Laura Kipnis in TNR:

The non-modest mission of her sprightly new book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, is to develop a strand of ethical thought that she labels “Neo-Socratic,” and which departs entirely from the prevailing ethical systems of Kant, Mill, and Aristotle. Among the challenges of the project, she notes, is that Socrates was content to refute everyone else’s positions while affirming nothing concrete himself, meaning that his philosophical heirs do a lot of performative contradiction, which is not sufficient. Nor is what we like to call “the Socratic method”—teaching by asking questions until students produce the correct answers—what Socrates had in mind. Such attempts to mimic him miss the point, which is that true thinking should be dangerous to your intellectual equilibrium. It should strive for answers that overthrow the terms of the questions being asked, not simply prove a point.

The failure to be sufficiently or dangerously philosophical besets most academic philosophers, she charges, who take off their philosopher hats when they arrive home after teaching their classes, shielding their lives from the kinds of inquiries that might disrupt their comfortable existences. They’re afraid of philosophy, and not actually doing it.

More here.

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Naomi Craine in The Militant:

During the last year of his life, Malcolm organized and spoke with increasing clarity on questions that remain central for working people today.

“I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing,” he told a television reporter in 1965. “I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think that it will be based upon the color of the skin, as Elijah Muhammad had taught it.”

Malcolm acted on his conviction that the fight to end racial oppression here was part of the worldwide struggle against colonialism and imperialism. He met and worked with other revolutionaries, taking two extended trips to Africa and the Middle East. He was attracted to the workers and farmers governments that had come to power through popular revolutions in Algeria and Cuba.

He was drawn to work with the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S.

Speaking at a Militant Labor Forum in New York in May 1964, Malcolm pointed to the example set by the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, where the capitalists and landlords had been expropriated. In contrast, he said, “The system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system, period.”

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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The Herd

The herd is so vitally important for the individual
that their views, beliefs, feelings, constitute reality
more so than what his senses and his reason tell him.

For the majority of people, their identity is precisely
rooted in conformity with social clichés: “They”
are who they are supposed to be, hence fear
of ostracism implies fear of loss of identity,
and the combination of both has a most
powerful effect.

Ability to act according to one’s conscience
depends upon the degree to which one has
transcended the limits of one’s society and
become a citizen of the world.

by Eric Fromm
from Poetic Outlaws

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LuHan Gabel in The Ideas Letter:

The Japanese feminist Chizuko Ueno begins her book, The Ideology In Order to Survive, with an anecdote. In 1994, Ueno attended an international conference organized by the Japanese progressive journal Sekai and the French magazine Le Monde Diplomatique. At the end of the conference, a French speaker asked the audience: “Human rights is a concept that originated in France. Do you think it is universal?”

“This is a tricky question to answer,” Ueno thought to herself. “If we answered yes, that means ‘you people in Asia also accept this French concept.’ And it also means to acknowledge French universalism. But if we answered no, that could mean ‘Asians are such un-enlightened people who can’t even accept the concept of human rights.’”

After some pondering, however, Ueno thought of a better response: “Human rights is a special French concept. It claims to be universal, but it cannot reach the level of universality it claims, precisely because the West has had monopoly on it.”

Much has changed in the ensuing 30 years since this debate took place. I can imagine the French speaker in this story now asking herself the same question as Nicholas Bequelin does in his recent Ideas Letter piece: “Can human rights survive the decline of global Western hegemony?”

More here.

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Ho-fung Hung in Dissent:

The China boom has ended. The country’s annual economic growth rate has decelerated from a height of more than 14 percent in 2007 to less than 6 percent in 2023. Total indebtedness (including both internal and external debt) surpassed an alarming 365 percent of GDP as of the first quarter of 2024, according to the Institute of International Finance—much higher than comparable middle-income countries like Brazil (208 percent), Argentina (152 percent), and Indonesia (86 percent). The collapse or near collapse of real estate giants like Evergrande, which just a few years ago was the poster child for China’s economic miracle, is just one example of the country’s economic difficulties.

Over the last three decades, China has experienced multiple economic crises driven by domestic imbalances or external shocks, including overheating in 1992–93, deflation in the aftermath of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, and fallout from the global financial crisis of 2008. Each time, the Chinese economy turned around swiftly thanks to decisive policy adjustments (Zhu Rongji’s reforms in 1994), new openings to trade (the 2001 accession to the WTO), and aggressive financial stimulus (the 2009–10 state-driven investment spree). These past successes have led many China watchers to assume the Chinese government can repeat the magic and rejuvenate the economy once again. But China’s current economic crisis has resulted from a long and deep structural imbalance that will be much more difficult to resolve.

More here.

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Branko Milanovic over at his substack:

One has to admire Quinn Slobodan: in order to write his most recent book “Hayek’s bastards: The neoliberal roots of the populist right” (the title is modeled after “Voltaire’s bastards” by John Ralston Saul), he had to enter the world of madmen who produced movies, fictionalized novels, investment newsletters, and comic books detailing the forthcoming economic apocalypse (several apocalypses every year for half a century), invraisemblable conspiracies and own racial superiority. All of that was happening because the piles of money were paid by various tycoons to maintain in a comfortable lifestyle and publishing activity Mont Pelerin Society fellows, so that they could continue meeting each other and exchanging the predictions of doom and gloom in the luxury hotels of the Riviera, Alpine resorts and even on the Galapagos islands.

The reader is unsure if this is really a world of madmen or the world of smart people who pretend to be madmen in order to extract money from the self-interested oligarchs and credulous readers (so called “investors”) who subscribe to their investment newsletters. One has a strong felling of a con business, reminiscent of evangelical scandals where preachers call for humility and love while the real business is one of money.

Did it have to be so? Friedrich Hayek is a serious thinker. Did his writings empower madmen who in many ways distorted his thinking (I will come to that later)?

More here.

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Pablo Pryluka in Phenomenal World:

Javier Milei’s rise to the presidency of Argentina came with all sorts of promises for economic, political and cultural repair. In one campaign speech in the run up to the October 2023 election, Milei claimed that should his party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), come to power, “Argentina could reach living standards similar to those of Italy or France in fifteen years. If you give me twenty years,” he went on, “Germany. And if you give me thirty-five years, the United States.” When he did in fact come into office in December of that year, he did so with a bold political agenda but little congressional support; La Libertad Avanza won just 15 percent of seats in the Cámara de Diputados and 10 percent in the Senate, both of which remained dominated by Peronists on the one side and Juntos por el Cambio (Together for Change), the coalition that led Mauricio Macri to the presidency in 2015, on the other. The promises had been large but, though victorious, Milei had been granted a tight space in which to maneuver.

Milei’s popularity was premised on his reputation as a staunch market radical and his apparent position against Argentina’s political elite. In presidential debates, he warned against “the damned caste” that, he claimed, “in fifty years would turn Argentina into the biggest slum in the world.” Corrupt politicians were keeping the public hooked on state handouts so as to keep themselves elected. In turn, the system produced budgetary deficits that led to rising debt or excessive money printing, driving inflation and economic collapse.

The solution he proposed was a radical deregulation of the economy, focusing on a reduction in public spending and taxes.

More here.

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Tobias Rees at Noema:

Tobias Rees, founder of an AI studio located at the intersection of philosophy, art and technology, sat down with Noema Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels to discuss the philosophical significance of generative AI.

Nathan Gardels: What remains unclear to us humans is the nature of machine intelligence we have created through AI and how it changes our own understanding of ourselves. What is your perspective as a philosopher who has contemplated this issue not from within the Ivory Tower, but “in the wild,” in the engineering labs at Google and elsewhere?

Tobias Rees: AI profoundly challenges how we have understood ourselves.

Why do I think so?

We humans live by a large number of conceptual presuppositions. We may not always be aware of them — and yet they are there and shape how we think and understand ourselves and the world around us. Collectively, they are the logical grid or architecture that underlies our lives.

What makes AI such a profound philosophical event is that it defies many of the most fundamental, most taken-for-granted concepts — or philosophies — that have defined the modern period and that most humans still mostly live by. It literally renders them insufficient, thereby marking a deep caesura.

Let me give a concrete example.

More here.

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Emily Cataneo at Undark:

In “Seven Deadly Sins,” Leschziner, a neurologist and sleep physician, interrogates the evolutionary, neurological, and psychological underpinnings of the seven greatest transgressions in Dante’s “Inferno”: wrath, lust, pride, greed, envy, sloth, and gluttony. He concludes that these so-called sins are inextricably interwoven with the experience of being a person, and that to understand them is “to gain insights into why we do what we do: the biology of being human.”

Leschziner had several personal reasons for wanting to understand humanity’s darkest side. His family was defined by the trauma of his grandfather’s narrow escape from the Holocaust, a “supreme expression of human sin.” Leschziner’s curiosity about sin was also sparked by his 25 years as a doctor in London hospitals, where he’s seen the best and worst of humankind on display. In writing this book, he sought to push himself beyond merely observing and treating his patients’ issues and instead “to see beneath the surface, to delve into the depths.”

More here.

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Minouche Shafik at Project Syndicate:

It is a multipolar world, with China, Russia, India, Turkey, Brazil, South Africa, and the Gulf states challenging the old order, alongside other emerging powers demanding a greater voice in shaping the rules of the international system. Meanwhile, belief in “universal values” and the idea of an “international community” has waned, as many point to the hypocrisy of rich countries hoarding vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic and the response to the Ukraine war compared to the failures to act in response to humanitarian crises in Gaza, Sudan, and many other places.

Adding to these pressures, US President Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw the security guarantees that have been crucial for Europe and Japan, quit many international organizations, and impose trade tariffs on friends and foes alike. When the guarantor of the system walks away from it, what comes next?

We may be heading to a zero-order world in which rules are replaced by power – a very difficult environment for smaller countries. Or it may be a world of large regional blocs, with the United States dominating its hemisphere, China prevailing over East Asia, and Russia reasserting control over the countries of the former Soviet Union. Ideally, we can find our way to a new rules-based order that more accurately reflects our multipolar world.

To get there, we need to better understand why the old order failed.

More here.

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Christian Macedonia in Singularity Hub:

Most work using AI in drug development intends to reduce the time and money it takes to bring one drug to market—currently 10 to 15 years and $1 billion to $2 billion. But can AI truly revolutionize drug development and improve success rates?

…Between 2010 and 2022, 20 AI-focused startups discovered 158 drug candidates, 15 of which advanced to clinical trials. Some of these drug candidates were able to complete preclinical testing in the lab and enter human trials in just 30 months, compared with the typical 3 to 6 years. This accomplishment demonstrates AI’s potential to accelerate drug development. On the other hand, while AI platforms may rapidly identify compounds that work on cells in a petri dish or in animal models, the success of these candidates in clinical trials—where the majority of drug failures occur—remains highly uncertain.

More here.

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Guy Mount in Black Perspectives:

Slaves freed themselves.  With this majestic assertion in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois all but cemented Black Reconstruction as one of the most influential American history books of the twentieth century.   At the time of its publication, it was widely denounced.  Writing from the depths of the Great Depression, and amidst a burgeoning black communist internationalism, Black Reconstruction was Du Bois at his finest. By deftly applying classical Marxist analysis to a population so often overlooked by its orthodoxies, Du Bois’s general strike thesis emerged not only as a historical corrective, but as a stark critique of Western philosophy and modern academic inquiry itself.  It brought together the study of class with the study of race and foreshadowed what we now call intersectionality.  Yet, it also sat on the shelf for decades until, like so many great masterpieces, it was dusted off well after its creator’s death and celebrated only in Du Bois’s absence.  As the great American poet/sometimes performance artist Kanye West reminds us: “people never get the flowers when they can still smell them.”

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Piki

I nicknamed this tiny girl Piki, “Cuckoo”
because she was furtive yet brave,
and had a distinctive cuckoo-like voice.
I would always see her upon landing
in Bangalore when I exited with my baggage.
She wore a see-through sleeveless pinafore and
no underwear. I guessed she was six and that she
was not raised by her parents, who I thought of
as cuckoos who plagiarize and lay their eggs
in another bird’s nest for rearing their babies.
In India, cuckoos are sacred to Kamadeva, the
god of desire and longing. Piki became holy to me
and full of desire to help. She would charge up to me
ahead of the other urchins seeking work and call out
“Cooey?” or “Coucou?” (“want help?” in French).
She learned these words as “Hi there!” from
disembarking French tourists.  The sound of her call
was like a soft knock or the gentle afternoon
murmuring of a morning dove. She was so small that
I might have held her in the palm of my hand.
Standing up she was a little taller than my bag. So,
try as she might, she could not carry it. Relinquishing
the effort of squeezing the handle, she would pat-pat
the sides of the suitcase as I made my way to the taxi
as if to assist me in getting aboard.

by Deacon Lucien Miller
from The Hidden Side of the Mountain
—Encounters with Wisdom’s Poor and Holy
Fons Vitae, Louisville Kentucky, 2021

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John Banville at The Guardian:

A time there was, and a recent time, when big beasts stalked the groves of academe. This was in the last quarter or so of the 20th century, the leafy days of Althusser and Paul de Man, of the terrible twins Guattari and Deleuze, of Foucault, Derrida and Sollers, of Susan Sontag and the delightful Julia Kristeva. It was the age of theory, after the demise of the new criticism and before even a shred of cannon smoke was yet visible above the battlefields of the coming culture wars.

How sure of ourselves we were, the heirs of Adorno and Walter Benjamin. We knew, because Nietzsche had told us so, that there are no facts, only interpretations – sound familiar, from present times? – and that danger alone is the mother of morals. We listened, rapt, to the high priests of structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, und so weiter. We pored in anxious excitement over the hermetic texts of the new savants, encountering sentences such as this, from the pen of a German-born academic who had been long settled in Britain, and who in the last decade of his life would mutate into a world-famous novelist: “The invariability of art is an indication that it is its own closed system, which, like that of power, projects the fear of its own entropy on to imagined affirmative or destructive endings.”

more here.

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Alexandra Alter at the New York Times:

In December 1999, around her 65th birthday, Joan Didion started writing a journal after sessions with her psychiatrist. Over the next year or so, she kept notes about their conversations, which covered her struggles with anxiety, guilt and depression, her sometimes fraught relationship with her daughter, and her thoughts about her work and legacy.

Shortly after Didion’s death in 2021, her three literary trustees found the diary while going through her papers in her Manhattan apartment. There were 46 entries stashed in an unlabeled folder and addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Didion left no instructions about how to handle the journal after her death, and no one in her professional orbit knew of its existence. But her trustees — her literary agent Lynn Nesbit, and two of her longtime editors, Shelley Wanger and Sharon DeLano — saw that she had printed and stored them in chronological order. The notes formed a complete narrative, one that seemed more intimate and unfiltered than anything she had published.

more here.

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Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian:

Coates’s The Message grapples with the question of whose stories get told, and how that forges our reality. As he writes halfway through: “Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.” Known for his searing critiques of racial injustice, he came to wider attention with a 2014 essay The Case for Reparations, followed by a 2015 book, Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his son. According to Toni Morrison, he filled “the intellectual void” left by James Baldwin’s death.

The Message starts with a reflection on Coates’s obsession with words. Aged five, he recited Eugene Field’s poem The Duel over and over: “The gingham dog and the calico cat / Side by side on the table sat”. As a young adult, he was captivated by rapper Rakim’s use of alliteration in his 1990 classic Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em: “I’m the arsenal, I got artillery, lyrics are ammo / Rounds of rhythm, then I’mma give ’em piano.”

As a student at Howard University it dawned on him that words, however beautifully arranged, “must serve something” beyond themselves: “They must do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing,” he writes. In his view, language – its arsenal, artillery and ammo – must be “joined to politics”. This linguistic responsibility falls particularly on Black writers, and writers of all “conquered peoples”, he says.

More here.

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Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

In early February 2020, China locked down more than 50 million people, hoping to hinder the spread of a new coronavirus. No one knew at the time exactly how it was spreading, but Lidia Morawska, an expert on air quality at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, did not like the clues she managed to find.

It looked to her as if the coronavirus was spreading through the air, ferried by wafting droplets exhaled by the infected. If that were true, then standard measures such as disinfecting surfaces and staying a few feet away from people with symptoms would not be enough to avoid infection.

Dr. Morawska and her colleague, Junji Cao at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, drafted a dire warning. Ignoring the airborne spread of the virus, they wrote, would lead to many more infections. But when the scientists sent their commentary to medical journals, they were rejected over and over again.

“No one would listen,” Dr. Morawska said.

More here.

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