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The Reading Room
Blame the lack of posts on the fact that I have been dull lately -- downright boring, really -- but at least my plans for a visit to Austin, Texas, in July are firming up, and at least I have been reading interesting books. This week I polished off a 1998 story collection, A Hard Time to Be a Father, by the always wickedly funny Fay Weldon, and Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009). That's perniciously wishful thinking as applied, for example, to cancer therapy, megachurches, high finance, and George W. Bush's vanity war in Iraq (the Iraqis, remember, were going to strew flowers in our path). Ehrenreich writes:
"At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure. Prehistoric humans had to make a careful study of the natural world and the materials it offered them -- for example, rocks, clay, plant fibers, animal sinews. Then they had to experiment until, through trial and error, they found what actually works. Without a doubt, throughout our several hundred thousand years of existence, humans have also been guided by superstition, mystical visions, and collective delusions of all sorts. But we got where we are, fanning out over the huge continent of Africa and from there all over the earth, through the strength of the knots we could tie, the sturdiness of shelters and boats, the sharpness of spears.
"Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions.... What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings."
I am also halfway through Leigh Brackett's Shannach -- The Last: Farewell to Mars (2011) and closing fast on the end of Joyce Carol Oates' Heat and Other Stories (1991).
"At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure. Prehistoric humans had to make a careful study of the natural world and the materials it offered them -- for example, rocks, clay, plant fibers, animal sinews. Then they had to experiment until, through trial and error, they found what actually works. Without a doubt, throughout our several hundred thousand years of existence, humans have also been guided by superstition, mystical visions, and collective delusions of all sorts. But we got where we are, fanning out over the huge continent of Africa and from there all over the earth, through the strength of the knots we could tie, the sturdiness of shelters and boats, the sharpness of spears.
"Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions.... What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings."
I am also halfway through Leigh Brackett's Shannach -- The Last: Farewell to Mars (2011) and closing fast on the end of Joyce Carol Oates' Heat and Other Stories (1991).
