Category: Philosophy
My thoughts on recent campus fracases
This topic feels over-covered by other sources, but still I would like to see these points receive more attention:
1. I don’t trust early media reports on such matters, and so I am reluctant to offer judgment on a variety of the specifics. That includes Yale, Mizzou, and other places. For most or maybe even close to all readers, the proper context probably is missing and perhaps some of the facts are being garbled.
2. Universities have the right to regulate speech and also behavior on their premises, just as a corporation does or a hotel might do. There is no infringement of freedom of speech when a university acts in this manner. Public funding does introduce some complications, but even there residual regulatory rights exist.
3. Subtle linguistic cues, social barriers, bigotries of expectations, and segregations can in fact harm students and shape their future life prospects. That said, I am mostly skeptical about the ability of universities to undo these social mechanisms by conscious social engineering of the immediate environment. Some gain can be achieved, and some of the worst harms can and should be avoided, but it is a mistake to expect too much from universities in this regard.
4. My personal preference is to see controversial ideas discussed and debated openly on campuses,more so than is currently the case. Those ideas are going to be out there anyway, so let’s have universities contribute to shaping the broader social discourse. For instance imagine that more advanced forms of genetic engineering someday become possible, and parents can selectively abort an embryo with a higher chance of being gay. Do we really want to be in a position where universities have shied away from discussing this issue for decades? I say no, realizing that in the meantime some peoples’ feelings will indeed have ended up being hurt. If you are gay, and sitting in a classroom discussion of this topic, or maybe you just have a gay friend — whatever — I doubt if there is a fully comfortable way for this discussion to proceed. Yet the rest of the world is going to be talking about this, the internet above all, and making the university a “safe space” won’t make the broader world one, if anything the contrary.
5. The natural tendency for administrators is to want to minimize internal disruption, even if that is sometimes at the expense of having a broader world impact. I thus believe many administrators overinvest in political correctness, at least from a Benthamite, utilitarian point of view. See #4.
6. The upshot of this all is that lower tier administrators will be sending fewer all-student emails in the future. And some presidents may be less interested in improving the quality of their football teams, or starting such teams in the first place. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
7. Most of the world knows very, very little about the details of these events. They see there is a mess, and they think something is wrong with universities, students, parents, administrators — everyone. No matter what happens from this point, universities have messed up and lost this round rather badly.
For this post I am indebted to a discussion with Stephen Macedo and two of his students, but of course they are not to be implicated in my opinions one way or the other.
Rene Girard has passed away
Here is the Stanford report of his passing, well done, and here are previous MR mentions of Girard. He was one of the world’s great thinkers.
Arnold Kling on Rand Paul words of wisdom
I think that recent developments in the Middle East, starting with the behavior of Hamas during the Gaza war and continuing with the behavior of ISIS, have struck a nerve among those inclined toward the civilization vs. barbarism axis.
Even if you do not believe that conservatives are right, you have to acknowledge that the news cycle suggests that we are in a civilization vs. barbarism wave. In my opinion, that is why Rand Paul is doing so poorly in the polls. You can criticize him as a candidate, but it is hard to argue that the other candidates are so stellar that they outshine him. I just think that the public is more receptive to the conservative axis than to the libertarian axis. This may always be true, but it is particularly true now.
Here is the full post.
Marxian markets in everything, cemetery edition
On a summer visit to the grave of Karl Marx, Ben Gliniecki found that he would have to pay £4, or about $6, to pay respects to the man who sounded the death knell for private property.
Mr. Gliniecki, a Marxist, said no.
“Personally, I think it is disgusting,” the 24-year-old political activist said. “There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which capitalists won’t sink if they think they can make money out of it.”
The charity that looks after this cemetery has long taken swipe at a different irony: Karl Marx’s decision to buy a burial plot in a private London graveyard over the then state-provided alternatives. They say their cover fee subsidizes the upkeep of a cemetery where 170,000 other people rest.
And note this:
The German philosopher…once predicted the “hot tears of noble people” would be shed over his ashes…
The WSJ article is here, via Vic Sarjoo.
The culture that is French
The innovation-friendly Green party mayor of Grenoble, Eric Piolle, has ordered eight vending machines to be placed in the heart of the city that will dispense literary short stories to pedestrians for free at the push of a button.
The big orange terminals have three options – stories of 1, 3 or 5 minutes – that are printed out on thin recycled paper reminiscent of a lengthy shopping bill and can be tucked into a wallet.
“The idea came to us in front of a vending machine containing chocolate bars and drinks. We said to ourselves that we could do the same thing with good quality popular literature to occupy these little unproductive moments,” Christophe Sibieude, a digital publisher who pitched the idea to the city council, told AFP.
You know he’s great
Here are two sentences about Raj Chetty:
“The unintended consequence of Chetty’s work is a tremendous demoralization of teachers,” said New York University educational historian Diane Ravitch.
It’s funny how you don’t need to know more there. And this one:
He says he won’t register to vote because he thinks that could bias his “laboratory science” approach to economic research.
Both are from this WSJ Bob Davis profile of Chetty, or Google to the ungated link if you wish.
The neuroscience of corporations
In research published last year in the journal Social Neuroscience, Mark Plitt at Baylor College of Medicine and colleagues presented some of their 40 subjects with vignettes of actions taken by humans or corporations that were either prosocial (e.g., donating money), neutral (e.g., buying a printer) or antisocial (e.g., breaking the law). As a control, the other subjects got Wikipedia descriptions of randomly chosen nouns. What were people’s responses to human and corporate actions?
There was a small negative skew about corporations—their prosocial acts elicited less positive emotions, and their neutral or antisocial acts elicited more negative emotions than did the equivalents by humans.
There is more from the WSJ here, via Samir Varma. By the way, file under “speculative.”
Thomas Merrill on David Hume’s coalition
American University professor Thomas Merrill writes:
Hume’s message to the “honest gentlemen” is therefore something like this: “you may not understand this curious character the philosopher; you may think him flaky and unhinged; but if you care about establishing a regime dedicated to individual liberty, you need him around. You need not model your life on his; in fact it is better if you do not. But you need to tolerate him and even be open to being guided by him. Especially do you need to heed his negative message of calling into question the political claims advanced by the various forms of superstition on the basis of alleged insights into the ‘original and ultimate principle.’ Think of the philosopher as you might a garbage man: you might not want to do the job yourself, but it is very useful to society that someone does it.”
That is from Merrill’s Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment, and the passage was sent to me by Daniel Klein, who describes the book as “new and highly recommended.”
Leo Strauss’s greatness, according to Dan Klein
1. A sense of virtue/justice/right that is large and challenging.
2. An appreciation of wisdom as something different than progressive research programs/specialized academic fields and disciplines.
3. An understanding of the sociology of judgment, in particular the role of great humans.
4. An epic narrative, from Thucydides to today.
5. Rediscovery, analysis, elaboration, and instruction of esotericism.
6. Close readings and interpretations of great works.
7. Inspiring, cultivating serious students and followers.
I should add that Dan also is developing a counterpart list, of weaknesses in Strauss’s outlook and approach.
What is stupid?
Should there not be more research on this apparently simple yet elusive question? Here is a new paper by Acezel, Palfi, and Kekecs:
This paper argues that studying why and when people call certain actions stupid should be the interest of psychological investigations not just because it is a frequent everyday behavior, but also because it is a robust behavioral reflection of the rationalistic expectations to which people adjust their own behavior and expect others to. The relationship of intelligence and intelligent behavior has been the topic of recent debates, yet understanding why we call certain actions stupid irrespective of their cognitive abilities requires the understanding of what people mean when they call an action stupid. To study these questions empirically, we analyzed real-life examples where people called an action stupid. A collection of such stories was categorized by raters along a list of psychological concepts to explore what the causes are that people attribute to the stupid actions observed. We found that people use the label stupid for three separate types of situation: (1) violations of maintaining a balance between confidence and abilities; (2) failures of attention; and (3) lack of control. The level of observed stupidity was always amplified by higher responsibility being attributed to the actor and by the severity of the consequences of the action. These results bring us closer to understanding people’s conception of unintelligent behavior while emphasizing the broader psychological perspectives of studying the attribute of stupid in everyday life.
What do you think people, a smart paper or a stupid paper?
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
The Case for Getting Rid of Borders—Completely
In The Atlantic I present the case for open borders. Here is one bit:
No standard moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-developed perspective, regards people from foreign lands as less entitled to exercise their rights—or as inherently possessing less moral worth—than people lucky to have been born in the right place at the right time. Nationalism, of course, discounts the rights, interests, and moral value of “the Other,” but this disposition is inconsistent with our fundamental moral teachings and beliefs.
Freedom of movement is a basic human right. Thus the Universal Declaration of Human Rights belies its name when it proclaims this right only “within the borders of each state.” Human rights do not stop at the border.Today, we treat as pariahs those governments that refuse to let their people exit. I look forward to the day when we treat as pariahs those governments that refuse to let people enter.
Read the whole thing.
Addenda: I was asked to write this piece for a forthcoming volume called How to Save Humanity that will feature essays by Steven Pinker, Martin Rees, Nick Bostom and others.
Open Borders seems to be having a moment. Time also featured a piece on migration by Bryan Caplan.
The comment section at The Atlantic reminded me of how good the comment section at MR can be. Amusingly, I was called both a zionist Jew and an anti-semite out to destroy Israel. On the other hand, my article has 31,000 likes and counting so I can’t complain.
Lawrence Dennis on what is wrong with economics
The trouble with most of our social thinking is that, being done in terms of eighteenth century rationalism, it takes dynamism for granted and assumes that the chief social problems are those of knowing what you want and how to get it. The chief social problem is that of generating and unifying the social will that creates activity, change and what we have been wont to call progress.
That is from his 1940 book The Dynamics of War and Revolution, p.53. It’s an ever so slightly fascistic version of a common critique of neoclassical economics. Is it entirely wrong?
*Landmarks*, by Robert Macfarlane
I enjoyed many passages in this book, here was my favorite:
As well as these untranslatable terms, I have gathered synonyms — especially those that bring new energies to familiar phenomena. The variant English terms for ‘icicle’ — aquabob (Kent), clinkerbell and daggler (Wessex), cancervell (Exmoor), ickle (Yorkshire), tankle (Durham), shuckle (Cambria) — form a tinkling poem of their own. In Northamptonshire dialect ‘to thaw’ is to ungive. The beauty of this variant I find hard to articulate, but it surely has to do with the paradox of thaw figured as restraint or retention, and the wintry notion that cold, frost and snow might themselves be a form of gift — an addition to the landscape that will in time be subtracted by warmth.
Also of note is the discussion of how places names in Gaelic (and many other languages and dialects) are becoming unintelligible, even if much of Gaelic is surviving. And so:
The nuances observed by specialized vocabularies are evaporating from common usage, burnt off by capital, apathy and urbanization. The terrain beyond the city fringe has become progressively more understood in terms of large generic units (‘field’, ‘hill’, ‘valley’, ‘wood’). It has become a blandscape…It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are disappearing, rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen.
Definitely recommended, buy it here.
Ayn Rand and The Martian
The Martian is the most Randian movie in years, perhaps in decades. Ayn Rand is best known for her defense of capitalism but her defense of reason was even more fundamental to her thought. The Martian has no bearing on politics but it reminded me of Rand’s essay on Apollo 11 and the moon landing, the launch of which she witnessed 
from Kennedy Space Center.
Rand wrote that the Apollo 11 mission “conveyed the sense that we were watching a magnificent work of art – a play dramatizing a single theme: the efficacy of man’s mind.” The efficacy of man’s mind and the power of reason is exactly the theme of The Martian.
As Rand continued:
That we had seen a demonstration of man at his best, no one could doubt…And no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being–an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality.
The difference is that Apollo 11 gave the sense that we were watching a magnificent work of art but it was real. While the Martian gives the sense that we are watching something real but it is a magnificent work of art. Have we not been diminished? Nevertheless, the sense of life of the event and the movie are the same and the movie is gripping, thrilling and uplifting, a triumph for Ridley Scott and the author, Andy Weir.
Addendum: See Tyler’s review as well.
Can philosophy be justified in a time of crisis?
Nathan Robinson of Harvard has an opinion:
In this paper, I take the position that a large portion of contemporary academic work is an appalling waste of human intelligence that cannot be justified under any mainstream normative ethics. Part I builds a four-step argument for why this is the case, while Part II responds to arguments for the contrary position offered in Cass Sunstein’s “In Defense of Law Reviews.” First, in Part I(A), I make the case that there is a large crisis of suffering in the world today. (Part I does not take me very long.). In Part I(B), I assess various theories of “the role of the intellectual,” concluding that the only role for the intellectual is for the intellectual to cease to exist. In Part I(C), I assess the contemporary state of the academy, showing that, contrary to the theory advanced in Part I(B), many intellectuals insist on continuing to exist. In Part I(D), I propose a new path forward, whereby present-day intellectuals take on a useful social function by spreading truths that help to alleviate the crisis of suffering outlined in Part I(A).
At least it’s his only paper.
The pointer is from the excellent Kevin Lewis.