by Martin Butler

Although by no means the only ones, two models of human beings and their relation to society are prominent in modern social and political thought. At first glance they seem incompatible, but I want to sketch them out and start to establish how they might plausibly be made to fit together.

The first one I’ll call the cultural model. It is based on the truism that human beings are the products of the particular traditions and histories of their society, and is a relativistic view since it allows for no trans-cultural standards against which cultures can be compared. The key features of this model are its historical nature and the fact that it is essentially social, in that individuals can only be fully understood with reference to the culture in which they were raised. All cultures have a history and evolve over time, and cultures only exist in groups of individuals; you can’t have your own personal culture.

To fully understand a culture it’s necessary to get to know the specific patterns of life within it, and these can’t be captured by abstractions or generalisations. You might, for example, say that culture X is Christian but that doesn’t actually tell you very much about how life is lived in that culture. This does not mean that human beings are completely malleable since we can accept that human nature exerts limits on what it’s possible for a person to be, and of course individuals within a culture can be very different. However, according to this model, culture leaves a major and indelible mark. There will, of course, be huge variation, but I think it’s important to note that typically gender and gender roles, bonds of kinship, religious belief (or lack of it) and rituals of various kinds are pivotal in shaping the identity of most cultures. The stereotypical image of a traditional culture is ethnically homogeneous with a well-established shared way of life, strong bonds of kinship and well-defined gender roles, all of which are supported by a set of widely held beliefs (usually religious) along with the general acceptance of a particular historical narrative.

The second model is the enlightenment model. The ideas that form the core of this model have been around for a long time but they found a particularly clear expression in European philosophy of the 18^th century. This model gives centre stage to reason and free-will, and sees individuals and their rights as the starting point and building blocks of society, rather than the products of society. Read more »

Anneliese Hager. Untitled. ca. 1940-1950

Photogram.

More here.

by Mike O’Brien

Well, it’s been two months since my last column, and I assume that most of my readers are still alive, so it’s time for a second consideration of the “war analogy” regarding our treatment of non-human animals.

I mentioned in May that Tom Regan, celebrated animal rights philosopher and activist, expressed some misgivings about the aptness and usefulness of this analogy, which compares the killing and maiming of humans in warfare to the killing and maiming (but usually killing) of animals in our economic status quo.

In several essays and interviews, Regan compared the war analogy to two other analogies employed by critics of animal agricultural industries, those of slavery and of the Holocaust. He notes that, unlike the slave owner, it is in the hog farmer’s interests to kill his captives. This is almost correct, but not quite. In both cases, the killing that results from exploitation is incidental to the goal of extracting labour, on the one hand, and meat, on the other. It would be better for the slave owner to work his captives harshly enough to kill them, but somehow have them survive to work another day. Brazilian slave owners, having access to a steady supply of new slaves from Africa, worked their captives to death at a far higher rate than those in the antebellum United States, leading Darwin to curse the country as one of the cruellest on Earth. The economically fine-tuned system of American chattel slavery is not paradigmatic of the practice across history; this is an example of how analogies between practices as widespread and varied as war, slavery and meat-eating require some nuance, specifying which instance of practice X mirrors which instance of practice Y. Read more »

by Michael Abraham

Imagine a boy, and then call him Oliver. His eyes are olive, and this is why you will call him Oliver. Oliver is not his real name, but this is no matter. None of the names in a fable are real names. In a fable, characters are named things like Fox and Hare; they have names for reasons, to tell us what they are. Hence, we will name the boy Oliver because of his bright, olive eyes—his eyes which betray so much of the intensity of him. 

Oliver has sparks inside him. Sometimes, Oliver thinks that he has these sparks inside him because he is a faggot; he believes, now and again, that faggots know more about the world than other people. He believes in what the scholar Jack Babuscio argues in a 1978 essay titled “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” namely in “the gay sensibility as a creative energy reflecting a consciousness that is different from the mainstream; a heightened awareness of certain human complications of feeling that springs from the fact of social oppression; in short, a perception of the world which is coloured, shaped, directed, and defined by the fact of one’s gayness.” It is very certain that Oliver’s gayness is a spark inside of him, but Oliver has another spark inside of him, a wildness, a sparkling desire for the wideness and the depth of human experience. These twin sparks will inform and shape all of Oliver’s life, and, one day, that other spark will drive him mad. But, right now, Oliver is only sixteen, and the faggot spark is much brighter than the madness spark. Right now, Oliver is desperate for someone to love, for the overwhelm of another boy’s nakedness. In Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson writes that “Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition,” and though Oliver has not read Anne Carson yet, and though Oliver has limited experience with being up against another human being (a couple blowjobs, a couple kisses), Oliver intuits this already; intrinsically, Oliver knows that Oliver will not know himself until he is loved by another. It is in the midst of knowing this, in the midst of being quite troubled over it, that Oliver encounters Ezra.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rebecca Baumgartner

In T.H. White’s masterpiece The Once and Future King, Merlyn’s recommendation for “see[ing] the world around you devastated by evil lunatics” is to learn something:

“There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

This summer, as I’ve watched my own country being devastated by evil lunatics, I’ve tried to take this advice to heart. Under Merlyn’s tutelage, the future King Arthur learned about his world by taking the form of various animals and seeing how they lived. We have to make do with a different form of sorcery – one that, rather than educating us about others, merely shows us a reflection of ourselves fractally repeated; one that keeps us sad and angry and has proven to be far less helpful in dealing with evil lunatics than one would hope: the internet.

When the Supreme Court released its now-infamous round of rulings towards the end of June – in a whirlwind week that felt like the answer to the question, “What if America were a monarchy?” – I obviously turned to the internet to find out what I could do.

But, as I quickly discovered, it’s hard to formulate a series of Google search terms that could possibly lead to anything helpful right now. The fact that I tried to do so anyway is a telling demonstration of how our capacity for action is mediated and diluted by the internet.  Read more »

by Ada Bronowski

More than an age of anxiety or anger, of indignation or self-righteousness, we live in an age of the constant high. We need not consume drugs or get inebriated to be met on a daily basis with sights and behaviours to which the only reasonable reaction is an alternation between ‘wow!’ and ‘oh my god…!’ From the still-not-yet-former British prime minister saluting the oldest of the modern parliaments with a deep-felt ‘Hasta la vista baby!’, to newspaper frontpages, to twitter feeds, the most pervasive mode of communication in contemporary society is the exclamation. Social media experts and communication analysts of every stripe routinely provide us with statistics demonstrating the normalisation of the exclamation point as a sine qua non of everyday communication. It is the lack of one which legitimately arouses concern. The use of a full stop at the end of a sentence tends rather to indicate that something is not quite right. Whether you write a text saying: ‘I’m waiting.’, or whether you write: ‘I’m waiting!’, the recipient knows either to be worried they have annoyed you in the former case, or that all is fine in the latter case, though without then assuming any particular degree of excitement. Whether someone writes in an email or text: ‘That’s perfect.’ or ‘That’s perfect!’, you sense in the former case, that something is in fact not quite perfect, whereas in the latter case, you do not consider anything’s being either perfect or not. The exclamation point, rather than emphasise excitement, functions as a neutraliser, shifting the focus of a sentence away from its actual content. Read more »

Mountain of plastic crates ready for the coming apple harvest in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Dick Edelstein

Ireland has produced a number of prominent scientists despite being a small nation, but if you ask an average citizen about John Stewart Bell, one of the top Irish scientists of all time, you are likely to draw a quizzical look. That is mainly because the area of Bell’s important contribution, quantum mechanics, is so difficult to grasp.

Robert Boyle, on the other hand, is well known throughout the land. Boyle’s Law describes the relationship between the pressure and volume of gas molecules in a closed chamber. Tourists visiting Dublin’s Trinity College to view the Book of Kells, a spectacularly illuminated medieval bible, also see a 17^th Century bust of Boyle prominently displayed in the Long Room of the Trinity College Library.

The public reputation of the 18^th Century scientist and mathematician William Rowan Hamilton lies somewhere between that of these two figures. His name is fairly well known, and each year a prestigious guest lecture commemorating his work and career is given in the historic physics building in Trinity College. The importance of his work and exactly what he has accomplished in science and mathematics is less well known. As with Bell, this is partly because his most important discovery is not easy to grasp. In addition, his work was for a long time regarded as esoteric. In fact, it took over a century for his discovery of the mathematical concept of quaternions to have a significant application in technology. Read more »

by Derek Neal

“Paradiso” by Erlend Oye is a song I’ve heard many times in many different settings. This is largely a result of circumstance: it is one of the few songs I keep on my iPhone, and I return to it when I’m driving and my phone doesn’t have cellular service. Once upon a time I had an iPod loaded with an extensive music library, thousands and thousands of songs, maybe even up to and over 50 GB, although I suppose this number has steadily increased in direct relation to the time it’s been since I owned an iPod. Every generation has their version of this story—record collections, cassette collections, CD collections, MP3 collections. Perhaps my generation was the last to experience the phenomenon of collecting and curating a music library as an ordinary cultural experience and not as a conscious act of rebellion against streaming technology, which by its very nature precludes the idea of ownership, having or not having, and the decisions that lie therein.

I could be wrong: maybe kids today sit on the school bus and share their Spotify libraries with each other in the same way that we would hand over our iPods and await judgement. But without the need to own music to listen to it, to decide what’s in and what’s out, and when everyone has access to every song, there must naturally be less of an impulse to cultivate a library. In any case, I’ve often found myself in various locations where I can’t stream Spotify, or call up YouTube, or listen to a DJ mix on SoundCloud: for example, driving in a foreign country, or going to my family’s cottage where the reception is poor, or when I simply don’t have any data left on my phone. “Paradiso” is one of the songs that I’ve returned to in these moments, and it has wormed its way through my ears and into my brain, not from love or obsession, although I do of course enjoy the song, but from mere repetition and necessity. The song describes one of the eternal human dramas that everyone will be able to relate to at some point in their lives. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In recent years the institution in England I have visited frequently is London School of Economics (LSE), in 1998 as a STICERD Distinguished Visitor, and in 2010-11 as a BP Centennial Professor (this was shortly after the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, so I hesitated telling people about my designation), and numerous times as visitor just for a few days. In recent times most of my interactions there have been with the development economists Tim Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak in the Economics Department and with Robert Wade, economist  Jean-Paul Faguet and some years earlier, John Harriss (the political sociologist specializing in India) in the International Development Department. In recent years, apart from departmental seminars, I also gave two somewhat formal public lectures in a large LSE auditorium, once on China and India, and the other time on A New Agenda for Global Labor.

In earlier decades on my way to or from India I’d often stop in London, and go to LSE and spend some time with my friends, including Nick Stern and Meghnad Desai (since then both of these people became Lords). Meghnad once invited me to a visit at the House of Lords, showed me around and took me to lunch there. Meghnad with his distinct Afro hairdo and all has always been a flamboyant character. He used to claim to be a Marxist economist. Rumor had it that he and his first wife (Gail, who I think was related to the wealthy Guinness Family) had a summer villa in south of France, where reportedly the only book on the shelf was Das Kapital. During the Vietnam War days he was active at the LSE protests against the War. I was told that my teacher Frank Hahn, who had moved from Cambridge to LSE by then, once suggested to Meghnad, in a characteristic Frank Hahn way, to publicly immolate himself in front of the LSE building in a spectacular anti-war protest gesture (around that time some Vietnamese monks immolating themselves in protest in Saigon had hit the headlines). Later Meghnad became one of the Thatcher-admiring (or –internalizing) Labor Party members. Now I hear in India he is a Modi-admirer. He is also the Chairman of the Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics he has founded in Mumbai. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

Francis Fukuyama does not mind having to play defense. Recognizing that the problems plaguing liberal societies result in no small part from the flaws and weaknesses of liberalism itself, he argues in Liberalism and its Discontents (Profile Books: 2022) that the response to these problems, all said and done, is liberalism. This requires some courage: three decades ago, Fukuyama may have captured the spirit of the age, but the spirit has grown impatient with liberalism as of late. Fukuyama, however, does not think of it as a worn-out ideal. He has taken note of right-wing assaults, as well as progressive criticisms that suggest a need to go beyond it; and his verdict is that any attempt at improvement will either stay in a liberal orbit or lead to political decay. Liberalism is still the best we have got.

Liberalism, according to Fukuyama, is primarily a system to manage diversity. Its foundational idea is tolerance, for which reason Fukuyama places its roots in the seventeenth century, at the end of the early modern European wars of religion. He swiftly moves on to individualism, property rights, and free trade, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps as to what all this has to do with each other: the historical introduction proceeds at such a pace that there is little time for details. From the French Revolution onward, Fukuyama identifies two competitors to liberalism: nationalism and communism. Social democratic parties are introduced in one breath with communism, but are clearly compatible with liberalism.

Fukuyama’s thesis from here on will be that liberalism has a ‘core idea’ – its emphasis on individual autonomy – that works best in moderation, but has been taken to extremes that have in turn led to illiberal backlash. Read more »

by Joseph Roth (translated and adapted by Rafaël Newman)

Every now and then, a nation becomes modern. Greeks and Poles and Russians were modern, for a time. Now it’s the Ukrainians’ turn.

The Ukrainians, about whom we and the rest of the Western world know little more than that they reside somewhere between the Caucasus and the Carpathians, in a land of steppes and swamps, and that the Ukrainian leg of our junket was relatively pleasant on account of the increased per diem for the duration of the trip. We also have an exceptionally fuzzy notion of a “Ukrainian peace for bread,” owed to the political dilettantism of an Austrian military diplomat.¹ Otherwise, “Ukrainians” are among those peoples who cannot definitively be declared mere cannibals—or worse, illiterate cannibals. Judging by their origins, at any rate, they must certainly be “Russians or the like,” and, by their faith, primitive Catholic heathens, whose clergy is all flowing beards, gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Such operetta commonplaces concerning a country and its people are all too seductive. The Poles have already been excessively Westernized, and we even have more precise information now about the Greeks, ever since Mitteleuropa learned that Greek monarchs and film starlets are equally susceptible to monkey bites.² Russia itself has become a familiar concept, thanks to all the German émigrés and POWs, so it’s no longer of any use for cabaret and operetta. What’s left?

Ukraine. Read more »

“Many life forms are so hard to categorize that (scientists) call these organisms
the ‘Problematica.’”—from: Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will
Survive a Mass Extinction, by Annalee Newit

Problematica

Here we are, never still, casting lines
upstream like fly fishers toward sources
teeming with what came first
hooking what we can, reeling it in
holding it before our mind’s eye smiling,
snapshotting bizarre Cambrian trophies
placing ourselves at the daisy chain’s end
hoping not to be rolled over or under
by our own cleverness and become extinct
as past Problematica looking
odd and grotesque to future fishers
—as uncategorizable as the dead husks of
Amebelodon whose strange tusks are the only ruts
they’ve left in rutted time

by Jim Culleny

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

As the January 6th hearings continue and Americans watch new, seemingly undeniable video evidence of insurrection and quibble about whether one could reach the steering wheel of the Presidential SUV from the back seat, the ideas of Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher and historian of science who coined the phrase “paradigm shift” to explain scientific revolutions remain prescient as ever, even as we approach his 100th birthday.

According to Kuhn in his most famous work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientists generally think and work in a state of what he called normal science. Under normal scientific conditions, all research occurs within a paradigm. Paradigms, he explained, do four interrelated things.

First, they define the terms that describe the universe, like atom or force. Second, they determine what counts as legitimate questions. (“What is the mass of the electron?” might be fair, for example, but not “Do electrons have polka-dots?”) Third, they set limits on which tools you can use to answer those questions. (Reading a voltmeter is perfectly acceptable, but reading tea leaves is out.) And fourth, they determine what counts as an acceptable answer to those questions. (Just to pick one: you don’t get to use negative lengths.)

Normal science is puzzle solving. The paradigm frames riddles and gives us the rules we need to follow in order to solve them. If you solve an approved riddle, you get to publish your answer, becoming a member of the community of normal scientists. The paradigm gives members of the scientific community their union cards, essentially, so the last thing they want to do is to question the rules of that paradigm. Read more »

by Marie Snyder

I knew it was coming, yet I was still surprised when it hit my classroom. 

“We shouldn’t be looking at this.”

Students have complained about my course before, certain that they should not be expected to read anything so difficult in a high school philosophy course. The effect of this grumbling can be seen in the watering down of some English courses deciphering Hunger Games instead of Hamlet.  I enjoyed that popular trilogy, and I’m no Shakespeare stan, but I do assert that it’s vital to develop more complex reading skills and close reading habits  in our teenagers with works that demand consideration of each word before they walk out of high school. Too many in our society are losing their ability to sustain attention to the end of a magazine article and grasp the nuances of an ambitious claim to the point of believing radical headlines and letting noxious chants sway their voting habits. So I firmly stand my ground, luring them to continue with the potential reward of being able to impress their friends and destroy their enemies with their enhanced reading superpowers.  

But this semester brought out that other quibble. 

A few students were adamant that I shouldn’t be getting them to read philosophers who are sexist or racist or homophobic. 

But that’s almost all of them! Read more »

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

I think a lot about the fate of human civilization these days.

The subject worries me because, after a half-century of studying the destructive forces at work in the systems of civilization, my gut feeling is that it is no better than a toss-up whether, in the coming generations or centuries, humankind will get its act together well enough to prevent our civilization from destroying itself

(Or, if not destroy itself utterly, at least inflict profoundly catastrophic damage– through some catastrophic nuclear war, or through some ruinous degradation of the systems of Life-on-Earth.)

And I worry because it doesn’t seem that humankind, taken as a whole, is giving this uncertainty about the human future – which could hardly be more consequential — nearly the kind of attention it deserves.

(Deserves– when so much of what we hold sacred is under serious threat — from human well-being, to the beauties of this living planet, to our aspirations for a human world ruled by Justice and the spirit of “Peace on Earth” and “Goodwill Toward Men”).

Upon reflection, that deficiency of attention is not so surprising: our history had no reason to equip us – to a depth commensurate with the stakes – with the capacity to connect our minds and our motivational core with this kind of challenge. Read more »

Lorenza Böttner. Face Art, 1983.

Digital C print.

” … Born in Chile, Böttner lost both arms in an accident at the age of eight. Institutionalized in Germany, where she moved with her mother for treatment, she rejected prosthetics intended to compensate for her supposed disability. In art school, she started presenting as female and assumed the name Lorenza. Although her career spanned just sixteen years, Böttner created hundreds of individual works, painting with her feet and mouth and using dance, photography, street performance, drawing, and installation to celebrate the complexity of embodiment and gender expression. Casting herself as a ballerina, a mother, a young man with glass arms, a Greek statue, Böttner’s work is irreverent and hedonistic, filled with the artist’s joy in her own body.”

More here and here.

Thanks to Laura Raicovich for making me aware of this amazing person!