … [and] the extreme inequity in wealth distribution across the planet in the early 21^st century.”

She opens this exchange on the economy by noting:

We touched on COVID-19, the virus, and this is also part of the human niche as you describe it. Then there’s the incredible economic fallout of the response to this virus. And it’s also a moment — this moment was upon us, but it’s even more upon us now, and I think this will deepen as we move into the next year — that there’s something profoundly out of whack in the way we do an economy.

Notably, however, most of the next several minutes of their exchange (around the 36’ mark of the unedited interview) don’t make the final, released version of the show.  Certainly, in going from an 80-minute interview to a 50-minute final show (which also includes musical interludes), the conversation will be smoothed out to remove the hesitations and false starts of typical conversations, and some whole segments will necessarily be left out.  But in these excised portions, both in the comments themselves and in how they are expressed, it feels like Tippett carefully avoids stepping outside what she perceives to be the Overton window for the majority of her audience with respect to discussions on our economic system.

In particular, she avoids directly suggesting that capitalism or the free market are implicated in the economic issues she highlights, and in so doing struggles to find a way to express her concerns.

The … the … the … I don’t know where to … you know, the … I’m mean … one thing that I’m so aware of is how the market … if we ever believed that it was some kind of reflection of overall economic well-being or was connected to the economic lives of actual people, that’s just clearly not true.  And, the economic disparity, which, whatever your philosophy of that is … such a small, small number, just literal number of human beings, control so much of the wealth of the global economy.

She seems clearly to be seeking a way to point at the economic issues she wants to discuss with Fuentes without actually saying “capitalism,” without calling into question the fundamental system.  Even when she mentions “the market,” she hesitates a moment, before plunging forward with her statement.

Fuentes, however, crashes through the boundaries of this Overton window on economics for her, linking capitalism and the market economy directly to the current suffering of so many.  This, effectively, gives Tippett permission to follow him through to broader considerations, which she promptly does, and the two then proceed into a concrete discussion of the current economic situation.

Fuentes: We created the contemporary economy, and we are suffering for it.  There’s no doubt about it.  I think the way you describe this is this idea that right now if you think about it, 0.7 percent of the globe’s population control nearly half of the wealth; that’s not right, I don’t know of any context in which that’s right.  

So, if this economic system, this sort of current capitalist market global economy that is sort of not the only but essentially the dominant in the world, if this only benefits a teeny percentage of humanity really, that doesn’t sound very good.  Humans usually don’t do things on average that are highly deleterious for the vast majority of any given community. 

Tippet: Right!

Later in their discussion, it is Fuentes who circles back to observe the challenges associated with questioning capitalism and the free market; having stepped outside the Overton window, he looks back at it to emphasize the need to initiate among the general population a broader conversation about how our economics systems could and should function.  Not surprisingly, along the way he feels the need to defend himself against the criticism always quick to be mounted against anyone questioning capitalism as the one, true economic system.

Fuentes: Absolutely, but it’s systemic processes, and the problem is, everyone talks about individuals.  Economies are not about individuals, they are about societies, the processes.  And so, in fact, I think if we could push a little bit, and educate folks, or have folks think more deeply about, What is it we’re doing?

And I’m not arguing against our contemporary systems writ larger; I’m not saying get rid of our economy, but we can – there’s always going to be inequality – but we can manage how that inequality is shaped, how extensive it is, and how it works.  We know that, economists know that, it’s unavoidable, if you understand how these systems work. 

And yet, so many people are much more, sort of, structured in their belief systems to go buy a lottery ticket, than they are to vote, or to really think about how one would change the given system, and the power of the belief of human nature, this idea, the idea that this contemporary market system is free and open and the cream rises to the top.  It’s simply not true.

Tippett then hints at the bludgeon that critics so often used to silence questioning of capitalism, a rhetorical weapon invented by the economic winners, who have craftily convinced the economic losers to wield for them – and Fuentes again takes her lead to make it explicit:

Tippett: Right.  And this is such an … this discussion is alive in our society, and I’m a bit older than you, and it’s a fascinating thing to me that it’s alive, I mean, the cold war kind of shut down any question about capitalism.

Fuentes: I think something that’s really important to point out is that everyone says, “Well, communism failed.” Yes. Soviet communism failed miserably. That doesn’t mean that American capitalism is working wonderfully. Those two things are actually not even related.

Tippett: Right. Again, it’s a false binary.

Fuentes: So let’s get rid of that binary, and let’s ask ourselves, how does our economy work? Are people getting paid the level, the value of the quality of their work? Is there equal access to different things? These questions, as you said, have been going on — for example, in the United States over the last century, there’s been this incredible dynamic of thinking about these kinds of economic processes. But now I think you’re right, I think people are saying, wait a minute. How did we get here?  And the thing is, we know how we got here, and we know how to change it.

Tippett: Something I also appreciate, that you point out, and really, first of all, that it’s possible to have this conversation and take it out of that fight, about capitalism versus communism.

Here, then, the fundamental plea: unburden discussions and considerations of our economic future from the simplistic accusation so often used to shut them down – that questioning capitalism necessarily implies advocating Soviet-style communism as the alternative.  And, thus freed, enter into a constructive conversation about what a sustainable economic future could look like.

---

During their conversation on economic issues and how to begin addressing them, Tippett and Fuentes touch on a number of themes that point to holes in the dogma built up to defend the existing economic system, and that have been getting increasing attention from scholars from a variety of fields.

 The pair note, for example, a simple yet powerful realization about our economic system:

Tippet: One of the things you’ve pointed out is that our economy reflects our view of human nature, our beliefs about human nature.  And so, this is a mirror of … it’s such a tangible reality, and yet it is an invention, it is an act of the imagination.

Fuentes: We created the contemporary economy, and we are suffering for it.

That is, the economic system we have today did not evolve naturally but rather was constructed.  To use the language of historian Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens (my review linked to at right), it is one of many stories that humans created and tell themselves:

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

Harari expanded on this idea and its implications, in a 2017 interview with Sam Harris on the Making Sense podcast entitled Reality and the Imagination (at 27’ 55’’), in language that aligns with Fuentes’ comment above that we are “suffering” as a result of one such story, that of our economic system.

My understanding is that a source of human power, but also the source of much human misery is … the human imagination, and the ability of humans to create fictional stories, and then to believe them, to such an extent that they can start entire wars just because they believe some religious or national or economic fiction. ... We control this planet not because as individuals we are much more intelligent than chimpanzees or pigs or dogs, but rather because we are the only mammal that can cooperate in very large numbers;  and we can do that because we believe in fictions. If we examine any large-scale human cooperation, you always find a fictional story at the basis, whether it’s about god, or the nation, or money, or even human rights. Human rights, like god in heaven, they are just a story invented by humans, they are not a biological reality.

And critically, Tippett and Fuentes go on to note that the creation of our economic system, this story we tell ourselves, actually originated out of false understandings about human nature.  Their discussion of this begins with a consideration of why humans don’t behave as rational economic actors – as individuals focused on maximizing their personal benefit from the economy – and then transitions to comment on the fundamental origins of these assumption of rational economic behavior.

Tippett: Something that you point at that I really appreciate is that why we don’t behave as rational economic actors — because you are about understanding why and how we actually do things — is not because we’re stupid, but because we’re social.

Fuentes: Exactly.

Tippett: There’s this sentence from your writing that — I had to think hard about it. But you said, “We willingly accept losses as often as gains, in exchanges. The reason is that for the majority of humans” — because classic economic theory would say that we would have an intolerance for loss. But you said, “For the majority of humans, exchanges are not about profit, but about making and keeping social connections.”

Fuentes: Exactly. These exchanges, these back-and-forth — this is about our sociality. It’s not about the money. There are many exchanges that are about money, but really, humans are constantly — we do things all the time for people, which if we did the cost-benefit analysis, we’d end up losing, but we do them because we end up winning. They’re part of this whole social dynamic that we’ve been talking about.

And I think if we understand that, then we come back to this notion that what’s really central for humanity are our acts of compassion and caring. And that gets us back to this idea of hope. There’s always hope for humanity, and there’s capacity, if we think about our exchanges not just as economic relationships, but as the patterns and processes of building the human society, we’re gonna think about it in a very different way.

 
These last thoughts from Fuentes, that “what’s really central for humanity are our acts of compassion and caring,” resonate strongly with the thesis of historian Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind: A Hopeful History.  Bregman argues that our deep-seated belief that competition and greed are fundamental and even necessary characteristics of human nature – that absent a thin veneer of civilization, people’s true, selfish nature would emerge – is not only wrong, but worse it undermines our ability to progress further on our project of civilization. Using a fresh analysis of human history, he rebuts the presumption that humans are inherently selfish, a belief that he notes has been largely unchallenged doctrine for millennia.

And, just as Tippett brings up with Fuentes that “one of the things you’ve pointed out is that our economy reflects our view of human nature, our beliefs about human nature,” so Bregman argues that it was during the Enlightenment that these cynical ideas about human nature became institutionalized. Enlightenment period philosophers and politicians celebrated it, building institutions based on reason and rationality that aimed to encourage and support each individual’s (apparently inherent) selfish behavior as a path to furthering the greater good. Thus were born: economic systems that encouraged people to focus on a desire to make a profit; democratic systems such as the U.S. constitution that created “a system of ‘checks and balances’, in which everybody kept an eye on everybody else;" and more generally a rule of law “governed by reason alone.”

Certainly, acknowledges Bregman, “a few centuries into the Age of Reason [a]ll things considered, … the Enlightenment has been a triumph for humankind … our lives … exponentially better and the world … richer, safer and healthier than ever before.”  But he then, in perhaps the most trenchant statement in his engaging and convincingly argued work, fires a direct shot across the bow of the cruise ship filled with end of history celebrants, saying of these Enlightenment approaches to our world: “it was the best answer – until now.”

For, willing to grant the Enlightenment institutions their due in lifting the world over the past several centuries out of the abject poverty and misery that was the inheritance of the shift to an agricultural society, he proposes that these institutions are not the final, best approach. He argues that it has come time to consider the next step in our social evolution, pointing out that:

the Enlightenment also had a dark side. Over the past few centuries we’ve learned that capitalism can run amok, sociopaths can seize power and a society dominated by rules and protocols has little regard for the individual.

The flaw of Enlightenment thinking and the institutions that arose from it, according to Bregman, is in fact precisely the mistaken assumption that selfishness is fundamental to human nature.  (My review of Bregman’s book linked to at right.) 

And Fuentes expresses Bregman’s idea of this selfish image of human nature as being a learned concept in an exchange later in his discussion with Tippett:

Tippett: And this, the perspective that you bring, is an interesting and, I think, a refreshing way to look at it, because the discussion that gets had becomes very partisan, and actually quite emotional. But just to point out, as you do, that we have this system that actually is based on an idea about how human beings behave, that is simply not true –“

 Fuentes: Yes.

Tippett:  that this kind of economy is based on an idea that we are essentially rational, logical economic creatures, and to the extent that we’re not, we’ll balance each other out, and you pointed out this study that I hadn’t heard about, in the 1990’s, this study in twelve countries, four continents, and there was not a single society in which people consistently behave in accordance with expectations of basic economic theory.

Fuentes: And that’s because, to behave in expectation … to behave as a good capitalist, you have to grow up in a capitalist society, that’s the way it works; if you grow up in a different kind of society, then your values, your perceptions, the way in which you think about money, for example, are totally different. And so, if we created it, right, we can alter it.  And that’s my point.

Thus, Fuentes argues, we are trained (as Bregman also claims) to believe that humans are fundamentally selfish, and, as a consequence, that free market capitalism is therefore the best possible economic system, and so finally raised to be good capitalists who actively defend the system against any evidence to the contrary.  As Fuentes points out earlier in the interview:

you’ve got to ask yourself, where did we get this and what’s going on, and that’s the really interesting question, because so many people who are even harmed by the contemporary economic system, they’ll support it, because they believe wholly and fully that this is the outcome of human nature, that this is the outcome of naturalness.

Another aspect that Fuentes explores of the economic story that has been created, is a more recent addition to the narrative we have been raised – particularly in the West – to believe:

Fuentes: that those who have money have money because of reasons of their genetic endowment or some kind of incredible business neuro-biological savvy…”

Tippett: It is kind of ‘survival of the fittest’ …

Fuentes: Yes!

Tippett: A very simple equation.

Fuentes: And it’s just not true, right?  People who have money aren’t necessarily – some could be quite smart – [but] many of them inherit money; the vast majority of people who have a lot of money have always had it.

Tippett: Or, they’re smart at some very specific little thing …

Fuentes: Right

Tippett: Not necessarily wiser, or smarter on balance.

Here, Fuentes draws similar conclusions to those of economist Thomas Piketty in his engaging and thought-provoking book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (my review at right).  Piketty presents extensive data that demonstrate Fuentes’ point about the significant impact of inheritance, and its powerful tendency in the capitalist system to cause wealth to become more concentrated among an elite few under quite naturally occurring economic conditions.  But, more directly to Fuentes’ specific point, Piketty also calls out the illusion of meritocracy that those who most benefit from the economic system as it exists today have propagated among the rest of society, in order to maintain their own right to further enrich themselves:

The conventional wisdom that modern economic growth is a marvelous instrument for revealing individual talents and aptitudes … has all too often been used to justify inequalities of all sorts, no matter how great their magnitude and no matter what their real causes may be, while at the same time gracing the winners in the new industrial economy with every imaginable virtue.

Later, focusing more specifically on the enormous and still growing disparity in wage income, particularly in the United States, Piketty writes:

a very high level of total income inequality [which] can be the result of a ‘hypermeritocratic society’ (or at any rate a society that the people at the top like to describe as hypermeritocratic) … a very inegalitarian society, but one in which the peak of the income hierarchy is dominated by very high incomes from labor rather than by inherited wealth …. It is hardly surprising that the winners in such a society would wish to describe the social hierarchy in this way, and sometimes they succeed in convincing some of the losers.

For many years there have been attempts to reform capitalism by pointing out its negative impacts, such as dramatically rising inequality and ignored environmental externalities, which, despite the benefits capitalism has brought about historically, now lead to concerns about its future sustainability.  These approaches at reform have mostly failed to gain traction, in large part because of the kind of aura that has built up around capitalism as the inevitable, ultimate outcome of human economic development.  This end-of-history belief has become so strong that even the losers in the economic status quo defend the system, easily persuaded that other reasons lie behind their economic struggles, typically some other they who are to blame: another race, immigrants, foreign governments, to name a few.

 In the past few years, however, a new front has been opened in the pursuit of economic reform, one focused on pointing out that free market capitalism is not necessarily the final stage in the evolution of economic systems, but rather an artificial construct built on potentially incorrect assumptions about human nature.  And, if the story we have been telling ourselves is no longer working, then perhaps it is high time to write ourselves a new one.

---

Other notes and information:

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.

Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)" by Katie Mack

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (2020)
Katie Mack (1981)
226 pages

Katie Mack is like a kid in a candy store … except that as an astrophysicist her candy store is the universe – unimaginably immense and containing an untold variety of goodies. And the seemingly unquenchable curiosity and sense of wonder she experiences as she explores this realm animates every page of her book The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking).

Despite the dire title, Mack’s joy for her work shines through as she examines the implications of current theories in astrophysics for how our universe might end. This theme serves Mack as both a dramatic narrative thread, and a vehicle for describing several of the most significant developments in physics of recent decades, from the experimental confirmations of the Higgs field and gravitational waves, to the implied existence of dark matter and dark energy. These discoveries and others have not only deepened physicists’ understanding of how the universe began, but also of how it may eventually end.

Beginning at the beginning, Mack describes current understandings about the Big Bang. Here she introduces one of the key tools for cosmologists – the ability to see into the past. It arises, she notes, from the fact that light takes time to travel, meaning that

to a cosmologist, the past is not some unreachable lost realm [but rather] an observable region of the cosmos [in which they can] watch the progress of astronomical events that happened millions or even billions of years ago. (15-16) 

One crucial discovery, in that sense, has been of cosmic background radiation, which is thought to be a signature of the Big Bang, and the investigation of which has led to an improved understanding of the early universe as well as the evolution of the physical laws that governed it.

Tracing forward from the moment of the Big Bang, Mack sketches out the phases physicists theorize the universe has passed through on the way to its current state. These phases – often described in unimaginable quantities in both space and time – include the Planck Time, the first 10^-43 seconds before which nothing can apparently be known, and the inflationary period, during which 

our entire observable universe increasing in size by a factor of more than 100 trillion trillion … to about the size of a beach ball … over the course of something like 10^-34 seconds. (38-39)

 Mack goes on to describe how the theories developed to model what occurred during these phases have motivated the design of lab experiments to recreate the conditions then thought to have been present, and have thereby led to a better understanding of the physical laws that reigned during each of these periods. And through these studies, physicists have achieved ever more comprehensive models of the physical laws of our present-day universe.

A transformative understanding of the universe came, Mack notes, with the discovery that distant galaxies are moving away from us – that is, that the universe is expanding, and not static, as previously thought. The dramatic consequence of this realization provides the spark for Mack’s book, “that a universe that is not static, that had a distinct beginning, must also, inevitably, have an end.” (50) And to the ‘ends of everything’ Mack considers, she gives fairly dramatic, if descriptive, names: the Big Crunch, Heat Death, the Big Rip, Vacuum Decay, and Bounce; none a particularly appealing conclusion to our story.

But each of these dramatic possibilities for the end of the universe provides Mack an opportunity to explain and explore the intersection between developing models of the universe and the experimental data being collected to either affirm or challenge their validity. She makes evident in her narrative the intimate relationship between those physicists who do theoretical work, and those pursuing experimental data. Although Mack herself works as a theoretical astrophysicist, her descriptions of the work of experimental physicists as they push forward the boundaries on what can be measured make evident her excitement for this collaborative effort.

And in fact, late in the book she makes the statement that 

creative thinking becomes especially important when we’re faced with a conundrum like “how do we improve on [existing theories such as] Concordance Cosmology or the Standard Model?” Everything we’ve tried so far [in terms of experimental data] has been frustratingly consistent with predictions.

I tripped over this line when I first read it: the data being “consistent with predictions” of the models would seem to be a good thing, not a source of frustration. But in the next line she clarifies this sentiment: 

where are we supposed to find clues leading us to new models if we can’t get something in the current model to break?” (190) 

Here the clear passion of an astrophysicist who through her work – and I nod here to her apparent love for science fiction stories based on her references them – looks to explore new worlds … to go where no one has gone before.

In a coincidence that must have caused at least some consternation at both publishing houses, Mack’s The End of Everything has appeared in the same year as that of her fellow physicist Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time (my review of Greene’s book linked to at right LINKLINK). It is perhaps not such a remarkable coincidence in the end, as we learn in both books that a host of significant advances in physics – theoretical and experimental – over the past couple of decades have fundamentally reshaped physicists’ understanding of the universe, from its origins to its ultimate end. So, the time was clearly ripe for narratives that bring these advances to lay audiences. And if, as we learn from both authors, these advances have so far generated more questions than they have resolved, that is only to the good in providing a rich palette for their further work.

Having read these two books almost back-to-back (with a big dose of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century in between to bring me firmly back to present-day Earth), I can highly recommend both to anyone interested in these topics. Mack provides a quicker read, and certainly a more colloquial style, wearing her passion for her work on her sleeve. Greene’s book by comparison comes in at about twice as long, and he takes a more in-depth pass through the material, if still eminently engaging and readable. In particular, he makes a valiant attempt to lay out for readers the timeline over which the details of these potential “ends of the universe” would play out. His narrative approach is more measured, but like Mack, his fascination and love for his field comes through on every page.

An animating theme that runs throughout Greene’s exposition is, to pull from the subtitle of his book, Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. Mack, too, explores this, in her Epilogue, recognizing that

it’s impossible to seriously contemplate the end of the universe without ultimately coming to terms with what it means for humanity. … Whatever legacy-based rationalize we use to make peace with our own personal deaths, … none of that can survive the ultimate distribution of all things. (206) 

Nonetheless, for Mack – like Greene – such considerations cannot dampen her enthusiasm for what we are learning in the here and now, this moment when astrophysicists are exploring the distant reaches of space and time to better understand the history, workings and future of our universe.

---

Here a brief overview of the ‘ends of everything’ that Mack considers (spoiler alert)

Attempts to understand and model the changing structure in a now recognized to be evolving universe led physicists to postulate the existence of dark matter as a necessary presence to explain the complex dance of galaxies. Though dark matter remains undetected, observations have provided firmer estimates of the amount present in the universe, reaching levels thought to be sufficient to overcome the expansion arising from the Big Bang, and eventually initiate a collapse. Mack refers to this as the Big Crunch, in which the matter of the universe comes crashing back together. More critically, she points out, all the energy that has been radiated out into the universe would also become condensed into an ever-smaller region, creating energies intense enough to “begin to ignite the surfaces of stars,” (65) with ultimately nothing able to survive. A hot, fiery end to our universe.

In the 1990’s, however, came the discovery that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating, not slowing down as was predicted based on the estimates of the amounts of dark matter. To explain this, “astronomers invoked the existence of a vast cosmic energy field that could make the empty vacuum of space itself have an intrinsic outward push in all directions,” (76-77) referred to as dark energy.

Mack notes that dark energy currently appears to have a constant value that leads to the conclusion that the universe, instead of collapsing in a ball of fire, could end in what she refers to as Heat Death: its expansion will continue to accelerate, with everything beyond our local cluster of galaxies eventually disappearing beyond the edge of our observable range. Ultimately stars will die out and everything will slowly disintegrate, even protons decaying as the universe reaches a cold, dark state of maximum entropy.

The Heat Death scenario assumes that dark energy has – and maintains – the specific, constant value of -1. But, Mack writes, a group of cosmologists have realized that if the value “is even infinitesimally lower,” (112) the result will be a Big Rip. In this scenario, the expansion of space overcomes the other forces in the universe, so that even the space within matter expands, leading ultimately to the disassociation of even atoms.

The next, and perhaps scariest, end to the universe that has arisen out of recent theoretical analysis, came out of what was perhaps the most well-publicized experimental discovery in physics in the past decade: the Higgs boson. The discovery of this particle confirmed the presence of the Higgs field, “a kind of energy filed that pervades all of space and has interactions with other particles in a way that allows them to have mass.” (134) Physicists have determined that the Higgs field has just the right value to permit our universe to exist.

Confirmation of the existence of such a field, however, has provided experimental evidence supporting a proposal from decades earlier: that our universe may not be stable. In fact, Mack notes, the data suggest that the Higgs field could decay to a more stable value, and, critically, this value would no longer allow our universe to exist as it has. She refers to this as Vacuum Decay, and notes that it could be initiated at any moment by a sufficiently powerful event. Such an event would initiate a kind of ripple moving outward at near the speed of light in all directions, as the Higgs field in the surrounding space subsequently decays. Unfortunately, this state is one in which matter would completely disassociate: a painless death that could happen at any time, and that we could never see coming.

The last of the fates of the universe that Mack considers arises out of the recent experimental verification of gravitational waves, found as part of the study of gravity, specifically why it’s so weak compared to the other forces in physics. Among the theories being explored, based on the work of cosmologists interpreting the experimental data that’s been collected, is the idea of extra dimensions. In particular, Mack describes a theory that allows for there being two adjacent three-dimensional universes that move apart and collapse – like clapping hands – with each Bounce, as Mack refers to it, ending, and then restarting the universe in a high-energy, Big Bang like event.

---

Other notes and information:

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf