Modern Society Archives - Page 4 of 21

The Inherent Virtues of Commerce

“Dear Cleinias, the class of men is small . . . who, when assailed by wants and desires, are able to hold out and observe moderation, and when they might make a great deal of money are sober in their wishes, and prefer a moderate to a large gain. But the mass of mankind are the very opposite: their desires are unbounded, and when they might gain in moderation they prefer gains without limit; wherefore all that relates to retail trade, and merchandise, and the keeping of taverns, is denounced and numbered among dishonorable things.”

That is Plato in the Laws. He is outdone by Aristotle who in the Politics advocates banning any merchants from the state, since “such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue.” It isn’t just the Greeks who disparage commerce. Aquinas says that a merchant who works to enrich himself is a rather despicable creature, “justly deserving of blame, because, considered in itself, it satisfies the greed for gain, which knows no limit and tends to infinity.”

One of the interesting things about reading old books is how modern they sometimes seem. You don’t dig very deep into Left or Right political commentary to find remarks disparaging the multinational industrial capitalist economy. The Left wants to replace it with some sort of edenic international socialist state. The Right wants to replace it with some sort of edenic national religious state.

But both conservative and liberal market critics claim that large corporations are being run by greedy CEOs who care only about becoming mind-bogglingly wealthy, tossing the concerns of the poor working classes into the ashbins. Indeed, these capitalist swine in pursuit of riches do what they can to corrupt the government and thwart the will of all those decent not-so-wealthy people who just want to live satisfying lives.

But a profit motive does not necessarily entail systematic social corruption as ancient and modern naysayers of open markets suggest. An individual working in the economic order does not cease to be a moral person simply because he has a profit motive. It is possible to run an ethical business—to treat your employees and customers the right way, the way you would like to be treated yourself—and still generate profits.

Can the case for commercial activity be made stronger? Is there a fundamental answer to the charges of immorality leveled by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and their modern counterparts? Is it possible to argue that commercial activity is inherently virtuous, that it does not need to be tolerated as a necessary evil, but rather should be embraced as a positive good?

Read the rest at Public Discourse

Can Sober Smithians Soften Polarized Partisans?

The centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Yeats’ lines seem to have a particular resonance these days.

One of the most frequent laments about the state of modern politics is the rise of polarization. Where, people ask, is the spirit of compromise, the willingness to come together to get things done? Each side blames the polarization on the other. Those who feel trapped in No Man’s Land frequently point to the rise of social media with its separate closed ecosystems.

Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments offers a different explanation for the polarization, an explanation which suggests there is nothing new under the sun.

Read the rest at Adam Smith Works

The Lonely Ones

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Sometime in the early 2020s, humans managed to eradicate themselves in a giant nuclear conflagration.

Well, fortunately, “eradication” is not entirely correct. A few remnants of humanity were able to move off-world. Fortunately, between 1999 and 2005, humans colonized Mars. Well, fortunately for the humans; it was not quite so fortunate for the Martians.

It’s funny how science fiction written in the 1940s seems so wildly off in its forecasts of the future. As you may have noticed, Mars wasn’t colonized by 2005. We do still have time to have a giant nuclear conflagration before 2026, though, so maybe the book isn’t totally off. Oh, don’t worry. The international situation is so remarkably stable, there is no chance at all of a giant world war. The book is just wrong.

The book? Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

First question: is this a novel or a collection of short stories? I have no idea. It sits right in no man’s land. It is clearly a whole bunch of bits written as stand alone short stories which are organized temporally and interspersed with brief little bits of connecting tissue in the form of one page vignettes. So, there is an overall story line through the book, but each substantive chapter could be ripped out of the book and read with absolutely zero loss of ability to understand the story.

As a story, it definitely has some clever bits. The book is easily divided into thirds. At first humans start arriving on Mars, and shockingly the Martians don’t seem too happy to see the humans. Conflict ensues. The Humans win (yeah for the humans!). Then we get a bunch of stories in which Mars is an unknown territory far from earth and the human settlements have all sorts of problems. Then the people on earth manage to destroy themselves and so life on Mars becomes the last refuge of humanity.

Now Bradbury is a fine writer and some of the stories are clever and fun, but is there any reason to read a bunch of 1940s science fiction if you aren’t unnaturally obsessed with post war apocalyptic imaginations about other worlds?

Yes.

The always amazing Library of America recently published the first volume of Bradbury’s writings. At the end of this volume is a brief essay Bradbury wrote helpfully entitled “A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles.” In it he relates how he came to write these stories. The idea started as Winesburg, Ohio set on Mars, which he fortunately abandoned because, well, Sherwood Anderson already wrote a book called Winesburg, Ohio, and it is really good and so why rewrite the same book?

What was he going to write instead?

It was going to be about people and they were going to be lonely people. They could not help being lonely, for they were double damned; once by a civilization that yanked the base out from under their God, and tried to take their mind off their loss with nylon toothbrushes and V-8 engines, and again by the impossible total miles between Earth and Mars.

That is exactly what The Martian Chronicles is all about. Every single story hammers home in one way or another, the unbearable problem of how to find a connection with another. The early explorers show up desperately hoping to be welcomed by the Martians and the tragedy is that the Martians have no interest in becoming companions of these lonely Earthmen. Eventually, humans take out their frustration at being so lonely so far from earth by asserting their control over Mars, hoping to build a place for humans to be in community, but once the Martians are gone, the loneliness remains. And then the humans on Earth use their new-found toys to destroy each other and the book ends with “The Million-Year Picnic” on Mars, where a few straggling remnants of humans trying desperately to build a community.

The Martian Chronicles is indeed a novel.

Who are these lonely people? This is the question which makes the novel truly fascinating. Also from “A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles”:

[In] my home in Illinois there was a man who prowled the streets in the year 1928, who was known as “the lonely one.” I have never forgotten him. Some day his sons, or the sons of his sons, will go to Mars. Eliot calls them The Hollow Men. Call them what you will, but there they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking they will find a planet like a seer’s crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they’ll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.

About whom are we reading when we read The Martian Chronicles? It is a mirror. Those lonely people? They are us, living in Eliot’s Wasteland, headpieces filled with straw. Alas.

The loneliness bred in the modern age is a subject which has been widely discussed. I teach at a college with a couple thousand students living in crowded dormitories, and yet, “lonely” is a pretty good adjective to describe most of my students. What happens when a bunch of lonely people are put together in a place? Well, all sorts of attempts to form deep bonds emerge, most of which do not actually generate such bonds, and thus the loneliness increases.

The Martian Chronicles is a taxonomy of failed means of trying to solve the problem of loneliness. Story after story, we just keep seeing yet one more way the quest to cure loneliness has failed. In the end, we destroy ourselves.

That sounds kinda depressing. And indeed, while the stories in Bradbury’s volume are entertaining, there is not a lot of hope here. I suppose that should be obvious in a book in which the most famous story (“There Will Be Soft Rains”), the penultimate chapter in the novel, is the tale of an automated house continuing to hum along making breakfast and so on for a family that is now just a shadow on a wall created by a nuclear explosion. And then the automation in the house breaks down, and even the house dies in a fire. The final chapter is the million year long picnic on Mars…maybe that will work out? Yeah, probably not.

What is the cure for loneliness? Bradbury doesn’t have an answer. He drives that point home by ending the last story in the book with an ellipsis; it just wanders off into the unknown. Bradbury is writing stories trying to convince you that there is a problem, that you are indeed lonely and that you don’t have a cure for your loneliness. Bradbury is silently whispering in your ear: This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

The Bradbury short stories are good, but here is a great example of the whole being better than the sum of the parts. I read his book decades ago and thought it was ho-hum. Some nice stories, no real cohesion. I was wrong. As a reflection on how humans try and fail to cure themselves of loneliness, it is rather amazing. Read this book, and then look around the world, and you suddenly see: it’s just The Martian Chronicles repeating itself here on Earth.

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Money, Wealth, and Whuffie

A common fantasy of adolescence is imagining a world without money in which you can get whatever you want without needing those pesky green pieces of paper bearing pictures of George Washington.

The fantasy quickly turns into annoyance that some people have lots of those Washington portraits. What makes those people so special? Why should they get to acquire all that cool stuff when you can’t?

Enter Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a veritable Fantasyland for the indignant adolescent. In this world, money has magically morphed into Whuffie.

Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.

To our embittered adolescent, that seems so much better. Up against the wall, green pieces of paper! Whuffie is here! Whuffie seems like a really amazing new form of money. You get more Whuffie by doing nice things for people. You lose Whuffie by being mean. So if you want to spend your days writing poetry or making puppets, you can still acquire Whuffie and be rich! Finally the right people are the rich ones.

Alas, go one step further and the Whuffie experiment starts unravelling….

Read the rest at Econlog

Beyond Black and White

Richard Wright’s most recently published novel is a cause célèbre. The Man Who Lived Underground, originally written in 1941, was rejected by his publisher at the time. Excerpts were subsequently published in a few places, including the posthumously published short story collection Eight Men. Thanks to the Library of America, we now have the complete novel.

The story: Fred Daniels is a black servant picked up by the police as a suspect in a murder he did not commit. Brought to the police station, Daniels is brutally tortured in order to solicit a confession. He escapes from police custody and goes into the sewers, where he lurks for a few days, observing what is going on aboveground. He eventually returns to the surface where he is killed by the police.

That at least is the gist of the plot summary provided in most of the reviews of the novel. “Eighty Years Later, Richard Wright’s Lost Novel About Police Brutality Speaks Across Decades” (Esquire); “Richard Wright’s newly uncut novel offers a timely depiction of police brutality” (LA Times); “Richard Wright’s novel of police brutality: The most relevant book of 2021 was written 80 years ago” (Chicago Tribune): these are some of the headlines. Innumerable reviews noted that the publisher did not provide a reason for not publishing the book, but (wink, wink) it is obvious that a publisher in the 1940s could not handle a manuscript painting the police in an unflattering light.

That narrative is a bit odd, however…

Read the rest at University Bookman

Godel and Escher and Bach! Oh My!

I actually did it!
I read the whole thing.
Every single page.
All 742 of them.

The Book? Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter.

The book was original published in 1979. It won the Pulitzer Prize. If you go to a library book sale, you will likely find a copy of it.

The book is like some rite of passage. At some point you see the book enough times and you think “I should probably read that.” Godel! Escher! Bach! A philosopher, an artist, and a composer walk into a bar! Fill in the rest! It’s like the promise of the Key to All Things that will unlock the secrets of the Universe. Escher with those funny reality distorting pictures and Bach with his O So Precisely Beautiful music and Godel with those accusations of Incompleteness. Surely this book contains the secrets to the Universe. Read it and you enter the secret society of those who know things! And did I mention it won a Pulitzer? So it must be good, right? All the blurbs on the back say it is great!

So, for you Dear Reader who have not read the whole book and wonder about the secrets of the Universe, I am here to tell you all! But first, the amusing bit.

The copy I have is the 20^th Anniversary Edition. (You can work out what year this was printed using the hidden clue above.) It has a new Preface written for this edition. As always, I waited to read the Anniversary Preface (which was obviously written after the book) until after I had finished the book (did I mention I read the whole book?). So, finishing page 742, I turned back to the 20th Anniversary Preface, started reading and instantly started laughing out loud. Really. The Preface is hysterically funny.

Hofstadter begins the 20^th Anniversary Preface by Complaining that Nobody Understood what his book was all about. The whole first page is Hofstadter noting all the people who thoroughly missed the point of the book. He complains about all the people who summarized his book and missed the point. He complains that bookstores would put the book in all sorts of crazy sections of the bookstore—they didn’t even know where it belonged. He spent 20 years collecting Royalty Checks and being Frustrated, yes Frustrated!, that nobody seemed to understand the point of the book.

So, he takes advantage of this opportunity to tell the world what his book was about. Here is the funny part. He then reveals the point of the book…and it was totally anticlimactic. I knew that was the point of the book. If he had asked me, I would have said the point of the book was exactly what he said the point of the book was. It was not that hard to figure out. In fact it was really obvious.

So, why did I know the point of the book and all those people who were frustrating Hofstadter did not? Here is my secret: I read the whole book. You see, Hofstadter doesn’t actually get to the point of his book in the first chapter. Or the second chapter. Or the third chapter…or… well, Hofstadter only gets to the point of his book in the chapter beginning on page 684. So, if you hurled the book across the room in disgust and frustration on page 683, you would not know what the book was about!

What was the book about? “In a word, GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter.” Yep. That is exactly what I learned in the chapter beginning on page 684!

Now if Hofstadter wanted people to know that was the point of his book, then he really should have given it a different title. Note, nothing about that point has anything to do with Escher or Bach, and the argument leading to the conclusion only has an indirect relationship to Godel. Then, he should have stuck to the parts of the book that actually led to that conclusion. That might have been about 150 page book entitled Mind From Matter or something like that. Some people might have read that book. It probably doesn’t win the Pulitzer, though. There is no 20^th Anniversary edition. Hofstadter isn’t Frustrated, but he also gets a lot less in royalty checks.

What happened? Hofstadter is apparently a very very undisciplined thinker and writer. He starts with his idea and then realizes there is this tangent and so he spins out a whole paragraph on that tangent. Then there is this other really interesting tangent, so he writes about that. Then there is this idea of telling stories with conversations between the Tortoise and Achilles and they can explain philosophical ideas in a whimsical way. Then along comes Crab and Sloth and we have even more whimsical conversations about record players that are destroyed when specially designed records are placed upon them. Then we get wandering off into music theory and all sorts of explorations of how clever Bach was. Escher is also really clever, so we get all sorts of explorations of Escher’s art.

Then Number Theory makes an appearance. Discussions about infinity. Zen koans. Lewis Carroll. John Cage. Lots of philosophers. DNA. Then computer programming language and long discussions about how computers work (remember this came out in 1979).

Opening up to three pages at random (really, I will now open up to three pages at random):

1. A discussion of Bach’s Crab Canon, which you can see visualized here. Escher also has a picture of Crab Canon.

2. An explanation of how to code loops into a program.

3. The transcript of a “conversation” with an early Artificial Intelligence Program, SHRDLU

As I guessed would happen before I picked those three pages at random, that is a perfect summary of the book. The first passage was really fun and incredibly interesting. The second one was a tedious explanation of something that anyone who has ever used computer code would know; if you know it, there is nothing new; if you didn’t know it, it was a pretty lengthy explanation of a pretty simple idea. The third thing was just tedious and rather dull and really I have no idea why Hofstadter decided we would all benefit from reading it.

All of which points to the Big Question. I read the whole book! Should you?

The answer depends on your determination and your tolerance for mental whiplash. There are all sorts of fun and interesting things scattered through the book. Some evenings, you’ll settle in and enjoy the ride. But other evenings, you’ll be staring at the book wondering if there is really any point to wading through the minutiae. Then there are the moments when you are startled because Hofstadter just gave you a full page of homework problems to work out. My favorite problem: “Strangely this one takes great cleverness to render in our notation. I would caution you to try it only if you are willing to spend hours and hours on it—and you know quite a bit of number theory!” Yeah, I skipped that homework assignment.

So, if you like books where you never really know what is coming next and you enjoy learning all sorts of random things along the way and you like looking at Escher pictures, thinking about music theory, and pondering philosophical conundrums and you like fantastical conversations between Tortoises and Crabs, well this book is right up your alley as long as you are willing to also spend many pages wondering what the point of all this is.

If you want to read a book about the thesis of this book, a book about how the self can arise from unthinking matter, then this book is only worth picking up if you are willing to spend 683 pages reading background material, only some of which is actually relevant to the thesis.

I realize that the above description has not convinced many people to read this book. Therein lies the problem. Godel, Escher, Bach falls into the category of “Books lots of people buy with the intention of reading it but then give up on the book long before the end because it just doesn’t seem worth the bother.” The few people who will actually finish this book roughly fall into two categories: 1) people who are fascinated with historical artifacts showing how someone in the late 1970s thought artificial intelligence might work, and 2) people who tell graduating seniors they should make a list of six books to read in the next year and then read those books and because they tell seniors to do that they feel obligated to make their own list of six books and happen to put this book on their list.

Hofstadter should not have been surprised that nobody knew the point of his book. If he wanted people to get that point, he should have, you know, written a book about that point rather than a meandering mess of a book in which he poked into every interesting nook and cranny he came across.

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