The New Criticism and the Politics of Identity

I studied English literature at Penn State University in the late 1960s. My classmates and I were the inheritors of a type of literary analysis called “the New Criticism.”¹ What the “old criticism” might have been and how this new approach remedied its failures was something about which the generation that preceded mine must have wrangled. By the time I was in the classroom, the New Criticism was the method taught, sometimes overtly but more often by example. It was accepted as the way you studied literature.

If memory serves—and I might be missing some of the nuances these fifty-odd years later—the essence of the New Criticism was and is “Read the text.” Treat the book—or the poem, play, song, or script—as a “found object.” What matters, what counts in your analysis is what you can read on the page and what it says to you, right there, in print, on the page. The New Criticism ruled out of bounds—or to be treated only anecdotally and not as part of the analysis—the author’s stature, life history, and political persuasions. Also out of bounds was the literary tradition or style in which the author wrote, whether the 19th-century Metaphysical, Romantic, Gothic, or Transcendentalist movements, and its associated canons and quirks. For today, the demarcations would be genre: Romance, Mystery, Science Fiction, or Fantasy. Yet the method remains the same. Don’t compare the text. Read it.

Explicitly out of bounds are the author’s stated intentions for the work. If the author has to write a foreword or introduction to tell the reader what to expect, his or her skills become suspect. All such preemptive preparation falls under the heading of special pleading. As a general principle, the author, having produced the work, must then let it go. It must go out into the world and stand on its own, because the work itself is all that the reader, once deep into the pages and engrossed in the story, will be able to receive.

And indeed, the author is not necessarily the expert on what he or she has produced. For example, sometimes after writing a passage I will go back, read it afresh, and only then discover that some object or action or comment from a character symbolizes, foreshadows, reinforces, or expands on something elsewhere in the book. I didn’t plan on this, but it’s there for the reader to perceive and appreciate. An author generally can’t create and plant such connections ahead of time—they’re something that just bubbles up from the subconscious mind and its involvement with the story.²

And so what exactly is the goal of this “close reading” of the text? Simply to establish its quality. Not whether the book adheres to the author’s principles or politics, or represents his or her best work, or fits well into its claimed literary tradition or genre. Quite simply, does it exhibit quality?

That’s a funny concept, “quality.” Of course, it’s the goal of every writer: to write a good book. Some of us measure quality in terms of sales: if enough people buy the book and recommend it to their friends, it must be good, right? And then along comes a literary phenomenon like Love Story or Fifty Shades of Grey, and all of us English majors are shaking our heads over the notion that commercial success equals quality. But often enough commercially successful novels do possess quality, as a close reading of many bestsellers from past years will show. And we’ve also seen that all the hype in the world can’t make a lackluster effort fly off the shelves. The readers generally know what’s good. At least, they know what works for them.

Robert Pirsig thrashes out the concept of quality fairly completely in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which was first published shortly after I graduated from the university. In the end, he arrives at quality in terms of the ancient Greek concept of arête, which means simply “excellence on its own terms” and sometimes “moral virtue.” Achilles had excellence because he was a ferocious and unmatched warrior. Hector had excellence because he represented the ideal of love of family, city, and country, or civic virtue. But Pirsig’s argument is kind of circular, isn’t it? “Quality” equals “excellence.” You can get that from a thesaurus.

In my experience of business, most recently in the biotech industry and our grappling with the principles of Six Sigma,³ I discovered a new concept of quality: “fitness for purpose.” An instrument has quality if it performs its detection functions accurately, quickly, efficiently, or according to some other specification valued by the user. Similarly, a car has quality if it drives well, transports the desired number of passengers and/or cargo, operates reliably, gets good gas mileage, pleases the eye and other senses, or meets some other specification valued by the buyer.

We can apply this concept directly to literature. It’s a good book—or poem, play, song, or script—if it delivers on its promise and pleases the reader. From there, you can begin to fill in the blanks. Is the language—in terms of vocabulary, sentence structure, required level of external experience—appropriate to the intended audience? Are the characters appealing, intriguing, or complex enough to keep the reader emotionally involved? Does the story structure reveal enough information, give it fast enough, but still keep certain key facts hidden, and yet provide enough clues, all to keep the reader intellectually involved? Does the subject matter make the book and whatever new insights or truths the author has to impart make the reading worth the reader’s time and effort? Does the story resolve itself in a way that leaves the reader’s imagination, sense of right and wrong, expectations, and emotions satisfied?

You might take the position that all of these questions must be answered from within the framework of the author’s intentions. Therefore, the New Criticism fails, because we must ask the author about the audience for which he or she wrote the book and what he or she wanted to achieve with it. But I would insist that’s not the case.

Every book—or poem, play, song, or script—exists in the real world and falls into the reader’s hand, whether by choice or chance. Sometimes, the book is just sitting there on the shelf as the reader passes by, and he or she becomes intrigued with the title, cover art, or blurb. The reader picks it up and samples the first page, or a page from somewhere in the middle. The book either catches the reader’s attention, or it doesn’t. Perhaps the reader at age twelve picks up The Odyssey because it has a title that suggests an adventure or the cover depicts a helmeted warrior with spear and shield. She starts reading and discovers that, first, it’s non-rhyming, unmetered poetry; second, it’s about people and places she doesn’t know or care about; and third, nowhere in the first ten pages does she see an adventure begin to form or meet that helmeted warrior. Does this mean it’s a bad book? Of course not. In the hands of a reader with the right expectations, adequate external experience—such as a previous interest in Greek myth and history—and appropriate vocabulary, it’s an excellent book.

Not every book is for everybody. But by reading sympathetically—and working purely from the text—the literary analyst can determine what kind of book the author was striving for and whether or not it fulfills its premise and its promise. Having established the intended age or reading level from the book’s vocabulary and use of language, and the story’s meaning from its treatment of the subject matter, we can begin to dissect the book’s structure and level of reveal, its use of dialogue and development of character, and its story arc and movement toward resolution. We can then see if all these elements work well, or if they leave the intended reader dissatisfied.

In recent years, the method of the New Criticism has come under attack. No one names or targets it directly, but it’s clear that many people want to ignore it, downplay it, and push it aside. People with a political agenda want to take over the literary world and its marketplace just as they want to dominate other aspects of life and culture.

In a political sphere where a person’s ethnos, experience, personal story, and opinions are considered most vitally important—what has come to be called the “politics of identity”—we lose sight of the fact that we are all basically human beings with a common human nature. In this environment, many people believe that a person from one particular background only cares about stories written from within that background and shared experience. That is, to use a nonjudgmental euphemism, Greeks will only care about stories concerning other Greeks and their culture. And in a world where everyone is trying so hard to sell their own books, Greek authors have become the sole inheritors, arbiters, and representatives of Greek culture and experience. It’s not just that non-Greek authors can’t adequately express the Greek viewpoint and ideals. They can, of course, but they probably have to work harder at it, be more sympathetic to it, and perhaps bring insights that a natural Greek might not develop on his or her own—just as a fish can’t tell you much about the nature of water. But more to the point, this political value says it’s insulting and morally wrong if a non-Greek even tries to tell a Greek story.

I find that viewpoint to be a prelude to tragedy. It says we are not all human beings together, that we can’t understand each other, and that Greek and non-Greek will remain mutually unintelligible for all time. That teaching is a closing in and shutting off rather than an opening outward.

Another element of the new politics aims to limit the appropriate sphere of literature. Once, while I was sitting on a panel at a science fiction convention in Portland, Oregon, an older man in the audience thundered to the room at large, “What other basis for stories is there but class war, gender war, and race war?” In other words, stories that don’t serve a Progressive, Marxist, revolutionary purpose are pointless and shouldn’t be published. I don’t think I can live inside a world that small.

Let’s see: love and how to share it; expectations and how to deal with them in a disappointing world; the act of discovery and how to proceed with its consequences—to name just a few themes worth communicating. These are issues with which every human being must grapple. And the story of that grappling is internal, personal, and works outward from the viewpoint of an established character. The political themes of class war, gender war, race war are external and social. To be sure, the literary world has a place for socially based stories and examination of the individual’s place in his or her society. But such stories are not the whole field.

Worse, an exclusive focus on these themes would make the reader intentionally colorblind—in the original meaning of that word: able to perceive in only certain colors or shades. For example, if you believe that class war, gender war, race war are the only basis for a good story, what do you make of Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Is it a play about a youth fighting corruption in the 16th-century Danish state? Not entirely. Is it about the male oppression of Gertrude and Ophelia? Not exactly. Is it about the oppression of Yorick as holder of a disrespected occupation—the court jester—and possibly as a dwarf? That would be pushing it. Hamlet is about power and powerlessness, but it’s far more personal than that. Those political and gender themes are hardly grace notes to the story. The attraction of the Hamlet story lies not in them, but in the young man’s moral dilemma, his choices, how he deals with them, and how that story resolves itself.

The New Criticism does not care if an author is Greek—or African, Asian, female, rich, poor, or abused as a child. This method of analysis discards the author’s experience and politics as metadata, peripheral, and extraneous. Instead, does the book work as a whole? Does it satisfy its intended purpose? To begin with, can you perceive that purpose—not from what the author says, but from what he or she has put on the page? And then, is the book faithful to what it is and where the story goes? Does the book have meaning for the reader? Does it satisfy a reader who has little, some, or great experience with the subject matter? Does the story resolve itself in a way that feels morally and emotionally right?

And the only way to answer these questions is to read the text itself.

1. I’ve addressed the New Criticism peripherally several times before, specifically: Art and Mystery from August 12, 2012; Separating Ego from Work from September 25, 2011; and The Value of a Liberal Arts Education from February 6, 2011.

2. See Working With the Subconscious from September 30, 2012.

3. See The Zen of the Machine from May 4, 2014.

Business Over Government

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of business enterprises and tend to trust business people at most levels—from the mom and pop at their grocery store to the CEO of an industry-leading corporation—over most elected and non-elected functionaries at most levels of government.

This is not to say that I hate government and loathe public servants. They have their place. I understand that a regulated marketplace and managed environment usually produce better outcomes and endure longer than uncontrolled chaos, and that stable laws and their enforcement promote peace and civilization among people. Still, my career has been and my heart abides with the commercial side of things.¹

I also know that we are all human beings with complex reasoning. People don’t become smarter or more cautious if they choose to work in government rather than on behalf of an industry or product. People don’t become more venal or selfish if they want to make software or shoes, or sell automobiles or insurance, instead of writing and enforcing rules and regulations. We choose our path—business or government—from a matrix of causes. The business person is not just a greedy bastard who wants to grab the money. Many people, if not most, go into business because they want to produce something that will enrich lives and make people happy or better off. They choose business because there they will be free to make the products they like in the way they think best. Similarly, most people in government choose that path because they want to write good laws, see justice done, and make people happy and better off. They want to be close to the core of things and have a vision of how to make their society function more effectively.

But I am also realistic. I know that some people go into business because a small enterprise, or an isolated department in a large one, is usually easier to manipulate and a better place out of which to run their scams than a large government bureaucracy with its built-in ranks of inspectors general and review boards. In this case, think of Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme or the wheeler-dealers at companies with ill-defined products and services like Enron and WorldCom. And I know that some people in government do want authority and the power to make other people jump through hoops with the full force of law behind them. Think of Lois Lerner and her minions at the IRS or Eliot Spitzer as Manhattan District Attorney.²

But what is true of both spheres is that, to enter them, then to survive, and eventually to rise, a person must make promises, enter agreements, keep his or her word, and offer fealty. You must promise the voters or the hiring manager that you will be good in the job. You must serve at the pleasure of someone above you and offer them service in return for continued employment, favor, and reward. And in most places, you must show your loyalty, at least to the organization if not directly to the person in charge. From the mom-and-pop grocery to the biggest corporation, from the town council to the federal government, you are dealing with human beings and their conflicted emotions, motives, and reasoning, as well as their own insecurities.

Given all this, why do I favor business over government? Basically, it’s a matter of scope and reach, and the opportunities for disaster.

Business people can only do so much damage through their actions. If they make poor choices or bad products, their first victims are usually their own prospects and those of the employees they hire and the shareholders who trust them with their investment. In a free market, where people are allowed to buy what they want and need based on their own judgment, it’s difficult to offer a bad deal or spin a bad product for long. Hype and market momentum will only carry you so far. Eventually wrong choices, shoddy workmanship, or bad practices will make themselves known and the corporation will lose money and perhaps even fail. Think of the Edsel, New Coke, or Star Wars Episode I as examples of notable market failures. Yes, a business run badly by people with no sense of foresight or honor can pollute the rivers and the atmosphere, disappoint and sometimes injure their unwary customers, and put their unknowing employees at risk of their careers and futures—but that’s where a well-regulated government free of corruption steps in to protect the environment, the innately foolish, and the innocent bystanders.³

On the other hand, elected government officials and the unelected agencies they appoint and staff through the Civil Service have the power and force of law behind them. The decisions they make are actively enforced—usually without consequence to themselves—and endure for years if not decades. Their wrong choices and feckless policies can mess up all of society. And without the automatic self-destruct of the marketplace to eliminate bad or ineffective programs, they can proceed unmolested practically forever.

If a business executive makes a mistake or miscalculation, generally the worst he or she can do is mess up a product line, inconvenience or anger customers, and lose business. If you disagree with a corporation’s ethics and practices, you can choose to boycott its products. If a business decision causes injury or costs lives, government agencies will be quick to establish blame and impose sanctions. And if a business loses money, it loses the faith of its bankers and creditors: stock price falls, bond rates rise, loans dry up.

That doesn’t work with a government and its laws. If a government department or cabinet secretary makes a mistake or miscalculation, the results can damage a whole sector of the economy or population, perhaps even cost lives. When a government program does financial or physical damage, it may take years for the results to be analyzed, cause and effect established, and corrections applied. Rarely, if ever, do the people responsible suffer personally for their mistakes. You cannot choose to opt out or boycott a bad law, agency requirement, or program. And suing for damages is problematic, because the government runs the court system. Also, the government agency usually has the edge in running its own oversight committees and accounting systems which, being staffed by imperfect human beings, can spin results and cover up failures for an unimaginably long time. And a modern democracy in normal circumstances turns over only the top layers of government, and then only at specified times through campaigns and elections. The middle layers, where most of the actual day-to-day decisions are made, continue in place for years and for whole careers. If a government program loses money, legislators generally vote it more: taxes go up, the government prints more money, inflation increases.

The extent of my concern goes even further. If you work for a business and disagree with its policies and directions, you can always quit. That move may take guts and planning; you may have to take a cut in pay or even “live on your hump” for a while. But you can usually find another job. The ability of the business to follow you out the door and persecute you is fairly limited, especially with a well-regulated and alert government to enforce fair labor practices. But if you work in the government sphere and disagree with its policies and practices, the bar is higher. You have fewer competing opportunities to work elsewhere in another branch or at a different level of government. And disgruntled former supervisors have the force of law and tradition to disrupt your life.

Similarly, if the business you work for gets upset with you or your performance, the best they can do is terminate you, and even then government agencies exist to help you fight against unfair discrimination. Your employer has to clear a pretty high bar to prosecute you for wrongdoing, and most businesses don’t want the bad publicity. If you work in government, your boss can pursue you with charges of malfeasance and corruption. A disgruntled agency can file complaints against you, put you in jail, or run you out of the country. In some cases, they can kill you.

A business that goes too far wrong sooner or later runs out of customers, resources, employees, and financing options—usually in that order. Eventually, the business has to close, and then the operators must answer publicly to their creditors in bankruptcy court. Government can conceal its mistakes, or print money endlessly or raise taxes to continue financing its mistakes. Eventually, one party will get booted out of office and another party will come in. In either situation, the bureaucracy that supports these elected and appointed officials, will sail serenely onward. They are the bulk of government. They don’t lose their jobs. They may have to pursue new policies and practices for a while under the new party in charge. But the power to tax and the impulse to govern remain intact.

The only way to stop a government gone wrong is when a mob, with torches and pitchforks, starts heaving bricks through windows. Then you are in a state of insurrection and ultimately revolution. This is like turning over the table and calling for a whole new game. But note that no revolution ever resulted in less government or no government at all. The board is never wiped clear. The new governors are usually worse than the old ones. And sometimes the players don’t even change places. Think of how many members of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, went right on working for the Soviet Cheka—or how many members of the Soviet KGB slid right into the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service.

I favor business over government because running a business is riskier, its mistakes can do less damage, and its failures are usually small and contained. The commercial sphere is also more democratic, because anyone can build a stake, enter the game, and play as long as his or her wits and inspiration last. And when that run is done, it’s done. Government is a closed society that believes it can go on forever.

1. Even though my first job out of college was as junior editor at the Penn State Press, an arm of the government institution that was my alma mater. But there I saw a public function that acted just like a business. Their job was to publish scholarly books and produce enough of an income stream to support themselves so that they could publish even more books. Their first questions about accepting any manuscript were not “Whose interest does it serve?” or “Does it benefit the university?” but rather “Who will read this?” and “Does it fit into our established market niche?” (They also pointedly asked, “Is this a reworked doctoral thesis?”—because theses by their nature make narrow books with limited market appeal.) In that way, the university press was just like the commercial tradebook publisher where I landed next.

2. However, I’m also a believer in the theory that most people do not rise in their organization—whether it’s business or government—because they want personal power over other people. Most of us want the authority and freedom to do things the right way, in the manner that we see fit, and for which we are prepared to take responsibility. Most of us chafe at answering to the dictates and decisions of the people above us, rather than desiring dominion over the people below.

3. A badly run government agency—such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, when it nodded blindly over Bernie Madoff’s shenanigans—serves no public interest. And a manifestly corrupt agency serves only its own interest. Either is a leech on the industry it regulates, the people it pretends to protect, and the taxpayers who support it.

Gods and Angels

I’ve said before—too many times, by now, for me to go back in my blog archive and find references—that I’m an atheist. This is not because I hate religion, or religious people, or the thought of God watching over me. And not because I think I’m smarter than believers or see more deeply into the mechanism of the universe than they do.

Instead, I feel my lack of something. I lack the gene that grants one the mental apparatus to tune into whatever vibration, wavelength, or dimension from which the presence of an almighty spirit might speak or make him/her/itself known. I’ve never heard a whisper. As a very young person, when I was giving religion—in the form of the Presbyterian church—a chance to reach me, I tried to pray. I tried to pose questions and receive answers. But nothing I ever heard or sensed fell outside of what I know to be my imagination or the workings of my own subconscious mind—and I have a very active and productive subconscious.¹

I also do have an amateur’s appreciation for the size and scale of the universe in which we live. We inhabit a bubble of spacetime filled with a hundred billion galaxies, each one composed of a hundred billion stars, and each star system enjoying a complexity approaching that of the humble star and planetary system we call home.² I have a hard time believing that a single conscious mind could have created this cosmos in all its complexity—let alone what we now imagine to be all the multiverses that continually branch out of the probabilities surrounding each meaningful event occurring within one universe. Nor can I believe that such a mind manages it all on a day-to-day, minute-by-minute basis, so that it marks the fall of a single sparrow.³

At root then, I have a hard time believing in an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful god who stands outside of space and time, yet who created the universe as a place inside space and time, manages it in detail, both large scale and small, and still cares about and guides the destiny of each and every sentient being within its sphere. For one thing, I don’t believe in superlatives, ultimates, and finalities, and an omnipotent god to rule over all this must have those attributes.

Infinity—whether in space, time, power, mass, density, or any other characteristic—does not exist anywhere in the universe. It is a product of the human mind and an extension of human mathematics. Infinity is a tent peg in the far distance beyond the highest number you can care to count, just as the concept of zero, nothingness, is a tent peg right under your feet, at the start of the range of positive numbers and negative numbers alike. Our mathematics also allows any whole number to be divided into an infinity of fractions. Our mathematics further allows us to add and multiply infinities—when the simple concept of “more than you can possibly count” just won’t do.

But nowhere do we find such immensity in the world around us. The speed of light is given as an absolute, a limit, a “they shall not pass,” and yet it remains finite, measurable, and comprehensible: 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second. We casually speak of the density of a black hole—or the monoparticle out of which the mass of our whole universe exploded in the Big Bang—as being “infinite,” but that’s just sloppy thinking. The mass of the collapsed star, or our universe, is finite and calculable within certain limits, and so the mass of the singularity or the monoparticle can be understood as finite—always allowing for the amount of matter that was blown off as energy and lost to the system during the event of either stellar collapse or Big Bang. Similarly, the age and spatial dimensions of the universe itself are finite and ultimately calculable.⁴

Even at the level of quantum mechanics, which chops the stuff of matter and energy pretty fine, we do not expect—our mathematics do not imply—an infinite division, like the fractions we can pull out of a whole number. A long time after the Greeks declared atoms to be the smallest things in nature and indivisible, we learned they actually weren’t, because they are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Then we learned that the protons and neutrons themselves were made of three quarks each in different flavors, and that quarks are only a few examples from a whole echelon of computed particles. We now suspect that those quarks and other particles are—at least according to one theory—bits of cosmic string that vibrate at different frequencies in a set of dimensions measured beyond the x, y, and z that we call normal space. We may eventually find levels below this. But nothing in our philosophy projects an infinite series of ever-tinier turtle backs supporting the smallest bits of matter.

So, I have trouble conceiving of, believing in, or acknowledging the existence of an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, infinite mind that stands outside space and time. A local god whom the ancient Hebrews worshipped and called “Yahweh”—or Tetragrammaton, standing for the “four letters” of his unspoken name—who held guardianship over a particular range of mountains and valleys in the Middle East and maintained an interest in and covenant with a particular group of people living there … perhaps. That was back when the Earth as such was all anyone knew of existence, and the stars were just pinpricks in the fabric of the sky. But one sole keeper who maintains interest in humans and all other living creatures on all the possible planets and takes responsibility for every star in the night sky … no.

This does not, however, mean that I am not prepared to learn about, believe in, and credit the existence of other intelligences, superior beings, or angels. However, by “angels” I do not mean those spiritual essences created by this all-knowing, etc. god as servants to bring messages to and render judgment upon earthly humans. I’m not talking about the seraphic agents of a higher power, but simply advanced individuals of whatever classification who may walk among us and display superior powers for any number of reasons. They may be from the future, or from another planet, or another dimension. They may be agents of a separate and currently secret society, or a sect of intergalactic do-gooders, or the keepers of a separate reality. Or they may be scientists sent here to study us who have tender hearts and who try to help out.

I have never seen an angel, an interdimensional being, an extraterrestrial, or a time traveler. But since they do not violate my distrust of infinities of knowledge, sight, and power, I am not naturally inclined to dismiss them. Such beings might arrive in metaphysical conveyances, cloak themselves in mysterious fashion, and use technologies and power sources that on this planet pass for miraculous and magical. I would actually expect them to do that. After all, Clarke’s Third Law states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”⁵ And I know that our own science and understanding are not yet complete.

I am not a disbeliever in things I cannot see or touch or have not yet experienced. I know that the universe is big and unexpected, and much of what we understand about it has only come to light in the last hundred years or so ⁶ and is still subject to much revision. My comfort with this level of uncertainty—indeed, my faith that we will finally understand what’s going on—is that now and for perhaps the last 400 years⁷ those of us in the Western tradition have been learning about our world and our universe through observation and analysis, rather than through superstition and ritual.

1. See Working with the Subconscious from September 30, 2012.

2. All of this, of course, is accurate plus or minus a few orders of magnitude. No one has actually counted the galaxies or inventoried each one’s stars.

3. See Matthew 10:26-33. I understand that Matthew is telling people to have no fear, because the Father is watching over each of us and cares for each of us. I’m just saying it’s a task that passes my understanding.

4. Of course, measuring the width and breadth of the universe presents us with a problem, because to look far enough in any direction is also to see back in time. The edge of the universe is also, in our telescopes, its beginning. As Audrey Hepburn said in the movie Always, “Time is funny stuff. Space has its points, too.”

5. Arthur C. Clarke—perhaps best known for the book and screenplay of 2001: A Space Odyssey, among much other great science fiction—was likely a believer in angels or astronomical agents himself. His first two laws are: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong” and “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” Here was a man who could see beyond the limits of the everyday.

6. I’m taking this time reference from the fact that astronomer Edwin Hubble showed in 1923 that all the “spiral nebulae” we thought lay inside our own galaxy, the Milky Way, were actually other galaxies lying far outside it. That was a first step in putting the universe in perspective. Half a dozen years later he showed that those galaxies were moving away and the universe is expanding. Those are pretty big steps for the science of star study that goes back to Mesopotamia.

7. Here I’m talking about the Scientific Revolution and the work of 17th-century scientists like Copernicus and Kepler, Newton and Leibniz, Galileo and Van Leeuwenhoek, and a hundred others who began looking with their own eyes, seeing with their full intellect, experimenting using their best imagination, and recording and comparing the results for others to inspect.

Reduced Instruction Set Arithmetic

I see recurring comments on Facebook and elsewhere about the new Common Core arithmetic, particularly the method of subtraction. People are indignant, confused, and upset, because this is a marked departure from the method we all learned in grade school.¹

In the traditional method. you start by subtracting the numbers in the one’s column, and if the top number is smaller than the bottom number, you borrow a ten from the ten’s column, reducing the number there by an imaginary one. Proceed in like fashion across the pairs of top and bottom numbers in each decimal column, writing the result of each single subtraction below the line. Watch the result build up from the one’s column across out to however many places the answer happens to go.

This method reaches an exact answer most directly. So it’s good for accountants and other people who need to deal exclusively in exact quantities. But I was raised by an engineer. Now, I was never very good at math, no matter how hard my father tried, but one notion I did learn from him was the idea of approximation.² That is, in most situations you don’t need the exact figure down to the one’s place and all the decimals,³ but instead you want a shot at the “close enough” answer without a lot of work. I think the Common Core teaching of subtraction is an approach to this.

In the Common Core method, you start with the lower number—the one you’re subtracting from the upper number—and add a comfortable, easily recognizable, rounded-off amount that takes you closer to the upper number. In the example most often given, subtracting 12 from 32, you add 3 to the starting 12 to get up to 15, then you add 5 to 15 to get to 20, then 10 to 20 to get to 30, then 2 to 30, to get to 32. Once you’ve made all these approximations, you add them up to get the answer: 3+5+10+2=20. And the difference between 32 and 12 is indeed 20.

This seems like a lot of work. And it is, if you go about it that way. A shorter route might be 3+12=15, 15+15=30, 2+30=32; so 3+15+2=20. Or 10+12=22, 10+22=32; so 10+10=20. In the Common Core, these would all be right answers—unless, of course, the hidden purpose of the exercise is to take the tiniest, most eensy-beansy steps in order to drive the child mad with all of those follow-up additions.

I wouldn’t teach children the Common Core method as the only way to subtract two numbers. First, because the “old way” is fast at reaching an exact answer. Second, because the child’s parents—at least for the next generation or so—will know the old way but not the new. Turning numbers on their heads is a dandy way to exclude parents from involvement with their children’s homework, or to blunt the child’s understanding when he or she hears a lot of parental muttering over an assignment.

But this method of approximating the answer from the bottom up is an excellent alternative to be taught alongside the old top-down subtraction. First, it teaches the child flexibility. It shows that the number system works both ways, and that subtraction can be thought of as another type of addition. Second, it works better with large numbers to get an approximate answer when a sense of proportion is all you’re actually looking for.

For example, suppose I have two large numbers: 53,246 and 34,152. I want to know approximately how much bigger the first is than the second. Say, I have two different makes and models of cars I’m thinking of buying, and I want to compare their two prices generally, without getting bogged down in the weeds with just a few dollars in pocket change. In the old way, I would start by subtracting 2 from 6 to get 4 and write down “4.” Then, because the upper number’s 4 in the ten’s column is smaller than the lower number’s 5, I would borrow 1 from the 2 in the hundred’s column, subtract 5 from 14 to get 9 and write down “9.” Then I would subtract 1 from 1 in the hundred’s column and write down “0.” All that work, and I’ve not yet reached the thousands—the biggest parts of both numbers.

With Common Core subtraction, I would say 34+20=54. That’s too large by a thousand, so I back that off to 34+19=53. The approximation is a difference of 19,000 and change. If I wanted an exact answer, I could go after those hundred’s, ten’s, and one’s places. And if the number there turned out to be negative, then I could subtract it from 19,000.

Accountants wouldn’t like this way of thinking. But a scientist managing data in terms of thousands and millions of cells, seedlings, or stars would find this a quick way to get into the right decimal ballpark. This is arithmetic you can do in your head, without paper and pencil and writing down phantom numbers loaned from one decimal place to another. It’s an instinctive way to get to the “big pieces” answer rather than starting out with the “little pieces.”

The Common Core method, because it turns subtraction into an addition problem, also strikes me as a kind of “reduced instruction set” arithmetic. Reduced instruction set is a concept from computer programming, where you trade a complex language full of purposefully designed operators for a simpler language with a limited number of operators. In this case, you’re trading an arithmetic with the operators “+” and “-” for a new arithmetic that only knows “+”. Generally, with reduced instruction set coding, as you trade off the complexity of discrete operators, you must accept the need to take more steps to achieve a result in any operation.

Say, for example, you want to program a robot car or forklift. The normal four instructions in a set for driving on a square grid—like a city’s streets or the aisles and rows of a warehouse—would be: Forward, Backward, Right Turn, Left Turn. The reduced instruction set would be would be: Forward and Right Turn. You could still perform all the necessary actions to navigate the regular blocks of a city like New York. But instead of backing up, you would take a turn around the block by executing Right, Right, Forward. And instead of making a left turn, you would execute Right, Right, Right, Forward.

Sounds stupid and silly, doesn’t it? Until you realize that UPS asks its drivers to do something similar in devising and following their delivery routes so that they can avoid hazardous, time-consuming left turns and U-turns in busy traffic.

The point of all this is not to be infuriating to parents or confusing to children, but to teach flexibility, to increase understanding, and ultimately to show that anyone can generally find more than one way to approach and solve a problem. And that’s always a useful teaching.

1. That is, all of us older than twelve.

2. I believe this comes—at least in my father’s generation—from their constant use of a slide rule. The old “slip stick” gives you rapid answers in multiplication and division, exponents, square roots, logarithms, trigonometric functions, and similar complex math. But it usually gives you just the “stripped down” version of the answer—that is, the most meaningful digits on the “big end” of the number, as in scientific and engineering notation. For example, the exact speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. But a scientist or engineer would write 3x10⁸ or 3e8, or “about three million meters.” In working a slide rule for multiplication and division, you only get the significant figures and you generally have to keep track of the decimal places—the tens, thousands, millions, and billions—in your head.

3. Unless, of course, you are dealing with very tiny amounts to the right of the decimal point—in which case the significant figures are still written as a one-, two-, or three-place decimal but the exponent notation is negative, reflecting the number of zeroes between the actual answer’s decimal point and the leading significant figure.

How Important is Race?

Not very—at least not on a biological, genetic, or morphological level.

I recently took part in a series of Facebook comments addressing a creationist-inspired link that attacked evolution for, among other things, its failure to produce a single “missing link” between ape and human. The discussion got into the issue of the multiple hominid lines, including the australopithecines and the genus Homo, in which these developments are all cousins and uncles to the H. sapiens species that we call “the human race.”

To me—and I’ve done some reading and study in the area of human origins, as well as genetics and morphology—looking for a single link or trying to define these human predecessors and parallels too closely as to type is a waste of time. In classical evolution, the dividing line between one species and the next is failure to interbreed. First, can a male and female from separate groups produce a viable offspring? And if so, can that offspring breed and produce more viable offspring? Horses and donkeys—both members of the genus Equus—can produce living offspring, but they are almost always sterile. So the two animals are considered to be from different species.

We used to think H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis were separate species, too. I mean, just look at the Neanderthals, with their arching brow ridges, disappearing foreheads, heavy jaws, and stocky bodies. Such features simply scream “brute.” Shave one and put him in a business suit on the subway, and you’d still think you were looking at some kind of monkey … right? But since we’ve discovered fossil remains well enough preserved to take an almost complete genome, we’ve learned that many modern-day Europeans—humans from the geographic areas where these two “species” overlapped some 20,000 to 40,000 years ago—actually contain about 4% genetic material that is particular to the Neanderthal genome. So not only could the two lineages breed, but they must have produced viable offspring.

Maybe H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis are subspecies of a wider—and yet to be identified—Homo species. And maybe they are just two sets of human beings with different associated features who can trace their lineage back to a common ancestor in the not-so-distant past.

Looking for distinguishing features and trying to identify all-encompassing “types” is a particularly 19th-century intellectual fetish. It’s probably best reflected in the natural philosophy inspired by the great 18th-century classifier of botany and zoology, Carl Linnaeus. You can see this classifying urge today in birdwatchers, who go to great pains to distinguish various types of jays and woodpeckers. But it can be a trap and lead one to make false distinctions.

In a parallel vein, I’m reading John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. He makes the interesting point that what we think of as “languages” do not actually exist in natural populations. Instead, what we really have is collections of dialects particular to a certain region. In this way of thinking, Italian, French, and Spanish are simply long-isolated dialects of Latin. And what we today think of as English is actually an amalgam of local dialects, from Yorkshire to Cornish, with the corners rounded off in the studios of the BBC to become “standard English.” Each of these dialects bears some resemblance to the others but has different accents, different vowel and consonant sounds, and different and sometimes peculiar word usages.¹

The trend toward identifying a “standard” language started with the rise in literacy after the adoption of moveable type. Most notably, people in the areas we now call Germany, ranging from the North Sea to the Alps, once spoke quite distinct dialects. It wasn’t until Martin Luther translated the Bible in the 1520s and ’30s, and then popularized it with his own brand of Protestantism, that a modern, standard German—called “High German” for its predominance in the southern or higher elevations of the region, compared to the lowlands of places like the Netherlands—developed to unite the country linguistically.

Similarly, in France one finds the langues d’oïl in the northern provinces and the langues d’oc of the southern provinces. The former beat out the latter as “standard” French because of their closeness to Paris, which was the center of culture starting in the Middle Ages and home of the Academie Française with its binding rules on language and grammar.

Just as our notion of a “standard” language is made up of amalgams of linguistic variants that developed in relative isolation in a separate places, so our notion of various human races is made up of amalgams of genetic mutations and morphological features that developed in isolation in different places. The features we now associate with “distinct” races—variations in skin and hair coloring, hair texture, nose shape, eyelid shape, and so on—are all just minor genetic differences that were passed down first in families and then in tribal lineages, and finally came to dominate in the community and the region.

Social structure and the prominence of certain families had a lot to do with it, too. For example, genetic analysis has shown that about 10% of the men living within the borders of the Mongol Empire at the time of Genghis Khan’s death carry his Y chromosome. It was good to be the khan, or king, or a tribal chieftain.

Take skin color, for the most obvious example of race. Various populations in Africa, southern India, and Australia are nearly uniform in having dark skin. This is a natural response to their lineage’s long exposure to tropical sunlight. The regulation of skin pigments and addition of melanin as an inherited trait is a protective reaction against exposure to damaging ultraviolet rays. If you put a Swedish family in the tropics for a hundred generations, they will start having dark-skinned babies, too—without having to invoke any interbreeding to explain the phenomenon.

Fair hair and blue eyes are genetic recessives—that is, they readily give way to brown or black hair and eyes in any genetic mixing. But places like Scandinavia came to be dominated by these recessives because the earliest inhabitants of these cold, far northern areas didn’t travel much and managed to avoid invasion. Then, during the three centuries of Viking raiding and mercantile expansion into western and eastern Europe in the late first millennium, their descendants passed these features on to other populations.

It’s not logical to think of dark-skinned people as belonging to a separate race but blue-eyed blonds as just another type of Caucasian.

Or imagine an island in the Irish Sea where people with red hair and freckles—another set of recessive genes—had become so dominant that you couldn’t find dark-haired, pale-skinned people anywhere on the island. Would we then speak of a separate race of redheads and make them into a special variant of the human race?²

Or if you imagine you can tell a person’s race by features like wide lips or flattened noses, think of the famous Habsburg jaw. This was a genetic feature—a long jaw and prominent chin—in the Habsburg family which ruled in Austria and other parts of Europe from the Renaissance to the 19th century. If that family had started earlier or been more prolific, its famous jawline might have become the distinguishing feature of a whole “race” of central Europeans, similar to Genghis Khan’s Y chromosome.

It's clear from biology that all the beings alive today and accepted as human are of one species and not even variants. Genetically, we all trace back to a band of about a hundred H. sapiens wandering through eastern Africa about 60,000 years ago. On that basis, we are all cousins under the skin.³

1. It’s not surprising that the British Isles should be so linguistically broken. They have seen successive invasions and domination in different areas by the Celts, the Romans, the Angles and Saxons, the Danes, the Norse, and the Norman French. Everybody brought their own words, accents, and other linguistic pieces to the puzzle—the glorious pastiche—that is modern English.

2. However, my daughter-in-law—being red-haired herself—collects memes and anecdotes about “gingers,” as if they were a separate group of people with their own mysterious origins, attractive features, talents, propensities, and special powers. I sometimes wonder if she’s being satirical.

3. Of course, all of this discussion is based on the biological dimensions of race: genotypes and morphologies, which are accidents of inheritance. I’m not commenting on the social and cultural dimensions of race: physical markers by which one person recognizes another whom he or she wishes to accept or reject as an associate. Race as ethnicity and a form of social bonding is a matter of self-definition and choice as much or more than it’s a matter of inheritance. But it’s not biologically significant.

Can Evolution Be Disproved?

Science—meaning, from its Latin root, the business of knowing—has little or nothing to do with absolute truth, consensus, authority, or belief. Science is about looking into what is really going on, and in most cases, like most things, it’s complicated. Science is an endless series of guesses and questions and refinements of knowledge which do not assume they will uncover a final and for-all-time answer.

Science is a process, written into the Scientific Method. First, you observe what’s going on around you, especially the occasions and outcomes that don’t seem to make obvious sense. These things make you wonder. Second, you think deeply about them and try to imagine what’s driving the observed outcome, why things work out that way, and what’s really going on here. From your thinking, you establish a guess or a principle, theory, or hypothesis about the part that you cannot directly observe: the part that explains the why or predicts the what. Third, you think of ways that your guess might be proven either right or wrong. Fourth, you devise and conduct one or more experiments under controlled conditions that would tend to prove or disprove your theory, guess, or principle. Your bet is: “If this happens during my experiment, then I’m likely to be right. If that happens, then I’m likely wrong.” Fifth, you communicate your theory, the tests you made, and the results in enough detail so that others can understand your idea, reproduce your test, and compare their own results.

The beauty of this process is that it’s entirely limited and incremental, as well as being purely democratic. You are testing your logic and reasoning in specific cases, and you are exposing yourself to questioning and either confirmation or refutation by independent minds. If your hypothesis covers only a specialized, limited case, or does not consider or allow for alternate theories, or if your test design ignores important variables, then your results will be revealed as possessing limited value and perhaps even no value. You can only lay claim to what you state and what you test, and even then your results are only valuable in terms of what others will accept as having been proved or disproved.

It’s really a difficult and demanding way to acquire knowledge—except for all the others, which are worse.¹

The linchpin of the scientific method is disprovability. Your test has to show that your hypothesis and its predictions were either right or wrong. Your hypothesis has to allow for an outcome that disproves it. But this is not always obvious.

Take, for example, the proposition or hypothesis that everything we see and experience in the universe happens according to the design of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing intelligence that stands outside space and time. It may be a comforting belief. It may even be true. But how would you disprove it? Whatever conditional test you proposed, the results could always be explained as part of this intelligence’s deeper intention. It might, for example, be trying to sharpen your wits with a conundrum, or discourage your impertinence with an unexpected result, or simply torment you with doubt. You have no way of knowing or proving anything about this overriding intelligence and its hidden purposes.

Take, for another example—one that claims scientific provenance—the propositions of string theory in physics: that every particle we encounter is actually a tiny loop of stringlike material that’s vibrating in one of a number of microscopic dimensions not observable at the human or galactic scale. It’s an elegant idea, combining notions of both matter and energy. It’s supported by elegant mathematics. It may even be true. But how do you disprove it? How do you physically examine and measure dimensions that we cannot experience? How do you determine where the vibration leaves off and the inert string material begins? Whatever test you proposed, the results could always be explained as applying to a higher and coarser level of existence, under which lies a deeper, more fine-grained level at which string theory actually operates.

This looks superficially like the older conundrums in the physical sciences: that Newton’s laws seem to apply on a human or planetary scale, but don’t exactly work out at the level of galactic interactions or at the level of subatomic particles. At the galactic scale, you have the laws of Newton refined, enlarged, and overwritten by Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. At the subatomic scale, you have Newton refined—and, in some cases, discarded and turned on its head—by the insights of quantum mechanics. The two approaches both work in their respective realms, generate hypotheses and predictions that can be proved or disproved, and answer a lot of important questions. But relativity and quantum mechanics are so far irreconcilable under any form of mathematics, because they take fundamentally different approaches and make mutually antagonistic assumptions.²

One might think then that something similar applies to the disjunction between the older stories of creation and earlier theories about the differences among plants and animals in biology and the insights of Charles Darwin. But Darwin’s theory of evolution is not an enlargement or refinement of earlier ideas but instead a total disconnect. And the people who disagree with and perhaps are offended by the implications of Darwin’s analysis want to attack it along several fronts.³

First, they want to explain that random chance is incapable of creating complex structures. I believe this is a misreading of both the theory and the events of biology. Random chance did not suddenly create a human eye with its ability to focus for varying distances, adjust to available light levels, and detect and discriminate colors among different wavelengths of light. Somebody didn’t roll the dice just once and a full-blown set of eyes came up. Instead, extant organisms and the fossil record show many examples of different stages in this development, from the light-sensitive chemicals in one-celled animals, to collections of light-sensing cells in many different organisms, up through various kinds and qualities of eyes.

Actually, random chance does not operate at the level of structure or purpose at all. Chance only plays a part in the theory at the level of occasional and undirected mutations to the genetic material that controls the nature and expression of proteins. These mutations are happening all the time in every organism, some with positive results, some with negative results, and some making no difference at all. The test of whether a mutation is used and preserved or eventually discarded is fitness for purpose. If the mutation helps the individual thrive and breed, it will likely stay and be transmitted to the next generation. If it hurts the individual, it will either die out immediately with the host organism or disadvantage the next and future generations. If the mutation has no obvious effect, it may either die out or persist, and if the latter, it may prove beneficial or hurtful later under changing circumstances. This test of fitness for purpose is not at all random but rather the most appropriate and important test for organisms inhabiting a dangerous and changeable world. It is the only test that matters.

Second, these people claim that no one has ever observed an “intermediate form,” halfway between one species or type of organism and another. They complain that the fossil record does not show such forms in support of, for example, a transition between apes and humans, or between lizards and dinosaurs, or between any two kinds of animals and plants. They focus a great deal of attention on the 19th-century notion of a “missing link.”⁴

Actually, such forms exist all over the place and throughout the fossil record. Fossils of the shrew-like mammal that survived the dinosaurs have been examined in detail and demonstrate many features that predate later mammals like rodents, dogs, and humans. Fossils of early snakes and lizards show how elements of their jaw hinge became the ear canal and the tiny bones—hammer, anvil, and stirrup—essential to mammalian hearing. And the process works backward, too, because we can trace in the flipper of a whale the bones from the front foreleg of its ancestral mammal, which walked on land, and associate with its vertebrae the vestigial bones of that ancestor’s pelvis. Life on this planet is a glissando of adaptive changes, from one shape and purpose to the next, one generation to the next.

Third, the people who dislike evolution claim that it’s just a theory and as such can never be proven. This claim has some merit, because evolution as currently understood depends on two separate processes: one, a random change to an organism’s genetic material; and two, the usefulness of that change in an environment subject to many different effects and conflicting factors. Neither the mutations nor the ecological conditions can be completely reproduced in the lab in order to arrive at the major dividing line in evolutionary theory: the creation of a new species. A species is generally defined as a population that can interbreed and produce viable and fertile offspring.⁵ Development of a new species generally takes a long time, the right conditions, and geographic separation from the ancestral gene pool.

Actually, we can see evidence of morphological and structural changes that take place fairly rapidly. For example, in studying finches in the Galapagos Islands, Peter and Rosemary Grant saw beak shape change from one generation to the next based on the availability of various seed types. For another example, we have been conducting a large-scale experiment with various types of antibiotics that has created new generations of bacteria that are resistant to their effects. For a third example, Craig Venter has organized at least two sea-going experiments that take genetic samples every couple of miles or so in the Baltic and Mediterranean seas and in the open ocean, looking for new bacterial and planktonic genes and charting their associated capabilities for use in synthetic biology. The genetic variations he discovered suggest that what we once thought of as distinct marine species are actually more like whole genuses and families. It would take time and effort to conduct an experiment designed to consciously create an entirely new species of bacteria or plankton—but probably easier there than with any species of finch, because of the faster generations and ease of isolation with microbes—but I have no doubt that eventually such an experiment could be done.

Given that evidence of evolution seems to be all around us, in terms of structural adaptation, genetic similarities, and traceable lineages, what would it take to disprove the theory of evolution? That is, aside from the claim that genetic mutation is simply the mechanism that an all-powerful, all-knowing intelligence has chosen for the way things work on this planet.

The first disproof—or evidence leading us to doubt the processes of evolution—would be to find a child that differed significantly in phenotype (appearance, structure, and development) as well as in genotype (genetic makeup) from its biological parents.⁶ Such a “cuckoo” would obviously raise questions of actual origins and the possibility of a hoax: did sperm A actually meet egg B to form a zygote as claimed? But if that chain of custody or provenance could be proved, then we would have a true biological oddity that would throw the principles of evolution into a quandary.

In this discussion, I’m not concerned with one or two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that could result from mutations occurring sometime between the separation of the gamete from the parent and examination of the embryo. Those happen all the time.⁷ To be a convincing disproof of evolution, the certified child would have to be so changed from its parents that a preponderance of its genetic material had no connection, its appearance was vastly different, or its genetics and nature were not even of the same genus, species, or family. Such child would represent so great a deviation from what we currently expect of genetics, obstetrics, and medical theory that we would today consider it a miraculous birth.

A second disproof of evolution would be to find two species that appear to be closely related but that had totally different genomes. It’s not hard to find two unrelated species inhabiting similar ecological niches but that have different genomes. For example, bats and birds both fly by flapping their wings, and some species of each make their living by catching and digesting insects in flight. But one is a mammal, descended from that shrew-like creature that survived the dinosaurs, and the other is an Aves of lizard-like heritage and possibly descended from the dinosaurs themselves. Similarly, humans and octopi have very similar eye structures, but one is a vertebrate living on dry land and the other is not, and the two are separated by huge genetic distances.

But what if you had two robins, or a robin and a dove, and the two birds were alike in everything else—their structures, activities, diets, morphology, and phenotype—yet their genomes were as far apart as bats and birds, or humans and octopi? Such a discovery would suggest that something else—maybe a divine and playful intelligence—was ordering the nature of life on Earth.

The third disproof would be to find another type of genetic organization at work. So far, every domain, kingdom, and phylum of organisms on this planet—bacteria, archaea, fungi, plants, animals, and you-name-its—found in the most isolated locations, from freshwater lakes under the Antarctic ice sheets to volcanic vents along the mid-ocean ranges, uses the same genetic system. The four bases of DNA—adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine—are attached to ribose sugar rings, which are strung on a phosphate backbone and arranged in reading groups of three bases each to call for combinations from among just twenty different amino acids to make all the possible proteins used in earthly biology. Aside from minor differences—like replacing thymine with uracil, and dropping the OH group from the ribose ring’s two-prime carbon, in creating and processing RNA—everything we consider to be alive uses this same system. No organism uses just three bases, or up to five, in its genetic material, or assembles them into two-base or four-base reading groups, or makes use of any of the 500 other possible amino acids to make strange and different proteins. And no organism uses some other type of protein-coding system, perhaps based on silicon instead of carbon in its bases and sugar rings, or arsenic instead of phosphorus in its backbone.

If we found another genetic system in operation on this planet, it would suggest a separate and unique creation. It wouldn’t actually disprove “descent with variation,” which is the core of current evolutionary theory. But it would indicate that what is going on in biology is different from what we currently imagine. That would suggest some principle, mechanism, or hypothesis which our biological scientists have not yet considered and discarded.

But we haven’t discovered any such thing. And in the meantime, until we do, evolution as a hypothesis and a working model explains so much of what we see and orders our thinking so clearly—and without those nasty mathematical dislocations that separate relativity from quantum mechanics in the study of physics—that the theory of evolution has no peer. Even if it remains just a theory, it works awfully well.

1. A thought stolen from Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.”

2. I’m not bothered by this and prefer to take a wait-and-see approach as to whether either one will prevail or some third kind of “mechanics” is waiting outside human knowledge and still to be discovered. For now, I’m content to think that, as the biomarkers and medical treatments appropriate for an elephant may be different from those for a flea, so the cosmic experience and the quantum level represent different cases.

3. Let me say here at the outset that I’m a convinced evolutionist, satisfied with the theory’s ability to explain what we see and its every encounter with developments in morphology, paleontology, and genetics.

4. The notion goes back to a creature that is not great ape and not human but has features of both and sits midway between them. The last hundred years has dredged up successive waves of skeletons of varying ages that show this progression. The confusion may lie with the misconception that we humans evolved from any of the present day or recent forms such as chimpanzees, gorillas, or Neanderthals. The truth is, all of these forms are our cousins, and together we all point back to some earlier ancestor.

5. In this context, horses and donkeys are separate species, because their offspring may survive to maturity but cannot breed a new generation. Horses and zebras are in the same situation. Rarely, however, a female mule has been known to reproduce if mated with a purebred stallion.
       For a long time, H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis were thought to be in this relationship, as separate species of the genus Homo. However, recent sequencing of the Neanderthal genome and comparison with our human genome suggest that in lineages tracing back to European populations, which came in contact with the Neanderthals between 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, some humans may possess up to 4% Neanderthal genes. This implies interbreeding with fertile offspring, and so the two groups are probably subspecies of an as-yet unnamed Homo species and not truly separate.

6. In this case, I’m not concerned with issues of adoptive parents or surrogacy, but the simple coming together of egg and sperm to form an embryo, regardless of legal conditions or laboratory circumstances.

7. And I’m not talking about chimeras, either. These are organisms resulting from one or more fused embryos, in which the individual ends up possessing cells and tissues with different genetic backgrounds. Such an individual might have both male and female organs or possess two different blood types. Chimeras are strange, but they do not violate any biological or evolutionary principles.
       In ancient times, chimeras were strange creatures with misaligned body parts: head of a lion, body of a goat, tail of a lizard. Famous ancient chimeras included winged horses like Pegasus, griffins (head, wings, and talons of an eagle, haunches of a lion), or even the humanoid centaurs (half-man, half-horse) and fauns (half-man, half-goat). Needless to say, as viable anatomical structures, these creatures were and are wholly mythical.

Needs vs. Wants

I actually knew someone who won the California lottery. It was back in the 1980s, and the man lived in my mother-in-law’s San Francisco neighborhood. He was retired from the phone company with a pension, a modest house that he and his wife had lived in for decades, having raised children there, and they now had even more grandchildren. I don’t recall the exact amount of his winnings, but for tax purposes they were structured so that he would receive $400,000 a year for twenty years. He kept living in the old house and used that money to get a nice car, buy a vacation cabin on the Russian River, and put his grandchildren through college. Being a prudent man, I’m sure he also set up some generous trust funds. The money greatly improved his lifestyle and his family’s prospects.

I also knew a woman in that neighborhood who wished this man well, but she once told me, “Nobody needs that kind of money. That’s excessive. The lottery should pay out at most about $5,000. That’s enough for anyone.” In other words, keep buying your tickets and dreaming big, but expect to win just enough for a nice vacation—then go back to work.

Shortly after this, the U.S. Congress enacted and the first President Bush signed a luxury tax on expensive goods that people obviously didn’t need. On target were boats costing more than $100,000, cars costing more than $30,000, private aircraft more than $250,000, and furs and jewelry more than $10,000. (Those were big numbers in those days, but slightly more laughable a quarter century later after years of inflation.) To each of these purchases would be attached a ten-percent surcharge designed to reduce the federal deficit as well as discourage such “conspicuous consumption.” The theory was that nobody would mind seeing the millionaires deprived of their toys.¹

More recently, on an episode of CNBC’s Closing Bell, I caught an interview with Thomas Piketty, the Parisian economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He was apparently denying that his book was all about income inequality, but he did say that no one really needed a billion dollars. That’s excessive.

This interview coincided closely in my experience with a poster someone was displaying on Facebook: “Why does anyone need an AR-15 with 30 rounds of ammo?” The presumption was that such firepower is excessive. People should be happy with a smaller gun—or maybe with just a cell phone, so they can call 911 when trouble occurs. That’s all anyone really needs.

The presumption in every such case is that, if you don’t need it, you don’t actually deserve to have it. And so you won’t mind if wiser heads decide to take it away from you.

I am averse to all these forms of social control that begin with “Why does anyone need …?” Whether it’s a gun, a yacht, or a billion dollars, the question still presumes that a fair-minded, “normal” person has the right to deny anyone possession of the specified object based on “reasonableness.” Questions of legal use aside,² this presumption flies in the face of personal freedom and property rights, among others.³

I may not need the object of my desire, or the fortune in the case of lottery winnings, but I do want it. In most cases I must spend time and energy, or their equivalent in money, to obtain the desired object. To have a chance at winning the lottery, I must remember to buy the tickets, seek out lucky numbers or other winning strategies, and sacrifice the other pleasures that the price of those tickets might buy each week. To amass a personal fortune by playing the stock market or climbing the corporate ladder, I must be bold, take risks, focus my talents and energies, and prepare to lose everything during a market collapse or a corporate coup. To acquire that gun, I must—at least in California—take training, pass tests, and submit to a background check. To have that yacht, sports car, airplane, or jewelry, I must spend money that is not available for other purchases or investments. This is my choice. These are my sacrifices. And they are nobody’s business but mine.

The presumption that nobody should be allowed to waste their time, energy, and money on these frivolous desires goes back to the central tenet of Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” That sounds fair enough—if you are twelve years old, have not yet had to make any tough decisions, and do not yet know how the real world works. But an adult must ponder the parallel questions: Who determines those abilities, and what part do effort and coercion play in exercising them? Who determines what a person needs, and what part do desire and freedom of choice play in acquiring them?

I may have the strength to shovel three tons of coal during an eight-hour shift, but that doesn’t make me willing to do it. I may also have the creative imagination to invent a new kind of energy-efficient light bulb or battery, but that doesn’t mean I want to give it away without what the lawyers call “consideration.” Similarly, I may be able to sustain life on three slices of stale bread and a turnip each day, but that doesn’t mean I won’t beg, borrow, or steal for more. I may be able to survive being packed three to a room and sharing a bed with strangers, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be happy about it.

The Marxist presumption is that I do not have either freedom or rights, other than those granted to me by overseers in the name of “fairness” and “reasonableness.” It presumes that my time, my energy, the strength of my body, and the power of my mind do not belong to me but are surrendered to the control of others who act and speak for a vast, nebulous, inarticulate thing called “society.” It presumes that I do not belong to myself, that I have no authority to enter into contracts and seek my own benefit and advantage. It presumes that I am a slave—and a docile, willing one at that.

Who needs a billion dollars, or a yacht, or a thirty-round magazine? Personally, I don’t. But if that’s where you want to put your time and effort, your energy and your money, I won’t stop you. Knock yourself out, as they say. Life is short. The road is hard. And personal salvation comes in many forms.

1. I don’t know what this luxury tax did for the fur and jewelry market, but my family has always been interested in yachting, including cabin cruisers and sailboats in the 30-foot range. At something north of $100,000, they were in the price range of a summer cabin on the lake, except you could take off and cruise the canals and waterways of the eastern United States. Most of the power boats in this country were made on the Great Lakes, and the tax just decimated that business. The really big yachts—the millionaire’s mansion on a 150-foot hull—are now made in Taiwan or the Philippines, and potential buyers will still pay for them because, in that price range, ten percent more is nothing. But the luxury tax priced the middle class out of the pleasures of boating.

2. The law says I may own a gun, a yacht, or a billion dollars. So long as I don’t use the gun to threaten and/or kill other people, or the yacht to smuggle contraband, or the billion dollars to overthrow the government—or take similar actions which only become illegal through their execution and not because of the ownership of the means—then my right of possession should be secure.
       And for those of you who believe that my possession of any amount of wealth denies other people or my society of an equal amount of money, I refer you to my earlier blog It Isn’t a Pie from October 3, 2010. Money expands by being used and contracts when hoarded.

3. Such as the Second Amendment, in the case of a gun.