crytical

Where Did The Decadent Novel Go?

Photograph: Roger Viollet/Getty Images
“What has happened to the great tradition of the decadent novel?” Lee Brackstone asks in a recent blog for Faber, bemoaning the dominance of realism and naturalism in contemporary fiction. Although he finds the decadent spirit alive and well in DBC Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland, his question still holds: Pierre aside, can it really be that the grand heritage of the fin de siecle writers has been so short-lived, especially when their arch, satirical mode is needed now more than ever?
Decadence has its roots in texts such as Petronius’s Satyricon, which date from as far back as the fall of the Roman empire. But the movement was picked up centuries later by the outlandish perversity of De Sade, Thomas De Quincey‘s opium-induced chimeras, the Romantics’ cult of the individual and the Gothic morbidity of Poe, before finding its apogee in late 19th-century France and England, particularly in the writing of Baudelaire, Huysmans and Wilde. The defining work of this period is Huysmans’s Against Nature, famously thought to be the “poisonous French novel” referred to in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Toby Litt notes that its protagonist, Des Esseintes, a man whose life is given over entirely to the pursuit of sensual pleasures, is “more likely to attract one when one is an adolescent”; certainly as a teenager I found it hard not to love decadent literature, with its emphasis on artifice, deliberate perverseness, art-for-art’s sake, sensuality and degeneration. All of this, couched in frequently beautiful and sometimes frankly purple language, was heady indeed: a shot of absinthe courtesy of literature’s Green Fairy.
A century on, though, and where does its legacy lie? I know I’m not alone in my enthusiasm for those bejewelled, subversive, gloriously unhealthy texts. The wider culture is awash with artists inspired by them: Marc Almond, Pete Doherty, Baz Luhrman, Pedro Almodóvar and the Chapman brothers to name just a few. Casting around for an equivalent literary line of succession, however, proves more problematic.
One might usefully consider the influence of the fin de siecle writers separately in terms of style and content. There is of course a very visible tradition of the portrayal of “decadent” lifestyles in books, taking in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin denizens, William Burroughs’s junkies and Irvine Welsh’s, well, junkies, as well as the addicts portrayed more recently by Tony O’Neill and Richard Milward. But, Burroughs aside, the tendency here has been towards a rather unadorned prose style; a kitchen sink, tell-it-how-it-is evocation of lives shattered by deviant practices. What of the baroque, mannered, self-consciously literary style of Baudelaire and Wilde? The official line is that this was distilled into symbolism, via poets such as Lautréamont, whose oblique, beautifully cadenced verses inspired TS Eliot, among others. Symbolism was also important in the work of Jean Genet, whose poetic evocation of sexual outlaws in Our Lady of the Flowers fairly reeks with the heady perfume of decadence.
Until DBC Pierre, this sort of writing has been eschewed by many for a more workmanlike prose: the bricks and mortar of realism. Wonderland, though, gives us sentences as declamatory and bathetic as “our Empire of Shopping is in its last twitching throes. Bye-bye free markets, farewell terms and conditions, ciao bogus laughter, he he, whoop, wa-hey. The last revellers are the dregs we see at any free event, now vomiting wine.” This is not measured, careful prose, it is bold, messy bravura; tightrope-writing.
And it is entirely appropriate. Throughout the book, Pierre explicitly aligns the decadence he describes with capitalism gone bad. It was ever thus: the artificiality espoused by the fin de siecle writers was in part a two-fingered salute to the urban artificiality engendered by the rise of industrialisation. Today, in an era of what Cyril Connolly would call “over civilisation” – celebrity culture, televised war, the rise and fall of credit, imploding banks – the language of decadence, self-conscious and maximalist, seems a more apposite discourse with which to portray reality than flat naturalism. Here and there, we sense it – it is alive in Will Self’s Liver and in the work of younger writers, such as Joe Stretch’s Friction. Hopefully, after Lights out in Wonderland, it will become common literary currency once more.
John Lucas in The Guardian

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
E.M. Cioran

Betsy Goodrich/U.S.D.A. Forest Service

GREAT BASIN NATIONAL PARK, Nev. — For millenniums, the twisted, wind-scoured bristlecone pines that grow at the roof of western North America have survived everything nature could throw at them, from bitter cold to lightning to increased solar radiation.
Living in extreme conditions about two miles above sea level, they have become the oldest trees on the planet. The oldest living bristlecone, named Methuselah, has lived more than 4,800 years.
Now, however, scientists say these ancient trees may soon meet their match in the form of a one-two punch, from white pine blister rust, an Asian fungus that came to the United States from Asia, via Europe, a century ago, and the native pine bark beetle, which is in the midst of a virulent outbreak bolstered by warming in the high-elevation West.
Blister rust is a new challenge to the pines. It spread to Europe from Asia in the 19th century and then was shipped unknowingly to the East and West Coasts of North America around the turn of the last century on nursery trees. Only now is it reaching the high-elevation bristlecone. Anna Schoettle, a Forest Service ecologist in Fort Collins, Colo., said, “Neither the bristlecones nor their ancestors have been faced with a disease like this, and they have not evolved tolerances.”
“So really we’re in uncharted territory,” she said.
Dr. Schoettle is leading research efforts on the threat to bristlecones and other species of five-needle pines, and strategies for sustaining them.
Blister rust is a slow-moving, slow-acting disease that appears as an orange patch on a tree. It could take many years or even decades for mature trees to succumb to the fungus. But there is little that can be done to stop its progress as it moves from one mountain range to another, as airborne spores. The spores land on gooseberries and currants, then move to attack any nearby five-needle pines, including limber and whitebark.
The rust enters a tree through the needles and moves into the twigs and branches and eventually arrives at the trunk, which it girdles and kills. Infected branches can be pruned, but that is not always effective. Scientists suspect warmer temperatures have helped the rust spread, but they do not have any evidence to show that this is the case. Pine bark beetles, on the other hand, are a fast killer.
And the pest and the disease working together are especially deadly. “Blister rust kills young trees rapidly,” Dr. Schoettle said. “The mountain pine beetle only kills the larger trees, but those are the trees that produce the seeds. So when you have a combination of blister rust and the beetle, that severely constrains recovery of the population.”
The long-term strategy that biologists are banking on to save the bristlecones from dying out completely is finding the few trees that are resistant to the fungus and growing their seeds into rust-resistant seedlings.
That is why Gretchen Baker, an ecologist here at Great Basin National Park, is collecting pine cones. The seeds will be sent to Dr. Schoettle’s lab, grown for a year or two and inoculated with blister rust. If they do not contract the fungus, other seeds from the same tree will be used to grow seedlings. The new resistant trees will be planted in bristlecone habitat. It is the same program being used for whitebark pines.
“For trees we collect cones from, we will be putting a pheromone patch on, so we can keep mountain pine beetles from attacking it,” Ms. Baker said. “Then if the tree has resistance we can collect additional pine cones.”
Still, everyone involved acknowledges that seedlings are a far cry from the wonder of a tree that was already ancient at the time of Jesus. “Bristlecones are one of the big draws here,” Ms. Baker said. “It would be a shame to see them go.”
The Wheeler Peak bristlecone pine grove here is one of the places Ms. Baker will gather cones. Like most bristlecones, those in this grove sit amid some of the world’s harshest conditions at timberline, adjacent to a field of giant boulders and a glacier. It is a forest of unusual, gnomish shapes, the trees spaced far apart, awash in brilliant desert light. The trees look almost dead, but that is a strategy to conserve energy. Only a small part of the tree keeps growing.
The oldest tree here is more than 3,000 years old. This grove was once home to the oldest known bristlecone, Prometheus, but in 1964, a graduate student named Donald Rusk Currey was studying tree ring data and got his drill bit stuck in the tree. He cut it down to fetch his tool. Later, when he counted the rings, he found the tree was at least 4,900 years old.
There are three species of bristlecones — the Great Basin, Foxtail and Rocky Mountain. All have prickly, immature cones, which prompted their common name. The Great Basin bristlecone forests grow on mountain summits in Nevada, California and Utah, and are the oldest.
Only the Rocky Mountain population has shown blister rust infection, though experts say it is only a matter of time before it reaches all groves. Pine beetles have killed at least one grove of as many as a hundred bristlecones in Colorado, ranging from 600 to 1,100 years old. They are present in Great Basin as well.
The fate of the whitebark pine is a grim hint of what may happen to the bristlecones. Blister rust and pine beetles have savaged stands of the pine, and in some places the mortality is 100 percent. In Glacier National Park, for example, virtually all of the whitebark pines are gone. Many other regions are under fierce attack.
“Blister rust is extremely virulent,” said Diana Tomback, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Colorado, Denver, who is studying the decline of the whitebark and helping to grow resistant strains. “We expect a lot more mortality in the years to come.”
Environmentalists have petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the whitebark as an endangered species.
The bristlecones face even more fundamental changes. Warmer temperatures are significantly altering ecosystems, according to Matthew Salzer, a researcher at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona who studies bristlecone tree rings. Over the last 50 years, bristlecone rings have increased in size, growing 30 percent faster than in any other 50-year period for 3,700 years. “They’ve really taken off,” Dr. Salzer said. “The growth rate is really high, and it’s related to the warming occurring at higher elevations.”
“I think they risk burning themselves out,” he said. “One of the reasons these trees have such longevity is they have a conservative approach. If they are no longer under such harsh conditions it’s possible their life spans will decrease.”
Some ecologists think that as warming continues, species that live at the top of mountains may no longer have a niche and simply disappear, something that has been called the “rapture hypothesis.”
How the bristlecones live so long is an unanswered question. They are one of a handful of organisms known as negligibly senescent — they defy aging. That may seem especially miraculous in such harsh conditions, but those conditions may be central to their success. They live much longer here than they do at lower elevations, where conditions are more hospitable.
“The key to the bristlecone is that they grow in a rigorous environment,” said Ronald Lanner, a retired forest biologist who studied bristlecones and has written a book about them, “and that environment is also rigorous to their pests.”
“So warmer temperatures,” Dr. Lanner said, “especially in the presence of drought, would work against the tree.”
By JIM ROBBINS
Published: New York Times September 27, 2010

Common Antidepressants Can Send Our Moral Compasses Spinning
Humans tend to flatter themselves by thinking they have the capacity to perform elaborate feats of moral reasoning, deeply considering possible consequences before arriving at an ethical decision. The reality is somewhat less flattering; a number of studies suggest we make moral decisions quickly and with a heavy reliance on our emotional response. Any reasoning that takes place tends to involve after-the-fact attempts to rationalize our decision, while everything from brain damage to neurotransmitter levels can alter our decisions in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The latest findings in this area indicate that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the class of drugs popularized by Prozac, can alter moral decision making, but only when the individual taking the drugs has a personal, emotional stake in the process.
This isn’t the authors’ first look at the impact of serotonin signaling. Two years ago, they reported that lowering the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin changed subjects’ behavior in the Ultimatum Game, which measures their willingness to punish peers for acting unfairly. With less serotonin around, individuals became more sensitive to offers that they perceived as unfair, and rejected them at elevated rates.
In the new work, the ultimatum game was used once again—a subject and partner are given a lump of cash, and the partner gets to divide it in any proportion they wish. The participant then gets the chance to reject the offer, in which case nobody gets any money. Rejections start increasing once the split reaches about 70 to 30, and continue to go up as the split becomes more disproportionate. Even though rejecting the money means they get nothing, people seem to be willing to do so in order to punish people for making an offer that they perceive as unfair.
At least, they’re willing to punish if their serotonin levels haven’t been messed with. A dose of SSRIs, and serotonin levels rose, while rejections of unfair offers declined. This wasn’t because they were no longer perceived as unfair, as a follow up survey showed no change in how the offers were rated. People just lost their taste for inflicting a punishment.
To figure out why, the authors gave the SSRIs to another set of subjects and hit them with a set of traditional moral dilemmas, like deciding whether to sacrifice a single person to save five. But they posed them in two very different ways: indirect, in which the person could make the choice by flipping a switch, or direct, in which they actually had to physically push people in order make their decision. Obviously, that latter situation is more emotionally challenging, and this is where increased serotonin had a significant effect: people declined to sacrifice someone when it required their personal involvement, even if doing so would save more people.
Between the two experiments, the authors conclude that elevated serotonin makes people less willing to make a personal, emotional commitment to a moral decision, such as punishing unfairness or pushing someone under a train. Detach the person a bit by removing their personal involvement—have them throw a switch instead of giving a push—and the impact of serotonin goes away.
To confirm this, the subjects were given a survey that measured their level of empathy; these results were then compared to performance on the tests. Those with the highest levels of empathy were more likely to be effected by serotonin, reinforcing the role of an emotional investment in the effect.
Beyond using a placebo as a control, the authors also gave a set of subjects a drug that blocked a neurotransmitter associated with executive decision making. That had no statistically significant effects in any experiment, so the authors conclude that high-level decision making doesn’t play a significant role here. That means, in their view, emotions aren’t competing with decision making when people face these moral dilemmas.
The work seems solid, but it may be arriving under a bit of a dark cloud. One of the authors is Marc Hauser, who has recently been found to have committed scientific fraud. According to the list of authors’ activities on the paper, though, Hauser wasn’t involved in gathering any of the data, and simply helped with writing it, which may help ease its acceptance.
PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1009396107  (About DOIs).
ARSTECHNICA John Timmer

By Peter Watson
By 1900, nearly everyone agreed that there was something special about the Germans. Their philosophy was more profound — to a fault. So was their music. Their scientists and engineers were clearly the best. Their soldiers were unmatched.
Did this German superiority bode well or ill for the new century? Some foreigners served up dire warnings, but others were rapt admirers. Richard Wagner’s English son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, even wrote a weighty tome arguing that the Germans were the only true heirs of classical Greece and Rome. Many Germans were happy to agree.
After world war broke out in 1914, German intellectuals rallied in indignant defense of a superior culture besieged by barbarians. Thomas Mann, for one, was anything but a flaming nationalist, but he wrote at length about the need to defend Germany’s unique cultural profundity.
Mann came to regret his fulminations long before 1933, when a more noxious band of German chauvinists drove him into exile. And in early 1945, in California, he read Joseph Goebbels’s defiant proclamation that the Germans’ national greatness was the reason an envious world had united against them. Mann was honest enough to confess to his diary that this was “more or less what I wrote 30 years ago.”
It is, of course, the Nazis who have made it hard for us to appreciate what Peter Watson calls “the German genius.” Goebbels spoiled the brand when he marketed Hitler as the apotheosis of German culture. Too many Germans and (for opposite reasons) plenty of foreigners readily agreed with Goebbels. Watson, a British journalist and the author of several books of cultural history, would like us to leave the Nazis aside and appreciate that our modern world — at least the world of ideas — is largely a German creation. But as he might have learned from his fictional fellow Englishman Basil Fawlty, it is futile to insist that we “don’t mention the war!”
“The German Genius” is a lengthy compilation of essential German contributions to philosophy, theology, mathematics, natural and social science and the arts since 1750. Watson enshrines a vast pantheon of creative thinkers, not dwelling very long on any of them. Perhaps the single most important figure is Immanuel Kant, who explored the limits of Enlightenment rationality without handing any authority back to revealed religion. Ever since, Watson argues, the Germans have led the way in plumbing the depths of the human mind and body in search of truth and meaning.
Watson reminds us that the age of Kant produced (among much else) Haydn’s symphonies, Goethe’s poetry, Herder’s discovery of national history and Winckel­mann’s archaeology of ancient art — the last in particular ushering in what Watson, in his subtitle, calls the “third renaissance” (after those of the 12th and 15th centuries). Long before Darwin, Germans showed that the natural world was a place of restless change. So, too, was human society: we owe them our sense of history. German Romanticism and German erudition placed truth and creativity firmly inside the human mind. Later, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud sought meaning in a world in flux, while lesser lights concocted their racial theories out of a fatal mixture of biology and philology.
“The German Genius” is a great baggy monster of a book, mixing passionate advocacy with biographical trivia amid compressed summaries of some exceedingly difficult ideas. The range of subjects is impressive, from painters to physicists, and includes important names most of us may recognize only from science class, and then only as units of measurement: Hertz, Mach, Röntgen. (Before Hitler, Nobel Prize ceremonies were in large part a German affair.)
In some ways this is also a very German book: long, earnest, plodding. Yet it is not really up to the exacting standards of German scholarship (or of English narrative sparkle), relying, as it does, largely on other scholars’ accounts of the great thinkers in question, and quoting the secondary sources far more than the original works of “genius.” Too often Watson urges us to revere people or books “now recognized,” “widely viewed” or “generally regarded” as brilliant. Readers may grow weary of being told what to think.
In effect, Watson has given us a kind of Dictionary of German Biography, along with a great deal of name-dropping. There were many German geniuses. But what was “the German genius”? To understand what was special about Germany, we need to know more than Watson tells us about the world that produced these thinkers. He does offer some valuable hints, insisting, for example, on the importanceof the 17th- and 18th-century religious revival known as Pietism, which urged believers to devote themselves to improving life on earth. Certainly he is right to emphasize Germany’s Protestant heritage (and the many preachers’ sons who populate his pages), but secularized Protestantism shaped other lands as well — notably Britain, where Catholics and Jews played smaller roles than in Germany.
More helpful is his emphasis on the role of universities in creating new knowledge and a new class defined by education. At Göttingen and Halle in the 18th century, and at Berlin and Bonn in the 19th, Germany invented the modern university, combining teaching with research in both humanities and science — at a time when Harvard and Oxford were conservative and theology-centered. University grads staffed a new bureaucracy of experts, and their work in laboratories and archives made research “a rival form of authority in the world.” The universities also enshrined a new ideal of individual cultivation (the fetishized German word is “Bildung”). Germans from Kant to Mann embraced this “secular form of Pietism,” turning inward to find truths not anchored in reason or revelation — and often, like Mann in 1915, choosing mystical wholeness over messy liberal politics.
This is modern subjective individuality, as expounded by philosophers like Martin Heidegger. Even if Heidegger hadn’t been a Nazi, we would still face the question of whether Hitler was the nemesis or the culmination of German genius. Just as Mann had to acknowledge Goebbels as his bastard child, Watson knows that Germany cannot disown the Nazis. He borrows many different and contradictory theories of the German catastrophe, variously suggesting that the educated middle class was too weak to stop Hitler, that it abdicated its responsibility to do so and that its antipolitical ideals taught a nation to welcome a charlatan’s promises of a redemptive community.
Yet no history of ideas can explain the tragedy of German genius. Hitler may have fancied himself a great thinker, but his success came from his brilliance as a political tactician in a troubled time. Intellectuals admired (or feared) him for his ability to seduce millions of voters who knew nothing of Kant or Heidegger. Watson gives us a compilation of German ideas; a history of the German genius would be a different and dicier matter.
Watson’s chapters on the anguish of postwar German intellectuals remind us that he is a world away from the ­mystical nonsense of his countryman Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Nonetheless, his attempt to exalt a national character suggests that he is offering something not altogether different for our chastened time.
Review in The Guardian by Brian Ladd, 18th July, 2010

On The Ridiculously Good Dream Attic
By Jim Beviglia Culturemap.com

Let me be the first to say that it is rare that I’m overly impressed by someone going off on a long guitar solo during a rock song. It usually ends up being indulgent and rarely serves the song. On the contrary, it’s often just a way to prop up a sub-par tune.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I can honestly say that there were moments when I listened to Richard Thompson’s new album Dream Attic when I found myself slack-jawed in awe at what this man was doing with those six strings. This is what a guitar hero is supposed to sound like.
It helps that Thompson had the novel idea to record these 13 new original songs live in front of an audience. You’ll only notice the crowd applauding at the end of the songs or after one of Thompson’s breathtaking runs, but the live setting gives the bandleader and his band an excuse to explore every nook and cranny of this material and to produce a powerful noise without the aid of touch-ups or studio trickery.
It also helps that Thompson, as songwriter, provides the proper framework for all of the instrumental exploration. Whether the song is a jaunty rocker like “Haul Me Up,” giving Thompson a chance to show off his rapid fingers, or a sprawling ballad like “Stumble On,” in which he delivers subtle commentary at the end of every line, the playing always synchs up with the song.
It sounds simple, but it’s a rare quality these days, and a quality that makes even the lesser songs here sparkle.
Thompson has assembled a crack band to do his bidding, and he lets them each get their share of the spotlight, even though most every song is anchored by a solo somewhere along the line. It’s not your usual rock instrumentation however, as saxophone, violin, and pipes give off the Celtic flavor that fans have come to expect from the former leader of Fairport Convention.  
For example, “Among The Gorse, Among The Grey” is a sad folk parable that sounds as if it could have been recorded hundreds of years ago, while “Demons In Her Dancing Shoes” is the rare rock song that can cause involuntary step-dancing among its listeners. These genre exercises aren’t the standouts, but they’re done well enough that they don’t descend to novelty level.
Thompson’s winningly snide sense of humor gets its due here as well. Opener “The Money Shuffle” takes aim at scheming money men who take advantage of unsuspecting regular folk, while the hilariously on-point “Here Comes Geordie” will likely leave certain Hollywood stars with ears burning due to its depiction of narcissistic and brainless do-gooding: “Good old Geordie righteous as can be/Chopped down the forest just to save a tree.”
The songwriter’s longtime interest in the underbelly of society is reprised as well.
“Sidney Wells” features a typically blistering solo in the service of a tale of a working-class murder, while the fantastic “Crime Scene” is even better, a meditation on brooding violence that builds from quiet contemplation to a maelstrom of fury, both lyrically and musically. Thompson’s underrated singing shines on the latter song, as he voices the impotent frustration of those left in the aftermath of a violent crime:  “I can’t aim my rage at fate/Where’s the face to pin the hate?”
There are standouts almost too numerous to mention here, and it all winds up with Thompson’s axe-wielding piece de resistance on the closer “If Love Whispers Your Name.” He takes off in the second half of this long song on an anguished tear that goes on for several minutes, endlessly varied with each new bar but always eloquently expressing the song’s theme of a man who frittered love away once and can only hope that it comes back again.  
When it, and Dream Attic, is all over, you’ll likely stand up and applaud in conjunction with the crowd on the disc. This album is not a rock journeyman churning out product; it is the work of a virtuoso inspired and at the top of his game.
Make sure to listen to it while sitting above some soft surface, so you won’t get too hurt when your chin hits the ground.
 

“No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
H. L. Mencken

The Process Is Dead
It’s already clear that the climate talks in December will go nowhere – so what do we do?
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 21st September 2010.
The closer it comes, the worse it looks. The best outcome anyone now expects from December’s climate summit in Mexico is that some delegates might stay awake during the meetings. When talks fail once, as they did in Copenhagen, governments lose interest. They don’t want to be associated with failure, they don’t want to pour time and energy into a broken process. Nine years after the world trade negotiations moved to Mexico after failing in Qatar, they remain in diplomatic limbo. Nothing in the preparations for the climate talks suggests any other outcome.
A meeting in China at the beginning of October is supposed to clear the way for Cancun(1). The hosts have already made it clear that it’s going nowhere: there are, a top Chinese climate change official explains, still “huge differences between developed and developing countries”(2). Everyone blames everyone else for the failure at Copenhagen. Everyone insists that everyone else should move.
But no one cares enough to make a fight of it. The disagreements are simultaneously entrenched and muted. The doctor’s certificate has not been issued; perhaps, to save face, it never will be. But the harsh reality we have to grasp is that the process is dead.
In 2012 the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto Protocol – expires. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it elapses: the existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we spiralled backwards.
Nor do regional and national commitments offer more hope. An analysis published a few days ago by the campaigning group Sandbag estimates the amount of carbon that will have been saved by the end of the second phase of the EU’s emissions trading system, in 2012(3). After the hopeless failure of the scheme’s first phase we were promised that the real carbon cuts would start to bite between 2008 and 2012. So how much carbon will it save by then? Less than one third of one per cent.
Worse still, the reduction in industrial output caused by the recession has allowed big polluters to build up a bank of carbon permits which they can carry into the next phase of the trading scheme. If nothing is done to annul them or to crank down the proposed carbon cap (which, given the strength of industrial lobbies and the weakness of government resolve, is unlikely) these spare permits will vitiate phase three as well. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the EU’s emissions trading system will remain alive. It will also remain completely useless.
Plenty of nations – such as the United Kingdom – have produced what appear to be robust national plans for cutting greenhouse gases. With one exception (the Maldives), their targets fall far short of the reductions needed to prevent more than two degrees of global warming.
Even so, none of them are real. Missing from the proposed cuts are the net greenhouse gas emissions we have outsourced to other countries and now import in the form of manufactured goods. Were these included in the UK’s accounts, alongside the aviation, shipping and tourism gases excluded from official figures, the UK’s emissions would rise by 48%(4). Rather than cutting our contribution to global warming by 19% since 1990, as the government boasts, we have increased it by around 29%(5). It’s the same story in most developed nations. Our apparent success results entirely from failures elsewhere.
Hanging over everything is the growing recognition that the United States isn’t going to play. Not this year, perhaps not in any year. If Congress couldn’t pass a climate bill so feeble that it consisted of little but loopholes while Barack Obama was president and the Democrats had a majority in both houses, where does hope lie for action in other circumstances? Last Tuesday the Guardian reported that of 48 Republican contenders for the Senate elections in November only one accepted that manmade climate change is taking place(6). Who was he? Mike Castle of Delaware. The following day he was defeated by the Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell, producing a full house of science deniers. The Enlightenment? Fun while it lasted.
What all this means is that there is not a single effective instrument for containing manmade global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as “a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen”(7), is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen.
Nature won’t wait for us. The US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the first eight months of 2010 were as hot as the first 8 months of 1998 – the warmest ever recorded(8). But there’s a crucial difference. 1998 had a record El Nino – the warm phase of the natural Pacific temperature oscillation. The 2010 El Nino was smaller (an anomaly peaking at roughly 1.8, rather than 2.5C), and brief by comparison to those of recent years(9). Since May the oscillation has been in its cool phase (La Nina)(10): even so, June, July and August this year were the second warmest on record(11). The stronger the warnings, the less capable of action we become.
Where does this leave us? How should we respond to the reality we have tried not see: that in 18 years of promise and bluster nothing has happened? Environmentalists tend to blame themselves for these failures. Perhaps we should have made people feel better about their lives. Or worse. Perhaps we should have done more to foster hope. Or despair. Perhaps we were too fixated on grand visions. Or techno-fixes. Perhaps we got too close to business. Or not close enough. The truth is that there is not and never was a strategy certain of success, as the powers ranged against us have always been stronger than we are.
Greens are a puny force, by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don’t want to see. To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic power, acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests of humankind. We allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting and protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but decent people would take care of us. They won’t. They weren’t ever going to do so. So what do we do now?
I don’t know. These failures have exposed not only familiar political problems, but deep-rooted human weakness. All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we’ve sought to avoid. The conversation starts here.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. http://unfccc.int/meetings/intersessional/tianjin_10/items/5695.php
2. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68C0RS20100913
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/10/eu-emissions-trading-savings
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/may/05/labour-tories-carbon-calculator
5. The official accounts claim a cut of 144 million tonnes. Including the unaccounted emissions suggests a rise of 225Mt, CO2 equivalent.
6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/14/republican-hopefuls-deny-global-warming
7. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/29/climatechange.carbonemissions
8. http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100915_globalstats.html
9. Page 22, http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
10. Page 10, http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
11. http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100915_globalstats.html

The Plot Escapes Me
Those were glorious days, the ones I spent reading “Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,” by Allen Weinstein. It is a book that I, having long had an interest in domestic Communist intrigues, had been meaning to read for years — decades — and I vividly remember that moment a couple of summers ago when, on my way to visit friends in New Hampshire, I found a hardcover copy in good condition at a restaurant-cum-used-book-store.
For the next few days, all I wanted to do was read “Perjury.” I tried to be a good sport about kayaking and fishing and roasting wieners with the kids, but I was always desperate to get back to Alger and Whittaker. The house where I was staying had been built on the edge of a lake, and I distinctly remember looking up from the book and seeing the sun sparkle on the clear, rippling water, then returning to the polluted gloom of the Case.
I remember it all, but there’s just one thing: I remember nothing about the book’s actual contents.
Before reading “Perjury,” I had an elementary understanding of the Hiss affair and the personalities involved; further, I knew that Hiss claimed to have known Chambers as “George Crosley.” Today, a couple of years after reading “Perjury,” I have an elementary understanding of the Hiss affair and the personalities involved; further, I know that Hiss claimed to have known Chambers as “George Crosley.” I have forgotten everything else. What was the point?
I have just realized something terrible about myself: I don’t remember the books I read. I chose “Perjury” as an example at random, and its neighbors on my bookshelf, Michael Chabon’s “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (on the right) and Anka Muhlstein’s “Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine” (on the left), could have served just as well. These are books I loved, but as with “Perjury,” all I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.
Nor do I think I am the only one with this problem. Certainly, there are those who can read a book once and retain everything that was in it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is not the case with most people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people cannot recall the title or author or even the existence of a book they read a month ago, much less its contents.
So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
One answer is that we read for the aesthetic and literary pleasure we experience while reading. The pleasure — or intended pleasure — of novels is obvious, but it is no less true that we read nonfiction for the immediate satisfaction it provides. The acquisition of knowledge, while you are acquiring it, can be intensely engrossing and stimulating, and a well-constructed argument is a beautiful thing. But that kind of pleasure is transient. When we read a serious book, we want to learn something, we want it to change us, and it hardly seems possible for that to happen if its fugitive content passes through us like light through glass.
Now, with a terrible sense of foreboding, I slowly turn to look again at my bookshelf. There they all are, “Perjury” and “Kavalier & Clay” and those other books that I have read and of which I remember so little. And I have to ask myself, Would it have made no difference if I had never read any of them? Could I just as well have spent my time watching golf?
But this cannot be. Those books must have reshaped my brain in ways that affect how I think, and they must have left deposits of information with some sort of property — a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it. Mustn’t they have?
To help answer this question I called Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” I described my “Perjury” problem — I was interested in the subject and engrossed in the book for days, but now remember nothing about it — and asked her if reading it had ultimately had any effect on me.
“I totally believe that you are a different person for having read that book,” Wolf replied. “I say that as a neuroscientist and an old literature major.”
She went on to describe how reading creates pathways in the brain, strengthening different mental processes. Then she talked about content.
“There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”
Did this mean that it hadn’t been a waste of time to read all those books, even if I seemingly couldn’t remember what was in them?
“It’s there,” Wolf said. “You are the sum of it all.”
This was very encouraging, and it makes intuitive sense: we have been formed by an accretion of experiences, only a small number of which we can readily recall. You may remember the specifics of only a few conversations with your best friend, but you would never ask if talking to him or her was a waste of time. As for the arts, I can remember in detail only a tiny fraction of the music I have listened to, or the movies I have watched, or the paintings I have looked at, but it would be absurd to claim that experiencing those works had no influence on me. The same could be said of reading.
Still, reading is different from life, and writing is different from those other art forms. Indeed, reading’s great distinction may be that it is not an experience to be experienced only as an experience (otherwise, poets wouldn’t have to sweat so hard to make their poems a performance rather than discourse). A book, even a novel, contains information, in the strictest sense, and the most obvious purpose of reading a book is to acquire that information for oneself. And unlike a catch-and-release fisherman, when I acquire that information, I want to keep it. I enjoyed reading “Perjury” and am relieved and happy that I retain its gestalt, but I didn’t actually read it for pleasure or for its gestalt. I read it so that I would know, consciously, a lot about the Hiss case. Well, guess what? I don’t.
I suppose one solution would be to use the techniques recommended in study guides for retaining reading assignments. Do not recline! First review the table of contents and index. Read actively, underlining and making notations in the text. Review what you have read, making notes (three to five pages for every hundred pages of text).
Some good ideas, surely. But “Do not recline”? Impossible.
James Collins is the author of the novel “Beginner’s Greek.”
New York Times 18.09.2010

Heavy bombing in this area last night till about 11 p.m……. I was talking in the hallway of this house to two young men and a girl who was with them. Psychological attitude of all 3 was interesting. They were quite openly and unashamedly frightened, talking about how their knees were knocking together, etc., and yet at the same time excited and interested, dodging out of doors between bombs to see what was happening and pick up shrapnel splinters. Afterwards in Mrs. C’s little reinforced room downstairs, with Mrs C. and her daughter, the maid, and three young girls who are also lodgers here. All the women, except the maid, screaming in unison, clasping each other, and hiding their faces, every time a bomb went past, but betweenwhiles quite happy and normal, with animated conversation proceeding, The dog subdued and obviously frightened, knowing something to be wrong. Marx [1] is also like this during raids, i.e. subdued and uneasy. Some dogs, however, go wild and savage during a raid and have had to be shot. They allege here, and E. says the same thing about Greenwich, that all the dogs in the park now bolt for home when they hear the siren.
Yesterday when having my hair cut in the City, asked the barber if he carried on during raids. He said he did. And even if he was shaving someone? I said. Oh, yes, he carried on just the same. And one day a bomb will drop near enough to make him jump, and he will slice half somebody’s face off.
Later, accosted by a man, I should think some kind of commercial traveller, with a bad type of face, while I was waiting for a bus. He began a rambling talk about how he was getting himself and his wife out of London, how his nerves were giving way and he suffered from stomach trouble, etc., etc. I don’t know how much of this kind of thing there is ….. There has of course been a big exodus from the East End, and every night what amount to mass migrations to places where there is sufficient shelter accommodation. The practice of taking a 2d ticket and spending the night in one of the deep Tube stations, e.g. Piccadilly, is growing . . . . . . Everyone I have talked to agrees that the empty furnished houses in the West End should be used for the homeless; but I suppose the rich swine still have enough pull to prevent this from happening. The other day 50 people from the East End, headed by some of the Borough Councillors, marched into the Savoy and demanded to use the air-raid shelter. The management didn’t succeed in ejecting them till the raid was over, when they went voluntarily. When you see how the wealthy are still behaving, in what is manifestly developing into a revolutionary war, you think of St. Petersburg in 1916.
(Evening). Almost impossible to write in this infernal racket. (Electric lights have just gone off. Luckily I have some candles.) So many streets in (lights on again) the quarter roped off because of unexploded bombs, that to get home from Baker Street, say 300 yards, is like trying to find your way to the heart of a maze