“Water always finds the path of least resistance. It flows. You never see square turns on a river. There’s always a curvature. I think life’s like that, too… So you could say that I believe in things being predestined. How could I not? When I think of my life, I feel as though I’ve always been given the absolute right circumstances to help create who I am. If I hadn’t grown up in Hawaii… surrounded by the era’s greatest surfers throughout my childhood, I don’t know where I would have ended up. And I don’t want to know. I’m grateful for all of the twists and turns of fate that have brought me here.
My spiritual beliefs have helped me walk the path that I knew I needed to be on. I’ve been reading the Bible since I was 16, when I first discovered it (through a girl I was dating — how else?). I’ve always found something golden and truthful in its pages. […]
I believe that our imagination is our connection to higher knowledge. It’s the most formidable tool that we have, an amazing source of inspiration. And then, of course, there’s the world we live in, which is no slouch in that area, either. What we’ve been given here is precious: majestic in its smallest details and its grandest spectacles. Anytime you feel like you’re in danger of forgetting that, I recommend taking a good look at a 50-foot wave. Anyone who can be around something that powerful and not feel humbled has some serious analyzing to do. You can’t deny the spritual world when you’re staring into its eyes.”
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance.
The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe). The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaching into the infinite.”
On their Philosophy Bitespodcast, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton asked an impressive array of scientists and philosophers the question “Who’s Your Favorite Philosopher?”. All of the brief responses are worth hearing, though one of my favorites comes from Susan Nieman, protégé of John Rawls and lecturer at the Einstein Forum, who riffs:
If I could only pick one, I’d pick Kant — and I’d pick him because I think he’s actually the bravest of any philosopher.
Kant’s most important insight was that there’s a huge gap between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be, and both of those have equal value. One needs to keep both of them constantly in mind.
It’s an extremely hard stance to take. It’s very modern. It means a certain amount of living on the edge. It means a certain amount of permanent frustration.
People tend to go in one direction or the other. Either they say, ‘well, the way the world is, is all there is, and any ideal is just an illusion that you ought to grow out of.’ Or they project some kind of illusion — this is where you get Stalinism and other ideologies — the way the world ought to be is the way the world is.
Living with both is extremely hard, and it means that you know you’ll never realize entirely the ideals you believe in, but I think it’s only way of being both honest and hopeful at the same time.
I apologize for the extended hiatus. Your regularly scheduled programming resumes now.
“Karl Barth, another Reformed clergyman, responding in an interview late in his life to a question about the afterlife, said he imagined it as somehow this life in review, viewed in a new light. I had not been as comforted as I wanted to be. For is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity — the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and-doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance…
In church this morning, as I half-listened to the Christmas hymns and the reading of the very unlikely, much-illustrated passage from Luke telling how Gabriel came to Mary and told her that the Holy Ghost would come upon her and the power of the Highest would ‘overshadow’ her and make her pregnant with the Son of God, it appeared to me that when we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
I have the persistent sensation, in my life and art, that I am just beginning.”
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Excerpted from the impeccable final chapter “On Being a Self Forever” in John Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this multifaceted, beautifully written book. Among modern American writers, Updike is perhaps the best known for his prolific output: in looking at his CV, it seems he published a book every month — and a poem every morning along with two essays and a review each afternoon. This unsurpassable fluency and energy come through in the superb writing and versatility of Self-Consciousness. It’s a memoir that covers a lot of ground, effortlessly.
Though I like the biographical narrative of Self-Consciousness, it’s these ruminative asides — profound and deeply personal — that make the book so special. You can read more below.
Robert Wright: Given the fact that you’re not looking forward to an afterlife, well… maybe the best approach is to just not think about death. But if you do think about it, is there a way you console yourself in the face of it?
David Frum: When you’re younger, it seems a much more terrifying prospect than it does when you’re older. I think we do see it coming and we accept it.
My consolation in my final hours, I hope, will be that I won’t have left anything unsaid. I won’t have left any of the people that I love in any doubt that I love them. That, to the extent of my ability, I’ve made provision for them. That they’ll be secure after I’m gone…
There’s something kind of megalomaniacal about wanting more, wanting our actions to have eternal consequence. I mean, I suppose that’s literally true — if you have a baby, and the baby has a baby, and so on, then yes, your action has an eternal consequence. But we ourselves are going to be forgotten so soon, and those of us who aren’t forgotten are going to be so misunderstood that they might be happier being forgotten.
There are a lot of things that are remembered for ill or even for derision. Whoever invented the Phlogiston theory, he’s remembered — and his work is held up to mockery in science classes from now and for a long time to come.
We look at history and remember the people who left behind misery. Genghis Khan remains a celebrity to this day. But how many people know the name of the man who proved how cholera was caused? How many remember the dozens of obscure civil engineers who put in safe and reliable water piping so we wouldn’t have it anymore?
Most of that desire for remembrance, it usually ends up pretty badly.
So, I think the answer is a resounding not much. Though not exactly wrong, the approach is in many ways an exercise in managing expectations.
Though I disagree with a good bit of Frum’s outlook, I thoroughly enjoyed this interview, as I do almost all of Robert Wright’s conversations, especially those on his new series MeaningofLife.tv. It’s a program devoted to the big questions, with guests who, like Frum, are leaders in their fields though not professionally or at least chiefly concerned with issues of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.
This combination makes for an informal, direct exchange, where intelligent people can make dinner table points instead of polishing well-worn soundbites. As you’ll see in the Frum interview, this is a man who’s thought a lot about these things, though I’m not sure he’s ever been asked a question like “Are you religious?” on camera.
His answer, by the way, is an interesting one. “I’m religious, but I’m not spiritual,” Frum replies, echoing a common though unacknowledged thread in modern reform Judaism. It’s the reversal of that well-worn yawn “I’m spiritual, but I’m…” Well, I can’t even bring myself to type it.
If you want to hear more of Frum, I recommend watching his appearance on Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, which features a very worthwhile back and forth about why middle class America is falling to pieces.
“Croesus, king of Lydia, asked him as follows: ‘Athenian guest, much report of thee has come to us, both in regard to thy wisdom and thy wanderings… a desire has come upon me to ask whether thou hast seen any whom thou deem to be of all men the most happy.’ This he asked supposing that he himself was the happiest of men; but Solon, using no flattery but the truth only, said: ‘Yes, O king, Tellos the Athenian.’
Croesus, marveling at that which he said, asked him earnestly, ‘In what respect dost thou judge Tellos to be the most happy?’ And he said: ‘Tellos, in the first place, living while his native State was prosperous, had sons fair and good and saw from all of them children begotten and living to grow up; and secondly he had what with us is accounted wealth, and after his life a most glorious end. For when a battle was fought by the Athenians at Eleusis against the neighbouring people, he brought up supports and routed the foe and there died by a most fair death; and his people buried him publicly where he fell, and honoured him greatly.’ […]
Croesus was moved to anger and said: ‘Athenian guest, hast thou then so cast aside our prosperous state as worth nothing, that thou dost prefer to us even men of private station?’ And he said: ‘Croesus, thou art inquiring about human fortunes of one who well knows that fate is apt to disturb our lot. For in the course of long time a man may see many things which he would not desire to see, and suffer also many things which he would not desire to suffer… As for thee, I perceive that thou art both great in wealth and king of many men, but that of which thou didst ask me I cannot call thee yet, until I learn that thou hast brought thy life to a fair ending: for the very rich man is not at all to be accounted more happy than he who has but his subsistence from day-to-day, unless also the fortune go with him to possess things of value. For many very wealthy men are not happy, while many who have but a moderate living are fortunate… But we must of every thing examine the end and how it will turn out at the last, for to many fate shows but a glimpse of happiness and then plucks them up by the roots and overturns them.'”
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Excerpted from the opening third of Herodtus’s The Histories, the only surviving work of the earliest known historian. (The excerpt is from the at-times haughtier G.C. Macauley version, which lends some gravity to sections like the one above. I haven’t read Tom Holland’s translation, but I assume it’s the best vernacular version out there.)
In The Histories, Herodotus notes that Croesus is a “Lydian by race,” a “ruler of the nations between the Syrians and the Paphlagonians,” and the “first Barbarian of whom we have knowledge.”
Drew Gilpin Faust: You’ve said that we’re inebriated by technology. If we weren’t inebriated, what would we be doing instead?
Leon Wieseltier: We would be living more slowly to begin with. The single most important fact about the technology is its speed, as far as I can tell.
Ten years ago, I frequently remarked to myself from my perch at The New Republic, that they finally invented a medium of communication with no limits in physical space — yet everything on it had to be 400 words.
And the reason was the speed.
The acceleration of everything is troublesome to me. I think we’re extending ourselves beyond what our hearts and our minds can actually absorb. And we’re all living checklist lives; we’re all just getting everything done.
There are bastions against this acceleration. Reading — I mean real reading. Sex. You can’t fast forward it. Music. You can walk out of a Bruckner symphony but you cannot speed it up. You are at the mercy of whatever the tempo of a piece of music is, which is why music is one of the great spiritual correctives of our era.
And if you speed things up, what you’re really doing is diminishing or impoverishing or in some ways even abolishing experience, because experience takes place in time.
There’s a tenth century Jewish philosopher who wrote a very influential book of philosophy in what is now Iraq. And in the forward to the book, he asks a perfectly sensible question: if God wanted us to know the answers, why didn’t he just tell us?
And the answer that Saadia Gaon gives is that because if He had told us, we wouldn’t in any strict sense know it. What would be absent is the dimension of time — or struggle or method, which is time.
The experience of acquiring knowledge is part of the certainty that we have it in some way.
And I’m not in any way a luddite, but the technology reduces all knowledge to the status of information.
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Leon Wieseltier, former editor The New Republic and current visiting professor of civics at Harvard, in conversation with the president of the school, Drew Gilpin Faust earlier this year. I encourage you to buy a copy of Wieseltier’s Kaddish, a book I plan to read early in the coming year.
Gaon may’ve been early by about a millennium, but his line of reasoning fits nicely in the “knowledge argument” that psychologists and philosophers have now been fighting over for a century. In short, the debate goes: is there such thing as knowledge that is not “physical” but exclusively “experiential”?
Fred Jackson outlined the most famous thought experiment on the subject in his 1982 paper “Epiphenomenal Qualia” (perfect the next time you need a cocktail party conversation starter!):
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. […] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?
The basic point is this: if Mary knows every bit of physical knowledge about human color vision before she is realized from the monochrome room, does she “learn” anything once released into a world of tomatoes and sky? If so, what exactly does she learn in apprehending these things for the first time? Several philosophers I’ve posted about — most notably the great Thomas Nagel — have taken sides on this issue and made arguments worth exploring.
I imagine you have some thoughts about how well spent the moral outrage of seven billion people has been on Cecil the Lion.
“I do. Look, there’s some reason to believe the dentist did do something wrong. It’s not quite clear; he said he was hoodwinked by somebody else and he thought they had proper permits. And so, you know, if he did something wrong, broke the law, he should be punished. I don’t have any problem saying that. And also, I don’t have any particular love for big game hunting — I may be betraying my own liberal background but I find it kind of a repellant activity.
However, the lack of proportion in this case is astonishing.
I honestly think if the dentist went to Africa and shot an African, there’d be a lot less fuss. Instead he shot this beautiful lion… and the sentimentality combined with the mob attacks has been insane.
Of course, he was not hunting for food, he was hunting for trophies. Personally, I find myself totally unsympathetic to that, even though I can get right up to the door of it. I shoot guns because I’m very interested in self defense, and the truth is it’s incredibly fun to shoot guns…
So I can imagine that hunting is even more fun if you don’t have any scruple about killing the animal. And I’m under no illusions that my position as a non-vegetarian, as someone who eats meat and therefore delegates the killing of animals to others, is more ethical. I think the hunter who eats his kill is in a stronger moral position than I am. He’s owning the full process by which he’s arriving at his hamburger, or in this case, his venison steak…
What matters? What counts as a worse crime than another? What should one be allowed to do? And one can, as a reflective person, rank things. It’s worse to kill somebody than to beat them. It’s worse to steal one-hundred dollars than one dollar. It’s worse to kill an African human than an African lion…
If you feel the killing of Cecil is one of the biggest news stories of 2015, you’ve really got to reassess your values.”
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Remarks from two self-described liberals — Sam Harris and and Yale psychologist Paul Bloom on Harris’s Waking Up podcast last week (these remarks come at the 48 minute mark in the track below).
“I don’t think I would think the way I do if I hadn’t had an affinity for the writings of the Greeks. I think the idea the Greeks had, the tragic view of the world — that there are limitations in the human experience: we all age, we all die, we don’t demand utopian perfection given the brief time we’re on earth — has made me more realistic about things.
So when you see a war, for example, you don’t ask who’s one hundred percent good and who’s one hundred percent evil. There is good and evil in the world, yes, but it can sometimes be very difficult to understand that you have to go to war even though you won’t always be in the right.
The Greeks were much more realistic about the fallibilities of human nature. That’s had a very profound influence on me…
The idea that people are predictable across time and space, as the historian Thucydides said. That they have appetites and urges which are often identifiable. That people seem to respond to status and honor and fear, and that civilization — whether it’s religion, or custom and tradition, or politics — tends to save us from our selves.
It’s a very different view from the Rousseauian, Diderot, French enlightenment idea that we’re born into the world perfect human beings, but that religion or the family or the government repress us and ultimately ruin us.”
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Victor Davis Hanson, checking off the important boxes in the first minute of his three-hour-long C-SPAN In-Depth interview in 2004. If you want to read Hanson, pick up his acclaimed study of nine pivotal battles in history, Carnage and Culture. I just ordered my copy.
Watch Hanson’s answer (along with the other two hours and fifty-nine minutes) below.
“Whenever I thought of you I couldn’t help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. You & I were walking along the river towards the railway bridge & we had a heated discussion in which you made a remark about ‘national character’ that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any… journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends. You see, I know it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other peoples lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important…”
The context of this note, which can be found in Malcolm’s intimate biography of his Cambridge advisor, is rooted in a casual interaction between the men which had taken place five years earlier, in 1939. That autumn, Malcolm and Wittgenstein were walking along the Cam river when they saw a newspaper vendor’s sign plastered with the headline “Germans accuse Brits of trying to assassinate Hitler!”. Wittgenstein shrugged, saying he wouldn’t be surprised if the accusation were true. Malcolm bristled, claiming such a scheme would be against the “national character” of England. “The British [are] too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand,” he remarked. Even years later, Wittgenstein thought the remark an enormous betrayal of logic which, to his mind, we owe loyalty above all else — especially something as dubious as nationalism.
“People are free to choose whatever view they wish to hold. If it were up to me, all intellectuals would be defending our kind of society. Let me add to this: I think American civilization, as a socio-political system, is one of the high points of human achievement. I compare it to fifth-century Athens. Not in the cultural sense; though we have not done too badly in the creation of artistic monuments, we don’t rank with fifth-century Athens or sixteenth-century Italy or Elizabethan England; but as a socio-political, democratic system we will be seen — if there is a future and there are future historians — as one of the highest points of human achievement, because we have created a society in which more people enjoy more freedom and more prosperity than any human community ever known to human history. And that is not nothing, to put it mildly. I wish everybody recognized that. Many people still don’t.”
This statement comes toward the tail end of Podhoretz and Kreisler’s hour-long conversation. The interview covers a lot of ground, and I recommend giving the whole thing a listen, though the next reflection, which wraps up their talk, has a special poignancy. Podhoretz is asked to summarize a lesson for his grandchildren in the context of his own strange intellectual journey from Marxist to founding neoconservative. He replies:
I hope that they would first of all learn to place the kind of value on this country that I think it deserves. Secondly, I hope that they would learn to understand how important ideas are… I would hope that they would also understand the idea that was most eloquently expressed by George Orwell who said something like this: the truth to which we have got to cling as a drowning man to a raft is that is possible to be a normal decent human being and still be fully alive. And I endorse that view with all my heart. I would hope my grandchildren would learn to endorse it as well.
Update: I emailed this excerpt to Noam Chomsky last night, with a question about how to square Podhoretz’s patriotism with Chomsky’s hypercritical posture towards American society and government. He replied:
No society deserves “gushing patriotism.” In terms of material prosperity, the US ranks fairly high. In the 18th century the colonies were probably the richest part of the world, and the US has incomparable material advantages, at least after the indigenous population was exterminated or expelled. Huge resources and territory, incomparable security, etc. One can debate how well the society has done considering these incomparable advantages. Similar questions arise in other dimensions. A true patriot doesn’t gush about how marvelous we are, but evaluates successes and failures and seeks to overcome the failures.
“The principle ideologue of British society is Jeremy Bentham and his Utilitarianism, which puts forward the idea that the aim of society should be to achieve the greatest good/happiness for the greatest number.
But I put it to you that it is precisely this Benthamite ideology that derogates the individual and removes the individual from her immediate experience and alienates her from the social and political process. […]
Take the Utilitarian philosophy where it leads you, and it tells you that human increase can only be a good thing. After all, there’s so much more good to be had when there are more of us.
So on the Utilitarian calculus, we’ll be in really good shape when all day, everyday we’re packed in just as tightly as we are in this hall… That is indeed the underlying prolegomena of the Utilitarian position. It’s an endless yay-saying to more of everything; it’s an endless yay-saying to knowing the cost of everything, because cost can be quantified, and Bentham loved to quantify.
But you can’t cost the real value of life. Just as you cannot know what other people are thinking and feeling. And philosophies that base themselves on such specious quantification throw up specious demagogues.
It’s up to us to be individuals, to discover our own nature of the good, and to respect other people’s idea of the good as well. And not treat them as cogs on a production line or bits in a factory.”
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The inimitable Will Self, presenting his opener in the IQ2 debate on the motion We’ve Never Had It So Good. (He’s one of the most captivating speakers, so don’t just read the text.)
Self’s opposition to this motion is pretty creative. It centers on his claim that you can’t tally up the “good” of a human life, much less of a society; and, by extension, attempts to score and impose goodness of this kind (whether through authoritarian states or utilitarian ethics) will inevitably lead to tyranny. Jeremy Bentham, though an original and very important thinker, produced a philosophy that minimizes the human being by reducing him to easily quantified component parts. In my opinion, utilitarianism is unsatisfying, since, as in the organ donor scenario — why doesn’t one healthy person donate all her organs to save ten people waiting for lung, liver, etc. transplants? — your humanity may be sacrificed for our utility. The autonomy of an individual life can be abolished. Its sanctity and its dignity may be made violable.
This isn’t to say I nod along with Self and disagree with the motion. By a ton of metrics (life expectancy, median wealth, exposure to violence, education, equality, and on and on), we’ve really never had it so good. Pinker is good on this point. And I’m a consequentialist: I believe our moral scales should be tuned more to outcomes than intentions — so metrics really do have a story to tell. But his point is more profound than that. And the idea that “good” should be kept, in some sense, relative — out of our own modesty, our own inability to know what’s the good life for others — appeals to me.
