Bot Not For Me

I'm still doing the daily Wordle, partly animated by my hatred of The Times's Wordle Bot and its critique of my performance, even when it praises me:

Who is it talking to? I didn't have this kind of strategic vision at this point. I was just looking to see if the answer contains any more of the commoner letters, and hit two of the letters. That was a good Turn 2 result!

I had no idea at this point that there were only two remaining words, of course, let alone what words they were. The Bot knows, because it only takes seconds to run through all the mathematical possibilities. (If I thought of "beaut" I wouldn't like it, I don't think Wordle's list is the same as the bot's, and that's the kind of word it would recognize but not deploy; on the other hand I have this feeling they've already used it, just a few weeks ago—if I'd thought of "gamut", on the other hand, I certainly would have tried it.) 

My own puzzle going into turn 3 is where do the A and U go? How many English words end in "-UT"? I don't have a list in my head, I have to game it out.

For the Record: Young Rawls at War

And in questions we don't normally ask here at Rectification Central, do we need a John Rawls biopic?

Gil, a finite mode, a philosophical tweep whose tweets are protected from piracy, thinks not. It may be true that Gary Oldman looks a lot like Rawls, and it may be equally true that Rawls is a signally important and lovable philosopher, with his idea of "justice as fairness", seeming to be deep, technically proficient, and heartwarming all at the same time, but Gil knows what philosophers do all day, and it is not the stuff of which movies are made.

"watching a world class actor pretend to think really hard and come up with the idea of pretending you don't know stuff, for justice. maybe he did that so much he was a bad husband. or idk maybe he was good to his wife. I'm so bored either way"

(Gil doesn't admire that zero-based budgeting style of Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau that commences by imagining a bunch of people who don't have a community and tries to imagine a rigorous philosophical method by which they could invent one, and I get that; in fact I've possibly thought about it more than he has—people are apes, my friends, homonini, meaning they had rich and complex social organizations long before they invented talking, so they had to do it without talking about it at all, let alone laying out a system of postulates and axioms, and deliberate social organization can only begin with a group that is already extremely organized.). 

Some might feel we would be better served by a Lou Rawls biopic (he's the king of them all, y'all), and I'm sympathetic to that point of view too. But thanks to Wikipedia I'm no longer so sure:

The Ismus of Enema

Via the Brooklyn Meetup Philosophy Book Club.

Hi, welcome to the Philosophy Diner, I'm David Brooks ("Two Cheers For Liberalism! (Or Maybe One and a Half)"), and I'll be your server. Today's special is Liberalism, which is my favorite, but I have to warn you, this is not the spicy kind of Liberalism you get from Eleanor Roosevelt and Saul Alinsky, but a more traditional or even antique kind of Liberalism, which is based on the idea that reason is separate from emotion, so it tends to devolve into a detached, passionless Rationalism. Or it's based on the idea that the choosing individual is the basic unit of society, so it devolves into Atomism, in an alienated society of lonely buffered selves. Or if it's based on the idea that people are primarily motivated by self-interest, it could devolve into disenchanted Materialism. To say nothing of Racism, which reduces a human being to a skin color, and people nowadays who dehumanize themselves by reducing themselves to a single label and making politics their one identity, as when they say, "speaking as a Liberal...," leaving no room for the individual conscience. 

I guess basically the Liberalism just devolves no matter what you do, and to be honest I can't recommend it, though, speaking as a Liberal, I've been there all my life myself, in this peculiar Rationalist, Atomistic, and Materialist sense. I only give two cheers, like E.M. Forster on Democracy, or am I thinking of Kristol on Capitalism, or Jonathan Chait on Socialism, or something else? Or even less than two cheers, maybe one and a half, because you probably won't like it at all, if only because of the Individualism, which leaves an unpleasant roughness at the back of the palate. I'd advise you to order a small plate of Liberalism with a small plate of Personalism, which is not based on the idea that the choosing individual is the basic unit of society, but the idea that the individual with individual conscience is the basic unit of society. And a basket of freshly buffered selves on the side.

See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Personalism, which is what Brooks's column is apparently really cheering, as opposed to any of these kinds of Liberalism, for further information. It seems to be a very specifically Christian and theologized kind of 19th-century philosophy working its way down to John Paul II, and a way of having your individualism and eating it too, if you know what I mean, often involving the recognition that God is a person too. That's undoubtedly a very crude oversimplification or schematic distortion but I'm not inclined to take it too seriously and just hope nobody cares a lot more than I do.

At the End Things

Kurt Schwitters, En Morn (1947). via Culture24.

This is your Brooks on drugs ("Your Loyalties Are Your Life"):

Royce took his philosophy one more crucial step: Though we have our different communities, underneath there is an absolute unity to life. He believed that all separate individuals and all separate loyalties are mere fragments of a spiritual unity — an Absolute Knower, a moral truth.

That sense of an ultimate unity at the end things, shines back on us, because it means all our diverse loyalties are actually parts of the same loyalty. We all, he wrote, “seek a city out of sight.” This sense of ultimate unity, of human brotherhood and sisterhood, is what is missing in a lot of the current pessimism and divisiveness.

The column is a collage composed of scraps from an essay by the Civil War historian Allen Guelzo that ran in First Things in January 2016 (Brooks links it in the first paragraph, he's not trying to hide this), contrasting two great Harvard philosophers of the late 19th century and very early 20th, pragmatic William James and idealist Josiah Royce, and concluding that Royce is "worth remembering today as a moral contrast to the utilitarian viewpoint, a reminder that the good must always be subordinated to the Good" or as Brooks puts it "the philosopher we need today" as opposed to, I guess, next Tuesday.

I believe it's part of a longstanding effort to prove that the progressive Royce was "really a conservative" just like Dr. Martin Luther King (whose concept of the "beloved community" comes from Royce). Guelzo's essay seems pretty lucid on the surface, though if you push inside it reveals itself as a collage in its own right, fragmenting into dada:

“Those who have believed in the being whom they called Christ,” Royce wrote gingerly, “were united in a community of . . . perfectly real and divine Universal Community, and were saved by the faith and by the life which they thus expressed.” In The Problem of Christianity, Royce declared I believe in the Holy Catholic Church to be the “capital article of the Christian creed,” and added that it “should be philosophically expounded and defended.” If you “merely take a cross-section of the social order at any one moment,” it will only yield “the predominantly pluralistic form” of “detached individuals.” The Church “has a past and will have a future,” and “its more or less conscious history, real or ideal, is part of its very essence.” 

Brooks, attracted like a magpie to all these glittering words, builds what we must call a meta-collage out of them and sits in it, like a new living room set, which is pretty much what philosophy is to him, a refined interior décor of the mind in which you will probably be confident and comfortable enough to make less panicky life-decisions, if you ever get it finished. At the end, or at the end things, he's contemplating his work and you can see him falling into a gentle snooze:

Royce’s philosophy is helpful with the problem we have today. How does the individual fit into the community and how does each community fit into the whole? He offered a shift in perspective. When evaluating your life, don’t ask, “How happy am I?” Ask, “How loyal am I, and to what?”

If I tried to squeeze all the possible laffs out of this material it would get pretty tedious before long. Nothing against Josiah Royce, about whom I know very little, but Roger Stone is under arrest and indicted, incoming flights into LaGuardia Airport have been halted because of the air traffic controller shortage caused by the government shutdown and more airport chaos seems to be happening from Atlanta to Newark, and it's going to be a busy day.

Concerned

Drawing by Roz Chast, via Fine Art America.

Concern troll David Brooks is concerned today about the narratology ("What Is the Democratic Story?"):

There’s a lot of discussion about how far left the Democratic Party should go these days. Is it destroying its electoral chances when its members call for a single-payer health plan or abolishing ICE?

That’s an important question, but the most important question is what story is the Democratic Party telling? As Alasdair MacIntyre argued many years ago, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of. Story is more important than policies.

Ah, a name—a clue, perhaps, to whatever it is Brooks has been doing wrong with this concept. Alasdair MacIntyre (b.1929), Dr. Google tells me, is a Scottish moral philosopher, a Thomist in his ultimate phase starting in the late 1970s, interested in

Brooklets Babbling

Rafaello Sanzio, "The Disputà over the Blessed Sacrament" (so called after the scholars around the center altar, debating the mystery of Transubstantiation), west wall of the Stanza della Signatura, Vatican, via Wikipedia.

Oh, Brooksie (The Fourth Great Awakening)!

There are certain melodies that waft through history.

It's Bad Poetry Day?

by Norris Clarion Sprigg, 1907.

I didn't bring my cymbols, though, or cymbals, or symbols. Just kidding, I've always got a symbol or two at hand. What else you got?

There are certain melodies that waft through history. One is the cultural contrast between Athens and Jerusalem. This contrast has many meanings, but the most germane one for our day is the contrast between the competitive virtues and the compassionate virtues.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is the cultural contrast between Athens and Jerusalem a melody that wafts through history?

Philosophic Nub

Not relevant to the post, but expresses something of the way I feel. xkcd via an old Language Log.

Are you sick of being forced to choose between (in the words of Margarita A. Mooney, Associate Professor of Congregational Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, from a 2012 blogpost at Patheos describing lessons she learned when she was a grad student, on a flight to Paris with the eminent political scientist Paul Sigmund, a son-in-law of Ambassador Lindy Boggs)

Marxist materialism and other forms of collectivism in which the individual is subsumed to the communal and the individual has no inherent worth

and

the idea that economic prosperity is the final ends of individuals and societies

?

Then David F. Brooks (I think there may be a David Brooks Plagiarism Watch situation with Mooney, whose post he links in today's column only after 14 paragraphs of material most of which she discusses) has a philosophy for you! As he says, "Personalism: The Philosophy We Need". Are you sick of philosophies you don't need? Me too! Those things are just taking up space! Plus, they're a fire hazard, since they're entirely made of straw, and extremely dry.

Intellectual Bubble

Grouchy old Tom Hobbes and smooth-talking John Locke in a quiet, conservative moment. Horse Feathers.

Le tout-Washington is talking about a new book, James Comey's memoir of the events leading up to his firing as FBI director (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership), so David F. Brooks is talking literature as well, seeing "A Renaissance on the Right": "all the political turmoil is creating a burst of intellectual creativity on the right" in which "Young, fresh writers are bursting on the scene" (getting stuck using the word "burst" twice in a space of 13 words gives you an idea of how fresh David Brooks is) such as Charles C.W. ("Cromulent Whiskers") Cooke, Mollie Hemingway, and James Poulos among other even younger and fresher names I'm not so familiar with, but the youngest and freshest of all is our old friend Jonah Goldberg, entering the field with his own immensely subtitled new book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy, which might sound better in the original German (Selbstmord des Abendlandes).

Which I'm not likely to be reading any time soon, after the disclaimer with which it begins—

Big, fat, beautiful heart

"You Gotta Have Heart", from a 1994 production of Damn Yankees at the Paper Mill Playhouse, photo by Ken Jacques/New York Times.

Steve M wonders about Trump's idea that the president needs to govern with "heart", which he was lecturing media personalities about in a pre-SOTU event yesterday at lunch:

“I've really learned a lot,” the president said of his first year in office during a lunch with television correspondents ahead of his first State of the Union address. “You know, governing — when you're a businessperson, you don't have to worry about your heart, the heart. You really do what's best for almost purely monetary reasons. You know, you make your money. You competing against people. In many cases, you don't like them, you want to beat, and all that stuff.... So having a business background and a successful business background is great, but oftentimes you do things that you would never do in business because you have to also govern with heart.”

In that case, as Steve points out, it looks like he hasn't learned much at all, since he had the same idea in the same words last April, in an interview with John Dickerson:

for what we're doing here, Washington, you really need heart, because you're talking about a lot of people. Whereas business, you don't need so much heart. You want to make a good deal.

And with a little additional searching, for that matter, as early as January 2016, when Newmax feared he was promising a single payer health insurance system under his presidency (remember those days?), it was in terms of his heart, and Ted Cruz's lack of one:

Trumpzilla

From "Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment", Marvel 1990, via Bleeding Cool.

David F. Brooks opens up like a classic monster movie, where the Orange Swamp Thing that had been ravaging the countryside has made his way into the metropolis and crunches up and down its avenues as girls in attractive déshabille scream by—crushing buildings underfoot and sweeping airplanes out of the sky with his careless hand: all the best guys bring out their best guns, one at a time, but to no avail ("The Philosophical Assault on Trumpism"):

Establishment Republicans have tried five ways to defeat or control Donald Trump, and they have all failed. Jeb Bush tried to outlast Trump, and let him destroy himself. That failed. Marco Rubio and others tried to denounce Trump by attacking his character. That failed. Reince Priebus tried to co-opt Trump to make him a more normal Republican. That failed.

Paul Ryan tried to use Trump; Congress would pass Republican legislation and Trump would just sign it. That failed. Mitch McConnell tried to outmaneuver Trump and Trumpism by containing his power and reach. In the Senate race in Alabama last week and everywhere else, that has failed.

I think there are some missing elements in that picture, like J.E.B.! and Little Marco were pretty busy trying to destroy each other, while the Wisconsin lads were working fairly closely together with the Majority Leader on what counts as a single project, not three different ones. If I were making this movie, I'd start off—after the requisite shot of the massive orange head lifting out of the mud, early morning light, and blinking—in a busy open-plan office, guys in shirtsleeves and rep ties rushing by the desks, with Reince and Ryan in hot conversation on some huge urban demolition plan that will net them billions of dollars but so destructive to human life that the authorities won't sign off on it, so that afterwards, when the Thing is ravaging the city, you see the two of them look at each other with a shock of realization: If we could just guide this creature somehow, like dangling a carrot in front of a mule, we could get our job done! They'd never be able to stop us! And old Uncle Mitch, beaming at the lads, giving them the go-ahead with the slightest of nods.

But then of course Brooks isn't making that movie, is he? He isn't concerned about the toll in human life and property damage. To Brooks, the problem with the Thing is that he's making the Republicans look bad:

Warring monologues

Martin Buber, via Wikipedia.

Yesterday was philosophy day in Brooksville! "Read Buber, Not the Polls!"

There has been so much bad communication over the past year: people talking in warring monologues past each other, ignoring the facts and using lazy stereotypes like “elites” and “Trumpeans” to reduce complex individuals into simplistic categories. Meanwhile, our main candidates are poor connectors. We’ve got the self-enclosed narcissism of Donald Trump and, to a lesser degree, the mistrustful defensiveness of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Using a lazy stereotype like "mistrustful defensiveness" to reduce Hillary Clinton to a simplistic category.

As an antidote for all this, I’ve been reading the work of Martin Buber, the early 20th century Jewish theologian who dedicated his career to understanding deep intimacy. Buber is famous for the distinction between I-It relationships and I-Thou relationships.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Did Martin Buber, the early 20th-century theologian, dedicate his career to understanding deep intimacy?

Bothsides vs. No Sides

Empress Catherine II of Russia, via GlobalHistoryCullen—can't find a date or painter's name.

Back in the good old days, says David Brooks ("Identity Politics Run Amok"), Americans talked about politics from a purely intellectual standpoint, impersonally, without any reference to the nasty realities of our different ethnic and class identities, divided only by their attachments to different philosophical perspectives:

Once, I seem to recall, we had philosophical and ideological differences. Once, politics was a debate between liberals and conservatives, between different views of government, different views on values and America’s role in the world.

"Seems to recall" indeed. He's been telling himself this story so long that he's created a spurious memory of having lived in it.

What he actually recalls, from his casual reading of popular history books, mostly Great Man biographies, is an America in which ethnic and class identity had no role in political discourse because the discourse was carried out almost entirely by people with the same identities: upper-class white Protestant men. Brooks may think it was because they were all so philosophical in those days, but the real reason identity didn't come up was that nobody with a different identity had a voice.

Yes I can—No you Kant—

Spitballer Dr. Johnson, sticking out his tongue, refutes the idealism of Bishop Berkeley. Drawing by Godescalc. Story at Frank's place (note that philosophically speaking Boswell was right and Johnson was wrong).

A seriously annoying op-ed in today's Times by Vlad Chituc and Paul Henne boasting that they have found empirical evidence that disproves an axiom from Emmanuel Kant, which is like saying you can disprove Euclid by baking a lasagna.

The axiom is the one leading up to the categorical imperative that "ought" implies "can", or:

one cannot be obligated to do something unless the thing in question is doable. For instance, there is no sense in which I am obligated to single-handedly solve global poverty, because it is not within my power to do so.

Apparently some analytical philosopher called Walter Sinnott-Armstrong contested that axiom in a celebrated paper of 1984 by the usual analytic method of combining a wild Talmudic imagination with a certain English linguistic prissiness, by constructing cases in which it would be possible to say that you are morally obliged to do something you can't do; as Chituc and Henne exemplify it,

Don't stultify my fabric, bro!

Buster Keaton in Our Hospitality (1923).

1.

David Brooks on "The Age of Small Terror":

On New Year’s Eve some friends and family members had a drink at a bar in Tel Aviv. The next day a gunman shot up the place, killing two people and wounding at least five. When I heard about the shooting I was horrified, of course, but there was no special emotion caused by the proximity 16 hours before.

Friends and family members of whom? Where was there no special emotion? Whose proximity? He's not actually trying to hide the fact that he has friends and relatives in Tel Aviv, he's more trying to hide the fact that he exists at all, as a specific human being with a body and a family and particular emotions of his own. General David Brooks and his general emotions are focused on the big picture:

These days, we all live at risk of random terror, whether we are in Paris, San Bernardino, Boston or Fort Hood.

I.e., wherever there are Muslims, apparently, but I'll get back to that.

Exchange: Locke and Load

The Founder of British Empiricism. Portrait by Sir Godfrey Knellor, 1697, via.

Another day, another comment war. This one at Crooks & Liars involving Dr. Ben Carson's assertion that the religion of Islam is incompatible with the US Constitution and a callow conservative who goes by Alex—sounds like he's about 20, but he uses Forbes Magazine as a source of scholarship on political philosophy, regarding it as "pretty objective", so he might well be 80.

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, I guess it depends on what that faith is. If it's inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter. But if it fits within the realm of America and consistent with the constitution, no problem.

CHUCK TODD: So do you believe that Islam is consistent with the constitution?

DR. BEN CARSON: No, I don't, I do not.

CHUCK TODD: So you--

DR. BEN CARSON: I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.

CHUCK TODD: And would you ever consider voting for a Muslim for Congress?

DR. BEN CARSON: Congress is a different story, but it depends on who that Muslim is and what their policies are, just as it depends on what anybody else says, you know. (transcript from Real Clear Politics)

Note how assiduously Alex works to turn the his opponents' argument from a complaint on Dr. Carson's ignorance of the Establishment Clause (and the Religious Test clause of Article VI) to a ridiculous gripe about Dr. Carson's right to vote for any asshole he wants to vote for.

Isn't it romantic? *spoiler alert*

No. It isn't.

Image by The Frumanista.

Shorter David Brooks, "The New Romantics in the Computer Age", September 4 2015:

Isn't it romantic? After all these years of anxious materialism, young people will soon start deciding they'd rather be like me. Or Dorothy Day, you know, whichever works better.

Or, verbatim:

Thin, relativistic, and ephemeral

18-foot fork in the road by Ken Marshall, Pasadena, Los Angeles Times, November 2009. Photo by Wakitu via Flickr. 

David Brooks writes, "The Big Decisions", New York Times, August 25, 2015:

Suppose you had a chance to become a vampire. Or suppose you had a chance to run for Senate. But I repeat myself.

No, seriously, the vampire question is one of those whimsical little devices used by professional philosophers to get a fix on how we should live our lives. And let's say it isn't a standard-issue evil Dracula type of vampire, for the sake of argument, but a stylish and benign vampire, what the philosopher L.A. Paul referred to before an editor got hold of the draft as a "vegetarian vampire", who only drinks free-range, organic, humanely slaughtered animal blood, bear with me here, and it turns out lots of your friends and relatives have done it already and are really happy with their decision, which gives them immortality, immense power, heightened sensory experience, companionship, and meaning. But once you do it there's no going back. I added the companionship and meaning part myself.

Fair and balanced

I really don't have any objection to David Brooks's column today, a book report (he called it that himself) on the philosopher Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007). Except to note that you can get a lot more out of the Wikipedia article, which is a lot longer, better informed about the philosophical and historical issues, and written with beautiful lucidity. (Typically, the article is under attack by the encyclopedia's army of fussbudgets, who claim that it's inadequately sourced. The author seems to have relied more on reading the book than reading about it—that's overuse of "references to primary sources". Democracy haters who still believe Wikipedia must be badly made, if they still exist, have no idea of the pedantry that pervades it.)

Amazon wants almost forty bucks to put the book on Kindle! I'll have to wait for the movie to come out.

Piety in the Renaissance home. Unsourced image from swinish University of Cambridge; Wikipedia would never allow this to go unidentified.

Update: Driftglass proposes what might be called an Autoshorter (i.e., when the author of the shortened text writes his or her own):

I’m vastly oversimplifying a rich, complex book

Heh-indeed.