As 2024 dawns, Crooked Timber has a new member for 2024. Doug Muir, formerly with A Fistful of Euros, and more recently an insightful commenter here at CT will be blogging here from now on. I’m looking forward to what he has to say.
From the category archives:
Timberites
Twenty years and a few months ago Chris asked me to join a group of bloggers who were going to create a group blog so as to reduce the pressure on each to post frequently and combine audiences.
First I asked him what a blog was.
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Not quite 20 years ago, I got an invitation to spend a week as a visiting blogger at an exciting new group blog called Crooked Timber. In the manner of the most catastrophic house guests, I managed to turn that into permanent residence.
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In 2007, I attended a workshop at which, during coffee after registration, I introduced myself to another scholar, who responded that he knew me. I couldn’t recall meeting him before, so when that showed on my facial expression, he added – “Well, I know your Crooked Timber persona”. That was a new expression for me! In my memory, Miriam was also there. A conversation ensued about Crooked Timber, and someone asked how the group of bloggers was put together and whether we all knew each other. I recall that those I was talking to were surprised to hear that, at that time (which for me was one year after I joined the blog), I only had met two Timberites – Harry and Chris. Harry I first met when I was a PhD-student at Cambridge and he was a keynote speaker at a political theory graduate conference, and Chris during a conference a few years later. But I had not met any of the other Timberites, and it would actually take quite a while before that would change. [click to continue…]
I have no idea how he found it, but George Monbiot read an (open access) academic article that I wrote, with the title “What, if Anything, is Wrong with Extreme Wealth?‘ In this paper I outline some arguments for the view that there should be an upper limit to how much income and wealth a person can hold, which I called (economic) limitarianism. Monbiot endorses limitarianism, saying that it is inevitable if we want to safeguard life on Earth.
As Monbiot’s piece rightly points out, there are many reasons to believe that there should be a cap on how much money we can have. Having too much money is statistically highly likely to lead to taking much more than one’s fair share from the atmosphere’s greenhouse gasses absorbing capacity and other ecological commons; it is a threat to genuine democracy; it is harmful to the psychological wellbeing of the children of the rich, and to the capacity of the rich to act autonomously when it concerns moral questions (which includes the reduced capacity for empathy of the rich); and, as I’ve argued in a short Dutch book on the topic that I published earlier this year, extreme wealth is hardly ever (if ever at all) deserved. And if those reasons weren’t enough, one can still add the line of Peter Singer and the effective altruists that excess money would have much greater moral and prudential value if it were spent on genuine needs, rather than on frivolous wants.
Monbiot wrote: “This call for a levelling down is perhaps the most blasphemous idea in contemporary discourse.”
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It’s Chris’s 60th birthday today – Happy Birthday, Chris!
Since this blog owes a lot to Chris (that is an understatement…), I want to let you know that on FB, Chris has launched a fundraiser for Bristol Refugee Rights, an organisator supporting refugees in Bristol of which Chris is the Chair of the trustees. If you’re on FB I am sure you can find your way there to the place to donate; otherwise, you can use this link.
Chris shares his birthday with my sister (Gelukkige verjaardag, zusje!) and with my former PhD-supervisor Amartya Sen, who celebrates his 85th birthday today (Happy birthday, Amartya!).
Since I was writing to them today, it occurred to me that the Dutch language has a word that, according to my knowledge of English and the online dictionary that I consulted, doesn’t have an equivalent in English: de jarige – the person who has their birthday. Either I am wrong, and then you sharp people will surely teach me a new word, or else I may have found one of the very few words in Dutch that doesn’t have an English equivalent (most of the time, it’s the other way around).
Lang leve de jarigen!
So as part of a general process of reinvigoration, we are bringing three new bloggers on board.
* Serene Khader is the Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on moral and political issues relevant to women in the global South. Her areas of research within philosophy include ethics and moral psychology, political philosophy, and feminist philosophy. She also works in the interdisciplinary field of development ethics, studying practices such as microcredit, small-scale development interventions, and commercial gestational surrogacy.
* Her work on adaptive preferences, including her first book _Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment_ (Oxford University Press 2011), develops an approach to responding to choices made by oppressed and deprived people that perpetuate their own oppression and deprivation. Her second book, _Decolonizing Universalism, Transnational Feminist Ethics_ (under contract with Oxford University Press), concerns the normative commitments required for cross-border feminist solidarity. When she’s not philosophizing, she can often be found lifting heavy weights and cultivating her love of New York City.
* Gina Schouten grew up near Indianapolis and went to college at Ball State University. Before beginning graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she taught kindergarten in Colorado. Following that, she taught philosophy for three years at Illinois State University. She now teaches philosophy at Harvard. Her research interests include gender justice, educational justice, and political legitimacy, and she is currently working on a book tentatively called Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labor.
* Astra Taylor is an activist, writer, musician, documentary film maker and general shit stirrer. She was involved in the Occupy movement, co-editing Occupy! with Sarah Leonard and Keith Gessen, as well as helping to found Rolling Jubilee, an organization that purchases and expunges debt. Her movies include _Zizek!_ and _Examined Life_, a series of dialogues with modern philosophers and thinkers, which appeared with a book of the same name. She has written for a wide variety of places – her book on culture in the digital era, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age is written up at Crooked Timber here. Astra’s new documentary, _Democracy_, interviews Silvia Federici, Cornel West, Wendy Brown, Angela Davis, trauma surgeons, activists, factory workers, asylum seekers, former prime ministers, and others, asking what democracy is, how it can work under conditions of inequality, and how people can reclaim their power. It’s going to be out really soon.
We’re really happy to have them all join.
This week’s picture is quite an old one, of the sculpture outside the then-new Bristol Children’s Hospital which is directly adjacent to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, where I spent a good past of the last week following an acute gallstone attack (with associated pancreatitis) last weekend. On the Thursday I had my gall bladder removed (which turned out to be slightly more complicated than anticipated) and by Friday I was home. I’m now resting and recuperating, but basically feeling fine. Some reflections on the experience below the fold.
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A public service request – someone, presumably a Crooked Timber reader, put up a Crooked Timber Twitter account a few years ago, to automatically tweet new posts that we put up. Which was very nice of them – but it appears to have stopped working sometime back in 2013. If the person who put this together reads this and would be kind enough to let us know the password so that we can put it all back together, we’d be grateful (we presume that he or she has abandoned this little project himself or herself). If anyone knows who did this, and could contact them, we’d be grateful too (the only two accounts that the Twitter account follows are WTDirect and the PHL Jokes Initiative, if that’s any clue). Or if this turns out to be abandonware with no known owner, and there’s some way of getting Twitter to release it that someone knows of, also good by us.
The interview I linked to last week, about our book Family Values
Now, what did we say that was so insane and ridiculous? – what was it for which, according to one of Professor Althouse’s commentators, we should be shot?
My friend and co-author Adam Swift was on the Australian Broadcasting Company’s show The Philosopher’s Zone yesterday (I think it was yesterday) talking about our book Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships
Congratulations to Harry on his new US citizenship! Perhaps English people rock the whole YOLO thing a little more like this:
I became a US citizen earlier today.
There was a truly unprecedented riot in Singapore’s Little India neighborhood last night. (Video report from the BBC, Channel News Asia, Al Jazeera’s good report.) Our family just moved house, out to the wilds of Bukit Batok (a lovely apartment, actually, next to the Bukit Gombak MRT). Up till October, though, we were living right up the road from the spot where it took place, like 700m away; we would have been able to hear the yelling no question, and the bus exploding with what I imagine would have been rather startling ease. The riot started when a private bus, driven by a Singaporean, struck and killed an Indian worker while backing up. The bus driver was injured in the riot, and the bus itself destroyed completely. There is video of the windshield being smashed, and later footage of the bus completely aflame, suddenly punctuated by the gas tank bursting. Ambulances and, later, police cars (?!?!?! there aren’t enough interrobangs to express my feelings about typing this sentence) were also turned over and torched. A number of policemen were injured in the riot, as were some rioters, but the police never fired on the crowd, and got things under control within two hours, and happily no one else died. The cops were able to get there in a hurry because the Tanglin Police Post (bigger than a station, and more important) is about 500m away. They’ve had a big photo on one of their recruiting ads for ages, on a banner on the side of the building, that shows a bunch of ethnically diverse police officers armed with riot gear and huge plastic shields. I used to think, whenever I rode past in the taxi, so exhausted from work and in terrible pain, at the end of a thirty minute drive, with my head fallen to one side and my cheekbone pressed flat on the glass like skinless chicken breast against the cold plastic in the butcher’s section, “well, they ain’t never going to get the chance to do that.”
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Today, July 8th, is the tenth anniversary of Crooked Timber. I don’t suppose that when we started, any of us expected it to last this long, but it has, retaining its distinctive character through many changes of personnel. By way of marking the occasion, I thought I’d set down how the blog came into being, and a little bit about its prehistory.
Some time early in 2003, I decided that I couldn’t keep going with my solo blog, Junius. My colleague Keith Graham had unexpectedly taken early retirement and the finger was pointing at me to head the philosophy department at Bristol. But I didn’t want to quit blogging: I’d made a bunch of friends online and I was enjoying arguing with people about ideas. Still, I knew I couldn’t keep Junius going if it meant updating a blog several times a week. So the idea struck me that I should invite some of the people I’d most liked interacting with to form a group blog. To them I added a few other friends whom I wanted to read online but who hadn’t yet taken the plunge.
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