Fellow Readers:
Wouldn’t it be something if a writer started the new year with a resolution to write less this year than last? That’s been my mood lately. (It’s been two months since my last confession.) This reticence may be a result of looking at Twitter every day and wanting to scream into the void: Will everybody please be quiet, please? Or maybe I’ve signed up for too many email newsletters; it makes me wonder why I should add to the Inbox Influx.
Do you recall what Montaigne wrote in “Of Vanity” more than four hundred years ago? “Scribbling seems to be one of the symptoms of an age of excess.” 1
This is the essay in which Montaigne recalls that he “once saw a gentleman who made known his life only by the operation of his bowels; you might see it at his house, on exhibition, a row of pots of seven or eight days’ use; it was his study, his conversation; every other subject had a bad smell to him.” 2 He goes on to suggest that in his own pages we find “a little more decently, the voidings of an old mind, now hard, now lax, and always undigested.” 3
He also produces one of the great backhanded justifications of the writing life: “In a time when it is so common to do evil, it is practically praiseworthy to do what is merely useless.”
We are told by one translator that the title for these characteristically melancholy reflections refers not to vanity in the sense of “being vain” but rather the feeling of working “in vain.” It’s the sense found in Ecclesiastes, where the preacher says “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun?
One generation passes away, and another generation comes;
But the earth abides forever.
The sun also rises, and the sun goes down,
And hastens to the place where it arose.
The “age of excess” was also an “unruly age,” and Montaigne is irked by both. He mentions a certain Didymus who filled six thousand books with the “mere subject of grammar.” (Fact-check: according to Seneca it was four thousand volumes.) “So many words for the sake of words alone!” But also, Montaigne was writing in a time when religious strife was raging throughout France. “I insist that things are getting worse and worse . . . . It is favorable for me that the ruin of this kingdom comes at the same time with the ruin of my years,” he writes.
Excess . . . and corruption . . . and civil disorder driven by Christian combatants. . .
That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
Scribble, scribble
But goodbye to all that. Speak, memory! We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Here’s a short story, perhaps signifying nothing:
We had a photographer come by the other day, on assignment by the contracting company that helped us renovate this old barn. As they walked through, the lead contractor told the photographer there would be no need to photograph the writer’s home office. “It looks like he’s been there for twenty years already,” he said. I took no offense, because it’s a fair observation: I have books and files and working materials that go back well more than twenty years, and not everything has found its place.
My intention is to turn back time: to make it look each year a little less encumbered by materials from the past. And so I am gradually sifting and winnowing. Just a few days ago I concentrated on one area where I have tall file cabinets and also piles of unsorted stuff. I took in hand a ring binder with the assumption this would no longer be worth keeping. It contained materials from a “media retreat,” that is, a conference of journalists who met in June of 2011.
The only distinct memory of this conference still with me ten years later was of how I got there. My friend Dave W., being a prominent journalist then working for Fortune, was on the roster for the invitation-only four-day event. 4 Knowing that the conference would be held at the swanky Wianno Club, near Hyannis, overlooking Nantucket Sound, and knowing that the club had fine tennis courts, D.W. prevailed on the conference organizers to get me, a mere freelance writer, invited. He wanted to make sure he had a tennis partner. We did play tennis, although the plan almost went awry because my tennis shoes were black and yellow, a violation of the “tennis whites” rule. Shorts, shirt, socks, cap, shoes—everything had to be white. However, we were sent to the court farthest in the back, in hopes my shoes would not be noticed by any dress-code-insistent club members.
But what went on in the conference rooms? I opened the binder and found on the very first page some notes I’d taken during a seminar on “Damned Lies & Statistics,” with the sociologist Joel Best. “A bad number is harder to kill than a vampire,” Best said. As an example, he spoke about how, some years ago, a false number of 150,000 deaths of young American women per year from anorexia became an established “fact.” Best said the actual number is closer to 100. He also spoke about the huge increase in the diagnosis of autism in recent decades. Best said that is largely a result of “category change.” Children who once might have been classified as “retarded” are more commonly now “autistic.” The American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual expanded the category of what qualifies as being on the autism spectrum in 1994. Those diagnoses have indeed increased; but Best asserted that the number of children with intellectual disabilities is about the same. 5
Just about every day during these two pandemic years, I’ve thought about the difficulty we have had—as members of a mostly innumerate society—in understanding what numbers and statistics can tell us. It’s dawned on me how many people in the field of epidemiology also develop expertise in statistical analysis, and how essential that is. Yet most of us have been bombarded with numbers we don’t really understand. Every statistic has some kind of story behind it. But what usually happens in politically charged debates is that people chose a story they want to tell, and then find a statistic to go with the story.
Well, damned if my conference binder didn’t include a page of “Resources about Dubious Statistics.” It included three books by Joel Best: Damned Lies and Statistics (2001), More Damned Lies and Statistics (2004), and Stat-Spotting (2008). These books, and the many others like them, should certainly be a part of every thinking person’s library. I hope there are some new ones being written that will tell us how to understand the numbers and statistics that have been so much a part of our “info wars” during this pandemic.
Here is where I add my customary admonition that there is never any reason to order books from that terrible company named after a long river. The books mentioned above can be ordered just as easily from Bookshop.org. Please make a note of it.
So many books
The daughter of my niece toured my home-office last year. A perceptive five-year-old (now six), her comment to me was blunt: “You have too many books.” I felt that way when we were moving, yes. Not so much anymore. Because I’ve got them out of boxes and on the shelves and they are there for me when I need them. And you know what? Some people thrill to the sight of ample bookcases, as Kate Dwyer noted recently in the New York Times. Of course I haven’t counted my volumes, but the number isn’t anywhere close to the 51,000 in this guy’s library.
Looking Backward
Historian Erik Loomis recently reminded us that on January 14, 1888, Edward Bellamy’s “weird little book” Looking Backward was published. Loomis wrote that Bellamy’s utopian novel “was the most influential book of the late 19th century for American labor, much more than anything by Marx!” Bellamy imagined in 1888 what kind of social progress the world might see by the year 2000.
That reminded me that in 1999, as the turn of the millennium approached, I asked my friend Ronnie Dugger to look back at Bellamy’s vision. RD (the founding editor of The Texas Observer) wrote an essay we used in CommonWealth magazine, which you can enjoy here. Ronnie gave the book such a rigorous and historically informed reading—I wish this and so many other RD essays would be collected in an anthology. . .
Looking forward, I may report back on some reading I’m doing on past pandemics. The so-called Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 especially. In many ways, the histories remind us, again, “That which has been is what will be.” 6
I have two translations of Montaigne’s essays. The above is from George Ives, 1925. The more current translation by Donald Frame, 1957, is “Scribbling seems to be a sort of symptom of an unruly age.” The original: L’escrivaillerie semble estre quelque simptome d’un siecle desbordé. I like the Ives version better. In the handbook for the Ives volumes, Grace Norton comments that Montaigne sees escrivaillerie as “one sign of a nation’s decadence.”
Ives uses the word “bowels” while Frame, disappointingly, goes with “workings of his belly.” But Frame’s translation says “chamber pots,” rather than just “pots.”
A journalist I know sometimes promotes his work on Twitter by imploring readers: “Read my shit.”
It was sponsored by the Murray Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, out of Washington University in St. Louis. Weidenbaum was a conservative economist (he died in 2014) who held the justifiable belief that journalists really ought to probe deeper into the details of economics and public policy. Skepticism about studies that pretend to certitude was the order of the day. My notes reflect that one economist quoted Laurence J. Peter (who is known for articulating the “Peter Principle”) asserting that “An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.”
Could that be true? I have not done much research into these statistics. But I’ve seen the same argument in more recent Scientific American articles, as well as this 2015 explainer from Spectrum, which noted that as the autism diagnoses went up, other categories of intellectual disabilities went down. “The total number of children with autism, intellectual disability or other developmental delay did not change. This stable statistic suggests that the uptick in autism stems in part from the reshuffling of children among these diagnostic groups.” At any rate, the obvious point is that changes in categories can make some statistics deceptive—and that an increase in diagnoses is not iron-clad evidence of an increase in a condition.
Really enjoying the footnote function this week! This one is to say that it’s worth clicking on that tweet, to read the entire un-truncated paragraph. Keep away from coughers and keep out of crowds! Still good advice.
It's been my observation that as America becomes increasingly enamored of credentials rather than expertise, we have correspondingly found ourselves bombarded with "information" of little actionable content or utility. Alas, now that the Credentialists have the upper hand, they are pretty effectively mortaring that unfortunate paradigm in place for our foreseeable future.
The scribbling shall continue until morale improves, I guess. Or something like that...