Jon Ronson
The Psychopath Test
Picador, 2011
304 Pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-0330492263

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Given that psychopathy is one of the most highly publicized and easily marketable of the mental illnesses, it should come as no surprise that a journalistic investigation of psychopaths should be a hit. But while Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test has its fair share of coldblooded killers and gory crimes, it stands apart from other works of popular psychology by all those psychiatrists and journalists who cater to the public’s fascination with madness. Instead of following the general patterns of the genre and focusing on the psychopathic mind, either to vilify it or else to examine it as a foreign object, Ronson broadens the scope of his book to investigate a far greater mystery: the role of madness in our lives.

Ronson explores this all-encompassing mystery through a series of separate encounters, each of which segues seamlessly to the next, though the deeper connections between them are only revealed at the conclusion. Each section contains enough quirky humor and distinct ideas to conceivably stand alone; indeed, the chapter on the overzealous application of drugs to treat such questionable conditions as childhood bipolar disorder reappeared, with only minor modifications, as an article in New Scientist. At the conclusion, Ronson manages to tie together all the ideas introduced and stories told while avoiding the rigidity and limitations of a central dogma. In fact, one could go so far as to describe The Psychopath Test as anti-dogmatic; Ronson criticizes the narrow, simplified conceptions of madness that result from the attempts of society and psychiatry alike to eliminate gray areas.

Before exposing the weaknesses in accepted views of madness, Ronson must first fully absorb the influence of the proponents of such views. Perhaps Ronson is more skeptical than he lets on (he always presents himself as an eager and willing convert to each successive idea), but his enthusiasm inevitably wanes when he discovers that those who teach each idea have motives and faults of their own, which are just as limiting as his own bias as a journalist searching for a catchy story. Although he is initially critical of the arbitrary diagnoses of psychiatry, he changes his mind after meeting some of psychiatry’s most vocal opponents, the Scientologists. An encounter with a man who was institutionalized after apparently “faking” madness then sends him veering to the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, as he becomes a disciple of the renowned psychiatrist Bob Hare. Under Hare’s tutelage, Ronson masters the Hare Checklist, that all-powerful method of detecting psychopathy which gives the book its title; a test in which scoring a few points too many could mean a lifetime of incarceration. It is at this point in the book that the temptation to embrace dogma wholeheartedly is at its strongest—once Ronson has memorized each item on the Hare Checklist, he becomes fascinated by Bob’s assertion that psychopaths are “the reason the world is so unfair”. Whether in the realm of “savage economic injustice”, “brutal wars”, or even just “everyday corporate cruelty”, psychopaths are “the jagged rocks thrown into the still pond”; the main disruptive forces in our society.

Ronsen seems to recognize that such a thesis could make for an exciting, dynamic study; almost like the nonfiction equivalent of an action comic, with Ronson as a hero on a mission to root out the villains from “the corridors of power”. All he thinks he needs to fulfill this mission are his new psychopath-spotting skills and some infamous personalities to interview, like the former Haitian death squad leader Toto Constant, convicted for crimes against humanity, and Al Dunlap, the legendary C.E.O with a penchant for firing people whose mass-downsizing ventures earned him the nickname “Chainsaw Al”.

But from the very beginning of its search for psychopaths, Ronson’s basic thesis is consistently undermined. Ronson mocks his own willingness to squeeze anything and everything he can into the categories of the Bob Hare checklist. He does not deny the existence of psychopaths, as demonstrated by his chilling interview with Toto Constant, but neither does he deny the presence of his own journalistic bias and general overconfidence, as demonstrated by his quick categorization of a critic and rival as a psychopath and his attempts to downplay Al Dunlap’s less psychopathic qualities. At first Ronson records these flaws in his own perspective matter-of-factly, as if he is unaware of his own absurdity, but his self-criticism becomes more direct as he turns his attention to the treatment of madness by the media, a group to which Ronson himself belongs.

Ronson is perhaps at his most self aware when dealing with the culture of reality television and the strange case of David Shayler, conspiracy theorist and would-be messiah. Ronson explains why a journalist like himself, who, after all, wants to sell a story, might be just as inclined to reduce someone like Shayler to his “maddest edges”. Yet once attuned to his own motives for classifying people as psychopaths, Ronson’s enthusiasm for Hare and his Psychopath Test noticeably wanes. Rather than rejecting the psychiatric dogma altogether, however, Ronson brings it back at the conclusion of the novel, when he returns to the case of Tony, a man who faked madness. After spending decades of his life living among serial killers in a prison for the criminally insane, Tony at last faces the prospect of release, if only the legal authorities could make up their minds that he is sane. It is at this point that the all the different threads of narrative seem to converge, as Ronson attempts to apply all the ideas he has encountered so far to Tony. Is he a psychopath through and through? A harmless but exploited madman? A semi-psychopath? Even when his fate is settled, the question of his diagnosis remains open to the reader. The book ends, as it began, with a mystery.

Rachael Goddard-Rebstein is studying English at Lady Margaret Hall. She writes fiction and is from Vancouver, Canada.

Tim Flannery
Here on Earth: A New Beginning
Allen Lane, 2011
316 Pages
£14.99
ISBN 978-1846143960

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Tim Flannery is a multi-talented man on an all-consuming mission against environmental fatalism, whose goal is to show that a sustainable future is possible through cooperation and environmental restoration—even for as many as nine billion of us. This outspoken and highly credible Australian environmental scientist, praised by Sir David Attenborough as “one of the greatest explorers [of scientific progress] of our times”, has become one of the world’s most outspoken advocates for climate change awareness and corporate social responsibility. Flannery, a long-time interdisciplinary researcher of Australasian zoology, has focused much of his current work on informing international policy to avoid global climate catastrophe and influencing major conglomerates like Siemens and Tata Group to reform their environmental governance structures and, in the process, reduce their environmental impact.

Flannery’s intellectually sprawling new book, the whirlwind tour de force Here on Earth: A New Beginning, keeps with his trail-blazing, activist mission, borrowing from a smorgasbord of scientific literature—ecology, the history of evolutionary biology, indigenous environmental history, the links between cultural and biological evolution—to argue that we need not write off humanity’s environmental future too quickly. Yet this is not your everyday science textbook, and Flannery stays far away from over-intellectualising and unnecessary verbosity by concisely conveying scientific principles in clear language. The book follows in the sizeable footsteps of physicist Carl Sagan, journalist Natalie Angier, and other great science writers in exploring science in unorthodox, exciting ways, yet it also breaks from the overwhelming pessimism of the environmental community by offering a cautious optimism. Flannery outlines an alternative vision—a compassionate, humanistic path—that seems attainable if we are able to appeal to our better selves. How we arrive at this end is open to debate. Flannery suggests a variety of different methods for realizing environmental regeneration, such as rethinking our increasing detachment from the Earth and considering the implications of E.O. Wilson’s “biophilia” concept that claims that man holds an innate sense of longing for the natural world. Although his more extreme suggestions are unlikely ever to be adopted, his proposed solutions are always rigourously scientific and, at least in theory, could render sustainable change.

Flannery, a quintessential ecologist, sees things holistically, and in the book elegantly outlines interconnections and interdependencies. He makes the natural world come alive, whether he is describing the crucial role played by sea cucumbers in maintaining biotic environments on the ocean floor or outlining the myriad dangers posed by persistent organic pollutants and radioactivity. Quite simply, Flannery’s rational exuberance and love of nature is contagious. Throughout Here on Earth, Flannery does not shy away from challenging the conventional ideologies of doom and gloom, taking particular aim at the “selfish gene” theories of celebrity academic Richard Dawkins, the grave warnings of imminent atmospheric catastrophe by former NASA atmospheric scientist James Hansen, and Peter Ward’s so-called Medea hypothesis that “life itself periodically brings about the destruction of life and…long-term ecological stability is impossible”.

One of the key scientific arguments backing Flannery’s central thesis is a controversial one, despite its solid footing in empirical science. It focuses on the homeostatic “Gaia” vision of UK scientist James Lovelock, who argues that Gaia is a living, self-regulating entity that tends toward equilibrium and, where possible, will take concrete measures to protect its environs. Although it has been dismissed by Dawkins and other prominent scientists as failing to account for natural selection and general evolutionary biology, Flannery nevertheless insists that it holds great promise for explaining and predicting future environmental trajectories. Flannery highlights fascinating new research—such as the ability of rainforest canopies to alter rainfall patterns in ways that seemed scientifically impossible—in arguing that we can reinforce Earth’s natural survival mechanisms to ensure the continued inhabitability of the planet.

In sometimes graphic detail, Flannery highlights the barbarism and cruelty that have blighted much of humanity’s past, arguing that we are beginning to outgrow our savagery. Ongoing social developments and interesting examples of altruism and compassion serve convincingly as arguments that we may be evolving toward a stronger awareness of the needs of the integrated whole, as opposed to focusing solely on our own narrow interests. In light of this theory, Flannery draws comparisons between the development of superorganisms like ant and termite colonies and the complex superorganism of globalised humanity. Consequently, he is largely dismissive of conventional economic orthodoxy, noting that “there is more than a passing similarity, incidentally, between neoclassical economics and Dawkins’ selfish gene theory…both describe idealised frameworks which can be powerfully explicatory; but when they become universally dogmatic, ideologies have the power to erode our capacity to value one another, and so threaten to destroy the common endeavour that is our global superorganism.”

Given his deep knowledge of biology, ecology, and resource management, this stance might seem surprising, as one might presume that Flannery, who is all too aware of the political inertia and scientific ignorance that impede necessary reforms, would despair of our current environmental situation. Furthermore, many would approach his optimistic premise, which has assumed a notable outlier position in modern environmental assessments, with a certain degree of justified scepticism.

However, Flannery does not hesitate to rebuke those he considers irrational optimists, for example in conveying his dismay at the overwhelming political failure of the 2009 Copenhagen Summit. He repeatedly calls into question traditional economic assumptions and criticises the ongoing failures to account properly for environmental externalities in economic analyses. According to Flannery, it is undeniable that degradation is accelerating—acidifying oceans, melting ice caps, and deforestation are only the beginning of his list—and this book makes it clear that the problems are not insignificant. He also warns of the complex psychological reasons beyond environmental apathy, such as the all-too-human preference for current gratification at the expense of later hardship.

As one might expect, this occasionally simplified and optimistic perspective occasionally oversteps realistic boundaries. Sometimes Flannery’s proposals seem inherently counterintuitive or, occasionally, the stuff of dreams. For example, he decries at length the excesses of the rich and the excessive consumption that inevitably results from rising living standards. Yet, later, he argues that “the last few decades have seen the most astonishing progress in lifting the entrenched poor out of their misery, and our future depends on hastening the trend”—a troubling and ostensibly contradictory prescription in a resource-constrained world. He does not appear to fully grasp the enormity of the fiscal challenges that will be required to facilitate some of his more startling predictions, such as the contention that “I have no doubt that [in the near future] we will all use electric cars.” Flannery does admit that the smart grid development needed to enable this transition would “require over 400 billion dollars in financing in the United States alone”, but he remains silent on how the political will and private sector involvement needed to coordinate such a massive project would be catalysed. In this particular case, the additional grid restructuring, infrastructure investments, and massive new developments in energy generation would cost trillions of dollars worldwide. Such a voluntary transition seems highly unlikely, especially without some sort of major environmental catastrophe or political revolution that Flannery claims we can avoid.

These shortcomings aside, the ideas in Here on Earth are incredibly powerful. From superorganisms, to Gaia, to policy, there remain many paths to a better future for all generations. In one particularly stimulating section, Flannery describes a group of Western Australian researchers and displaced Pintupi hunters returning to the latter’s traditional Aboriginal lands. In eloquent detail, Flannery describes the crestfallen looks of the elders as they assess the utter lack of biodiversity and complete soil erosion decades after their departure—the inevitable outcomes of the abandonment of their sustainable controlled burning practices in favour of modern, “scientifically-sound” methods of environmental management. Without resorting to unnecessary idealisation of non-scientific knowledge, this example is instructive, and shows us that there must be another way besides the status quo.

Joel Krupa graduated in 2010 with an MSc in Environmental Policy from Mansfield College, Oxford.

Peter Atkins
On Being: A scientist’s exploration of the great questions of existence
Oxford University Press, 2011
152 Pages
£10.99
ISBN 978-0199603367

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Arriving at the end of a long decade of tumultuous argument, Peter Atkins’s On Being is a succinct yet superfluous addition to the ever-raging “religion versus science” debate. Appropriately endorsed by fellow atheists Richard Dawkins and Paul Davies, Atkins’s study summarises current scientific wisdom on the grand narrative of existence—from the birth of the universe to the death of the human individual—in order to underline his belief that “the scientific method can shed light on every and any concept”. In the process of making this argument Atkins fiercely condemns the more extreme advocates of a spiritual worldview. In Atkins’s view, for example, the religious creationists’ “interpretation of comprehension is the abnegation of the intellect”, their misrepresentation of facts an “inexcusable evil”.

While Atkins’s eloquent assertions about the power and wonder of science are valid and worthwhile, his approach can be distasteful at times. Perhaps the most salient question to be asked of such a (by now) commonplace diatribe against religion is: who will be on the receiving end of these arguments? By recounting the evidence that introduces scientific insights into various aspects of existence, Atkins aims to remove the necessity for myth and faith. Yet, surely the faithful will be disinclined to purchase the writings of a noted chemist-atheist author; conversions from belief to non-belief seem unlikely to arise out of such an overtly partisan text. Thus, one of the chief problems for the curious and open-minded reader of On Being is likely to be Atkins’s uncompromisingly polemical stance, which is often expressed by way of a certain sardonic sense of humour.

Atkins’s narrative strategy is to pitch bygone myths once used to explain the unfathomable against the science that has since filled this “chasm of ignorance”. The juxtaposition of myth and science is both interesting and entertaining, yet as a fundamental attempt to refute the existence of God, the approach is questionable. Its limitations are particularly apparent in the book’s final chapter, which sees Atkins examine contemporary myths of the apocalypse: “Millennium”, “Tribulation”, “Armageddon”, and “Rapture”. So extreme are these ideas, and so clearly are they the preserve of minority groups, that their discussion is little more than a peripherally relevant attack on an easy target.

Nonetheless, Atkins is undoubtedly thought-provoking, and he writes with authority throughout. On Being summarises the nature of existence in the space of five enlightening chapters, which describe, in turn, the creation of life, evolution, birth, death, and the prospective end of the universe. Each chapter is informative and engaging, balancing scientific detail with anecdotal information, interspersed with a sporadically well-judged deployment of wit. Despite the tiresome tirade on religion, when focusing on science itself, Atkins is an excellent narrator, one who leads us effortlessly through the physics governing the universe and the biology of our own bodies. Indeed, the book contains numerous scientific insights evoked in a lucid, chatty style that illustrates matters of life and death, from conception to the initiation of rigor mortis, with concise clarity. His prose is convincing and highlights the capability of the scientific method. Yet whether the reader will take a “near spiritual joy from a solely material perception of the world”, as Atkins would ideally hope, remains to be seen. A more extensive treatment of the scientific material, which speaks for itself, may have helped him to achieve this goal by gratifying the scientifically curious reader. Instead, the wonderfully described scientific explanations are diluted with dismissive and patronising arguments against religion.

Indeed, the more academic, scientific details in On Being are written in small typeface, allowing them to be “skipped over” by the hasty reader. Yet these are also some of the most illuminating paragraphs in the whole work and integral to Atkins’s defence of the “near-miracle” detail of our scientific understanding. It is difficult to decide whether Atkins is being vaguely patronising to his reader in toning down his own rigorous rationalism, or whether his assertion that such paragraphs can be skipped is a somewhat arch dig at the unthinking assumptions of religious belief (“if you do not want to be bogged down in these minuatiae and can accept without further ado that science has achieved the near-miracle of detailed understanding”). Regardless, these paragraphs deserve close attention; the discussion of human conception is particularly fascinating, describing how our own genetic makeup is duplicated, rearranged, and mixed with our partner’s through a series of unlikely and highly complex events.

The origins and prospective demise of the universe is always a captivating though well-worn topic of pop-scientific discourse, as are evolution and birth. But On Being is surely unique in its stark biological description of death. The unusual chapter on this subject aims to disprove the existence of an afterlife. Atkins succeeds in evoking the bleak reality of death as a simple biological process akin to an apple rotting in the ground. Such descriptions chime with the blurb on the book’s back cover that deems his prose to be “unflinching in the face of uncomfortable truths”. We are all “inescapably destined to decay”, Atkins austerely reminds us. Whilst there is a certain morbid fascination in reading about the biochemical changes that occur in the decaying corpse, the level of detail, for example, with which algor mortis (the cooling of a body following death) is described feels excessive. More broadly, this chapter’s technical description of biological decomposition perhaps misses the point somewhat. Further, Atkins’s brief mention of “the utterly hopeless, those trapped irredeemably in poverty and disease,” looms like a shadow on the edge of his argument. For this group of people, such a blithely rationalist theory of suffering and dying is likely to seem absurdly inadequate. Atkins recognises this, acknowledging the therapeutic role faith may have in this instance, but in doing so, contradicts his own argument against the necessity for religion.

The recurring motif of On Being is the powerful, impassioned assertion of scientific method. Atkins proactively declares at the outset of his book that science can explain “love, hope, and charity” as well the seven deadly sins. Further discussion of current scientific insight into such fascinating aspects of human nature, coupled with a little less time battling religious dogma, would have made for a more convincing argument and a more pleasurable read. Yet, whether or not you are convinced by Atkins’s view that “there is nothing the scientific method cannot illuminate or elucidate”, this book provides a mostly enjoyable and provocative summary of the scientific explanations behind both existence and the development of life on earth. Indeed, with its skilful coverage of some of the most interesting aspects of physics and biology, it is an informative introduction to the scientific worldview. Moreover, as Atkins intends, the reader is forced to question the role of religion in contemporary society. Although this message is already well-established, and the manner in which it is put forward undoubtedly discordant (at a time when the beatification of the late Pope John Paul II for performing miracle cures from beyond the grave is being seriously considered), On Being is perhaps after all a timely if not entirely necessary reminder of the value of scientific evidence. As Atkins poetically remarks concerning humanity’s ongoing scientific endeavours and achievements: “[we] are not merely stardust and the children of chaos, we are the spreaders of light.”

Louise Weston graduated with a DPhil in Clinical Pharmacology from St John’s College, Oxford in 2010. She is now a postdoctoral research associate at The Rockefeller University, New York.

David Eagleman
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
Pantheon Books, 2011
304 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-0307377333

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The problem with popular science writing is also often what makes it popular in the first place: it makes you think you know more than you do. Or rather it makes you think that scientists—and, by extension, that grasping, grand thing we call the sciences—know more than they do.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is, for example, fairly obvious why someone would prefer not to pick up a book about, say, the brain, only to find out how little we know about the brain. There’s no need to dwell on what we don’t know, we say to ourselves, and it’s not relevant to what we do know.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman, in his new book Incognito, certainly says enough about the brain’s inner workings to sustain anyone with the hankering for this kind of knowledge. In Eagleman’s entertaining, only occasionally cloying account, our understanding of this remarkable organ has made enormous progress over the past decades. We have more information than ever about the vast network of competing centers in the brain, from the amygdala to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex—words that, at the very least, make one feel smarter.

We know, roughly speaking, the aspects of thought and behavior for which the brain’s various regions are responsible, and we have a rapidly expanding sense of how minor alterations to any one of them can seriously affect the whole. This influx of knowledge is due, in part, to technological advances. MRI machines are capable of yielding real-time snapshots of brain activity, and a pharmacopoeia of specially tailored drugs is available to modulate brain chemistry. A broader movement in neuroscience is also in play here, one characterized by a resurgent confidence in determining a wholly material basis for the mind’s mysteries.

If this movement has been a boon for brain science, however, it has also shown how little we know about ourselves. What makes Eagleman’s book unique, particularly in the realm of popular science writing, is the attention it gives to this interplay between the knowns and unknowns of neuroscience. He writes first of how our senses are wholly constructed by the wiring of the brain. What seems “real” to us is really the product of an automated system of interconnected neurons, trained to mold whatever sensory input we have at our disposal into a coherent story. Through a smattering of anecdotes, psychological studies, and biological explanations, Eagleman goes on to show how the higher-order aspects of the brain’s activity—consciousness, thinking, feeling, believing—are similarly constructed. The book is a gripping and demystifying assault on the reliability of our senses, the coherence of our impulses, and the agency we ascribe to our decision-making. In this way, Incognito exposes that easily elided paradox of science: the more we learn, the less we know.

These newfound complexities of the brain have profound consequences for our conception of the self. In Eagleman’s view, they dismantle it. The story he tells runs the gamut from the absurd—the tiny tumor, properly positioned, that turns a loving husband into a homicidal maniac—to the countless daily tasks that are accomplished far before “we” are aware of them. But in this telling, the otherwise sad claim of biology—that so much of who we are and how we act is nothing more than a function of grey matter—becomes an occasion for awe. It is awesome for the answers it provides, and for the questions it raises. Eagleman’s openness to the questions—not just the biological ones, but also the philosophical, psychological, and sociological ones—bespeaks a humility essential to such a complex endeavor. As he writes, sampling a well-worn joke, “if our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.”

What we can do (with what little we have) is legislate. If human behavior really is inseparable from biology, how can one justify a system in which blameworthiness is determined by dated laws that presuppose free will, that effectively treat recidivism as a choice to be punished, that divorce rehabilitation from the real burden of brain chemistry? Eagleman, who directs both the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law at the Baylor College of Medicine, closes his book with a convincing case for social policy founded on sound neuroscience. The practical implementation of such a program is, of course, fraught with danger. Biological explanations for crime do not excuse criminals; they also do not justify invasive chemical rehabilitation. They do, however, invite a different way of thinking about human agency, one that might inform the way we punish human agents. We may not be reducible to our biology, but we are certainly tied to it.

Ultimately, the problem of living with other people is the problem of living with ourselves. The brilliant irony is that the brain is both the means and the end of the effort to solve this problem. If Eagleman’s book is any indication, we have far to go in this endeavor, but it is well worth the trip. And we can, along the way, console ourselves with the humbling reality that our brains, grey lumps though they may be, know so much more than we do.

Samuel Bjork is reading for an MPhil at King’s College, Cambridge.

Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and one of the world’s leading string theorists. His first book, The Elegant Universe, introduces general readers to physicists’ quest for a “theory of everything” and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His second, The Fabric of the Cosmos, covers the evolution of our concepts of space and time, and was a New York Times bestseller. In 2008, Greene created the World Science Festival, an annual week-long affair geared toward general audiences which assembles leading authorities from around the world to discuss central issues raised by developments in science and the connections between science and other areas of inquiry and of life.

His new book, The Hidden Reality, explains the many ways in which the concept of parallel universes emerges naturally from current research in theoretical physics, and argues that what we typically conceive of as our own universe may turn out to be a miniscule portion of a much vaster “multiverse”.

Among other things, Greene spoke to the Oxonian Review about parallel worlds, the new atheism, and the relationship between sciences and the humanities. This interview was made possible by St Cross College and the St Cross Science Lecture Series.

In your book, you explain how physicists invoke the idea of a multiverse to explain things that our current theories simply postulate—for example, things like the electron’s mass and charge and the cosmological constant. Do you ever imagine a situation in which we’ll have a theory that won’t make us feel compelled to look for deeper explanations? Assuming that some of the multiverse proposals that you describe in your book are correct, do you think they could finally quell our need to keep asking why questions?

No, I think it’s hard to really imagine in any realistic or semi-realistic sense that we’d come to an understanding that eliminates the capacity to ask further “why” questions. Multiverse or not, whatever proposal is on the table, one can always say, “why those laws, why that approach, why that framework?” Now in the best of all worlds, you can imagine that we come to such a deep understanding that logical consistency alone would dictate a particular scientific physical framework and to deviate from that would be to abandon logic. If we could find a theory that was that tightly constructed and that inevitable in its formulation, then maybe there wouldn’t be any further why questions.

But we’re so far from anything like that that what we’re really talking about here is pretty fanciful.

Do you think that’s even a possibility that logic alone will uniquely dictate a theory?

Well, logic supplemented with some very rudimentary observations. For instance I could imagine that if you demand that the universe have gravity and quantum mechanics, that perhaps those features alone would be enough to dictate a physical framework that embraces them in a logically consistent way. But again, we’re far from that.

Do you feel that you get anything out of writing the books in terms of your own understanding of the material—either in terms of having to consolidate it or explain it in simple language?

Yeah, very much so. My approach to writing these books is a) you’ve got to know the material deeply and b) you then need to be able hone in on those aspects that are really central and be able to carve away the parts that, while important mathematically for detailed research, are not critical for the general reader to fully understand or be aware of. And then [you need to] find a way of framing it that is interesting and accessible to the general reader. I have found that research projects have come out for me from that process, so it does help clarify my own thinking for sure.

A number of leading scientists are deeply religious. Do you think it’s possible to reconcile deeply held metaphysical religious belief in God with established claims of theoretical physics, or do you think that when serious scientists are religious, it’s because they keep their work and their spiritual lives separate?

I think there’s a compatibility as long as your religious sensibility’s not literal. If you try to literally interpret teachings of the Bible you run smack into some pretty significant problems with what we’ve discovered in science. But if you’re willing to view religion more in a Spinozan or even Einsteinian way—that there is an overarching order and harmony that the laws of physics represent and reveal, and that order and harmony, if you want, ascribe it to some deeper theological origin—then I don’t think science has much to say about that. What science is pretty good at ruling out is the so-called “God of the gaps”—the traditional way of invoking God whenever there’s something in science that we haven’t figured out. The problem is, once we figure it out, that particular invocation of God is no longer necessary; it gets pushed to the side. So that’s a recipe for God getting squeezed to the margins. But if you don’t view God as the reservoir of temporary answers to issues we haven’t solved scientifically, but rather as some overarching structure within which science takes place, and if that makes you happy and satisfied, so be it. I don’t see the need for that; others do.

How do you feel about the “new atheism” that’s become prevalent especially in the writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens?

There’s much in it that resonates with me because I personally don’t find the need to invoke religious explanation. On the other hand, as a strategy for spreading a scientific worldview, I don’t know how effective it is. I think those [who are already atheist] can nod their head in agreement. I don’t know how many people are convinced by [Dawkins's and Hitchens's] approach, so that their previous religious perspective no longer is one worthy of attention. I wonder if any studies have been done; I don’t know. My own approach is less confrontational, less antagonistic. Some of that crowd have called me an accommodationist because of that.

Have you spoken to them?

Not directly. I’ve seen unflattering comments here and there. (Smirks.) For instance, at the World Science Festival, we’ve had a program each year called Faith and Science, which some of that community have questioned: does that belong in a science festival? My view is absolutely. A science festival is a wonderful environment in which the long reach of science…can be described and exposed and discussed and made exciting. And a good fraction of the world’s population does have a religious perspective, so to have a conversation about how science reaches into some of the issues that others have long thought were solely the purview of religion, I think that’s a good conversation to have.

Do you see a division or antagonism between the cultures of the sciences and humanities?

I see a division between the two cultures insofar as society has willfully allowed people to be okay about not knowing science, but has not allowed them to be okay about not knowing humanities and art. I think that is one of the major barriers that we need to tear down in order that science take its rightful place in the culture alongside music, art, theatre, dance, literature as something that you cannot dispense with [if you want to] consider yourself educated [and] engaged in the world conversation. And slowly, I think, that will happen.

When Larry Summers made his remarks about women in science, what was your feeling about the remarks themselves and also about the academic community’s reaction to them?

It’s not one of those things I followed in great detail…But extracting away from what he did or did not say or what he did or did not mean, the notion that women are not well-equipped to succeed in science is one that’s clearly false and certainly got him into hot water. Regardless of what he meant, that was how it was interpreted. I think that our charge in the scientific community is to open the field up more broadly so that there are more role models in science for women and for minorities, because that ultimately is what gets the young kids excited. You see someone like yourself succeeding in cosmology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and that fires you up to try to follow in their footsteps.

Science and especially physics seems to suggest a view of the world in which reality is reducible to mathematical laws. Scholars outside the sciences are more likely to be hostile to the view that everything, including human experience, can be reduced to something so coldly mechanistic. Do you see any potential for reconciliation between these two points of view?

I would say it’s more than arts or humanities. I would say there’s a more general tendency to find larger purpose or meaning that, when reality’s reduced to laws and particles and equations, feels somehow devoid of meaning. My view is that there’s a barebones reality within which we exist and we tell ourselves stories and we build ourselves narratives to try to inject meaning on top of it, but ultimately that’s a human undertaking—a valuable one, an important one, but not one that I think the universe comes equipped with from the get go.

Josh Rosaler is reading for a DPhil in Philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford. Josh is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Brian Greene
The Hidden Reality
Allen Lane, 2011
384 Pages
£25.00
ISBN 978-0713999785

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Einstein once famously wrote that the whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. This can seem like false modesty or wishful thinking on Einstein’s part when one considers some of the outlandish ideas that have come to populate the conceptual landscape of theoretical physics during the 20th and early 21st centuries. Indeed, the central thesis of Brian Greene’s new book, that our universe may be just one among many parallel universes in a much grander “multiverse”, seems about as remote from everyday thinking as one can possibly get. Yet, with a slew of clever analogies, Greene communicates with uncommon clarity, intuition, and honesty the essential elements of the reasoning that has carried researchers over the centuries from the realm of everyday experience to the most obscure corners of reality—and, for the fact that he does not invoke a single line of mathematics in the whole text, with impressive faithfulness to many of the original ideas.

There are two central and recurring philosophical themes throughout The Hidden Reality. The first is what Greene calls the Copernican Pattern, the idea that successive developments in science have displaced humanity progressively farther from the central position that we thought we occupied before Copernicus first proposed that the sun and not the Earth lay at the center of the universe. To Greene, the possibility that our universe is one among an infinite number may turn out to be the culmination of this progression. He writes “Some people recoil at the notion of parallel worlds; as they see it, if we are part of a multiverse, our place and importance in the cosmos are marginalized. My take is different…For me, it is the depth of our understanding, acquired from our lonely vantage point in the inky black stillness of a cold and forbidding cosmos, that reverberates across the expanse of reality and marks our arrival.”

Yet others recoil at the notion of parallel worlds because the idea simply sounds too strange or extravagant to be believable, and more like science fiction than science. To which Greene responds with the second refrain of The Hidden Reality: take the math seriously. In this book, as in his two previous best-selling popular physics books, Greene repeatedly emphasizes the power of mathematics to extend the reach of our knowledge into extremely remote realms of existence that are as yet inaccessible to experimental observation. Often, he suggests, our only foothold into understanding what goes on far beneath the scale of the atom or well beyond our cosmic horizon comes from the assumption that nature is governed by a unified set of laws. Over the history of physics, the search for unification, particularly in the mathematical formulation of physical theories, has proven remarkably successful, often sending theory leaps and bounds ahead of experiment. And, as Greene is often at pains to bring home, if we take the math of many of our current best physical theories seriously, we are lead naturally to the idea that what we conventionally conceive of as our universe is in fact a miniscule speck in an inconceivably vast expanse.

The proliferation of parallel universes that Greene describes begins with the simplest. Greene asks us to consider the possibility that space is infinite—whether it in fact is turns out still to be an open question. What we would be forced to conclude in such a case, given that there is only a finite number of ways in which matter can arrange itself (because of the fundamental discreteness imposed by quantum mechanics), and given the infinite expanse in which it can do this, is that if you travel out far enough, you’ll find places where their arrangement of matter, and therefore everything of physical interest, is identical in every respect. The infinite set of copies of our world which tile the endless expanse of space is what Greene calls the “Quilted multiverse”.

The second kind of parallel universe, called the “inflationary multiverse”, arises from a careful analysis of the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It has long been known that these equations in their original form imply that the universe is expanding, suggesting that it began at a single point in an event now known as the Big Bang. But astronomical data strongly implies that this expansion occurred at speeds different from those predicted by Einstein’s original equations; when these equations are tweaked to accommodate these results by incorporating varying concentrations of “dark energy” at different points in space, the result is not only that space is expanding, but that some parts of it are expanding much faster than others. In this case, our universe emerges as only one among many bubbles of relatively slow expansion which are separated by regions of ultra-fast, “inflationary” expansion.

Another possible source of parallel universes is string theory’s “brane world scenario”. According to string theory, all the fundamental constituents of matter, as well as the particles that govern their interactions, consist of vibrating filaments of string whose patterns of vibration give rise to different properties such as mass and electric charge. These strings propagate in a space-time with as many as 11 dimensions—times, the three familiar dimensions of space, and seven extra spatial dimensions that we can’t directly see. It is now widely believed that string theory not only requires the existence of one-dimensional objects (strings), but also of higher dimensional generalizations of strings called “branes” (short for “membrane”). Certain string theorists have speculated that the three dimensional space in which we live may actually be one such brane—a “three brane” since it has three spatial dimensions—and that there are many such three branes existing in parallel in a “Brane Multiverse”, separated from one another like stacked slices of bread along the extra spatial dimensions allowed by string theory. Moreover, the possibility that we are on one of many three branes raises the further possibility that two three-branes may collide, wiping out whatever structures may have formed in either of the branes’ universes and resetting the clock on each back to zero. Calculations have suggested that in such a scenario, branes will tend to collide periodically, causing the brane universes to come in and out of existence over time, and bringing about the fourth type of multiverse—in which the different universes are parallel in time rather than in space—known as the “Cyclic Multiverse”.

Greene’s fifth multiverse scenario, also suggested by string theory, is known as the Landscape Multiverse, and arises from attempts to explain the value of Einstein’s famous cosmological constant, which is crucial to understanding why space is expanding at the rate revealed by cosmological data. One well-known proposal that has featured centrally in string theory research is that the theory’s extra spatial dimensions are tightly curled up so that we can’t see them—much in the way a string’s circular width,  if sufficiently small, becomes invisible from afar, causing the string to appear one-dimensional. It is widely believed that if these extra dimensions exist, then they probably take a special shape described by something known as a Calabi-Yau manifold (analogous to the extra circular dimension of the string, but more complicated). However, as it happens, there exist somewhere in the neighborhood 10^500 Calabi-Yau manifolds describing the possible shapes of these curled-up dimensions. Theorists believe that different shapes for the extra dimensions give rise to different values for this constant, of which there are only a relatively puny 10^124 possible theoretical values, and that somewhere among the 10^500 Calabi-Yaus there is almost certainly a set that produces the cosmological constant value for our universe. A number of theorists have suggested that when string theory is combined with the inflationary multiverse, the different possible Calabi-Yau shapes, and therefore the different possible values of the cosmological constant, will be distributed across each of the bubble universes that arise from inflation. Our universe emerges as just one among the vast collection of bubble universes, but one that has the particular value for the cosmological constant that we happen to measure.

Greene’s next variety of multiverse comes from a relatively commonplace domain of quantum mechanics (“relatively” being the operative word here). This quantum multiverse emerges from one attempt to make sense of the math of quantum theory, which says, for example, that a fundamental particle like an electron does not generally have a definite location, but exists only in an indeterminate but mathematically precise haze of being in multiple locations at once. The conceptual problems with this description become especially acute when these laws are extrapolated to macroscopic scales of everyday objects; when taken literally, the basic equation of quantum mechanics requires that when you look to see whether a particle like an electron is here or there, the indeterminacy in its location propagates up to the macroscopic scale, yielding a copy of you who sees the electron in one place and another copy who sees it somewhere else. The quantum multiverse is thus one in which multiple universes can emerge during the process of measurement: in this case, one universe in which you find the electron over here and one in which you find it over there.

The final species of parallel universe emerging from contemporary theoretical physics research is what Greene calls holographic parallel universes. A revolutionary result in string theory known as the AdS/CFT correspondence suggests that if the occurrences that we observe are accurately accounted for by string theory, then they are mirrored, and in some sense generated, by events transpiring on the inner boundary of our spatial region.

In the midst of reviewing the plethora of possible parallel worlds suggested by the progress of theoretical physics, Greene is diligent in speaking to concerns that parallel universe theories engage in a particularly cheap kind of explanation—our universe is the way it is only because, as it happens, reality scans every possible universe including ours—and for this reason seem less like science than and more like mathematical onanism. While Greene himself reserves firm support for any of the multiverse proposals he covers, what he does suggest is that if we take the mathematics of our best theories seriously, as history suggests we ought to, then theories with parallel universes emerge naturally as the simplest account of what we see, and are in many cases harder to avoid than they are to embrace. In this particular case, less, it seems, may not be more.

Josh Rosaler is reading for a DPhil in Philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford. Josh is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Philip Ball
Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People
Bodley Head, 2011
384 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1847921529

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In Unnatural, Philip Ball considers the cultural history of anthropoeia, “people making”, exploring how mythology—from alchemical formulae for creating homunculi (little people) to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—inform and reflect attitudes toward unnatural life. Ball detects in these myths either suspicion, distrust, or disapproval of artificial life, concluding that the mythology of anthropoeia has prejudiced the modern mind into initially mistrusting scientific interventions in the creation of life, such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF), cloning, and gene manipulation. On Thursday, 24 February, Ball spoke at Blackwell’s in Oxford about how the mythology of anthropoeia negatively shapes our perception of the “unnatural”, and argued that the science of anthropoeia should be judged on its own terms.

Your book treats the conceptualisation of the natural and unnatural through the history of Western mythology, and makes the point that artificial life is often stigmatized as “unnatural”. Considering that contemporary advances in the artificial creation of life, such as IVF, often blur the boundary between what is natural and unnatural, is there a value anymore in distinguishing between the two terms?

I think there are two ways that you can make that distinction. One distinction made generally by scientists is to talk about things that are natural and artificial, and even in science that is not an easy distinction to make. It’s not clear where the dividing lines are. We have plenty of examples of things, including organisms, that are part natural and part made by some kind of technological intervention. But that distinction is different from the one between natural and unnatural. My contention in the book is that to call something unnatural is not to say that it is unnatural because it’s not made by nature; it is to say that it is supposed to be condemned, disapproved of. It is a moral judgment.

There is a linguist’s discussion that this prefix “un” has that [negative] connotation. It’s really inviting you to disapprove, to feel uneasy about something. And I think that distinction has never really had any basis in science. I think ultimately it is a theological distinction. And while I think people are inevitably going to keep using those terms, I want to make it explicit that, when we call something unnatural, that’s what’s really going on in our minds.

You argue that we invoke myths of anthropoeia to express our anxieties about scientific attempts to manipulate the processes of life creation. Of course, these myths were not originally intended to serve as critiques of IVF or cloning, so what was their original purpose?

Although [Westerners before the late 20th century] did not have the technological means to create life, that does not mean they did not believe it was possible. Quite the opposite, the myths show [that belief in artificial life existed]: there are stories of artificial statues or beings created by alchemical means, etc. Those debates were still going on.

The question is what myths were for and what they are for. What they are not for is some kind of prognosis of what’s going to happen in the future. That’s the problem. Myths are often seen as “this is where things are inevitably going to lead; things are inevitably going to go badly.” Myths are much more about our fears of what happens in the everyday, mundane sense. So the myths about monstrosities or monstrous births are fears about the possibility of that happening anyway in natural conception…Myths are about what’s going on in the human mind: our nightmares, our worries.

Are myths about anthropoeia purely an expression of our anxieties? Do they serve a didactic purpose?

There is certainly an argument that they may be a codification of taboos. You might say that about incest in Oedipus. But it seems to me that a lot of those taboos don’t need to be shored up by myth. Myths are about fears…Their main purpose is not to persuade us to do something or not to do something. It isn’t to persuade us how we should live; it’s a deeper exploration of what’s going on in the human psyche: our fears and our hopes and our dreams.

Can we learn anything from myths that could positively shape debate over anthropoeia?

It’s not clear to me that there’s any deep wisdom in myths that will help us find our way through the ethical dilemmas we’re confronted with. There are things in myths that are relevant and well worth listening to, but they’re not going to tell us what to do about stem cell research…But it seems to me that we have to confront these technologies regarding the real possibilities that they raise for better or worse, rather than the imaginary ones that no scientist is interested in doing or would contemplate…

It’s striking that in Brave New World, and many dystopian tales of [anthropoeic] technologies, the dystopia is already imposed. It’s already there and already something that’s happened to society that condones [for example] the rearing of children by the state without access to their genetic parents. The implication is that these technologies will lead to that, but the stories already have those totalitarian dystopias in place, and the technologies are injected into them. Sometimes we get it the wrong way around. We use Brave New World as a stick to beat these new technologies…There is no argument in Brave New World for why exogenesis would lead to that kind of state. That’s something that state decided it would do.

How do we go about legislating limitations on the research or practice of artificial life creation? Do we first create an ethical framework to inform legislation, or do we first consider other factors, like utility?

I’m wary about using any ethical framework for answering these questions. We’d find that, once the technology has moved on, the ethical framework has dissolved…We don’t have the ethical tools, the ethical scope, to know how to think about these things clearly yet. They are very difficult questions, and I don’t think the ethical apparatus that has served us so far will deal with them, so I’m very much in favour of dealing with them on a case-by-case basis.

I [favour] using the process in law called casuistry, by which you accept that sometimes new evidence comes along so that you have to change your practice…To a lot of people that feels very unsafe, and they invoke slippery slope arguments: unless you draw the line somewhere it’s going to end up here or there. We have reason to believe that that doesn’t happen at all. In the UK, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority was able to draw up very sensible guidelines for where we are so far that were in some ways quite liberal, allowing a lot of research to happen, but at the same time were cautious…Some scientists found them restricting, which is probably a good thing. It’s a good sign if scientists find them a bit too restricting. So I see no reason why that can’t be done on a case-by-case basis rather than by grand ethical schemes that will collapse when the technology moves on.

William Kolkey is reading for a  DPhil in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxonian Review.

*Philip Ball spoke in a speaker series organised by Blackwell’s Books at Oxford. Future events are as follows:

Sunday 6th March, 6pm – 7.30pm

Apostolos Doxiadis: “Quest Myths: From Numbers to Stories”
Blackwell Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford. Please telephone 01865 333623.
Tickets are £2 and are available from the Customer Service Department, Blackwell’s Bookshop.

We are thrilled to announce an event with Apostolos Doxiadis taking place on Sunday 6th March from 6pm to 7.30pm. In his talk entitled “Modern Quest Myths: From Numbers to Stories”, Apostolos Doxiadis will speak about his books Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture and Logicomix, as an introduction to a discussion about their theme and forms.

Tuesday 8th March, 4.30pm
Deborah Harkness: “A Discovery of Witches”
Exclusive talk and walking tour – please note, places are limited
Blackwell Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford. Tickets: £5

Join Deborah Harkness author of the highly anticipated debut novel, “A Discovery of Witches” on a magical tour of Oxford. Starting at Blackwell’s bookshop, you will have the opportunity to chat with the author in Caffe Nero, enjoying a tea or coffee included in the ticket price. Hear about how Blackwell’s itself appears in the novel before moving onwards to visit other locations in Oxford, learning about the history of the famous locations alongside the author’s own experiences and reference points within the novel.

Thursday 17th March at 7pm
Sara Paretsky
Blackwell Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford. Tickets: £2

Internationally bestselling author Sara Paretsky will be with us on Thursday 17th March at 7pm to talk about her latest book, Body Work. Sara Paretsky’s critically acclaimed V. I. Warshawski series has revolutionised female characterisation in mystery writing since 1982. Body Work is the fourteenth outing in the series.

Elisabeth Tova Bailey
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
Green Books, 2010
208 Pages
£12.95
ISBN 978-1900322911

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Can written words make noise? How is it that some sentences scream at the top of their syntactic lungs while others barely whisper as they gingerly approach a full stop? Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is not only a supremely quiet book: its clean, careful prose transports the reader to a serene universe where words act as librarians, gently shushing away the nagging anxieties of our own everyday lives.

As Bailey lies convalescing in her sunlit sickroom, the tiny grinding teeth of a munching mollusc become a reason to get up in the morning. This amiable woodland snail arrives with a visiting friend one day, and after a brief getting-to-know-you period, Bailey announces that “there was no doubt about the relationship: the snail and I were officially cohabiting”. As she watches the minute daily routine of the snail, and begins to learn of its many idiosyncrasies, Bailey forms a strange and poetic attachment that renders her devastating condition a little more endurable.

Bailey’s quirky volume fits loosely within a contemporary canon of “sickness memoirs”, the popularity of which relies on a vaguely masochistic readership driven by a mixture of curiosity, sympathy and the urge to cry while reading a book. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating thankfully refrains from the generic inclination toward angst and sentimentality and instead employs an essayistic style reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill”. In this 1926 mini-treatise, Woolf describes the many virtues of having absolutely nothing to do.

Ordinarily to look at the sky for any length of time is impossible. Pedestrians would be impeded and disconcerted by a public sky-gazer. What snatches we get of it are mutilated by chimneys and churches…Now, become as the leaf or daisy, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered…This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it!…Some one should write to The Times about it.

Such thoughts mirror Bailey’s own philosophy on the unsung lives of snails – her scientific-literary hybrid embodying Woolf’s parodic notion of a public letter to The Times. Bailey, like Woolf, is interested in the temporal fissure between the sick and those Woolf cynically calls “the army of the upright”. Bailey muses,

My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose.

These sharply observed digressions remind us that Bailey’s celebration of nature is, at its core, a way of coming to terms with mortality.

The concise chapters open with epigraphs quoting snail-related utterances, both poetic and scientific. These frequent appendages sometimes feel cumbersome and superfluous, as if Bailey is reluctant to trust her own wonderfully lucid voice. On the other hand, the haikus by Kobayashi Issa cleverly encapsulate the economical style of both the humble woodland snail and Bailey’s sparing prose.

the snail gets up
and goes to bed
with very little fuss

Bailey’s book is like a snail’s shell, with an unexpectedly touching friendship lying at its centre. Spiralling outwards are meditations on time, purpose and purposelessness, evolution and human survival.

Kate Steinweg is reading for an MSt in English at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Richard Watson is a writer and consultant, who specialises in scenario-planning and the analysis of trends. On 27 January, Watson spoke at Blackwell’s in Oxford about his newest book Future Minds: How the Digital Age is Changing our Minds, Why this Matters, and What We Can Do about It (2010). Future Minds expresses concern about the pernicious effects of technology on the brain, arguing that the Internet and contemporary multimedia impair the ability to think deeply and creatively. The book enters an ongoing discussion about the Internet’s influence on cognitive ability (see articles by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal), but is unique in its focus on ways to curb our addiction to technology. He spoke to the Oxonian Review about the relative rate of contemporary innovation and the relationship between technology and education. For more about Richard Watson, visit What’s Next and Future Files & Future Minds.

You argue that technology can impair the development of important skill sets, namely the ability to think deeply and creatively.

That’s really my focus. What are these technologies doing to our thinking? But we’ve got to be careful because obviously there are different types of technology and equally there are different types of thinking. And I think [technology] is enhancing different types of thinking but it is eroding others.

Should recourse to technology in the classroom be limited?

I think it should. I need more time to think about how that works…But I think fundamentally we need to ask: What kind of thinking are we after? What kind of technology best supports that? I would regard pencils and papers and books as much a technology as a blackboard. So we need to think very hard about what we’re trying to achieve and what are the best tools for the job…There should be periods when technology is switched off. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you are trying to cram information, then by all means use a computer, use a whiteboard. But if you’re trying to do more than that, to understand context—for instance, what was the Battle of Britain and why did it happen?—then I think that needs physical interaction.

You criticise the current emphasis that schools place on quantitative analysis. Do we change the curriculum to give more emphasise to the humanities?

Yes, and this isn’t particularly my view. It is Ken Robinson’s more than anyone else’s. But I think we are only educating one half of our brain: the left logical side…The education system is still producing the same type of person and the world has changed. Bear in mind if you’re 5 years old and starting education, the world when you graduate is going to be an incredibly different place. It seems to me we’re training people for the wrong skills… The thing that has real value is the ability to relate to other people physically and emotionally. We talk about the information economy ad nauseam but we don’t really educate for it, and so creativity is sort of relegated…It’s not a real subject. The real subjects are like law and medicine. But these other things have equal weight…Essentially the education system is set up to say there’s a right answer for everything. Learn it; go and apply it. That’s true if you’re an engineer, and for a lot of scientists, there is one answer. But in a lot of areas, there isn’t. There are lots of different answers…We essentially teach convergent thinking: there’s one right answer. And actually, if you want a culture of innovation, you need to encourage divergent thinking.

In the United States there’s a big scare that the Chinese are out-educating Americans in the maths and sciences. Do you think these fears are missing the point?

Someone sent me an e-mail last night and it’s got a great slogan. They’ve got this campaign called “No right brain left behind”. It’s fabulous; I love that. I read a statistic recently. It said that 90% of PhDs in science and engineering reside in Asia…The issues in America are healthcare, obviously, but also education. The same is true in Britain. We are falling behind…We just don’t know what’s about to hit us. The Chinese take education so seriously. There are certain subjects you can’t teach unless you have a certain grade in that subject. Here, you can fail maths four times and eventually pass and then teach maths. You could not do that in China.

The interesting thing about China [and a few other countries] is that they’ve got a model that’s all about the production of low-cost stuff. The challenge now is to move up the value chain; they’ve got to start not just producing this stuff. They’ve got to start inventing. Now to what extent can they do that? To what extent is Silicon Valley dependent on the American Dream and that political system of freedom, etc.? Some people say you can’t have an innovation economy without freedom, but those people were probably also saying you can’t have capitalism without democracy, and the Chinese have proved that completely wrong. My feeling is that there are issues [correlating] serious innovation and creativity and originality. Unless you have openness and freedom, [innovation] could be quite constrained. I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal stuff from McKinsey. When they hire Indian and particularly Chinese graduates, there is a sort of groupthink going on there. They’re not going to challenge the teacher in a different direction. And for serious innovation you need that disruptive element; you need the wise ass. And maybe the Chinese system isn’t creating that, but maybe I don’t know enough about it.

In your talk, you said that Alvin Toffler was 30 years ahead of his time. You also invoked phrases of another mid-century analyst of technological change, Marshall McLuhan, such as “the global village” and “the medium is the message”. To me this suggests that Toffler wasn’t ahead of his time at all, but rather these technological changes have always been with us, and I wonder whether this is merely a change in pace?

There’s a quote I use from William Gibson: “The Future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.” Change always comes from the fringe…If you want to see the future, there are certain places you can go and you’ll get it. The history of prediction is appalling. It’s not that they’re wrong; it’s that their timing stinks. They are too optimistic about how quickly change is going to happen. There’s an argument that says change is accelerating; that it’s happening quicker than it used to. A lot of people are [predicting] what’s going to happen in the future, and [their predictions] are probably a decade off. There’s also the classic mistake of saying x will replace y. It’s a sort of binary argument. And actually it’s not like that. [For example] physical newspapers will not die. They may be an exception rather than the rule, and the same with books. There are going to be multiple futures and you can buy into the future you want.

With Toffler, that’s what’s been the case. There’s a really good book called Future Hype, written by an American computer scientist, who tries to put the predictions of technology into some kind of a historical context, and it’s really interesting looking at what people say now versus what they said 100 years ago. To some extent, I think his argument is that compared to the level of change we talk about now, there was actually more change during the Industrial Revolution. It was far more rapid, far more impactful. In a sense, there’s no reason to be anxious—it’s all nothing.

You encourage people to occasionally isolate themselves from technology and offer advice for how to do this: experiencing the outdoors, turning off mobile phones whilst on vacation, etc. But how optimistic are you that people will voluntarily remove technology from their lives?

[Technology] is a bit like drugs, cocaine, and alcohol. It’s rather satisfying if you are involved in social networks; [they] make you feel in control and important…A study was done on cell phone use, and [the researchers] withdrew the cell phone and a few other things, and the physical and emotional symptoms were exactly the same as going cold turkey from serious drug addiction. I don’t think we’re going to acknowledge this as a problem for 5 to 10 years minimum. I then think it will be acknowledged. South Korea and America are the only countries that have Internet addiction clinics at the moment. I think it will become more common 15 to 20 years down the line. Even so, most people will deny that they have a problem.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review. William Kolkey is reading for a DPhil in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxonian Review.

Marilynne Robinson
Absence of Mind
Yale UP, 2010
176 Pages
£18.00
ISBN 978-0300145182

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On 13 September 1848, among the rocks where the new train line was to run outside of the small town of Cavendish, Vermont, there was a sudden explosion, probably caused by poorly prepared dynamite, which blasted a tamping iron through the left eye and top of the head of the popular foreman Phineas Gage. Within minutes, and much to the amazement of the gathering throng of townspeople about him, it appeared he had not only survived, but was remarkably unperturbed. As time went on, however, it became clear that he was a much changed man, subject to fits of almost bestial rage and outbursts of wild profanity, the fundamentals of his whole personality totally altered.

This now long-gone story from a rapidly expanding America interests Marilynne Robinson in Absence of Mind, not so much for its contents, as for how it has been utilised by contemporary neo-Darwinian thinkers such as E.O. Wilson, Stephen Pinker, Michael Gazzaniga, and Antonio Damasio. Surveying their work, she notices how each of them allegorise the story, turning it into a fable of selfhood, seeing in the story proof that personality can be located in an exact place within the brain, thus destroying the quaint notion of a mind/body dualism. For Robinson these accounts are wildly misleading, as “there is no sense at all that he [Phineas] was a human being who thought and felt, a man with a singular and terrible fate.” This dual demand for a reincorporation of context alongside an intense reverence for the self is typical of Absence of Mind as a whole, and provides the argumentative scaffolding that supports the book. Bravely and with immense intellectual clarity and precision, Robinson attacks those discourses which she sees as undermining the uniqueness and provenance of the human mind. What emerges is a triumph for traditional humanism and a provoking challenge to modern scholars to generate a critical language meaningful and rich enough to represent the strange paradoxes of the self. Stunning both in the range of its references and the generosity of its thinking, Absence of Mind represents another brilliant addition to the canon of one of today’s most important writers.

And what a strange and beguiling canon it is. Housekeeping (1980), a frontier novel of longing and loss, first introduced her lambent and aqueous prose, her combination of metaphoric, symbolic depth with sensuous and direct descriptive presence. Then nothing happened, until Mother Country (1989), the oddity among oddities, an indictment of Thatcherite social policy and nuclear power. Another gap followed until The Death of Adam (1998), again a non-fiction book, which explored the legacy of Calvinism and roundly denounced Darwinism and cloddish modern atheism. It was with much general surprise that she finally returned to fiction with the Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead (2004), a novel so delicate that it was easy to imagine she required every one of those 24 years after Housekeeping to compose it, before producing its sequel Home (2008).

It is Gilead that Absence of Mind most resembles, forming a polemical counterpoint to Gilead’s easy erudition and emotional intimacy. Gilead, a book-length letter written by a dying Iowan pastor to his son examines the meaninglessness of contemporary attacks on metaphysics, and asserts the essentially mystical and transcendent reality of the everyday. Absence of Mind, originally delivered as part of the Terry lecture series at Yale (a series that has included, among others, Paul Tillich, John Dewey, and Carl Jung) explores the philosophical roots of such concerns.

Robinson’s primary focus in the book is on what she terms parascience, a tradition that she suggests involves a diverse range of thinkers from Charles Darwin to Herbert Spencer to Sigmund Freud to Richard Dawkins and the aforementioned neo-Darwinists. Although acknowledging the ostensible difference in focus, ideology, and thought of the above writers (and others like them), she posits a unifying methodology that underpins their discourses. Surveying the field she notes how a parascientific work “using the science of its moment” goes from an account of the “genesis of human nature in primordial life to a set of general conclusions about what our nature is and must be, together with the ethical, political, economic and/or philosophic implications to be drawn from these conclusions”. Though notionally empiricist in focus, parascientific works undermine their own claims on truth by extracting and positing unjustified value judgements. This might include the non-existence of God, the essentially base and bestial selfishness of humanity, or the absolutely quantitative and knowable nature of all existence. Yet, Robinson suggests, the most egregious epistemological crime that these works commit is in their dismissal of a rich, volitional, and essentially free construction of the self. What unites them is that they believe it to be a “persisting illusion” that “we reason and learn and choose as individuals in response to our circumstances and capacities”. The risk is that Robinson, in so eloquently deconstructing the foundational precepts and unspoken assumptions of such a wide range of works, reinscribes exactly the same sort of totalising and generalising tendency of parascience itself. Can such a wide range of thinkers in so many different disciplines be adequately placed beneath such a methodologically strict umbrella?

Whatever the answer, it is precisely the grand, over-arching ambition of the work that is to be admired, as well as the scope of its interests and the magnitude of the conclusions. As the work progresses it becomes clear that the focus is less the parascientific than the entirety of modern thought and the meaningfulness of the claims it makes. Robinson is effortlessly able to construct a grand and absolutely convincing historical schema of epistemology that abrogates modern intellectual arrogance. Modern discourse is characterized for her by a temporal schism, verging on the apocalyptic, that converts all past thought into a morass of superstition and illusion. She identifies how time and time again modern thinkers invoke “the crossing of the threshold” which “asserts that the world of thought, recently or in an identifiable moment in the near past, has undergone epochal change”. This gives them the unjustified “right to characterize the past and establish the terms in which discourse will be conducted from this point forward”. This might sound reactionary, coming with the implication that “the old ways were best” as well as being deeply sceptical of any notion of progress. The reality is more nuanced. What she is demanding is a more delicate approach to the way in which we conceive of history. Instead of ironising, smirking, and dismissing, Robinson argues that we should first emphasise context and then intellectual sources. She dismisses the notion that any idea can form “in a weatherless vacuum of some kind, in the pure light of perspicuous intellect”, which inevitably is to exclude what she terms the “testimonies of culture and history”. A tension does arise here—if Robinson emphasises context and sources as the key elements of her historiography, is there the implication that the rich self she emphasises again and again is rendered passive to the pressing presence of culture (in other words is fundamentally determined by elements exterior to it)? If not, is the self she believes in exactly the type of “perspicuous intellect” she dismisses elsewhere, unconditionally freed from the culture it inhabits?

The word “testimony” provides a way of uniting these two disparate strands. Through reincorporating and re-emphasising the presence of thousands and millions of thinking selves in the past, a more accurate, sensitive, as well as radically disintegrative method of thinking about our forebears can emerge. There is “richer data to be gleaned from every age and every culture, and from every moment of introspection” she suggests. Robinson’s urges, then, do run counter to current critical trends in cultural theory, which tend to render the self absolutely passive to larger and only subconsciously felt historical (and often linguistic) forces which aggressively construct and mediate all discourse. Not only can the self be the locus of cultural creation, the volitional and originary site of what we call history, but even if it is not, it has the power to respond actively to and shape the culture in which it finds itself. A complex historical loop is generated with the self creating culture, the culture modifying the self, and the self responding again in turn ad infinitum. The important point is that the mind is somehow reincorporated into discourse.

The implicit question then posed is how to write and create this type of highly individualised history. How can critics, looking back over a vast abyss of long-dead years, reconnect with the living consciousnesses that necessarily generated all that we know and think? How can we construct the historical Ouija board that will let us hear their voices? Robinson gives neither any answers, nor any practical advice, but the force of the rhetoric and the beauty of the sentiments ought to inspire the next generation of thinkers to attempt, at the very least, to recover an “imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are”.

Ed Sugden is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Linacre College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.