Sarang's How the World Is Made

I don't know quite what to make of Sarang's latest effort, How the World Is Made.  On one hand, the tract has been met with near-universal dismay in the literary, scientific, and philosophical establishments.  Colin McGinn called it "undoubtedly the most inane and perverse book of his benighted oeuvre, somehow managing to be astonishingly illogical and yet deadly boring."  Oliver Sacks labeled it "puerile and pedantic."  Dave's scathing review was given the headline "An Innovation in Geometry If Nothing Else:  Sarang's Reasoning Is Both Elliptical and Circular at the Same Time."  (An excerpt from Dave's review was blurbed on the book's cover as follows:  "Sarang's book is…  a tour de force of…  philosophy.  Your time would be better spent…  reading this [book].")

On the other hand, some observers have praised the book.  Hatchjaw found it to be "profound but accessible," while Le Clerque has hailed its universal relevance and penetrating insight.  But whereas Dave pilloried the book from the pages of the Paris Review, and Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker, the book's defenders have mostly written on obscure blogs.  Among the academic and literary elite, the tide of opinion has run very much in one direction.

As for me, I seem to be one of the few reviewers who is neither delighted nor disgusted by the book.  I will be the first to admit that it is not an easy book to read.  Its acknowledgement section reads, in its entirety, "After de Selby," but I think the book owes as much to Kant and Kierkegaard as to the mysterious de Selby, whose works I have been unable to find.  There is definitely something to Sarang's arguments, but he always seems to push his reasoning into obscure and poorly-supported territory, well past anything his data can support.

An example will clarify what I mean.  In the chapter "Of Cities and Men," Sarang "problematizes" the traditional economic and geographical explanations for the rise of cities.  Sarang develops startling evidence that the traditional explanations involving density, agglomeration effects, and specialization are ill-founded.  For instance, it is commonly thought that the skyscraper revolutionized cities by permitting highly dense business districts to flourish.  This theory has become so dominant that it has displaced theories emerging from the Freudian, Marxist, and de Selbian traditions.  But is it all based on a lie?

To find out, Sarang looked at data on travel within skyscrapers, an area traditionally ignored by geographers (who focus on commuting patterns across horizontal space).  He found that if you add up all movements from floor to floor (using positive numbers for upward movement and negative numbers for downward movement), you find that the vast majority of office workers move, on average, zero floors per workday!  So what is the point of building dozens of floors, if the average worker never leaves the lobby?

Dave calls this calculation "methodologically unsound" and "so much hooey," but you can't discount a striking empirical regularity like this with such a perfunctory dismissal.  Gone are the days when empirical evidence was excluded from serious discussion of social phenomena—we live in a data-driven society now, and we are better for it.  If we are going to understand cities, we have to grapple with Sarang's almost unbelievable findings.

But here is where Sarang pushes his reasoning to places where I am unwilling to follow.  It may be true that most floors of a typical skyscraper are "merely so much surplusage," but it doesn't follow that skyscrapers are built merely as an obscene gesture of phallic display.  Here I find Sarang's extended exegesis of the word "erection" to be misguided and tedious.  Sarang may have proven that skyscrapers are not used for their ostensible purpose, but that's a long way from establishing that they are the fulfillment of corporate executives' "adolescent fantasies of female-anatomy-destroying revenge for the indignity of the birth canal."  For one thing, Sarang doesn't address the likelihood that many CEOs were delivered by C-section—but that is just a minor example of the many flaws in his rather tortuous reasoning.

Sarang, like Tolstoy, is better at ridiculing the ideas of others than he is at building an affirmative intellectual framework.  To upend major areas of economic and geographical thought is no small thing, but to achieve greatness Sarang's philosophy would have to build a convincing alternative as well.  He hasn't done it yet, but let us hope that the chilly reception the world has given How the World Is Made doesn't dissuade Sarang from trying again.  The world deserves as much.