Category: Philosophy

Are Americans losing their perspective?

Being a member of the opposite party often beats religious difference, unattractiveness, and low educational and professional attainment on Ms. Adler’s clients’ list of turnoffs…

“People now say ‘I don’t even want to meet anybody who’s from the other party,’ even if it’s someone who’s perfect in every other way,” Ms. Adler says. In past election years, about a quarter of her clients wouldn’t date a member of the opposite party. Now it is three-quarters, Ms. Adler says.

Here is more.

Anthem: Ayn Rand’s Dystopian Masterpiece

Rod Long offers a very insightful reading of Ayn Rand’s Anthem:

The book’s most striking feature, both stylistically and in the substance of the story, is the absence of the first-person singular. The idea of a totalitarian state suppressing subversive ideas by banning or distorting the language needed to express or even formulate it has been made generally familiar by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its fictional language, “Newspeak”; but Rand’s treatment precedes Orwell’s by more than a decade (and may possibly have influenced it).

In Rand’s dystopia, the first-person singular pronoun — the word “I” — has been abolished in order to prevent people from thinking of themselves as individuals with identities distinct from that of the collective. The struggle of Equality 7-2521 (Rand modeled her characters’ names on telephone exchanges of the “Pennsylvania 6-5000” form) to discover his own individuality is mirrored in his, and the text’s, struggle to move from “we” to “I.”

…If the book’s linguistic center is the first-person pronoun, its imaginal center is light — the guttering candlelight of the collectivist dystopia, contrasted with the electric light that the protagonist reinvents, the latter symbolizing the fire that Prometheus of Greek myth stole to give to the human race, and, consequently, symbolizing as well the creative fire of the unfettered individual mind.

…Rand was a dedicated Aristotelian and a lifelong critic of Plato, and many of the features of Anthem’s dystopia, such as government assignment of professions, state regulation of breeding and reproduction, and abolition of private property and the family, seem drawn from the recommendations in Plato’s Republic. The prohibition of the word “I” in favor of “we” is likewise a natural development of Plato’s dictum in the Republic that all citizens should say “mine” and “not mine” about the same things — a proposal criticized by Aristotle, who warns in his Politics that the attempt to give a community the same degree of unity as a single individual is doomed to disaster.

…Moreover, Equality 7-2521’s journey down into an abandoned subway tunnel to discover an artificial light source turns on its head Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the wise man ascends from the cave of physical reality, lit by the artificial light of the senses, to discover the “real” world of abstract Forms, lit by a sun of pure ineffable intellect. By reversing Plato’s parable, Rand, in Aristotelian fashion, reorients the pursuit of knowledge away from the supernatural and back to this world, to empirical reality.

Read the whole thing.

Where oh where are they?

Bringing the search for another Earth about as close as it will ever get, a team of European astronomers was scheduled to announce on Wednesday that it had found a planet the same mass as Earth’s in Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that is the Sun’s closest neighbor, only 4.4 light-years away.

Here is more.  Planets, planets everywhere…

Bagel head saline injections the culture that is Japan

Here’s how it goes down: technicians insert a needle into the forehead and inject about 400 cc of saline to create a forehead-sized blob. (One bagel-ee describes it as feeling like “something’s dripping down [his] head” and a “slight stinging sensation.”) The practitioner then places his or her thumb into the blob to create the indentation.

For those of us who don’t see the appeal in any sort of forehead needles, you can’t help but wonder: why in the world would you want a bagel on in your head? A Japanese artist named Keroppy who pioneered the “modcon” body art explained to Vice back in 2009 that it’s about innovation: “People who like extreme body modification want to find their own way of doing things, and they’re always looking for new ways to do that. The more progressive the scene gets, the more these people have to experiment and go their own way.”

Luckily, the bagel-shaped injections aren’t permanent; the round protusion fades after about sixteen hours as your body absorbs the saline.

Here is more, photos included, hat tip goes to the excellent Daniel Lippman.

The bias against stale labor

Rational or not?  Brian Leiter reports:

Philosopher Daniel Weiskopf (George State) calls my attention to a quite startling ad for a job in English at Colorado State University, which requires that applicants have earned the PhD since 2010!  As the linked post notes, given the state of the humanities job market, everyone knows there are lots of very good candidates with PhDs from 2009, 2008 and, horrors, even 2007 who still haven’t found suitable appointments.  This ad promises to consign them to the discard pile without even looking at them.

There is another example here.  By the way, here is a Leiter post updating us on Grayling’s New College of the Humanities.

The next transformational technology?

Noah Smith writes:

Addendum: I seem to be the only person talking about Desire Modification as a transformational technology. Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge have written books in which this technology plays a central role. In my “spare time” I’m writing a couple of sci-fi short stories based on the idea. It’s a really big deal, and I’ll write a post about it soon.

The new Thomas Nagel book

The title is *Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False*.  Here is a brief summary of his “teleological” argument.  My bottom lines on it:

1. He is good on attacking the hidden hypocrisies of many reductionists, secularists, and those who wish to have it both ways on religious modes of thinking.

2. He fully recognizes the absurdities (my word, not his) of dualism, and thinks them through carefully and honestly.  Bryan Caplan should beware.

3. The most typical sentence I found in the book was: “We can continue to hope for a transcendent self-understanding that is neither theistic nor reductionist.”

4. He doesn’t take seriously enough the view: “The Nagel theory of mind is simply wrong.”

5. People will dismiss his arguments to remain in their comfort zone, while temporarily forgetting he is smarter than they are and furthermore that many of their views do not make sense or cohere internally.

6. It is ultimately a book about how Christian many of us still are, and how closely the egocentric illusion is connected to a broadly religious worldview.  I don’t think he would see it that way.

For the pointer to the book — now out early on Kindle — I thank David Gordon.

Sentences to ponder

…I find it remarkable that I have yet to receive a thank you note for paying my taxes.  When I fill out my taxes, I notice that even receipts for $25 donations have thank you notes attached. But for the tens of thousands of dollars I give each year to help keep our wonderful Republic afloat, nothing. Can’t we do a little more as a nation to honor our taxpayers individually?

…And how about a dinner at the White House honoring the top 100 taxpayers in the country? Not the 100 richest people in the country, but the top 100 taxpayers. One might object that they would just use the opportunity to lobby for lower taxes, but if they did, they wouldn’t get invited the next year.

That is from Miles Kimball.  Of course very often these individuals are criticized for not wanting to pay higher taxes.

Does new information slow down your life?

From William Reville, here is a speculation:

Finally, here is a “guaranteed” way to lengthen your life. Childhood holidays seem to last forever, but as you grow older time seems to accelerate. “Time” is related to how much information you are taking in – information stretches time. A child’s day from 9am to 3.30pm is like a 20-hour day for an adult. Children experience many new things every day and time passes slowly, but as people get older they have fewer new experiences and time is less stretched by information. So, you can “lengthen” your life by minimising routine and making sure your life is full of new active experiences – travel to new places, take on new interests, and spend more time living in the preset.

Most of the short article considers why “the return journey” often seems to run by much faster.

Posner on Skidelsky and Keynes and leisure time

This review is a fun rant about whether we would be better off with lower incomes and more leisure time.  Here is one excerpt:

…I well remember as recently as the 1980s how shabby England was, how terrible the plumbing, how shoddy the housing materials, how treacherously uneven the floors and sidewalks, how inadequate the heating and poor the food — and how tolerant the English were of discomfort. I recall breakfast at Hertford College, Oxford, in an imposing hall with a large broken window — apparently broken for some time — and the dons huddled sheeplike in overcoats; and in a freezing, squalid bar in the basement of the college a don in an overcoat expressing relief at being home after a year teaching in Virginia, which he had found terrifying because of America’s high crime rate, though he had not been touched by it. I remember being a guest of Brasenose College — Oxford’s wealthiest — and being envied because I had been invited to stay in the master’s guest quarters, only to find that stepping into the guest quarters was like stepping into a Surrealist painting, because the floor sloped in one direction and the two narrow beds in two other directions. I recall the English (now American) economist Ronald Coase telling me that until he visited the United States he did not know it was possible to be warm.

The benefits of learning a second language

Bryan has had a few recent posts criticizing the notion of multilingualism for (most) Americans.  As a general advocate of learning foreign languages, I have a few points in response:

1. There is a sizable literature on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism.  I get nervous when I see the topic discussed without reference to the main claimed benefits.

2. I believe that good fluency in a second or third language significantly expands one’s ability to see and understand and also articulate other points of view.  And most of the very great thinkers of the past were fluent or semi-fluent in multiple languages.  By teaching other languages at an early age, we can make our most productive thinkers deeper and more productive.

3. Ideally foreign languages can be taught to individuals when they are young, well before high school, thus very much lowering the opportunity cost of such instruction.  Just toss out some of the other material, making sure to keep mathematics and English literacy.  Most of Western Europe does this quite well, and I hardly think of those children as miserable.  I don’t see why this has to cost anything at all.

4. I am reasonably sympathetic to the “we’re so uncommitted to this notion we’ll never see it through so let’s not bother trying” response to my attitude.  (In particular it is harder for Americans to get within-culture reinforcement for language learning in the way that Europeans so often do, either from American popular culture or from crossing a nearby border.)  Yet that’s a far cry from believing it would actually be a mistake to invest resources in that direction, if indeed we would see it through.

Here is one stimulating discussion of the topic, in English of course.

Morality and dispassionate analysis

A while ago a few people drew a contrast between a more dispassionate style of (blog) analysis and a more explicitly moralizing approach.  I would frame it differently.  Pluralism reigns and there are many different moral values of import.  The moralizing approach tends to leave a writer stuck in emphasizing a single value or a single comparison of values.  The so-called dispassionate approach is more likely to lead the writer to see a broader range of values and moral trade-offs.  The moralizing approach is most of all impoverished when it comes to…morality.