Book Review: "The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli

The Order of Time (2017)
Carlo Rovelli (1956)
240 pages

evolution endowed us with intuition only for those everyday aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, leading to the prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down.

Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe (363)

This observation from Max Tegmark could have served as an appropriate epigraph for his fellow physicist Carlo Rovelli’s wonderful new book, The Order of Time, which explores how physicists’ current thinking about the concept of time calls into question our intuitive understanding of it based on millennia of interactions with the physical world. In a richly lyrical account, Rovelli employs an engaging mix of science, philosophy, history, music and literature to make his case for how we should think about time.

Rovelli opens his book with a sequence of five chapters grouped under the appropriately ominous section heading The Crumbling of Time. In each, he presents a particular expectation we have about time, one that seems unimpeachable based on our daily experience but which he goes on to quite thoroughly eviscerate. These include our impression that time: passes at a uniform rate everywhere; flows from the past, through the present, to the future; has a single now or present applicable across the universe; is independent of physical events and so represents a fundamental measure for everything in the universe; and, is continuous even at the smallest scales. Together these could be summarized as that our intuition tells us that time is an independent scale, around which everything in the universe aligns itself.

He demonstrates, however, that these beliefs about time do not align at all with the understandings scientists have developed and, particularly over the past century, validated through experiment. Fortunately, despite the inherent complexity of the terrain he covers, Rovelli’s captivating prose helps guide us through the intricacies of the mind-blowing discoveries that have overturned our intuitive expectations about time.

We learn for example that time doesn’t pass at a uniform rate throughout the universe: the closer one is to a large mass the slower, in fact, time passes – for someone on top of a mountain, time passes more quickly than for someone down in a valley. Perhaps more strangely, it turns out that there is no single now throughout the universe – the now we experience at any given moment on Earth does not have an equivalent now-moment on a distant star, on another planet in our solar system, or even on the other side of a room, though the difference becomes more and more insignificant at such close range.

Such non-uniformities of time can seem strange and unexpected, but they come to feel like minor oddities compared to what follows, as Rovelli next dismantles our view of time as necessarily having a flow, from the past of the future. He notes that with the exception of the law of physics that says that heat cannot pass from cold to hot, all other physical laws are independent of time – they can run forwards and backwards, and so do not distinguish past from future.

Examining more closely the phenomenon of heat, Rovelli notes that the irreversible progress of heat in one direction is labeled entropy, a quantity that can only stay the same or increase, and that is “the only equation of fundamental physics that knows any difference between past and future … that speaks of the flowing of time.” (27) This connection, between entropy and time, becomes the basic building block for much of Rovelli’s subsequent discussion.

According to Rovelli, Ludwig Boltzmann made the critical association of entropy with increasing disorder – from configurations more special and particular to those less so – though he points out that this does not

clarify the difference between past and future … it just shifts the question [to] …: Why, in one of the two directions of time – the one we call past – were things more ordered … was entropy lower? (30)

The answer, Rovelli argues, lies in our inability to see all the details of a particular state of the universe, a concept he refers to as blurring. He explains by referencing a deck of cards: if we have a deck with the particular ordering of the first half red and the second half black, then shuffling them will, to our minds, disorder the deck – increase its entropy. But, Rovelli points out, if we pay attention to all the details of the cards in the deck, then any initial ordering is a particular, or special one, and shuffling will increase the disorder relative to it.

The end result is the understanding that any ordering of the deck can be considered particular if we are paying sufficient attention to all the details, and shuffling simply leads to a different particular configuration. Thus, crucially, if we comprehend all the details of a deck of cards, then as it is shuffled there is not actually any evolution from past to future, just transformation from one configuration to another. Extending this to the physics of the universe, Rovelli claims that only because we lack the ability to “apprehend the world in all of its minute detail” (33) do we perceive that a flow of events takes place from past to future; this becomes a key element later in the book in Rovelli’s reconstruction of how we perceive time.

Having demonstrated how our intuitive expectations about time have been misled by our interactions with the physical world, in the middle section of chapters Rovelli takes a brief detour to address a question at the heart of his own research work: if the universe is not governed by time, then … by what?

Summarizing the extended exploration of this topic in his book Reality is Not What it Seems (my review linked to at right), Rovelli points out that

the distinction between past, present, and future is not an illusion. It is the temporal structure of the world. … [But] the temporal relations between events are more complex than we previously thought. (110) 

To address this question he begins, as in his earlier work, by looking back to the work of early philosophers in Greece, and from there builds up the history of science’s understanding, the fits and starts along the path to the models physicists are currently grappling with.

In recent years, Rovelli notes, a number of theories have been proposed to describe what happens at the level of the most fundamental building blocks of the universe, the bits, as it were, that “form, matter, photons, electrons, other components of atoms and the gravitation field.” (124) String theory is perhaps the most well know, but Rovelli leads a research team that is part of a cohort of scientists who propose what is referred to as loop quantum gravity as the appropriate model for the fundamental basis of the physical world.

He explains quantum gravity as tying together the fundamental elements of the universe, quanta or grains, in webs called spin networks. The key point – tying back to the question of what is time – is that these webs “transform into each other in discrete leaps,” (126) transformations that are described by, crucially, “equations without time.” (127)  Employing the analogy of the deck of cards: at a detailed enough level, each shuffle is a transformation from one particular configuration to another, and the act of shuffling could take us in either direction between two successive configurations.

Having already demonstrated that our intuitive expectations of time do not align with physicists’ current understandings, and hinted at how the physical world could be described without a time variable, in the third and final section of chapters, Rovelli explores how we should think about time.

He describes time as not an intrinsic quantity, but rather something that emerges from the physical processes we experiences in our world. In particular, he recalls the concept of blurring described in the opening chapters – our inability to completely describe the state of a system at a microscopic level. He notes that the discoveries of quantum effects support the idea that we can only have a blurred vision of the world, since they point out the fundamental importance of the order of knowing the speed and then the position of a particle such as a molecule:

If what materializes first is the speed and then the position, the state of the molecule changes in a different way than if the order of the two events were reversed.” (138, italics in all quotes as in the original)  

This difference, Rovelli argues – this blurring at the microscopic level – creates a variable that we experience as time.

He refers to what emerges as thermal time, tied to the thermodynamics of the microscopic changes in the state of a system. He notes, however, that the ‘time’ variable described in this way does not yet have flow – it has no direction as we experience time, from past to future. This leads him to his central proposition: that the flow of time may be found in “the fact that the entropy of the world was low in the past,” (143) and our experience of time is then that of the shift from lower to higher levels of entropy.

To explain this, he recalls from the opening chapters the idea that “the entropy of a system depends explicitly on blurring … on what I do not register, because it depends on the number of indistinguishable configurations.” (145)  Critically, this makes the level of entropy a “relative one” (145), dependent on how human beings as physical systems interact with the world. That is, for a state of the world based on another system’s different interaction with it (than ours), a different level of entropy may be experienced.

Here he returns again to his example of a deck of cards to provide a simple, but profoundly clarifying explanation. In particular, he recalls the situation in which the deck of cards is sorted so the first half are red, the second half then black – shuffling the cards then transforms them from the highly ordered, special initial state, to a more disordered one, one in which there are more indistinguishable configurations from our point of view, focusing on red versus black, and not other details of the cards.

But, he suggests, consider a deck shuffled into a random configuration, and memorize the first six cards. Now, as we shuffle further, we are again going from a particular, special configuration to a more disordered one relative to our particular starting configuration. We again observe ‘entropy’ to be increasing, but only relative to a configuration we determined to be particular, based on our memorization of the first six cards. Thus, Rovelli point out, the original point of ‘low’ entropy depends on our interaction with the system – what we consider to be the starting configuration based on our blurred understanding – and is not intrinsic.

Exploring in more detail how entropy leads to our experience of time, Rovelli examines the relationship between energy and entropy. He points out that though we commonly consider the energy from the sun as the source of what happens on Earth, the reality is that energy is conserved by a process, such as a plant growing or a machine operating. The actual driver of these processes, and all others, is the transformation of energy during the process from low entropy to higher entropy – ultimately to heat. The sun provides low entropy photons to the Earth, and

in turn, the sun is born out of an entropic configuration that was even lower: the primordial cloud from which the solar system was formed had lower entropy. And so on, back into the past, until we reach the extremely low initial entropy of the universe. (161) 

It is this transformation of energy – entropy – that causes the flow of events of the world and the universe, and that thus gives us the experience of time flowing form the past to the future.

Rovelli acknowledges that this leads directly to the question of why we, as a physical system, ended up in the fortunate position of having an interaction with the universe that we experience as having the special initial configuration of low entropy – a situation critically important for life as we know it. Here, though he doesn’t use the word, he resorts to a version of what has been referred to by some physicists as the multi-verse concept (see for example the book by Max Tegmark, from which I took the opening quote; my review at right), noting that

in the vastness of the universe, there are innumerable physical systems, and they may interact with each other in ways that are even more numerous. Among these, through the endless play of probabilities and large numbers, there will surely be some that interact with the rest of the universe precisely with those variables that find themselves having a particular value in the past.

It is hardly surprising that there are “special” subsets in the universe as vast as ours … and that someone [us in this case] wins the lottery. … For this subset the entropy of the universe is low in the past, the second law of thermodynamics obtains; memories exist … and there can be evolution, life, and thought.” (149)

(For more on the idea of multiverses see, for example, Max Tegmark's book, from which I took the opening quote; my review of that book at right.)


Rovelli concludes with a captivating rumination on how this flow of events leads to our experience of time, noting that “inexorably … the study of time does nothing but return us to ourselves.” (170)  He turns to those who study how human beings perceive time, how it emerges as part of our identity – neuroscientists, certainly, but also philosophers. He finds that our perception of time, finally, is built into how our minds are wired, the neurons and synapses through the formation of which are collected the

traces of the past … [containing] a blurred image, no doubt – think of how many millions of details our eyes see every moment that do not stay in our memory – but one which contains worlds.

Boundless worlds. (187)

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For those interested in meditation, and the exploration of how we perceive the world, Rovelli offers a his perspective on the feeling of 'self' that we feel we have:

The experience of thinking of oneself as a subject is not a primary experience: it is a complex cultural deduction, made on the basis of many other thoughts. My primary experience – if we grant that this means anything – is to see the world around me, not myself. I believe that we each have a concept of “my self” only because at a certain point we learn to project onto ourselves the idea of being human as an additional feature that evolution has led us to develop during the course of millennia in order to engage with other members of our group: we are the reflection of the idea of ourselves that we receive back from our kind. (177)

Along with Rovelli's book Reality Is Not What it Seems, mentioned above, I've also read his wonderful introduction to some of the key developments in physics over the past century, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics; my review linked to at right.

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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: "Serotonin" by Michel Houellebecq

Serotonin (2019)
Michel Houellebecq (1956)
Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside
309 pages

In his 2015 novel Submission, French writer Michel Houellebecq imagined the intensifying present-day social and economic tensions in France leading to the rise to power in that country’s 2022 elections of a Muslim Brotherhood party that cloaks itself in moderate language and proposals, highlighted by an explicit promise to bring peace to the streets. Houellebecq implicates moderates and the left in this electoral outcome, presenting them as so beholden to an extreme and undifferentiated support for cultural diversity that they have become willing to sacrifice even the most core elements of liberal democracy at its alter – not only unwilling to forcefully condemn those who participate in violent riots, but also paranoid about appearing racist if they oppose the Muslim Brotherhood politically. Through his main character, an academic in his forties stuck in a listless, unengaged existence, Houellebecq personifies the decadence he feels has consumed French – and by extension Western – democracy.


Returning to this theme of Western decline in his new novel, Serotonin, Houellebecq again has as his protagonist a man in his mid-40’s, Florent-Claude Labrouste, a career civil servant. As the novel opens, Labrouste has sunk into a profound mid-life crisis: having undermined the promising relationships of his youth with a seemingly incorrigible hedonistic carelessness, he suddenly feels old. A decaying and loveless relationship with his latest youthful partner only reinforces the growing disgust he feels for his perceived failures, leaving him obsessing over the opportunities he has let slip by.

And neither has he found relief in his work, a series of jobs supporting agricultural policy makers at the local, federal and European community levels. Despite having had an apparently successful career analyzing agricultural policies, Labrouste has come to realize that he can only report out on the implications to French farmers of political decisions that promote globalization over local concerns, that he remains powerless to stop the dire social consequences his work details. Having recognized that the merciless logic of capitalism has created the fundamental reality that, as science write Colin Tudge notes in The Time Before History, “the agricultural systems of the [modern] world are not actually designed to feed people,” Labrouste can only lament the quixotic fight French farmers wage in trying to protect their livelihoods against the powerful forces seeking profit from a globalized economy.

Fueled by his personal failures and a general hopelessness about the future, he has sunk into a deepening depression. And while the drugs he has been prescribed for it – to raise his levels of the chemical serotonin of the title – help alleviate the worst impacts of his depression, they have also severely curtailed his libido, further exacerbating his dark mood.

His sexual adventures thus limited to his imagination, he finds himself reflecting more and more on past relationships, and what and whom he has sacrificed in his pursuit of carefree pleasure. Desperate now to right his life, he sets off on a journey to resurrect some of these past relationships, seeking to find an anchor point from which to construct a more promising future for himself. His hopes are plagued by fears however: can the reunions and rehabilitations he seeks live up to his out-sized expectations for them?

Houellebecq paints a dim view of French society, and by extension the West, as on a misguided and self-inflicted path of abandoning its most fundamental and cherished values – economically through a single-minded focus on globalization that ignores local concerns and inequality, and culturally through an emphasis on diversity based on a moral relativism that considers any culture’s values as inherently valid, giving preference to each individual’s self-expression over any cultural norm. Perhaps most disturbing, however, is his implication that nothing can be done at this point to stem the tide, that the West lacks the social will to resist the decay, or at best has left the fight to destructive and xenophobic nationalist forces.

In Submission, Houellebecq’s main character eventually succumbs to the pull of the legions on the left and center who flock to the new Muslim Brotherhood regime, scared of otherwise being left socially and politically in the cold. By contrast in Serotonin, Labrouste finds himself unable to recover from a youth squandered lightly and unwilling to make peace with a socio-economic system centered on globalization, and so becomes resigned to a solitary future without hope, an existence that he can only make minimally bearable by hiding in the cloud of his anti-depressants. Craven submission or medicated self-isolation – either way, a dismal view of the West’s future.

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Other reviews / information:
 

My review of Serotonin is linked to at left.

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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: "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History" by Kurt Andersen

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History (2017)
Kurt Andersen (1954)
462 pages

the Enlightenment rationalists’ hopeful fallacy… : once granted complete freedom of thought, [Thomas] Jefferson and company assumed, most people would follow the paths of reason. Wasn’t it pretty to think so. (185)

If Kurt Andersen’s book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History had appeared before 2016, its title would have seemed needlessly polemical to many. Reading the book then, in what now seems like that distant past, would have most likely left one with a feeling of awe that the history he recounts had not led to extreme social disruption and dysfunction.

But discovering Andersen’s book today, in the wake of the political and social disintegration of the past few years, his title seems simply descriptive, an appropriate label for the present reality. And reading his book becomes a search for understanding, for explanation – how did we get here?

The book’s subtitle makes clear that Andersen traces the origins of how America went haywire back to the time of the earliest settlers. For their part, Puritans journeyed to America from Europe in search of a blank slate onto which to create a society that conformed to their extremely strict views; meanwhile, adventurers such as those at Jamestown came with fanciful hopes of becoming wealthy from the storied riches of the New World. Thus, Andersen writes:

America was the dreamworld creation of fantasists, some religious and some out to get rich quick, all with a feverish appetite for the amazing. … Mix the Protestant impulse to find the meaning and purpose in everything with the Enlightenment’s empiricism, and you get our American mania for connecting all the dots, irrationality in rationalist drag. (427-428)

Willing to recognize the implications for his own behavior in an American system he has found to have gone haywire in so many ways, Andersen footnotes the particular passage above with the comment “I realize, given this book, I’m one to talk.” And, in fact, his text does quite thoroughly connect the dots, from the fevered dreams of those earliest settlers to the frenzied manias that characterize our present day derangements.

Through a compellingly argued series of short, five to ten page chapters, he details an inexorable rise in what he refers to as American fantacism. (Though Andersen doesn’t point this out directly, it jumps out from his telling how similar sounding are the words fantacism and fanaticism; certainly his history provides ample evidence that the pair represent profoundly interrelated concepts.) Integrating engaging details about specific personalities and groups into the broader currents of the growing fantastical thinking he finds coursing through America’s 500 year history, Andersen reveals how the realms of religious and socio-economic fantacism became increasingly intertwined.

The early Protestant settlers appear in Andersen’s telling to be guilty of the original sin, arriving in the New World convinced that “I believe, therefore I am right.” (15) The Puritans soon parlayed this conviction into increasing intolerance – and the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials which, while certainly brief and highly localized, become a telling portent of the wide spectrum of fantacism to come.

Andersen charts a subsequent, ongoing splintering in religious belief over the succeeding centuries and through to current times, as extreme groups of (generally Protestant) congregations of one generation broke-off to form their own sects or off-shoots, which in turn became too mainstream for some in a later generation, leading to a repeat of the process to found yet another group with even more fantastical dogmas. In that vein, he details the origins of not only the Mormons and the Christian Scientists, but the growth of evangelism, a movement later seen as too mainstream by their off-shoot the fundamentalists, and the appearance of Pentecostals (speaking in tongues).

A similar evolution played out for the descendants of those early settlers who arrived on the shores of the New World with visions of easy riches. Andersen traces how the original, fantastical belief in the bountiful presence of gold and silver in what would become the United States laid the groundwork for a psychological predisposition that fueled the rise of such things as patent medicines in the 1800’s, when

small and large businesses started selling all sorts of elixirs, tonics, slaves, oils, powders, and pills [t]he principal ingredient of many [being] agar or alcohol … [to variously] cure “deafness in 2 days” … “hunchbacks,” “acquired deformities,” and “early decay” … “asthma, diabetes, epilepsy and cancer.” (79-80) 

with a straight-line path onward to the homeopathic cures sold today. He describes how the selling of these patent medicines came, in the second half of the 1800’s, to be accomplished through showmanship, from early grifters and hucksters going town-to-town, to increasingly extravagant traveling shows involving such immortalized personalities as Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok.

Gradually, Andersen notes, these two paths of fantacism, the religious and the socio-economic merged:

[as] new churches were splitting off helter-skelter from almost-new ones, modern American Christianity and the modern American news media, advertising, entertainment, politics, and pharmaceutical industries all got their starts. Each was predicated on freewheeling blends of the fanciful and the real. Selling ourselves dreamy fabrications on a national scale became routine, part of the American way. What had been founded, in other words, was a synergistic and unstoppable fantasy-industrial complex. (112-113) 

One need look no farther than the present day news to witness the deplorable outcome.

Andersen identifies periods when the reach of fantacism expanded more rapidly, such as what he refers to as the “First Great Delirium” in the 1800’s, during which

new fantasies of every sort erupted – not just religious but cultural, pseudoscientific, utopian, and political, all variously radiant and lurid, feeding on another in a synergistic national crucible. (59) 

In the wake of the extremes of this period, reason and rational thinking managed to reassert itself to an extent in the early part of the 1900’s, somewhat slowing the march of fantacism. Then, however, came what Andersen calls the Big Bang, during the 1960’s and 1970’s: a step change in the scale and the destructive and disruptive power of fantasy thinking that has, he argues, led to the current corrosive and divisive social, cultural and political reality.

Andersen recounts having first recognized this connection during a lecture in Woodstock, NY, some four decades after the festival that put it on the map. It was a moment that galvanized his thinking about the implications of what he had previously viewed as seemingly disparate strands of American history, suddenly clarifying for him how the characteristics of America’s earliest settlers set the stage for developments that eventually created the cultural fireworks of the 1960’s, and finally culminated in the social disruptions we experience today. At that talk, he recalls:

a bearded man with white hair pleadingly asked why, did I suppose, had the revolution they imagined been won in so many social and cultural zones – civil rights, women’s right, gay rights, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, natural foods and medicine … but lost in the economic realm, with free-market ideas victorious? …

I had an epiphany, which I offered, bumming out everyone in the room. What has happened politically, economically, culturally, and socially in America since the sea change of the 1960’s and early ‘70s … isn’t really so contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece, for better or worse. …

What the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same coins minted around 1967. All the ideas we call countercultural barged onto the cultural main stage in the 1960’s and ‘70s, it’s true, but what we don’t really register is that so did extreme Christianity, full-blown conspiracism, libertarianism, unembarrassed greed and more. Anything goes meant anything went.” (173)

Thus, even as the anti-Establishment groups of the 1960’s fought for the their right to reject the status quo, to live as they wanted to live and demand the shifts in rights and norms that they believed were right and proper, the Establishment claimed the same right – to live and pursue their beliefs. Andersen argues that this “enabled a deep and broad believe-anything-you-want ethos that has powered the political right more than the left – and that extends way beyond politics … [giving] license to everyone in America to let their freak flag fly.” (174)

Support for Andersen’s emphasis on the 1960’s as the moment when the fantacism experienced escape velocity from grounded thought comes from a serendipitous source I tripped across as I finished the book and began writing this review: Krista Tippett’s fascinating interview with Vatican astronomers Father George Coyne and Brother Guy Consolmagno for her On Being program.  I first heard it some years ago – it originally aired on April 1, 2010 – but it popped up again recently in her podcast stream. As I listened to it again now, comments that had not particularly stood out for me when I first heard them jumped out in the light of having read Andersen’s book. The following is transcription I’ve made from the unedited version of the podcast, during a discussion lamenting the increasing tendency of so many toward a literal interpretation of the Bible as a refutation of science:

Consolmagno: The other interesting thing about the whole Galileo affair is, you read scripture, you read the description of say Genesis I, and it’s a flat world with a dome over it and water above and below the dome and its Babylonian science, basically. Nobody believed that by the time of Christ.

Tippett: Right.

Consolmagno: And certainly nobody believed that in Roman times. There was no Galileo trial, or crisis, when people moved from a flat earth to a Ptolemaic earth to a Telien Earth. The closest we can come is a wonderful phrase that Augustan wrote about in the year 400, in a book on the interpretation of Genesis, that said, it’s a scandal if a Christian tries to interpret the Bible this way and says things that everybody else knows is nonsense.

Coyne: It diminishes religious faith, religious culture.

Consolmagno: It diminishes the bible.

Tippett: And my understanding is that started to happen perhaps around the time of the printing press, the reformation – these things became popularized without all the sophisticated analysis that was actually a part of Christian tradition.

Consolmagno: Oddly enough, I think it really kicked in around the 1960’s.

Tippett: [Laughing] Ok…

Consolmagno: Because this kind of literalism, was certainly debated in the Enlightenment years, but it wasn’t a really big part of culture, until the culture wars of the 60’s. And part of it is that we live in this technical culture, where people want to read everything as if it’s the owner’s manual to a Volkswagen, and that’s the only kind of truth that they’re familiar with. They don’t understand that truth sometimes can only be expressed in poetry, because it’s too big for words.

Consolmagno and Coynes comments not only corroborate Andersen’s view of the 1960’s as a critical point of acceleration in the growth of literalist thinking among Protestant sects, but also the dismaying regression this represents from centuries of religious scholars and leaders.

Andersen goes on to note that, once social and political discussions shifted from a basis of factual and rational discussion to claims based on feelings and beliefs, it became perhaps inevitable that emotional reactions driven by uncertainties, anxieties and fears would lead to increasing acrimony, distrust and ultimately polarization. The authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt make a similar connection in their book The Coddling of the American Mind, in which they define and explore what they refer to as the “Three Bad Ideas” or “untruths.” The second of these, “The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning,” (borrowing the following from my review of their book, linked to at right)

they describe as the belief that how one feels about an event or situation provides a valid understanding of what has occurred. For someone condition to accept this belief, the feeling that an aggression has occurred means that by definition it has. The tendency becomes to view any sort of unwelcome behavior or statement in the worst possible light, defining even accidental and unintentional offenses as aggressions. This leads ultimately to the concept of so-called micro-aggressions, a view that apparently no miss-statement is too minor to be condemned.

And the situation has only been exacerbated by politicians, as well as business and social leaders, who discover they can encourage and exploit this polarization to their personal political and economic benefit.

Unfortunately, Andersen offers little concrete hope that a path back to a broad-based acceptance of rational discourse can be found. He argues that we must individually fight the good fight in this regard, noting that the future is not written. But the most he can do is to hope “that America may now be at peak Fantasyland.” (440)   Having “connected the dots” from 500 years of our history, however, his wishful thinking leaves me recalling a professor who years ago told me that ‘hope is the last resort of fools and dreamers’ – cold comfort in dark times. Andersen in fact notes that, examining even himself:

My life isn’t one of pristine, lab-pure rationalism, unleavened by emotion or superstition. Superrationalists are often prone to arrogance, hubris, a blindered devotion to markets or technology, an abandonment of the wholehearted search for meaning beyond science and economics. Flecks of fantasy are charming condiments in everyday existence. Like so much of life, it’s an instance of the Goldilocks Problem, avoiding the too-cold and the too-hot in favor of the just-right. But despite my dull faculties and primitive comprehension of the impenetrable mysteries of existence, I do try hard not to surrender to magical thinking. (435)

But that such self-understanding and rational intention were more widely shared.

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Andersen's interview with Sam Harris linked to at right.

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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: "Berta Isla" by Javier Marías

Berta Isla (2017)
Javier Marías (1951)
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (2018)
480 pages

In the popular imagination – fueled by an unending stream of books and movies – spies live lives filled with adventure and danger, moving from one harrowing assignment to the next. Whether portrayed as brooding loners or dashing playboys, it’s the circumstances of their missions that generally drive the stories, with their lives outside of work only tending to come up when in service to those main plot lines.

In Berta Isla, however, Spanish author Javier Marías turns these usual spy story tropes on their head, exploring the life of a spy from the context of the inevitable domestic sacrifices that result: the challenging requirement to keep family and friends in the dark about the reasons for unannounced disappearances from their lives, and the profound psychological impact of needing to rigorously compartmentalize one’s mind between the deceptive personas created for particular assignments and ‘normal’ life back home. Instead of a game of cat-and-mouse, the mystery that Marías pursues in this novel – and that in fact animates so much of his work – lies in how little we know, how little we in fact can know, about those closest to us, and even about ourselves.

And so it goes for the novel’s eponymous lead, Berta. As the story opens a new boy, Tomás Nevinson, enrolls at her school in Madrid, and for Berta it’s love at first sight. The pair soon begin dating, and when, after graduation, Tomás goes off to study at Oxford, they still manage to maintain their relationship, following a seemingly inevitable path to marriage, though they see each other for only a few weeks at a time each year. For Berta the future seems, if not clearly defined, then at least comfortably foreseeable; Tomás, too, anticipates contentedly his future with Berta, pursuing his studies with great success and imagining a comfortable and rather placid life: a staid career and a loving marriage.

Toward the end of his studies, however, a shocking event results in Tomás signing on with the British intelligence services, profoundly altering the course of his life. Upon returning to Madrid, and a nominal position at the British embassy, he and Berta soon do marry; but Tomás’ explicit orders to not tell even his new wife – much less his other family and friends – about his role as a spy, inexorably engulfs their marriage, and his broader life, in a fog of lies and deceit.

Tomás’ real job requires him to regularly return to London for what he tells Berta are conferences and training. At first she believes his explanations for these frequent trips, and for why she often cannot easily get ahold of him while he is away. But as the lengths of his trips grow so do her nagging suspicions, concerns only further fueled by the changes in his behavior that she cannot explain: the carefree boy she had known before Oxford has become moody and often distracted.

Then one day, in the wake of a terrifying threat, Berta tries desperately to contact her husband and discovers that he truly is unreachable, and for much longer than she would have imagined. Unable to ignore the many signs any longer, she confronts him when he again surfaces in Madrid, and finally learns the bare minimum he has been allowed, given the circumstances, to reveal to her.

Coming to understand that a significant part of Tomás’ life will always remain hidden from her and that each time he leaves it could be to face dangers she can only darkly imagine, she must confront the question of whether her deep love for the boy she once knew can be sustained with this man who has become so transformed and mysterious to her. Tomás too, struggles with the destructive consequences of his life of deception, not only on his marriage, but also on the people targeted in his missions, and, finally, on his own sense of himself.

In Berta Isla, as in so many of his earlier stories, Marías masterfully builds an engagingly intricate and compelling plot from what seems at first a relatively simple set-up. In Thus Bad Begins, for example, a young man is asked by his boss to observe and report back on a friend of the boss, based on a vague accusation of indecent behavior. In The Infatuation a young woman becomes infatuated with a couple she regularly sees at a café, and, when they no suddenly no longer show up, she becomes obsessed with finding out why. And, in The Man of Feeling, an opera singer sees two men and a beautiful woman sitting together on a train, and, when later encountering them again, implicates himself into their lives. In each of these stories, chance moments and encounters end up throwing the main characters’ lives off balance, forcing them to not only confront the inscrutable motives and desires of those closest to them, but also to recognize the often profound mystery of their own behaviors and motivations.

A novelty of the story Marías constructs in Berta Isla lies in the state imposed requirement on Tomás that he thoroughly partition himself between his work and the rest of his life. As the number of missions increases, each requiring its own particular persona, he comes to realize that this partitioning will only continue to become more difficult for him and that, beyond the inherent danger of his missions, he faces a life of increasing psychological strain, for both himself, and for his love, Berta.

The twists and turns in Berta Isla allow it to stand as an effective and engaging mystery story; but the fully formed characters of Berta and Tomás, and their struggle to work through the lives they’ve chosen, give the novel it’s heart. That said, relative to earlier works by Marías that I’ve read, I found his exploration of the human condition in this story less poignant, less personally impacting, as empirically indicated by the single quote I took from this story compared to the much larger number from earlier works I’ve read by him, as can be found here.

I expect this is a consequence of Marías’ focus in this novel on how state security service rules constrict Tomás’ life and actions, as well as through him those of Berta. Whereas Marías’ earlier novels explore the equally strict but often unstated and unrecognized social, cultural and historical conventions that constrain peoples’ behavior, in Berta Isla he turns to the extreme and destructive nature of the state demands on its intelligence service personnel, and the justifications and rationalizations these services sell their employees to convince them of the singular and world-changing importance of their work. Tomás struggles with the question of whether the consequences of the violence he has directly or indirectly, physically or psychologically, imposed on the targets of his missions has truly been beneficial. And these concerns also directly put into question for him the years of secrecy and dissembling that he has had to practice with Berta, as well as his friends and family, back home.

Citizens of nation-states want to be safe, and free from fear, but so many seem to conveniently overlook, or at least ignore, the stiff cost to those on the front lines who must often sacrifice so much to provide that safety, whether military personnel or the less visible security services. And even if we do consider it, as Marías does here, the reality is that the nature of espionage work in particular imposes a profound requirement of secrecy that makes any justification unquestionable, and the acceptableness of the consequences on those involved difficult, if not impossible, to fully understand and judge. In Berta Isla, built around an engaging story of two characters fighting to salvage a life together that has slid off the rails, Marías forces us to confront these costs of the structure of our modern civilization.

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Other works I have read by Marías, though I read all but one before I began this blog of reviews:

• While the Women are Sleeping: A collection of short stories.
• When I was Mortal: A collection of short stories.
• A Heart so White: A novel of a man who upon getting married reconsiders his past.
• Dark Back of Time: A novel written as a kind of imagined biography; a study of human nature that will pull you in deeply and force you to consider ideas and fears you had tried to leave buried in your subconscious.

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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: "Supernova Era" by Cixin Liu

Supernova Era (2004)
Cixin Liu (1963)
Translated from the Chinese by Joel Martinsen (2019)
348 pages

Sometimes you truly can’t judge a book by its cover. I certainly found that to be the case for the hardcover edition of Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel, Supernova Era. The cover art does admittedly include a bright explosion off in the distance beyond a picture of Earth, apparently representing the supernova of the title. But, in my eyes, the cover also shows what appear to be dozens of satellites circling Earth, which look for all the world like giant, orbiting skyscrapers; and although it could certainly be argued that imagining these objects to be inhabited satellite-cities was a product of an over-active imagination on my part, the fact is that the story takes place entirely on Earth, with the exception of a cryptic reference in the Epilogue to a settlement on Mars – never a mention of a veritable cloud of fancy-looking orbiting structures.

So, anticipating – chapter-by-chapter – an eventual shift into orbit based on the cover art is a fruitless wait. And that, unfortunately, turns out to be a bit appropriate, because the story itself never quite leaves the ground.

Unlike Liu’s trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past (a review of the first novel in that series, with links to the others, at right), which gathers momentum slowly but develops into an enthralling story eventually encompassing the entire universe and ranging from the recent past to the unimaginably distant future, Supernova Era begins with an apocalyptic bang – a nearby star exploding – but then carries forward through events only a few years into the future.

Which can be ok: as I’ve written in earlier reviews (for example here), my fascination with apocalyptic novels is not so much the catastrophic event at their core, but rather how the author imagines individuals and societies will react to it, for which the immediate period after the catastrophe can be the critical one. In Supernova Era, however, the opening pages describing the location, history and finally explosion of the star that initiates the plot end up being the most affectingly written part of the story. For, while the bulk of the novel focuses on the aftermath of the supernova, it plays out as little more than a sequence of descriptions of the cultural phenomena that result, sprinkled with occasional dialogue that serves little more than to break up that description a bit.

Oddly, Liu himself seems to indirectly acknowledge this stiffness in the Epilogue, presented as if written by one of his descendants, a man living in a colony on Mars with an interest in history. This struggling historiographer explains that he wrote the story as an attempt to convey the events of the immediate aftermath of the supernova in novel from, to tell the history of the period through the eyes of the people involved. But, in focusing on societal development, our historiographer-become-novelist doesn’t bother to develop the characters, and we so never learn much of anything about what they think or how they feel; instead they seem rather like props added in only to help carry the narrative, each fulfilling a stereotypical role – the quiet savant, the caring healer, the bully.

The situations these characters experience and react to turn on the conceit that roughly a year after the supernova everyone over the age of 13 will suddenly die of radiation poisoning. Discovering this coming disaster in the immediate aftermath of the supernova, each country’s adults move aggressively to train their children to take over all the work of their nation and society, from delivering the mail, to working in agriculture and manufacturing plants, and including political and military functions.

When the adults’ time is up, they then disappear, preternaturally passive and herd-like, to distant gathering centers to die, leaving their children in charge. Given the short time available to prepare the children for the handover of control and responsibility, and the momentum of centuries of human history that have led to the social, cultural, economic and political structures of our current world, Liu’s historiographer portrays the adults as having done the best they could.

But once they have left it is not long before the spectacular – though perhaps inevitable – failure of imagination that the adults have displayed in assuming how it would go for the children in their absence becomes evident. The remainder of the book covers the shocking first few years of the eponymous Supernova Era, as within a few days of the adults disappearance the momentum of their old world flags, the children’s world going spectacularly off the rails. The suddenly rudderless kids proceed to ricochet through a terrifying sequence of social transitions and transformations that repeatedly push their new world to the brink of collapse, though occasional references to quotes and comments from future historians let the reader know that civilization will ultimately survive.

The on-going calamity of the children lurching forward earnestly but haplessly as they confront a life without adults recalls William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, which Liu, not surprisingly, references at one point. And Supernova Era can certainly be viewed as Golding’s scenario playing out on a world stage, with all of the world’s resources – both natural and manufactured – in play, though with no hope of adult rescue at the end. The crushing finality of the children’s separation from the security of the adult world seems to prevent any of them from coming to a full appreciation of their changed reality – to weep for, as Golding’s main character Ralph does upon rescue, “the end of innocence [and] the darkness of man’s heart” that they come to discover as the supernova era deepens.

Liu centers his story in China, thus telling it from his home country point of view, though the young Chinese leaders do end up spending time in the US capital at a summit that includes the child leaders of other first world countries. As it was in the trilogy mentioned earlier, this non-Western point of view is an intriguing aspect of the book, encouraging readers mostly familiar with Western authors to shift their expectations relative to science fiction fare that tends to imagine a Western-led future where Earth is involved. What came through in Supernova Era much more than I recall from the trilogy, were some rather stark stereotypes of the West; these characterizations not only provide an eye-opening look at how Western culture is perceived in China (at least from Liu’s viewpoint), but force a reader to question how Western writers most likely also build stereotypes of the Eastern world into their stories.

Unfortunately, these stereotypes, as well as a series of astounding coincidences, pile up as a reader gets deeper into the story. To name but a few: the hard cut-off at 13 years old for survivors; all the adults dying of radiation sickness within a few days of one another at the collection points (and not, for example, gradually, over a period of months); the ability of 13 year olds on only less than a year’s training to run large industries, fly planes and so on well, if not perfectly, or even just to be able reach all the necessary controls.

And perhaps most striking: even assuming the best and most accomplished 13 year olds have been chosen for leadership positions, and allowing for their childish outbursts, the characters all still display an uncanny level of maturity in their behavior and their knowledge of history.

Ultimately these and other coincidences, as well as stereotypes taken to extremes largely in service to the plot (American children becoming obsessed in playing “games” with real guns and experiencing rapidly mounting casualties that don’t seem to slow the fascination) make the story seem too pat. It becomes a series of cultural shifts that Liu imagines would happen in such a scenario, but, without characters that a reader can develop an attachment to, the mounting casualties from the social disruption have little impact on a reader, and the characters’ decisions seem arbitrary and of little psychological consequence. Supernova Era, unfortunately, reads more like a detailed outline for a story than a fleshed out novel.

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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

Lamentation 4: we are such stuff as dreams are made on

I found this when sorting through my mom's things, after she passed away last year.  On a loose sheet of paper from almost a decade earlier, she noted

4/5/09 found in: John Cleever - The Wapshot Chronicle:
Shakespeare: Prospero's speech -

"Our revels now are ended.
These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.  We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

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The full quote, from <u>The Tempest</u> (Act 4, Scene 1) is

Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

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Another entry in an occasional series of posts of lamentation. (The introduction to this series can be found here, and links to the complete series here.)

Book Review: "Horizon" by Barry Lopez

Horizon (2019)
Barry Lopez (1945)
572 pages

During certain periods of uninterrupted vigilance at the edge of the sea, I’ve … had the sense that there is some other way to understand the ethical erosion that engenders our dissatisfactions with modern life – the tendency of ruling bodies, for example, to be lenient with entrenched corruption; the embrace of extrajudicial murder as a legitimate tool of state; the entitlement attitudes of those in power; the compulsion of religious fanatics to urge other humans to embrace the fanatics’ heaven. The pervasiveness of these ethical breaches encourages despair and engenders a kind of social entropy; and their widespread occurrence suggests that these problems are intractable.

I can’t say what this other way of looking at these situations is, how a huge domed space like the daylit ocean, a space almost entirely free of objects and offering a different sense of time passing, might provide a perspective to make banal human failure seem less enduring, less threatening; but taking in this view, I always sense that more room for us to maneuver exists. That what halts us is simply a failure of imagination. (67)

A desire, in part, to overcome the limits of this failure of imagination has driven writer Barry Lopez throughout the world on a lifelong journey of exploration and learning. In Horizon, he offers an engrossing meditation on what he has experienced during this on-going pilgrimage through all manner of geographies and communities of humankind, and what it has taught him about how – to borrow a question that On Being host Krista Tippett routinely asks guests at the conclusion of her interviews – how he would begin to answer the question of what it means to be human.

And as part of addressing that question Lopez doesn’t shy away from discussing its intimate relationship to the existential challenges currently facing the humankind.

Though in some sense the entire work is autobiographical, over the first fifty or so pages of the Introduction Lopez provides a brief timeline of his life, focusing on elements of his childhood that came to trigger his desire to see beyond the horizon, as well as glimpses of transformative moments he has experienced during his travels. The remainder of the book is divided into six sections, each centered on a period he has spent at a particular location, but each also further illuminated through vignettes from others of his trips and from the extensive reading and studying he has done to accompany and inform his travels.

His narrative soars with the wonder with which he views both the natural landscapes he discovers – each with its own intriguing geology and biology – as well as the often forgotten human cultures that once called these places home and have since disappeared or been displaced. And he brings a long-term, comprehensive view to the physical and social environments he encounters. Thus during a sojourn on Skraeling Island in the Canadian arctic he finds himself bewitched by not only the beautiful, natural extremes of the landscape, but also the ruins of pre-Inuit cultures that he encounters – abandoned structures of the ancient Thule built on top of and from the remains of the even more ancient Dorset culture; viewing all this he revels in “the way one century nestled within another here, the verticality of time in this place.” (158)

Later in the book, visiting East African sites rich in “fossil evidence of early Homo Sapiens,” Lopez joins the search for evidence of “any hint of human ancestors.” (272) But his narrative expands beyond the already fascinating details of the anthropological hunt to explore what becoming fully engaged in such work has on his understanding of who we have become today as a species:

Walking the [East African] desert every day, I feel no compunction about imagining [pre-Sapien species such as] australopithecines or early Homo. … I feel no stake in whatever they were. They are like objects to me. After that group leaves the Afar region 55,000 years ago, however, I find I cannot think of them as objects. They are more like relatives, like harbingers, people with whom I share a fate.

The australopithecines send a message forward in time with no ominous note in it, no hidden threat. The message we read from the 1,800 generations of humanity that became historical following, possibly, a slight change in the structure of the human brain, a story about cultural achievement and human brilliance impossible adequately to honor, seems to carry within its heart, in contrast, a warning. (302) 

Here again, as throughout his journeys, Lopez looks back into the often mysterious depths of our species’ past and discovers implications for our modern day world, as well as demands placed on how we choose to create our future. By including such deeply personal reactions to what he experiences and learns, he animates his stories of these places, making clear the shared humanities of far-flung peoples from wildly different environments and epochs.

But for the all the beauty and wonder he finds as he visits the far corners of our world, he also regularly encounters the destructive impact humans have, and recognizes and acknowledges the profound threats humanity faces from the consequences of our own behaviors. Lopez wears his heart on his sleeve throughout the book, unsparing in his analysis of the ecological damaged being caused and the destructive economic and social constructs he finds to be at the origin of these problems. Early on he laments:

By putting economic growth on an equal footing with the preservation of human health, by promoting a need to possess and to consume that borders on the pathological, and by permitting industries to run roughshod over landscapes in order to create financial profit, the governments of industrialized nations have supported the changes that are primarily responsible for the befouled and poisonous environment that in many places has become our heritage. (84)

Reacting to the scale of the destruction he encounters, his writing joins the growing chorus of voices – of economists, scientists, philosophers and others – who have looked out at the social and ecological challenges we face, and begun to question the sustainability of our deeply intertwined economic and political systems.

Informed by the diversity of cultures he has encountered in his travels and readings, he also asks whether the solutions to the crises humanity currently faces – from climate change, ecological destruction and the sixth extinction to economic inequality – could more readily be found by broadening the discussion beyond the leaders and populations of the few nations with power. Instead, he argues that we could perhaps benefit in our search for solutions to these seemingly intractable issues by including in our conversations peoples from many different cultural and geographical backgrounds. He notes that, in his experience, each culture develops an understanding about its local geography and biology that informs its particular world view, and that each such alternative world view could provide an element contributing to the understanding needed to escape our present “failure of imagination."

With that thought in mind he laments the many cultures lost to history, having either died out, or been overrun in conflicts with more powerful outside societies – a process that has accelerated since what Charles C. Mann referred to in his book 1493 as the “great unification” (24, 1493, review linked to at right) that followed the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. With the disappearance of these cultures he wonders if a singular opportunity to benefit from their particular wisdom has been irrevocably lost to us.

Even as he returns again and again, however, to the ecological and social destruction he has encountered, he makes clear his complex feelings about and relationship to this new reality we live in – and continue to create – out of our world. He questions, for example, whether it really makes sense to try to return a particular ecosystem to some imagined previous pristine state, or, if it is instead better to accept it as the given present, and instead look forward:

I’ve often thought my long-standing aversion to clearcuts is no longer really warranted. … it might be viewed [that] the throttled Earth – the scalped, the mined, the industrially farmed, the drilled, polluted, and suctioned land, endlessly manipulated for further development and profit – is now our home. We know the wounds. We have come to accept them. And we ask, many of us, What will the next step be? (65)

He seems to conclude that we must both accept the world we have inherited – its beauty as well as its ugliness – but at the same time not capitulate to the entrenched social, economic and political forces that fight to convince us that no other path forward but the current one exists, that the resulting destruction is the unavoidable price of progress. In this way the cumulative story here is an autobiography of a person traveling and reading widely as he tries to grapple with the fundamental question of the human condition, someone who refuses to give in to simplistic conclusions or believe that there are simple solutions, but who will also not release us from our individual obligation to understand our world better, and engage actively in its future direction.

Ultimately this complexity is the thread that runs throughout Horizon, a gorgeous story of discovery and understanding of the incredible variety of our world, but also its many scars. On the one hand, Lopez exalts in the beauty he sees:

For as far back as I can remember, a feeling of affection toward what the poet Adam Zagajewski calls “the mutilated world” has welled up in me when I’ve listened to [Beethoven’s] Ninth Symphony, to Mahler’s Second Symphony, to Bach’s Passion According to St. John, or to the contemporary music of the Estonian composer Arvo Párt. In my experience, a change in the quality of light falling on a hillside or a single choreographed movement by a ballerina might as easily release in someone else similar feelings of tenderness toward the wounded world, and feed the hope that these wounds might somehow be healed. (192)

But on the other he refuses to ignore those “wounds,” and the clear and present dangers he finds them to signify, and so calls on us to stand up to these challenges – the future of humanity hanging in the balance:

I sat … wondering where the path to safety lies in our time. Wondering about the fate of those who, uneasy, are increasingly raising their voices. Wondering, considering the many apparent threats we can see on the horizon, whether what is to emerge for us is an unimaginable darkness of social disorder and ecological disaster or the fully imagined landscape of a second, a very different, Enlightenment. (179)

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Lopez includes helpful maps of the main areas he discusses; both comprehensive area maps at the back of the book, and more detailed versions spread throughout the text.

Though some might not find it necessary, it doesn’t hurt to have dictionary handy as you read Horizon: Lopez brings a precision to his writing, both in terms of the flora and fauna he describes, as well as his descriptions of human and natural geography, that never allows him to pick the more common word for something when a perhaps more precise – though some might argue more esoteric – word exists for it.

Barry Lopez’s website here.

More quotes from this book

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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