by Thomas R. Wells

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has exactly one strategy in his EU trade negotiations: threatening to drive Britain into a no-deal wall unless he gets what he wants. In other words, Johnson has been approaching this extraordinarily important matter of national interest as a peculiar version of the game of chicken. This explains much of his bizarre behaviour over the last 18 months, such as his antagonistic attitude, stubbornness, time-wasting, and even (part of) his buffoonery. Nevertheless, to be explained is not to be justified. Not only will the strategy fail, as it did before when Johnson used it in the Withdrawal Agreement negotiations. It has also foreclosed any hope for a substantive trade deal that could have fulfilled the positive aspirations of Brexiteers.

In a traditional game of chicken, two teenagers drive their cars directly towards each other at high speed, threatening mutually comprehensive destructive. The one who swerves away first is the loser, but still better off than if they had crashed. It is a game that rewards the most reckless player, and so it is no wonder that a famously irresponsible politician like Johnson would select it. He is willing to make huge bets with Britain’s national interest because he seems to see politics as just another game, and one that he gets to play with other people’s money rather than his own. The way Johnson decided to support the EU referendum back in 2016 illustrates this. He calculated that supporting Brexit gave him his best chance of winning the Prime Ministership – naturally the public interest was irrelevant to his considerations.  Not unrelated to Johnson’s disinterest in taking politics seriously, the other reason he relies so heavily on gambling as a method of government is that he is famously lazy and incompetent (in stark contrast to his Churchillian self-image). Thus, Johnson decided to play the trade negotiations as a game of chicken both because he knows that EU politicians and institutions do take the responsibility of politics seriously and will be unable to match his recklessness, and also because he knew that neither he nor the witless Brexit loyalists he has filled his government with would be capable of conducting a normal negotiation process. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

Audio version

When you say you have an ancestral temple, it sounds fancy. To be fair, some are. My mother’s ancestral temple, the Vaitheeswaran Koil, is a vast complex with five towers and hall after cavernous hall housing both worshippers and elephants. The temple is dedicated to Shiva in his incarnation as a healer. Perched on the banks of the Cauvery river, a dip in any one of its eighteen water tanks is said to cure all ailments. Dedicated to Mars, it is one of only nine ancient Tamil temples devoted to the planets. (Before you get excited about the prescience of the nine, I feel obliged to inform you that two of them are the sun and the moon, and another two are “Rahu” and “Ketu” who reside somewhere between the sun and moon, causing eclipses.) It has gold plated pillars; emerald encrusted deities; and inscriptions dating back to at least the Chola period in the twelfth century. All very impressive.

I would bask in the reflected glory except that I don’t stem from a matrilineal religious tradition, so my ancestral temple is said to be my father’s. Our parents’ biannual visits to India always included a temple tour with a mandatory visit to the ancestral temple. The itinerary never included Vaitheeswaran Koil, and looking back, I can see why. My ancestral temple was in a village called Tholacheri, and I use the term “village” loosely. Tholacheri contained four or five mud-walled, thatched roof structures surrounding three sides of a viscous pond. On the fourth side lay the temple compound.

The compound’s architectural ensemble comprised the temple itself, consisting of a small anteroom and alcove; a hut that served as the priest’s residence; and four or five giant-sized painted terracotta statues of Ayyanar deities. These statues were armed with machetes. They had bulbous eyes, protruding tongues, and outsized fangs. As an adult they looked almost comical but as children they struck the fear of God in us, which I suppose was the whole point. Read more »

by Jackson Arn

I: Bubbles

Not knowing they’re impossible, they slip

through geometry or fitting, go

squarish where they must, kissing

the rainbow mouths to right-left-up-down

from here to death.

Bathing in clones, each holds,

with skin and neighbors,

a secret breath.

Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

There is a spate of popularizations of neuroscience promoting the idea that “reality isn’t something you perceive, it’s something you create in your mind”, that “everything we perceive is a hallucination created by the brain”, or — as one Scientific American article put it — “It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is a figment of our imagination.”

These popularizations are unfortunate, because they run together at least two claims that we should distinguish from each other. The first claim is that perception isn’t merely a process in which the brain passively receives impressions from the world. Rather, it’s a process in which the brain is an active participant, testing predictions about the world against the inputs that it receives. The second claim is that, if the brain is an active participant in perception, then perception “creates reality in your mind” or is a “hallucination”.

Now, when neuroscientists make the first sort of claim, they’re speaking on the basis of their expertise as scientists. Indeed, the past thirty years have seen the rise of views in psychology and neuroscience that understand the brain as, in the words of  the noted philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, a “prediction engine”.

Here’s how Lisa Feldman Barrett puts this idea in her book, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain :

The discovery of simulation in the late 1990s ushered in a new era in psychology and neuroscience. What we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it. … Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest. (Feldman Barrett, Chap 2)

Of course, it’s important not to downplay the significance of this development in our understanding of perception. Traditionally, philosophers drew a stark distinction between perception and inference. On this traditional view, perception is the primary route by which we acquire new information, whereas inference can only transmit information that we already acquired. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Tapestry. November, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Emrys Westacott

Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class is a famous, influential, and rather peculiar book. Veblen (1857 – 1929) was a progressive-minded scholar who wrote about economics, social institutions, and culture. The Theory of the Leisure Class, which appeared in 1899, was the first of ten books that he published during his lifetime. It is the original source of the expression “conspicuous consumption,” was once required reading on many graduate syllabi, and parts of it are still regularly anthologized.

The central argument of the can be briefly summarized. In the earliest human communities, pretty much everyone contributed to securing the means of life. In this situation there was no steep or rigid social hierarchy. Cooperative traits were socially valuable and therefore generally respected, and individual property was not important. At some point, however, certain members of the group created a situation in which they didn’t need to beaver away at mundane tasks like tending crops or making clothes. These individuals would typically be the biggest, strongest, boldest, most competitive types–for example, men who were good at hunting, which made them also good at fighting against other hostile groups. Social hierarchies emerged. Women and the less able-bodied men drudged away to produce the means of life; men who possessed the necessary traits engaged only in activities such as hunting and fighting. These men became the “leisure class.”

The leisure class came to include others who did no genuinely productive work, for instance, priests and administrators. This elite came to look down on productive work, which was performed by the majority who had to do it out of necessity. Not having to do such work thus came to be a distinguishing mark of a person’s higher social standing. In smaller societies it was fairly easy to flaunt this privilege in the form of “conspicuous leisure”, but in larger, more complex societies, one exhibited one’s status by showing off one’s wealth through conspicuous consumption. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Robyn Repko Waller

Academic titles aren’t everything. But they signpost what might not otherwise be socially salient; I, and others like me, are present here as members of this academic community. 

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal published a now widely criticized op-ed piece, imploring Dr. Jill Biden to drop her academic title from her public persona before her tenure as First Lady. Many outlets have condemned the misogynistic tone of the piece, which refers to Dr. Biden as “kiddo,” disparages her dissertation as sounding “unpromising,” and encourages her instead to focus, as if it is mutually exclusive, on the excitement of living in the White House. Even the author’s former employer has distanced themselves from his views. 

Now, the author, Mr. Epstein, does provide an argument of sorts for his views, backed with anecdotal evidence. He cites his decades-long career as a university lecturer and editor of a scholarly publication, a career he has advanced without a Masters or PhD. Sometimes, he notes, students have called him by ‘Dr.’ He reports that he has an honorary doctorate, but he speaks poorly of the kind of individuals who typically have such honorary degrees bestowed upon them in contemporary times — wealthy donors and entertainers. Rather, he quips, “no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child.” (An apropos male doctor reference in a misogynist piece.) Charitably (against all initial recoiling), we may read this as the view that the mere possession of a doctorate, at least of the honorary variety, does little to track the merit or quality of work or worth of the individual. Using the title, then, presumably, does not signify what it seems.

Of course, we may well agree that plenty of meritorious work, academic or otherwise, has been produced by those without a doctorate or even a bachelor’s degree. To think otherwise is to slide into the growing elitism about the “uneducated.” I was a first-generation (undergraduate) college student. Having grown up in a proud working-class family, whose character —community-mindedness, warmth, ingenuity, courage — and work ethic were second-to-none, I also recoil at  this growing elitism. Plus I can understand the frustration about celebrity and money trumping desert for academic accolades. Few scholars, if any, have gotten nearly as much attention as Nicole Polizzi, aka Snooki, did when delivering a lecture to a university (although I’m sure it was an interesting address). More seriously, there is a severe socioeconomic barrier to entry into college in the US and elsewhere.  Read more »