Through the Lookingglass Creek, and What Hope Was Found There

by David Oates

For my whole life, the world has been ending. For various alleged reasons. . . but always there’s been an overhang of dread and fear, the end times already here, human cussedness and sinfulness and greed at work in every moment, everywhere, eating away at what’s left of goodness and preparing the Day of Wrath, the horror, the tribulation, the Last Conflict, the End.

The “end times” got preached regularly from our Baptist pulpit, and during the summer a traveling evangelist would offer several days of extra-scary sermons, whoo boy, could that guy paint a picture! And we’d get scared all over again.

And yet, somehow, all of the various Beasts and Final Battles have failed to materialize. The Late Great Planet Earth spins forward in its usual way, bestselling doomsters notwithstanding, and lo, now I have arrived at my seventy-first year in this cavalcade of dread. Intact. Unscathed. Or anyway only mildly scathed. It’s been prediction, prediction, prediction. . . then nothing.

Funny how that happens. Read more »

The Parisian Pigeon

by Ethan Seavey

Photo by James Parrott

I sit in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in this the 19th and penultimate arrondissement. We are a pocket of American students lounging down by the perfectly circular pond. We rehash old jokes in unapologetic English which go unheard by the hundreds of Parisians sitting on the hill like Greek citizens watching lesser and stupider gods. It is the weekend so we cross the city on the Métro and by pure luck make it to our destination and once we’ve arrived we mispronounce the name of this handsome park.

Right at the edge of the water stands a man who rips off pieces of bread from the bakery and throws them to the mallards who flock before him. The duck man loves them and they return the feeling. But he so hates the pigeons which walk up to him on the grass and seek the crumbs he throws to the mallards. When they approach he kicks at them; and if they watch from nearby, he chases them with a fallen bough from a horse chestnut tree. He smokes something that is not tobacco and is not cannabis. It smells pleasant enough. It makes him more relaxed and still more vicious towards the approaching pigeons.

We sit by the water and some of us watch him. We are New Yorkers though most of us have only been in New York for a year or two because our time spent studying at Washington Square was cut short by the pandemic. And in New York at Washington Square there is no duck man and there is the pigeon man. We loved to see him enveloped by the purple green flashes of gray feathered flock. He let every oil-slicked feral disfigured city bird onto his lap and onto his shoulder and head. Read more »

The Nonidentity Problem: Can an act be wrong if it doesn’t harm anyone?

by Tim Sommers

If we take action now to mitigate global climate change, it might make life a little worse for people now and in the near future, but it will make life much better for people further in the future. Suppose, for whatever reason, we do nothing.

Since future people will have much worse lives, it seems that we owe it to future generations to do something now. But if we do things differently now, it will have the side-effect of bringing into existence different people than those that would have been brought into existence if we did nothing.

That might sound strange. But if you procreate in October instead of December, if you go build windmills and delay going to college and so meet someone else or the same person at a different time, if you do almost anything differently the children you have will not be the ones you would have had.

If we do nothing, do people in the future have a right to complain that we made their lives much worse? Here’s the odd bit. The future people who have better lives because we acted, and the ones who have worse lives because we didn’t, are not the same people.  As long as your life is worth living, you can’t complain about things done before you existed that helped bring you into existence, because if any of them had been different, very likely you would not exist. Again, as long as your life is worth living the choice is not between you having a better or worse life, it’s a choice between existing and not existing.

That seems crazy, right? Philosophers call it the nonidentity problem. Read more »

Corporal Punishment Revisited

by Peter Wells

Corporal punishment is a sickening and ugly procedure. Apart from the fact that one person is deliberately hurting another (usually smaller) at close quarters, it is often associated with anger, and even sadism. It is too often administered without reflection, too soon after a perceived offence has been committed. It is humiliating for the victim, especially if done in public, possibly causing lasting resentment and/or low self-esteem. It may encourage the development of violent attitudes among its recipients. The recent efforts to outlaw it are therefore humane and well-intentioned and, as far as they go, praiseworthy.

Unless, as in the case of Capital Punishment (q.v.), the alternatives turn out to be worse.

Let us look in turn at three loci in which corporal punishment has been used (and is now outlawed) in the UK: school, the home, and the criminal justice system.

As a teacher for half a century, I’ve given a lot of thought to how classes might be managed and children’s misdemeanours dealt with, and much has changed in that time. In the past, in addition to formal canings or beatings, administered by a headteacher or a responsible deputy, teachers in the classroom were given unofficial licence to strike children – which, as they were usually sitting in desks, meant hitting the part of the body most exposed: the head. Sometimes they threw things – chalk, if you were lucky. Aside from the obvious physical danger of this practice, it was inconsistent and suffered from flawed motivations. Teachers developed irrational hatreds for particular students, and therefore punished them with exceptional savagery. They were sometimes angry for some extraneous reason. The relationship between the crime and the punishment was ill-defined. I can remember dropping off to sleep in a warm classroom after lunch, and waking to find my head ringing from a blow, my spectacles broken on the floor beside me, and the red face of my French teacher a few inches from mine, roaring with rage. QED – it was a long time ago, and I still remember it vividly! And I particularly resented it because I was a keen student, who normally kept to the rules. Read more »

Tracking the Impact of Judicial Decisions

by Varun Gauri

As a consequential Supreme Court term gets underway, with potentially large consequences for women’s autonomy and health, it’s worth thinking about the ways in which judges do or do not consider the real world consequences of their decisions.

In his confirmation hearings, Justice Roberts, like a Clark Kent intent on hiding his true identity, possibly embarrassed by the size of his ambitions and self-conception, adopted a pose of humility: On the bench, Roberts said, he would just call balls and strikes. No one goes to a ball game to watch the umpire. He wouldn’t pitch or bat, just call ‘em like he saw ‘em.

The metaphor can’t work for an apex constitutional court. The whole point is that the court has final say over the interpretation of the constitution; in other words, the justices determine the rules of the game, not just the size of the strike zone, at the margins. Nor does the metaphor work for lower level courts, which do not merely apply statutory law and judicial precedent, but strategically push the boundaries of laws, rules, and extant court opinions, which themselves are often purposefully vague or discretionary. As if umpires were saying, “Strike three! In my opinion. For now. If so and so is true.”

The metaphor also fails because umpires are participants in the game of baseball. They enforce the rules. If a batter says, “I know that’s three strikes, but I’m staying up here and taking another swing, anyway,” an umpire righteously tosses the batter from the game.

In contrast, in the United States (and most other countries) judges typically don’t enforce, or even monitor the effects of, their rulings. Read more »

Another World is Coming: Liberals, Socialists and the New Right

by Chris Horner

The political world is changing again. In place of the neoliberal politics of the last decades, capitalism and the nation state is undergoing one of its periodic metamorphoses. The period of what Nancy Fraser has called ‘neoliberal progressivism’ – broadly progressive stances by many governments on issues of sexual choice, reproductive rights and so on, coupled with an economic agenda committed to ‘balancing the books,’ actually cutting public expenditure, austerity in other words, is slowly giving way to a new dispensation. This new approach is unsurprisingly favoured mainly by parties of the right, and it threatens to leave centre left parties with a problem. This hasn’t happened in every developed country in the same way, and like any political phenomenon, it is subject to the ebb and flow of electoral fortune. But whether the right is formally in power or not, the we can see a family resemblance in the different forms that the right has recently taken. Read more »

Death of a Neighbor

by Thomas Larson

Yesterday during a morning nap, Mrs. Jo Anglemire, a downstairs neighbor at the apartment complex where I live and the wife of Val, the maintenance man, died. I came home around noon, arriving moments after their adult daughter had heard the news. As I walked up, I could hear her shouting repeatedly, “No, not my mommy!” and “Daddy! Daddy! Make Mommy come back!” The words cut the air like mad hornets.

I walked up to their apartment. The screen door was propped open. Three people were in the living room. One man, tall and gaunt, stood alone. The other, heavy-set with shorts and long socks, stood holding the woman who wailed. The large man stood still, in an eerie frieze—arms clamped around her as she pushed her head up and screamed. He held tightly, her head giddy as if under the broadside of a fire hose. Leaning against the outside wall was a white-cushioned stretcher. I slumped against the doorjamb.

Her squalls kept on, piercing my muscles, weakening me. I turned away, walked toward the yard. “No, Daddy. She can live, Daddy. You can change it, Daddy. Daddy, you can change it!” She shrieked and gulped in her words, and some sobs got caught in a rhythmic clucking, seemingly unstoppable. Read more »

Charaiveti: Journey From India To The Two Cambridges And Berkeley And Beyond, Part 12

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

I knew that Cambridge was by the river Cam, but the first day when I looked for it I could not find it. From the map I knew that on my way to the Economics Department I had to cross it, I stopped and looked around but I could not see anything like a river. Then I asked a passerby, and he pointed to what I had thought was a small ditch or a canal. It was difficult to take it as a river, as in India I was used to much bigger rivers. Over time, however, I saw the serene beauty of this mini-river, with its placid water by the weeping willows, the swans, gliding boats and all.

There was a time when the Cambridge Economics Department was one of the most famous in the world. By the time I went as a student its relative rank had declined somewhat, particularly compared with a few American universities, but it was still very high. As I was going to specialize in International Trade Theory, the professor who was assigned to supervise me was James Meade (later to get the Nobel Prize in that field). He was an extremely decent, soft-spoken, and modest man (he declined a knighthood). I was told that he was a superb musician (I occasionally heard him humming inside when I knocked at his door) and an excellent carpenter.

He was also an austere man. He usually gave me appointments at 8 AM; in wintry mornings when I arrived shivering from the long walk from my bed-sitter, I’d find that he had switched off the heating in his office (he, of course, asked me if I minded, but how could I). He was the most conscientious supervisor imaginable. He’d promptly and meticulously read all the writings I inflicted on him, write detailed comments on the margin, mark a few lines on some pages saying that he had not vetted those lines as the mathematics used there was somewhat beyond him, which I should get checked by someone else (at his urging, I had soon a joint supervisor appointed: Frank Hahn). Read more »

Monday, September 27, 2021

Of Small Nations: An Interlude

by David J. Lobina

Last time around I said I would bring this series on language and nationalism to an end by considering an actual example: the case of Catalan nationalism, a discussion likely to be testy. I still intend to do that, and to be a bit argumentative about it to boot; however, it has occurred to me in these last four weeks that the follow-up between the first three posts and the case study of Catalan nationalism is not as smooth as it should be. This is because of an issue I brought up in the last post, where I rather briefly mentioned that the Catalan case exemplified what is sometimes called a peripheral nationalist movement, in contrast to core nationalist movements. To this I should have added that in the case of peripheral nationalisms the historical process that turns a state or a country into a nation-state is slightly different to what is the case for core nationalisms – additional factors are involved – and this point deserves to be spelled out a little bit. I shall do just that this week, and I will come back to the Catalans, finally, in the next post.

As explained in the previous three posts, it is certainly noteworthy, though not at all surprising, that the word nation seems to have been initially used in history as a place name and only much later did the politically-laden term of nationalism actually appear. The feeling of belonging to a particular place, after all, has plausibly been a feature of human gatherings for centuries and it is not intrinsically tied to the concepts of “nation” or “nationalism” per se.

In medieval Europe at least, the village where a person was born was typically that person’s “country”, as the historian Henry Kamen has chronicled, and this sentiment was still present in many parts of the world well into the 20th century. For instance, the Belorussian-speaking people of Polesia, a historical region stretching from modern Poland to Russia, simply replied ‘from here’ when asked about their nationality in a 1919 census, and even as recently as the 1950s, we have the curious case of captured Egyptian soldiers during the second Arab-Israeli war who seemed to know very little about their own country, instead identifying more strongly with their local villages.[i] Read more »

The Monty Hall Problem and a Covid-19 Precaution

by John Allen Paulos

The well-known counterintuitive Monty Hall problem continues to baffle people if the emails I receive are any indication. A meta-problem is to understand why so many people are unconvinced by the various solutions. Sometimes people even cite the large number of the unconvinced as proof that the solution is a matter of real controversy, just as in politics an inconvenient fact, such as the ubiquity of Covid-19, is obscured by fake controversies.

This analogy is a bit deeper than it may seem. So, first the original problem, which arose because of a television show, “Let’s Make a Deal,” that was popular in the ’60s and ’70s and has been resurrected in one form or another since then. In the show a contestant is presented with three doors, behind one of which, he or she is told, is a new car. The other two doors have nothing behind them.

“The Let’s Make a Deal” host, the eponymous Monty Hall, asks the contestant to pick one of the three doors. Once the contestant has done so, Monty opens one of the two remaining unpicked doors to reveal what, if anything, is behind it, but is careful never to open the door hiding the promised new car. After Monty has opened one of the two unpicked doors, he offers the contestant the chance to switch his or her choice. The question is: Should the contestant stay with the original choice of door and hope the car is behind it or switch to the remaining unopened door? Read more »

Justification and the Value-Free Ideal in Science

by Fabio Tollon

One of the cornerstones good of science is that its results furnish us with an objective understanding of the world. That is, science, when done correctly, tells us how the world is, independently of how we might feel the world to be (based, for example, on our values or commitments). It is thus central to science, and its claims to objectivity, that values do not override facts. An important feature of this view of science is the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values. Simply, epistemic values are those which would seem to make for good science: external coherence, explanatory power, parsimony, etc. Non-epistemic values, on the other hand, concern things like our value judgements, biases, and preferences. In order for science to work well, so the story goes, it should only be epistemic values that come to matter when we assess the legitimacy of a given scientific theory (this is often termed the “value-free ideal”). Thus, a central presupposition underpinning this value-free ideal is that we can in fact mark a distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values Unfortunately, as with most things in philosophy, things are not that simple.

The first thing to note are the various ways that the value-free ideal plays out in the context of discovery, justification, and application. With respect to the context of discovery, it doesn’t seem to matter if we find that non-epistemic values are operative. While decisions about funding lines, the significance we attach to various theories, and the choice of questions we might want to investigate are all important insofar as they influence where we might choose to look for evidence, they do not determine whether the theories we come up with are valid or not.

Similarly, in the context of application, we could invoke the age-old is-ought distinction: scientific theories cannot justify value-laden beliefs. For example, even if research shows that taller people are more intelligent, it would not follow that taller people are more valuable than shorter people. Such a claim would depend on the value that one ascribes to intelligence beforehand. Therefore, how we go about applying scientific theories is influenced by non-epistemic values, and this is not necessarily problematic.

Thus, in both the context of validation and the context of discovery, we find non-epistemic values to be operative. This, however, is not seen as much of a problem, so long as these values do not “leak” into the context of justification, as it is here that science’s claims to objectivity are preserved. Is this really possible in practice though? Read more »

Monday Poem

Looking Up

the horizon circle,
past which I can see no further
in any direction other than up,
hems me in,
but looking up I can see forever
or as far as lightspeed allows
or until more time passes
or, more truly,
until now shifts again,
but by then I will have passed,
whatever that means,
since to pass is merely a term
proffering a hint of understanding
without understanding,
but there’s so much hint in being alive
the truth of our metaphysical deficiencies
has become second nature, acceptable,
we’ve become creatures of sacred
misunderstandings,
we live by them
never silent
looking up

Jim Culleny
9/21/21

Re-Wild Thing

by Deanna K. Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog)

It had been a long time since I thought about lawns. I don’t mean in a grand philosophical sense, or the stoned contemplation of a single blade of grass. I mean thought about them at all. Before moving to Mississippi we had lived in Vancouver for 13 years, where we felt lucky to have a place to store our toothbrushes and maybe an extra pair of slacks; we really hit the jackpot when we acquired a postage-stamp-sized balcony on which we could murder tomato plants. Actual yards were out of the question for anyone who hadn’t bought a house on the west end of town 30 years ago; by the time we moved to Vancouver in 2006 as a tenure-track assistant professor and a trailing-spouse adjunct, it was already clear that we would never own a lawn.

And yet here we are: the proud owners of nearly an acre of chemical-soaked herbage dotted here and there with scrubby flowering bushes native to an ecosystem half a planet away. Or at least that’s what came along with our new house in Mississippi, which was the main attraction: a 1962 bungalow with two fireplaces, built-in bookcases, arched doorways, and mellow hardwood floors. To be honest, I didn’t want the lawn—or the yard at all, really. If it had been possible to purchase a mid-century gem with a porch swing and seven ceiling fans that was floating on a gossamer cloud in mid-air—basically a house from The Jetsons—I would have done so.[1] I took one look at that expanse of greenery, factored in the whole located-in-the-Deep-South element, and saw nothing but a never-ending round of backbreaking chores. And boy, was I right. But not for the reasons you might think. Read more »

Ode To An Old Lump Of Coal

by Mike O’Brien

Some readers, having a particular taste in humour, will guess the subject of this piece from the title. “Just an old lump of coal” was a favoured expression of self-reference for the recently deceased comedian Norm Macdonald, who died on September 14th. It was typical of the archaic and self-deprecatory style that marked his career, a poetic and perfomatively (though not necessarily substantively) confessional body of work that seemed sparse in volume but rich in depth. I say that his confession was not necessarily substantive because I didn’t know him, and am not privy to the facts of his life and the contents of his heart. He may have been affecting an unaffected style for dramatic effect. Or he may have been baring his soul earnestly, while allowing his audience to laud him, mistakenly, for so artfully feigning candour. I don’t know which is the case. Nor, it seems, do many who did know him, if not intimately than at least closely and with ample time for exposure. A formidable trick, that, to keep secrets in a business where self-exposure is considered the primary means of production.

Much has been made of the fact that he had cancer for the last nine years, a fact he kept private for fear of polluting his audience’s reactions with sympathy, or worse, pity. Or maybe he just didn’t want to be bothered by well-wishers and news hounds. Or, more maybe still, he just didn’t think anyone needed or was owed any information about his life beyond what he chose to share or fabricate. Read more »

Then and Now: Reading Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the Future with My Mother

by Nicola Sayers 

What is it to be twenty? Forty? Sixty? Eighty? These points that mark the four quarters of a life — fifths if you’re lucky, larger portions if you’re not. 

*

We read the book together, my mother and I. The book, a work of autofiction, is Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the Future, and it tells the story of a twenty-three year old (S.H.) arriving in New York in 1978, and of the same woman in 2016, aged sixty-one, as she discovers her old journals from that earlier time. As we read, I am forty and my mother over seventy, although how much over I cannot say. I have learnt that there are those who treat you differently when they know your age, regardless of your health or vitality. That age is a signifier that in the end betrays you. 

*

‘Then’ and ‘now’. Hustvedt draws attention to these words, these perspectives, again and again as she sets her reader up. Her central concern is with how a person changes between then and now; her central question, what remains of that girl? 

*

The young S.H. could be any young, reflective woman setting out to soak up what the world has to offer. I admit to feeling a particular affinity with Hustvedt: Scandinavian roots, Jewish husband, PhD in literature before focussing on her own writing. But her story is in truth an archetypal one. She could be Felicity from the eponymous 90s TV-drama, going to New York in search of her crush Ben and of herself; or Jo from Little Women, heading off with pen and persistence to discover, write and right the world. 

And so, I arrive in the city I have seen in films and have read about in books, which is New York City but also other cities, Paris and London and St. Petersburg, the city of the hero’s fortunes and misfortunes, a real city that is also an imaginary city.

I am reminded by Hustvedt’s prose of Joan Didion’s famous essay ‘Goodbye to all That’ about her experiences as a young person in New York, and about leaving it all behind. For both Hustvedt and Didion the defining experience of youth is of life as a field of possibility: Who will you meet? What will you do? Who will you love? What will you be? Read more »

43 Reasons To Go For A Walk

by Mary Hrovat

1. The public library is holding a book or DVD for me.

2. I’m going to see my older son and his family.

3. It’s dusk, and I love to walk in the twilight.

4. It’s late in the evening, a few days before Christmas 2019, and my younger son has just arrived from out of town. He’d like to drop off his rental car, and I decide to go with him to the rental lot so we can walk back to my house together. We stride through the chilly hush of a college town on Christmas break, past colorful lights and down dark familiar streets, talking and laughing.

5. The dew point is below 60°F, and it’s not too hot. I might as well make the most of this break from the heat and get out for a bit.

6. The university library is holding a book for me.

7. I want to see the ginkgo trees in the park in all their autumn glory.

8. It’s been raining heavily all day, and it’s still coming down pretty hard. But I’m out of lettuce, and these library books won’t return themselves. Also, I’m curious about whether the creek running through campus has overrun its banks. (It has.) Read more »