So, I was reading some philosophy tonight. I finished David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which - at the end of a book with no abstract reasoning of quantity or number or really any experimental reasoning - has the following as the final lines:
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
In other words, by the strictest interpretation of Hume's own conclusion, his own book should be committed to the flame. (One could argue that there is some generally experimental reasoning going on in the book, of course, but still ... it's an amusing contradiction.)
After finishing this book, I moved on to the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell's Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Model in Philosophy. It, in turn, starts with the following line:
Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.
Russell's point, of course, is that he feels he can set the record straight and get philosophy back on course ... but still, the quote is just charming on its own.
There's been a flurry of criticism lately for some physicists - specifically Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson - who have made some outspoken (and unwise) comments against philosophy. While I generally disagree with their dismissal of the value of philosophy, I do find it amusing that similar criticisms come from prominent figures within philosophy as well ... and that I stumbled on two similar comments within a couple of minutes of each other.
With the film coming out in November, it's the season for Ender's Game promotional material ... including Wiley publishing's Ender's Game and Philosophy: The Logic Gate is Down(Amazon, B&N). Since Ender's Game is one of my favorite novels from my teenage years, it was especially a privilege to tackle some of the themes in the book as an adult. My essay in the collection has the following title:
"The Enemy's Gate is Down:
Perspective, Empathy, and Game Theory"
As the title indicates, my main goal in the essay is to discuss how one's perspective on a conflict determines how one responds to it.
For example, game theory requires the participants to be able to understand their opponents motivations and possible outcomes, so that they can rationally determine what the "enemy" is going to do. In Ender's Game, this manifests through Ender's empathy, wherein he often seems to be able to intuitively grasp on a very deep level what his opponents want and need. As Ender says:
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
In the essay, also I put forth the idea that Ender really faces four different types of conflicts within the book, which I classify as follows:
Military
Leadership
Vendettas
Rebellion
Re-reading the book as an adult, I now see that much of Card's brilliance in crafting the story is how these different conflicts play off each other. This all relates back to Graff's upon Ender's arrival at Battle School:
There’s only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that’s being so good at what you do that they can’t ignore you. I told them you were the best. Now you damn well better be.
Ender's only way of overcoming his isolation is through victories in leadership and military battles. However, Ender's military successes also serve to escalate the vendetta conflicts. When Ender finally "resolves" the vendettas, his conflict turns into a rebellion against the school authorities, which prompts his final battle room battle.
None of Ender's victories come without an escalation in one of the other areas.
And then, of course, I do have a bit of a discussion of game theory itself and how it relates to the situations described in the book. I touched on some of these similar general themes in my essay for The Hunger Games and Philosophy, which I discussed here. Both stories feature protagonists who are in no-win situations, playing games that they don't want to play anymore ... and their final response is, in many ways, similar: to ignore the rules of the game. It is only in abandoning the construct of the game that they are able to truly find victory (although, for both Katniss and Ender, this victory carries a hefty cost).
Ender's Game and Philosophy touches on a lot of deep themes which are inherent in Ender's, from the morality of warfare to the ethical responsibilities of caring for children to global geopolitical manipulation. If you enjoyed the book and want to learn more about these and other themes, then check it out.
And if you are concerned about the moral consequences of buying this book, I guess I should say this: this is an unofficial collection of essays and, as such, no proceeds from sales of the book go to Orson Scott Card. Just in case you're boycotting.
This spring, The Avengers finally hits theaters ... and bookstores ... bringing the top heroes of the Marvel Universe together to fight forces that threaten to destroy the world. Among the plethora of media tie-ins rests one that might of particular interest to you if you're reading this blog: The Avengers and Philosophy: Earth's Mightiest Thinkers(Amazon, B&N).
My contribution to this anthology takes the form of the essay:
"Can Kang Kill His Past Self? The Paradox of Time Travel."
The title pretty much says it all, I suppose, but for the uninitiated here's some context:
Kang is a warlord from the distant future who frequently travels through time in an effort to defeat the Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the Avengers. However, over the nearly-50 years of the Avengers' existence, Kang's recurrences in the comic book have resulted in a wide range of time paradoxes.
In the essay, I walk through three of the most significant paradoxes that arise out of the various Kang storylines and discuss how they relate to our scientific and philosophical understanding of the flow of time. For a hint of the scientific themes involved, you can also check out these posts over at About.com Physics (although the Avengers make no appearances in these articles):
If time travel isn't your thing, there are a lot of other great essays based on the Avengers' many years of adventures. For example, the nature of romantic love is examined through the life of the android The Vision. What are the ethics of being a superhero? What are the philosophical implications of having and maintaining a secret identity?
These topics all sound great, but I think my favorite title (I confess I haven't yet read the essays) is:
"I Am Made of Ink: She-Hulk and Metacomics"
She-Hulk always had a playful air about her, in part because she was (sometimes, at least) actually aware that she was a character inside a comic book. She even went so far as to directly address the readers of the comics ... not in the form of a vague narration, but flat-out looking out through the "fourth wall."
What philosophical question would you most like to see tackled in relation to the Avengers?
I heard my wife's friends express their fanatic appreciation of The Hunger Games for well over a year before I got around to reading it. From the first moment I heard about the concept, I was reminded of the Stephen King novel (and subsequent Schwarzenegger film) The Running Man. It seemed interesting, but I didn't anticipate that I'd get so engrossed in the books.
Then I read the first novel and was absolutely hooked. I think it's safe to say that not since reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has the first novel in a series so gripped me.
I did not rush out at midnight to see the film. (This becomes a far less viable option when you have two young children.) We're hoping to see it tonight, but neither my wife nor I took the time this week to buy tickets ahead of time, so we may be out of luck. We'll see. Regardless, we will go out of our way to see the film as early as we can.
Early reviews from friends on Facebook indicate that the film is faithful to the book and well done. I'll post a review once I've seen it.
I'm pleased to be tangentially connected to The Hunger Games phenomenon through my appearance in the new collection The Hunger Games & Philosophy: A Critique of Pure Treason(Amazon, B&N). My essay focuses on applying the concepts from game theory to the situations presented in The Hunger Games ... which is fairly obvious from the essay's title, "The Tribute's Dilemma: The Hunger Games and Game Theory."
When I began work on the essay, I had hoped to include a discussion of The Hunger Games: Training Days strategy game (Amazon). In the game, you play a Tribute who arrives in the Capital for the Training Days. You practice not only your combat, survival, and other skills, but also perform other tasks in an effort to gain a higher ranking (and thus more sponsorship and rewards) going into the games themselves.
Unfortunately, the portion of the essay which discussed this was originally a bit clunky and ended up getting highly edited. This is a normal part of the process, but the upshot is that all reference to the physical game ended up being removed.
I do still discuss the Training Days themselves within the essay, since the experiences of the Tributes during that time represent a subgame. In game theory, a subgame is a well-defined game within a larger game. Anyone who watches real-world reality television shows like Survivor and The Biggest Loser is familiar with the concept of a subgame, even without realizing it. The challenges in these shows that confer rewards, such as immunity, are examples of subgames, because they're smaller games within the larger game of trying to win the show.
Beyond that, I also discuss the idea of putting one's life at risk to gain a little extra food ... and how that might actually make a lot of sense. The essay concludes with a discussion about the role cooperation plays within the Arena, using the classic game theory example of The Prisoner's Dilemma as the model.
In a fight to the death, does it make more sense to cooperate or betray?
I don't like rules. It's not so much that I am particularly fond of breaking rules personally. It's just that rules tend to seem rather pointless to me. They can easily take on a life of their own, with the rules perpetuating for their own sake, rather in service to the cause that they were initially created to serve. I find that just trying to make the best choices usually result in better outcomes than trying to follow an elaborate set of rules.
Well, apparently I'm in good company, because Aristotle wrote an entire book - Nicomachean Ethics - on the concept of how to be wise without being inundated in rules. His conclusion was to embrace something called "practical wisdom," and now Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe have tackled this topic in their recent book, Practical Wisdom.
Specifically, Schwarz and Sharpe describe the following traits of a person who is engaged in practical wisdom:
A wise person knows the proper aims of the activity she is engaged in. She wants to do the right thing to achieve these aims--wants to meet the needs of the people she is serving.
A wise person knows how to improvise, balancing conflicting aims and interpreting rules and principles in light of the particularities of each context.
A wise person is perceptive, knows how to read a social context, and knows how to move beyond the black-and-white of rules and see the gray in a situation.
A wise person knows how to take on the perspective of another--to see the situation as the other person does and thus to understand how the other person feels. This perspective-taking is what enables a wise person to feel empathy for others and to make decisions that serve the client's (student's, patient's, friend's) needs.
A wise person knows how to make emotion an ally of reason, to rely on emotion to signal what a situation calls for, and to inform judgment without distorting it. He can feel, intuit, or "just know" what the right thing to do is, enabling him to act quickly when timing matters. His emotions and intuitions are well educated.
A wise person is an experienced person. Practical wisdom is a craft and craftsmen are trained by having the right experiences. People learn how to be brave, said Aristotle, by doing brave things. So, too, with honesty, justice, loyalty, caring, listening, and counseling.
Schwartz has given two TED talks on the subject of how our wisdom is becoming impaired.
The biggest challenge in our modern society is that we're supplanting wisdom with elaborate sets of rule. These rules are usually initiated, I think, from a genuine attempt to make things better, but they often don't actually have that effect.
On example from the book is wildfire fighters. In the 1950's, they had four rules to keep themselves safe. Today, they have a detailed list of over 48 rules. The result of all of these extra, detailed rules is that the survival rate has actually dropped! Why? Basically, for two reasons, it seems:
It's harder to keep track of all the rules, no doubt.
With fewer rules, the fire fighters know that they'll have to learn from experience. The detailed list of rules diminishes their reliance on experience.
It's not that rules aren't necessary, because we can't always guarantee that people will choose to be ethical. Rules are in place to minimize damage done by those who are unwilling or unable to act ethically without detailed guidance.
For example, author Michael Lewis has described the recent economic problems worldwide as being caused by people being left alone in a dark room with a pile of money. (This is from his Daily Show interview about his new book, Boomerang.) But that's not the whole problem, either. The problem is that they were left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, and their primary concern was their own self interest, rather than to implement a wise and ethical course of action. The whole point of Lewis' book, for example, is to point out that the cultural landscape of different countries caused them to exploit this situation in different ways.
Schwartz & Sharpe, however, would argue that the ideal situation would have been to have changed the culture. Instead of creating a culture where greed and monetary benefit was the rule, a culture in which ethical considerations - practical wisdom - was key would have meant that the bankers would have brought a different set of priorities to their tasks.
They discuss several differences between the "Rules Talk" that we spend so much time using and the "Wisdom Talk" that we need to begin using:
Rules Talk asks: What are the universal principles that should guide our moral choices? Wisdom Talk asks: What are the proper aims of this activity? Do they conflict in this circumstance? How should they be interpreted or balanced?
Rules Talk tends to be about absolutes. Wisdom Talk is context talk -- talk about nuance.
Rules Talk sidelines, or even labels as dangerous, moral imagination and emotion. Wisdom Talk puts them at the center because they allow us to see and understand what needs to be seen and understood.
Rules Talk ends with determining the right principle or rule to follow. Wisdom Talk ends with determining whether to follow it and how to follow it.
Rules Talk marginalizes the importance of character traits like courage, patience, determination, self-control, and kindness. Wisdom Talk puts them at the center.
Rules Talk urges us to consult a text or a code. Wisdom Talk urges us to learn from others who are practically wise.
Rules Talk is taught by teachers in the classroom. Wisdom Talk is taught by mentors and coaches who are practicing alongside us.
The problem, of course, is that if you don't have rules, then there will be people who are perfectly happy to be unethical, to abuse the system.
Here, I think, the solution is not more rules, but greater transparency.
Rules would not prevent people left alone in a dark room with a pile of money from abusing their position. However, a culture that prizes wisdom together with systems that leave few dark rooms would seriously diminish the dangers of people being able to abuse their positions.
Until we have a more transparent society, though, we'd definitely have a better world if more of us began focusing on Wisdom Talk than Rules Talk.
The anthology The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy: Everything is Fire, edited by Eric Bronson, is now available. This features a series of essays on how Stieg Larsson's internationally-bestselling Millenium trilogy explores various philosophical concepts inherent in the rich story laid out in the trilogy: gender roles, sexual morality, vengeance, rape, justice, privacy, and government corruption, just to name a few.
My essay, "Hacker's Republic: Information Junkies in a Free Society," explores the ethics of hacking and how to balance freedom, responsibility, and privacy in the modern technological age. An abbreviated version of the essay was printed in The Philosophers' Magazine issue #54 under the title "Hacker's Ethics," so it should give some sense of the flavor of the full piece.
In the essay, I make the argument that WikiLeaks founder and faceman Julian Assange possesses a lot of the same core traits as the series' protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, and that these traits are intimately tied into why both have become hackers.
But these traits are no longer limited to an eclectic "hacker class" of individuals. It turns out that society as a whole has begun to adopt these ethics, in a trend toward openness on all fronts. Young people have very different ideas about ownership, privacy, and cooperation than past generations, and the interaction of these norms lie at the heart of the Millenium trilogy ... as well as at the heart of the modern, real-world controversies of the behavior of WikiLeaks.
Today is the release date of the Green Lantern film DVD ... and also my 35th birthday. I am now officially old enough to run for President. Live in fear, America! (For anyone interested, I do have an Amazon.com wish list.)
While I realize the film may not have quite captured the attention of fans as much as it could, I'll take the opportunity of this DVD release to remind everyone that Green Lantern & Philosophy: No Evil Shall Escape This Book is available as part of the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series. Once again, I'm fortunate enough to have an appearance in it. I love reading these sorts of books, so am equally pleased to get involved with them when they're based on subject matter that I enjoy.
This time my essay is the closing piece, which I'm interpreting as a good thing. Editors likely want the best essays at either the beginning or the end. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)
The essay, "Magic and Science in the Green Lantern Mythos: Clarke's Laws, the Starheart, and Emotional Energy," focuses on the role of science in the Green Lantern storyline ... or, more specifically, the lack of it. Though the Guardians of the Universe (the creators of the Green Lantern Corps and their fancy power rings) are depicted as having accumulated all known scientific knowledge in the universe, they don't actually function at all like scientists, but instead act like a secretive cabal of mystics or gnostics. I also spend a fair amount of time discussing the Starheart, which is the semi-sentient magical energy that the Guardians gathered up and "contained" in the early days of the universe, and which form the basis of the powers for Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott.
It was fun to write the article and to use this great setting to highlight some of the key concepts in science.
So, even if you hated the move, I still recommend that you check out the book.
Sam Harris believes that morality can be reached without the intervention of religion. In fact, he seems to believe that religion, as often as not, complicates issues of morality more than it provides any clarity. He's an interesting guy, though I have not yet read his books (but that will change soon), so I was pleased to when I heard about his TED talk on the issue of morality derived from scientific principles.
I'm very sorry to have missed these discussions when they first came out, because they parallel many of my own thoughts in recent years ... thoughts which have led me into a serious consideration of how to define morality in a purely rational framework.
Me, Joe Lieberman, and a Moral Quandry
Specifically, these thoughts can be traced back to the 2004 Senate primary campaign of Connecticut Independent (then-Democrat) Joseph Lieberman.
Lieberman lost the Democratic primary in 2004 because he supported the Iraqi War, and he did so because he thought that Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who deserved to be stopped. This is the story as I understood it at the time and, frankly, I saw no reason then (and see no reason now) to question the sincerity of this stance.
While I didn't particularly agree with Lieberman's stance on the war itself, I was disturbed while witnessing some of the passionate disagreements with him. In part, they seemed to focus on a fundamental opposition to him taking a moral stance. In other words, it seemed like many educated liberals were attacking him specifically over his use of the word "evil" to describe a man who often tortured people, murdered his own citizens, and had "rape rooms." Lieberman was being attacked by Democrats, at least in part, because he was not adopting a moral relativistic stance, at least in regards to the Saddam Hussein's particular evil quotient.
I, too, thought that Saddam Hussein was evil. But why? I am also an intellectual, and I didn't have any particular religious-based convictions to give me guidance on evil. Was my only basis for calling Hussein "evil" a moral conceit, ingrained into me by the society in which I happened to be raised, or did I have a better grasp on the subject that I couldn't yet fully explain?
I didn't know, and that really bugged the bejesus out of me, so I began trying to figure out if there was a rational basis for my moral evaluation of Hussein as "evil" in some objective sense.
Framing the Question
My first step was to determine if this is the right question. Just a few moments' worth of consideration led me to believe that it had been framed wrong from the very beginning, because I actually had no idea if Hussein himself was evil as a person, but I did believe that the actions which he had been accused of (and to this day have no reason to doubt) were evil.
So my real question is what makes an action evil, not what makes a person evil. (The "evil person" question that had started this line of reasoning could be tackled later, I decided, if it was actually needed.)
Where, then, should be my starting point for defining evil? I believe that you can begin with a simple concept: suffering.
In fact, at this point I realized a beneficial aspect of this approach, and one which resonates strongly with the aforementioned Harris/Carroll discussion. It is my belief that when devising a rationale system of morality, it is best to start from the "evil" and work to the "good," rather than vice versa. I believe this for three reasons:
1. Morality in society is usually invoked harmfully through the "evil" label. If evangelical Christian pastors gave sermons about how wonderful and good the heterosexual lifestyle was, they would not inspire hate speech or crimes against homosexuals (but, I might add, would still get their basic message across). If Muslim terrorists spoke exclusively about the virtue of their Muslim religion, they would not feel the need to be terrorists. It is primarily through attaching the label of "evil" to others that religion and morality causes the most damage, so the "evil" label is the more important one to make rational.
2. "Suffering" is, I think, a more well-defined concept than "pleasure," "well-being," or any of the other concepts which might be used to define a "good" action. If I wanted to make someone suffer, there are a clear set of things that I could do that would guarantee their suffering. I could, for example, hit them in the knee with a hammer. Suffering accomplished.
3. If, however, I wanted to please them, it's less clear. Oh, I could offer them food, but what food would I have to offer them? What if they've got a nut allergy? Questions must be asked about causing pleasure which did not have to be asked in the attempt to cause suffering. (In that case, the only question that needed to be asked is, "Does he have a wooden leg?" Even then, I imagine banging on someone's wooden leg with a hammer would still qualify as making them suffer, though to a far lesser degree than intended.)
To use Sam Harris' metaphor from the TED talk, this is like pointing out that the best place to understand health is by really getting a firm handle on what it means to be dead. Once you've clearly nailed down the dead state, you can begin having a discussion about what would then constitute being alive.
Therefore, the first iteration of my rational definition of morality was as follows:
An evil act is one which causes suffering.
Though a nice start, we will see in the next installment of this discussion that this proves to be insufficient.
From college into my mid-twenties, I spent most of my spare time as a staffer on various text-based multi-user online games, most of them set in the World of Darkness roleplaying setting. My emphasis was on the Mage: the Ascension game, though I did have some overlap with Vampire: the Masquerade and Changeling: the Dreaming. My focus was then (as now) on telling a good story, and I was told by many that I was one of the best "storytellers" (as those who "run" these games are called) that they'd dealt with. The games that I was involved with were what were called MUSHes (multi-user shared hallucinations) or MUXes (not really sure what this ever stood for).
In 2003, though, I finally got drawn into the graphics-laden world of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG), which include the better known games like Everquest, Ultima Online, Dark Ages of Camelot, World of Warcraft, and the like. The game that finally got its hooks in me was Star Wars: Galaxies, in which you were able to play a character in the Star Wars universe. Starting in the last few weeks of their beta test release, and continuing into the full version of the game, I played for nearly a year and a half as a Mon Calamari character, loyal to the Empire. (As a boy during the Clone Wars, my family's transport had been rescued from destruction by rebels thanks to a young Darth Vader, and Lord Vader forever after had my allegiance. Remember - it's all about telling a good story!)
My character - Evrab Akicky was his name, if I recall correctly - was an artisan (crafter) and merchant. In the course of the game, he obtained the profession titles of Master Artisan, Master Droid Engineer, Master Architect, Master Chef, Master Merchant, and possibly a few other master professions. (They have since, I'm told, revised the Profession system a bit.) Mostly my emphasis was on being a Chef and Merchant, the two Master-level rankings (along with Master Artisan) that I kept throughout my tenure in the game.
I built top-notch mining equipment, with which to extract the needed raw materials for my creations. I would go to a website that featured a list of all of the minerals available on all of the planets, along with their various statistics, then analyze the requirements for my recipes to figure out which places I needed to mine to get the most valuable resources. Then, in game, I would go to that location and try to find the highest concentration of the choicest resources. These resource deposits shifted regularly, so the process required careful attention or the mining machines would be sitting idle, costing me valuable credits and time.
As a Chef, I also needed materials like hide, bone, and meat from animals, which means I needed to commission Rangers to hunt for me (for resources, again, whose quality I obtained from the same website). Eventually, I created another character - a Master Ranger, Master Marksman, Master Rifleman - who could help me obtain these things without having to go through others exclusively. I was known throughout my guild as having some of the best resources around, and I honestly made more off of the trade of raw resources than off of selling my Chef concoctions (although in SWG at the time such food and drink provided powerful "buffs," playing the role that magical potions provide in fantasy-based games, so they were valuable in their own right and I made a pretty penny off of them).
As a Master Merchant, I was specifically designed to get the highest return, able to have many mechanized, customized vendors placed throughout the universe, on various planets. My trade only increased with the "Jump to Lightspeed" expansion, in which I gained the ability to craft customized spaceships.
This all sounds like I never actually played on the game, and that is certainly not true. I helped my guild found an in-game city, crafting many of the municipal buildings myself. In probably one of my proudest gaming moments at Star Wars: Galaxies, I officiated at the online wedding of our two guild leaders, wherein I told a touching homily about two ancient Sith Lords, whose love was torn apart by a deceitful Jedi who sowed distrust between. (Remember, I was an Imperial character.) The moral: be ever mindful of the importance of love, and mutual trust, in holding a relationship together.
My point in all of this is that for nearly a year, I spent about as much time "working" in Star Wars: Galaxies as I did in my day job. (I was single through most of this time, for reasons which should now be obvious.) And it was only toward the end of this time that I became aware that there were markets for selling in-game credits for real-world money. I never got involved in these sorts of transactions, but it did occur to me that it would be possible ... at around the same time I began dating again, and slowly got out of the gaming life, so never personally profited from it.
So when I saw the book Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell, I was instantly intrigued. At the same time I was playing Star Wars: Galaxies, Dibbell was diving head-long into the Ultima Online loot trade in an effort to make a living at it in real-world dollars. There but for the grace of God go I, and all that. I ended up getting Play Money on audiobook from my local library, and it was excellent!
For those who have familiarity with these worlds - who have once, as I have, been addicted to them - I would really recommend reading Play Money and seeing it through Dibbell's eyes. It's part nostalgia, part reality check, and part economic philosophy lesson. Here's a quote from my Amazon.com review of the book:
The most intriguing aspect of the book is Dibbell's analysis of what it means to be "real" in an economic sense. Why do things have value? If people work for hours to establish a virtual economy, and that virtual economy has an exchange rate to the real-world economy, then is the virtual economy any less real than the real-world economies? In light of the recent financial crisis, caused in large part by the trading of insubstantial "derivatives" far removed from the tangible home assets that they purport to represent, in some obscure fashion (they actually represent the trust placed in a person to pay the mortgage on a home, not the value of the home itself, after all), Dibbell's questions become even more relevant. Are the virtual economic decisions made by virtual game designers at a gaming company, in regards to how much money to introduce into the economy for example, substantially different from those made by the Federal Reserve? Isn't the only difference one of scale? There are more people affected by the U.S. economy than by the Ultima Online economy, and that's the only sense in which it is "real."
Monday, September 07, 2009
Authors@Google Features Heroes and Philosophy:
One of the authors in the essay collection Heroes and Philosophy: Buy the Book, Save the World edited by David Kyle Johnson has been lucky enough to appear on Authors@Google. Tyler Shores discusses the rich philosophical aspects of the television series Heroes and why it lends itself so much to philosophical discussions, and why these concepts are important to people who are not just philosophers. It's a great talk ... and, if I say so myself, a great book!
Sunday, July 26, 2009
We Are Killer Apes:
I'm currently in the process of listening to the audiobook version of A.J. Jacobs' The Know-It-All, where he outlines his experiences reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. It's a great book. I was especially moved by the following quote, which Jacobs ran across in the Philosophy section of the EB, written by Robert Ardrey:
“But we are born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever the may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished? The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”
- Robert Ardrey
As Jacobs says, a "powerful set of sentences," which is I think a bit of an understatement. In its own way, this cuts to the heart of the beauty of the human condition. We are creatures as low as any others, but have the capacity for greatness ... and not just occasionally, but consistently, over time, we make the choice to be slightly more creative than we are destructive. We progress, however slowly, toward a better future, when we could regress into a future that is lower than our present state.
Good for Robert Ardrey in realizing it, and good for A.J. Jacobs (and the Encyclopedia Britannica) for passing along the quote.
Friday, December 26, 2008
My Year of Magical Reading:
Back at the beginning of the year, I devoted some time to the website 43 Things and created my list of 43 things. I've found several things I've done in the past, and since starting the list I've accomplished 5 of my "things" - and assuming I make it 6 more days without a cigarette, I'll have accomplished 6!
Anyway, one of my things, which I completed yesterday, was to "Read 50 Books in 2008." Early in the year, I began to get worried about my prospects, so I began counting audiobooks as well, but I actually ended up making it without audiobooks - I have read 50 actual books this year (not counting books read to my 3-year old).
My point in posting about this is not to brag, although I must admit I'm fairly proud of this accomplishment. Granted, some of the books were very short, but others were very long and complex, so I figure it basically evens out. The point of it all was to expose myself to ideas, and I did that in spades.
I'll post my general "year in review" blog in a few days, but these books - the fact that I took the time out of a busy year to expose myself to diverse topics, to just reflect on my life and the world I live in - has colored everything else. It has made a year that was rich with love also rich with wisdom.
One of the books, Making Your Dreams Come True, is of special interest ... not because it was necessarily the best book, but because it makes you really think about the purpose or your life. My "mission statement" after finishing that book was pretty clear to me:
To teach and to learn
The goal to read 50 books, which I'd come up with months before I read that book, was a reflection of the purpose of my life, and I hadn't even realized it at the time. I worked for Project SEED and strove to be a writer, eventually getting a job as the About.com Physics Guide, based on this purpose ... and all the time, I was completely unaware of it on a conscious level. I went to a liberal arts college to learn physics and philosophy (and some math), and before that to the Indiana Academy ... even back then, I was being guided by a principle that I'd never articulated.
Below is a list of my 50 books and the 22 audiobooks that I've read this year! (The list is basically in the order I read/listened to them. * indicates an audiobook.) Feel free to e-mail me if you would like to know whether any particular book is worth reading.
The Faiths of the Founding Fathers David L. Holmes
The last month has been hectic, in ways that will shortly become apparent from changes to the site (as if the very re-emergence of the site over the last month hasn't been enough change!), I read Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism (again, motivated by Goldberg's appearance on The Daily Show). I was a bit disappointed in Stewart on this one, because he really didn't let Goldberg explain the premise of the book and pointedly ignored some fairly reasonable comments. He was talking at Goldberg, instead of to him. I was disappointed ... but I definitely wanted to read that book.
In Liberal Fascism, Goldberg makes the thesis that current liberalism dates back to the "progressive movement" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Okay, no particular problem there. We expect such a historical tradition, right?
But then he proceeds to explain how the progressive movement was actually linked to Italian fascism (which is clearly distinct from Nazism, as he points out). In fact, as Goldberg points out, scholars can't even agree what the term fascist means. But whatever it means, it was not the evil that it has been portrayed in the years since. Italy, until it essentially lost sovereignty to Germany, actually protected Jews from persecution.
His whole point is that liberals are, in general, way too "liberal" about throwing around the word fascist to describe anything they disagree with, all the while not really having any understanding of what the word means. In fact, most liberals would be truly disgusted by some of the actions championed by "progressives" of the past, ranging from eugenics to clear support of corporate interests over individual liberty.
Goldberg is not attacking all liberals as being fascists. Oh, he doesn't like liberal politics, but that's not really his goal here. Instead, he's providing a thoughtful analysis of the historical evolution of liberal policies, and linking current liberal policy initiatives to their historical antecedents.
Perhaps one of the most entertaining aspects of the book, for me, was a very minor little side comment regarding World War I. It seems that, during this time, sauerkraut became temporarily referred to as "Liberty Cabbage" since America was at war with Germany. Granted, we were never at war with France, but it still bears similarities to the silliness regarding recent "Freedom Fries."
Goldberg's book didn't actually change my stance on a single issue, thankfully, but it did open my eyes to some of the historical roots, and possible dangers of extremism, that are inherent in the viewpoints I do hold. I think it's an insightful book, for both liberals and conservatives ... so long as they're willing to actually explore the ideas of the book instead of just embracing their own ideologies.
