I approached this one with some trepidation. Lightman's Searching For Stars On An Island In Maine was a wise and beautiful book about reconciling a scientific understanding of the universe with a sense of the spiritual. But it was also a book of essays, and as soon as one moves from that personal and questioning form to anything programmatic, the risk of grave error increases vastly. Was this going to be another Descartes or Wordsworth, and end up dragging all the impedimenta of organised religion back in through the side door? Lightman reassured me with his opening incident, a moment of connection between human and bird - but then shook me again with the first of his emblematic figures, Moses Mendelssohn, polymath and grandfather of the composer. Whose attempt at a scientific argument for the existence of the soul Lightman admits doesn't work, but still treats with more respect than it deserves given it is, not to put too fine a point on it, shit. Which is only to be expected, given it comes from a book purporting to be an update of Plato, and to the best of my recollection all of Plato's arguments for anything are shit.
And so it continues. To his credit, Lightman is not here attempting either to shore up the creeds which have caused so much destruction over recent millennia, and nor is he peddling woo. His thesis is unobjectionable and at times wonderfully put: in short, what we think of as the spiritual sense of life is a by-product of awe and a sense of beauty, things which themselves have evolutionary benefits. Explaining it this way needn't be the same as explaining it away, given it does still enrich our lives - but nor does it argue against consciousness as an emergent property of purely biological structures (indeed, at one point he quotes a colleague's suggestion that asking where consciousness resides is like asking where in a speeding car is its motion). I'm not sure I wholly agree with him on this, but it seems a better basis than most on which to proceed.
The thing is, Lightman seems like a really nice guy. Which in many ways is a good thing: when he observes that we largely lose the sense of the self in transcendent moments, he was never going to follow Peter Watts and conclude that maybe the sense of self is humanity's big problem, and while that may fall short logically, it certainly leaves me feeling less bleak. But at its worst, niceness can degrade into mushy both-sides-ism:
"Scientists could do a better job of reaching out and trying to understand the anti-science camp. And the anti-science camp could do a better job at trying to understand the methods of science and the manner in which scientists acquire knowledge."
Yeah, except only one of these camps consists of dangerous idiots and grifters who have doomed us all, so actually, fuck 'em.
Related to this is that, as is so often the way in philosophy, he seems to be too kind to his predecessors, on which I've already touched - and also, when he does criticise them, to pick bad angles of approach. Quoting Descartes' insistence that "One cannot in any way conceive of a half or a third of a soul" only reminds me quite how limited Descartes' imagination was, notwithstanding the grand thought experiment with which he is normally, undeservingly credited. Or: "But to further claim that the world is a mental fabrication - as proposed by Bishop Berkeley and other philosophers - does not seem at all tenable to me. If that view were true, then we would never be surprised by what we find in the outer world." Now, leaving aside whose mind Berkeley conceived the world to be within, surely it follows from this that either we would never be surprised by our own dreams, or that dreams also have external reality? Not that the philosophical material here is entirely a blind alley: yes, it is intriguing that Wang Chung and Lucretius speak of souls in very similar language, despite the distance between them. And there is something beautiful in the notion that mathematics can hold the same central, abstracted purity for Lightman as ideas of the good or the divine did for his predecessors. But his grasp of the material is maddeningly inconsistent, even down to silly little mistakes like John 'Stewart' Mill* (though of course I was reading a Netgalley ARC, so hopefully the final copies will fix that).
Not that all the inaccuracies were simple typos, though. Mentioning the amyloid hypothesis regarding Alzheimer's as simple fact, despite recent fraud revelations, is hardly Lightman's fault, just an unfortunate collision of publishing schedules with how science (and capitalism) work. But saying that conservation of energy is "one of the sacred cows of science" feels like entirely the wrong phrase. Elsewhere it's generalisations or simplifications which go so far as to become outright wrong, as when Lightman says "The ancient Egyptians believed that each human being was composed of three parts:" body, ba, and ka. Now, possibly at the time of the Fifth Dynasty pharaoh whose inscription is being discussed in this section that was true, because it's important to remember that what we blithely call 'ancient Egypt' encompasses a greater span than that from Julius Caesar to Greta Thunberg, and while it had much continuity, there were also changes. But certainly there were large stretches of that time where the composition was much more variegated - I generally think of it as nine parts, though I can only remember another two offhand (the name is one, and another becomes a star).
One of the more annoying recurring forms this broad brush takes is manufacturing an 'us' from which I recoil with 'Speak for yourself, mate', as in "What happens in the brain that enables us to ignore a leaking faucet but pay attention to a knock on the door?" Or "We are awed by Superman, Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, Pablo Picasso, Carl Lewis and Michael Phelps, Jane Austen, Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln, Angela Merkel, Jack Ma." Just over half of them for me, and beyond my own preferences, surely Merkel in particular is a category error? Quiet, unshowy competence feels like a weird thing to inspire awe, rather than respect, for all that it is now a vanishingly rare quality in politics. Which brings me to the most harrowing example, where Lightman talks about how a greater sense of connectedness to nature has been shown to make people happier, because it means we feel like a part of something bigger than ourselves. Which is all presented as part of a traditional sense of the cycle of the seasons and so forth, and yes, I'm sure that must have been very reassuring back before the cycle's wheels came off, but there's no acknowledgement of how the connection has a very different impact now, because feeling a part of something vast and ancient isn't so reassuring when that beautiful, complex system is dying all around you and most of your wretched species doesn't seem to give a toss.
Still, for all its blips and blitheness, it is clearly a book that means well, one which intends to get Lightman out of the niche space of literary essays and on to the non-fiction tables at the front of bookshops. And if it were to become a runaway bestseller, it could conceivably do a lot of good. I just don't think that in itself it is terribly good.
Although I am unaccountably tickled by the idea of a neuron which deals specifically with recognising pictures of Bill Clinton.
*Quoted regarding emergence, where Mill pointed out that knowing the properties of hydrogen and oxygen doesn't offer a good guide to the properties of water. Which is true, but as a fan of The Persuaders! I couldn't help longing for the Judge's far funnier if dangerously inaccurate "Mix two relatively harmless compounds like nitro and glycerine, and you've got yourself a very potent combination."