by Mike O’Brien

They say that everyone’s a critic. Some more than others. I have a particularly critical streak, that occasionally strays into full-on curmudgeonry. I have a few excuses. First, the generally awful and worsening state of the world tends to put me into a bit of cranky mood. Second, I am lazy, and picking at the flaws in other people’s work is easier than creating something new. And third, there is a lot of really awful, slap-dash work being done in the world of letters that cries out for detraction.

As a break, if not an antidote, to my nay-saying tendencies, I’m going to attempt something a little more constructive this time around. My first column, way back when, was basically a riff on all the facets of my generalized anxiety, and the ecological facet featured prominently there, but there’s still some unpacking left to do.

First, some predictions. After all, anxiety implies that I think something is going to happen, and in this case that something is very bad and very difficult to avoid. Mass extinction will continue, and continue to accelerate, for the rest of my life and beyond. Global warming, ocean acidification, habitat destruction and atmospheric carbonization will continue to blow past every “point of no return” that scientists set, and narrowly human-regarding effects will continue to immiserate billions of people. If we were the kinds of creatures, organized in the kinds of societies, that were capable to avoiding these inevitabilities, we would not be as far along the road to perdition as we are. This is not about what might happen. This is about what has happened and will continue to happen. Read more »

by Callum Watts

Growing up often feels like a process of finally understanding advice you completely ignored when it was first given to you. For me, this often has the form of thinking I’ve just discovered a profound insight about life, only to realise that it sounds entirely cliché once articulated. Perhaps it supports Plato’s idea that nothing brand new is every really learnt, because learning is really just remembering innate wisdom. More likely though, it’s just a happy reflection of the fact that there really are many general lessons to be learnt on how to live well. Happier still, these are shared and passed down not by philosophers, but by everyone, and so they become clichés. The past year of lockdowns has given me such a remembering, specifically, on the nature of how we find meaning.

Lockdown leaves us bereft of ordinary sources of meaning and value. This is extremely hard to do anything about because meaning is a little like happiness, the pursuit of it tends to scare it away. It is often the by-product of other activities, rather than the goal pursued. Like happiness, it also seems to be the case that the more our source of meaning rests on the dogged pursuit of a single thing, the more it is hostage to the what one thing, and so the more fragile it is.

For example, a person who mainly finds a sense of meaning through their work is extremely vulnerable to existential crises if their job fails to deliver that sense of purpose. The so-called midlife crisis is often (not always) a reaction to professional disappointment, a sense that one’s career has not really lived up to what was demanded of it. In this scenario the failure of a career to have delivered meaning can result in one’s whole existence appearing pointless all of a sudden. Read more »

Sunrise on a foggy day in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in January, 2021.

by Joan Harvey

As we’ve all noticed, as soon you mention something about, say, your neighbor’s annoying poodle and your phone is anywhere within a three mile radius, you immediately get ads for poodles, poodle accessories, poodle food, and yet more poodles. I must have been talking or writing to someone about my immune issues, or possibly just Covid, and boom, they got me. Among all the ads I get for sheer underwear with snakes on it, there it was: immunology, Coursera, first week free, then $49 a month. Okay, I thought, I should know something about this, I’ll sign up, learn a bit, and go on my merry way. Little did I know. Because I’m someone who often doesn’t pay attention to details—exactly the wrong type for this sort of thing—I accidentally ended up in a course from Rice University designed for people with a serious interest and commitment to actually knowing how antibodies work.

I’m not much for video learning in general, or at least I hadn’t been until Covid, when a friend pointed out to me that the wonderful British-Israeli cookbook writer Yotam Ottolenghi did a Master Class. Up until that point I had conscientiously avoided Master Class and all those celebrities telling you they have the answer to life and if you just follow their advice you are guaranteed to become a confident-glamorous-successful novelist-filmmaker-model-architect. I’d also never had a cooking lesson, and found Ottolenghi’s cookbooks (of which I have four) intimidating, though when I attempted one of his recipes, or, more usually, part of one, it was always delicious. I would not have considered learning cooking from anyone else, but Ottolenghi was irresistible. So I paid the fee and there he was in my kitchen: relaxed, gay, handsome, with his wonderful accent, pouring olive oil on everything, squeezing lemons with his hands, squooshing garlic, talking me through each step, making everything easier. With him nearby I was no longer the anxious cook I often am; I was relaxed and reassured, and, following his steps, the food I turned out—Smacked Cucumber Salad with Sumac-Pickled Onions, Mafalda Pasta with Quick Shatta, Pea Spread with Smoky Marinated Feta—was actually amazing. I was only sorry there weren’t more recipes. But that was the extent of the video learning I’d done until my venture into B-cell arcana. Read more »

by Peter Wells

Jesus is reported to have critiqued the seventh commandment as follows: 

You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Mt 5:27-28, New Revised Standard Version).

The principle seems clear. It’s not enough to avoid the act of adultery. You have to avoid wishing to do it. Not in the sense of never being tempted, but in the sense that ‘you would if you could.’ To persist in wishing to do a bad thing is as immoral as to do it. So, when Jesus came to comment on the sixth commandment, you’d assume he’d say something parallel, like this:

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder,” and, “whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.” But I say to you that … everyone who looks at someone with murder in his heart has already committed murder.

However, what Jesus is actually reported to have said at this point is this:

if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool,” you will be liable to the hell of fire.

In other words, insulting someone, or calling them a fool, is the equivalent of murder.

Whether you are a Christian or not, it’s a thought that deserves to be reflected upon. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Libertarianism does not make sense. It cannot keep its promises. It has nothing to offer. It is an intellectual failure like Marxism or Flat-Earthism – something that might once reasonably have seemed worth pursuing but whose persistence in public let alone academic conversation has become an embarrassment. The only mildly interesting thing about libertarianism anymore is why anyone still takes it seriously.

When evaluating a normative ethical theory we should consider three dimensions: 

1. Is the theory plausible in its own right? I.e. does it make sense or is it an incoherent mess of contradictions?
2. Would the world be better if it was ordered according to the theory? I.e. does the theory promise us anything worth having?
3. Does the theory provide a useful guide to action around here right now? I.e. is it any help at all for addressing the kind of problems that actually appear in our practical moral and political life?

1. Does Libertarianism Make Sense?

Libertarianism is a response to the problem of politics – the sphere of activity concerned with the collective management of our social living arrangements that is complicated, contingent, and refuses to obey the authority of reason. The problem of politics has offended many philosophers from Plato onwards. Libertarians’ particular solution to the problem is what I call eliminative moralism: the reduction of the entire noisome political sphere to its supposed basis in a narrow interpersonal morality of consent. The result has an extraordinary intellectual simplicity and normative minimalism which many find appealing and convenient, yet the very sources of its appeal are its deepest flaws. Read more »

“This is conclusive, and if men are capable of any truth, this is it.”
……………………………………………….…— Blaise Pascal, on his wager 

Blaise’s Place

Blaise’s place is on a sunset strip
sliced razor-straight through desert air
many cul de sacs veer from its hot black path
which is squeezed in a pass between mountains there
west where the day goes down in a blaze

The road’s white line on the northern side
is lit with votive flame-tipped wax
while on its south hot neon in glass tubes glows
glazing the way in pink-lit veneer
as fountains spit from golden taps

The landscape reeks of myrrh & beer
on a highway set with a brilliant trap:
a bet to which Blaise alludes
and away from which skeptics steer

A crooner’s song from a glittery stage
with background bells of dollar slots,
a mix in warp & weft on a nameless loom
with Gregorian chants wrung into gambler’s knots

—priests & players in cassocks, albs,
sequined shirts and denim pants
—Adidas shuffling under slick, chic suits,
heads with miters or baseball caps
—water & booze from an aspergillum
dipped in Byzantine plastic flask and flung,
dots ears and eyes and throbbing sternums
beating for life in which wisdom basks

But (as if in Solomon’s chair),
Blaise calls all bettors there,
throws loaded dice against a wall
that runs from floor
past stratosphere,
past moon, past sun, 
past galaxies in curls of space
to end of time, but
always ends down here
where gamblers grumble
and losers grouse
that the odds (by grace)
are always with the house

by Jim Culleny, 1/29/17
Jim Culleny – Blaises Place – Clyp

by Raji Jayaraman and Peter N Burns*

We both have daughters who are good at math, but opted out of advanced math. In so doing, they effectively closed off entry into math-intensive fields of study at university such as physics, engineering, economics, and computer science. They used to be enthusiastic about math, but as early as grade three this enthusiasm waned, and they weren’t alone. It was a pattern we observed repeatedly in their female friends during those early school years, as boys slowly inched ahead.

This turns out to be something of a statistical regularity. Girls don’t start school hating math or doing worse at it than boys. Then, somewhere in elementary school, this changes for many girls and in some (though not all) countries, a gender gap in math performance appears. The reasons why girls sometimes begin to dislike or slip behind in math are important, wide-ranging and controversial, with scientists, psychologists,  sociologists, and others all weighing in. What often starts as small fissure in test performance in childhood seems to be locked in by the onset of puberty. At this stage kids hit high school where they get to choose their subjects, and the great divergence is set in motion. Girls disproportionately opt out of math-intensive subjects. From there, there’s really no turning back. Girls tend to study subjects, and graduate with degrees in fields, that have lower math requirements. In the U.S., women receive only about a quarter of bachelor’s degrees in physics, engineering and computer science; the pattern persists in graduate school. That there are tragically few women in these professions, is a logical consequence.

What is remarkable about this great divergence is that the size of the initial gender gap in average math performance is itself, pretty unremarkable—typically under a quarter of a standard deviation depending on the country. In fact, in many countries, girls do at least as well as boys on average, and girls are well represented in the top tail of the math performance distribution. In short, girls do well in math by many metrics, both in absolute terms and relative to boys, and yet they opt out of math. Why is that? Read more »

Wu Tsang, boychild. Untitled. 2019.

More here, here, and here.

by Jackson Arn

This could all be circular.
Not self-swallowing like the staircase
from the poster, I mean circular
as in smooth rows of endless smooth stacks
perpendicular to pain, touching on a plane
but only one, so air bubbles
and grains of sand left in the loaf
remember their orders and lend
a noble cause their roughness—
who brings a harp to an island?

I can tell you don’t believe me and
are too polite to wince. Sometimes I wish
I didn’t need your vote. Then I
could drift with purpose instead of at odd hours
between naps and chopping onions. As it is,
we’ll drift together until our vectors
pull us apart or, better, pull the shoreline here
so we can drift in place, chattering
about the blue pond by the blue window,
the pilgrimage between your thumb and me.

by Joseph Shieber

The philosophical world has recently been abuzz about Susanne Bobzien’s argument that Gottlob Frege — often taken to be one of the founding figures of what became 20th century analytic philosophy — plagiarized many of his logical positions from the Stoics.

Bobzien’s charge isn’t merely idle speculation. In her paper, descriptively titled “Frege Plagiarized the Stoics”, Bobzien brings the receipts. In painstaking detail, she demonstrates the ways in which many of Frege’s signature views — previously often thought to have been radical innovations in logic and philosophy of language — mirror almost verbatim the language of the chapter on Stoic logic in Carl Prantl’s influential Geschichte der Logik im Abendland (History of Logic in the West).

In painstaking detail, Bobzien lays out her case that not only was Frege strongly influenced by Stoic ideas, but also that he copied those ideas from one source, Prantl:

First, it is vastly more likely that Frege obtained his knowledge of Stoic logic from one text, rather than from browsing through the dozens of Greek and Latin works with testimonies on Stoic logic that Prantl brings together. (Of the hundreds of Stoic logical works, not one has survived in its entirety and we are almost completely dependent on later ancient sources.) Second, virtually all parallels between Stoics and Frege are present in Prantl, and some important elements of Stoic logic without parallels in Frege are missing in Prantl. … Third, there are several misunderstandings or distortions of Stoic logic in Prantl which do have parallels in Frege.” (pp. 8-9 of Bobzien’s paper linked above)

In one sense, it’s hard to exaggerate the significance of Bobzien’s findings. In the words of Ray Monk, the acclaimed biographer of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, “it is Frege who [of the triumvirate of Frege-Russell-Wittgenstein] is—100 years on from his retirement—held in the greatest esteem by the philosophers of today.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Photo taken two days ago of the main church in the town of Welschnofen in the Eggental valley of the South Tyrol.

by Eric Miller

Flat cap

For my part, the plank staircase angling by rickety twitches cliff-side down to Wreck Beach reminds me of the steps that stagger toward the Whirlpool below Niagara Falls. Each increment here in British Columbia is too short—each increment there, on the frontier of Ontario, too long. Yet a kind of music accompanies treading down both, we play them like a keyboard, the music of inhibition and the music of extension.

I cannot for the longest time glimpse saltwater. Can you see it? I perceive cedars and arbutus, and observe the adjacent protean precipitousness of tumbling rills, ruffled like fern leaves, rippling like otters. These waters don’t have to flex their knees. Every time we think it’s over the creaking flight continues! I have the time to think of Ontario, and to think of how the British conceived of the Niagara River as a part of the Saint Lawrence, and to think of characters I have conceived, members of the British party going upstream to administer the new province of Upper Canada, the year being 1792. Now, like Dante in La Vita Nuova, let me provide a context for the cameo with which I hope to entertain you as, lurching ourselves a little woodenly, imitating thus the boards of hundreds of discrete steps that support our resolve, we bring ourselves, with luck, onto the sea-level reach of Wreck Beach. There is something prosodic and stirring about staircases is there not? They are symbols of so much! To descend a staircase is not necessarily an anticlimax is it?—in spite of etymology. Read more »

by Alexander C. Kafka

The disappointing new film Bliss is maddening in ways both intended and surely unintended. A heady rumination on the nature of reality featuring two bright stars in quirky character roles was an attractive proposition, but it doesn’t pan out.

The film sometimes conveys a real sense of dissociation. The script could have been honed with that goal in mind and become a workable study of two drug-addled down-and-outs, Greg and Isabel (Owen Wilson and Selma Hayek), living in a tent city on the streets of L.A. 

Alternatively, Bliss could have been a pure sci-fi reverie as we learn that the couple’s gritty misadventures are actually a computer-simulated role-playing game devised in another L.A. of affluence, comfort, and ease. In lounges, players access the virtual reality through tubes up their noses connected to large tanks with floating brains. Take that, Xbox! This provocatively reverses the premise of the Matrix franchise, in that rather than being slaves to technological overlords, humanity has been freed by its own digital prowess, revisiting a synthesized street life only as a reminder of the pollution, poverty, and mayhem civilization has overcome.  Read more »

by Martin Butler

Both morally and politically, equality is a powerful ideal. Over the last two centuries it has been one of the fundamental demands of most movements aimed at improving society. The French Revolution is the paradigm case. Despite its enduring relevance, however, equality has always been a somewhat vague ideal. It was hardly a problem for the revolutionaries in France, where the difference between the aristocracy and the sans-culottes was so stark that further elaboration was unnecessary.  Over the years, however, the question ‘equality of what?’ has become more pressing, and many answers have been highlighted: equal rights, equal pay, equal treatment, equal opportunities, equality under the law, equality of outcome, to name but a few. Rather than just looking at these answers, perhaps we should start by identifying the source of the ideal of equality’s ethical power, and see where this leads us.

It seems to me that there are at least two powerful ethical justifications, which, although overlapping lead in somewhat different directions. The problem is that one of these has tended to dominate over the other. One source arises from an obvious principle of rationality. It is clearly irrational to treat people differently for irrelevant reasons. Parentage, accent, race, age, wealth, gender, social class, sexual orientation, religious belief, physical attractiveness, etc. are in most cases completely irrelevant to a person’s capacity to play a particular role in society. In the past, privilege, tradition and prejudice have been the main reasons why irrelevant factors have been treated as relevant in the selection of individuals for particular roles, especially those associated with power and prestige. Only with the enlightenment did the irrationality of this tendency begin to be felt, and ever since, there has been slow but steady progress towards disregarding it.  Of course, it is rational not to treat people equally with regards to factors that are relevant to that role. We have no problem in discriminating when it comes to giving some people and not others jobs on the basis of their ability to perform those jobs, or giving some people and not others a place on a course of study based on their capacity benefit from that course. But there must be equality of opportunity to be considered for those roles. The irrelevances listed above should not interfere with the process of getting to the starting blocks, even if it is clear that not everyone can win the race.

This compelling narrative of ‘equal opportunities’ has become the pre-eminent expression of the ideal of equality in modern liberal democracies, a conception of basic fairness which is about removing barriers and creating a level playing field. In recent years this has led to a focus on policies that attempt to create this level playing field. This powerful ethical argument is supported by pragmatic considerations. Nobody wants a doctor chosen from a limited pool of candidates. Equal opportunities allow us to get the right people onto the starting blocks so that the one who wins is more likely to be the fastest, rather than the fastest from a skewed and therefore limited selection. Equal opportunities is both fair recruitment and smart recruitment.

However, the story starts to get more complicated if we pursue this ideal further still. Read more »

by Usha Alexander

[This is the eighth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

In the late fifteenth century, European seafarers began searching for what they called the “Northwest Passage,” a fabled route across the Arctic Ocean, which would allow them to sail northward from Europe directly into the Pacific in search of fortune. But the Arctic of their time, during the so-called Little Ice Age of the fourteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, was covered by thick, impenetrable sheets of ice and densely packed icebergs. Nor had they any reasonable expectation that the great mass of ice would soon melt away. That they imagined finding a reliably navigable route through a polar sea seems to me a case of wishful thinking, a folly upon which scores of lives and fortunes were staked and lost, as so many adventurers attempted crossings, only to flounder and often die upon the ice.

But now that the Arctic sea ice is melting away, the Northwest Passage has become real in a way the adventurers of old could not have dreamed. Today, nations encircling the Arctic Ocean jockey for control of its waters and territorial rights to newly exposed northern continental shelves, which promise to be full of oil and gas. What had been a deadly fantasy is now a luxury cruise destination flaunting an experience of rare wonder, including opportunities to watch polar bears on the hunt. “A journey north of the Arctic Circle is incomplete without observing these powerful beasts in the wild,” entices the Silversea cruises website, with nary a note about the bears’ existence being threatened by the very disintegration of their icy habitat that makes this wondrous cruise possible. Meanwhile, in China, the emergent northern sea routes have been dubbed the Polar Silk Road, projecting a powerful symbol of their past wealth and influence onto an unprecedented reality.

By now, we’re all aware that the planet is profoundly changing around us: angrier weather, retreating glaciers, flaming forests, bleaching coral reefs, starving polar bears, disappearing bees. Yet how blithely we go on making plans, as though the future will follow as neatly and predictably from today, as today did from yesterday. From buying a new beachside home to booking a cabin in the redwoods a year in advance, the ongoing planetary changes apparently figure little in the plans so many people make. It seems I regularly read articles in which mainstream economists make predictions that entirely disregard the changing climate and collapsing biodiversity, as though these concerns lie beyond our economies. Even governments and corporations who seek to profit from changes like the opening of the Arctic Ocean often presume themselves the drivers of “disruption,” creating new market opportunities in an otherwise stable or predictable world. They don’t seem to recognize that the true nature of what’s upon us might just be greater than they imagine and far more consequential. Read more »