In recent pieces I have been discussing the argument in my new book, Science and Spirituality. (Not exactly the title I chose but like everyone else who is not Stephen Jay Gould, I do what my publisher tells me to do. And look what happened to him. He ended up leaving a 1,464-page monster, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, that rambled on and on and on and on and on and on and on. That’s what happens when you don’t do what you are told.) I have not quite finished telling about the argument of my book, but I will pick up the thread in the next week or so.
Here I want to use the book as an excuse to move sideways somewhat, as it were. Science and Spirituality came out about six weeks ago and has been listed by Amazon.com since then. At last looking, it was hovering somewhere in the 400,000 sales ranking, although that may be a bit generous. I cannot say that I am particularly worried. It is not really a trade book and I do have my audience. I will be surprised if in the next two or three years it does not sell about 10,000 copies. (Surprised and bloody upset if the truth be known. I am not that casual and modest.)
What is interesting is that, as soon as the book was listed by Amazon, a review appeared--one of those things that readers do and that are listed under the information about the book. And to say that it is a bit of a corker is to underestimate. “This is an odd book: It teeters on the verge of being a good book, nearly bringing a new perspective to a tired debate, and then it skids off and loses its focus. The reason is simple: You can’t be a Darwinian true believer, defending ad infinitum the metaphysics of natural selection, and deal with the topics the book raises, or rather--it seems, someone else raised, and which Ruse almost dishonestly takes up and discusses as if this was his material.” And that is just for starters! I ignore or belittle Kant, for instance. (No matter that I am almost obsessive on the subject of Kant in an earlier book, Darwin and Design.) “It would seem that Ruse wishes to intone from on high with academic grandeur to fix these questions without any reference to the original discussions. This is professorial arrogance at its worst.” And so we keep going. “As to the mainline topic of the book, science and spirituality, it is still another useless effort to bridge the Divide here, doomed to failure if by science and spirituality you mean Darwinism and Christianity.” There is quite a bit more along these lines.
Now I don’t know right now if the world will judge Science and Spirituality a good book or a bad book. But one thing I can say is that at the moment it is an unread book. The reviewer has simply not opened the covers! There is absolutely nothing in the review to show that he has any sense whatever of the main argument--or any interest for that matter. I say this not out of a sense of pique, but out of a sense of reality. The review may be a good one. The only thing is that I do not know which book the review is reviewing. It is not mine.
This is all a prolegomenon to what is going on in historical circles in England at the moment. The deservedly distinguished historian of modern Russia, Orlando Figes, has been caught with his pants down. He has been writing reviews, on Amazon.com, trashing his rivals’ books. He has also been writing reviews praising his own books. After a week of threatening and blustering, talking of libel suits, and then blaming his wife (a distinguished law professor in her own right), he admitted to his actions.
- [A]fter a week of questions and increasingly critical headlines, Figes today revealed that he had been responsible for the comments.
- He apologized to [those] “to whom I gave incorrect information"--for actions he called “stupid”, adding: “Some of the reviews were small-minded and ungenerous, but they were not intended to harm.”
- He described a state of panic when he first saw the email sent by [a rival whom he criticized], which made him instruct his lawyer “without thinking this through rationally.”
- “This escalated the situation,” he said, “and brought more pressure on myself by prompting a legal response. My wife loyally tried to save me and protect our family at a moment of intense stress when she was worried about my health. I owe her an unreserved apology.”
At the moment, according to his college, “he is on sick leave and we are offering our support.” No doubt he is consulting Tiger Woods about the appropriate therapy.
One would have to be a person of exceptional moral purity not to take a certain pleasure in all of this. University profs like me are not such people although we are pretty good hypocrites, so I am sure we will go around speaking gravely in sepulchral tones. But although there are obviously moral issues here--hiding behind his wife is what in the old days we used to call the action of a cad--I confess my main emotions are not of ethical horror but of sadness and bemusement.
First, the man has destroyed his career and that is a great pity. He is a good historian working on serious issues--about Russia in the 20th century--and now he is the butt of common-room jokes on every campus in the English-speaking world. Even as I take a certain joy in the unfolding story--and if I don’t, I have a lot of friends who have been sending me emails who clearly do--I pity the wretch.
Second, why on earth did he do it in such a crude way as to get found out? Any experienced academic knows that there are lots of ways to put the boot into rivals. Start with writing nasty grant-proposal referee reports. (One eminent evolutionist so liked the nasty report his wrote on one of my proposals that he then published the whole thing unchanged in a journal!) Or get your students to do the dirty work for you or whatever. I am not saying that any of this is moral--it isn’t--and I am not recommending it (for which reason, I am not going to list another five obvious ways to get at your rivals) but I am saying that I really do wonder about the man’s sanity at doing all of this in such a crude way, almost begging to be found out.
I am not going to draw any immediate moral conclusions from all of this. Apparently the historians that Figes trashed were very upset. I clearly have a different sort of personality. I welcome any publicity so long as my name is spelt correctly. (By no means a foregone conclusion--Rose, Russ, Rouse, Roose, Rooze.) As I have been explaining in the pieces about my book, I am what is known as an accommodationist--this apparently has nothing to do with my sexual preferences and everything to do with the fact that I believe that science and religion can co-exist harmoniously. The blogs are out to get me. Jerry Coyne in his Why Evolution Is True and P.Z. Myers in his Pharyngula are obsessive about my sins, and their commentators range from disdain to outright abuse. The number who confidently assert that I am a nasty person quite amazes me. I didn’t know I knew that many people. There is one critic who is so persistently unpleasant and anatomically presumptuous that I truly do wonder if my fault was making an indecent proposition or not making an indecent proposition.
Certainly nasty reviews are part of the happy course of my academic life. Which brings me to the conclusion that I do want to draw. One thing that I value above all else in American culture is the First Amendment right to free speech. If some jerk wants to go to downtown Tallahassee, stand on a soapbox, and praise Hitler, then I say let him do it. I can ignore him or (more likely) my grad students and I can go down there and yell rude things at him. He could not do that in Canada and I think that a mistake.
If Jerry Coyne wants to say that I am like an embarrassing old uncle who wets his pants at a family dinner party, then I say let him do so. I don’t want to be in Britain where the libel laws are so restrictive that when the son of England’s leading fascist from the 1930s paid prostitutes to tie him up and walk all over him stark naked except for leather boots with high heels, while shouting “Heil Hitler,” the newspaper that reported all of this was fined for presuming to suggest that he had a thing about the Nazis.
So I for one will be very very sorry if the Orlando Figes affair puts a damper on the blogs or on the reviews on Amazon. I say, let them all hang out. Say what you want and let the world decide. And that even goes for the betas who comment on my pieces on Brainstorm, failing to appreciate my literary genius, my philosophical depth, and my great moral sensitivity. I should retire, indeed!