Fiction Can Make Us More Humane

One of the things that makes humans different from other animals is that we have a uniquely well developed sense of creating and appreciating art. I myself am mediocre at musical composition and art, but I consider myself a good writer. Writing, especially fiction, is an art.

But in some cases art, including fiction, seems like a waste of time that could be more profitably spent in some other way. But art makes us more humane; that is, it increases our capacity for empathy and altruism, both of them extremely important products of evolution and both of them dangerously low in the world. Almost anything we can do to increase our sense of empathy is worth the cost. If my writing helps to increase the sense of empathy in my readers, it was worth doing. Below is an example.

I have been reading recently about how white Americans have slaughtered Natives in gruesome ways, hundreds or thousands of times. This is our white national guilt. We need to face up to this part of our history, even if it makes white people uncomfortable. Here in Oklahoma, it is illegal to teach anything (such as but not limited to history) in such a way as to make anybody (that is, anybody white) feel guilty.

One famous example of a white massacre of Natives is the Sand Creek Massacre in southeastern Colorado. Colonel John Chivington attacked a peaceful party of Cheyenne Natives. A former minister, Chivington justified his massacre by saying “Nits make lice.” He hunted down women and children who fled the camp and mutilated them. His soldiers sliced open a pregnant woman. One soldier sliced the pubic hair from a Cheyenne woman, and it was on display in Denver. The next decade, in the Black Hills, whites bought Sioux scalps for up to $300 apiece. (It was as common for whites to scalp Natives as the other way around.) I will not go into more details, partly because they sicken me. You can read about it in Edward Lazarus’ monumental 1991 book, Black Hills White Justice.

This is what happens when powerful men are free to do whatever they please to poor and helpless people. There is no sentiment that can stop them.

At the same time, writers of stories and novels depicted Native Americans as being brave, honorable, noble, and respectful at least to people who were not killing them. An example that comes to mind, of which everyone has heard, is Last of the Mohicans. Painters such as George Catlin lived among them and painted them as real people, with real lives and relationships. While the nineteenth-century fiction about Native Americans seems racist to us today, at the time it stood out as practically the only defense of the humanity of Natives. At the time of the slaughters of Cheyenne and Sioux, “East-river” humanitarians (east of the Missouri River in Dakota Territory) called for peace with, rather than slaughter of, Natives.

Whenever the Natives struck back against the Army that gleefully massacred them, the newspapers (writing what they considered non-fiction) would loudly proclaim the Natives to be savages that deserved extermination. In particular, one editorial proposed a Final Solution for the Natives. He wrote, “It’s high time the sickly sentimentalism about humane treatment and conciliatory measures should be consigned to novel writers. There can be no permanent, lasting peace on the frontier till these devils are exterminated” (emphasis mine). You will find this on page 39 of Lazarus’ book.

This shows how important it is for us writers, especially of fiction, to reveal the humanity of all groups of humans. I mean full humanity, the bad as well as the good. People who read these novels opposed the slaughter of Natives. Without these novels, the humanitarians might have disapproved of the slaughters but would not have felt very much outrage at them. It was not just a matter of legal fairness, good government, or the proper use of human resources. These are human beings we are talking about.

This is an exact Native equivalent of the important role that Uncle Tom’s Cabin played in stirring up the national conscience against slavery.

As a writer, I consider it my responsibility to champion the full humanity and beauty of oppressed peoples.

Science as THE way of knowing

It is common among scientists, as among others, to refer to the scientific method as a way of knowing, but there are other ways as well. I wish to briefly explain that science is not just a way of knowing, but the way.

I am not referring, of course, to the subject matter of science. I refer to the scientific method, about which I wrote my most recent book, Scientifically Thinking.

 

I have had positive and exciting responses to this book. One email that I received is typical:

“[I am] an astronomy PhD student in UC Riverside. I read your fantastic book (Scientifically Thinking) and all the way during reading the book I was like: This book is really great! I think this book can be and is a life-changer and savior for many of us, regardless of the field of study and career.

I feel I am a better person after reading this book. That's why I recommend it to everyone I know and even don't know: last time I recommended it to a stranger in a playground who was trying to raise his little son a better person that himself!”

However, one reviewer (who was otherwise rapturous about how much he loved the book) accused me of being a scientific imperialist. How dare I say science is the only way of knowing? He said this was dangerous.

I plead guilty.

Science, as a profession, confines itself to repeatable and measurable data. The scientific method, however, can be applied to other kinds of observations that are not physical. What the scientific method allows you to do is to, as much as possible:

• Avoid bias. Science allows you to recognize your own biases and at least try to compensate for them.
• Have appropriate construct validity. Science allows you to, as much as possible, use a source of information that really tells you what you want to know.

These are characteristics that all kinds of thinking, including philosophical and religious, need to have. (Note that many fields of study outside of science—such as history—do in fact use data that are physical. Music is grounded in the physics of sound and in the psychology of the human mind. Psychology, in turn, is based on physiology and evolution. Literature is also based on psychology and evolution. As I use the term, science may include all of these fields of experience.)

If a religious person makes a claim, there must be something other than his own craziness that can support it. At least, find it in the Bible before blurting it out. While finding a Bible proof-text does not count as scientific thinking, it is better than the kind of craziness that we see around us today. Christian fundamentalists wave their Bibles in the air without reading them.

While I consider science to be the way of knowing, it is clearly not the only way of experiencing. I have had numerous and powerful religious experiences, both when I was a fundamentalist Christian, and now when my views are less defined. When I listen to music, I do not think about music theory; I am swept away by a rapture that is not unlike religious experiences that I have had. Earlier, I reviewed The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell. He studied his little patch of forest floor scientifically, but his experience was strongly influenced by Buddhism (he kept referring to the spot of land as a mandala).

And while I now question the historical reliability of the “stories of Jesus,” I am irresistibly drawn to them; I continue to write about them in my fiction and use Bible quotes even in my science classes. To me, Jesus is real, even though it may all be inside my head. I love this guy. I just don’t claim this to be knowledge; it is experience.

As I close, I must mention a source of bias in my views. I have, on several occasions, been duped by religious cult leaders. One was Garner Ted Armstrong. I was also swept into a Church of Christ cult for many years. My faith was more powerful than any experience I have had before or since. It was strong enough that I ignored contrary evidence, such as the verified news that Garner Ted was having illicit affairs with undergrad women at his college. With a history of such vulnerability to cult-thinking, how can I trust anything that is generated solely within my brain? I’m just speaking for myself, but I’ll bet you have similar vulnerabilities. I need to test my beliefs against evidence.

The distinction between knowledge and experience is particularly crucial today, when millions (not many millions, I hope) of people believe that everything Donald Trump says is as infallible as if God Himself had said them, and that there is a totally secret conspiracy that stole the election from Him. Few of them will go as far as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who claimed that mass shootings were all fake, and that the California wildfires were started by a satellitefinanced by Jewish money, but many of them use their religious delusion to claim that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax and that we should neither wear masks nor get vaccinated. At this point, treating religious experience as if it is knowledge has become a public threat.

That is, I get upset when I see people using religion as a basis for believing and doing terrible things, which is something that I almost did as well. I am reacting in horror to what I might have been, as well as to what they are. That is my bias but, I think, a reasonable one.

Scientific thinking, not necessarily science, is THE way of knowing.

 

George Washington Carver: The Convergence of Art and Science

Many people were surprised that George Washington Carver painted flowers as well as studied them scientifically. But to him, art and science were both ways of approaching the truth, and there was no dissonance between them. Here is a scene from Linda O. McMurray’s book, George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol, page 302:

            [Carver] reached across the table for a tiny green herb. The soil still clung to its threadlike roots.

            “All these years,” the artist continued, looking at the weed in his hand, “I have been doing one thing. The poet Tennyson was working at the same job. This is the way he expresses it:

Flower in the crannied wall

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower—but it I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is...

            “Tennyson was seeking Truth. That is what the scientist is seeking. That is what the artist is seeking; his writings, his weaving, his music, his pictures are just the expressions of his soul in his search for Truth.

            “My paintings are my soul’s expression of its yearnings and questions in its desire to understand the work of the Great Creator.”

Prophecies of Jules Verne

My coming-of-age experience in literature and science was when, in sixth grade, I read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers), in English of course. Soon I hope to read it in French. (I already notice that the French title was “under the seas,” not sea.)

Jules Verne is considered to be the father of science fiction. In addition, one biographer called Verne “the man who invented the future.” It would seem that Verne was ready to embrace a scientific and technological future for the human species. What a surprise it was, therefore, for me to read Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century (Paris au vingtième siècle), in which he created a nightmare future that was ruled by science and technology. As someone said, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” This quote has been attributed to everyone from Niels Bohr to Yogi Berra. So far, no one has attributed it to Verne. But, at any rate, Verne got it wrong, though not completely.

Apparently the manuscript of this novel was found in 1994 in the proverbial locked drawer of a desk which Verne’s grandson had inherited. Verne’s publisher rejected the manuscript in 1863. And for good reason. It is a structurally flawed novel with two-dimensional characters. And it was overwhelmingly depressing. At least Twenty Thousand Leagues had an uplifting ending (see below), while this book (I will spoil it since you probably won’t read it) the protagonist falls into the snow and freezes to death.

Rather than to attempt a summary of it myself, I quote extensively from the Wikipedia summary, in bold italics below, but I add some of my own comments, not in italics.

Paris in the Twentieth Century (French: Paris au XX^e siècle) is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The book presents Paris in August 1960, 97 years in Verne's future, where society places value only on business and technology. Written in 1863 but first published 131 years later (1994), the novel follows a young man who struggles unsuccessfully to live in a technologically advanced, but culturally backwards world. Often referred to as Verne's "lost novel", the work paints a grim, dystopian view of a technological future civilization.

The novel's main character is 16-year-old Michel Dufrénoy, who graduates with a major in literature and the classics, but finds they have been forgotten in a futuristic world where only business and technology are valued. Michel, whose father was a musician, is a poet born too late. In fact, the opening of the novel was of Michel getting an award for writing Latin poetry. The science and technology professors of the big university scoffed at the arts and humanities, “spouting like a steam engine.”

Michel had been living with his respectable uncle, Monsieur Stanislas Boutardin, and his family. The day after graduation, Boutardin tells Michel that he is to start working at a banking company. Boutardin doubts Michel can do anything in the business world.

The rest of that day, Michel searches for literature by classic 19th century writers, such as Hugo and Balzac. Nothing but books about technology are available in bookstores. In fact, the bookstores did have books of poetry, but the poetry was all in praise of mathematics and technology, such as Harmonies Ėlectriques and Méditations sur l’Oxygène. One of the poems began, “Le charbon porte alors sa flamme incendiaire Dans les tubes ardents de l’énorme chaudière...” Yes, it is as bad in French as it sounds (“Horreur, s’écria Michel”).

Michel's last resort is the Imperial Library. The librarian turns out to be his long-hidden uncle, Monsieur Huguenin. Huguenin, still working in the arts, is considered a "disgrace" to the rest of the family, and so was barred from attending Michel's birthdays, graduations, and other family events, though he has followed Michel's life—from a distance. This is the first time they meet in person. Huguenin tells Michel that his father was “un musicien de grand talent, né pour un siècle meilleur,” a great musician born for a better century. In fact, he refers to our present age as “notre âge crapuleux,” which I thought meant “our crappy age” but crapuleux actually means totally motivated by money. Chapter 10 consists of a tour of Uncle Huguenin’s library crammed with non-scientific books that could be found nowhere else.

At his new job, Michel fails at each task with Casmodage and Co. Bank until he is assigned to The Ledger, where Michel dictates the accounts for bookkeeper Monsieur Quinsonnas. Quinsonnas, a kindred spirit of 30, writes the bookkeeping information on The Ledger. Quinsonnas tells Michel that this is a job he can do in order to eat, have an apartment, and support himself while he continues working on a mysterious musical project that will bring him fame and fortune. Michel's fear of not fitting in is resolved; he can be a reader and still work on his own writing after work. In fact, Quinsonnas’s apartment is almost completely filled by a giant piano.

The pair visit Uncle Huguenin and are joined by other visitors, Michel's former teacher Monsieur Richelot and Richelot's granddaughter, Mademoiselle Lucy. Quinsonnas and Michel both dream of being soldiers, but this is impossible, because warfare has become so scientific that there is really no need for soldiers anymore—only chemists and mechanics are able to work the killing machines. But this profession is denied to even them, because "the engines of war" have become so efficient that war is inconceivable and all countries are at a perpetual stalemate. Verne said that fighting lifted the spirit (Se battre élève l’âme) and seemed to mourn the end of war. Verne’s character also missed the old days when there were courtroom battles and convictions instead of just financial settlements out of court.

Before long, Michel and Lucy are in love. Michel discusses women with Quinsonnas, who sadly explains that there are no such things as women anymore; from mindless, repetitive factory work and careful attention to finance and science, most women have become cynical, ugly, neurotic career women. Verne depicts twentieth-century women as downright ugly: long, skinny, and dry. Their waists were flattened, their faces austere, their joints stiffened (La taille s’aplatit, le regard s’austérifia, les jointures s’ankylosèrent). Their noses stuck down below their lips (un nez dur et rigide s’abaissa sur des lèvres), and they were nothing but acute angles (de la ligne drote et des angles aigus). In fury, Quinsonnas spills ink on The Ledger, and he and Michel are fired on the spot; Quinsonnas leaves for Germany. Of course, the misogynous Quinsonnas blamed Eve for the fact that he lost his temper.

In a society without war, or musical and artistic progress, there is no news, so Michel can't even become a journalist. He ends up living in Quinsonnas' empty apartment while writing superb poetry, but lives in such poverty that he has to eat synthetic foods derived from coal. He eventually writes a book of poetry entitled Hopes which is rejected by every publisher in Paris.

Michel briefly has a job at the Great Drama Warehouse, where popular entertainment is churned out quickly and sloppily. Each play was required to have “soixante-quinze mille calembous” (75 thousand puns). Michel, who loved serious literature, quit this job, saying “plutôt mourir de faim,” better to starve to death.

As the year 1961 draws to a close, all of Europe enters a winter of unprecedented ferocity. All agriculture is compromised and food supplies are destroyed, resulting in mass famine. The temperature drops to thirty degrees below, and every river in Europe freezes solid. In despair, Michel spends his last bit of money on violets for Lucy, but finds that she has disappeared from her apartment, evicted when her grandfather lost his job as the university's last teacher of rhetoric. He is unable to locate her amongst the thousands of starving people in Paris. He spends the entire evening stumbling around Paris in a delirious state. Michel becomes convinced that he is being hunted by the Demon of Electricity, but no matter where he goes, he is unable to escape its presence. He wanders into a morgue, with “les cadavres rigides, verdâtres, et boursouflés, étendus sur les tables de marbre,” stiff, greenish, swollen corpses extended upon marble tables, but even here there is bright electrical illumination. As Michel wanders, he finds the tomb of Heloïse and Abélard fallen into ruin, the glorious past forgotten. Is this depressing or what?

In the climax of the story, the heartbroken Michel, bereft of friends and loved ones, wanders through the frozen, mechanized, electrical wonders of Paris. The subjective narrative becomes steadily more surreal as the dying artist, in a final paroxysm of despair, unconsciously circles an old cemetery and finally collapses comatose in the snow. You will never guess what his last word was. If you guessed “Lucy,” you are right. “Oh! Lucy, murmura-t-il, en tombant évanoui sur la neige.”

The book's description of the technology of 1960 was in some ways remarkably close to actual 1960s technology. The book described in detail advances such as cars powered by internal combustion engines ("gas-cabs") together with the necessary supporting infrastructure such as gas stations and paved asphalt roads, elevated and underground passenger train systems and high-speed trains powered by magnetism and compressed air, skyscrapers, electric lights that illuminate entire cities at night, fax machines ("picture-telegraphs"), elevators, primitive computers which can send messages to each other as part of a network somewhat resembling the Internet (described as sophisticated electrically powered mechanical calculators which can send information to each other across vast distances), the utilization of wind power, automated security systems, the electric chair, and remotely-controlled weapons systems, as well as weapons destructive enough to make war unthinkable.

The book also predicts the growth of suburbs and mass-produced higher education (the opening scene has Dufrénoy attending a mass graduation of 250,000 students), department stores, and massive hotels. Verne depicts a giant canal that connects Paris with the ocean, and gigantic ships big enough to be floating gardens. A version of feminism has also arisen in society, with women moving into the workplace and a rise in illegitimate births. It also makes accurate predictions of 20th-century music, predicting the rise of electronic music, and describes a musical instrument similar to a synthesizer, and the replacement of classical music performances with a recorded music industry. Verne’s example of the degeneration of modern music was none other than Richard Wagner projected into the next century. Verne said Wagner’s four-hour operas were not so much to taste as to swallow. His music, Verne thought, sounded like someone sitting on a keyboard. Ah, if Verne could only have imagined what twentieth-century music, with its dissonances, actually did sound like! Whether it was melodic and expressive like Stravinsky or like a gray mixture of dissonance as in Webern, it makes Wagner’s music seem very tame. In addition, [Verne] predicts that the entertainment industry would be dominated by lewd stage plays, often involving nudity and sexually explicit scenes. Verne’s example of this from the nineteenth century was Jacques Offenbach, whose female “jumpers” wore swimsuits “showing them as nature made them.” In another place, Verne writes “le flambeau de l’hymen ne sert plus comme autrefois à faire bouillir la marmite,” which I think means “the flame of the hymen does not serve, as in the old days, to make the stew boil.” I’m not sure what this means, but it can’t be good.

In some ways, the modern world is worse than Verne could have imagined, but in some ways it is better. The modern publisher, on the last page, told how many grams of carbon dioxide equivalent were produced by publishing each book. Verne did not imagine global warming; and he could not have imagined science helping us to prevent global warming.

How could a writer who loved science so much imagine that science would create a nightmare future? I can suggest an answer to this question. In Verne’s twentieth-century Paris, all of science was in the service of making money, whereas the science that M. Arronax viewed from Captain Nemo’s underwater drawing-room was a view of the wonders of the ocean. Twenty Thousand Leagues ends with (I quote from memory), “The writer of Ecclesiastes said, millennia ago, That which is far off and exceedingly deep, who can find it out? Of all men now living only two can answer in the affirmative: CAPTAIN NEMO AND MYSELF (his caps).” Science can liberate our minds to understand the world, or it can enslave us. To Verne, either future was possible. Unfortunately, the real twentieth and twenty-first centuries more closely resembles Captain Nemo’s acts of terrorism than his exploration of the sea.

The main message I get from Verne’s forgotten novel is that science and education are whatever we make them to be. They can be used to open our eyes to beauty or to enslave us to Mammon.

Does Science Kill the Spirit?

Just posted: a Darwin video about global warming, soil, with a mole joke at the end.

Some people in the humanities perceive science as a threat. They think that it turns all human creativity into the mere operation of neurons, the product of a complex brain computer. A scientific explanation of creativity, in terms of action potentials and neurotransmitters, may, they fear, kill the spirit.

When I was an undergrad, I took music theory courses. I learned about the overtone series, and how the notes of major chords blended together within that overtone series, whereas the notes of a minor chord created discord because they differed from that series. An overtone series occurs when the vibrations at a certain frequency, say 256 Hertz for middle C, also create resonant harmonies at higher frequencies, first at the octave (512 Hertz, or twice that of middle C), then the fifth above that (G), then another octave (high C, at 1024 Hertz), then the third above that, which is E. C major contains C, E, and G, while C minor contains C, E-flat, and G; the E-flat grates against the natural overtone of E. Major chords make us feel at peace, while minor chords make us feel on edge. This is usually interpreted as happy and sad. This is not quite true; Andean music, for example, consists largely of minor-mode melodies that are happy. Even if you do not know anything about chords, your emotions can be affected by hearing these chords. One could say that the human mind, with all its happiness and sadness, is the plaything of the laws of physics, particularly the overtone series of vibrations.

Furthermore, the overtone series can explain the differences in what musicians call timbre, which can be figuratively described as the color of the sound. A flute and a trumpet playing the same note, for example 512 Hertz, sound very different, because the trumpet has more of the high, piquant overtones than the flute. So also, the overtone series explains why you need to avoid certain compositional mistakes, such as doubling your leading-tones or having parallel fifths.

I learned this, and knew it, yet at the same time I was able to participate in the near-magic of musical experience. I knew that all of music could be explained by the mathematics of vibrations and by the human brain’s response to them. But I still imagined music as magic. At the time, I was a creationist, and believed that music was literally divine. It never occurred to me to worry that my knowledge of the physics of sound might destroy the magic of musical experience. I knew just enough about music to be able to write some mediocre stuff of my own, and just enough to be frustrated when I heard works of true genius, such as those of Mozart. You think Mozart’s music is nice; I understand why it is not only nice but profound. (You’ve never heard my “Emmaus Road” symphony of 1977? Thank God it was never performed or recorded.)

And so it is with all of science. A biological explanation of the working of the human brain in no way destroys the wonder of human creativity. Explaining religion in terms of stimulation of the right temporal lobe does not negate the transcendent experience of religion. Franz Schubert put the poetry of Wilhelm Muller to music in Die Winterreise, proclaiming that all our joys and all our sorrows, “alles eines Irrlichts Spiel,” they are all the playthings of illusion. Everyone who has sung Die Winterreise, including the late great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, could experience the transcendent beauty of this line of music, even while proclaiming that this beauty is a mere illusion of the mind. You see, when we are participating in music, or in the world of nature as explained by science, we are inside of it, and the mathematical and physical explanations do not destroy the evolved capacity to experience them as transcendently inspiring experiences. We can analyze our animal evolution, but we are still animals, exulting inside of those experiences.