by Charlie Huenemann

Observations are laden with theories, or so we are told, and theories are laden with cultures. There’s a good reason for thinking this. Theories, after all, spring out from people’s heads. But people’s heads grow within languages and cultures, along with whatever biological constraints lay at the foundations of our being. So anything coming out of our heads is going to bear the imprint of those complex systems. When you speak, a culture is speaking through you, with your own distinctive garnish.

This plausible observation, however, exists in tension with one of the guiding principles our culture speaks through us. That guiding principle is methodological individualism, or the basic strategy of understanding the big stuff by understanding the little stuff. Society is just people, we observe, and languages are just how these people say what they say. So if we understand the people, we will understand the larger cultures and languages they compose en masse. Better yet, understand the individual brains of these individual people; for certainly anything they do will be issuing from what is inside their heads. Better yet still, understand neurons and their local neighborhoods, for certainly the brain is not doing anything more than they are doing. Keep at it, and pretty soon you’ll just be paying attention only to what the quantum physicists say. And at that point you’re a goner, for sure.

We live in an epoch of nominalism: a general distrust of any explanation that proceeds from the big stuff downward. All causality is a local exchange between concrete individuals; larger patterns result from these, just as — in not a wholly unrelated way — economies exist through the exchanges of rationally self-interested individuals. Our culture is formed around the crucial notion that all social facts rest on the consent of individuals disposing of their individual liberties as their own reasons see fit. As Nietzsche once recognized, as scientists we generously extend these republican ideals to nature as a whole, interpreting it as a state teeming with wayward individuals governed by stern and inviolable laws. What is done in the large is only as real as what is done in the small.

But we just might be oversimplifying things a tad. Read more »

by Callum Watts

At the 100th anniversary of John Rawls’ birth back in February, some of the most generous op-eds, whilst celebrating the brilliance of his thought, lamented the torpor of his impact. ‘Rawls studies’ are by no means the totality of political philosophy, but they are one of its most significant strands, and his approach has been dominant for the past 50 years. I’m an admirer of political philosophy, having happily spent much time and energy studying it, specifically looking at theories of deliberative democracy, an area with important connections to Rawls’ thought. That political philosophy does not have much to say that is of direct practical concern does not bother me, the sense that it is not just uninfluential, but is disconnected from the reality of the present moment does though.

Although I’ve been out of academia for 5 years or so, my work in large organisations focussed on change programmes and innovation has meant that deep questions about how people work together, and how we understand the purpose and ontology of collective action, have never really left my mind. When you are trying to encourage and inspire new behaviours in organisations of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s almost impossible not to ask about the fundamentals. Specialists in this field have elaborate theoretical apparatuses of varying rigour explaining different models of change, different accounts of human motivation, and ultimately, normative accounts of what is desirable. Even though much of this has developed in the business literature, it cannot help but stray into the broader social realm as the outsized impact of businesses that are often more powerful than states become impossible to ignore. One particular area of interest is in the idea of systems thinking. Read more »

Anderson Ambroise. Rubble Sculpture.

More here and here.

by Mindy Clegg

By now over 100,000,000 Americans have received the Covid-19 vaccine and we seem on track to double that by the end of President Biden’s hundredth day. Efforts to reach herd immunity continue apace with many states opening up access to more groups in recent weeks. It’s a hopeful feeling, seeing more people receiving this promise of a return to normality. But some dark clouds are obscuring this (global) goal of herd immunity. We might see yet another surge before we’re done, both here and in other countries. Many of the states struggling to get their populations vaccinated have begun to roll back various mandates for distancing, masking, and capacity limits in businesses. There is still a vocal minority who continue to insist that masking and distancing are useless “health theater”, a direct threat to our civil liberties, that Covid-19 is no worse than the flu, and will refuse getting the vaccine as it’s “their body” (ignoring how their actions impact others in their communities).

This vaccine hesitancy—which despite the media narrative that it’s prevalent among Black Americans is really now a problem among white Republicans—can easily disrupt our goal of herd immunity and draw out the liminal state many of us have been living through. This hesitancy stems from a longer history of initially pro-health, anti-corporate movements that have been twisted and weaponized. As a result, the people who have been historically hurt the most by our government and other institutions are now suffering the most. Their pro-life rhetoric only extends to theoretical life, not to actual humans already alive and in need of support and protection via widespread vaccinations. Here I argue that skepticism of government and even corporations has become weaponized to a dangerous degree, even when it comes to settled science such as vaccinations. Read more »

Phoenix

after Iqbal

Unveil your face
A star is witness

Stop flickering
Blaze

How long will you beg like Moses on the mountain?
Fan the flame within you

Create a new Mecca with every speck of your embers
Rid yourself of idolatry

Observe the limits in this temple
Even if you want to boast

First create the confidence of Alexander
Then lust after the splendor of Darius

 ***

By Rafiq Kathwari. His new collection of poems, My Mother’s Scribe, is available here  and  here.

by Mary Hrovat

I don’t think I saw an actual daffodil until I was 19, although I had admired the many varieties I saw pictured in bulb catalogs and even—I hesitate to admit this—written haiku about daffodils (at 14, in an English class). When my first husband and I drove through Independence, Missouri, early in our marriage, I saw my first daffodils, a large clump tossing their heads in a sunshiny breeze. Wordsworth flashed upon my inner ear, and as I remember it, I recited “And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils!” (If I did in fact say that, I’m sure I added the gratuitous exclamation point.) My husband, who was driving, gently asked me to return my attention to the map (I was navigating).

I delight in the names of cultivated daffodils (Silver Chimes, Falconet, Sorbet, Pink Parasol…), but for a very long time I didn’t understand the differences between daffodils, jonquils, and narcissi. Over the years I’ve become confused on a slightly higher level.

Narcissus is the name of a genus in the family Amaryllidaceae. This genus occurs naturally primarily in the Mediterranean region but is cultivated widely in other parts of the world, and some naturalized populations have escaped cultivation and thrived on their own. The word narcissus, with a lowercase n, can be used as a common name to describe members of this species. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mike O’Brien

Thirteen months of living under the spectre of plague has me looking for some means of escape. Mental escape, of course. Physically, I’m still stuck at home, abiding by various lockdown measures, awaiting with weary disdain my province’s next randomized adjustments to its infection-control scheme. Trapped below decks on a ship piloted by imbeciles, who believe that the sea respects economic imperatives and rewards prior restraint. It could be worse, of course. But that’s cold comfort as I anticipate the months of uncertainty between today and whenever I’m vaccinated.

My usual escape is to dive into curious corners of science and theory, learning odd bits of information about nature, or mechanics, or, if I’m feeling very adventurous, some dumbed-down version of maths. A recent dive led me into the world of astrobiology, a field rife with the kind of barely-tethered speculation that philosophers like myself thrive in. There are all kinds of empirical and technical questions, like what kinds of life used to exist on Earth when its chemistry was wildly different, and what kinds of chemical precursors are required to produce the elements necessary to terrestrial life. There are also more abstract questions about the probability of life’s emergence, and the probability that other advanced species exist given our inability to detect them. Even more removed from concrete facts are the ethical questions of what ought to be done and what does it all mean, and these are the easiest to write about without doing expensive experiments or troublesome equations, so I’m doing that. Read more »

There is a very unintuitive method of protecting fruit trees from a late spring frost (which can be deadly for fruit crops) on a day when temperatures fall far below freezing in the early morning: the trees with their blossoms and buds are sprayed (from a sprinkler system) with water which keeps freezing on them and protects the plants underneath from getting too cold by giving up the latent heat of phase change as it freezes.  One must keep the water spray on as long as the air temperature is below freezing. More information about this method is here.

You can see how dramatically beautiful the apple orchards look in this photo I took in the town of Vahrn, South Tyrol, last week. Imagine row upon row of these crystalline dwarf apple trees shining in the sun.

by Peter Wells

In 1887 Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish ophthalmologist and amateur linguist, published in Warsaw a small volume entitled Unua Libro. Its aim was to introduce his newly invented language, in which ‘Unua Libro’ means ‘First Book.’ Zamenhof used the pseudonym ‘Doktor Esperanto’ and the language took its name from this word, which means ‘one who hopes.’ The picture shows Zamenhof (front row) at the First International Esperanto Congress in Boulogne in 1905.

From all available accounts, it is difficult to fault ‘Dr Hopeful’ in terms of intellectual attainment or character. Zamenhof was a native of the city of Białystok, now in Poland, then under Russian rule. Of Jewish ancestry, he is reliably reported to have had the following languages in varying degrees: Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, German, French, Belarusian, German, Latin, Greek, Aramaic, English, Lithuanian, Italian and Volapuk (another invented language of the same period). Born in an area bedevilled by conflicts between people of different cultures and languages, and filled with an idealistic desire for peace and harmony, Zamenhof seems to have viewed his efforts as a practical contribution towards fulfilling that aim. Internationalism was in the air. Esperanto belongs to the group of forward-looking international movements that came into prominence at the end of the 19th century, such as the International Telegraphic Union, the Universal Postal Union, the Red Cross and the aforementioned Volapuk. Read more »

by Joan Harvey

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world. —Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Violence

When a young gunman murdered ten people at a supermarket in Boulder, a place I’d been in the week before the shooting, I was reading the letters of Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt. McCarthy and Arendt lived through terrible times, the worst being the Holocaust and then Vietnam; McCarthy lost both her parents to the Spanish Flu. In their letters I was struck by some parallels to our time: a friend and I had discussed, in letters, whether to stay or leave the country if Trump was reelected; McCarthy and Arendt did the same about Johnson and the escalating war in Vietnam; our fears of Trump echoed theirs of Nixon (though I’m not sure they could have imagined the disaster of the Trump presidency). But when the shooting took place, I realized that while both of them had lived through far worse atrocities than most Americans living today, neither Arendt nor McCarthy lived through these random mass shootings of children and civilians on American soil. There have always been random killings and serial killers, but not this massive meaningless mowing down of strangers.

As shocking as this event was, especially coming so close to the previous week’s mass killing in Atlanta, what has been less noticed are the many mass shootings (defined as four or more shot or killed, not including the shooter) in the United States every day. As of this date, April 10, 2021, there have been 135 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2021 and we’re just at the beginning of April. More mass shootings than days in the year so far. At least 31 more mass shootings since the one in Boulder. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Effective altruism is based on a very simple idea: we should do the most good we can. Obeying the usual rules about not stealing, cheating, hurting, and killing is not enough, or at least not enough for those of us who have the good fortune to live in material comfort, who can feed, house, and clothe ourselves and our families and still have money or time to spare. Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can. —Peter Singer

It is almost universally agreed that the persistence of extreme poverty in many parts of the world is a bad thing. It is less well-agreed, even among philosophers, what should be done about it and by who. An influential movement founded by the philosopher Peter Singer argues that we should each try to do the best we can by donating our surplus income to charities that help those in greatest need. This ‘effective altruism’ movement has two components: i) encouraging individuals in the rich world to donate more; and ii) encouraging us to donate more rationally, to the organisations most efficient at translating those donations into gains in human well-being.

Unfortunately both components of effective altruism focus on what makes giving good rather than on achieving valuable goals. Effective altruism therefore does not actually aim at the elimination of global poverty as is often supposed. Indeed, its distinctive commitment to the logic of individualist consumerism makes it constitutionally incapable of achieving such a large scale project. Effective altruism is designed to fail. Read more »

A Question of Necessity

Can you tell me a certain thing
that is a moral fact? … is a
specious question because
the fact of the thing
exists as something essential
to the survival of homo sapiens
in creating civilization, though civilization
does not always believe in the necessity
of its essential thing: the root
of what it means to be civilized—and the fact
of chaos, or natural inclination,
becomes the default mode
simply because morality,
being thought subjective,
and hard taskmaster, cannot be
sufficiently defined, and we all become
hawks or vultures feeding on carrion doves

It’s a question, whose answer itself is not an easy act
but is nevertheless, even if undefined, called love,
which is foremost not a thing we feel, but do:
a moral act made fact

Jim Culleny
9/13/20

by Raji Jayaraman

It’s official: Lilly Singh, the YouTube phenomenon, stands with Indian farmers. So do Greta Thunberg and Susan Sarandon. How could they not? Thousands of farmers—men and women, young and old—have been protesting non-violently but determinedly in the smoggy Delhi winter, for months.  If having seen their images in the news you feel no sympathy, then you may want to consider going on the same quest as the Tin Man. Rihanna thinks we should talk about #FarmerProtests. The Indian government disagrees, but let’s take Lilly Singh up on her challenge and “run with it.”

In September, 2020, the Government of India passed three farm bills, which arguably constitute the most dramatic agricultural reforms since independence. Everyone in the know will tell you that the agricultural sector, which employs roughly forty per cent of the Indian labour force, is in desperate need of reform. But why now, with little consultation and much haste, in the middle of a pandemic? The suspicions aroused are grounds enough for peaceful protest, but let’s press on. Read more »

by Robyn Repko Waller

Last spring we stumbled through the frighteningly new COVID landscape, facing unknowns. This spring we steer the course for a COVID exit, armed with vaccines. But how has our experience as agents changed?

This March we found ourselves in a starkly different pandemic reality from last. Gone are the early days of ubiquitous question marks — are masks effective? Will there be a vaccine? When will we see our extended family again?

Granted, grimly, the COVID case and death counts continue to rise. And one still fears for the health of loved ones. Nonetheless we have hit our stride in the vaccine rollout (here in the US, that is). Just this weekend, 4 million Americans received the vaccine in one day. Institutions and industries — from universities to Broadway — are making plans to reopen like the golden days of pre-COVID. Those agonizing months of dread and isolation seem, comparatively, in the rear view mirror. 

Moreover, for many of us, the selves we were in March 2020 are no longer. We’ve lived through a transformative experience — honing new values and skillsets that we could not have imagined we’d acquire. Like my newfound role of hairdresser, kids’ crafts director, and work-from-home extraordinaire. 

In some ways, though, we haven’t changed. We still long for normalcy. We still value much of our pre-COVID ways. How will we square those old values and behavior patterns with this brave new world? Here, I contend, the work of eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume can offer illuminating insight. But, first, a story. Read more »

Marlène Huissoud. A3 Drawings 8, 2020. 

More here, here, and here.