Man a Machine by Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Materialist manifesto

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) was a philosopher of the French Enlightenment. As a young man, he studied theology, then medicine, then worked as a practicing physician. His physiological researches led La Mettrie to formulate a philosophy of materialism. In this sense, materialism is exactly what the name implies: the belief that everything in the universe is made of matter. This opposes the philosophy of dualism, which argues for two universal substances: matter and spirit. La Mettrie’s book Man a Machine (L’homme machine in French) was published in 1747.

The concept of dualism goes back to ancient times, but in early modern France, René Descartes (1596–1650) was its primary proponent. La Mettrie, writing almost a century after Descartes’s death, directs his arguments to refute many of Descartes’s dualistic assertions. The direct opposite of dualism is monism, a school of thought led by Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Spinoza, however, believed that matter was imbued with God—a belief that amounts to Pantheism. La Mettrie, on the other hand, was an avowed Atheist, who believed in no god or divine power.

As the title of his work indicates, La Mettrie believed that human beings are machines, though constructed of living tissue rather than metal. That is to say, all the phenomena of the human body and mind can be explained by material processes. Mankind has no spirit or soul. La Mettrie sometimes uses the word “soul” in Man a Machine (or rather, the English translator does), but what he means by that is human consciousness. La Mettrie believed that each particle of matter was invested with an infinitesimal degree of intelligence or sensation. When organized into complex forms, these bits of mentality could be combined and amplified into higher orders of intelligence, with the human mind being the pinnacle of this process. This concept, sometimes referred to as atomistic consciousness, was later championed by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), among others. While the knee-jerk reaction of many to such an idea might be to disregard it as ridiculous, the development of computers and artificial intelligence seems to argue in its favor. Mankind has created artificial minds entirely of matter. Though they are not quite up to the level of human consciousness as of yet, who knows where the future will lead?

La Mettrie begins his materialist manifesto by pointing out the various ways in which the human mind is altered or affected by physical causes, such as illness, alcohol, drugs, or injury. He then goes on to assert that humans are no different from animals in their form and function, except that in many ways—especially mentally—humans are more advanced. This is not a precocious argument for evolution but rather a rebuke to the common Judeo-Christian belief that man has a soul but animals do not. La Mettrie scoffs at the anthropocentric idea that man is so special there exists a portion of his being to which the laws of physics do not apply. La Mettrie then goes on to concur with empirical philosophers like John Locke (1632–1704) who argued that all knowledge comes form sensory perception. Humans are born with a mind that is a blank slate, or tabula rasa—essentially an empty hard drive waiting for input. La Mettrie also advocates atheism over theism and rejects the theistical argument for intelligent design.

To be honest, La Mettrie probably doesn’t have a whole lot new to say in Man a Machine that Spinoza, Locke, and other pre–Enlightenment philosophers hadn’t already said. The merit is in how he says it. La Mettrie is materialism’s most enthusiastic booster. Rather than a hefty treatise that only a sage could decipher, he has written a brief, intelligent work accessible to any literate man of his age. His argument is logically structured, clearly stated, and pleasantly irreverent. In his day, even deists like Voltaire found La Mettrie’s thought too radical and dangerous, but readers of today who are atheistically inclined will enjoy this unsung Enlightenment freethinker’s no-bull iconoclastic straight talk.   

Government by B. Traven

The Porfiriato’s culture of corruption

B. Traven was a German-born author who wrote mostly fiction set in Mexico and Central America. His novel Government, published in 1931, is one of a series of six books known as the Jungle Novels. Depending on which list you’re looking at, this is either the first or second book in that series (both Government and The Carreta were published in 1931). The Jungle Novels take place in the state of Chiapas in Southern Mexico in the years just prior to the Mexican Revolution. This period is known as the Porfiriato because Mexico was governed by the dictator Porfirio Díaz, who ruled from 1876 to 1911. During his reign, Díaz invited foreign corporations to exploit Mexico’s resources for his own financial gain. He and an oligarchy of favored landowners and industrialists enjoyed immense wealth, while the majority of the country’s population struggled for survival as illiterate peasants and laborers. Traven’s Jungle Novels deal directly with this social and economic environment.

Under Díaz’s regime, as depicted in the novel Government, a system of trickle-down patronage determined the granting of government positions. Government offices at all levels were reserved for Spaniards, Mestizos, or Ladinos—essentially the “whiter” population of Mexico as opposed to the Native Mexicans or Indians (the term Traven uses), who were treated little better than beasts of burden. In this novel, Don Gabriel is granted a minor role as secretario of an Indian village, basically the federal government’s appointed mayor. His job is to keep the Natives in line and keep rebellions in check to ensure that farms in the region remain profitable. Because such government jobs pay very little, it is understood that the functionaries appointed to such positions will generate wealth for themselves through various schemes of corruption or graft, including arbitrary taxes, fines, and fees, the taking of bribes, and the monopolization of certain goods, in particular alcohol. The drawback to such a seemingly lucrative position, however, is that if the secretario pushes his Indians too far, he may find himself beheaded by a machete. At first, Don Gabriel is somewhat reluctant and very ignorant of such unethical techniques of income generation, but by the end of the book he is wheeling and dealing in Indian lives as if they were cattle.

In this novel, Traven uses the word “montería” a lot, and he doesn’t define it for the reader. This is a logging camp in the tropical jungle where hardwoods like mahogany were extracted for export. In other regions of Mexico, mines were the primary scene of slave labor, but in Southern Mexico and the Yucatan it was the monterías. The labor was grueling and the living conditions extremely harsh. Technically, of course, it wasn’t slave labor, because slavery was nominally illegal under the Porfiriato. However, a system of indentured servitude was common and basically amounted to slavery for many Indians, who had no power, no rights, and little or no chance of ever earning their way out of debt peonage.

Traven lived in Mexico for much of his adult life and spent considerable time in Chiapas from 1924 to 1931. Despite being born in Germany and writing in the German language, Traven is one of the best writers of fiction about Mexico for English-language readers. If Mexican writers wrote critical novels of this sort, they haven’t made it into translation. Juan Rulfo’s The Burning Plain, although set after the Revolution, is the closest I can think of to Traven’s work as far as considering the plight of the Mexican Indians. Mariano Azuela’s Los de Abajo is in a similar ballpark, but more about the Revolution itself and not the conditions that inspired it.

One surprising thing about Traven’s Government is how well it has stood up to the passage of time. The book is still very relevant to our political climate today. In recent years, the United States has drifted farther from democracy, and government officials at the highest level commit blatantly corrupt acts of self-enriching graft. Occasionally you’ll hear critics saying, “This certain politician [who shall remain unnamed] wants to be the next Hitler or Mussolini.” No, that’s not quite accurate. What he really wants to be is the next Porfirio Díaz, and Traven’s Government gives us a pretty good idea of what that might be like.

Fourth World: When the Old Gods Die by Jack Kirby, et al.

Trippy, dippy stuff from the King of comics

Jack Kirby, one of the most highly regarded creators in the history of comic books, began his career way back in the 1940s. From the late 1950s through the 1960s, he co-created most of Marvel Comics’ most popular characters, including the Hulk, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the X-Men, and Doctor Doom. In 1970, Kirby left Marvel and moved to DC Comics, where he was given some free reign to develop his own projects. He created three new titles for DC: The New Gods, The Forever People, and Mister Miracle. He was also assigned to an existing DC title: Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. Kirby connected the four magazines into one intertwined narrative arc utilizing a new fictional universe of his own creation, dubbed the Fourth World. (I’m guessing the name arose from the fact that, long before the Marvel multiverse, DC had three parallel Earths inhabited by different versions of their superheroes.) DC Comics recently released a volume of Kirby’s Fourth World stories in their new DC Finest paperback line of full-color reprints, with a second volume planned for the near future. The first volume, subtitled When the Old Gods Die, reproduces roughly 21 issues of comics from 1970 and 1971. This includes a few issues of Lois Lane, not by Kirby, that are very loosely related to this story and really shouldn’t be in here.

The gist of Kirby’s Fourth World is that long ago, in some other dimension, two antithetical worlds were created: New Genesis, home of the New Gods, and Apokolips, home of all things evil. The forces of Apokolips are led by the supervillain Darkseid, who searches for the anti-life equation that will allow him to control the universe. This formula is locked inside the mind of some unknown human on Earth, so Darkseid sends gangsters and monsters to hunt for it, and New Genesis sends heroes to stop them and to protect humans. Characters travel between worlds via boom tubes, which are similar in function to Asgard’s rainbow bridge. The Forever People are hippy teenagers from New Genesis. Mister Miracle is a Fourth Worlder who comes to Earth and assumes the identity of a performing escape artist.

The art in these comics is the typically spectacular and bombastic drawings one expects from Kirby. Surprisingly, however, when Superman appears, Kirby does not draw DC’s staple superbeing in his own trademark style but rather in a more mundane style resembling that of Curt Swan. I can imagine an order coming down from on high: Don’t get creative with Superman! With that one major exception, the art in this book is classic Kirby, and it is beautifully reproduced in this DC Finest volume.

The stories, however, as is typical of post–Marvel Kirby, are hit and miss. After bringing life to Norse mythology with his pantheon of Thor characters, Kirby started creating his own original mythologies of gods and cosmic forces. He began with Marvel’s The Eternals in 1976, and the Fourth World is a continuation of similar themes and elements, but more unrestrained in its weirdness. The most enduring element to come out of all this is Darkseid, but in these stories he doesn’t really do much except show up for brief appearances to look mean and give orders. The three Kirby-created titles are the better material here, but you only get three or four issues of each. There’s an awful lot of Superman, Jimmy Olsen, and Lois Lane in this book, however, and most of those stories are rather stupid. Kirby dredges up characters from the 1940s: the Newsboy Legion, whom no one was asking for, and the Guardian, a generic superhero. Comedian Don Rickles makes a guest appearance in Jimmy Olsen, and as if that wasn’t dumb enough, Kirby creates a second Rickles, a silly fictional doppelganger of the first.

So for the most part, this volume amounts to silly stories with exciting art. The rogues gallery of villains is interesting. The plot involves mentions of DNA and cloning that might have been advanced for their time, but Kirby doesn’t do much more with them than mad scientists creating monsters and evil twins, an idea that’s been around since the Golden Age of the 1940s. The Comics Journal named Kirby’s Fourth World one of the 100 best comics of the 20th century, but I don’t see anything here to merit such accolades. Maybe all the good stuff will be in the second volume, subtitled The Storm of the Battle, scheduled for publication in the Summer of 2027.

Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions: The First Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Games by Martin Gardner

Math games and puzzles mostly for the Mensa set

For much of an authorial career that spanned over three-quarters of a century, Martin Gardner (1914–2010) was America’s most popular writer on matters mathematical. He is best known for “Mathematical Games,” a column he wrote in Scientific American magazine for 25 years. The articles from that column were collected into a series of at least 15 books, the first volume being The Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions, published in 1959. Many of the books in this series were later republished under different titles. This first book was rereleased in 1988 as Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions. The 1988 edition includes additional new content from Gardner in the form of addenda to each chapter and an afterward at the end of the book.

Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” was more than just a brain-teaser-of-the-month. In fact, very few of the chapters in this book are the sort of puzzles you would find in a typical brain teaser book. A couple chapters entitled “Nine Problems” feature such riddles. For the most part, however, a typical Gardner column was more of a recreational exploration into a topic of mathematical interest. The word “Games” in the title is no casually chosen word. Gardner does spend many pages talking about games, those in the abstract strategy category that includes chess, tic tac toe, and everything in between. In this volume he discusses chess, tic tac toe (2D and 3D), Hex, Nim, and Tac Tix. Beyond going over the rules for such games, Gardner might discuss the number of possible moves, play on different board sizes, the winning probabilities of certain opening moves, whether the first or second player has a mathematical advantage, and sure-fire strategies to ensure victory. Other favorite Gardner topics include magic tricks, geometry puzzles, and the branch of mathematics known as topology. Even when he’s discussing card tricks, magic squares, or hand-held sliding-square puzzles, the emphasis is on permutations and probabilities.

It’s amazing how many of the games and puzzles that Gardner features here were created by scientists and mathematicians in some of the most prestigious research institutions in the country. Apparently physicists, when they’re not splitting the atom at MIT or Fermilabs, spent their leisure time on such mathematical diversions. Hexaflexagons are strips of paper that are divided into equilateral triangles and folded into a hexagon-shaped object somewhat like a kid’s paper fortune teller. Yet Gardner tells us that one of the pioneers of hexaflexagons was Richard P. Feynman, the theoretical physicist who won the Nobel in 1965.

Nowadays, Scientific American magazine is aimed at a broad popular audience, but back in Gardner’s day, it was written for a high-IQ clientele. Those same mathematicians and scientists who were fooling around with flexagons, polyominoes, and board games would have been reading the magazine and tuning into Gardner’s column every month. For that reason, this ain’t always easy stuff for the average Joe to wrap his head around. In some cases, that’s because the math may be beyond your level. In others, it’s because Gardner’s explanations are confusing. For the most part, he’s great at explaining higher mathematical concepts to laymen, but sometimes the content is just too complex to be dumbed down for mere mortal mathematical minds like mine.

By its very nature, this book is a grab bag, and as such, some topics will fascinate particular readers more than others. I, for example found the geometry stuff more interesting than the magic tricks. Since a good portion of the book is about abstract strategy games, it helps to have an interest in those, which I do. I can’t say this book was fun and fascinating form start to finish, but it hooked me enough to know that I’ll likely delve into the second volume of Gardner’s Scientific American writings.

Eline Vere by Louis Couperus

Half-successful attempt at a psychological novel

Louis Couperus (1863–1923) was a Dutch novelist who achieved some international success in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Various critics and scholars have classified him as a realist, a naturalist, and a Dutch sensitivist. His first novel Eline Vere was published in 1889 and released in English translation in 1892.

The novel depicts bourgeois society in The Hague. Eline Vere is a wealthy orphaned young woman who lives with her sister’s family. Their social set is comprised of about a half dozen well-acquainted families who all gather frequently for dinners, dances, and outings. Privacy is at a minimum, as no one can seem to do anything without inviting at least a dozen companions. The roster of these families is difficult to keep track of. They all have multiple children who grow up expecting to marry from this tight-knit circle of friends. Among this set, Eline is generally regarded as the most beautiful girl, but there’s something kind of flighty and stuck-up about her personality that’s off-putting to some. For the first half of the novel, you wonder why it’s named after Eline Vere because she barely appears. The second half, however, focuses entirely on her. Over the course of the book, Eline undergoes a few loves and a few minor trials that affect her outlook on life. Her behavior abruptly becomes irrational, and from the reader’s perspective, not entirely believable. She gradually declines into a paralyzing and depressing malaise.

Eline Vere seems to have been obviously influenced by Emile Zola’s l’Assomoir, and probably by way of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. In l’Assomoir, Zola charts the downfall of a woman who succumbs to alcoholism; in Eline Vere, Couperus charts a similar trajectory for mental illness. The heroine of l’Assomoir comes from among the lower classes. Eline, on the other hand, is of the “gentlefolk” who don’t work for a living and occupy themselves with frequent balls and parties, which is probably what made this novel more attractive to an English audience, as it’s more in keeping with Victorian literature than l’Assomoir. Zola and Couperus, to some degree, are both naturalist authors, so they both claim to employ scientific techniques in their fiction, ostensibly drawing from the fields of psychology, medicine, and genetics. L’Assomoir, however, is really the far more scientific (i.e. realistic) of the two. Eline Vere, on the other hand, reads more like a romantic opera.

Eline Vere can be called a psychological novel, but at this point psychology was still a very young field. This novel was published before any of Freud’s books. Couperus certainly makes some baby steps towards psychological authenticity, but it still reads like quite a long way from the more mature psychological novels of Knut Hamsun or Hermann Hesse. Unlike the development of Gervaise’s alcoholism in l’Assomoir, the mental illness from which Eline suffers seems like a collection of assorted symptoms that really don’t follow any logical progression. Her irrational episodes are calculated for operatic drama and not a thoughtful study of mental illness or its social causes. In hindsight, Eline’s malady would fall under the general sexistly amorphous headings of “hysteria” or “women’s nerves” that were commonly cited in fiction of this era.

Eline Vere may be the work for which Couperus is best-known outside of the Netherlands, but in my opinion, he’s got better books in his oeuvre. His follow-up to this debut, Footsteps of Fate (1890) is an improvement. Far superior is his four-novel Small Souls series (including the books Small Souls, The Later Life, The Twilight of the Souls, and Dr. Adriaan), which also depicts bourgeois life in The Hague but does so with the admirable realism of a mature naturalist style. 

My Struggle, Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Real life, ad nauseam

About fifteen years ago, Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard made a big splash in the literary world with his six-volume work My Struggle (Min kamp). Is it an autobiography or a series of novels? Only Knausgaard and his family know for sure, but it’s written as ostensibly an autobiography, so I will consider it as such. My Struggle has received much critical acclaim, but when I read Book One, I wasn’t terribly enamored with it. These volumes, however, often come up as inexpensive Kindle daily deals, so I impulsively bought Book Two and eventually felt compelled to read it.

Book Two, first published in 2009, does not pick up where Book One left off. Book One was mostly about Knausgaard’s teenage years in Norway. In his mid-twenties, he married a woman named Tonje, but we don’t really learn much about her. That period of his life isn’t covered in either of these first couple volumes. As Book Two opens, Knausgaard and Tonje have separated, and he makes a spur-of-the-moment relocation to Stockholm. In Sweden he reconnects with a prior acquaintance, Linda, and they fall in love. Despite the fact that she’s bristling with red flags, Knausgaard quickly decides to make babies with her. From that point on, the book is mostly, “Heaven knows I’m miserable now.”

Book Two is much like Book One in that Knausgaard spends many pages describing scenes from his life in minute detail. The first tenth of Book Two is occupied by a lengthy depiction of a children’s birthday party that Knausgaard and Linda attend with their two kids. This extended vignette is a skillful piece of realistic prose, but so what? I’ve already been to this party dozens of times with my own children. Hundreds of years from now, some historian studying the social customs of 21st-century Nordic parents could use this book as a reference, but to me, spending so much time reliving the author’s experience felt pointless. Knausgaard’s writing is at its best when he delivers brief essay passages with his philosophical thoughts on life, death, love, and marriage, but unfortunately such interludes are only a few pages out of each hundred otherwise devoted to the mundane details of everyday life. Much of the book is spent discussing Knausgaard himself and analyzing his character, which he obviously finds fascinating. Such is the subject of a very long evening Knausgaard spends in conversation with a friend over a few beers that amounts to an egomaniacal My Dinner with Andre.

Most of the narrative takes place in Sweden, but Knausgaard doesn’t really like Sweden. Based on his descriptions and comments, Norway seems a lot like the Wisconsin I grew up in—very alcoholic and a little rednecky, but charmingly unpretentious and laid-back. Knausgaard’s take on Sweden, on the other hand, is very pretentious, uptight, and cumbersomely woke. I feel like I have a lot in common with Knausgaard: none of his good qualities, like his creative passion for writing; just the bad ones, like his misanthropy, low self-esteem, degrees of cynicism, nihilism, and narcissism, and a longing for solitude. It’s his ability to write with authentic psychological realism that allows me to identify with him, but am I supposed to take some kind of pleasure or satisfaction from that? While reading this book, I didn’t. Book Two is an exploration of, or perhaps more accurately a wallowing in, everything that sucks about marriage and parenthood. Even worse, it just comes across like Knausgaard is blaming everything on his wife (I don’t know if Knausgaard and Linda were ever legally married, but they’re at least common-law spouses). This volume reads like it was written as a deposition to support his claim in a custody battle, except Knausgaard doesn’t want custody; he just wants to be left alone.

I thought My Struggle was worth a second look, but Book Two was even more frustrating and disappointing than Book One. Knausgaard is very good at the descriptive diary stuff, but after about a thousand pages, I feel like I wasted a lot of time on one guy’s obsession with his own not-so-extraordinary life. I don’t know if Knausgaard ever got the freedom from his wife and kids that he so desperately craves in Book Two, but from now on, I for one will leave him alone.

A Drama in Muslin by George Moore

Realistic critique of the Victorian marriage market

The Irish author George Moore (1852–1933) was an open admirer of the writings of French novelist Emile Zola. Influenced by Zola’s school of Naturalism, Moore argued for more realism in Irish and British literature, and he practiced what he preached. His novel A Drama in Muslin was published in 1886. In later editions, Moore changed the title to simply Muslin. A type of cotton fabric, muslin is meant to symbolize the white dresses traditionally worn by young women at balls and parties as they “come out” into society. When actually describing women’s garments in the novel, however, Moore more frequently references silk and satin.

The Bartons are a well-to-do family of Galway. Mr. Barton is an absent-minded painter preoccupied by his own little artistic dream world, presumably living off of inherited wealth. His wife, Mrs. Barton, as they say, wears the pants in the family. The Bartons have two daughters. The eldest, Alice, is a very intelligent young woman, somewhat plain in appearance, who exhibits characteristics of what we today might call a feminist or at least an independent woman. Her younger sister Olive is a beautiful young girly-girl who embraces the traditional doll-like Victorian gender role of the feminine sex. Like all aristocratic young women of their time, the two young ladies’ primary goal in life is to find a suitable husband. Fortunately or not, Ireland had an established and regimented system for accomplishing this. For part of each winter, the girls and their mothers would relocate to Dublin where they would take part in a series of dances, dinners, and parties in which the prospective would associate with eligible prospective grooms. This was known as the “castle season” because some lucky ladies would be invited to balls at Dublin Castle. When the Barton women venture to Dublin for their coming out, the beautiful Olive is hailed as the belle of the season, with a possible royal title in her married future, while Alice is less enthusiastic about the whole process.

Meanwhile, back home in Galway, the Bartons and their set of land-owning aristocrats are having trouble with the Land League. The tenant farmers of Ireland have essentially unionized in an attempt to combat exorbitant rents charged by abusive landlords. Much mention is made of Griffith’s Valuation. This was a survey of land appraisal values in Ireland, in this case serving a purpose similar to today’s Blue Book of automotive values. The tenants demand to pay only the rent appropriate to Griffith’s Valuation, while of course the landlords want more. This class struggle has become violent, leading to murders and destruction of property.

While the inclusion of this social issue is in keeping with the naturalist ethos, the material on the Land League is really just background context in this novel. The main issue under consideration here is the commodification of young women in the marriage market. Moore’s coverage of the social maneuverings involved includes a fair amount of satirical humor. Mrs. Barton is depicted as a calculated schemer trying to pimp her daughters out to the highest bidder. There are, however, more serious aspects to Moore’s consideration of women’s roles. One of the young women is an atheist, another is a lesbian, and another undergoes an unwed pregnancy. While Emile Zola’s novels were more overtly scandalous, Moore does push the envelope of Victorian literature into a realm of realism that was no doubt controversial for its time. Unlike most of his British contemporaries, Moore writes women well. Alice is a commendably well-drawn and intelligent modern woman, but even Olive and her more traditionally feminine cronies come across as quite realistic in this novel. With A Drama in Muslin, Moore manages to deliver a story in which drama and suspense are generated by the question of who will marry whom, while also calling into question and satirizing the restrictively sexist emphasis that Irish society placed upon that very question.