Two kinds of psychophysical reduction, part 1: biochemical

by Dave Maier

The relation between mind and matter is a perennial philosophical conundrum for a reason. If the workings of the mind depend too much on the physical material that seems to house it, then it can be hard to see how there’s conceptual room for human agency. On the other hand, if they don’t depend on it at all, then it’s hard to understand why such things as brain injury or the ingestion of this or that chemical substance should have any effects at all, let alone the reliably predictable effects that often result. Something’s gotta give!

We’re certainly not giving up the truths of natural science. However, just as allowing agency to slip the bonds of nature makes a lot of things inexplicable, so does getting rid of it entirely. (Imagine trying to explain, say, the Civil War without even once appealing, even implicitly, to the notion that human beings act on their beliefs and desires, and are thereby subject to praise and blame from others.) The two types of explanation need to learn to live together, as equally valuable tools in our conceptual toolbox. We need to get clearer, then, on how exactly our normative explanations, and our practices of praise and blame, actually play out. What are they good for, and what are their proper domains of application? What happens when we press them too hard, or try to use them for something they’re not designed to do? How can we get them to play nicely with their conceptual colleagues?

Problems result not only when we use normative language like we do the laws and concepts of science (a common error), but also when normative concepts or principles get in each others’ way, which they will even when we’re being careful, because that’s the nature of the beast. (And of course we’re not always careful.)

Let’s start with a look at a widely used principle, applicable not simply in moral contexts but to normativity generally: that “ought implies can.” The point of this principle is fairly intuitive. [Note: as a speaker of American English, I will be using “ought” and “should” interchangeably here (my apologies to the Queen).] It is at least very often true that it makes no sense to criticize someone for failing to do something which is impossible. On the other hand, there are many different potentially relevant senses and degrees of (im)possibility. Read more »

Your Rights, Part III, Establishment Clause Edition

by Michael Liss

It is a big cross. A really big cross. Forty feet in height, made of granite and concrete, The Bladensburg Peace Cross stands tall and straight for all to see.

The Peace Cross, sponsored by the American Legion, was built in 1925 in the aftermath of World War I to memorialize the sacrifice of 49 Prince George’s County servicemen. It was paid for by the Legion, and by subscription of local residents and businesses. In 1961, maintenance of it was passed to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, and the land it currently stands on is State land, in a traffic median, the cost of maintenance paid for by the taxpayers of Maryland.

If you are just a little bit attuned to the First Amendment (religion portion), you might be interested in how that last part meshes with “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

It is a perceptive question, one that the Supreme Court grappled with and decided this last Thursday in American Legion v. American Humanist Association. The Peace Cross, they ruled in a 7-2 decision, may continue to stand on public land and be paid for with public funds.

This is the kind of wonky, incredibly subjective ruling that makes my heart go pitter-patter. I’m not sure I agree (or disagree) with the result, but I love the tortured efforts of most of the Justices to do the best they could under difficult circumstances. This is not an easy one. Read more »

Is Making Babies Immoral?

by Akim Reinhardt

Image by Per Kolm Knudsen
Image by Per Kolm Knudsen

A wave of friends is having babies. I’m 51 years old so this is nothing new. Friends of mine have been having babies for nearly three decades. However, this time it feels different, and not because I’m now old enough to be a grandfather. Rather, as we approach the year 2020, my ambivalence stems from the indisputable fact that humanity is destroying the planet.

Human beings have initiated a mass extinction. We’re probably closer to the beginning than the ending of the process, but it’s already worse than anything since the dinosaur die-off 65,000,000 years ago. Under normal circumstances, 1-5 animal species go extinct per year. But we’ve so damaged the planet’s ecosystems that on average dozens of species are now dying off every day. Just since 1970 we’ve wiped out 60% of all mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles.

We’re facing a near-future (the mid-21st century) where half of all the planet’s animal species will be gone. And it’s not just animals. Plant extinctions are occurring at a rate 500x faster than we would normally expect, and twice the rate of all mammal, bird, and amphibian extinctions combined. It looks even grimmer going forward. Human activity threatens to render no less than one million animal and plant species, a quarter of all life forms on Earth, extinct.

How are we bringing about this devastation? It’s tempting to point the finger at climate change. But truthfully, to some extent warming temperatures are merely symptomatic of a larger problem. Read more »

How I Grew Up Jewish…or, Does Everyone Get to Be an Outsider?

by Robert Fay

I’m not typically a reader of White House memoirs, but after finishing the new biography of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, Our Man (2019) by George Packer, I became intrigued by depictions of Obama’s management style in dealing with Holbrooke, Hilary Clinton and others. I soon picked up The World As It Is (2018) by former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes, which has been described as the best “inside” look of Obama to date. Rhodes tells us enough Obama anecdotes to bring the man into focus. And while none of it is terribly surprising, I was intrigued to learn that Obama, despite being President, continued to see himself as an outsider, as someone who, by virtue of his own personal journey and outlook, could never truly become enculturated to power and authority, despite being the executor of state power for eight years.

Former White House adviser Rhodes with President Obama (photo by Pete Souza/White House/Flickr).

It seemed Obama’s self-view as an outsider had less to do with being African-American or as someone who had lived in Indonesia as a child, but more to do with being, at heart, a writer (it’s no coincidence that Rhodes, one of his closest advisors, was a speechwriter who had an MFA in creative writing from NYU). Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father (1995) garnered the kind of literary praise that few politicians since Winston Churchill have received. During his presidency, Obama carved out four or five hours of “alone-time” in the White House Treaty room each night to read books, review documents and often just to think. Obama’s famous coolness, his so-called detachment, was likely a misreading of his observational mode with people, a common trait among writers who find you can learn more from a “scene” by observing people than by inserting yourself into the action.

But most of all, I was struck by a random comment Obama made to Rhodes regarding criticism from American Jews over his Israel policy. “I came out of the Jewish community in Chicago,” he said. “I’m basically a liberal Jew.” Read more »

The jerk in the machine

by Sarah Firisen

Many years ago, my father and I were at a backyard BBQ in New Jersey hosted by someone we barely knew, I think they were somehow connected to my step-mother. At some point, the topic of flag burning came up and, before we knew it, we were engaged in an extremely heated debate on what patriotism actually means (I believe that the rights the flag stands for include the right to burn it). The debate ended up with a large group of people holding beers and hot dogs decrying the liberal anti-Americanism of the two of us. Not the best way to spend a summer afternoon. These days, it’s possible, in fact too easy, to repeat the unpleasantness of that afternoon all the time on social media. I try my best to steer away from the soul sucking void that is having debates on Facebook with friends of friends. We all have those people in our lives with whom we have a moral or political disconnect and that those people will sometimes make comments that will inflame our more simpatico friends may be inevitable, but doesn’t have to be engaged with and perpetuated. Such debates don’t change hearts and minds. Full disclosure, I admit, sometimes I don’t follow my own advice here as well as I should, but I try.

Perhaps even more pointless is having fights with utter strangers who just happen to subscribe to the same Facebook groups you do. The other day I felt unusually compelled to comment on a New York Times Modern Love posting on Facebook. The story was about a woman who listened to a tarot card reader and took her “predictions” very seriously. Now as far as I’m concerned, if you make the choice to write about your private life in a public sphere, you’re fair game for other people to comment on your choices – indeed, I open myself up for this in writing for this blog, and I get that. I’m not sure why I bothered to comment, why do people write letters to newspapers? But I certainly believe I had a right to state my opinion. A fellow reader disagreed and started a personal attack on me and my judgement of the story writer. I should have left it at that, I didn’t, I answered back. Read more »

Up-River! The adventure of reality from Haggard to Conrad to Coppola to Bourdain

by Bill Benzon

How, then, do we get from H. Rider Haggard to Anthony Bourdain? Let’s start with the easy and straightforward. Both are white men, as are Joseph Conrad and Francis Ford Coppola for that matter. Haggard was British; he was born in the 19th century and died in the 20th (1856-1925). Bourdain was American, born in the 20th and died in the 21st, at his own hand (1956-2018). It’s easy enough to interpolate the other two: Joseph Conrad, Polish-British (1857-1924); Francis Ford Coppola, American (1939 and still living).

So much for bare biography. It’s the imaginative life that interests.

Haggard wrote a ton of novels, many of them well-known. The Allan Quatermain stories, starting with King Solomon’s Mines, are said to have inspired the character Indiana Jones. She: A History of Adventure marked the beginning of a different series and is one of Haggard’s best-known novels. If not exactly a high-culture masterpiece, it has been quite influential as one of the founding texts of “lost world” fiction. Wikipedia tells us that it’s been made into 11 films and sold over 83 million copies, making it an all-time fiction best seller, and has been translated into 44 languages.

Read more »

On the Road: Border Towns

by Bill Murray

A few months ago, Mikhail Saakashvili, ousted leader of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and the Ukrainian town of Odessa, predicted that Russia would next attack either Sweden or Finland. A few days ago I visited the Finnish and Russian border towns of Lappeenranta and Выборг (Vyborg), and if war preparations in these two places are any indication, Sweden had better man the barricades.

For people of a certain age, coming to Russia from any direction sends up a certain Cold War frisson. Today we shall cross the border from Finland, which has been fought over and traded between Sweden and Russia for centuries.

As early as 1293 a Swedish marshal built a castle in Vyborg, now Russian. The castle traded hands repeatedly between the Swedes and the then Republic of Novgorod. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and loss of fortresses in Narva, Tallinn and Riga, Vyborg Castle is the only European-style medieval castle in Russia. Its current iteration is touted as a prime tourist destination but appears to be randomly, and arbitrarily, closed for renovation.

Viipuri, in the Finnish appellation, was capital of Finnish Karelia and a vital outlet to the sea until Vyborg was seized by the Red Army in June of 1944. John H. Vartenen, in a 1979 New York Times article:

The Finns felt that to some extent they had won the war on the ground by forcing the Russians to come to the negotiating table. On the other hand, they felt that they lost at the table because, though the Russians had never moved more than 50 miles into Finland, the Finns lost eastern Karelia, including the area’s second‐largest city, Viipuri.

While Vyborg is almost exactly the same size today as when it was taken from the Finns, for 75 years it has been Russified. If you were twelve years old on the day Viipuri fell and had a child of your own five years later, that child would now be 70. Teaching Finnish was out of the question in early Russian-occupied Vyborg, but even for those who quietly did so, use of the language is dying – except in tourism. Read more »

A Novel That Explores the Silencing of Palestinian Trauma

Isabella Hammad in the New York Review of Books:

Adam Dannoun, the protagonist of Elias Khoury’s powerful new novel, calls himself a child of the ghetto. He does not mean the Warsaw ghetto — although, growing up in the newly established state of Israel, he allows his university colleagues to make that assumption. He means the “ghetto” of the Palestinian town of Lydda, created by Jewish forces who uprooted tens of thousands of Palestinians on a death march in one of the bloodiest massacres of the 1948 Nakba. (That term, which Arabs use for the founding of the Jewish state, means “catastrophe.”) Adam, a baby at the time, was one of those who remained.

Through layers and levels of storytelling — we are in familiar Khoury territory here, moving in and out of various narrations — “Children of the Ghetto” ponders the silence of those who stayed in Lydda. To survive in the new state they lived “as invisible people.” Why were they silent — to avoid being killed? Because they had given up hope? Or because what they had gone through was unspeakable, an experience for which “silence is more eloquent than words”?

More here.

Jumping Spiders Can Think Ahead, Plan Detours

Michael Greshko in National Geographic:

But a new study shows that many species plan out intricate detours to reach their prey—smarts usually associated with far bigger creatures.

The arachnids, already well known for their colors and elaborate mating rituals, have sharp vision and an impressive awareness of three-dimensional space. (See “Surprise: Jumping Spiders Can See More Colors Than You Can.”)

“Their vision is more on par with vertebrates,” says Damian Elias of the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “And that allows them to do things that are physically impossible for other animals that size.”

Jumping spiders of the subfamily Spartaeinae (spar-TAY-in-ay) are particularly ambitious—they eat other spiders. Researchers suspect that preying on other predators requires extra intelligence and cunning.

More here.

Prof Cass Sunstein on how social change happens, and why it’s so often abrupt & unpredictable

Robert Wiblin and Keiran Harris in 80,000 Hours:

It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where most people seem opposed or at best indifferent to you. But according to a new book by Professor Cass Sunstein, they shouldn’t despair. Large social changes are often abrupt and unexpected, arising in an environment of seeming public opposition.

The Communist Revolution in Russia spread so swiftly it confounded even Lenin. Seventy years later the Soviet Union collapsed just as quickly and unpredictably.

In the modern era we have gay marriage, #metoo and the Arab Spring, as well as nativism, Euroskepticism and Hindu nationalism.

How can a society that so recently seemed to support the status quo bring about change in years, months, or even weeks?

Sunstein — co-author of Nudge, Obama White House official, and by far the most cited legal scholar of the late 2000s — aims to unravel the mystery and figure out the implications in his new book How Change Happens.

More here.

The Racial Politics of National Defense

Joseph Darda in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Since the Truman administration dissolved the Department of War and replaced it with a Department of Defense in the early years of the Cold War, our presidents — Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal — have used the idea of defense to mask a hard-to-ignore fact: the United States has looked to black, brown, and Asian countries to imagine invasions and define enemies. It has fought wars in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central America, East Africa, and the Middle East. It has declared none, because the United States no longer wages war against people; it defends itself against communism, crime, totalitarianism, and terrorism. Or so we’re told.

Trump may be less subtle than his predecessors, but he is far from the first president to turn war against dark-skinned people into defense against beliefs and behaviors. The idea of defense came with the office.

More here.

To Have and Withhold

Colm Toibin in Bookforum:

Henry James did not wish to be known by his readers. He remained oddly absent in his fiction. He did not dramatize his own opinions or offer aphorisms about life, as George Eliot, a novelist whom James followed closely, did. Instead, he worked intensely on his characters, offering their consciousness and motives a great deal of nuance and detail and ambiguity. James was concerned with his privacy, burning many of the letters he received. Most of the time, he conducted his own correspondence with caution and care. But at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, when James was in his late fifties and early sixties, he began to write letters to younger men whose tone had a mixture of open affection and something that is more difficult to define.

For example, on February 25, 1900, he wrote to the writer Howard Sturgis, then forty-five: “I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you. Meanwhile I can only try to live without you.” On May 19, 1912, he ended a letter to the writer Hugh Walpole, twenty-eight at the time, with: “I don’t know how to tell you vividly enough how yearningly I pat you on the back or in fact take you to the heart. But feel it, know it, like it.”

These letters and some late stories, such as “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Jolly Corner,” are the only clues we get from James about his secret desires. Many of his readers have tried to find clarity in James when there is obfuscation, a definite sexual identity for him when he sought, using artistry, to disguise himself, to conceal himself behind an elaborate prose style and an intricate architecture for his novels. The cultivation of secrecy in James’s life and work was not merely a strategy he used during his time in England, a time when homosexuality, as we learn from the Wilde case, could be punished severely. It is not simply that he kept things to himself so that he would not be ruined by disclosure. Rather, sexual secrecy and disclosure became his great subject as an artist. His four best novels—The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904)—are animated by a story of a liaison that if revealed will be explosive.

More here.

Capitalism, populism & crisis of liberalism

Jipson John and Jitheesh P.M. interview Akeel Bilgrami in Frontline:

How do you engage with the term populism, its emergence and its philosophical and political connotations?

There is so much punditry on this subject that it is tempting to say that one should just put a moratorium on the term populism. But that would be an evasion. One can’t ignore the important issues underlying the obsessive interest in the subject. Yet, it’s not obvious what the best way to characterise those issues is. By “best way” I mean one that does not either trivialise them or distort them.

Dictionaries characterise populism as “the political effort of ordinary people to resist elites”. This is also our intuitive understanding of the term. If that is so, a question arises. Populism in its widespread usage today has become a pejorative term (and I don’t just mean that the elites use the term pejoratively, which they are bound to; many others do so as well). But how can it be a bad thing for ordinary people to resist domination by elites? Another closely related question is: in effect, democracy too amounts to the resistance by ordinary people of the elites, so then what is the difference between populism and democracy? These are both good questions. I’ll come back to them at the end.

The first and most obvious thing we notice is how variously the term populism is used. And worse, as your own question points out, it is used to describe or denote quite contradictory things: Trump, [Bernie] Sanders, [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, Modi, Brexiteers, [Jeremy] Corbyn, [Marine] Le Pen,… not to mention, Peronism in Argentina, the Narodniks in Russia, the agrarian movements of the late 19th century in the United States. If all these get counted as populist, then can there be said to be any common property or properties possessed by this disparate array of movements and ideologies that can be identified and analysed and explained? Well, if by common properties we mean common contents in their political commitments, the answer will simply have to be “No”.

More here.

A Complex Fate

Sheila Fitzpatrick in The Nation:

Vasily Grossman is hard to pigeonhole. A Jewish novelist and journalist and not a party member, he was one of the Soviet Union’s leading war correspondents during World War II, first at Stalingrad, then with the Soviet Army moving westward. He wrote powerfully about the destruction of the Jews of the Ukraine and Poland. His big postwar novels, For the Right Cause and Life and Fate, drew on his wartime experiences, and at one point it seemed he might be a plausible contender for the role of the Soviet Tolstoy. But the novels, especially Life and Fate, had too strong a Jewish theme for the Soviet authorities. They also suggested a basic similarity between the Soviet and Nazi political systems, so he often had trouble with the censors, though his work was never under a total ban. Life and Fate was confiscated by the KGB in 1961 before publication, but his other writings stayed in print, and he remained at liberty and died of cancer a few years later.

Grossman was never a favorite of Soviet dissidents, being too Soviet-minded for them and coming too early, and during his lifetime he had prickly relations with the main reform-minded Soviet journal of his day, Novyi Mir. While Western literary critics were often lukewarm about his work for stylistic reasons, Life and Fate nevertheless finally found a niche with Western readers who enjoyed its big, multicharacter war-and-Holocaust narrative and its clear moral line, relaxed narration, and vivid realistic settings culled from his journalistic days. No doubt those readers also approved of the implicit message that Soviet Communism and Nazism were much the same thing.

More here.

Facebook created our culture of echo chambers—and it killed the one thing that could fix it

Tiffany Li & Belabbes Benkredda in Quartz:

This week Jürgen Habermas, one of the world’s most famous living philosophers, turned 90. A week before, Congress hosted yet another hearing investigating tech platforms Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple.

What does one event have to do with the other?

In 2006, long before social media echo chambers were a worldwide phenomenon, Habermas warned that “the rise of millions of fragmented chat rooms across the world” would lead to “a huge number of isolated issue publics”—micro public spheres that threaten the shared national conversations that are essential to democracy.

Habermas’s philosophies and the antitrust investigations both point to a fundamental issue we face today: the concept of a public sphere, and what tech companies and the government can and should do to protect democracy.

Facebook, like Twitter and Google, represents the modern version of the public sphere that Habermas and other democracy theorists have called for. With more of our lives lived online, we’ve stopped prioritizing physical spaces, and therefore lost shared spaces spaces for public discourse.

The internet has largely satisfied a human desire for connection, but it doesn’t necessarily cultivate a democratic exchange of information.

More here.