by Dave Maier

A few posts ago I distinguished between philosophical and scientific/practical questions about the objectivity of science, and urged that we not get them mixed up. There’s a lot more to say about that, so here’s another chapter in our continuing story.

Philosophical questions about objectivity are metaphysical questions, and of course we invite confusion right away if we insist that as scientists we don’t do that metaphysics stuff (as if one could somehow avoid metaphysical commitments simply by saying so). A closely related question (or a different aspect of the same one) is that of the relation between fact and value. Whether they affirm it or deny it, all sides seem okay with calling this the “fact-value dichotomy,” so that’s what we’ll do too.

This dichotomy is also called the “is-ought” question. It’s pretty obvious that there’s a literal difference between asking how things are and whether they should be that way, but that doesn’t entail that the former questions are objective and the latter not (and of course this is where our question morphs into our earlier question about objectivity anyway). The natural context for this question (although not, as we shall see, the only one) is that of the objectivity of morality; and here too we see an obvious (if not conclusive) difference between scientific and moral questions. As Gilbert Harman points out, moral questions are not subject to experimental confirmation. If we want to know whether murder is wrong, we can’t just murder a number of people (under proper test conditions), crunch the numbers, and see. That doesn’t make sense.

As always, though, the problem with dichotomies is that they make it seem that if we’re not on one side of the fence then we’re on the other, and that’s all there is to it. (It doesn’t help matters that there are plenty of cases in which this is perfectly true; philosophy tends not to be one of them though.) Just because we can’t establish the truth or falsity of moral judgments experimentally doesn’t mean they can’t be true or objective or whatever you want.

But even so, how does this work? Not surprisingly, there are better and worse ways to think about this. Here’s a hopefully instructive look at one of the latter.

One sort of conversation I learned to avoid early on in life was one which pits Science vs. Religion. [Full disclosure: I was a card-carrying “skeptic” and subscribed for several teenage years to Skeptical Inquirer magazine, each issue of which features multiple insufferably condescending “debunkings” of this or that superstitious nonsense, whether this be the doctrine of transubstantiation or that Bigfoot is retired and living in Mexico (okay, I made that one up), so when I say I learned this “early on,” I don’t mean (*cough*) immediately.] I mean the sort of conversation in which participants may deem it significant that, for example, Isaac Newton (or some other certified Smart Science Guy) was a religious believer or that at one point the Bible seems to indicate that pi = 3. That sort of thing.

There are many reasons to avoid such conversations; one is that the fact-value dichotomy or its negation is often, as are many ideas in this context, used as a bludgeon.

Read more »

by Michael Liss

My father hated the Richard Strauss opera Ariadne Auf Naxos.

Dad obviously had his preferences, and they had a certain strongly expressed idiosyncratic logic to them: He liked “good tunes,” so thumbs up to Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Offenbach and Bizet. He didn’t like too much recit or harpsichord, which meant Mozart often tested his patience. Wagner was a no—too Wagnerian (I don’t think the Hitler thing helped). The Beethoven and Tchaikovsky efforts puzzled him: When you write symphonies and concertos as magnificently as these two, why waste your time with mediocrities like Fidelio and Eugene Onegin?

Dad was more than capable of clearly articulating, at length, the reasons for his dislikes (this was a quality he also applied to the world beyond opera), but he would not get specific about Ariadne Auf Naxos. Ariadne Auf Noxious was not discussable. It did not make his formidable collection of open-reel tapes. He actually walked out of a performance (between acts, of course, but our seats were conspicuous) and never returned. Milton Cross couldn’t tempt Dad. If, by some chance, it would appear on his subscription, he would give away the tickets (an act not lightly taken). Because of this, I had absolutely no memory of the opera, not even a wisp of a melody, so, as a public service to the reader, I subjected myself to about 15 minutes of it, and I think I almost blacked out. Dad was right. Very bad.

Yet, as we “celebrate” a year of Donald Trump, I can’t stop thinking about this ridiculous, over-the-top, oddball, play-and-opera-within-an-opera as metaphor. The Donald Trump Show is our Democratic Ariadne Auf Naxos (Clockwork Orange version). It’s like someone has tied us to our seats in the Trump-Lovers Section, and forced us to watch them leap up, screaming bravo, at his every croak. What’s worse is that we (especially those of us in coastal Blue States) had to pay double for the tickets. It’s driving us nuts.

One year is enough. Time to get off the feedback loop, because Trump-madness leads to electoral doom. Indulging in it is a fix, blaming it is a crutch, and frankly, with surveys showing more Republicans trust Putin than the FBI, it’s our patriotic duty to do better. We have to start thinking with our heads instead of our glands. So, here are my 12 steps to sobriety:

1. Let Trump be Trump. Why fight a hurricane with a five-dollar umbrella? Trust the public to judge. Recognize that there is a large group of bedrock Trumpistas who will never leave him. They really believe the Deep State, Secret Society, Globalist Conspiracy, #fakenews mantra and nothing is ever going to shake that. So, let Trump do his thing, because every time we voice our outrage … his people cheer. They have been waiting for a champion a very long time, and for whatever incomprehensible-to-us but clearly genuine reasons they may have, he’s their guy.

2. Learn from the situationally sycophantic. Not the true believers, but the ones we think are hypocrites; the professional preachers, the party apparatchiks and the uber-wealthy—those guys. Take careful notes, because they have much to teach. Of course it’s disgusting when Tony Perkins and Franklin Graham trade piety for power. Or when economic titans hold their noses with one hand while the other is palm upstretched. But bear in mind, Trump delivered for them. That’s how they judge him. On theocracy and plutocracy, Trump delivered. What are we going to deliver?

Read more »

African Americans protest against police brutality in Harlem, New York, 1963.

Protesting police brutality in downtown Seattle, 2015.

November, 2015 report by MintPress:

"As of Monday evening, U.S. police had killed 1,024 people since the start of the year, according to The Counted, a continuously updated database of U.S. police killings maintained by The Guardian. Of the total, 203 victims of police were unarmed.

In November alone police killed 10 unarmed males, including Jamar Clark, the 24-year-old man whose death led to in ongoing protests in Minneapolis, and Jeremy Mardis, a six-year-old who was shot by police in Louisiana during a chase. (Body camera footage showed that the two officers involved in Mardis’ death fired recklessly into the car driven by Chris Few, the boy’s father, who was also injured in the incident. The two officers have been arrested.)

Despite claims America’s police forces need to be highly armed in order to defend themselves against a “war on cops,” just 34 police were fatally shot and three others died of assault in the line of duty so far this year, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, which tracks police deaths in the United States."

by Akim Reinhardt

Every time of year is ripe for bread and circuses in America. There is nary a day when you can't eat cheap fast food and indulge in aimless distractions. There are all the holidays, like Christmas, Memorial Day, and Labor Day, which used to mean something but now are little more than convenient excuses for shopping sprees and drunkenness. There's the endless streams of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon to complement the more traditional time wasters of cable TV and the broadcast networks. There's the Friday happy hours capping off a miserable week of work with shallow social relationships and cheap booze and finger food. And of course there's always your phone. Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp, QQ, all those photos you took, all those photos people are sending you, GIFs galore, and tic-toc, tic-toc, text, text, text.

It never ends.

And perhaps it never did. Perhaps it's simply that society is wealthier than it's ever been before, leaving people with more leisure time, cheap food, and expendable income than prior generations could have imagined. Perhaps our ancestors pined for the chance to wile away their lives but simply lacked the time and resources to do so. Perhaps they were too busy laboring in factories and on farms, trudging and hustling, to become so thoroughly absorbed in nothingness as we do today. If our great-great grandparents could see us now, maybe they'd scold us for paying insufficient attention to the republic's affairs, or spending too much time on food and drink and idle entertainment, but not enough time in the House of the Lord, improving our souls and making amends for our sins.

Or maybe they'd just be jealous. Maybe whatever criticisms they lobbed at us would be born of anxiety and envy, designed to hide the sad yearning within them, the hopeless desire that they too could have so easily filled their bellies and wasted their lives.

Because maybe floating upon a lost cloud of minor hedonism is the best we can hope for.

Read more »

by Leanne Ogasawara

Once upon a time, the world was full of miracles.

And oh, that was the miracle of those two spires of Chartres Cathedral! Separated in time by some four hundred years, the spires can still be glimpsed past fields of wheat, rising up over the low town; a town which itself has somehow retained its old medieval quality. Very much like the legendary first view of Mont Saint-Michel one gets from a distance, it is the unexpected vision of those cathedral spires arising out of the clear blue sky that makes arriving at Chartres so emotionally stirring an experience.

We were following in the footsteps of Henry Adams.

The son of Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to London, it wasn't just his father who was a great man; for Henry Adams' grandfather and great-grandfather were US presidents. A historian and man of letters, I had never realized until I stumbled on his book about Chartres that Henry Adams was a Harvard-trained medievalist. And an excellent one at that. His book, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres is written in the finest 19th century classical essay style. Engaging and filled with all manner of playful and dazzlingly-told medievalisms, the book became the blueprint for our own journey in Northern France this past summer.

So, since Adams begins his travelogue with Mont Saint-Michel–so did we.

I've already written about our stay on the Mont in my July post Benedictine Dreams. Even now, I cannot get the sound of the seagulls and church bells out of my mind: or of walking across the bridge of dreams toward that fairy palace shimmering in the summertime air. It was utterly otherworldly. Its infamous mudflats and quicksand, which pilgrims of old had to cross in order to reach the Mont, were known in the Middle Ages as the "path to paradise." And it's true. The Mont is, as they say, one of the great wonders of the western world. Everyone should try and go see it someday. Henry Adams was also much beguiled by the vision of the great fortress abbey, perched on top of a granite rock in the middle of the strongest tidal currents in Europe. He describes it as a monument to the masculine. And in his book, he sets up Mont Saint-Michel as a kind of "yin" to Chartres' "yang."

He has a point; for if the massively fortified Mont was dedicated to the archangel Michael, commander of the army of God and weigher of human souls; Chartres, by contrast, has always been dedicated to the Virgin Queen.

Indeed, even before there was a cathedral at Chartres, this place had already been known as a holy place in the Druid cult of the divine feminine.

[Joan Sutherland "Casta diva" from "Norma"]

But how did this cathedral survive intact for so long?

Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Evert Cilliers

Hitler and Mussolini came to power because they were freely elected by their people, with the complicity of many in the established political class.

Can the same thing happen in America with the freely elected President Trump, who is being coddled by our established political class in the GOP?

After all, in true authoritarian fashion, Trump attacks the free press, attacks our courts, attacks the FBI and the Justice Department, and tells half a dozen lies a day.

Never before has so much crap been dropped from the piehole of an American president.

It's something we've never seen in all of our history.

Unprecedented. Bizarro. Weird beyond weird.

We now have a presidential moron who, in between his intake of junk food and junk news, spends his days shitting on our democracy.

Ezra Klein wrote at Vox:

"This was a year in which Trump undermined the press, fired the director of the FBI, cozied up to Russia, baselessly alleged he was wiretapped, threatened to jail his political opponents, publicly humiliated his attorney general for recusing himself from an investigation, repeatedly claimed massive voter fraud against him, appointed a raft of unqualified and occasionally ridiculous candidates to key positions, mishandled the aftermath of the Puerto Rico hurricane, and threatened to use antitrust and libel laws against his enemies."

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.
–Samuel Delany

New York 2140, as many of you know, is Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, a hefty doorstop of a book at a few pages over 600. The title tells the tale, well not all of it by any means, heck, not much of it at all, but it tips you to the central premise: this is a story set in New York City in the year 2140. After the flood. Actually, it’s after two floods, called pulses in the book, a term suggesting that they’re but inflections in the global climate system, though Robinson clearly believes that human activity ramped them up. Consequently, the sea in 2140 is much higher than it is now, fifty feet higher. Manhattan below 50th Street is under water, but most of the buildings remain. People live and work in them and get around by boat and by skybridges. And it’s like that all over the world. Coastal cities have flooded, but people remain.

It’s called the intertidal, this vast worldwide coastal boondocks. It’s not fully wild, but it’s no longer fully civilized, whatever that means. It’s legally ambiguous, lots of off-grid activity, lots of informal mutual-aid living.

The two pulses have weakened nation-states in favor of private institutions and the world remains split into a large sprawling 99+% and a much smaller (fraction of) 1%, who rule over everything by speculating in real estate and financial instruments. New York 2140 is about how a small handful of 99 percenters living in one building in lower Manhattan manage to put a monkey wrench into the whole shebang and bring it to its knees. It is thus a comedy, in the literary sense of the word (e.g. Dante’s Divine Comedy), with an optimistic outlook.

I’m going to take a longish passage from about two-thirds of the way through and use it as a prism – or a Leibnizian monad – to examine the whole. At this point three of our central characters are spinning out a scheme to save the building where they live and do a few other things as well.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

"It is not humiliating to be unhappy."
~ Camus

It was only a few days ago that I heard about Joe Frank's recent passing, which was an odd feeling, because I'd thought he was already dead. Further reflection made me realize that I based this opinion on no evidence whatsoever, but if you know about Joe Frank, you'll agree that an abiding belief in his demise would have been entirely appropriate, and that he would have likely even approved of such a confusion. If you don't know Frank, though, I envy you the experience of hearing him for the first time. To me, he was the greatest radio ever committed to the airwaves. But, regrettably, the best way to hear Frank's work is to have no idea that it's him at all. In that sense, I apologize for blowing it with this modest appreciation, and take comfort from knowing that Frank would be amused by such ambivalence.

Any fan will remember exactly where they were when they first heard one of Joe Frank's broadcasts. For me, it was back in high school, in 1980s central New Jersey. One of my friends was Nadim, a burly Pakistani guy who lived in the tonier part of my neighborhood. Nadim always tramped around in big black combat boots and teased out his long hair with liberal amounts of hairspray to signal his devotion to The Cure. He also played guitar in a few bands, and was the first person to pass me a joint. His parents were wealthy enough that they gave him a red Trans Am for some birthday or other, and we would cruise down the farm lanes of central Jersey late at night, smoking, listening to Joy Division, The Smiths, Bauhaus, Hüsker Dü or Big Black, and remonstrating against life as only teenagers could.

On one of these bone cruises I was fiddling with the radio when I came across a husky, grieving voice intoning over a short loop of a Jewish cantor singing. Frank's voice is unforgettable in its immediacy. He spoke so closely into the microphone that you could feel the humidity of his breath. Although he had many guests on his shows (both intentional and unintentional) his was the only voice that sounded as if it were coming from inside your head. On the occasion of discovering him, it's difficult to remember what he was talking about; his surrealist's take on life was obscured further by the fact that we'd just parachuted into the middle of one of his stories, and immediately, in the words of Conrad at the start of Heart Of Darkness, "we knew we were fated…to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences." But while Marlow's listeners were mildly irritated at being a captive audience, Nadim and I were hooked. We kept driving, and Joe Frank kept talking. It felt as if we'd made a pact with the radio.

Read more »

Slaying of the Suitors

—thoughts on finishing Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey

Ancient Cinema

Book 22 of The Odyssey plays like a scene of The Punisher
so we know that men have been bloodthirsty since the Greeks sacked Troy
(at least) and that Homer rivals Hensleigh in imagery of hacked limbs
and scarlet springs. Almost 3000 years have not dulled our thirst
for an aesthetic of pain. We can imagine Homer yakking with Tarantino
of techniques depicting dread death and cruel dispatch over cups of sea-dark wine
imagining clueless suitors mocking an 800 BC ISIS collapsed into the form
of one Odysseus disguised by Athena as an old mendicant, a beggar envisioning
his tormentors' imminent decapitations, amputations, punctures, skewers,
unconcerned of R ratings, happily scripting till bloody-fingered dawn rolls in
with crime scene cleaners to make the place respectable for the almost-civilized
who’ve slapped down good money for tickets to clean, screen brutality
and spent small fortunes on popcorn and coke

Jim Culleny
1/26/18
.

by Jonathan Kujawa

If you have a sibling you are familiar with the problem of dividing up something desirable between selfish people. For some things, like ice cream or money, your only preference is to get as much as you can. If you divide it equally, then at least nobody will be envious of anyone else. My parents used the trick of letting one of us make the divisions, but in the knowledge that the other kids would get first pick. NASA can only dream of the atomic scale cuts made by me and my siblings [1]!

But what happens if the item in question isn't all the same? If it's a cake, a corner piece with roses made of frosting might be more desirable than a piece from the center. In an inheritance, a taxidermy collection and jewelry are hardly the same. Worse, each person might have very different preferences! My brother has a huge sweet tooth. He loves frosting while I'd definitely steer clear of corner pieces. One person's mounted deer head is another person's diamond earrings.

Delicious Baked Alaska

You might guess math has useful things to say about dividing things. But we'll soon see that there are more than a few surprises, too. The first question you might ask is if it is even possible to always divide something into two equal pieces with a single straight cut. It's not too hard to see if you have a single uniform object (say a plain cake), then no matter its shape, a single, well-chosen slice with a Samurai sword will split it into two equal sized pieces.

But what if your cake is a Baked Alaska? Surely you can't make a single cut which equally splits the cake and the ice cream and the chocolate drizzled on top? The Ham Sandwich Theorem is a remarkable result which says that no matter how elaborately intertwined three objects are, it is always possible to make a single cut which separates each of the three into two equal sized pieces!

Read more »

William Klein, Gerard Ifert, Wojciech Zamecznik. 1950s-1960s

"… In the post-war years, these three photographers managed to revolutionize photography, despite its young history in the arts. Through photomontages, formal abstractions, they became predecessors and influences of the Bauhaus, a school that promotes the alliance between the fine arts and the applied arts. The artist takes center stage and is in charge. The photographer becomes a painter, the camera, his pencil. To draw with light, as most would define photography."

"Photographisme" at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, through January 29, 2018.

More here and here.

by Arjun Appadurai

Dear Professor Appadurai,

We are writing with great trepidation to invite you to the Jaipur Literary Festival this year. You have never been invited to this Festival over its many years of star-studded glory, unbridled creativity and collaborative celebrity, because we have hesitated to include someone with your fame, stature and credentials to our humble (yet magnificent) event. It is also the case that we do not generally support serious books with too many footnotes. Unless they are published by one of our already established cognoscenti, who sometimes dabble in scholarship of various kinds.

But we digress. We want you to give a plenary talk, during which all other panels, promotional events, political processions, private parties or sexual interactions will be strictly prohibited. This can be at a location and time of your choosing. We suggest the Taj Rambagh Palace lawns at sunset, with a special rendition of Raag Yaman will be performed by a global orchestra conducted by A.K. Rahman.

We are aware, of course, that Rajasthan is a slightly controversial setting, where bride-burnings, film censorship, mob lynching, beef bans, cow protection militias and murders of Dalits, sometimes upset the royal serenity of our palaces, forts, villages and luxury hotels. But we assure you that we guarantee your security, comfort and peace of mind, unless you say something that could hurt the feelings of the sponsors, the Rajasthan government or the Karni Sena, though these are all composed of individuals who are usually entirely free of feelings.

Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

If you are one of the billions of people on this planet who avoid the wine press you might never have heard of "natural wines". Yet, they are the source of great controversy in the wine world, dividing brother from brother and tearing at the delicate fabric of overwrought sensibilities. It's not quite civil war but it's serious enough to generate plenty of creative insults. To select one example, a Newsweek article was entitled "Why Natural Wine Tastes Worse than Putrid Cider" which, as you might imagine, caused natural wine proponents to launch diatribes against smug, snobbish, closed-minded apologists for "frankenwines". That's the tenor of the debate.

What is this debate about?

Natural wines are wines made without cultured yeast, minimal (or no) use of the preservative sulfur dioxide, no modern winemaking technology such as reverse osmosis or micro-oxygenation, no additives such as mega purple, enzymes, or additional acid, no filtration, and using only grapes grown organically and/or sustainably. Natural wine producers often advertise an aspiration to make wine the way it was made 120 years ago.

So what is wrong with modern winemaking technology? Well, environmental issues such as soil depletion and potentially harmful chemicals to start with, but natural wine enthusiasts also claim modern industrial winemaking destroys flavor, creates generic wines that lack freshness and complexity, and that no longer reflect the unique characteristics of the grapes' origins.

Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Gerald Dworkin

In October, 1961, I was sitting in The Jazz Workshop, a San Francisco nightclub, listening to Lenny Bruce doing his infamous routine Are there any Niggers here tonight?

It begins with asking that question and proceeds to make comments using racial slurs for every racial group he could–kikes, guineas, wops, spics, polacks, sheenies, etc. His point, as he explains in the routine, was to routinize the words, so that they lost their shocking impact and obtained the status, as he says, of "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" He was arrested that night not for the racial slurs but for obscenity—his "to is a preposition, come is a verb" routine.

Bruce spent most of his professional life being arrested and prosecuted by the police in various jurisdictions—always for obscenity. He was convicted in New York State, died during the appeals process, and in 2003 given a posthumous pardon by Governor Pataki.

I was therefore both amused and shocked to see in recent weeks that Bruce was under attack again. This time by some angry students and faculty of Brandeis University. An alumnus of the University had written a play about Bruce and it was scheduled to be performed on campus.

Some members of the theatre department raised objections and felt that more time was needed to produce the play "appropriately" and some students objected that the portrayal of its black characters was "ridiculous and vicious." The playwright decided to take the play elsewhere for its premiere.

This was one of the calmer instances of an attack on expression. In recent months student protests have led to cancellation of speaker talks, to disruption of invited speakers, to violence and destruction on campus. The names of Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Richard Spencer and the campuses of Evergreen State College, Middlebury, University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, University of Florida, Yale, University of Missouri, are known to many. For a view of what one such protest looks, and sounds, like, click here.

Read more »