Montaigne for the 20th Century writer

Yesterday my friends, my wife and baby boy drove almost three hours through rain and traffic in the southwest of France to see something that I have pictured in  my mind for a long time; the small tower, and the grounds where the 16^th century writer Michel de Montaigne lived and worked. To visit sites such as chateaus is normal, but this was not Montaigne’s chateau, but rather just the small tower that remained. Luckily for us that tower is the most important part, as Montaigne wrote his famous and influential essays from a tiny room on its top floor. A visit to Montaigne’s former residence is not a historical journey as far as I am concerned; instead it is perhaps one of the more pure ways of seeing my own generation. The lens turned on Montaigne reveals more about the artistic expressions of our time, as well as the societal progress we are making than any I can think of.

Reading Montaigne if you haven’t should not be daunting, even though the essays are longish, and the entire volume very big. Instead do what I did, get it on a Kindle, and you won’t notice the size. As soon as you start reading, if you are like me, you will have this strange sense of time bending, where plagues, kings and political strife don’t matter, but instead you are sitting next to a friend who is speaking more eloquently than you the words you would have liked to have spoken yourself. This admiration of Montaigne is almost a trend in the United States, as nearly every author I respect mentions him as an influence, and seeing both the tower, and reading the essays is it easy to understand why. The first reason is rather shallow, but nevertheless relevant. That is, Montaigne was doing, (much better) what I am doing now. He was writing about what he felt important, even if it was unconnected with any political or fashionable trend. He felt a need to move from journal writing to something which had not been done before, which was essay writing. He had his views published not for money, but so that others could have the chance to read his often contrarian views, and notice the same feelings in themselves when it happened. This is what we do with blogs a lot of the time, and certainly Montaigne would have been a very popular blogger. He was a celebrity, connected to royalty, had the best parties, traveled the world, and yet wrote about the condition of living which was universal.

The second reason I see a connection has to do with a conversation I had with Professor Steven Pinker  about his upcoming book about violence. Though no one has read it yet, it is essentially, from what I understand an account of humanities tendency throughout time to become less violent. Dr. Pinker is very quantitative, so I am sure this is backed up by a lot of data, but we can imagine this even rationally when considering the bloody tortures of times past, and the mere likelihood that you and a family member would directly experience violence.  Montaigne lived during one of these violent times, yet he himself was an outlier, resisting all violence and cruelty towards other people and even animals. My generation of writers seems to be embracing similar ideas, which is a departure from the tough Hemingway and Mailer generation of writers. Jonathan Safron Foer wrote a convincing book about animal cruelty, which led him and subsequently others to vegetarianism. Franzen’s “Freedom” is as much a call for peace towards wildlife as it is a story of a family. Jonathan Letham takes empathy in a direction not dissimilar from Montaigne in a novel format in “Chronic City”, where wealth and society are things to be coped with, but do not make for a rewarding existence. Rather personal connections far exceed superficiality. I mention these three only in rather cliché ways, when I like all three books a great deal and find them more complex, as I find Montaigne himself more complex. Somehow though the spirit of that tiny writing room on Montaigne’s giant estate 500 years ago still speaks to us, even in Brooklyn New York.

So, if you can’t make the physical journey at least read these essays, and see the world’s first would be blogger, and father of generation X philosophy.

When the cat's away...

Jonathan Franzen hates cats. In his massive and all around stunning novel “Freedom” there is one point that can’t not be argued. Franzen and felines are sworn enemies. It is a novel, where so many stories intertwine, but that fact remains salient, making it obvious to me that his convictions are genuine. One of the characters, Walter, spends much of the novel in a quest, or at least a tirade, against the beast of house cats, who kill nearly two million birds domestically each year. This is so overwhelmingly convincing to me, that I have made a point of tiresomely preaching anti-house cat propaganda to my friends, who basically think I am crazy. What I didn’t think about is that neither Franzen or I are Europeans, especially French. What could this possibly have to do with our dislike of cats? Probably nothing, but a recent article I read in Scientific American has made me think. Read the article and references if you want some real science, but here is a brief description.

There is an extremely common one-celled organism called Taxoplasma Gondii. Many new parents are familiar with this, as expecting mothers are often tested for this, as the neurological problems associated with a baby having Taxoplasmosis can be very dangerous. Basically it is a parasitic protozoa that takes up residence in the brains of animals, and creates a protective cell casing. This cell casing protects the host from any overt symptoms caused by the parasite, so there is no problem with having it, at least from all appearances. Now if you were a rat, the problems of hosting T. Gondii are much more obvious. It is this super smart single cell that has one goal only for existence and that is to live in the gut of a cat. So as a resident in the Amygdala, a part of the brain associated with emotions and certain senses, T. Gondii is in an excellent position to manipulate a rat who is hosting it. It does it in a very subtle way which is to disable the rats’ fear of the sense of cat urine. The rat can still smell, but has no anxiety regarding the dangerous cat urine, so may very well be eaten by a cat. T. Gondii then gets to fulfill its aspiration of living in a cat gut.

I have heard of such parasites before, as Carl Zimmer even wrote a book about them. It is fascinating for many reasons. The article touched on one that I hadn’t really thought of, which is much more philosophical. That is, how can we claim to have freewill when we aren’t even really controlling ourselves? A simple single-celled organism can be pulling the strings of our actions, adding yet another cause to the endless causes that make me believe that there is not counter causal freewill at all.

So why is it possible that my French wife loves cats and I and Franzen hate them? Well, T. Gondii is primarily passed to humans through raw milk cheeses, and raw beef which are commonly eaten in France. Therefore 80% of the French population host T. Gondii. Does this also mean that this population is putting themselves in unhealthy cat danger? Are old ladies who can’t move in France more likely to be sequestered in rooms of 20 cats who will one day devour them? I asked my wife if this accounts for the French love of the circus, and the large amount of lion tamers. Are those French people putting their heads inside lions’ because a parasite is telling them to be eaten? She thought this line of questioning rather stupid I think, and she is certainly right. It didn’t however stop her from saying “most of those circuses come from Italy anyway”, leaving me to wonder if she herself is not being manipulated by T. Gondii into cat denial.

Anyway, I better go chase the neighbors’ cat out of my garden before the bastard eats a poor sparrow....

Will Thinking in Pop Culture

I have felt pushed into a prison of disconnect with pop philosophy. This can lead down paths so promising, only to be destroyed by pseudo-science, superstition, and religiosity. Most obviously this is “The Secret”, that best seller of self delusion, and Deepak Chopka, the man most responsible for teaching the world the the words quantum mechanics, without having the slightest idea of what he is talking about. I know that I, and thousands of bloggers, make this complaint so often that we have become like street corner preachers, who are unheard even though they boom their voices through megaphones and amps. This blog however is not about this, but rather about signs that American culture may be as polarized as American politics. This is actually a relief to me, as I have not heard scientific reason applied to popular culture in any major way in a long time. The practitioners  of the movement I mention above I will refer to as the willful thinkers. They tie various unrelated elements in science, which they don’t understand, into a basic theory that puts free will in a more powerful place in society than it has ever been historically. Never before have people connected neuro-science, physics, and free -will in such broad ways as this. This type of self determination likely has some commercial motives, like convincing people to use a lot of credit on useless books, because they are capable of earning enough money to pay it back. Or it could be politically motivated in order that people feel they are never stuck in despair, but instead vote for candidates that promise that they will change things. It basically puts the responsibility for happiness and success on the individual by some spiritual connection with a universal energy. The reasoning goes that even if your individual energy is limited, your will can allow you access to a larger life force that can aid in success. This is a lot of science-like talk which really is just explaining free will the same way it is explained, rather unconvincingly to me, in the Bible.  

There are books that I consider rational alternatives to this thought, but they have significantly less readership. Just this week though I had two examples, one light of substance but entertaining, and the other much more profound. "Fringe" last week had this compelling plot line, where (in a parallel universe, but that is not so important) a man was on a drug trial designed to increase the intellectual range of very low IQ people. The trial worked better than expected, and this particular man ended up being hundreds of times more mentally capable than other humans. I know that already it seems hypocritical for me to blame the will thinkers for scientific faking, when the entirety of “Fringe” is so clearly unscientific. This is the case with this episode, as I don’t feel that there is a superpower capability of the human brain, but still this provided a nice metaphor on free will. The character was not only smart, but extremely proficient in probability, so much so that he could predict the future of events. In other words he understood the deterministic nature of existence and to connect the dots from the past and present out into the future.  This is more thought provoking than the average prime time sci-fi episode. It makes us think about a relevant question: how much information would we, or a computer, need to have in order to statistically know future events? That then leads to the question of whether, if such events can be mathematically predicted, there is any role for free-will.

The other deeper look at free-will, is the large, and brilliant new novel “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen. It is  the story, through various perspectives, of a woman, a family and the the ideals of recent generations. There is too much here to talk about, other than to refer back to the title “Freedom” where we see Franzen’s characters forever unable to escape the past in order to create an independent future. They are, like all of us, trapped by causality, and therefore freedom itself alludes them.

It may be that the answers, such as will thinking, are the most satisfying, which is why they may always remain in society. That said, a slow enlightenment seems to have risen on the horizon of mainstream culture, at least enough to start making us all question what it means to be free.