Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Curious to see what’s happened to story-telling over the course of the last century, I am taking a class on the American Novel from Drieser to the present. It’s a misnomer, in a sense — we don’t read any Drieser. But his 1900 novel “Sister Carrie” gets credit for sparking a new more realistic form of storytelling amongst American fiction writers. The professor, Philip Fisher, argues that the American novel then turned away from the moral form, where actions have consequences. Instead, Naturalism and Manners (that is, social constructs), a chance set of circumstances that overwhelm any individual desires of the characters in these novels, become the dominant forms of the novel, along with Aestheticism, the pursuit of beauty (and, Fisher argues, the only type of novel in which characters have freedom in deciding their course of action).

Our first assignment was to read Willa Cather’s “My Antonia.” I was struck by how differently she portrayed the immigrant experience from the way Upton Sinclair does 12 years earlier in “The Jungle.”Where Sinclair is sour, Cather is sweet. Her immigrants ultimately do well for themselves, largely on the strength of their backs. Sinclair’s Lithuanian hero, Jurgis, blows out his back, ending his American dream. Sinclair’s villainous capitalists crush the souls and bodies of those who make them their money; Cather’s capitalist, Cutter, is far more muted and even a comic character (his wife has that great line: “Mr. Cutter, you have broken all the Commandments — spare the finger bowls!”). Perhaps that’s because of setting: Sinclair is in the city and roughly concurrent with 1905, while Cather, though writing later, sets her novel primarily in the late 1860s and 1870s, when Nebraska was first settled by whites. Indeed, Cather seems to deliberately avoid delving in the ugly and brutal side of the lives of her characters. The murder(?) of Antonia’s father is brushed over (and later the possible murderer, Krajiek, seems to just disappear from the story). If the father was murdered, no one has an outright identity crisis in My Antonia. The closest we get is Antonia telling Mrs. Harling “a girl like me has to take her good times when she can. I guess I want to have my fling, like the other girls.” Jim’s possible affair with Lena is ignored; no casual sex in this book, at least not openly. Then again, Lena seems like the original Jessica Rabbit: she’s not bad, she’s just drawn that way.
Cather gives us but small sentences of crisis: “There was nothing in life for him but trout streams, ever since he’d lost the twins,” she notes at one point. She leaves it to us to fill in a lot of those blanks.

Morality is there, but more a duty than a force, in line with Fisher’s argument about the shift in American novels towards naturalism. Witness Jim when he arrives at the homestead: “I did not say my prayers that night; here, I felt, what would be would be.” We also see traces of the vast environment Jack London poised against his characters (and all of humanity) in the violent snows of Nebraska, i.e. Jim’s comment that “I was convinced that man’s strongest antagonist is the cold.” Providence does get invoked, but by the grandmother, suggesting to me that Cather wants us to recognize a generational shift in beliefs. The book ends with Jim referring to  “those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be.” Not Calvinist predestination, but chance, rules the day.

I was struck by how Cather’s town, Black Hawk, is inhabited by much more likable people than those we’ll meet two years later in Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street “(it is striking that this course avoids Lewis and Pearl Buck and Steinbeck, especially Steinbeck. No Toni Morrison or Isaac Bashevis Singer, either).  We do see this sterile small town atmosphere and its myopic people emerge towards the end, suggesting a dying off of energy and vitality in the second generation among the people who, unlike Jim, do not go to the city. In this sense she presages what Lewis will mock and eviscerate just two years later.

Cather’s book is filled with remarkable and strong women, which feels unusual to me from what i know of the fiction of the era. I found that refreshing. But it may have been a reason why Cather does not push into dangerous territory, like having Jim marry Antonia, or having any of the ‘hired girls’ marry a town boy (Fisher introduced us to a Jhumpa Lahiri story that does explore this theme in a contemporary context).

Nebraska epitomizes fly-over states today; one would not visit there without a specific reason. But Cather makes the place sound lovely and placid and full of life. She has such evocative turns of phrase: “the panting wheeze of a saw,” spring’s ‘nimble air”, the “draft-horse necks” of the peasant women.

A lovely piece of writing, all in all.

Often I think our modern math and neuroscience just tell us what we already know. Here’s Max Weber writing about a puzzle of agricultural output in 1905 in “The Protestant Ethic:”

a man who at the rate of 1 mark per acre mowed 2.5 acres per day and earned 2.5 marks, when the rate was raised to 1.25 marks per acre mowed, not 3 acres, as he might easily have done, thus earning 3.75 marks, but only 2 acres, so that he could still earn the 2.5 marks to which he had become accustomed. The opportunity of earning more was less attractive than that of working less.

Despite this, Colin Camerer et al. noted in 1997 that “The standard economic prediction is that a temporary increase in wages should cause people to work longer hours.” Camerer et al. used data on New York City cab drivers to test this premise, built on the economic truism that people will substitute labor for leisure (that is, work more when it pays better, and work less when it pays less). They found that many cab drivers, especially those with less experience, have “negative wage elasticity.” That is, they work less on good days, rather than building up cash reserves that will tide them over and allow them to work less on days when customers are hard to come by. In the jargon of behavioral economics, this is because of ‘narrow bracketing,’ where drivers bracket their time day-by-day, rather than taking a longer-term perspective, and also due to loss aversion (the cabbies set daily targets and don’t want to fall short on bad days, so, having knocked off early on their good days, on their bad days  they must drive more).

Camerer’s paper also makes reference to agricultural studies, and notes that such problems of narrow bracketing and loss aversion could be endemic to the kind of people who seek out piece-rate work like farming and cab-driving. But the authors say this seems unlikely. [The paper is “Labor Supply of New York City Cab Drivers: One Day at a Time,” Camerer, Colin F., Linda Babcock, George Lowenstein and Richard H. Thaler, as published in “Choices, Values and Frames, ed. by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, c. 2000]
The wonder is that the standard model would ignore the observations of actual behavior. Camerer, by the way, is not using particularly complicated math in his study; I wonder if it will work against the adoption of such ideas.

A professor in class today said, “the young look ahead, the old look back, and the middle-aged look tired.” I got a smile out of that – I’m feeling a bit tired on turning 47. I wonder if I’m feeling old because I’ve been reading Nabokov’s Lolita for the first time, and realized that “the old man in that book by Nabokov” is in fact only 36 (maybe 37) when he meets Lolita (see also this post on Sting and Nabokov).

Perhaps I think I can no longer pretend I’m not middle-aged. I am nonetheless younger than my parents at this same age, since they were already grandparents.  My problems thus differ from those of my parents. I have, by one reading of the social security system, 18 productive economic years left, in which I must both save for my (likely forced) retirement and engage in the great transfer of wealth that is college for my children. I shall do this at a time when my chosen profession suffers an historic disruption in its business model, and when a Great Convergence seems to be disrupting the world economy (I felt smart today when the professor also said we were heading towards a Great Convergence). I like to think this convergent tide will raise boats, not swamp them. But the Great Convergence could damage the standard of living in the world’s wealthy economies (perhaps because a global game of labor arbitrage is driving the Great Convergence).Today I wrote up a small mission statement for what could become my next journalism project. I sent it to someone who might know someone who might want to fund something like it. From small beginnings…I jogged a mile for the first time since I injured my calf in December. No recurrence, though I had some other odd pains in my calf. Note to middle-aged self: remember to exercise and stretch regularly.

I also listened to a much older man than me discuss Nabokov’s “Lolita,” not for its disturbing content but for its lush and inventive aesthetic prose. He called it the first novel of the American suburbs, the first to recognize and depict this then-new (1955) way of life. He acknowledged Nabokov’s taboo topic but compared it to the murder of the king in Macbeth. In a sense he is correct – great works often are great because they engage our taboos. If we can speak about the unspeakable, does it make us better? Or does it send society careening off into some less stable place?

Sitting in my political economy class yesterday I watched Roberto Unger and Ricardo Hausmann debate economics. Unger asserted, and Hausmann all but conceded, that economics does not respond to empirical evidence by throwing out its models for looking at the world. Instead, it blames the world for problems with the models, as in, ‘oh, the model was right, but there was a market failure. People didn’t do what they should.’

It reminded me of the satire on economic man in Dosteovsky’s Notes from Underground:

Though man has come to see more clearly than in barbarous times, he is still far from having grown accustomed to acting as reason and science dictate. But even so you are perfectly confident that he will not fail to grow accustomed once one or two old bad habits have passed and once common sense and science have thoroughly re-educated and given a normal direction to human nature. You are confident that man will then voluntarily cease making mistakes and…refuse to set his will at variance with his normal interests. [page 24, Pevear and Volokhonsky translation]

“…our wantings are for the most part mistaken owing to a mistaken view of our profit. We sometimes want pure rubbish precisely because, in our stupidity, we see this rubbish as the easiest path to the attainment of some preconceived profit. Well, but when it’s all explained, worked out on a piece of paper (which is quite possible because, after all, it’s vile and senseless to believe beforehand that there are certain laws of nature which man will never learn) — then , to be sure, there will be no more so-called desires. For if wanting someday gets completely in cahoots with reason, then essentially we shall be reasoning  and not wanting, because it really is impossible, for example, while preserving reason, to want senselessness and thus knowingly go against reason and wish yourself harm….And since all wantings and reasonings can indeed be calculated — because after all they will someday discover the laws of our so-called free will — then consequently, and joking aside, something like a little table can be arranged, so that we shall want according to this little table.” [ibid., pp. 26-27]

If I didn’t know that homo economicus was a 20th century creation, I would’ve thought Dosteovsky was writing about it.

(Reposted from November 2007.  I deleted this accidentally while purging spam posts).

I learned this morning that Peter Lipton has passed away.

He was one of the first speakers in Cambridge this summer at the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion. He gave a fun, provocative lecture on the philosophy of science. He had talked about the various models used to define science by philosophers of science like Carl Popper or Thomas Kuhn. He proposed that a way to manage conflict between science and religion is to take an immersion approach, borrowing in part from Kuhn and in part from a philosopher of science named Bas Van Fraassen.
Photo: www.Templeton-Cambridge.org

Peter was a fascinating lecturer, but also fascinating to we fellows for a different reason: he was both an atheist and a devout Jew, regularly attending temple. We had a terrific discussion with him about how he could separate his lack of belief in God yet still accept the idea of God in the scriptures (this is my shorthand and does not do justice to his position). But when one of the fellows asked him if he could accept the verses proscribing homosexuality, Lipton said adamantly he could not. So we challenged him further on this — how could he accept the idea of God while not believing in God, but make a different distinction around homosexuality?

I followed up with him on email. He sent me this:

Thanks for this excellent question, which is forcing me to think harder about my
position. There are several options here.

First, I could follow your advice and accept but not believe the proscription on
homosexuality. This would capture my view that I work with the entire text, and that
I am helped in my ethical deliberation by struggling with that text, even in cases
where I end up not believing some of its moral content. The downside of this option,
from my point of view is that it takes the notion of acceptance pretty far from van
Fraassen’s use in his constructive empiricism, since for me ‘accept’ would now seem
to mean something like ‘engage with’. For van Fraassen, ‘accept’ has a more positive
meaning, something like ‘believe to have true empirical consequences’ or ‘use for the
purpose of making predictions’.

On balance the first option may still be my best bet. But I think I have another
option too. For although I did not mention this yesterday, full acceptance is only
the limiting case. Thus van Fraassen would not say that we should even accept all of
all of our theories, since in many (all?) cases we know that the theory is not even
entirely empirically adequate. So we may decide only to accept part of the theory.
Thus we have three levels: the stuff we believe, the stuff we accept without
believing, and the stuff we do not even accept. So I think I could take the view
that the proscription on homosexuality is something I do not even accept. (I can
still of course give it a literal interpretation, even though I wholly reject it.)
The downside of this option is that it might lead to a loss in the coherence of my
religious practice, a coherence that the notion of acceptance was designed in part to
preserve.

There is also a third, dynamic option, combining the first two. What I have in mind
here is that one might start with accross-the-board acceptance as a kind of default,
so one begins by accepting the whole text, but then with study and thought one works
out not only which parts of what one accepts one should also believe, but also which
parts one should not on reflection continue to accept.

A paper he was working on at the time that captures his thinking on the subject, “Science and Religion, The Immersion Solution,” Peter Lipton , will soon be published.

He and I also exchanged a brief note on Harry Emerson Fosdick’s 1929 sermon, Shall the Fundamentalists Win?. Peter said the sermon was quite apropos for the ideas in his paper.

The Cambridge obituary on Peter Lipton.

It was a treat to engage with him. May his model resonate.