My favorite quotes by other people on this blog

It's been a year since I did the first quotes post, so here's an update. For the sake of readability, I've removed all formatting (italics, etc.) and alterations (ellipses and brackets). If you happen to need a more exact quote, just click the link on the person's name and look for the quote in the original post.


LIFE

"If there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair." -- Thomas Nagel

"Don't confuse simple, reasonable honesty with radical silliness. There is no reason to try to articulate blurry feelings or over-explain every detail. The point is to be honest instead of internalizing, not to try to extract juicy confessionals out of everyday life." -- Summer Anne Burton

"My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it." -- Daniel Gilbert


WORK

"One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to 'do what you love.' If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you'd do even if you didn't get paid, you'll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money. -- Penelope Trunk

"Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable." -- Bertrand Russell


THOUGHT

"We have grown terribly -- if somewhat hypocritically -- weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace -- as their predecessors did -- big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth -- however provisional it might be." -- Cristina Nehring

"Is Mount Everest more 'real' than New York? I mean, isn't New York 'real'? I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean, isn't there just as much reality to be perceived in the cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different." -- Wallace Shawn

"If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible." -- Paul Graham


DOUBT

"It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects." -- Colin McGinn

“Instead of explaining why this recession (or depression) is just like the others, we should attend to what is new and especially problematic about the current downturn and why it may not respond to policies modeled on avoiding the errors of the past. To speak of a crisis of financial epistemology may sound abstract, but it has had very concrete and disastrous consequences.” -- Jeffrey Z. Muller

"Scientific psychology becomes unscientific because it is dealing with mind, and mind does not lend itself to experimental precision." Norman N. Holland

"And this is the point in which I think I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men -- that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know." -- Socrates


ENVIRONMENT

"On the one hand, we are told that our overconsumption is polluting and cluttering up the earth with garbage, using up resources and showing insensitivity to all the needy people in the world. On the other hand, we are told that until we start buying more goods and services, the economy will be in the dumps and we will leave many of our fellow citizens jobless, homeless and hungry. Something is wrong with that picture." -- Ina Aronow

"You might declare that global warming and energy insecurity, not to mention urban sprawl and pollution, have intensified the sin of indulging one's motoring desires. And I would not argue with that point. You're right. I am a bad man. But over the long term, if you want to develop a new transportation and energy policy, you'd probably want to err on the side of assuming that people won't change much. And it is human nature to like to be empowered." -- Joel Achenbach

"Can environmentalism be bad for the environment?" -- Edward L. Glaeser


SCIENCE

"It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning, rather than any special scientific doctrine, that makes science and religion look like competitors today. Scientism emerged not as the conclusion of scientific argument but as a chosen element in a worldview -- a vision that attracted people by its contrast with what went before -- which is, of course, how people very often do make such decisions, even ones that they afterwards call scientific." -- Mary Midgley

"If a psychological Maxwell devises a general theory of mind, he may make it possible for a psychological Einstein to follow with a theory that the mental and the physical are really the same. But this could happen only at the end of a process which began with the recognition that the mental is something completely different from the physical world as we have come to know it through a certain highly successful form of detached objective understanding. Only if the uniqueness of the mental is recognized will concepts and theories be devised especially for the purpose of understanding it." -- Thomas Nagel


HUMAN NATURE

"The science of happiness barely grasps the things that the average sage of antiquity took as fundamental. The fundamental error of the science - and the reason why so many of its recommendations sound trivial or just confused - is the assumption that happiness is the same as positive emotion. Researchers are continuously drawn back to this idea since it makes happiness measurable." -- Mark Vernon

"We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)" -- Robert Wright


SOCIETY

"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution -- all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light." -- Steven Pinker

"What if everyone followed this Larger Meaning Doctrine? Something happens to an individual, and he could drop it or apologize or look into the particular details of the case, but instead he insists that his experience should represent some big problem in the world that people ought to be concerned about, that his case should be the jumping off point for something much more general, so that his problem isn't wasted but yields Larger Meaning for us all. Imagine how annoying that would be! And now think about how you'd react if these Larger Meaning adherents also topped off their demands by declaring 'this is not about me.'" -- Ann Althouse


MUSIC

"This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer to that would be, 'Yes.' And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, 'No.' Therein lies the difficulty. Simple-minded souls will never be satisfied with the answer to the second of these questions." -- Aaron Copland


WRITING

"I am now part of the conspiracy to intentionally make simple ideas obscure and complex." -- David R. Hakes

"Complexity and obscurity have professional value -- they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

"Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated." - Blaise Pascal


MEDIA

"People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book. A blog is more immediate, so you’ll get better feedback. And getting feedback as you go is much more intellectually rigorous than printing a final compendium of your ideas and getting feedback from the public only when it's too late to change anything." -- Penelope Trunk

"Book publishers mostly rely on their authors to ensure accuracy; dedicated fact-checking departments now rarely exist except at some magazines. The New Yorker’s checkers are justly renowned for their tenacious scepticism, but even they err sometimes. One reader was annoyed to find himself described as dead, and requested a correction in the next issue. Unfortunately, by the time the correction appeared, he really had died, thus compounding the error. This tale illustrates not only the drawbacks of printed media, but also the role that readers can play in overcoming them -- even if things did not quite work out in this instance." — Anthony Gottlieb

"It was deeply disturbing, but not terribly surprising, to learn that under the guidance of a stern man in a lab coat, ordinary people would torture innocent victims in the infamous Milgram experiment carried out at Yale University. Cronkite was a white man in a tie, with a calm, reassuring voice, and he could have talked us into almost anything, if he wanted to. But his legacy is a paradox: We trusted him to teach us to trust less. The nostalgia for Cronkite is nostalgia not for a lost golden age, but for a brief time when three large media corporations held a monopoly on the airwaves, when trust could be sorted out easily and quickly with the shorthand of race, class and education." -- Philip Kennicott


GOVERNMENT

“Something that’s unsustainable, like a dysfunctional relationship, can go on longer than you expect, and then end faster and messier than you think.” -- Peter Orszag

"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." -- Richard Posner

"I am mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who – in discussing our national security – said, 'Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.' Over the past several years, we have lost that balance, and failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. We simply cannot afford to ignore the price of these wars." -- President Obama

"The aughts were ruined by not letting good crises go to waste." -- Will Wilkinson


GENDER

"No matter how bad things get for boys/men, well, they're men, so they can look after themselves. Women, on the other hand, need a Presidential Council to make sure they're doing all right, even if by many metrics they are outperforming men." -- Sofa King

"[quoting this New York Times article:] 'Women's desire is dominated by yearnings of self-love, by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.' A lot of feminist writing would say that the culture has oppressed women by presenting them as the object of male desire. What if that originates in the woman? Well, that would shake the foundations of feminism!" -- Ann Althouse

"From the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It's not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood -- and underappreciated -- vulnerabilities inherent in men's genetic and hormonal makeup." -- Marianne J. Legato

"It’s too bad that one side of teaching our children about sex and relationships means reminding them that there are bad people in the world; stay away from them, stay safe, speak up if someone hurts you or pushes you. But everyone needs that information, and that promise of adult support. We have to get that message across without defining some of our children as obvious perpetrators and others as obvious victims, because that insults everyone." -- Perri Klass


SEXUAL ORIENTATION

"I think the institution would be strengthened by the inclusion of more couples who are genuinely committed to each other. But even if you believe marriage would be changed for the worse by same sex unions, I'm not sure it's a compelling argument for their exclusion. We don't forbid divorce, a more proven and prevalent threat to the health of our society." -- Steve Schmidt


RELIGION

"Every religion I know of has changed its views with respect to concrete controversies over long periods of time. People's views about the morality of homosexuality are likely to undergo some change, even though they're making judgments based on their religious beliefs. Because in fact, religion is an extremely durable, and yet flexible, way of trying to apprehend what's good and what's bad in the world. In fact, its durability comes from its flexibility. Now, speaking from inside a religion, it's hard to talk that way." -- Jack Balkin

- "Is life in general more rewarding if you are spiritual, and a real believer? Does someone who truly believes that God is watching my every step, God is taking care of me, whatever happens to me is somehow approved by or helped by God, does that person live a richer, fuller life than someone who thinks: we're on our own here?"
- "It depends on your specific conception of God, because belief can equally well leave you with this constant sense that you're coming up short and you're being judged and you're not doing quite the perfect thing. You know, I was brought up very religiously, and I never totally lost that sense, you know, that I'm screwing up." -- Joel Achenbach and Robert Wright

"How can it be Heaven if our families aren't there?" -- Greta Christina


ANIMALS

"I'm not a vegetarian. Now, don't get me wrong — I like animals. And I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. Kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left." — Mark Bittman

"If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too." -- Ann Althouse


HEALTH CARE

"Whether, in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place." -- President Barack Obama

"We're traveling down the route of Europe. And many Americans just hate that idea. If you're in any group of conservatives, and you say, 'Oh, that will take us down the route of Europe,' they will say, 'Oh no, we don't want to do that! That's awful!' Nobody ever explains what's so terrible about Europe." -- Bruce Bartlett


RIGHT and WRONG

"We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters." -- Ed Hickling

"Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere 'statistical people.' They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations." -- Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule

"Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part." -- Bertrand Russell


ART

"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. 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." -- Bryan Magee

"The devaluing of the visual goes along with the theory that there is no such thing as quality, i.e., good versus bad [art], a theory that inevitably comes to parody itself as a prejudice against the beautiful." -- Richard Lawrence Cohen

"'He was in pain all the time,' recalled his father. 'He cried. I bought him a toy piano.' The keyboard looked like a mouth to Michel, and he thought it was laughing at him, so he smashed it with a toy hammer, and his father got him an old full-size upright abandoned by British soldiers at a military base. -- David Hadju, quoting Tony Petrucciani


BLOGGING

"So that's what's sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I'm alone, it doesn't involve dinner if it doesn't involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now." -- Roger Ebert

"And if I told myself that I would have something interesting to blog about, that I had something to look forward to, and that I still had something to write, then there was absolutely no reason to die." -- Zachary Paul Sire

The conservative case against higher taxes on the rich

Pithily taken down by Jon Chait.

The Library of Congress is going to "archive the collected works of Twitter."

We're going to record "the second-by-second history of ordinary people."

That NYT article makes this important point (which it attributes to unnamed academics):

For hundreds of years, . . . the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, . . . it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently.

I've been critical of Twitter. But I only wish we had this kind of access to random people's fleeting thoughts from 50, 100, 200 years ago.

On the other hand, most tweets surely aren't very interesting. It's hard to imagine that more than 10% are worth going back and reading even a year later. But the Library of Congress is apparently archiving all tweets. This seems bizarrely undiscriminating for such an august institution.

Now, sifting through the 55 million tweets per day (!) would be an enormous task, so I'm not surprised they don't bother to do that. But couldn't they come up with an algorithm that would automate the process of distilling the whole archive into something with more overall value? For instance, they could have a rule that they only archive tweets that have garnered a certain number of "favorites."

Lastly, this is disturbing:

[T]he vast majority of Twitter messages that would be archived are publicly published on the Web.

"The vast majority"? You mean some of the posts that will be stored in the Library of Congress will be from posts that were never publicly published — that is, from "locked" accounts? How is that not a flagrant violation of privacy?

What people have said about this blog

Just for fun, here's a selection of responses this blog has gotten in the two years since I started it (comments without links are from either emails or defunct links):

"I learn at least one thing new every time I visit."

"My goodness. A tremendous, very well written, passionate post. . . . I'm glad I was able to read it. Wow."

"Of those live-blogs I read, this is one of the more thoughtful, eclectic, real-time following of last night’s debate."

"What a nice piece of Live-blogging, thank you very much . . . I appreciate your acute comments, being overseas and too tired to stay awake to watch, I have a very sensible idea of what went on last night."

"John's post about gender rules and the disadvantages of being a man prompted me to stay up wayyyyyy too late last night reading and thinking about the topic . . ."

“I got to number three or four or five and ended up wandering off into random spaces in history, fixing Wikipedia articles (with minutes old knowledge) and having a blast. Thanks! This is what the internet is for.”

“Hey, that blog you linked to is great. The series on grunge was fantastic.”

"What this is about is nothing more than self-centered, me-first, half-assed, infantile analysis."

“I love you for writing this post. It was so thoughtful and thought provoking and perhaps you have just touched the tip of the iceberg.”

"John Althouse Cohen says, better than I ever could, why Tim Russert was so important and why he will be so missed."

"Kind of long-winded and waffley."

“A fascinating argument”

"As always, love your stuff."

"Just wanted to let you know that I explored your posts, and your links.... Please keep up the great work."

“Cohen’s posts are well written, thoughtful, and provocative. Highly recommended.”

"John, your premise has all the makings of a serious book on the topic, not some jumped-up Dr. Phil exploration, and I wish you luck should you delve further into it."

"John, whose list of the best songs of the 2000s is probably better than mine . . ."

"How fortunate that my favorite blogger should also turn out to be my son! And how fortunate that even if I didn’t know John, I’d respect and admire his rigorous intellect and forceful prose."

"Your son's Blog is very well done. He has a sensitivity to the limits of men knowing Truth together with a courage to push those limits in many areas."

"JAC’s comment is hardly unique on the left and it is a categorical, dictionary definition of racist."

"Lovely little bittersweet blogposting from him."

"I can relate to your post, & found it very touching. & I'm not easily moved"

"The blog entry strikes me as one of those things someone writes in the heat of a sentimental moment."

"What a beautiful post."

"I thought that was a lovely, poignant post and remarkably insightful for someone who's commenting upon his own [ex-]relationship."

"JAC's comments sound like the usual half-truth ramblings of the clueless beta male."

“John Althouse Cohen is awesome. (And not just because he quoted me! His whole blog is great.)”

"Son of prominent blogger Ann Althouse – runs a pretty damn good blog, himself..."

"It's written by Althouse's son, which should be reason enough to check it out, but the guy is a good thinker, and a good writer, on his own account. JAC and I don't agree (he will be voting for Obama), but from what I've read of his blog, he's a sane voice, as I hope to be. He doesn't write exclusively about politics, but a good and necessary part of politics writing (for me at least) is a reminder that the other side of the aisle contains real people too."

"Who the ---- is Ann Althouse's son and why the hell do I give a ---- what he thinks?"

"Hey there, this is my first time here, and let me say what a thoughtful and well written article that was. Outstanding! . . . You are a brave person, perhaps braver than you realized, and I wish you well on your journey."

"John Althouse Cohen puts in another application to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations . . . ."

"Thanks for your thoughtful and enjoyable post. Now I'd like to see the movie . . . "

"I've long been bemused by how easily impressed people are by brain scans. That every state of mind is paired with something going on physically in the brain was known in principle long before anyone was able to capture pretty pictures of it. Excellent post, JAC."

"I hope that the people who translate feminism into just being a movement to protect women are a very small group. I can only speak for myself when I say that my idea of feminism is that it gives attention to the ways that gender defines us and the ways that society forms that gender translation. A wise professor once talked about the Marlboro man and how that man had never learned to express or communicate or be intimate. It was an eye-opener for me, and I was ever so thankful for it. This was a great piece to read and remind me how fragile we all are, how kindly we should look on one another and how different the world could be with just a bit more attention to the how's and why's of our actions."

"I want you to know that you have me thinking a LOT more about the role of young men in today's American society. . . . It was really your post and the corresponding links and commentary around the internet that now has me standing back and THINKING instead of REACTING to this topic. Thank you for that."

"I have tried to blog, but I so lack your focus and tenacity. You have done well, I would buy you a beer and toast you if I could. Carry on!"

And I will.

Thank you, all of you.

Well, almost all of you.

The top 10 posts from year 2 of this blog

It was two years ago today that I wrote and published the first post on this blog.

As with the first blogiversary, here are 10 posts from year 2 of this blog that I find the most worth going back to:

1. 6 ways blogs are better than books

2. The 100 best songs of the decade

3. 17 online dating profile cliches that women should avoid

4. The 2 most overused chord progressions in pop music

5. The movie scene I think of every time I hear the "brilliant filmmaker" defense of Roman Polanski

6. Do women earn less money than men for equal work?

7. Abortion rights and quality of life

8. Robert Wright's self-contradictory attack on the "new atheists"

9. Kant's categorical imperative vs. the golden rule

10. "What are the simple concepts that have most helped you understand the world?"

Stay tuned for more blogiversary content throughout this week . . .

Colonialism's legacy isn't the most important thing holding Africa back.

So says Nicholas Kristof.

It's very easy to invoke "colonialism" as the root cause of anything that goes wrong in Africa. (An example is the fifth comment in this Metafilter thread about the article on African "un-wars" that I blogged the other day.) I say this is easy because it almost always sounds plausible, and you can make the assertion without knowing much beyond the general fact that there was a lot of colonialism in Africa. Not many people will defend colonialism, and that's fine with me -- but I don't think it's fine to use it as a convenient scapegoat for all the current-day problems in an entire continent. Kristof supports his conclusion by taking a reasoned looked at the actual evidence from developing nations that experienced heavy, light, or no colonialism. Anyone who wants to opine on the effects of colonialism should first look at Kristof's fact-based reasoning.

Although placing all the blame on outsiders who did wrong in the past might feel like a righteously perceptive outlook, this can't be the key to future progress. It's similar to turning every discussion of race in America back to slavery. While it is important to recognize that slavery (aside from its inherent evil) had deleterious consequences that are still with us, it's counterproductive to place all the blame on slavery. If you send a message that a group of people is persistently held back by things someone else did in the distant past, you're denying the current-day people their own agency and capability to solve problems for the future.

What I don't understand about Kristof's blog post, though, is why he doesn't link to his own vividly reported column about a household in Zimbabwe, which that blog post is based on. (See how easy this linking thing is?) You can find the link somewhere on the page, but it's buried deep in the right-hand sidebar. (And I've found by observing the behavior of blog readers that people rarely look at the sidebar.) Basic blogging practices dictate that if your blog post begins, "In my Sunday column . . . ," you need to link to that column. Kristof writes a New York Times blog and has an active Twitter page; surely he's blog-savvy enough to know how to do this, or he has staffers who are supposed to do it for him.

By the way, Kristof notes in that column that the leader of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, "subjects journalists to imprisonment," so he had to keep his reporting "surreptitious." He risked his liberty to bring us this column; he should promote it as effectively as possible.

Enter Sandman, smoothly

That's Andy Rehfeldt -- a self-proclaimed YouTube celebrity -- playing all the instruments, with only the vocals from Metallica's performance of their great song "Enter Sandman."

The basic gimmick is simple: replace a distorted guitar tone with a clean one, and switch the key to the relative major of the original. But the execution is impressive. Here's a disco version by the same guy.

Addiction and choice, part 2

If you've read the post from a few weeks ago about whether addicts have a choice in their behavior, you might be interested in this rebuttal and the original author's response, which gets surprisingly personal.

Speaking of personal, the commenters over here unflinchingly give us some snapshots of their experiences. Here are a few that stood out:

Michael said...

I stopped drinking 20 years ago because I am/was addicted to alcohol. I doubt seriously that alcoholism is a "disease" but I do not doubt that if you quit drinking the desire to drink will go away. Give a monkey a number of drinks every day and the monkey will become addicted to alcohol. Not because he didn't get enough bananas when a baby and not because he had a bad home life but because he drank too much alcohol with too much regularity. Our therapeutic culture has transformed a fairly simple solution (quit drinking) into a very complicated solution(quite drinking after you find out why you drink). I commend to all Theodore Dalrymple's book "Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy" which supports the view that the industry built around "recovery" is very invested in the notion that addictions to drugs and alcohol are nearly impossible to overcome without the help of therapy, medical supervision, etc.


themightypuck said...

I've gotten off heroin and pain meds and it was never a problem. The hardest drug for me to quit was crystal meth but I got off that as well. The most painful drug for me to quit was xanax which I had taken daily for 8 years as prescribed by a doctor for a legitimate health reason. That was hell for 3 days and dysfunction for 3 months. The only drug I have been unable to quit is alcohol and for the most part I don't abuse it (although I bet I'd live longer if it were illegal).


David said...

I learned about alcoholism up close and personal through by beloved but alcoholic second wife.

The argument about whether it's a disease is all semantics. If it's a disease, it's a treatable disease. The treatment is to stop drinking. There are lots of ways the treatment can fail, but unlike in other diseases, the treatment is ultimately in the hands of the patient.

RIP Sally.

Preserving "are-" language

Wow.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some object to the focus on this sign. I held back from defending it because, well, you know what they say about explaining a joke. But I'm glad that my dad responded with a cogent explanation of the humor and importance of the photo.

I'd just like to reiterate that I find the protester's sign not only funny but profoundly significant; there is a lot more that could be said about this. I certainly don't think it should be considered out of bounds to publicly criticize obscure, non-powerful individuals who have chosen to thrust themselves into the public spotlight, especially when they do so with malice toward others. The way to respect an adult is not to try to place him or her beyond intellectual scrutiny.

How good has Obama's foreign policy been?

Pretty good, says Matthew Yglesias.

Pretty bad, says The New Republic.

I hate to say it, but TNR's argument sounds more convincing. But I haven't been following foreign policy very closely since January 2009, so I don't have a strong opinion. What do you think?

The "taste" of political and economic ideas

I love this passage, from an old book review in The New Republic, about which I'm deliberately omitting the key details:

It will not do to dismiss [this book] as a farrago of nonsense. Its very quality of not making sense is exactly what gives it effectiveness. We must rid ourselves of the view that only logical ideas can be political weapons. Ideas in politics are much like poetry: they need no inner logical structure to be effective. Edward Lear's nonsense verse merely extends a principle inherent in poetry as a whole. And _____ is, in a sense, the Edward Lear of political thinking. He has taught us that, just as a limerick drives Shakespeare out of our minds, . . . illogical political ideas drive out the logical. And whether or not he makes sense, his book has become the profoundly evocative philosophy of millions of people.

I left out the specific book and author in question because I think the point is worth considering in the abstract before being distracted by the specifics. If you click the link, you'll immediately see who it's about.

Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen have a similar insight in this portion of a Bloggingheads diavlog. (I want to be clear that I'm not at all trying to put down their thoughts by connecting them with the above passage.)



A transcript:

Wilkinson: My own view of intellectual life was influenced by it.* When I consider questions about difficult intellectual issues, I think of them as somehow having to do with taste . . . . There are certain arguments that 'taste' wrong. Because you don't necessarily explicitly see the logical structure of an argument. But you're like, "There's something wrong with this." And a lot of what you do when you're trained in a discipline, whether it's philosophy or economics, is that you're cultivating a kind of epistemic taste. You're not implementing an algorithm to tell whether a certain policy argument violates a fundamental principle of economics. You have to develop what people call economic intuition. But what is that? And it feels like what you have when you can taste the elements in a good Merlot. "Oh, there's a little bit of blackberry in there."

Cowen: Economics and politics are much more about taste and aesthetics, I think, than often we have realized. And there are thinkers that see that, when you go back in the history of ideas. They're not always the most salubrious thinkers, but there's a lot to it.

* This segment explains what Wilkinson means at the beginning of the clip when he says his view of intellectual life was "influenced by it" -- the "it" is Hume's essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (which I've blogged before).

By the way, that whole diavlog is excellent and worth listening to. (You might want to download it as a podcast.) It's structured as an interview with Cowen about his book Create Your Own Economy (which is oddly titled since it's not mainly about business or economics). But the diavlog transcends the promotional interview format and turns out to be an enlightening conversation about the value of outside-the-mainstream thinking styles.

Could teaching nonfiction as literature improve American kids' reading ability?

In a Daily Beast article called "How to Make American Teens Smarter," Dana Goldstein takes stock of the disappointing progress we've made with children's reading skills:

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal test known as "the nation's report card," only one-third of American kids can read at the "proficient" level. Over the past two years, no national gains have been made in closing the achievement gaps between rich and poor, white and black, white and Hispanic, or girls and boys. And though some individual states did better than others on the assessment, the overall picture of literacy in America is bleak—a decades-long achievement plateau that leaves most young adults unprepared for higher-level work.

Are we not allowed to suggest that this might be caused in part by the custom that reading and writing are taught almost entirely through fiction rather than nonfiction? Goldstein goes there:

In no grade do students typically read nonfiction, beyond memoirs like the The [sic] Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night—even though success on standardized tests, in college, and in many jobs requires the ability to comprehend dense nonfiction texts. . . . [In the comments, my dad takes issue with this paragraph, and Goldstein responds. -- JAC]

"People don't really understand the nature of reading. They feel that reading is a skill, that it's transferable, so once you're a good reader, you can read anything that's put in front of you," says Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive psychologist who focuses on K-12 education. "But that's only true for decoding—what you learn until grade three or four. After that, when you see good readers versus poor readers, what you're looking at is mostly differences in the knowledge that kids bring to the reading. It's easy to read something when you already know something about the topic. And if you don't know about the topic, it's utterly opaque to you."

That's why children should read newspapers and magazines, texts about nature and technology, and biographies—genres that increase real-world knowledge. This is especially important for poor children, who may not be exposed to as much "background" information at home: the random vocabulary, facts, and associations that make it easier to do well on tests like the NAEP and SAT, and to succeed in the workplace.

My favorite example Goldstein gives is that high-school students are regularly taught George Orwell's novels 1984 and Animal Farm; why shouldn't they read "Politics and the English Language"? And that's just one of his great essays. Children are taught to write essays for specific purposes, but they're not taught to read essays for the sake of encountering an intelligent mind contemplating the world (as opposed to the utilitarian, non-literary nonfiction in science and history textbooks).

My mom made this proposal (which "really stirred people up"):

[W]hy does reading even need to be a separate subject from history in school? Give them history texts and teach reading from them. Science books too. Leave the storybooks for pleasure reading outside of school. They will be easier reading, and with well-developed reading skills, kids should feel pleasure curling up with a novel at home. But even if they don't, why should any kind of a premium be placed on an interest in reading novels? It's not tied to economic success in life and needn't be inculcated any more than an interest in watching movies or listening to popular music. Leave kids alone to find out out what recreational activities enrich and satisfy them. Some may want to dance or play music or paint. Just because teachers tend to be the kind of people who love novels does not mean that this choice ought to be imposed on young people via compulsory education. Teach them about history, science, law, logic -- something academic and substantive -- and leave the fictional material for after hours.

Back to Goldstein's article:

"One of my big gripes is the imperialism of literature, of trivial fictions and poetry," says E.D. Hirsch, a literature professor and advocate of "cultural literacy." Hirsch rejects the idea that storybooks are the only books that appeal to children. "Fiction doesn't have a monopoly on narrative," he says. "Take, for example, biographies. They have the form of fiction. It isn't whether kids can read it or not, it's whether it is taught or not. And boys tend to be more interested in nonfiction than fiction. It's one of the reasons… that boys do less well and are turned off from reading."

Matthew Yglesias agrees that reading should be taught through nonfiction as well as fiction, but bristles at the gendered angle:

The thesis about boys is provocative, but it’s probably best not to get this tied in too much with controversial claims about gender. The essence of the issue is that clearly some people are more interested in reading non-fiction than fiction and might find reading lessons oriented to non-fiction material more engaging.

That does make a certain amount of strategic sense: if you're mainly trying to advance a controversial position (the nonfiction idea), you probably shouldn't connect it to a second controversial position that's not your driving motivation.

Maybe it's unfortunate that the idea that we should care about boys is so controversial. But, as Yglesias says, the more useful perspective is that we want to help people. The gender-neutrality of that goal is a good thing. While it might make some people feel good to say of a certain policy, "This helps women [or girls]," and it might make some other people feel good to say, "This helps men [or boys]," there's no inherent virtue to those statements beyond the general idea of helping someone.

I also don't see any need to stereotype boys as liking one type of reading and girls as liking another type of reading. (The article doesn't include any actual evidence to support the claim that boys especially enjoy reading nonfiction.) Rather, we need to stop stigmatizing nonfiction as unserious and privileging fiction as the only real literature.

IN THE COMMENTS: My dad, who works in this field, points out that things are a little more complicated than this post may have suggested. Admittedly, I'm no expert in nationwide English curricula (I used the time-tested writer's technique of extrapolating wildly from my own experiences), so I'm glad to hear that nonfiction-for-its-own-sake isn't quite as absent from schools as I thought.

Bertrand Russell on flow, selfishness, and death

This will conclude my blogging of Bertrand Russell's 1930 book The Conquest of Happiness (you can see all the posts at this link):

11. "A great deal of work gives the same pleasure that is to be derived from games of skill. . . . All skilled work can be pleasurable, provided the skill required is either variable or capable of indefinite improvement. If these conditions are absent, it will cease to be interesting when a man has acquired his maximum skill. A man who runs three-mile races will cease to find pleasure in this occupation when he passes the age at which he can beat his own previous record. Fortunately there is a very considerable amount of work in which new circumstances call for new skill and a man can go on improving." (165)

Those observations are uncannily reminiscent of Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who supported his theory with psychological experiments conducted around the world over 20 years. Russell understood it instinctively.

12. "The traditional moralist . . . will say that love should be unselfish. In a certain sense he is right, that is to say, it should not be selfish beyond a point, but it should undoubtedly be of such a nature that one's happiness is bound up in its success. If a man were to invite a lady to marry him on the ground that he ardently desired her happiness and at the same time considered that she would afford him ideal opportunities of self-abnegation, I think it may be doubted whether she would be altogether pleased. Undoubtedly we should desire the happiness of those whom we love, but not as an alternative to our own. In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world . . . disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves." (190-91)

It's all too easy to criticize someone's life decisions as "selfish." You have to have children -- it's selfish otherwise. Someone who doesn't want children can just as easily maintain that having children is what's selfish. Russell's paragraph is a good reminder that this word shouldn't have too much power. Everyone is selfish, and we need to live with this fact.

13. The book's final thought: "The happy man . . . feels himself a citizen of the universe, . . . untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him." (191)

"Un-wars"

"Across much of Africa."

Warning: very disturbing text.

Do sex and violence in pornography and other media lead to more or less rape and violence in real life?

Some data.

How the poor are more rational than the rich about money

From the rich perspective:



(That's Glenn Loury and Sendhil Mullainathan, on Bloggingheads.)

Books that haven't influenced me the most

Now that I've taken stock of which books have most influenced me, I also want to look at what kinds of books haven't been as influential.

Most people would find the most striking omission from my list to be fiction. But I've gotten used to this. Fiction just doesn't reach me the way nonfiction does. Even when nonfiction tries to be engaging by using personal narratives, I often lose patience with the details and just want the writer to get to the abstract point.

What stands out most to me is the lack of history books, even though I own a lot of them. I've enjoyed reading these books and learning about history. In retrospect, though, I'm not sure they've fundamentally changed my views. I even wonder if anyone really "learns lessons" from history, or if we just interpret everything to fit our preconception of the world.

There's also nothing in my list about a huge interest of mine, music (except for parts of Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow). I have read illuminating books about music, but the reading process is subordinate to the everyday listening process. On the other hand, I can't say that the books in my list are subordinate to the everyday thinking process; it's often the opposite.

Challenging the premise of "the books that have influenced me the most" meme

Ezra Klein challenges the premise of the "books that influenced me" blog meme (which I picked up today), saying books haven't influenced him much:

I've written this sort of thing before. The mainstays on my list are John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," Tom Geoghegan's "Which Side Are You On?," Abraham Joshua Heschel's "Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity," Richard Ben Cramer's "What It Takes" and maybe a handful of others.

But I always feel like a fraud.

These books meant a lot to me, but they were much less influential in my thinking -- particularly in my current thinking -- than a variety of texts that carry consider less physical heft. Years spent reading the Washington Monthly, American Prospect and New Republic transformed me from someone interested in politics into someone interested in policy. So, too, did bloggers like, well, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum and Tyler Cowen. In fact, Cowen, Brad DeLong, Mark Thoma and a variety of other economics bloggers also get credit for familiarizing me with a type of basic economic analysis that's consistently present in my approach to new issues.

Much of my emphasis on the institutions of American government and the processes by which they work (or don't) came from my relationship with Mark Schmitt, first through his blog and then through his editorship at the American Prospect. . . .

So much as I love my favorite books, the biggest influences in my thinking have been the continuous intellectual relationships I've had with blogs, periodicals and other people.

One of the bloggers Klein cites as an influence, Matthew Yglesias, responds:

[I]f I look back at my list of books that influenced my thinking . . . these aren’t books that influenced my thinking “on the issues” the way blog posts and magazine articles do nearly so much as they’re books that influenced my thinking about my thinking. Like: What’s important? What’s it worth doing in life? What questions are a waste of time? What kinds of mistakes have I been making?

I feel like this is going to be the kind of thing books are still important for, simply because they’re more intense experiences. A solo encounter with a major work is a big deal in a way that sporadic engagement with blogs isn’t. Which is just to say that I hope and think digital media will mostly crowd out relatively low-value book-reading experiences and still leave room for some of the big deal reads.

Well, I agree with Yglesias. Klein seems to want to extend his reach as little as possible. Klein, Yglesias, Schmitt, and Drum share similar vocations (journalist-bloggers), and the same time period (right now), and the same country, and mostly similar worldviews (most of them are liberals; Cowen is a moderate libertarian). It may be comforting to draw your influence from this close by, and it hasn't stopped Klein from writing a top-notch blog. But his attitude seems cramped and a bit sad.

It's not that I'm surprised that Klein would have been more influenced by blogs and magazines than by books in writing his Washington Post blog about economic policy. But the question isn't "books that influenced my blog"; it's "books that influenced me." It's important to not just be your blog or your job but to be a complete person. That's hard to do if you're not willing to immerse yourself in worldviews that are far removed from your own.

The 12 books that have influenced me the most

Tyler Cowen started this meme, in response to "a loyal reader" who told him:

I'd like to see you list the top 10 books which have influenced your view of the world.

Will Wilkinson, Matthew Yglesias, and many others have given their lists. There's no required number of books, but most people seem to be giving around 10.

Some of the recurring authors are Plato, Nietszche, John Stuart Mill, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Hannah Arendt, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Thomas Kuhn, Derek Parfit, Paul Johnson, and Thomas Sowell. This is all slanted by the fact that the meme was started by a libertarian economist, so the people who pick up his meme are going to be disproportionately libertarian.

Here's my list:

1. The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel. (Previously blogged by me and also my dad.) He looks at many of the classic philosophical problems (knowledge, free will, the meaning of life, etc.) in order to illuminate the frustrating interplay between the objective and the subjective, both of which are inescapably real. 

2. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume.
3. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. Kant's book is famously badly written, while Hume's book is pretty clearly written for the 18th century. Both of them have to be confronted by anyone trying to understand the limits of understanding. They didn't create enduring theoretical frameworks, but they still made progress by waking us up from our "dogmatic slumbers" (as Kant said Hume had done to him).

4. Upheavals of Thought by Martha Nussbaum. Emotions aren't the opposite of reason — they contain intelligent thoughts and allow us to rationally interact with the outside world.

5. What's It All About? by Julian Baggini. An argument that the standard solutions to the meaning of life don't work.

6. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Blogged.) How to structure all the activities in your life to maximize happiness.

7. The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell. (Blogged.) You could file this under philosophy or self-help.

8. The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. (Blogged.) I'm sure there are more recent books on evolutionary psychology that are better supported (at least because more research has been done since 1994), and Wright himself admits that the theory has its shortcomings. But this book offers a compelling explanation of human behavior.

9. Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel. He applies his dryly, lucidly analytical style to the kinds of questions that continental philosophy more often approaches with overwrought extravagance and obscurantism. The famous "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is one of many highlights; others include "Death" (blogged), "The Absurd" (blogged), "Sexual Perversion," and "The Fragmentation of Value."

10. The Mysterious Flame by Colin McGinn. Why we haven't, and aren't going to, solve the mind-body problem.

11. Rationality in Action by John Searle. A refreshing look at the problem of free will. (His shorter follow-up, Freedom & Neurobiology, deals with similar themes but also extends his analysis into political philosophy.)

12. Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. As the back cover says, he makes the case for a revolution in our concern for animals by reasoning from beliefs most people already hold. This is the one book about which I can say it has affected my life every single day for the past 20 years.

Looking over the list, I seem to have been most interested in thinking about thought and its place in our lives, with more emphasis on the inadequacy than the power of rational thought. This emphasis is rather awkward since any such analysis is itself an attempt to think rationally. The View from Nowhere captures this awkwardness explicitly.

Feel free to post a comment either listing the books that have influenced you the most, linking to your blog post with your list, or linking to other people's lists that you've found especially interesting.

Kaus leaves Slate.

Mickey Kaus is leaving Slate for both legal and tactical reasons.

He has a new website, which is apparently going to be both a blog and a Senate campaign site.

(Background.)

Do addicts have self-control?

This book review about "addiction and freedom" is worth reading, and it's a good companion to the book review about medicating children that I blogged recently. The book is Addiction: A Disorder of Choice by Gene M. Heyman, a Harvard psychologist. The reviewer is a psychiatrist, Sally Satel.

Both this review and the one about children illuminate the same fallacy, which I'd paraphrase like this:

1. A certain behavioral/mental problem -- call it "X" -- is associated with brain activity in ways that can be observed and predicted.  

2. Therefore, the solution to "X" must take the form of psychiatric/medical assistance; the solution cannot be individual free choice. (Indeed, even invoking that concept may be detrimental.)

There's a lot that could be said about why this is a fallacy and why it's so common. The question of free will lurks under the surface of the discussion, though Satel understandably sticks to talking about science, policy, and history, and hardly touches the philosophical problem. Here's what she says about the fallacy:

[M]uch of the public, and a dismaying number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and neuroscientists, mistakenly believe that if a behavior is influenced by genes or mediated by the brain then the actor cannot choose his actions. While every behavior has a biological correlate (and a genetic contribution) and every experience that changes behavior does so by changing the brain, the critical question, Heyman wisely says, is not whether brain changes occur (they do) but whether these changes block the influence of the factors that support self-control. . . .

Heyman uses the phenomenon of addiction to make a profound point about neuroscientific progress in general. "The implication is that as we learn more about a disorder," he writes, "the more likely it is to be thought of as a disease" -- and, consequently, as a condition whose course cannot be modified by its foreseeable consequences. Indeed, reconciling advances in brain science with their meaning for personal, legal, and civic notions of agency and responsibility will be one of our next major cultural projects.

Progress in brain science will also force a confrontation with the fact that the common interpretation of pathological behavior is often informed by a primitive form of dualism. If biological roots can be found, then we reflexively think “disease”—as in the obliteration of choice-making ability. The mechanical “brain disease” rhetoric is a symptom of the growing tendency to privilege neuroscientific explanations as the most authentic way of understanding human behavior.

In addition to logically explaining why that's a fallacy, Satel also says that the people who came up with the idea that addiction is a disease and is incompatible with self-control were motivated by political and financial concerns (and probably emotional impulses):

In fairness, the scientists who forged the brain disease concept had good intentions. By placing addiction on equal footing with more conventional medical disorders, they sought to create an image of the addict as a hapless victim of his own wayward neurochemistry. They hoped this would inspire companies and politicians to allocate more funding for treatment. Also, by emphasizing dramatic scientific advances, such as brain imaging techniques, and applying them to addiction, they hoped researchers might reap more financial support for their work. Finally, promoting the idea of addiction as a brain disease would rehabilitate the addict’s public image from that of a criminal who deserves punishment into a sympathetic figure who deserves treatment.

Those concerns may be admirable. But having good intentions behind your account of reality hardly ensures that your account will be accurate.

Finally, I had never heard of this incident (which begins the review), and I'm surprised it isn't better-known:

In 1970, high-grade heroin and opium flooded Southeast Asia. Military physicians in Vietnam estimated that between 10 percent and 25 percent of enlisted Army men were addicted to narcotics. Deaths from overdosing soared. In May 1971, the crisis exploded on the front page of The New York Times: “G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam.” Spurred by fears that newly discharged veterans would ignite an outbreak of heroin use in American cities, President Richard Nixon commanded the military to begin drug testing. In June, the White House announced that no soldier would be allowed to board the plane home unless he passed a urine test. Those who failed could go to an Army-sponsored detoxification program before they were re-tested.

The plan worked. Most GIs stopped using narcotics as word of the new directive spread and the vast minority who were detained produced clean samples when given a second chance. More startlingly, only 12 percent of soldiers who were dependent on opiate narcotics in Vietnam became re-addicted to heroin at some point in the three years after their return to the states. “This surprising rate of recovery even when re-exposed to narcotic drugs,” said the epidemiologist who collected the data, “ran counter to the conventional wisdom that heroin is a drug which causes addicts to suffer intolerable craving that rapidly leads to re-addiction if re-exposed to the drug.”

Satel says our ignorance of this real-life experiment represents a case of "generational amnesia." It's easy to keep believing in a dogma if you don't look at any of the evidence that goes against it.

(Photo by Daniel Modell, a.k.a. dM.nyc.)

This blog's visits so far this month

(Here's a more readable version.)

That spike of wild popularity was from a post about Mozart, late-'90s British politics, and a philosopher's mid-life crisis.

Thanks, Mom and Instapundit!


(Graphic and data from StatCounter.)

A Washington Post headline that will make no sense 100 years from now

"Readers react to photo of two men kissing"

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.)

Blogger of the Day: Mrs. Q, Fed Up With School Lunch

A school teacher is eating the cafeteria lunch every day and blogging it. The blog is called Fed Up With School Lunch (via).

Her Blogger profile sums up the concept:

ABOUT ME

MRS. Q

Eating school lunch just like the kids every day in 2010

I love the blog's straightforwardly descriptive writing style, accompanied by a photo of each lunch. There's a similar aesthetic to Jim's Journal, the comic strip compiled in the book I Went to College and It Was OK. The entries should be boring, but instead they're fascinatingly ordinary, radically mundane.

For instance, here's the first lunch in the project:

As far as school lunches go, this one is pretty good. The meat sauce over penne was passable and the green beans were ok too. I ate all of main stuff, but I only took one bite of the breadstick, which was too chewy yet semi-hard, and the blue raspberry thingy....I took one suck and knew it was not for me. Of course I drank all the chocolate milk.

School lunch at my school/workplace always comes in these strange little packages. I have to say that it is very hard to open them. I have to stab them with the spork multiple times.

You can see the tags for each different food in the sidebar: " . . . milk . . . pear . . . salisbury steak . . . "

What do the vegetarian students do?

There is a vegetarian (or non-meat) option every day. If you want that food item, most days you have to request it specifically because it is not set out.

Mrs. Q had a physical exam right before starting the blog, and once she's done with it she'll compare the results of her next physical. But she isn't worrying about her health:

The other meals I eat during the average day are healthy. I have the money to make good meals for my family that are from fresh and frozen ingredients, many organic. So I actually think it's funny that people are concerned about me.

What she is concerned about is the lack of recess. The only physical activity is gym class, and that's only once a week. A commenter on Metafilter asks:

How can this be allowed? The parents should be up in arms at the school board.

Mrs. Q points out several ways the lack of recess is stifling to kids' development. I don't see how the kids are expected to focus in class, hour after hour, when the day is broken up only by lunch. And lunch is only "20 minutes to eat including getting through line and clean up"!

The blog seems pretty popular, and the comments sections are very active. She says she expected the blog to be utterly unknown, getting "5-10 hits per week"; instead, she's "averaging 1,000 to 4,000 per day." (By comparison, this blog usually gets between 100 and 200 visitors a day.)

In fact, she's worried that this popularity could cost her her job, which is why she's anonymous and reveals scant personal details about herself (she lives in Illinois and has a husband and child). She says:

I'm blogging anonymously because I like my job and getting a paycheck. But I'm still putting my livelihood on the line by speaking up. . . .

I feel a lot of guilt and turmoil about what I'm doing here. I'm waiting for the moment I'm called to the principal's office and let go. I do believe it's a matter of "when" not "if" they both find out and it's curtains for me and then of course the project. I want them to know that the project is not about individuals in one school, but about a country full of children who need better food models.

I'm getting a lot of requests for interviews from major newspapers and other news outlets (I have done other interviews for media with smaller distribution and/or all online). Many assure me of my anonymity, but if I get major attention even without my real name, well, someone is going to put 2 + 2 together. All that is needed is one person sending one email to all lunch room managers and asking, "Who's eating school lunch every day?"

After reading all that, I have to feel slightly guilty for drawing a bit more attention to her blog. But this is an important and oddly beautiful project. I find it hard to imagine her losing her job over it. If she does, she should be able to compensate for the loss of income by getting a book deal.

Mickey Kaus to run for Senator from California against Barbara Boxer?

Whoa!

There's still some wiggle room as to whether he's going to be a candidate. But he's quoted as saying he's "taken out the nomination papers, to gather the necessary signatures," and "file[d] a 'candidate registration and qualification form.'"

I've been reading Kaus regularly for 10 years, and listening to him regularly for 4 years. ("Watching" might seem more appropriate since that link goes to his Bloggingheads video conversations, but I usually listen to them as podcasts.) I've often used his material on my blog.

Mickey Kaus is a great voice in American politics. He has a rare ability to convincingly blend moderation and skepticism with decisiveness and clarity.

So, I'm very excited about this possible run. I won't be able to vote, since I live in New York state. But I'll be keeping an eye on this race if Kaus does enter.


UPDATE: Kaus breaks the silence on his blog:

I did go down to the local registrar's office Monday and take out nomination papers to run in the primary for U.S. Senator against Barbara Boxer. If I return them in timely fashion with enough signatures, I should be able to get on the June ballot. We'll see what happens.

This isn't the place to make an electioneering spiel--I don't want to be a test case of campaign finance law if I can help it. But the basic idea would be to argue, as a Democrat, against the party's dogma on several major issues (you can guess which ones). Likeminded Dem voters who assume they will vote for Sen. Boxer The Incumbent in the fall might value a mechanism that lets them register their dissent in the primary.

UPDATE (3/12/10): He says he's gathered enough signatures and filed the necessary papers. Here's his opening statement.

Metablog: Follow

I've added a widget in the sidebar that lets you "follow" this blog with "Google Friend Connect."

To my surprise, I already had 3 followers before I added the widget.

I'm still not sure I see the point of this. But I'll see what happens.