Review : Penguin Dragons (1)

Immediately following on from The Greek Myths I proceeded to devour the Penguin Book of Dragons. I simply had to find something to fill the mythological gap until I could get back to the shop for the other books in the "Myths That Shape The Way We Think" series, so what better than one all about my favourite creature of myth and legend ? Admittedly "The Penguin Book of Dragons" sounds a lot like The Usborne Children's Guide To Scary Lizards, or something, but in fact it's a delight : I only wish there was an expensive, hardback, fully-colour-illustrated edition I could display proudly on my bookshelf.

The book is a wide-ranging collection of translated storied about dragons, covering pre-antiquity, classical Greece and Rome, medieval Europe (the main focus) and Asia, and even modern America. It's a wide-ranging and eclectic mix indeed, from the absolutely bizarre to the profound to the childish and boring. It doesn't feature much at all in the way of analysis by the editor, which is a shame – sometimes it would have been useful to have some context as to why the stories are significant*. Nor is it in any way comprehensive – rather disappointingly it misses one of my favourites, the Lambton Worm, while including many which are so dull that they're only bearable because of their pathetic brevity.

* I'd like to say this makes it more interesting to do my own analysis, but in this case I'm often lacking enough information to get a handle on it. 

That said, it's still a very nice collection overall, featuring many stories I'd never even heard of. It doesn't really seem fair to give it a review but I would definitely recommend it for anyone who likes stories about dragons. There's a lot more to them than the standard scaly-scary-lizard, and even the really boring stories are interesting in adding variety to the dragon-as-plot-device motif. 

I don't have a particular question I want to answer here. Rather I'm going to just give a summary of the different ways dragons are used in the old stories, ordered roughly by how interesting I found them. These categories don't always divide quite so neatly as this, but as a guide, it's probably not awful. As I see it there are six main types of story : 

• Dragons as simple warnings and moral instruction
• As anecdotal traveller's tales asserting little more than that they exist as real creatures
• Surrealist fantasy where the symbolism is unintelligible
• Natural histories concerned with some degree of critical thinking on the nature of the beast
• High literature with complex characters, moral reasoning, and subtle symbolism
• Mythological explanatory metaphors in which dragons have a deep connection to the natural world and human nature.

To avoid spreading myself too thin, I'll cover the first three parts here and the second three in the next post.

1) Dragons : A Warning From History

A great many of the stories – too many – consist of very very simple warnings aimed at converting the heathens to Christianity. "So-and-so the blessed saint", they say, "came along and made the sign of the cross, and lo! the deadly beast was thwarted." And that's about it. They contain very little information of any kind, with the dragon itself barely even described.

I suppose if used together, delivered by a priest suitably skilled at oratory, listing a whole series of examples of devout Christians defeating dragons might have some rhetorical, persuasive power behind it. "Did not St Butface not smite the dragon with his mighty club ? And did not St Windolene not crush the heathens as St Gertrude did vanquish the firebeast of Moronia ?". That sort of thing. As it is, without context there's not much to say about them. Typically the dragon is very easily vanquished, literally in some cases just by the sheer power of belief or making the sign of the cross, nothing more than that. 

On its own each of these sort of stories are deadly dull. There's nothing at stake, no risk to the protagonists, the defeat of the dragon is assured. The dragon usually seems to symbolise paganism or some such, but is barely developed beyond merely naming it as a dragon. Everything about these stories is zero dimensional and presumably aimed at very simple, very stupid people.

There is one interesting exception that nevertheless fits the general description though. The twelfth century Abbot Herman of Tournai describes how God, rather than the Devil, sends a dragon which lays waste to an entire town for the relatively minor crime of refusing to welcome visitors carrying holy relics. Herman's gracious host himself escapes by the usual virtue of just being sufficiently pious, and the offending deacon has to seek God's forgiveness. These are all the usual tropes of the genre, but still, for God to send a five-headed dragon to burn a town to ashes for such a minor misdemeanour is surprising. Tolkien held that the earlier writer of Beowulf was no muddled Christian-Pagan hybrid, but this story only bolsters my disagreement* : even in these later ages, the distinction between the two is not at all sharp. Christianity itself, with its prophets, saints, messiah and holy trinity, has never really managed (in some ways) to fully escape the pagan past.

* And also Tolkien's claim that "a dragon is no idle fancy", with so many of the stories presented here being quite literally nothing more than that. It should be no idle fancy, but it often was.

2) Traveller's Tales

By number if not by total length, these probably make up the bulk of the collection. Anecdotal incidents abound of unwary travellers who had an unlucky encounter with a dragon, in which still nothing much is at stake except (at least) the traveller themselves. These aren't usually adventurers or explorers, just ordinary people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The point of these, if there is one at all, seems to be only to tell people to take care on the roads, much as we'd take note of a traffic report. At most they're concerned with establishing the existence of the beasts and their general characteristics, but nothing more than that. Everything is presented in a very matter-of-fact way.

This often makes the dragon itself narratively uninteresting. It doesn't carry any greater significance, it's just an animal which exists and does its thing, with no supernatural attributes of any kind except perhaps size. Even in the story of St George, the poor dragon itself only gets a walk-on part, though at least the rest of the story has some surprising redeeming qualities (see "literature" in the next post).

The Roman story of the dragon of Bagrada river in Tunisa exemplifies this sort of "traveller's tales" variety of dragon. It reads an awful lot like fan fiction : not actually at all bad in its description, but only hopelessly boring in narrative. The dragon is at least, unlike in the Christian warning stories, described in truly fearful terms, but in the end it's just an animal. The characters are still pretty lifeless : the main protagonist is brave but his companions are not, and in the end he goes forth and kills the beast without too much fuss and bother. More interesting is how often this particular story was repeated by later chroniclers, being held up as a standard piece of evidence that of course dragons existed – even though it reads very obviously as pure fiction.

Rather surprisingly, the last tales in the book purporting to be sincere encounters with dragons are from late 19th-century American newspapers. I have to wonder how seriously these were ever intended, with, for example, the otherwise extremely boring Abergavenny Chronicle currently having rather more fun than one might expect for a paper that usually describes such things as how much everyone likes cake. Critical thinking is a recurring theme with dragons and myth, on which more next time.

3) Surrealism

Much more fun but completely unintelligible are the stories which are truly bizarre. Few of these are pieces of pure surrealism : they tend to be halfway towards genuine literature but then with aspects which are absolutely random and baffling. One exception is the deliberately comic Dragon of Wantley, which, rather surprisingly, is a genuinely funny ballad about a giant flatulent dragon defeated by a local knight.

More typically, the surrealism is merely peppered throughout all the other sorts of dragon stories, even the natural histories. Pliny was convinced that dragons were the mortal enemies of elephants for some reason, describing their battles as almost chess-like in their careful tactics. This became widely accepted, it being proposed that dragons are particularly keen to drink the blood of elephants for its cooling properties. Then there was another author who insisted that dragons were afraid of lightning as, being so dry and hot themselves, it would easily cause them to burn up. The very obvious question of "well why doesn't their own fire ignite them ?" (and this author does assert that dragons breathe fire, unlike many others) is left cheerfully unraised.

More of these in the next post. Others are truly weird allegories and surely not intended as literal. Such as the idea, found in a medieval bestiary, that Jesus was a panther whose sweet breath scared dragons, and viewed the dragon's hatred of elephants as a metaphor for the corrupting effects of sin.

Yes, well.

Then there's the story of the demon-dragon Rufus. This mainly fits the description of the warning tales, in which the heroine Maria defeats the dragon by making the sign of the cross... except in this case she's inside the dragon at the time, so rupturing his innards and killing him. Then his relative appears and Maria grabs him by the hair and beard, makes the sign of the cross, and the story ends with him declaring (and this is a direct quote), "Ow, my beard really hurts !".

An honourable mention must be made of Onachus. This beast is mentioned in passing as one of the parents of dragon (the other half being Leviathan, see "myths" next time). It's described as, "a native of the region of Galatia, which lets fly its dung like an arrow at anyone who gives chase and can shoot it up to an acre away, scorching whatever it touches as if it were fire." This particular story is otherwise a classic of the utterly boring heroine-easily-defeats-dragon variety.

The final ones I have to mention are bizarre through and through. The Japanese god "Rushing Raging Man" defeats a dragon by getting all eight of its heads really drunk, then he chops it up and finds inside a sword he decides to call the grass-cutter great sword. God knows why. Generously, I suppose it's testament to how Western myths have indeed shaped modern thought – that is, presumably it makes more sense if you've grown up in Japanese culture. I'm reaching though, it could well be just pure silliness for all I know. And a Ming dynasty tale describes a dragon with "the antlers of a deer, the eyes of a rabbit, the ears of an ox, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales [81 of them] of a fish, the claws of an eagle, and the paws of a tiger". Perhaps unsurprisingly, this Frankensteinian concoction was afraid of coloured silk – well, I mean how could the poor thing know if it was coming or going ?

---

Dragons are indeed versatile plot devices able to fill a multitude of different roles. But the dragons in the stories considered thus far aren't really much developed. Even the tales purporting that they exist aren't really concerned with the the beasts themselves. For that, we need to go to the second set of stories, ones where not only are the dragons crucial to the tale but the whole nature of the dragon is often of fundamental importance. Dragons can be silly, comic, and fanciful, but sometimes they also raise very much deeper and more interesting questions about our place in reality and our rational and irrational mindsets.

Review : The Greek Myths

I went on a book-buying splurge the other day, and for no particular reason I decided to start with Richard Buxton's The Greek Myths That Shape The Way We Think. There's a question which has been ticking over in the back of my head for a while... what makes these bizarre, surreal tales still appealing ? How is it we keep returning to these intensely other-worldly stories which so often feature behaviour that must have seemed reprehensible even at the time ? 

Or in other words : What's the appeal of a god who turns into a swan and rapes people, as opposed to helping the sick and destitute ?

This book presents a compelling answer. My only gripe is that it's too short : I would have been happier if it had been about double the length. Each chapter is about the right length but I wanted there to be more of them.

In terms of style it's light and accessible but articulate and thoughtful. At times the author lapses into an academic style of prose that might be daunting if you happen to alight on such a passage when perusing it in a bookshop, but for the most part he's almost poetic. He's clearly distilled his conclusions with expert precision down to his key findings in a brilliantly readable way, as comfortable in discussing pornography as he is with Renaissance epic poetry. Each section begins with a description of the myths in their "original" tellings, followed by an analysis and a history of the re-tellings right through the ages to the present day. It's a carefully curated selection, thoughtfully and lively described, never lacking in interpretation and really just a delight to read.

I'm giving this one a "I immediately want to buy the other books in this series"* 9/10. Sadly the others (Norse and Celtic myths) aren't by the same author, so very possibly I'll have to buy more by him as well. Really, I would have just liked it to be longer. 

* Quite literally. I've already begin the Norse book in the same series, and only didn't buy the Celtic one yet because the bookshop didn't have it.

To summarise this one is a challenge : I took a full six pages of notes while reading it. Trying to give a blow-by-blow account of each myth examined would be a simply hopeless task. Instead I'll try and pick out what seemed to me to be the most interesting major themes that emerge.

1) Versatility

I said "originally" with the quotes because this is one of the author's more explicit points : that there are original versions plural of the myths, not one single tale you can point to and say that all the other versions are illegitimate. The Greeks themselves certainly had no problem with retelling the tales to suit their own preferences and purposes. It's a bit like Doctor Who's fixed points in time, certain core features of each myth that remain similar (but by no means identical) between authors, around which the myth is shaped and endlessly reshaped. Throughout the Protean shiftings, all the while there remains something recognisable about the whole thing, much like Trigger's Broom a.k.a. the Ship of Theseus.

Two things about this appeal to me. First, that fiction can be interpreted differently but legitimately according to the reader is something I've mentioned here many, many times. But while I do get the annoyance of making changes from the book to the screen, as long as a change has an interesting message to convey, does it really matter ? The Greek answer would have been an emphatic no. They would have completely accepted changing characters, the setting, and even the whole storyline as absolutely valid. They wouldn't have seen it as being somehow "untrue" in a way that, say, as a Christian might see a story about Jesus fighting a robot dinosaur with lasers for eyes.

Pew, pew pew....

Yes, that was a terrible and intentional pun. You can't stop me.

Which brings me to the second point : the pagan peoples of antiquity didn't have the same concept of religion itself as later thinkers did. Tom Holland analyses this in more detail in Dominion, but here I think the concept comes across more clearly. There simply are no pagan bibles, no foundational texts or dogma that believers in Zeus had to adhere to. It didn't seem to bother the Greeks a jot when foreigners claimed that Hercules had visited their country, or that locals of one part of Greece believed in different traditional stories than the others : they all believed nonetheless in the same gods, and their stories weren't supposed to be "true" in the modern sense. More important was that the stories were instead felt to contain truths.

This meant that the religious practises were tremendously adaptable and the tales were incredibly flexible. And that means that all the later versions, even the modern ones, have some claim on being "true" in this very loose sense. That's not to say they're all good, of course : plenty of them are utter crap. Taking out the nasty, naughty bits in the interests of making the tale more moral is a particularly bad idea, as we'll see later on. But they are valid. "Old gods do new jobs", as Pratchett put it.

Later authors looked back to the myths as allegory, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes these, such as Promethean fire being a symbol for wisdom and knowledge, seem at least halfway plausible that this is a message the myth conveyed to the earliest audiences. This fits particularly well given that Prometheus is also (as is less well-known these days) the creator of mankind, thus explaining the subtitle to Frankenstein and the Alien spin-off movie. It would present a nice, coherent character at least.

But most other allegorical readings seem extremely forced and often absurd, though this isn't to say they're without their own pseudo-mythic value. For example interpreting the fall of Icarus to point to too much knowledge as a dangerous thing seems fairly obviously a weird claim given his more knowledgeable father's successful flight. Or Francis Bacon's truly tortured use of the Sphinx as an analogy for science : get the findings wrong and you'll come a cropper – this isn't wrong or inappropriate, but it seems dubious in the extreme that the early audiences would have seen it this way*. Even in antiquity, the idea that Hercules was actually a deep thinker and the boar he hunted represented "the common incontinence of men" is... strange.

* Saying that you think there's a similarity between [insert situation or character here] and [insert mythology here] is of course fine. It's the assertion that the mythology is supposed to represent something in particular which is problematic.

Though the strangeness is part of the appeal. Of course, such interpretations can be absolutely self-inconsistent, with the Amazons being variously interpreted as models of both chastity and promiscuity. Or my favourite example, in which the murderous murderess Medea flies off in a magical snake-pulled aerial chariot declaring that the gods do not exist. Since they don't aim to be true, the stories are often deceptively simple, readily lending themselves to endless reinterpretations, with no few contradictions along the way.

2) Complexity

Heroes, says Buxton, are "a special kind of mortal, whose behaviour challenges the boundaries of what humans can achieve". Many of the myths feature gods and heroes alike very prominently, but they're never much like the modern idea of heroes : they aren't archetypal personifications of virtue. The Greek stories are not morality tales, they don't set out to say "this is how you should act" or even "this is who you should imitate". It's up to the reader to decide when the hero is behaving respectfully and when they're being a massive arse : and most of the time they do both.

Take the Judgement of Paris. Paris is asked to choose which of three goddesses is the most beautiful. As a mortal he's chosen for this task because he's beautiful himself and also has a divine wife, so has experience in judging supernatural beauty. He selects Aphrodite, who in turn helps him abduct Helen, thus precipitating the calamitous Trojan War.

This is not an especially feminist tale according to many modern thinkers... but why not ? In the earliest versions, there's no way to choose between the goddesses based on their appearance, because divinity has no "real", set appearance, and consequently the early artists depicted them as all very similar. From the offset it's not the beauty contest it appears to be.

Paris needs some other criteria to make his impossible choice. So the goddesses bribe him with different options : power, skill, and sex. It's corrupt from the very beginning, explicitly unfair despite Paris being ostensibly qualified to make the judgement. The goddesses themselves receive nothing, because there's nothing Paris can give them. Paris isn't even choosing them at all; he doesn't get one of them as a reward. He's choosing instead only what matters to him. In short, it's nothing to do with the goddess' own attributes but everything to do with with what Paris wants.

He chooses sex : adulterous sex, no less. The result is war, disaster, and death.

Now this to me does not feel like a ringing endorsement of manly virtue but the exact opposite, a commentary on male weakness. Paris is a skilled warrior but his lack of ability to keep it in his pants brings about utter ruin*. His betrayal of his wife leads her to refuse him medical treatment when he needs it. No, to me this seems like a tale of natural male desire run amok, a cautionary tale that in no way promotes Paris' actions – rather the reverse ! Paris isn't one-dimensional, but he is a sexist pig, or at least a sex-crazed one, but the tale itself doesn't endorse this.

* Whether the other options on offer would have had better outcomes is an interesting counterfactual that isn't considered.

Or take Hercules. At heart he's a man with "huge biceps and a massive club", and there is a certain base appeal in a big strong manly man beating up monsters. But he's also, on occasion, capable of shrewd diplomatic negotiations and thinking his way through problems rather than just employing brute force. He's also radically reinterpreted. Sometimes his divinity is a reward for his Labours while sometimes he undertakes his quest only to atone for his accidental murder of his uncle. He's a mighty figure but at the beck and call of a weaker character who happens to have a hold on him. He can been seen as heroic but ordinary, but also even Christ-like in his divinity. He may not have the lasting metaphorical value of some of the other myths, but the ambiguity of the character definitely gives him staying power.

Finally Orpheus. Told he mustn't look back as he and Eurydice flee from Hades, his love for his wife overcomes him : sensing her distress, he can't avoid glancing back to check she's okay, confining her back to the underworld. It's a fundamental paradox of human behaviour, that the very thing we hold most dear can cause us to lose it. And of course Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. He has, he thinks, done nothing wrong, and always acted in good faith, but discovers he's committed the very worst of sins. It's a damn good bit of drama which speaks to a tragic paradox in human life. Complexity, indeed.

3) Primal metaphors

"The very oldest stories are, sooner or later, about blood", said Pratchett. A big part of the appeal of the Greek myths is that they resonate with us emotionally if not intellectually. All of us have faced difficult choices where we can't decide our own truest wants, even if they didn't have any divine consequences like Paris. All of us have have undertaken great labours even if they weren't of the Herculean variety. All of us have to deal with things which are, as for Tantalus, just out of reach.

And we often encounter sudden revelations that come from nowhere, much as Athena sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus... which raises that issue of blood. An interesting detail in Hesiod's Theogony is that Athena is born from her pregnant mother who Zeus swallowed to prevent her from rearing dangerous children. This is an image as ludicrous and incomprehensible as it is viscerally terrifying. Myths have staying power because they combine this deep, physical-emotional resonance with the ordinary, everyday life we all experience.

I want to mention a couple of other myth-metaphors (mythtaphors ?) of particular resonance. The first is the story of Daedalus and Icarus. What's often forgotten here is that Daedalus murdered his own student/rival and had to flee to escape persecution (or rather prosecution), and then helped create the Minotaur by constructing a magnificent sex costume... to wit, a giant cow for Pasiphae to hide in while being impregnated by a bull. This extremely disturbing image is then countered as he creates not only lifelike statues (robots by some interpretation) but also the gift of flight, itself a mythical accomplishment. Buxton notes a common theme of linking of opposites : human with animal, statues with life, flying between earth and sky. Add to this the hubris of his son, who he genuinely loved, and the especial poignancy of the grief because Icarus was in competition but no-one but himself, and the story becomes wonderful precisely because of its complexity, tragedy, and violence.

But if the brutality in the Daedalus story is somewhat incidental, the same cannot be said for Medea. The villainy of the wronged mother who murders her children may have a moral complexity to it, but the heart of the appeal is that Medea commits horrifying actions. Her humanity, shown by her chronic indecisiveness, heightens the sense of monstrosity by making her more believable without taking away from the shocking nature of the crime. 

And yet Pratchett continued :

Later on they took the blood out to make the stories more acceptable to children, or at least to the people who had to read them to children rather than the children themselves (who, on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided it’s being shed by the deserving), and then wondered where the stories went.

Which perhaps points to when revisionism simply doesn't work. While it's absolutely understandable that later interpretations have focused on her status as a woman and an outsider wronged and scorned, sometimes this would seem to miss the point. In one later retelling Medea basically does nothing at all, becoming friends with a woman she originally murdered. This would seem to be ludicrously bland and dull, sacrificing the whole point of the story for the sake of making a feminist statement. The point, surely, is that some things in a good story should be bad. And that women too can be evil, for that matter.

By contrast, History Hit's Medusa documentary presents a far more compelling case for a myth retold in ever-more unjustified misogynist tones, with Medusa originally being a giant, protective guardian figure and only later made into the evil demon-woman of modern popular depictions. Nevertheless, the appeal of the villains, that they are villains, should not be overlooked, especially given their complexity and depth. There's nothing wrong with stories that feature villains, and though there absolutely are misogynist aspects to some of the Greco-Roman myths, there are far better and less insulting ways of dealing with this than simply making all the women wonderful models of virtue.

Conclusions

One version of the myth of Prometheus has him cheating the gods not once but twice : stealing fire, and deceiving them into accepting the worse cut of the meat for sacrifices. But not everyone accepted this. Plato in particular didn't think that such things were even possible : of course the gods were good and of course they couldn't be deceived, or, as he went on at some length, placated with actual physical offerings of something as trivial as a side of beef. He also used the stories of the Amazons as proof of the viability of a more feminist society, whereas others used them more for misogynistic titillation (notably, while they were often said to cut off a breast, they were never depicted as having done so in paintings or sculpture).

This enormous versatility of the myths, that nobody would much care if you rewrote them, is part of their longevity. Not all changes are always to the good. Much of the political symbolism of this and that leader wanting to associate themselves with Hercules or Achilles is superficial and vain, and many artists have gone for unfathomable surrealism in trying to depict the indescribable. 

At their core, though, the myths couple primal themes with everyday reality. They make the normal world seem that little bit extraordinary. They join the predictable blandness of everyday life with the brutal and often bloody realm of fantasy. And they succeed in part with ambiguity : I'm particularly gratified to learn that the myth of Pandora's Jar, where she closes it to keep hope inside, isn't something with an obvious message that I've just missed but confusing to historians as well. Which is probably why we're still talking about it.

I've suggested at some considerable length that part of the appeal of Tolkien is in linking the worlds he describes with the cosmic, the very grandest of themes embodied in the otherwise basically-normal figures. This is true in part for the Greek myths too, but Buxton chooses here not to concentrate on the cosmology but the ordinary : the forces driving the characters, their flawed and complex personalities, and the similarities we infer with them. I've not given Buxton many direct quotes, but I'll let him summarise the nature and the appeal of myths :

One serviceable definition of myth is 'a socially powerful traditional story'... Myths are first and foremost thought experiments. What myths do [is] exaggerate, sharpen, and heighten issues taken from everyday life. About Oedipus' fate each one of us might say : there but for the twists of fortune go I.

A crucial difference between the world of mythology and the world of the everyday is that myths crystallise and dramatize and highlight and sharpen the concerns of everyday life, making the tensions more extreme, the disasters more catastrophic, and the achievements more glorious – and everything more memorable.

Another strategy, called 'rationalization', consisted in asking the question, 'What ordinary truths underlie these myths ?' ... The Hysperides were two ordinary women who owned sheep; Hydra was the name of a fort. This perspective can display a good deal of ingenuity and remains incredibly popular today (a centaur is just a confused memory of a man on a horse). But such an approach involves one fatal drawback : to regard myths as stories that simply reflect the ordinary world is to bleach out the very quality of imaginative daring – the departure from the everyday – that makes a myth a myth.

Do any myths reflect literal truths ? Quite probably. Does this matter ? Surely the most appropriate answer can only be, given the ambiguous versatility of a good myth : yes... and no. 

AI images are art, not theft

Far more for my own benefit than anyone else, I want to summarise my perspective from a recent and fruitless discussion. If that thread is anything to go by, then I suspect readers will already agree or disagree with my position, and my arguments here won't persuade anyone either way. Even so, I thought I should set it out, if to no other purpose than to get it out of my system*.

* For the record, in this case I respect my opponent very much, and they absolutely qualify as someone who I still view as credible despite disagreements.

The issue began as whether AI-generated images constitute art. The allegation is that they're not, which spiralled into the accusation that they're actually theft. I here refute both of these claims. There's some overlap between them, but I think I can separate them enough to cover them as different issues.

1) Yes, It's Art

A rigorous, all-encompassing definition of art is well beyond the scope of this post, and arguably impossible given its subjective nature. In fact even fully defining theft might be a bit of a challenge (as we'll see), but I think certain working definitions will do well enough for my purposes here.

As I detailed in the art-meets-science solarigraphy workshop last year :

How you visualise your data really does affect how you interpret it, not just aesthetically but also scientifically : some information is far easier to discern using one technique than another. I think none has a claim to be more valid or true than another, but each can be more appropriate for tackling different questions.

Nobody, including the many professional artists present, raised any issue with this. To me art involves choices, the creation of material for emotional self-expression. If you decide to dance or sing or paint or whatever, you've created something which expresses emotion, and you choose how to communicate your emotions to others. It doesn't really matter what your medium is, and it certainly doesn't matter if it's any good or not : bad art is still art. I would unhesitatingly accept that most AI-images are rubbish (with an annoying, hard-to-define "samey" look), but then so is most conventional art and indeed most content in any field of endeavour.

So what's different about AI-generated images with regards to choice and expression ? Nothing significant. When you write a prompt, you choose what to express. You make the further choice of selecting which of the generated images to share – which one either most closely meets or improves upon (or otherwise modifies in some beneficial way) your expectations. In some systems you even get at least a measure of direct control of the resulting image by using simple drawings to modify the result or generate the initial image. In many others you can refine the resulting image by continuing to respond via the prompt (and always you can simply reject all the output images, write a different prompt and begin from scratch if the output wasn't what you wanted). Just like all art, including writing, there is a measure of both accident and deliberate choice at work.

The counter-argument is that because the user does not (always) have any direct control over the image, then they are not the artist. They are creative only in regards to the prompt, the thinking goes, not the image itself. After all, "causing to be" is not the same as direct, deliberate creation.

But this is to woefully misunderstand the entire creative process. The process of accident and self-reflection is vital, not incidental. Tolkien, for example :

I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlorien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horselords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor of the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf's failure to appear on September 22nd.

This isn't rhetoric or hyperbole. The vast corpus that is the History of Middle Earth is full on almost every page of accidents in which Tolkien really does "discover", in a sense, what happened, or at least what he wanted to happen : until he set things down on the page, he didn't know for sure (and very often not even then).

Now it's true that you have less direct control in most cases of AI image-generation : the author doesn't move pixels around on the screen. But the analogy of commissioning a piece, claiming that those who pay the piper don't create the tune, doesn't work. I've been on the receiving-payment end of this myself many times and I know from direct first-hand experience that the the client absolutely can have creative control, as stipulated by the contract. "Causing to be" is indeed not the same as "create", this is true, but they're not mutually exclusive either. Without a client paying me money, some works I never would have created at all. Without them further directing me to "move this over there, make that bigger, make that bit more orange", the piece would have ended up quite different from the final result. Claiming that the client had no creative hand in the image, just because they themselves didn't move the pixels on the screen, seems to me to be quite plainly silly.

With AI, the user modifies the image with the only tool available to them : the prompt. They can refine this to the nth degree, just as with commissioning a piece. What's more, the deliberate choice to surrender some level of control is absolutely, unequivocally, unarguably, a valid artistic choice – again see the solarigraphy workshop post. Sometimes this is the very point of art, especially experimental art. Choosing not to choose is still a choice. Writing with a squiggly pen, or using a spirograph (if you arrange its patterns rather than just making one pattern and leaving it at that) : yep, the user is still expressing themselves. AI is just a tool, and the fact it operates differently and can carry out so much more of the process than a paintbrush is the very thing that makes it artistically interesting.

The claim seems to be that in this case, neither the user nor the AI is artistically creating the image, that the whole thing isn't even a creative process at all but an outright sham. I look aghast at this, with the idea that an image can be created without any sort of creativity at all just being incomprehensibly silly. It doesn't have to be the human, emotion-driven creativity, fair enough, but the very fact that something gets created that didn't exist before is self-evidently a creative act. It simply cannot be anything else.

The argument goes that AI doesn't adapt, interpret, or draw on inspiration. It simply regurgitates stolen content, doing nothing more than rearranging stolen data.

I think this is in no sense true. There simply must be adaptation in the sense of transforming text to an image : by its very nature, text is not the same as an image, and the one must be adapted into the other. And there is demonstrably interpretation in that many (sometimes radically) different images can result from the same prompt, just as human artists would have to interpret a request. And there is inspiration in that the models do not simply rearrange pixels, but extract generalised trends to apply them in specific and novel situations. This moves us to the second charge of theft and plagiarism.

2) No, It's Not Stolen

There is at least a legitimate question here as to where creativity ends if it's not strictly limited to the person directly creating the work. Is the guy handing an actor a sandwich responsible for creating Star Wars ? Nah, but what about George Lucas, who wrote and directed, but didn't act in any of the parts or directly create any of the sets or props* ? Clearly there are grey areas and I don't propose a full, generalised answer.

* Did he ? I dunno, but plenty of directors don't, so the specific example doesn't matter.

It's also true that patrons don't always have direct creative control : they can do, but this isn't necessary. Great artists of yesteryear flourished because people paid them money to get on with doing what they were good at without micromanaging them. But when this does happen, when somebody directs the precise details of how an image is constructed – not only what aspects it has but where, their style, arrangement and pose – how can they not be a part of the process ?

Clearly, the guy with the paintbrush or the actor speaking the role are involved too, and to my mind the only sensible interpretation for AI is that both the prompt-writer and the AI itself have claims of responsibility for what's produced. Nothing else makes sense.

But an AI model, it's argued, can be coaxed into reproducing its training data precisely. This is of no matter because humans can do the same, albeit to a more limited degree. Few of us can reproduce detailed images from scratch (but some people can !), but pretty much everyone can remember a perfectly exact quote or two. And people can create digital-level precision images, for example forgeries. These of course are rightly illegal, but we don't say that because the forger is so good that this invalidates the entire artistic process. 

Going further, of course even copy and paste can be used for theft, but this doesn't mean that this fundamental aspect of the digital world is inherently immoral or invalid. It's the use to which it's put that matters, not the process itself. It doesn't matter if someone has a photographic memory unless they use that to actually produce perfect forgeries which they go on to sell for money.

More often with AI, as with human artists, people don't want perfect recreations of what already exists. They want something new. That AI has a memory inspired by the training data doesn't mean it's stolen anything any more than merely visiting an art gallery constitutes stealing the pictures. Some semblance of the paintings are stored in your brain which, if you're an artist, you can then draw on (consciously and deliberately or otherwise) when you yourself create a new work. Just as with the AI, if you try to create an image in a particular style, you find general trends and apply them to the specifics. Nobody would describe it as theft if, because you once saw a Monet or a Turner in a gallery somewhere, something about your piece had a vague resemblance to a speeding train or some waterlilies.

There is, however, the issue of how the data was acquired in the first place. Exactly how human memory works is still far from understood, but each experience affects us and changes us a little bit, giving us new information from which to draw on. We accept this, encourage it, thrive on it, charging each other money to enjoy our creative works. Nobody says, "you can visit this gallery but you're forbidden to be inspired by anything". But they might well say, "don't take photographs", and of course they would certainly say, "don't take the paintings home with you".

In fact they'd rarely these days have a problem with taking photographs. Taking the pictures off the walls and digitally scanning them without permission would cause greater consternation, if only for the potential damage done. In general the quest to digitise everything is a good one though : it doesn't give you the infinite analogue precision of the original but it can give you enough to be useful. Art which is inherently digital is different, as there the "copy" and the original can be literally identical (caveats about original files often being vector formats notwithstanding). Would this copy then constitute theft ?

My answer is sometimes yes, but not necessarily. If a gallery themselves puts a digital scan online and freely available, or allows people to take pictures, then they have no reason to expect security for the digital copies. They simply have to take it as a given that people might use this for any purpose because to impose specific restrictions on what anyone can access is sheer folly. The obvious solution for controlling access (which I myself use) is to limit the resolution of the images they put online, or paywall it, and forbid taking photographs. And by this token, if AI companies have not paid for the access rights to copyrighted content, then even though what they've done amounts to copying rather than taking a physical product, then it can be constituted as theft. What they've done is not steal the product itself, but steal access rights. This is still taking without permission, i.e., theft*.

* There is of course a very important moral difference between increasing access rights without permission (making a copy, and/or making that copy available more widely) versus taking a physical product – the latter denies access rights to the original owner, which is hardly the same as giving more rights to more people.

It's a bit like paying to access a gallery versus sneaking in after hours for free. Authors and owners surely have some rights to control access, not just the thing itself. Perhaps a better analogy : it's like breaking in to take high resolution scans without permission. But if they're just paid for regular access rights, and/or ingested the vast amounts of freely available online data that anyone can access anyway, and this gets copied as part of the training process... then no, this not theft. Neither the original product itself nor access has been compromised in any way. This would be like erecting a statue in your own front yard and declaring that anyone who took a photograph was a thief, or even saying that if anyone even looked at it then they would be guilty of stealing the image.

That's my take then. AI images constitute art because they express human choices and will, the only novelty here being their particular method. Using publicly available data for the training doesn't constitute theft because it doesn't change the original products or affect their access, provided the AI companies paid for access in the usual way. If they didn't, of course that's theft and they shouldn't have done that.

Seems perfectly straightforward to me.

These things are not the same as these other things

Today, a couple of similar-ish pieces from Pscyhe I think I can get away with combining into a single post.

The first one is very simple, describing how wanting things and liking things aren't the same. This may well seem obvious : I like Star Wars but don't ever want to become a Jedi Knight, I like reading history but have no desire to actually meet Genghis Khan, and I really like chocolate cake but don't want to stuff my face with it continuously. But I have some sympathy for those who, like the researcher in the article, "thought that liking and wanting were just two words for the same process", because I strongly suspect the second piece is also similarly obvious.

Anyway, the neurological distinction between liking and wanting is interesting, especially as to how this was discovered :

When the neuroscientist Roy Wise blocked dopamine in the brains of rodents, he found that they eventually stopped eating, stopped having sex and stopped socialising, presumably because they lost the pleasure of those rewards... By blocking dopamine in the rats’ brains with a drug, Berridge expected to show how their facial expressions switched from liking to disliking. To his surprise, that’s not what happened. Blocking the rats’ dopamine did strip them of their motivation to eat, but it didn’t alter their liking response when they were fed.

I'm going to leave aside the fascinating nugget here that rats have facial expressions otherwise this will spiral into another post altogether.  

A key part of what dopamine actually does is cause wanting: it’s related to the anticipation of rewards, as opposed to the enjoyment of them. Wanting and liking are both associated with a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, but within this region are two distinct areas: some that are involved in generating pleasure and, others, motivation.

By increasing dopamine, Berridge can even make a rat want something that hurts – like an electrified probe.

You might recall this piece from a few years back on Trump becoming addicted to and damaged by the negative attention from his idiotic tweets. I suspect any psychologist who's familiar with gambling addictions or children acting out for attention wouldn't be surprised that people can want to do things they don't enjoy. And I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of thing was especially common in politicians, who are basically compelled into doing things they personally don't enjoy or want to do*. A demographic study on this would be fascinating. Something something "authentic self", something something...

* There are probably unique factors at work in the Trump case and certainly not all politicians are even remotely like this, however. Still the general tendency might be interesting.

The only other thing I want to mention from this piece is this bit :

There’s an important distinction between the kind of wanting Berridge is talking about and ‘wanting’ in a more aspirational sense. ‘I want to work out more, I want to stop spending so much time on social media, I want to eat healthier – those are cognitive plans,’ Robinson says. This kind of wanting can go along with a more primal want, but it doesn’t have to. It’s the more intense wanting that is affected in addiction.

Well, as before, that's just liking the idea of something, isn't it ? Or liking and wanting the consequences but not the process, not the thing itself. Everyone wants to be fit but lots of people don't enjoy exercise : we want the end result but don't enjoy the process. We might say we want to work out but that's not what we really mean. So there's nothing problematic here, just a bit of nuance about language and the distinction between the ends and the means.

On to the second piece, which is about appreciating things you already have. This one resonates with me. I've long made it a habit, whenever things are pleasantly stable, to a take a moment from time to time to deliberately and actively appreciate that : to realise that things could be much worse, and that because the background level of my daily activity is stable and not a rollercoaster of exciting adventures it's none the worse for that. When things aren't changing, it's easy to miss that you're actually in a very happy place. To deliberately recognise, just occasionally, that you'd miss the things you have if they were ever gone (even those which have really no chance of being lost) is definitely beneficial.

What does this have to do with things that seem similar but aren't the same ? Hold up, I'll get to that. I'm not going to go through the whole "how-to" guide in the essay but there are a few points I want to remark on.

Appreciation, as I use it here, may begin with thankfulness for what you have, but it goes beyond that to a broader understanding of how the world works and what is valuable in that. Appreciation can also lead us to a critical attitude in a way that gratitude does not, because we may recognise that the world and its inhabitants are not cared for as they should be.

A certain kind of appreciation might be thought of as a desire for cultivation and continuity, then. I'm not really sure I agree with the author's characterisation of a human desire for a "boom and bust hedonistic treadmill" – that's probably overstating the case. Still I do think we often want a certain sort of combination of stable novelty, something that's unpredictable but with clear boundaries. As I've said before, this is why socialising with friends is so appealing. We get interactions we like but are never quite the same.

The author then raises the excellent point of how the old adage that you should "be happy with what you've got" can be a declaration of repression. And this is where the article does an excellent job of breaking a distinction I've sort of always been aware of but never been able to properly articulate :

If you’re like me, you might also have some political resistance to the idea of appreciation. The idea that we should ‘appreciate what we have’ can strike one as a ruling-class ideology: ‘You peasants should be grateful we feed you slop at all.’ We shouldn’t appreciate – we should have a revolution! I understand this resistance. But over time, I have come to believe that not appreciating what I have is an even crueller way of looking at the world. It’s like a little voice in your head saying: ‘Not only do you not have enough, but you should also be miserable about it.’ 

Just as we should appreciate things in spite of difficulty, so we should appreciate difficulty in spite of progress. It’s this balance that makes for a productive version of ‘elsewhereism’: seeking a better place, collectively, not because we fail to appreciate where we are, but because we know that the good of our time and place is still not enough.

Yes ! The word the author is looking for here is "satisfied". You can enjoy things but still want more without being greedy. To enjoy the latest game but wish it had extra features is not necessarily to be entitled or ungrateful. You can recognise and appreciate the good in progress and development while simultaneously wanting more, for things to be better than they are. Wishing a game had better graphics but enjoying it anyway isn't greedy, but wanting more than would actually satisfy your hunger is. A desire for continual progress isn't the same as being dissatisfied with the current state of development, though these aren't mutually exclusive either.

Should you be "happy with what you've got", then ? Sure, as long as what you've got meets your material needs and you've got things which are uniquely special to you. Here I think the author falls down a bit by advocating us all to appreciate the stars and public libraries and roads and suchlike – sure, but everyone has those, so it's difficult psychologically to see them as special. More importantly, just because you're happy doesn't mean you don't have a right to wish for improvements. And if you are miserable despite living in material and social luxury, well, maybe that's a you problem.

Elsewhereism is, I think, based on a specific kind of forgetfulness: that is, forgetting that even in the new, better elsewhere, there will still be problems. You will still suffer from accidents, from unrequited love, from natural disasters, from new psychological foibles that will simply emerge. That’s just part of our human condition. To better appreciate what you have isn’t to give up on an elsewhere. It’s to understand that there is no elsewhere that is beyond some degree of difficulty, and that, if you’re not appreciative of what you have now, you never will be.

This I think is important. It especially hits a nerve because there is so, so much journalism which is exclusively and ludicrously negative. If you don't take a moment to recognise when you've reached your goals, if it's all about just setting more and more difficult objectives, you'll never be happy. That's not healthy and I think it's a major source of toxicity in the media. That said, I'd add a caveat to the above quote that this probably only applies if your base needs are already at least met and/or exceeded; if there's something fundamental missing from your life, it's not your lack of appreciation that's the problem. And sometimes a change is as good as a rest. Novelty for novelty's sake can be important, it's just a perpetual hunger for change that can be psychologically damaging. There are things we can continuously appreciate but this is not true of all things.

Two final points. First, a favourite pet point about how awful Stephen Pinker is :

It is good to appreciate, for example, that humans now have longer life expectancies than in the past and that we have the technical capacity to feed everyone alive. Those are amazing accomplishments. But sometimes it’s suggested that such progress means the world’s institutions are basically good and progress is inevitable. In a world where billions of people still live in poverty, this is over-appreciation for the progress we’ve made.

Nailed it. Just because things are better now doesn't mean they're anywhere near as good as they could and should be, especially when the causes largely appear to be insane levels of inequality, corruption, naked greed, entitlement and wilful ignorance. Pinker would have us all believe we should "be happy with what we've got" in the worse and most repressive sense; conversely, the media wallows in perpetual misery despite any and all accomplishments. A better, middle way is possible.

Finally :

Because we are all imperfect in some ways, none of us can claim much superiority over others. By appreciating our own imperfections, we come to see that others’ imperfections are not irreparable flaws, but aspects of what makes them equal and meaningful members of our communities.

This is a bit self-helpy but it's valuable nonetheless. We seem to expect not just perfection but also continuously-varying perfection, not just in our own lives but, perhaps more dangerously, in those of others too. Neil Gaiman's preface to Pratchett's A Stroke of the Pen makes it abundantly clear that Pratchett the man was not the same as Pratchett the legend, as capable of anyone else as being a bit of a grumpy old twit from time to time, and not the all-forgiving, ever-wise public figure that's so (rightly) frequently celebrated. I often wonder what it must be like for celebrities, especially new celebrities, trying to juggle this public demand for a perfect persona with a desire to just do normal people things and not be harangued for it. Surely the advice here to expect everyone to be basically like us, warts and all, is at least a decent starting point.

Review : Ordinary Men

As promised last time I'm going to do a more thorough review of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. I already mentioned the Netflix documentary, which is excellent (if you want a counter to this, see the extraordinary movie One Life with Anthony Hopkins). The book of course is even more nuanced – and terrifying. It covers the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101's role in the Nazi holocaust. If that's not your thing, you should stop reading immediately.

I previously described this as horror beyond horror, and that's exactly what it is. Unlike other books I won't even try to rate this one; to do so feels disrespectful. Like One Life, this is in a category all of its own, the kind of book everyone needs to read but not necessarily more than once. Rather than review it, instead I'll try to just summarise the author's main conclusions : a task made easier because Browning lays them all out very clearly and directly. Quite properly, he first covers the history purely as a factual series of events, and this makes up the bulk of the book. He reserves his wider thoughts almost exclusively to the final two chapters, where he sets out his findings in some detail.

In large part Browning presents his arguments as in direct opposition to another work, Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which claimed that it took extreme anti-Semitism for the holocaust to happen. Browning shows, I think all too convincingly, that this is far from the whole story. In this particular case it seems abundantly clear that it can be all too easy to turn ordinary, educated, middle-aged, happily-married men into the most brutal sort of killers. This is much, much more disturbing than ascribing it to a horrific but uniquely peculiar happenstance of history.

The book in brief

First some preliminaries. Ordinary Men is a work that must have truly taken nerves of steel to compile. In fact I think I've never read anything that made me so viscerally, deeply angry that human beings could ever act like this. I've read of the ghastly practises of the Aztecs and Vlad the Impaler and so many other historical nasties in lurid and highly graphic detail, and I'm not easily disturbed by reading about such things. Yet the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were, in their own uniquely terrifying way, worse than all of them.

Part of it is lack of distance. One expects the distant past to be a different place, for extinct cultures to have radically different values and beliefs to us. That's a large part of the appeal in studying it, like visiting another world, safe and secure behind the impregnable mental shield provided by the lens of the text. Ordinary Men is different. While of course there have been enormous cultural changes in the course of the intervening 90-odd years, there are unnerving similarities. It is after all still within living memory, an age of cars, electricity, medicine, global travel, cinema and television, not the almost alien realm of medieval feudalism or or even a Victorian stately home. And the main subjects of the book were, as Browning makes clear, men who were in no significant way different from us. They were recognisably normal.

The book begins with a rather dry documentation of the policing system, how the Nazis sent the reserve police forces (mostly men in their forties, married with children and who had been policemen for many years) into occupied countries to enforce German rule. It's a rather tedious list detailing exactly who went where, who gave which orders to whom, etc. Tedious but necessary : Browning wants the readers to know exactly much unique detail we have about this case, that this is documented thoroughly and actually provably happened. There isn't any doubt about it, as there is in many of the more ancient historical atrocities.

I won't go into the full gruesome details. Browning justifiably does do this, not for the sake of some ghastly titillation but because the public has the right to know and because the full horror of it is necessary to have any hope of understanding it psychologically : to comprehend how such ordinary men could behave so profoundly abnormally.

What happened ?

Nevertheless, I must necessarily lay out the basics. The police battalions were used to supplement the military forces in rounding up Jews for the holocaust. Primarily this consisted of forcibly deporting them on trains to extermination camps but it also involved a very great deal of direct murder. There was overlap between the two : transportation could often involving shooting Jews in the street if they refused to move, leaving the bodies where they lay. On the trains alone, hundreds or thousands died from heat exhaustion. 

But the direct actions were the most disturbing of all, marching men, women and children into the forest and shooting them at point-blank range with high powered rifles. As I said, horror beyond horror, and I need not go into the full grim detail as Browning does. 

Browning estimates the number of Jews shot by Reserve Police Battalion 101 alone at 38,000. The number they crammed onto trains to the Treblinka extermination camp was about 45,000. In some individual actions each policeman shot on average 14 Jews, with that figure rising to about 80 for their whole period of deployment in Poland. The great majority of them quite literally became serial killers. Unlike soldiers fighting armed opponents, they were virtually never under threat : their victims were unarmed civilians.

These averages reflect the disturbing fact that the "smallest group comprised the non-shooters". Some did object to the action, though only one single individual made a stand on moral principles : the rest tried to excuse themselves on grounds of illness or by making themselves scarce. Perhaps 10 or at most 20% managed to avoid personally killing anyone. At the other extreme there were of course traditional sadists and psychopaths who actively enjoyed murder and torture. But crucially :

The largest group within the battalion did whatever they were asked to do, without ever risking the onus of confronting authority or appearing weak, but they did not volunteer for or celebrate the killing. Increasingly numb and brutalised, they felt more pity for themselves for the "unpleasant" work they had been assigned than they did for their dehumanised victims. For the most part, they did not think what they were doing was wrong or immoral, because the killing was sanctioned by legitimate authority. Indeed, for the most part they did not think, period. As one policeman stated : "Truthfully, I must say that at the time we didn't reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then." Heavy drinking helped : "most of the other men drank so much solely because of the many shootings of Jews, for such a life was quite intolerable sober."

Few of them actually wanted to take part, let alone enjoyed it, yet the majority committed the worst of atrocities. In the initial actions most were sick afterwards, physically disgusted with what they had done. One officer in particular expressed no emotional or intellectual disapproval (if anything the opposite) with the actions but still fell ill every time a killing was ordered. As time went on this subsided, with Browning speaking of a group who massacred elderly Polish villagers (importantly, not Jews, as I'll return to) by day and relaxing in the cinema in the evening.

After the war, none of them did anything remotely like this ever again. They were "willing executioners" in that they followed orders, but they were also hardly enthusiastic genocidal maniacs in the way Hitler was* : had they not been ordered to, it's doubtful any of them would every have killed anyone. This is in spite of them brutally murdering entire families.

* 75% were not Nazi Party members, though Browning notes that the 25% who were is an unusually high fraction for a police battalion.

Why did they do this ? How could it happen ?

The obvious explanation : racism

Browning takes us through this point by point. While he firmly rejects demonization of the killers, trying to see them as real, multi-layered, complex individuals, that doesn't mean he has any sympathy for them. "Explaining is not excusing. Understanding is not forgiving."

Why does he so firmly reject the obvious, simple demonization of people who carried out unarguably evil and monstrous acts ? The afterword of the book is a prolonged rebuttal of Hitler's Willing Executioners, which Browning quotes Goldhagen as describing the perpetrators' "Jewish blood lust" and "killing for pleasure". This is an obvious explanation, but as Browning notes, there are many arguments against it. Without doubt, anti-Semitism must surely be the driving factor behind the "desk murderers" who formulated policy and strategy, but this is not Browning's remit : he wants to know about the people pulling the triggers.

Undeniably some of them were simply evil sadists, but most were not. They were willing to kill but hardly enthusiastic about it. Even the battalion commander Major Trapp hated the whole prospect, openly weeping when he gave the initial orders. In fact Trapp not only allowed anyone who wanted to freely excuse themselves, but actively protected those who did.

At the larger scale, Browning draws a picture of a more complex relation between anti-Semitism and Naziism than is usually given (but for an intelligent counter-argument, see Niall Ferguson's The War of the World). To discriminate against something, he says, is not the same as wanting to stop it entirely, especially when that concerns people. He quotes another historian as saying that "Ordinary Germans knew how to distinguish between an acceptable discrimination... and the unacceptable horror of genoicde." 

This is an important point, one which is often difficult to keep in mind. On reading some chapters I felt a physical level of disgust and outrage at anyone agreeing with even the mildest form of racial or xenophobic policies, because why would you ever want to take even a single step down this road ? And yet, if they were really so closely linked, human history would be far more bloody than it already is. This is in fact something I've pointed out previously, though I have to admit it was very hard to maintain any sort of rational perspective while reading the book.

Anti-Semitism is now of course the main thing associated with the Nazis, but at the time it wasn't their main selling point. Achieving no more than 37% of the vote, it seems very unlikely that all those who did vote for them were of the same order of evil as the party leaders. Browning suggests that the primary attractions of economic policies, authoritarianism and nationalism acted as the draw to anti-Semitism, rather than the other way around. And as he sets out at length, there were plenty of killings of non-Jewish people that were just as horrific as those of the Jews. Furthermore, the non-German peoples participating in the holocaust behaved much the same despite lacking a supposedly uniquely-German anti-Semitic cultural brainwashing.

The biggest role anti-Semitism may have played was not in causing ordinary people to actively and personally shoot Jews, but in apathy. The general population might not have actually wanted to kill anyone or even wanted anyone else to kill on their behalf, but they were open to the idea of "limiting, or even ending, the role of Jews in German society." Indifference may have allowed the holocaust to happen but anti-Semitism wasn't the reason that ordinary middle-aged policeman would murder entire families in the forest. As Browning says, the relationship between discrimination, hatred and actual cruelty is more complex :

But we are still left with an unresolved question that cannot be solved by simple assertion : is a culture of hatred the necessary precondition for such a culture of cruelty ? Goldhagen has posed an important question. I do not believe that we have found a satisfactory answer.

If anti-Semitism is not the explanation for why hundreds of policeman committed acts of barbarity, then what is ? Browning carefully and systematically addresses many suggestions before settling on a single likely root cause. 

The calculated banality of evil

First, this was atrocity by policy, not a series of barbarous acts committed in an uncontrolled frenzy. Like the extermination camps it was a coldly calculated procedure which actively and deliberately accounted for the natural human tendency not to want to murder each other. The amount of direct shootings the policeman were ordered to undertake was (with some exceptions of the truly sadistic commanders) "minimised" and their roles limited as much as possible to loading the Jews onto trains – this was itself a barbaric process, but a step removed from direct murder; or limited only to cordon or other duties. The policemen were not told in advance of their tasks so not given a prior opportunity to withdraw, but if anyone asked to be excused (such as for being unable to shoot women and children), they were allowed. After the first shootings, volunteers were requested or policeman chosen who were already known to be willing to carry out further killings.

All of this was anticipated by and accounted for by Nazi High Command :

Being too weak to continue shooting, of course, posed problems for the "productivity" and morale of the battalion, but it did not challenge basic police discipline or the authority of the regime in general. Indeed, Heinrich Himmler himself sanctioned the toleration of this kind of weakness in his notorious Posen speech of October 4, 1943, to the SS leadership. While exalting obedience as one of the key virtues of all SS men, he explicitly noted an exception, namely, "one whose nerves are finished, one who is weak. Then one can say : Good, go take your pension."

This was a regime which was absolutely focused on its goal. They knew they were asking things fundamentally opposed to basic (or rather, civilised) human nature but they didn't demand making men into "mad dogs". Rather, says Browning, brutalisation was the effect, not the cause, of the killings. In fact while the policeman were no less indoctrinated with anti-Semitism than everyone else at the time, they were not especially more so either. While they were given some additional propaganda materials, none of it was designed to appeal to middle-aged married men with families, and none of it was designed to excite them to such bestial acts.

Instead, the killings themselves brutalised the men. They became inured to it, initially witnessing horrific injuries caused by their tendency to aim too high (quite possibly so as to subconsciously try and miss), and then adjusting to point-blank, careful shots aimed along the bayonet to guarantee a kill. Likewise, some of them justified killing entire families as a "kindness" as opposed to the cruelty of leaving the children alive. 

Nor were the policeman an especially unusual bunch. If anything, says Browning, they were the dregs, the only source of manpower available for their assigned task, and not the sort anyone would normally choose for something like this. There was certainly no deliberate selection on the part of the government nor any self-selection at work in who joined up, because they weren't told in advance as to what they would do, only learning of their initial duties on the morning of the first massacre. Officers certainly weren't selected for their sadistic tendencies either, with their being no indication of Major Trapp's open weeping as being anything other than sincere.

Another key point is that they weren't "only following orders".

Quite simply, in the past forty-five years no defence attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of post-war trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly dire punishment... even putative duress dot not hold for Reserve Police Battalion 101. From the time Major Trapp, with choked voice and tears streaming down his cheeks, offered to excuse those "not up to it" at Józefów and protected the first man to take up his offer from Captain Hoffmann's wrath, a situation of putative duress did not exist in the battalion.

That is, the men knew they didn't have to kill anyone and no serious consequences would befall them. Yes, they might be shamed by their comrades and yes, shame is unpleasant. But one would reasonably expect that the shame of murder would be infinitely greater. 

So what was going on ?

Group conformity

Browning's answer is group conformity. This is not the same as obedience to authority : rather, the men carried out their orders out of the expectation that everyone else would too. This was a government-approved, legitimate action, so while they might not have believed it to be a good thing (certainly few were ever enthusiastic about it), they did accept that it was necessary. Just as in Milgram's shock experiments, the most successful encouragement to action was not in emphasising that the order was given, but that the action was necessary and beneficial to society.

Browning does a better disection of Milgram's findings than Bregman here (see previous post), acknowledging the differences between the situations. He notes that Major Trapp was a somewhat weak authority figure but invoked the "anything but weak" authority of the Nazi government, and respected by the men. He seems to have been genuinely sympathetic to the men's obvious disturbance at the prospect of their horrifying task, which may have made them respect him more, not less. That they knew they had a get-out option may, ironically, have helped many of them to overcome their discomfort. It wasn't so much fear of being shamed by the group that may have been the crucial factor in compliance, but in the fear that by not doing their fair share of this grisly task, they would be letting their friends down.

The battalion had orders to kill Jews, but each individual did not. Yet 80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them – at least initially – were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behaviour, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot.

Why ? First of all, by breaking ranks, nonshooters were leaving the "dirty work" to their comrades. Since the battalion had to shoot even if individuals did not, refusing to shoot constituted refusing one's share of an unpleasant collective obligation. It was in effect an asocial act vis-à-vis one's comrades. Those who did not shoot risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism – a very uncomfortable prospect within the tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population.

For this reason those who objected did so almost entirely on the grounds of "weakness", not moral principles. Weakness, it seems, is excusable, but moral objection meant open defiance of the group. Anti-Semitism and widespread cultural notions of German superiority, of what it meant to be a good citizen, definitely played a role here, even if only a second-order effect. Defying orders wasn't a problem so much out because of the disobedience itself, but because you'd be going against cultural norms. Conversely by obeying these terrible orders, you would, so the perverted reasoning goes, actually be helping your fellow men and wider society.

This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.

Conclusions 

Perhaps the most disturbing implication of Ordinary Men is not that racism leads to genocide, but that genocide can be perpetrated by those with no great ideological commitments. Yes, it took extreme racism coupled with hatred and a particular kind of evil intelligence for the "desk murderers" to formulate their policy. These men were diabolically evil. The brand of extreme malevolence that ran wild with the Nazi faithful is, fortunately, rare, and to couple this with the analytic intelligence needed to implement its insane policy in a workable, coherent way is rarer still. But the same simply cannot be said of those who actually pulled the triggers. Their motivations were altogether both more subtle and more common.

Circumstance, I think, appears to be very heavily dominant in human behaviour. Whether raising awareness of this helps us to make better choices, to be less swayed by group behaviour which goes against our own moral principles, remains poorly unanswered. Balancing the strengths of our collectivist and individualist tendencies against their respective deficiencies is a formidable challenge, and until we solve this most subtle of problems, I think we will remain forever haunted by the threat of hatred, war, and genocide. 

Review : Human Kind

I suppose I really should review Bregman's Human Kind : A Hopeful History, though I'm not sure I want to. This was a deeply frustrating read when at various times I wanted to grab Bregman by the shoulders, give him a good hard shake and scream "Not like that, you fool !" and at other times I just wanted to tell him to sod off for being a twat. It ranks among the most idiotic things I've ever read.

In terms of a book it reminds me very much of Planta Sapiens : it's highly, pro-actively defensive to the point of often saying very little. It isn't quite as bad as that one (it at least presents a great deal of evidence) but it wastes a lot of time saying how much the author has been derided for ideas instead of actually making claims, and after a little while one has to wonder that if everyone hates it, maybe it's just stupid. After all, if everyone around you is an arse, maybe you're the arse.

The annoying thing is that I liked his previous book Utopia For Realists very much. I did find it a bit breathless though, so this time I forced myself to slow down a little and try more actively to critique things as I went along. But I think I needn't have worried. While there are some genuinely insightful bits here and there, most of this is pop psychology I knew anyway, with the conclusions painted with a brush so broad you could fly a plane through them and so rabidly, uncritically ideologically driven that.... sigh. I despair. I suspect the author is really just another Suella Braverman or Lee Anderson, on the other side of the fence to be sure, but utterly lacking in self-awareness. 

In terms of writing, as with UFR it's highly readable, although towards the end the short, impactful statements become over-used and extremely irritating. Other than that it's only the content which lets it down : it's an eminently readable bit of absolute tripe. Whereas UFR was a persuasive appeal but backed by a pretty solid analysis, this one is much more of a straightforward polemic.

Here's a very brief TLDR summary :

The central claim is that humans are, basically, when you get right down to it, fundamentally good. They want to be nice to each other unless they themselves are ill-treated by others, and it's civilisation that's the main reason this happens. We were all much happier as chillaxing apes in the jungle living our best, anarcho-communist-hippie lifestyles. I swear to goodness that I am not exaggerating this at all – this is literally what he claims.

The main strength of the the work is in writing popular summaries of individual incidents. He's genuinely very good at this. Give him something specific to tackle and he does a good job of analysing it in a decently-critical way, looking at things from different perspectives to see if there was any missing data or confounding facts. He even does include some examples which run counter to his main conclusion, and tried quite sincerely to account for them, toning down his conclusion in response. Few authors with an axe to grind ever do this, so kudos to him for that.

The principle weakness is in drawing wider conclusions. At this he's shite. Absolutely shite. Here his critical thinking skills abandon him like rats leaving a sinking ship, which does, in fact, sink. He totally and utterly fails to consider any alternative hypotheses whatsoever and drones on and on about how he must be right because nobody believes him. At times, he reaches an almost Liz Truss level of lack of self-awareness. His conclusions simply don't make any sense and he can't accept any of the (often fairly obvious) counter-arguments. He's driven here by pure ideology and nothing else.

If you just want to know if you should leave it on the shelf, you can stop here (if I have to rate it, I give it a dismal 3/10). For those who want a bit more depth, let us continue.

The Good

Credit where credit is due, Bregman does have some good points to make. For example, he covers the famous Prison Experiment quite well and reinforces (as I already knew) that it was a literal fraud. I also knew about the bystander effect being something of a fallacy, but Bregman's debunking is especially thorough and convincing. In particular he digs into the details of the famous case of Kitty Genovese, supposedly left to die by 38 eye-witnesses and finds that nothing of the sort took place : of those 38, only two actually saw anything. One of those was a racist and the other a homosexual (this was the 1960s) drunk and worried about contacting the police.

What's less widely reported, and was news to me, was that the famous Robber's Cave experiment was also little better than any of these misconstrued and misreported incidents. In this experiment a summer camp of two "tribes" of children were contrived to fight each other and then unified by a common enemy. But Bregman digs into the research and finds that all the hyper-competitive games the children played were chosen for them by the experimenter, with any spontaneous attempts at cooperation (of which there were many) immediately suppressed. It's hardly the compelling proof of how naturally vicious tribalism develops that it's so often been portrayed to be. And the experimenter had actually tried the same thing a previous year, which hadn't worked : the assistants didn't like it, the children didn't like it, and ultimately realised they were being manipulated so the whole thing was called off.

Probably Bregman's best point concerns the famous electro-shock experiments of Stanley Milgram. He notes that only half the participants actually believed they were inflicting electrical shocks on the supposed victim, and most of those who believed it was a setup (as of course it was) refused to continue. Milgram himself, in private at least, expressed some pretty strong doubts about the validity of the experiment. And in fact excessive pressure by the experimenter for the subjects to keep going actually had the opposite effect : the stronger the pressure, the more likely they were to stop. This hardly fits the common "we're all slaves to authority" take-home message that the experiment is so often associated with. 

To his great credit, however, Bregman admits that still, many people did simply continue with the experiment and these results have been replicated many times. There is an aspect of obedience to authority, sort-of, but I'll get back to that later. Elsewhere he concedes that other experiments do show an innate tribalism, or at least that it's relatively easy to induce – though not nearly so much as the Prison Experiment and Robber's Cave would suggest. You can't make ordinary people into villains that easily, or so he claims.

Finally, he makes the important point that that humans' main cognitive strength is in social learning. There are few true geniuses, but once someone figures out a solution, we're very good at copying them. Tribalism has its weaknesses but this can be a tremendous strength : what requires genius to figure out for the first time can become commonly utilised by almost everyone.

The Bad

Unfortunately the 500-odd words in the above claims really are the sum total of the best bits of a 400 page book. All the rest, apart from a handful of trivialities here and there, is considerably worse. Let's start with the assertions he makes which are straightforwardly wrong or absolutely unprovable.

One thing that Bregman keeps coming back to is that nomads are all lovely people. They would "rather talk out their problems or just move on", he says, and they're "constantly getting together to party". They also "got plenty of exercise". For thousands of years they kept clear of conflicts, and "the chiefs of nomadic tribes were all modesty."

FFS. Anyone who knows anything about the fall of the Roman Empire or the Great Wall of China will be immediately screaming : MONGOLS ! HUNS ! XIONGNU ! ALANS ! VISIGOTHS ! SCYTHIANS ! And literally hordes of others besides. Bregman's idea of the hippie nomadic lifestyles is cherry-picking run amok. The Mongols alone had the second largest empire the world has ever seen. Tamerlame was famous for grinding cities into dust, sowing fields of barley among the ruins and building towers of skulls out of the victims. They. Were. Not. Nice.

To blatantly ignore all of these very famous examples (none of the above are ever mentioned) is pretty insulting to one's intelligence. Furthermore, he insists that nomads manage to do this despite having large social networks far exceeding the monkeysphere, thus supposedly questioning how many people we can associate with before we dehumanise them. The problem is that this ignores the obvious point that they probably didn't know all of their sometime friends all at once.

It's true that evidence for ancient warfare is sparse. War may well have had a beginning, but Bregman is reaching here : plenty of other animals do get into conflict with each other, so quite possibly it's always been with us. Especially given the difficulty of obtaining evidence. Even some of the more recent battlefields don't leave much in the way of archaeological traces; plenty of well-documented Roman battles have never been found at all (neither for that matter have entire cities). Couple this insistence that humans are "simply not wired for war" with the rabid belief in perfectly peaceful nomads (!) and things start to get downright silly. It's just daft. War keeps happening, over and over and over again. His denials of this seem to be based on the flimsiest of evidence, that sometimes the soldiers wanted to stop fighting. Well of course they fucking did you twit. Anyone who's ever watched the news will be able to tell you instantly that this in no way diminishes human propensity for warfare.

Perhaps worse, he simply states without any justification that early hunter-gathers were likely "proto feminists" for some reason. Well, that's entirely possible, but without explaining how we know this it's a vacuously stupid statement. With similarly little justification, Bregman claims that the Enlightenment invented racism. I mean, sure, Enlightenment values can absolutely be questioned. But this is a garbage claim with no merit to it. It's incredibly, deeply frustrating to reduce deep and complex issues to absurdly over-simplified barely coherent nonsense, especially coming from someone who is clearly capable of careful and critical thinking.

Finally, some modern stuff. I don't really disagree with the idea that we should prefer intrinsic motivation to trying to give people rewards as motivation : as long as we're paid fairly, a whopping great big bonus is more of an incentive to greed than to doing a good job. But the idea that teachers give bad grades as a punishment to children is deeply offensive. I would never do that. My mum would never do that. None of the schoolteachers I've ever met would ever do that, not would any of the lecturers. It's a moronic, throwaway claim that insults an entire and extremely valuable profession for no reason whatever.

And for crying out loud... the idea that the government will violently assault us if we give up our desk jobs (sorry, "cages", as Bregman calls offices)... dude, what are you even talking about. This is the kind of uber-cynical, ultra-naïve meme-based protest politics that is such a big problem on the internet. It is not the slightest bit worthy of a published book, even if intended as hyperbole. Even weirder, and far less excusable as rhetoric, is that Bregman appears to be genuinely against the idea of political checks and balances. This is mad. Properly mad, to the point I have to start seriously wondering if the guy is feeling okay.

The Ugly

By far the biggest problem, however, are the weird claims. The ones that are a mixture of truths, half-truths, mistakes, incomplete data, and wild speculation; likewise ones where a conclusion that's perfectly valid for a specific case is deemed without proper consideration to apply to the whole of human society in perpetuity.

Bregman begins the book with a summary of the failure of strategic bombing in WWII to have the devastating affects on morale that both respective sides hoped they would inflict. But much like this article on the myth of panic, it's ill thought-through. Yes, true, it didn't lead to nationwide calls to end the war, or simply make everyone too depressed or panic-stricken to fight. Fair enough, that's a good point and worth making, especially since it was true of both sides. But both authors view the effects not so much as simply "not as depressing as expected", which is perfectly respectable, but "actually good".

'Scuse me ? So you'd... want to live in a war zone then, would you ? What's that ? Didn't quite catch it. Oh, you wouldn't want to live there ! No, I thought not.

There's a subtlety here that both of them seem to miss, and it's nothing terribly complicated. Surely, having a foreign nation bomb your cities will make you hate the enemy, and cause most people to band together in a state of nationalistic fervour against the oppressor, but that doesn't mean it makes them fundamentally happy. They don't enjoy watching their loved ones get blown to bits. They don't actually like making do with mediocre and minimal food, poor shelter, lack of power... good lord man, just because it makes them more determined to fight back doesn't for a moment mean that they actually want to live like that. Honestly, this isn't difficult*. 

* See Lucy Worsley's excellent documentary Blitz Spirit for a more detailed analysis, which unarguably shows that actually yes, the bombing did induce a measure of panic amongst the population, if still not anywhere near breaking national morale. She also makes very good points about how much the government controlled the flow of information.

One of the most serious aspects of the book is also the most deeply frustrating. Bregman notes at various points the reluctance of soldiers to fire on the enemy, claiming that contact reduces conflict and distance causes hate. I appreciate the sentiment; I've heard others make the same claims. And it's definitely a very interesting conundrum. The problem is that Bregman hasn't read Ordinary Men (which I plan to review properly in the next post). This is an incredibly powerful counter-example in which ordinary German policeman rounded up Jews in WWII and shot them at point-blank range with high powered rifles. These weren't indoctrinated fanatics or even soldiers – they were normal, mostly educated, middle-aged policeman who, except for this one ghastly moment of horror beyond horror, would live completely unremarkable lives.

But when the moment claim, they did as they were told : they rounded up the Jews, shot them in the street and left them there, rammed others onto overcrowded trains were hundreds died of sheer heat, and took others into the forest and shot them in the head. These weren't clean kills. It was gruesome in the extreme, and they did this not because they even wanted to, or because of consequences if they refused (which were negligible). No, they did it largely out of simple group conformity, and with precious little in the way of any serious reluctance.

This is very different from simple obedience to authority. To be fair, Bregman understands this, stressing that Nazi soldiers fought out of a sense not of ideology but of group camaraderie, something lacking from the one-on-one experiments of Milgram (though, interestingly, those who did continue to inflict shocks were often persuaded by the value of the research to the community). The problem is, that since he also acknowledges that tribalism and racism are easy to induce, this would seem to render his whole project a colossal waste of time. If you concede that it's actually quite easy to transform ordinary people into a bunch of bloodthirsty killers, you have conceded everything. Maintaining that humans are basically nice in spite of this is as mad a claim as anything I've ever heard.

On a related note, Bregman notes that empathy can be a key part of racism in binding us together with people who seem to be like us. This is something Paul Bloom, who he cites, has examined in some detail. I'm still not convinced by this (though Bloom's arguments are intelligent and lucid), but Bregman does himself no favours by immediately claiming in the very next chapter that empathy is central to compassion – with no reference to the previous claims that it's an essential part of racism !

Finally, there are the wild extrapolations. Okay, Bregman likes Agora/Montessori schools, but doesn't offer any evidence at all that these less structured methods actually result in cleverer or nicer people : he just takes it for granted that they do. Then there's the claim that private property is the root of all evil, based on the deeply absurd claim that peaceful nomads became warlike settled peoples only when they decided that they could own things (likewise the idea that farming led to...wait for it... bestiality). That's so stupid I don't know where to start, so I won't. And then there's the part where he advocates for full-on literal Communism, cherry-picking all the times it actually worked out quite well while happily ignoring the much more famous examples where it really, really didn't.

The idea that we were built to "chill out", though, (but racism comes naturally when we live together) ... that's the heart of it. I mean, sure, there's far more to life than material concerns, but it's fucking stupid to pretend they don't matter at all. And there's something much more fundamental here that Bregman simply cannot understand. He insists we must have some base, primal, instinctive nature, and that culture only obscures and corrupts it. He cannot consider the possibility that, in spite of understanding our deeply social nature, maybe being social is our nature. That maybe we simply don't have any innate higher-level tendencies, any more than we are hard-wired to play the flute or build cathode-ray tubes. He's caught in a trap of his own making.

Summary : A Hopeless History

Bregman falls into his principle error fairly early on. He gives a nice overview of Rosseau and Hobbes – Rosseau depicted mankind as being fundamentally good and it was only ever that pesky veneer of "civilization" that led us all astray, whereas Hobbes viewed as all as naturally in a state of "war against all", and only a powerful ruler could save us from ourselves. While Bregman does sometimes consider nuanced versions of this, for example acknowledging that sometimes tribal peoples commit violence (and I think trying earnestly to keep everything consistent), he utterly fails to consider the underlying premise. The lack of any discussion whatever about feral children is, in a book about our innate nature, a criminally silly omission.

His sometimes astonishing lack of self-awareness betrays him. Having examined many theories very carefully and critically, he'll sometimes go off on one about something absolutely silly and irrelevant, like a bizarre connection between sin and the nature of eyes. Worse, having acutely demonstrated the errors of previous experiments and their conclusions, he has an unshakeable "we've got it right this time" attitude which does him no credit. Nobody reading this long and well-compiled series of different mistakes and interpretations ought to go away with anything like this much self-belief. The right response to this series of changing conclusions isn't to be crippled with doubt, but it damn well demands a measure of caution, a careful tempering of findings and a willing acceptance that they must be provisional.

And this whole notion that we lived in a sort of blissful paradise until about 1800, that 95% of human history was quite lovely until only very recently... this is so palpably silly that I don't have adequate words to express just how daft the whole thing is. I mean, okay, you like the hunter-gatherer tribal people lifestyle, eh ? Well, go and live in the jungle then. No, seriously, off you pop. Oh, you actually quite like living in a solid house and not having to deal with innumerable dangers and diseases ? You'd love to go but you won't be able to charge your laptop in the jungle ? Oh deary deary me, what a terrible shame that must be. 

Idiot. It takes some seriously next-level weirdness to conclude that mankind would be happiest if we all lived in the jungle with other people lobbing high explosives at us all day, but that's literally what Bregman is claiming. It's the old "noble savage" fallacy but supercharged to the nth degree.

The thing that's most stuck in my head from the whole book is a diagram Bregman reproduces from a psychology review paper. This compares the evolution of wolves to dogs with early hominids to modern humans. The more I've let this one mull over, the more I've concluded that it's practically a modern version of phrenology : claiming that big eyes and small brow ridges are a mark of friendliness, and that the opposite traits are clearly indicative of nasty, brutish attitudes. We are, Bregman says, Homo Puppy, whereas the Neanderthals clearly weren't.

Righto then. The claim is essentially that early, ugly humans were beastly thugs, whereas modern ones are clearly much better-looking and lovely. To my mind this is very, very racist, a prospect which never seems to even occur to Bregman.

Yet Homo Puppy is deeply flawed concept. The big problem here, the root problem, is that he's determined to find the earliest humans who lived in a "state of nature". This in my view is a nonsense idea. I say instead not that there is no such thing as society, but rather no such thing as a natural society. There is no one right way in which we're supposed to live, any one way in which we're meant to be. We are far, far more adaptable and malleable than that. If we have a base nature it's that we're governed by our circumstances : our resources and culture alike. 

It's not that there's no such thing as society, as that ghastly witch Maggie claimed, but that we are society. This I will develop more in a couple of posts time. For now, I'll just say that I'll never read anything by Bregman ever again, because he's clearly a complete pillock.

EDIT : I decided to give this one the PotC treatment, and you can read my expanded conclusions here.