April 30th;
Light rain. Help
Franc
move furniture, stay for dinner. We watch an 18th-century
Black
Adder episode where Atkinson's
character meets Dr Johnson.
An oldie
from Fela, strutting around in blue-green Y-fronts with his mike & cigarette, getting all indignant.
Notice his pretty young wives contradicting him line by line from the second call and
response on.
April 29th;
Go to Apple showroom. Thank goodness, they replace my defective battery on seeing only the warranty.
Visit a number of pharmacies in search of herbal remedies, and
find myself in one chemist's with two customers being dealt with by two members of staff, while a third customer,
a rather pretty brunette, waits in front of me. One customer is a man with greasy grey hair and a curious odour.
He says everything very slowly and LOUDLY, as if he had a sharp blow to the head some years ago. He is
wearing his clothes the way a partly-consumed slab of lard wears its wrapper, he has a long list of
medicines he wants at reduced prices, and it starts to become clear he does not plan to leave the shop until
he gets exactly what he wants. Minutes crawl by. I inspect three odd pictures on the wall, which show old
woodcuts of mediaeval chemists done in enamel paint on thick, roughcut
chunks of fibreboard roughly oval in outline. Slowly I see that the outline of the middle chunk of board,
unrelated to the shape of the picture, is slyly done in the shape of the late-19th-century
big
Hungary. This is from when
Hungary was, as something of a last resort, promoted to co-ruler of the Habsburg Empire for its
last few decades before collapse in World War One. It has the fishtail shape in the lower left-hand corner
where parts of the Slovenian and Croatian coast are now. After ten minutes with both customers still taking
up the two members of staff and the third customer still waiting in front of me, I leave.
Robin
arrives in the evening, in high spirits from a bash at the Dutch Embassy.
April 28th;
See 'The Kiterunner'
with Viki. Moving, almost sentimental in places, this Afghan film tells a tale of a father,
his son, and his son's best friend. Themes like shame, pride, honour, forgiveness are handled with dignity and the
characters built up carefully yet simply. Good. Afterwards, orange juice and we chat about voyeurism.
Rather less artistic, online find charming black-and-white
film
about aliens killing everyone in Britain. A sort of decade-earlier version of
Terry Nation's 'Survivors'.
April 27th;
Dinner at
Franc's. Recommends
this film.
April 26th;
Fruit tea with Agnes at the library. She knows
Grazyna, who has moved to a euro-job in Belgium,
and Agnes comes up with the wonderful image of working in
Brussels
being like moving "closer to the sun", the centre of power & money that all of Europe's sunflowers turn to face.
By night
Terri
& Alvaro invite me along to a party hosted by
Oliver,
Istvan, and their urbane Dutch sheepdog Gustav. Oliver's colleagues Csilla, Ibi, and Boglarka smoulder
enticingly in one corner.
Ben,
his girlfriend Katharina, and his sister Gemma ply me with alarming quantities
of generously-mixed cocktail/punch-type stuff.
April 25th;
Pick up shoes from cobblers. Visit Istvan, who helps me instal
XAMPP
on my laptop. Go swimming on island.
Franc
comes over with cakes and we drink tea. The progression over just 3 or 4 years [1968? to 1971] from
this song to
this song reminds me oddly
of once teaching my cocker spaniel how to bark. After repeating the word "wuff" with my human accent a few
times, she suddenly got the idea of dogginess. She excitedly ran round and round the sofa barking with
happy abandon, taking it as far as it would go. It's clear that
Pulp and
Supergrass and
other 1990s retro bands
wanted to recapture the mood of Mr Marriott's first video more than his second. Franc & I
dine on pizza & red wine.
April 24th;
Kind Zaza signs my
library-membership
application. Decaff Irish coffee & dinner with Nora & her student Gabor, a
National Bank network engineer.
April 23rd;
Seems those yellow flowers were rape. Entire fields have come out in intense yellow over the weekend. Grey day.
Robin drives with me to Kiskunfelegyhaza for his
check-up with a new dentist, who it seems is very good. We have lunch at a middling restaurant
called 'Desperado' and walk round town a bit. Then I catch the train from the station, which has an odd combination
of pre-war fascist modernism, neo-rococo plasterwork on the ceiling, and odd early 20th-century
touches. Particularly striking is the train times board. Unlike Kecskemet station, which traded in their
white-painted metal board about two years ago, Kiskunfelegyhaza still has a large metal board on the platform
with little hand-set clock faces whose pointers show departure times. Metal plates slot into grooves to show
destinations and platforms of various trains. All painted a Swedish sort of blue and yellow, with
proud red lettering. Much clearer than the dot-matrix electronic scoreboard that Kecskemet now has. Take
2.30pm train to Budapest. Now for a
brief
message.
April 22nd;
In the morning, Robin finds the lawnmover is not working well after all. Georgina rings up, only to hear from the
wife of Lawnmower Laci that an ambulance took him to hospital an hour earlier.
He has just had a serious accident
while mending a lawnmower. Thick grey bands of cloud hang motionless in the sky. As the light fails, Zsuzsi plays
draughts with me and then Zsuzsi & Bela show me how to play croquet outside in the dusk.
After dark I do some
papier mache in the kitchen.
April 21st;
Strange, long, warm day.
Robin & I drive
to see Lawnmower Laci in the early evening to pick up the lawnmower
Georgina & I took over there yesterday. He seems not to hear us, but we eventually he realises we are outside.
We enter his house as
darkness falls, strangely quiet, over Nagyrev. This is a town, almost cut off inside a loop in
the river, where forty odd people died, poisoned, between 1911 and the 1920s. Some victims unwanted
babies, some unwanted husbands. Laci's Alsation dog is - incredibly for
Hungary - completely silent. It assesses our trustworthiness quietly. Just as real guard-dogs do in countries
where people realise you should train a dog, rather than keep it chained in the garden, uselessly,
anti-socially going off all day and night like
a broken car alarm. It seems Laci knows about dog breeds, and we meet his cocker spaniel too.
Getting a lamp from his workshop, he guides us through his garden to show us his collection of carefully restored
Soviet-era jeeps and vans. We stand, our heads surrounded by apple blossom, as he plays the torch on the grey or
mud-green vehicles parked on the grass. Robin says he is often melancholic, and some years ago mended his car
forgetting to put any bolts on one of the wheels, but seems quietly happy now and has clearly changed. A tree frog
chirrups and croaks loudly. As Laci shows us out onto the road, random, soundless flashes of lightning on the horizon
warn of the coming thunderstorm. Back at the house, we eat brown pasta and Brie by a single candle so we can see
jagged stabs of lightning and pay proper attention to the increasingly loud rumbles and cracks of thunder.
April 20th;
Wake
up strangely early and alert. Probably the gingko and guarana I tried yesterday.
A day of sport, in which Robin
improvises some croquet for the children, rigs up a
tennis court, a couple of them do rollerblading, and I join
the children
for the usual riding lesson at Rita's paddock overlooking the huge field.
I ride in circles on Otello
wishing I had not worn a black shirt in surprisingly
hot sun. Even the deranged dog on the chain seems too tired
from the heat to bark
senselessly as usual. Zsuzsa and Kasper gallop quite well now. Nothing
around us apart from
our clothes betrays which
century we are in. After riding, both Kasper and Bela climb on a haystack. Otello,
a
large black horse, surprises me by getting into his stall and promptly rolling
around on his back for a good wriggle
in the straw. Turns out Rita's late father
was also a novelist, like her mother. Some
French
pop music. Ze gurl eez crazee!
Mind you,
is
this
really
any
different?
April 19th;
Catch earlier train to Robin's on the
Great Plain. In my compartment are three women,
all looking glum and exhausted. The blonde lass is wearing one of
those puffy white jackets,
an off-white cardigan, a pink and grey shirt with writing across the breasts in glittery
letters, and blue jeans. Completing this look are turquoise socks with pictures on them,
black training shoes with
silver padded stripes down the side, purple-tinted
steel-framed sunglasses with deep pink sidebars along the arms,
and her fingernails,
which are cut square and lacquered a bright pale green just paler than apple green. Almost
exactly the colour that the chewy lime-flavoured Opal Fruit pastilles used to be. Small yellow flowers seem to have
engulfed the last four tracks at Kecskemet station where I change onto the local train.
Stationmistress
Liza
meets me off the train at Tiszaug and greets me like an old friend. Warm sun as soon as we
get into open flat
country is putting everyone in a good mood.
Robin drives
up and we give Liza a short lift.
Later we pick up Letty off the bus back from a school athletics outing in Pecs.
April 18th;
Phone
Moscow
to find where Vlad works these days. Budapest
public
transport closes down for a one-day strike.
Franc & Peter
drop by for drinks. Peter mentions that he met the Slovak-Hungarian
girl in 'Bakkerman'
on a train a couple of years ago and asked her to act in his Transylvanian film.
April 17th;
Hand proofing to
Heikki. Then Martin & I dine at 'Jelen' bar while he explains
superdelegates to me.
April 16th;
Be afraid.
Big
Dog has been improved.
April 15th;
Green
tea with Zsenya, who relates how he recruited a Canadian man for an
important job, only to find he
already had a Hungarian husband. Meet
Viki at the Corvin cinema to watch
'Bakkerman',
a truly appalling Hungarian comedy about country life. Drunk, fat
peasant characters,
perhaps from somewhere near the Slovak border, do
some self-congratulatory
larking about while drooling over the village
siren & the sleazy barmaid.
A lot of
falling-over-and-getting-covered-in-mucky-stuff jokes give it a strongly
Germanic feel, with some 1970s-Bavarian-sex-comedy lineage.
Despite a
dire story and some third-rate
acting, one or two well-observed cameo
roles. Nonetheless, this is the
most amateurish type of film: smug,
sloppy slapstick from people without the
discipline of real comedians.
Like watching overweight parents think
they look funny on the dance
floor. No,
really.
April 14th;
Iced
coffee with Nora. Curious Tarot spread. Song from a few years ago:
sounds easy to make an audio texture
like
this, yet hear them struggle to do it
a
g
a
i
n.
What must it be like to hit the nail on the head just once?
April 13th;
More editing work for Heikki.
Sunday. Just after 6pm, I go out to the shop in the lemon-coloured sunshine
you get just before dusk. On the way back to my flat, I visit the big, flaky yellow church. In this light it's the
rich hue of that cheese in tiramisu. Surprisingly, a service is in progress [Is 6.30pm Vespers for Catholics?].
I stand at the back holding my silvery tin of Red Bull caffeine drink to help me continue proofreading later. Some
kind of assistant priest in white is kneeling to one side of the altar, and at crucial moments bells smaller
and higher in sound than a dinner gong are rung for emphasis. The church is full. A couple of worshippers,
standing at the back near me, kneel at this stage. Some of the Hungarian text mentions Easter just past, but
I don't know the calendar well enough to place this ritual. In the middle of the aisle, but right at the back,
just a
few feet in front of me, I can see the back of a young mother with a pram she keeps quietly rolling forwards
and back on a slight curve to soothe the baby inside. Not clear if the move is curving because the wheels
are skewed or because she knows the move that lulls the infant better. As a couple of other people kneel,
she kneels too, but without stopping the to-and-fro motion of the pram which now completely blocks her view
down the church to the altar. Somehow odd, a kneeling woman moving a pram back and forward. More bells
ring out, and I notice a faint jingling from inside the pram from some kind of plastic rattle each time it
moves, plus a charmingly restrained baby gurgle. Kneelers stand up and she stands up too and starts walking
around the back area slowly wheeling the pram in figures of eight across both sides of the aisle behind the
back row. I get a glimpse of her face: she looks tired, late twenties, judging by her skin eating a diet poor
in veg and vitamins. Once again editing at my table back at the flat under a desk lamp, it is so quiet, I can
make out a very faint tingling sound in the room. Turns out to be bubbles bursting against the inside metal
surface of my half-drunk can of caffeine drink.
April 12th;
Last night met Nathalie at the internet cafe, the day after the museum reminder, for the first time in several
years. We drank mango lassis together and did some debriefing. Struck me during this chat that the proper
translation for
'banlieue' is actually
'township'.
Today, proofread for Heikki.
Taking a break in the editing, I find a website about disreputable herbs & spices. The rye mould
ergot gets the encouraging summary: "Ergot poisoning (St Anthony's Fire) causes hallucinations,
gangrenous loss of limbs, and death." Moving on, I come across a
tape
transcript about experiencing another
substance: "I saw him on the wall, and he was lying in a swamp of blood, it was like blood,
and he had skulls all around, it was like he was lying on this morass of bodies in a swamp, there was blood
instead of water, and the skulls were all around his head like a halo, and they were covered with vomit, this
orange vomit, which was coming out of their eyes… [sigh] …and that’s it, that was all there was… [heavy
breathing] …but it was the most benevolent thing, you know, and benevolent because of the
power…" To organise that kind of evening, apparently you should smoke some acacia.
April 11th;
Irish coffee with Viki. Banana at
Heikki's office.
April 10th;
Lunch and decaff coffee with Martin at Klauzal square. Very interesting chat, about
Alice
Bailey, among other people. Weather actually warm now. Finish 'Why
Beautiful People Have More Daughters' by Alan S. Miller
& Satoshi Kanazawa, which has lots of explanations for various
behavioural mysteries, based on evolution, not
standard sociology, and of course, though some of them might be
incomplete, they make more sense than the sociological ones.
Q. Why
would Bill Clinton endanger his job as president to mess around with
Monica Lewinsky? A. Because enjoying access to more women
is what an alpha-male job like being president is
for... Q. Did men get larger than women, or women smaller?
A. Women got smaller, because polygyny rewards the genes of girls who
reach menarche earlier and therefore stop gaining height ...and so on. This way of thinking,
if not some of the details, has seemed pretty obvious since reading
Dawkins' 'Selfish Gene' in 1982, and my biggest surprise was
how recent much of the research is. The authors gamely admit to only
getting into this field themselves in 1994. Some of the open questions are very
interesting. Male homosexuality now has an evolutionary
explanation with some supporting evidence, but lesbianism doesn't
yet have even a good hypothesis, for example. Meet Franc later.
He takes me to an event at the Ludwig about the paintings of
Istvan
Nadler (using colours rather reminiscent of
Next shopping catalogues from 1980s
Britain), where I bump into Robin's friend, Swiss artist Hans.
Franc & I also meet
Jeff, who -
when we are discussing angry white men doing
weights and taking steroids in fitness clubs, thus shrinking their
gonads - describes this as the
"white man / steroids / small penis Bermuda Triangle". Jeff continues,
describing the desktop, vertically down-pointing camera tripod wired up to a laptop
he rigged together to scan in hundreds of catalogue records from 75 years of
19th-century Hungarian contemporary art auctions for his Phd. Jeff muses he should really
patent his contraption. Franc dubs this the Bermuda Tripod, into which thousands of
books will disappear, forever digitised. I warn Jeff he has a day's head start to open
his patent application before it will have a prior-art problem caused by this weblog.
At the gallery, an elegant girl claims to know me and then reveals she worked with
Nathalie Pigeon in Budapest well over a decade ago. She asks if I know what has
happened to Nathalie. I say no, I haven't seen her for six or seven years.
Later on, Franc & I come back to my flat with pizzas & beer where we chat while I
tidy a bit, then open and break permanently the white-tape thing Robin bought
me in Rome. Franc kindly explains a couple of the buttons on my camera to me.
April 9th;
Go to cobbler to get measured up myself, and discover that oltes are
not in fact different from Paris points. He shows me his tape measure.
It is marked in centimetres, Paris points (= oltes = 2/3 of a
centimetre), and in the corresponding British shoemaker's unit which
looks like 2/3 of an inch. Sorry to mislead you,
Tex.
Finish a book I bought in Rome in January,
'Romeo
& Juliet' (Romeo e Giulietta),
translated by Agostino Lombardo.
This was pretty slow going since I don't read Italian but cussedly
made myself read each line both on the English and Italian pages. Did
I pick up the rhythm of the language a bit? Probably not even that.
Nonetheless, interesting to reread a classic, deliberately slowing
myself down - different things emerge as important. Mostly the size
of the Friar's and Nurse's roles: the play is virtually a four-hander
with four equal roles, two adolescents and two actors of their
grandparents' generation, confronting the parents in between them.
Leisurely chat with Marion over cakes in the afternoon. Bump into
Heikki late at night in the Indian canteen.
April 8th;
Train from a grey, damp Lakitelek after a hot chocolate with Robin in the station pizzeria. Almost empty carriage the whole way back to Budapest. Today I only got five
Nigerian scam letters, but yesterday was a record so far, seven in one day.
April 7th;
Robin & I drive around. He needs pieces of wood, and we visit Praktiker, OBI, and finally a plywood and plank sawmill in Szolnok so anonymous
we are unable to find the front door and end up getting in through the goods entrance, using their helpful pile of pallets as steps. As we pack stacks of freshly-cut five and ten ply board in the back of Georgina's car during a short spell of rain, she phones
Robin him to say that near-hurricane winds are threatening the house and the boys' school. I buy drawer handles at a Szolnok hardware shop where Robin gets into detailed discussions about wood tints and lacquers. Then we eat some chicken at a Mexican-style restaurant next door with mirrors on the ceiling, sofas at every table, lots of fruit machines, and two other customers the whole time we are there. I stick up some posters in Tiszafoldvar on the corner opposite where the funfair was last week and we buy spring onions and eggs from an old lady on the main road. Back at the house we end up talking late about whether modernism is finished, and whether the Nigel of Darkness was right years ago to predict that after 2000 the past would become more fashionable than the future.
April 6th;
In the morning, finish 'Will
the Boat Sink the Water?', a book about China's bullied, exploited
900 million peasants. They live far inland, away from the glamorous coastal
cities, unknown to urban China and the rest of the world alike.
This is a book by two brave Chinese journalists, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, who
are admirably outraged as they report on peasants tormented and sucked dry by greedy
communist bureaucrats at local level, but seem to share the same heartbreaking
naivete as everyone else in the book about the Maoist system having once had
some achievements or value. Perhaps they could not hope to get it published
in China if they just said straight out that Maoist rule was based on deceit
and starvation from the very start. Yet they seem to believe, with worrying
sincerity, that the system can somehow be repaired with a new or better "system"
of local officials, when it should be obvious by now it never worked to start with. The curious title is based on a quote of Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, that the peasants are the water of China, that can either hold up or sink the boat of the emperor. How the surreal-sounding inversion makes sense is never justified. Some of the book reads oddly for a foreigner - there is a chapter which takes place in a place called Zhang County, where the extorting bullying local official's family name is Zhang, and he is opposed by four upright peasants bravely enforcing their rights, all four of whom are also called Zhang. Seems unkind to carp about such a courageous and important book, but it is frustrating how gullible left-wingers worldwide were for half a century about Mao's "successful exception" when behind the lies was obviously fascism on a massive scale, almost certainly the most monstrous regime earth has ever seen. The authors, a married couple, get their house stoned these days, apparently. I suppose some enormous, hideous civil war in China is on the cards. Then go with Robin to pick up three of the children from
their riding lesson and on to the cakeshop between Cserkeszolo and Cibakhaza.
The blonde is still serving there, minus her
Egyptian
goddess eyeliner.
April 5th;
Meet the lovely duo Peggy and Nora for afternoon drinks. Pack for Robin's, and
at the station in Budapest am ushered into a dingy office when I ask if any late connections are
available for Kunszentmarton via Szolnok. The fat woman is patient with my
idiotic customerness (how much better the train service could run if they
didn't have to waste their time with fare-paying passengers), looks through
her timetable book, and explains, sighing wearily at my ignorance,
that, by now, 7pm, absolutely no further connection is available to Kunszentmarton tonight.
We spend 20 minutes discussing alternative routes via Kecskemet all in her
timetable book, before she discovers that I can in fact catch the 8.25pm to
Szolnok and from there catch a train to Kunszentmarton, my original query.
I'm no longer even slightly surprised by this kind of thing. Of course,
being Hungarian, she acts as if this is a completely novel idea, not the
question I walked in through the door with 25 minutes earlier. Go to the
Don Pepe restaurant to have a superb cold soup made of plums, an indifferent
coffee, an indifferent beer, and an indifferent pizza that makes me feel
mildly unwell. Catch train from Budapest to Szolnok.
The small train from Szolnok leaves half an hour late,
keeping
Robin
waiting patiently in his car at the other end. It stops at all the small
stations near Robin's house that the woman in the dingy Budapest office
repeatedly assured me in a exasperated voice that it definitely didn't stop
at. Robin and I meet around midnight at Kunszentmarton. He is enjoying the little
traditional brick station and the fact that the grumpy stationmaster is
dressed in full uniform.
April 4th;
With Robin to the cobbler downstairs in the morning. He measures
Robin's feet in a unit called 'oltes', using a special tape that
is calibrated in centimetres, oltes, and a French unit
(presumably
Paris points), all three different.
April 3rd;
Yesterday's mix of sun and rain gives way to general greyness.
Strange moment waking up on sofa in Budapest next to the desk lamp I moved over
to the sofa so as to read by last night. For a second I have a clear picture of
the complete darkness with the lamp the only source of light last night,
contrasted with this morning, where daylight pours under, round and through the
undersized thin curtains. (After all, why would an East European think of hanging
curtains that actually block out light?) The very banal thought that it is very dark
at night and very light during the day becomes oddly vivid for a few seconds as I
wake up and look at the little lamp that was the only source of light eight hours
ago.
Finish a dark little book with a hideous brown cover (not the
attractive caricature on front of the Faber & Faber edition)
about a quarrel between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein
at Cambridge at a philosophy seminar in 1946.
This is
'Wittgenstein's
Poker' by David Edmonds & John
Eidinow. Though the book
is well meant and fairly well written, the subject matter is
strangely depressing and the premise a bit unsatisfactory.
Supposedly, at a crowded 1946 meeting of philosophers, Wittgenstein
picked up a poker from a fireplace and waved it around, perhaps at
Popper. Then, challenged by someone to name a moral rule,
Popper gave as an example "Not to threaten visiting lecturers
with pokers". The question is, did Popper say this before, or after, Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed
angrily out of the room? Popper in a book he wrote later
claimed he said it before, making it look as if Wittgenstein
left the room in a sulk, humiliated in argument. A couple of
witnesses present insist he said it after Wittgenstein had
left the room, making Popper look rather less victorious.
Problem 1: This question isn't answered by the end
of the book. Problem 2: We hear very little from the other
people in the room at that meeting. The whole reconstruction
seems to have been spun out of about one page of notes or less
for each of four or five people who were there. I was hoping at
least we would get four or five pages worth of interview
with at least ten people who were at the meeting. Instead we
get extended biographies of the two small, argumentative men
from Vienna. Naturally these describe their different involvements
with the people and ideas of the pre-war Vienna Circle of
verificationists. There is some
explanation of Wittgenstein's ideas on language, rather
less explanation of what Popper actually says in
'The Open
Society and its Enemies'. The pop-star quality of
Wittgenstein's own personal charisma, that still enthralls
many today who never met him, is quite well captured.
However, the final
taste the book leaves is a sour one. Two enormous egos, filled
with resentment and insecurity about their own intellectual
limitations and reputations, squabbling over status in front
of the harem - not really discussing whether philosophy has
problems or only linguistic puzzles, the ostensible theme
of that evening's seminar.
April 2nd;
Late breakfast
briefing Gyongyi, then meet Viki for drinks, and finally an iced coffee
and a beer with John-Michel & Katrina.
April 1st;
Help Robin move some old fridges and a couple of agricultural tyres off his land to the recycling place round the
corner. Dragging the heavy farm-tractor tyres across rough grass on a rope behind the green Benz tests the engine,
and I sit on top of the boot of the car to put more weight on the back axle.
Robin
drives me to Lakitelek, and then
I realise I have left my phone at his house. He kindly drives me back and we return to the railway station. I have
plenty of time for a leisurely pizza in the annex to the Lakitelek
restaurant done up to look like a railway carriage in every detail except for the
mature tree growing up through the floor and the ceiling. I read more of Frank Sulloway's
book until my pizza arrives on a plate with a design on it in grooves showing a man putting/taking a pizza in/out
of an oven. On the small train, at Kecskemet station, and on the last train to Budapest, I read through the
French Revolution section, and finish the book as the train pulls into the Budapest terminus. Frank Sulloway's
'Born
to Rebel' is a book I've been meaning to read for years since reading a piece about
Sulloway in the Economist. It is interesting to see how little impact it has still had, probably
because his idea does not seem, as he warns, counterintuitive enough to excite readers. Sulloway
refines Darwin to look at human history. He uses statistical analysis of large sets of historical figures chosen by historians in those fields, not by himself, to show convincingly that first-borns among children identify with authority. First-borns are more likely to become scientists or politicians, yet less likely to support new &
revolutionary theories or movements within their scientific field or political life than later-borns. First-borns (including only children with some caveats) are more likely to be political conservatives, and if they are political liberals, it usually emerges that they are identifying
with liberal parents as loyal first-borns tend to do. If first-borns innovate in science, it is likely to be in a
technical field, to follow on from a serious estrangement from a parent, or - like first-born Galileo - to having been trained by an older relative (in Galileo's case a musicologist, Vincenzo Galilei) who also innovated in a scientific field. First-borns emerge as overwhelmingly likely to oppose a new theory like evolution in its first few years, likely to be bitterly argumentative in disputes over priority, and more likely to support reactionary new theories like spiritualism or racial eugenics. In the French Revolution, first-borns dominated the royalist
representatives (even after correcting for primogeniture), yet among the revolutionaries it was first-borns
like Robespierre who were most likely to vote for execution of opponents, while later-borns on both sides were
more conciliatory. Fascinating, methodical piece of work. Sulloway has clearly accomplished something that eluded both Marx and Freud - a convincing, probabilistic explanation for political and social attitudes and thus
historical change. Birth order, for example, turns out to predict political views a thousand times more accurately than socioeconomic background. As Sulloway keeps stressing, major divisions are within families, not between them. In their early struggles for parental love & support, siblings learn strategies which last a lifetime, and Sulloway's refinement of Darwin's ideas makes it even clearer that the naturalist aboard the Beagle will be the only Victorian remembered a couple of centuries from now.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact@otherlanguages.org
back
up to top of page