New(ish) Books

The MANIAC and The Big Fail

Dear Friends,

I have a piece in Quillette on the Substack content moderation controversy. You are tired of this topic, I am tired of this topic, but it is important. The argument I’m making is that the new modality of content moderation developed out of a sort of moral panic in the 2010s and resulted in the curtailment of a great deal of legitimate speech. Instead of posting that here, I’m sharing a couple of book ‘reviews’ — as usual, splitting between fiction and non-fiction.

Best,

Sam

BENJAMIN LABATUT’s The MANIAC (2023)

Labatut to me represents how, all market forces to the side, publishing can actually do what it’s supposed to do: find an interesting, idiosyncratic writer somewhere in the world and propel him towards the center of the conversation. 

Labatut was raised between Chile and Holland. He made international waves in 2020 with his When We Cease To Understand The World, which seemed to change, at an almost molecular level, the understanding of what a novel could be. I’ve written about it before, claiming that Labatut sort of manifests the solution to a grievance that a number of critics had felt about the state of literature. In 2011, David Shields wrote, “I’m bored by out-and-out fabrication by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters.” Michel Houellebecq in an interview in 2010 complained of what was lacking in the writing he read: “A little reality, man! Show us the real world, anchored in the real lives of people.”

What Shields was getting at was the literalization of our minds in the modern era. The creation of a character, of fictional circumstances, now seems not exactly an enchantment and source of magic — it seems like a half-hearted stage set when the real world, meanwhile, is clamoring with so many strange and unexplored corners. The role of the novelist, then, becomes something a bit different — more impresario than magician, more somebody who can give shape and meaning to what’s all around us instead of confusing us further with some cockeyed campfire story. 

Shields seemed to be not entirely sure what he was advocating for in Reality Hunger (and most of his readers were equally mystified, although impressed by his passion), but Labatut filled in many of the blanks. Much of the enchantment that fiction used to supply could be substituted for by the crevices of history (or, in the case of When We Cease To Understand The World, by the mysteries of higher mathematics). The novelist wouldn’t be some narcissistic progenitor but would — to be reductive — offer up almost Wikipedia-style bites on a topic and would act as a field guide, leading the reader through complicated subject matter and then at suitable moments suggesting their own hypothesis on how it all fit together. This was the ’non-fiction novel’ and it did not really take away from the creativity of the writer. It wasn’t ‘history’ because the writer wasn’t beholden to things the way they actually happened. The writer was in charge, could make up motivations if they wanted, could fabricate entire scenes, could interpose fiction at will. Labatut claimed that his idea with When We Cease to Understand the World was for “the quantity of fiction” to steadily and discreetly grow throughout the book.

When We Ceased to Understand the World was, justifiably, a sensation. The MANIAC is a worthy successor but also highlights some of the kinks in the ‘non-fiction novel.’ The sense with Labatut, often, is of some gleaming-eyed scientist proposing an hypothesis and harnessing everything he can find to fit it. In When We Cease To Understand The World, it was that there is something at the very heart of creation that is destructive, irrational — and that those who approach it (our most brilliant mathematicians and physicists) inevitably go mad from the dark knowledge. In The MANIAC, the hypothesis is very similar — that an alien life-form, hyper-intelligent and utterly inhumane, entered into the consciousness of the human world through science and continues to institute itself in our lives, above all through AI. That entity can even be said to have taken on human shape, as it evidently did with the physicist John von Neumann, who — as Labatut demonstrates with copious examples — was as non-human as he was brilliant, had a stunning intelligence and no trace of normal human morality, and seemed to be the advance sentinel of, as Labatut writes, “a truly malignant influence, both logic-driven and utterly irrational.” 

Glancing at von Neumann’s achievement, it is hard not to be at least somewhat persuaded of Labatut’s theory. Von Neumann wrote the critical equations for the atomic bomb, built one of the very first computers as part of the process of developing the hydrogen bomb, invented game theory, made critical developments in quantum mechanics and in the understanding of cellular reproduction, and predicted with uncanny accuracy the future course of AI.

Virtually everything he did, Labatut claims, was to “slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche as a way to prepare us for a future that no one can imagine.” The point is that everything is mathematized. Sentimentality is dropped. Life and death come to seem far less important than the operations of (and beauty of) logic. Labatut writes, “A brain like his indicated the evolution of a superior species.”

Von Neumann: a superior species (beta version)

I don’t really disagree with Labatut’s hypothesis. The challenge is that I did sort of know it before reading The MANIAC — not the details of Von Neumann’s career, which are interesting in their own right, but the general sense of terror that we have with the ascent of an artificial intelligence that is clearly different from our own and is also, just as clearly, in very many ways superior to ours. The overall effect of The MANIAC is of something like ‘AI Gothic’ — a genre that’s meant a little more to pleasantly terrify us about our mutant future than it is to actually think through the technology’s implications. The novel’s final part, the story of AlphaGo’s defeat of Lee Sedol, seemed like a somewhat uninspired choice — not because it’s not an interesting and salient story (it is) but because I’d already read the Wikipedia article on the event and knew the basic ideas, which Labatut, with some hyperbole, is so eager to emphasize: that it wasn’t just a story of a superior intelligence blowing a human off the board, as seemed to happen with Kasparov in 1997, that it was a peculiar synergy between human and machine (a bit of what von Neumann is interpreted to represent) in which the computer demonstrated an almost childlike plasticity and ability to grow, while the human overcame some of the limitations of his own design and played, at a certain point in the match, with a far-seeing and superhuman intelligence. 

Probably the most interesting moment of Von Neumann’s story and Labatut’s narrative — a moment that really perplexes the choral voices Labatut employs to explicate von Neumann — is von Neumann’s sudden embrace of religious thought near his death. But his religion had nothing to do with the Judeo-Christianity — it was a a kind of pagan revival enacted through science. “We needed to fill the void left by the departure of the gods and the one and only candidate that could achieve this strange, esoteric transformation was technology,” Labatut has von Neumann say. The idea is very close to where Houellebecq gets at the end of Atomized — that the future is based in mitosis, in a superhuman and world-striding intelligence, and that, in some sense, all that humans can do is get out of its way and behold it with religious awe. 

I don’t know that Labatut really believes this anymore than Houellebecq does. My sense is of a writer with tongue-in-cheek sticking to his provocative hypothesis mostly for the sake of narrative coherence. It’s interesting, it’s absorbing, but it is a little scientific, a little one-dimensional. I didn’t get engaged in any of the characters, who have little life of their own except to offer up testimonials of von Neumann’s brilliance from various points in his career. I didn’t feel that I was really under the skin of von Neumann or learning anything that I couldn’t have from some assiduous googling. After some time, I did find myself with a slight longing for “invented plots and invented characters,” for the unrestricted license that traditional fiction, when it’s done well, offers.

JOE NOCERA AND BETHANY MCLEAN’s The Big Fail (2023)

A very valuable attempt to reach a new consensus in how we understand the pandemic. 

What’s become gradually clear — I think even to the sort of NPR crowd — is that the old consensus, which drove and supported governing decisions from 2020-2022, is no longer tenable. That consensus held that government entities and public health institutions were of course acting in good faith; that lockdowns were needed and saved lives; that vaccines were equally needed and were the path out of the pandemic; and that criticism of government intervention tended to be either Trumpian-inflected or just mischievous and deserved to be stamped out of public discourse for the sake of a unified social response. 

There have been so many holes picked apart in that consensus that it’s difficult even to know where to begin, and the general response — even for those who may grudgingly admit that public schools were closed longer than they should have been or that masks weren’t particularly effective — is to just not talk about it. Which has resulted in a strange lacuna in all of our lives. This was the biggest public event in virtually anyone’s memory — in some sense the first truly global event. It affected everyone’s life, it created deep and far-reaching psychic scars, and nobody wants to talk about it. It’s like it never happened. 

A great deal of the reason for that silence is, I suspect, that any conversation at all immediately becomes contentious. ‘Masks’ has become a fighting word, let alone ‘vaccines.’ 

The society (I’m referring specifically to the U.S. here) was ripped apart in ways that nobody foresaw and that we are still healing from (if ‘healing’ is even the word). 

So a book like Nocera and McLean’s The Big Fail is actually of seismic importance. It creates the conditions to have a reasonable, centrist conversation about the pandemic, which takes in the critiques (and acknowledges that some of the prominent ‘dissidents,’ like Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, were right far more often than they were wrong) without dissolving into conspiracy. 

To do that, they leave out some of the really incendiary topics — the question of how the virus originated; the charge that over-the-counter medications like ivermectin had efficacy in treating the virus and were kept out of consumers’ hands; the data pointing to various side-effects of the mRNA vaccine — but they reach a consensus that many rational people could agree to. 

The first point they make is that, to put it simply, mistakes were made. These mistakes included but were not limited to: 

-Failure of initial Covid tests by the CDC;

-Slowness to contact the private sector in manufacturing tests;

-Failure to implement an initial quarantine;

-Depletion of N95 masks during H1N1 without restocking; 

-Decisions to implement one-size-fits-all lockdowns without regard to age or health;

-Inequities of treatment for Covid along class lines;

-Refusal by Fauci and the health authorities to acknowledge uncertainties of science regarding masks;

-SBA loans directed towards wealthy businesses rather than small businesses;

-Overselling by health authorities of the vaccines (glossing completely over their lack of utility in preventing transmission);

-Obsessive control over narratives of Covid response, including ‘cancelation’ of perfectly-credentialed medical dissidents.

But Nocera and McLean’s thesis is that focus on Covid response misses the big picture, which is, in a word, capitalism — a predatory, shareholder-driven capitalism that had the net effect of hollowing out public institutions and offshoring critical manufacturing sectors and which left the country utterly vulnerable for exactly an event like Covid-19. That’s the ‘Big Fail’ of the title — that American society is so broken that most of the subsequent miscues during the pandemic followed from these underlying structural flaws. 

In Nocera and McLean’s telling, the primary villain of the pandemic isn’t Anthony Fauci or Donald Trump or any of the governors, it’s Milton Friedman and Friedman’s bottomline-driven approach to all possible social questions. “The more extreme and insidious idea was that everything in American life was measured by its ability to make money,” Nocera and McLean write of the mindset that followed from Friedman. “If it made money, it was good. If it didn’t make money, it was unworthy.”

That perspective might be defensible (barely) when applied to the larger economy, but not remotely when it came to public health. And much of Nocera and McLean’s account is a chilling, blow-by-blow rendition of all the failures of the health sector during the pandemic, with hospitals entirely unable to turn themselves around from the decades of private-sector rapaciousness. Private equity’s investment in nursing homes meant that nursing homes were operating on skeleton staffs and became the site for the most devastating spread of the virus. The profit motive in health care meant effective care for high-end patients, while lower-income hospitals in the same cities suffered from overcrowding and threadbare treatment. The continuation of business-as-usual for major hospital groups meant nursing strikes and shortages in the midst of the pandemic, while hospital chains still managed to turn profits. 

This is the critique of the pandemic response from the left, and it’s surprising that we didn’t hear more of it — the ways in which the pandemic revealed the fundamental immorality of the United States’ wealth disparity. “COVID-19 didn’t just shine a spotlight on the problems in our health-care system; it stacked multiple inequities on top of each other,” Nocera and McLean write. 

We’ve become more familiar with the critique from the right, and it turns out that there was much to take seriously in that critique as well. If Milton Friedman is the leading culprit in The Big Fail, the British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson comes in second place. Ferguson’s influential model of Covid infections and deaths turned out to be wildly inflated and pushed Western societies towards lockdowns that had no real epidemiological basis to them. “Here’s the odd thing: lockdowns became the default strategy for most of the world,” Nocera and McLean write. “Even though they had never been used before to fight a pandemic; even though their effectiveness had never been studied; and even though they were criticized as authoritarian overreach.” 

In their analysis, Ferguson takes a great deal of the blame for that — with his inflated and terrifying Covid model deliberately pushing governments to lock down, and with Boris Johnson reversing course on his Covid mitigation strategy within a week of the release of Ferguson’s findings. In Ferguson’s worldview, lockdown was viewed as a pleasant surprise — since conventional wisdom had been that democratic societies would never agree to such draconian measures. “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it, and we realized we could,” Ferguson later said. 

In Nocera and McLean’s telling, there is no excuse really either for the decision to implement lockdowns on the scale that Western societies did or to keep them in place for as long as they lasted. That decision is at some level incomprehensible — “Looking back now, one of 2020’s enduring mysteries is why Fauci was such an early and unyielding supporter of lockdowns,” Nocera and McLean write — but the best explanation of it may be that influential pockets of society simply lost the ability to think in terms of trade-offs or of nuanced solutions. “Too many people were unwilling to judge risk rationally,” Nocera and McLean write. 

That includes the teachers’ unions, which rebelled at the idea of returning to classrooms for the 2020-2021 school year, even though the risks of classroom transmission were very low and the entire school year would turn out to be, from a pedagogical point of view, a wash. And it includes the health authorities, who were unable to bring themselves to make any public announcements acknowledging that young, healthy people had completely different risk factors for Covid than the elderly or those with preexisting conditions. 

That disjunction came to a head with the Great Barrington Declaration, orchestrated by Bhattacharya and Kulldorff in late 2020, which called for a far more measured public health approach based on risk factors and which was immediately stamped on by the health authorities. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises,” NIH director Francis Collins wrote by e-mail as soon as the Declaration was published. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff found themselves ostracized — shunned by colleagues in the scientific community; heavily moderated online. In one of his early posts on pandemic response, Kulldorff had laid out a series of principles including that “in public health, open civilized debate is profoundly important” — a principle that came to have a certain irony when LinkedIn took down Kulldorf’s profile for his heretical point of view.

“Fringe epidemiologists”: Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford

It was this closure of public debate, this unwillingness to tolerate dissension, that is, in Nocera and McLean’s view, the most enduring legacy of the pandemic. In the analysis of the late epidemiologist D. A. Henderson — a real hero of this account — effective epidemiological responses could only exist with a cooperative public that trusted in health authorities. A nation like Sweden moved through the pandemic largely unscathed — and with 97% of adults willing to get vaccinated — because, as Bhattacharya puts it, people “trusted the government.” By the time vaccines rolled around in the U.S., conversely, that civic trust had eroded — too many people remembered Fauci’s self-contradiction on masks and there was too great of a sense that health authorities were not forthcoming about the state of their knowledge. By the time of boosters, less than 2% of those eligible got the vaccine in the first month of distribution. 

That lack of trust comes to be the real story of the pandemic. Government and public health authorities come in for their share of criticism. “The reason [Swedes] trusted the government was that officials were honest with what they knew and what they didn’t know,” said Bhattacharya by way of pointed comparison to the U.S. “And they didn’t force people to do things that were outside their capacity to manage.” And the private sector deserves its share of the blame as well — globalization had set up a just-in-time supply system that was a wonder when everything was working well but spelled civic disaster if there were any disturbances. “We’ve completely lost the signal,” said one CEO of the shipping market a couple of years into the pandemic — and everything in American society, from defense to basic goods, suddenly appeared vulnerable. The consensus proferrred by Nocera and McLean is that Covid served as a kind of stress test for the society as a whole, with nearly every element of it found wanting — with neoliberal economics and the medical/scientific establishment and the Fed and both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations deserving of severe criticism but with the collective inability to have civilized debate or to maintain civic standards even more concerning. And in Nocera and McLean’s analysis, much of that damage is likely irreparable. 

Healing is a long process. But reaching a point of consensus is a start. There were some things to be proud of in the pandemic — Nocera and McLean are laudatory about Operation Warp Speed, about the collaboration between the DoD and the private sector. They have a lot of good to say about Steven Mnuchin. But it’s not worth pretending that all the mitigation measures (masks, lockdowns, etc) were necessary, and it’s not worth trying to pin all the initial miscues on Trump (which was the default response of so many liberals). The pandemic was a catastrophe on many fronts. The least we can do is to grapple with that.