Category Archives: books

An imaginary connection to the post office

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Reading Troubled By Faith by Owen Davies, 22 November 2023

Readers of this magazine may recall how, in early 2020, 5G mobile technology got caught up in a conspiracy theory that saw cellphone towers being set on fire across Europe. But how many of us knew just how dated this delusional belief really was?

A medical note from 1889 reports on the plight of one Henry Staples, 59, who ”fancies telegraph wires are over his head” and “that messages are being sent to people as to his character”. A year later, 56-year-old Janet Sneddon from Glasgow presented with an imaginary wire “connecting her to the post office”.

Owen Davies is an historian of magic. Troubled by Faith is his account of how early clinicians met with, understood, and dealt with irrational belief.

In a book that never lets the big ideas get in the way of the always entertaining fine detail, he builds a cast-iron defence of the movement that saw asylums springing up across western Europe in the 1830s. There were certainly abuses — there still are — but asylums were also places of compassion and sensitivity. Nor, by the way, were you ever just dumped there. Half of all “incarcerated” patients left after less than a year, and most within two years.

19th-century asylum records have serious limitations — the patients’ own words are rarely recorded directly — but Davies’s examination reveals what he calls “an extraordinary cultural space where under one roof prophets, messiahs, the bewitched, and the haunted, wrestled with angels, devils, imps, and witches.”

Troubled by Faith is a complex, sometimes tragic and ultimately uplifting story of how intelligence, sympathy and good-will triumphed over clinical ignorance. Growing up imbued with the values of the Enlightenment, doctors like the pioneering French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his pupil Sigmund Freud believed that magic was “a diseased survival of a benighted mediaeval past”, and that “madness” was therefore largely determined by history. Ignorance had spread superstition; superstition had fertilised irrational beliefs; and irrational beliefs were driving people into manias and insanias of one sort or another. If you could educate people into thinking rationally, mental wellbeing was bound to follow.

But irrational beliefs were not irreconcilable with modernity after all, Owens explains. Magical thinking, which ruins lives, is just a species of rule-of-thumb thinking, without which day-to-day life is impossible.

These have been humbling lessons for a discipline that, when it started, imagined the problems and mysteries it confronted could be cleared up in a generation.

Troubled by Faith is hardly the first book to be written about the very early years of psychology. But while most of these tend to plash about in the shallows of developing theory, Owens does everyone a tremendous favour by rolling up his sleeves and diving into the lived experiences of distressed and delusional people.

Owens explains how insanity diagnoses spread from behaviour to belief — in witches or fairies or ghosts, in divine or infernal visitations, or in new technologies operating in supernatural ways — and he explains how, by listening to and caring for patients, this diagnostic overreach was eventually corrected.

Many a contemporary observer found such a muddle infuriating, of course. In a long section about the legal culture around insanity, we meet the judge Baron George Bramwell who, we are told, “became something of a bogey figure in the psychiatric community as he routinely critiqued and dismissed medical expert witnesses and scoffed at the notion of moral insanity.”

With hindsight, and thanks to works as insightful as this one, we can afford to be more admiring of the effort to understand the mind, that enjoys reason, but does not need reason to be right.

Cutequake

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Reading Irresistible by Joshua Paul Dale for New Scientist, 15 November 2023

The manhole covers outside Joshua Dale’s front door sport colourful portraits of manga characters. Hello Kitty, “now one of the most powerful licensed characters in the world”, appears on road-construction barriers at the end of his road, alongside various cute cartoon frogs, monkeys, ducks, rabbits and dolphins. Dale lives in Tokyo, epicentre of a “cutequake” that has conquered mass media (the Pokémon craze, begun in 1996, has become arguably the highest grossing media franchise of all time) and now encroaches, at pace, upon the wider civic realm. The evidence? Well for a start there are those four-foot-high cutified police-officer mannequins standing outside his local police station…

Do our ideas of and responses to cute have a behavioural or other biological basis? How culturally determined are our definitions of what is and is not cute? Why is the depiction of cute on the rise globally, and why, of all places, did cute originate (as Dale ably demonstrates) in Japan?

Dale makes no bones about his ambition: he wants to found a brand-new discipline: a field of “cute studies”. His efforts are charmingly recorded in this first-person account that tells us a lot (and plenty that is positive) about the workings of modern academia. Dale’s interdisciplinary field will combine studies of domestication and neoteny (the retention of juvenile features in adult animals), embryology, the history of art, the anthropology of advertising and any number of other disparate fields in an effort to explain why we cannot help grinning foolishly at hyper-simplified line drawings of kittens.

Cute appearances are merely heralds of cute behaviour, and it’s this behaviour — friendly, clumsy, open, plastic, inventive, and mischievous — that repays study the most. A species that plays together, adapts together. Play bestows a huge evolutionary advantage on animals that can afford never to grow up.

But there’s the sting: for as long as life is hard and dangerous, animals can’t afford to remain children. Adult bonobos are playful and friendly, but then, bonobos have no natural predators. Their evolutionary cousins the chimpanzees have much tougher lives. You might get a decent game of checkers out of a juvenile chimp, but with the adults it’s an altogether different story.

The first list of cute things (in The Pillow Book), and the first artistic depictions of gambolling puppies and kittens (in the “Scroll of Frolicking Animals”) come from Japan’s Heian period, running from 794 to 1185 – a four-century-long period of peace. So what’s true at an evolutionary scale seems to have a strong analogue in human history, too. In times of peace, cute encourages affiliation.

If I asked you to give me an example of something cute, you’d most likely mention a cub or kitten or other baby animal, but Dale shows that infant care is only the most emotive and powerful social engagement that cute can release. Cute is a social glue of much wider utility. “Cuteness offers another way of relating to the entities around us,” Dale writes; “its power is egalitarian, based on emotion rather than logic and on being friendly rather than authoritarian.”

Is this welcome? I’m not sure. There’s a clear implication here that cute can be readily weaponised — a big-eyed soft-play Trojan Horse, there to emotionally nudge us into heaven knows what groupthunk folly.

Nor, upon finishing the book, did I feel entirely comfortable with an aesthetic that, rather than getting us to take young people seriously, would rather reject the whole notion of maturity.

Dale, a cheerful and able raconteur, has written a cracking story here, straddling history, art, and some complex developmental science, and though he doesn’t say so, he’s more than adequately established that this is, after all, the way the world ends: not with a bang but a “D’awww!”

Is Wanda June? Is Catherine Jerrie? Is Jerrie June?

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Reading A Woman I Know by Mary Haverstick for The Telegraph, 15 November 2023

This is an anxious, furious, forensic contribution to the study of the assassination of US president John F Kennedy. Forensic, because Haverstick has spent a dozen years learning how to read the US National Security Archives; furious, because the subject of this work, begun as a hymn to female empowerment, turned out to be a monstrous double-agent who maims cats and poisons drinking water; anxious because, as Haverstick is at pains to point out, these forays into espionage, assassination and casual violence have taken her about as far away from her creative comfort zone as it is possible to imagine.

Haverstick is an independent filmmaker. Home, her feature starring Marcia Gay Harden, came out in 2008. Her publisher’s web page says that Home came out in 2009. There is in fact a French documentary called Home released that year. Explaining to IMDB that the “Home” I was after was a “drama” from “2008” threw up a touching French comedy, also called Home, starring Isabelle Huppert. If looking up a movie generates this amount of fuss and bother, imagine what Haverstick’s been wading through for the last dozen years. Very early on in researching the life of female aeronaut and NASA hopeful Jerrie Cobb, Haverstick was taken aside by an unaccountably friendly woman from the Department of Defense and told that Jerrie’s government paper trail was largely “classified” and not worth the bother. It’s possible that she was genuinely trying to do Haverstick a favour.

Haverstick’s subject is Jerrie Cobb, one of the “Mercury 13” — female flyers who many observers assumed would participate at some point in NASA’s space programme. Their (never official) training programme was scrubbed in September 1962. In 2009 Jerrie agreed that Haverstick should tell her story, and strongly implied that this story was bigger — much bigger — than it first appeared. What she absolutely wouldn’t do was share her story: instead the elderly Jerrie spent years dropping expertly timed clues into Haverstick’s lap as the two travelled the world on cruise ships — trips that were “exotic, stressful, exhilarating, scary, and fascinating but never exactly enjoyable”. (Much the same could be said for this book. Haverstick has a sizeable and material axe to grind, and has little time for Dealey Plaza neophytes.)

The book draws together several figures who may or may not be real people, and are anyway rarely the people they say they are, even when there’s only one of them to contend with, which is almost never. (Welcome to spycraft.) There’s Jerrie Cobb, the disappointed astronaut. There’s June Cobb, the double agent who arranged for the delivery of poison pills to US enemy number one Fidel Castro. Jerrie and June aren’t related, though they’re of an age and came from the same town — and are you thinking what I am thinking? There’s Catherine Taaffe, who’s no relation at all to Jerrie and definitely a person in her own right — only how come Jerrie bears scars from a knife wound that are supposed to belong to Catherine? And — the cherry on this teetering cake — there Wanda Baran (savour that name), a Belgian con-artist whose company suckered in communist countries looking for nuclear materials. Is Wanda June? Is Catherine Jerrie? Is Jerrie June? Well, yes. Or sometimes. Or something.

I’m being flippant only because flippancy saves space. Haverstick has over five hundred pages to explain her case — that the privately funded astronaut project we’ve come call Mercury 13 was, among other perfectly legitimate things, a cover for the case officer driving the Kennedy assassination. She needs every single one of those pages and she does not waste a line.

Did I buy into every one of her speculations and inferences? No. No-one will. This genre has form. Arguably the most successful espionage book of all time, 1976’s A Man Called Intrepid, about the adventures of Sir William Stephenson, turned out to be the melancholy fabulations of a man suffering catastrophic memory loss.

At the same time, I’m certainly not going to throw the first stone. Haverstick is in earnest here and has a memory like a filing system and a filing system like a vice. The least this book could possibly be is a compelling real-life thriller, full of passion, free of writerly fuss, woven from the most intractable archival cat’s cradle imaginable.

That’s what you’ve got, even before you think to take it seriously — and I’ll bet the farm that you will.

How to catch an elephant

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Reading The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary by Hana Videen for the Spectator, 11 November 2023

How to catch an elephant.

Find a tree, and saw most of the way through it, without felling it. Sooner or later an unwary elephant is bound to lean up against it. Down comes the tree and down comes the elephant which, since it has no joints in its legs, will be unable to get up again. Dispatch your elephant with, um, dispatch, lest the herd arrives in answer to its plangent call. In that case the youngest of them, being lower to the ground, will be able to lift their fallen comrade back on its feet.

In her second foray into the Old English lexicon and mindset (The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English came out in 2021), Old English scholar Hana Videen is out to explore a world where animals hold sway. (A “deor”, by the way, is the Old English word for any animal, and opening this volume, you are as like to be confronted with a spider or a dragon, a dog-headed man or a tusked woman, as you are by anything so commonplace as a “deer”.) These living, breathing sources of knowledge, enchantment and instruction provided the feedstock for countless bestiaries, which flooded the Medieval book market for a good three hundred years. No earlier, Old English bestiary survives. Still, there’s lore enough in “tales, poems and medical texts, riddles and travel logs, sermons and saints’ lives” to justify Videen’s putting a synthetic one together from the available material.

Though it helps to know a bit of German, Old English is a captivating tongue. What’s not to love about a language that collides nouns in kennings like “gange-wæfre (walker-weaver) and wæfer-gange (weaver-walker), to name a spider? (At least we’ve retained the gærs-hoppa (grasshopper).)

Where Old English becomes arduous is in its religious texts, that cannot leave anything alone, but must constantly be making things act as metaphors for other things. That stiff-legged Elephant we started with is God’s Law, you see, that ultimately fails to keep us from committing sin. The other adult elephants (prophets of the Old Testament) try to help their fallen brother, but it’s only with the help of the little elephant (Christ) that the fallen can rise again.

There is, Videen explains, nothing particularly dogmatic or esoteric going on here — only people’s ongoing effort to explain their world in the most vivid and entertaining terms available. (We do the same today, and quite as unthinkingly: our plugged-in views over smooth-running power brunches of start-up meltdowns would surely addle the most visionary mediaeval mind: do these people imagine they are machines?)

Old English literature becomes a lot less arduous when we realise that its rhetorical fancies are fancies: they’re a poetic register, not a secret sign, and they aren’t designed to stand much scrutiny. In the Old English Life of St Margaret, for example, poor Margaret is swallowed by a dragon, splits it in two by making the sign of the cross, and steps out into the world again unharmed — making her the patron saint of women in childbirth. If you overthink this, you’ll tie yourself up in knots wondering at a metaphor that kills the mother-to-be while making her the instrument of the devil. The point is: stop being so needlessly scholastic. Focus on the first things the image brings to mind — the blood and the pain and the miracle of birth. Treat the language like a language, not a codex from the Beyond.

Much time has passed, of course, since “doves congregated in multicoloured flocks”. Videen is an excellent guide to lost lore (black doves were associated with obscure sermons, and “blac”, by anyway meant “glossy”) and sees us safely through some disconcerting shifts in meaning. Today we associate owls with wisdom, “yet mediaeval bestiaries compare the owl’s daytime blindness to the spiritual ‘blindness’ of the Jews,” Videen explains, “who refuse to accept the ‘light’ of Christianity.” When other, smaller birds flock around an owl in an Old English sermon, don’t assume they’re paying homage to the wise old bird.

Not every Old English text feels the need to find moral instruction in the birds and the beasts. There is also a sizeable quantity of what Videen charmingly terms “Alexander fan-fic”: imaginary first-person accounts of Alexander the Great’s adventures in Ind, or Ethiopia, or Lentibelsinea (home of the self-immolating chicken, the fabled “henn”), or wherever the heck else he was supposed to have got to (and sometimes, mark you, on the back of a griffin).
“Did people struggle to imagine creatures of Alexander’s campaigns like the teeth tyrant and moonhead?” Videen wonders. “Were the solutions to riddles more obvious than they are today?”

Though her charming, endlessly fascinating book is chock-full of archival detective stories (and not a few shaggy dog stories into the bargain), Videen would rather we entertained the possibility that the early English mind was quite as imaginative as the modern one, and just as intelligent, and had not yet lost the art of appreciating a tall tale or even, Heavens defend us, a joke.

Everything we think we know about migration is wrong

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Reading How Migration Really Works by Hein de Haas for New Scientist, 8 November 2023

Three decades of research, conducted largely with teams at the University of Oxford and the University of Amsterdam, have gone into geographer Hein de Haas’s comprehensive, fascinating, often shocking survey of global migration. Everyone will arrive at this book nursing some opinion or other about migration. Few will finish with the preconceptions still intact. De Haas is out to show how everything we think we know about migration is wrong, not because migration is an especially complex matter, but because economic and political interests, on both the left and the right, have lost sight of the evidence, when they haven’t actively covered it up; both would rather shape public narratives out of just-so stories than resort to anything so dull and intransigent as fact.

The shibboleths surrounding migration are demolished in three waves. De Haas explores trends in global migration patterns, first, moves onto examine the impacts of migration on both destination and origin societies, and closes with a series of fairly devastating takedowns of popular ideas championed by politicians, interest groups and international organizations across the political spectrum.

How degraded has the evidential foundation around the migration debate become? Consider, for starters, frequently quoted figures released by UNHCR, the United Nations’ own refugee agency, which to show that the total number of displaced people in the world increased from 1.8 million in 1951 to 20 million in 2005, rose to 62 million in 2018, then leapt up to almost 89 million in 2021 and 100 million in 2022. What explains this shocking rise? Globalisation? War? Climate change? Or the inability to present statistics? “What appears to be an unprecedented increase in refugee numbers,” de Haas explains, with what weary patience one can only imagine, “is in reality a statistical artefact caused by the inclusion of populations and countries that were previously excluded from displacement statistics.” UNHCR’s current figures are truly global. Their 1951 figure, however, was drawn from a database covering just 21 countries.

Its the direction of migration in the post-war world that has proved so disconcerting. Former emigrant nations have become immigrant destinations. The numbers have fluctuated hardly at all. At any one time, three per cent of the world’s population are migrants. A tenth of those are refugees. The figure for unsolicited border crossings fluctuates wildly, depending on labour demand in destination countries (for illegal migration) and conflict in origin countries (for refugee migration), but the underlying figure remains consistent.

From where, then, comes all this Stürm und Drang around migration? De Haas pulls no punches. Both right and left have a vested interest in inflating migrant numbers, he says: “Although they may advocate very different solutions, politicians from left to right, climate activist and nativist groups, humanitarian NGOs and refugee organizations and media have all bought into the idea that the current era is one of a migration crisis.”

That this results in some staggeringly wrong-headed policy-making comes as no surprise — witness the massive US investment in border enforcement since the late 1980s that has turned a largely circular flow of Mexican workers into an 11-million-strong population of permanently settled families living all across the United States.

There’s also the cultural impact. In host nations including the UK, nightmare scenarios are regularly peddled to tickle every political palate. An international cabal controls people smuggling! (No evidence.) Across the world, the mafia are trafficking young women for sex! (No evidence.) Migration flows are predominantly from the impoverished South to the wealthy North! (Wrong.) Migration lifts all boats! (No: it overwhelmingly benefits the already affluent.) Few scenarios credit migrants themselves with foresight, agency, or even intelligence.

How Migration Really Works is a carefully evidenced diatribe against a political culture that would rather use migration as a domestic psychodrama than treat it as an ordinary and governable part of civics. To be pro-immigration, or anti-immigration, is to miss the point entirely. You wouldn’t ask an economist whether they’re for or against the economy, would you?

We’re constantly told we need “a big conversation” about immigration. I’m currently re-reading this book (something crabbed reviewers never normally do). And until I’m done, I’ll keep my big mouth firmly shut.

“These confounded dials…”

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Reading The Seven Measures of the World by Piero Martin and Four Ways of Thinking by David Sumpter, for New Scientist, 23 October 2023

Blame the sundial. A dinner guest in a play by the Roman writer Plautus, his stomach rumbling, complains that

“The town’s so full of these confounded dials
The greatest part of the inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the streets”

We’ve been slaves to number ever since. Not that we need complain, according to two recent books. Piero Martin’s spirited and fascinating The Seven Measures of the World traces our ever-more precise grasp of physical reality, while Four Ways of Thinking, by the Uppsala-based mathematician David Sumpter, shows number illuminating human complexities.

Martin’s stories about common units of measure (candelas and moles rub shoulders here with amperes and degrees Kelvin) tip their hats to the past. The Plautus quotation is Martin’s, as is the assertion (very welcome to this amateur pianist) that the unplayable tempo Beethoven set for his “Hammerklavier” sonata (138 beats per minute!) was caused by a broken metronome.

Martin’s greater purpose is to trace, in the way we measure our metres and minutes, kilogrammes and candelas, the outline of “a true Copernican revolution”.

In the past fundamental constants were determined with reference to material prototypes. In November 2018 it was decided to define international units of measure in reference to the constants themselves. The metre is now defined indirectly using the length of a second as measured by atomic clocks, while the definition of a kilogramme is defined as a function of two physical constants, the speed of light, c, and Planck’s constant, h. The dizzying “hows” of this revolution beg not a few “whys”, but Martin is here to explain why such eye-watering accuracy is vital to the running of our world.

Sumpter’s Four Ways of Thinking is more speculative, organising reality around the four classes of phenomena defined by mathematician Stephen Wolfram’s little-read 1,192-page opus from 2002, A New Kind of Science. Sumpter is quick to reassure us that that his homage to the eccentric and polymathic Wolfram is not so much “a new kind of science” as “a new way to convince your friends to go jogging with you” or perhaps “a new way of controlling chocolate cake addiction.”

The point is, all phenomena are mathematically speaking, either stable, periodic, chaotic, or complex. Learn the differences between these phenomena, and you are half way to better understanding your own life.

Much of Four Ways is assembled semi-novelistically around a summer school in complex systems that Sumpter attended at the Santa Fe Institute in 1997. His half-remembered, half-invented mathematical conversations with fellow attendees won me over, though I have a strong aversion to exposition through dialogue.

I incline to think Sumpter’s biographical sketches are stronger. The strengths and weaknesses of statistical thinking are explored through the life of Ronald Fisher, the unlovely genius who in the 1940s a almost single-handedly created the foundations for statistical science.

That the world does not stand still to be measured, and is often best considered a dynamical system, is an insight given to Alfred Lotka, the chemist who in the first half of the 20th century came tantalisingly close to formulating systems biology.

Chaotic phenomena are caught in a sort of negative image through the work of NASA software engineer Margaret Hamilton, whose determination never to make a mistake — indeed, to make mistakes in her code impossible — landed the crew of Apollo 11 on the Moon.

Soviet mathematician Andrej Kolmogorov personifies complex thinking, as he abandons the axiom-based approach to mathematics and starts to think in terms of information and computer code.

Can mathematics really elucidate life? Do we really need mathematical thinking to realise that “each of us follows our individual rules of interaction and out of that emerges the complexity of our society”? Maybe not. But the journey was gripping.

 

 

Bees (playful) Frogs (ardent) Bats (unbelievably loud)

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Reading A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous by Caspar Henderson for the Spectator, 7 October 2023

Caspar Henderson writes beguiling commonplace books about the natural world, full of eye-catching detail and plangent commentary. His Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary came out in 2012. A Book of Noises is a worthy companion: a pursuit of auditory wonders, a paean to the act of listening, and a salute to silence.

Item: the music of the spheres. (The planets’ orbits, proving unideal and elliptical, suggested to the musically-minded astronomer Johannes Kepler an appropriately sad, minor-keyed Leitmotif for the Earth, “where, he felt, misery and famine held sway.”)

Item: the world’s loudest sound. (The asteroid Chicxulub, that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago; also an honourable mention to the Indonesian volcano Karakatoa, whose eruption in 1883 burst eardrums forty miles away).

Bees (playful). Frogs (ardent). Bats (unbelievably loud). The Magic Flute and the soundscapes of Hell. Sounds of the cosmos give way to sounds of the Earth. Life follows, bellowing, and humanity comes after, babbling and brandishing bells. The 48 forays into sound that make up A Book of Noises are arranged with the sort of guileless simplicity achievable only after the author-compiler has been beating their head against a wall for some years.

Everything trembles. The world sounds and resounds. Elephants flee the sound of helicopter blades turning eighty miles away. The root system of the common pea plant will move towards the sound of water in a pipe.

There’s something missing. If ever a book cried out for an accompanying Spotify playlist, it’s this one. Maybe I was looking too soon. Maybe a kind reader will put one together. What the heck, maybe I will. Ransacking this book affords hours of listening pleasure (or at any rate bemusement). Max Richter’s album Sleep to ease us in. Then Sam Perkins’s Alta for Two String Trios and Electronics, capturing the ephemeral crackles that sometimes accompany the Northern Lights. Dai Fujikura’s 2010 Glacier, which the composer describes as “a plume of cold air which is floating silently between the peaks of a very icy cold landscape, slowly but cutting like a knife.” Joseph Monkhouse’s soundscapes of the Somerset levels in the Iron Age. David Rothenberg’s quixotic saxophone duets with whales in 2008 stretched even Henderson’s famous generosity of spirit, and he writes: “it is hard to know how far, if at all, the whales are actually listening.” Such grounding moments are important, in a book chock-full of fancy.

The point is, the world makes sounds and we, at our best, make sounds of our own in response. For every natural wonder, there is probably an eccentric musical instrument gathering dust somewhere: for every frog, a flute; for every booming volcano, some variation on a horn. The sounds that humans make are rooted in a profoundly material soundworld. The extrapolated and bizarre soundworlds made possible by digital technology are still largely terra incognita, and there may be good reason for this. “One is humbly aware that [this digital soundworld] will only be conquered by penetration of the human spirit,” the British composer Jonathan Harvey is quoted as saying, “and that penetration will neither be rapid or easy.”

Music itself, as a technology and as an idea, sometimes imposes too narrow a filter over our experience of sound. In a striking (ha!) chapter on bells, Henderson explains that the bells in Russian churches are meant to be voices, not musical instruments. For that reason, they are quite deliberately untuned, so that they produce as many over- and undertones as possible.

Humanity at its worst, meanwhile, makes a din that deafens whales and stresses birds out of their minds and mating patterns. Henderson cites soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause’s twenty-year project to record the sounds at Sugarloaf Park in California — a dramatic and frankly depressing record of environmental diminution and fragmentation, speaking to “a catastrophic loss of sonic diversity and richness worldwide.” The story of our scraping of the planet is also part of Henderson’s story. This is not an altogether happy book.

Is it a wise one? This is Henderson’s clear and laudable ambition. One of the perils of writing a book like this is that, in order to make the contents readable in any order, you have to carefully top and tail every one of those forty-eight seemingly disconnected microchapters. The effort throws up gnomic and occasionally ponderous capstones that are a gift to the mean and cantankerous critic. In my notes here, the following closers: “Life calls to us even as we call to it.” / “If there is to be a future worth living in it will surely hold a place for re-enchantment.” / “While you live, shine.”

This sort of niggle only shows up on a fast read. Readers can and should take their time. It will be very well spent.

 

“A failure by the British state”

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Reading The Poison Line by Cara McGoogan for the Telegraph, 17 September 2023

Mayor Treloar College, founded in 1907 for the education and care of physically disabled children, was more than just a school for Ade Goodyear. The teaching and medical staff were more like an extended family. Dr Anthony Aronstam, director of the Treloar’s haemophilia centre, used to invite Ade and his schoolfriends over to his house where they drank lemonade and swam in the pool.

One afternoon in the summer of 1984 Ade found Aronstam bent over his desk, trembling. “‘We’ve fucked up,’ Aronstam said. ‘We’ve messed up, boys. I’ve messed up. It’s all gone wrong.’”

In the face of a gathering global calamity, Aronstam had been assessing Ade, without his knowledge, for signs of AIDS. Two of Ade’s schoolfriends were already diagnosed. One, Richard Campbell, had already died. By 1986 Aronstam had forty­-three patients who were HIV positive. He wrote in a report, “”There are gloomier predictions about, which suggest that up to 100 per cent of the infected haemo­philiac population will eventually succumb to the virus.”

The Poison Line is the first book by journalist Cara McGoogan. It began life as a couple of features written for this paper in the opening week of the Infected Blood Inquiry in 2019.
It may seem thin praise to single out the way McGoogan has arranged her material here, but truly the effort has been superhuman. This is the story of a global medical scandal, implicating health services, pharmaceutical companies and whole governments, and unfolding slowly enough, and meeting obstacles enough, that many of its victims died before they ever saw justice, never mind compensation. It is told, for the most part, through the recollections of the victims, their families, their doctors, their legal and political representatives. That so many individual stories here burn their way into the reader’s skull is testament to the strength of the source material, of course, but there were so many plates McGoogan could have dropped here and didn’t, so many stories to leave hanging and implications to leave unexplored, that there ought to be some sort of award for literary juggling established in her name.

Treloar College is just the most familiar domestic emblem of a crisis that played out across the US, UK, mainland Europe, and south-east Asia. It began when a new, much quicker, more convenient and more comfortable way was found of administering blood clotting factors to haemophiliacs. Factor VIII, a freeze-dried powder derived from blood, was infected with hepatitis B, but since this infection was common among haemophiliacs anyway, and went away in time, the issue was ignored. Consequently, other agents infecting Factor VIII went undetected, including HIV and hepatitis C.

Institution after institution doubled down on their original error in allowing and promoting a tainted product. In the UK, ministers themselves come out of this account surprisingly well, as McGoogan traces their appalled investigations into decades of deliberate cover-up. It was left to Jeremy Hunt, “the epitome of the establishment politician”, to sum up the disaster as “a failure by the British state. I don’t think there’s any other way to describe it.

The second half of Poison Line, about the victims’ courtroom battles, reveals the economic drivers of the scandal. By the 1990s plasma was more valuable than gold and oil. Most Factor VIII was produced in the US, and American blood bankers, who are allowed to pay donors for plasma, were gathering blood from wherever they could: outside nightclubs, from inside prisons, and from a centre in Nicaragua nicknamed the ‘House of Vampires’, which collected plasma from up to a thousand people a day. The there was the way Factor VIII was made: any one injection could contain the blood of twenty-​­five thousand people.

As McGoogan’s account gathers pace and scale, the more existential the issues become. At what point does a corporation countenance the death of its customers? In what institutional setting will a doctor think it reasonable to tell an AIDS-infected mother that “Women like you should be sterilized”? What level of conformism does it take for the mother of a seventeen year old, infected with HIV from a haemophilia treatment, to tell him that he’s brought shame on her, and throw him out the house?

By the closing pages, we seem to have left the news pages behind entirely, and be wrestling with something that looks very like the tragedy of the human condition.

New flavours of intelligence

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Reading about AI and governance for New Scientist, 13 September 2023

A sorcerer’s apprentice decides to use magic to help clean his master’s castle. The broom he enchants works well, dousing the floors with pails full of water. When the work is finished, the apprentice tries to stop the broom. Then, he tries to smash the broom. But the broom simply splits and regrows, working twice as hard as before, four times as hard, eight times as hard… until the rooms are awash and the apprentice all but drowns.

I wonder if Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1797 poem sprang to mind as Mustafa Suleyman (co-founder of AI pioneers DeepMind, now CEO of Inflection AI) composed his new book, The Coming Wave? Or perhaps the shade of Robert Oppenheimer darkened Suleyman’s descriptions of artificial intelligence, and his own not insignificant role in its rise? “Decades after their invention,” he muses, “the architects of the atomic bomb could no more stop a nuclear war than Henry Ford could stop a car accident.”

Suleyman and his peers, having launched artificially intelligent systems upon the world, are right to tremble. At one point Suleyman compares AI to “an evolutionary burst like the Cambrian explosion, the most intense eruption of new species in the Earth’s history.”

The Coming Wave is mostly about the destabilising effects of new technologies. It describes a wildly asymmetric world where a single quantum computer can render the world’s entire encryption infrastructure redundant, and an AI mapping new drugs can be repurposed to look for toxins at the press of a return key.

Extreme futures beckon: would you prefer subjection under an authoritarian surveillance state, or radical self-reliance in a world where “an array of assistants… when asked to create a school, a hospital, or an army, can make it happen in a realistic timeframe”?

The predatory city states dominating this latter, neo-Renaissance future may seem attractive to some. Suleyman is not so sure: “Renaissance would be great,” he writes; “unceasing war with tomorrow’s military technology, not so much.”

A third future possibility is infocalypse, “where the information ecosystem grounding knowledge, trust, and social cohesion… falls apart.”

We’ll come back to this.

As we navigate between these futures, we should stay focused on current challenges. “I’ve gone to countless meetings trying to raise questions about synthetic media and misinformation, or privacy, or lethal autonomous weapons,” Suleyman complains, “and instead spent the time answering esoteric questions from otherwise intelligent people about consciousness, the Singularity, and other matters irrelevant to our world right now.”

Historian David Runciman makes an analogous point in The Handover, an impressive (and impressively concise) history of the limited liability company and the modern nation state. The emergence of both “artificial agents” at the end of the 18th Century was, Runciman argues, “the first Singularity”, when we tied our individual fates to two distinct but compatible autonomous computational systems.

“These bodies and institutions have a lot more in common with robots than we might think,” argues Runciman. Our political systems are already radically artificial and autonomous, and if we fail to appreciate this, we won’t understand what to do, or what to fear, when they acquire new flavours of intelligence.

Long-lived, sustainable, dynamic states — ones with a healthy balance between political power and civil society — won’t keel over under the onslaught of helpful AI, Runciman predicts. They’ll embrace it, and grow increasingly automated and disconnected from human affairs. How will we ever escape this burgeoning machine utopia?

Well, human freedom may still be a force to reckon with, according to Igor Tulchinsky. Writing with Christopher Mason in The Age of Prediction, Tulchinsky explores why the more predictable world ushered in by AI may not necessarily turn out to be a safer one. Humans evolved to take risks, and weird incentives emerge whenever predictability increases and risk appears to decline.

Tulchinsky, a quant who analyzes the data flows in financial markets, and Mason, a geneticist who maps dynamics across human and microbial genomes, make odd bedfellows. Mason, reasonably enough, welcomes any advance that makes medicine more reliable. Tulchinsky fears lest perfect prediction in the markets renders humans as docile and demoralised as cattle. The authors’ spirited dialogue illuminates their detailed survey of what predictive technologies actually do, in theatres from warfare to recruitment, policing to politics.

Let’s say Tulchinsky and Mason are right, and that individual free will survives governance by all-seeing machines. It does not follow at all that human societies will survive their paternalistic attentions.

This was the unexpected sting in the tail delivered by Edward Geist in Deterrence under Uncertainty, a heavyweight but unexpectedly gripping examination of AI’s role in nuclear warfare.

Geist, steeped in the history and tradecraft of deception, reckons the smartest agent — be it meat or machine — can be rendered self-destructively stupid by an elegant bit of subterfuge. Fakery is so cheap, easy and effective, Geist envisions a future in which artificially intelligent “fog-of-war machines” create a world that favours neither beligerents nor conciliators, but deceivers: “those who seek to confound and mislead their rivals.”

In Geist’s hands, Suleyman’s “infocalypse” becomes a weapon, far cleaner and cheaper than any mere bomb. Imagine future wars fought entirely through mind games. In this world of shifting appearances, littered with bloody accidents and mutual misconstruals, people are persuaded that their adversary does not want to hurt them. Rather than living in fear of retaliation, they come to realise the adversary’s values are, and always have been, better than their own.
Depending on your interests, your politics, and your sensitivity to disinformation, you may well suspect that this particular infocalyptic future is already upon us.

And, says Geist, at his most Machiavellian (he is the most difficult of the writers here; also the most enjoyable): “would it not be much more preferable for one’s adversaries to decide one had been right all along, and welcome one’s triumph?”

 

“Trees and bushes and hills. Or houses and streets. Or rooms and furniture.”

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Reading The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard for the Telegraph, 12 September 2023

1986: nineteen-year-old Syvert Løyning returns home from navy service to find his widowed mother chain-smoking. If she’s not dying of lung cancer, she’s making a good stab at it. Her declining health leaves Syvert spending most of his evenings looking after his younger brother Joar. His efforts in this direction are sincere but often ineffective.

This is Knausgaard’s long, compelling prequel to 2021’s The Morning Star, a novel which saw time collapse and brought the realms of the living and the dead into collision. To this metaphysical malarkey, The Wolves… offers the unprepared reader the coldest of cold openers. What should we make of Syvert’s slow, ineluctable decline amid the edgelands of southern Norway (woods and heaths and lakes, football fields and filling stations)? What of his equally slow recovery, as he acquires a girlfriend (Lisa), a job (at an undertaker’s) and a purpose — tracking down his dead father’s secret second family in the former Soviet Union?

Half way through, The Wolves… breaks off and moves to present-day [Russia] to follow Syvert’s lost relation Alevtina on her way to her step-dad’s 80th birthday party. Alevtina describes herself self-deprecatingly (and accurately) as “a kind of hippy biologist who talked to trees”. Knausgaard makes a show of giving her the same close attention he devoted to Syvert, but there’s a sight more handwaving going on now: a sophomoric piling-up of cultural capital about Death, Hell and various species of Russian messianism and biophilia. Never trust a protagonist who’s a college lecturer.

Both halves of The Wolves… have their strengths, of course. Alevtina’s half is flashier by far; consider this time-reversed vision of some woods: “If you filmed that, an injured or sick animal that crept away to hide, died and rotted, and then ran that film backwards, the soil would pull apart to become an animal that rose up and slunk away.”

But there’s a greater power, I reckon, to be gleaned in the ordinariness of things. The pity we feel as Syvert sorts out his father’s old boxes, “not to get closer to him, more the opposite, to remove him from me, put him back in his boxes, back with his things”. And terror, when it occurs to Syvert that the World (which The Wolves… sees to its end) is only “what the eyes could see… A sort of duct in front of and behind us, with various things in it. Trees and bushes and hills. Or houses and streets. Or rooms and furniture.”

Knausgaard should resist the siren call of his library card, and go on writing very big books about nothing. The less The Wolves… is about, the more it has to say.