The Subjectivity Of Everything: Music And Math Edition

Recently from a combination of world-weariness, pandemic-weariness, and me-weariness, I was seized by a desire to think about something abstract, useless, inert, and intellectually challenging. "I know what I'll do," I thought. "I'll buy a book about math."

I went to a small bookstore and asked, "Do you have a math section?" No. But there among the science books I came upon Music By the Numbers by math historian Eli Maor. I thought it would be about music theory and the mathematical underpinnings of classical music structures -- something I vaguely remember being interested in when I read about it in Gödel, Escher, Bach as a teenager forty years ago. But it was more about the fundamental mechanics of western music's organization of sound. Where did all these notes come from?

I knew that with a string, half as long means an octave higher. What I learned first is that the Pythagoreans and their followers based an entire scale on their idea of pleasing fractional intervals. The full story is a bit complicated, but taking fourths and fifths as a starting point, you can create a scale with a version of the "whole tone" interval we're familiar with (C to D, for example) based on a 9/8 ratio of a note to its predecessor (and a half-tone with ratio 256/243).

Maor says that while this way of creating a scale is mathematically elegant, it is out of step with the pitches produced in harmonic overtones -- and thus with the fundamentals of acoustics itself. From a philosophical point of view, Maor argues that their obsession with formal beauty led Pythagorean followers into a self-circular mathematical maze: by insisting on mathematical simplicity, pleasing ratios, and no irrational numbers, they "subject[ed] the laws of nature to their ideals of beauty."

But the more amazing moment for me came later, when I learned about tempering. As I kid, I knew about Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and I used to enjoy imagining that the well-tempered clavier had replaced a sour and irritable keyboard instrument known as "the ill-tempered clavier." But in all these years, I never learned what tempering is.

The background for tempering in the Western context happened around 1550, when a new scale was created bringing in intervals of thirds and their inversions. This "just-intonation" scale has intervals close to the ones we'd find on a modern piano. Maor argues that as it is based on the first six members of the natural harmonic series, and has pitches corresponding to the natural harmonics of musical instruments, it is acoustically and empirically superior to the Pythagorean scale. You could say that it has formalism that is not so much mathematical but rather musical.

However: a crucial feature of the just-intonation scale is that not all the tone ratios are the same. For example, in a C-major scale, the ratio of C to D would be 9/8 and from D to E, 10/9.

From a musical point of view, Maor argues, this is as it should be. It's from the practical and social point of view that these differences became a problem. For instruments with keyboards and fixed holes, a just-intonation tuning in one key will have notes at slightly different pitches from those in another key. Increasingly, people wanted to play together, with multiple instruments all at once. What if a group wants to play one piece in one key and another in another? The workarounds were complicated: early harpsichords had multiple keyboards, each tuned to a different key, for pieces written in different key signatures.

"Tempering," then, is creating a scale with even divisions, all the same. You just divide the octave into 12 equal semitones. Now all the instruments can play together, and playing in C is the same set of notes as playing in any other key.

Math people may already see that, unlike the just-intonation scale, the ratio of a note to its predecessor in the tempered scale is based on irrational numbers -- numbers that cannot be expressed as fractions. Having even divisions requires dividing the scale into equal parts -- in this case, 12 equal half-tones -- and to be equal, each ratio between a note and its predecessor in the sale would have to be the twelfth root of 2 to 1.

Maor: "This irrational number would have been regarded with horror by the Pythagoreans, as it cannot be written as a ratio of integers." !!!

Leaving aside Pythagorean worries, Maor describes tempering as "an acceptable compromise" between "the dictates of musical harmony" and "the practicality of playing a piece on the keyboard." The difference between the tempered semi-tone and the just-intonation semi-tone is just barely within what human ears can discern, a difference "most musicians were willing to live with." Maor alludes to a suggestion that Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier was partly PR: written to convince his fellow musicians of the benefits of this sociable way of organizing everything.

I found myself astonished by idea that the structural simplicity I associate with piano keys is the result of an "acceptable compromise" to solve practical problems of musicians playing together.

From a personal point of view, I guess I thought that the Western division of the octave into 12 equal semitones was somehow linked to the fundamental structure of music and sound. Not that it was the only way to exploit that structure -- I've always known that non-Western music was organized differently -- but that it was one way. Now this book says not only is that not so, but it's even weirder: there is structure of music and sound, and those equal piano divisions are really, deeply, not it.

From a philosophical point of view, the analysis provides an interesting reminder about the subjectivity of concepts like simplicity and elegance. For the Pythagoreans, these concepts translated to rationality. For the just-intonation fans, they relate to harmonics and ratios. For the temperers, it's like brute force to make it work -- hey, make 12 that are exactly the same, whether they are rational or not.

From a mathematical point of view, it's striking to see how slippery the difference between natural numbers and other numbers can be. The nineteenth-century mathematician Leopold Kroeneker is famous for having said "God made the integers; all else is the work of man." But when you can describe the tempered scale in terms of "12 equal divisions" or "12 irrational tone ratios" -- well, things start to seem less clear. Even in math, simplicity and elegance can mean one thing in one context and another in another.

From a sociological point of view, I found myself wondering: did books like this used to be more common, or more talked about, or something? I feel like Gödel, Escher Bach was a bit splash of a book, right around the time of other math books like the Gleick book Chaos. But now my bookstore doesn't even have a math section. Did the world change, or is it something about me that's different?

Why Do I Care About The Gender Of Elena Ferrante?

When I first encountered the kerfuffle around the true identity of the novelist Elena Ferrante, I had two immediate and diametrically opposed reactions. First, smugness: I never concern myself with the autobiographical details of authors I love. So who cares? Second, freak out: wait, "Elena Ferrante" might not be a woman?

Normally I use mental discipline to avoid finding out about fiction writers. If I love a novel, thinking about which parts might be based on real life leads me down a mental rabbit hole of pointless philosophical questions. "If that part is real, did it really happen like that? Or is the author changing the details to manipulate me into feeling one way or another about a thing?" Then I'm like "What do you mean, 'manipulating,' anyway"? Talk about pointless and dumb.

However, I have also been shaken to learn certain facts about books I love, especially books representing the experience of women, especially books representing the experience of women and sexuality.

As a young person, I fell in love with Colette, the early twentieth-century French writer whose work and life challenged gender norms and all other kinds of conventions. Colette is best known now for the book that inspired the movie Gigi, but if that's all you know about Colette then you have the wrong idea -- as so often happens, the novel is darker, weirder, and more interesting. Colette is also famous for her many short stories. But the books I feel hardest for were the Claudine series.  

Over the course of the four Claudine books, Claudine grows from a precocious and rambunctious fifteen-year-old into a comfortably bourgeois but also free-thinking and unconventional adult. The first book, Claudine at School, gives an amusing side-on look at French social life in the provinces and the complex emotions of mid-adolescent feminine life. Among other complexities, Claudine has a massive crush on her young school teacher Aimée; they have a budding sensual romance when Aimée throws her over for the head schoolmistress, mystifying Claudine and giving her minor heartbreak. Aimée's younger sister Luce develops an unreciprocated love for Claudine, who doesn't understand her own desire to hurt Luce and cause her pain.

The way Claudine has romantic feelings for women and men and the way at fifteen she is both highly sensual and also a child both profoundly resonate with me. So I was disturbed to learn that the first version of Claudine at School may have been a more chaste and childlike story, and that Claudine's husband -- the writer Willy, who first told her to write up her memories and initially published the Claudine books under his own name (!), may have told her to tart them up, to liven them up with sex. I don't have sophisticated thoughts about this, but the idea that my favorite things were in there because some guy wanted them in there made me feel sad and weird.

Then a similar thing happened with erotic novel Story of O. That's not a book I loved (and the kind of submission/dominance thing in that book is not my kind of thing), but I always appreciated Story of O as a frank and explicit presentation of a certain version of positive sexuality from a woman's point of view. How many stories depict a woman being sexually adventurous and just basically enjoying it and having a great time? It's not a lot.

So, again, I was unsettled to learn late in life that while the author is a woman, the book may have been originally written for a man. That is, the author was in a relationship with a man, and wanted to get his attention, to turn him on, and to flirt with him. Again, I don't have sophisticated thoughts about this, but I find it disappointing to think that this, too, like so many things depicting women's sexuality, was ultimately crafted to appeal to a man's taste.

I loved Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, and I found The Days of Abandonment conveyed vividly what if feels like to be trapped in your life and in despair. Like Claudine at School, The Lying Life of Adults shows a textured experience of girlhood-womanhood adolescence.

It's been suggested that Ferrante may be a woman, or may not be a woman, or may be a woman and a man writing together. I feel like there's some sense in which I shouldn't care: the books are the books whoever the author is, and Ferrante herself has suggested that it's misogyny and sexism that makes people want to know.

But I also can't shake the feeling that the thoughts and feelings of people who aren't women so often affect what gets presented as the truth about women. It happens in pornography, it happens in movies, and it happens in books; given the way social gender norms work, it probably happens whenever there is an audience. While the books are the books whoever the author is, I also don't want the books by Elena Ferrante to be another example where the tastes, attitudes, and feelings of people who are not women are shaping narratives of our woman- and girl-hood experience.

What Compelled Me to Reread Dracula During Lockdown?

I don't know how it started, but I think it was something in the NYT crossword, something to do with Keanu Reeves. My partner said, "Keanu Reeves was in Dracula." Wait, what? From the miracle of modern self-surveillance, I know that I looked it up and learned that Keanu Reeves did not play Dracula (thank god) but rather Jonathan Harker, the lawyer. Whether Gary Oldman is any less WTF as Dracula I leave as an exercise to the reader.

I have a long history with Dracula, a book that obsessed my father when I was a kid. My father was the kind of guy where a lot of things were like 80 percent jokes and 20 percent serious and others were 20 percent jokes and 80 percent serious and it was always a little murky, probably even in his own mind, where we stood on things. After his annual rereading, my father would sleep with garlic under his pillow out of fear. You might think that's the 80 percent joke, but this was a man whose nightmares tended to actual devils actually chasing him, so I'm not so sure.

Later, I had the widely shared adolescent girl experience of being "into" vampires, whatever that means. I watched the movie The Hunger over and over, and read a lot of Anne Rice. My first reading of Dracula, around that time, I had a vivid sense of the erotic in the vampires' ways -- you may not remember this, but these are literally described as "voluptuous" in the book. Poor Jonathan Harker, on meeting the women in the castle who want to drink his blood, describes their voluptuousness as "both thrilling and repulsive." I remembered the book as basically anti-vampire, but not in any particular way.

On this rereading, by contrast, I felt the full weight of the Christian anti-sex moralizing. As Lucy's appearance begins to shift toward the vampiric zone, her friends are disgusted by the new sensuality of her face; after they destroy her body to free her from Dracula's spell, they're thrilled to see her previous sweet, pure expression and physiognomy return. A "diabolical sweetness" allows vampires to express love and desire to seduce new recruits. I guess I'm as against killing people and sucking their blood as anyone else, but this framing struck me as depressing and dumb.

Rereading Dracula during lockdown, I couldn't help but notice that it's partly a travel book. The best part of the story is when Jonathan Harker first goes to Transylvania, ostensibly to help the Count with some clerical matters, and slowly gets caught up in Dracula's web. There are trains, and ships, and transfers to carriages, and rides on horses. I was like, "Oh yeah -- travel!" Of course, so much of that late nineteenth-century mode, of going to truly unknown places and being completely cut off from anything familiar, is totally lost to us now. These days, Jonathan Harker could read on Yelp, "Castle looks interesting but they will kill you and drink your blood. One star."

The most melancholy aspect of my reading experience was the way that it was stupidly mediated by all the ridiculous parodies, take-offs, and remakes of the Dracula story that I've encountered in my time. Chief among these was the 1979 film Love at First Bite, which as a kid I saw on TV multiple times and found hilarious and awesome. How could I not love a vampire movie that featured the classic disco song "I Love the Nightlife"? There's also Young Frankenstein, which takes place at a castle in Transylvania for who knows what reasons. Memories of those films made me see Renfield as an annoying twerp, the horses and wolves under Dracula's command as side-shows, and even the Count himself in the light of a ridiculous show-boater.

Overall, the whole thing was a sadder and less fun affair than I'd hoped it would be, though whether that's because I'm old, or because of lockdown, or because the book isn't really that good is totally unclear.

Enraged by Irritations: Human Nature Or Aristocratic Problem?

I don't know if you've read The Leopard -- the 1958 book by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that tells a story of social change and the decline of the nobility in 19th-century Sicily through the narrative of the Salina family and its patriarch Don Fabrizio.

I love The Leopard. I love the sensuality of the narrative and of Don Fabrizio himself. I love the way Don Fabrizio admires and supports his nephew Tancredi, even though Tancredi represents the decline of the Salina's social class. I love the way that Don Fabrizio's real interest, and true comfort, lies in astronomy and mathematics.

At one point in the story, Father Pirrone - a priest who lives with the Salina family -- is asked to reflect on what the aristocrats think about then coming shifts in social equality. And he tries to answer, he gets caught up in a long and rambling response because he doesn't know how to explain how the nobility see the world and how different it is.

In trying to express the incomprehensibility what the nobility care about and what they don't, he says "I've seen Don Fabrizio get quite testy, wise and serious though he is, because of a badly ironed collar to his shirt; and I know for certain that the Prince of Làscari didn't sleep for a whole night from rage because he was wrongly placed at one of the Viceroy's dinners."

Encountering that passage always gives me a shock of recognition in an uncomfortable way. Because I, too, am frequently thrown by small irritations. I went through a phase where if I was chopping vegetables and a small piece of something would fall on the floor, I would flip out, feel the world was against me. The problem of price stickers leaving sticky residue on elegant objects sends me into a tailspin. Sometimes I get dressed to go out, and realize my shoes won't work with the weather, and realize my outfit won't work with different shoes, and I get a complete feeling of despair come over me. Yesterday morning, my clothes hangers got tangled up and I was like OK, that's it, we're done.

I don't think I'm alone. I've seen friends in a rage because of coffee spilled on a shirt, or a glass dropped on the floor.

I used to buy into the orthodoxy of "underlying mood": that this kind of thing happens because there is an undercurrent of stress and anxiety so intense that the seeming OKness of the surface is a superficial layer, a paint job over roiling chaos. Sometimes that's true. You can always describe it that way if you want to. But often it doesn't feel that way to me. To me, it feels more like a plunge into the essential pointlessness and harrassingness of human existence, a plunge caused by the irritation itself, not requiring unusual life stress as a background condition.

At first, I was inclined to draw the conclusion that Father Pirrone's association of this experience with aristocracy was questionable. I'm not an aristocrat, and neither are my friends. But then I started wondering if maybe just being middle-class and white in North America was a kind of experience of aristocracy -- I mean, that the relevant background needs and social comforts are met at such a high general high level that our idea of what is a "problem" would be more similar to that of the Salina family than to the non-aristocrats of 19th century Sicily.

But then -- "on the third hand," as my mother liked to say -- I got to thinking, maybe Father Pirrone is wrong about it after all -- because what does Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa know about it? He was the last Prince of Lampedusa and owner of a hereditary agricultural estate. He has no special insights into whether being enraged by irritations is a special aristocrat thing or more a general human thing.

I used to have a lot less money than I do now, and for a time I was in difficult circumstances. I've been trying to remember whether I was just enraged by small irritations then as I am now. But I can't quite sort it out. In my mind's eye of that time, I'm just smoking a lot of cigarettes. I do remember that when I worked as a waitress, one of my tasks was to break cold feta cheese into crumbled feta cheese with my hands, and I hated the feeling so badly, I swore I'd never do that by choice. To this day, I use a knife to chop feta into little cubes.

So: enraged by irritations: human nature or aristocratic problem? I'm really not sure. Or -- maybe it's just me?

Some Books To Alleviate Holiday Boredom And Dread

For me, inactivity often induces existential angst and the feeling of the pointlessness of life. So I don't do well with blah holidays like New Year's Day, when people tend to laze around eating and watching sports and everything is closed. Maybe you're a bit this way yourself. If so, here are some books you could read -- my favorite novels and memoirs from the last year or two. All highly recommended!

Don't forget: if you want to support alternatives to the dystopian future where Amazon controls the world's reading material, you can always buy these from Barnes and Noble or Indigo.

Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy
This novel tells the story of a kid named Kiran, of Indian descent, growing up in Ohio, who wants to wear makeup, hang out with girls, and possibly have sex with boys. Not surprisingly, Kiran struggles to find a way to fit in to his world. Funny and sad, but mostly funny.

Paul Beatty, The Sellout
It's almost impossible to describe The Sellout, as people have been discovering since it won the Man Booker prize and all kinds of other things. It's a satirical commentary on modern culture and modern America and modern race relations, told through some very .. unlikely plot elements, like a black hero who gets in trouble for trying to bring back segregation and slavery. Hilarious and biting.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
The "sympathizer" in question is a a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist double agent at the end of the Vietnam War, who travels to the US ostensibly alongside US-supporting Vietnamese but secretly reporting back to his communist allies in Vietnam. I don't usually read the Q and Y type things at the end of books, but I did with this one, and the author said this one brilliant and fascinating thing. Usually, he said, books about colonized places written for the west fall into this trap of explaining the culture of the colonized place to the imperialist listener; this serves to flatten and misrepresent it. By having his narrator travel to the US and report back, he was able to fill his book with the opposite: explanations of US culture to outsiders. An amazing book.

Paul Murray, The Mark and the Void
About modern banking and everything else wrong with the world. We've already covered it in detail.

Riad Sattouf, Arab of the Future
Graphic memoir by an author who is half French and half Syrian, about growing up in Libya, Syria, and France, but also about the terrifying helplessness of childhood no matter what is going on.

Trevor Noah, Born a Crime
This memoir by the host of The Daily Show was so much better and more interesting than I thought it would be. Noah grew up in South Africa as a mixed race kid when it was literally illegal for people of different races to have sex and children. The book is about life under apartheid, complicated family relations, and being an awkward teenager. Also, it explains many things you probably didn't know, like why people sometimes name their kids "Hilter" in South Africa. Funny and sad, in equal measure. There is also violence, including domestic violence, so be careful to read this in the proper frame of mind.

Tarquin Hall, The Vish Puri detective series
If you're looking for something lighter and less serious than the other books listed, check out this serious about an Indian crime-solving detective. These books are entertaining and also contain many small interesting details about Indian food, politics, culture, corruption, family life, spirituality, language, history ... you name it. I had assumed the author was Indian, and when I discovered that he's a guy of British and American ancestry who grew up in the UK I was surprised, and honestly a bit disturbed -- it just seems different when this kind of culture commentary comes from an outsider. But Tarquin Hall lives in Delhi, and is married to an Indian woman, and the end of this interview at least suggests his novels are popular with readers in India.

Happy New Year, everyone!

A Few Philosophical Reflections On Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

I just finished reading Sam Quinones's astonishing book Dreamland. Dreamland tells the story of the story of America's recent opiate epidemic, but it is also about a million other things like modern American culture, the ethics of health care, late capitalism, the role of government, the nature of pain, and the timeless dilemma of human existence: can you make things better for people without also, somehow, making them worse?

This post isn't an overview of important themes from Dreamland. For that you'll have to read the book. And you should read the book. If you're not sure, start by listening to the author talk about it on the WTF podcast or check out more info here.

Anyway, this is just a discussion of a few things I personally found philosophically interesting, relevant, and thought-provoking.

1. Philosophy of science: evidence and social epistemology

One of the central aspects of the epidemic was the sudden rise in prescriptions for opioid pain relievers and particularly Oxycontin. For a long time it was part of health care orthodoxy that opioids are highly addictive and thus dangerous, and so should only be prescribed in special circumstances like after surgery or when someone is near death. But Oxy tried to change all that.

Oxycontin was formulated as a time-release pill made up of the opioid oxycodone intended to eliminate the euphoria and make the drug non-addictive. It is not surprising that Oxycontin was aggressively marketed as non-addictive: in the nature of things, the makers of the drug stood to make more money the more it was prescribed, and this is what companies do.

What is surprising, and indeed utterly shocking, is how many people went along with it -- with a belief that challenged everything they thought they knew -- on the basis of virtually no evidence. Doctors believed it, med school profs started to teach it, massive health care decisions were made on its basis. And, of course, it turned out to be wildly false. So: what the hell?

As with so many things, it turns out that the answers are complex. The drug arrived in the middle of a shift away from thinking of pain as something to be endured no matter how awful and toward thinking of pain as something that ought to treated. That shift probably would have been a good thing, except that at the same time, insurance companies didn't want to pay for the multidimensional treatments known to help with pain. The producers of Oxy spent a fortune conducting huge conferences that trained drug reps and reinforced the message.

These reps were trained to cite, as evidence, a text known as "Porter and Jick." This text, which was refereed to as a study and sometimes described as a large or important study, was supposed to show that opiods aren't so addictive after all. But Porter and Jick isn't a study at all. In fact, it turned out to be a one-paragraph letter to the editor, written in 1980, to the New England Journal of Medicine, in which a doctor with a taste for data wrote out an informal observation of patients at the hospital where he worked. Not only wasn't it a study, it described patients in a highly controlled environment receiving drugs before the rethinking of pain treatment was underway.

No one questioned "Porter and Jick" -- at least for a long time. People shared the info, passed it along. Quinones points out that everyone thought everyone else had read it; before the journal archives were put online in 2010, finding out what Porter and Jick really was would have required going to the library and looking it up -- something doctors just didn't have time to do. Interestingly, when I tried to use PubMed to view Porter and Jick, I saw the image at the top of this post -- no associated abstract even! -- and Google Scholar offers only a citation. It is still not an easy text to find!

Don't you find it profoundly disturbing that people can cite something crucial, and build on it, and teach it, and share it, without really knowing what it is? I do. And yet, I expect that this -- or something like it -- happens a lot. We know that science proceeds in a highly social way, and that scientists trust one another. People appropriately subject some beliefs to much more crucial scrutiny than others, because they are relying on a sense of what is, and isn't, already known and what is, or isn't, important to revisit. You couldn't require everyone to check everything going back all the way at every stage, or nothing would move forward. It's complicated.

Of course, when it comes to actual pharmaceuticals, you could build in specific checks on things. This article points out that the current US scheme -- in which advertising has to be submitted to, but not reviewed by, the FDA before it can be used -- is a big part of the problem.

2. Capitalism and philosophy of economics

The story of the opiate epidemic is, in some ways, the story of capitalism going where capitalism had never gone before. If you leave out the "people dying in droves" problem, the story of Oxy is a story of business success. And Dreamland describes how a guys from one town in Mexico create a kind of pizza-delivery model for black tar heroin, where you call and there's a guy, and there's quality control and customer service and so on.

I'm constantly trying to convince people that economics is not value-free: that our definitional choices affect our conclusions, that this process is not value-neutral, that assumptions about what is and is not important are hidden behind seemingly objective principles.

The opiate situation is a perfect illustration. The story we always hear about capitalist exchange is that when A and B  make a voluntary transaction, overall well-being improves: since A and B are both getting what they prefer, they are both better off.

As Adam Smith well knew, this is true only in certain contexts and against certain backdrops, and ethical questions and economic ones are deeply intertwined. If you allow that people buying Oxy and black tar heroin, becoming addicted, and often dying is a "bad thing," then you immediately face several deep questions: How is this exchange unlike others? What is the theory of "well-being" in which Coca-Cola makes you better off but Oxy doesn't? What is the theory of "voluntary" that makes addiction incompatible with free choice?

In her wonderful 1962 book Economic Philosophy, the economist Joan Robinson uses the example of addiction to showcase the problems with the standard economic view in which the theory of revealed preferences -- whatever the person chose must, tautologically, be what they wanted -- comes together with the theory of well-being as preference-satisfaction -- whatever the person preferred must, tautologically, have been what would improve their well-being.

"But [addicts] should be cured," she writes, "[and] children should go to school. How do we decide which preferences should be respected and what restrained unless we judge the preferences themselves"

Sure, highly addictive drugs are an extreme example. But you can't rule them out without a some thinking about what preferences matter and why, that is, about what is good for people and what isn't. And once you're going down that road, well -- pretty soon you're asking what is a good life and what matters and why. You're far from rational choice theory and revealed preferences, and there's no telling where you'll end up.

3. Is the human experience essentially a pain?

When it comes to the pains of human existence, there are two types of people in the world. There are people who think things are naturally OK and only become fucked up when bad things happen, and there are people who think that the human experience itself is essentially a problem. In case you haven't noticed, I'm the second type.
   
In Dreamland, Quinones talks about the dilemma of all attempts to kill pain: can you have the heaven of pain-killing without the hell of addiction? The thing I'm talking about is related to that but goes beyond pain and pleasure into general human existence questions.

As the opiate crisis deepened, many of the people who got addicted were young privileged white people from well-to-do families -- kids growing up in leafy suburbs, with their own bedrooms and cars and TVs and so on. In some cases they started because of sports injuries, but a lot of them were just looking for a good time.

If you think things are naturally OK and become fucked up only when bad things happen, it seems difficult to explain these kids deciding to take drugs. Why take those risks? For what? But if you think human existence is naturally difficult, exhausting, irritating, and boring, it makes all the sense in the world. People are constantly trying to escape their own consciousness, and they always have.

What this ultimately shows, I think, is that while freedom and autonomy are wonderful things, desires don't just come out of nowhere, and most people aren't going to do very well when left alone to their own devices.

Miscellaneous Thoughts About Clothing, Sex, Food, and Capitalism

As regular readers know, there is a health problem in my family (mom, congestive heart failure, in a rehab place trying to regain her strength to go home. Stressful and time-consuming!). I didn't have the mental energy for a regular post. But here are some things that are on my mind this week:

1. Free love and politics

I just finished reading the Oryx and Crake trilogy by Margaret Atwood and I thought it was really good and full of interesting things. In case you don't know, it tells the story of a dystopian future where biotech has run amok, much of the environment is ruined, and society is divided into safe and bland "compounds," where wealthy educated people live and work, and the "pleeblands" where people are poor are things are violent and shady and unpredictable.

One of my favorite things in this book is the way Atwood depicts the "God's Gardeners," who are a gang of animal-loving, anti-materialistic, anti-technologist zealots. The Gods Gardeners are basically the heroes of the story, and there's no question they are "right" about things in some deep and important way. But Atwood also goes out of her way to say how they're also kind of dull and moralizing, insisting on drab clothing and low-key social life.

I was glad to have this pointed out. Contrary to the "harmony myth of human nature," things like making your own soap can be both really boring and the right thing to do.

At one point there's a discussion of why Katrina, who runs a fancy pleebland sex club, can't escape trouble by going to live with the God's Gardeners. The answer is that "it wouldn't have worked out" because "wrong wardrobe preferences."

I never highlight things in novels, but I highlighted that -- because it captures something deep and real and sometimes very puzzling, namely, that "free love" rebels and other kinds of political rebels often can't get along. Really: why can't you be pro-environment and pro-equality in a miniskirt and heels?

2. The cultural and personal aspects of meal skipping

After I read The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung I put into practice some of its recommendations, and I started skipping breakfast and avoiding snacks. Not only did I lose weight and start to feel better physically, I also experienced other surprising positives.

Though I think of myself as someone who isn't easily seduced by nutrition orthodoxy, I had somehow really bought into the commandment to "eat frequent small meals." Only now do I realize how ridiculously and pointlessly stressful this made my life. Being out and about all day and trying to find healthy food to eat four or five times a day? It's impossible. The standard advice -- to prepare and carry food around -- was unworkable for me.

I can't believe how liberating it is to just ... not eat when it's not convenient. My god. Yes, you get a bit hungry. But honestly, once I started separating the feeling of "hungry" from the anxiety of "not eating! unhealthy!" I found being hungry is not really a big deal.

On top of everything else, it saves money, it's consistent with environmentally friendly eating, and it requires no consumer products. Dr. Fung points out in his book how much standard nutrition advice is influenced by corporations need to make money. Skipping meals is like the opposite of that - it's like the food equivalent of buy-nothing-day.

3. How is late capitalism so strange?

It's fascinating to me how many of the things that we need most for happiness and well-being are things late capitalism is proving terrible at providing. Job security, time to care for children and others, time to cook food, opportunities for moving around and being outside, basic health care -- all things we need most, all things late capitalism seems to be eroding.

Sometimes it seems like the aspects of life that other societies are most focused on providing are just the ones we somehow expect people to deal with in the corners of their lives, as things they'll have to find a way to work out. Things like who is going to watch the kids when a parent gets sick -- it's like such a basic, basic thing, and yet somehow in late capitalism it gets treated like some kind of personal problem that everyone has to solve on their own.

I'd like to say I saw this coming, but I didn't. I was young during the days of middle-capitalism, when it really looked like with a bit of planning you could have it all kind of work. You could have the pleasures of technology and fashion without rampant inequality and with environmental protections and with structures in place to make all the difficult things work the way they should. Somehow, though, that's not how it all seems to be going.

Don't Tech People Ever Encounter Dystopian Fiction?

The drones from Iron Man.

 Often when I read the news these days, I think to myself: don't these people ever encounter dystopian futuristic books and movies?

To me, it seems like modern narratives are full of of very plausible depictions of the very awful and disastrous consequences of creating and adopting new technologies that are of very dubious usefulness in the first place. Don't the people creating these technologies ever think to themselves "Wow, I'm like the inadvertently evil person in a futuristic disaster movie"?


One obvious example is the Internet of Things. I'm not even a huge sci-fi fan, but even I know that many of the classics depict objects turning, or being turned, against us. It's not in the least far-fetched. In fact, just recently a successful DDoS attack was executed by a bunch of "innocuous things like digital video recorders and security cameras."

When I first read that, I felt like, 'Well, duh." This is what novelists and artists have been telling us for years. Isn't one of the main sci-fi moments when Dave says "Open the pod bay doors, HAL," and Hal says "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"? Didn't Philip K. Dick write about a door that wouldn't open unless you pay? Aren't these the logical extensions of having your fridge or your front door connected to the internet, and, by obvious extension, to mega-corporations and the NSA?

I don't even get why people want the Internet of Things. What's so tough about making a note to buy milk, and if you forget and run out one day, it's not the end of the world? What's inadequate about the existing concept of, say, a key to get into your home? The electric grid is fragile from years of neglect. One good shot could knock out communications satellite. If the power is out, do you really want to be unable to get into your own home? I picture the poor befuddled people of the future, thinking "If only there were some simple technology where you could fashion a device, maybe out of metal and it would just ... open the door." Sad!

I thought the same thing when I read about how Facebook wants to help banks evaluate your credit-worthiness by looking at the creditworthiness of your friends. For fuck's sake, people. Isn't this well-worn territory? In just the latest incarnation I happen to know of, Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story describes a system where people's scores are constantly broadcast so everyone knows exactly how you stack up mony-wise and prestige-wise. I'd tell you more about Super Sad True Love Story but the truth is I haven't read it, partly because it seems too insanely depressing and I have other things to worry about.

And what about new and improved facial recognition technology? The dystopian possibilities of 100 percent surveillance are well-explored, and yet we keep marching forward. The always great MathBabe says that a new company headed by "two 20-something Russian tech dudes" is producing software pretty good at it. Faced with the obvious ethical questions, their response is along the lines of "It's too late to worry; we can distinguish the good guys from the bad guys; Luddites gonna be Luddites."

Finally, I'm sure you've read about Amazon testing drone delivery, out in the back-wilds of the UK (and, I now learn, in Canada!). Drones? To bring consumer crap to your house? Don't these people go to the movies? You'd think the Iron Man franchise was some kind of Indie cult film you could only get on Blu-ray.

So: what is the deal? Is it that the powers of capitalism are so intense that people forge ahead knowing that it will all end in tears? Is it some kind of cognitive bias for optimism, where people just think "this time it will be different"?

The popularity and style of modern dystopian narratives almost suggests to me a much darker and creepier possibility: that there is a desire for dystopia, a yearning for a crisis that will throw us out of our current state of moral complexity and our compromised ways of living and boredom. The problems of modern life are so complicated and unglamorous. It's hard to do a good thing without worrying you're also doing bad. Solutions to problems like the refugee crisis, systemic injustice, and climate change are going to require thinking and dealing with laws, education, and bureaucracy.

Are people secretly longing for a new situation, one where some of us are heroes and some of us are vulture food? Where instead of dealing with difficult problems that we don't know how to solve, we'll be in a more Mad Max situation, where it's like "Weakness = bad! Protecting daughter by killing guy = good!"

I don't know. But whenever I go along with this train of thought, I always end up in the same place. Should I give up this whole "philosophy professor" biz, and to learn how to repair low-tech kitchen appliances?

Calories-In-Calories-Out And The Fetish For Epistemological Simplicity

This post considers why, given all the evidence against it, the calorie-in-calorie-out theory of weight has such a grip on people's imaginations.

I started thinking about this because a couple of weeks ago I was looking up some boring nutrition thing online and I came across the website of Dr. Jason Fung, a doctor and kidney specialist. Dr. Fung has a theory about obesity being cause not by overeating but rather by excessive insulin. I found it interesting enough to buy and read his book, The Obesity Code.

The Obesity Code draws on a range of evidence to argue against the calories-in-calories-out model -- in which weight gain and loss is governed by amounts of food and exercise -- and in favor of a different model, in which there are many factors but hormones -- and especially insulin -- are central. Insulin acts to direct the body's regulatory system: too much insulin and we gain weight. It's like a thermostat set at the wrong temperature.

I gather this is similar to what other people, like Gary Taubes, have been saying. But Dr. Fung adds an interesting point about meal timing. The main problem, Dr Fung says, is that our modern way of eating -- lots of carbohydrates, lots of "small meals" and snacking -- generates a lot of insulin. Frequent eating means that insulin is released often, and this means that our bodies develop a resistance to it -- just as they develop resistance to other things like drugs. We need more and more to get the effect insulin is supposed to provide, of helping us process sugar, and the body produces more and more insulin. And we gain weight.

The solution is to eat fewer carbohydrates, especially processed ones, but also to pay attention to meal timing. Don't snack. And if you want to lose weight, try skipping meals or fasting.

I'm not a physiologist so obviously I can't assess the scientific evidence of this book, but you don't have to be a scientist to know there is something very wrong with the idea of "calories-in-calories-out." You can easily observe that if you give the same food to different people their bodies will respond differently. In fact, if you give the same food to the same people at different times of their lives their bodies will respond differently.

Right at the start of his book Dr. Fung mentions several obvious examples of the how the calories-in-calories-out model obviously fails. Prior to puberty, boys and girls have the same body fat percentage. After puberty, women have almost 50 percent more body fat, despite eating less. Pregnancy induces weight gain, beyond the effect of eating more. Various drugs are known to cause weight gain, regardless of food intake. If you give people insulin, they gain weight; in fact there's a thing called "diabulemia" where people with Type 1 diabetes deliberately give themselves less insulin than they need, in order to lose weight.

Given all of this easily observable evidence, isn't it strange how often people, including scientists and health care professionals, constantly bring up this idea of calories-in-calories-out? The idea that to lose weight you should eat less and move more is like gospel in this country.

Proponents of calories-in-calories out would, I expect, want to say something like this: Sure, we know that there are many factors influencing the body. The idea of calories-in-calories-out doesn't mean calories are the only factor. It just means that "all things being equal," the more calories you take in and the fewer you use, the more you'll gain weight. Sometimes this is followed up with "It's thermodynamics! You can't change the laws of thermodynamics!"

I find this response unpersuasive. Obviously, I think it's true at some level that biochemical processes obey the laws of science. But so what? If there are many factors contributing to weight, then what is the point of saying calories-in-calories out? Even if it is true, it is irrelevant.

It's especially irrelevant if you're looking for understanding and explanation of cause and effect. Adapting one of Dr. Fung's analogies, imagine if you were looking to explain why a plane crash happened, and the answer was "there was not enough lift to overcome gravity." Yes, this is a law of physics. But how is it relevant? What we want to know is whether there was human error or mechanical problems or weather or what.

To say calories-in-calories-out and imply that it is relevant is to say something else: that if a person choses to eat less and move more, they will lose weight, and vice versa. This is the statement we're arguing about. It is clearly debatable, and there is increasing evidence that it is false. There's a large genetic component to weight. Foods like olive oil are processed differently from foods like sugar. Fat stores are regulated through homeostasis. The body is not a machine, but rather a delicately responsive organism that regulates itself through all kinds of delicately tuned mechanisms. 

And yet, you can't get away from calories-in-calories-out. It's brought up all the time, sometimes in a sneering tone. It's the cornerstone of policies like the Obama administration's "Let's Move" campaign. Just the other day I read something on the Guardian presenting a multifactorial theory, and bam -- first comment I saw was about how, duh, you can't break the laws of thermodynamics. Why does everyone love to say and believe this? Here are a few thoughts.

1. The simplicity fetish
   
Modern westerners love a simple theory. I don't know what it is that makes people think a simpler theory is better than a more complicated one, especially when you're dealing with complex things like nutrition. In my book, Moral Reasoning in a Pluralistic World, I talk about how, even in ethics, people show a preference for simple theories organized around a single principle, despite the fact that most of us value various things -- such as justice, liberty, and overall well-being -- that are different and can obviously conflict.

I don't know if people just got over excited about the simplicity of modern physics, expressed in those elegant equations, or what, but this is definitely a thing. Somehow the idea that you could express the complexities of nutrition through a single equation -- I think it appeals to people on some visceral level.

2. The harmony myth

I think there's also a vague and often subconscious preference for seeing things all fit together, as if things that are good in one way are good in other ways and vice versa. High calorie foods strike some people as indulgent, and some high calorie foods, like meat, are a problem from an ethical and environmental point of view. As with the "harmony myth of human nature," we think it should all fit together. But of course it doesn't.

There's really no reason certain foods can't be bad from one point of view and good from another.

3. Politics and capitalism

One of the most interesting ideas in The Obesity Code is the idea that capitalism creates pressure for governments to endorse a calorie theory of weight. Because here's what the calories-in-calories-out theory doesn't say: it doesn't say "don't eat that." If official policy said to avoid starchy foods, the grain industry would have a freak out. By falsely treating all foods as the same, the calories-in-calories-out theory avoids demonizing any particular food, and thus satisfies certain political pressures.

In general, the capitalism angle on nutrition is pretty out of control. Nina Teicholz's book The Big Fat Surprise is full of hair-raising stories about how much of modern food science is funded by giant food corporations and industry. I think of myself as skeptical and cynical, but even I was shocked at the role olive oil companies played in organizing lush mega-conferences around the concept of the "Mediterranean diet."

Since this post is about weight gain and weight loss, I'd like to end by reminding everyone that weight is not a predictor of health, and that people can be healthy at any size. In fact, I expect the same dysfunctions creating chaos in the world of nutrition are also getting creating some of the misplaced hysteria over weight. 


Someday, a social epistemologist is going to have a field day with the whole thing.

The Two Faces Of Branding

A couple of months ago I read Eddie Huang's book Fresh Off The Boat: A Memoir. If you haven't read it, it's about his life growing up as an Asian-American in the US and doing all kinds of different high-intensity activities like getting into fights, going to law school, and opening a restaurant. The book was the origin of the TV sitcom with the same name, though as I understand it the book and the show are quite different.

Of the many interesting and funny things in the book, one topic that really got me thinking had to do with brands. Brands are a big deal in this book. As a kid, Huang discovers that hip-hop culture, and the clothing associated with it, give him a way to challenge Asian-American stereotyping and racism.

Huang grows up in Florida, where his social experiences are constantly reminding him of the fact that he is seen as Asian and thus seen as being a certain kind of person with certain kinds of qualities -- many of them qualities he does not have or want. He talks about how in American movies Asian men never get the girl, and how Asians are stereotyped as deferential and non-assertive.

The racial stereotyping take many different forms, many of them social and peer-oriented, some of them professional. When he expresses his dream to become a sportscaster on ESPN, his father says, "They'll never let someone with a face like you on television." Huang thinks his father doesn't know what he's talking about. But later he has an interview with a newspaper, to do sports journalism, and the "big white guy" doing the hiring takes one look at him and says, "Oh, wow, that face ..." which turns out to mean that no athletes are going to talk to him with "that face" because he looks "... so young." He doesn't get the job.

Huang is a wound-up aggressive guy who likes to scrap with other guys, get into people's faces, and get into all kinds of trouble, and at one point he realizes that his being that way is a big problem for people. He says, "I was a loud-mouthed, brash, broken Asian how had no respect for authority in any form, whether it was parent, teacher, or country. Not only was I not white, to many people I wasn't Asian either." 

Early on, Huang gravitates toward hip-hop music, style and culture, and as he grows up and learns things, he comes to realize that connecting with black American culture allows him a way into a mode that is both embracing genuine identity -- not trying to be white -- and also outspoken and non-apologetic.

And wearing clothing brands associated with hip hop culture is a big part of that: it allows him to connect with people he wants to connect with and also show people he's not the stereotype they are putting on him.

That, of course, is part of what branding is all about. I mean, if you ever read the business section of the paper and you get a glimpse in to what companies are doing when they talk about "creating and and maintaining brands," that is exactly the kind of concepts they use. The  idea is to create a set of feelings and ideas around your brand so that consumers will connect with it and see the brand as representing who they are.

Somehow, when I read about branding strategy from the corporate perspective, it usually seems so dumb. I mean, the idea that some company is going to use fashion models and ad guys to link up their brand of car or vodka or shirt or whatever with some set of impressions and feelings, and the idea that you would then use those brands to express yourself -- it all seems so cynical and ridiculous, like one of those debased aspects of consumer culture that is too stupid to enter into and yet in some ways unavoidable.

But then when I read Huang's book, using brands to express yourself didn't seem stupid -- it seemed clever and interesting. Of course, part of that is because what he's using brands to do is clever and interesting, and isn't your run-of-the-mill I-have-more-money-than-you. Still, the basic concept is the same.

I guess in a way it's not surprising that you can use the tools of capitalism to sometimes do cool things. After all, sometimes the tools of capitalism are the only tools we have.

The Global Economics And Inner Morality Of Drug Mafias

Regular readers know of my admiration for Roberto Saviano, who wrote the amazing book Gamorrah about organized crime in Italy. Now I've just been reading his latest book ZeroZeroZero, which is about how organized crime -- especially that associated with the movement of cocaine and other drugs -- functions in the global economy.


It's no surprise that massive drug cartels operate like large and powerful businesses -- after all, that's why they call them "cartels." But Saviano also argues that the global economy of crime is hugely intertwined with the global economy of everything else -- so much so that you could almost think of cocaine as the essential commodity, the consumer good that not only drives the world's economic changes but also profoundly affects global politics and, by extension, the everyday lives of people around the world.

It's a complicated argument to make, and at least some readers wish it could have been made less impressionistically. But I found it fascinating. Saviano tries to tell the tale of cocaine by tracing out highly individualized stories and connecting them to the bigger picture. Though the stories of the individual narcos are vivid and extreme, I was in some ways even more interested by the narrative concerning Wachovia bank, money laundering, and the whistle-blower Martin Woods.

You can read about the Wachovia story at the Guardian here. Billions of dollars from drug money was filtered through Wachovia in direct violation of all kinds of laws, side-stepping all kinds of internal guidelines. Woods, hired to be an internal senior anti-money laundering officer for Wachovia in 2005, kept telling his superiors that something was up, and kept getting shushed and eventually harassed. Finally, Woods meets someone outside Wachovia who is willing to review the evidence, and the bank's defenses come crashing down.

Saviano's take on it is partly that of course it is massively in the bank's interest to look the other way. All the incentives were, and presumably still are, in that direction. To me, it is hilarious to consider this in the light of the comments at Naked Capitalism about how banks are harassing small-time customers who want to use cash rather than cards, sometimes with the excuse that monitoring and preventing cash transactions is necessary to prevent money laundering.

From the point of view of moral philosophy, the book has much to ponder about self-interest and society, and especially about the bonds that enable people to keep commitments to one another even as they perpetuate the most cruel and inhuman behavior imaginable.

Not surprisingly, those commitment are embedded in Hobbesian webs of threats and violence that ensure that people do as they're expected to do. These kinds of stories always make me reflect on the newer "self-interest" theories of morality, where the idea is that if everyone does what's actually in their (enlightened) self-interest, things will work out for the best.

In a passage from an old article in the New York Times that still rankles me, Steven Pinker tried a version of this moral jiu-jitsu. Trying to say that self-interest will lead people to act morally, Pinker wrote,

"If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it."

The idea being something like "Gee whiz, if I want you to be nice to me, I'll have to be nice to you! Unless I'm Galactic Overlord, but of course that doesn't apply to any of us."

Among other things, this just always seemed to me so naive about the nature of power. You don't have to be Galactic Overlord to be able to boss other people around; you just have to have power over them, wherever that comes from. Then, self-interestedly, you can do whatever you want. In fact, self-interest can often recommend perpetuating harm and violence.

Early in ZeroZeroZero, Saviano tells the truly horrifying story of a guy who is actually a DEA agent and who manages to infiltrate deep into the drug cartels of the "Golden Triangle" -- Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. When he is found out, the people he has betrayed realize that, rationally speaking, they must punish him in ways that will serve as a powerful reminder for anyone who might dare to try something similar. It can never, ever happen again. As Saviano says, "No one was ever to forget how Kiki Camarena was punished for his betrayal."

[If you're sensitive about violence skip this next paragraph]: Toward that rational end, "Camarena was tortured at Gallardo's ranch over a 30-hour period, then murdered. His skull, jaw, nose, cheekbones and windpipe were crushed, his ribs were broken, and a hole was drilled into his head with a screwdriver. He had been injected with amphetamines and other drugs, most likely to ensure that he remained conscious while being tortured."


Of course, the whole thing was taped. How else could it work as a warning? In fact, one of the prime strategies the criminals in Saviano's stories use to keep people afraid and keep them in line is YouTube, with videos of torture posted as warnings. The whole thing is a paradigmatic use of rational thinking-- incentivizing others to do what is in one's interest.

So really, you don't have to be Galactic Overlord for self-interest to recommend that you abuse others. You just have to have power.

At one point, describing a lengthy discourse from a mafioso, Saviano points out that he's heard "dozens of speeches on Mafia moral philosophy." And I thought, "Wow, that is really what it is." Is any philosopher studying the moral philosophy of the Mafia? I don't know. I can only say that, really, somebody really ought to get on it.

Hard Copies And The Coming Apocalypse

Detail from Medieval Book of Hours (1533), via Wikimedia Commons

A little while ago I told a friend that when I buy an e-book, I often buy a hard copy of the book at the same time. Not surprisingly, my friend was a little like, WTF? Is that an "oh look at my library" sort of thing?

No. As I told my friend at the time, one reason I buy and hold on to a lot of hard cover books is that I think you'd have to be crazy to trust the mega-corporations that produce e-books. Surely you remember when Amazon disappeared all those copies of 1984 from people's Kindles in 2009, becoming an early strong entry in the most ironic moment of the new millennium? How creepy was that?

Amazon just has the power to take away or change your book at any time. Once Amazon has that power, what are we supposed to do, trust them not to use it? What will happen when Homeland Security tells Amazon some book or part of a book is pro-terrorism/anti-American/related-in-some-nebulous-way-to-the-vague-possibility-of-child-pornography?

You know what will happen. The book will be synced out of your kindle and out of your life forever.

That's reason number one for having the ink and wood pulp on the shelf. But there's also this other thing, which is that the fact that so few people want to buy and hold on to physical books makes me wonder: is no one else thinking about the coming apocalypse?

I mean, is it really so far fetched to think that part of the coming climate disaster is going to involve having little access to electricity? And that if there's not much electricity, the only texts we're going to have access to is the text that's actually printed on paper?

Everything else would be lost, right? I'm struck at how few people seem to worry about this. Getting rid of library books -- especially if you can have "e-access" -- seems to strike almost everyone as simple common sense. But what's going to happen when the lights go out?

In his recent book Ethics for a Broken World, the philosopher Tim Mulgan deploys the incredibly imaginative technique of presenting his book in the form of lectures that take place after the coming apocalypse, when resources are terribly scarce and there's not enough to keep everyone alive. In the imagined future, they refer to life in our period as the "affluent" world.

In studying the affluent world, the lecturer of the future explains, they use texts "translated from fragments of affluent philosophy recently recovered from the sunken cities of the western Atlantic: the famous Princeton Codex."

You get the picture. A lot of land is under water. There's no internet. There's no JSTOR or iBooks  or Project Gutenberg.Whatever we got is salvaged from some actual books and actual pieces of paper.

In my home, we use the term "Princeton Codex" as shorthand for the collection of ideas around the possibility of a dark future, where tattered damp copies of Portnoy's Complaint and A Theory of Justice and The Autobiography of Malcom X are all there is from which the people of the future might be able to connect with us, to remember us, and to grasp what the hell we were thinking.

Hard copy books were much on my mind a few weeks ago, when I went through my crisis of stuff. I got rid of clothing and kitchen stuff and unwanted gifts and old pieces of paper, but there's one category of thing I didn't touch: the books. They're piling up, but it doesn't bother me.

The possibility that the tiny libraries of readers like me all around the globe might help, or at least momentarily entertain, the people of the future came to mind immediately when I read this week's fiction in The New Yorker, a story called "The Empties" that takes place in the near future, two years after the power goes out.

A small city Vermont is struggling along. Everyone who hasn't died of disease has pretty much learned how to chop wood, how to use fireplaces, how to make "arrangements" for the other things they need, and how to get along without knowing what is happening anywhere else.

And at the center of town, a librarian carries a shotgun. She sleeps in the library, and allows no one to check out anything. You want to read, you sit in the building, because:

"People might share their last finger of motor oil, Matilda says, break a four-inch candle in two, divide a pot of beans to serve eight, but they’ll kill you for a book."

Next time you're tempted to avoid the clutter and go e-book only, think of your 23rd century counterpart. She might be cold and hungry, but she might also be jonesing for a little education or light reading. Don't let the Princeton Codex be all she has.

Is Reading So, Like, Nineteenth Century?

Don Quixote in the Library, Adolf_Schrödter, 1834, via Wikimedia Commons

Every September we go back to school and every September I go over the idea that to be successful in your philosophy class you have to read some difficult texts and every September the students get a little glazy-eyed and there are are questions having to do with the point of reading for class.

And every September I try to explain, in a brilliant impersonation of a movie-land Boring Professor, why being able to read things for yourself really matters in terms of forming your own opinion and not just being spoon-fed ideas from people who are actually trying to talk you into something. Every September I try to talk about how if you're not already skilled at reading difficult things, part of the point is to help you read difficult things. Every September, yada yada yada.

Every September I get vaguely irritated thinking about the range of forces that work together to make students think that the point of education is "efficient knowledge transfer" -- a range that weirdly includes sci-fi and pop culture but also certain educational administrative entities and ignorant news-y education pundits and know-it-alls.

Every September I ponder the obvious implicit question: if that's what knowledge is, what the hell are we doing reading anything at all? Hey, Prof, the 1850s called -- they want their learning methods back.

Every September I reflect on the fact that even if university classes are sometimes about efficient knowledge transfers, humanities courses are really about something else, and about how even if that something else is hard to pin down, at least it has something to do with learning how to think for yourself -- something that, contrary to widespread opinion, I'd like to affirm is actually very difficult, and something that seems to me to have something to do specifically with encountering words.

Every September, this prompts me to start thinking about what the deal is. Hey reading, you think you're so great. What makes you so special?

Every September, I think about how exchanging ideas works pretty well when you're using words -- and how once you're using words anyway, it's hard to see the point of presenting them in some ridiculous ephemeral form like a video when you can just, you know, write and read the words themselves instead.

Every September I think about the novels I've read and how I like to use them as examples in class and how this is a problem that just gets worse and worse. Every September I mention examples like "Orwell's book, 1984" and every September the students are, like, "What about that movie -- "The Dark Knight"? and I'm like "Sorry, I'm old and steeped in a culture of words. I'm sure I haven't seen it. Why don't you tell us what happens?

Every September I think about my commitment to the uncomfortable truth that encountering the Human Condition through movies is not like encountering the Human Condition through words -- which is obviously not to say Movies = Bad and Books = Good or anything like that.

And every September I think about the way that the drama of film is just not the same as the drama of word; I'm reminded yet again about how film has this tendency to glamorize, and I encounter the uncomfortable fact about myself that cruelty and violence, presented in the right way, are things I can enjoy watching, even when the same thing, described in words, would horrify.

Then every September when I think about these things I'm reminded of the book and the movie Gamorrah -- which if you don't know is an incredible non-fiction book about organized crime in Italy written by a young guy who sort of got to know people and then had to go into hiding -- and I remember how when I first saw the movie I was, yes, shocked at what it depicted but also, yes, kind of enthralled with the visual beauty of it, by the beauty of the crumbling slums, shot somehow in the sun to make them look like artwork, by the beauty of the kids, with their black hair and expressive faces, and even, yes, by the beauty of the scene in which some gangsters are all in a salon getting their nails done and they all get shot.

Every September I remember, with a shudder, how when I read the book I felt so chastened, by the way the same events described in words brought home the reality of poverty and violence, brought home the horror of having to choose between killing people for the mob and not having enough to eat or worse, brought home how an Italian slum where life is cheap is a place no one wants to be, brought home how sunlight and whatever have nothing to do with it.

And every September, this circles me back to the importance of reading, and I feel a burst of unapologetic fervor about it: yes, there's going to be reading; no, there's no shortcut, no, we're not going to watch a video.

And if that means I'm stuck in the nineteenth century - well, whatever. There are worse things to be.

Truth And Lying In Fiction And Non-Fiction

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Portrait of a Woman (formerly thought to be Madame Roland) via Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday for the first time I read a David Sedaris story and found myself thinking, "Is that really true?"

Mostly I like David Sedaris. His stories are often funny and sad, and as someone who is frequently amused and sad at the same time, I'm always surprised how few things there are to read that bring the two moods together. Maybe that's why I like Philip Roth so much too -- though maybe Roth is more like "funny and angry" -- a notoriously easier combo to bring off.

Anyway, yesterday I read the story in The New Yorker about how he gets one of those step tracking devices and becomes obsessed with tracking his steps to the point where he changes his existing pick-up-the-garbage-around-town routine from a bike oriented thing to a walking oriented thing and that it now takes him around nine hours a day. He gets up to sixty thousand steps a day, which is twenty-five and a half miles, which is, of course, kind of insane.

I get that he's an obsessive guy -- and I get that one point of the story is how obsessive people can get obsessed with anything to the point where some number tracking some pretty pointless thing can nonetheless come to rule your life. 

But the story is presented in terms of an utterly pointless thing becoming a complete obsession. It's a little hard to believe. There was no connection to something else? Wanting to lose weight or walk more for health? (He does lose weight but that's presented as an afterthought.) It's just a random thing that happens to an otherwise successful middle-aged guy with a nice home and partner there to eat dinner with and talk to?

I don't think he is lying. But I started wondering if there hadn't been something left out, something that would make the story seem less strange, less striking and interesting, if it had been included. Like -- a way the obsession was connected to other things. I even developed the base suspicion that the obsession itself had been exaggerated on grounds that twenty-five and a half miles a day is a story, in a way that five miles a day isn't, really.

It's likely that one reason I had these thoughts has to do to the fact that I took a memoir class recently and for that class wrote some things about my life. For the first time I was giving serious attention to the process that starts with memories and turns them into narrative. 

Frankly, it's a somewhat creepy process. A good story has certain elements that make it interesting and fun to read. A particular narrative arc or structure. Engaging characters. An interesting setting. Memories aren't like that.

And when you put the memory materials into the narrative machine, you don't put in fake stuff, but you do shape the stuff you've got to make the story good. You are telling a particular version of things. Your version has to commit to all kinds of decisions about very murky things like: Did this cause that? What was that person like? Was some moment in your life primarily a turning point, a triumph over adversity, of a piece that came before, evidence of something characteristic,  typical or exception?

To me, this kind of "shaping" felt a whole lot like lying.

The weird thing is -- and I was acutely conscious of this taking the class -- that when you think for even a moment about these decisions, they're the same decisions anyone has to make in describing anything.

I don't care if you're writing a historical narrative or making a theory about things or people or doing a philosophy thing or even just writing a stupid managerial report: you have to figure out, from an endless jumble of random and disconnected facts and make endless decisions about which ones are important and which ones are connected and how to put them all together in a way that's meaningful.

So at some level, it's all just a big fake-out.

In certain ways, non-fiction narrative seems like a special problem. Because if you're crafting real events and facts for a narrative, there are many things that might pressure you into making the narrative be "about" something or other.

For instance, aren't you kind of sick of the "triumph over adversity" and "what I learned" narratives? They're such a big part of modern North American culture. When events and facts are massaged into this narrative, they're extra dangerous, because they're reinforcing an already overly represented idea about life: that yes, sometimes, it is possible to overcome obstacles or change. As they say in "Wag the Dog": "It's a story of loss and redemption!"

If it's non-fiction and it's one of these narratives, you risk being manipulated in a special way, because "oh that story again" allows the response, "But it's true!" When really -- well, you know.

And yet -- the matter seems to me complex. Because there might be times when only a true story will do.

I recently heard someone talking about how stories are used in social science to exemplify how certain theories would explain human behavior -- e. g. Mary found herself in X situation and because she had to compare Y and Z alternatives she used W method and found her answer. The speaker pointed out the ways these stories build in assumptions about human behavior that draw on, rather than challenging, stereotypes -- associated with gender, race, etc.

We use stories in philosophy all the time, to imagine things, carry out thought-experiments, or just give simple examples where real examples are too complicated. And it is so true -- there's a real risk of telling the stories in a way that just builds in an understanding of how the world is.

And I thought to myself that at least stories crafted around actual events and people have fixed points that can't be changed and have to be accommodated. So you can't just say anything that "seems right." There will be recalcitrant facts.

And this, too resonated with my memoir writing experience. You might want to say "X happened." But then you find for X to make sense, you need to explain Y. And then for Y to be comprehensible to the reader, uncomfortable fact Z has to be fit in somehow.

Looking back, that might have been my favorite part of the memoir experience -- you might be massaging reality to fit into a narrative, but reality is right there pushing back at you.

At the end of the David Sedaris story he talks about how his local council is going to name a garbage truck after him, and they call to ask what font he wants used. I found myself with a million questions about this part of the story. People name garbage trucks? Is that just a British thing or is that everywhere? How does that get decided? You really get to choose the font?


It's nice that with a true story there are answers to these questions, even if they're things you'll never know. 

Is Culture Snobbery The New Resistance?

When I was a young person in the 80s I remember people talking about how "capitalism consumes everything" and how I was like "Oh, yeah I guess," but I was also sort of like "no it doesn't: what about punk rock? what about me and my friends with our thrift store clothes and bizarre hairstyles? what about protests? what about hanging out, not doing anything?"

Now, I feel like if you wanted to do a school project diorama showcasing the concept "CAPITALISM CONSUMES EVERYTHING," all you'd have to do is slap a giant glass dome over some part of the modern world and you'd be good to go.

Tbh, I didn't really see it coming. But more than ever it feels like resistance is futile. No matter what you do trying to challenge the status quo, the status quo has a way of eating that shit up and spitting it back out as a commodity.

Punk sensibility is now "personal style & branding." Protests feel like the symbol of resistance necessary to buttress the true power of the entrenched. And anything you do on the internet is valuable to someone in the form of data about you -- turning your quietest mood, your nostalgic thought, or your sexy imagining into someone else's dollars.

Plus somehow the internet, which started as the experience of connecting with a handful of other weirdos talking about something no one cares about with no one else paying attention, has become the opposite: a place where nothing really counts unless it's seen, and liked, and favorited, and making good stats.

The "hanging out" of the slacker generation, Gen-X, which was at least nominally anti-establishment and involved actual cafes and actual reading and actual talking to people, seems to have given way to social networking and watching stuff.

I don't know what the answer is but I will say that a quality in myself that I used to think of as conformist I now think of as resistance and it is this: I am a culture snob.

Yeah, that's right. I'm a culture snob. And I'm not ashamed to say it. I don't have a TV. I don't watch any "shows" or do Netflix. I occasionally go to the movies but it's usually high-brow shit like 8 1/2 or other international films. I don't read general interest or fashion magazines and I don't read the Huffington Post and I don't look at TMZ.

I read a lot. I like The New Yorker. I like to go to the opera.

When I was young I was inclined to see these things in the light of establishment activities and I was inclined to be a bit embarrassed by them.

I used to fall all over myself explaining -- and this is true, too -- that one reason I didn't have a TV was that I was a channel flipper, and I would flip channels endlessly, couldn't really stop flipping channels, even as it felt like my life was wasting away.

I used to fall all over myself explaining that I didn't have anything against trashy movies and stupid things -- it was just that I was easily bored and needed a high level of intellectual stimulation all the time not to fall into pits of ennui. Like I had a personality problem.

Well, no more apologizing.

Because while I'm obviously not naive enough to think that actual artistic things and actual literature are somehow outside the capitalism and commodification machine, I do think they offer something "entertainment" often doesn't, and that is the capacity to challenge and disturb you in ways you didn't expect or foresee or maybe didn't think possible.

My reflections on lifehacking last week got me thinking about the opposite of lifehacking, and I thought about that whole "slow food" movement and how there might be a "slow life" movement and that reminded me how many of my activities are, relative to most people, pretty damn slow.

This led me to check out the Wikipedia page on the "Slow Movement." Interestingly, while there's a "slow art" (which looks interesting) and a "slow media," there isn't really a "slow culture" in the sense of what it means to read and listen and look and think about things in general in the old receptive and open-ended way, where you might spend an afternoon reading a novel, or listen to a whole album, all the songs in a row, or whatever.

The Slow Movement seems to take as one of its antagonists things like Twitter, on grounds that OMG 140 characters? But I think that is a mistake. There's nothing wrong with Twitter as long as it doesn't take over your whole life. It's the way these things take over your life, so you can't do anything slow, that's the problem.

I now regard my own ability to sit down and read quietly like a rare and treasured thing that has to be nurtured and kept alive. I'm certainly not going to risk damaging it by, say, allowing push notifications on my phone.

Finally, I'd like to say that as a person who seldom consumes mainstream entertainment media, I'm frankly a little shocked by the scene out there. Isn't there so much sexist crap? Isn't there ridiculous racial stereotyping? Isn't there a lot of nationalism and violence and absurd Good Guys Fight Bad Guys And You're With Us Or Against Us?

Kids? Just say no. Slow it down! Culture snobbery FTW!

The Rationality Of Gangsterism: Morality, Self-Interest, Organized Crime, And Economics

A few years ago I saw that movie Gamorrah about the organized crime syndicate the Camorra based in Naples, and I still remember vividly how it opens, with a visually brilliant scene of the crime guys in a tanning salon getting beautified. They're wearing goggles to protect their eyes, and there's an intense light, and it looks so cool and interesting and just when you're thinking wow, that's awesome, so cool, I'd like to ... BAM-- they're getting shot and there's blood everywhere.

It's a mind-blowing movie along several dimensions, but in many ways the book, which I read later, is even more so. It opens with the scene of a container ship at the port, breaking open by mistake as it is hoisted up, spilling out dead bodies onto the ground. The bodies, it turns out, are those of undocumented Chinese workers who had put aside money all their lives so they could be buried back in China once they were dead.

The author, Roberto Saviano, who studied these matters extensively and now lives in hiding, goes on to describe communities in which virtually everyone is subject to the terrorizing tactics of the mob: cooperate with us, or we will simply kill you, the power of the mob being such that it can terrorize government entities as well as citizens so there's no way out.

I think about Gamorrah all the time, and I especially think about it when I read about economic rationality, self-interest, and morality. Economics models people as self-interested, and rational insofar as they choose the best ways of maximizing their personal, self-interested preferences. So right away you could be forgiven for wondering: so what about morality? Is being moral irrational? Are the killers of the mob just rational economic agents? If not, why not? From the point of view of self-interested rationality, what are they doing wrong?



Generally, there are several ways to navigate around this problem of morality and self-interest. One is to say that morality is, itself, just a matter of preferences: the person who keeps their promise at great personal cost *seems* to be acting contrary to their self-interest, their actually acting *in* their self-interest, getting a psychic benefit from a ping of satisfaction or something from refraining from killing or whatever.

One puzzle about that view is that it seems to say morality never requires acting contrary to what you want to do, never requires constraining your behavior -- while it sure seems like morality sometime requires you to constrain your behavior and do what you don't want to do. And really -- if it's only your scruples or your conscience getting in the way of your carrying out that series of murders whose completion would benefit you in other ways, then wouldn't it make the most sense to just try to eliminate the scruples, get over your conscience, learn to stop worrying and love the bomb? The gangster with conscience pangs could just take Klonopin.

Another very different way to navigate around the problem is to say that constraining your behavior is somehow actually in your interest even when it's not what you feel you want to do, because in an implicit social contract you benefit more from certain rules being followed than you do from violating the rules yourself. For example, if you gain more from everyone else refraining from killing you than you do from getting to kill others, then it's rational to accept a constraint against murder, and to refrain from doing it even when you want to or it's in your interest.

This contractarian answer says that the moral rules are the ones that would benefit each person, if everyone followed the rules. Since the idea is to say that acting morally is acting rationally, in order to explain the wrongness of murder, theft, blackmail, etc, it would have to be the case that no matter who you are, you are better off in a system in which no one does those things and you don't do them either than you would be in a system in which people do do those things and you do too.

What happens if we apply this reasoning to the mob example? One of the most vivid aspects of the Gamorrah book talks about the way people choose organized crime because in some town the main alternative for making an honest living is working in factories that make handbags and stuff and how the hours are long and punishing, the pay is low, and your hands are perpetually dirty with black stuff. Compared to that, life in the mob makes people much better off.

Now think about the young recruits. They face the choice: work in the factory, OR -- go kill that guy and earn big bucks, respect, and protection of various kinds. On the face of it, I'd have to say that in the situation they find themselves, it could be in their self-interest to kill.

The contractarian response to this is to say sure, it might be in their self-interest to kill in their situation, but if everyone were following the rules it would not be. That is, as long as everyone obeyed the contract not to kill, it would be rationally self-interested for this guy not to kill, and that's the reason he'd have for constraining his action.

Though the matter is complex, doesn't this seem like saying that when a lowly member of a crime gang carries out a series of killings, his actions are wrong because and insofar as the prosperity engendered by a lack of organized crime would make him better off than he is now?

And when you think about the possible rewards of organized crime, the fact that killings can be so richly rewarded, with material goods and non-material ones, doesn't this seem striking, and interesting, and maybe false?

Picture a obedient but slow-witted guy. Maybe if he kills for his boss he gets a fancy car, money, etc. Is it really true that if everyone followed the rules and he followed them as well, he'd be better off? Fancier car? More money?  Wouldn't it depend on the economic distribution of his society, how much inequality there is? If he's at the bottom, mightn't he be better off with his crime job?

If this is right, it would seem that people are economically rational to play by the rules and not lie, cheat, steal, and kill, only in the presence of certain distributional facts -- and only when there's limited inequality.

Otherwise, as long as you can get away with it, why play by the rules at all? From the point of view of the economically rational self-interested agent, it would seem hard to find a reason.