How critical theory dismisses the best ways to achieve social justice

Andrew Sullivan reviews an upcoming book which I’ve already pre-ordered: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. Sullivan writes:

liberalism can include critical theory as one view of the world worth interrogating. But critical theory cannot include liberalism, because it views liberalism itself as a mode of white supremacy that acts against the imperative of social and racial justice. That’s why liberalism is supple enough to sustain countless theories and ideas and arguments, and is always widening the field of debate; and why institutions under the sway of Social Justice necessarily must constrain avenues of thought and ideas. That’s why liberalism is dedicated to allowing Ibram X. Kendi to speak and write, but Ibram X. Kendi would create an unelected tribunal to police anyone and any institution from perpetuating what he regards as white supremacy—which is any racial balance not exactly representative of the population as a whole.…

Here's an excerpt from a 2019 New Yorker piece in which Kelefa Sanneh takes down Kendi's book How to Be an Antiracist, along with Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

Andrew Sullivan goes on:

these theorists … claim that their worldview is the only way to advance social progress, especially the rights of minorities, and that liberalism fails to do so. This, it seems to me, is profoundly untrue. A moral giant like John Lewis advanced this country not by intimidation, or re-ordering the language, or seeing the advancement of black people as some kind of reversal for white people. He engaged the liberal system with non-violence and persuasion, he emphasized the unifying force of love and forgiveness, he saw black people as having agency utterly independent of white people, and changed America with that fundamentally liberal perspective.

The gay rights movement, the most successful of the 21st century, succeeded in the past through showing what straights and gays have in common, rather than seeing the two as in a zero-sum conflict....

The women’s rights movement has transformed the role of women in society in the past without demonizing all men, or seeing misogyny as somehow embedded in “white supremacy”.

As we have just seen, civil rights protections for transgender people—just decided by a conservative Supreme Court—have been achieved not by seeing people as groups in constant warfare, but by seeing the dignity of the unique individual in pursuing their own happiness without the obstacle of prejudice.

In fact, I suspect it is the success of liberalism in bringing this kind of non-zero-sum pluralism into being that rattles the critical theorists the most. Because it suggests that reform is always better than revolution, that empirical truth is on the side of the genuinely oppressed and we should never fear understanding things better, that progress is both possible in a liberal democracy, and more securely rooted than in other systems, because it springs from a lively, informed debate, and isn’t foisted on society by ideologues.

The rhetorical trap of critical theory is that it has coopted the cause of inclusion and forced liberals onto the defensive. But liberals have nothing to be defensive about. What’s so encouraging about this book [Cynical Theories] is that it has confidence in its own arguments, and is as dedicated to actual social justice, achieved through liberal means, as it is scornful of the postmodern ideologues who have coopted and corrupted otherwise noble causes.

This is very good news—even better to see it as the Number 1 Amazon best-seller in philosophy long before its publication date later in August. The intellectual fight back against wokeness has now begun in earnest. Let’s do this.

The authors of Cynical Theories are 2 of the 3 people behind the academic hoax I posted about in 2018.

Here’s one of the authors, Helen Pluckrose, reading a summary of the book:

Cynical Theories explains how theory has developed into the driving force of the culture war of the late 2010s, and proposes a philosophically liberal way to counteract its manifestations in scholarship, activism, and everyday life. The book charts the development of the evolving branches of cynical postmodern theory over the last 50 years, and shows that it has influenced current societies in ways the reader will recognize.… This book is a story about how despair found confidence, which then grew into the sort of firm conviction associated with religious adherence.…

The book's other author, James Lindsay, has a new piece called "No, the Woke Won't Debate You. Here's Why." Excerpt:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked why it is that the Woke won’t seem to have a debate....

It is not, as many think, a fear of being exposed as fraudulent or illegitimate—or otherwise of losing the debate or looking bad in the challenging conversation—that prevents those who have internalized a significant amount of the Critical Social Justice Theory mindset that prevents these sorts of things from happening. There’s a mountain of Theoretical reasons that they would avoid all such activities, and even if those are mere rationalizations of a more straightforward fear of being exposed as fraudulent or losing, they are shockingly well-developed and consistent rationalizations that deserve proper consideration and full explanation....

Critical Social Justice activists ... tell us constantly about the high emotional labor costs of doing the “work” they do (and never being taken seriously for it). To invite them to a public conversation or debate is to ask them to get exploited in this way for other people’s benefit by getting up on stage in a dominance-approved paradigm with a bad-faith moral monster who just wants his opportunity to reinforce the very dominance that exhausts them....

That whole piece is worth reading, and I have a feeling that his and Pluckrose's upcoming book, Cynical Theories, is going to be worth reading too.

Happy 90th birthday to Thomas Sowell!

Here are some thought-provoking quotes by the celebrated economist and writer Thomas Sowell, who turns 90 today.

The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all — the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding.... Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.

— Intellectuals and Society (pg. 2)

Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed because they are consistent with a widely held vision of the world — and this vision is accepted as a substitute for facts. Subjecting beliefs to the test of hard facts is especially important when it comes to economic beliefs because economic realities are inescapable limitations on millions of people's lives, so that policies based on fallacies can be devastating in their impacts. Conversely, seeing through those fallacies can open up many unsuspected opportunities for a better life for millions of people.…

Fallacies are not simply crazy ideas. They are usually both plausible and logical — but with something missing. Their plausibility gains them political support. Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing or ignored factors likely to lead to "unintended consequences," a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters. Another phrase often heard in the wake of these disasters is, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." That is why it pays to look deeper into things that look good on the surface at the moment.

— Economic Facts and Fallacies (pg. vii, 1)

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them, and only in the short run.

— May 22, 2012 article

How do you tell morality from sanctimoniousness? For one thing, morality is hard and sanctimoniousness is easy.... Morality means being hard on yourself. Sanctimoniousness means being easy on yourself — and hard on others....

Sometimes we can make a moral judgement about behavior, without being able to make a moral judgement about individual merit. I can say that drinking yourself into the gutter is not moral behavior. But it so happens that my body has a low tolerance for alcohol. It takes less alcohol to make me sick than it would take to make me drunk. Nature has made it almost impossible for me to become an alcoholic, without any moral virtue on my part. So, when I walk past a drunk lying in the gutter, I have no basis for being sanctimonious. How do I know that, if my body's tolerance for alcohol were greater, I might be lying there in the gutter and he might be walking past me under his own power?

Morally, it is still wrong to drink yourself into the gutter, no matter who does it. But this is one of many areas in which those who behave better may do so because of fortunate circumstances, which they did not create. They may be justified in saying, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." What they are not justified in doing is bending the rules to favor those whose behavior is a threat to themselves and society. It is right to try to help others raise themselves to a higher standard, but wrong to bring the standard down to where they are.

— "Morality vs. Sanctimoniousness" (speech)

After my 85th birthday ... I looked back over my life and was surprised to discover in how many different ways I had been lucky, in addition to some other ways in which I was unlucky.

Among the things I did not know at the time was that I was adopted as an infant into a family with four adults, in which I was the only child.

All sorts of research since then has shown how the amount of attention and interactions with adults a child gets has a lot to do with the way the child develops....

It was decades later, when I had a son of my own, that I asked one of the surviving members of the family how old I was when I first started to walk. She said, “Oh, Tommy, nobody knows when you could walk. Somebody was always carrying you.” ...

Although I was raised by people with very little education, they were people who wanted me to get an education. They praised my every little accomplishment when I was very young, and I was taught to read by the time I was four years old, taught by someone with only a few years of schooling herself.

Years later, when I was promoted to the seventh grade, I was surprised by what a commotion it caused. Then I was told: “You have now gone further than any of us.”

— July 8, 2015 article

(Photo of Sowell in 2018 from the Hoover Institution/YouTube via National Review.)

Yeonmi Park's escape from North Korea and "journey to freedom"

I first posted about Yeonmi Park's escape from North Korea last year. As I quoted from her back then:

I lived in North Korea for the first 15 years of my life, believing Kim Jong-il was a god. I never doubted it because I didn't know anything else. I could not even imagine life outside of the regime. . . . I had to be careful of my thoughts because I believed Kim Jong-il could read my mind.

When I posted that, I had no idea she would ever go to America, let alone that I’d have the pleasure of meeting her in NYC. Her memoir, In Order to Live, came out this week, and I just started reading it.

At a talk by Yeonmi the other day, my friend Peter Prosol took these notes (using first and third person):

Is it that difficult for other leaders to say one sentence to Xi Jinping when they meet him: if you encounter North Korean refugees in China, can you please not send them back?

If I had the things Americans throw away, I wouldn't have left North Korea. The way people have to live is unimaginably, indescribably bad.

A refugee she met in China was trying to injure herself to induce an abortion so as to be able to escape a man who kept her in captivity, enabled by the legal shadows China keeps refugees in.

Everyone should read this book.

Nietzsche on Obama?

1. "Our social order will slowly melt away, as all earlier orders have done when the suns of new ideas shone forth with new warmth over the people. One can desire this melting only in that one has hope; and one may reasonably have hope only if one credits his own heart and head, and that of his equals, with more strength than one credits to the representatives of the existing order. Usually, then, this hope will be arrogance, an overestimation."

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878), #443

2. "[S]ome individuals . . . are driven through the waves of the most exciting turns of fate, of the most varied currents of their time or nation, and yet always stay lightly on the surface, like cork."

— Nietzsche, id., #627

3. "There are men so presumptuous that they can only praise a greatness which they publicly admire by representing it as steps and bridges that lead to themselves.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880), #210

Nietzsche on life stages

"Age and truth. Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

People as bad poets. Just as bad poets, in the second half of a line, look for a thought to fit their rhyme, so people in the second half of their lives, having become more anxious, look for the actions, attitudes, relationships that suit those of their earlier life, so that everything will harmonize outwardly. But then they no longer have any powerful thought to rule their life and determine it anew; rather, in its stead, comes the intention of finding a rhyme."

From Human, All Too Human, Part I, # 609-10.

If Mitt Romney doesn't "know" global warming is mostly caused by humans, is he "against science"?

Paul Krugman's latest column is headlined:

Republicans Against Science

Krugman writes:

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us. . . .

In the past, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But, last week, he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but “I don’t know that” and “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.” Moral courage!

So, Mitt Romney says he doesn't know. Is this uncertainty "terrify[ing]"?

The full Romney quote is: "Do I think the world's getting hotter? Yeah, I don't know that but I think that it is." So his basic conclusion is: "I think that it is," but he qualifies this with "I don't know." Isn't this appropriate for a layperson who's deferring to scientific consensus?

I've been reading Richard Feynman's book The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist. Here's what Feynman said about uncertainty:

It is necessary and true that all of the things we say in science, all of the conclusions, are uncertain, because they are only conclusions. They are guesses as to what is going to happen, and you cannot know what will happen, because you have not made the most complete experiments. . . .

Scientists, therefore, are used to dealing with doubt and uncertainty. All scientific knowledge is uncertain. This experience with doubt and uncertainty is important. I believe that it is of very great value, and one that extends beyond the sciences. I believe that to solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.

So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are most unsure; some of them are nearly sure; but none is absolutely certain. Scientists are used to this. We know that it is consistent to be able to live and not know. Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing.

Remember, Feynman said this about all scientific conclusions, including ones about much simpler questions than how much the billions of people in the world are contributing to climate change. And he was describing the level of doubt that even scientists should have about their own fields of expertise, let alone the appropriate attitude of a layperson. Feynman said this isn't some weird defect in science, but it's essential to science. If Krugman is terrified at the idea of not "knowing," maybe he's the one who's against science.

Dick Cheney kept a resignation letter in a safe the whole time he was Vice President.

He reveals this in his memoirs, which are coming out next Tuesday. Only Cheney, President Bush, and one staffer knew of the letter's existence.

Cheney's reason:

"[T]here is no mechanism for getting rid of a vice president who can’t function."

He also makes this tantalizing statement about his book:

"I didn’t set out to embarrass the president or not embarrass the president."

Aphorisms on the limits of knowledge by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

From his recent book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms:

It is much harder to write a book review for a book you've read than for a book you haven't read. . . . (49)

Today, we mostly face the choice between those who write clearly about a subject they don't understand and those who write poorly about a subject they don't understand. . . . (50)

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people's heads. (58)

(Taleb is probably best known for his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and he's also written highly technical works on human error — for instance, this paper on the error rates of error rates.)

Why divorce?

Today's New York Times Magazine has a piece about Dana Adam Shapiro, who, when he was in his mid-30s, interviewed all his friends he knew who had gotten divorced. He then asked each of them for referrals to other divorced couples. Almost everyone was happy to talk to him about their divorce. He's now making a movie (not a documentary) called Monogamy based on the interviews.

The article sums up three of the couples Shapiro interviewed: "The Young Wife," "The Two-Time Ex," and "The Adultress."

So, what lessons do we learn from the article? It turns out that marriages fail due to adultery, alcoholism, sex starting to feel like a chore, people taking less care of themselves, and the realization that what they had in common from the beginning was too superficial to be a strong basis for a lifelong commitment. Stop the presses!

It's disappointing if those are the most interesting insights from 50 interviews with "people of all ages, all across the United States" about their divorces. There isn't one unexpected observation in the whole piece.

If you like the "Here are a few paragraphs about a couple and their problems" format, I recommend, instead, a book called One to One by Theodore Isaac Rubin, M.D. Here's one of my favorite vignettes from the book (102-104):

Lionel and Lisa

This couple was seen by their friends as "glittering, beautiful, fun-loving." . . . When asked how things were with them, their inevitable answer was "Great!" . . .

They gave large cocktail parties every three or four months and ate out frequently with friends, of whom they had many. In actuality, few of their "friends" knew very much about them except that they were good-looking, fun, and obviously successful. . . . [T]hey took pains to avoid any kind of "heavy talk," on the few occasions when they ate out alone. . . .

The fact is, there was very little openness, tenderness, trust or intimacy, caring or kindness between them, or between them and anyone else. . . . This is an example of two highly narcissistic, shallow people who affected a pose for the outside world but who had very little tolerance for each other. . . .

They . . . used history between them only to seek further evidence for recrimination. "Do you remember," said Lisa to Lionel, "the time two years ago when you forgot my birthday?" Interestingly, their sexual lives were satisfactory in terms of arousal and response, but neither Lionel nor Lisa was aware of any love or tenderness during sex. . . . [I]n view of their great similarity, and their high degree of narcissism and alienation, they got through the barrier of antagonism sexually by seeing each other as mirror images of themselves. . . . [T]hey engaged in masturbatory or solitary sex, even though it took place together. . . .

They came to see me, not to get help, but to use me to support them in their onslaught on each other and to win me over to believing that each was right in hating the other. . . . I do not know whether they parted company or continued on an antagonistic basis. Antagonism can keep people together in a state of mutual pseudo-aliveness for a lifetime.

Scheduling life

I've been reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, which is worth reading if you read it critically enough to sort out the great advice from the terrible advice. I like this suggestion from the book (which he originally made in a blog post):

Work is not all of life. Your co-workers shouldn't be your only friends. Schedule life and defend it just as you would an important business meeting. (326-27)

Ferriss isn't recommending that you put a high priority on socializing in general. In fact, the above advice only makes sense if you first take stock of which socializing is truly valuable, by asking yourself these questions:

• Positive friends versus time-consuming friends: Who is helping versus hurting you, and how do you increase your time with the former while decreasing or eliminating your time with the latter?

• Who is causing me stress disproportionate to the time I spend with them? What will happen if I simply stop interacting with these people? (81)

At first, he suggests explicitly confronting the negative friends about how you're not getting enough out of the relationship, but he realizes many readers won't be up for this. So instead, he recommends "just politely refus[ing] to interact with them":

Be in the middle of something when the calls comes, and have a prior commitment when the invitation to hang out comes. Once you see the benefits of decreased time with these people, it will be easier to stop communication altogether. (82)

I'm reminded of a scene from a Seinfeld episode, "The Boyfriend," where Jerry's annoyed that his new friend (Keith Hernandez) hasn't called him:

Elaine: You know, maybe he's been busy. Maybe he's been out of town.

Jerry: Oh, they don't have phones out of town? I love how people say they're too busy. 'Too busy!' Pick up a phone! It takes two minutes! How can you be too busy?

Everyone's "too busy" for what they don't really want to do. We make time for the things value the most.

3 ways to deal with loneliness

I'm reading the book An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin (published in the UK in 1994), which describes how people throughout history and all over the world have tackled problems that he claims are common to people in all times and places.

Each of the 25 chapters is on a different one of these problems. There's a chapter on how people have dealt with — or, in his preferred metaphor, immunized themselves against — loneliness. He takes this problem extremely seriously:

The fear of loneliness has been like a ball and chain restraining ambition, as much of an obstacle to a full life as persecution, discrimination or poverty. Until the chain is broken, freedom, for many, will remain a nightmare. . . .

Feminists were the latest group to be thwarted by it. Simone de Beauvoir's idea that work would be a protection, a better one than the family, proved mistaken. Even she, who claimed 'I am sufficient to myself', found she needed someone who could 'make me pleased with myself'; even she was 'made stupid by falling in love'; even she felt lonely when Sartre, in his last years, was no longer himself. All movements for freedom come to a halt at the wall of loneliness. . . .

Fifty-nine per cent of those who say they feel lonely are women, and 41 per cent men, but it is impossible to be sure what reticence conceals . . . (60)

There may be a reporting bias here, if women are generally encouraged to be open about their feelings more than men.

Zeldin corrects a misconception about the history of loneliness:

The story we are usually told is this: in the beginning everybody lived cosily in a family or tribe, people did not originally even know what loneliness was, never conceiving of themselves as separate individuals. Then suddenly, quite recently, togetherness crumbled. . . .

But it is not true that loneliness is a modern ailment. The Hindus in one of their oldest myths say that the world was created because the Original Being was lonely. Even when all humanity was religious, there were sufferers from loneliness, as the prophet Job, in the fourth century BC, testified . . . :

'My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. They that dwell in mine house . . . count me for a stranger: I am an alien in their sight. . . . ' (60-61)

So how have people fought loneliness? Here are 3 of the 4 ways, according to Zeldin:

1. You can become a "hermit":

They were men and women who felt out of place in the world, who did not like its greed, cruelty, and compromises, or who believed they were misunderstood; as one of them, Narcissus, Bishop of Jerusalem, said in the year 212, 'Weary of the world's slanders against him, he retired to the wilderness.' Instead of feeling alienated in society, they left it to become professional aliens, aiming deliberately to be 'strangers' or 'exiles' . . . . The reward they sought was internal peace. Some subjected themselves to painful mortifications, almost starving, or tying themselves up with heavy chains, or living in graves, in order to have spiritual illuminations; some became deranged; but the famous ones were those who triumphed and emerged with a sense of having discovered the realities that mattered; and they radiated an internal peace which was immensely impressive: admirers flocked to get their blessing. (61)

There's another bias: success bias. We glorify whoever is most successful, without looking at how everyone who followed their path turned out.

2. You can stay a part of society but cultivate your individuality:

The Romantics claimed that each individual combines human attributes in a unique way, and that one should aim at expressing one's uniqueness in one's manner of living, just like an artist expressing himself in his creative act. . . . 'The truly spiritual man feels something higher than sympathy' [the quote is from August Wilhelm Schlegel]: he feels the individuality of other people, and he considers that individuality sacred, not because of how important or powerful its possessor is, but because it is individuality. Such opinions expanded the dreams of the Renaissance by demanding that one should like a person because he is different. (66)

3. You can pursue and associate yourself with some "truth" out of a sense that you're part of larger network of truths:

The final form of immunisation has been achieved by thinking that the world is not just a vast, frightening wilderness, that some kind of order is discernible in it, and that the individual, however insignificant, contains echoes of that coherence. People who believe in some supernatural power have their loneliness mitigated by the sense that, despite all the misfortunes that overwhelm them, there is some minute divine spark inside them . . . . Much of what is called progress has been the result of solitary individuals saved from feeling totally alone, even when persecuted, by the conviction that they have grasped a truth, a fragment of a much wider one too large to capture. (68-69)

That could explain why people write nonfiction books.

But getting beyond loneliness in this way does not eliminate all forms of loneliness, any more than one vaccination will protect against all forms of disease. (69)

He says none of these are surefire ways to fight loneliness. You still need other people "for clear thoughts and for knowing where one wants to go; only knowledge of humanity's previous experience can save on from suffering disillusionment." (70)

He concludes:

Having won the right to be alone, to be an exception to generalisations (which can be even more dangerous to freedom than generals), having freed oneself from the generalisation that humans are condemned to suffer from loneliness, one can stand it on its head: turn being alone upside down and it becomes adventure.

(Video via + via.)

Why politics and policy are less important than music and art

I'm reading Confessions of a Philosopher, a 1997 book by Bryan Magee. It's the best long-form account I've read of how philosophical issues impose themselves on one's life. (I deliberately speak of the issues as animate things acting upon a passive person — this is a main theme of the book.)

In a chapter called "Mid-Life Crisis," Magee describes his anguished struggle with the problem of the absurd (which I recently blogged about at the end of this post). He says:

I used to look at people going about their normal lives with everyday cheerfulness and think: "How can they? And how can they suppose that any of what they're doing matters? They're like passengers on the Titanic, except that these people know already that they're headed for total and irremediable shipwreck. . . . Above all, I was baffled by the fact that the middle-aged, who were so close to death, tended to be even more cheerful than the young. . . .

Under the influence of these thoughts my values went through sea changes. Everything that was limited to this life and this world came to appear insignificant. Only what might possibly point beyond them, or have its basis outside them — beauty, art, sex, morality, integrity, metaphysical understanding — could even possibly be worth anything. . . . Success and fame were worse than nothing, because anyone pursuing them was actively throwing his life away. (253)

This leads him to contrast following politics (apparently as a hobby or an occupation) with experiencing art (again, apparently as an audience member or performer, amateur or professional). I was pleased to see his description, because it articulates why I've been feeling increasingly uninterested in politics:

Even on their own terms the politics and business of the world were absurdly evanescent. One week politicians, people who worked in the City, and people whose job it was to report their doings would all be kept out of their beds by a financial crisis which, six months later, would be little talked of. By that time perhaps there would be . . . a corruption scandal in local government, which would then be followed by a flurry of public concern over crimes of violence, which in its turn would be pushed out of people's minds by their fury over some proposed new tax; and so it would go on. Each of these things would seem important for a time, then each would pass away and scarcely matter again except to historians. In fact, the truth is that most of them made little or no difference even to the daily lives of most of the population living through them. People immersed in this stream of ever-changing events were filling their minds with . . . ephemera and trivia, what people in electronics mean by "noise." (254)

I should note that he was a Member of Parliament for about 10 years, so he's not simply apathetic about politics by nature.

Not only do I agree with that passage as a description of current-day American politics (even though it was written in the UK in the '90s), but I find it especially silly that people get so worked up about one tax or one appropriations bill without seeming to care much about what taxes are like on the whole, or how much the country spends on different kinds of things overall. The specific bills that happen to be pending in Congress can only be validly assessed against this backdrop of broader understanding. But the media rarely gives us this information for fear of seeming to lack "objectivity" (whatever that is). And those who aren't concerned about being objective are usually too unreliable to be taken seriously. A subtle, balanced analysis of the tax structure is never going to achieve the level of interest generated by a report on the latest dumb comment by Sarah Palin (for the left) or President Obama (for the right). Magee goes on:

It is not as if were no alternatives. Time spent listening to great music, or seeing great plays, or thinking about issues of lasting importance, was not in this category. In those cases the object of one's activities retained its interest and importance for the rest of one's life. If I spent an evening listening to Mahler's Third Symphony, that symphony was still going to matter to me in six months' time, or ten years, or thirty: it was part of my life, for always. In fact such things more often than not increased in interest and value with the passage of time. If I spent two or three months saturating myself in, let us say, recordings of Mozart's piano concertos, and then did not return to them like that for another four years or so, I would find when I came back to them that I engaged with them on a deeper level than before. And the same was true of most great art. . . .

There were times when I felt, after all, that I was living to the full in face of death. Many men of action who are also writers have described the bliss induced in them by the sound of bullets smacking past their ears, and said that it intensified their awareness of being alive to an intoxicating level. The things that came closest to doing this for me when I fully realized I was facing death were my love affairs and friendships, philosophy and the arts. Never have I reacted to these things more intensely than I did in my late thirties and early forties. It was as if Shakespeare and Mozart were addressing me personally. . . . Had it not been for my need to earn a living I would have immersed myself in them entirely. (254-5)

Although I was more than satisfied by this explanation, some would respond, "But what about political art?" His answer to this is, again, exactly how I feel:

Those that treated political, social or historical levels of explanation as fundamental now seemed to me to be treating externals and surfaces as if they were foundations, and to be superficial and point-missing. In the world as it was at that time the most conspicuous example of this was Marxism, though there were others too. Marxism had a complete explanation of the arts in terms of political power, economic interests and social classes, and this seemed to me a grotesque attempt to explain the greater in terms of the less. Not only was there a lot of Marxist criticism around at that time, there were innumerable Marx-influenced stage productions which had the effect of superficializing the works they dealt with for precisely this reason, that they treated social and political externals as fundamental, while remaining oblivious to what actually was fundamental. Arguing with people who produced or supported this kind of thing was a dislocating experience, because it seemed self-evident to them that the metaphysical, personal and interpersonal dimensions of things were of secondary importance compared with the social and political. Indeed, they often denied that there was any metaphysical dimension at all, either to reality or to works of art. (255)

Some people will respond: "But art should say something about society. It shouldn't be just meaningless fluff to make you feel good. It should disturb people and wake them up to social injustices." (Yes, I've heard all of this said.) Of course I agree that art can say important things about society and that this can be a fine thing to do. It's not that I totally dismiss this function, and I don't think Magee does. But these aren't the most important functions of art, nor are they requirements of great art.

And as for anyone who considers art "meaningless" if it doesn't contain a social critique, or if isn't "appreciated in the social context in which it was made," I feel sorry for them for what they're missing . . .



(That's Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20, conducted and performed by Mitsuko Uchida.)

Does evolutionary psychology make it hard to understand "culture"?

I've been reading Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters over my Christmas vacation. It's similar to Robert Wright's The Moral Animal in that it popularizes evolutionary psychology. But the authors (Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa) update Wright's 1994 book by using more recent research to answer a slew of questions about society.

In a future post I'll excerpt some of the more useful insights from the book. For now, I have a complaint with the authors' discussion of "culture."

They start out the book saying that "everyone" realizes that environment, culture, etc. shape human behavior. "[T]here are no serious biological or genetic determinists in science" (pg. 2). The only controversy is whether biology, genes, evolution, etc. also shape human behavior. Of course, the authors, being evolutionary psychologists, are adamant that the answer is "yes." I agree.

But it's not so clear to me that the authors actually recognize that culture shapes human behavior. They say:

Gender socialization helps to accentuate, solidify, perpetuate, and strengthen the innate differences between men and women, but it does not cause or create such differences. In other words, men and women are not different because they are socialized differently; they are socialized differently because they are different. Gender socialization is not the cause of sex differences; it is their consequence. (32) (emphasis in original)

The first sentence in that paragraph sounds relatively nuanced, but the rest of the paragraph eliminates any nuance. Their position seems clear: gender norms are simply not a cause of any differences between men's and women's behavior. It's hard to imagine a more extreme position than that.

Similarly, they say:

[T]he sex differences in behavior, cognition, values, and preferences are largely innate; universal across cultures; and, in many cases, constant across species. If the sex differences were the result of social and cultural practices such as gender socialization, then they should by definition vary by culture and society. In fact, however, in every human society (and among many other species), males on average are more aggressive, violent, and competitive, and females on average are more social, caring, and nurturing. What is constant in every culture and society (sex differences in behavior) cannot be explained by what is variable across cultures and societies (cultural and social practices). A variable cannot explain a constant; only a constant can explain a constant. (32) (emphasis added)

But later in the same chapter, they have this heading:

There Is Only One Human Culture

Um, I thought they just said that anything that results from culture must, "by definition," "vary by culture and society." But no:

[A]ll the cultural differences are on the surface; deep down, at the most fundamental level, all human cultures are essentially the same .... [C]ulture is a universal trait of all human societies. Yes, culture is a cultural universal.

I'm open to hearing out someone's argument that all human culture is the same. And I'm open to the argument that culture is wildly varied; therefore, any traits that are universally present in humans cannot be the result of culture. But is it too much to ask that the same co-authors stick to a consistent position within a given book?

Aside from the internal inconsistency, I'm not convinced that sex differences are so universal that they can't be the result of social norms. One problem with this is: how could you ever conclude that a particular sex difference is universal? Even if you've surveyed every society in the world and found that, for instance, women refrain from serving in the military in all of them, you'd still only be speculating that this will continue to be the case for all time. Of course, women didn't used to serve in the military, but they do now. Many jobs used to be considered out of the question for women, but this is no longer the case. Who's to say that a sex difference that appears universal right now won't crumble in the future?

Goethe for bloggers

I recently bought Goethe's Maxims and Reflections at the fantastic NYC bookstore Three Lives. I started reading it yesterday morning over breakfast and underlined numerous passages. I was initially concerned that the book -- a posthumously compiled set of aphorisms from the early 19th century -- might seem dry or antiquated, but it's quite the opposite. It has less wit and pithiness than the standard quotations book, but it makes up for this by having more actual insight.

Here are three thoughts I want to keep in mind while blogging:

[N]o one should be silent or give in; we must talk and be up and doing, not in order to vanquish, but so as to keep on the alert; whether with the majority or the minority is a matter of indifference. [#159]

It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth. [#166]

Surely the world is quite full enough of riddles for us not to need to turn the simplest phenomena into riddles too? [#81]

Finally, here's a point that I hope we Americans can appreciate:

No nation attains the power of judgement until it can sit in judgement on itself. [#113]

(To those who might sit in judgment of that spelling: the book was published in the UK.)

As a side note, other people also deserve credit for this wonderful little book: (1) Elisabeth Stopp, who completed the translation shortly before she died and saw it as the crowning achievement of her life, (2) Max Hecker, who compiled the maxims (Goethe jotted them down on scrap paper over the course of decades and used about half of them in other works), and (3) various sources, many of them unknown -- the book euphemistically points out that Goethe would "borrow" other people's aphorisms without including quotation marks or attribution.

Free will: the horse and the engine

I'm planning to do a few posts on the problem of free will. It's a daunting topic to even begin to talk about, partly because it touches on everything you do in your life, and also because it's one of those philosophy problems that's been debated for thousands of years with no consensus; what are the odds that your attempt to solve it is going to be convincing?

One of my professors in law school made this comment to introduce a case we were going to study that day: "When the Supreme Court granted cert, most people agreed that this was a very easy case. They just couldn't agree on whether it was an easy reversal or any easy affirmance" (the two possible outcomes). The free will problem is like that. Everyone thinks the answer is so easy and obvious it's hardly worth talking about. The problem is, people have that feeling equally strongly on both sides (or should I say on all three sides?) ... so maybe it's not so simple.

Before I get into the substance of the debate, I want to share a passage that's not explicitly about free will, though the author later connects it to free will. This story dates back to the 19th century, when a new railway had been built in Germany:

When it reached the village of a certain enlightened pastor, he took his people to where a locomotive engine was standing, and in the clearest words explained of what parts it consisted and how it worked. He was much pleased by their eager nods of intelligence as he proceeded.

But on his finishing they said: "Yes, yes, Herr Pastor, but there's a horse inside, isn't there?" ...

It is ... a great effort to think of all the parts working together to produce the simple result that the engine glides down the track. It is easy to think of a horse inside doing all the work. A horse is a familiar totality that does familiar things.*

I find it interesting that he uses this anecdote to leverage his "compatibilist" position on free will. By "compatibilist," I mean he believes we have free will, but it coexists with determinism. But you could just as well use the horse anecdote as a criticism of philosophers who aren't comfortable introducing free will into our picture of the world unless determinism remains intact. After all, for us in the scientific age, the idea of a deterministic machine is a "familiar totality that does familiar things."

* This is from an essay by R.E. Hobert (a pseudonym for Dickinson S. Miller, who I've never heard of either) called "Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It," from the anthology Metaphysics: The Big Questions, and originally appearing in Mind in 1934; the anecdote in turn comes from Friedrich Paulsen. I've added line breaks for readability.

Judges as "workers"

Another insight from the introduction of Richard Posner's How Judges Think:

[J]udges are not moral or intellectual giants (alas), prophets, oracles, mouthpieces, or calculating machines. They are all-too-human workers, responding as other workers do to the conditions of the labor market in which they work. ...

Because behavior is motivated by desire, we must consider what judges want. I think they want the same basic goods that other people want, such as income, power, reputation, respect, self-respect, and leisure. ...

[L]egal uncertainty ... creates the open area in which the orthodox (the legalist) methods of analysis yield unsatisfactory and sometimes no conclusions, thereby allowing or even dictating that emotion, personality, policy intuitions, ideology, politics, background, and experience will determine a judge's decision.

It's ironic, then, that many conservatives will claim that conservatism is based on an understanding that human beings are imperfect, and human nature can't be changed. These same conservatives will find it outrageous that judges' decision are influenced by factors outside the narrowest definition of "the law."

Speaking of judges' fallibility, Posner makes a blatant factual error on pg. 22:

Presidents differ in their ideological intensity, and taking account of that difference can improve the accuracy of the attitudinal model. Seven of the nine current Supreme Court Justices were appointed by Republican Presidents, but it is more illuminating to note that four conservative Justices were appointed by conservative Republicans (Scalia and Kennedy by Reagan, and Roberts and Alito by the second Bush), two liberal Justices by a Democratic President (Ginsburg and Breyer, appointed by Clinton), and one liberal and two conservative Justices appointed by moderate Republicans (Stevens by Ford, Souter and Thomas by the first Bush).

Did you find it?

I count two liberals and one conservative appointed by Ford and Bush Sr.

Richard Posner on the benefits of America's legal system and why we care about how judges think

Here are some more tidbits from the introduction of Richard Posner's excellent book How Judges Think:

• [I]t is even harder to estimate the benefits of our legal system than its costs. Legal rights are options that may have value even if never exercised, but how to value such options? And legal duties deter harmful conduct — but how effectively is extremely difficult to determine too.

• The judicial mentality would be of little interest if judges did nothing more than apply clear rules of law created by legislators, administrative agencies, the framers of constitutions, and other extrajudicial sources (including commercial custom) to facts that judges and juries determined without bias or preconceptions. Then judges would be well on the road to being superseded by digitized artificial intelligence programs. [Footnote:] I do not know why originalists and other legalists are not AI enthusiasts.

• The confidentiality of the judicial process would not matter greatly to an understanding and evaluation of the legal system if the consequences of judicial behavior could be readily determined. If you can determine the ripeness of a cantaloupe by squeezing or smelling it, you don't have to worry about the produce clerk's mental processes.

Do you think we underestimate the benefits of the legal system because they're so hard to assess?

How Judges Think by Richard Posner

I'm reading How Judges Think, by the eminent judge, professor, and blogger Richard Posner. I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in understanding what really drives judges' rulings.

Here are a few tidbits, all from the introduction:

• Ivan Karamazov said that if God does not exist everything is permitted, and traditional legal thinkers are likely to say that if legalism (legal formalism, orthodox legal reasoning, a "government of laws not men," the "rule of law" ... and so forth) does not exist everything is permitted to judges -- so watch out!

• [M]ost judges are cagey, even coy, in discussing what they do. They tend to parrot an official line about the judicial process (how rule-bound it is), and often to believe it, though it does not describe their actual practices.

• The secrecy of judicial deliberations is an example of professional mystification. Professions such as law and medicine provide essential services that are difficult for outsiders to understand and evaluate. Professionals like it that way because it helps them maintain a privileged status. But they know they have to overcome the laity's mistrust, and they do this in part by developing a mystique that exaggerates not only the professional's skill but also his disinterest.

More to come...

Bertrand Russell on the impulses that drive our actions

Continuing the series of insights from Bertrand Russell's book The Conquest of Happiness (see this tag for all the posts)...

In these passages from 1930, he seems to hint at evolutionary psychology, which would have put him ahead of his time:

9. "Loss of zest in civilized society is very largely due to the restrictions upon liberty which are essential to our way of life. The savage hunts when he is hungry, and in so doing is obeying a direct impulse. The man who goes to his work every morning at a certain hour is actuated fundamentally by the same impulse, namely the need to secure a living, but in his case the impulse does not operate directly and at the moment when it is felt; it operates indirectly through abstractions, beliefs and volitions." (133)

That reminds me of something Robert Wright says in The Moral Animal: "We aren't designed to stand on crowded subway platforms, or to live in suburbs next door to people we never talk to, or to get hired or fired, or to watch the evening news. This disjunction between the contexts of our [evolutionary] design and of our lives is probably responsible for much psychopathology, as well as much suffering of a less dramatic sort." (38-9)

10. "Very few men or women will have children from a sense of public duty, even if it were far clearer than it is that any such public duty exists. When men and women have children, they do so either because they believe that children will add to their happiness, or because they do not know how to prevent them. ...

"To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future. As a conscious sentiment, expressed in set terms, this involves no doubt a hypercivilized and intellectual outlook upon the world, but as a vague instinctive emotion it is primitive and natural, and it is its absence that is hypercivilized. A man who is capable of some great and remarkable achievement which sets its stamp upon future ages may gratify this feeling through his work, but for men and women who have no exceptional gifts, the only way to do so is through children." (152-4)

COUNTERPOINT: "Would having children make me happier?"

Bertrand Russell's thoughts on money, extroverts, and helping people

Continuing the list from last week's blogging of Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (1930):

6. What to spend your money on - "[A]ny man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like every one else." (108)

7. Why extroverts are better than introverts (?) - "The man ... whose attention is turned within finds nothing worthy of his notice, whereas the man whose attention is turned outward can find within, in those rare moments when he examines his soul, the most varied and interesting assortment of ingredients being dissected and recombined into beautiful or instructive patterns." (126-7)

8. Helping people - "If you feed an infant who is already capable of feeding himself, you are putting love of power before the child's welfare, although it seems to you that you are only being kind in saving him trouble. If you make him too vividly aware of dangers, you are probably actuated by a desire to keep him dependent upon you." (157)