Chris Beckett's Blog, page 12

Population

I saw this post some months ago and saved it because it jarred and I wanted to write about it.  It’s a review by Abigail Nussbaum of the movie Avengers: Infinity war, and I came across it on Twitter because someone posted it as an instance of a really good review.  I daresay it is a good review.  I’ve never seen the movie and almost certainly never will, so I can’t comment, but what troubled me was the following paragraph:

It should go without saying that Thanos’s
overpopulation bugbear and his proposed solution for it are hideous
claptrap.  Reducing a population by half, whether through violence as
Thanos used to do, or by making people simply disappear as he wants to do with
the Infinity Stones, would result in immediate economic and industrial collapse,
and therefore mass starvation and most likely war.  It should go
without saying, but because Hollywood continues to linger in the grip of
Malthusianism decades after the rest of the world saw it for the racist
nonsense that it is…

As I say, I haven’t seen the movie and don’t know who Thanos is (though with a name like that I can tell he must be VERY BAD), and it sounds as if he is proposing genocide which is clearly VERY VERY BAD INDEED.  No dispute there!  But, unless I’ve completely misunderstood her, what the reviewer seems to saying (and she’s not the only one I’ve heard say it) is that the very idea that overpopulation is a problem is itself part of the ‘hideous claptrap’ which everyone but Hollywood has seen as ‘the racist nonsense it is’.

Hideous
claptrap?  Really? 

I’m 63.  I’m living on a planet whose population is over seven and a half billion, which is three times what it was when I was born.  It’s a planet in the middle of one of the great mass extinction events of its history, a planet where the biomass of human domestic animals is now greater than that of all other animals of similar size, a planet where human activity has destabilised the climate itself and is threatening to acidify the ocean to a point that marine animals with shells may not be able to survive.  I find it hard to imagine being inside a head that not see the sheer number of human beings on Earth as being one of the factors responsible for this crisis.

It’s true that population is not on its own a reliable indicator of the human impact on the rest of the planet, because the impact of any one human being is dependent on his or her behaviour.  If we eat meat and diary products, for instance, we have a much greater impact than if we are vegan, because meat and milk production are, in nutritional terms, far less efficient uses of land than growing edible plants, meaning that much more land is needed to feed a meat or cheese eater than to feed a vegan.  In the same way, if we drive a car and use aeroplanes, we will have a much greater impact than if we only walk or use a bicycle.  And if we have a centrally heated house with a TV, a fridge and a washing machine, our impact will be much greater than if we live in a hut and don’t use electric power at all (although it must be said that, even if we rely entirely on firewood for heat and light, that can still have a considerable impact.)  

The idea that being concerned about population is ‘racist’ originates, as I understand it, from a time when people in wealthy countries expressed concern about the rapidly growing populations in developing countries without acknowledging that their own extravagant patterns of consumption were at least as much of a problem.  I get that. But it would be pretty poor logic to take from that the idea that concern about overpopulation was necessarily racist per se.  That isn’t even an argument.  It’s just a way of shutting down discussion.

The fact
is that all human behaviour impacts on the environment and the impact of any
given human behaviour has to be multiplied by the number of people on the
planet who behave in that way.   A
billion people driving cars X number of miles per year generates a billion
times the amount of carbon dioxide as one person driving a car X miles per
year.  A billion people cutting down
forest to grow vegetables will need a billion times as much forest as one
person.  Etcetera, etcetera. So, yes, population
is only part of the story, but it is an indispensable part nevertheless.  Say the human race were collectively to
change its behaviour in such a way as to reduce the impact of every person on
the planet by 50%.  The population only
has to double for all the benefit of that change to be lost.

Which
takes me to the second charge made (and not only in this particular film review
by any means) against the idea that overpopulation is a problem.  Not only is it racist, but it is Malthusian. 

The implied
argument goes something like this:  We
know that Malthus was concerned about human population, right?  We know that his predictions were wrong.  We also know that some of what he said was
pretty obnoxious.  QED being concerned
about overpopulation is ‘Malthusian’ and therefore both wrong and obnoxious.  Right?

Wrong!  That’s not a logical argument at all.  We are not living in the age of
scholasticism, and arguments do not stand or fall on the authority of whatever famous
name happens to have become associated with them.  Calling someone a ‘Malthusian’ for being
concerned about overpopulation, is just another way of shutting down debate.

I’ve
already pointed out that the impact of any human behaviour on the planet is,
and must be, related, not only to the nature of that behaviour but to the
number of people who behave that way. 
Building cities, clearing forests, scooping fish out of the sea,
discarding waste: whatever the behaviour is, it will have more of an impact on
the world, the more people there are who do it. 
This seems to me obvious.  And it
seems obvious too (and indeed uncontrovertible) that however much the human
population increases, the surface area of the planet remains unchanged, so that,
for any given pattern of human behaviour, there must be a physical limit to how
many people the planet is able to support.

To
dismiss this as ‘racist’ or ‘Malthusian’ feels to me like an exercise in
denial.  

Sons of Eden

Published as a chapbook as part of my guest of honour contribution for Novacon 48, in Nottingham.

Scene from the planet Eden: David A Hardy’s cover illustration for Sons of Eden.

New interview with GJ Stevens

New interview here with Gareth Stevens.  Includes my tips for would-be writers.

Interview with Robin Shantz

New podcast interview here with Robin Shantz aka Bloginhood.

Beneath the World, a Sea

My seventh novel, due out in April 2019.

Memories of a Table

Included in the collection 2001: an Odyssey in Words, edited by Ian Whates and Tom Hunter, published by Newcon Press, July 2018.

The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater

If I were to describe this book as superficial (which I would) the author should perhaps be pleased, for he sets out specifically to show that the mind contains no hidden depths.

Nick Chater starts with visual perception and he shows that we actually see much less than we think we see.  This is something that’s struck me before.  For example, focus on an object in front of you, a mug for instance, and then, without moving your eyes, notice how little else you can see while you remain looking at the mug.  You’ll find that, even in the immediate vicinity of the mug, your visual field is a blur. (Apparently if you get someone to read a page of text on a screen, and change all the words except the one they ones they are looking straight at into nothing but xxxx’s, they won’t notice the difference!)  Something I didn’t know until I read this book is that the blurred forms you see at the edge of your field of vision aren’t even in colour.  (I tested this myself and it’s true!).

This is all fascinating stuff (and I  enjoyed reading about it), but I take issue with the author when he asserts that our impression of seeing the whole world in front of us is an ‘illusion’ (the Grand Illusion as he calls it), and even more so when he calls it ‘fake’ or a ‘hoax’.  Our perceptual apparatus isn’t just presenting us with the raw sensory data, that’s true, because that would be pointless, and its job is to assemble fragments into a stable and coherent sense of where we are.  But why on earth call the result a hoax?   A radar screen shows incoming planes in the vicinity as blips.  These are refreshed with each new sweep of the continuously revolving antenna and in fact the antenna is only detecting some of those planes at any one moment.  But does this mean it’s just a hoax that says those blips show the positions of all the planes in the vicinity?  Of course not.  It’s an approximation perhaps, but that’s not the same thing as an illusion at all, and it’s an accurate enough approximation for air traffic controllers to safely manage incoming planes at busy airports, day in day out, for months and years on end.

Having discussed perception, Chater then goes on to talk about cognition.  Just as experiments on perception show that we see much less at any given moment than we might think, so too are our thoughts much more circumscribed than we might think and, at any one time, we can only pay attention to a very limited number of mental tasks.  I can drive and sing.  On a clear straight road, I can drive and list prime numbers (I tried it out recently).  But I can’t drive, sing, and list prime numbers all at once.   In fact, Chater suggests, our sense of a rich mental life with many layers is a hoax, just like the illusion that we can see a rich detailed exterior world.  ‘Our thoughts are not shadows of an alternative inner reality to be charted and discovered; they are fictions of our own devising, created moment by moment.’  Even emotions, it seems, are ‘just fiction too.’

But hang on.  There is a rich external world out there, that’s not disputed.  So, insofar as there’s an illusion going on perceptually, it is that we imagine ourselves to be taking in that world whole and all at once, whereas in reality we’re forming a (pretty serviceable) impression of it a little bit at a time.  And surely the same is true of our inner life?   The fact that I am not thinking lovingly of my children at this exact moment in time, doesn’t mean that it’s just an illusion that I love my children, any more than the fact that I’m concentrating on my computer screen just now doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a garden through the open glass door to my right.

The funny thing about all this –and Chater does acknowledge this himself- is that, in order to dismiss depth, he has to introduce an incredibly powerful unconscious mechanism.  He aruges that our sense of having a coherent self is an illusion that is being constructed for us in the moment by this powerful unconscious process so that, while we imagine that we are drawing on some inner self,  in fact ‘we are quite literally making up our minds, one thought at a time’.    So, in other words,  the illusion that our thoughts come from something complicated inside us is an illusion being created for us by… well… something complicated inside us!

He doesn’t have very much to say about how this mechanism works -the book concludes with a slightly hand-wavy paeon to human imagination- but clearly it must draw on memories of previous experiences .  It follows, surely, that this very powerful and complex unconscious process is actually not just making up our minds for us out of the blue but is rather surveying the relevant parts of our vast store of knowledge and experience, much in the same way as when we are walking down a road, our perceptual apparatus surveys the relevant parts of the external world.

Et voilà!  Depth is back again with a different name.  (Chater himself speaks of ‘an ever-richer web of connections across our mental surface’.)  It is a vast and complex inner landscape, but one which (as probably few of us are surprised to learn), we cannot see in its entirety all at once.

*  *  *

One thing that strikes me about this book is that, while it describes as an ‘illusion’ or a ‘fake’, impressions of the world assembled by the sensory system from fragments, it is happy to present a version of the world that is also assembled from fragments, in this case controlled psychology experiments.  Not only do these experiments (fascinating as some of them really are) constitute discrete and pretty miniscule glimpses into the nature of the human mind, but the interpretations placed on them seem extremely questionable.

For instance, he describes a series of experiments in which people make different choices depending on how the same options are presented to them, and suggests that this demonstrates that ‘preformed beliefs, desires, motives, attitudes to risk lurking in our hidden inner depths are a fiction’.  There’s ‘no point wondering,’ he says, ‘which way of asking the question…  will tell us what people really want… not because our mental motives, desires and preferences are impenetrable, but because they don’t exist.’    These are extraordinary bold claims to make on the basis of a few experiments in which people are offered some rather artificial choices.  And it seems to me that a much simpler explanation of the findings of the experiments is that people have competing wants (for example, a desire to make money, versus a desire to avoid risk), and that, depending on how questions are put to them, different wants come to the fore.

*   *   *

So much of what we think we know about the world is shaped by the paradigm through which we choose to view it.  The Freudian approach (which, with some justice, Chater disapproves of) involved getting people to lie down on couches and ramble .  Not surprisingly, it generated an elaborate and convoluted model of the human mind.  The experimental approach which Chater favours involves highly controlled experiments in which a single variable is manipulated, and some other very specific variable is then measured.   There are many advantages of such an approach but, since it quite deliberately excludes almost all of the multidimensional complexity of the thing being studied, I don’t find it suprising that it results in the impression of flatness.

Novacon

I’m feeling very chuffed and… well… honoured, to be the Guest of Honour at this year’s Novacon in Nottingham.  More details here.  It runs from 9th-11th Nov.

New Covers

It’s a cliche that you can’t judge a book by its cover but in my experience, the cover can make quite a difference to the whole reading experience.  So I’m really delighted that Corvus have decided to re-release the first four novels of mine they published, in these really beautiful new covers by Richard Evans.

Here are the three Eden books:

And here is my first novel, The Holy Machine, which has already had several very different cover designs:

America City in paperback

Advance copies of the paperback version of America City, with its new cover.  It will be out on Sept 6th, and can be preordered now.