Alwyn Scarth
Vesuvius: A Biography
Terra Publishing, 2009
342 Pages
£24
ISBN 978-1903544259

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It is an intriguing irony that many of the world’s most beautiful landscapes are also its most deadly. The same geologic forces that gave rise to Japan’s Mount Fuji, America’s Yellowstone, and India’s Deccan Plateau also unleash catastrophic volcanic eruptions. And although many volcanic hotspots are located on distant continents, some powerful volcanic landscapes also lurk on the fringes of Europe.

Alwyn Scarth explores one of these, Italy’s Campi Flegrei (the “burning lands”), and its vital core, Mount Vesuvius, in Vesuvius: A Biography. Refreshingly, Scarth’s lens is the landscape itself; his project aims not merely to give readers a geology or history lesson, but rather to show how the region’s human and natural histories are deeply intertwined. He provides perhaps the best statement of this intention at the end of his preface: “I wrote [Vesuvius] for all those who would welcome a thorough study of the changing relationships between Europe’s most violent volcano and the people living around it.”

This is indeed a worthy aim. While the geologic and ecological characteristics of landscapes, more than almost anything else, inform the human stories that play out on them, few chroniclers possess the vision and breadth of knowledge to attempt a simultaneous human and natural history of a region. But Scarth’s is an exhaustive history of volcanism in the Campi Flegrei, and a compelling account of its impact on human lifestyles in the region. All in all, it is an excellent exercise in geography, blending human and natural histories.

Though it has few true practitioners, geography in its truest form attempts to understand human phenomena (societies, economies, etc.) as spatially distinct—people and the things they build differ from place to place, and they differ because places themselves are diverse. It’s a simple point, but one rarely taken seriously by practitioners in a field of increasingly specialized scholarship.

The modern discipline of geography is divided into human and physical geography; the former sits distinctly within the social sciences, the latter in the earth sciences. As a result of this division, few authors attempt to tell the story of a place in terms of both people and landscapes, ordinarily choosing one lens and neglecting the other.

Scarth deploys an expansive intellectual arsenal to attempt to bridge this divide, combining detailed descriptions of the geologic record with meticulously researched first-hand human accounts of the region’s volcanic activity. Particularly impressive are his own translations of a number of Roman sources, and his description of the impact of the Pompeii disaster on Roman history. One of the most vivid accounts of this disaster comes from the Roman historian Dio Cassius:

Suddenly, a portentous crash was heard, as if the mountains were falling down in ruins. First, huge stones were hurled aloft, rising as high as the highest mountains. Then came a great quantity of fire and endless smoke, so that the whole atmosphere was obscured and the Sun was entirely hidden, as if it had been eclipsed. Thus, day was turned into night and light into darkness.

Yet, for all its value as a work of scholarly synthesis, Vesuvius is also something of a cautionary tale for those who might undertake projects with such a broad scope. While Scarth displays an impressive command of the geological processes below Vesuvius and the human history above it, the book itself has a ponderous feel, as if unsure of its true character. Vesuvius awkwardly tests the boundaries of genre, oscillating between textbook and popular history. The former character is suggested both by the “Further Reading” section which concludes each chapter, and by the numerous text boxes that seem chiefly of academic interest, such as “The Spanish Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies” and “Alfred Lacroix observes a lava flow at its source in 1905.” In navigating between the academic and the popular, Scarth seems most determined to cobble together a historical narrative.

This would not present any problems, of course, but for Scarth’s intensive focus on constructing an observational record of volcanic activity rather than relating his material to broader historical trends. While Scarth’s broad perspective—both scientific and humanistic—is illuminating, the point of this perspective remains to construct a narrative larger than the sum of its parts. A geologist might produce an exhaustive account of Vesuvian volcanology; an historian, a rich tale of the peoples who live in its shadow. United, the geologist-historian is able to tell us not only about Vesuvius, but also about why it looms so large in the European imagination, and how it resonates far beyond Italy’s Campania.

This, however, Scarth fails to do. In his chapter on William Hamilton, who made important contributions to the field of volcanology during his tenure as British envoy in Naples, Scarth repeats Hamilton’s observations of Vesuvius in great detail, but gives short shrift to his influence on the natural sciences in the Age of Enlightenment. Though Scarth displays an awareness of his subjects’ relation to such broader historical trends, he seems unnecessarily intent on relating these to Vesuvius, rather than the other way around. Though Scarth’s geologic-historical perspective may be sound, his literary handling of this admittedly difficult synthesis is far from deft.

The promise that connections will be made to broader themes is suggested by the book’s final chapter, “The Future: the Eruption to be Avoided.” Here, Scarth takes stock of Vesuvius’s impact on the psychology of Campanian people, and how it has affected their preparations for future eruptions. From his exhaustive history Scarth is able to draw some interesting lessons for such preparations. Based on past experience, he says, “The Campanians would probably place more trust in ministers of religion than in ministers of government.” Better, then, to enlist the region’s priests in making plans for evacuation and emergency management than the famously factious provincial and central governments.

It is to be hoped that we will see more works of a scope and ambition similar to Vesuvius. So much of modernity would have us believe that we are masters of the natural environment, that it is merely a sort of chessboard on which we impose our own designs. But this could not be further from the truth: human history is shaped by, and in many cases at the mercy of, natural forces. Vesuvius is a powerful testimony to this fact, and a warning to take greater heed. If its substance is flawed, its form is not: an integration of the anthropological and the ecological, places and the people who live there.

Scott Moore is reading for an MSc in Environmental Change and Management at Merton College, Oxford.

Daniel Bodansky
Art and Craft of International Environmental Law
Harvard University Press, 2010
376 Pages
£29.95
ISBN 978-0674035430

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We are all familiar with the grim statistics quantifying humankind’s impact on the planet. From the radical alteration of the virgin rainforests of South America to the falling aquifer levels and melting mountain glaciers near densely populated areas of Southeast Asia, the list of worsening environmental conditions seems endless. Many believe that global ecosystems are spiraling toward total and irreversible collapse.

Faced with these apocalyptic prospects, Daniel Bodansky, a distinguished professor of international law at the University of Georgia and a renowned authority on the legal implications of anthropogenic climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, prefers to respond with cool-headed legal analysis rather than the righteous indignation that colours most modern environmental thought. In Art and Craft of International Environmental Law, Bodansky marshals a wide range of global empirical evidence to argue that environmental law issues are, above all, inextricably linked to ongoing political dilemmas. In doing so, he deflects attention from the apocalyptic rhetoric that tends to dominate environmental discourse to the legal contexts of effective environmental stewardship.

What are the ends of environmental policy and which problems deserve vital attention? What means should be used to achieve these ends? These are some of the difficult questions that Bodansky attempts to find comprehensive answers to in The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law. But the question which Bodansky’s book wrestles with most persistently—and which is one of the central issues of the contemporary environmental movement—is whether the faith in international environmental law is itself justified or misplaced.

Bodansky says it is justified. In opposition to those who claim that a shift toward an integrated and environmentally friendly economy would be prohibitively expensive, Bodansky contends that the technologies, policy instruments, and human expertise needed to tackle the problems are readily available and economically viable for governments and corporations worldwide.

Global consensus building, multilateral environmental agreements, and progressive co-operation are essential for reaching any sort of practicable solution to hot-button issues like climate change and biodiversity preservation. Unlike the vast majority of other legal subfields, complex environmental legalities transcend borders and must span vast differences in cultural values, economic policy, and political systems of thought. Yet in relatively few words, Bodansky succeeds in elucidating the myriad rules and processes that comprise international environmental law.

Bodansky is also aware, however, of the trickiness of adapting these laws in an inherently reactionary and unadventurous field like law. His discipline is plagued, he argues, by a patchwork of cases, many of which are non-binding, (in contrast to binding cases, which must be adhered to by affected countries). Furthermore, these cases provide few compliance enforcement mechanisms, in addition to carrying little weight for lack of sufficient precedent. The admittedly prosaic nature of law makes jurisprudence particularly susceptible to a systemic lethargy. For this reason, Bodansky insists that the legal community’s historical aversion to change must be overturned, even if only by an incremental and gradual process.

Although they believe that existing systems are flawed, proponents of environmental law will also concede that the industrial revolutions have resulted in numerous societal benefits, including strengthened environmental regulations, ecologically minded “Green” political entities, and citizen groups advocating for causes like biodiversity preservation and animal welfare. These optimists, many of whom wield considerable leverage in policy-making, point to isolated cases of unified environmental law advancement, such as the near-universal phasing out of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons with the adoption of the Montreal Protocol.

Of course, critics of the current international legal regime abound, and Bodansky does not shy away from addressing the concerns of even the most radical of them. These increasingly outspoken activists, including prominent academics, community activists, and independent thinkers, believe that the existing structures need to be drastically altered or abandoned altogether. They claim that legal paradigms lead inexorably to exacerbated pollution issues, resource depletion, and eventually to complete environmental collapse. Indeed, the bulk of empirical evidence seems to corroborate this viewpoint.

But regardless of the many difficulties facing environmental law, one fact is clear: the art and craft of international environmental law must play a critical role in shaping our collective future. Any seasoned negotiator will tell you that most environmental agreements require more art than science, as negotiators diligently wrestle with national agendas, differing ideologies, and over-sized egos. As the world considers the disappointing results of the much-anticipated Copenhagen Summit and continues to revise other key global environmental agreements, it will be interesting to see if countries will choose to sacrifice short-term gains to fulfill their long-term legal and moral environmental obligations. The difficulties of matching soft law (i.e., non-binding legal instruments that simply provide direction rather than enforcement-heavy compliance) with scientific realities is a persistent difficulty yet to be solved. Unfortunately, most of the past environmental agreements have merely proposed guidelines rather than provided concrete frameworks for right action.

Corrective measures will be difficult and will require sacrifice. Politicians, in particular, must look beyond the next electoral cycle; business people must grapple with challenging concepts like inter-generational equity; and everyday consumers must re-think the effects that their purchases have on the biosphere as a whole. All of these changes must be complemented and encouraged  by  sound legislation and progressive environmental law.

Within these contexts, The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law provides a refreshingly open-minded perspective on the contentious debates surrounding environmental law and policy. Despite the justified concerns of dissidents, it would be unwise simply to write off environmental law as ineffective. Environmental law is like a living organism, one constantly seeking to adapt itself and to assert its importance. Bodansky is candid in his appraisal of the situation and realistic in his estimation of the role that environmental law will play in any solution. Unique in its accessibility to the layman, The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law makes for an engrossing and timely read.

Joel Krupa is reading for the MSc in Environmental Policy, at Mansfield College, Oxford. He is writing a thesis on solar energy potential in the Middle East.

Bin Ramke
Theory of Mind: New and Selected Poems 1978-2008
Omnidawn, 2009
162 Pages
£14.50
ISBN 978-1890650414

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Texas-born poet Bin Ramke is an established author with a string of acclaimed poetry books to his rather unusual name (”Bin” is short for Lloyd Binford Ramke). This new edition makes a selection of Ramke’s work available in a handy form, from the early Anomalies of Water to the stranger and more difficult collections like Matter (2004) and Tendril (2007).

At heart, Ramke is a scientific poet. In a 2007 interview in Poets & Writers, he explained that his initial calling was science: “I had always assumed that some element of physics, science, or mathematics was what I was going to do”. These disciplines continue to provide the poet with “other names and things”. He is fascinated by the chemistry of colour (”yellow ochre, ferric hydroxide/ red ochre, Fe₂O₃“) and botanic taxonomy (”laurus nobilis … tillandsia usneoides/ epiphytic bromeliads“), and his poems carry titles that could appear in scientific papers (”Anomalies of Water”, “Surface Tension”).

At the same time, Ramke’s themes are deliberately mundane: landscapes, red balloons, bicycles, TV; scenes from childhood and love. This mix of the scientific and the everyday amounts to a modern version of metaphysical poetry, where experience can be counted in numbers and colour is measured by the chemical makeup of pigment.

Ramke’s poems are scientific in another way, too. As he told Poets & Writers: “I actually think that my work is experimental in a very real way, and experiments can fail”. Like T. S. Eliot’s famous ideal of poetry that “approach[es] the condition of science”, Ramke’s poems work like chemical reactions; they sometimes fail, but always intrigue readers to follow their strange and often surprisingly compelling processes.

Nora Goldschmidt is reading for a DPhil in Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford.

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After becoming the first woman ever to receive the Nobel Prize in economics, Eilnor Ostrom expressed hope that “the recognition…is helping” to increase the number of women in her discipline. This week, scientists at Oxford echoed Ostrom’s call—and her concerns.

In a conference titled “Scientific Research—is it different for women?”, three high-flying female academics reflected on their male-governed fields. Motherhood remained a key issue for all involved:  while Professor Ottoline Leyser emphasised that childcare responsibilities should be shared, Dr Blanca Rodriguez was expressly asked how she will cope when her child goes to school. Refreshingly, Dr Peggy Frith focused on gendered differences in perspective rather than pregnancy, suggesting that women see and use career opportunities in a more pragmatic way than their male counterparts.

Scant mention of disproportionate pay and employment rates left the general impression that success in the sciences is attainable across the gender divide. But while these women’s achievements underscored the opportunities for female scientists, they also stood out against “a numbers game”: only 12 women won a scientific Nobel Prize prior to this year, compared to 523 men.

Indeed, the real proof of persistent gender inequity lies in the existence of such “empowering” conferences, and in the need for resources explicitly dedicated to supporting women in science, such as the UKRC and the WISE campaign.  Professor Leyser maintained that passion for the job will carry women through their chosen career paths. She may be right, but one wonders how many men need to be told that.

Jenny Messenger is a second-year classics student at Worcester College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

David Whitehouse
Renaissance Genius
Sterling, 2009
256 Pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-1402769771

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Galileo, the ostensible “father of modern physics”, very nearly became a priest.  Had it not been for the encouragement of his unconventional father, the outspoken scientist would never have had the chance to open up the sky and transform how the world saw itself. Astrophysicist David Whitehouse maps out this unlikely story in stunning technicolour in Renaissance Genius, juxtaposing Galileo’s inexhaustible curiosity about the universe with the rise of the inquisition and heavy-handed methods of the church.

Whitehouse evocatively explores Galileo’s childhood, his first tremulous forays into science, and his unfailing Catholicism. The last of these narratives renders the church’s treatment of the scientist positively agonizing: while Galileo reconciled his faith with his discovery of Jupiter’s moons (which implied that the universe did not revolve around the Earth as scripture taught), the church ensured that spiritual—rather than scientific—criticism prevailed. Poignantly, we learn that Galileo would never know if he had done enough to escape the fate of other intellectuals victimised by the inquisition, who were consigned to infamy rather than academic acclaim.

Renaissance Genius concentrates largely on these social quandaries rather than hard physics, paying deserved homage to its hero’s character. Whitehouse combines just enough science with rich details of Galileo’s personal and professional life, ranging from precarious battles for patronage to the scientist’s attempts to discover the location and size of Dante’s inferno. He also acknowledges the endearing legends that surround Galileo, an essential aside in any biography whose subject is so near mythical.

While this relative paucity of didactic content may dissuade more traditional science readers, Whitehouse’s approach wins out in the end, for he exposes the terribly human struggles behind the great scientist’s accomplishments.

Jenny Messenger is a second-year classics student at Worcester College. She is an editor of ORbits.

Richard Dawkins
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Bantam Press, 2009
406 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-0593061732

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“We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful”, reads the back cover of Dawkins’s latest. A black dust jacket with a pretty, Escher-esque pattern of moths and butterflies and a title that frames evolution as entertainment: Dawkins, it seems, wants to harness the beauty of science to seduce us away from the television—and the Sunday School. The inside cover is more strident. “Richard Dawkins takes on creationists”, it proclaims, just as he “took on” the entire population of believers in The God Delusion. At least, notes The Independent, he has narrowed the field.

Dawkins is one of many evolutionists, as their opponents call them, who has seized upon Darwin’s 200th anniversary to intensify public awareness of his claims. But is The Greatest Show the definitive answer to creationism? Dawkins’s is not the first serious attempt, even this year. And yet, reviews in the leading papers—a biting parody in the Guardian excepted—are broadly sympathetic to his cause.

This is because the real issue is not Dawkins but a much larger pedagogical debate over the 40 percent of Americans and a significant minority of Britons who, he charges, maintain an untenable position through active ignorance. The issue  is organisations like the Kentucky Creation Museum and the British Truth in Science company, which increasingly intersperse sin with scientific terminology to “modernise” their case. Few people beyond the hexaemerists would deny the dubiousness of such claims.

There is, however, something disturbing about the way that even The Greatest Show polarises and moralises the debate between good and evil, evolution and creation, leaving no room for learned uncertainty. If creationists are imitating the language of science, Dawkins and his supporters are doing the same with religious vocabulary. In oracular tones, the blurb on the book’s cover claims that Dawkins “bears witness to the truth of evolution”. The implicit parallel between Dawkins and Darwin, the “great scientist” whose work Dawkins continues, oversimplifies the complex history of evolutionary theory into what is in large measure an ego trip. To see the intolerance and cult of celebrity this propagates, one need only glance at Dawkins’s official website.

Not to mention the profit to be garnered from books costing £20 a pop.

Emma Park is reading for a DPhil in Classics at University College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

Nick Lane
Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution
Profile Books, 2009
288 Pages
£18.99
ISBN 978-1861978486

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A white wooden plaque hangs next to the door of Darwin’s original home in Shrewsbury. “Charles Darwin was born here in 1809”, the plaque reads, but the exhibit ends there. Visitors are not invited to enter. “The Mount”, as it was known to the Darwin family, who occupied it for the better part of the 19th century, has been converted into a government tax office.

The absence of any further mention of The Mount’s most famous inhabitant is especially remarkable this year, Darwin’s bicentennial. A few miles away, in downtown Shrewsbury, large banners proclaiming “Darwin 200” are concentrated in the main shopping plaza. Walk into Waterstones on the town’s High Street and you’ll find a torrent of titles whose publishers are hoping to ride the wave of worldwide “Darwinmania”. Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, by Nick Lane, is Profile Books’ attempt to get in on the game.

Lane, who earned a doctorate in biochemistry before becoming a full-time science writer, garnered high praise for clear exposition and bold ideas in his first two works, on oxygen and mitochondria, respectively. These books, aimed at non-specialists, succeeded in unconventional areas: neither diatomic molecules nor organelles are typical popular science fare, and that gave these ambitious books a certain panache.

A background in biochemistry lends itself to the molecular issues less frequently covered in popular books on evolution. The most interesting of these issues is the question of abiogenesis: how did life on Earth emerge from inanimate matter. In his most famous work, Darwin avoided speculation on this question (ironic for a book titled The Origin of Species), instead focusing on how life evolved once it existed. The curious, elegant last sentence of The Origin reads: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

This sentence—which leaves room for a creator who “originally breathed” life into the first organisms—was more a move of political expediency than scientific inference. Darwin knew the question of life’s genesis was intractable with current science, and though he was fully aware of the religious implications of his work, he was probably relieved to leave a place for a creator in his theory. Following publication of The Origin, Darwin never showed an interest in engaging in the religious debate it engendered, focusing his work on further scientific investigation (including eight years devoted to drafting the definitive study of barnacles) and defending his theory from scientific attack. The popular and religious debates he left to his friends and supporters, most notably Thomas Henry Huxley, who came to be known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”. Privately, however, he did muse about the origins of life. In a letter to his close friend Joseph Hooker, he wrote, “But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine (sic) compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were found.”

This speculation was put to the test in 1953 by the young Stanley Miller. Lane begins his discussion on the origins of life here, with the famous Miller-Urey experiment. Miller, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, reacted a mixture of water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen gas—then believed to be the contents of Earth’s early atmosphere—with electric sparks, meant to play the role of lightning. Within a few days, he found appreciable concentrations of most of the amino acids which form the building blocks of proteins. The notion of a “prebiotic soup” out of which life evolved came to dominate thinking about life’s origins for the next two decades. Miller’s findings, however, were perhaps too perfect. With the fluency of an adept biochemist, Lane masterfully deconstructs this appealing but flawed hypothesis. Given what we now know, the Miller-Urey soup recipe turns out not to be the correct one. More recent experiments have not reproduced Miller’s promising results. Lane then introduces us to two competing theories which account for the early evolution of life from deep ocean vents.

It is here that Lane is at his best, parsing competing theories with the command of a practitioner, yet cushioning the sharp edges of the technical details. He deftly employs metaphor, toeing the line between presenting the fully scientific details and sketching the larger picture. The old metaphorical stalwarts are there (thermodynamics is the science of “desire”, what atoms do and don’t “want” to do), but so are some new ones (the transfer of high-energy phosphate groups is a children’s game of tag).

But as Lane ascends the ladder of life—moving away from prebiotic chemistry onto topics such as sex, movement, sight, and “hot blood”—his comparative advantage as a biochemist fades. This area of evolutionary literature already has been covered extensively in popular format by biologists such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and EO Wilson. One wonders whether Lane would have been better off if he had remained on his native terrain.

Indeed, prebiotic chemistry is especially rich terrain in the immediate aftermath of last month’s announcement by University of Manchester researchers that they had synthesized RNA nucleotides in a laboratory setting using the ingredients that would have existed on early Earth. Proponents of the “RNA world hypothesis” argue that ribonucleic acid polymers—whose subunits are composed of a sugar, a base, and a phosphate group—could have given rise to life by encoding information (as DNA does) and catalysing replication (as proteins do). But no scientist had successfully shown how the initial RNA nucleotides could have emerged in high yield from appropriately prebiotic conditions—until now.

Last month, the University of Manchester’s John Sutherland and his team stunned the world of prebiotic chemistry with an announcement that they had synthesized RNA nucleotides under conditions similar to those that existed on the early Earth. Whereas other scientists had tried to put the sugar, base, and phosphate group together piece-by-piece, Sutherland’s team took a different approach. As Sutherland told reporters: “Basically, we took half a base, added that to half a sugar, added the other piece of base, and so on. The key turned out to be the order that the ingredients are added and the way you put them together — like making a soufflé.”

RNA synthesis could have occurred under “prebiotically plausible conditions”, Sutherland and his co-authors wrote in Nature. Or, as Sutherland subsequently said, “It’s consistent with a warm pond evaporating as the sun comes out”. In short, Darwin’s speculations in his letter to Hooker might have been correct after all.

For readers interested in learning more about prebiotic chemistry and early evolution, Lane’s Life Ascending provides a helpful primer (even if Sutherland’s findings mean that the recently released book is still not quite up-to-date). But ultimately, the cottage industry that has emerged around Darwin’s bicentennial pays little homage to his scientific legacy. After penning The Origin, Darwin dedicated his final years to filling its gaps, and published a further five editions. The most meaningful celebration of his life is the work of scientists such as Sutherland who continue to test his hypotheses—and who strengthen the theoretical framework that The Origin of Species left behind.

Jacob Lemieux is a DPhil student Clinical Medicine in the Molecular Parasitology Group at St. John’s College, Oxford.

It was the spring of 1938 in Mussolini’s Italy, and a group of men had obtained custody of a former railway worker whom the police had recently picked up off the streets of Rome. Drawing inspiration from the apparatus used by a nearby abattoir to stun pigs before slaughter, the men shaved their subject’s head and proceeded to attach a pair of crude electrodes to either side, which were then connected to a custom-built machine designed to deliver brief but intense bursts of electricity. Experiments involving a number of unfortunate dogs had indicated that the same current applied across the heart was generally lethal, but no animals had been killed by a shock to the head. The switch was flicked; the man, hitherto fully conscious, immediately entered a tonic-clonic or grand mal seizure, akin to the most severe kind of epileptic fit. His limbs contorted wildly, his face blueing through lack of oxygen as his breathing temporarily ceased. The seizure was brief, and the man returned to consciousness a short time later. It was not long, however, before he would be shocked into convulsions again.

One could be forgiven for seeing in this sequence of events a session of torture, akin perhaps to the force-feedings with castor oil that the Fascist authorities at the time so enjoyed. Indeed, many commentators have interpreted the events of that April day and the subsequent history of what became known as electroconvulsive therapy or ECT, in just that way. For the men in Rome were a team of psychiatrists, led by a Dr. Ugo Cerletti, and the goal of their experiments with electricity was not punitive but medical. As far as Cerletti was concerned, the first trial had been a resounding success. After several sessions of the treatment, the patient, who had been living as a vagrant, speaking incoherently, and suffering from paranoid delusions, showed a dramatic improvement in his mental state and was able to return home to his wife. Psychiatrists around the world rapidly adopted ECT as a more patient-friendly alternative to the existing methods for producing therapeutic seizures, namely injections with toxic drugs or high doses of insulin. (That such seizures could produce improvements in some cases of mental illness had been known for a number of years.)

Today, to the extent that they are aware of the procedure at all, most people regard ECT as a frightening and shameful black mark on the history of medicine. Jack Nicholson’s powerful portrayal of a lovable rogue subdued and broken by the ‘shock box’ in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is familiar to millions. How did such a once-lauded treatment fall from grace, and is its sinister reputation deserved? Edward Shorter and David Healy attempt to answer these questions in Shock Therapy, a book that combines a history of ECT’s origins and development with an enthusiastic defence of the procedure’s continued use. It is a timely book. With the safety and effectiveness of antidepressants and other psychiatric medications increasingly coming under fire (not always fairly), and with increased debate about the desirability of more psychotherapists in the NHS, it is bracing to be told that nothing works nearly so well as a few electrical shocks. According to the authors, received wisdom has been utterly wrong for the past few decades, and ECT is and has long been an underused and grossly underappreciated treatment.

As they explain, ECT was not always perceived as inhumane. During the 1930s and 1940s, shock therapy enjoyed widespread popular acclaim, with the press promoting it as a wondrous treatment for all kinds of mental ills. The media and most of the public accepted the claims of doctors quite uncritically. By the 1960s, however, lurid stories of minds shattered by shock therapy became commonplace, and a series of damaging newspaper articles, books, and movies served to erode the procedure’s reputation in the minds of the public. With surprising rapidity, the perception of shock therapy transformed from a miracle cure into a case study in medical brutality, a damaging, cruel, and useless procedure. The use of ECT declined markedly during this period, and numerous hospitals abandoned it, though its use continued in many others. In some US states and a few European countries, shock therapy even became subject to specific legislation limiting its use—something almost unprecedented for a medical procedure.

For Shorter and Healy, the campaign against ECT was a misguided and harmful deviation, a rejection of the one psychiatric treatment that really worked in severe mental illness in favour of talking cures and psychiatric medications that were less consistently beneficial. (Healy’s critical views on such drugs, especially antidepressants, are well known and forcefully expressed at several points in this book.) Many readers will react with surprise to this, for it is the critical accounts of ECT that have become fixed in the public consciousness. Some people are even surprised to learn that shock therapy is still practiced in civilised nations, yet it is used routinely in Britain and elsewhere: walking down the main corridor of Oxford’s Warneford Hospital, near Headington, visitors can see the waiting room of the ECT suite alongside the Coke machine and the toilets.

Strange as it might seem, ECT is an extremely useful means of treatment. Psychiatrists today are almost unanimous in the opinion that it is highly effective for many patients, and most would agree with Shorter and Healy that it is in fact the strongest treatment available for severe clinical depression. Study after study has shown that a course of ECT (which today most commonly involves one session every other day for an average of ten sessions) produces major improvements in at least 70 percent of such patients, with the benefits becoming apparent within days. Numerous clinical trials have shown that the effects of ECT are both more powerful and more rapid than even the most potent antidepressant drugs, and it is often effective in patients in whom several different medications have been tried and failed. In addition, many psychiatrists believe that ECT is useful in treating psychiatric conditions other than depression, such as manic excitement, though there have been few systematic studies to support such alternative applications.

When it works well, ECT can produce truly dramatic effects. For example, people who have been lying motionless in a state of catatonic depression ‘wake up’ over a matter of hours. Those who describe watching the procedure sometimes sound like believers witnessing the power of the Lord at a revival meeting: the treatment is miraculous; it restores life to the desolate; it is like raising patients from the dead. Despite a proliferation of theories, scientists are still at a loss to explain how ECT works, but that it works remains beyond serious doubt. The treatment’s major limitation is that the benefits produced are often short-lived, unless the therapy is followed by drug treatment or a continuing course of shocks.

Despite the best efforts of its detractors, shock therapy never went away because, quite simply, it is indispensable. This brings us to the central question of Shock Therapy: given that it was and remains so helpful, why did ECT become so unpopular? Opponents of the procedure would say that during the 1960s, shock therapy ‘survivors’ found their voices for the first time and made the public aware of the procedure’s dark side, that is, of the side effects. This is an issue that is, to put it lightly, controversial. On the one hand, the long-standing belief that shock produces gross ‘brain damage’ or massive mental impairments—that it destroys intellects and personalities—is certainly false. Indeed, it can and regularly does restore such faculties to people who have lost them to illness. Rather more plausible are the claims relating to memory loss: ECT has been accused of ‘wiping’ memories laid down years before the treatment and also of causing impairments in the patient’s ability to remember new material. Although there is no firm scientific evidence that such lasting damage occurs, it is well known that patients never remember the therapy procedure itself and frequently lose memories of events occurring within hours or days of the shocks. The crucial and as yet unanswered question is whether the memory losses extend beyond these periods, and it is not impossible that the absence of affirmative evidence represents researchers’ failure to measure such long-term problems.

Shock Therapy dismisses complaints of lasting damage and essentially brands them as symptoms of mental illness in patients for whom ECT did not work. This explanation is possible, and most psychiatrists agree that any lasting harms that do exist are outweighed by the proven benefits, but critics are unlikely to be satisfied with this rather glib explanation. Even most ECT practitioners say that more work is needed to investigate the consequences of the treatment. It is fair to say, however, that such side effects can hardly suffice to explain either the militancy or the success of the public anti-shock campaign. Cancer chemotherapy and other such treatments with deeply unpleasant consequences are accepted as uncontroversial by all but a fringe minority of contrarians. Hollywood does not make movies about them. Shock therapy seems to strike a nerve, but why?

Shorter and Healy’s answer is that the fall of ECT was the product of the inherently unpleasant image of the procedure combined with the intellectual climate of the 1960s. Early shock sessions were indeed traumatic to witness: the patient’s wildly contorting limbs were a sight not easily forgotten, even if one was aware that patients were quite unconscious and not in any appreciable danger. (Since the 1950s, anaesthetics and muscle relaxants have been used to ensure that patients lie motionless throughout—something ignored in most media accounts). Yet while the procedure may never have been pretty, it was not until the 1960s that it became controversial. This was the decade of dissent in the West, as generals, priests, and politicians all found their authority challenged. Psychiatrists fared no better: during the early sixties, a number of doctors, psychologists, sociologists, and writers began to rail against what they perceived as the authoritarian nature of the somatic therapies and their practitioners, and also against the whole system of diagnosing and locking up the mentally disordered.

Evaluating these ‘antipsychiatrists’ (as they became known, and sometimes called themselves) would take a book in itself, but it is certainly true that psychiatry at the time was not short of abuses, though few of these were related specifically to shock therapy. Nevertheless, ECT was sometimes used in ways that would now be recognised as quite unjustified. Shorter and Healy do not shy away from describing such practices as ‘regressive ECT’, whereby practitioners applied the treatment at far higher than the normal doses in order to provoke a state of infantile disorientation, from which, a few doctors hoped, it would be possible to ‘re-train’ the patients to become functioning members of society. In other cases, practitioners used the threat of ECT to keep unruly patients in line. The point, however, is that by focusing exclusively upon its abuses, the antipsychiatrists ignored the benefits of the procedure, and the authors are right that it is the perpetrators of such actions rather than ECT itself that should bear responsibility.

The antipsychiatrists were nevertheless remarkably successful in changing public perceptions. The whole spirit of the age was changing and suddenly, for large segments of the population, psychiatry became the enemy and ECT one of its most destructive weapons. Psychiatrists Andrew McDonald and Garry Walter’s survey of the portrayal of electroconvulsive treatments in American cinema nicely illustrates the change in attitudes. They note that early depictions were generally positive: ECT featured in only a handful of movies from the 1940s to the 1960s, but when it did, it was as a helpful therapy for distraught or traumatized protagonists, something which ‘put them back on their feet’. Yet during the sixties and early seventies, shock therapy underwent a sudden and dramatic transformation, culminating in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and a number of similar if less well known works. Since the 1980s, the cruel nature of shock has been taken as so obvious that it has mainly played the role of a humorous or ironic source of pain or punishment in scenes set in psychiatric hospitals—its use as a weapon by a vigilante bent on revenge in the lurid Death Wish 2 (1981) being typical. As McDonald and Walter put it, ‘Having commenced its movie career as a severe but helpful remedy for personal distress, ECT on film has become a progressively more negative and cruel treatment, leaving the impression of a brutal, harmful, and abusive manoeuvre with no therapeutic benefit.’

Yet this raises a crucial point, and it is one that Shock Therapy does not fully explore. In movies since the 1970s, the question of the therapeutic benefits of ECT does not even arise: the procedure is presented not as a bad medical treatment, but rather as an effective tool of oppression, just as the antipsychiatrists had suggested. In Cuckoo’s Nest, the victims of ECT appear as sane as anyone else (‘What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin’? Well you’re not! You’re not! You’re no crazier than the average asshole out walkin’ around on the streets and that’s it’). Therefore to ‘treat’ them is, in itself, an absurdity. Shorter and Healy convincingly argue that the impact of popular culture on the reputation of ECT has been profound; they warn, indeed, that even today Bollywood movies are undermining the procedure’s reputation in India, a country in which shock has long been used more widely than in the West. Yet, in their focus on the portrayals of ECT, Shorter and Healy do not explore the perhaps more important issue of the portrayal of mental illness. This is central, because in claiming that shock therapy is useful, psychiatrists necessarily assume that people suffering from mental illnesses are in need of a cure. By undermining this fundamental axiom of psychiatry and presenting the people who receive shock as being anything but ‘ill’, Hollywood made ECT illegitimate regardless of what it specifically entailed: it cannot be a good treatment because there is no disease to treat.

Thus, it is hardly surprising that public opinion of ECT is so out of tune with that of psychiatrists, when the public understanding of mental illness is so often different from that of professionals. This situation cannot be blamed on Hollywood entirely. Severe psychiatric illnesses are unnerving and deeply mysterious diseases, and most people are lucky enough never to come in contact with someone in the midst of severe melancholic depression, or a full-blown manic or psychotic episode. Few people understand these conditions, yet it is just these states that ECT is used to treat. To say that electroconvulsive shock is effective is not to say that it is a useful way of keeping people compliant, but rather that it can make life bearable for people who have lost all hope. It can help restore mental equilibrium to people who have lost all contact with reality. Unless one realises the initial state of those who undergo the procedure, it is inevitable that one’s opinion of the treatment will be low. That mere electrical shocks could bring such profound benefits goes against all the dictates of common sense, but in the face of mental illness, common sense is commonly an unreliable guide.

Shock Therapy does not look beyond the ECT suite to ask what it is about psychiatry that allowed huge segments of the public to become utterly oblivious to the benefits of one of its most effective treatments. To do so would be to write an account of psychiatry itself. Yet the story of shock therapy cannot be complete outside of such a history. Perhaps the most important lesson of this book is that we are rarely more irrational than when faced with madness.

Jamie Horder is reading for a DPhil in psychiatry at St John’s College, Oxford.

I

The identification of the musical moment when a fissure appeared between the Romantic and the Modern is a constant source of historical debate. For many, the harmonically ambiguous chord at the beginning of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde reflects the breakdown of bourgeois social codes, while for others modernism’s first steps are better represented by the unbounded flute solo which begins Debussy’s Prélude à L’après-midi d’un Faune. Alex Ross chooses to initiate his sweeping history of twentieth century music with the Austrian premiere of Strauss’s Salome at Graz in 1906. Certainly he has good reason to: within its luxuriant folds of orchestration the opera seems to contain both the final remnants of the glorious ‘Teutonic’ tradition—of Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner—and the seeds of a revolutionary order where strangeness began to overtake beauty as the guiding spirit of composition. Indeed, Salome can be described as both anarchic and cacophonous, in contrast to the carefully ordered rituals of opera-going which does not escape Ross’s attention. After experiencing the opera, Kaiser Wilhelm II is reported to have commented of Strauss that ‘normally I’m very keen on him, but this is going to do him a lot of damage’. The monarch, in politics as in matters of art, was proven somewhat naïve, for the opera’s reception was such that the work arguably coloured a whole generation of musical innovators whose significance was to stretch to the end of the twentieth century.

So begins a history whose purpose is to encounter every significant, and many insignificant, moments of twentieth century music. No character is deemed too small in the telling, no musical style considered inconsequential. As a result there is something almost histrionic, rather than historic, in Ross’s claim to capture the repertoire of the last century in its entirety. This is not to denigrate his accomplishment, as few writers outside the academic arena have tackled what is, musically, a multifarious century of extremes. Ross should be applauded for attempting a history that is arguably beyond the limits of a single volume. But it is somewhat inevitable that charting every cultural movement within a period that experienced rapid social and economic changes will result in a somewhat blurred account. The danger is that, without the space to differentiate carefully between the truly important trends and the mere flashes, we are subject to a sensory overload in which the vibrancy of events thwarts a discernable teleology.

Nevertheless, Ross does achieve a convincing, if somewhat unbalanced, three-part division of the twentieth century: the first section covers European modernism from 1900 to 1933; the second runs from 1933 to 1945 across Russia, America, and Germany; and the third embraces all national styles from 1945 to 2000. The least satisfying of the three is the final section, which, as so often is the case with contemporary music criticism, becomes an encyclopaedic list of composers, mentioning many styles but dissecting few.

The middle section of the book, where Ross discusses the relationship between political and cultural despotism, is the most persuasive, partly due to the fact that he gives more space and time to developing his theses. Modernism, like the political regimes that characterise the first half of the twentieth century, is conceived as the final, terrible flowering of the Enlightenment project, but one incompatible with the stifling cultural policies of Nazism and Stalinism. Clearly Ross’s decision to begin his tale of modernist music in the decaying glamour of fin-de-siècle Vienna accords convincingly with his thesis that national socialism signalled the ‘death fugue’ of European music. Here was a system that could not permit music to continue on its path to chaos, for in doing so, it would have undermined the belief in the power of order. The strength of the collective too would have been breached if Schoenberg and the other lone celebrities of modernism had been heralded as individual geniuses.

There was space for only a single dignitary in Nazi Europe, and he had ears exclusively for Wagner. Indeed, one of the more surprising elements that materialises in Ross’s reading is the constant presence of Adolf Hitler, not only as a historical figure—possibly present at the Graz performance of Salome and definitely there at the Bayreuth festival—but also as a shadow cast across the entire canon of Western art music. Looking back over the twentieth century, Ross almost suggests that the negative reception that classical music currently experiences is partly the due retribution for an art form that courted the attention of history’s most evil bogeyman.

To the cynical onlooker, orchestras and operas houses are stuck in a museum culture, playing to a dwindling cohort of aging subscribers and would-be elitists who take satisfaction from technically expert if soulless renditions of Hitler’s favourite works.

The implication here is of classical music’s perfect suitability as an agent of social stagnation, preventing radical innovation and maintaining class hierarchy. In keeping with Ross’s agenda, which is left unsaid but clearly sensed throughout, it is seen as imperative that music save itself from reactionary forces epitomised most obviously by Nazi policy but also to an extent by our current form of bourgeois ‘museum culture’.

Assuredly, Ross’s history is dazzling, not only in the vastness of the subject matter, but also in the energy of the prose, which skips around from one performance to the next, across continents and time periods almost with impunity. However like any bright light stared at for long enough, The Rest is Noise begins to cause something of an almost migrainous pain. Music critic for The New Yorker, Ross clearly belongs in a journalistic milieu whereby palatability trumps depth and intricacy. The rush to include as many composers as possible leads him to reduce these highly complex characters to a glib list of adjectives so that Mahler (‘childlike, heaven-storming despotic, despairing’), Schoenberg (‘sharp-witted, widely cultured, easily unimpressed’), and Berg (‘a debonair, handsome man, self-effacing and ironic’) lose their individuality under a barrage of cliché. Similarly, the rapaciousness of Ross’s interest in non-musical art forms leads occasionally to wild simplifications of both music and visual art, as in his under-developed notion that Rauschenberg and Reich can be termed unequivocal adherents of ‘Pop Art’. Most saddening from a scholarly perspective is the absence of any notated musical example. It should not be expected that everyone who reads The Rest is Noise can interpret notation, but for the majority who can, musical examples could have served as evidence for Ross’s deductions, strengthening his prose rather than creating a distraction as the publishers must have foreseen. One might interpret this as indicative of a writer whose own voice, cutting stridently across the twentieth century, cannot resist talking over the music.

II

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, a book about Oliver Sacks’s experiences as a consultant neurologist, provided the inspiration for Michael Nyman’s 1986 opera of the same name. It seems particularly apt that Nyman’s music should be repetitive, obsessive, and seemingly devoid of rational development, given that Sacks’s book shows how the human mind regularly operates in similarly illogical ways. Sacks’s latest book continues his exploration of the connection between anomalies in the neurological condition and the manifold experiences that listening to music generates. Musicophilia is essentially a collection of medical notes, a re-telling of various real-life experiences in which a malfunction in the subject’s brain is accompanied by an alteration in their attitude to music. Results range from an increase in the ability to aurally memorise complex and lengthy passages of music, to the discovery of a synesthetic ability to visualise colour or smell with certain intervals to, in some unfortunate examples, the onset of convulsions at the sound of a particular tune. Incredibly, these neurological symptoms are not limited to those who consider themselves particularly ‘musical’, but often affect people who have had no, or very little, training and exposure to a formal musical education.

The most extraordinary history is of a male subject—Dr. Cicoria—who, previous to being stuck by lighting, had no musical gifts at all. He enjoyed some rock music, but remained unmoved by the classical repertoire. Something in the near-death experience of being electrocuted sparked an obsession for piano music, particularly for Vladimir Ashkenazy’s recordings of Chopin’s works, which resulted in many hours of repeated playings and practice. Dr. Cicoria’s personality underwent severe alteration too, from being an ‘easygoing, genial family man’, he became a figure ‘inspired, even possessed, by music’, believing he had been ‘saved’ for the higher purpose of developing his ‘gift’.

As fascinating as these stories are, the number of anecdotes that Sacks includes becomes tiresome. The lack of any kind of narrative across what is essentially an almanac of neurological curiosities means that the book is perfect for dabbling in, but frustrating when read from cover to cover. From a clinical perspective, Musicophilia is deliberately not a technical book and, thankfully for those uninitiated in the language of statistics and cerebral scans, the author has the happy ability to translate highly specialised neurological discussions into transparent prose. Indeed, at times Sacks’s endeavour to simplify medical information results in his own language bordering on the gratingly colloquial. In the same way that Ross resists the inclusion of musical examples, so Sacks shares a reticence to provide any scientific data. The anecdotal nature of his collection requires the incessant use of the first person throughout, which by itself creates an ambiguity of tone. Musicophilia is neither comfortable as an academic work nor characterful enough to be convincing as a personal memoir. Just as Sacks’s individual voice remains submerged beneath anodyne prose, so the patients linger as anonymous figures, displaying little interest to the reader beyond the peculiar gift they demonstrate. As a result, it is a struggle to be involved in the human side of the personalities beyond raising an eyebrow at some especially bizarre condition.

Perhaps it is most exasperating that Sacks does not show an inclination to be more scientific when it comes to the music itself. The question of why it is that Chopin should be the composer with whom Dr. Cicoria becomes obsessed is never broached. Is it, one wonders, because Chopin’s music sounds improvisatory, flouting formal constraints, and thus continually suggestive of new, imaginary horizons? Or is it something about Chopin’s peculiar handling of the piano’s rich sonorities that inspired Cicoria to practice so obsessively? Could it even have been a narcissistic desire to be like Vladimir Ashkenazy, to inhabit the role of the virtuoso? Sacks could have been more exploratory through his writing, reducing the number of patients discussed and spending more time on the music that inspired them.

III

What is clear from a joint consideration of these extensive books is the presence of a form of antinomy in the way music is understood. Through his excessive contextualisation of musical works alongside contemporary developments in philosophy, visual art, literature, and politics, Ross underlines the manufactured nature of music. The canon is a collection of artefacts constructed in the image of their particular zeitgeist, be that artistic, urban, or ethnological. Made by human hand, works are dependent on the mediation of composers who, grounded without choice in their social environment, cannot but compose in the way they do. Musical compositions, in Ross’s world, do not simple float down from the sky. As Ross claims in his introduction, his subject is not just music but the ‘politicians, dictators, millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written.’ It is a noble thing, according to our scientific principles, to explain music in this way—that is, to prove that good music is dependent on its historicity, its ability to speak for a community in time and the repressions they battled.

Conversely, Sacks’s stories of people with inexplicable musical abilities only highlight the innateness of music. This is admittedly not an attitude currently in favour within a society that prefers to overlook difference in pursuit of egalitarianism, but if Sacks tells us anything, it is that creativity operates for reasons as yet unknown, strongly felt by some and not at all by others. Those in power tell us that music should be available for all and, as proof, every society in the world has its own music through which its members’ identity is partly constructed. It seems a falsehood, however, to claim that within those societies every member has an equal ability to compose, perform, and appreciate music, even as this recognition may seem to go against our anti-elitist values. Is it too cynical a view to suggest that the characters that make up Sacks’s study would inspire enraged jealousy if their genius were not portrayed as the counterbalance to some neurological fault? This trend has presented itself most notably in the recent past with the emergence of the not unreasonable idea that Mozart suffered from Asperger syndrome. In this way, his prodigious talent is not only explained but justified by his foul mouth and scatological sense of humour (according to the sources). In Beethoven’s reception there is an even greater sense of justice in the fact that, being profoundly deaf towards the end of his life, his music was in some way a reward for battling against adversity. In our era of supposed meritocracy, it is easier to swallow the pill of unearned musical genius when it is accompanied by a good dose of perceived heroism or disability.

The questions of defining what we recognise as musicality and where we locate genius stem from the paradoxical situation where music operates both as an object (a score, a recording) that exists with a high degree of autonomy, and as a temporal experience that only comes into being through the perception of the listener. Conceptions of musicality and genius are therefore based on an uncomfortable mixture of two sets of criteria: an objective criteria based on knowable facts such as the work’s formal structure and its historical context; and, secondly, an interpretative criteria based on the feelings the music evokes in the listener. In the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the two criteria seemingly coalesced: Bach’s music, for example, is both fascinating to analyse structurally and highly affecting in performance. At some point, however, the two criteria diverged so that a composer like Schoenberg, whose music is distinctly discordant and unsettling, is heralded a genius for his quasi-scientific grasp of structure, while Rachmaninov, whose music exhibits a looser form, remains beloved for his emotional warmth. The twentieth century is endlessly exciting for this particular reason—it was perhaps the first time that the conviction of a composer was all that was required to stand as the purpose for a work of art, in place of the previous intention of communicating an objective idea to a wide audience. As a consequence, the century has become infamous for the gradual loss of a consensus as to what constitutes musical beauty, even of rationality’s disappearance altogether from in aesthetic judgements.

The Rest is Noise and Musicophilia have something to say to all who love music, but individually they present somewhat unfinished impressions of what a musicological discipline could be. They are, if anything, rather apologetic, with Ross’s dissolution of music into a web of culture, and Sacks’s portrayal of music as a divine illness. But ‘discipline’ implies a sense of struggling to control excessive desires, in this instance the desire to discuss music purely in terms of emotional content and the temptation to reduce its almost mystical elements to graphs and facts. Musical composition equally needs to be assessed as evidence for a disciplined mind, with the term ‘genius’ used sparingly for the rare figure who creates works of art that touch both our objective faculties and our heartstrings. To ignore one or the other is not only to misrepresent music, but implies a denial of an integral aspect of being human.

Benjamin Skipp is reading for a DPhil in music at Christ Church, Oxford.

Steven Pinker
The Stuff of Thought:
Language as a Window into Human Nature
Allen Lane, 2007
512 pages
£25.00
ISBN 978-0713997415

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Steven Pinker likes language.  He has, after all, built a career on the study of it, and he confesses that he is perhaps a little too fond of obscure verbs.  Language, it seems, also likes Steven Pinker, at least judging by his justly famous ability as a master of English prose.  Given this mutual appreciation, it is perhaps somewhat surprising that one of the arguments of Pinker’s latest book, The Stuff of Thought, is that the place of language in the human mind is not nearly so central as many have claimed.  Although he spends plenty of entertaining pages discussing the grammar and semantics of profanity (When I exclaim ‘Screw you!’, what exactly am I saying?) and explaining why so many of his generation are called Steve, the focus of the book lies in exploring why language is not the master of the mind and what, in fact, is.

The anthropologist and linguist Benjamin Whorf lent his name to the hypothesis that the particular language which one is raised to speak has a profound influence on the way in which one perceives and conceives of the world.  In its strong form, Whorfianism holds that certain thoughts and ideas are literally inconceivable to those who do not speak the appropriate tongue.  In other words, the language we use to communicate with other people is the same language which we use, in our heads, for thinking and reasoning: the unspeakable is also the unthinkable.  To take a well-worn example, Eskimos supposedly have a great many different words for the various kinds of what English simply calls ‘snow’.  Surely, this means that Eskimos think about and even see the powdery white stuff differently?  (Whorf himself even went as far as to claim that the Hopi, a Native American people, actually have no concept of time, or at least not as we know it, on the grounds that their language has no tenses and has, in general, a poverty of time-related terms.)

Pinker thinks little of such arguments.  As he points out, if Eskimos have no shortage of words for water in its solid form, this is presumably because they spend their lives working on and with it.  Their numerous words for snow are the consequence, not the cause, of the Eskimo’s intimate knowledge of it, and even the most parochial English speaker will quickly come to appreciate the subtleties of snow once they find themselves knee-deep in it.  Depending upon how you count them, Pinker says, we in fact probably have just as many words for snow as the Eskimos anyway.  Likewise, although different languages deal with time in numerous ways, closer anthropological inspection shows that all peoples do understand and work within it (how indeed could they survive if they didn’t?).  Of course, it remains possible that the language we speak determines not what we can and cannot think but what we habitually tend to think, conditioning the kind of things we pay attention to, and the implicit assumptions we are prone to make.  Pinker is willing to admit that there may be something in this weaker (or as he puts it, less interesting) theory.

Whorf’s is not the only theory of ‘linguistic determinism’ that Pinker is determined to lay to rest.  The cognitive scientist and Democratic Party activist George Lakoff also draws fire for his theory that our abstract thoughts are necessarily structured by linguistic metaphors.  Lakoff points out that almost all of our discourse either concerns concrete objects and occurrences, or refers to abstract concepts as if they were such concretes.  It is indeed remarkable that we talk nonchalantly about the stick that props up Sam’s garden shed and the argument that props up Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism; of the passing-by of the 10.30 train to Bristol and of the passing-by of time (or its flowing, etc.)  For Lakoff, these are not ‘mere’ metaphors, but evidence that our minds actually cannot deal with abstract concepts except by representing them as concrete things.  It follows that the particular metaphor which we adopt in regard to a situation dictates the whole way in which we think about an issue—a conclusion with important practical implications for politicians, among others.  Pinker, however, says that we can, and indeed often do, point out the ways in which a given metaphor is valid or invalid.  Rather than being slaves to metaphors, we seem to have a genuine abstract reasoning ability, independent of language, which stands aloft from them.  Again, this is not to deny that analogies can be important tools of thought, especially when it comes to helping us to formulate novel ideas.  Nor is it to deny that the way an issue is framed can shape our conceptions of it.  Pinker’s point is that, even if influenced by language, thought does not rely upon it—we can go beyond metaphor, indeed beyond words, even if we often do not.  As he points out, this is probably most people’s ‘common sense’ view, although of course, this does not mean it is true.

If, then, Pinker is so fond of language, why is he so eager to put it in its place?  One clue is in the subtitle of the book, ‘language as a window into human nature’.  For Pinker holds a very specific theory of human nature and, in one way or another, all of his several popular books have been dedicated to expounded and defending it.  In The Stuff of Thought, he aims to show how our ways of speaking shed light on human psychology, but for this to be more than a circular exercise, our psychology has to exist independently of, and be reflected in, the structure of language, rather than the other way around.  If Whorf and his friends had their way, it would be psychology which reflected linguistics, and human nature would vanish in a puff of pronouns.

Pinker’s interest in human nature is long-standing.  He is a founding member of the school of thought known as Evolutionary Psychology, a movement which originated in the late 1980s as a conscious reaction against the prevailing climate in the social sciences, where culture was everything and man was a ‘blank slate’ whose mind and behaviour were socially constructed.  Evolutionary Psychologists believe that just as the human body has been shaped by the process of evolution, giving us the distinct anatomy with which we are all so familiar, natural selection has also provided us with a mental architecture—a set of ways of thinking, feeling and perceiving shared by all normal human beings, regardless of the language we speak or the culture in which we are socialised, and ultimately the product of the genetically determined structure of our brains.  This cognitive toolbox is human nature, man’s common inheritance.  Pinker is one of the most influential proponents of this view; he was a contributor to the classic The Adapted Mind (1992), while in his book The Language Instinct (1995), he described language as one of Man’s evolved mental faculties.  In How the Mind Works (1997)he presented a layman’s account of human nature as Evolutionary Psychologists see it.  Such ideas have proven attractive to many experimental psychologists and neuroscientists—among other things, Darwinism offers what the behavioural sciences have long lacked, a unifying paradigm.  There have, however, been vocal critics—the philosopher Jerry Fodor, for example, left no doubt over which side he was on by publishing a book entitled The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way.

So, for Pinker, the stuff of thought is not language.  On the contrary, it is our built-in cognitive machinery: a triumph of evolution which effortlessly performs the mind-boggling task of taking our raw sensory data and constructing a model of the world ordered according to the categories of space, time, and causation, populated by other people whose minds we understand in terms of intentions, beliefs and desires.  We are so familiar with these mental scaffolds that they can easily go unnoticed, but if we look closely we can see evidence of them in our language.  Take causation: the way we think about cause-and-effect is not derived from anything we know about physics, Pinker claims, but rather relies upon a simple mental model.  Certain objects or actors have ‘intrinsic’ tendencies to do or act in certain ways and other objects can prevent, allow or help them to do this—like little balls pushing each other around.  Accordingly we distinguish between scenarios which are, nevertheless, logically equivalent: if I were to throw a marble at a coin which was about to fall heads, pushing it over onto tails instead, we say that I ‘caused’ it to end up tails, but we do not say this, although it is hard to justify why, if I intercept a marble which is threatening to do the opposite.  We also talk about certain objects (often people) as being uncaused causes—John broke the lamp—implicitly affirming our belief in free will.  Pinker provides a similar analysis of the cognitive scaffolding behind our talk about space and time, ethics and more.

Some might detect echoes of Sigmund Freud in all of this, perhaps comparing it unfavourably with the psychoanalytic theory of unconscious desires which reveal themselves cryptically in dreams and slips of the tongue.  Yet there are fundamental differences.  For one thing, Pinker does not rely purely on the analysis of language, since he also quotes experimental evidence in support of his positions.  The analogy with Freud is also tenuous, for he claimed to have identified long-buried ideas which were quite inaccessible to normal consciousness; only with the help of a trained psychoanalyst could such gloomy realms be charted.  By contrast, what Pinker is doing is pointing us towards aspects of our thinking which normally escape our attention. The point is that they are just that—aspects of our own minds, not of reality out there.  In other words, he is inviting us to see as merely psychology things which we otherwise take for granted. Our brains impose the concepts of causality, space, and time, and human agency, upon the world, rather than reading them off from it—and this is surely a fascinating thought, not to mention a disturbing one.

There’s nothing especially new in all this.  Anyone familiar with Western philosophy will recognise that Pinker is providing a modern treatment of issues centuries old, and, to his credit, he briefly discusses thinkers such as Hume who, more than two centuries ago, provided arguments against the objective validity of, for example, our conception of causality.  In particular, the theory that our minds produce a picture of reality structured around innate mental concepts of space and time strongly recalls Immanuel Kant, as Pinker himself points out.  Yet what is more original about The Stuff of Thought, apart from its accessibility (one certainly feels that Kant could have used a couple more Dilbert cartoons, and I’m sure Plato would have appreciated Pinker’s characterisation of his Cave as a ‘movie theatre out of the Flintstones’), is that it provides a firmly scientific approach to these quintessential philosophical questions.  Our minds work in certain ways because these ways proved to be useful during the evolutionary time over which our species was formed: there is no real mystery about why we conceive of the world in the way in which we do, and some day, we may even come to understand how our brains do it.

Yet Pinker shies away from some of the more radical interpretations that could be drawn from this picture.  Our concepts of free will, moral responsibility, cause-and-effect, and objects-in-space may indeed be mere phantoms of the human brain, he says, but they are useful ones, and it is not as if we have any practical alternatives for our day-to-day lives.  Disappointingly, while he may well be justified in this pragmatic conservativism,  he gives very little attention to the issue, and one is left feeling that there is much more to be said about this.  Philosophers, for example, have long used their intuitions as a window into the nature of the moral and physical worlds.  If Pinker is right, then this whole enterprise seems in danger of being reduced to a branch of cognitive science: the study of how we have evolved to think about the world, rather than how the world really is.  (Indeed, although Pinker does not mention them, a number of philosophers, such as Shaun Nichols, have begun to argue along these lines and have proposed that the future should belong to an ‘experimental philosophy’ which adopts scientific methods.  Of course, not everyone is happy about this threatened annexation by science.)

The Stuff of Thought concludes on a hopeful note with a chapter called ‘Out of the Cave’.  Pinker says that while evolution has given our minds a distinct architecture, it has also made them flexible.  We are vassals neither of language, nor culture, nor natural selection, and with the proper education we can come to think, and talk, in ways which go far beyond what nature intended.  While the ways our minds have evolved may not be ideally suited to the challenges of the modern world, and while, as Pinker notes, ‘Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide into our instinctive conceptual ways’ we also find ourselves with the capacity for genuine reasoning.  Reading this book along with his others, one senses that Pinker is interested in more than just language and psychology.  What he is really concerned with is defending the possibility of human knowledge and progress against the threat of post-modern relativism.  Thus his rejection of Whorf and Lakoff’s attempts to reduce the mind’s working to linguistic puppetry.

With his common-sense view of cognition, his confident belief in a universal human nature, and his enthusiasm for natural science, Pinker resembles the philosophes of the 18th century Enlightenment.  Like them, he is no professional philosopher, but seeks, with more than a little mischievousness, to overturn what he sees as an outdated orthodoxy, in this case the prevailing cultural relativism of the social sciences.  Those on the receiving end—those for whom the Enlightenment is something which our post-modern world has rightly moved beyond—are likely to be less than enthusiastic about The Stuff of Thought’s message.  Were Voltaire in a position to comment, however, he would, I feel, approve.

Jamie Horder is reading for a DPhil in Psychiatry at St John’s College, Oxford.

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