A Generall Historie of Plantes should probably be a large book.
The “rewiring of childhood” and the parents who are enabling it — even when they know they really shouldn’t.
ignorance, vincible and invincible
[Jonathan Haidt:] ‘TikTok and Twitter are incredibly dangerous for our democracy. I’d say they’re incompatible with the kind of liberal democracy that we’ve developed over the last few hundred years.’ He’s quite emphatic about all of this, almost evangelical. Which makes me think of his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, in which he argued about the danger of getting too caught up in your own bubble, believing your own spin. Might he be guilty of that here? Might it just be the case, I ask, that there’s less of a stigma around mental health now, so teenagers are far more likely to admit that they have problems?
‘But why is it, then, that right around 2013 all these girls suddenly start checking into psychiatric inpatient units? Or suicide – they’re making many more suicide attempts. The level of self-harm goes up by 200 or 300 per cent, especially for the younger girls aged ten to 14. So no, the idea that it’s just a change in self-report doesn’t hold any water because we see very much the same curves, at the same time, for behaviour. Suicide, certainly, is not a self-report variable. This is real. This is the biggest mental health crisis in all of known history for kids.’
People are absolutely desperate to believe that this isn’t true, but as Jean M. Twenge shows, the alternative explanations are getting less defensible by the day.
One oddity of this: People used to worry desperately about boys being immersed in gaming, but it turns out that gaming is not as bad for young minds as social media, and therefore boys are not being as thoroughly traumatized as girls. The smartphone era is bad for boys, but it’s nightmarish for girls.
My guess is that parents who continue to provide smartphones for their kids are, epistemically speaking, indistinguishable from those who declare that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. They cannot now back down; they have made themselves invincibly ignorant. Their sunk costs are just too great for them to consider evidence. They’ll keep doing what they’re doing, no matter the suffering their children undergo.
Now, these people are not invincibly ignorant in the proper sense of that term: The truly invincibly ignorant are not culpable because they cannot remedy their ignorance. I am using, and perhaps abusing, the term by employing it to describe parents for whom the admission of tragic error is psychologically impossible.
It’s noteworthy, I think, that in his current and forthcoming work Haidt links the smartphone plague with helicopter parenting: the very same parents who fret ceaselessly about their children’s safety, and prevent them from achieving independence, also put those kids in the way of certain dangers by tethering them to social media. Worse and worse!
But: Lenore Skenazy, of Free Range Kids fame/notoreity/infamy, writes on Haidt’s Substack about a new study demonstrating … well, you can put it two different ways. You can say that while parents accept that their kids need to be more independent, their actions don’t reflect that acceptance: they just keep on helicoptering and snowplowing. But today I choose to put the point more hopefully: Though most of them cannot yet break themselves of what they know to be very bad habits — they can’t summon the courage to take away their kids’ smartphones or let them walk to the local library by themselves — at least they know these habits are bad. Which is the necessary first step, after all. Maybe if I meditate on that I’ll become less despairing.
P.S. On the other hand, I’m reading stories about how A.I. + social media = guys using their phones to make deepfake porn videos featuring their female classmates, so maybe parents who don’t take their kids’ smartphones and smash them to pieces should be sent to prison for, like, fifty years.
Malcolm Gladwell thinks the disposable diaper is a “perfect innovation.” Maybe he should think again. Best essay about diapers I’ve ever read.
Mann's Joseph: 2
Joseph, unlike his ancestors, delights in the gods of the gentes: he knows their names and attributes. He thinks about them, he plays in his mind with those names and attributes; he can’t help himself. When Jacob comes upon his son in nude contemplation he thinks Joseph is “blowing kisses to the stars,” which the lad denies, but in a flood of verbiage — he is an incessant chatterbox and will one day pay mightily for it — that takes him right back into danger. He soon finds himself describing the worship of the Mesopotamian moon-god Sin, whose “day of festive contemplation,” Shapattu, is coming soon, and recalls that the moon does not shine on its own, no, we know that “He made it to shine” and —
“Who?” Jacob asked softly. “Who made it shine?”
“Marduk-Baal!” Joseph cried all too hastily, but followed this at once with a long, drawn-out “Aeh-h-h-h,” shaking his head to undo it, and now continued, “… as He is called in the old tales. It is, however — as my dear papa has no need to learn from his poor child — the Lord of the gods, who is stronger than all the Annunaki and Baals of other nations, the god of Abraham, who defeated the dragon and created the threefold world.” (76)
Joseph is this, if not consciously and intentionally polytheistic, imaginatively so; moreover, he is, even when speaking conciliatory words to his father, not a strict monotheist but rather a henotheist — which suggests that that he thinks this may be acceptable to his father. (Mann is surely aware of the passages in the Hebrew Bible that sound henotheistic, for instance Psalm 95:3: “For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.”) But we readers know that it is not so acceptable. In this very chapter Mann describes a conversation Jacob had on just this subject with a man named Jebshe:
If the God who had established the sun, the signs along its path, and the planets, including the earth, was the highest God, then he was also the only god, and it would be best not even to speak of other gods, in such a case, otherwise one would be forced to label them with the name Jacob had refrain from using, precisely because reason demanded that the term and concept of “the highest God” be equated with the only God. [56]
Jacob is horrified by any suggestion that the gods of the gentes are to be treated with anything but contempt and revulsion, and Joseph has to employ his best and most charming eloquence to calm his father’s troubled spirit. (It is, fortunately for him, a task he is always up to.)
So this opening scene of the story-as-such establishes this tension between the single-minded devotion of Jacob to the Fear and Joseph’s playful delight in contemplating the religions of the gentes. It wouldn’t be right to say that Joseph simply is polytheistic. But he is inclined to enjoy correspondences and to seek whenever possible a reconciliation of opposing forces. The tetralogy as a whole is called Joseph and His Brothers, but I think in a more fundamental sense it’s about Joseph and his father. It explores the difference between a radical uncompromising monotheism and a more … flexible approach to matters of faith.
Robin Sloan pitches his forthcoming novel: “The year is 13777. There are dragons on the moon.”
Mann's Joseph: 1
There’s a long Prelude to the tetralogy — called “Descent into Hell” — which I may discuss later on. After the Prelude we enter the first of the four parts of the tetralogy, The Stories of Jacob. And while the main character of this book is (theoretically) Jacob, we don’t get his story in chronological order: we begin with a scene between Jacob and Joseph, his teenage son — indeed, we see Joseph before we see his father. This scene strikes certain notes which then resonate, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes discordantly, throughout the rest of the tetralogy.
The first substantive thing that we learn about Joseph is that he is widely and deeply aware of the religious practices of what the Israelites called the nations, the peoples that surround his little familial world. (“Nations” = Latin gentes = our word “gentiles.”) He sits, at evening, in a contemplative pose, and intently contemplates the moon. Or does he worship the moon? Moreover, the whole scene takes place under the influence, one might even say the patronage, of the goddess Ishtar, who gives her name to the first section of this first chapter. (Here, as is traditional, she is associated with the planet Venus.) Mann also tells us that there is something indefinably Egyptian about Joseph’s appearance.
Above I wrote of “Israelites,” but really there are no Israelites yet, just the family of the man born as Jacob and later re-named Israel — Yiśrā’ēl, “strives with God.” He is the son of Isaac, who is the son of Abraham; so we are just three generations into this new adventure in human history — and, Mann says, a new adventure in the life of God. For one of the points that he makes at several points in the story is that Abraham was the man who invented God.
Mann doesn’t think that Jacob is literally the grandson of Abraham — he believes that many generations separate them — but he accepts that Jacob is in some … other sense Abraham’s grandson. Mann has a notion, often referred to in the narrative, that certain personalities recur generation after generation: people as it were imagine themselves into the lives of their ancestors, so that they become their own ancestors: they inhabit the stories they have inherited. So for instance, when Jacob comes upon the contemplative Joseph, the boy is naked, and Jacob tells him put to put some clothes on — and as he does he finds himself recalling the mirror image of his experience, the moment when Noah’s sons saw his nakedness, and Jacob fells that he is in some way entering into that story, a story he had been told by his father and grandfather. That’s what happens, in this narrative, to old stories: through inhabitation they are revivified, generation after generation. (This is the beginning of typology.)
So Abraham learned certain essential stories which he then passed them down to his descendants, one of whom is Jacob. And the central story is that of Abraham himself having been called from his old life by God, a God who is jealous and singular — so much so that Abraham, reflecting on his encounters with this strange disembodied presence, comes to think that he is not encountered merely another god among the many gods, but Something more extreme, Something that can’t be classed with anything else. And this is the sense in which Abraham invents God: he discovers — or imagines; Mann allows the reader to judge, though he sometimes hints that this God really does exist, though perhaps only because Abraham imagined Him — a universal Deity, the Creator of all things visible and invisible, Lord of all the nations, even the nations who do not recognize him. That’s the God Abraham invented, and that’s the God that that Jacob has inherited, and Jacob is fierce in his monotheism. He thinks always of his God and imitates Him. “El-Elyon’s choice and preference of some individuals, absent, or at least beyond, any merit on their part was absolute and splendid; by any human measure, it was hard to comprehend and unjust, a sublime emotional reality that was not to be quibbled with, but to be honored with trembling and rapture in the dust. And Jacob, himself aware – though in all humility and fear — that he was the object of such favor, imitated God by existing exuberantly on his own predilection and giving it free rein” (63).
But Joseph doesn’t think this way. Joseph is, as I said earlier, highly aware of the gods of the peoples whom the children of Abraham regularly encounter. The children of Abraham, these herdsman and wanderers, don’t occupy the cities where the gentes dwell, with their temples and priests. They may visit such places to trade goods, but they don’t live there. They live, rather, in the places between, in the fields and on the hills. They take their herds with them wherever they go, and when their herds flourish, they become people of real substance. They buy and trade, and that become substantial figures in the economy of their world, but they remain always nomadic, and have no need for a city, a city with a temple in the midst of it and statues of God to bow down before. The God they worship, and whose voice in the fields and on the hills they can hear, is the one who has called them out of a dead life and has accompanied them; is also the one with whom Jacob wrestled on the banks of a river. He is the Fear (Gen. 31:42). But Joseph may not be as fearful as his ancestors.
RSS access is the only thing that makes reading Substack newsletters tolerable for me. If I had to go to their site, with its combination of the most annoying features of Facebook and Twitter, I’d just unsubscribe from everything.
I wrote about Francis Spufford’s utterly wonderful new novel Cahokia Jazz.
greetings from Cahokia
Among the novels written in the 21st century that I have read, my favorite is Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz. (I’m going to call the author “Francis” because he is a dear friend – I’ll say more about this later – so calling him by his surname rings false to me.) But the concept of “favorite” is not an easy one to explain. I do not mean to say that I believe Cahokia Jazz to be the best even of Francis’s novels. I could, if lightly pressed, make a case for the superiority of Light Perpetual, which is a glorious and deeply moving book. But I am not pressed, and can say what I want, and what I want to say is this: I adore Cahokia Jazz, and I hope you will read it and adore it too. It’s available in the U.K. right now and will appear here in the U.S.A. early next year.
Why do I delight in this story so much? Well, for one thing, it participates in a genre that I am especially fond of, the Alternate History Novel. I first fell in love with that kind of story when I was around fifteen and read Keith Roberts’s Pavane, a book I’ve never quite gotten over. Soon afterwards I read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and my attachment to the genre was fixed forever. What do I love so much about this kind of story? I suppose it’s the unannounced and waiting-to-be-noticed alternation between the known and the unknown, between world-as-it-is and world-as-might-have-been. You’re reading along, well-placed in a familiar history, and then something happens that you know did not happen. Or: you begin reading a story that seems to be set altogether otherwhere, and then something is mentioned that connects to the familiar, the established. I can’t explain it, but I love the frisson that happens when two histories brush against each other. I love not quite knowing how to understand the relation between those two histories, the long puzzle of figuring out the Same and the Different.
When I first read Cahokia Jazz I had an experience that you, dear reader, will not have. I’ll take an example from the first page of the book:
Barrow stepped carefully back towards the little hutch holding the door to the stairs. There was already a mess underfoot. As he expected, the uniform who’d called them in, from the phone down in the lobby, was waiting only a few steps down, on the narrow flight winding round the top of the elevator shaft. Just behind him was the night cleaner who’d found the door unlocked originally. She’d gone out onto the roof, and then run screaming onto Creekside to flag down the patrolman. Neither of them looked what you’d call avid. The cleaner, a heavyset taklousa in her forties, had her mouth clamped shut to hold in shock or nausea. The patroller, only twenty or so, was doing the classic takouma stone face – the set pose for male strength when something bad happened. He’d been out to the skylight too. Not rubberneckers, not spectators. Yet there they still were, keeping close; commanded somehow by the presence of death, compelled to wait attendance where it had visited. It took death repeated over and over, in Barrow’s experience, death repeated in quantities too great for meaning, to wear that solemnity away. It took a war. Soldiers could learn to just walk on by in the presence of death, not many other people.Even from this you’ll probably get that this is a murder scene, that the story is (at least in part) a police procedural. (And that our protagonist is a former soldier.) But you don’t know what a taklousa is, or a takouma.
Neither did I, when I began the story – but then, what I got was the naked and unadorned first chapter. The events of Cahokia Jazz take place over six days: the book begins on a Monday and ends on a Saturday. And Francis sent me the story one day at a time, with some weeks or months intervening between my experience of one day and the next. Because I was utterly absorbed in the story from the first page, I found this both exhilarating and anxiety-producing: like Dickens’s American readers in 1841, wondering whether Little Nell would survive the next installment, I waited desperately at the quay of my Gmail inbox, holding my breath in anticipation of the next Day of the story.
Nothing in what Francis sent me told me what a taklousa is, or a takouma, or for that matter a takata (mentioned for the first time on page 7); nor are we told what it means for someone to be addressed as tastanagi, or what a, or the, tamaha is. I had to figure all this out out as I went along, which I loved doing – and so, long-experienced in the publishing world as I am, I wrote to Francis to say Your editors will demand a glossary, you must refuse to provide or even allow a glossary. Thanks be to God, there’s no glossary in the book … but there is a brief explanatory note at the beginning, between the map and the first chapter, and while it’s handled with skill and grace I encourage you to skip over it if you can. It deprives you of a pleasure. (Editors – I suppose this must be their job – always think in terms of the less active and committed kind of reader, the one who needs some hand-holding. Sometimes reviewers of my books complain that I have made something too explicit, and I always want to say The editors made me do it, dummy.)
So: I’d love for all of you to read this book while knowing no more than I knew when I read it. But if you need, or just want, to know more, well, further info is coming after the break.
Still here? Okay, so: Alternate-history novels grow from What-Ifs. Here are the relevant ones for Cahokia Jazz:
What if the variety of smallpox that Europeans brought to the New World was a less deadly one than the one that devastated a continent? (There are less deadly ones.) What if as a result a large Native American population survived colonization? What if a common trade pidgin of the American colonial era – to be specific, the Mobilian trade jargon – became a full-fledged language, capable of serving as a binding agent for the many takouma – um, I mean, Native American – cultures of the American South and Southwest? And what if as a result the old abandoned city of Cahokia was rebuilt into a great modern city, populated by several varying ethnicities, dominating its region so that you get moments like this:
They left him in the village of St. Louis, which was a church, a gas station and a general store, clustered under dripping oak trees. There was a sign, put up by the state historical society, saying the place had been founded by a French settler in 16-something. It didn’t seem to have grown much since.I love stuff like that.
Francis has commented on some of his key concerns — and some of his key challenges in writing this story — over at Goodreads:
- The Matter of America
- Imaginary Architecture for Imaginary Cities
- On Having a Map — and yes, the maps in Cahokia Jazz really are wonderful.
One tiny example, drawing on one of the several delightful cameos in the book. At one point, late in the story, our hero is at Cahokia’s railway station and happens to see a family, “pale, shabby-grand, and relocating with their life’s possessions” – including, curiously enough, butterfly nets: “white Russians on their way to Kodiak, by the look of it.” One of them, “a lanky twenty-something in flannels and tennis shoes,” is called by his family Vovka, and he briefly assists our hero. Then off they go, leaving our story as abruptly as they had arrived in it. Assuming that they made their way to Kodiak – or, more formally, as our map tells us, NOVAYA SIBIRSKAYA TERRITORII – it is unlikely that their world ever knew Lolita or Pale Fire. But what might they, in their timeline inaccessible to us, possess instead? This we do not know. About this we are free to imagine.
I’ll have more to say later, more especially about the story as a story, which I found both enthralling and touching. But first I need to do some Thomas Mann while his story of Joseph is fresh in my mind. For now, I just wanted to make sure all y’all know about this wonderful book.
I’m a big fan of the rooftop lounge at the Austin Central Library.
My lens was fogging up when I took this one, but I sort of like the effect.
the smoker
They came, as all extremists do
In time, to a sort of grandeur …
— Richard Wilbur, “The Undead”
There’s a kind of patio in front of this hotel and a man sits there, smoking a cigarette.
I arrived at this hotel three days ago and he was already there.
When I awake in the morning — I peer out of my window, look down — he is there.
When I go to my car, he is there.
When I ready myself for bed, he is there. Smoking.
He has neither phone nor book. He listens to nothing — nothing that you or I could hear — and appears to look at nothing, except, perhaps, the tiles that floor the patio.
It could be that he has neither sight nor hearing, that he is only mouth and lungs.
He sits by a table, but nothing is on the table: no pack of Marlboros, no lighter.
He wears a loose casual shirt and nylon trousers.
It is as though he has one cigarette he smokes eternally. It never burns down, but eternally renews itself.
“Purity of heart is to will one thing,” said Kierkegaard. This man has the purest of hearts.
When I check out today, he will surely still be there, and I will try to catch his eye. But I have little hope of that.
Perhaps I will return to this hotel in a year or two and find him still there, smoking.
Perhaps I alone can see him.