Reading Paul McAuley’s Gardens of the Sun (2009) I am greatly impressed with his ability to describe futuristic technology (for example the physics involving new spacecraft or the creation of a new species through genetic technology), which is quite unlike the (mostly very silly) science talk in movies or television series that do SF. However, since I know nothing about fields like physics or molecular biology I cannot judge whether his descriptions would remain as credible as they are when looked at with the eye of an expert. Since McAuley is a biologist by training his story may at least hold with regard to that field, but how about for example his thoughts about the propulsion of space crafts or the construction of habitats in space? I don't know.
Half way his Gardens of the Sun one of the protagonists (Sri) is stimulated to get acquainted with the literature on the functioning of the human brain with regard to emotional control and social relations. While I know almost nothing about neuroscience either, I am not entirely unfamiliar which social psychology. So how did that affect my appreciation of McAuley’s description of Sri’s study into that field?
First of all, Sri’s investigation leads her to conclude that basic emotions like joy, distress, anger, fear, surprise and disgust are mostly expressed within milliseconds, without any intervention of the higher functions of the neocortex. This comes from the field of neuroscience, which currently is very much in development. Sri connects it with the ‘sable tiger hypothesis’, the idea that these emotions are hard wired in this way because that was evolutionary useful when humans were still being hunted by predators. I'm not sure that it is entirely true though, since I've seen counter claims that state that more elaborate cognitive appraisals do play an important role.
Leaving that one aside, Sri considers other emotions, love, guilt, shame, embarrassment, pride, envy, jealousy and ‘... the pleasurable feeling of acceptance by others that the Japanese called amae’ (p. 201). Sri goes on to consider amae.
[Of the higher cognitive functions] amae was the most interesting. Even though there was no word for in Portuguese, English or any of the other major Western languages, it was definitely universal. Sri knew it as the feeling she had after making a successful presentation to her peers. Approval, belonging, being valued (p. 202).
That is not amae as I know it. I would agree that the feeling of belonging is universally important, but that is a different concept. Amae refers specifically to the behavior to appeal to and depend on another's indulgence.[*] The feeling Sri has after a successful presentation, is not amae, it is pride in the sense of Cooley and Scheff - a feeling that indicates both self respect and acceptance by the group. While I think McAuley is on track when he emphasises belonging, amae is a much more specific concept involving usually hierarchical relations with one person depending on the care and benevolence of another.[*] So, while the direction of Sri's thought was not necessarily wrong, conflating amae with a sense of belonging or perhaps even interdependence is distracting to say the least. Unfortunately, the references to amae continue for a number of pages.
Almost at the end of the character Sri's exploration of social emotions, McAuley describes an interesting custom specific to the culture of the so called Outers - the people that populate the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in his book. He calls it ‘wanderjahr’ - (a German word that corresponds with ‘journeyman years’ in English) which used to point to an institution practised in the middle ages in Europe - and to some extent still is in Germany. The original institution has to do with an apprentice traveling for a number of years before he would be allowed to make his masterpiece. McAuley has modified the concept to a transition period which all youngs Outers go through, to
...leave home and travel from moon to moon. Supporting themselves with menial jobs, they discovered what excited and engaged them, experienced every variation of Outer culture, and learned how to get along with every kind of person. And because this taught them to be open-minded and tolerant, and made them feel that they belonged not to any single social subgroup or city but to the entire Outer System...
In the book this custom is disrupted by occupation of the moons, leading to maladaptive behavior of the young people affected. The fictitious custom reminded me of an article by Ruth Benedict, in which she reviews some variations between cultures she knew of, regarding the way transitions were dealt with, specifically the transition from the role of a child to that of an adult. One dimension she discusses is the transition form a ‘non-responsible status role’ to a responsible one. In some societies this transition may be very gradual, because in those even as children people are responsible for certain tasks, albeit tasks that are suited to the abilities of their age, and grow slowly into more responsible jobs. Benedict contrasts this with societies were the transition is very sudden, with some youngsters being unable to switch from being dependent to being totally independent. I think McAuley’s ‘wanderjahr’, while fictitious, is also an interesting custom that bridges the transition to adulthood (and has some other functions as well), and was pleasantly surprised to find it in an SF novel.
Takie Suguyama Lebra, 1976. Japanese patterns of behavior. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press (p. 54).
Charles H. Cooley, 1956 [1922]. Human nature and the social order. Glencoe: The Free Press.
Thomas J. Scheff, 1994. Microsociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
In the draft of a first chapter on research on indigenous peoples of the Americas Ruth Benedict states that the institutional framework of a society did not in itself determine ‘how much or how little social solidarity a tribe may have’. Whether a society had a king, or open chieftainship, or one god or many, or whether it consisted of hunters or farmers.
... there are tribes where every man's hand is raised against another, and ones where this is not so. Social solidarity, in any possible investigation, is not a problem of the formal items of the culture pattern; it is a problem of the emotional relations between individuals in that society. [1]
This reminds me of Norbert Elias's notion of ‘internalized self-restraint’ - or simply the idea of internalized norms. I think this is an interesting question: is there a connection between the type of institutions a society has and the nature of the norms the members of that society can and will hold. It also reminds me of the hypothesis of the neocons of the USA, that the introduction of democracy to a country will necessarily lead to freedom and civil society - which on itself certainly seems false.
Ruth Benedict, ‘‘Beyond cultural relativity’’, chapter 1 for Columbia University Project #35. Ca. 1937, Ruth Benedict File, Research Institute for the Study of Man, New York.
According to Virginia Heyer Young (2005:76) Margaret Mead’s two books on Benedict show only ‘scant knowledge of Benedict’s contributions’ during the latter half of the 1930s and first half of the 1940s. An explanation that Young suggests is that in that period Mead had a really busy life (among other things she gave birth to her daughter in 1939). Young goes on to say that in her books Mead was more preoccupied with Benedict’s more psychologically troubled early life and was ‘either disinterested in or uninformed’ on Benedict’s latest research. This is in contrast to the facts that the Benedict and Mead kept up a very lively correspondence which without a doubt ‘gives many insights into their intellectual work’, and that they were in close contact otherwise as well.
An additional tentative explanation of my own is that it might have been the case that each woman took from the other only what she thought she needed and each gave away only what she thought was relevant to share. I don't think that that is in conflict with the close relationship the two women had. I think it's impossible for a human to be in ‘total share mode’ all the time. Unless people are actually working together on a specific collaborative project, discussing each and every sentence that is put to paper, the sharing of information is bound to be incomplete.
I must say I am greatly impressed with Young's approach to Benedict's work, which focusses very much on retrieving and analysing Benedict's latest work, which as a result of Benedict's early death is rather fragmented and mostly unpublished. Apart of Young's analyses a great feat is her reconstruction of lectures by Benedict from the period 1946-1947, resulting in 110 pages of text.
Virginia Heyer Young, Ruth Benedict : beyond relativity, beyond pattern. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Just read Grenzen aan de vrijheid: van de sade tot wilders (2010), which Buruma wrote in Dutch (Boundaries to Freedom: from De Sade to Wilders). It’s only 95 pages long, but surprisingly thorough and broad in its approach. As in Murder in Amsterdam Buruma points out that the way conservatives in Western Europe now embrace the liberties that left-wing activist had fight for so hard, battling against the conservative authorities of their time, is somewhat odd. Now those liberties are ‘our Western values’ (consider however that in the 1930s the Dutch government was still thinking it should be prudent to make it against the law for married women to work; That till 1954 women were still routinely fired from governmental position when they married; Don't even mention something like homosexuality) or ‘the enlightenment values’ (nobody had heard of those outside of academia till only a few years ago).
While Buruma seems to agree that it is laudable to pursue the ideals of the enlightenment, he is somewhat weary of turning them into dogmas, as politicians like Wilders prefer to do.
No surprise there. A bit unhelpful as well - in my experience people who embrace ideals as dogmas are as much beyond reason as fundamentalist religious people are (even though ‘reason’ is supposed to be one of the enlightenment values, but I guess they are a bit selective). While unhelpful with regard to the issue of dealing with people who converted to this or that dogma, the book was still interesting to read. Some interesting histories, and lessons or thoughts that might help navigate between Isaiah Berlins ‘negative liberties’ and ‘positive liberties’.
A review of Taming the gods (which I haven't read) seems in line with what I just read: ‘Presenting a challenge to dogmatic believers and dogmatic secularists alike, Taming the Gods powerfully argues that religion and democracy can be compatible--but only if religious and secular authorities are kept firmly apart.’ Seems reasonable enough, but how do you explain that to someone who is under the spell of one of those dogmas?
What really surprises me is the part were Moss mentions the covering of the corpse:
Cynthia Moss recorded the responses of a community of elephants to one of their members being shot by a poacher. As the struck elephant’s knees buckled and she began to go down, her elephant comrades struggled to keep her upright. ‘‘They worked their tusks under her back and under her head. At one point they succeeded in lifting her into a sitting position, but her body flopped back down. Her family tried everything to rouse her, kicking and tusking her, and Tallulah even went off and collected a trunkful of grass and tried to stuff it into her mouth.’’ After she died, her friends and family members covered the corpse in dirt and branches. [1]
1. Shermer (2004:31) quotes Cynthia Moss (1988).