In an article published last year, I tried to show that our moral judgement is heavily biased when it comes to migration. For instance, an action that we regard as a minimum moral obligation towards compatriots becomes, towards migrants or foreigners, non-obligatory and even forbidden. I tried to show that even ethicists well disposed towards foreigners – cosmopolitans, so to speak – suffer from the same bias. Nationalism stifles creativity to such an extent that we are often unable to imagine doing to foreigners what it is a minimum moral obligation towards compatriots.
I invite other teachers or students to submit their own best moment of the academic year past. Mine was this.
A small class — just 17 students. They had read Amia Srinivasan’s “Does anyone have the right to sex?”. Some of them hated it, because they thought (wrongly) that it expressed sympathy with incels. Others were more intrigued. During the discussion I made reference, as she does, to political lesbians, and as I was saying the word it occurred to me that they might not know what it meant. So I asked them what it meant. The blank faces indicated that none of them had looked it up, which I pointed out (I knew they’d all read the piece). So I asked them to guess, and several made wild guesses. The one who got closest was very uneasy in saying it, I think because he worried that he was being politically incorrect. I finally told them what it meant. Several of them looked concerned, wondering what they ought to think about this. A few knew that I am perfectly capable of making things up to bamboozle them. After an interminable 2 seconds of silence, though, one young woman hit the table, and cried, very loudly: “That’s AWESOME! Good for THEM!”. Her face had that look that a baby’s face gets when it has its first taste of chocolate.
Tyler Cowen suggeststhat Tom Lehrer would have been a member of the Intellectual Dark Web.
Lehrer represented the IDW of his day. He said (sang) things others couldn’t, and his main enemy or target was political correctness. It surprised me to hear how little many of the battle lines have changed. Yet Lehrer, while warring against hypocritical political discourse, was in his day on the Left. (Shades of Eric Weinstein!) He worried about the “decline of the liberal consensus,” following the Kennedy era. In 1982 he wrote that he considered feminism, abortion, and affirmative action “more complicated” than the older liberal causes, so perhaps he simply did not blend into the contemporary Left (the piece is interesting more generally).
This is provocative – but it seems basically wrong to me. The more trivial reason why is that Lehrer seems to have stayed on the American left.
“I’m not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem: I don’t want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.” In a phone call to Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post in February 2008, Lehrer instructed Weingarten to “Just tell the people that I am voting for Obama”
The more useful answer is that whatever you think about their respective political positions, their orientations to politics are fundamentally different. Lehrer was an iconoclast. The IDW people, in contrast, are iconolaters. IDWers don’t just want to push back against what they believe to be an emerging orthodoxy. They want to defend a pre-existing orthodoxy of their own (which roughly coheres around a common mythology regarding the ‘Enlightenment’ was and what it still has to offer) against it, and they take their own dogma seriously. This is why the style of IDW tends more towards thin-skinned self-seriousness, and heavy hectoring. You need a sense of the absurd to be funny.
Perhaps a modern Tom Lehrer would indeed skewer the pieties of the left. Any broad social movement tends towards dogma. All dogmas produce some absurdities, and for that matter, tragedies. But the left is hardly the only source of such pieties, or, perhaps, the most important one. The piece that Tyler links to also has this section:
On the other hand, there are certain dead horses that still merit kicking, such as the late Wernher von Braun, the subject of one of the songs in the show. I say that not out of animosity toward him especially, but because of what he represents. I have been amused over the years at the number of scientists who have enjoyed the song without ever realizing that it was about them.
It’s hard not to be reminded of the ‘we’re only interested in the neutral scientific inquiry’ line that many IDWers take on race and IQ, and the Left’s Hostility and Open Debate.*
Lehrer was entertainingly impatient with the people whose politics he agreed with, but his true venom was reserved for an altogether more important set of shibboleths. Not political correctness, but the Cold War fusion of unthinking patriotism and technocratic politics. There are analogies to that fusion today, but I don’t think they’re on the left.
Update: as happens pretty well every time that I write a post responding to Tyler, whether agreeing or disagreeing, there’s a raft of comments with personal invective aimed towards him, and/or complaining that I shouldn’t be engaging him. And as before, I’m deleting all such comments – opinions about my engagement have already been amply expressed, and there are plenty of other places on the Internet you can express your derogatory opinions about him (or, for that matter, me).
* When I once had the misfortune to be criticized online by Jordan Peterson, I spent several days dealing with multitudes of politely insistent followers demanding that I engage them in lengthy debate on race and IQ, to the point that I eventually had to write this post to fend them off). NB that I am quite sure that Tyler is no more enthusiastic about race-IQ nutters than I am.
I have been a little loath to write this because Freddie deBoer already has a huge beef with our blog for some reason (I’m mean to Jonathan Chait?), but…
Freddie deBoer recently wrote a post denouncing the less-hinged supporters of the proposed TPP, one of whom saw fit to compare Obama’s critics on this issue to the lynchers of Emmet Till. This was obviously an awful thing for Dem politico Allen Brauer to say, and most readers here probably regard both this and the TPP with unified disgust, putting us in agreement with deBoer. [UPDATED NOTE: since many people have found this post unclear (which is obviously my fault), I’m merely noting here that I entirely agree with FDB’s actual political point (and in all likelihood most of you do as well), and quoting the post written the other day to explain how I perceive it with suspicion because of his past remarks. It would be irrelevant and unfair to attack Freddie deBoer on the sole basis of a five-year-old dustup.] Allen Brauer fired back at his critics by high-mindedly calling them “dude-bros and manarchists” and saying he was wrecked after a “tsunami of white tears.” DeBoer correctly calls this bullshit:
Allan Brauer, I would argue, is today’s progressive internet in its purest form. He’s someone who’s learned all of the lessons of how we do things too well…. Do we still have the capacity, as a political and intellectual movement, to argue in a way that’s not entirely based on associating with race or gender in a totally vague, unaccountable, and reductive way?
Solid enough. But–
The stakes are much lower in our cultural writing, but the problem is largely the same: tired, rote arguments and magic words, treated as cutting rebuttals no matter how lazy and uninspired. You use magic words in your work, and no matter how good or bad it is, you’ll get credit for it. And if people criticize you, you just use the magic words against them, too.
UPDATE [which interrupts the post but needs to be above the fold]: as I mention below, I’ve said a metric f#$k-ton of dumb things in internet comments, especially years ago. So I feel a bit uneasy basing my complaint on a comment. If Freddie deBoer would like to say, “I made that comment on Tiger Beatdown when I was irritated and stung, but would retract it if I could,” I’m happy to edit the post to reflect this. [click to continue…]
Ha, just kidding! Sorry, sensei! It’s actually me, your friendly yet irreverent and over-enthusiastic Belle Waring. I read so much manga, dudes. So much. In Singapore, we use the metric system and everything, (which is way more rational, except for acres which are totes intuitive and based on a meaningful connenction to the land) so I know for certain I read a metric f$^Kton of manga. There are just piles around, and John is like “we’re reading Black Butler now?” Me: “Mmmmmaybe. Zoë said she was going to stop reading it at volume VIII. [For free, online at mangareader.net (since we only own I-V) which, OMG it’s gonna kill the print business! But no, because it bitens the ween.] There were about to be zombies (she’s scared of zombies). 1hr 15 minutes later she said the zombies weren’t as bad as she thought. Sebastian’s hot, so.”
The truth is that we never acquire great amounts of anything until a) John has already bought the full (iff sub 20, for he is an frugal Oregonian) run. Then, slowly, like a hopeful NYC resident of his new summer house in Bridgehampton feeding corn to deer, he coaxes us out by telling us that these are, in fact, excellent manga such as normal people read, and we all ignore him and say things like “you bought the hardback edition of Lois Lane: Superman’s Girlfriend, which is like a moving, 12-minute-long youtube-tribute-to-Paul Walker supercut of the Fast and Furious movies, except of superdickery–we don’t believe a word you say, man. Saying you wanted to read the entire thing to us aloud over a series of like 20 f&c*#ng nights ironically is not a valid objection.” And you shouldn’t feed the deer because they are adorable vermin and they eat every single thing you have every planted that is not actively poisonous to deer (don’t think this isn’t a bigass section at at the nursery). That’s why we haven’t read 20th Century Boys, despite owning the books. Or b) the other way we get stuff is I start to like it (this is the win scenario for my children). When I started reading Naruto, we had volumes 1-23. We now have volumes 1-66, roughly 8 weeks later. Why am I reading thousands of pages of comics about ninjas? Oh, golly, I thought you’d never ask! [click to continue…]
Sometimes people need to be cheered up. And sometimes nothing cheers you up like a 6’8″ sad clown/performance artist named Puddles nailing “Royals” so hard you can’t hear the real song in your brain anymore. It’s like he did a weird magic trick to me.
Imagine you see an impossibly tall clown in old-fashioned black and white clown makeup, bald head all covered up with white paint, and black lips and eye drops and just a little red paint on his nose, overly expressive, is what it makes him, with white clothes, and three enormous black bobbles in place of buttons on his shirt-front, and black rick-rack at his ruffled white satin sleeves and double neck-ruff, and white gloves on his huge hands, which he uses to mime the driving of imaginary Cadillacs to excellent effect, and a duo of backup singers so composed they look as if they are waiting for the Kronos Quartet to come on, at which point they will contribute 12 bars only and stay at the side for the rest of the time, and a pianist who…is never seen and may well be Satan, don’t ask me but I’ve just got a bad feeling about this guy–and then anyway upright bass, and drums with brushes because it’s MTV-Unplugged time, apparently…right, but Puddles is wearing a crown made of tin painted gold with a P on it and is…is… Man, y’all should watch this video.
I personally, am not afraid of clowns. There’s something humorously American about thinking, “oh, we’re the only one’s afraid of clowns, it’s Stephen King’s fault, etc.” No, fools! Everywhere in the world people wear masks, or face paint, and when they do that, they freak you right out. A tiny Japanese school-girl wearing a fox spirit mask? Scary. Even askew so you can see her real face? SCARY. These guys from Trivandrum in India, when they play the demons [I have been corrected by reader Peter Erwin,who notes that divine heroes also use the blood-red eyes. Having checked, it seems as if this man, with his red lips only, is probably a hero, while if he had similar green makeup with red slashes in it he would be a demon–but an awesome demon], they put a flower petal inside each eye at the bottom, under the lower lid next to the eyeball, to make their eyes blood-red. (I watched them do their make-up one time when I went to see the performance, you could go early.)
Verdict: SCARY. I have a mask from Lombok that’s of the evil Balinese king from a play (all the Balinese kings in all the plays are evil; it’s like having a Grand Vizier; you signed up for evil) and I used to have to go to ridiculous lengths so my kids wouldn’t have to walk past it at night. [click to continue…]
Folks are linking to it. The Farhad Manjoo profile of Neetzan Zimmerman, the Gawker writer who picks the linkbait stories like no one else, apparently. I do like the idea that after AI’s are better than us at everything else, it might still take a human to figure out whether sloths are in this month.
Donald Barthelme wrote a story about this back in … – turns out it was 1980! “Pepperoni”!
Basically, he envisions a kind of Gawkerization of media. (But without the social media aspect, admittedly.)
A newspaper has found financial success by diversifying its operations. It owns timberlands, mines, pulp and paper operations, and a number of different media, and over-all return on invested capital increases at about 9% a year. But top management is saddened and discouraged, and middle management is drinking too much. Automation has lowered morale in the newsroom. Recently the paper ran the same stock tables every day for a week. No one noticed, no one complained. Some elements of the staff are not depressed. The real estate, food, clothing, and games columns of the paper are thriving. Nevertheless, the Editors’ Caucus has applied to middle management which has implored top management to alter its course. The paper’s editorials have been subcontracted to Texas Instruments and the obituaries to Nabisco. There was an especially lively front page on Tuesday. The No. 1 story was pepperoni – a useful and exhaustive guide. Top management has vowed to stop what it is doing – not now, but soon, soon. A chamber orchestra has been formed among the people in the newsroom, and we play Haydn until the sun comes up.
You can get it in Forty Stories [amazon]. Funny stuff! But the funny thing about the New Yorker summary is that you probably think you are getting a teaser. The first paragraph or something. But it’s actually a condensed version of the whole story. Only, of course, nothing really happens in a Donald Barthelme story. Executive summaries of postmodern literature are weird. I never really noticed that until just now.
UPDATE: Oooh, oooh. Now I’m rereading Forty Stories. From “Conversations With Goethe”:
Critics, Goethe said, are the cracked mirror in the grand ballroom of the creative spirit. No, I said, they were, rather, the extra baggage on the great cabriolet of conceptual progress. “Eckermann,” said Goethe, “shut up.“
I like Jacques Derrida, I think he’s funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he’s not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn’t you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?
As an accomplished Derrida-disliker, I am obliged to set Moore straight. It isn’t that he told jokes but how that bothered analytic critics. Searle said Derrida didn’t get Austin’s arguments, which was true. But the thing that bothered him – but he couldn’t just say this is what bothered him – was that, as a result, Derrida couldn’t ‘tell it right’. (I said all this somewhere else, long ago. Well, I’ll just say it again.) Reading Austin for the Nietzschean spark is like reading Wodehouse for its Kafkaesque quality.
In general, Derrida is obviously extremely concerned to collect applause for his punchline – coup de don, etc. Which often comes right at the start. And it doesn’t work as a ‘snapper’, not just because he tells it at the start, but also because ‘I’m telling a joke and it’s going to be very funny!’ is painted all over his face.
That sort of obviousness about the fact that you are joking limits the styles of humor you can pull off. Analytic philosophy consists of jokes that can only be told in a more understated style.
The analytic-continental split, in philosophy, is a side-effect of different styles of joke-telling. Continental means not telling jokes: Heidegger. Or: telling Heidegger’s jokes in a French style. Analytic means not telling jokes: logic. Or: telling logic jokes.
UPDATE: The deepest issues of the mind arise equally in both traditions, but that tail can’t really wag both shaggy dogs, as it were.
Moonshine
All that I have to say, is, to tell you that the
lanthorn is the moon; I, the man in the moon; this
thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog.
‘Ah, so it’s come to this, I see! Ms. Waring wishes to share with us her love of Geto Boys. This is a bridge too far. Really, though. These are the Let a Ho be a Ho people here. Is this some sort of feint after which other marginally less implausible opinions will seem more plausible?’ (hint: ish.) Oh look everyone! It’s Unsung, a Behind-The-Music style show about black musicians, with a whole episode about Geto Boys!
What’s that? You say that it is, possible worlds and all, conceivable that I might have found something you were less likely to watch/listen to, but I would have had need to strive hard? Look, you goobers listen to podcasts about Alan Greenspan’s tragic and shamefully-lauded legacy in US monetary policy. Multiple podcasts of such wise. You listen to podcasts with Dan Drezner in them! (Sorry Dan, but you’ve never laid down beats like this.) It would hurt you real bad to hear about a concrete way in which racism in American society is applied to obscenity and threats of violence, would it? And hear some killer tracks? Scroll on, then, one wouldn’t want you to dirty your hands. SIKE! No, motherf%*#kers! Just open a tab and listen; it ain’t like it’s going to kill you. Though you will be missing interesting and humorous visual effects. “But Belle, I hate all rap music!” OK, this is nonetheless rather historically interesting, you may find, about the spasm of violence in the late ’80s and mid ’90s in the US that seemed like it would never end, and the real fear that hip-hop induced in white listeners. This white dude who was covering the hip-hop beat at Source magazine at the time is probably the single whitest person who has ever lived, including Immanuel Kant. His last name is Soren! When he tells you, “people were scared of this music!” you think, “you wet your pants when Paul Anka came on the oldies station!” Nah, but, in fact he’s extraordinarily well-informed etc. “But Belle, I only care about the history of Neolithic Northern Africa!” Oh really! How fascinating! Well, you’re off the hook then, but you should be getting about your business, I must say. This is rather a lot of slacking already. Oh hey five minute version! [click to continue…]
I just love econobloggers, with their capacity for Swiftian satire. Dry as dust, yet clearly having a laugh, they aim to reel in the poor saps who are take them seriously, but they are big enough to continue to play along, making as if they really mean it. Until now, I’d thought of Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan and, perhaps, even Arnold Kling as being the true masters of the genre. But I’m pretty sure that Noah Smith surpasses them all with a new blog on The Rise of the Cyborgs. Smith does a really excellent job of pretending to be keen on the robot-human future he imagines. So, for example, we get
artificial eyes and ears would replace all input devices [i.e. actual eyes and ears]. You would never need a television screen, a phone, Google Goggles, or a speaker of any kind. All you would need would be your own artificial eyes. You could play video games in perfect, pure augmented reality. Imagine the possibilities for video-conferencing, or hanging out with friends half a world away! And why stop there? If you wanted, you could perceive the buildings around you as castles, or the inside of a spaceship. The whole world could look and sound however you wanted.
But understandably, he feigns enthusiasm most successfully about the prospects for the economy:
… cyborg technologies have the potential to improve human productivity quite a bit, as my examples above have hopefully shown. Humans who can store vast amounts of knowledge and expertise, who can directly interface with machines, and who can make themselves more well-adjusted and motivated at the touch of a (mental) button will be valuable employees indeed, and will prove useful complements to the much-discussed army of robots.
Indeed, employers could make it a condition of employment that workers undergo the necessary cyber-modifications! Actually, I think Smith missed a trick there, by failing to imagine how this might affect workplace dynamics. Oh well, I expect someone will be along to explain how such contracts would be win-win. Brilliant.
A sort of postscript to my “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/13/embassytown/ on _Embassytown_ a couple of weeks ago. Sam Thompson’s “LRB review”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n12/sam-thompson/monsters-you-pay-to-see had a brief discussion in passing of Miéville’s earlier children’s novel, “Un Lun Dun”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345458443/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0345458443.
bq. In a novel he wrote for children in 2007, _Un Lun Dun,_ a despotic entity called Mr Speaker turns language into flesh in a literal sense: when he talks each word takes animate form as a weird creature dropping from his mouth. The word ‘jealous’ manifests as a ‘beautiful iridescent bat’, ‘soliloquy’ is a ‘long-necked sinuous quadruped’, ‘cartography’ a ‘thing like a bowler hat with several spidery legs and a fox’s tail’. These ‘utterlings’ are obedient slaves, existing to do their creator’s will. Like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, Mr Speaker thinks that when it comes to words, the only important question is ‘which is to be master’: he has none of Alice’s doubts about ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things’. Miéville’s modern Alice is a pre-teen Londoner called Deeba, who, when she encounters Mr Speaker on her journey through the looking-glass city of UnLondon, delights him with fresh vocabulary like ‘bling’, ‘lairy’ and ‘diss’, spawning new kinds of word-critter. But when Mr Speaker orders his words to take her prisoner, she turns the tables by pointing out the flaw in his theory of language. ‘Words don’t always mean what we want them to,’ she says. ‘Like … if someone shouts, “Hey, you!” at someone in the street, but someone else turns around. The words misbehaved.’ Deeba’s subversive logic shows the utterlings that they don’t have to obey Mr Speaker after all, and she escapes as the tyrant is overwhelmed by his own mutinous verbiage.
It was only when I saw this quote singled out that I realized that Deeba’s response is in part a joke very specifically aimed at structural Marxism. I give you Louis Althusser, as “quoted by our own Michael Bérubé”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/theory_tuesday_iv/
bq. I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called _interpellation_ or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’
bq. Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a _subject._ Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was _really him_ who was hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed.
This is a class of an “Easter Egg”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_%28media%29, but also a serious point, I think. For Miéville, the delight of language is that it _isn’t_ determinative in the fashion that Althusser says it is. Not all who are hailed recognize it – and if they do recognize it, they can choose to ignore or subvert the fashion in which they are being hailed. It’s also a nice example of how a metaphor can be framed in two registers at once – most readers of _Un Lun Dun_ will have no very great familiarity with defunct Marxist theorists, but they don’t have to be to get the point (it’s more fun for readers who recognize the target of the joke, but it’s not really necessary to the underlying point).
I always liked the Goodies more than the Pythons. Sillier, far less intellectual, funnier, and almost never stumped by the lack a punchline. My children have seen all the episodes available on DVD at least 7 times, the girls know several episodes by heart, and yet they still fall about laughing whenever they watch them. Here’s the obligatory 30-minutes celebration. Well worth a listen. And, much to my relief, this coincides with the release of several new episodes including the one with the giant Dougal which should arrive in time for the 9 year old’s slumber party on Friday.
[amazon]. Funny stuff! But the funny thing about the New Yorker summary is that you probably think you are getting a teaser. The first paragraph or something. But it’s actually a condensed version of the whole story. Only, of course, nothing really happens in a Donald Barthelme story. Executive summaries of postmodern literature are weird. I never really noticed that until just now.
at least 7 times, the girls know several episodes by heart, and yet they still fall about laughing whenever they watch them. 
which should arrive in time for the 9 year old’s slumber party on Friday.