What I'm Reading

1. Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. Slingerland analyzes the conceptual metaphors used by early Chinese philosophers to characterize the ideal of wu-wei or "not doing". He argues that these metaphors result in irresolveable paradoxes, suggesting that the concept of wu-wei may be self-contradictory.

2. Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World. An analytic philosopher looks at the issue of the purpose of life, in the light of contemporary science and eastern and western wisdom traditions.

3. Clark Ashton Smith, A Vintage from Atlantis. This is volume 3 of the collected fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith. Smith was a writer for the pulps in the 1930s, whose poetic prose and lush imagery had a big influence on other writers of horror, fantasy, and science fiction (including H. P. Lovecraft and Jack Vance).

4. Robert E. Howard, The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. Along with Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard is one of the three most influential writers from the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s. Howard's writing is vivid and visceral, and his brooding hero is more than just the muscle-bound oaf in sandles of later pastiche, film, and television.

5. Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000. Wickham shows the continuity and contrasts between the late Roman empire and the early Dark Ages. He helps clarify the nature of the transformation of Western Europe after the gradual collapse of Roman rule there, working extensively with both the archaeological and textual sources, and even-handedly evaluating the theories of other historians.

The Costs of Higher Ed

I teach philosophy at Bowling Green State University, and I like what I do, but I have to admit I don't think higher ed provides a very good bargain for students. According to a recent study, college students aren't learning much, and meanwhile the cost of getting a degree continues to rise. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution recently blogged about what might be keeping higher ed costs so high, and he linked to a couple of recent posts by Matthew Yglesias on the same topic. I'm glad that more people are thinking about this issue, because it has perplexed me for a long time.

The general problem is a lack of incentive among higher ed administrators to reduce prices and improve quality. One solution might be to replace not-for-profit private universities and state-run universities with for-profit private universities, but I imagine that this would be too controversial to ever actually happen, regardless of how effective it might be. (David D. Friedman has a chapter in his anarchist manifesto Machinery of Freedom dedicated to this idea, which he titled "Adam Smith U.".)

Even in cases where universities offer a quality education (as measured in terms of actual learning outcomes), costs are often higher than they should be. Part of the problem is supposedly due to the "Baumol cost disease," which in the case of higher ed is due to the fact that salaries of professors have continued to rise despite the fact that their productivity has not. I suspect this is part of the problem, and that new technologies might be able to reduce the teacher to student ratio at higher ed institutions (and thus reduce the amount spent on faculty labor), but there are probably other factors as well, such as the amount spent on the administration, on facilities such as rec centers (et multa alia) that aren't directly connected to learning outcomes, and on building and maintaining a physical campus (as opposed to having the school operate over the internet or in un-glamorous but cheaper physical spaces). One institution dedicated to finding ways to lower the costs of higher ed while at the same time improving outcomes is The National Center for Academic Transformation. Unless the incentives facing administrators, faculty, and other people involved in higher ed change, though, I wouldn't anticipate much improvement.

How to Start a Revolution

A recent article in Foreign Policy profiles Otpor, a Serbian group which overthrew Slobodon Milosevic, and which now organizes workshops on the tactics of nonviolent revolution. Otpor has taken a page from the work on the tactics of nonviolent revolution by the American political scientist Gene Sharp.

It's encouraging that today's revolutions seem to be led by liberal and social democrats and not by the communists and socialist anarchists of old; today's revolutions seem less likely to just give rise to new authoritarian regimes of a differing ideological pedigree from the old. There are probably many reasons for this shift, but Gene Sharp has argued that the use of violent tactics makes it more likely that a revolution will result in an authoritarian regime instead of a genuinely liberal and democratic one.

Claims Regarding Democracy in the Middle East

From "This Is Not an Islamic Revolution," an article in the New Statesman by Olivier Roy:

But the "democracy" that is being called for is not foreign, and therein
lies the difference from the Bush administration's attempt to promote democracy
in Iraq in 2003. That did not work, because it lacked political legitimacy and
was associated with a military intervention. Today, paradoxically, it is the
waning of US influence in the Middle East, together with the pragmatism of the
Obama administration, that has allowed a native and fully legitimate demand for
democracy to be expressed.

Would democracy have come sooner to Egypt and Tunisia if the United States had never supported military dictatorships there? Has the U.S. foreign policy produced more or less stability and security on the Middle East on balance?

Mixed Messages from the Obama Administration

Blowback from appointing Hilary Clinton as secretary of state?

How-To Manual for Revolutionaries

The New York Times had an article the other day on Gene Sharp, an American political scientist who wrote several works on the tactics of nonviolent revolution. Evidently his ideas have been used by actual revolutionaries in Serbia, Ukraine, and now in the Middle East to help overthrow dictators. Evidently, activists in Burma and elsewhere are interested in his ideas as well. His foundation's website includes copies of many of his works, including the classic From Dictatorship to Democracy, which is available in over 24 languages.

Effectual Reasoning vs. Causal Reasoning

Inc. magazine has an article about a recent study which looks at the style of thinking used by entrepreneurs. The study also looked at the style of thinking used by corporate executives as a way of understanding what sets entrepreneurs apart:

Sarasvathy concluded that master entrepreneurs rely on what she calls effectual reasoning. Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don't start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively
reacting to contingencies. By contrast, corporate executives—those in the study group were also enormously successful in their chosen field—use causal reasoning. They set a goal and diligently seek the best ways to achieve it.

This contrast in thinking styles seems of great interest. I'm guessing that most of us, whether in business or not, gravitate to one of these two cognitive styles. Effectual reasoning seems more flexible, causal reasoning more systematic. Do you tend toward effectual reasoning or causal reasoning? Is each thinking style better adapted to certain kinds of problems or situations? How easy is it to effectively mix both styles, either synchronically or diachronically?

Read the whole article. Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Joko

Last summer I read Charlotte "Joko" Beck's classic works Everyday Zen and Nothing Special. Joko is a Zen master with a unique gift for communicating the essence of Zen meditation in a straightforward, commonsense manner. Joko focuses on the intersection between Zen practice and everyday life. Phil Dickinson, a professor of English at Bowling Green State University and a member of the Toledo Zen Center, calls Joko's approach "no bullshit Zen," and I think that sums up her life and work quite well. Joko is clear about the difficulties of practice--the phrase "no pain, no gain" comes to mind here--and also about the true nature of the benefits of practice--e.g. getting angry a little less often, or a little less severely, or simply being more aware of when one is angry, for example.

Joki strikes me as a true Zen master, in that her considerable attainments and insights are equally matched by humility and by a sometimes painful honesty--which seems unfortunately rare in discussions of Zen meditation (at least, in my limited experience). Wheareas earlier works on Zen (such as Philip Kapleau's classic The Three Pillars of Zen) often focused on pushing hard to attain special enlightenment experiences (or satori, in the lexicon of Japanese Zen), Joko places the focus squarely on the impact of Zen practice on such everyday matters as one's relationship with one's boss, child, parent, or spouse. While seeing bright lights and attaining the brahma worlds is nice, what's the benefit if one still seethes with rage when criticized by one's employer, or belittles one's child for her lack of accomplishments, or take's one's parent's love for granted?

Joko is also refreshing in her willingness to dispense with the traditional trappings of Japanese Zen, favoring the unadorned substance of the teaching over textual exegesis and ceremonial ritual. (It is an irony, albeit par for the course in terms of the general history of religious movements, that Zen has become somewhat weighed down by its own layers of textual and ritual adornments, given that its origin lies precisely in a reaction against these attributes in the other schools of Buddhism in the China of the 7th century.) Joko even seems willing to contradict or at least question some of the traditional views of Zen Buddhism (and of Buddhism generally), such as when she raises the possibility that no person has ever been fully enlightened (that is, fully free from self-induced suffering caused by selfish craving and ignorance, and fully accepting of whatever hardships one may come across in life); strictly speaking, such a statement is heretical from the Buddhist point of view, because it calls into question the authenticity of the Buddha's enlightenment experience (and it's hard to think of a more basic view put forth by Buddhists other than the claim that the Buddha was in fact fully enlightened). Such openness and honesty, together with the sensible grounds which she gives for calling such traditional beliefs into question, makes me respect Joko a great deal; one wishes that more religious teachers would follow her example. In any event, her books are much recommended, and you can see an interview with Joko on YouTube(excerpted from a German documentary by Claudia Willke called Nothing Special) .

Protest Tactics in Egypt

For those of us who hope for a free, peaceful Egypt, it is interesting to ponder the significance of street level tactics in determining the political outcome. There are other factors, of course, but if the pro-Mubarak protestors had beaten back the anti-Mubarak protestors last week, this could well have caused the anti-Mubarak movement to lose momentum and go the way of Iran's aborted protests.

Via Delta's D&D Hotspot, I learned of a blog post by the War Nerd, who provides an analysis of street-level tactics in Egypt as seen through the lens of military history. I should warn you that the analysis of this "War Nerd" fellow is laced with slurs and foul language, which is unfortunate (and a mark against his maturity as a human being), but having said that his discussion is quite insightful, and definitely worth thinking about for those who support protest movements like those in Egypt, Burma, and elsewhere. When the military stands by, the tactics used on the street are basically a re-creation of the tactics used in the Middle Ages by cavalry and infantry (including the cavalry charge, skirmishers, the testudo or shield wall, and so on).

Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans

While reading Reihan Salam's review of Tyler Cowen's new e-book on the stagnation of the American economy, I came across a link to Kevin Kelly's "1,000 True Fans" essay (or is that a blog post?). Kelly's main point is that a self-employed artist or creator can make a living if he gains and retains about 1,000 true fans who spend an average of $100 per year on the artist's product. Kelly claims that this is a reasonable goal, even in the present economy of the "long tail"--i.e., an economy in which the consumer faces an endless selection of goods (think of the amount of book titles available through Amazon, for example), and in which it is very easy for a creator's work to end up on the long, thin tail of sales, but increasingly difficult for a creator to produce a blockbuster which lies on the short, stubby torso (um, so to speak).

Anecdotally, I've seen this approach work in the role-playing game community, which has a small market, and in which independently produced games are a niche within a niche. It seems like it could work in other areas as well, such as music or visual art.

People I Know

This is the first in a continuing series of blog posts devoted to sharing the traits and accomplishments of "people I know".

Marvin Belzer is a former professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, and currently teaches mindfulness meditation at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center. He was my dissertation advisor and philosophical mentor while I was a graduate student at Bowling Green.

Marv is one of the most inspiring people I have ever met. He has done valuable work in analytic philosophy, particularly in the metaphysics of personal identity, and he also did a great job teaching introductory logic to a large (100+) class of non-philosophy majors. Marv has a unique ability to empathtize and connect with his students, and to paradoxically inspire excellent work through a gentle, patient approach.

Marv has also been practicing and teaching mindfulness meditation for several decades. His strengths as a teacher of academic philosophy are if anything even more evident in his work as a meditation instructor. Marv was also probably one of the first people to teach meditation as an undergraduate philosophy course. He introduced literally hundreds of students to mindfulness meditation in this way. Some of my most cherished memories are practicing with Marv and the rest of his class on the meditation retreats he led while an instructor at BGSU.

For-Profit Primary Ed

My girlfriend Brenda Baker recently told me about a for-profit primary education school called K12 (which received a somewhat informative write-up in Forbes a couple of years ago). Now, most people probably associate the idea of for-profit education with greed, inequality, and injustice, but I think that social justice considerations actually point in support of such schools.

The issues are mainly ones of choice and accountability. Pupils in a lot of public school districts suffer from a lack of choice. Now, charter schools do provide parents in a school district with more choice, but not-for-profit charter schools don't face the same amount or kind of accountability as do for-profit schools. For-profit schools have to provide a valuable service to their customers at a low enough cost that there is at least some profit left over for investors. A for-profit school which is doing a poor job will lose pupils, lose funding, and die. A not-for-profit school doesn't face quite the same incentives to keep quality up and costs down. This is the bright side of market self-correction--waste and poor value can only persist for so long.

In a way, K12 seems to have found a loophole into the brave new world of school vouchers, in that in at least some states in which they operate they receive per-pupil funds directly from school districts (just like not-for-profit charter schools). This allows K12 to compete on an even footing with public schools and not-for-profit charter schools (which receive a government-provided subsidy, in the form of school district funds, that is not available to other private schools). It's hard to see how this is a bad deal for parents and taxpayers, since it gives parents more choice for where they send their kids to school, and since if K12 should fail, it is the investors, and not the school district and its taxpayers, who will take the loss.

If there is going to be improvement in America's primary schools, my guess is it will be through for-profit schools which operate as charter schools and slip in under the radar, as it were, of the public debate surrounding school vouchers. The public debate about school vouchers, like most political debates, is so charged with hatred, rhetoric, and ideology, not to mention warped by the lobbying of special interests, that no solution is to be expected through overt or intentional political means. As in so many other areas of social life, order or progress is often brought about through unanticipated and unintended developments. In other words, progress often occurs despite the political process, not because of it. For this reason, I'll light a stick of incense tonight to the god of spontaneous order and pray that he lets us drift unexpectedly into a superior primary education system.

Greek Is Hard (or, Greek with Peek)

I started studying ancient Greek last semester. I've studied other languages before (Spanish, Latin, German, and French), but never enough to become fluent or to make them stick. (It's like a long string of love affairs that seemed promising but all ended in heartbreak, and none producing a lasting relationship or any offspring.)

Fortunately, Professor Philip Peek of the Bowling Green State University Romance and Classical Studies Department has let me attend his elementary Greek classes. Peek is truly a great professor--he achieves a good balance between challenging and supporting his students, for example, and he's a lot of fun to be around and work with. Unfortunately, ancient Greek is a lot harder than any other language I have tried and failed to learn. There are several reasons for this, including the complex rules for accent, rules for contracting vowels, rules for ellision and crasis, the large number of irregular conjugations and declensions (more than the number of irregular verbs and nouns that I recall seeing in Latin, for example; especialy difficult is Greek's schizophrenic third declension, in which every other word seems to be irregular), the peculiarities of Greek grammar (a middle voice in addition to the active and passive, an optative mood in addition to the subjunctive, a dual number in addition to the singular and plural, an aorist tense in addition to the imperfect and perfect), and many more reasons than I care to list right now. Learning to read a new alphabet has been simple in comparison to all these other issues.

A quote from the textbook we are using, Alston Hurd Chase and Henry Phillips' A New Introduction to Greek (first published in 1941), nicely illustrates the experience:

A word bearing the acute upon the ultima is known as an oxytone, one with the acute upon the penult as a paroxytone, one with the acute upon the antepenult as a proparoxytone. One which bears the circumflex upon the ultima is called a perispomenon, one with the circumflex upon the penult is a properispomenon. These terms, though formidable, will save much laborious periphrasis (p. 4).

"Will save much laborious periphrasis," indeed. It is only now that I understand Saint Augustine's seemingly irrational hatred of his childhood Greek grammar lessons (as described in his Confessions). We'll see what this semester will bring; reading Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek still seems a long, long way off--and the distance has seemed to only increase the more Greek that I have learned!

Article on the New Rich

Arts & Letters Daily recently linked to an article in The Atlantic describing the new global elite. This is the best article I have read on the new plutocrats. Author Chrystia Freeland takes a balanced approach, noting the real contributions which have been made by the new rich--they tend to be self-made men, creating businesses and producing wealth, instead of just living off of their family's estate--but the article does not shy away from some of the more troubling aspects of this class--noting, for example, that economic inequality has actually been growing in developed societies, creating a social as well as an economic divide between the have-some's and the have-lot's (to coin a phrase).

Passing Strange

One of the best films I saw last year was Passing Strange, Spike Lee's film of a Broadway musical's last performance at the Belasco Theatre. The musical is autobiographical, and is based on the life of its writer "Stew". Stew grew up in a middle-class black family in Los Angeles in the 1970s, but ended up passing as a ghetto black when he moved to Europe to develop his musical career. The film works on many levels, addressing issues of racial identity, prejudice both against blacks and within the black community itself, the difficulties faced by an artist attempting to find his "voice," good-old adolescent rebellion, family conflict, and more. Although he was not involved in the production of the musical itself, Spike Lee did an excellent job capturing the show's last performance on film. Highly recommended (and this from someone who ordinarily can't stand musicals of any kind).

Blogging Again

I'm not sure why I stopped blogging, or why I've decided to start again. Part of the reason for stopping is probably that I have a chronic illness (the so-called chronic fatigue syndrome), which severely restricts the amount of work I can do. Part of the reason for starting up again is probably that I often want to share articles or thoughts with my friends, and I don't use facebook much. Anyway, for anyone still following this blog, expect many new posts soon.

The Examined Life Is Not Worth Watching

Last Sunday, some friends and I watched Astra Taylor's Examined Life, a film which consists of interviews with well-known contemporary philosophers such as Cornell West, Judith Butler, and Martha Nussbaum. Astra Taylor deserves credit for trying to bring philosophy to a broader audience, and for all of the thought and sheer hard work that clearly went into her film. Nevertheless, Examined Life suffers from a couple of problems. There is not enough time devoted to each philosopher, so the interviews are fairly superficial. The film would have been more focused if the philosophers had at least all been speaking on the same topic. Dialogues between two or more philosophers would probably also have been more stimulating than one-on-one interviews (in particular, an encounter between rivals Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler would probably have been electrifying). Taylor's previous film, Zizek, was a superior effort, if only because focusing on one (albeit controversial) philosopher enabled his ideas to be explored more deeply.

On the other hand, it is gratifying to see any professionally made film about philosophers, so perhaps one should simply focus on encouraging Taylor to make more films, improving her craft in the process.

Charter Cities

Paul Romer argues that developing nations with severe economic and political problems (such as Haiti) should invite developed nations to operate charter cities within their borders. The developed nations would enforce laws that both nations had agreed to in advance.

Romer believes charter cities would help developing nations more than does foreign aid, which provides a benefit in the short-run as a one-time transfer, but which does not help the developing nation get out of poverty in the long-run. What is needed to get developing nations on the path to prosperity are better governmental institutions, and who better to provide those than nations which have already succeeded in doing so within their own territories.

This is a clever idea, but it is not clear that charter cities would fare any better than have charter schools. The problem is (at least in part) one of incentives. What is to guarantee that the government of the host nation will ask for the right kind of laws to be enforced? Do the interests of the governors of developing nations in fact represent the interests of the people as a whole? What is to guarantee that the government of the guest nation will live up to its side of the bargain? What incentive will either side have to improve the quality of government services and lower the costs of such services?

Don't let worries about developing nations' sovereignty or about neo-imperialism distract you from the even deeper problems regarding incentives. Charter cities might work, but there is plenty of reason to be skeptical.

What's Wrong with Libertarianism (A Continuing Series)

The title of this post is apt for a book, not a blog entry.

Nevertheless, I might as well start getting some of this stuff off of my chest, to clarify the sense in which I am and am not a libertarian.

I count as a libertarian, broadly speaking, because I am a fan of the free market, and of traditional, meat and potatoes, Enlightenment-era civil liberties such as the right to free speech, the freedom of religion, and all that sort of thing. It is also fair to call me a classical liberal or neoliberal.

What's wrong, then, with libertarianism? Libertarianism is primarily a political theory about the nature of liberty and the proper role of government, but many libertarians also as a matter of fact have ethical beliefs that I find suspect. Robin Hanson, though he may be a sex-obsessed misogynist (hey! I said may be), is right about this: an axiom about the value of liberty (as conceived of by most libertarians) should not be taken as the basis for libertarian political theory. The reasons for this are many, but one of them is that the theory risks becoming question-begging. Why is it wrong for the government to restrict a person's liberty? The libertarian axiomatist's reply: because it's always wrong to restrict liberty! It would seem that the putative libertarian axiom is in fact the conclusion which is need of prior justification. Moreover, there is liberty and then there is liberty. Even if the normative value of liberty were quite fundamental to our political theory, we need an argument for why we should adopt the libertarians' conception of liberty, and some alternative conception (such as the Marxist).

The Link between Ayn Rand and Karl Marx

I have been sitting in on Fred Miller's Economics and Political Philosophy seminar here at Bowling Green State University. The seminar is for graduate students in philosophy, but is also attended by faculty members like me and visiting scholars such as Stephen Hicks and James Otteson. The purpose of the seminar is to help its attendees design introductory PP&E courses (that's philosophy, politics, and economics, for the unititiated). PP&E programs have recently been sprouting up in the United States, in imitation of the famous program at Oxford (which shines like a Platonic form in the heavenly firmament, and compared to which our best efforts are no doubt merely degraded imitations).

The central issue of the seminar is whether capitalism is morally defensible. Now, for those of you not in the know, Fred Miller is a director of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, a research center which is to capitalism roughly as the Dominicans are to Catholicism. Therefore, one expects to confront more dogmatism than skepticism in the matter of the moral defense of capitalism. Nevertheless, the sessions of the seminar have seemed both fair-minded and intellectually stimulating (albeit from the point of view of this dyed-in-the-wool free marketer). For example, this week we talked about Karl Marx's theory of capitalism and alienation, and I think we did a pretty good job of just trying to understand the theory and its place in the history of ideas, as opposed to trying to just mercilessly rip it to shreads. In particular, we disucssed the inspiration Marx took from some of Aristotle's passages in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics about justice in exchange and the nature of money.

It turns out that both Karl Marx and Ayn Rand were influenced by the man nicknamed "the Brain" while he was a student as Plato's Academy. It's worth noting that Marx and Rand, like Aristotle, were both empiricists, and they were also both materialists and atheists. In addition, Chris Matthew Sciabarra has argued that both Marx and Rand shared a dialectical methodology. Of more direct relevance with respect to their economic and political views, both Rand and Marx share a similar conception of human flourishing, derived ultimately from that of Aristotle.

Now, on the Objectivist end of the spectrum, Neo-Aristotelians such as Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl have taken more than a page from Rand in their attempt to apply an Aristotelian ethic to a defense of capitalism and liberal political institutions. But it was not until yesterday that I realized that Neo-Marxists have done the same with regard to Aristotle and Marx. In particular, Paul Gomberg has done a great job developing a broadly Aristotelian reading of Marx's conception of the good life, and fleshing out the relationship between this conception and a Marxist theory of justice which he calls "contributive justice". I have only read three chapters from Gomberg's book, but I already want to buy it and read the whole thing. Gomberg makes good use of insights from psychological research on human happiness, from shop-worn bits such as the relative independence of income and happiness (once subsistence has been taken care of), to rarer gems such as the importance of a sense of self-efficacy to well-being, the importance of the perceptions of others to decisions we make that might at first seem purely self-interested (such as what car to buy or what career to pursue), the use of social norms to police behavior within traditional and contemporary societies, et multa alia. In particular, Gombeg makes a compelling case for the regarding labor as a good worthy of choosing for its own sake, partially constitutive of human flourishing, following Aristotle's conception of the function of man as an activity involving reason, and against Smith and the other classical economists' narrow view of labor as little more than an odious burden.

And the best part is that Gomberg is scheduled to present to us next week as part of the Economics and Political Philosophy seminar. I look forward to sitting back and letting him entertain us with insights from his book. From each according to ability, to each according to need.

Of course, Marxism is still rubbish. But 'tis a small man who is unable to learn great lessons from his greatest opponents. Besides, I met Gomberg once, long ago when he was visiting Bowling Green for a conference, and he seemed a swell sort of chap. One wishes for more Marxists of his character and intellectual calliber!