Celebrating human uniqueness

Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves by James Le Fanu

James Le Fanu’s book has the worthwhile intention of drawing his readers’ attention to the complexity and sheer unlikeliness of the world around us – and, especially, of our unique place in it.

Natural human amazement been ground out of us, he believes, by over-confidence in the ideas of Marx, Freud and Darwin, each of whom started with a legitimate but limited insight and expanded it to claim universal truths, about, respectively, economies, the human psyche and the natural world.

Le Fanu is a doctor, so when it comes to science, he knows what he’s talking about even if his views are decidedly unconventional. Most of the book is devoted to arguing that science’s claims have over-reached the evidence for them. We don’t understand how genes work or why there is such an overlap in the genetic makeup of species which have little in common, for instance, but the theory of evolution is an article of faith, not be questioned.

We certainly don’t understand how the brain works, however detailed the experiments in which parts of it are activated in different tasks. We don’t know how neurones record memories. We don’t even know how gravity works.

The assumption that materialism is ‘all there is’ and that evolution must, in the end, somehow or other, explain every tiny detail of every living organism, puts a huge weight of explanatory responsibility on the ideas of beneficial mutation, natural selection and the survival of the fittest.

Le Fanu’s doubts about all this are interesting and well-argued. His account of where they leave us is not quite as solid. He will occasionally drop the word “soul” in, as if it’s something everyone is comfortable and familiar with. But not all his readers will have been brought up at a Catholic monastic school, as he was at Ampleforth.

Less pointedly, he talks about “the possibility of there being a ‘dual’ nature of reality, with both a material and a non-material realm”. This is the “commonsense” view that has been held for millennia, he says, which has, in recent years been “censored, written out of the script as being of historical interest only, a relic of the superstitious ways of thinking of the distant past”.

The point of drawing attention to science’s failures is to give credence to the aim he gets to in his final chapter, which is called ‘Restoring Man to his Pedestal’. If science’s limitations were acknowledged, he says, that would have many benefits, including allowing us to see the world anew, “fresh-minted in glorious Technicolor as astounding and amazing, magical and mysterious”.

Free will would become intellectually respectable again, restoring the assumption that we exercise personal freedom and responsibility. Science itself would be liberated from its “degenerate” research programmes and allowed to investigate areas which are currently considered off limits. (Rupert Sheldrake would be pleased.)

As for religion, it would enjoy a “renewed sympathy” which would “heal that rupture in Western civilisation between its present and its overwhelmingly Christian past”, along with other religions, who have a common belief “of there being ‘more than can be known’.”

This is an underdeveloped part of the argument. Whilst it doesn’t seem right to dismiss all of religious thought and culture as superstition, as scientists may want, there’s no question that believers in most faiths are asked to sign up to some very specific and unproven claims. Is Le Fanu saying we shouldn’t worry about that – which would be odd since he’s dismissing the claims of science on the basis of a lack of evidence – or is he saying that there will be a new, less specific kind of religious belief – perhaps just a kind of nature-worshipping awe, combined with the admission that there’s a lot we don’t understand? He’s less forthcoming on a future vision for religion that on the current problems of science.

Marx and Freud no longer hold sway the way they once did, Le Fanu argues. It’s time we downgraded Darwin too. It’s a refreshingly independent-minded book. Even if Le Fanu hasn’t presented a solid alternative to science’s world view, it’s worthwhile – and eye-opening - to be reminded what an odd thing it is that we exist at all.

But whose idea was it to call it Why Us? That doesn’t do justice to the subject. And the subtitle How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves is even worse. The main point is that far from any ‘rediscovering’, science refuses to admit the mystery of our existence. The book is 16 years old, was well reviewed and is still worth reading, but it could have been so more influential with a better title. Science in Denial? Humans are Special? What Science Doesn’t Admit? Restoring Humanity’s Self-Esteem? The Unique Species? 

Caro's epic biography of LBJ: as gripping as any novel

The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro

Robert A. Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson is historical biography on an almost unimaginable scale. This first volume (768 pages plus more than 100 pages of notes) feels like a non-fiction equivalent of War and Peace - equivalent in richness and literary excellence as well as length – and is as enjoyable to read as any novel.

And there are another three volumes - or four if the 88-year-old Caro can finish the final one - to complete Johnson’s life. The second, Means of Ascent, is the book William Hague said he would choose to take to a desert island: it “conveyed more brilliantly than any other publication what it really feels like to be a politician”. That is too good an endorsement to ignore: I will continue devoting hours to Caro.

Volume one alone, The Path to Power, provides an extraordinary education in a huge range of subjects: the history and geography of Texas; the poverty of its Depression era farming communities; Roosevelt and the New Deal; congressional elections; oil money as a political force; corruption in state and federal politics. Understanding all of these is necessary, Caro demonstrates, to understanding the career of Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson was the son of an honest and respected local politician from a remote part of Texas, but a man whose finances and reputation collapsed in later life, to the boy’s eternal humiliation. We learn about tensions – and hunger - in the Johnson family and the harsh, primitive life of the community. With no electricity, farming was little changed from the nineteenth century.

Caro’s brilliance is in the seamless interplay of the telling detail and the wider picture. The reader is never confused about the relevance of the particular to the overall narrative. We see the young Johnson, an ambitious young political assistant in his twenties, ducking into shop fronts on the streets of Austin, Texas, to comb his hair obsessively as he sees a politician approaching, so that he can emerge with an apparently surprised and casual greeting, always trying to impress his seniors. He had a talent, Caro shows, for bringing out paternal feelings in older men. And we hear about Johnson’s love life – always courting the daughters of the wealthiest families. We see his frustration at not being the centre of attention in a social gathering: he had a habit of falling asleep at a party if he was ignored. And we learn about his extraordinary appetite for work and his ability to pick subordinates who would never question the crazy demands he made on them.

The Path to Power is no hagiography. Johnson’s willingness to pay for votes, in cash if necessary, was not unusual in Texas at the time (the late 1930s). His first campaign for the senate involved rallies in which crowds stayed through what Caro describes as Johnson’s arrogant and unappealing speeches in order to win cash prizes that were promised at the end. The local officials who counted votes were the recipients of envelopes of money from candidates’ campaigns. (Trump’s desperate plea for officials to “find” votes to tip the balance of a Presidential election is part of a grand tradition.) Johnson only avoided being hauled before a Department of Justice investigation into his campaign finances by the interventional of President Roosevelt, whom Johnston has spent years cultivating.

The Democratic party held sway in Texas and the whole of the South in those days. But the tension between politicians’ desire for government projects (dams to generate power or the electrification of rural areas) and their conservative instincts to limit the power of Washington – and the national debt – led to conflict within the party. Roosevelt’s Vice-President, a Texan, John Garner (“Cactus Jack”) was fiercely conservative. Whilst he agreed initially that New Deal spending was necessary to pull America out of the Depression, eventually he split with Roosevelt and even planned to run against him. Johnson was caught in the middle (although a very small fish at the time). His skill, Caro shows, was in making both sides in this vicious fight believe he was with them. One of the most striking features of Johnson the politician was that he rarely articulated views about policy which might ‘come back to haunt him’, hardly ever speaking in Congress, for instance.

Caro’s storytelling – and Johnson’s incredible story – make for a gripping tale. Unless you already know about Johnson’s career, you will want to keep reading, to find out whether he wins or loses the next election and how he manages to use his powers of persuasion as a junior Congressman on the President of the United States. The final episode of the first volume, in which Johnson battles for a place in the Senate against a popular and populist governor of Texas who was no politician, having made his name as a folksy radio personality, is a classic illustration of the power of money on politics. It was oil money versus money from the beer and spirits industry. Nobody comes out of it looking good, which makes for a satisfying conclusion after Caro has shown so thoroughly that neither side deserved to win. 

Too much poetry for a novel, but perfect for Wes Anderson

 

In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje


Apologies to the author, but I'm afraid that by the end, I found this novel annoying and pretentious. It starts well, with some vivid descriptions of boyhood in the Canadian backwoods around the start of the twentieth century. Then the story describes the construction of major pieces of infrastructure in Toronto. I thought I might learn something about the city's history.

But Ondaatje's spare style, which, I'm guessing, is supposed to give his scenes a poetic clarity, soon begins to tire. It's like Hemingway written by T.S.Eliot. And why not just use quotation marks like everyone else instead of indenting paragraphs after dashes to indicate that someone is speaking?

You have to keep your wits about you to know which of several men living on the fringes of society or the women they manage to have fall in love with them (with unusual ease) we are dealing with. That's because the chronology is artfully muddled, leaving readers to reassemble events for themselves - admittedly from not too many pieces, but it's a task I felt was left to us rather inconsiderately by the writer.

In my edition of the book, there is an introduction by the poet Anne Enright, explaining its greatness. Could it be that someone was worried that otherwise more readers might feel the same as me?

Enright remembers first reading the book when she was on a creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. She now warns her writing students that the book is "full of things that Michael Ondaatje can do, but that you probably can't do, or can't do yet". Later, she notes "how deeply I have absorbed the book" - to the point where "it makes me think you can progress through time like a poet" or, more bluntly, "you can do whatever the hell you like with time". (Frankly, I wish I'd chosen to do something else with mine.)

And what about the ending? As I said, the tough men in this book do a lot of seducing - even, for instance, when concealed horizontally on a large tray for growing mushrooms. The unlikely echo of Bond becomes more obvious in the final set piece which involves boats, swimming through pipes, dynamite and a one-to-one confrontation with a villain - albeit an evil capitalist rather than a proper Bond villain.

It would be a strange and very visual movie: could Wes Anderson be persuaded?

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