A day in Scientopia

Daylight tickles open my eyes before my alarm rings — I need to fix that wonky blind. Still clumsy with sleep, I reach over to my phone, open the health and fitness app and, scrolling lazily, examine its neat little graphics and lines. You slept well, they assure me, two hours of REM, six hours of core sleep, and one hour of deep sleep. You’ve once again met your sleep goal! 

Once this reassured — and even galvanised — me and I drew satisfaction from being congratulated for my impressive sleep numbers. Now, being scored leaves me indifferent and even irate. What, after all, is this nosey, expensive little machine purporting to tell me that I don’t already know? In fact, either it’s telling me something that I already know (by feeling well-rested) or it’s wrong and I would be a fool to defer.

And yet, for a long time I deferred, often adjusting my schedule or forgoing a late-night coffee with Lia, not because doing made me feel better but in the hope of pleasing the gizmo that lives on my wrist, feeding on my heartbeat and “vitals” like a parasite. I’m surprised that I never checked it to make sure that I was still alive. I would have marooned it on a shelf long ago, were it not for the convenience of its message alerts and, well, the prettiness of its appearance.

Sighing, I peel myself out of bed and head to the en-suite, where I clean my teeth, changing my brush’s position every time its bristled head flashes blue, and smear my cheeks and brow with the freshening Vitamin A-SPF blend that Lia bought for me a few months back.  

* * *

Amelia, my girlfriend, having spent the final hours of my core sleep attentively burning calories on her favourite gym contraption, is already at the kitchen table when I enter, drinking coffee and watching a video on her phone. Peering over her shoulder, I see that it’s of a historian of science and some gormless-looking biologist, debating the true nature of human “sex”. The biologist appears to be equating “sex” with gamete production — “a female,” says he, “is someone who has a reproductive system that’s organized around the production of large gametes” — whereas the historian seems to be pleading the case for nuance, arguing that historical and cross-cultural differences demand much greater levels of breadth and flexibility than his definition affords. “I don’t know the answer to [‘what is a woman?’],” she responds mildly, “I mean I’m a historian so I’m going to do that annoying thing where I’m going to ask you which time and which place you’re talking about and then I can define it for you.” I suppose that he’d just  retort that all of those times and those places, lacking our sophisticated, scientific notions, were or are wrong and didn’t or don’t know any better.

Catching sight of me, Lia turns, pretty, dimpled, and self-righteous, and smiles with theatrical despair. I know what she’s thinking, having heard it before, every time her department subjects it’s unfortunate junior researchers to inclusion training or a man-in-a-dress makes a headline: “For God’s sake, Max! It’s 2024! I can’t believe that, with all the biological knowledge at our disposal, we’re still dealing with crazy people who don’t know what a woman is!” Perhaps. While I still share her visceral bafflement — and even disgust — at people claiming not to see the difference between women and men with, well, complex inner worlds, I am becoming tired of too-easy appeals to “biological” knowledge.

Is “adult human small or large gametes-producer” really all that it can mean to be a man or a woman? Even for those whose cosmology lacks a concept of “gamete”, but nonetheless retains a clear and rich understanding of sex difference? When the Vezo of Madagascar permitted their soft, men-loving men to dress as and live amongst the women but nonetheless buried them with other men, in the deep forest far from the white sand, was it because — unbeknownst to them and irrespective of their intricate conceptions of sex, embodiment, and identity — they were actually tracking “differences in gamete production”? And were past societies wrong to treat the people that modern biology labels as feminised, malformed males with internal, small producing gonads (testes) as the girlish-but-barren women? Or were they instead deploying a different understanding of womankind, of their time, place, and sense of the world? Indeed, to me these intriguing male-women suggest that our world is ambiguous enough to support an array of such understandings, of which modern biology is just one. Of course, something like “reality” is out there, pushing its way in and setting bounds, but the gamete-theory-of-womanhood is only one way of making it liveable and others have, do, and will exist. More and more, the irritation that I feel with those who negate the former is only matched by my frustration at those denying the latter.

However, less than confident in my ability to make myself understood and fearing association with crazies, I leave my preoccupations unvoiced, kiss Amelia on her forehead, and head to the cupboard in search of a bowl of Weetabix and a Vitamin D tablet. 

* * *

Much to my annoyance, the trains break old habits and run on schedule, forcing me to arrive at work with plenty of time to spare. To right this injustice, I take an early lunch break, slipping out of the office in the hope of soaking up as much of the December sunlight as possible. After a brief exploratory stroll, I find a suitably exposed bench and sit, gingerly unwrapping my protein bar and watching a young mother corral a quartet of devious-looking children. An oddity, nowadays! Or at least that’s what the headlines and salaried opinion-havers tell me. Forget the killer viruses, global warming, or, amusingly, population bombs, they say — this time it’s the real thing, it really is the end, and, absent a jump in the fertility rate, modern society’s collapse is inevitable. I take a bite, watching the woman struggle to strap two of the kids into their pram as a third dashes back to the tree that he’d been climbing. Only the fourth — spectacles glinting beneath a bowl of white-blonde hair — stands still, waiting patiently for his frazzled mother to finish dealing with his siblings’ kicks and howls.

Chewing mechanically, I let my gaze drift to the pond where a pair of mallards bob in lonely circles. Until recently I was, like most young men, sort of indifferent to the idea of having children. I knew that it was something that one did, that others saw as important, and hazily understood that it was something that I, all things going normally, might eventually do. But since I left home and moved in with Lia, my life has unfurled as if from within, taking on the comfortable shape of cohabitation and stable employment, and those vague ideas have begun to crystallise, like a boiled sweet in the pit of my tongue. I can now say with confidence that I want kids — I just can’t say exactly why. Is it because I love Lia, this woman, with that face and laugh and rebarbative sense of humour, who, through her spiky warmth, good-natured mulishness, and subtle, plummy wit, makes my world habitable? Or is it because the British population’s Total Fertility Rate needs boosting — and fast? 

Beyond what I’ve learned through a handful of opinion pieces and podcasts, I don’t understand demography (I am, per a sixth form teacher’s frustrated marginalia, barely numerate) and yet here it is, weighing on my most intimate projects and desires.

But maybe it doesn’t matter? After all, every human being’s desire to procreate is inevitably refracted through their particular society’s codes and cosmologies and just as Hasidic Jews’ desires respond to the Godly injunction to go forth and be fruitful, maybe ours are — or are destined to be — mediated by demography’s concepts and disciplinary concerns? Still, I can’t help worrying that there is something distinctly pernicious about a cosmology that swaddles our lives in a veil of unreality and, by advising us to think of our lives in terms of statistical abstractions, distances us from the real, the concrete, and the particular complexities and demands of the everyday. A “population” (let alone a “population average”) isn’t real like the people who I encounter and interact with are real, and losing sight of that can enable such banal cruelties.  

This drags me back to the pandemic. We (my parents, my brother, and myself, that is) complied with every mandate and stricture, not out of any deep, technical understanding of what was going on (each of them being somehow less numerate than I) but out of a vague sense that this it was needed to “flatten the curve” of case numbers and to reduce the virus’ reproduction number. My aunt, however, did not comply and refused to organise her life around such narrow metrics. From the early weeks of March 2020, she defied house-arrest, taking long and winding walks through her neighbourhood in Manhattan. When all of the local nurseries eventually made face-coverings mandatory, she chose to pull her son out and temporarily move upstate where they were permitted, as she put it, to “breathe at will”. This exasperated my poor, very English father — as he told her, often and forcefully.

“I do not understand,” he’d huffed into his phone, “Why you think you understand science better than people with decades of research experience!” “Don’t be such a fool, Chris,” she’d replied with businesslike derision, “I don’t need a PhD in quantum masking to know that covering my toddler’s face for eight hours a day is bad for him — I’m his mum. And I certainly don’t need a PhD to know that there’s more to living a good life than avoiding a virus.” She was right of course, on both counts.

I wonder if the young mother before me masked her children — or would have masked her children, had she been asked to. I don’t know what horrors, if any, breeding by demographic indicators promises but I recognise enough similarities with living-and-breathing by epidemiology to be sceptical and worried.

* * *

Lunch finished and lacking the imagination to know what to do with myself, I am spared a premature return to the office by a call from my mother.

“I’m well,” she says. And what about dad? “Ha!”, comes the response, “He’s on the roof, pretending to fix something. He’s in a huff.” I ask why. “He went to the GP this morning,” she answers in the same chipper tone, “and got told that his BMI is too high—he needs to lose weight.” And he’s on the roof now? “Yes.” I smile and picture my portly father lying prone, grumpily scrubbing moss off a red tile or wiping a skylight clean. Since retiring, he spends most of his day pottering around the garden or clambering up and down ladders. And though I’ve heard him complain of his achy joints endlessly, I’ve never known it to stop him from doing what he likes. 

If God is long dead and buried, must we really replace him with correlation coefficients, karyotyping, and population averages?

My mother sighs. “He’s being such a child. The doctor said he’s unhealthy and he just needs to be a grown-up and do as he’s been told.” I am not so sure. I wonder what the doctor means by “unhealthy” here. Probably some point on a line-graph, showing a greater prevalence of certain conditions like ischaemic heart disease or diabetes amongst people with a higher BMI. And while this is not wholly useless information, I wonder how much it can actually tell my active, garrulous father about what he should do, about how he should live. The doctor, if he’s being honest, can tell my father, “more people in your weight-class develop certain conditions or die earlier than people in other weight-classes” but cannot tell him that he is living incorrectly or, when he dies, that he died in the wrong way or at the wrong time. This suggests to me that, rather than merely doing as he’s been told, my father’s time would be better spent living in a way that allows him to be well and with few regrets — and to work out where the doctor’s facts fit with this, if at all. Life will always have been too short, anyway.  

Again however, I set these thoughts aside and make noises of mindless assent. Quite satisfied by this, she is a whirlwind of kisses goodbye and, abruptly hanging up, leaves me without excuses. So I begin the slow trudge back towards the park exit and, beyond that, my plate-glass mind-coffin. An airplane passes overhead and I squint to read the letters printed along its belly, wishing that I too could be heading towards Emirati sunshine. I don’t hate science and would rather have the option of taking the plane, a call from my mother, or a dose of antibiotics than not. But I am also left wondering why it reduced us to acting like we can’t know or do anything without its sanction, and how it convinced us to live, breathe, breed, and die by it and its practitioners’ demands. If God is long dead and buried, must we really replace him with correlation coefficients, karyotyping, and population averages?