Tag Archives: Politics

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen – Kwame Anthony Appiah

“[H]onor, especially when purged of its prejudices of caste and gender and the like, is peculiarly well suited to turn private moral sentiments into public norms…That is one reason why we still need honour: it can help us make a better world.”

Author’s note: it’s an American book, and so he spells honour with an ‘o’ – being a Canadian, I refuse to do the same. Apologies for confusion.

In the Gospels, when Paul was about to be whipped, he revealed he was a Roman citizen, and therefore exempt. Romans took it as a matter of honour that their citizens should never be beaten but rather be treated with dignity at all times, regardless of the crime. For much of history, honour was a founding principle of (usually male) behaviour, but in modern society, it has something of a bad name, linked as it is to human rights abuses, including honour killings, and violations of the rule of law. Appiah, however, believes that far from deserving a bad name, honour provides a motivating force for morality; it compels people to be honourable out of a desire to avoid shame.

There are two kinds of honour, Appiah suggests. The first, competitive honour, is about being better than others; winning a race or gaining victory in war. The second is peer honour, which governs relations among equals: being born a lord in medieval England would give you peer honour, to be beheaded instead of hanged if you were found guilty of a crime, for example, even if you were a completely incompetent lord. The modern conception of human rights is perhaps similar to a universal extension of peer honour.

Appiah examines three case studies, dueling, footbinding, and slavery, and discusses the role honour had in ending each of them. Each activity had critics long before it actually ended, he points out, but what actually ended them was a shift in the perception of what was honourable, from the activity itself being honourable to the activity being shameful.

To my mind, there is some question of correlation versus causation in his case studies, but they are interesting nonetheless. Unfortunately, my broader impression was somewhat neutral. The book plays an important role in attempting to introduce honour into the discussion of morality, and that far I agree. Often though I was left feeling his examples were incomplete, and they lacked the depth of understanding of Steven Pinker on a similar subject, for example. I just didn’t feel he fully engaged with the complexity of honour or morality, and as a result for me the book raised more questions than it answered.

Still, it’s an interesting subject, and if you want to keep reading, you can do so here (or in the UK or Canada),

Antifragile 2 – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.”

Last time we explored the idea of antifragility – what, though, are its implications? Taleb has but one core lesson; we cannot escape or prevent volatility, so we must love it, and we can only do that if we are antifragile.

To do so, focus on doing, not on theory. Taleb argues that progress comes from small advances by doers, while theorists usually just post-hoc justify the progress of doers. As Yogi Berra tells us, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.” [Nick Note – I’m not sure I agree with this, and will object below, but I thought I’d pass it along anyway]

Second, focus on dispersion, not just on averages. For a stock portfolio, for example, don’t have all your money in a fund with moderate risk/return; put 10% in an extremely risky fund with a large upside, and the other 90% somewhere very safe. We are best, he argues, when faced with alternating periods of recovery and high intensity, whether we are talking weight lifting, investments, diets, or emotions.

Third, obey nature in the absence of opposing evidence. Taleb follows Burke, arguing that the burden of proof always lies with the unnatural or new. The natural or traditional has been tried and turned antifragile through an evolutionary process, while the new has not. It’s a principle he lives by; on breaking his nose and failing to find empirical evidence of the value of ice, he dutifully refused ice. I can only respect his adherence to principle.

Fourth, value heroism. Heroes, Taleb points out, are people who sacrifice for the community; they are extremely antifragile, taking society’s risks on themselves. As a society, we should only respect people who take risks for their opinions. Roman engineers, for example, were required to stand under their bridges after they were built, while bankers in Catalonia were beheaded if their banks failed. Consultants and investment bankers today, on the other hand, bear almost no risk from their advice. This, Taleb argues, is the core problem with capitalism; the basic unit of interaction is the corporation, by means of which no individual bears any risk for their decisions.

It can sometimes feel like Taleb is taking an unjustifiably extreme position to provoke controversy – perhaps it’s effective, but it’s also somewhat annoying. He is convincing that practical knowledge is undervalued, for example, but that is hardly the same as showing that theory is always useless. More generally, his book can sometimes feel a bit one sided, as he writes to convince, rather than to inform. That aside, the book is phenomenal; Taleb is one of the foremost thinkers of our age, and if he sometimes seems overeager to support his own ideas, the rest of the time is he is truly wise. He’s also, by the way, one of the rare authors who can throw in a line like “Genoa and Venice were competing for the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean like two hookers battling for a sidewalk.”

You can get your copy here (or in the UK or Canada), and it’s definitely worth a look. Antifragility is a concept all of us could benefit from.

Cicero: A Turbulent Life – Anthony Everitt

“We follow the narrative of the fall of the Roman Republic through the excited, anxious eyes of a participant who twice held the reins of power – and who did not know how the story would end…In Cicero’s correspondence, noble Romans are flesh and blood, not marble.”

Cicero is one of the most influential figures of antiquity, in large part because so many of his writings survive. We have hundreds of letters, some of them written on a daily basis, several books, and large numbers of speeches from his time as an advocate and in various political roles, including as Consul during which time he suppressed an attempted coup and was awarded the title of Father of his Country by the Senate. He also coined several words which serve as the base of words we use today; moral, quality, essence, and swan song, among others.

Perhaps above all, Cicero was a great speaker, likely the greatest of his day. Even without Latin, that brilliance carries through translation; his quick wit gets him both in and out of trouble. In one case, Cicero prosecuted a former governor of Sicily for corruption, and the defending lawyer was paid with an ivory sphinx that had been stolen from Sicily. The defending lawyer at one point claimed he didn’t understand Cicero’s riddles, and Cicero whipped back “Oh, really? In spite of having a sphinx at home?”

At heart, Everitt is a Cicero apologist. Cicero’s reputation today is mixed; by his peers at the time he was seen as cowardly and indecisive (though a genius), and that perception has to some extent continued today. Everitt argues that the truth is much more positive. To be blunt, I’m not sure I buy it. Renaming indecisiveness “tactical suppleness” doesn’t make it so, and the book can sometimes feel like a hagiography, not a biography. As a result, the strength of the book is its history of the 1^st century BCE, as seen through Cicero’s eyes, not biography.

To defend Cicero and focus on the good, the book unfortunately misses opportunities for insight into his full character. In the end, Cicero is perhaps best captured by Julius Caesar, who remarked that Cicero had won greater laurels than a general, because it meant more to have extended the frontiers of Roman genius than her empire. Cicero, and the first century BCE, are topics critical to antiquity: of the two, Cicero does a better job capturing the latter, and to my mind, a worse job capturing the former.

You can get the book here (or in the UK or Canada), or you can just sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list and get your wisdom that way!

From Democrats to Kings – Michael Scott

“From Democrats to Kings is a story not just of Athens at the height of its power and Alexander at his, but of the turbulent times of transition in between these two powerful extremes.”

Is the European Union better off as a united whole or individual nations? Would the US be better off if it had a stronger president, one that could break congressional deadlocks? Countries today are immersed in arguments over the benefits of centralized or decentralized power.

As Michael Scott dryly points out, however, the past is just like now, only earlier. In From Democrats to Kings, he covers a relatively understudied period of Greek history: the period of transition between what we often see at the height of Athenian democracy, the 500s, and when it was taken over by Philip and Alexander the Great, often seen as the end of their democracy.

The book is perhaps slightly easier to read if you already know about the periods immediately before and after its setting, but it’s fun either way. Over a single generation, Athens goes from a democracy to a dictatorship, and Greece goes from a collection of warring cities to a unified whole, one that would eventually be a part of the enormous land empire of Alexander the great. For that generation, Athens would be wracked with indecision between divisive democracy and dictatorial unity, even putting Socrates on trial for supporting dictatorships.

Today, we often see Alexander as the death of Greek democracy (partly due to Athenian propaganda), but Scott points out that Athens actually benefited enormously during his reign. Their GDP doubled, huge public investment was begun in religious sanctuaries, stadiums, theatres, and public works, statues stolen 150 years previous by the Persians were returned by Alexander, and Athens entered the longest period of prosperity it had enjoyed in a century. Unification, even under a dictator, was not all bad for Athens, nor for Greece, though it came at the cost of liberty.

The period is an interesting one, and the book is even more so. As well as a professor at Cambridge, Scott is a presenter of BBC documentaries, and that style comes through in the book with his eagerness to share tidbits of knowledge as well as explain his larger theme. I will guiltily admit I have a passion for classical history anyway, but even if you don’t the book is interesting, providing a clear understanding of events and carefully putting it into modern context. Though few democracies today are faced with a choice between democrats and kings, the optimal level of centralization remains an interesting, and contentious, issue.

Want more? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Decline in Social Capital: Bowling Alone 1

“The core idea of social capital theory is that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so too social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups.”

Today we’ll start with the evidence for and causes of a decline in social capital in the U.S. – next week (link here) we’ll focus on the value of social capital and potential cures.

On April 30^th, 1999, the Charity League of Dallas met for the final time. They had met every Friday for 57 years, but by 1999, the average age of the members had increased to 80 and their last new member had joined two years earlier. As old members had passed, new members had not joined, despite increases in population. The same pattern is repeated across the country. Why? And does it matter? These are the questions Putnam seeks to answer. Bowling Alone is the classic work on social capital, and as such is frequently referred to elsewhere, both in sociology and more broadly.

Putnam believes that in the last forty years, America has undergone a dramatic fall in social capital. Social capital, he explains, is the networks and connections that unite us to others, smoothing our progress through life and adding value to our lives. Today, however, Americans no longer join as many clubs, volunteer as many hours, run as often for office, vote, play sports together, or eat together, and generally involve themselves less in civic affairs or their communities. At best, they are members of mailing list based organizations, watching from the sidelines as their organization lobbies Congress rather than being themselves involved.

Social change generally occurs as a result of a combination of two factors, changes in individual decisions and generational shifts. Putnam notes however that seniors remain as involved in the community as they were when younger. Instead, generational change has occurred; young people today are far less involved in the community than their forebears. Why? He lists four causes, and estimates their percentage of the total impact.

The changing nature of households (10%). The entry of women into the workforce and the increase in full time as opposed to part time work.
Urban sprawl (10%). Sprawl leads to an increase in commuting and the fracturing of communities.
Electronic media, particularly TV (25%). TV takes up time and drains energy, so that people who watch TV do far fewer other activities even after controlling for the time taken.
Generational change (50%). Intense community bonds were formed by generations who experienced the war, in contrast to late generations like baby boomers and others who did not have that formative communal experience.

Next week, we’ll discuss the benefits to social capital as well as Putnam’s suggestions for rebuilding or communal bonds.

In the meantime, if you want to read it for yourself, you can find Bowling Alone here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Public Intellectual in Canada – Nelson Wiseman

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” – Albert Camus

Something of a specialist post this week, and not everyone is interested in the state of public intellectuals in Canada, I realize. But, I think it’s interesting, and I get to pick. So there.

According to the philosopher Julien Benda, because intellectuals existed, “humanity did evil for 2000 years, but honoured good. This contradiction was an honour to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.” A fairly intellectual way to look at it, of course, and it reflects an irony in asking public intellectuals to contribute to a collection of essays about public intellectuals. How public intellectuals see themselves and each other does not exactly capture all possible viewpoints.

The Public Intellectual in Canada is a collection of essays on, as can be guessed from the title, the role of the public intellectual in Canada, whether as public policy wonk, media don, professional pundit, or perhaps simply as thorn in the side of power. Canadian thought and thought-leaders can sometimes feel a bit overshadowed by our much larger neighbour to the South, a fact reflected by several essays, as is our somewhat unique cultural divide into English and French Canada. In other ways, however, our public intellectuals struggle with much the same issues as anyone else, and insight into the need for public opinion polls as a way for individuals to learn about themselves in the context of society, the history of public thought, the changing nature of universities and their expectations of academics, and perhaps most of all the role of slow deliberation to mediate the deluge of information from a 24 hour news cycle, is welcome – and applicable – anywhere.

Many of the essays are Canadian centric, and I suspect would have little interest beyond Canadians. One, for example, focuses on the history of Le Devoir, a Québécois publication, while another discusses the benefits of a larger population for Canada. Others have broader appeal; some individuals discuss their own experiences as public intellectuals, while others reflect on the role of an intellectual more broadly. Most of all, however, Wiseman has assembled a selection of essays both left and right, data-driven and qualitative, on how knowledge is constructed and ideas disseminated, and for someone interested in Canada, it is a great read.

Want more? Get the Public Intellectual in Canada from the U of T publisher. Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right for regular updates! Disclosure: I read The Public Intellectual in Canada as a free advance reader copy.

The Price of Everything – Eduardo Porter

A little bit late this week – my apologies! Life sometimes gets in the way of the internet, I find.

“Market-transactions do not necessarily provide people with what they want; they provide people with what they think they want… [Prices] provide a road map of people’s psychological quirks, of their fears, their unacknowledged constraints.”

What do religion, happiness, healthcare, women’s rights, culture, and gifts all have in common? For good or for ill, says Eduardo Porter, they all involve prices. In The Price of Everything he covers how these issues and more are affected by the price system, and how people directly and indirectly put prices on everything that we interact with.

The standard criticism of this perspective goes back Oscar Wilde, of course: that people know “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Porter argues that this can actually be a strength: prices may have little to do with what is good for people, but they can tell us what they believe or what they are willing to pay for. Many of our everyday values can be captured by the implicit prices we assign them, and even when prices are inefficient or incorrect, they still tell us what the people involved in the transaction believe.

An iphone app entitled “I am Rich” (now taken down) did nothing but flash a red gem on the screen, and retailed for $999, providing a price on status. Organs in Iran go for $1,200. Monogamy, he argues, spread largely as a result of an increased price on social cohesion, while animal rights movements are more common in the developed world because humane actions cost more in developing countries. All of these prices may be interesting, but unfortunately though his arguments have some merit, they feel incomplete. Few of us would agree, for example, that the Protestant Reformation occurred because the Catholic Church wasn’t giving good value for money.

Porter’s knowledge is broad, and unfortunately as a result the book can feel like a literature review that brushes over the material instead of providing insight. A chapter per subject, when the subjects are as vast as happiness, culture, and religion, means the book sometimes reads like a list of facts. I would enjoy a chapter here and a chapter there, but reading it cover to cover can be a a bit dry. In the end, though I enjoyed the brief anecdotes, I would have preferred a book that engaged with the material, rather than listed it. That said, though I can’t tell you the price of everything, I can admit I only paid £2 for the book.

Want more about the price of religion? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Stranger Magic – Marina Warner

“Magical thinking structures the processes of imagination, and imagining something can and sometimes must precede the fact or the act.”

In Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, Marina Warner examines the presence of enchantment and magic in everyday culture, and the reasons for its continued persistence despite its difficult co-existence with science. To do so, she studies how the perception of magic and imagination has evolved over history in the context of the Arabian Nights, and worries magic has been made more comfortable for Western audiences through the exoticisation of Oriental material.

She begins each chapter with a chosen story from the Arabian Nights, and analyzes it in detail before moving on to its larger implications. For me, this was actually the highlight of the book: I haven’t read the Arabian Nights in years, and having someone explain the context of the stories was fascinating. She covers Shahrazad’s gradual move from stories of men wronged by women to stories portraying women as victims, eventually earning the Sultan’s forgiveness for all women and his agreement to stop executing one per day.

Arabian Nights was enormously popular in Europe when it was translated, so much so that many of the classic tales we associate with it, like Aladdin or Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, were actually additions by European translators. Warner argues that the Arabian Nights were one of the first major popularisers of flights of fancy in Western European thought. They have provoked imagination and ideas ever since, and it is imagination that is key to knowledge, key to ethics, and key to humanity. The Enlightenment may have been the Age of Reason, but it also required imagination, and it is fiction and magic that allow for imagination to grow. Unfortunately, she suggests, since then magic has become perceived as exotic and foreign, diminishing cultural exchange and cultural understanding, not just of reason and imagination, but of East and West.

The book, however, is almost impossible to take good notes on: she moves directly from Mongolian Shamanism to Obama’s Dreams from my Father, all in the context of understanding dreams. Such tangled webs make for interesting reading, though some chapters seem to lack relevance. That said, her thesis on the importance of imagination is one I am sympathetic to, and the framing of the issue in Arabian Nights is excellent. All of us might be better off if we were a little more willing, even in this rational world, to indulge in magic, both strange and everyday.

Want more enlightenment? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Present Shock – Douglas Rushkoff

“It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now – and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.” – Douglas Rushkoff

Early post this week: I’m in the air on Sunday, so won’t be able to post. I deny any irony in early-posting a review about bringing everything into the present.

Information can be either a storage or flow. Twitter is a flow: there is no point in going back and rewatching twitter feeds, because once it loses its present immediacy, it loses impact. We cannot catch up with it. Books, on the other hand, are storage, and can be returned to repeatedly. The problem with modernity is that we confuse the two, scanning a digital article with the same focus as we give our facebook news feed, and missing out on much of its value.

Rushkoff argues that we have begun to experience life as one long moment, always in the present, with no beginning and no end. As a result, we have stopped emphasizing narratives in our movies and tv shows; we attempt to be everywhere at once both in attention and physically; we try to make everything happen now rather than waiting; and we oversee patterns due to an overdose of data points. It is an interesting and compelling point, that we are placing less and less emphasis on things that are not happening now, and are overwhelmed by everything that supposedly is.

Beyond that (admittedly interesting) claim, however, I don’t find the rest of his thesis convincing. His argument that we no longer value narrative arcs, supposedly evidenced in flashback heavy Family Guy episodes, just doesn’t seem reasonable. Modern life is certainly accelerated, as Alvin Toffler argued in his book Future Shock, and it seems that the faster it gets, the faster we demand it goes. It seems to me though that we show just as much need for narrative arcs as ever, though perhaps less patience for long ones. Family guy still has a story – it’s just short and shallow.

Despite being on a fascinating topic, Present Shock didn’t add as much as I had hoped to the discussion, introducing few new ideas or ways of thinking about the world. Yes, multi-tasking brains do worse on almost every measure, but that’s fairly well recognized. His discussion of moon phases affecting chemical balances in the body, on the other hand, sounds a lot more like junk science, and the fact that he doesn’t provide any actual evidence for it suggests there may not be much. There is interesting information in Present Shock, but it is overwhelmed by the irrelevant and the unlikely to be causal.

Want more wisdom? Join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Or, keep reading (or in the UK or Canada).

Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee

“Time for the black flower of civilization to bloom.”

I don’t know how to review fiction, so instead I’m just going to let Coetzee speak for himself. I’ll give a bit of background, but there are so many quotes with wisdom I think I’ll just share those.

Waiting for the Barbarians is the story of the Magistrate, a man who has “not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times.” He administers a small town on the border between Empire and the barbarian lands. As the novel progresses, Empire becomes concerned over the possibility of war with the barbarians: interrogators come and go, prisoners are taken, and the army moves in. It captures a clash of worlds, Empire and barbarians, humanity and brutality, complexity and simplicity.

As the magistrate witnesses some of the horrors of Empire, he periodically reflects on them:

“I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering… The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end.”

On new beginnings;

“It would cost little to march them out into the desert (having put a meal in them first, perhaps, to make the march possible), to have them dig, with their last strength, a pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even to dig it for them!), and, leaving them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new intentions, new resolutions. But that will not be my way. The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble.”

On time;

“What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history.”

On certainty;

“In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.”

I’m not sure a selection of quotes do him justice, but Coetzee is very much one of the wise, and there is definitely wisdom to be gleaned here.

There’s also some wisdom to be found in the Subtle Illumination email list to your right, however. Or, keep reading Coetzee (or in the UK or Canada).