Category: Philosophy
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Simon Critchley on John Gray
Dear loyal readers: the unannounced seven-week hiatus on this blog — prompted by the relocation of two of its authors from the United States to India and attendant distractions thereof — is now over. We’re resuming the normal cadence of 6-10 blog posts a month.
______________________________For many years, I’ve read British philosopher John Gray with both interest and irritation. I like that he attacks many dominant secular faiths of our age — sometimes for the right reasons — but often, unfortunately, from a vantage point whose implications I find troubling. Few thinkers are as bleak and pessimistic towards the arc of modernity led by the Enlightenment, as lacking in sympathy for it, as wilfully blind and relentlessly negative. This was evident is Straw Dogs, which revealed to me the hollowness of his vision, based as it is on commitments no less questionable, even cowardly. Simon Critchley’s thoughtful review of Gray’s new book, The Silence of Animals, describes many of Gray’s admittedly interesting forays into the world of ideas before repudiating the larger worldview of which they are a part.
Sometimes I think John Gray is the great Schopenhauerian European Buddhist of our age. What he offers is a gloriously pessimistic cultural analysis, which rightly reduces to rubble the false idols of the cave of liberal humanism. Counter to the upbeat progressivist evangelical atheism of the last decade, Gray provides a powerful argument in favor of human wickedness that’s still consistent with Darwinian naturalism. It leads to passive nihilism: an extremely tempting worldview, even if I think the temptation must ultimately be refused. -
Of Bonobos and Men
Primatologist Frans de Waal has a new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist. Below is an excerpt from an early review in the New Republic (click photo for the Amazon listing; the Publisher’s Weekly blurb is here).
Those familiar with de Waal’s previous books … will recognize many of the same arguments resurfacing here, including the idea that human morality has biological origins. “Fairness and justice are … best looked at as ancient capacities. They derive from the need to preserve harmony in the face of resource competition.” De Waal uses the bonobo—a peaceful, sex-loving primate who may be as closely related to us, or more closely related, than the more Machiavellian chimpanzee—to attack the prevailing notion of human nature as selfish and violent, and that we are constantly battling to suppress our terrible “animal nature.” “Everything science has learned in the past few decades argues against this pessimistic view that morality is a thin veneer over a nasty human nature.” What’s new here is that de Waal wades directly into the atheism-versus-religion debate, which he claims is often mistakenly cast as a science-versus-religion debate. He argues that a biologically evolved “bottom-up” morality obviates the need for the “top-down” morality imposed by religion. And yet, he sees science (and himself) as aligned with secular humanism, which is not necessarily anti-religion. He would like to see the influence of religion fade, but acknowledges that a moral code is not all religion provides: “The question is not so much whether religion is true or false, but how it shapes our lives, and what might possibly take its place.”
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Sex & Style in Murakami’s 1Q84, A Review — Part 2
By R Alexander
This is part 2 of 2 of a review of Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84. You can link to the first part here.
Structurally, non-realist narratives are no different from more standard “realistic” fictions. They create a narrative tension, often involving some sort of conflict, and then they resolve that tension in some way. What I’m addressing here is narrative structure, and what I’ve posited sounds simplistic, I suppose. Even if a story is non-realistic (as in, say, magical realism, surrealist fiction, slip stream stories, science fiction or fantasy, fabulist pieces, and whatever else), there is some sort of hook or some way that the reader can relate to what’s going on, and there is narrative tension built on conflict. In addition to this, stories provide a sense of closure, at or near their end. Non-realist stories tend to play with the conventions of these two aspects of story and to make that play an explicit part of the narrative. Kafka, for instance, tells the story of a person who turns into a bug. That story takes as its starting place an event that is impossible and also horrific. We can become involved in this story though, not because we are interested in entomology, but because we recognize something human in the situation. Sympathetic readers of the story will recognize that it is about, among other things, alienation, about the creaturely nature of our nature, and about family. So the story involves us in a very straightforward way. And the story has a very straightforward sense of closure at the end. The story ends with Gregor Samsa’s death and with changes that occur among the family because of it. -
My Life as a Turkey
On this Thanksgiving Day, consider watching this extraordinary and beautifully filmed Nature documentary in which naturalist Joe Hutto raises 16 wild turkeys from incubation to adulthood, an experience that changed his life. As their turkey mother, Hutto spent over a year in a Florida forest with these birds, each developing a complex and unique relationship with him. He shows us their stages of development, their innate knowledge of the environment, their curiosity and survival instincts. He exults at their distinct personalities, social and emotional lives, individuality and playfulness, and their different appetites for physical affection.Hutto gets very immersed in their lives, begins to understand their communication, and learns to “talk turkey”. He identifies over 30 distinct turkey vocalizations for other animals like rattlesnakes and hawks. He explains how “within each of those calls are inflections that have very different meanings”. His bond with one bird in particular, and the way it ends, is especially remarkable and unexpected. En route, Hutto also reveals his own shifting state of mind and what he has learned from this experience about his own life. It might well become hard to see turkeys as “dumb birds” after this documentary, which, incidentally, won the 2012 Emmy for Outstanding Nature Programming.
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Consider the Lobster
I just read Consider the Lobster, the famous 2004 essay by David Foster Wallace, for the first time. I liked it enough and recommend it to one and all. “Originally published in the August 2004 issue of Gourmet magazine, this review of the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival generated some controversy among the readers of the culinary magazine. The essay is concerned with the ethics of boiling a creature alive in order to enhance the consumer’s pleasure, including a discussion of lobster sensory neurons.” [Wiki]
In any event, at the Festival, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings …and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why? Or what about this one: Is it not possible that future generations will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Aztec sacrifices? My own immediate reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme—and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I have not succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.
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Kathryn Schulz on Regret
In this TED Talk, Kathryn Schulz takes on the emotion of regret and how we ought to handle it.
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When Einstein Met Tagore
An enchanting conversation between Einstein and Tagore, which concludes with Einstein saying, “Then I am more religious than you are!”
EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?TAGORE: No.
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Of CEOs and Psychopaths
Working in highly competitive Silicon Valley, I’ve often thought that some of the most successful corporate executives—had they lived in another time and place—could well have been successful mafia dons, munition makers and suppliers to royal armies, or perhaps colonial administrators in charge of tax collection. What I imagine they share is a certain quality of mind: being ruthless, charming, focused, goal oriented, driven, able to project authority and inspire loyalty, and, above all, relatively impervious to moral doubt. A potent brew for sure but a new article suggests that many corporate executives resemble psychopaths more than one might think!
The question of what it takes to succeed in a given profession, to deliver the goods and get the job done, is not all that difficult when it comes down to it. Alongside the dedicated skill set necessary to perform one’s specific duties—in law, in business, in whatever field of endeavor you care to mention—exists a selection of traits that code for high achievement.In 2005 Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon, then at the University of Surrey in England, conducted a survey to find out precisely what it was that made business leaders tick. What, they wanted to know, were the key facets of personality that separated those who turn left when boarding an airplane from those who turn right?
Category: Philosophy -
Mental Disorder or Neurodiversity?
In this thought-provoking essay, Aaron Rothstein discusses neurological conditions like autism, ADHD, depression, dyslexia, and others. In recent decades, they have become quite visible for reasons that are often highly dubious (and owe more to the workings of knowledge and power that Foucault outlined in Madness and Civilization). Rothstein describes how people with such neurological conditions function, often with other heightened capacities. To what extent should their differences be seen as an aspect of neurodiversity worth embracing versus a genuine mental disorder worth fixing?
Today, some psychologists, journalists, and advocates explore and celebrate mental differences under the rubric of neurodiversity. The term encompasses those with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), autism, schizophrenia, depression, dyslexia, and other disorders affecting the mind and brain. People living with these conditions have written books, founded websites, and started groups to explain and praise the personal worlds of those with different neurological “wiring.” The proponents of neurodiversity argue that there are positive aspects to having brains that function differently; many, therefore, prefer that we see these differences simply as differences rather than disorders. Why, they ask, should what makes them them need to be classified as a disability?But other public figures, including many parents of affected children, focus on the difficulties and suffering brought on by these conditions. They warn of the dangers of normalizing mental disorders, potentially creating reluctance among parents to provide treatments to children — treatments that researchers are always seeking to improve. The National Institute of Mental Health, for example, has been doing extensive research on the physical and genetic causes of various mental conditions, with the aim of controlling or eliminating them.
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Robert Sapolsky: Are Humans Just Another Primate?
A thought-provoking lecture by Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurobiology and primatology at Stanford, in which he tries to discern, to the best of our knowledge, what it is that separates us from other animals. He narrates lots of fascinating experimental results from recent decades. This lecture, archived on Fora.tv, is one of several in a series called Being Human: Connecting to Our Ancient Ancestors.
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Animal Rights: Mapping the Debate
Carlo Salzani presents a brilliant overview of the current philosophical debate on animal rights by focusing on three authors of recent books. For what it’s worth, I lean towards the viewpoints of Milligan and Garner, and not Francione’s.
The heterogeneous galaxies of studies revolving around the issue of animal ethics agree on one point: nonhuman animals endure unacceptable levels of suffering due to human exploitation, and this suffering ought to be eliminated. For the rest, philosophers and activists working in this field agree to disagree: they disagree on the moral status of nonhuman animals, on the major goals of pro-animal activism, on the actions to be taken to ameliorate animals’ conditions, on the strategies to adopt, and on the results achieved by the various movements to date. The diversity of theoretical positions and practical approaches, and the growing number of works addressing the problem, have generated an intense internal debate. Two books published in 2010, Gary Francione and Robert Garner’s The Animal Rights Debate and Tony Milligan’s Beyond Animal Rights, help giving a sense of what is presently going on in philosophical circles and mapping the theoretical territory of the animal ethics discourse.The two books certainly do not (and do not claim to) cover the entire territory, nor attempt to summarize the entire debate; rather, the three authors offer three distinct — and discordant — positions which, though all advocating a revolution in the human treatment of animals, are as distant as the stars in a constellation. Francione and Garner argue that the debate between abolition and regulation of the human use of animal is at the center of modern animal advocacy, and propose two solid and consistent set of arguments: Francione is in favor of the abolition of the human use of animals, while Garner defends a protectionist approach, according to which at least some uses of animals may be justifiable. Milligan, on the other hand, does not propose a thesis or a consistent “package,” but rather attempts a different approach which explores different issues in different ways without relying on fixed and one-dimensional baselines.
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Tim Parks on Copyright
In this insightful piece, Tim Parks looks at where copyright comes from and how to think about it.
Do I, as an author, have the right to prevent people copying my books for free? Should I have it? Does it matter?“They have taken away my right to own a slave,” wrote Max Stirner, the opening words of the chapter on human rights in his great book, The Ego and its Own (1844). One paradoxical sentence to remind us that what we call rights are no more than what the law concedes to one party or another in any given conflict of interest. There are no rights in nature, only in a society with a legal system and a police force. Rights can be different in different countries, they may be notional or enforced.
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The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness
A congregation of scientists in Cambridge, UK, recently issued a formal declaration that lots of non-human animals, including mammals, birds, and likely even octopuses are conscious beings. What do they mean by consciousness,
you ask? It’s a state of awareness of one’s body and one’s environment, anywhere from
basic perceptual awareness to the reflective self-awareness of humans. This declaration will surely strike many of us as ancient news and a long overdue recognition, even as it may annoy the stubborn skeptics among us.
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Thinking in Pictures
Linguistic philosophers have long held that thinking requires words; anyone without language, including animals, is incapable of concepts or thoughts—and by extension, of planning ahead and recalling the past. Mary Midgley disagrees. In Animals and Why They Matter, she wrote:
I think it is clear that linguistic philosophers have often overstated the case for the dependence of intelligence [and understanding] on language in a way which their arguments do not justify and indeed do not require. Thus, for instance, Max Black, having said that man is the only animal to use symbols, goes on to add that he is ‘the only animal that can truly understand and misunderstand. Similarly Stuart Hampshire writes, ‘It would be senseless to attribute to an animal a memory that distinguished the order of events in the past, and it would be senseless to attribute to it an expectation of an order of events in the future. It does not have the concepts of order, or any concepts at all.’ Plainly neither Black nor Hampshire is controverting—or is even interested in—the very large literature of careful discussion by zoologists and psychologists about the different kinds of understanding and conceptual grasp which different sorts of animals actually display. This work would not impress them. Their point is one of definition. They are not prepared to count as concept or as understanding anything which does not involve speech.An interesting article by Professor Ray Monk, an expert on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life and work, sheds new light on what the great linguistic philosopher thought of the matter himself (h/t 3QD). I
was also happy to see that this article supports my own
intuitions about animal minds and the ideas I expressed in an article I wrote earlier this year, The Inner Lives of Animals, and in its comments section. -
Grist and Mills: On the Cultural Origins of Cultural Learning
In this provocative paper, sure to annoy evolutionary psychologists, Cecilia Hayes argues that the “cognitive processes that comprise cultural learning are themselves culturally inherited; they are cultural adaptations [rather than genetic adaptations]. They are products as well as producers of cultural evolution.” Here is the abstract (and my two recent related posts are here and here):
Cumulative cultural evolution is what ‘makes us odd’; our capacity to learn facts and techniques from others, and to refine them over generations, plays a major role in making human minds and lives radically different from those of other animals. In this article I discuss cognitive processes that are known collectively as ‘cultural learning’ because they enable cumulative cultural evolution. These cognitive processes include reading, social learning, imitation, teaching, social motivation, and theory of mind. Taking the first of these three types of cultural learning as examples, I ask whether and to what extent these cognitive processes have been adapted genetically or culturally to enable cumulative cultural evolution. I find that recent empirical work in comparative psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience provides surprisingly little evidence of genetic adaptation, and ample evidence of cultural adaptation. This raises the possibility that it is not only ‘grist’ but also ‘mills’ that are culturally inherited; through social interaction in the course of development, we not only acquire facts about the world and how to deal with it (grist), we also build the cognitive processes that make ‘fact inheritance’ possible (mills). -
The Social Conquest of Earth
EO Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, has reignited an old debate about natural evolution, i.e., the level at which it occurs. In the dominant camp are folks like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker who hold that evolution occurs via gene selection. In the other camp, folks like Wilson and Jonathan Haidt claim that evolution occurs at multiple levels, including via both gene and group selection. Notably, Charles Darwin himself supported the latter view in Descent of Man.Not surprisingly, Dawkins and Pinker wrote hostile reviews. Dawkins lamented Wilson’s “erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory” and called Darwin’s own support of group selection “anomalous”. Other reviewers I’ve read include David Sloan Wilson, Steven Mithen, Jerry Coyne, and Leonard Finkelman. Wilson responded with a vigorous defense of his thesis in a NYT’s Stone column. At least to me—a general reader, not a specialist in the field—Wilson’s account seems entirely plausible and more than likely. What empirical observations might settle this dispute however seems less than clear.
Whatever the truth, what concerns me more about both camps is their penchant for, in the words of H Allen Orr, Darwinian storytelling. Evolutionary psychologists, who abound in both camps, often try to explain too much of human behavior, including our current morality, through evolutionary selection. While it is undeniable that our basic moral instincts come out of millions of years of evolution, it also seems to me that to explain the prolific range of our behavior, we should look more at the cultural edifice that our humanoid ancestors have developed relatively recently through symbolic language and the resulting explosion of speech, concept formation, and social learning.
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Stannard On the Reach of Science
If Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss incline you to the view that physicists today are philosophically naïve, read Russell Stannard.
We said earlier that the job of science is to describe the world. In order to do this, we have to observe it to find out what kind of world it is. But having made the observations (done the experiments) what we write down in our physics textbooks is a description of the world itself, regardless of whether one happens to be observing it. Bohr, and other adherents to his so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, claimed that this was not so. What has been written down is not a description of the world at all, but a description of acts of observation made on the world. All our customary scientific terms such as energy, momentum, position, speed, distance, time, etc. — they are terms specifically for the description of observations. It is a misuse of language to try and apply them to a world-in-itself divorced from the action of an observation. It is this misuse of language that leads to problems like that posed by the wave/particle paradox. Which is not to say that the world-in-itself does not exist outside the context of someone making an observation of it. Rather, as Werner Heisenberg asserted, all attempts to talk about the world-in-itself are rendered meaningless.Not that there is anything new in this. The philosopher Immanuel Kant had long ago asserted that one could know nothing about the thing-in-itself. (So much for the death of philosophy.
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Think Before You Breed
Christine Overall on one of the most important ethical decisions people make in their lives: to procreate or not?
In fact, people are still expected to provide reasons not to have children, but no reasons are required to have them. It’s assumed that if individuals do not have children it is because they are infertile, too selfish or have just not yet gotten around to it. In any case, they owe their interlocutor an explanation. On the other hand, no one says to the proud parents of a newborn, Why did you choose to have that child? What are your reasons? The choice to procreate is not regarded as needing any thought or justification.
…The burden of proof — or at least the burden of justification — should therefore rest primarily on those who choose to have children, not on those who choose to be childless. The choice to have children calls for more careful justification and thought than the choice not to have children because procreation creates a dependent, needy, and vulnerable human being whose future may be at risk. The individual who chooses childlessness takes the ethically less risky path. After all, nonexistent people can’t suffer from not being created. They do not have an entitlement to come into existence, and we do not owe it to them to bring them into existence. But once children do exist, we incur serious responsibilities to them.
Category: Philosophy -
On Eating Animals
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. A slightly modified version of this essay appeared in the July/Aug 2013 issue of the Humanist.)
Some years ago in a Montana slaughterhouse, a Black Angus cow awaiting execution suddenly went berserk, jumped a five-foot fence, and escaped. She ran through the streets for hours, dodging cops, animal control officers, cars, trucks, and a train. Cornered near the Missouri river, the frightened animal jumped into its icy waters and made it across, where a tranquilizer gun brought her down. Her “daring escape” stole the hearts of the locals, some of whom had even cheered her on. The story got international media coverage. Telephone polls were held, calls demanding her freedom poured into local TV stations. Sensing the public mood, the slaughterhouse manager made a show of “granting clemency” to what he dubbed “the brave cow.” Given a name, Molly, the cow was sent to a nearby farm to live out her days grazing under open skies—which warmed the cockles of many a heart.Cattle trying to escape slaughterhouses are not uncommon. Few of their stories end happily though. Some years ago in Omaha, six cows escaped at once. Five were quickly recaptured; one kept running until Omaha police cornered her in an alley and pumped her with bullets. The cow, bellowing miserably and hobbling like a drunk for several seconds before collapsing, died on the street in a pool of blood. This brought howls of protest, some from folks who had witnessed the killing. They called the police’s handling inhumane and needlessly cruel.
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Why Relativism is True
The phrase “moral relativism” is usually considered a scornful term today. It is often used to discredit an opponent’s moral position by those who more or less subscribe to the idea that universal and objective moral truths exist, that all humans can discover them, and that morality, like science, can be progressive (less often the term is misapplied to suggest a plainly dishonest or inconsistent moral position). In this essay, Jesse Prinz attempts to dignify the phrase by arguing that moral relativism is in fact true.
Suppose you have a moral disagreement with someone, for example, a disagreement about whether it is okay to live in a society where the amount of money you are born with is the primary determinant of how wealthy you will end up. In pursuing this debate, you assume that you are correct about the issue and that your conversation partner is mistaken. Your conversation partner assumes that you are making the blunder. In other words, you both assume that only one of you can be correct. Relativists reject this assumption. They believe that conflicting moral beliefs can both be true. The staunch socialist and righteous royalist are equally right; they just occupy different moral worldviews.Relativism has been widely criticized. It is attacked as being sophomoric, pernicious, and even incoherent. Moral philosophers, theologians, and social scientists try to identify objective values so as to forestall the relativist menace. I think these efforts have failed. Moral relativism is a plausible doctrine, and it has important implications for how we conduct our lives, organize our societies, and deal with others.
Category: Philosophy
