Michael Pollan made his name writing important books about food. He wrote the famous ‘Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.’ A seven-word summary will always be an over-simplification, but this one indicates some of the problems with his work.
In some ways it’s obviously true that much of what people eat is not food, and Pollan was prescient in documenting the harms of ultra-processed (not) food. Mostly plants, yes, we all know, best for us and our planet, and unless your chosen plant is sugar-beet, ‘too much’ isn’t a big issue if the first two conditions are met.
What’s missing is any curiosity about why people don’t eat this way, any interest in the socio-economic, cultural and geopolitical factors determining human behaviour. If we all ate like wealthy white male professors who live within walking distance of Californian farmers’ markets, more of us would be in better health.
A World Appears suffers from a similar myopia. Pollan attempts to explore or define human consciousness. Although he begins by citing white male philosophers across the centuries who have failed in this project, Pollan is perpetually surprised that it’s hard for him too. The terms are slippery: how do we separate ‘consciousness’ from ‘sentience’? How can we study an invisible, silent, intangible entity, especially from the inside? How might we know another consciousness?
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These are all interesting questions if you’re that way inclined, though for readers of a more pragmatic turn, the impossibility of sensible answers might limit tolerance of speculation. Pollan interviews neurologists, philosophers, software engineers and biologists (mostly American, mostly men), and finds little agreement on the terms of debate, let alone the answers.
He turns, briefly, to fiction; the possible contribution of other art forms doesn’t seem to cross his mind, since one of many assumptions is that consciousness takes verbal form. (Even so, songs, poetry, film, theatre?) In all areas, questions beget questions, all undermined by the difficulties of using cognition to define cognition.
The title itself betrays one of many troubling assumptions. Pollan circles around the certainty that ‘we open our eyes and a world appears.’ That ‘we’ carries much of this book, and it is, obviously, fully sighted, and it rapidly becomes clear, able-bodied, neurotypical, educated in a particular European and North American tradition at a particular time, unable to conceive of forms of experience, thought and knowledge beyond its own vocabulary as anything but ‘magical thinking’.
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Pollan and some of the men he interviews enjoy and venerate the use of psychedelic drugs, apparently their only alternative to a rigorous and joyless rationalism that he assumes is shared by the reader. ‘The duality of mind and body seems intuitively true to most of us,’ he writes tellingly, and I wonder, have you ever met a dancer, a rock-climber, a woman giving birth, a person in pain? Ever been too hungry to think straight, too scared to move, so anxious you threw up?
Elsewhere there is discussion of why so much of our brains’ ‘information processing’ takes place ‘without any of it crossing the threshold of our awareness.’ That ‘we’ and ‘our’ again: one of the burdens of autism is that a great deal of information of which most people are unaware crosses the ‘threshold of awareness’ and bangs on the door. Pollan assumes that his and his interlocutors’ reality is the only one, or the only important one.
The parts I found most interesting were those I knew least about, always a bad sign. I enjoyed and was discomfited by evidence that plants can echolocate, plan ahead and behave altruistically. Some of the ideas about the limits of AI were mildly reassuring. But where I know the subject, I found alarming errors in Pollan’s understanding. He builds several pages of argument around the statement that ‘Umwelten’ in German means ‘self-worlds.’ It means, literally, ‘around worlds’ and is usually translated as ‘environment’ or ‘surroundings’, a vital difference where the philosophical issue at stake is to do with solipsism and epistemology.
When Pollan turns to literary criticism, it’s hard to know where to start. He dates ‘stream of consciousness’ writing with absolute confidence to the 1920s, speculating that its advent ‘had something to do with the dissemination of Freud’s ideas’ or ‘the revolution in physics’ or ‘the traumas of the first World War.’ Maybe, or maybe Woolf and Joyce were influenced by Samuel Richardson’s novels Clarissa (1748) and Pamela (1740), or Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria (1797) and its Gothic sisters.
He recounts ‘turning up one excellent, if somewhat daunting, specimen of the genre’, Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. Since this novel won the Goldsmith’s Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker in 2019, it hardly needed ‘turning up’, and nor do we need the footnote that ‘Ellmann is the daughter of Richard Ellmann, the legendary James Joyce scholar.’ Don’t worry, boys, she writes weird stuff but her dad’s a legend. One of very few female scholars ‘presents as a kindly Jewish grandmother ... but is also a leading authority in several arenas.’ But?
Maybe I’m unfair. To some extent failures of expertise are the curse of interdisciplinary work – no one’s an expert in everything and we do need scholarly curiosity that crosses traditional boundaries. But there are blindnesses, lacunae in curiosity and unforgivable assumptions in the foundations of Pollan’s understanding here.
Sarah Moss is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin. Her latest novel is Ripeness.
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