by Charlie Huenemann

Over years of teaching philosophy, I have observed that people fall into two groups with regard to the Biggest Question. The Biggest Question is one that is so big it is hard to fit into words, but here goes: When everything that can be explained has been explained, when we know the truths of physics and brains and psychology and social interactions and so on and so forth, will there still be anything worth wondering about? I am assuming the “wonder” here is a philosophical wonder, not the sort of wonder over whatever happened to my old pocket knife or whatever. It’s the sort of wonder that has a “why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing” flavor to it. It’s the sort of wonder that doesn’t go away no matter how much is explained.

Some people think that on that sunny day when everything that can be explained has been explained, well then, that will be that. We will understand why things have happened, and how we came to exist, and what we should do if we want to be healthy and happy, and why works of art move us as they do. It’s not that such people are in any way shallow or unimaginative or tone deaf. They are open to the most wonderful experiences of life, along with the most heart-wrenching and most tragic. It’s just that they think these experiences can be explained and understood in all their glory through that explanation. If there is anything “left over” — some stubborn bit of incredulous wonder we just can’t shake — then that too will be explained through some feature of human psychology, like the way those patterns still seem to swirl in a static optical illusion even when you know the trickery behind it. The feeling that there is a Mystery can itself be explained as an illusory sort of feeling, an accidental by-product of the cognitive engine we happen to think with.

But other people think that the Mystery is not an illusion or accident, and that there still would be something worthy of genuine philosophical wonder even when the grand explainers have completed their grand task. Maybe the Mystery is worthy of some kind of worship or spiritual reverence. Maybe it can be reflected in a poem or in music or in a painting, or even in a shared and silent moment with friends. Maybe it is exactly what remains when all explaining is done — as Wittgenstein the Sage once wrote, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is”. In his terms, the Mystery is precisely that of which we must remain silent, simply because no amount of talking will capture it. These people would say that the first group of people are the ones with the illusion: namely, the illusion that what can’t be explained isn’t real. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

In politics, business, and education, the issue of how to ensure proportional representation of groups is often salient. A salient issue, but usually an impossible task. Why?

Since group identity and wokeness arouse so much emotion, a “geologic upheaval of thought” as Proust characterized it, it’s probably best to discuss a couple of simple illustrative scenarios abstractly. Consider, for example, a well-meaning institution, the Earnest Enterprises Foundation say, operating in a community that contains a numerically dominant majority group, Maj, and two subgroups – a substantial minority group, Min, and a smaller minority group, Sm, which has members in group Maj as well as members in group Min.  Let’s assume that the group Maj constitutes 75% of this imaginary community, Min the remaining 25%, and let’s also assume that 10% of the community belongs to group Sm, whose members are known to be somewhat marginalized and less likely to self-identify as Sm, self-identity being a somewhat nebulous notion. This latter assumption introduces complications since the extent to which the groups differ, self-identify, and intersect is unknown to the foundation or even to the community. Let’s further assume that only 4% of group Min members self-identify as Sm and 8% of the group Maj members self-identify as Sm.

Making a well-intended attempt to assemble a workforce of 1,000 which “fairly” reflects the community, the foundation most naturally (but not necessarily) prioritizes the Maj-Min dichotomy and hires 750 members of group Maj and 250 members of group Min. But this is problematic since just 10 members of the group Min (4% of 250) would self-identify as being in group Sm, AND 60 members of the group Maj (8% of 750) would self-identify as being in group Sm. Thus ONLY 70 or 7% of all 1,000 workers would be self-identified members of group Sm.

It follows that, despite their best efforts, Earnest Enterprises would still be liable to charges of bias. It could obviously be accused by its Min employees of being anti-SM since only 4% of the Min employees (10 of 250) would be in group Sm, not the assumed community‑wide 10%. Interestingly, the foundation’s group Sm employees could likewise claim that the foundation was anti-Min since only 14.3% of the self-identified Sm members (10 of 70) would be from group Min, not the community‑wide 25%. Read more »

“Facts are surprisingly delible things.”
………….— Bill Bryson, author

“Trump won.”
……….…— Fox Skews

Facts Are Delible

facts are not indelible after all—
imagine that

now U S headspace is one of delibility,
if such a word exists
—but of course it may, nothing
moors every word to dictionaries:
fresh definition embraced, case closed.
now we just say: fact’s indelibility is erased

what’s interesting though is that
those who scorn indelible facts
genuflect before them when fact is essential
—no heart transplant’s performed through routines
of delible facts, that’s a certainty; nor have
kidneys enjoyed dialysis through ignorance,
or deliberate, delible inconstancy
—nor does any pact, personal or political
survive in a miasma of delible truth or law
by which, instead, we suffer lives of
tooth and claw

Jim Culleny
11/19/21

by Nicola Sayers

Clickety clack, clickety clack. All aboard the twilight train, a Scottish man with a deep voice announces over the sound of a train heading off into the night. This story is the only one on the Moshi app that I can happily listen to over and over as I wait for my kids to fall asleep. I lie on the floor of their bedroom and think of Before Sunrise, a movie that takes place mostly in Vienna but whose defining image is of the opening, the eroticism of the young couple’s meeting on the train; I think of the sweeping, freighted snowy train journey of Dr Zhivago; I think of Anna Karenina, standing defiantly on the train platform, and of her eventual death. I think, too, of the apartment in Chicago that I so miss, of the view, and the sound, of the L-train clattering loudly past the window at five minute intervals. And I think of a train journey I once took across Europe. 

That they would use the sound of a train for a children’s bedtime story is unsurprising. It is repetitive, soporific. But to me, lying there, it is enlivening, as though I might myself just hop on board the twilight train and be transported right on out of here: away from this room, this moment, this world. 

*

It was the end of  the Christmas holidays a few years ago, and I was due to fly back from Stockholm to London, a flight I have taken dozens of times. The familiarity of this particular journey usually alleviates the mild fear of flying I sometimes suffer. Waiting at the gate I felt completely relaxed, and I boarded happily. But after boarding and sitting down in my seat for a few minutes I was hit, for whatever reason, by a paralysing fear. This was not something that I could breathe through; I had to get off the plane. So I sheepishly exited back down the jetway, watched by many curious eyes as I took refuge behind my escort, the flight attendant, like a celebrity might behind their bodyguard, or a criminal behind their captor. Cast back into the waiting area and left to my own devices, I uploaded a series of badly designed apps and began to plot an alternative route home from Arlanda airport to Oxford, England. 

The story of my two day journey home across Europe is, I confess, an uneventful one. If it has anything to offer it is simply in the account of the minutes and hours that make up such a journey, and of the very particular ways in which travelling long distances by train today alters your sense of space and time.  Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

My books are arranged more or less the way a library keeps its books, by subject and/or author, although I don’t use call numbers. I also have various piles of current and up-next and someday-soon reading. In addition, I have a loose set of idiosyncratic categories that guide my choice of what to read right now, out of several books I’m reading at any given time. I choose books for occasions the way more sociable people choose wines to complement their menus.

Books To Read With A Meal

I read while I’m eating, even though I’ve been told it’s a bad habit. I prefer not to read grisly books during a meal: no noir, nothing about the digestive system or skin diseases (eyeball diseases, brain diseases…really, nothing medical), no travel books of the sort where terrible accidents are likely. I think I tried to read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air with a meal and couldn’t.

It’s best if I read something that doesn’t make me cry while I’m eating, although that’s difficult these days because so many things make me cry. (My sister died this summer. Also…you know, everything.)

It’s even harder to tell when something you’re reading is going to make you laugh. I was reading a novel by Barbara Pym in a restaurant once and found something so hilarious that I had to set the book down and stop eating for several minutes while I laughed. Every time I thought I was finished laughing, I’d pick up the book, and there was the funny bit again to set me off. I can’t remember what was so funny, but I’m smiling as I type this. Thank you, Barbara Pym. Read more »

Deana Lawson. (title and date not found).

More here, here, and here.

by Mike O’Brien

I’ve been reading some articles about dehumanization lately, mostly by the popular philosopher (I doubt he would object to that characterization), David Livingstone Smith. I had already spent some time in that domain, given the preponderance of politics in my early post-secondary studies and the looming questions of how humanity’s greatest intramural atrocities came to pass. The vast post-WW2 literature on racial ideology is, of course, very much called for; the Holocaust was a singular event that begs to be understood and prevented from reoccurring. But moral imperatives, useful as they are in spurring action, tend to muck things up when the work turns to matters of descriptive accuracy and conceptual clarity. I’ve witnessed some very silly and non-helpful things said in my own preferred sandbox of animal ethics, which would never have been expressed save for the driving impetus of moral compulsion. The more desperate the moral situation, the more tolerant I tend to be of moralizing intrusions into descriptive questions. I draw the line at philosophers muddling philosophical discussions with other philosophers, the one situation in which one ought to dispense with ordinary moral manners and state the case as one sees it, as terrible as it may be.

I won’t delve too much into the particulars of Livingstone-Smith’s take on dehumanization, as I’m not really reacting to his work so much as reacting to a general approach of which it is typical. Briefly, he has argued that dehumanization is one (but not the only) important way in which human beings are “othered” and thus made suitable, even deserving, objects of cruelty and destruction. The main philosophical point beyond this commonplace notion is that dehumanization is not a metaphor (Xs are like rats in such and such a respect) or rhetorical excess (Xs are a disease that infects our society!), but rather an earnest categorical shift whereby the dehumanizing imagination really does believe that X-type people are not human, despite evident similarities to the observer’s own type of people. Read more »

by Mark Harvey

Growing up in western Colorado, my baseball team traveled around the state playing against the tiny towns of Rifle, Grand Valley, Rangely, Delta, and Meeker. We had a good team and when I was playing, our coach was an ex-Houston Astros pitcher who brought real science and sophistication to our practices. Having an ex-pro coach our team was something that we probably didn’t appreciate enough but it definitely lifted our game. As teens, we found ourselves learning the same major league skills of run-downs, sacrifice bunts, adjusting infield depth and very complicated hand signals. The coach, Joe Arnold, had a consistently disapproving face, and paradoxically we had a strong desire to win his approval. The expression never changed, and we probably never fully won his approval, but we got quite good at executing major league strategy despite our ungainly adolescent bodies.

We needed the skills because our opponents in the tiny mining, ranching, and farming towns around western Colorado all seemed to be four to five years ahead of us in physical development, fearless, ruthless, hard-throwing kids. One time when an opposing team was warming up, I honestly wondered why one of the parents was on the field. Then I realized it wasn’t a parent, just a six-foot-two, seventeen-year-old with a five o’clock shadow at 2 p.m. on a hot Colorado afternoon.

That man-child (more man than child) was a pitcher in the town of Grand Valley. Grand Valley is now called Parachute, named after the creek that comes out of the mountains to its north. Grand Valley was a much better name for the town and I don’t know which public relations guru changed it. I don’t remember the name of that kid but I’ll call him Stan because if he wasn’t named Stan he must have been named Billy or Jimmy. He definitely wasn’t named River or Rowan and his parents definitely never felt a need to “validate” his feelings. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Early morning sky above the Eisacktal valley in the South Tyrol in October of 2021.

by David J. Lobina

And now, by popular demand – that is, on account of the few people who wrote in the comments section of last month’s post – here’s an expanded endnote 4, which in the alluded post was meant to answer one simple question but in the event did no such thing. Namely: What on earth has happened in Catalonia in the last ten or so years?[1]

It all started in Arenys de Munt, a town of about 9,000 people 40 kms north-east of Barcelona. I’m kidding, but only in part. In September 2009, Arenys de Munt held a referendum of independence, which according to the journalist Guillem Martínez, my guide in this post, was the first case of an explicitly secessionist vote in Catalonia in modern times, and the perspective that would dominate what is now known as the procés [“process”].[2] In fact, there were a number of such consultations in different areas of Catalonia between 2009 and 2011, all of which should be regarded as independentist exercises rather than independence referenda, as participation was generally low and support for independence unnaturally high – the turnout in a vote in Barcelona in 2011 was only 21%, with 90% of voters supporting independence. As mentioned last month, numerous official surveys of Catalans show that support for independence is not the majority opinion, though it has increased since 2007, when it was less than 20%, to the 34% of 2021 (see previous post).

These consultations from 2009-11 certainly showcase the process that has made the issue of independence part of mainstream political debate in Catalonia in the last 10 or so years, and which has turned Catalan nationalism into a secessionist movement, leaving behind the federalism that had been favoured since the early 19^th century (and which remains the option most people in Catalonia support, mind you). The origins of this change in outlook may be found in a variety of recent political developments, some of which were more removed from the day-to-day of citizens than what may be appear to be the case at first. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

There was another well-known economist who later claimed that he was my student at MIT, but for some reason I cannot remember him from those days: this was Larry Summers, later Treasury Secretary and Harvard President. Once I was invited to give a keynote lecture at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics at Islamabad, and on the day of my lecture they told me that Summers (then Vice President at the World Bank) was in town, and so they had invited him to be a discussant at my lecture. After my lecture, when Larry rose to speak he said, “I am going to be critical of Professor Bardhan for several reasons, one of them being personal: he may not remember, when I was a student in his class at MIT, he gave me the only B+ grade I have ever received in my life”. When it came to my turn to reply to his criticisms of my talk, I said, “I don’t remember giving him a B+ at MIT, but today after listening to him I can tell you that he has improved a little, his grade now is A-“, and then proceeded to explain why it was not an A. The Pakistani audience seemed to lap it up, particularly because until then everybody there was deferential to Larry.

Later when I asked Stan Fischer if Larry was my student, he told me that he might have taken my undergraduate class. The undergraduate classes were larger than graduate classes, and I do not remember many of those students (one very bright MIT undergraduate I do remember teaching was Hal Varian, who later became my colleague at Berkeley, and has been the Chief Economist at Google for some years). Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

“The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he” (Thomas Rainsborough, spokesman for the Levellers at the Putnam Debates)

What does it mean to say that everyone is equal? It does not mean that everyone has (or should have) the same amount of nice things, money, or happiness. Nor does it mean that everyone’s abilities or opinions are equally valuable. Rather, it means that everyone has the same – equal – moral status as everyone else. It means, for example, that the happiness of any one of us is just as important as the happiness of anyone else; that a promise made to one person is as important as that made to anyone else; that a rule should count the same for all. No one deserves more than others – more chances, more trust, more empathy, more rewards – merely because of who or what they are.

This ideal of equality is a point on which pretty much all moral philosophers agree, and it is also the ideological foundation for liberal states. In the last centuries, much progress has been made in realising it in institutions like universal suffrage, the rule of law (where justice is portrayed wearing a blindfold), and impersonally (bureaucratically) administered social insurance systems. But this equality revolution remains an incomplete and fragile achievement. It is in perpetual conflict with our all too human moral psychology, which evolved to manage the micro-politics of small groups and is highly focused on personal relationships and social status; with assigning privileges rather than recognising rights.

Who you are known to know still counts for far too much in how we get treated. Within the state and between the state and those it governs, personal relationships are much less significant than they used to be after a centuries long effort to redescribe them as ‘corruption’. But they are merely down; not out. Read more »

Drinking It All In

a long way up Bray Road
past the point where the first of two small brooks cross beneath
it came to me in a new way that you and I are still breathing
four decades after we met at the threshold of the unknown,
the part that comes after now,
and here we are, still there, poised together
even though we were strangers when we met,
but now you’re my most intimate love

no one knows me better

the sun’s slant was perfect on our walk,
every particle or wave, not a thing wrong with it,
perfect the way it shone, the way it distended the shadows of things that stop light,
creating dark corollas, opaque space, the wild grid of leafless trees
spread across the road, or shadow patterns of lush foliage of a juniper blanket
on a bank fronting a long porch and the slope of Robert’s field heaving up behind
lifting stone walls on its back without a hint of sweat

but there were no cows today ambling down to lap the brook,
just us . .drinking it all in

Jim Culleny
11/9/21

by Derek Neal

I’m a bit surprised to see that all my previous columns for this website are about language in some way. I didn’t set out for this to be the case, but a clear pattern has emerged, although through no design of my own. When planning this Monday’s column, I decided that I should give into the impulse to explore language in more detail by thinking about my own job as an ESL teacher. One of the interesting things about being a language teacher, especially for an American, is that you finally become aware of the rules governing the language you use. In American school, much to the surprise of students from other countries, we don’t study grammar. In terms of my own public-school experience, I can’t recall ever discussing things such as verb tenses, relative pronouns, clauses, or phrases.

There may be some logic to this. When you start teaching ESL, you might think that to help students learn to speak it is useful to explain what, say, the simple past and the present perfect are, going through their definitions and the various rules when each tense is used. In other words, you might think it’s useful to start with theory and then move into practice. Attempting this method will quickly teach you that this is not, in fact, a good idea. I still think back and shudder about the time I attempted to draw a timeline on the whiteboard to explain the past tenses used in English, with the result being that I’d not only confused the students, but also myself. In addition, I displayed my terrible drawing skills. Read more »