A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson

(read Part I here)

A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from the South, militant ants, and the coupled fate of humans and nature—will help spark a conservation revolution.

Wilson met me at his Harvard office—a three-roomed cavern at the university’s natural history museum. “Harvard treats emeritus professors very well,” he observed. He showed me part of the world’s largest collection of ant papers, and a copy of his portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. He wore a blue/black checked shirt and slouched when he sat. His sentences were criss-crossed with asides and qualifications, and he squeezed in a few startlingly good impressions. Throughout our talk he sipped iced tea—or as Wilson, a native Alabaman, might say, sweet tea. When he spilled some on the table, he swept it onto the floor with his hand. “The difference between a book review and an interview,” he mused right before we started, “is like the difference between a handshake and a shot in the back.”

SK: In the book, was the “Anthill Chronicles” section the easiest one for you to write? [It describes a war between ant colonies from the p.o.v. of the ants.]

EW: Actually it was. I had just finished with Bert Hölldobler the book The Superorganism. And earlier I’d done many, many—well over 300 scientific papers—on ants. And with Bert Hölldobler, the two of us are about to bring out another book called The Leaf-Cutters, on these ultimate superorganisms. And now they’re one of the best-known group of species in the world in biology because they’ve become a model group to work on, at all levels, from genetics up.

Of course, that was all in my head, so I just rolled it out. And it’s authentic: how they talk to each other, what responses they have, what their cycles are, their constant wars with each other. They’re the most war-like of all creatures we know. Even more than people.

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Review of Rhonda Byrne, The Power (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010) ISBN: 978-085-720-1706.

1. The Law of Attraction

Rhonda Byrne, author of 2006 best-seller The Secret, has released its sequel. Entitled The Power, it claims further depth into the insights gleaned from The Secret. As she humbly states: ‘You don’t need to have read The Secret for The Power to change your life, because everything you need to know is contained in The Power.’

According to Byrne and her publishers, Byrne’s oeuvre (The Secret movie, released prior to the book; and various cards, sayings and other fashionable accessories) focuses on readers’ abilities to get what they ‘deserve’, using what is known as ‘the law of attraction’. According to The Secret’s synopsis by her publishers: ‘fragments of The Secret have been found in oral traditions, religions, literature and philosophies throughout the centuries … By unifying leading-edge scientific thought with ancient wisdom and spirituality, this riveting, practical knowledge will lead readers to a greater understanding of how they can be masters of their own lives.’ We become ‘masters’ of our lives by invoking the ‘law of attraction’.

To understand the law of attraction would require either a casual or a long glance at the current trend in the self-help industry. This is the factory-produced, standardised answers to questions of human betterment, which elicits a solipsistic attitude as the touchstone for all problems in the world; a tethered link between religious guilt and nihilistic dismissal, self-help gurus claim to walk this fine line over the precipice of our banal existence.

This is how they do it. The three rules of the Law of Attraction – let us capitalise the letters now – according to Byrne are the following: Ask. Believe. Receive. As Byrne says, in The Secret, it means that: ‘like attracts like. What that means in simple terms for your life is: what you give out, you receive back. Whatever you give out in life is what you receive back in life. Whatever you give, by the law of attraction, is exactly what you attract back to yourself.’ If you want good things to happen, be a good person, think positive thoughts. By doing so, you can have many things granted: if one wants a parking-space, simply ask the universe to provide it for you; if you want that career, simply ask for it, believe in it and you will receive it. By this logic, Byrne then went on to state one of the worst sentences any literate, twenty-first century individual can make. She says, in The Secret: ‘The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.’

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In my last essay “A Rational Approach to Irrationality,” I argued that not all forms of religious criticism are equally effective. Judging from the comments and blog articles posted in response, I seem to have hit a nerve. The respected evolutionary biologist and blogger Jerry Coyne took me to task in his article, “Should religion get a pass?” because he interpreted my position as going soft on religion.

In all fairness to Coyne, I wasn’t clear as to where I stood on the issue of criticism of religion. So let me set the record straight here: my answer to Coyne’s question, “Should religion get a pass?”, is an emphatic no.

I suggested that attacks on religion may not be the most effective approach to protecting secular education. And I argued that verbal abuse may do more harm than good. That I oppose all criticism of religion is an easy, but incorrect, inference. I think critical discourse is a vitally important part of a healthy society; religion merits no exemption.

I’m not surprised that my article precipitated such a passionate response from atheists, since to many it seemed to support the widespread public attitude that religion is sacred territory, and criticism of any kind is akin to a personal attack.

Which raises the question, why is it that the general public seems to think that religion should get a pass, that any kind of criticism of religious beliefs is offensive? Maybe it's because religious people feel that their beliefs are as much a part of who they are as their race or their eye color; something they were born with and can’t change. This feeling probably isn't too far off- to some extent, religious faith is not a choice. Children are born into the religious world of their parents and after years of indoctrination, religious beliefs are not easily changed or abandoned.

The importance of early childhood education is recognized by both sides of the religious debate. This is evident in the Jesuit motto “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man”. The secular movement should adopt a similar motto.

The systematic indoctrination of children is unethical and must be stopped. Strictly speaking, religious freedom is a state protected right. But I think we can agree that freedom to choose a religion can be restricted in a more practical sense. For students at a religious school, the choice is free in a legal sense. It’s not a free choice in any practical sense, since all but one of the options have been obscured. If you are only exposed to one option, you don’t have a choice.

Criticism of religion is respectful of people’s freedom to choose. Presenting facts and arguments that people can use to draw their own conclusions doesn’t in any way restrict their freedom to do so. It informs the decision. It’s a good thing.

I think Richard Dawkins sets a great example. He doesn’t stoop to personal attacks. He isn’t gratuitously offensive in speech or in writing. His recent documentary “Faith School Menace?” draws attention to the rise of faith schools in the UK. It raises important questions, like what’s best for children and what rights should children have in determining their beliefs. I suggest we follow his lead, in both the way we treat people and what we focus on.

Jerry Coyne also sets a great example. In a review of Coyne’s book, Why Evolution is True, Publisher’s Weekly said this: “Additionally, although fully respectful of those who promote intelligent design and creationism, he uses the data at his disposal to demolish any thought that creationism is supported by the evidence while also explaining why those ideas fall outside the bounds of science.

Generally speaking, I think we should pay greater attention to strategy and tactics. More specifically, I think secular education should be our top priority. To this end, non-threatening persuasion tactics may be especially useful. It will be a long battle and we should identify of our most effective weapons.

Coyne closed his response to my essay with this statement: “In the end, the arguments to go easy on religion all boil down to this claim: it’s the most common form of superstition. It’s useless to attack it because it’s ubiquitous and entrenched, and we’ll only alienate people if we try. But I need hardly point out one lesson of history: the ubiquity of bad beliefs does not make them immune to change.” I agree wholeheartedly, and real change may begin when we are able to grant every child their right to an education free from religious indoctrination.

Meditations on Maps

by David Schneider

I'm hunting for an apartment in Brooklyn. It's 2010. I only halfknow the borough; it's hipster havens and borderlands, vacant lots and lofts, new towers and old clapboard – a shredded psychogeography re-folding itself every second, like hyperactive origami.

I take CraigsList to the GoogleMap, stroll a StreetView to the Subway, and race a grey L to a green 6 or brown Jay-Z. Time the walk. Time the trains. Recalc the time –– rush hour, late night –– recalc revised (the new service cuts) –– rush shower, late tight –– and is there a supermarket? A laundromat? Rats, mice, bedbugs, pricepoint? What if the…what if the…what if the roof –– the electric –– the piano up the stairs?

Down to Brooklyn and up the stairs. Down the stairs, out of Brooklyn, sit. Scribble out. Redraw. There's got to be a better way.

•••

The roadmap for Middle-East peace lies crumpled on the floor, an accordion with a compound fracture. Can't anyone fold this damn thing? It's an origami in the shape of a dove. Special Envoy George Mitchell is a courier, shuttling messages back and forth down the 20-mile road from Jerusalem to Ramallah and back again. The origami master is named Möbius of Zeno.

•••

I want to install a CraigsList app on my iPhone so I can get the jump on new Brooklyn apartment listings while mobile. I download the iOS4 app but I don't have iOS4 yet so I've got to download that. But first I need iTunes 9.2 to get iOS4. The download for iOS4 says, “It'll take an hour. Don't interrupt.” My ISP enjoys interrupting me. The pulsing blue bar ticks down to 11 minutes and stops. I have to start from the beginning. The process ends up taking a day and a half. The CraigsList app doesn't work anyway. I rename my iPhone “Zeno.”

•••

I'm rewriting my résumé for the 12th time in six months. As I click homeward to collect the mail, three Yahoos are gibbering through the window, regarding me with expert eyes. One suggests, “Don't use deadening phrases and jargon! Make your résumé unique!” A second admonishes, “Make sure you use common keywords, or the computers will sift you out.” The third waggles its finger, “Here are ten things that will make sure your résumé is never even looked at.” If I had a job I'd hire a résumé writer, I think; I procrastinate the twelfth redraw of selfmap by scanning the opportunities at Catch-22 Incorporated. I think of Dante, in the middle road of life, in that dark wood.

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Sit back and let me tell you a story: a large professional services firm, let’s call them Firm A, once went up for a large job at the Client. Firm A, which had good reason to think a lot of itself, had excellent qualifications for the work and gave, what they didn’t doubt was a winning pitch. Then, they sat back, waiting for the call that would certainly anoint them as the winning bid.

A week later they got the call; the other firm, their bitter, but undoubtedly lesser, rival Firm B had won the bid. Confusion reigned at Firm A. How could this have happened? What did they do wrong? They called the Client and did a postmortem. The Client told them that they had done nothing wrong, their pitch was as compelling and as convincing as they thought it had been. So what happened? To the amazement and bewilderment of Firm A they were told, “You were great, and we have no doubt that you would have done a fantastic job, but they brought muffins.”

Muffins! What did the Client mean, “They brought muffins”? It turned out that the Client had very recently moved offices. They hadn’t unpacked all their boxes yet and people’s desks were still in state of disarray. Firm B had realized that this meant that people probably couldn’t find their coffee mugs, or even the coffee machine and, on the day of their pitch, had brought coffee and muffins for everyone in the office. They had thought about what it must be liked to be the employees of the Client, had put themselves in their shoes and had performed a relatively cheap and minor act that had proved to the Client that Firm B had the emotional intelligence necessary to really understand what the Client needed. The Client had decided that there was little enough between the pitches of Firm A and B that, all other things being equal, they were giving the bid to the company that had the institutional empathy to feel the Client’s pain.

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Build no Mosque Near Zero

—zero's too near the hole in our hearts: the naught
we know at night when the bogey-man bites, the zip
we feel when we love hate, the nada of exclusion
which seeths in the interstices between faith and fear,
the cipher that numbers the digits displayed in a holy fist,
the nadir of our understanding, the O in no,
the void which deepens our capacity to destroy,
the nil of unknowing, the aught of unloving,
the nullification of our presumptions of God's
will in the midnight of His contradictions;

—no mosque must be built near the silence
of the negative space in which god speaks
his or her or its apparently futile
promise of peace and good will
among men

—no mosque and no church

by Jim Culleny
8/26/2010

Tyler Smith and David Bax host the film podcast Battleship Pretension. For over three years, Smith and Bax have explored on the show all aspects of cinema history, cinema appreciation, cinema technique, and cinema criticism, doing so with the freewheeling, humorous sensibility of the best late-night film school conversations.Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

To give people an idea of where you guys are coming from, we should start with your perspectives on film. What do you like? Your favorite filmmakers? Your defining film moments?

David Bax: I was drawn to film for the same reason that the sport I played when I was a kid was swimming: because it's not a team thing. Film is something you do in a dark room alone. It keeps you from having to talk to other people, and I was such an antisocial kid — it's not like they would have had me, that the social groups would have welcomed me in if I had applied. I wasn't a popular kid, so I watched movies all the time. The way I view films is very much personal, individual; I'm not really interested in the community aspect of it, which there is now with the internet. There's very much a community aspect. We're kind of on the outskirts of that, but it's not what got me into film. As far as defining moments, my favorite film of all time is Barton Fink. The reason is, I was at the grocery store video counter and saw the cover, and it had John Goodman on it. I always liked to watch comedies; I'm a comedy nerd as much as I am a movie nerd. I thought John Goodman was funny — I mean, King Ralph, you know —

Tyler Smith: He's very funny in Arachnophobia.

David Bax: He was. So I just picked it up, and it just blew my mind. It was so much more ambitious, otherworldly, and just plain old artistic than I Had come to expect from films. From that moment, that was my search. It was like a junkie looking for that high again. It also helped that this was the beginning of the age when the internet was readily available, so I could find discussions and writings about film. It was easy to research, and I had a library card.

You bring up a good way to frame this, which is that there's usually a film in any cinephile's life that was the one to expand their view of what film can do, that gave them new vistas, that first high you want to reach again. Tyler, what opened up your cinematic vistas?

Tyler Smith: It's odd; I have a very difficult time pinpointing a specific film or a specfic moment where I'm like, “This is what I want to do” or, “This my official passion.” I loved movies growing up. My parents went to a lot of movies. It was one of my favorite things to do. I saw as many movies as I could. I really loved them. Right around middle school, I started becoming very dissatisfied with the films aimed people at my age.

Which, at the time, were, like… ?

Tyler Smith: Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. Don't get me wrong; looking back, they are very funny in moments.

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