Middlesex

"Winner"

"A number of reasons. To start with, I just really love the story. And it also illustrates two really good insights into emotions as they really are, and how emotions are really made. First of all: Jeffrey presents some descriptions of emotion concepts that have no single word associated with them. For example, “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I know that emotion! I experienced that emotion this morning. “The disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy, and having it not live up to your imagination.” “The excitement of getting a room with a minibar” – although I don’t particularly have that emotion, instead I have the excitement of getting a room with pieces of chocolate in it. Exactly true, a great big tub that you can really soak in. So, he’s talking about the variation in emotional life that is the central theme of my book. I also talk about the emotion of ‘chiplessness,’ which in our house is the feeling of regret and desire, and also relief, of getting to the bottom of a bag of potato chips and realising there are no more. I don’t know about you, but I love potato chips. When I get to the end of a bag of potato chips, I usually feel relieved, but also sad, and a little bit guilty. I have to explain it to you with multiple words, so you understand all the features of my experience. But to my husband, or my daughter, I can just say, “I’m feeling chiplessness.” We use that emotion concept even at times when we’re not eating chips. “By having an intersex protagonist, Eugenides takes on the assumption that categories cut nature at its joints” My daughter came up with the concept of the ‘emotional flu,’ that yucky feeling that you have when you don’t actually have a virus and there’s nothing actually wrong in your life, but – maybe because you just didn’t sleep enough, or maybe you’re dehydrated, or maybe you just had a stressful test – you just feel wretched. Exactly. So in Middlesex , Eugenides does a really nice job of illustrating this complexity of emotional life, the variation of emotional life that doesn’t necessarily fall into neat categories, neat parcels of ‘anger,’ ‘sadness,’ ‘fear,’ ‘disgust,’ and so on, and that’s the first reason I like the book. The second reason that I really like the book is that it takes on an assumption that is pervasive in the science of emotion, and in science generally – certain sciences more than others. By having an intersex protagonist, Eugenides takes on the assumption that categories cut nature at its joints, that nature has joints to be cut. This needs a little bit of explanation. A category is basically a group of objects, or items, or people, or events, a group of things, that are similar in some way. Many of the things that we put into the same category, we assume are similar in a physical way, that the similarities exist in the physical world. For example, if you believe that a scowl is the expression of anger, not just facial movements that people sometimes make when expressing anger, but also sometimes when expressing confusion or an unpleasant taste, when then you’d be assuming that every time someone scowls, they’re angry, and anytime someone is angry, they should scowl, because all the instances of anger are similar in their scowling, okay? This means you are assuming that all instances of anger are physically similar in the facial movements people use to express anger. “Essentialism assumes that similarities are in the world, rather than in your head” There are a number of scientific approaches to emotion that assume an emotion category – all the instances of anger – are physically similar in some way. In fact tech companies are spending right now millions of dollars to develop emotion reading technologies based on this belief. This assumption is what philosophers call essentialism , the belief that a group of things that you’re treating as similar for some purpose are actually physically similar. Essentialism assumes that similarities are in the world, rather than in your head. For example, if we said: “Well, maybe there is one set of neurons that create anger and another set of neurons that create fear,” that would be an example of essentialism. If we believe that people scowl when they’re angry and only when they’re angry, but never when they’re disgusted, and we assume that people wrinkle their noses in disgust and only in disgust, but never when they’re angry, then we’d be essentializing. If we said: “ there must be a set of chemicals that allow us to feel anger and only anger, or a set of genes that allow us to feel anger and only anger….” these are other examples of essentialism. There’s a fantastic book by Richard Lewontin, called The Triple Helix , where he takes on this misunderstanding of genetics as essential causes. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . People make the mistake of essentialism when they misunderstand Darwin’s ideas about natural selection, or they make mistakes about understanding evolution or genetics more generally. This is discussed in a terrific book by Ernst Mayr, called What Makes Biology Unique ? If you assume that a single set of genes are like little essences that cause the same characteristic in everybody, like brown hair, and that everyone who has brown hair has the same set of genes, that’s essentialism. And it’s not true. Most characteristics (not all, but most) are created by combinations of different genes – so more than one set of features can create a characteristic. This was Darwin’s great insight: a biological category is highly variable in its features. Natural selection works only because there is this variation within a category. A biological category like sex works the same way. People assume that there is a single set of characteristics that make you male or female, and that the boundary between male and female is firm in nature – that all the men are similar in some physical ways, and that men are never similar to women in those ways. But here’s the cool thing: there’s no single set of features that every woman shares with every other woman and that some men do not share. There may be no firm boundary between male and female, it’s more like a fuzzy graded boundary, and there are some number of people who have some characteristics of being male and some of being female, or some characteristics that are sort of half way between what we conventionally understand as male and female. Depending on which characteristics you focus on, between .05% and 1.7% of the world population who are intersex. “Between .05% and 1.7% of the world population are intersex” That’s actually a lot of people who don’t fit firmly into one category or another. But our culture believes so much in the essential nature of being male and female that physicians physically alter with surgery intersex babies so that they fit into one category or the other. It causes tremendous health and mental health related challenges later in life, so there’s a tremendous amount of suffering that goes along with our forcing people into male and female categories with firm boundaries, as Middlesex illustrates in narrative form. There’s a book by Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger , where she takes on other examples of essentialism, as well as her book on Hermaphrodites . This has a parallel to the science of emotion, because many scientists hold the common sense view that emotion categories have essential features with firm boundaries in nature. They believe in the existence of a handful of categories that are endowed by genetics, so that the human brain contains a single circuit for anger, fear, sadness, and so on, that all humans have them (and maybe even some other animals have them too) and that anger, or sadness, or fear, when it’s triggered, looks the same and feels the same in all people, and in even in some non-human animals. That’s a very essentialised view of emotion, and there are decades of scientific evidence showing it’s wrong. I cover some of this evidence in my book."

"I loved "The Virgin Suicides" of course, as it was the debut film of my daughter, Sofia, but very much also loved "Middlesex.""