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| Jonathan Franzen (born 1959) |
"Listen, Richard," Walter said. "The conservatives won. They turned the Democrats into a center-right party. They got the entire country singing 'God Bless America,' stress on God, at every single major-league baseball game. They won on every fucking front, but they especially won culturally, and especially regarding babies. In 1970 it was cool to care about the planet's future and not have kids. Now the one thing everyone agrees on, right and left, is that it's beautiful to have a lot of babies. The more the better. Kate Winslett is pregnant, hooray hooray....Thus the novel I'd been finding hugely entertaining and rewarding for its sharply etched characters, its sardonic social commentary, the adult twists and turns of its plot, its masterful writing has turned profound as well. What a read!
"Kids are beautiful," Walter said. "Kids have always been the meaning of life. You fall in love, you reproduce, and then your kids grow up and fall in love and reproduce. That's what life was always for. For pregnancy. For more life. But the problem now is that more life is still beautiful and meaningful on the individual level, but for the world as a whole it only means more death. And not nice death, either. We're looking at losing half the world's species in the next hundred years. We're facing the biggest mass extinction since at least the Cretaceous-Tertiary. First we'll get the utter wipeout of the world's ecosystems, then mass starvation and/or disease and/or killings. What's still 'normal' at the individual level is heinous and unprecedented at the global level."
"It's like the problem with Katz," it sounded like Lalitha said.
"Moi?"
"Kitty cats," she said. "C-A-T-S. Everybody loves their kitty cat and lets it run around outside. It's just one cat—how many birds can it kill? Well, every year in the U.S. one billion songbirds are murdered by domestic and feral cats. It's one of the leading causes of songbird decline in North America. But no one gives a shit because they love their own individual kitty cat."
"Nobody wants to think about it," Walter said. "Everybody just wants their normal life." [beginning at 8 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds in the digital recording, pp. 221-222]
July 12. Some critical comments on this article have convinced me that I needed to have said more about what I thought was "profound" about the passage from Freedom. The critic latched onto Lalitha's contention that "one billion songbirds are murdered by domestic and feral cats every year in the U.S." I told him that I wasn't concerned with the precise number (or with whether Franzen might or might not agree with what Lalitha was saying).
I told him that, for me, the passage made the point that in going about our "normal lives," there can be significant unintended consequences. I wasn't concerned with the distinction between songbirds and other birds, which the critic also latched onto. The songbird issue is a single issue in the larger context of human over-population and species extinction.
I take unintended consequences seriously as a matter of conscience. I worry about things like driving my car a mile when I could have walked with no ill effects (and possibly some healthful ones) and thereby contributing to the amount of greenhouse gases going into planet Earth's atmosphere, about eating animal flesh and thereby subsidizing factory farming of animals, about not being more watchful for the subsidized predator of a house cat who roams our neighborhood and stalks the birds for whom I put out various seeds and thistles in our feeders every morning of my life. I may have wished that my two children would have more than a total of one offspring, but I am abstractly glad that at least my line hasn't contributed to human population growth.
Maybe the book had turned profound only to me. Maybe I worry too much. In however many years before Earth is barely habitable, it'll hardly matter what this lone individual here did or didn't do.
It would matter enough to make a difference only if many more had worried.
The critic reported the shooting of a stray cat by someone his wife knows, which prompted my wife to send me a link to a December 2, 2007 article in The New York Times ("Kill the Cat That Kills the Bird?," by Bruce Barcott). The article tells a cat-shooting story that
went something like this: On the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006, Jim Stevenson [a bearish, ruddy-faced 54-year-old former science teacher who is known as the ornithological guru of Galveston, Texas] took a break from watching the election returns to look at some birds at San Luis Pass, a ripply channel connecting Galveston Bay to the gulf. Stevenson parked his white Dodge van with “Galveston Ornithological Society” bannered on its side, near the end of the San Luis Pass bridge, a tollway that connects Galveston Island to Follets Island. He found a spot in the low grass-speckled dunes and waited. Soon enough, he saw a handful of piping plovers, a federally listed endangered species. Then he saw something else: a scraggly cat stalking the plovers. A colony of about a dozen feral cats had been sleeping under the bridge. The cats liked to wander into the dunes for the same reason Stevenson did: the birds....Stevenson was the cat killer. His trial lasted a week, but the jury was deadlocked, so the case was dismissed. The article concludes: "The war between cats and birds—and among their protectors—continues."
Many of the protectors of birds (perhaps most) seem to be attempting to think globally, while protectors of cats (whose populations are not endangered) seem primarily to be "wanting their normal life," as Walter says.
The larger continuing war, generally, is between people wanting to think globally and people wanting their normal life not to be indisposed. We all want our normal life, but are we willing to make some sacrifices for the larger, longer common good?
July 15: More thoughts of Walter.
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Wikipedia:
"Think Globally, Act Locally" urges people to consider the health of the entire planet and to take action in their own communities and cities. Long before governments began enforcing environmental laws, individuals were coming together to protect habitats and the organisms that live within them. These efforts are referred to as grassroots efforts. They occur on a local level and are primarily run by volunteers and helpers.
I've had 6 cats over the decades. Total birds killed, 2. No idea about the quality or frequency of their singing. My current cat couldn't kill a bird if it landed on his nose, and I have a hunch that the 2 dead ones weren't up to par when they warbled their last.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Frazen has asked, How can one calculate the number of songbirds killed by cats? What sort of statistical method or extrapolation was involved? What agency did the work and at whose direction?
I do worry about where humankind is headed. Whatever our fate, it will not be mitigated by the avalanche of statistical bullshit that pollutes our thoughts daily.
Ken, thanks for commenting.
ReplyDeleteSounds as though your cats haven't been allowed to roam. House cats and cats closely supervised when they're outside aren't the problem.
In February, a roaming cat in our neighborhood became the subject of discussion on our neighborhood information network. Two articles were cited, one in The Washington Post, another in The New York Times:
"The number of pet cats in the United States has tripled in the past four decades, and each outdoor cat kills between four and 54 birds a year, according to wildlife biologists Nico Dauphiné and Robert J. Cooper in a review paper published last year by the bird conservation consortium Partners in Flight. They estimated that at least one billion birds are killed by cats annually, 'and the actual number is probably much higher.'" [The Post, Sept. 2010]
"In a newly completed study, Dr. [Peter P. Marra, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center at the National Zoo] and his students used radio transmitters to track fledgling survival in two Washington suburbs: Bethesda and my own Takoma Park. The towns are similar socioeconomically and demographically, but while much of Takoma Park is crawling with outdoor cats, many streetscapes in Bethesda are, for reasons that remain unclear, largely cat-free. At least partly as a result of this discrepancy, Dr. Marra said, fledgling survivorship among Bethesda birds is about 55 percent, similar to what you would see in a natural population. But for birds that happen to be born in my tree-lined paradisiacal hamlet, only 10 percent last long enough to take wing." [The Times, Sept. 2009]
I don't know what to say about your abiding problem with statistics, other than quote William Playfair (1759–1823), whom Wikipedia credits as "the founder of graphical methods of statistics":
"No study is less alluring or more dry and tedious than statistics, unless the mind and imagination are set to work, or that the person studying is particularly interested in the subject."
The sort of imaginative work he had in mind seems to have been different from the work your imagination does when provoked by a mention of statistics!
Morris, all of my cats have been outdoor cats, although they've differed in their courage to explore. I haven't supervised them closely. If I tried, I'd have a lot less life left over for myself. Most of them have have stayed close to the backyard by choice, and I've found only those 2 dead birds I mentioned.
ReplyDeleteIt's characteristic that you defend a published claim with another published claim. Nothing to give confidence that either claim is accurate. Most objectionable is your focus on my personality — I'm statistics phobic! — rather than on the plausibility of the statistics.
What's dying much faster than songbirds is the practice of critical thinking. If our suspicions aren't aroused when someone hands us buffalo chips in place of gold coin, neither the climate nor our population growth nor our dietary choices nor the imbalances in global wealth will matter. We will not have the fundamental habits of mind that are necessary for our survival.
Ken, until you admitted that you haven't supervised your cats closely, I was willing to accept your claim of 2 birds killed. Now my confidence is shaken.
ReplyDeleteI didn't think that researchers needed for me to defend their use of statistics to analyze sample populations, although perhaps I should have said the reason I quoted the two articles: to show briefly by a small sample that the passage from Franzen's novel was using gold coin, not buffalo chips.
I do admire your phrasing. If not the best way for me to express my admiration, then the sincerest way might be for me to try to imitate it:
If our suspicions aren't aroused when someone hands us a single piece of anecdotal evidence in place of statistical analysis of a sufficiently large sample, we will not have the fundamental habits of mind that are necessary for us to know how to act locally to avoid global catastrophe.
Morris, you're confidence isn't shaken. No one other than a naturalist with a special tracking and night photography system supervises an outdoor cat closely. My last comment contained no surprises.
ReplyDeleteMy first comment mentioned extrapolation. I chose the word because I anticipated the problem of making a stunning generalization from the results of a few limited studies. If a researcher shrinks from this problem, buffalo chips are his stock and trade.
Your last paragraph is an excellent recipe for chaos. A case in point… Linda (my wife to you Moristotle fans) belongs to a women's social group. One of the members had read the songbird baloney and decided to act locally. When an unknown cat appears in her yard, she shoots it! Yes, she whips out a gun, and bam! I think we can agree that she's nuts, but we're left with some good questions. Would a decline in songbirds warrant urgent local action? If so, what would it be? If it isn't possible to act in a coordinated and rational way — It isn't — why does Franzen bring it up? Seems likely that he was groping for something profound and came up with nothing but smoke.
All it takes to supervise a cat is to keep it indoors. Something, by the way, that all the veterinarians we saw during the years we kept a cat recommended.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Carolyn, for mentioning what I thought was (or should be) understood. I wasn't trying to prescribe for Ken what cat supervision should be, but only trying to understand what his idea of supervision was (and he's now made it pretty clear).
ReplyDeleteKen, thanks for sticking with this. Your reference to "a stunning generalization from the results of a few limited studies" is pretty stunning jujitsu in its own right, given that you seem to be generalizing from your own individual experience of cat ownership and given that your phrase, "a few limited studies," suggests (to the unwary) that you're familiar with all of the studies and not only know that they're not numerous enough to support valid statistical inference, but also know what constitutes valid statistical inference.
For the record, I agree in condemning Linda's fellow women's social group member's practice of shooting cats that come into her yard. In the case of the cat that I mentioned in our neighborhood, who is a stealthy predator given to patiently stalking bird feeders until he can pounce on a bird, we shoo him out of the yard with as much ruckus and menace as we can muster in the hope of discouraging his return. (We recently had a nest of five Blue Bird eggs in our back yard and a nest of five Wren eggs on our front porch; we seem to have provided enough cover for all ten fledglings to survive their initial foray into the world.)
The Times article, by the way, referred to such cats as "subsidized predators": they're fed and cared for by their owners (who will take them to the vet when necessary, for example) but allowed to go out hunting for sport (killing birds with no need to eat them). The cats don't deserve shooting—and, of course, neither do their owners, who do need to learn to respect birds' rights, however; this cat's owner refused to do that, preferring to belittle her neighbors for caring about birds and asking rhetorically whether we expected her to put her cat on a leash or take it to be euthanized.
Ken, you ask why Franzen brings up the possibility of acting in a coordinated and rational way, since "it isn't [possible]." Let's remember that the speech comes from a fictional character, an activist who is trying to influence behavior. The most we might be allowed to infer about Franzen's motives is that he's trying to create a realistic character.
I suppose that I, too, in addition to amusing myself by blogging about things I value, am hoping to influence behavior. But I don't think that the futility of such a hope means that my jeremiads are "nothing but smoke."
Carolyn, you're right that the majority of vets recommend keeping a cat indoors. Vets are medical people, and they know that traffic and fights with other cats have a measurable effect on cat longevity. (Gold-coin data, Morris.) Trouble is, you need to keep indoor cats away from windows. Otherwise, they can see the natural world from which they've been disinherited. Their morale plummets. Data shows that electrical activity in their brains drops by 54%.
ReplyDeleteMorris, do you really expect me, a life-long cat owner, to withhold my personal observations? If the songbird number were true — at least a billion dead annually — wouldn't a cat owner's first reaction be "That does (or doesn't) jibe with my personal experience"? Of course I agree that my "no confirmation here" response doesn't invalidate the claim in the book.
By the way, doesn't it at least raise an eyebrow that this BS is about songbirds rather than birds in general? This odd narrowing of a legitimate subject is a flashing red signal: WARNING — SENTIMENTAL MANIPULATION AHEAD. Think of the research money that poured in on the condition that blackbirds and other drab chirpers would be no part of the study. Think of the researchers putting tick marks in their notebooks only if the dead bird was a warbler. What crap!
Ken, the "what crap" might or might not apply to the fictional Walter and Lalitha's project, which has to do, though, in the fictional world created by the author of Freedom, with protecting songbirds.
ReplyDeleteRemember, I described the book as "hugely entertaining."
Do you think that cat owners should be exempt from doubting that their personal experience jibes with a larger reality accessible through the lens of hard-working, dedicated field researchers—the way people who don't want the globe to be heating up seem happy to exempt themselves from taking atmospheric and oceanic and other science seriously?
Nice joke, by the way: "Data shows [sic] that electrical activity in their brains [i.e., the brains of indoor cats kept away from windows] drops by 54%."
Morris, let's not play the "it's a fictional world" game. What are the themes of the book? Does Lalitha come off as a serious person or as a blockhead? Are Walter and Lalitha protagonists or friends of protagonists? Do they profess ideas that are supportive of the book's themes? The answers to such questions tell the reader whether he is hearing Franzen's voice or not. You're the reader. If Lalitha is a figure of ridicule, please say so, and I'll do a U-turn. But if she is an admirable figure, you're yanking my chain.
ReplyDeleteI don't get your question about cat-owner exemption and hard-working, dedicated field researchers (deserving of a shrine, given your tone). I can only affirm that no one is exempt from the responsibility to think critically about everything that poses as knowledge or fact or wisdom or virtue.
Ken, I'm not familiar with the game you refer to. I googled on "fictional world game" and found something about videogames, but they don't seem to have been your reference. So, I don't get your meaning.
ReplyDeleteYou're free to do a literary critique of the book. There's another 13 hours and 20 minutes (or 440 pages) remaining beyond the pages I quoted. At this point, I'm not confident yet that I even know why the novel is titled Freedom.
But Walter and Richard have already been well-established as main characters. I don't think that Lalitha will become so (unless Richard is right that she is in love with Walter and he leaves his wife Patty for her, which I very much doubt he will).
I see that I shouldn't have mentioned "hugely entertaining" in this context, for I certainly didn't (and never do) intend to "pull your chain." I care too much about you to toy with your affections.
I'm not sure what I was trying to convey by the reminder of the book's being entertaining, but I can at least point out now that "entertaining" means more than laughter-provoking. It's not a happy book (so far, anyway).
I obviously respect people who become and work as scientists. But build them a shrine? No, I didn't mean to suggest that, even if you chose to interpret my words as having a worshipful tone. I was trying to counter your own seeming dismissal of scientists and scientific knowledge (when statistics are involved, anyway). I don't think that they or scientific knowledge deserve to be so easily dismissed.
I agree with you in affirming that no one is exempt from the responsibility to think critically about everything that poses as knowledge or fact or wisdom or virtue. My reasons for thinking critically about your approach seem to be the same as yours for thinking critically about mine. There's something about each other's approach that we don't like.
I hope we can move on now, but I suppose you're going to explain next what you don't like about my approach? I hope I can make productive use of whatever it is.
Morris, I think you're right about moving on. I'll try to sum up with what I'll call the Marks Rule. It goes this way… The more startling a claim that is presented as fact, the greater the responsibility of the claimer to thoroughly present his methods and logic to the startled public.
ReplyDeleteFrom what you've written in this thread, and from what I've read on my own, I've seen little to satisfy the Marks Rule in the "Freedom claim." I accept that the population of songbirds is declining, but very little else. Alternative hypotheses are easy to formulate. For example, begin with the order of magnitude stated in Freedom: at least one billion dead in America every year. I've seen different magnitudes on the web, some pegging the number at 75% lower. Then admit that cats are responsible for some number of these, but are they chiefly free-roaming house cats or feral cats? I think there's a big difference. So far as I've read, studies haven't made this distinction (and I can't see how they could). Then ask how many of the dead songbirds were done in by agents other than cats. I've seen articles that lay most of the blame on other culprits. They cite predators other than cats (some of them other birds), deforestation, tall city buildings on migration routes, and pesticides that have entered the food chain. So this alternate hypothesis would affirm something like this: Hundreds of millions of songbirds are dying every year in America. A number of predators are responsible, and one of the notable ones is feral cats. However, mankind bears most of the responsibility.
It's obvious that what one does to act locally depends on which hypothesis you accept. A much greater burden, given the Marks Rule, rests on the hypothesis in Freedom.
Ken, thanks, and very well stated. I hope to apply the Marks Rule in my future attempts to think critically.
ReplyDeleteBut, in quoting the passage (and in titling the article "Think globally, act locally"), I wasn't concerned with the precise numbers (or with whether the author might or might not agree with what Lalitha was saying), I was hoping to illustrate the point that in going about our "normal lives" (e.g., consuming like an American), there can be significant unintended consequences. We don't often think about that. People drive because they have a car and can (still) afford gas, even when they could walk (and be better off for the exercise). And on and on. You're familiar with some of my issues (and even alluded to them in one of your comments).
What the passage did for me, it obviously can't do for everyone, so I probably should have specified what I thought could reasonably (and reliably) be drawn from it. I can still do that and, if I may, I'd like to incorporate some of your ideas.
I have more to ponder. As ever, thanks for your instruction.