by Paul Segal on August 12, 2023
Most visitors to Argentina are attracted by its famous meat and wine. Personally, I come for the Freudianism and Marxism. I grew up in north west London in a family of socialists and psychoanalysts, acutely aware of the contempt with which most of Great Britain held both of those vocations in the late 1980s. So while I spoke barely a word of Spanish when I first visited Buenos Aires in 2003, I had an extraordinary feeling of coming home. Now, twenty years later, my children are half-Argentine, and we’ve just had a semester in Buenos Aires, much of it spent in the traditional past time of discussing the personal and the political over endless coffees (and, I admit, also consuming plenty of meat and wine).
Argentina probably has the most psychoanalysts per capita of any country in the world. I would guess that every Argentine I know is in or has had therapy – at least, I’ve never met an Argentine who told me they never had it, and the topic usually comes up. What is clear is that they have a remarkable love of admitting to and talking about experiences of trauma, its causes and its effects, both at the personal level and at the social level. I’ve mentioned before the historian John Womack’s argument that Latin Americans are subject to chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, due to the ongoing stresses of poverty, violence, and political oppression. One of my in-laws recounts the story of being stopped by a soldier in Buenos Aires in the late 1970s, under the military dictatorship, and the soldier pointing his rifle at her baby while he waited for her to produce her papers. 45 years later her voice still shakes as she describes the experience. Trauma is endemic and enduring, and also quite plausibly a root of the dynamism and creativity, the refusal to meekly accept the status quo, that visitors to Argentina often extol.
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by Gina Schouten on August 10, 2023
At the grocery store the other day, when my five-year-old made an impassioned plea for a certain kind of cereal, I said, “nah, that one’s too sweet for breakfast.” He responded with a stern reprimand: “Mom, you shouldn’t yuck my yum!”
I was pretty sure that admonishment didn’t apply here, but I heroically let it go.
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by Eric Schliesser on August 9, 2023
Late July, The Wall Street Journal published five short pieces under the title, “Have We Ruined Sex?” Among the five pieces was one by Mary Harrington. In her contribution she argues that the sexual revolution has mainly benefitted the “entrepreneurial class.” Since this appeared not in The Nation but WSJ, I was amused, so I decided to read her (2023) Feminism Against Progress.
Feminism Against Progress is reactionary, but it cites Karl Polanyi approvingly and also rails against Adam Smith and Hayek; the political right is indeed transforming. (Harrington spoke at this year’s National Conservatism Conference.) As the mention of Polanyi hints at, Harrington’s sensibility is, in many ways, a culturally traditional, social democratic left (and I was not surprised to find a piece of hers on the SDP blog here.) I expect Keith Starmer’s Labour party (which is by no means liberal in sensibility) to find use for her downstream.
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by Henry Farrell on August 7, 2023
In order of relative clout. I’ve been meaning to do some version of this for years …
by John Holbo on August 6, 2023
by Chris Bertram on August 6, 2023
by Chris Bertram on August 5, 2023
I’ve been reading Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (highly recommended), and though I have not finished it yet, it has already made salient a question that I’ve asked myself before, as I suppose others have too: which was the best year to be born? I think my answer, at least for the UK and for the last 100 years, is 1948, ten years before I actually was.
Someone born in 1948 has escaped the risk of being killed by a falling bomb and has had the benefit of Britain’s new National Health Service. They turn 15 in 1963, perhaps “Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban/And the Beatles’ first LP”, and hit 20 in 1968. If they want, they can go to university, and if they do so it will be free and they will get a student grant from the government. But a degree is still not a prerequisite for decent employment and, either way, they will probably, manage to get established with a job and a career. (Women will benefit from the Equal Pay Act of 1970.) They may buy a house that will, allowing for a couple of blips, grow in value and provide the basis for further wealth. They hit 60 just about the time of the Lehman crash, but they can take early retirement with a final salary pension, fully indexed to inflation, so they will be insulated against the stagnant and falling living standards that came later. They are a bit too young to be very seriously at risk of dying in the COVID pandemic and, by the time they get to old to look after themselves, the UK may have sorted out its social care system. And though a person born in 1948 will have started to experience some of the climate crisis, they will certainly escape the disaster that is to come.
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by Chris Armstrong on August 3, 2023
I’m a complete sucker for them. I don’t know why: you’d think twenty-odd years as an academic would have cured me of the idea there is anything romantic or glamorous about universities. But I keep going back to the trough. Some good recent ones: Julia May Jonas, Vladimir; R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries; Rachel Henstra, The Red Word; Sally Rooney too. Further back, I loved On Beauty, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, The Marriage Plot. Even further, then of course The Secret History, Possession, all the David Lodges, Stoner, the whole caboodle.
How is my love for these books compatible with the fact that real-world academic life is increasingly crappy? It’s not obvious that they’re offering a rose-tinted version of reality to divert myself with – or not all of them, anyway. Should we expect to see fewer of them, now that academia is ever more precarious, bureaucratic, stressful? What the hell is going on with the Dark Academia craze? (I’ve dipped my toes in there too). Why are campus novels so enduringly popular, with academics and non-academics alike? Is it just that the setting WORKS so well, as a microcosm? What are their vices? And, well, which good ones have I missed?
by John Q on August 2, 2023
I don’t have anything original to say, but it seems important enough to discuss. I’m going to pre-emptively rule out Trumpism and bothsidesism: you can take that to X or tell it to Ernst Thaelmann.
by Chris Bertram on July 30, 2023
What was I doing 10 years ago? I thought I’d look through my photoarchive from 2013:
by John Q on July 30, 2023
In my previous post on utilitarianism, I started with two crucial observations.
First, utilitarianism is a political philosophy, dealing with the question of how the resources in a community should be distributed. It’s not a system of individual ethics
Second, (this shouldn’t be necessary to state, but it is), there is no such thing as utility. It’s a theoretical construct which can be used to compare different allocations of resources, not a number in people’s heads that can be measured and added up.
Failure to accept these points is at the heart of the kind of ‘longtermism’ advocated by William McAskill and, earlier, Parfit’s Repugnant conclusion. The claim here is that the objective of utilitarians should be to maximise total utility, including people who are brought into existence as a result of our decisions. In particular, that means that it is desirable to bring children into existence who will have a miserable life, provided that no one else is made worse off, and the life is not so bad that the children in question regret being born.
As well as being intuitively unappealing, this idea makes no sense in the two main contexts in which it is relevant: families deciding how many children to have, and polities deciding whether to promote pro-natalist policies[1]
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by John Q on July 29, 2023
As regular readers will know, CT blogger Ingrid has long been making the case for limitarianism, that is, the idea that there should be an upper limit on the amount any one person can own or consume. As Ingrid has observed, limitarianism is a constraint, rather than a complete ethical principle, so it’s important to consider how it interacts with other principles. In the case of utilitarianism, the answer is surprisingly well, at least in (using Ingrid’s terminology) this and nearby worlds. But understanding this requires a little bit of background and some arithmetic.
Shorter JQ: utilitarianism implies limitarianism. The full argument is over the field (no tricks this time, I promise).
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by Chris Bertram on July 26, 2023
When journalists write articles about whether countries are free or not, as with this piece in the Financial Times by Martin Wolf about India, they often rely on the ratings from Freedom House. Reading Wolf’s article, my interest was piqued concerning what Freedom House says about the post-Brexit UK, and specifically for the freedoms that it classes as “civil liberties”. Given that one recent major study — Chandran Kukathas’s Immigration and Freedom — makes a compelling argument that immigration restrictions involve extensive restrictions on everyone’s liberty, I was interested to see how this would be reflected both in Freedom House’s criteria and in its use of those criteria in country reports.
First of all then, Freedom House’s methodology. There would seem to be several relevant parts:
F4. Do laws, policies, and practices guarantee equal treatment of various segments of the population?
Do members of such groups face legal and/or de facto discrimination in areas including employment, education, and housing because of their identification with a particular group?
As I’ve discussed before on Crooked Timber, and as is extensively documented by Amelia Gentleman in her book The Windrush Betrayal, the UK’s hostile environment legislation, pioneered by then Home Secretary Theresa May, had the effect of denying to many people, particularly of Caribbean origin, employment, housing and health. Many children born to immigrants in the UK are denied access to higher education because of restrictive nationality laws.
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by John Q on July 26, 2023
In view of the apparent end of what passed for democracy in Israel, it’s time for me to repost my comprehensive proposal for US policy covering all aspects of relationships between the US and the Middle East. It’s over the fold.
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by Henry Farrell on July 25, 2023
Last September, Abe Newman, Jeremy Wallace and I had a piece in Foreign Affairs’ 100th anniversary issue. I can’t speak for my co-authors’ motivations, but my own reason for writing was vexation that someone on the Internet was wrong. In this case, it was Yuval Harari. His piece has been warping debate since 2018, and I have been grumpy about it for nearly as long. But also in fairness to Harari, he was usefully wrong – I’ve assigned this piece regularly to students, because it wraps up a bunch of common misperceptions in a neatly bundled package, ready to be untied and dissected. [click to continue…]
