Category: book reviews

Book review: “Left is Not Woke”

May 18, 2023 • 11:30 am

The title of this new and short book (160 pages; click screenshot to go to the Amazon site) lured me to ask our library to buy it, for I thought it should be available to University folk.  And of course being a Leftist and generally “antiwoke,” I wanted to see what arguments were on offer about why being on the Left is incompatible with being woke.

I hadn’t heard of the author, but Wikipedia has an entry for Susan Neiman and this is part of it:

Susan Neiman (/ˈnaɪmən/; born March 27, 1955) is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She currently lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

Sadly, I was disappointed in her book.  The first problem is that she doesn’t deal much with what “wokeness” really is, nor give examples of it to buttress her thesis. And Neiman’s thesis is this: she’s a big fan of the Enlightenment, and thinks that Leftism (unlike Liberalism, which is wedded to capitalism) is the political instantiation of her admired Enlightenment values.

Wokeness, Neiman argues, violates three Enlightenment values in ways I describe below:

a. Wokeism is tribalistic.  The overweening aspect of the Enlightenment, argues Neiman (and here I agree), is its emphasis on UNIVERSALISM.  Moral stands should not be taken based on nationality, ethnicity, or any other generalizable trait of a person.  It is this universalist attitude that led to the fight against slavery, child labor, and segregation. All that’s required is the ability to put yourself into the shoes of another person, conferring a moral stand that effaces nationalism, racism, sexism, and so on.  Wokeism, as Neiman argues, and as we all know, is tribalistic. It is based on identity politics and sees one’s race, gender, or similar traits as the most important aspect of a person, and something that can validate or invalidate their views. Identity politics is the antithesis of the Enlightenment. It’s not that Neiman has no sympathy for the oppressed. She has plenty, and in fact goes overboard praising some aspects of identitarianism (she’s a huge fan of Black Lives Matter, for instance). But yes, true Leftism sees humanity as a community with common interests, and, as the saying goes, “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere”. So I’m on board with her here.

b. Wokeism places power over justice.  Drawing from postmodernism, argues Neiman, Wokeism sees the conflict between groups as a battle for power, not a fight for justice. Her argument, based on the philosophy of Michel Foucault et al., is that the Woke aren’t really looking for justice, but seeking power. And a fight for power never ends, while a fight for justice can.  I think this is also true, and is in conflict with Enlightenment values, which were far more concerned with justice than power. In fact, the two “values”, as we know, are inimical to each other. One example is the fight by gender activists to allow biological males to compete in women’s sports. Justice would say no, they shouldn’t, but many gender activists favor this, and that is a drive for power. (This is my example; one of Neiman’s flaws is, as I said, her lack of examples of Wokeism to buttress her thesis.)

c.) Wokeism doesn’t really believe in progress.  Again, I agree with Neiman. The Enlightenment, as we know from Steve Pinker’s two big books (Better Angels and Enlightenment Now), always rested on beliefs that progress was possible, even if not always achieved.  One example I can adduce is civil rights.  The U.S., for example, has made huge strides in racial equality and racial justice since 1940, but to listen to some Wokesters you’d think that racism now is as bad as—or even worse than—the days of Jim Crow.  Wokesters claim that it’s just gone underground and has a different form. This, to me, is a ludicrous belief, refuted by tons of evidence.

One issue that strongly mars Neiman’s book is that she sees evolutionary psychology as deeply inimical to Leftism and to progress. She argues that evolutionary psychology, in the end, attributes selfish motivations to everything that people do, and that not only hinders moral progress (for everyone’s out for themselves), but gets rid of progress made possible by appealing to the interests of humanity as a whole instead of just your personal well being.

But Neiman’s not a biologist, and her view of evolutionary psychology is shallow and misguided. Evolutionary psychology does not predict that people will act in their own self-interest in every case: the “selfish” gene is “selfish” simply because natural selection can be seen metaphorically as genes trying to be “selfish” by outreproducing other genes.  Dawkins, frustrated by this misunderstanding (much of it coming from Mary Midgley, whom Neiman cites often), says that if he wrote The Selfish Gene now, he may have called it The Cooperative Gene.  There is far too much ignorant dissing of evolutionary psychology in this book, and it’s a serious flaw. Social rogress has clearly been made despite the fact that we’re products of natural selection, and no evolutionary psychologist I know holds the naive view that Neiman presents as characteristic of the field. We all know, for example, that culture can override evolution, and we also understand ways that natural selection itself can favor cooperation.

So if I agree with Neiman’s thesis, why am I not a big fan of her book? As I said, one reason is her lack of examples of Wokeism, which would not only support her thesis but also liven up what is a pretty scholarly and unexciting tome. Further, she dwells far too much on the Enlightenment (her academic speciality) at the expense of Wokeism, so you learn a lot more about the Englightenment (and there’s some good stuff there) but not so much about Wokeism. In other words, the book doesn’t fulfill the promise of its title.

Finally, there’s the annoying and—there’s no other word to use—ignorant attacks on evolutionary psychology presented as setting almost complete limits on our behavior and on human progress.

In the end, you might want to read this book to learn about the Enlightenment, and if you do you will. If you’ve heard the criticisms that the Enlightenment was a “Western” project, Neiman shows you how Enlightenment thinkers deliberately adopted the viewpoint of people from other cultures as a way of criticizing the problems with their own cultures without getting into trouble. But you won’t get a lot of buttressing if, like me,  you’re a Leftist seeking to understand why Wokeism is incompatible with your politics.

My WaPo review of Jon Losos’s new book on cats

May 3, 2023 • 9:00 am

My colleague Jon Losos, an evolutionary ecologist at Washington University who works on lizards but also has three cats, has written the kind of book I’d always wanted to write: an exploration of the evolutionary roots of the housecat and an evolution-based analysis of its behaviors.  Given Losos’s line of work, it’s also imbued with ecology. The book came out today, and you can order it on Amazon by clicking on the screenshot below:

 

Knowing of the book’s existence since it is published by Viking/Penguin (my own publisher), I asked the Washington Post if they wanted me to review it. They said “yes” and the link to my review below is taken from today’s newspaper. Click on the screenshot to see it, and, if it’s paywalled, perhaps judicious inquiry will yield a copy.

I’ll just give a short excerpt since you should read it on the site. (It will be in the paper edition of the Post on Sunday.)

The review is positive, so if you want to learn about cats, you should read the book. I couldn’t resist a dig at d*gs at the outset, just to liven things up:

My view, and that of many other die-hard cat lovers, is that the internet exists primarily to circulate pictures and videos of cats. Dogs, you may be surprised to learn, can also be found on the internet but curiously tend to remain stuck in remote corners of cyberspace. Cats fuel wildly viral memes; dogs seldom get beyond that family vacation picture on Facebook (with just three likes, all from elderly relatives). Both cats and dogs — especially the younger versions of both — have fuzzy, big-eyed appeal, but dogs apparently lack what it takes to snare a global audience. As the New York Times contended, cat pictures are “that essential building block of the Internet.”

One prominent theory to explain this cat/dog disparity suggests that it’s the residual wildness of cats that makes them so special. This accounts for their infinite capacity for aloofness. Cats were domesticated rather recently — about 10,000 years ago when humans were busy inventing agriculture. And DNA tells us that the ancestor of all house cats is the African wildcat Felis silvestris lybica, which looks much like a domestic tabby.

. . . It’s appropriate, then, that an evolutionary biologist should write the definitive book on the biology, ecology and evolution of the house cat. That would be Jonathan Losos, who, although best known for his studies of lizards, also owns three cats. Those cats, he found, were every bit as interesting as his lizards but had a marked advantage over the reptiles: Losos didn’t have to leave his home to carry out field work. The result, “The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa,” is a readable and informed exploration of the wildcat that lurks within Fluffy.

. . . Many mysteries remain. Did meows (emitted only by domestic cats) really evolve, as has been seriously suggested, to resemble the cries of a distressed infant, to convert a hardwired human response — “I must take care of an unhappy baby” — into an ingenious ploy to get tuna? What is the real difference in the average life span between a cat allowed to roam outdoors and one kept inside? The traditional answer is five vs. 17 years respectively, but as Losos notes, “I have not been able to find the basis for this claim, and the discrepancy seems extreme to me.”

And we remain abysmally ignorant about my two most pressing cat questions: why they wiggle their butts right before they pounce on prey, and why they “chatter” when they see birds. All they seem to be doing in each case is alerting their potential meal to its hazardous situation, surely not a good idea. One of the lessons of the book, in fact, is that mysteries abound in cat science. One of the largest is how many times cats were domesticated in the Middle East. Did house cats evolve in a single location, or in several places around the same time? We don’t know, and the genetic data is ambiguous.

Like all good scientists, Losos admits that are many questions that will keep cat research active for years to come. Writing as a confirmed, and long-standing, cat lover, I look forward to an ever-expanding understanding of catness and to luxuriating, in quiet moments, in the joys of an infinite supply of online images, memes and videos of that most charismatic and beguiling of all domestic animals.

Sunday Times gives a lukewarm review to an accommodationist book

March 12, 2023 • 11:15 am

The only reason to write books about reconciling science and religion—as opposed to, say, reconciling sports and religion or business and religion—is if the two fields conflict in some way, and thus require reconciliation. After all, if  religion were purely philosophical, lacking any empirical claims, there would be no need to reconcile science and religion, for science is not philosophy.

As I argued in Faith Versus Fact, the never-ending attempts to reconcile science and religion come precisely because they are in conflict—in conflict about what is true in the universe and about how to ascertain those truths. Science has a toolkit for (provisionally) ascertaining what’s true in the universe: a toolkit including observation, replication, doubt, testability, prediction, and so on.

Religion’s toolkit includes three things: authority, revelation, and scripture, none of which is a reliable guide to the universe.  If these were reliable, all religions would converge on the same truth claims. Jesus would be either a prophet, as he is in Islam, or the son of God/God, as he is in Christianity. Jesus would have visited America, as the Mormons claim, or not (as Christians believe.). I could go on, but of course as author, I recommend reading my book (for a cheaper take on my thesis, read the archived version of my 2010 USA Today column, “Science and religion aren’t friends.” (I’m still amazed I got that published.)

Though I claim that my book killed off any reconciliation between science and religion, the attempt won’t lie down. That’s because, except for fundamentalists, religious people, along with nonbelieving “faitheists” who think religion is false but still necessary for society, don’t want to think that their own religious delusions make them unfriendly to modern science, which WORKS. You’re not a credible human if you think science isn’t the best way to find out empirical truths.

Yet, the attempts continue, spurred on by philosophers like Ronald Numbers who argue that conflicts between science and religion are only apparent but not real. The Scopes Trial, or the saga of Galileo versus the Church weren’t really about science/religion conflicts, but were merely the results of sociological or political differences.

They’re partly right, but mostly wrong. Tennessee’s Butler Act, which forbad the teaching of human evolution (but not evolution of other species) was not about politics, but about the fact that the new theory of evolution directly conflicted with the accounts given in Genesis I and II.

And so accommodationism returns in this new book by Nicholas Spencer, an author described on Amazon as:

Senior Fellow at Theos, a Fellow of International Society for Science and Religion and a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London

Theos is a pro-religion think tank in London founded by “the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the then Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor.” As Wikipedia notes, it ” maintains an ecumenical position.” That is, it’s pro-Christian.

Here’s Spencer’s book (click to preorder), which I haven’t read as it won’t be out in the U.S. until May 23. I’ll simply highlight today’s Sunday Times of London review.

The review of Spencer’s book by James McConnachie can be reached by clicking on the headline below; but for nearly everyone it’s paywalled. Fortunately, you can find it archived for free here.

Apparently Spencer doesn’t accept Steve Gould’s position that science and religion occupy distinct and non-overlapping magisteria (a false claim advanced in his book Rocks of Ages, which I heavily criticized in a TLS review you can see here). No, Spencer thinks it’s more complicated than that, but whatever their relationship is, it’s not antagonistic. (Indeed, in some trivial senses they aren’t antagonistic, as in the observation that there are religious scientists, one that Spencer apparently makes much of. Quotes from McConnachie’s review are indented:

For Spencer, [Buzz] Aldrin stands in a long line of scientists and scientific icons whose thought and work have been inspired and shaped by their religious convictions. Through history the “magisteria”, or realms, of science and religion have not been antagonistic, he argues, still less non-overlapping, but rather “indistinct, sprawling, untidy, and endlessly and fascinatingly entangled”.

Spencer has covered some of this ground before in sophisticated and readable histories of Darwin and religion, atheism and the centrality of Christianity to western thought. This book, though, is surely his magnum opus. It is astonishingly wide-ranging — there is a whiff of the encyclopaedia about it — and richly informed.

. . . From here on the narrative of a clash between science and religion is weighed, and found wanting. Medieval Christians, Spencer argues, responded to Greek science — transmitted through the “fragile brilliance” of medieval Islamic science — with enthusiasm. They used astronomical observation to prove what the Bible told them: that “the heavens declare the glory of God”.

Renaissance astronomers thought something similar. Even Galileo — much-championed by anticlerical types — “was no sceptic, let alone a heretic”. (And he probably didn’t mutter “And yet it moves” shortly after vowing in front of the Inquisition that the Earth was at the centre of the universe.)

The touchstone about whether one can see this history objectively is whether they admit that yes, the clash between Galileo and the church was largely about observation conflicting with religion. McConnachie continues:

“If the marriage of science and religion was harmonious across much of Europe in the Enlightenment,” Spencer writes, “it was positively blissful in England.” He traces a line of devout English theorists and experimenters from the “fiercely religious” Isaac Newton — a man more interested in theology than physics — through to a suite of English “clerical naturalists”.

This lineage culminated in Charles Darwin, who had started training for ordination as a younger man and lived in a rectory when he was older — “lacking only the dog collar and the Christian faith” to be a clergyman, as Spencer puts it. Even the older, agnostic Darwin had his religious doubts and yearnings. Spencer describes the poignant note given to him by his wife, Emma, encouraging him to leave room for faith. Underneath her words, he later wrote: “When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed and cried over this.”
Darwin was at best a deist, and trying to claim he was conventionally religious is another touchstone of academic dishonesty.

There are so many moments like that — myths not so much busted as brought down by controlled demolition. The 1860 Oxford evolution debate, which set Darwin’s monkey-descended champions up against the scoffing bishop? By the end of the century most Christians accepted evolution.

If you know about the Oxford debates, or about the initial reaction of religious people to Darwin, you’d know that the marriage was not “blissful” at the outset. Christians accepted Darwin because they had to: the evidence was overwhelming. Yet they still held onto superstitious and antiscientific notions of Jesus, so in what sense is that a “blissful marriage”? “Cognitive dissonance” is more like it.

And of course most Christians in the U.S. do not accept evolution in the naturalistic sense. A 2019 Gallup poll showed that of all surveyed Americans, 40% believe God created humans in their present form, another 33% think that humans evolved but that the evolution was guided by God, and a mere 20% held the naturalistic view that humans evolved and God had no part in directing the process. That means that nearly 3 out of 4 Americans hold a view of human origins that contravenes science (regardless of whether God was in charge, science doesn’t show that evolution was “directed” at all).

After praising Spencer’s writing, McConnachie gets down to his overall assessment of the book:

The argument could sometimes be summed up as “it’s more complicated than that”, plus “let’s replace a narrative of conflict with one of collaboration”. It’s so reasonable. So Anglican! But then Spencer is a senior fellow at the Christian think tank Theos, which exists to challenge negative representations of religion in western countries, believing that “faith, and Christianity in particular, is a force for good in society”.

In other words, Spencer’s book is tendentious, and nothing I’ve read about it in either the Amazon summary or McConnachie’s review adds to what’s already been written by previous accommodationist authors. After all, there are only so many ways to claim that science and religion are friends.

McConnachie’s final take:

At heart, then, Magisteria is a plea for religion to remain entangled in our lives and in our science. I’m not convinced. That word from Spencer’s subtitle, “entangled”, references quantum entanglement, whereby two separate particles are mysteriously linked, so that the state of one is bound up with the other, even if they are far apart. Einstein sceptically summed this up as “spooky action at a distance”, and I feel similarly about Spencer’s view of the interaction of science and religion. The two realms overlap only if you accept the validity of religious beliefs to start with. And Spencer’s own narrative, despite himself, reveals a historical disentangling — a slow withdrawal of the spookiness from science. Whether or not you see that as a good thing depends, ultimately, whose side you are on.

It sounds to me as if McConnachie is a nonbeliever, since he appears to reject “the validity of religious beliefs.” He also recognizes that the history of the “blissful marriage” is one of inevitable divorce as science pushes God back into the corner as an ineffectual deity unable to cure children of cancer but powerful at deciding who wins football games.

I’ll close with a great paragraph on this supposedly blissful marriage written by The Great Agnostic, himself, Robert G. Ingersoll:

There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: “Let us be friends.” It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: “Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet.”

h/t: pyers

Two pieces of fiction: one very good and the other a classic

February 17, 2023 • 12:15 pm

As I said earlier, I’ve spent a lot of time lately trying to read fiction that has won Pulitzer or Man Booker prizes, figuring that this is one way to find good books as my time runs out (so few years and so many books!).  The last two I’ve read have been very good, and I recommend them both. The second, however, is a MUST READ—a modern classic.

Here’s the “very good” book by Jhumpa Lahiri, one that came out in 1999 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the next year. It’s a collection of nine short stories, almost all of which deal with people of Indian descent interacting with either the West or with Westerners who visit India. Click on the screenshot to see the Amazon listing (only nine bucks for the paperback):

Unlike a lot of Anglo-Indian fiction, much of it packed in books over a thousand pages long, this one has no ambitions to be an epic. Rather, it’s a series of snapshots of human relations and emotions, written simply but beautifully, and not overly concerned (as it was in A Passage To India or The Raj Quartet) by a clash of cultures.  Although some claim there’s a deliberate theme to the sequence of stories, that’s above my pay grade, and I appreciated each story as a whole. The best, to my mind, is the title story, which depicts an imagined relationship between an Indian driver/tour guide—as well as an “interpreter of maladies” for a doctor whose patients don’t speak his language—with the mother of an Indian American family he’s driving around India. The driver’s futile imaginings and longings are heartbreaking.

The book sold over 15 million copies worldwide, and that would translate to about an equal number of dollars for the author! Lahiri now writes in Italian, which she taught herself after moving to Italy, and her work is translated back into English. I haven’t read anything she’s written other than this book, but if you want a book you can dip into for an hour here and there, this is the one for you.

But this next book is stunning—stupendous in ambition and achievement.  Up to now, I’ve said that the best new fiction I’ve read in perhaps a decade was All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2018, and I still think it’s a fantastic book and a classic. But I just finished a novel that I think is even better. It’s this one by Australian Richard Flanagan, published in 2013 and winner of the Man Booker Prize the next year (click on screenshot to go to Amazon link).

First of all, if you don’t like grim scenes, torture, death, or horror, you should avoid it, for the major part of the book depicts what life was like for a group of Australians captured by the Japanese and ordered to build the Burma Railway, also known as the “Death Railway”. Built between 1940 and 1943, the horrible working conditions and draconian treatment by the Japanese guards led to the deaths of over 100,000 men: 90,000 civilians and over 12,000 Allied prisoners. (It was the subject of the novel and 1957 movie “The Bridge On the River Kwai”.) If you can’t stand graphic depictions of maggot-ridden limbs being amputated, people being beaten to death, and men being drowned in shit by falling into communal latrines, this is not for you.

But the point of all the grimness is not sensationalism, but to convey a sense of what it was like and what I see as the book’s main theme and its only depiction of goodness: the idea that although life may be meaningless, one thing that redeems that is people caring for each other.  I think this was also the point of Camus’s The Plague.

And at any rate, only about half of the story is about the camp experience, which is sandwiched between the life and loves (or rather, one great love) of the protagonist, Dorrigo Evans, a Tasmanian who becomes a doctor. Dorrigo, himself engaged, falls deeply in love with his uncle’s young wife before being transferred to Asia, and the depiction of their love affair, which ends abruptly when the uncle finds out, is gorgeous and heartbreaking. If you want to see the best depiction in words of the psychosis that is the beginning of love, you’ll find it here. (After the war Dorrigo sees Amy, his great love, only once, passing on the street in Sydney, only then realizing that she was all that gave meaning to his life.) The lives of other characters are also described in detail, especially that of Major Nakamura, the evil Japanese camp commander who manages to escape punishment after the war. The plot is intricate, and you’d best read the Amazon summary, though it will be a spoiler

The reason this book is so great, beyond the intricate plot and minute depiction of a of hell on earth which most of us weren’t aware of, is Flagan’s beautiful writing, used to describe the inner life of of every character. This is a book in which just the words themselves convey a sensuous pleasure, and I found myself rereading sentences—something I never do. There are a fair number of literary allusions for those who know their poetry or fiction (at one point the crumbling railway is described in words similar to those used by Shelley in “Ozymandias”), but the language alone is stunning.

The ending, in which Dorrigo, after being a true hero to his men during the war, decides that he’s actually a bad man, while Nakamura, a truly evil man, decides that he’s actually good, is mesmerizing.

It’s a war story, a stirring love story, a story of deprivation, horror, and misery, an internalized monologue of Dorrigo and everyone else, all couched in the most luscious prose—what’s not to like?  Seriously, if you don’t read this book you’re missing some of the finest fiction of our era.

As with Lahiri, I haven’t read anything else by Flanagan. I’m not sure that’s bad, as I can’t imagine either could do as good a job as they have in the two books above.

Your turn: I told you my latest favorites, now you can tell us yours.

Are you a racist if you like big butts?

January 8, 2023 • 1:15 pm

How can you not like Kat Rosenfield when she’s named “Kat,” is Jewish, and has the ability to write a trenchant but also funny review of a book on how white people are not allowed to either like big butts or (if a woman) have one, for it’s a form of racist cultural appropriation. Twerking is out too.

The book under consideration is called Butts: A Backstory, and you can click on the cover to go to the Amazon link (yes, the title and graphics are clever):

 

You can read Kat’s Unherd review by clicking on the screenshot:

Kat gives the book a mixed review. The bit about the documented racialization of oversized derrieres, particularly in the 18th and 19th century, is pretty horrifying, especially the story of the South African black woman Sarah Baartman, who was exhibited as an inferior specimen of human for her rear pulchritude. But if big butts were racially denigrated then, author Heather Radke says that they’re welcome now among some white people, and gives examples like Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, and so on. “Twerking,” too, has been taken up by whites. And it’s the white appropriation of the butt fetish that is, well, problematic:

Rosenfield:

To be fair, it surely is not Radke’s intention to inculcate racial anxiety in her reader: Butts feels like a passion project, deeply researched and fun to read, offering a deep dive into the history and culture of the human rear end, from the Venus Callipyge (from whose name the word “callipygian” is derived) to Buns of Steel to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s seminal rap celebrating all things gluteal. It is a topic ripe for well-rounded analysis, so to speak. But having been written in the very particular milieu of 2020s America, Butts unfortunately falls victim to the contemporary vogue for viewing all matters of culture through a racial lens. The result is a work that not only flattens the butt, figuratively, but makes the book feel ultimately less like an anthropological study and more like an entry into the crowded genre of works which serve to stoke the white liberal guilt of the NPR tote bag set.

At this point I was starting to fall in love with Rosenfield, but she kept on stoking the ardor with her insistent anti-wokeness:

The concept of cultural appropriation has always struck me as both fundamentally misguided and historically illiterate, arising from a studied incuriosity about both the inherent contagiousness of culture and the mimetic nature of human beings. But when it comes to the remixing of thing such as textiles, hairdos or fashion trends across cultures, the appropriation complaints seem at least understandable, if not persuasive: there’s a conscious element there, a choice to take what looked interesting on someone else and adorn your own body in the same way. Here, though, the appropriated item is literally a body part — the size and shape of which we rather notoriously have no control over. And yet Radke employs more or less the same argument to stigmatise the appropriation of butts as is often made about dreadlocks or bindis.

The book is insistent on this front: butts are a black thing, and liking them is a black male thing, and the appreciation of butts by non-black folks represents a moral error: cultural theft or stolen valour or some potent mix of the two. Among the scholars and experts quoted by Radke on this front is one who asserts that the contemporary appreciation of butts by the wider male population is “coming from Black male desire. Straight-up, point-blank. It’s only through Black males and their gaze that white men are starting to take notice”. To paraphrase a popular meme: “Fellas, is it racist to like butts?”

But if it’s racist to like big butts, why are so many white people either getting butt implants or taking pride in their derrieres? It seems that Radtke is conflating racism with cultural approprition. Both are “moral errors”, but really it’s only the first.

First of all, buttophilia is not a new thing; there have always been a subset of men who like an ample bottom, and there’s nothing wrong with that, for there’s a subset of men who favor any given female body part. (Rosenfield notes the theory that the bustles of earlier times were designed as a superliminal stimulus to appeal to those who favor large rears.)

But there’s also no doubt that there’s recent cultural appropriation, as in white rapper Iggy Azalea’s astounding increase in bum girth, one suspects through surgery. If a love of big butts is racist, there’s an awful lot of white people who favor them!  Again, things that are really considered racist are not culturally appropriated, no matter who appropriates them.  I suppose that Radtke’s thesis, although she mentions cultural appropriation, is that women who strive for big butts are, à la Rachel Dolezal, trying to be black, and that is somehow a form of racism. But that doesn’t explain why some white men like big butts.

It’s all a mystery, but Rosenfield still writes well about it:

By the time Butts comes around to analysing the contemporary derriere discourse, its conclusions are all but foregone: the political is not just personal, but anatomical. The book calls multiple women, including Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, and Miley Cyrus, to account for their appropriation of butts, which are understood to belong metaphorically if not literally to black women. The most scathing critique is directed at the then-21-year-old Cyrus, whose twerking at the VMAs is described as “adopting and exploiting a form of dance that had long been popular in poor and working-class Black communities and simultaneously playing into the stereotype of the hypersexual Black woman”. The mainstreaming of butts as a thing to be admired, then, is the ultimate act of Columbusing: “The butt had always been there, even if white people failed to notice for decades.”

There is also the curious wrinkle in Radke’s section on the history of twerking, which credits its popularisation to a male drag queen named Big Freedia. The implicit suggestion is that this movement style is less offensive when performed by a man dressed as a woman than by a white woman with a tiny butt.

On the other hand, now that the fad is “healthy at any size,” how can there be an ideological stigma against large bottoms?

. . . Ironically, the author of this book is herself a white woman with a large backside, a fact of which she periodically reminds the reader. And yet, Butts thoroughly subsumes its subject matter into the cultural appropriation discourse in a way that implicitly impugns all the non-black women who look — at least from behind — a hell of a lot more like Nicki Minaj than Kate Moss, women who perhaps hoped that their own big butts might be counted among those Sir Mix-a-Lot cannot lie about liking. It is worth noting, too, that the women hung out to dry by this argument are the same ones who other progressive identitarian rhetoric almost invariably fails to account for: the more it indulges in the archetype of the assless willowy white woman, the more Butts excludes from its imagination the poor and working class — whose butts, along with everything else, tend to be bigger. It fails to account, too, for those from ethnic backgrounds where a bigger butt — or, as one of my Jewish great-grandmothers might have said, a nice round tuchus — is the norm.

And the last paragraph is great:

All told, Butts offers an interesting if somewhat monomaniacal look back at the cultural history of the derriere. But as for how to view our backsides moving forward — especially if you happen to be a woman in possession of a big butt yourself — the book finds itself at something of a loss. Those in search of body positivity will not find it here; Radke is firm on this front, that white women who embrace their big butts are guilty of what Toni Morrison called “playing in the dark”, dabbling thoughtlessly with a culture, an aesthetic, a physique that doesn’t really belong to them. The best these women can hope for, it seems, is to look at their bodies the way Radke does in the final pages, with a sort of resigned acceptance: her butt, she says, is “just a fact”. On the one hand, this is better than explicitly instructing women to feel ashamed of their bodies (although implicitly, one gets the sense that shame is preferable to the confident, twerking alternative). But after some 200 pages of narrative about the political, sexual, cultural, historical baggage with which the butt is laden, it feels a bit empty, a bit like a cop-out. It could even be said — not by me, but by someone — that Butts has a hole in it.* [see below]

In the end, it seems as if Radke’s message is that it’s not really racist to like big butts if you’re white, but you better not get one or engage in twerking.  That’s reserved for ethnicities whose women naturally have large rumps; in other words, whites of a callipygean bent are engaging in cultural appreciation, and that’s wrong. But I’ve never seen a form of cultural appropriation that I’d criticize, and this one is no exception. Let a thousand butts twerk!

The evolution of Iggy Azelea’s rear, from an article in (of course) The Sun:

Rosenfield’s last line reminds me of a semi-salacious joke that my father used to tell me when, as a young lad, I was tucked in (he always had a witticism at bedtime):

“Jerry, there’s a good movie on. The ad says “Mein Tuchus in two parts. Come tomorrow and see the whole!”

h/t: Luana

A short book review and two short movie reviews

January 1, 2023 • 1:00 pm

Since I wasn’t able to be in Poland over the holidays, I read books and watched movies. One book I recommend highly is Beartown, loaned to me by a friend (image below links to Amazon site). It’s the first book of a trilogy by Swedish writer Fredrick Backman, and this one’s about the way high-school hockey takes over a small Swedish town and then tears it apart. The language is spare but lovely, especially when the author becomes more philosophical near the end. It starts off with a simple narrative about the local hockey team, but then becomes very dark very fast. I won’t give away the pivotal event of the story.

It’s engrossing, was a best-seller in Sweden and then in the U.S. The theme is about community and loyalty, and I’m considering continuing on to the last two novels of the trilogy. I’d recommend this one highly. It’s not a world classic or a masterpiece, but it’s an absorbing and disturbing read. (Disturbing books are the best books.)

I didn’t go to the movies much last year because of the pandemic, and the University movie series, Doc Films, had a pared-down schedule. I’m catching up online now, and here are two that I watched and liked. I found them because they both appeared on at least two “best films of 2022” lists.

I watched “The Worst Person in the World” because, though I hadn’t heard of it, it was named as the best movie of the year on Esquire’s tally of the 35 best. Here’s what the authors have to say:

Granted, it was only February when I saw this, but director Joaquim Trier’s wonderfully humane Norwegian import and nominee for last year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar is still, hands-down, the best film of 2022. I’ve blown hot and cold on some of Trier’s earlier films, but this one is an instant classic in large part due to Renate Reinsve’s luminous performance as Julie—an aimless Oslo woman on the cusp of 30 who’s trying to figure herself out in ways that are so funny, sad, and realistically messy that it feels like we’re spying on someone we’ve known for years. The title might give you the impression that Julie is trouble, leaving chaos and broken hearts in her wake. But the title actually isn’t about her. Plus, she’s far more complex than that implies anyway. Told in 12 chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue, The Worst Person in the World is anything but neat and orderly. Like life, it’s complicated, unpredictable, bittersweet and indecisive. It’s also brimming with so much empathy for Trier’s female lead that you can’t help but fall in love with her even when you know she’s making mistakes. After all, who are we to judge? Trier tracks Julie’s relationships with men, but it’s far more interested in getting inside of her head and figuring out what makes her tick, which is a rarity in Hollywood films. We’ll see if anything in the coming months can match Trier and Reinsve’s masterpiece, but they’ve set an incredibly high bar.

That pretty much says it all, but I wouldn’t rate this as the best even among the few movies I’ve seen this year (that would be “Tár”). The main character ,Julie (played by Renate Reinsve), turns in a creditable performance, but I don’t understand all the critics’ hulabaloo. (It was rated 96 by the critics and 86 by the audience on Rotten Tomatoes.) Julie is aimless, flaky, and lovable, and makes a mess of her life, especially when dealing with men, but that aimlessness itself, and the attendant sadness and tragedy, don’t carry the picture.  To my mind, Julie wasn’t sufficiently developed to be absorbing, and the reviewers seemed to conflate flakiness and confusion with complexity and depth. I would rate this as a good+ movie, but the best? No way. But watch it for yourself. Here’s a trailer:

“Kimi“, directed by Steven Soderbergh, was better, and though also not a classic is clever, absorbing, and a crime thriller to boot. Kimi is an AI device like Alexa, made by a company that employs the protagonist Angela, played very well by Zoë Kravitz. Angela is an extremely introverted and agoraphobic women who almost never leaves her flat, but her job can be done from home: she listens in on requests to Kimi to figure out how to improve the AI device. By accident she hears a crime being committed, and it’s her attempts to report the crime, and the opposition she faces from a criminal conspiracy, that make for an edge-of-your-seat experience.  I’m surprised I liked this better than the one above, as I usually like long, slow, movies with character development and not that much action.  This movie gets a “very good” from me and I recommend that you see it if you get the chance.

I also watched a movie that was on many lists as a “best of 2022”: “Everything Everywhere All At Once“, starring Michelle Yeoh, but I found it tricked out and tedious, and stopped watching 45 minutes in. (It’s about the multiverse.) Many of my friends liked it, so I’ll just say, “Go see it and report in”, or report below if you’ve already seen it.

Now it’s your turn: which movies did you like best that were made last year?

The Atlantic recommends six long books

December 28, 2022 • 12:15 pm

If I like a book, I want it to be LONG. A thousand pages means nothing to me if the book is a good one. On the other hand, I know that many people beef about long books—an attitude I fail to understand. If the book is absorbing, or a good story, then why would you want it to end so soon? It’s like A. J. Liebling’s explanation of why he was a gourmand and not a gourmet: if you like food, you will like a LOT of food.

Well, I know I’m in the minority here, but I just found an article in The Atlantic that recommends LONG books (I also just remembered that I’ve had an online subscription to the magazine for five months, and had forgotten about it!)

Click to read (I don’t know if it’s paywalled):

It turns out that I’ve already read four of these. Guess which of the six I haven’t read?

Here’s Masad’s list, but first the intro:

Literature should not be something we approach out of a sense of duty. But many lengthy, complex, and well-known books really are that good. Like taking a long hike or following a tricky recipe, engaging with writing that challenges you can be deeply satisfying. Each of the books below is demanding in its own way, and reading or rereading them can be a fascinating, beautiful, and rewarding experience.

The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu (translated by Dennis Washburn)

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

Almanac of the Dead, by Leslie Marmon Silko

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Of the four I’ve read (and this gives one away), I found Middlemarch the best, but all the ones I’ve read are good.

But why do they leave out Ulysses, or Anna Karenina, or The Brothers Karamazov? (Actually Masad did read and enjoy Joyce’s novel, though he said he initially  read it out of a sense of duty.

Here’s a book (or rather, a bunch of books) that I tried to read out of a sense of duty, and couldn’t get through even the first volume: Remembrance of Things Past.  It was simply too fricking turgid!  Of course that means I can never enter a “Summarize Proust” contest (first five minutes of the Python episode below):

Two (actually five) excellent books to consider

December 15, 2022 • 12:30 pm

I’m working on a long writing piece, so have had to curtail posts here for a few days. We’ll be back to normal tomorrow.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this book before, but it’s in a tie for second place among all the fiction I’ve read this year. I’ve reviewed the other two books before: All the Light We Cannot See, a 2014 book by Anthony Doerr that’s the best new fiction I’ve read in several years (my review here), and the book that ties with the one below as second-best, Hamnet, a 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell(my review here).  Either of those, or Horse, below, will serve you very well. But if you can read only one book, it must be the one by Doerr, which won the fiction Pulitzer Prize in 2020.

Horse, which came out this spring, is a terrific work of the imagination, weaving past and present around a single famous (and real) eighteenth-century racehorse, Lexington,. The theme is anti-black bigotry, which in the “past” section involves Jarret, the enslaved black trainer of the racehorse, and in the “present” section involves a woman zoologist, Jess, and her black boyfriend Theo. Theo finds a discarded painting of the horse in a Washington, D.C. trash heap, figures out who it is, and uses it for his Ph.D. thesis in art history. That’s how he meets Jess, who in fact is the keeper of the horse’s bones at the Smithsonian, but didn’t know that those bones belonged to Lexington.

And so the past interweaves with the present in short, compelling chapters, with nearly all the fictional characters based on real ones. The story is mesmerizing, though it swerves a bit into wokeness and preachiness at the end; and there’s a tragedy that I won’t reveal. The horse, by the way, is an almost humanlike character in the book, since his character is described in great and winsome detail.

You don’t have to be a fan of horses to love this book, and if you want to read more, go to the laudatory review at the Washington Post.  Click on the screenshot below to go to the Amazon site.

Below is the real Lexington—one of the few existing photos. As Wikipedia notes, “Lexington (March 17, 1850 – July 1, 1875) was a United States Thoroughbred race horse who won six of his seven race starts. Perhaps his greatest fame, however, came as the most successful sire of the second half of the nineteenth century; he was the leading sire in North America 16 times, and broodmare sire of many notable racehorses.”

The second book is not in my top three, but is still an excellent read:  Empire of Pain. by Patrick Radde Keefe. This book came out in April of last year, and was, like Horse, recommended to me by my editor at Viking/Penguin, who has impeccable taste in books. It is the story of the Sackler family and the trio of Jewish brothers who founded Purdue Pharma, the company that devised and manufactured OxyContin, a synthetic opioid that, as you may know, got gazillions of Americans addicted to painkillers. Many of them died. The Sacklers, who made billions on this one pill, were also philanthropists who gave millions to museums and universities, always insisting that the family name go on the donated wing or building. They—and especially the eldest brother Arthur—were hard driving and arrogant, but also somewhat polymathic (Arthur, for instance, became an autodidactic expert in Chinese art and built up a huge collection).

The family advertised OxyContin in ways that they knew would get people addicted, and ignored the damage caused by their drug. They were able to fight off lawsuits for years, but finally took a hit (not a big hit given the family’s billions) and declared bankruptcy. But all the Sacklers wound up fine, living it up in mansions around the world. The message: is was no justice.

An immense amount of reportage went into this book. It reminds me a lot of Bad Blood, the fantastic book by reporter John Carreyrou that exposed the duplicity of Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Sunny Balwani, the pair who ran the bogus startup Theranos. (Both will be going to jail for a long time, partly because Carreyrou’s book revealed their perfidy.)  Bad Blood began with Carreyrou’s reporting in the Wall Street Journal, which eventually became a mesmerizing piece of nonfiction (read it!). Empire of Pain started with an article as well: a piece by Keefe in the 2017 New Yorker. It’s extremely well written, and will introduce you to a family of which you haven’t heard, and to the enormous damage caused by their greed.

Click the screenshot to go to the Amazon site.

Now, as General Patton said, “You know what to do.”  Let us know what you’re reading, how you like it, and what books you’d especially recommend.