fish_dont_exist.md

Why Fish Don't Exist

A Story Of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

• You don’t matter seems to fuel his every step, his every bite. So live as you please. He spent years riding a motorbike, drinks copious amounts of beer, and enters the water, whenever possible, with the belliest of flops. He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code. While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.

• “It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed are invariably sterile,” Darwin writes, “or that sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation.”

• “Natura non facit saltum,” he writes. Nature doesn’t jump. Nature has no edges, no hard lines.

• But she loved David; she loved the way he loved the world.

• But… that weather… that salary. In 1891, he was sworn in as the founding president of Stanford University. He had just turned forty years old.

• He immediately built a shiny new marine research facility on the tip of the Monterey Peninsula, the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory,

• When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency, compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better.

• According to legend, before his execution Bruno quipped, “Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.” And David uses the quote to indict his readers, to warn them that if they’ve ever chosen to shut out hard truths in the name of happiness they are complicit with Bruno’s killers.

• He says that the problem with spending one’s time pondering the futility of it all is that you divert that precious electricity gifted to you by evolution and you flush it all down the drain of existential inquiry, causing you to literally “die while the body is still alive.”

• There is grandeur in this view of life. I was horrified. There it was. My dad’s same trick. The same words that hang in a frame over his desk, to this day. Darwin’s call to arms. As different as David had seemed from my dad—as defiant, and hopeful, and full of faith—he had nothing new to offer me after all. Just a reminder of what I’d always been told. There is grandeur, and if you can’t see it, shame on you.

• I decided to put my morality on the shelf for a moment and see what the professionals had to say about the matter: Was self-delusion as dangerous as David and my father warned?

• But as the twentieth century roared on, clinical psychologists began noticing odd things. Their healthier patients, the ones leading easier lives, bouncing back more quickly after setbacks, getting jobs, friends, lovers, all the gold rings on the carousel of life, seemed to carry the rosy mark of self-delusion.

• Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are.

• You walk around with the knowledge that the world is fundamentally uncaring, that no matter how hard you work there is no promise of success, that you are competing against billions, that you are vulnerable to the elements, and that everything you ever love will eventually be destroyed. A little lie can take the edge off, can help you keep charging forward into the gauntlet of life, where you sometimes, accidentally, prevail. As

• Historian Luther Spoehr, who wrote his dissertation on David Starr Jordan, noticed the same phenomenon, how he had a knack for slyly editing out or omitting information that would hurt his self-image.

• Forget millennia of warnings to stay humble; maybe this is just how it works in a godless system. Maybe David Starr Jordan is proof that a steady dose of hubris is the best way of overcoming doomed odds.

• Delroy Paulhus found that while college students are initially drawn to those students with inflated self-esteem, over time the group grows weary of them, rating them more negatively. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic found that overconfidence has serious costs in the workplace. One of the most widely cited studies claiming that positive illusions correlate with better physical health turned out to contain errors that rendered the results not significant. Michael Dufner, who did a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies on “self-enhancement,” found that over time, an overconfident person’s boasting can end up alienating others; while the overconfident person might not ever realize it, they may be losing out on benefits that come from being well-regarded in a community.

• High self-esteem, they say, can make you freakishly peaceful (or “exceptionally nonaggressive,” as they put it), because you’re so comfortable with yourself that criticism does not threaten your self-worth. They believe it’s the very small subset of people with easily threatened high self-esteem that are the dangerous ones.

• In his writings, David took all the kinds of people he wanted to rid from the Earth—the paupers and drinkers and “crétins” and “imbeciles” and “idiots” and morally depraved—and he lumped them into one category, the “unfit.” Unfit! Such a catchy word, so evocative, so trim. It could take his opinions about which groups of people deserved to live and wrap them in the cloak of science. Unfit! Not one man’s judgment, just a reality of nature.

• In the wake of these talks and similar ones given by other early eugenicists, back-alley sterilizations and, occasionally, executions began taking place all over America.

• ... eugenics seemed as roaring a part of American culture as flappers and the Model T. This was not a fringe movement; it crossed party lines; the first five presidents of the twentieth century hailed its promise; eugenics courses were taught at prestigious universities all across the country, from Harvard to Stanford to Yale to UC Berkeley to Princeton and back again. There were eugenics magazines. Eugenics cosmetics. Even eugenics competitions. Often held at state fairs, under festive white tents. Contests would be held for the fittest families and best babies—measured and weighed like pumpkins. Blue ribbons for the fairest skin, the roundest head, the most symmetrical features.

• Slowly, more and more states passed sterilization laws. Connecticut. Iowa. New Jersey. Have a sexually transmitted disease? Snip. An epileptic seizure? Snip. An out-of-wedlock baby, a criminal record, a low score on a standardized test? Snip. Snip Snip.

• ... in 1916, an American eugenicist named Madison Grant published a book that a German guy named Hitler would later call his “bible.” In the book, The Passing of the Great Race, Grant proposed a policy that, in certain ways, resembled Galton’s sci-fi vision: that all the nation’s “moral perverts, mental defectives and hereditary cripples” be rounded up under the guise of charity and sterilized. American eugenicists thought it was brilliant. When over a decade later Hitler passed Germany’s first mandatory sterilization law, American eugenicist and doctor Joseph DeJarnette whined, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”

• Carrie’s case paved the way for over 60,000 sterilizations, performed legally and against people’s will, all over America in the name of “public welfare.”

• ... those deemed unfit were “often were young women pronounced promiscuous; the sons and daughters of Mexican, Italian, and Japanese immigrants… and men and women who transgressed sexual norms.” Other studies have shown how women of color were disproportionately targeted for sterilization. The US government has admitted to forcefully sterilizing over 2,500 Native American women in the early 1970s. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina sought out and sterilized hundreds of black women during the 1960s and 1970s. And, mind bogglingly, approximately a third of all Puerto Rican women were sterilized by the US government between 1933 and 1968.

• David Starr Jordan remained an ardent eugenicist until his dying day. There’s no evidence of any last-moment realization or remorse.

• It was chilling. His brutality. His remorselessness. The sheer depth of his descent, the breadth of his rampage. I felt sick. I had been fashioning myself after a villain, after all. A man so sure of himself and his ideas that he was capable of ignoring reason, of ignoring morality, of ignoring the clamor of thousands of people begging him to see the error of his ways—I am a humanbeen as well as you.

• As much as David had railed publicly against self-delusion, privately he seemed to rely on it, especially in times of trial.

• The very mind-set we define our national identity in opposition to—the evil that we tell our schoolchildren started with the Nazis, the others, the bad guys—we were the first in the world to make it national policy.

• This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the “whole machinery of life.” The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the “convenient” lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.

• I was still sure that our ruler was uncaring and cold, that waiting around the corner for each of us was precisely nothing. No promises. No refuge. No gleaming. No matter what we did or how much we mattered to one another.

• ... the reverence for David Starr Jordan seemed only to solidify over time. If you stroll Stanford’s campus today, you will find a bronze bust of him in the library, a psychology building bearing his name, portraits of him in ornate frames.

• ... from the time of cavemen to his present day, he and his disciples unveiled nearly a fifth of that scaly section of the tree of life. The fact that many of his fish were in fact discovered by the very targets of his eugenicist campaign—the immigrants and “paupers” whose value to society he dismissed—was something David chose to omit from the scientific record.

• David Starr Jordan was allowed to emerge unscathed, unpunished for his sins, because this is the world in which we live. An uncaring world with no sense of cosmic justice encoded anywhere in its itchy, meaningless fabric.

• ... the more scientifically logical thing to do is to admit that fish, all this time, have been a delusion. Fish don’t exist. The category “fish” doesn’t exist. That category of creature so precious to David, the one that he turned to in times of trouble, that he dedicated his life to seeing clearly, was never there at all.