S’funny how your perspective changes with a new piece of information.

While I was briefly under the impression that Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent was written by the cuddly old curmudgeon pictured on the back cover I rated it LOL for very funny. But once I found out that it was actually his first book, written when he was 33, his lovable vitriolic ways sounded a lot more spiteful.

The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn’t hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that they would soon be dead.

I still enjoyed it though.

The book is a standard Bill Bryson travelogue with scathing, spur of the moment honesty uncensored by any regard for the recipient’s tender feelings. It’s funny to read the reviews at Amazon by all the people who’s town he trashed. They are all like, “No wonder he found BFE dead on a Thursday night. If he had come the night before, he could’ve have played bingo”.

Bill has an unnerving ability to say what you are thinking but in half the words and with twice the bile.

About casinos…

I wandered through room after room trying to find my way out, but the place was clearly designed to leave you disoriented. There were no windows, no exit signs, just endless rooms, all with subdued lighting and with carpet that looked as if some executive had barked into a telephone, “Gimme twenty thousand yards of the ugliest carpet you got.” It was like woven vomit.

That’s like every casino I have ever been in. When we lived in New York, G and I took the bus to Atlantic City - not to go to a casino, just for a day out.

As we got off the bus, they gave us $10 in quarters and a big plastic pot to keep them in so we felt obliged to go spend them. We managed to spend about $1.25 each and then wandered around for hours trying to find the way out. When we got back on the bus we still had about $18 in quarters.

…and who hasn’t done this?

And the toilet seat did not have a sanitized for your protection wrapper on it, denying me the daily ritual of cutting it with my scissors saying “I now declare this toilet open”.

The Lost Continent is very funny but not quite Bill Bryson funny. If you’ve read all the others, read this one too - unless you are a waitress or you live in BFE - but if you haven’t, read In a sunburnt country first.

Atlas Shrugged is a classic tale of good versus evil.

The heroes are easily recognized by their strong profiles, high cheekbones and tendency to speech rather than speak. Heroes always know the precise angle to present their bodies so that the setting sun can highlight their virtues and their flat hips while the bright red glow of morality from the furnaces blazes in their Rearden Metal brooches and their steely blue eyes.

The villains, or looters, meanwhile (you can almost hear the boos from the cheap seats), are made of blancmange and have names like Tinky and Kip and Balph (Balph!) and Cuffy and Orren and Chick. The blancmanges don’t have profiles, they have pendulous jowls and sagging, tired features and, when they are not starting organizations with phony names like Friends of Global Progress, they stoop and they slouch and they deny everything that’s obvious and honest and true.

The blancmanges don’t have conversations either. They blubber nonsense about everything being self-evident and how it’s not their fault - it’s nobody’s fault. They have no independent thoughts of their own and they regurgitate half-digested ideas scavenged from the waste bucket of philosophy and they speak in unfinished sentences (the heroes always finish their sentences).

“It wasn’t real, was it?” said Mr Thompson.

“We seemed to have heard it,” said Tinky Holloway.

“We couldn’t help it,” said Chick Morrison.

“Who permitted it to hap-” he began in a rising voice but stopped ;

“We don’t have to believe it, do we?” cried James Taggart.

The overall effect is like a child’s pantomime where all the children boooo when the unshaven villain, in the stripey jumper and with a bag of swag over his shoulder, twirls his moustache as the lights grow dim and a badly played organ heralds his entrance on its lowest register.

There is no dialog in this book. In place of normal conversation, the heroes take it in turns to practice their oratory while the blancmanges barf out platitudes that can only have been retrieved from someone’s maiden aunt’s sick bucket after she’d had a little too much tincture of laudanum.

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonestly; the man who respects it has earned it.”

The glare of steel being poured from a furnace shot to the sky beyond the window. A red glow went sweeping slowly over the office, over the empty desk, over Rearden’s face, as if in salute and farewell.

When the heroes and looters actually do speak with each other it’s like some absurd Monty Python skit wherein the leprous townspeople, armed only with a bowl of radishes and a pound of liver, try to do battle with the Noble Paladins in Shining Armour mounted on Noble, Snorting Stallions only to be cut down one by snivelling one by the Paladins’ Virtuous Steel Blades. Terry Gilliam could not have drawn it better.

“All you want is production without men who are able to produce.”
“That…that’s just theory. That’s just a theoretical extreme.”

Even the adulterous sex is virtuous with the moral flame of righteousness reflecting in her chaste dampness and his thrusts like the pistons that power the engines of prosperity.

She lay back, conscious of nothing but the pleasure it gave her. Yet her mind kept racing. Broken bits of thought flew past her attention, like the telegraph poles by the track. Physical pleasure? - she thought. This is a train made of steel…running on rails of Rearden Metal…moved by the energy of burning oil and electric generators…it’s a physical sensation of physical movement…but is that the cause and the meaning of what I now feel?…Do they call it a low animal joy-this feeling that I would not care if the rail did break to bits under us now-it won’t-but I wouldn’t care, because I have experienced this? A low, physical, material, degrading pleasure of the body?

Oh, wait…maybe that really was about a train. It’s hard to know with these people - they live their whole lives in metaphor so it’s impossible to tell when reality begins…or if it ever does.

Perhaps passages like that help to explain why Ayn Rand is every budding libertarian’s favourite philosopher. Perhaps they got their first hard-on while imagining that Ayn was Dagny and Dagny was Ayn and that, when they closed their eyes, Ayn stood before them naked saying “I want you <insert name here>. I’m more of an animal than you think…[snip 100 pages]… If I’m asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say: I have slept with <insert your name here>.”

The only possible reason that the book is so popular among that kind of conservative is that, around age 19, they became confused between Ayn Rand’s prescription for a new Utopian Republic and Dagny’s high breasts and animal depravity. Now and forever, when they think of steel production, they become aroused by thoughts of themselves as Hank Rearden driving his train into Dagny Taggart’s tunnel.

I can’t count the number of times, on Usenet and on mailing lists, when a comment about cooperation causes a shotgun response, Earnestness set to Stun, with a one-line directive to “now go read Atlas Shrugged”. Just today, in the comments after an article about Ron Paul in the Times, someone grumbled about the fate of the dollar, sighed “Where is John Galt?” and resolved to buy gold presumably until the Industrial Philosopher Kings return.

I wonder how many of Ron Paul’s supporters have on their desk a framed, signed picture dedicated with “To Marcus. May you care about no-one but your self. With Love and Virtue, Ayn xxx” and a Heroines of Objectivism calendar on the back of their bathroom door? I’ll bet Greenspan had one.

I really wanted to like this book as I enjoyed The Fountainhead thoroughly. I had intended to write a mini review when I was about three hundred pages into it, while it was still just a fun ride on a moralistic steam train through Objectiville, but events conspired against me and I missed my stop. The book started to judder about a third of the way in and finally came off the rails on page 606 as Ayn, furiously shovelling coal and with whistle blowing, described, to the rhythm of a rickety train on an out-of-control track, why everyone who disagrees with her deserves to die…

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence…

The man in Roomette 7, Car No. 2, was a journalist who wrote that it is proper and moral to use compulsion “for a good cause”…

The woman in Roomette, Car No. 3, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards,by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil…

[...skipping cars 4 through 15 until...]

The man in Bedroom A, Car No.16 was a humanitarian who had said “The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer”….

…and we are still only half way through our journey. Having now fallen into a ditch, the book ploughed on through some heavy mud until the surreal interlude where the publishers accidentally printed 60 pages of someone’s 10th grade homework on the subject “Why we must fear communism” (it turns out that From each according to his ability to each according to his needs was a terrible idea) and finally comes to rest, with a final mournful sigh, about 900 pages after the ending became obvious.

Still, there is a lot to like about Objectivism. Like many philosophies, it tries to scale a simple idea from a Personal Guide to a Virtuous Life up through an ethical system for interacting with one’s family, friends and business partners to a political recipe for Utopia.

At the first level , her moral philosophy is spot on. Colour me Objectivist when it comes to “What is the Good?” and of how to structure one’s hopes and dreams and, most importantly, actions to achieve The Good. It all gets a little shaky when ask our friends and family to earn the love we give them and then it totally falls apart when we imagine that we could structure our society around the idea that captains of industry and politicians are paragons of virtue (in the Ayn Rand sense).

In Ayn’s topsy-turvy world, successful businessmen would be successful precisely because they play by the rules and have a strict code of honour. Thy would channel their enlightened greed into production, commerce and other activities that benefit society accidentally but with supreme efficiency. Not once would they clear cut rain forests or dump plastics in the ocean or pollute rivers or poison thousands of Indians or any of the things that real businessmen do.

This is ultimately where the book, and the philosophy, gets it dead wrong. Sure we can all think of politicians and industrialists enlightened by self-interest but the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them and the James Taggarts and Wesley Mouches and Orren Boyles outnumber the Hank Reardens a thousand-fold. I am a dyed-in-the-wool elitist but even I would not trust the elite to decide who is or is not elite.

Perhaps, in 1957, when she wrote it, fear of communism and fascism and other collectivist disasters was very real and she saw herself as writing a cautionary tale against the submission of the needs of the individual to the needs of society. But that does not explain why she seems unable to distinguish between, say, the enforced starvation of one group for the benefit of another (usually more privileged) group and a government program to build schools. It also does not explain why so many modern day Objectivists equate income tax with slavery.

In Ayn Rand’s fairy tale, the collectivist Utopian dream of the looters ends in dystopia and apocalypse. It’s hard to imagine the Objectivist dream ending differently.

I can’t get the hang of the blogging business. Is it better to leave comments on their blog or write a counter-blog of your own? Maybe you should blog then comment on theirs with a link back to yours? But what if they have trackback turned on? It’s all so confusing. In the end, I decided to comment on Aaron’s blog and reproduce it here.

Kevin said…

I watched the Star Wars movies in order. I thought Episode I was pretty good but went downhill after that.By Episode IV it was like he ran out of ideas or his budget for cool graphics was all gone or something.

Aaron didn’t enjoy it as much as I did…

Last night I watched Star Wars Episode 1. The movie really isn’t half bad except for three things.

… but at least we agreed that the first one was best.

When I said that Crick was a flawed, flamboyant genius, I was guessing really. Pretty good guess, it turns out, as Matt Ridley’s fascinating mini-biography makes vividly clear.

Let’s get the flaws out of the way first. What I had in mind first time around was his total disdain for the institutions of religion and monarchy but, on reflection, I think he really deserves respect for standing up for what he believed in - at potentially great cost to his career. There are a bunch of interesting anecodotes about his antipathy to organized religion - Crick makes Richard Dawkins look like the Archbishop of Canterbury - but my favourite episode occurred when he was offered a founding fellowship of Churchill College. The college was being founded in honour of Winston Churchill as a specifically scientific college in an attempt to imitate the success of MIT. Crick had initially refused the fellowship because the college planned to add a chapel (the initial plan did not include one) and Crick thought a chapel had no place in a place of science. He was persuaded to change his mind because it was considered unlikely that the college would ever raise the funds to build the chapel. Crick became a fellow.

Shortly after that, one Timothy Beaumont donated the entire cost of the chapel and the foundations were dug before the fellows even got to have a say. Crick resigned immediately and sent a letter of resignation to Winston Churchill. He received the following reply:

I was sorry to learn that you have resigned from Churchill College, and am puzzled by your reason. The money for the chapel was provided specifically for that purpose by Mr Beaumont and not taken from general college funds. A chapel, whatever one’s views on religion, is an amenity which many of those who live in the College may enjoy, and none need enter it unless they wish.

Crick sent this reply:

To make my position a little clearer I enclose a cheque for ten guineas to open the Churchil College Hetairae [courtesans] fund. My hope is that it will eventually be possible to build permanent accommodation within the College, to house a carefully chosen collection of young ladies in the charge of a suitable Madam who, once the institution has become traditional, will doubtless be provided, without offense, with dining rights at the High Table.

Such a building will, I feel confident, be an amenity which many who live in Cambridge will enjoy very much, and yet the institution need not be compulsory and none need enter it unless they wish. Moreover it would be open (conscience permitting) not merely to members of the Church of England, but also to Catholics, Non-Conformists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Zen Buddhists and even atheists and agnostics such as myself.

The trustees may feel my offer of ten guineas to be a joke in rather poor taste. But that is exactly my view of the proposal of the Trustees to build a chapel, after the middle of the 20th century, in a new college and in particular one with a special emphasis on science. Naturally some members of the college will be Christian, at least for the next decade or so, but I do not see why the college should tacitly endorse their beliefs by providing them with special facilities. The churches in town, it has been said, are half-empty. Let them go there. It will be no further than they have to go for their lectures.

Even a joke in poor taste can be enjoyed, but I regret that my enjoyment of it has entailed my resignation from the college, which bears your illustrious name.

The chapel was eventually built outside of college grounds.

Crick refused to attend weddings, funerals and baptisms in church but suggested that, if humanism were to take off it would need its own rituals, anticipating Kev and Jeff’s House of Death by 40 years. I think Francis Crick would have appreciated a sad, silent clown.

There is another great story which has a broke, father-of-three, Francis Crick writing to Jim Watson to request - and be refused - Watson’s blessing for a show about the double helix on BBC Radio:

Do you still feel you can’t allow the Third Programme Broadcast? I’ve yet to find anyone who would object to it, and things have cooled down a bit now. Also, it would bring in $50 to $100 which at the moment I could do with.

Watson refused his blessing:

If you need the money that bad, go ahead. Needless to say, I should not think any higher of you and shall have good reason to avoid any further collaboration with you.

Crick graciously declined to do the broadcast but this episode was perhaps in the back of his mind when he and Watson had their great falling out over the latter’s The Double Helix (Amazon, here I come again). Crick did everything he could to try to suppress Watson’s book which (I am told - still waiting for delivery) is written as much as a warts-and-all autobiography as an account of the science that led to the breakthroughs with DNA that won them their Nobel Prize. Crick succeeded in getting Harvard Press to refuse to publish it and, after its eventual publication, bore a grudge for several years.

But, as Julio suggested, none of that rises to the level of ‘flawed’. But flaws, sadly, there are. In the 70s, Crick was very outspoken on such contentious topics as eugenics, population control and race. He made suggestions that seem outrageous now (and, presumably, then) such as forced sterilization, social experiments on twins (who would be subject to madatory separation at birth) and a form of licensing to discourage breeding among the genetically unfit.

I won’t spend too much time on Crick’s flamboyance. Just open the book at any page to read of the parties at his residence, The Golden Helix (at one party in particular, guests were handed a sketchpad and required to provide a sketch of the nude life model in the foyer) or of his reckless yachting adventures or his eccentric choice of friends (including one who would habitually use Crick’s name whenever he was arrested - often - or picking up women on foreign beaches - all the time).

The book is ultimately, of course, about Crick’s genius which seems almost unfathomable. Consider a man who quit his well-paying job to enter academia but could not decide whether to first solve the secret of life or whether to explain the nature of consciousness. With the double helix well-documented and the DNA code cracked Crick still found time, at the age of 60 to start work on the second problem. Sadly, time ran out for Francis Crick in 2004. I am sure he would have cracked that one too if he had only started a little earlier.

One day, when I am rich, I will have a house with a study and on the walls of that study will be the portraits of all my heroes. Francis Crick will be up there with Bob, George, Winston and the others.

Jeff and I pair-read 1984 and Brave New World a couple of years ago. Most people - me included, until my latest reading - seem to miss the point of 1984. ‘1984′ means they are watching you to those with only a casual acquaintance with the book. ‘1984′ should mean they are manipulating language, history and even thought to make criticism impossible. The lessons of 1984 seemed very relevant a couple of years ago (I wait with baited breath to see if the American public can see through the lies in the present election season) but I expect, that if we end up in a dystopia, it will be closer to the one described in Brave New World where even the alphas are conditioned and everyone is happy with their lot because all their basic needs are provided for.

I picked up Huxley’s Island without knowing what to expect. It started well (I fear I oversold it to Jeff based on that promising beginning) but what seemed at the first to be an overly stodgy exposition turned out to be the entire thrust of the book.

If you can get over the fact that you are reading Huxley’s prescription for utopia - dystopias are so much more interesting as long as you don’t have to live in them - it wasn’t too bad. I like the idea that you could build a perfect society by combining the harmless, distilled essence of Buddhist spirituality with the most positive offerings of science and technology. But - and I am sure it won’t surprise you, even if you haven’t read the book yet - it’s the unenlightened ones on the outside who will come along and fuck it all up for you.

Back to 1984 for a moment…the horrific ending of 1984 completely neutralizes, negates and ultimately ruins 1984 for me. It’s like an another corollary to Godwin’s Law. Room 101/the Holocaust were so evil that to compare anyone or anything with them is such an over-exaggeration you automatically lose the argument. If the Nazis had not committed the terrible crimes of the holocaust and if Orwell had not rolled out the rats-in-a-cage-torture-device you could make some very fruitful analogies with the Nazi’s and with Airstrip One’s manipulation of popular opinion. But because they did, anything short of 6,000,000 seems benign by comparison. I am not complaining about Godwin’s Law - 6,000,000 murders is a lot of evil - but I wish it were safe to quote Orwell and Rove in the same sentence. It should be.