Anthony Kenny reviews Alister McGrath on C. S. Lewis

Philosopher Anthony Kenny has written a TLS review of Alister McGrath's biography of C. S. Lewis, which discusses, among other things, Lewis' encounter with philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (it did not go well for Lewis), critiques of his theological arguments, and his influence on contemporary American Christians:

'The final chapter of McGrath’s book, entitled “The Lewis Phenomenon”, charts the writer’s posthumous reputation, particularly in the United States. In the 1960s, Lewis almost vanished from view: by the end of the century he had become a cultural icon. Initially, in America, he was read only by Episcopalians, and was upbraided by Evangelicals as a smoker, a drinker and a liberal. But as barriers between mainstream Protestant denominations began to weaken, the author of Mere Christianity began to be admired across the spectrum. Roman Catholics, too, began to link him with G. K. Chesterton and Tolkien, and to consider him a fellow traveller. Most surprisingly, we are told, Lewis has now become the patron saint of American Evangelicalism. In a centenary article in 1998, its flagship periodical, Christianity Today, declared him “the Aquinas, the Augustine and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism”. Polls of American Christians, McGrath tells us, regularly cite Mere Christianity as the most influential religious book of the twentieth century.'

Who needs Augustine and Aquinas when you have Lewis? God help us all.

Towards the end of the review is a brief (and perforce too quick) critique of naturalism by Kenny; his confidence that "indeed there are signs that naturalism is collapsing under its own weight" seems premature, given the recent work of Owen Flanagan and other naturalists. Although Kenny is correct to point out some difficulties faced by naturalists in defending and defining their position, I do not believe there is a single philosophical position which does not face grave difficulties which must be overcome through careful argument.

Michael Ruse on Final Causes

Philosopher of biology Michael Ruse offers a critique of final causes, partially in response to recent work by philosopher Thomas Nagel.

Ruse's argument is not fully developed here but is compelling (he has argued persuasively and at greater length elsewhere in his published work). However, this piece is misleadingly titled, because from the fact there are no final causes it does not fully that life does not have a purpose. There is more than one sense of the word 'purpose'. Life could have a purpose in the sense of there being a reason to live or a source of meaning for living organisms, even if there is no purpose in the sense of a final cause. (I somehow doubt that Ruse himself chose the title for this piece; it may have been the editor of Aeon Magazine.)

Another minor problem with the piece: Ruse may have incorrectly characterized the relation between Plato and Aristotle's views on final causes. Ruse seems to draw a contrast between Aristotle's First Cause and Plato's demiurge, though the correct comparison is between Aristotle's First Cause and Plato's One (or The Good), both of which serve as the metaphysical ground of all other beings, and which do not function as divine craftsmen or designers in the conventional theistic sense.

Other than that, this is a great introduction to the issue for anyone who is still tempted by belief in final causes.

Links

1. Medieval pet names. 

2. Riots in China after teachers attempt to prevent student cheating on exams. "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."

3. The decline of the English major amid the persistent value of knowing how to write.

4. Big data in the humanities.

Stephen Fry on Loneliness and Suicide

I have long enjoyed Stephen Fry's acting, and he has impressed me with his knowledge of and appreciation for literature (for example, see his surprisingly astute commentary on Lawrence Stern's Tristram Shandy, in one of the special features on the "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" DVD). In a recent blog post, he writes poignantly of loneliness and of a recent brush with self-slaughter:

"In the end loneliness is the most terrible and contradictory of my problems. I hate having only myself to come home to. If I have a book to write, it’s fine. I’m up so early in the morning that even I pop out for an early supper I am happy to go straight to bed, eager to be up and writing at dawn the next day. But otherwise…

"It’s not that I want a sexual partner, a long-term partner, someone to share a bed and a snuggle on the sofa with – although perhaps I do and in the past I have had and it has been joyful. But the fact is I value my privacy too. It’s a lose-lose matter. I don’t want to be alone, but I want to be left alone."

Links

1. A discussion of Jonathan Israel's controversial history of the 'radical Enlightenment', which highlights the role of philosopher Baruch Spinoza and a clandestine network of Spinozists in spreading the ideas of monism on the one hand and radical political freedom and equality on the other.

2. Neither barbequed nor grilled: Baltimore pit beef (slow cooked for around 2 hours over coals--less than traditional bbq, more than grilling). Traditionally served with horseradish on a roll.

3. Reading Tocqueville in Beijing. The political subtext: China's political elites seem to fear a revolution against their regime based in part on rising expectations--similar to what overthrew the Old Regime in France, according to Tocqueville's account.

4. Historical mystery solved: the recipe of Roman concrete revealed at last, and it could revolutionize construction and architecture. Roman concrete included lime and volcanic ash, which when combined with seawater produced a chemical reaction that created a powerful mortar.

5. Economist Felix Salmon summarizes some depressing facts about Detroit.

6. NYT review of "Confessions of a Sociopath," which purports to be a memoir of a noncriminal sociopath.

7. Hand-made Guinea-pig armor sells for $24,300.

Links

1. Sports pundits perform worse than a coin flip, and the more successful one's are more confident without being more correct in their predictions. 

2. The Soviet-era commercials of Harry Egipt. 

3. The Norwegian slow-tv movement, as exemplified by a world-record breaking 30 hour continuous interview with crime novelist Hans Olav Lahlum.

4. Join Wall Street to save the world?

5. "Yukio Ohyama has devoted his entire life to photographing Mt. Fuji."

6. The art of book-stacking in Japanese book stores.

7. Ask the Past: advice from old books.

8. New York Times review of Joss Whedon's adaptation of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing"; filmed on a shoestring, it is allegedly a superior effort to Whedon's blockbuster "The Avengers". 

9. Excel spreadsheet artist.

10. The NSA and CIA have been running tests using Watson to sift through the massive reams of communications data which they have been secretly collecting.

11. Erotic goat sculpture from Pompeii.

12. The new field of behavioral epigenetics; it may be possible to inherit traits acquired by one's parents during their life.

John McTaggart

John McTaggart was a 19th century British Hegelian (or at least strongly influenced by Hegel) who, along with other British idealists such as F. H. Bradley, is unfortunately rather neglected in today's philosophy curriculum. I was recently reading the article on McTaggart in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, when I came across this interesting fact about his name:

"John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart was born on the third of September, 1866, in Norfolk Square in London, to Francis Ellis and Susan McTaggart (Rochelle 1991, 16). He was named at birth 'John McTaggart Ellis', but took on the second iteration of 'McTaggart' after his great-uncle, also named 'John McTaggart', died without descendents and willed his money to Francis Ellis on the condition that his family assumed the surname 'McTaggart'. And so John McTaggart Ellis became John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart. (At Cambridge, he was sometimes referred to as 'McT.)" (Kris Daniel, "John M. E. McTaggart," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

Links

1. The effect of soil on sub-Saharan African agriculture and development.

2. What happens when you resubmit previously published journal articles to peer-reviewed psychology journals?

3. Are we breeding the nutrition out of food?

4. Teens' use of social media. 

5. Pictures of Finland from World War II.

6. In praise of New Zealand's health care system.

Links

1. A Hungarian student's redesign of the egg carton. 

2. The battle over junk DNA.

3. An 18-year old Romanian has created a design that may drastically reduce the cost of driverless cars. 

Thomas Nagel and Natural Teleology

Michael Chorost has written a reappraisal of the furious debate over Thomas Nagel's claims about natural teleology. Chorost purports to offer scientific evidence in support of Nagel's view (which he criticizes Nagel for failing to offer in his own defense):

But highly regarded scientists have made similar arguments. "Life is almost bound to arise, in a molecular form not very different from its form on Earth," wrote Christian de Duve, a Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine, in 1995. Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and biogeologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, struck a similar note in 2007: "With autotrophy, biochemistry is wired into the universe. The self-made cell emerges from geochemistry as inevitably as basalt or granite." Harold J. Morowitz, a biophysicist at George Mason University, argued that evolution has an arrow built into it: "We start with observations, and if the evolving cosmos has an observed direction, rejecting that view is clearly nonempirical. There need not necessarily be a knowable end point, but there may be an arrow."

Chorost seems to conflate the claim that the development of life and complexity is causally determined with the claim that the development of life and complexity is naturally teleological; unfortunately, even if there is evidence for the former, this does not itself constitute evidence for the latter.

Links

1. Photo of Iceland. 

2. Yitang Zhang, an "obsure" mathematician, stuns his peers with a major result about primes. 

3. Japanese barista makes 3D latte art.

4. "Our American Pravda." Claims about the failures of the American media.

5. Thinking big about small talk.

6. The story of one man and his colonoscopy bag. 

7. If you go back far enough, everyone is descended from a king (because everyone has the same ancestors). 

The Metaphysics of David Birnbaum

David Birnbaum, a Hollywood jeweler and self-styled metaphysician, has somehow convinced Bard College to host a conference dedicated to his theories. Birnbaum claims to have seamlessly reconciled religion and science in his (self-published) magnum opus, the Summa Metaphysica. He mailed copies of the Summa to 2,000 philosophers. (I received a copy, but only read a few paragraphs before giving up.) 

Garry Hagberg is a professor of philosophy at Bard College whom Birnbaum falsely claimed served as an editor to the Summa. Here is Hagberg's summary of the Summa: “His work so far as I can see does not (this is description, not criticism) intersect at any point with what the discipline of philosophy considers to be within the field of historical or contemporary metaphysics.” 

A bizarre tale, worth reading.

Progressives' Truck with Trek

Matt Yglesias has written a fine essay on the many incarnations of Star Trek, including a celebratory discussion of its implict (or should that be blatantly explicit?) progressive ideology, with a concluding plea for a new series.

I agree with Yglesias' interpretation of Trek ideology, though I do not join in fist-pumping such a utopian statism. Also, I could do without another series. Yet the importance/impact of the franchise is undeniable. 

Paul Bloom, "The Case Against Empathy"

Paul Bloom's critique of empathy. In fact, it should probably be presented as a critique of the sloppy / careless use of empathy, since the criticisms it offers seem to rely upon empathic concern of others to ground their normativity. Also, the innumerate character of empathy is characteristic of human intuitive cognition and affect generally, so it's misleading to frame the innumerate objection as being against empathy specifically; many instances of self-love are no doubt also innumerate in the same problematic way.

LInks

1. The economics of social status. And: the "Gervais Principle" (an analysis of corporate power dynamics).

2. Tribute to physicist Richard Feynman. 

3. Retrospective of David Graeber, anarchism, and the Occupy Movement. 

4. James Hamilton on the Reinhart and Rogoff kerfuffle. And Greg Mankiw and Ryan Avent.

Two Books on Samuel Johnson

Kate Chisholm reviews two books on Samuel Johnson at the Times Literary Supplement: Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone's edited anthology, Samuel Johnson: The arc of the pendulum, and Julia Allen's Swimming with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale: Sport, health and exercise in eighteenth century England. The review quotes Johnson on his struggles with the dictionary:

one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to pursue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them

Allen's work reveals the surprising range of Johnson's physical activities (given his considerable bulk and reputation for melancholy):

Inspired by her knowledge of lexicography and a desire to rescue Johnson from caricature as a “stout, elderly-looking man in a wig”, Allen reproduces a collection of curious gobbets to illustrate the physical (as opposed to mental) activities enjoyed by Johnson and his contemporaries, and the opportunities for exercise afforded them by skating, riding, boxing, swimming, foot-racing and climbing. Of these we know that Johnson attempted all six; not something you might expect of a man noted for his physical awkwardness, depressive tendencies and prodigious hours devoted to his literary output. Yet, if anything, Johnson was a truly twenty-first-century man in his adoption of fast days and vegetarian diets, and his belief in the beneficial effects of exercise on mood and motivation. Allen gives us Johnson the swimmer, diving nude into the sea at Brighton; Johnson the physically daunting nephew of a champion boxer; and Johnson, aged fifty-nine, in defiance of time, space and the balanced life, rolling down a Lincolnshire hillside (is there such a thing in the fenlands?), “turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom”.

Who would have guessed it?: Johnson the boxer, the skinny-dipper; Johnson fasting, foot-racing, and rolling down a hill.

Links

1. "I was swallowed by a hippo."

2. The astounding art of Siyu Chen.

3. Newark mayor Corey Booker played Dungeons & Dragons.

4. The fantastic 1970s interiors of Verner Panton.

5. The sublime cluelessness of throwing lavish Great Gatsby parties. "It's like throwing a Lolita-themed children's birthday party."

6. "I hate fun."

7. The decline of state and local public investment.

8. The Open Borders Movement. 

9. "There are more people living inside of this circle than outside of it."

10. "I still love Kierkegaard."

Jeremy Bentham, Not Paul But Jesus

I just learned of the existence of Jeremy Bentham's Not Paul But Jesus. This work is in three volumes, only the first of which was published during his lifetime, under the pseudonym "Gamaliel Smith". In this work, Bentham argues that Jesus, unlike Paul, was not an advocate of asceticism or a foe of pleasure, and that Christians should return to the ethic of Jesus, and abandon the ascetic ethic of Paul. It's surely no coincidence that Bentham's interpretation of Jesus' ethics is consistent with Bentham's own pleasure-loving doctrine of utilitarianism.

In the third volume of Not Paul But Jesus, a critical edition of which has just been released for free over the internet (pdf), Bentham  argues, among other things, for the toleration of non-traditional sexual relationships ("the eccentric pleasures of the bed"), including homosexuality. This would have been quite radical in Bentham's time, so perhaps it is no surprise that this volume of the work went unpublished, even under a pseudonym.

As another example of just how radical the work is, chapter 13 is entitled "The Eccentric Pleasures of the Bed, Whether Partaken of by Jesus?", and in this chapter Bentham presents evidence from the Gospels to support the claim that Jesus had homosexual relationships with the Apostle John and with a certain "stripling of loose attire". Upon a cursory reading, I don't find Bentham's arguments in chapter 13 to be particularly compelling, but it is fascinating that Bentham should see fit to even make such an argument, particularly considering the attitudes of the majority of his contemporaries, and it is evidence of his extreme broad-mindedness and originality, which is in abundant evidence elsewhere in his life and works (such as in his advocacy of the auto-icon, a display case containing the mummified corpses of deceased scientists and other cultural luminaries, to help preserve their memory among the living; an auto-icon was created for Bentham himself, in accordance with his wishes, but the practice sadly failed to catch on).

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Tyler Cowen on Government and Public Goods

In a New York Times column, libertarian economist Tyler Cowen argues that the government should provide more public goods, including rewards for medical research, patent buyouts, and pandemic preparation.

A public good is a good characterized by non-excludability--once produced, it is difficult or impossible to exclude people from consuming it. In contrast, a private good is characterized by excludability. An example of a private good is Medicare, since the benefits can be limited to particular people. An example of a public good is a public health measure which reduces the risk of infection with a given disease to the members of a given population. Even vaccines, which can be given to particular people, have positive externalities, in that they reduce the risk of infection for others who are not vaccinated, and so they count as public goods.

It may seem surprising that a libertarian is arguing for more government production of public goods, and in a sense that is right given the current culture of 'libertarianism' in America, but in fact the libertarian or classical liberal ideology has included the view that the proper role of the government is to produce public goods and not private goods. The point is not made enough that, even from a libertarian standpoint, governments may fail by not doing enough, as well as failing by doing too much or engaging in activities which should be left to civil society. To my mind, another salient example of insufficient government action is prosecution of financial fraud and "white collar" crime.

Kintsukuroi

Cracked indigo bowl
A caring soul restored it
With veins of bright gold.

Links

1. Gypsy law (.pdf).

2. "The diploma's vanishing value." Community colleges provide a better deal than four-year colleges or universities.

3. The genetics and neuroscience of violence.

4. Profile of philosopher Daniel Dennett. In some ways Dennett is the modern-day version of Charles Sanders Peirce, except that people actually care about what he has to say.

5. Why Iceland. 

Links

1. Singapore's (racist?) strategy for increasing their birth rate.

2. Retire by 30?

3. 66 behind the scenes pics from the set of the The Empire Strikes Back. 

4. "Find what you love and let it kill you."

5. Fast food you can't eat in America.

6. Femivores (domestic-DIY feminists). 

Links

1. Police misconduct blog.

2. The rise of Big Data.

3. I missed this one: Karl Marx credit card. Hat tip to this Neo-Marxist round-up.

4. The best philosophy is Hume's skepticism.

5. Nobel-prize winning economist Daniel McFadden argues for an overhaul of consumer choice theory, drawing on fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology. 

Hat tips to The Browser and Arts & Letters Daily.

Muso Soseki, "People's Abuse"

People's Abuse

People's abuse
has melted what was golden
and it has gone from the world

Fortune and misfortune
both belong to the land
of dreams

Don't look back
to this world
your old hole in the cellar

From the beginning
the flying birds have left
no footprints on the blue sky

--Muso Soseki (In Stephen Addiss, Stanley Lombardo, and Judith Roitman, Zen Sourcebook, [Indianapolis: Hackett], pp. 182-183.)

Links

1. Reinhart-Rogoff controversy scorecard.

2. Competency-based education.

3. Atul Gawande on why Boston's hospitals were ready.

4. David Chan's 6,297 reviews of Chinese restaurants.

5. Mormon bishop fends off woman's attacker with a katana.

6. What is a terrorist?

7. "Sailor suit old man."

Daigu Ryokan

Sixty years have passed for this frail old monk
Living in a shrine hut, far from the world of men.
At the base of the mountain I'm nestled in during the evening rain;
The lamp flickers brightly in front of my old window.

--Daigu Ryokan. (In Stephen Addiss, Stanley Lombardo, and Judith Roitman, Zen Sourcebook [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008], p. 259.)

Links

1. Zizek on Rand and the financial crisis.

2. Fruit flies do better when fed organic fruit.

3. The market for cupcakes crumbles. 

Virgil Henry Storr, Enterprising Slaves and Master Pirates

I have been reading Virgil Henry Storr's Enterprising Slaves and Master Pirates: Understanding Economic Life in the Bahamas. Storr is an economist at George Mason University. His book is an economic history of the Bahamas, and is of interest both in terms of its content and its methodology.

Content-wise, the Bahamas are a fascinating case; for example, slavery in the Bahamas operated differently than in other places in the West Indies, due at least in part to the poor Bahamian soil, which prevented plantations from being as profitable as elsewhere. Bahamian slaves were permitted to work for themselves on Saturdays, to relieve their owners from having to feed and clothe them. This allowed (or forced) slaves to engage in farming and crafts for their own benefit, and they had the right to sell their labor to others (though, predictably, their owners still received a cut). Storr argues that the peculiarities of slavery in the Bahamas introduced a spirit of enterprise among Bahamians, which is still a part of the culture today. Storr also argues that the Bahamian culture and economy was influenced by piracy and other piracy-like practices over the centuries, including wrecking and salvaging, blockade-running during the U.S. Civil War and bootlegging during Prohibition, all of which played a salient role in the economic life of the islands. There is thus a connection between profit and plunder (or at least, illicit activity) in the Bahamian culture.

Methodology-wise, Storr's work is a fascinating synthesis of two different research programs: Max Weber's economic sociology and Austrian economics (i.e., Mises, Hayek, and so on) on the one hand, and cultural studies and theory more generally on the other hand. Perhaps the root of this synthesis is Max Weber's own economic approach to sociology, but the later Hayek also placed great emphasis on the role of culture in the development of economic institutions. In any case, Storr makes a powerful case for the view that economists should pay more attention to culture in order to understand how economic agents and whole economies actually function. If this puts pressure on the methodological individualism of classical and neo-classical economics, it also pressures cultural and critical theorists to pay more attention to economic factors when producing their analyses of cultural and historical factors. For instance, an understanding of slavery and its legacy in the Bahamas is incomplete without an analysis of the Bahamian plantation economy, including the farming and piecework practices of the slaves there. Storr's research program is probably just beginning, but I hope it has an influence both on economists and on cultural theorists.

Touch

The ragged edge of loneliness, broken

By strangers’ gossip of sex and God.

Fertilized by dust spores of desire,

Womb’s fruit waxes tender, smooth

In the fullness of the day’s empty hours.

Sing in me, O muse,

The sound of an earthworm’s progress

The sight of a mosquito’s eye jelly

The taste of an oncoming storm

The touch of a mysterious stranger.

Invincible

The dead are mighty,
For only the living can be wounded:
Fingernails ripped off
Tongues stapled to a wall
Hearts attacked
Spirits sundered.

Neoliberal Links

1. Financial Times "Lunch with the FT" interview with philosopher Michael Sandel. 

2. Bruce Bartlett's critical assessment of Margaret Thatcher (she didn't significantly lower taxes and spending).

3. "Cognitive Biases and the Trouble with Moral Local Shopping." 

Kyong Ho

The moonlight of clear mind
Swallows the whole world;
When mind and light both go out
What is this?

--Death poem of Kyong Ho (1849-1912), Korean Son (Zen) Master.

Links

1.  Government-run raisin cartel.

2. Ghost marriages in China.

3. Global warming has "paused" but is not going away.

4. An evil Ranger?

Clifton's Cafeteria

Is it possible to eat mid-20th century style cafeteria food in downtown Los Angeles in the midst of kitschy decor inspired by the Santa Cruz region (and bearing an eerie resemblance to a live-action Yogi Bear set)?

Yes.

I ate their once, around a decade ago. A memorable experience, and I would go back (thought it's currently closed while undergoing restoration).

Links

1. Why China prefers its own political model.

2. Claims about nitrogen fertilizer (or: against organic farming).

3. China's disappearing rivers (or: the hazards of development). 

Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen."

("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.")

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7.)

Elan Vital

Swallow your own death in the morning

Over easy with salt and pepper.

By nightfall, you'll have digested it fully

Death in every cell, a vital nutrient.

Links

1. The real Mongolian barbecue: cook an animal in its own skin. 

2. Journalistic cliches avoided at the Washington Post's Outlook section.

3. Derrida as intellectual outcast.

4. Explosives artist Cai Guo Qiang. "[H]is great influence was Chinese Taoist spirituality."

Hat tips to Arts & Letters Daily and The Browser.

Links

1. Eating zoo animals, cats, dogs, rats, and donkeys in the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war.

2. Adam Gopnik on the Mechanical Turk, a (fraudulent) 18th-century chess-playing automaton. According to Gopnik, Charles Babbage was inspired by the Turk to develop the concept of the difference engine, and Edgar Allan Poe was among those who realized the Turk had to be a fraud.

3. Myanmar gets daily newspapers (formerly banned by the government). 

Hat-tips to The Browser and Marginal Revolution.

No Human Can Fully Grasp the Complexity of Our Computers

A Google employee on the mind-boggling complexity of our computers. Corollaries include an explanation for the popularity of Steve Jobs, why computers are so frustrating, and why the patent system is broken.

Reflections

When all else is taken away, what remains is the relationship you have with being itself. If this relationship is sound, though you lose everything, at bottom you will be well. If this relationship is not sound, though you gain the entire world, you will not be well. Your relationship with being unfolds each moment, in ways you may not even be aware of. The magic power of attention can transform your relationship with being. In addition to the clear, well-lit parts of the mind, this attention must be applied to the dark, the silent, the hidden parts.

The Law of Karma

Sin is not just a demon crouching at the door;
It's a stain on your soul, treasured
By zealous memory, a captive longing
To be consumed by the chemical burn
Of enlightenment.

A Dream of the Beloved

The transcendent rapture of cleaning the dishes
Together. Holding hands, we enjoyed
The supreme bliss of aimless chatter
And shared soft kisses as the neighbors pulled into the drive.

Such was my one dream of the beloved.

Love, a Ghost

The first time I saw her, it was too early. 

The second time, too late. 

How could I be so inspired 

By love's hungry shadow?

Thoughts on Plato's Cave

Plato, in his Cave Allegory, taught that the sun of awakening rises high above the murky depths of ignorance. His peers, the authors of the Upanishads, held rather that the shining sun of the Self lies hidden in the innermost cavern of the heart. As far as I can tell, the Upanishads had it right. It is precisely those who insist on seeing by the clear light of day who end up knowing least. Coming to know requires an ever deeper exploration of the self's, of the world's, many shadow-strewn ways.

The Greatest Loves

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Beata Beatrix. 1864-1870. 

The ancients knew that the greatest loves are unrequited; or, if requited, unconsummated; or, if consummated, profoundly unhappy. Dante and Beatrice; Romeo and Juliette; Lancelot and Guinevere; et multa alia. It seems to be a decree of Fate that the greatest loves end in great disappointment or utter wretchedness.

D.I.Y.

Laundry de-odorizer: add 1/2 cup baking soda to a load before running a cycle.

Links

1. Times Literary Supplement review of David Foster Wallace's posthumously published The Pale King.

2. Onion AV Club interview with writer Neal Pollack. (What it means to be a writer today.)

3. Five Books interview with atheist Susan Jacoby.

4. Decline of the German bookseller business.

5. Tyler Cowen on the egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and civil libertarian core of economics.

As usual, hat tips to The Browser, Marginal Revolution, and Arts & Letters Daily.

The Book of Oghams

A page from the Book of Ballymote (Royal Irish Academy MS 23 P 12) containing ogham scripts.

Edit: This page from the Book of Ballymote is used by Andrew West at BabelStone to help interpret a peculiar bit of ogham found in a manuscript composed by a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon monk named Byrhtferth.

Links

1. John Nye on the war in Iraq.

2. Terry Eagleton's book-review-as-essay on the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.

3. Toronto's Monkey Paw bookshop: curators of printed curios and curiosities. A future for bricks and mortar book stores?

What Is the Point of Philosophy (by Way of the Jewish State)?

Joseph Levine, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has a well-written blog post at the New York Times about whether or not "Israel has a right to exist." Levine's thesis is that no people, including the Jewish people, has a right to a nation-state; nation-states do not exist for the sake of any particular people (in the sense of an ethnic group), but rather exist (or should exist) for the sake of all of the peoples who are their citizens.

This article is a great illustration of what the point of philosophy is. It's true that philosophers have often addressed questions which are of mainly theoretical interest, that they have (especially historically) attempted to answer questions which are best left to the empirical sciences, and that philosophy does not produce empirically verified or mathematically proven theories in the same way that the special sciences or mathematics do. So one may be forgiven for wondering what the purpose of philosophy is or if it even has one.

In a word, the point of philosophy is to think carefully and critically about thorny questions having to do with values or with the first principles of science, mathematics, or other disciplines. The tools of the philosophers in their quest for clarity are not microscopes and chemical assays, but rather logical and conceptual analyses.

A big part of both of these tools is the ability to make crucial distinctions (such as that between the ethnic and the civic sense of the term 'people'), which Levine aptly illustrates in his blog post about the Jews and Israel. Conceptual and logical clarity are not sufficient for resolving difficult questions of value or foundations, but they are necessary, and all too often lacking in debates about morality, politics, the arts, scientific methodology, and the like.

I am not hereby endorsing Levine's thesis or his arguments (though they are worth considering seriously), but as soon as I started reading his blog post, I could tell that he was a philosopher or had philosophical training, because of the obvious care he was taking to get conceptual and logical clarity before reaching his conclusion. Most non-philosophers regrettably do not sufficiently distinguish between related issues or concepts as carefully as Levine has done in this piece. I hope that Levine's work serves as a helpful illustration of the value of philosophy, even for such practical, political, "blood and soil" issues as the relations between Jews and Palestinians in the state of Israel.

Jeffrey Sachs' Great Paul Krugman Smackdown

Self-styled "progressive" economist Jeffrey Sachs delivers an energetic smackdown of economist Paul Krugman's over at the Huffington Post. Among Sachs' main points: the CBO's projections GDP growth in the wake of the stimulus have not been met; it matters quite a bit not just how much money the government spends, but what it spends it on; the interest payments on the debt will become uncomfortably large within ten years. Recommended reading for all citizens, not just policy wonks.

David Lynch

"I used to go to Bob's Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I'd have a milk shake and sit and think.

"There's a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner."

(David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 39.)

I wonder which Bob's he went to.

Dark Illumination

For Masters Kong and Lao

The clever-tongued thief of virtue

Grabs you with his rhinestone coat

A rich beggar snatching coins from passers-by.

His light is outshone by the hidden virtue

Of a hooded lantern, invisible from without

Grown brighter and brighter from within.

America's Biggest Foreign Policy Blunder?

Peter van Buren, a former state department official who worked in Iraq, paints a vivid portrait of the failures of the United States' invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, arguing that it constitutes the nation's worst foreign policy failure ever.

D.I.Y.

Make your own glass cleaner: Mix 1/4 cup white vinegar with 3 cups of water in a spray bottle. Spray and wipe down with newspaper.

Never buy commercially produced glass cleaner again!

China's Generation Gap

Chinese parents who came of age during the Cultural Revolution are separated from their children, the balinghou, by an immense cultural gulf. 

David F***ing Lynch

"Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.

"Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn't know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn't know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it; that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.

"I don't think I'll ever say what that sentence was."

(David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 33.)

Daniel K. Gardner (translator), The Four Books, and Edward Slingerland (translator), The Analects

Daniel K. Gardner's The Four Books is a translation of selected portions of the four great Confucian classics: Great Learning (Daxue), Analects (Lunyu), Mencius (Mengzi), and Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong; translated by Gardner as "Maintaining Perfect Balance"). These four books became the basis of the Chinese imperial examination system during the Song Dynasty, due to the influence of the "Neo-Confucian" (Daoxue) scholar Zhu Xi (1130-1200); previously, the Five Classics (Wujing) had been the basis for the imperial exams, but Zhu Xi argued that the Four Books served as a better introduction to the study of Confucian thought.

Gardner's aim in this slender volume is to introduce the student of philosophy not only to the Four Books themselves, but also to Zhu Xi's influential Neo-Confucian commentaries, through which Chinese students have traditionally approached and interpreted these classic texts. While Gardner does not translate Zhu Xi's commentary directly, his own commentary is peppered with quotations from Zhu Xi, and Gardner explicitly adopts a Neo-Confucian stance when explaining how the passages from the Four Books have traditionally been read. This choice does provide an effective introduction to the Neo-Confucian commentarial tradition, and to Neo-Confucianism generally, but at the expense of occasionally obscuring the original meaning of the texts.

By contrast, Edward Slingerland, in his translation of Confucius' Analects, makes use of a range of traditional commentaries, together with modern textual scholarship, in his own attempt to make sense of the Analects (in terms of their likely original meaning, to the extent to which this can be reconstructed). There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to both of these interpretive strategies, and there is likely room for both in preparing contemporary translations and editions of classic Chinese texts.

While Gardner's The Four Books largely accomplishes what it sets out to do, I would have preferred an edition which contains the complete versions of Great Learning, Analects, Mencius, and Doctrine of the Mean, even if this meant expanding the work to multiple volumes. Also, since Gardner in many cases merely paraphrases Zhu Xi's commentary, it would have been preferable to simply include a translation of Zhu Xi's commentary alongside the original text, supplemented where needed by Gardner's own notes or additions (perhaps noting those cases in which other commentators have disagreed greatly with Zhu Xi). Nevertheless, Gardner has produced an excellent introduction both to the Four Books themselves, and to the Neo-Confucian commentary tradition of Zhu Xi, which colored the reception of these texts in China for hundreds of years (and which still does). 

Confucius

"The Master said, 'A clever tongue and fine appearance are rarely signs of Goodness [ren].'" (Confucius, Analects 1.3. Translated by Edward Slingerland.)

Links

Hat tips to TheBrowser and Marginal Revolution.

1. The London Underground as a state of mind.
2. Are we living in the early 19th century? Income inequality and standard of living.
3. The current state of Africa. (The headline could be: The Economist calls for a Pan-African Union. Read to the end.)

Donald Ritchie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics

Donald Ritchie's A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics is a learned introduction to traditional Japanese aesthetic concepts, such as wabi, sabi, and mono no aware. Ritchie lived in Tokyo and wrote about Japanese culture for decades. In his Tractate, Ritchie deftly handles traditional Japanese sources, telling famous tales such as tea master Sen no Rikyu's development of the refined yet rough and simple aesthetic later associated with the tea ceremony; he also appropriately clarifies and juxtaposes Japanese aesthetic concepts using Western aesthetic thinkers and artists such as Hume, Kant, and Oscar Wilde. The "tractate" form averred to in the title is that of an extended essay, which aptly serves Ritchie's goal of creating an introduction to his topic suitable for the literate novice. Recommended. I will be using portions of this tractate as a required reading for my aesthetics class this semester.

Teaching the Bible in Texas Public Schools

I think the Bible should be taught in public schools, since its influence on world civilization (history, politics, religion, art, literature) has been profound. However, according to a recent article in the New York Times, the teaching of the Bible in Texas public schools involves possible violations of the principle of the separation of church and state. For example, some religion classes are taught by evangelical pastors, whose teaching is colored by their particular theology, and some public school students take their religion classes (which are part of the public school curriculum) in nearby churches.

The Year Thus Far in Links

1. What's wrong with ebooks.
2. Buddhist hell-realms depicted at Thailand's Wat Phong Rai Wua.
3. Christmas book flood in Iceland.
4. An environmentalist's reasons for supporting GMO and factory farming.
5. The wisdom of psychopaths? 
6. "The Deep End." Hand-drawn animation, white-out, and coffee. By Jake Fried.
7. China's new 'it girl' is a grandfather.
8. Music tastes and delinquency.
9. Prehistoric oral bacteria.
10. Head trauma sometimes unlocks creative talents.
11. The decline of Jewish delis.
12. "World's worst tattoo" inked in Bowling Green, Ohio.
13. The science of WEIRD people. 
14. Addictive junk food?
15. Out of control health care costs.
16. Five psychiatric disorders share genetic risk factors related to neural calcium channels.

Confucius

"The Master said, 'One who is Good sees as his first priority the hardship of self-cultivation, and only after thinks about results or rewards.'"

(Confucius, Analects 6.22. Translated by Edward Slingerland.)

D.I.Y.

Toothpaste: mix one part sea salt to one part baking soda. Make a 50/50 mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, and then add enough of this to the salt and baking soda to form a paste like consistency. Add a few drops of pure peppermint oil.

Stop buying mass-produced toothpaste! The homemade stuff is cheaper and (in my experience) works better.

Jerry's Map

World building as open-ended semi-random fine art project. Jerry Gretzinger also has a blog about his project.

Update (2014.10.26): Wired now has a piece about Jerry's map with extensive pictures.

Links

1. A plan to build a real-life Starship Enterprise.

2. Neuroscience and stage magic. (Hat tip to the Browser.)

3. A flowchart for changing habits.

The Future of TV = Broadcast + Broadband?

According to Tech Crunch, "Cord cutters"--households without cable TV--represent only 5% of TV households, but their number has grown over 22.8% the past year. I am a cord cutter myself; a big part of the reason is that cable companies do not allow consumers to purchase individual shows, but instead require that they purchase a large bundle of channels, even if consumers aren't interested in most of the programs that are in the bundle. At the Atlantic, UCLA sociologist Gabriel Rossman explains the economics behind cable companies' resistance to a la carte programming. He also links to an amusing cartoon from the Oatmeal which portrays internet piracy of cable TV shows as a response to cable companies' lack of flexibility in delivering content.

Robot Wars

Who would win: a 5-axis milling robot or a 3D printer that works in metal? According to this article, the future lies with 3D printers, but for the time being the safe money is on the milling robot.

The Nine Hells

1. Slavery in Mauritania.

2. Born and raised in a North Korean prison camp.

3. With U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

4. The madness of Philip K. Dick.

5. Mississippi hate crime.

6. Staff Sergeant Robert Bales.

7. Inside America's Ivy League fraternities.

8. The harassment of women in modern India.

9. Seeking justice for Haiti's rape victims.

Links

1. New York Times review of "Marley", the new Bob Marley bio-pic.
2. Wired profile of Joss Whedon.
3. Jennifer Tilly, poker player.
4. Chairs are dangerous.

The Quants Rule, OK

Atlanta, Montreal, Oslo, Paris. What do these cities have in common?

Recent social network research reveals the answer: Montreal leads North Americans' raido listening habits when it comes to indie music, while Atlanta leads for North American hip-hop. In Europe, Oslo is the leader for general music listening habits, and Paris leads for indie music. This means that what people are listening to on the radio now in Montreal (for example) will soon be what people are listening to across North America.

A related story: a school for quants doing research in network science at University College London. These are the job skills of the future. Adapt now, or forever hold your peace. Amen.

Links

1. Modern slave owner in Mauritania becomes an abolitionist.

2. China's 30 million cave dwellers.

3. E-books may make it harder to remember what you read. (Hat-tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Links

1. Ten lessons to learn from Jeremy Lin.

2. Tiny lizards in Madagascar.

3. Spartan vs. Athenian models of education. (Hat tip to The Browser.)

'Undue Weight' on Wikipedia

Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the department of ethnic studies at Bowling Green State University. The Chronicle Review recently published a piece of his, in which he recounts his many failed attempts to edit the Wikipedia page related to his area of expertise, the Haymarket Riot of 1886. The main problem: while Messer-Kruse's claims are backed up testimony from the trial available from the Library of Congress and by his own peer-reviewed articles, they conflict with the account given by the majority of published sources, which, according to Messer-Kruse, have been simply repeating the same errors for decades. The problem stems from Wikipedia's 'undue weight' policy, which requires that the content of Wikipedia articles reflect the majority of published works on a given subject (even if the majority happen to be in error):

[A] Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."

Given Messer-Kruse's experience, it would seem difficult or impossible for a new discovery by a researcher to make its way quickly into Wikipedia; as he puts it:

I guess this gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, perhaps before another century goes by, enough of my fellow scholars will adopt my views that I can change that Wikipedia entry. Until then I will have to continue to shout that the sky was blue.

Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

I have recently been reading Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, a set of techniques for resolving disputes in a way that is nonviolent (as the name implies) but does that meets everyone's needs without compromise. NVC was developed by a clinical psychologist named Marshall Rosenberg; Rosenberg, a student of Carl Rogers, first used NVC to mediate disputes in schools that were desegregating in the 1960s, and more recently he has traveled to hot spots such as Bosnia, Rwanda, Israel-Palestine, and northern Nigeria to try to mediate disputes between people who have literally been killing each other. More prosaically, Rosenberg also leads workshops on NVC in the U.S. and other countries.

The core of NVC involves four main steps: (1) observing actions, (2) identifying and stating feelings, (3) identifying and stating the needs which cause these feelings (when they are either met or not met), and (4) clearly articulating requests for actions. These four steps can be performed both on oneself and the person one is communicating with. Though easy to understand, it's actually quite hard to put these techniques into practice, due to the power of our habitual ways of interacting with people. My attempts to use NVC in the classroom and in my personal life have been difficult, but still effective--even if the only effect is to get greater awareness of what I am feeling and needing when someone does something (which makes it less likely that I will react with anger, resentment, or a passive-aggressive behavior).

One of Rosenberg's claims is that while people's preferred strategies for meeting their needs often conflict, the needs themselves could all be fulfilled if only they were willing to use different strategies to meet those needs. Now, like much of the theory behind NVC, I don't believe this 100%; there are surely some cases in which genuine needs conflict, such as lifeboat scenarios where there is only enough food or water for one person to survive. But like the other defects in the theory of NVC, this point does little to undermine the effectiveness of the techniques of NVC, which are quite practical. In the vast majority of human conflicts, even those involving physical violence, everyone's needs could be met without violence (even if not everyone's preferred strategies could be met without violence--such as if one side seeks to satisfy its need for security by killing off every member of the opposing side).

Another defect in the theory behind NVC is Rosenberg's claim that humans are not inherently violent; violence, he maintains, is something against human nature which we learn through our culture or society. To the contrary, since violence has been a part of every human culture, and since rates of death by violence were higher in stone age hunter-gatherer societies than they are in today's society, it is arguable that human nature includes the propensity for physical violence, and that if anything culture is gradually shifting our behaviors to less physically violent forms. But this theoretical quibble seems to have no bearing on the effectiveness of the techniques of NVC. These are grounded in careful observation of people's behaviors, coupled with acts of interpretation which seek to clarify feelings and needs, and finally with the formulation of clear action requests that can move dialogue forward more effectively than vague or judgmental criticism and demands.

My friend Lynn Ackerson first told me about NVC several years ago, but it took me a while before I actually looked into it further. I was turned off in part by the corny terms and techniques used by Rosenberg to communicate his ideas. As shown in the picture above, Rosenberg frequently uses tattered hand puppets to convey his points about NVC. This technique would be utterly laughable except that Rosenberg does seem to be in on the joke. It's a way of getting attention and of clearly summarizing points; when the "jackal" puppet says something, we know he is giving an example of violent communication, even when it doesn't sound like it--such as when someone snivels and says "I'm sad because you hurt me". Rosenberg also occasionally sings God-awful songs on his guitar (many of which he wrote himself!).

All of this, together with the problematic theory behind NVC, should be overlooked when one is considering the effectiveness of the techniques themselves. They are the real deal, and have been field-tested by Rosenberg in the worst conditions imaginable--when talking to groups of Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria, some of who had killed relatives of those on the other side; when talking to convicted murderers and rapists in prison; when dealing with one's own road rage while driving behind the slowest car in the world! Likewise, Rosenberg's original inspiration for NVC was his own brutal experience as a child in Detroit in the 1940s, where he witnessed terrible race riots immediately upon moving to the city (in which many people were killed right in his own neighborhood), to being repeatedly beaten at his school starting on the first day because of the fact that he was Jewish. Rosenberg may occasionally indulge in cheesy or hokey antics, and his theoretical speculation seems off the mark, but NVC itself is no joke and should be practiced by more people.

Jonah Lehrer on the Incredible Shrinking Effect Size

Jonah Lehrer recently wrote an article in The New Yorker (and another in Wired) about decreasing effect sizes in the sciences. An excerpt from the former:

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

Possible explanations for the problem include publication bias (journals like to publish interesting results), selective reporting of data by scientists, and data mining (scouring already collected data for interesting results, as opposed to collecting data to test an already determined hypothesis). One of the scientists interviewed by Lehrer proposes as a solution an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their plans for research and to document all of their results. Lehrer's Wired article is titled "Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us," but science rather seems to be revealing the problem with some of its own methods; the problem is real but potentially self-correcting. Lehrer also makes a philosophical mis-step when he invokes David Hume's skepticism about causation:

Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts—tangible things that can be discovered—they’re actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a “lively conception produced by habit.” When an apple falls from a tree, the cause is obvious: gravity. Hume’s skeptical insight was that we don’t see gravity—we see only an object tugged toward the earth. We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.

Hume was skeptical about the view that a cause is a necessary connection between cause and effect, not about whether a cause is a fact. Hume's point is that causal reasoning can be overturned by subsequent experience, unlike reasoning about relations of ideas (such as logical or mathematical truths), which is immune to empirical rebuff. Philosophical quibbles aside, Lehrer's articles are a useful layperson's introduction to this important issue.