My Dad reading me Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy by Lynley Dodd, a New Zealand classic
Delinquent Links is a series I post the last week of the month, every month. I share updates and discuss what may happen in the future at The Delinquent Academic, and share links to books and articles accompanied by reviews. If you’ve read them, want to read them, or just have any general thoughts, I would love it if you commented!
Here’s Delinquent Links #1
… 100% Updated
I posted two works this month, a science fiction story about a guy who comes across drug deal gone wrong at a space port (thanks
and for the feedback):And my most successful piece of non-fiction writing so far; a passionate plea to artists to forgo the perceived benefits of the machine, like using CHAT-GPT to rephrase your writing, with some ways to go about doing so:
I spent months reflecting on this topic, and spent many hours writing and rewriting the story. I vacillated between thinking “other artists must share my concerns!” to “stop being so dramatic, it’s cringe.”
To all those who offered kind words; who read, commented, subscribed, liked, restacked, DM’d me (and who told me in person!), I appreciated all of them - and it meant a lot … perhaps more than it usually would. Maybe because it reinforced my belief that we all share a cosmic journey together; that art is an expression of this journey; and that to rid ourselves of this ability to express may be the deepest and darkest of modern crimes committed upon the soul.
Anyway, thank you
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June and Beyond
Next month, I have planned at least one non-fiction post (along with another one of these of course), and another short story. My next PhD update is coming along, though I am awaiting ethics approval for my pre-study (the realities of the academy are hitting home …).
Delinquent Links #2
This month I finished reading DUNE by Frank Herbert and HOW RELIGION EVOLVED AND WHY IT ENDURES by Robin Dunbar. I read a heap of Substack articles, my favourite being THE FAR OUT INITIATIVE by Scott Alexander.
(I also began listening to NAPOLEON THE GREAT by Andrew Roberts, though I’m only a few chapters in - so far it’s awesome! - and won’t review it now.)
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DUNE by Frank Herbert
Dune.
Last month, I reviewed the first half of it, well the first ‘book’ of Dune, that encapsulates the treacherous scheme of the Emperor and Baron Vladimir Harkonnen to assassinate the Duke Leto Atreides and take control of the desert world Arrakis.
Briefly, I loved the political thriller feel to it; that despite knowing the plot (as I had watched both recently made films), Frank Herbert was enticing me to turn pages. The characters were all multi-dimensional and fascinating; I found Duke Leto to be an inspiring manifestation of noble power, and Baron Harkonnen a brilliantly well-rounded villain who had his weaknesses. The prose was … far from beautiful, but it served it’s function. My main character/story criticism was the ‘seeing into the future’ power of Paul and his mother, Jessica, the Bene Gesserit. To me, it was overused, and I became bored of their interactions with others simply because it reduced the magic of human interaction - the uncertainty - to something akin to a mechanical prediction software. I said I was keen to see how this developed as a story mechanism later in the novel … so let’s start there.
The ‘seeing into the future’ power of Paul, an ability first bred in him, and later trained in him by his mother, strangely seemed to recede in the second ‘book’, or second act. After escaping assassination themselves, Paul and Jessica flee into the desert, and encounter the Fremen - a wonderfully written native population. Here, Paul had visions, dreams, and nightmares, but - at least to me - he seemed to intuit others intentions less than the first book. In that regard, I was relieved.
However, Paul and Jessica’s journey, meeting the Fremen, learning their ways, was the most boring part of the whole novel. Beside from a couple of cool fight scenes, I did not feel invested at all, perhaps because it felt like young adult fiction, following a teenage boy along in his adventures …
But by the end of the second ‘book’, and definitely, by the start of the third, Paul had developed. He had matured into a delicious anti-hero. Sometimes his words were streaked with wisdom, sometimes with arrogance; he was a character the worst parts of your soul desired to be.
Though there were weaknesses about the third act - like not developing Feyd-Rautha enough as an antagonist for Paul so their final knife fight carried enough emotional and dramatic weight (something Villeneuve rectifies in the films) - I loved it overall.
I was denied an epic war scene, but the final battle of wits between Paul, his mother, and his aide-de-camps on one side; and the Emperor, his daughter, the Harkonnens and the Space Guild on the other, was incredibly satisfying - even more so than the films. Herbert, certainly, is a master of political intrigue and the dueling of words with multiple characters (another example of this is the dinner scene in the first ‘book’).
I could go on and on; and may do at some later time (there’s much to discuss about Chani, and they way she was changed in the films). By the end of the novel, I was fiercely hungry for more of the Dune narrative, and ordered myself DUNE MESSIAH - which I will review probably next month.
My main philosophical takeaway from the character of Paul, personally, was not simply the folly of the cult of personality - something I have heard others say - but how, in order to subdue and the incite a populace and become a tyrannical dictator or cult leader, one needs to master and integrate both his shadow masculinity (force, domination, ruthlessness), and his shadow femininity (coercion, manipulation, sabotage).
Think of the history of one man rule - some of the most powerful tyrants and cult leaders used their shadow feminine as much as their shadow masculine to get and maintain power.
Anyway, it’s a great novel.
I recommend.
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HOW RELIGION EVOLVED AND WHY IT ENDURES by Robin Dunbar
(Note: My views on religion are perhaps the most tentative of any of my positions. My hard atheism in my youth could not contend with transcendental personal - and interpersonal - experiences. I have people very close to me who believe in a deity; some that interpret God as a metaphor; and some who are artistic materialists - meaning they are not Richard Dawkins-esque in their reductionism. Currently - and for the past five or six years in fact - I am in open-investigation mode. Maybe a conclusion will present itself to me in the future; but at the moment, I don’t feel as I have the tools or the knowledge to discuss my views with confidence. Ironically, the words ‘tools’ and ‘knowledge’ may indeed be the wrong way to approach it - but I am learning by the day.)
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Summarising and reviewing this book … is not easy.
Let’s just start with the writing.
Robin Dunbar (who I didn’t realise when I purchased the book, came up with Dunbar’s number, the limiting cognitive law of 15 close friends, 150 meaningful contacts, and 1500 acquaintances), is both sweeping and … academically pedantic. Their interplay sometimes works a thrill; but sometimes, clashes like two antagonistic genres of music in the same song. He will cross hundreds of thousands of years in a sentence, and spend three pages on one individual study done on some Amazonian or West African tribe. At times I was turning pages thoroughly intrigued; at others, probably would find cutting my toenails more interesting. Overall, it felt disjointed; its level of focus (broad or detailed?) confused.
Seemingly lacking a central argument, a thread holding it together, the book maybe better understood as a series of standalone chapters, each in their own, if not narratively fascinating, at least academically fascinating. I’ve decided it’s easier to highlight some of the interesting studies and speculative theories from a few of these chapters, than to provide an overarching ‘review’.
In Chapter I: How to Study Religion, he did something that intrigued me. He put the ‘truth claims’ of religion to one side; detailing the methodological approach of the evolutionary cognitive psychologist, how religion can and should be interpreted as something that evolved to help not only human individuals, but human groups. He criticises mainstream evolutionary biologists and psychologists, who claim there are no fitness benefits to religion; that religion is negative byproduct of our Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), evolved to detect salient phenomena that may impede our reproduction (death). Our intelligence - the ability to perceive time and to recognise ourselves as distinguished from objects and other beings - combined with the natural risk-aversion of our HADD, meant we may attribute phenomena we cannot explain (“Did you see that?”), to a mysterious other who exists in an immaterial, secondary world, like a ghost, a deity, or a life-force. Due to the perceived individual level maladaptations of religion, like fasting, self-flagellation, and - most importantly - altruistic behaviour, these mainstream academics dismiss religion as a backpack of heavy rocks, slowing and stalling our biological fitness.
Dunbar, mostly in Chapter 3: Why Believing Might Be Good For You, but all through the book, argues against this view, and cites much research as to the individual- and group-level benefits of different formulations of religion, from ancient “shamanic” religions (most hunter gatherer religions) to modern “doctrinal” religions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity, etc). For example he mentions that religious individuals are both happier and healthier on average, when compared to secular individuals. Here he discusses life expectancy:
A study of 21,000 American adults found that those who had never attended religious services had a risk of dying during the eight-year follow-up period that was nineteen times higher than those who went to services at least once a week. Another meta analysis of forty-two studies, totaling nearly 126,000 subjects, found that active religious involvement increased chances of being alive at follow-up by 26 per cent compared to those who never went to church, even when controlling for sociodemographic variables and existing health.
On a group level, he mentions many beneficial things, including the common-sense view that indeed, on average, religious people are more generous (prosocial) than secular people:
… pairs of people were asked to take part in one of three kinds of economic games: a dictator game (in which player-1 decides how to split a sum of money with player-2, a measure of baseline generosity or prosociality), an ultimatum game (in which player-1 decides how to split the money, but player-2 has the option of rejecting the offer if they think it too low - a measure of relationship level fairness) and an ultimatum game with punishment (in which a third-party, player-3, can pay to punish player-1 if they think player-1 has been too mean - a measure of societal level regulation of fairness). … except in the punishment version, offers were more likely to be closer to a fair 50:50 split if player-1 belonged to a doctrinal religion (in this case, always Christianity or Buddhism) than if they belonged to no-religion or to a tribal shamanic-type religion.
Dunbar also goes into much detail about the benefit and mechanism behind, religious rituals - that seemingly on the surface, can be maladaptive (self-flagellation). He explains Emile Durkhiem’s view that religious rituals produced elation and arousal that [Durkheim] defined as effervescence, which he believed created a sense of belonging and love for fellow religious members. Dunbar mentions that rituals such as dance, trance, synchronised chanting and singing, even crossing one’s chest in front of an altar or statue with another beside you, all enhance group-level cohesion and thus cooperation - furthering the groups ability to compete with not only the environment writ-large, but other human groups.
I found some of the middle chapters a bit boring, but he finished off with a couple of incredibly interesting chapters. In Chapter 8: Crisis in the Neolithic, he explains that religions needed to evolve so that humans could maintain larger population sizes; and Chapter 9: Cults, Sects, and Charismatics, he explains why he thinks cults and cult leaders form - a perfect adjunct to reading DUNE!
This review is getting a bit long, but to conclude, hopefully I’m not doing him an injustice in saying that he views religion as necessary to our evolution, a feature NOT a bug. In some ways, the better the religion a society has, the better the society is, rather than the other way round (though course these are bi-directional).
Reflecting on what this might mean for our deeply secular, reductionist society today, and we could be unintentionally impairing not only the lives of our individual citizens, but the society as a whole.
Overall, there is heaps of fascinating detail, if you are willing to get into the weeds a bit (and if you are social psychologist like myself, you’ll find it speaks your ‘paradigmic’ language.)
I recommend.
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THE FAR OUT INITIATIVE by Scott Alexander
If the above book was hard to summarise, well what I am I in for here?
Scott Alexander, who writes the famous Astral Codex Ten blog, returns to his fluid, intense, exhilarating style; in describing a whacky and almost repulsive new movement, called FAR OUT.
In a sentence, the FAR OUT movement, is trying to identify certain genes (?) in those rare people who do not suffer and do not feel pain, so they can genetically engineer a new race of eternally happy people. Alexander himself seems sympathetic to the movement; myself, as my friend
also said, I kept thinking that if we remove suffering from the world, we remove the context in which happiness - and all the things that make up this wonderful emotion: love, passion, awe, contentment - can exist. Without darkness there is no light; there is only … grey? And by the law of diminishing returns this grey gets darker and darker, until the shade becomes the black of night.Anyway, the article is wonderfully written and intoxicatingly fascinating. I’d be interested to hear other people’s views on the topic!
I recommend.
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Thank you all for reading.
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Chur, and have a good day and night,
The Delinquent Academic