Category: Books
*One Life to Lead*, and Scheffler’s stance on time neutrality
The author is Samuel Scheffler, and the subtitle is The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment. He is one of America’s leading philosophers, and proves it once again here.
Much of this book is devoted to arguing against Derek Parfit’s view of “time neutrality,” namely that a pleasure or pain is not intrinsically more or less valuable because it arrives earlier or later in time. Scheffler has some compelling examples of intuitions that seem to violate Parfit’s time neutrality. Here are two:
a) If you will have written say 6 good books in your life, you might at a moment of time care how many of them lie in your past, and how many lie in your future.
b) If a loved one dies, you want to be grieving for some particular period of time, and for a period of time of a particular length. You also (probably) prefer that most of the grieving passes after some particular period of time.
Scheffler has other examples too, but those force you to consider what time neutrality really means.
One possible defense of time neutrality is to invoke a ceteris paribus clause, namely when comparing different time periods a time neutrality standard is allowed to hold certain things constant across the two periods. Scheffler should have done more to consider that option. That said, a sufficiently strict ceteris paribus clause obliterates the distinctions between past and future, and threatens to make time neutrality a tautology (i.e., of course you should be time neutral if the past and present differ in no distinguishable regards).
Another possible defense is to suggest that time neutrality does not necessarily apply to individual “personalist” decisions, but it should rule impersonal judgments of social welfare and assessments of “what is best.” That is the stance I take in my Stubborn Attachments.
A third defense, but only a partial one, is to suggest that virtually all individuals, at the margin, should be more time neutral than they are currently.
A further trick might be to ask how Scheffler finds some of the counterexamples to time neutrality compelling, but presumably not all possible counterexamples are compelling. He is weighing the costs and benefits, and other philosophical considerations, of having most of the books in your life ahead of you rather than behind you, to continue with one of his exmaples. And finding those two states of affairs are not equally valuable. What discount rate should he be using to assess which are the effective counterexamples? What if that discount rate were in essence zero? Time neutrality would have re-entered through the back door. You have to choose some discount rate to evaluate all of those counterexamples and their degree of compellingness, and if Scheffler thinks the right rate is, say, three percent, he ought to come out and say so. But I suspect the arguments for that position would look rather weak, weaker than the arguments for time neutrality at the very least. And so there is a silence where he needs to give some answer or another as to how exactly costs and benefits get weighted through time.
Ultimately I think of a multiplicity of not-fully commensurable perspectives on time neutrality are required to give a life meaning, and to make our attachments salient. And some of those perspectives ought to include time neutrality, and indeed will need to include time neutrality, most of all at the level of social choice. At some level or another, the time neutrality position will prove to be indispensable as part of the portfolio.
That is not where Scheffler ends up, but in any case I am happy to recommend this book strongly to anyone with an interest in serious philosophy.
Note that many other issues are considered in the work as well. He gives new arguments for “finding meaning in the whole,” yet without going overboard on dubious metaphysics. There is also an implied theory of obligation in his account, namely that you should act to help create more meaning and more attachment for others. His notion of “archived lives” is fascinating, but I fear it, and much of the associated discussion, gives one very neurologically specific understanding of memory too central a role in understanding human valuation and also human attachment.
It is all worth a ponder.
My entertaining Conversation with Annie Jacobsen
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Annie explore whether we should be more afraid of nuclear weapons or if fear itself raises the risks, who should advise presidents during the six-minute decision window, whether moving toward disarmament makes us safer or more vulnerable, what Thomas Schelling really meant about nuclear war and rational actors, the probability that America would retaliate after a nuclear attack, the chances of intercepting a single incoming ICBM, why missile defense systems can’t replicate Israel’s Iron Dome success, how Pakistan-India nuclear tensions could escalate, why she’s surprised domestic drone attacks haven’t happened yet, her reporting on JFK assassination mysteries and deathbed phone calls, her views on UFOs and the dark human experiments at Area 51, what motivates intelligence community operators, her encounters with Uri Geller and CIA psychic research, what she’s working on next, and more.
Excerpt:
JACOBSEN: I quote him in the notes of my book, and this is perhaps the only regret I have in the entire book, that I put this quote from Schelling in the notes rather than in the text. Maybe it’s more interesting for your listeners if we drill down on this than the big platitudes of, “Do more nuclear weapons make us more safe?” It goes like this. This was Schelling in an interview with WGBH Radio in 1986 in Boston.
He says, “The problem with applying game theory to nuclear war is that nuclear war, by its very nature, does not involve rational men. It can’t. What sane person would be willing to kill hundreds of millions of people, ruin the earth, and end modern civilization in order to make somebody called the enemy doesn’t win first?”
COWEN: But Schelling did favor nuclear weapons. That was his dark sense of humor, I would say.
JACOBSEN: You think what I just read was his sense of humor?
COWEN: Absolutely.
JACOBSEN: I believe it was a man in his elder years coming to the conclusion that nuclear war is insane, which is the fundamental premise that I make in the book.
COWEN: You can hold both views. It is insane, but it might be the better insanity of the ones available to us.
JACOBSEN: Yes. From my take, he, like so many others that I have interviewed, because, for some reason — call it fate and circumstance — I have spent my career interviewing men in their 80s and 90s, who are defense officials who spent their entire life making war or preventing war. I watch them share with me their reflections in that third act of their life, which are decidedly different — in their own words — than those that they would have made as a younger man.
I find that fascinating, and that’s my takeaway from the Schelling quote, that he came to terms with the fact that intellectualizing game theory — like von Neumann, who never got to his old age — is madness.
COWEN: Let’s say that Russia or China, by mistake, did a full-scale launch toward the United States, and they couldn’t call the things back, and we’re in that six-minute window, or whatever it would be with hypersonics. What do you think is the probability that we would do a full-scale launch back?
…COWEN: The word madness doesn’t have much force with me. My life is a lot of different kinds of madness. I’ve heard people say marriage is madness. A lot of social conventions seem to me to be madness.
The question is getting the least harmful form of madness out there. Then, I’m not convinced that those who wish to disarm have really made their case. Certainly, saying nuclear war is madness doesn’t persuade me. If anything, if enough people think it’s madness, we won’t get it, and it’s fine to have the nuclear weapons.
A different and quite stimulating episode.
What I’ve been reading
1. Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives. I get tired of reading through the same old histories of Persia/Iran, and how they tell the same old tales of the rise and fall of the Shah, etc. So how else might you try to understand contemporary Iran better? Books like this are a very good place to start, plus they are fun to page through. If anything, the works seem to get better and more original post-1979? And you can see continuing currents of the non-Islamic undergrounds strands in Iranian theology?
2. Neal Bascomb, The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less than Four Minutes to Achieve It. While the major focus is on Roger Bannister, there is plenty on the other runners of his time as well, most of all the Australian John Landy, who rapidly broke Bannister record after it was achieved. Many smart people do not read enough books about the history of sports. Yet the genre is very good, as often both the readers and the authors (!) actually really care about the content of the material. Recommended.
3. Barry Mazor, Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story. I’m not going to pass this one up, as Macca once said: “The biggest influence on John and me was the Everly Brothers. To this day I just think they’re the greatest.” In addition to the very famous songs, “Roots” is an incredible and now neglected album. This book however is good not great, as it never quite brings them to life. But it is now the main biography, and in that sense is self-recommending.
4. Ian Penman, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite (Semiotext(e)/ Native Agents. A hard book to explain. A kind of devil’s dictionary of terms related to Erik Satie, interesting and witty throughout, at least if you know something of early modernism and its culture. Recommended, for those who care.
5. Alexander Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke. “Schnittke really lies between two traditions, with German rationalism on one hand and Russian irrationalism on the other.” Lately I have been listening to the Psalms of Remembrance and the violin sonata #2. I had not known that Schnittke grew up speaking Volga German.
5. Rachel Cusk, Parade. I quite enjoyed this, described on the back cover as “a carousel of lives.” You will find an overview and spoilers here.
Bill McGowan, and Juliana Silva, Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience, is a good and useful book.
Jo Ann Cavallo, editor, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor. There is even an essay by David Gordon (!) in here.
The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Immigration, edited by Sahar Akhtar, is the best collection on its topic.
There is Thomas Piketty, Equality is a Struggle: Bulletins from the Front Line, 2021-2025. Columns in favor of democratic socialism and higher taxes.
And there is Samuel Arbesman, The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World — and Shapes Our Future.
No abundance for *Abundance*
Book clubs nationwide have been talking for months about whether you are “Abundance-pilled,” a reference to the recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has made it into the lexicon of many public policy nerds.
And public policy nerds happen to be everywhere in the District of Columbia. That is why the waitlist to borrow this book at the D.C. Public Library is more than 300 people long for a hard copy, over 500-long for an eBook and more than 800-long for an audiobook.
How many copies does the D.C. library system have of this New York Times-bestseller, which was published in March? Well, from March to July, the total was just one. One hard copy, zero eBook registrations and zero audio books.
Only in August did the D.C. public library finally expand its catalogue to 51 copies, which is still little relief for the hundreds who have been waiting months.
Model that! Here is the full story, via Bruce.
*Taking Religion Seriously*
By Charles Murray, now forthcoming, I expect it will be very interesting. Due out October 14.
The British Navy snapped up so many of the good personnel
Circa WWI:
Before the War Office had awoken to the demands of modern war, the Admiralty had. Put in its orders, protected its workers from conscription and claimed a large share of national steel production. Of the 480,000 protected industrial workers in July 1915, 400,000 belonged to the Admiralty, which controlled three-quarters of the maritime industrial labor force and virtually all its skilled men. The Ministry of Munitions never succeeded in laying claim to any of them and had to rely heavily on unskilled women throughout the war…This generated much resentment among less fortunate, or less provident, ministries and ministers.
That is from the truly excellent The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945, by N.A.M. Rodger. Reading Rodger you get a sense of how frequently and how well he thinks about “how institutions actually work,” and how rarely so many other historians actually do that.
*The Price of Victory*
The author is N.A.M. Rodger, and the subtitle is A Naval History of Britain, 1815-1945. An excellent book, volume three in a longer series. Here is one excerpt:
…the most significant of all material innovations of the nineteenth century was virtually invisible. It took twenty-five years of investment and some heavy losses, but the completion of the first reliable transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 may be taken to mark the moment when intercontinental communication times fell instantaneously from months to hours. Contemporaries talked enthusiastically of the ‘practical annihilation of time and space,’ and for an imperial and naval power with more time and space to handle than anyone else, the submarine cable was truly revolutionary. This different and expensive technology offered secure communications almost invulnerable to interference (except in shallow water). Britain possessed most of the world’s capacity to manufacture underwater cables, had an effective monopoly of Gutta percha, the only good insulator, trained the majority of the world’s cable operators, owned (in 1904) more than twice as many cable-laying ships as the rest of the world put together, and alone had mastered the difficult art of recovering and repairing cables in deep water. The high fixed costs, advanced technology and very long life (seventy-five years on average) of undersea cables made it extremely difficult for foreigners to break into this monopoly.
I will be buying and reading other books by this author, as this is one of the very best books of this year.
Daunt tote bags as status symbols
Her husband, Jimmy, is carrying the blue tote bag through Victoria Park Village, where three other Daunt totes bags are spotted within a 20-minute window despite there being no store nearby.
Locality doesn’t matter. “I have a friend with a bookshop in Italy who follows Daunt Books on Instagram so I gave her a spare from my collection. She was so excited,” Marta Timoncini said. At 50, she says she is “too old to make a fashion statement” but simply thinks the design is nice and enjoys the secret pocket to hold her phone. She also said she likes to flaunt her love of her beloved store.
She is perhaps an outlier. A team member at the Broadway store for Jimmy Fairly said people come in just to buy the tote bag, which is free with every purchase, but costs £20 on its own. The shop is capitalising on the frenzy, selling limited-edition summer and winter versions.
The tote is another success story of virality: people walk around trendy London hotspots and hawk-eyed trend watchers satirise them in meme pages on social media. “That’s when I knew we had made it. We are cool now, it is viral, that is amazing,” the team member said.
Here is more from the Times of London, also covering Trader Joe’s tote bags as a status symbol. I now own about twenty-five of these bags? Via Rebecca Lowe.
What should I ask George Selgin?
Yes, I will be having a Conversation with him, live at the Cato Institute on September 26th, here is some basic information:
Website: https://www.cato.org/events/false-dawn-new-deal-promise-recovery-1933-1947
Registration: https://register.cato.org/false-dawn-new-deal-promise-recovery-1933-1947/register
We will start with George’s new and excellent book False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery 1933-1947. But of course George has a long and distinguished record in monetary economics, free banking, macro, and ngdp ideas, as well as productivity norms for monetary policy.
So what should I ask him?
My excellent Conversation with Helen Castor
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Helen explore what English government could and couldn’t do in the 14th century, why landed nobles obeyed the king, why parliament chose to fund wars with France, whether England could have won the Hundred Years’ War, the constitutional precedents set by Henry IV’s deposition of Richard II, how Shakespeare’s Richard II scandalized Elizabethan audiences, Richard’s superb artistic taste versus Henry’s lack, why Chaucer suddenly becomes possible in this period, whether Richard II’s fatal trip to Ireland was like Captain Kirk beaming down to a hostile planet, how historians continue to discover new evidence about the period, how Shakespeare’s Henriad influences our historical understanding, Castor’s most successful work habits, what she finds fascinating about Asimov’s I, Robot, the subject of her next book, and more.
Here is an excerpt from the opening sequence:
COWEN: Richard II and Henry IV — they’re born in the same year, namely 1367. Just to frame it for our listeners, could you give us a sense — back then, what was it that the English government could do and what could it not do? What is the government like then?
CASTOR: I think people might be surprised at quite how much government could do in England at this point in history because England, at this point, was the most centralized state in Europe, and that has two reasons. One is the Conquest of 1066 where the Normans have come in and taken the whole place over. Then, the other key formative period is the late 12th century when Henry II is ruling an empire that stretches from the Scottish border all the way down to southwestern France.
He has to have a system of government and of law that can function when he’s not there. By the late 14th century, when Richard and Henry — my two kings in this book — appear on the scene, the king has two key functions which appear on the two sides of his seal. On one side, he sits in state wearing a crown, carrying an orb and scepter as a lawgiver and a judge. That is a key function of what he does for his people. He imposes law. He gives justice. He maintains order.
On the other side of the seal, he’s wearing armor on a warhorse with a sword unsheathed in his hand. That’s his function as a defender of the realm in an intensely practical way. He has to be a soldier, a warrior to repel attacks or, indeed, to launch attacks if that’s the best form of defense. To do that, he needs money.
For that, the institution of parliament has developed, which offers consent to taxation that he can demonstrate is in the national interest. It has also come to be a law-making forum. Wherever he needs to make new laws, he can make statute law in Parliament that therefore, in its very nature, has the consent of the representatives of the realm.
COWEN: What is it, back then, that government cannot do?
CASTOR: What a government doesn’t have in the medieval period is, it doesn’t have a monopoly of force. In other words, it doesn’t have a police force. It doesn’t have a professional police force, and it doesn’t have a standing army, or at least by the late Middle Ages, England does have a permanent garrison in Calais, which is its outpost on the northern coast of France, but that’s not a garrison that can be recalled to England with any ease.
So, enforcement is the government’s key problem. To enforce the king’s edicts, it therefore relies on a hierarchy of private power on the landed, the great landowners of the kingdom, who are wealthy because of their possession of land, but crucially, also have control over people, the men who live and work on their land. If you need to get an enforcement posse — this is medieval English language that we use when we talk of sheriffs and posses — the county posse, the power of the county.
If you need to get men out quickly, you need to tap into those local power structures. You don’t have modern communications. You don’t have modern transport. The whole hierarchy of the king’s theoretical authority has to tap into and work through the private hierarchy of landed power.
COWEN: Why do those landed nobles obey the king? They’re afraid of the future raising of an army? Or they’re handed out some other benefit? What keeps the incentives all working together to the extent they stay working together?
CASTOR: They have a very important pragmatic interest in obeying the king because the king is the keystone of the hierarchy within which they are powerful and wealthy. Of course, they want more power and more wealth for themselves and for their dynasty, but importantly, they don’t want to risk everything to acquire more if it means serious danger that they might lose what they already have.
They have every interest in maintaining the hierarchy as it already is, within which they can then . . . It’s like having a referee…
A very good episode, definitely recommended. I enjoyed all of Helen’s books, most notably the recent
*Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America*
By Sam Tanenhaus. I held off reading this book at first, as I felt I already knew a lot about Buckley and his life. But it is excellent. Very well written and engaging throughout. I learned a good deal, and it is one of the best books on the history of the American 20th century right wing.
As a youth, watching Firing Line, I frequently was frustrated that Buckley was not more analytical, and that he sometimes spoke in such a roundabout manner. In part I wanted to expand Conversations with Tyler to fill that gap. I am also indebted to Buckley for first getting me interested in Bach. So he played a very definite role in my life.
*The Monastic World*
The author is Andrew Jotischky, and the subtitle is A 1,200-Year History. He writes very well and also can think in terms of organizations. Excerpt:
As such, monasteries were complex institutions. The demands of property ownership included systems for collection and receipt of rents, and thus methods of accountancy and management of finances and human resources. But even the fulfilment of their spiritual functions of communal worship required internal systems and management. The correct performance of the liturgy required training in chant and sacramental theology. It also required service books and specific sacred objects for celebration of the eucharist. In order to fulfil the expectation of constant prayer and praise, the liturgical offices were spread across day and night, which in turn meant that light — from candles or oil, depending on the region — was needed for several hours. All of these items had to be produced or procured. Monasteries thus needed supplies ranging from bread to wine to wax and parchment, and the technical know-how to process these. Moreover, the schools that monasteries developed to train their own monks also provided opportunities for a largely non-literate society to educate their young.
An excellent book, Yale University Press, and currently priced below $15 in hardcover.
What should I ask Anne Appelbaum?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia:
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum…is an American journalist and historian. She has written about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She became a Polish citizen in 2013.
Applebaum has worked at The Economist and The Spectator magazines, and she was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006). She won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2004 for Gulag: A History. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine, as well as a senior fellow of the Agora Institute and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University .
But she has done more yet, including work on a Polish cuisine cookbook. So what should I ask her?
What I’ve been reading
1. Michael Kempe, The Best of all Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days. A good book, I had not realized the full import of Leibniz in the history of binary computation, his understanding of “novels as models,” his theory of social distancing during epidemics, or just how much attention he devoted to the historical episode of a woman as Pope.
2. Judith Scheele, Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara. A quite good, informative, and readable book on a very much undercovered topic. Saharan civilization is something that runs deeper, and is more coherent, than any set of national boundaries in the region. The author spent years living in the Saharan region of Chad. Recommended, a good example of “you should read a book about a topic you are not thinking of reading about.”
3. Frank Close, Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age 1895-1965. A good look at the underlying scientific history behind nuclear, most of all in the pre-Manhattan project years. I had not sufficiently realized how dangerous this research was, and how many of the people died prematurely from cancer, quite possibly from radiation exposure.
4. Bijan Omrani, God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England. Some might argue this book is a “duh,” nonetheless I found it a good overview of the importance of Christianity in British history, and suggesting that those ties should not be lost or abandoned,
5. Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. Are you excited by the prospect of learning more about why Burma split off from the rest of the Raj in 1937? If so, this is the book for you. It also has good coverage on the role of the Middle East in the history of the Raj.
6. Perry Anderson, Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War. This strikes me as the kind of book where a very established author is seeking to work out issues that preoccupied him as a much younger man. Such books tend to be interesting but also incomplete and unsatisfying? Overall I am glad I read this one.
7. Diana Darke, Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments. Perhaps overargued in places, but an excellent book, with super-clear explanations and wonderful illustrations. Excerpt: “No architectural style just ‘appears’ magically out of nowhere. All the key innovations attributed to Romanesque — new vaulting techniques, the use of decorative frames, interlace and ornamental devices like blind arcades, Lombard bands, blind arches, lesenes, Venetian dentil and the use of fantastical beasts and foliage in sculpture — can be traced back to their origins, and all of these without exception lead us eastwards [to Islam].”
The new Javier Cercas book
The new Cercas book is El loco de Dios en el fin del mundo. That title translates roughly as “The crazy man of God at the end of the world,” noting there are ambiguities in who that man is (Cercas? The Pope?), and whether the end of the world refers to a trip to Mongolia or the apocalypse or perhaps death.
Cercas, arguably Spain’s greatest living writer, decides to shed his purely secular perspective and accompany Pope Francis on his Mongolia visit, a country with about 1500 Catholics. Like many of Cercas’s novels, it is a mix of non-fiction and fiction, and it is also self-consciously a detective story – which truths will Cercas unlock during this journey? Most of all, he wants to know if his mother will meet her husband (Cercas’s father) when she dies.
We live in a time when an atheistic European author puts down his preoccupation with Spanish history and spends almost five hundred pages engaging with the Pope and also the possibility of God. A vibe shift if there ever was one.
Cercas reports that he came away from the trip more anti-clerical than before, but on the matter of God and the miracle of the Resurrection, I read his text as ever so ambiguous.
Do not despair, the works of Cercas usually end up translated into English in a reasonably prompt manner.