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Chris Hibbert

Jo Walton's The Just City investigates the nature of justice, while telling an enchanting story involving gods, mortals and robots trying to actually build the Just City hypothesized by Plato. The goddess Pallas Athene brings together 10,000 children and a few hundred adults from many different times and places to found a new city (on the island of Atlantis) according to Plato's prescriptions in The Republic. Plato's main goal in The Republic was to explain the nature of Justice (the words 'Just' and 'Justice' occur more than 150 times on the wikipedia page), so Walton has plenty of room to explore the idea from several different directions.

In order to get infrastructure in place without burdening the new inhabitants (who are supposed to be coddled and trained so they can understand Justice) the goddess brings in robots to build housing and meeting rooms. The robots are kept around to take care of maintenance and other tasks that Plato didn't describe the city's inhabitants as handling. When the historical Socrates (as envisioned by Walton) joins the city, he turns out to be a very inquisitive man. Since the robots display some autonomy, Socrates wonders whether they have individual personalities and whether they're thinking and aware. This leads to even more opportunities for questions about Justice.

Pallas Athene wants to populate the city with willing participants, so the children (exactly half girls and half boys) all are from disadvantaged circumstances. The adults are all people who prayed for a chance to live in Plato's Republic, so (considering how often the book is actually read in the original greek, and in what historical periods) most are men from antiquity, and the women are nearly all from more modern times. This leads to some interesting political factions, and changing of practices as time goes on and the oldest denizens die off first.

Not all of the children are happy to be there, even though all of them agree that their previous lives (most were slaves) were worse. Even so, not having been given a choice rankles with a few, and their reactions are also interesting.

Many of Plato's ideas are reasonably modern, but others are very outdated, like assigning citizens to societal roles according to their metal. The adults of The Just City spend a lot of effort training and testing the children in order to place them appropriately. Many of the adults are uncomfortable with this duty, but they carry it out, and even put their thumbs on the scales as necessary in order to make the numbers come out right according to Plato's very Greek ideas about numerical harmony. When some of the children figure out that test rankings are being adjusted in order to fit pre-defined notions of how many should be in each category, they challenge the adults, and as with everything else that goes on in the city, philosophical discussion and socratic dialogue ensues.

Since there's limited space on the island, procreation must be limited and sexual activity controlled. The children (and adults) find creative ways around the restrictions, but this means discussion of sexual mores and prohibitions are necessary. We hear about everything from rape and unwanted intimacy to Plato's ignorance of issues of women's hygiene. For the most part the adults attempt to do everything according to Plato's prescriptions, but there are several clear gaps in Plato's planning which leads to the need for endless committee meetings (most of which we, mercifully, hear about afterward, rather than having to endure.)

Walton does a wonderful job of presenting these philosophical questions of freedom, choice, and justice through the character's activity and interactions. In the end, we get to know these people who are all striving to be their best, and to create an environment in which justice is available to all, even though humans always have incompatible desires. We even get some satisfying answers to new and old questions and some unresolved issues to ponder on our own.

Judith Rich Harris: No Two Alike

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Chris Hibbert

Judith Rich Harris's book No Two Alike is a followup to her previous work, The Nurture Assumption. In her first book, Harris explained that most of the non-genetic affects on the personalities of adults are a result of their interactions with peers rather than with their parents. She pointed out that many people want to believe (and prove) that parents are the major source of their children's personalities. According to The Nurture Assumption, the field of sociology has been confused for several decades and has been trying to distinguish nature and nurture, when they needed to be either distinguishing the effects of heredity from environment, or disentangling the environmental influences which include both parents and peers.

The best tool, according to Harris, for distinguishing the effects of heredity and environment consists of studies of twins. Comparing twins raised together and twins raised apart controls for genetic affects and allows us to see the effect of gross differences in environment. Comparing fraternal twins raised together with identical twins raised together holds the gross environment constant and makes it easier to see what differences are purely genetic.

In the new book, Harris focuses on why twins are so different, in order to isolate the causes of differences that aren't explained by other results. The existing literature says that some proportion of personality differences are due to genetics, and some proportion by each of various environmental causes: parents, wealth, neighborhood, etc. But a significant amount of variation remains that isn't apparently caused by any of these. Her focal example is that even siamese twins have different personalities, and they share all of their genes, and all of the environmental influences that anyone could hope to treat as responsible.

Harris' conclusion (skipping over most of her argument for the moment) is that there must be something driving each of us to be unique, and that means we have to find a distinction to enhance. The bottom line is that a significant part of personality (who we are) isn't determined by factors that we can examine or control. Each individual starts out with an endowment of heredity, and occupies an environment that isn't fully under their control, but the developing personality is still a negotiation between that individual and their context. If the strongest part of their innate tendencies is best suited for a niche that is already filled, they will look for a second best. When two identical individuals struggle to fill the same niche, some factor (random or not) will eventually determine a winner in each particular event, and at some point the effects of competition, if nothing else, will drive them to exploit different strengths. The different choices and different results in competition will magnify any differences, and over a reasonable lifetime, they will become recognizably different people.

Along the way, Harris spends a good deal of effort (successfully) demolishing other possible explanations (differences in environment, combination of nature and nurture, gene-environment interactions, environmental differences within the family, gene-environment correlations, and transferability of learning between situations). At the end she argues that she has demolished all the other possibilities and provided an argument for the one remaining theory (an innate drive for status), and so it must be true. But her argument for the specific mechanism is a little too weak, and it seems plausible that some variation or related description will fit the data a little better. I'm reasonably convinced that something drives us to differentiate, but it may not be purely a status drive. Two possible variations on her theory include drives for attention or to master something.

I found the style of Harris' presentation sometimes compelling, and sometimes distracting. She fit the presentation into the framework of a detective story. The presentation is salted liberally with examples from popular detective stories to show how attentive the detective has to be to details that have distracted other investigators. This worked for me when I was familiar with the detective in question (Sherlock Holmes, Kinsey Milhone), and didn't work when I hadn't read the stories (Alan Grant). I suspect that Holmes is the only one of these that is widely enough known that other readers would feel that they should get the references even when they don't.

On the whole, I think the book was successful in explaining that fundamental differences in personality are effectively the result of an innate drive that causes us to differentiate. The drive makes use of arbitrary differences in the material it has to work with (genes and environment). Parents do make a difference in the lives their children lead, but the ultimate person each child becomes isn't determined by parenting style at any gross level.