About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

Stumbling on “Stumbling on Happiness”

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I seem to be stuck in a rut, reading mostly books written by Harvard professors. The latest is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology there. It’s not about how to be happy, but about why we have difficulty figuring out what will make us happy. As he says about books about how to be happy:

Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you’ve bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why.

The problem we face, he says, is that our imaginations are faulty in systematic, predictable ways. He points to the case of conjoined twins who spend every moment of their lives locked together, face-to-face, but who can’t imagine undergoing surgical separation. “Why would you want to do that?” one of them asks. “For all the tea in China, why? You’d be ruining two lives in the process.” A medical historian says this isn’t unique–in fact, he found the “desire to remain together to be so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal.” And yet conventional medical wisdom is that conjoined twins should be separated at birth, even at the risk of killing one or both. This, Gilbert points out, is a failure of imagination. When we imagine how others feel, or how our future selves might feel, we focus on ourselves in the present. If we think we don’t have enough money, we imagine that having more money will make us happier; we can see now, so we can’t imagine that we could still be happy if we were to go blind. But in fact, over a certain level of income, money doesn’t make people any happier, and blind people are as happy as sighted people.

Everything he says seems insightful and perfectly reasonable, but I have to say that every time I encounter findings from social psychology, behavioral economics, and related fields, I wonder about how reproducible they are. This is pretty basic concern in these fields, and it’s referred to as the WEIRD problem. Most research of the sort Gilbert talks about is carried out on American undergraduates or people like them; the samples are overwhelmingly from drawn from societies that are Wealthy Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic. And there is a good bit of evidence that we have little basis on which to extend the findings of the research to the rest of humanity. I suppose this may not be much of a issue for Stumbling on Happiness, which is aimed at people who are probably not terribly different from American undergraduates. But I can never shake the feeling that grand statements about human behavior are being made on the basis on relatively flimsy evidence.

But mostly I don’t care when it comes to Gilbert, because he is a spectacularly good writer. Wikipedia tells me that he started out wanting to be a science fiction writer, but the creative writing class was full at his local community college, so he took the only course that was open, which was Introduction to Psychology. This was science fiction’s loss (although he has published stories in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, where I have also appeared). He has a way with sentences that Lisa Randall should attempt to emulate. Here is a paragraph taken at random:

By muddling causes and consequences, philosophers have been forced to construct tortured defenses of some truly astonishing claims–for example, that a Nazi war criminal who is basking on an Argentinean beach is not really happy, whereas the pious missionary who is being eaten alive by cannibals is. “Happiness will not tremble,” Cicero wrote in the first century BC, “however much it is tortured.” That statement may be admired for its moxie, but it probably doesn’t capture the sentiments of the missionary who was drafted to play the role of the entrée.

This is good stuff. I’d love to take a course from the guy.

Which is the better title: “Bride of the Slime Monster” or “Locksley Hall”?

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Previously we looked at the titles Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies and Dover Beach and decided that Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies won hands-down. In fact, in my opinion Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies might be the most awesomest title ever.

Let’s consider Bride of the Slime Monster. There’s no question that this is also an excellent title. Short, funny, gives you a clear sense of what the book is all about. Is it as good as Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies? I think not, but I recognize that others may feel differently. The cover is also pretty good.

Now, what are we to make of Locksley Hall? I think it’s pretty clearly an awful title, except maybe for a Regency romance, with a cover showing an auburn-tressed young maiden running from an English country estate, her half-uncovered bosoms heaving with strong emotion. While “Dover Beach” has the benefit of being the title of a somewhat familiar poem, nobody nowadays reads the 1842 poem “Locksley Hall” by Alfred Tennyson. It’s too long, too hard to follow, and it’s got just this one memorable line: “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” So memorable, in fact, that it has been totally decoupled from the poem in which it occurs.

So what kind of an idiot would title a science fiction novel Locksley Hall? That kind of idiot would be me! That’s what I named the long-unawaited sequel to Dover Beach. If you think you have read this sequel, you are quite probably deluded. But before too terribly long it will be an ebook you can put on your eshelf next to your dog-eared ecopy of the original novel. Yay!

My original error, it seems, was in buying into my editor’s idea that naming a post-nuclear-war private-eye novel after a nineteenth-century poem was a good one. So I decided that I should do the same thing for the sequel. But when Bantam examined the box office receipts for Dover Beach, it decided that the market for post-nuclear-war private-eye novels named after a nineteenth-century poem wasn’t as strong at they had imagined it to be and, in spite of great reviews, they didn’t want to publish its already-completed sequel. Boo!

Which isn’t to say that Locksley Hall is a bad title, in the sense that it is tightly integrated with the novel’s themes, in just the way that Dover Beach is. The poem “Locksley Hall” (that’s its author over there on the right) is all over the map. In outline it is a standard romantic poem about lost love. But it takes weird digressions into sexism, racism, and weirdest of all, science fiction.

Here is the SF-y passage, which seems to come out of nowhere:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

My novel, it turns out, is about the attempt to form a better government as New England is recovers from the “ghastly dew” that rained upon it. Some people are still dreaming of a parliament of man, a federation of the world, and other are thinking: You’ve got to be shitting me. Look how well the old government worked out for us!

And in the middle of it all, Walter Sands stumbles onto his second case, and he has to figure out which side a private eye should be on.

There’s gonna be some changes made

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Richard Bowker

. . . starting around July 30.

It’s pretty easy to get your ebooks up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble; it’s somewhat more complicated putting them on sites like iBooks and Kobo. You can do it yourself, via a nice outfit like Smashwords, but that involves Smashwording your ebooks, and I’m just too lazy, or (probably) incompetent. So I’m taking a different route. This will all fall into place pretty soon now, and then all you Apple bigots will be happy.

So here’s a video to celebrate:

Fire in a crowded theater: The Dark Knight, Plato, and censorship

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Oddly, on the day of the Aurora tragedy I listened to a lecture about censorship, as advocated by Plato in The Republic. (Here‘s the Open Yale course I’ve been listening to. It’s good!) It’s interesting that one of the foundational documents of Western civilization advocates strict government censorship of poetry and drama, for the good of the person and the benefit of the state. Here is Plato (in the voice of Socrates) in Book X:

Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and that you should take him up again and again and get to know him and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honour those who say these things–they are excellent people, as far as their lights extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.

In earlier books he raises the issue in the context of educating the young who will be rulers of the state.

As a nation, we have free speech built into our DNA. As a writer, I have no wish for my work to be censored (or, worse, forbidden). As a parent, though, I’m awfully glad that I’m past the time when I had to worry about whether my kids would be allowed to watch R-rated movies or play M-rated games or listen to songs with explicit lyrics. It was exhausting!

There aren’t any good answers here — it’s easy enough to see the flaws in Plato’s strategy, especially in a state with 300 million citizens. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep thinking about it. And we need to recognize the downside of the choices we have made as a society.

I’m obviously not the target for the Batman movies. I saw The Dark Knight at home on my little TV, and to me the violence just seemed over the top and stupid. But I could imagine the impact of the experience on the big screen. And once upon a time I was young enough to spend my time fantasizing about living in the worlds I experienced in movies and novels. We know nothing about the shooter’s motives (or even if he had any), but it looks like the world of The Dark Knight was the one he chose to inhabit. And that’s pretty scary.

The Sandman rides shotgun and quotes Titus Andronicus

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Here is another excerpt from Dover Beach. It’s early in the story, and our narrator is accompanying two of his friends on a trip to New Hampshire to do some business. It’s nighttime, and it’s snowing out, and they’re far from what’s left of “civilization.” Not a good combination in the world of this novel.

Our narrator, we are beginning to discover, has an odd literary bent.

*************

The road barely existed anymore. Hunched over the wheel, Mickey stared out through the snow and swerved constantly to miss the rocks and potholes and assorted debris. A broken axle up here would not be a good idea.

Bobby was nervous. When he’s nervous, he talks too much. “So she says, ‘Oh, it’s so hod to pot with all this. It’s been in the family for generations, you know. We godded it all through the Frenzy and now things are settling down, but what am I to do? One must eat, mustn’t one?’

” ‘Oh, certainly one must,’ I says. Jesus, they all make you feel like they’re doin’ you a favor, handing over their firstborn or something. But I’m not the one that’s starving. You know what I’m saying? Jesus, this snow’s a bitch.” Bobby leaned forward and peered out at an abandoned house. He doesn’t see very well. “I hate bein’ outside the city. I mean, the city is dangerous, but at least you know what’s goin’ on. There are rules, sort of. Who the fuck knows what’s goin’ on up here?”

Bobby sat in the middle, between Mickey and me. A shotgun rested between my legs. I held its smooth barrel in my right hand. The van’s heater was turned up full blast, and it felt great. I wished Bobby weren’t so nervous. He was making me nervous too.

We were off the highway now, passing by cold white fields and scrawny trees and rocks. Bobby was right: we didn’t belong here. Still, something stirred inside me—wisps of memories that were better left unremembered. “How much further, Mickey?” I asked.

“Not far,” he said. Mickey was about as talkative as Gwen.

Bobby drummed his fingers on his thighs. “This guy is so fuckin’ weird, Wally, you won’t believe it. It’s being stuck up here in the boonies, if you ask me. You got no human interaction, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“He has you. And O’Malley’s people.”

“O’Malley’s people. Shit. Talking to one of them’s like talking to a tree. This guy is so weird. Christ, I wish I could see something.”

Mickey was going even slower now. Eventually there was a light in the distance. “That’s it,” he said. We aimed for the light, and came to a stop in front of a large gate. The light shone down at us from behind the gate like a beacon from heaven. A dog was barking. I don’t like dogs.

“Get out with your hands up,” an amplified voice ordered. It sounded like God.

I looked at Bobby. “So fuckin’ weird,” he said, shaking his head. He motioned to me to get out. I left the shotgun behind and climbed down into the snow with my hands over my head. Bobby and Mickey did the same.

The gate swung open, and two figures appeared out of a shack. One stayed behind and trained a shotgun on us. The other moved forward. He had a revolver in one hand, a Doberman on a leash in the other; the Doberman was about the size of the van. The figure was wearing a knitted cap and a homemade sheepskin coat. He was about twelve.

He searched us. The Doberman growled when it was my turn. Good doggie. I kept my hands up. The boy found my Smith and Wesson and pocketed it. He found the shotgun in the van and gave it, and the Doberman, to the figure waiting by the gate.

The boy returned to us. “Okay,” he said. We all got into the van. The boy kept the revolver trained on Mickey, who drove slowly through the open gate. We passed the other figure, standing by the shack and restraining the Doberman. It was a girl, maybe a little younger than the boy. The Doberman kept barking. The gate clanged shut behind us. I felt as if I had crossed a border.

Here is a survival skill I have learned. Generally, when you come upon an isolated farm surrounded by barbed wire, with searchlights and Dobermans and shotguns in evidence, it is a good idea to move on. Quickly. Not tonight, however.

“So how do you like this snow?” Bobby asked the boy.

The boy didn’t reply.

“I don’t think there was this much snow in the old days,” Bobby went on. “Of course, they say that about a lot of things. But I think maybe they’re right about the snow. A lot more snow than there used to be.”

Bobby was nervous. I wished he would shut up.

The land extended flat and unbroken on both sides until it disappeared in the darkness. The road along which we were traveling was plowed and newly paved. We were headed for a sprawling house that blazed with light about a half mile in front of us. Several smaller buildings were scattered like seedlings around it. There was a large barn and a silo off to one side, and in the distance a windmill loomed like a creature from a fairytale.

“Stop,” the boy said when we had reached the house.

Mickey pulled up by the front porch.

Another figure stood by the door, holding another shotgun. The boy got out and waved, and the figure motioned for us to come in.

“Here goes,” Bobby muttered. We got out and crunched across the snow to the open door.

“Wipe your feet,” the figure commanded.

We wiped our feet and walked inside.

“Come with me.” The figure took off her cap—it was a girl with a misshapen face. We followed her while our senses reeled. Warmth: the house was warmer than the van, warmer than the Ritz; a month’s supply of logs blazed in a fireplace. Light: electric lights, shining out from chandeliers and sconces, reflecting off mirrors and polished mahogany furniture. Smells: the sharp sweet scent of burning birch, the rich aroma of something sweet being baked. Apple pie? Strudel?

Somewhere close by a piano was playing, children were laughing. I felt as if I had stepped into a storybook.

The deformed girl led us into a long dark room lit only by a coal fire. The room had a vaulted ceiling, tapestries on the wall, a Persian carpet on the floor. At the far end of an oak table sat a man with a gray beard and deep-set, glittering eyes. He was wearing a flowing white robe. Maybe I hadn’t stepped into a storybook; maybe I had stepped into the Bible. Maybe he was God.

“You may return to your post, Lavinia,” the man said in a deep, God-like voice.

The girl silently left the room. The man’s gaze turned to us: three travelers from a distant land, bearing gifts.

Not much to look at. Bobby is the only fat man I know—but it isn’t a healthy fat, a storybook fat. And his eyes are clouded, and his teeth are rotten. Mickey is short and has a shriveled arm. And I—well, I am reasonably normal, which means reasonably scrawny, reasonably scarred by life. I don’t think I look like a private eye.

“Please sit,” the man said.

We sat.

“I trust your drive was uneventful.”

“Wasn’t bad, Mr. Fitch,” Bobby said. “But the snow didn’t help matters much.”

“Ah, yes, the snow.” Mr. Fitch paused. “‘When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul.'” He fell silent then, as if he had exhausted his supply of sociability, or forgotten the next line. He looked as if he didn’t have much need for sociability. He sat straight and stiff as a pine tree, his hands folded on the table in front of him. His skin was leathery, his mouth hard. He scared me.

“We brought some very good merchandise,” Bobby said. “You’d be surprised at how much is still out there, if you know the right people.”

Mr. Fitch nodded, unsurprised. “I’ll take a look.”

“Want us to bring it right in here?”

Mr. Fitch unfolded a hand and gestured at the empty table.

Bobby stood up. “Great. Come on, boys.”

Mickey and I followed him back out to the van. Lavinia kept a careful watch on us from the front porch. “What’d I tell you about that guy, huh?” Bobby asked as Mickey opened the doors and jumped inside. “He’s got maybe thirty kids and half a dozen wives and he goes around lookin’ like the goddamn Lord of the Universe. Watch that stuff, Mickey, okay? It’s fucking fragile.”

I did most of the lugging. Mickey couldn’t help much because of his arm, and Bobby preferred talking to lifting. After a few trips back and forth we had covered the table with our stuff, and Bobby started his sales pitch. “Look at this china, Mr. Fitch. Rose Medallion. Service for six, plus assorted other pieces—almost perfect condition. See this portrait? Look at the signature: John Singer Sargent. He was famous. Ever see his murals in the Boston Public Library? That tea set is sterling silver. And you said you liked books, right? A complete set of Dickens—leather bindings, acid-free paper. I don’t think anyone ever opened them. Isn’t that something?”

Mr. Fitch examined everything while Bobby rattled on. He unwrapped every piece of china and stared at it. He took the painting out into the hall to study it in better light. I noticed he was wearing hiking boots under his biblical robe. Bobby was sweating. Mickey and I stood by the fire and waited.

“All right,” Mr. Fitch said eventually. “Come with me.” He strode outside and signaled to Lavinia, who fell in step behind us. We crossed to a long, narrow structure off to one side of the main house. He took out a key and opened the padlocked door, then went inside and flipped on an electric light. We followed him in.

It was a storage building—shelf after shelf of cartons jammed against the walls, a narrow aisle down the middle. Amazingly, the place was heated. We stood awkwardly in the aisle while Lavinia waited outside, her shotgun cradled in her arms.

“PC?” Mr. Fitch asked.

“Right,” Bobby said.

Mr. Fitch reached up and took down a small box. He opened it. The object inside was covered with bubbly plastic stuff. He unwrapped it.

It was not as beautiful as the china, but Bobby was not interested in beauty. He took it from Mr. Fitch and hefted it approvingly. It was a hard drive, I knew. Not that I cared. “How many?” he asked.

“I’ll give you twenty-five.”

“Are you crazy? I need fifty, or no deal.”

Mr. Fitch shrugged. “I haven’t got fifty.”

“Well, what else do you have? Got any ammo?”

Mr. Fitch stiffened. “I don’t deal in weaponry.”

“Okay, okay. How ‘bout software? And printers. How about them?”

Mr. Fitch and Bobby started dickering. I was impressed by how forceful Bobby was, considering that his entire future was on the line, and a girl stood ten feet away holding a shotgun she was clearly prepared to use. He obviously knew what he was doing, at any rate, because after a few tough minutes they had struck a deal, and I found myself lugging the precious equipment out to the van.

“Nice work,” I said to Bobby when he came to inspect.

“Thanks. He’s weird, but he’s a Yankee, and that means you can do business with him. Jesus, I could use a drink. Let’s go inside.”

I followed him back into the house, carefully wiping my feet before I entered.

Our merchandise had been cleared from the table. One of the Rose Medallion plates was piled high with pieces of cake. A solidly built woman with gray hair was pouring cups of tea, using the sterling silver tea set. I sat down next to Mickey, who was eyeing the cake with considerable interest.

“Can I get you anything else?” the woman asked when the tea had been poured.

Bobby cleared his throat. “I was wondering if there might be anything stronger than tea in the house. To celebrate our new business relationship, you understand.”

The woman looked at Mr. Fitch. He paused a moment, then banged his fist on the table. “‘What?'” he thundered. “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?'”

She smiled and left the room. In a moment she returned with a green bottle, which Bobby gazed at with something approaching religious ecstasy. She poured an inch of the amber liquid into a glass and gave it to Bobby, then did the same for Mr. Fitch. She offered the bottle to Mickey and me next, but we refused. We were tea people.

Bobby toasted Mr. Fitch. “Here’s to many more nights like this,” he said.

Mr. Fitch nodded his agreement.

The cake was delicious. Bobby drank half his whiskey. “You must come to Boston and let me return your hospitality,” he said.

Mr. Fitch’s face darkened. He set his glass down. “I will not go to Boston, Mr. Gallagher. I lost a child there once. Killed by the brigands who inhabit that place.”

“Well, it’s really a lot better than it used to be,” Bobby said, a little uneasily.

“‘Dost thou not perceive that it is a wilderness of tigers?'” Mr. Fitch roared. “Tigers must prey, and Boston offers no prey but me and mine.”

Tigers? Bobby scratched his head, for once at a loss for words. I reached for another piece of cake. “‘How happy are thou, then,'” I remarked, “‘from these devourers to be banished.'”

Mr. Fitch stared at me. “You know Titus Andronicus?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t everyone?”

He smiled and drank his whiskey. “Maybe this world has a future after all,” he murmured.

Bobby looked at me as if I had just caused the blind to see and the dumb to speak.

Mickey poured himself another cup of tea.

You must not look like a clueless foreigner If people are asking you for directions

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Here is the latest post from our fearless world traveler.

It’s about a bazillion degrees Fahrenheit in my neck of the woods, so here is a photo of the traveler, looking a bit like Kevin Youkilis, jumping into what he calls a “dope waterfall”:

“Dope”, for you old fogeys in the audience, means something like “amazing” or “extraordinary”. (Comparative “doper,” superlative “dopest.”) I recall when my kids taught me the word “sick,” with approximately the same meaning. At some point “sick” wasn’t intense enough, and I was introduced to the word “ill”, meaning “really sick.” But even old fogeys know these words nowadays. Thus the language evolves.

Life is stupider than fiction: Mitt Romney and his tax returns

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Richard Bowker

It seems clear that Mitt Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of his tax returns will be something of a political liability. Here’s the kind of hit he is taking, even from Republicans.

Democrats, led by Obama’s campaign, have pushed for Romney to release more years of returns. On Sunday, Bill Kristol had a similar message, saying Romney is “crazy” not to release more tax returns as soon as possible.

“He should release the tax returns tomorrow. It’s crazy,” Kristol said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You gotta release six, eight, 10 years of back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two.”

One plausible theory I’ve come across (see here, for example) is that if he releases his 2009 returns, he might show even more income than on his 2010 returns, but with no tax liability at all. The blogger says:

Still, willingness to do extremely aggressive tax sheltering (such as through loss generation from circular flows of cash) in 2009 would not come as a huge surprise, even though it seems like a dumb idea if you are preparing to run for president again. I wonder if the very fact that he was running for president might have led him to figure that he was audit-proof, on the ground that the IRS would look too political if it started challenging things.

I would like to second the “dumb idea” remark. I just don’t get it. Mitt Romney is a smart guy, and apparently he has wanted to be president all his life. He’s been running for elective office since 1994. He is clearly willing to forego vast gobs of money that he could be making in the private equity world. Couldn’t he see this coming? If I were Mitt Romney in 2004 or so, and I was making the decision to run for the presidency, I’d start cleaning everything up. What’s a few million dollars in taxes, compared to achieving your lifelong ambition of being the most powerful man in the world?

In a way, I find this more baffling than the record-shattering stupidity of John Edwards. People do stupid things when they fall in love. But people fall in love with people; they don’t fall in love with aggressive tax shelters. Or maybe I’m just suffering a failure of imagination.

If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s Romney who suffered a failure of imagination. To him, using aggressive tax shelters is as natural as breathing. If you have vast gobs of income, of course that’s what you do. Doesn’t everyone? Living in Massachusetts, I’ve seen enough of Romney to know that he’s not a natural politician. He’s smart enough to understand the game intellectually, but he doesn’t have good instincts. If you’ve been wildly successful at everything you’ve tried your entire life, maybe you start thinking the game will be easier than it really is. And that leads you to unforced errors like this one.

Or maybe he’s just an idiot.

Hemingway tries to get the words right

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Apropos of these post about revising and rewriting, it turns out the Simon & Schuster has released a new edition of A Farewell to Arms that includes all Hemingway’s alternate endings. He claimed that he wrote the ending 39 times before he was satisfied. The basic issue, he famously said, was “getting the words right.” Turns out that the actual number of endings was probably more like 47.

Here’s the first page of the manuscript, which is stored, with the rest of Hemingway’s papers, at the JFK Library in Dorchester, MA, about ten miles away from where I am sitting.

Endings are hard because they are so important. They don’t need to sum up what the novel was all about, but they control what readers are going to be feeling when they put the book down.

For close readers of Hemingway the endings are a fascinating glimpse into how the novel could have concluded on a different note, sometimes more blunt and sometimes more optimistic. And since modern authors tend to produce their work on computers, the new edition also serves as an artifact of a bygone craft, with handwritten notes and long passages crossed out, giving readers a sense of an author’s process.

One of the endings was suggested by Fitzgerald. Speaking of Fitzgerald, has anyone written a better ending than the one he wrote for The Great Gatsby?

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

More on Weinberg on religion

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Here is Jeff’s very fine comment on the Steven Weinberg quote in yesterday’s post:

Well, Weinberg did get his Nobel in physics, not psychology or sociology, so I mean no disrespect to his science when I say I think he’s wrong. What it takes for good people to do evil is any number of things, including temptation, the seduction of power, corrupt surroundings that cloud one’s moral thinking, guilt and fear that keep people from coming clean… in short, the whole panoply of human weaknesses. Religion might play into it, and sometimes does, but it\’s just scapegoating to blame religion for it in general.

Institutions, now–I think you’re on to something there. What led to the abuse coverups in the Catholic Church wasn’t the religion–and by religion, I mean not the church but the underlying faith that is the church’s reason for being–but, as you say, the belief that the institution was more important than the individuals being hurt. Even the slightest examination of the Christian faith makes clear that the faith is not about covering up wrongs, but rather shining a light into dark places. So the fear of hurting the institution (and the powerful, guilty individuals) led to wholesale abandonment of the actual tenets of the faith. It wasn’t the religion at fault, but a corrupt institution, and human weakness at its ugliest.

Jeff’s first point is obviously true. But his second paragraph misses something that I believe is fundamental about religion and religious institutions. Let me try a different way of stating what I think Weinberg is getting at: Religion uniquely empowers good people to ignore common conceptions of individual good in the pursuit of “higher” goals. For a salvation-based religion like Catholicism, nothing in this world is–or could be–more important than its mission of saving souls. It is really too facile to say that the sex abuse coverup in the Catholic Church is just about protecting an institution. The whole point of “not giving scandal” is to keep people from losing their faith and thereby risking eternal damnation. And that’s what the bishops said they were worried about when they didn’t publicize the misdeeds of the priests in their dioceses. Not giving scandal has to compete with other values within their faith, and sometimes the other values lose.

We can believe, I suppose, that this wasn’t the real reason for their actions, that they were really just trying to protect their own reputations and do everyday damage control. And I suppose some of that was going on. But I’m just taking their explanations at face value, because the concept of “giving scandal” is an essential part of their faith. And, of course, the Catholic Church has done this sort of thing before. The Inquisition had an iron-clad logic to it if you accepted the Church’s theological premises. Heresy was an unmitigated evil for the individual who believed the heresy–but also for society at large, which must be protected from heresy at all costs. If you could get the individual to recant his heresy, you were helping to save his immortal soul, and you were protecting the rest of the faithful from falling into the same error. How could mere physical pain stack up against that?

Similarly, I’m trying to give Paterno the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t just an everyday creep who was protecting Sandusky in order to protect himself. Probably there was some of that, but I also think that Paterno had the much the same motivation as Bernard Law. The Penn State football program was his equivalent of the Catholic Church. Which is to say that I don’t think Weinberg has it entirely right. Some institutions (communism also comes to mind) become like secular religions, with equally disastrous results.

By the way, all of a sudden there is a weird Red Sox angle to the discussion about Paterno. Everything in life is ultimately about the Red Sox.

Why the institution is more important than the victims

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Richard Bowker

The Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg famously said:

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

This seems pretty accurate to me, although nowadays I think we need to expand the definition of religion to include football. Probably not that much of a stretch.

Joe Paterno was a good Catholic, and as a good Catholic he was probably familiar with the idea of giving scandal. Here’s a good summary of the concept. When the sex abuse scandal erupted in the Archdiocese of Boston, the explanation trotted out by some of the clergy was that they didn’t publicize the abuse because they didn’t want to give scandal. Non-Catholics might misconstrue this as having something to do with the common usage of scandal–the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Watergate scandal….. But that’s not the kind of thing we’re talking about. Here’s the relevant Merriam-Webster’s definition:

Conduct that causes or encourages a lapse of faith or of religious obedience in another

The bishops felt that it was their duty to keep these problem priests secret, because if the faithful found out about them, they might lose their faith. It’s hard to disagree with this analysis, actually.

The assumption, of course, is that the institution, and people’s faith in it, is more important than individual lives. If you want to apply this belief to your own life, you can become a martyr. I expect that some of the bishops involved in the scandal might in fact be willing to become martyrs, if circumstances required it. Who knows? But they were willing to apply this belief to innocent young lives that were placed in their care. And that’s where Weinberg’s quote applies.

So here is Joe Paterno, by many accounts a secular saint–an upright and moral man beloved by one and all. His institution was a clean, successful football program–not exactly the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, but close enough in Happy Valley. And in the end, his institution mattered more than anything, more than morality, more than human lives:

The consequences of the lack of action by Mr. Paterno and others, whatever its explanation, were grim. Mr. Freeh said that by allowing Mr. Sandusky to remain a visible presence at Penn State following his retirement from coaching in 1999, he was essentially granted “license to bring boys to campus for ‘grooming’ as targets for his assaults.”

“Good people” doing evil.