A great ending, and a terrible one

Recently I finished the final book of the Expanse series.  Having seen many long series end up either in limbo or finished badly I was a little concerned that it would finish up a giant mess - I needn't have been concerned.  The Expanse finished wonderfully, tying up the loose ends well, giving the readers insights into the story that we have long been waiting for, and wrapping up character arcs in appropriate ways.

It was quite the contrast to the other space adventure series I finished recently - Battlestar Galactica - which shambled to a disastrous end that tainted the entire series.

I won't spoil the the final book of the Expanse here, though I will assume you have read most of the books already.  Galactica though, I will spoil ruthlessly.

One of the key things that has to happen for a finale to work is that the authors have to reveal solutions to some mysteries that have continued throughout the story.  To do this you have to have a plan.  The Expanse writers clearly had a plan.  There were many unknowns about the two alien races in the series, including how exactly the war between them played out, and a lot of those gaps were filled in.  More importantly, they were filled in with information that fit everything that came before.  All of the things that happened during the series fit with the information in the final installment, and you can see the consistency of the rules of the world.

Galactica though, wow.  They got to the end and it was clear that they had *no* idea how to wrap up their ongoing storylines.  They had a shared vision among multiple people about an opera house where a child had two people chasing after her to save her, and two others who were taking her away for some unknown purpose.  This vision was a big part of the plot for multiple seasons.  It needed a grand ending, something to justify all the setup.  Then, at the end, the kid in the vision was walking through a ship with those two people trying to find her.  The other two people picked her up, walked ten paces, and put her down.  And that was the entire payoff to two seasons of drama and tension.  

The kid could have walked those ten paces herself.  If no one had been there, nothing would have happened.  If the other two people had found the kid first, nothing would be different.  What a waste, and it made it entirely clear that the writers came up with a cool thing to do in season 2, but never bothered to consider what it would actually mean in the end.

Another key ingredient to a good ending is keeping character motivations and traits consistent.  Again the Expanse did this well.  Holden and Alex in particular got endings that fit their arcs, and had appropriate and emotional callbacks to how they thought and behaved in the early books.  They continued to act like themselves and although they had changed throughout the series the change felt real, believable, and good.  Being able to combine a variety of threads from the first book through to the end to help finish off a character's tale is difficult, and the Expanse nailed it.

Again, Galactica failed spectacularly.  At the end all of the characters decide to throw all of their technology into the sun and become nomadic hunter gatherers.  This wasn't set up ahead of time, even though they had plenty of opportunities to establish religious groups that could have potentially justified this nonsense.  They had a bunch of people totally reliant on modern technology all decide simultaneously "Well, I guess I don't want to have a heater, or medicine, or sanitation, or anything ever again.  It is time for us all to die of exposure and disease... because reasons."

It was embarassing to watch, honestly.  Truly, it is hard to imagine that a space adventure series ends with a "Because God's divine plan, that's why." and that wasn't even the main thing I wanted to rant about.  If the story beats had been paid off, and the characters got appropriate and consistent endings, I could have forgiven Because God as the end of the show, but put it all together and you have something truly pathetic.

If you just want some views, you can make up random crap as you go along.  That works.  If you want an enduring legacy though, you have to actually make a plan.

The Expanse had a plan.  Galactica did not.  It shows.

Feline Ethical Hedonist

My cat Lewis died today.  We got him six years ago, a blind, rotund creature who wandered about bumping into everything.  We worried that he would struggle to settle in, find his litterbox, figure out the layout, but Lewis managed wonderfully right from the start.

He was an utter failure as a majestic predator.  He loved to go outside and sit on the lawn at the cottage sniffing the air while birds and squirrels wandered 50 cm away from him.  I don't think he understood that they were there at all, but I can't quite say why the wild creatures were so willing to hang out near him.  I suppose they sensed his inability and disinterest in chasing them down.  Most cats like to hang out on high perches trying to look fierce and independent.  Lewis liked to do this:

His favourite thing was to lie on his back in a sunbeam with his paws in the air, begging for a belly rub.  Unlike other cats it wasn't a trap - he loved attention and would chirp and purr happily if you stopped by to get some cat tummy time.  This cat knew how to be an ethical hedonist, no doubt.  He loved snuggles and would happily fall asleep on your chest, snoring very softly away.  He trusted everyone right away, and would happily sit in the middle of busy rooms with people walking all about, even those he didn't know.

This fall he got deadly sick and we found out that his kidneys were failing.  There is no cure, but after the vet got him stabilized we brought him home and began giving him daily injections of fluids because he stopped drinking water entirely.  We knew we were just buying time against the inevitable, but we wanted to give him all of the good days he could have.

This weekend he ran out of good days.

The looming prospect of euthanasia was a tremendous struggle for me emotionally.  I see myself as my family's protector, a physical shield against all the dangers of the world.  To take him to a place where stranger would kill him is a terrible thing to face, and it was made much worse by the fact that due to covid only one of us could be with him at the end.

Normally this sort of thing Wendy would do.  She was the one who was there when Pinkie Pie came out of surgery and only one of us could be there... but I needed this.

I needed to be with him because even though I can no longer protect him from death, I will still protect him from suffering.  I needed to be there so he would know, as he died, that he was not abandoned, and that he was loved.  When he died I fell apart for awhile, and his wonderful soft fur soaked up my tears.

Now Lewis is dead.  Not gone entirely, of course, so long as we remember.  I will remember him as being the worst of the deadly hunters... and the best of the cats.

I wish I was wrong

This past fall Pinkie Pie decided to try high school.  She missed what would have been her grade 9 year with the pandemic, but she wanted to try again.  I had thought it wouldn't work at all, but it is now almost four months in and it looks like she will get full credits for the term.  My parents set high standards for my marks and results in school, but Pinkie Pie has struggles that I never did - we will be happy if she passes.  

One thing that has been making school more challenging is an educational assessment.  It is a process where psychologists and learning experts evaluate kids for all kinds of things including behavioural problems, learning disabilities, etc.  It costs a few thousand dollars, which is the barrier for many people, but with some family help on that front we decided to try it as school started.

I was quite sure what the result would be.  Pinkie Pie has been through the mental health system for years now, and I knew this educational assessment would result in them saying "Pinkie Pie is a clever kid with high anxiety and executive function problems.  She needs extra help, flexibility, and time to complete her work."  However, we decided to go for it anyway in the hopes that I was somehow wrong.

The process was much more of a struggle than we had thought.  It involved numerous sessions of tough academics and doing it caused Pinkie Pie to miss a whole week of school due to exhausion.  Making school even worse is not was I was hoping for out of this.

Still, just maybe I will be wrong?

I was not wrong.

After several months of appointments they sat us down and told us in big words that my kid is bright but has big struggles with anxiety, energy, and organization.  They recommended doing exactly what the school was already doing anyway.

I was ready to write it off as a perfect prediction, but they added one thing at the end.  They told us we could go for parent coaching to try to help with this process.  If there is one thing I need at the end of paying people hundreds of dollars an hour to tell me stuff I already know it is a recommendation to pay someone else hundreds of dollars an hour to tell me *different* stuff I already know!  It would be great - I would describe my situation to them, and they would tell me that Pinkie Pie needs a good sleep schedule, healthy food, and for us to tell her to go to school in a firm voice.  Somehow they would imagine that I didn't get this advice from one thousand other sources.

It isn't as though I think these people are all incompetent.  Probably parent coaches mostly give good advice, and I am sure the people evaluating Pinkie Pie knew their stuff.  They just had absolutely nothing of value to give us at the end.

What I know for sure though is that I have read and listened to endless parenting advice when Pinkie Pie struggled and it was not helpful.  It was always stuff I already knew, had already tried, and which totally failed.  When I got this advice I always responded that I had tried that exact thing and it did not work.  Mostly they would give me blank stares, no doubt being sure that the advice was good, so clearly I had screwed it up.  

Fact is, you can be as good a parent as you want, and there are some things you can't fix.  No strategy will suffice, no route to victory can be found.

I wanted so much to be wrong, for them to find something, anything, that would give her an edge to deal with her current struggles.  Unfortunately I was right, and we will just have to continue to muddle through.

Moving on up

I recently finished the book Exodus - How Migration is Changing Our World.  It is about the movement of people from poor countries to rich ones, and examines what effects this movement has on all of the parties involved.  I didn't agree with it all the way, but I think it does a great job of asking hard questions and looking at the issue from the perspective of everyone affected.  Being as I live in Canada it is no surprise that most of my exposure to immigration discussion has been centered on whether or not it is good for current Canadians if new people move here.  Exodus examines the subject from that perspective, but it also spends a lot of time talking about the effects on the immigrants themselves and the people left behind in the poorer countries from which they come.

In political debate the subject of immigration often comes down to left vs. right shouting matches.  The left wants all the immigration and any opposition to that is racist, and the right wants no immigration and any opposition to that is destroying our culture.  Naturally both extremes are nonsense, and both have some kind of point if you tone the rhetoric down some.  A lot of opposition to immigration within rich countries is based on racism, but there are real concerns about how immigration levels change the culture of the countries people are moving to.

One key topic that is pivotal and controversial is the examination of why exactly poor countries are poor.  Is it just historical, based on past behaviour?  Luck?  Or is it culture, and poorer, worse functioning countries are that way because of the behaviour of their citizens?  Again, this discussion is a political minefield, but the explanation is a bit of all of each of these simple answers.  Colonialism left all kinds of troubles and issues in poorer countries, but some countries have pushed beyond a troubled past, marred by invasion and occupation.  Some countries are lucky to have valuable resources, but those resources do not explain much of the difference in standard of living.

Exodus explains that much of the difference between countries can be explained by mutual regard between citizens.  If you think of everyone else in your country as someone close to you, someone you should respect, and insist on the same behaviour from them, your country will prosper.  When nurses steal all the drugs from hospitals to sell on the black market, the country suffers.  When crime is so rampant that everyone must spend tons of money on security guards, the country suffers.  When bureaucrats demand bribes and squander money via corruption the country suffers.  Countries that are rich tend to have high trust among citizens and people do not overlook transgressions by others, even if those others are close to them.  Of course every country has some degree of corruption, but less corruption is hugely beneficial.

If a rich country wants to maintain its standard of living, then any new arrivals must take on its current culture.  They don't have to have all the same holidays, modes of dress, etc. but they need to buy into the basic ideals and customs with regards to law and corruption.  If they do not, the standard of living in the country will suffer.  It is reasonable to demand certain cultural standards, but it is easy to tip over and demand far too much, and of the wrong types.

I definitely think Canadians need to be concerned about racism, particularly against immigrants.  I also think that we have to carefully manage how many people we bring in to make sure we have the infrastructure to support them, and also make sure that we maintain the parts of our culture that give us the wealth and privilege that the immigrants are seeking.  We can't expect to have open borders and welcome anyone who wants in while maintaining our standard of living, so we need restrictions, and those restrictions are going to be complicated and difficult to decide on.

The simple fact is that immigration cannot be boiled down to Good or Bad.  It is a complicated thing that is governed by extremely complex systems, and how we approach it hugely affects our outcomes.

One thing in Exodus that I was especially interested in is the discussion of nationalism.  I have been wont to say that nationalism is poison, but Exodus does point out that nationalism does have some benefits.  It tends to reduce corruption and increase mutual regard, convincing citizens to do things for one another.  The basic argument is that nationalism is good for the economy.  The author carefully states that nationalism was, in the past, a huge source of wars and conflict, and this is an obvious downside.  He thinks though that this is a thing of the past, and we shouldn't worry much about that anymore.

I think he is delusional on this point.  Nationalism may well improve the economy, but wars are still happening and they aren't gone forever.  Nationalism is a danger to humanity at large, particularly since one of our greatest existential threats, nuclear war, is vastly more likely to occur between two states in the throes of nationalist ideas. I am totally willing to take a hit to my standard of living to push the possibility of war further to the wayside, and it isn't even close.

Anyone who thinks that nationalism isn't setting us on the warpath anymore should look carefully at the US and the wars it has been continuously involved in for the past several decades.  Would Russia have been involved in the military actions it has over the past few years if it weren't so tightly in the grasp of militant nationalism?  I think not.

While I disagree with some of Exodus, I do think it raises a great many useful points.  If you haven't thought a lot about immigration from a variety of viewpoints you will probably learn a few things, and the book is easy to read and clear.  One final caveat though - the author likes to use formulas and graphs to make points, and sometimes they are misleading.  You can't take an enormously complicated topic, boil it down to 2 numbers, and then pretend that putting those numbers in a formula gives you good data out the other side.  Economists are fond of simple math representing labyrinthine issues, and such behaviour should be given a generous helping of side eye.

Fitting in nowhere

The next book in my 'recommended to me' series is Surviving the White Gaze.  This book is beyond the reach of the initial set of recommendations and is part of my new section 'people keep hearing that I am taking recommendations so they shove books at me'.  Surviving the White Gaze is simultaneously easy and hard to read.  It is a series of short, well written anecdotes and stories about the author's life focused around her experiences of race.  She is a biracial woman who was raised in a town where she was the only person who wasn't white.

While the writing is clear and smooth, the stories are harsh and jarring.  She had a tough childhood, being raised by white parents who didn't understand her struggles at all, and being surrounded by people who were constantly racist towards her.  As she got older she found her way into black social groups and communities but this often didn't help at all, as she was too black for the white people and too white for the black people.  I had realized academically that this is a serious struggle for biracial people but these stories brought that experience to life and made it real and visceral.

The stories of racism vary wildly.  Some were outright tales of outright discrimination that I found hard to stomach, and others revealed struggles that aren't necessarily obvious.  For example, black hair is different from white hair.  If no one in your town knows how to deal with your hair, then it can feel like you are inferior when in fact you are simply lacking in expertise.

If you are curious about what racism feels like, or how it plays out, this is a good book.  The author does not attempt to portray herself in a perfect light, and her many mistakes and issues are on display.  You get to see a flawed person struggling in a world that makes it extremely difficult for her, and through that struggle you will get a glimpse into humanity.

The author was adopted by a white couple and mostly raised by them, though she spent some time during her teenage years and adulthood with her birth mother.  All three parents did things wrong and made her life more difficult, though certainly her birth mother was the worst.  (Taking your eleven year old daughter to a bar and leaving her alone, and then blaming her when an old man tries to convince her to have sex with him is beyond the pale.)  She blames all three parents for many of the things she suffered, quite justifiably.  However, she also lays blame in ways that I don't accept as reasonable.

Blaming parents for their children's misbehaviour or suffering is something I see a lot.  My instinct is that this is more of a modern phenomenon, but perhaps that isn't true.  Parents often do this to themselves of course, asking themselves what they did wrong.  Sometimes they did do things wrong, of course, but often had they chosen differently it wouldn't have helped, or it would simply have created different issues.  I don't like blaming people when we can't even be sure that different choices would have improved outcomes.  If you would have been angry even if a different choice were made, then you are giving the target of your anger no right choice, no way out, and I don't accept that.

I am happy to blame parents for bad behaviour, but only if I can see a better way.  I don't toss blame if they just made the best of a bad situation.

For example, blaming her adoptive parents because they didn't give her exposure to black culture, or help her find ways to work with black hair seems quite reasonable to me.  They should have worked harder on that.  Blaming them because they didn't uproot their entire lives to move to a big city from their country residence to put her nearer to black people isn't reasonable.  It was hard on her, of that I have no doubt, but parents don't have an obligation to relocate in the world, especially when they have other kids too.  I understand her feelings, but I don't accept the allocation of blame.

When Pinkie Pie struggles, I worry.  I wonder if I could do something to help her, to fix her problems, to make things better.  I think about the choices I have made in the past.  However, I don't accept that all of her issues are on me.  I have to continue to try to help her, but I won't make it all about me, nor drown in misplaced blame.  No matter how perfect a parent you are, your children will screw up, suffer, and struggle.  You do what you can, but they have to go through things to learn how to cope with them, and you can't entirely avoid that.  Heaping blame on parents in no win situations isn't productive or fair.

Surviving the White Gaze is a powerful book that can give you a visceral understanding of the struggles of biracial people.  However, I do suggest that you take the criticisms of some of the author's family with a grain of salt.

Humans are kind

Next up in my reading series is HumanKind.  This book is about humans natural tendencies towards kindness and helpfulness, and how these tendencies can be overwritten or pushed aside by modern life.

By modern life I mean all life since the invention of agriculture.

Our examples of hunter gatherer societies are fairly small in number but they consistently paint a portrait of cooperation, lack of hierarchies, and group decision making.  This makes a lot of sense when you think about the way such groups would live.  When you move around following herds or harvesting by season there is little to own.  You don't stay on any particular patch of land, and owning it makes little sense.  You can't have more possessions than you can carry, so hoarding wealth is nearly impossible.  Having a standing military is an expense you cannot afford because they can't accomplish anything useful.  This is the sort of environment that humans are mostly adapted to.  The few thousand years since agriculture developed have changed a lot, but that isn't enough time for evolution to have a big effect.

Once you have agriculture the rules all change.  Land ownership becomes crucial.  Hoarding wealth is suddenly feasible.  Increases in food production allow for specialization and pave the way for standing militaries and their accompanying rigid hierarchies.  All of this leads to war and violence.  However, turning highly cooperative nomadic humans into bloodthirsty pillagers requires a lot of change in our outlook, and it turns out the key to that is making us believe that humans are naturally bad, and thus in need of constant control.  We also need to be convinced that other people are evil, and thus it is acceptable to murder them and take their stuff.

This is the key to being a dictator over a huge group of people.  In order to impose your rules you have to make people fear each other so they will surrender their liberties for safety.  There are many versions of this - religions telling people that other people are inherently wicked, for example.  However, there are modern day equivalents like most economics that holds dear the idea of humans as machines that try to maximize their personal power and position.

The book addresses a lot of the ways we try to convince each other of humankind's wickedness.  For example, the bystander effect, in which the death of Kitty Genovese is often cited.  The story that is often told is that Kitty was attacked in an alley, and 38 people witnessed the attack.  They did nothing, and the attacker returned repeatedly until finally Kitty died.  The true story is that the police interviewed 38 people, most of whom were asleep or heard yelling in an alley and thought it was just a drunk person.  Two of them called the police (who arrived too late to help) and one found Kitty and held her while she died.  It is a tragedy, and certainly shows that some individuals are wicked and violent, but it does not teach us that human bystanders are callous brutes.

Similarly the Stanford prison experiment and the famous experiment where volunteers administered shocks that they were meant to think were fatal are often used as examples of humans being basically bad.  The book talks about both cases, and shows how flawed the conclusions are.

Humans are marvellously adapted to cooperate and learn from one another.  These are the things that set us apart from all other species.  The great majority of us struggle to harm others at all.  However, we can be indoctrinated, tricked, and pushed into hatred and violence, and we often are.  We should not imagine that this is inevitable though, because it is not.  The last century shows us that we can get better.  We can reduce war, we can try to help others, and we can break down barriers.  

We aren't perfect, and never will be, but we are slowly fumbling our way towards something better.

HumanKind is an excellent book that will teach you about the ways that we are tricked into hatred, how hierarchies and possessions create conflict and division, and how people use this story of inherent wickedness of humankind to justify atrocities.  Being better is difficult, but this book provides clues as to how we can go about doing that.

Defeated by detail

The next book on my 'stuff people recommended' list is The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.  It is a book about archaeology / anthropology that looks at ancient peoples, particularly a group that lived in the steppes of Asia called Indo-Europeans.  

It is the first book that I failed to finish.

I didn't fail because the book was bad, or wrong, but rather because it is so chock fill of minute details that I just don't care about.  It sounds like it would be right up my alley - I am interested in historic trends and the idea of following the invention of the wheel or horseback riding and seeing how they influenced language migration sounds neat.

Unfortunately the book is just so dry and so full of proof for minor points that I couldn't get through it all.  I read halfway, and then stopped reading at all for weeks because I had no desire at all to finish.  Finally I concluded that I need to give up on my goal of reading all the books all the way through and simply write up what I have and ship it back to the library.

It turns out that I like broad strokes of learning when I am looking at something quite unfamiliar.  I suspect I am like most people in this regard.  If I am well versed in a topic I enjoy intricate detail, but for something I know little about I can't get that interested in a scholarly treatise that gets bogged down in minute tidbits.  I just don't care about the origin of a particular consonant in the Proto Indo European language.  

The book seems well researched.  I don't fault its academic credentials, though honestly I don't know that I would be able to tell if it was absolutely full of it.  That might be the issue, really.  If every single word in the book was a lie I don't think I would be able to definitely argue against it, and that means I am reading way above my pay grade.

If you enjoy detailed linguistic explanations and exhaustive examination of archeological evidence, this book may be for you.  

For me though, it was just a bit too much.  I don't have the knowledge required to get a lot out of it... and I suspect that 99.9% of humanity is in the same situation.

My next couple of books are much more approachable, written for mass audiences, and I am sure I will be able to finish them.  For now though I will consider myself defeated by detail.