How bad could it get? America’s ugly election

The Economist

’s style

mavens have their heads in their hands

at the ugly Americanisms and egregious

stylistic infractions. It will be a relief to

them, and to the reader, that Johnson will

not be dictating any future columns.

when we talk to each other, but it makes

for extraordinarily messy looking writing.

To make turning the spoken word into

coherent writing requires lots of planning.

You’ll need some kind of notes or other

organiser to make it work, which only

brings us back to the original problem.

Those who need to write with their voice

will first need to write a structure to then

write from. If you are unable to write, this

does not solve the problem.

Another question turning speech into

writing raises is one of style. How would

writing change it more people spoke their

writing rather than typing? Chances are

that at the very least they would come up

with many more short sentences and more

concrete language, which is good. But they

would probably also rely on pre-assem-

bled phrases and clichés a lot more often,

which would definitely be a bad thing.

Good writing requires slow thought,

which is not available when you are speak-

ing at full clip.

To test this proposition this column

has been not written but dictated. It was

composed from brief notes written down

---

The Economist

September 5th 2020 

Books & arts

73

2

1

cal success delivers paltry financial re-

wards, which mostly go to pay technicians.

But the artists earn in other ways: higher

status on the street, the attention of wom-

en, respect from other would-be rappers

and adoration from some online fans. 

Who then is responsible for the vio-

lence? Not one actor alone. But one conclu-

sion is that consumers of drill—mostly

more affluent folk far from the South

Side—encourage it through the digital

economy. They reward (by sharing and

clicking) videos of artists who are the most

authentically antagonistic and boastful

about their violent crimes. “I want to impli-

cate all of us,” says Mr Stuart. “Too often we

leave ourselves, as consumers, out of the

equation.” Rappers respond to consumer

demand. If their content “is not egregious-

ly violent, then they are irrelevant”. 

7

A

nts and

people have much in com-

mon, Edward Wilson explains. Both

are social animals, organised into complex

societies with elaborate forms of commu-

nication. Ant societies, much like the hu-

man kind, are often highly stratified, with

specialised jobs and a well-defined caste

system. Some ants are warriors, some slav-

ers, and some, more benignly, gardeners. 

But Mr Wilson cautions against carry-

ing the analogy too far. Though ants are

creatures of instinct, “human beings are

torn by the competing needs of self, family

and tribe. We use culture to banish instinct

or at least tame it.” There is nothing in the

ruthless lives of ants “that we can or should

emulate for our own moral betterment”. 

Mr Wilson has built a distinguished ca-

reer by deploying insights from the biology

and behaviour of ants to present larger les-

sons about evolution, ecology and the ex-

tent to which human psychology can be ex-

plained by natural selection. As its title

suggests, “Tales from the Ant World” is a

short, loose-jointed and conversational

book. It lacks the ambition of works such as

Mr Wilson’s “Sociobiology: The New Syn-

thesis” (published in 1975) or the panoram-

ic sweep of “The Diversity of Life” (1992),

but it is filled with delightful accounts of a

naturalist in action and enough hard sci-

ence to keep readers on their toes.

Ants and humans not only share a so-

ciable nature; they have shaped each oth-

er’s destinies throughout their shared time

on Earth, sometimes as competitors, at

other times companionably. For instance,

ants have exploited the human talent for

long-distance travel to extend their own

reach. On their own, ants are “poor oceanic

travellers”, but they hitched rides with

mariners across the Polynesian archipela-

go during the age of European exploration,

and roamed beyond their natural habitats

aboard modern commercial vessels. Often

the arrival of these aliens disturbs the eco-

logical balance. When a crop-destroying

fire ant native to Argentina and Uruguay

arrived in the port of Mobile, Alabama, on

cargo boats, it soon spread devastation

across the American South and beyond.

In Mr Wilson’s hands even ant-sized an-

ecdotes carry the seeds of larger ideas. He

celebrates ingenuity even when it is mani-

fested on the smallest scales. As may be ex-

pected from someone who has spent much

of his career crawling on hands and knees

among the rotting leaves of a forest floor, or

chasing insects across desert sands, the au-

thor is not squeamish. He finds beauty in

the clever ways a parasitic fungus drives its

host insect to its death, or in the resource-

fulness of the Matabele ants, which attack

and destroy termite mounds the size of

buses. “Every corpse is an ecosystem,” he

phlegmatically observes.

Revolting as all this may seem, Mr Wil-

son soon brings the reader around. “Each

fallen bird, landed fish, beached whale, de-

composing log, plucked flower”, he writes,

“is destined to change from a conglomerate

of giant molecules, the most complex sys-

tem in the universe known, into clouds

and drifts of much smaller organic mole-

cules.” Zooming out from the microscopic

to the panoramic and back again, “Tales

from the Ant World” finds wonder in na-

ture’s endless variety.

7

Myrmecology