Just as rocks hurtling at supersonic speed find it hard to penetrate Earth's atmosphere, unwelcome facts and unfamiliar ideas almost never make it through the membrane of the reality bubble. It shields us from thinking about forces “out there” that are seemingly beyond our control and lets us get on with the business of our lives.
As a science journalist and long-time host of The Discovery Channel's science programme The Daily Planet, I expected Ziya Tong's book The Reality Bubble to be a science-heavy, fact-filled look at some of the unexamined realities of today's world. But that's not quite what this is: although there are many, many interesting nuggets to be found here, this is more of a wake up sheeple call to arms against those invisible processes behind modern life that Tong herself has identified as the greatest threats to our planet – where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes. It's an oddly specific thesis, repeated a few times throughout, yet it doesn't quite get fleshed out by the body of this book. With a persistent default to the Argumentum ad Naturam logical fallacy (that whatever is natural is automatically superior to anything made by humans), Tong's main point seems to be that we should treat animals and our planet better (which conclusion it would be foolish to argue against). I didn't think the book was well organised, I didn't think that Tong made any kind of persuasive argument, and without offering any solutions for a different way of doing things, I was left with the overwhelming feeling of, “Well, what was the point of that?” [Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.]
The first section of the book had the most interesting sciencey facts, and there were many bits that made me think (and which made me believe that I would enjoy the whole thing):
We tend to forget that on the scale of living things we are massive. To us, reality may seem human-sized, but in truth ninety-five percent of all animal species are smaller than the human thumb.And:
While we can't say for certain whether reality exists independently of an observer, what we do know is that the physical world is far stranger than what our eyes perceive. For one thing, we commonly think of our bodies as separate and distinct from the external world, but modern science tells us that there is no “out there”; indeed, there is no place where your body ends and the world begins.In retrospect, this first section on Biological Blind Spots seems intended to prove that humans are both insignificant in the scheme of the wider universe and unentitled to claim supremacy over the Earth and its other inhabitants. Part Two, Societal Blind Spots, focusses on where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes, and it is mainly about pollution and climate change and the mistreatment of factory-farmed animals. I don't eat mammals myself, but I found the phrase, “Most bacon comes from pigs that were put in a gas chamber”, to be unnecessarily provocative, but I was downright offended by the following a few pages later:
After the Second World War and the Holocaust, we may have thought that the grotesque horrors of gas chambers has been ended, but for animals the method was reintroduced in the 1980s and '90s, and gas chambers are widely used to this day. Controlled Atmospheric Stunning (CAS) is considered a humane method for rendering pigs and poultry insensible before slaughter. But inside the gas chambers themselves there's incredible suffering.To make this equivalence between the methodical extermination of humans and the modern attempt to provide a stress- and pain-free final few minutes for the animals we eat was deeply offensive to me and Tong had pretty much lost me from that point onward. Along the same lines, in writing about pollution, Tong quotes paleoclimatologist Curt Stager as saying, “Look at one of your fingernails. Carbon makes up half of its mass, and roughly one in eight of those carbon atoms recently emerged from a chimney or tailpipe.” And in another *alarming* passage she writes:
There is one more Matrix pin-drop before we move on. Because half of the nitrogen in our food chain is now synthetically made, half of the nitrogen in your DNA comes from a Haber-Bosch factory.I did find it surprising to read that a full two percent of the world's energy use is devoted to the Haber-Bosch process (which synthesises nitrogen from the air; which enabled the green revolution; which led to nothing but too many humans overburdening the planet; damn the eyes of Haber and Bosch both), but after the first section of the book – which stresses that every atom in our body was formed in the nucleus of some long-dead star – I couldn't get myself worked up about where the nitrogen or carbon now in my body had found itself recently. That “Matrix pin-drop” drama feels as beneath an author trying to make a serious argument as referencing the Holocaust while discussing abattoirs.
The final third of the book, Civilizational Blind Spots, reads like your typical defense of tearing down Capitalism. The first chapter of this section laments the invention of timekeeping (because once time could be measured, the hours of a person's day could be bought and sold; which led to today's rat race) and the second laments the invention of measuring lengths (because what could be measured could suddenly be owned, from a family's plot to a nation's borders). At the end of each of these chapters, Tong points out with a dire warning that since the nanosecond and the metre now have standardised measurements based on atoms and wavelengths, they have been completely removed from the human scale, making these artificial constructs utterly invisible to us. To which I say: So what?? The book ends with the most pernicious reality bubble of all: The idea that any of us could possibly own anything (Tong apparently finds it ridiculous for a person to believe they have any say at all about where their possessions go after they die). I agree with Tong that there's something wrong with a system that sees the top twenty-six richest people have as much wealth as the bottom fifty percent, and it feels loathsome to consider ghost homes (investment properties owned in major cities by the super-rich; most of which sit empty for the majority of the year while thousands go homeless), but I don't know if the solution is to ban ownership. I'm not sure if I completely understand the point she is trying to make in the following:
Property, whether it's an object, a cow, or a slave, does not have right of movement without the owner's consent. “It” cannot change its conditions even if it's unhappy, because it has no rights. The key point here is that rights are incompatible with ownership when it comes to living things. After all, if rivers and chimpanzees have rights, what's next? Will our bacon and eggs demand freedom? Our lumber and paper? Our leather shoes and our wool sweaters? All of this life, or extinguished life, is defined as our property to do with as we please. To begin to question that fundamental authority of our ownership of life would be to upend our whole system of thinking. That's because the core tenet of our entire economic system can be eviscerated by asking one simple question, which is: What does it even mean to “own” something anyway?I appreciate that these are all themes that Tong is passionate about, but they didn't add up to some meaningful, eye-opening experience for me. I reckon that the only readers Tong will be able to wake up with this book is those who already consider themselves woke.
