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I picked up The Bonobo and the Atheist my senior year of college when I was leaving my religion and highly concerned with such things as atheism and its relationship with religion, particularly my brand of Evangelical Christianity. It sat on my shelf and followed me through several moves until it ended up one of the few conversations pieces in my office I hadn’t read. It had always intrigued me but it wasn’t until I picked it up that I fell flat on my ass in wonder.

I’m glad I didn’t read it when I was first rejecting my own beliefs because at the time I wasn’t in a position of exhaustion over the constant fighting between left and right, Atheist and Christian, etc. and et al.

The weekend before I started the book I visited with my mom for an afternoon. We wandered Greenlake and grabbed some Mighty-O and just fell more in love with each other with every word. We don’t always agree but we always love each other. When I picked up the book I felt like the author had listened over our shoulder and was saying in a more creative, better supported way what she and I said to each other.

The author’s main point is that atheists need to chill the F out (my words, not his) when it comes to religion for two reasons: one being why are you getting so worked up over a principle that isn’t important and the other that it won’t work to shepherd religious beliefs out any faster. I immediately knew exactly what he was talking about.

Religion speaks to something deep within us, emptiness in some, fullness in others, altruism in some, selfishness in others. It codifies our own inclinations and gives our feelings the validity of ultimate authority. We wrench our religious beliefs in whichever direction suits us whether that’s feeding the homeless or picketing funerals and use it to find and support community wherever we go. It is beautiful and ugly, priceless and worth less than dirt, uplifting and depressing. Atheists picking apart the facts of a particular belief system are doing nothing more than reinforcing their own dogma and alienating many good and useful people in the process.

We’re seeing that ideological alienation happening now, both nationally leading up to and in the wake of last year’s election and locally in the pro and anti sex workers movements. I could get into my personal politics but that’s not why I felt compelled to write about this book. I felt compelled to write about this book because I so deeply identified with the author’s core message which is our ultimate goodness and potential for a bright future.

Those of you who haven’t had much experience leaving a religion may not exactly resonate with these ideas but my fellow ex-evangelists will know exactly what I’m saying.

Frans De Waal is a Dutch Primatologist and social scientist who has been studying primate behavior for decades. He’s been a speaker and a teacher and a writer and all his experience over all his long life tells him that we, humans, are capable of all things great and socially just.

In TBATA, De Waal pulls on various sources such as his own research, the research of psychologists and other primatologists, and some historical artwork to illustrate his strong, and I believe true, belief that morality and ethical behavior comes naturally out of our social desires for love, acceptance, and fairness. That children, apes, canids, and other mammalian species exhibit empathy and a sense of at least first degree fairness, second degree in the case of many apes*, is to me a strong argument for the base nature of our social goodness. He argues that the commandments aren’t from God but from a sense of community we evolved by virtue of our social nature and need for community.

Setting aside the religious argument, I just loved the book for his almost childish innocence. His attitudes toward behavior are exuberantly optimistic and fit with my thoughts on humanity like pieces in a humanist puzzle. I think that the tendency of people to fall into discord and antisocial behaviors has more to do with malfunctions of the group or the individual than the natural inclinations of either. While we are all self serving, our altruism and empathy serve us just as much as our greed and elitism, if not more. Humans are basically good but don’t understand how to operate on a global level which is why we have such widespread issues with the ‘outgroup’. His closing arguments include “…even though I believe that morality is firmly rooted in the emotions, biology has barely prepared us for rights and obligations on the scale of the modern world. We evolved as group animals, not modern citizens.” He quotes Christopher Boehm saying “Our moral codes apply fully only within the group” which sparked my marginal commentary “’Don’t hurt people’ is universal; the definitions of ‘hurt’ and ‘people’ are not.” Which is something I’ve been saying since my Junior philosophy class.

There’s just so much in this book that spoke to me I could write about it for ages. I don’t underline books. I’m too lazy and usually there’s nothing that stands out enough to warrant noting. In this book, there’s hardly a page without my notes in the margins. Nearly every statement hit me like a house. This book fits so tidily into my worldview it’s almost spooky and I encourage you to read it, wherever you’re coming from. He’s an educated, tolerant optimist who writes very well and you can never go wrong with that.

*First degree fairness is simply: “he got paid with a doggie bone for his handshake and I’m doing it for free? No way, I won’t do it.” Second degree fairness is “I’m getting bananas and grapes but my friend in the cage next to me is only getting lame carrots. Unless they get at least some grapes I won’t take anything but carrots.” Third degree fairness is “There are children in the Phillipenes who don’t have food or running water. I’m going to send money to people who say they will fix that.”

I stumbled on ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’ while browsing audiobooks on Overdrive, a library partnered app that lends out e- and audio- books. I recognized the author, George Orwell, but not the title. I figured it would be a good put-me-to-sleep tome so I downloaded it and spent the next weeks being frustrated, baffled, bored, and confused by turns.

We all know Orwell’s dystopian novels but they’re set in fantastical places that we can only imagine. Aspidistra is set in London between the two great wars and follows the dismal life of Gordon Comstock as he lives a ridiculous life warring against ‘The Money God’.

He’s come up with this idea that middle class people are miserable because they worship this idea of ‘respectable money’ and ‘good jobs’ and without those things, they look down on you. He chooses to fight ‘The Money God’ by eschewing his well paid position as an ad man to work as a poorly paid clerk in a book shop. I never did quite figure out what his worldview was but I found his constant hemming and hawing over money incredibly irritating.

You see, Gordon is exactly the kind of poor person that conservatives think of when they think of poor people. He’s not stupid and he could make more money, but he chooses poverty and then complains about it pretty much every minute of every day. He complains to his best friend who is reasonably wealthy but can’t bear to talk about money because it’s not respectable to do so. He complains about it to his long suffering girlfriend who won’t have sex with him because she’s not ready but he blames his poverty. He essentially makes everyone around him as miserable as himself and then blames his lack of money and everyone else’s respectability for his misery.

The Aspidistra in the title is a hardy houseplant that was common at the time because it could withstand not only the variance in temperature but also the crummy indoor air quality caused by coal and gas heating. Gordon sees it as a symbol of the middle class clutching at respectability and worship of the money God and so he despises it everywhere he sees it, which is really everywhere.

The story follows his internal monologue as he berates his girlfriend for not sleeping with him until she finally gives in, he comes into enough money to pay his sister back and treat his friends to a nice dinner and proceeds instead to blow it on booze and food, sexually assault his girlfriend, hook up with a prostitute who steals the money he was supposed to return to his sister, and punch a police man.
This event lands him in jail, he loses his job, loses his ‘respectable’ housing, and ends up even poorer than he started. And he revels in it. Finally he’s escaped the worship of The Money God and he gets to wallow in his own filth and read trash all day instead of anything intellectually stimulating. His friends try to rescue him from his self created hell but to him, it’s heaven. 

At this point in the story I’m furious. He’s screwed over everyone who cares about him and it’s no ones fault but his own because there’s literally an easy, well paying job waiting for him to take it this entire time and his pathetic high mindedness means he’d rather live in squalor and boredom. What a pathetic shit. His girlfriend even finally sleeps with him to prove her love but she leaves him as she found him: dirty, smelly, and stupid.

And she gets knocked up.

Which then turns his entire life around and he takes the job, marries her, and moves into a nice lodging house and lives happily ever after. With an aspidistra in the window sill.

What the Fuck, Orwell!?! I’m pretty sure this isn’t actually a happy ending? I mean, it sounds ok; guy gets girl, they start a family, he’s deliriously happy… But his new life as the reader leaves him doesn’t fit his ideology. How is he happy?

I was so confused by this book that I suggested it for my next book club session and I’m very curious to see how my friends feel about this book. I felt such strong anger when he tried to rape his girlfriend and when his own form of money obsession ruined his life but my relief at his eventual redemption was confused. Taking into account the dystopian nature of his other works, I can’t imagine that it’s not a cautionary tale of a man shoving his principles under the rug in order to live a superficially happy life.

I finished Aspidistra so unsatisfied that I had to pick up another Orwell so I started his autobiographical Down and out in Paris and London which shed some light on all three of his other works I’ve now read (1984 and Animal Farm, of course). Orwell lived as a tramp and a pauper for a few months in his twenties. He had served in the army and was living ok when someone stole most of what little he had and suddenly he went from what we would think of as paycheck to paycheck to what we think of as straight up homeless.

The book covers the two or three months between the theft and a new job in London that pulled him from poverty but in that time he worked as a dishwasher in a Parisian hotel restaurant, tried some scams, lived as a tramp in and around London, and describes in detail what it feels like to be truly penniless.

Aside from the eye opening descriptions of the physical conditions of poverty, Orwell includes some philosophical ideas around work and the lack thereof, what it feels like to accept charity, and the kinds of men and women stuck in poverty and homelessness and why the middle and upper classes don’t like them. It helped me understand a little better why he wrote some of the other books and where he was coming from when he dreamed up these stories.

I also saw a few quotes I liked and one in particular that I felt resonated with the cause of Sex Workers Rights:

“He (the blue collar working man) is kept at work ultimately because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.”

This could very easily be said of anti-prostitution activists on both liberal and conservative sides. They know nothing about us, our lives, and our clients and are thus afraid of all of it. As you’ll see in my coming review of ‘The Bonobo and the Atheist’ I believe fervently in the underlying goodness of humans and that simple, kind, nonjudgemental education can save the world. It’s getting it simple, easy, and nonjudgemental that will be the hard part.

In summary: both of these novels are reasonably short and easy to read and they made me think in ways I hadn’t quite before. Orwell, as we all know, is a phenomenal writer and shares with us a valuable glimpse into a life many of my readers have never known and hopefully never will in the future.