Austin Bramwell

The Bookshelf column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday (I know, ancient history in blogging time) featured an essay so typical you normally wouldn’t even notice it. Reviewing a new book entitled Fame, Toby Young (himself moderately famous for How to Lose Friends & Alienate People) summarizes the book’s thesis – that the modern cult of celebrity satisfies the same primitive bloodlust once expressed in ritual human sacrifice (!) – offers tepid praise (the book is “lively and well-written”) and damning criticism (“another book on such a well-worn subject needs to be startlingly original to justify its existence”), and concludes that the book is probably not worth readers’ time. Along the way, Young gives us his own, somewhat self-contradictory opinion of celebrity (“the phenomenon of stardom has become and more routine, less and less interesting,” says Young, despite that it has consumed more and more of our attention), and blandly concedes that the book’s theory is probably right (“the impulse to destroy those whom we adore, whether gods or men, may well be an ineradicable part of man’s psyche.”). All in all, a solid, if uninspired, book review.

What’s missing here? Someone writes an entire book purporting to reveal deep structures in human behavior. A reviewer then comes along and finds the book’s theories basically credible. Young describes the idea with a metaphor from fluid mechanics: “Without an outlet for [the human psyche's] bloodlust, such as the pagan rituals of Greece and Rome, the appetite will inevitably find expression elsewhere.” (inevitably!) Civilization, in other words, channels primitive instincts in hidden directions.

Nowhere does the reviewer even mention Darwin, who apparently doesn’t factor into the the book Fame either. On the contrary, both author and reviewer seem persuaded by Sir James Frazer, author of the once enormously influential treatise The Golden Bough, that the mind has progressed since civilization began. I understanding that the evidence of recent human evolution is accumulating rapidly. Nonetheless, recent human evolution involves a relatively small number of genes (just as the recent evolution of dogs involves a relatively small number of genes. Wholesale psychic changes have not had enough time to evolve.

Now you would think that if you are interested in deep structures of human culture, you would be interested in the genes. Human DNA is surely the only plausible source of cross-temporal and cross-cultural universals. But not only does neo-Darwinism not factor into the thinking of author or reviewer, they do not even pay it even heed. Young does need even bother to ask how a desire to raise up figures for later ritual sacrifice could have evolved. Instead, he evidently believes that it is not only possible but perfectly sensible to expatiate on the nature of the human pysche without reference of evolution at all.

That this should be true just goes to show that once again, for all that right thinking people are supposed to believe in and esteem Darwinism, mainstream intellectual discourse remains for the most part a Darwin free zone.

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(Cross-posted from @TAC.)

Virginia Postrel argues this weekend that environmentalists favor high-speed rail and wind power not because they reduce carbon emissions but simply because they look good. “These technologies,” she writes,

aren’t just about getting from one city to another. They are symbols of an ideal world, longing disguised as problem solving.  You can’t counter glamour with statistics.

Though she doesn’t say so, Postrel plainly thinks that “statistics” — or what she  later calls the “annoyingly practical concerns the policy wonks insist on debating” — militate against high speed rail and wind power.  Environmentalists, in other words, can’t think straight because they are thralls to beauty.  Like the philosopher who banished the poets from the city, Postrel concludes by admonishing her readers to shun the seductions of  green technology.

Clever as it is, Postrel’s techno-glamour thesis doesn’t withstand scrutiny.  For one thing, she takes for granted that wind turbines are attractive.  Really?  If anything the movement for wind power is handicapped by the ugliness of wind turbines.  The Kennedys, for example, a wealthy Irish-Catholic family who now own a house on Cape Cod, objected to a proposed offshore wind farm on largely aesthetic grounds.  As Kenendy scion Robert wrote in The New York Times:

Cape Wind’s proposal involves construction of 130 giant turbines whose windmill arms will reach 417 feet above the water and be visible for up to 26 miles. These turbines are less than six miles from shore and would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Hundreds of flashing lights to warn airplanes away from the turbines will steal the stars and nighttime views. The noise of the turbines will be audible onshore. A transformer substation rising 100 feet above the sound would house giant helicopter pads and 40,000 gallons of potentially hazardous oil.  According to the Massachusetts Historical Commission, the project will damage the views from 16 historic sites and lighthouses on the cape and nearby islands. The Humane Society estimates the whirling turbines could every year kill thousands of migrating songbirds and sea ducks.

Giant arms, flashing lights, the annual slaughter of migrating songbirds: this is hardly the stuff of glamour.

Postrel skirts the ugliness of real-life wind turbines by focusing instead on the pleasant images we often see of them.  Those images, she says, promise a radiant, efficient and clean future, which distracts us from the actual costs of green technology.   But we are treated every day to glamour shots not just of green technology but of pretty much anything under the sun that anyone has any interest in defending.  Check out these shots of off-shore oil platforms, for example. One could write just as rapturously of them as Postrel writes of wind turbines:

The platform stands potent and erect over the deep,  a steel hymn to man’s mastery over nature. In the face of so mighty an image, arguments against drilling for oil are beside the point. You can’t counter glamour with statistics, after all.

Yet somehow environmentalists aren’t swept up in the romance of offshore oil drilling. Postrel, who makes her living writing about (and defending) the aesthetics of consumer culture, has grossly over-estimated the power of aesthetics to distort debate.

A better explanation of the appeal of green technology might start by asking what makes Postrel’s column so alluring.  Might it not have something to do with the unflattering portrait she draws of environmentalists?  Those who wish to cut carbon emissions often see themselves as level-headed champions of an indubitable scientific consensus.  Postrel instead depicts them as aesthetes impervious to rational argument.  At the same time, she shrewdly declines to take any stance on the actual merits of wind power.  Enviro-skeptics can thus take pleasure in Postrel’s subtle ridicule without having to indulge in any crass ad hominem attacks.

Tribalism, in other words, and Postrel’s skill in catering to it, best explains the allure of her column.  She depicts environmentalists as effeminate and irrational, skeptics as sober and analytic. For the enviro-skeptic, what’s not to like?  Likewise, glamour shots of green technology help reinforce environmentalists’ belief that they seek a radiant, beautiful future, while their opponents, presumably, seek one that is polluted and ugly.  All politics is tribal.  That’s the lesson of green technology glamour shots — and of Postrel’s column.

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I confess: We are alternate side parkers.  To make way for “Mechanical Brooms,” New York City prohibits parking for 1.5 hours on one side of the street on Mondays and Thursdays and the other side on Tuesdays and Fridays.  Just like tens (hundreds?) of thousands of other New Yorkers, we exploit the system.  That is, come Monday morning, we (1) cruise until the Mechanical Broom passes through, (2) seize a spot on the empty, freshly swept street and (3) idle until the no parking period ends.  The spot then belongs to us until Wednesday, when the routine starts anew.

All this takes time, wears down our car and increases our gas bills.  (It also pollutes the air and reduces the number of available parking spaces.)  But these costs to us pale in comparison to the cost — $400 a month or more — of paying for parking at a local garage.  Absurd as it sounds, on weeks when we keep our car in the city, we park on alternate sides. To pay for parking would be unthinkable!

Now the City Council wants to eliminate step 3.  Under a bill before the City Council, traffic cops could not issue parking tickets after the Mechanical Broom has swept through. Drivers would be liberated from their cars as soon as they claimed spot.  For our own sakes, I hope the bill passes.  It would save us many hours that we would otherwise spend confined to our car.

Alas, for the good of the public, Mayor Bloomberg has promised to veto the bill, albeit for all the wrong reasons.  Hizzoner claims that allowing parking after the Broom passes would interfere with street cleaning.  Allegedly, you see, the Brooms sometimes need to sweep the same street twice.  Hogwash.  I have lived in Manhattan for over 30 years have never seen it happen.  (Not that I was paying attention, but you can depend upon it that unionized municipal workers are not going to drive through the same street twice out of some zeal to get the job done right.)

No, the real reason Bloomberg opposes the bill – or the reason he should oppose the bill – is that alternate side parkers consume nearly all the parking in the City, even though they need it the least.  Keeping a car in New York is a luxury.  I should know: most of the year, we manage without one.  But offered “free” parking or a week at the cost of a few hours of maneuvering, we’ll take it every now and then, even if doing so means depriving visitors to our neighborhood (who would pay a lot more for temporary parking than we would) of an additional space.  If the City Council gets its way, New Yorkers who currently don’t bother will decide that moving their cars twice a week is worth the inconvenience if they can walk away from their cars as soon as the Mechanical Broom lumbers by.

Now, there is one argument in favor the City Council’s proposal, namely, that it will by definition open up more parking space.  Spaces where parking is now prohibited two hours a week would become available sooner.  But under the current rules, those “free” spaces fill up already with alternate side parkers who just sit in their cars until the 1.5 hrs are up.  Officially freeing those spaces would not make them any more available to drivers who need them.  It would just increase the free parking subsidy.*

Ideally, the City would not offer so-called “free” parking at all. In the meantime, the City should not make it any easier than necessary.

* I should admit that, though the Council bill may not free parking spaces, it will free alternate side parkers to do something else with their time. But come on: Is anyone who spends weekday mornings parking their cars going to do anything else more productive with that time if given the opportunity? In most cases, the answer is no.

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