Generosity

Just joined Goodreads to post a little review in support of one of my favorite novels, Richard Powers' Generosity: An Enhancement (Picador, 2010). It's the last thing we'll read in Bioethics, in April.

I was already a Powers fan, when "Generosity" came along just in time for my "Future of Life" philosophy class (Gen1, Gen2). It served our purposes well there, and I'm going to try it next semester in Bioethics. And then in Philosophy of Happiness. 

Those who like the more cerebral Powers but think this is comparatively conventional or mainstream may be missing levels of complexity that present themselves on second and third reading. My present focus, pedagogically, is on the crucial bioethical choices we'll be making in the near future that promise great or terrible consequences for what the Aussie humanist calls the future of "human nature." Powers does a great job of setting those problems & questions in motion, leaving us with a story still to be written. I'd love to see his sequel, and am even more curious to anticipate ours.

“But this is when the story is at its most desperate: when techne and sophia are still kin, when the distant climax is still ambiguous, the outcome a dead heat between salvation and ruin.”

NOTE to Bioethics students: Amazon has the paper edition for $6 & the e-book for $10. There's also a terrific audio version at audible.com.

Oona!

As Oprah departs one of her many platforms, here's an homage in the form of Richard Powers' parody in Generosity. I think he hits the nail more-or-less squarely.





"The Church of Oprah" (nyt):

She helped launch Rhonda Byrne, creator of the DVD and book “The Secret,” who teaches that just thinking about wealth can make you rich. She invited the “psychic medium” John Edward to help mourners in her audience talk to their dead relatives.

“The Oprah Winfrey Show” made viewers feel that they constantly had to “sculpt their best lives,” Dr. Lofton writes. Yet in her religious exuberance Ms. Winfrey gave people some badly broken tools. Ms. Winfrey nodded along to the psychics and healers and intuitives. She rarely asked tough questions, and because she believed, millions of others did, too. 

Enough

Will we choose to stay human, to pursue our happiness in the old unscientific way, in this engineered age? Bill McKibben hopes so. His Enough remains one of the best statements of a kind of Russell Stone-like humanist rebellion against the science of happiness.

generous wisdom

Maybe the smartest line in Generosity, so far:

...tomorrow will be there, as soon as you need it.

But also good is: "The secret of happiness is meaningful work." Or is it simply to fall into the orbit of someone who's already happy, and bask in their glow? Isn't that resignation?

young at heart

The fictional Thomas Kurton, part Ray Kurzweil ("Humans Are So Yesterday")and Aubrey de Grey, part Craig Venter, part Jean-Paul Sartre ("existence precedes essence") thinks aging is a disease. He's desperate to cure it. His rival colleague is closer to the mark, I think: the disease  is desperation itself, the cure is generational. There are qualities of childhood that can make us better, if we don't kill them first. If we don't kill ourselves.

Aging is not what's really killing us. That's an immature equation. But we can still reasonably hope to die before we get old. Generosity again:

real generosity

The great Richard Powers' last novel, Generosity, prescinds from a familiar quote from Camus-- "real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present." Sounds very wise, but what it means in practice is an ongoing experiment and challenge. I don't think we can afford to ignore the future, but of course the present is the bird in hand we must attend to.

Then, Powers offers an epigraph from Kay Redfield Jamison:

Exuberance carries us places we would not otherwise go— across the savannah, to the moon, into the imagination — and if we ourselves are not so exuberant we will, caught up by the contagious joy of those who are, be inclined collectively to go yonder.

Exuberance, generosity, presence... to me they all point forward, but they're also all prime markers of the wilderness of childhood: a place, an imaginative space of play in which mere reality does not constrict the dreamscape. More on this to follow.

"hyperthymia"

Good news in the Sunday morning Times: my favorite living novelist, Richard Powers, has a new book exploring, guess what, happiness.

"The central figure of Generosity is a woman ostensibly afflicted with hyperthymia — an excess of happiness. The new book poses the question, What if there were a happiness gene?"

Jay McInerney isn't wild about passages like “A revolution is afoot, one that looks almost like retooled Lamarck ism, calling into question the centrality of the gene and all the old dogma of fixed inheritance.” But I like 'em fine.

And what if there weren't a happiness gene? No problem, right?