6th
The Bell Jar
There seems to be two ways to explore the literary world with any sense of true enjoyment. The first is to find an author that is like oneself and to discover yourself in their works. The second is to find a person that is like oneself and to discover yourself in their adulations, consolations, and eulogies. Anything else and you’re not reading for yourself but for someone else: a teacher’s commandments, a career’s demands, cocktail conversations and girls at bars.
That is not to degrade this second form of reading. A life practically lived has its own rewards for the liver (adianoeta!) as well as his friends and relatives: jobs created, cars maintained, families supported. In comparison, a life of literary enjoyment seems almost selfish: nights of brooding, contemplation, red wine and abusive thoughts. Demands on others’ time, patience, and sanity. All for the sake of a richer, more vivid personal experience.
And yet, we, as a society, celebrate the latter. We celebrate the young poet, the starving (adianoeta again!) artist, the depressive-manic playwright. It’s romantic and cheap and raises an important question: why?
In an economic sense, culture is a public good. We all participate in its consumption and my enjoyment of Harry Potter takes away nothing from your enjoyment, unless I am one of the pricks screaming “Snape killed Dumbledore” at release parties. Given that, it would seem the rational thing to do is to convince someone else to produce culture while sitting back and reaping the benefits of yet another vampire masterpiece coming down the publishing tubes.
But if we were all rational about it, vampire novels indeed would be the only things coming down the publishing tube. The only cultural artifacts being produced would be the ones worth the money to produce. Entertainment and short sentences. Sex and violence. And yet, many twentysomethings seem wired to seek out hard culture careers.
This highlights the inherent conflict between genes, memes, and us as individuals. Evolution is frequently misunderstood in the details: the imperative “survive of the fittest” gives no indication of context. To an average adult, this context is supposed to be the individual. The fittest individuals survive to procreate: a species becomes adapted to its environment.
Just as the fable of Copernicus and the church teaches, we are predisposed to believe that we are the center of the universe. It is in fact our genes that are the essential competitors in this story. They move across generations and replicate themselves to survive. Our mortal bodies serve only as their transient vehicles.
The mistake is easy to forgive. In most cases, our genes and ourselves share the same goals and incentives: when we live and produce offspring, they also live and replicate. But sometimes we diverge: genes do what is best for themselves, not us.
In one case, t genes in mice have a 95% precedence rate (compared to the normal 50%) and is fatal if dominant. Needless to say, mice populations introduced to the t gene quickly die off. But not before the gene, in every generation, manages to replicate itself like wildfire.
One of the most interesting advances in recent years is the use of memes to explain cultural artifacts and individual choice. Dawkins postulated that the process of evolution applied to any phenomena with variation, fitness, and replication. Our own thoughts and ideas fit these criteria: we inherit a certain set of norms (culture) from our environs, form our own opinions (variation), and spread them to others (fitness, replication).
And like the almighty gene, the intuitive approach of believing ourselves the center-point of this replication process is flawed. Again, we serve as mere vehicles: we inherit, mutate, and spread memes. If anything, our individual goals are even more grossly misaligned with these cultural units.
A simple example would be to bring up the meme of celibacy. But given its irrelevance to most people, a more salient example can be found in Powdthavee (2009): in one longitudinal study, mothers had their happiness measured over the course of their lives. It was found that their joie de vivre reached a nadir shortly after childbirth and did not return to pre-child levels until after the child left for college.
One thus wonders why remaining childless ranks somewhere above dying completely alone but below using the last piece of toilet paper on the social acceptance scale. Well, how well would a society advocating blissful childfree marriages do?
So now back to the writer and reader. When Franzen in How to Be Alone guesses that writers write and readers read to preserve a community of like-minded folk, a community where “nothing in the world seems simple to them,” perhaps he is all too right. Perhaps they are preserving a community, a shared culture, a powerful idea. And perhaps that shared culture is the reason why nothing in the world seems simple to them.
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.
