Archive for the ‘class’ Category
The last of Wilde, I hope: De Profundis, etc, and why I rarely read fiction these days…
Henry James
Oscar Wilde
So I’m writing this on the day that a book group I’m a part of will be discussing The picture of Dorian Gray, which I’ve written about quite disdainfully in a couple of previous posts. Interestingly, I’ve been sorting my very messed-up library in recent days, putting stuff into categories, and fiction into alphabetical order. During this process I made the shocking discovery that I had a ‘Penguin Classics’ copy of the novel all along, leading me to wonder whether I’d read the book years ago or not. I think not. More interestingly, I discovered a copy of De Profundis, Wilde’s ‘letter’ to Lord Alfred Douglas, written from prison and clearly intended for a wider audience. The most touching thing for me about the book was the name of the original purchaser, ‘Ethel Gwmes, or Gwymer, 1913’. Not that I wasn’t affected by Wilde’s plight – the fall from grace, the plank bed, the hard labour (for a time), the injustice, the humiliation – but it soon became clear in the reading that Wilde was still Wilde. As one would expect. (NB – I’ve just read, in a brief chronology of his life, that he was received into the Roman Catholic church the day before his death, so the concept of sin, which comes up so often in Dorian Gray, was one he really took seriously, maybe. If only he’d known what we now know about that August institution, he could’ve taken Holy Orders long before, diddled as many young lads as he liked, and ended life as a fat, self-satisfied Cardinal).
In De Profundis he makes a number of self-flattering observations and comparisons:
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
Oh dear. Never trust people’s views of themselves – we’re evolved to have an overly positive view of ourselves, after all, for our survival and thriving. Nevertheless, reading of others’ high opinions of themselves can be a fun pastime. And so let’s on:
I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation…
Interesting lines, of course, in considering Dorian Gray as an autobiography, of sorts. I certainly find it hard to see it as a moral work. The word ‘sin’ is often used – a perfunctory term that has no place in the courts or in works of moral philosophy. And for much of the novel – up to the murder of Basil – his evil-doings are a matter of ‘strange conjecture’, delineated more in ‘the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth’ of the portrait, rather than in any account of actual crimes or debaucheries. This is what makes it ‘gothic’ of course – more creepy and horror-show than in any way thought-provoking from an ethical perspective.
Now, having attended the book club’s discussion of the novel – all very lively and civilised – I want to return to a chapter discussed with some interest (chapter 18), in which James Vane, Dorian’s nemesis, is accidentally shot dead during a hunting party, while skulking in the bushes, apparently awaiting an opportunity to shoot the anti-hero. Lord Henry, one of the party, reveals himself in all his colours in this scene. Dorian, who’s recently been spooked by the sight of Vane peering into the window of some mansion that he (Dorian) is visiting, is deeply troubled by this shooting, which at this time was thought to be of one of the aristocrats’ servants, acting as a ‘beater’ to frighten the quarry into view:
Dorian looked at Lord Henry, and said, with a heavy sigh, ‘It is a bad omen, Harry, a very bad omen.’
‘What is?’ asked Lord Henry. ‘Oh! this accident, I suppose. My dear fellow, it can’t be helped. It was the man’s own fault. Why did he get in front of the guns? Besides, it is nothing to us. It is rather awkward for Geoffrey, of course. It does not do to pepper beaters. It makes one think that one is a wild shot…
These remarks occur after the man has been pronounced dead, and presents Lord Henry as something worse than a droll, loquacious layabout. The question our readers were discussing vis-a-vis this passage, I think, was whether Wilde was censuring Lord Henry in any serious way, or just gently mocking the upper classes as he does in his plays. I would tend to think the latter is true, (or more true) as he never breathes any life into his ‘lower-class’ characters, except when they’re instrumental to the plot, as is the case with the Vane siblings. But then, considering the class he wholly identified with, maybe it’s just as well that he didn’t try to.
But returning to De Profundis, Wilde’s predilection for trying to say something impressive (whether witty or wise) in a sentence works well enough in the plays and in the remarks of Lord Henry and his entourage, but when he writes them in his own voice, they come across more like Daniel Dennett’s ‘deepities’, unworthy of too much scrutiny. But I don’t necessarily consider Wilde’s comparison of himself with Christ (whom I prefer to call Jesus) as an act of vanity, since Jesus is delineated in the ‘gospels’, in my view, as a more or less kindly ‘everyman’, from a period when depth and complexity of character is hardly explored.
And then there’s the matter of class. When I were a lad I worked in factories and read about working people in the 19th century, especially through the novels of Thomas Hardy – stonemasons, farmers and milkmaids – and their emotional highs and lows. I read Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch and lived a kind of extra life through the characters in those novels. But I can feel no emotional connection to the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m now an old codger. My teenage obsession with Hardy caused me to buy a biography of the author, in which I read of Henry James’ disdainful opinion of him. My reaction was typical – I thought ‘what an arsehole’, and then I went out and bought one of James’ most acclaimed novels, The portrait of a lady. What I got from it, some 50 years ago now, was an intro to the same world as Wilde – the parasitic upper class – a lot of intellectual verbiage, and a vague sense of outsiderdom and resentment (James, as it turned out, was also homosexual, FWIW). Nowadays I don’t read fiction at all, except for these book club choices. I’m not quite sure why that is, I just seem to get more of a buzz from learning about Neanderthals, nuclear fusion and stuff that stretches my brain such as AI and other new technologies. Perhaps because, in doing so, I can leave class and relative poverty behind, and feel myself a part of the great wave of transcending humanity…
the self and its brain: free will encore
so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible – in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.
Victor Hugo, author’s preface to Les Miserables
Listening to the Skeptics’ Guide podcast for the first time in a while, I was excited by the reporting on a discovery of great significance in North Dakota – a gigantic graveyard of prehistoric marine and other life forms precisely at the K-T boundary, some 3000 kms from where the asteroid struck. All indications are that the deaths of these creatures were instantaneous and synchronous, the first evidence of mass death at the K-T boundary. I felt I had to write about it, as a self-learning exercise if nothing else.
But then, as I listened to other reports and talking points in one of SGU’s most stimulating podcasts, I was hooked by something else, which I need to get out of the way first. It was a piece of research about the brain, or how people think about it, in particular when deciding court cases. When Steven Novella raised the ‘spectre’ of ‘my brain made me do it’ arguments, and the threat that this might pose to ‘free will’, I knew I had to respond, as this free will stuff keeps on bugging me. So the death of the dinosaurs will have to wait.
The more I’ve thought about this matter, the more I’ve wondered how people – including my earlier self – could imagine that ‘free will’ is compatible with a determinist universe (leaving aside quantum indeterminacy, which I don’t think is relevant to this issue). The best argument for this compatibility, or at least the one I used to use, is that, yes, every act we perform is determined, but the determining factors are so mind-bogglingly complex that it’s ‘as if’ we have free will, and besides, we’re ‘conscious’, we know what we’re doing, we watch ourselves deciding between one act and another, and so of course we could have done otherwise.
Yet I was never quite comfortable about this, and it was in fact the arguments of compatibilists like Dennett that made me think again. They tended to be very cavalier about ‘criminals’ who might try to get away with their crimes by using a determinist argument – not so much ‘my brain made me do it’ as ‘my background of disadvantage and violence made me do it’. Dennett and other philosophers struck me as irritatingly dismissive of this sort of argument, though their own arguments, which usually boiled down to ‘you can always choose to do otherwise’ seemed a little too pat to me. Dennett, I assumed, was, like most academics, a middle-class silver-spoon type who would never have any difficulty resisting, say, getting involved in an armed robbery, or even stealing sweets from the local deli. Others, many others, including many kids I grew up with, were not exactly of that ilk. And as Robert Sapolsky points out in his book Behave, and as the Dunedin longitudinal study tends very much to confirm, the socio-economic environment of our earliest years is largely, though of course not entirely, determinative.
Let’s just run though some of this. Class is real, and in a general sense it makes a big difference. To simplify, and to recall how ancient the differences are, I’ll just name two classes, the patricians and the plebs (or think upper/lower, over/under, haves/have-nots).
Various studies have shown that, by age five, the more plebby you are (on average):
- the higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response
- the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism
- the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation , impulse control, and executive decision making.
All of this comes from Sapolsky, who cites all the research at the end of his book. I’ll do the same at the end of this post (which doesn’t mean I’ve analysed that research – I’m just a pleb after all. I’m happy to trust Sapolski). He goes on to say this:
moreover , to achieve equivalent frontal regulation, [plebeian] kids must activate more frontal cortex than do [patrician] kids. In addition, childhood poverty impairs maturation of the corpus collosum, a bundle of axonal fibres connecting the two hemispheres and integrating their function. This is so wrong – foolishly pick a poor family to be born into, and by kindergarten, the odds of your succeeding at life’s marshmallow tests are already stacked against you.
Behave, pp195-6
Of course, this is just the sort of ‘social asphyxia’ Victor Hugo was at pains to highlight in his great work. You don’t need to be a neurologist to realise all this, but the research helps to hammer it home.
These class differences are also reflected in parenting styles (and of course I’m always talking in general terms here). Pleb parents and ‘developing world’ parents are more concerned to keep their kids alive and protected from the world, while patrician and ‘developed world’ kids are encouraged to explore. The patrician parent is more a teacher and facilitator, the plebeian parent is more like a prison guard. Sapolsky cites research into parenting styles in ‘three tribes’: wealthy and privileged; poorish but honest (blue collar); poor and crime-ridden. The poor neighbourhood’s parents emphasised ‘hard defensive individualism’ – don’t let anyone push you around, be tough. Parenting was authoritarian, as was also the case in the blue-collar neighbourhood, though the style there was characterised as ‘hard offensive individualism’ – you can get ahead if you work hard enough, maybe even graduate into the middle class. Respect for family authority was pushed in both these neighbourhoods. I don’t think I need to elaborate too much on what the patrician parenting (soft individualism) was like – more choice, more stimulation, better health. And of course, ‘real life’ people don’t fit neatly into these categories, there are an infinity of variants, but they’re all determining.
And here’s another quote from Sapolsky on research into gene/environment interactions.
Heritability of various aspects of cognitive development is very high (e.g. around 70% for IQ) in kids from [patrician] families but is only around 10% in [plebeian] kids. Thus patrician-ness allows the full range of genetic influences on cognition to flourish, whereas plebeian settings restrict them. In other words, genes are nearly irrelevant to cognitive development if you’re growing up in awful poverty – poverty’s adverse affects trump the genetics.
Behave, p249
Another example of the huge impact of environment/class, too often underplayed by ivory tower philosophers and the silver-spoon judiciary.
Sapolsky makes some interesting points, always research-based of course, about the broader environment we inhabit. Is the country we live in more communal or more individualistic? Is there high or low income inequality? Generally, cultures with high income inequality have less ‘social capital’, meaning levels of trust, reciprocity and cooperation. Such cultures/countries generally vote less often and join fewer clubs and mutual societies. Research into game-playing, a beloved tool of psychological research, shows that individuals from high inequality/low social capital countries show high levels of bullying and of anti-social punishment (punishing ‘overly’ generous players because they make other players look bad) during economic games. They tend, in fact, to punish the too-generous more than they punish actual cheaters (think Trump).
So the determining factors into who we are and why we make the decisions we do range from the genetic and hormonal to the broadly cultural. A couple have two kids. One just happens to be conventionally good-looking, the other not so much. Many aspects of their lives will be profoundly affected by this simple difference. One screams and cries almost every night for her first twelve months or so, for some reason (and there are reasons), the other is relatively placid over the same period. Again, whatever caused this difference will likely profoundly affect their life trajectories. I could go on ad nauseam about these ‘little’ differences and their lifelong effects, as well as the greater differences of culture, environment, social capital and the like. Our sense of consciousness gives us a feeling of control which is largely illusory.
It’s strange to me that Dr Novella seems troubled by ‘my brain made me do it’, arguments, because in a sense that is the correct, if trivial, argument to ‘justify’ all our actions. Our brains ‘make us’ walk, talk, eat, think and breathe. Brains R Us. And not even brains – octopuses are newly-recognised as problem-solvers and tool-users without even having brains in the usual sense – they have more of a decentralised nervous system, with nine mini-brains somehow co-ordinating when needed. So ‘my brain made me do it’ essentially means ‘I made me do it’, which takes us nowhere. What makes us do things are the factors shaping our brain processes, and they have nothing to do with ‘free will’, this strange, inexplicable phenomenon which supposedly lies outside these complex but powerfully determining factors but is compatible with it. To say that we can do otherwise is just saying – it’s not a proof of anything.
To be fair to Steve Novella and his band of rogues, they accept that this is an enormously complex issue, regarding individual responsibility, crime and punishment, culpability and the like. That’s why the free will issue isn’t just a philosophical game we’re playing. And lack of free will shouldn’t by any means be confused with fatalism. We can change or mitigate the factors that make us who we are in a huge variety of ways. More understanding of the factors that bring out the best in us, and fostering those factors, is what is urgently required.
Research articles and reading
Behave, Robert Sapolsky, Bodley Head, 2017
These are just a taster of the research articles and references used by Sapolsky re the above.
C Heim et al, ‘Pituitary-adrenal and autonomic responses to stress in women after sexual and physical abuse in childhood’
R J Lee et al ‘CSF corticotrophin-releasing factor in personality disorder: relationship with self-reported parental care’
P McGowan et al, ‘Epigenetic regulation of the glucocorticoid receptor in human brain associates with childhood abuse’
L Carpenter et al, ‘Cerebrospinal fluid corticotropin-releasing factor and perceived early life stress in depressed patients and healthy control subjects’
S Lupien et al, ‘Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition’
A Kusserow, ‘De-homogenising American individualism: socialising hard and soft individualism in Manhattan and Queens’
C Kobayashi et al ‘Cultural and linguistic influence on neural bases of ‘theory of mind”
S Kitayama & A Uskul, ‘Culture, mind and the brain: current evidence and future directions’.
etc etc etc
downtown, uptown, upstate, downstate, qu-est-ce que c’est?
A spot of holiday writing. The other day I was stopped in Adelaide by a foreign fellow with kids in tow, who asked ‘excuse me can you tell please where is downtown from here?’ I was momentarily discombobulated, but after translating the question, answered, ‘ahh, the city centre is thataway’, pointing towards Rundle Mall.
The point is, ‘downtown’ and its derivatives have never been a part of my vocab, because I’ve never really understood the terms, though as a kid I sang along to ‘Downtown’, a 1964 number one hit sung by Petula Clark and written by Tony Hatch. Both Clark and Hatch are English, which is interesting as I’ve long considered ‘downtown’ etc to be Americanisms. Another popular reference of course is Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl’. But is there a downtown and uptown in, say, Adelaide? And if there are uptown girls (or boys) are there also downtown peoples? The terms carry no coherent meaning for me, which is why I don’t use them. I think in terms of inner city and, maybe, outer city, and certainly inner suburbs and outer suburbs. So I think in circles rather than ups and downs.
A few months ago, after listening to an American commentator talking about ‘upstate New York’, I had another head-scratching moment, powerful enough to send me to Dr Google for enlightenment. I mean, why does nobody mention downstate New York? And isn’t New York a city? I’ve always been a little confused by US geography, but now I realise that New York is a state and that New York City is down the bottom. Upstate New York represents virtually the whole of the state apart from NYC.
A little research tells me I’m not the only one who’s confused. It seems that downtown and uptown regions vary in placement from city to city, though ‘downtown’ generally refers to the CBD and also the shopping precinct, though interestingly the “Downtown” song refers to the lights being much brighter there, and listening to the music, so I tended to imagine it as a nightclubbing spot. Uptown girls, at any rate, are supposed to be sophisticates with expensive tastes so that would suggest that ‘downtown girls’ are a little more – down to earth? But there’s no such term.
Of course there are other ways of distinguishing parts of cities, which always have class elements. I’ve mentioned inner and outer. The more ‘inner’ you are, the closer you are to the ‘core’, the action, the power etc. In Adelaide, and far more so in Sydney, there is eastern and western (I’ve actually met Adelaide people who shudder at the thought of venturing into our western badlands). In London they have eastenders and westenders, though I can’t remember, if I ever knew, which are the goodies and which are the baddies (the west, though, has a general tendency to be wild). And nowadays the crooked or otherwise rich like to live in gated communities, which I suspect are mostly on the rises. So, with all these ups and downs, it seems we’re all still a little obsessed with status, though with some ambiguity, as we like to get down and get with it and we don’t like to be up ourselves too much. And which is better, to be stood up, or stood down? Ca dépend…