Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 22

David Hume was born three hundred years ago, in 1711. The...

David Hume was born three hundred years ago, in 1711. The world has changed radically since his time, and yet many of his ideas and admonitions remain deeply relevant, though rather neglected, in the contemporary world. These Humean insights include the central role of information and knowledge for adequate ethical scrutiny, and the importance of reasoning without disowning the pertinence of powerful sentiments. They also include such practical concerns as our responsibilities to those who are located far away from us elsewhere on the globe, or in the future.

...

As it happens, contemporary theories of justice have largely followed the Hobbesian route rather than the Humean one. They have tended to limit their considerations of justice within the boundaries of a particular state. In an important essay in 2005 called "The Problem of Global Justice," Thomas Nagel explained that "if Hobbes is right, the idea of global justice without a world government is a chimera." The most influential modern theory of justice, namely John Rawls's theory of "justice as fairness," presented in his epoch-making book A Theory of Justice, concentrates on the identification of appropriate "principles of justice" that fix the "basic institutional structure" of a society, in the form of a cluster of ideal institutions for a sovereign state. This confines the principles of justice to the members of a particular sovereign state. It is worth noting that in a later work, The Law of Peoples, Rawls invokes a kind of "supplement" to this one-country pursuit of the demands of justice—but in dealing with people elsewhere, Rawls's focus is not on justice, but on the basic demands of civilized and humane behavior across the borders.

Amartya Sen on Hume, the rest here.  (HT MR)

we are what we habitually do

Like the prophets of old, today's addicts may remind us that our desire for God is trivial and weak, and our horizons of hope and expectancy are  limited and mundane. We recoil at the presence of the addict, for we fear that the addict's life is an indictment of the insufficiency of our own lives. The addict has rejected the life of respectable and proximate contentment and demanded instead a life of complete purpose and ecstasy. We recognize that our own lives are not interesting and beautiful enough to offer a genuine alternative to the addict, and we fear that a gospel powerful enough to redeem the addict would also threaten our own lives of decent and decorous mediocrity. 

Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue

This is a brilliant book, which in itself has justified my purchase of a Kindle in my last week with my mother.  (I saw the book on Amazon just after proposing a review to a magazine; the book looked relevant to the review, so a more prudent would-be reviewer would have waited for a free copy --but I could have it in seconds on my Kindle!)  The reason I subjected my credit card to further abuse was that Dunnington addresses a startling gap in discussions of addiction, one I was particularly struck by in Gene Heyman's (generally excellent) Addiction: A Disorder of Choice. 

Reading avidly along in Heyman, I had been baffled by the complete absence of discussion of Aristotle on voluntary and involuntary action, on the role of habit in the virtues and vices, all treated so extensively in the Nicomachean Ethics.  And here is Dunnington, bringing Aristotle and Aquinas to bear on the subject! (When I say the book is brilliant, I do not mean that I have finished it; I mean that I am just getting into the thick of a discussion of Aristotle and Aquinas. )

Dunnington, as will be obvious from the quotation, is writing from a Christian perspective; it's rare for authors of  "mainstream" works of scholarship to thank a supervisor for praying with the advisee. Radicalism is not necessarily the norm among Christian writers any more than it is among scholars, but part of the power of the book lies in the challenge it offers the non-addict: Du muß dein Leben ändern.

accidental history

What do you think about hair dye?
Hm. When I got to Berlin I would go to this or that Frisür with the idea of having some highlights, and the hairdressers would try to persuade me to include brown highlights as looking more natural. Every time I would get dragged into a discussion of the Natural. I slightly felt that the Natural could be mine without recourse to a hairdresser, by the simple expedient of leaving the hair to its own devices. My German is not really up to discussions of the Natural and the Artificial, though, let alone the Natural as understood by early 21st century German hairdressers.

Emily Segal invited me to give an interview for Berlin Fashion Week way back in late 2009/early 2010. I was staying with my mother, but for a couple of days every so often I would go to my sister's apartment and collapse on the bed. (The theory was that I would pull together 100 pages for Bill, but there was no energy.)  In the midst of all this, anyway, I was trying to write answers to interview questions.  The feeling was of writing with a prosthetic head. I finally apologised for what struck me as a dead loss; was under the impression that ES agreed and had dropped the piece, but now I find it is online.  For better or worse, here.

(There are authors who never give interviews, and then there are authors, it seems, who never stop giving them.)

A few years ago, a colleague in another university publis...

A few years ago, a colleague in another university published a huge book, based on a vast amount of archival research, meticulously documented, beautifully written and offering a new and formidably argued reinterpretation of a major historical event. I remarked to a friend in that university that this great work would certainly help their prospects in the RAE. 'Oh no,' he said. 'We can't enter him. He needs four items and that book is all he's got.' ...

I contrast this with my own experience in the old, supposedly unregenerate days. The college where I became a tutor in 1957 had only 19 academic fellows. Of these, two did no research at all and their teaching was languid in the extreme. That was the price the rest of us paid for our freedom and in my view it was a price worth paying. For the other fellows were exceptionally active, impelled, not by external bribes and threats, but by their own intellectual ambition and love of their subject. In due course three became fellows of the Royal Society and seven of the British Academy. They worked at their own pace and some of them would have fared badly in the RAE, for they conformed to no deadlines and released their work only when it was ready. I became a tutor at the age of 24, but I did not publish a book until I was 38. These days, I would have been compelled to drop my larger project and concentrate on an unambitious monograph, or else face ostracism and even expulsion.

Sir Keith Thomas in the LRB, the rest here.

How Keynes would explain Iowa

John Maynard Keynes famously likened playing the stock market to judging a beauty contest where, rather than choosing the most beautiful girl, you had to choose the girl that everyone else would choose as most beautiful. "We devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be," wrote Keynes. This is, with some minor modifications, true for judging the results in Iowa, too. 

Consider a question that doesn't get asked enough: Why does it matter who wins Iowa?

In theory, the answer should be: "because whoever wins Iowa gets Iowa's delegates." But it isn't. The Iowa caucuses award about one percent of the nation's delegates. That's not nothing, but it's not much.

The real answer is both widely known and difficult to discuss. Winning Iowa matters because the outcome in Iowa governs the subsequent actions of the political media and party elites. And it matters for them because, as Jonathan Bernstein puts it, "What Iowa does is it produces information" -- information that allows them to plan their next moves, and information that thus changes the outcome of subsequent primaries.

The media doesn't like to discuss this too forthrightly because it makes our role as a political actor -- rather than a simple observer -- uncomfortably explicit. As Duke political scientist Brendan Nyhan writes at CJR, there is "a refraction effect" in which "journalists help make Iowa influential and then report on its 'effects' without acknowledging their role in the process or the often arbitrary nature of the distinctions that are made among the candidates."

Party elites don't like to discuss it because their role in the presidential nomination process can seem undemocratic. But the process is undemocratic. A democratic process would be one in which the whole nation votes today; not one in which .04 percent of the nation caucuses today. 

Ezra Klein, Wonkbook, the rest here.

tomato tomato?

For most of the twentieth century, Arabs, Arab nationalists, and their Western devotees tended to substitute Arab for Middle Eastern history, as if the narratives, storylines, and paradigms of other groups mattered little or were the byproduct of alien sources far removed from the authentic, well-ordered, harmonious universe of the "Arab world."

Every person who speaks Arabic is an Arab. Every individual associated with an Arabic-speaker or with an Arabic-speaking people is an Arab. If he does not recognize [his Arabness] … we must look for the reasons that have made him take this stand … But under no circumstances should we say: "As long as he does not wish to be an Arab, and as long as he is disdainful of his Arabness, then he is not an Arab." He is an Arab regardless of his own wishes, whether ignorant, indifferent, recalcitrant, or disloyal; he is an Arab, but an Arab without consciousness or feelings, and perhaps even without conscience.Franck Salameh, "Does Anyone Speak Arabic?" (Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2011) ht LanguageHat

Relay Foods

An e-mail arrived in the mail at some recent point announcing that Relay Foods has attracted a big injection of venture capital, owing in part to the enthusiasm of its customer base.  Relay Foods, since you ask, is a grocery delivery service based in Charlottesville, VA, with a recentish expansion to Richmond; the core of the service involves taking orders for groceries (mainly) from local businesses (including local farmers), packing them in appropriately insulated boxes, and delivering to local pick-up points. (It's also possible to arrange home delivery, free I think with minimum order of $50.)

I watch with interest, since RetailRelay,com, to use the firm's original  name, figured in a book I was working on in 2008-9, immediately prior to signing on with Bill Clegg.  The ms was up to a respectable 61,253 words, but it was not clear that this was the best book to finish and publish next. 

With the wisdom of hindsight, life would have been incomparable simpler if I had forged ahead and finished the book, whether or not it was best for #2, during July-September 2009, before talking to an agent and having LR sent out by default because it happened to be finished.  (The problem was that there were difficulties with film rights which I somehow imagined an agent might help to resolve.) 

(I DO rather wish I had gone down to C'ville to give a reading of LR, as one reader suggested; I could have talked to local participants in Relay Foods! It would have been helpful for research!)

In any case, as a tribute to Relay Foods I excerpt the section relating to this excellent service below the fold.  (Needless to say, Relay Foods bears no responsibility whatsoever for the reflections of the character.  For what it's worth, it is the view of pp that anyone in the Charlottesville or Richmond area who is not already making use of the service is missing out on a good thing.)

And he runs another search for Pepperidge Farm Brussels, and this time he finds a place that is selling them for $3.39.  Which is exactly what the Internet is for, it helps you scout out the cheapest price nation- or even worldwide.  The question is, obviously, what they charge for shipping, given that the other place offered free shipping on orders over $100.  He fills in an order form for 25 packages, bringing the total to $84.75, and he then fills in his address in hopes of discovering what the shipping charges will be.  They offer free pick-up twice a week, that is you can go and pick up the order; as it turns out, the first delivery is also free.  So this is definitely a good deal and RetailRelay.com is definitely the place to go, except wha-?

Apparently they will only deliver if you live within a something-mile radius of Charlottesville. So. Right. When they deliver they deliver personally to your home, it seems, in their own personal delivery vehicle. The next question being, naturally, OK, where is this place?

He runs a search for Charlottesville and unsurprisingly gets hits in 23 states. He returns to RetailRelay.com.  He clicks Home. He clicks About. He clicks Contact Us. He clicks every damn place he can think of, but he is unfortunately unable to narrow down the location of the firm, not that he doesn't pick up a lot of other information in the process. 

What the firm does is, it takes orders online for a wide range of groceries and other retail items, and two days a week customers can stop by and pick up their bagged orders which will in fact be carried to the car on their behalf.  Or, if the customer lives within the designated radius, they can have a delivery to the home.  Either way, saving the customer the hassle of going to the store and picking stuff out and standing in line at the check-out.  They're advertising, interestingly enough, for what they call an operations manager, or rather operations team member, which turns out to be a combination of retailer liaison rep and delivery truck driver, 20 hours a week, $11 an hour.  Which is not without its appeal, though probably better suited to someone with a valid driver's license.

In its way, actually, the whole thing is not without its appeal. If he moved to Charlottesville, wherever that might be, he would not be eligible for the gig as operations team member for another 4 years, but in the meantime he could definitely avail himself of this seemingly cool service. You could definitely make a case that a man without a driver's license would be better off in an area where groceries can be home-delivered at no or negligible cost.

He clicks around some more and ascertains that the Charlottesville in question is, in fact, in Virginia. In fact the place he clicked turns out to be the Contact Us tab, so he can't see any obvious reason why this would not have been obvious the first time around.

One thing that occurs to him is, this could actually be a different way to socially engineer your life.  AA has way more than the national average for suspended or endangered licenses, because a DWI is often the wake-up call that brings people to the program in the first place, whether on their own initiative or because a sympathetic judge thought it would be good for them. So it could be that members would give themselves a better chance of a manageable life if they moved somewhere like C'ville.  Given that, as previously noted, AA does not go in much for orchestrating van rentals, deliveries, bulk buys.  You can imagine the security you would feel in a place where you could stockpile your 7-year-old cheddar and your Pepperidge Farm Brussels, but where the other stuff, the impulse buys, could be conducted online for convenient home delivery.  Plus, it specifically says in the ad that the Operations Team Member needs to be highly-motivated, flexible, hard-working, able to solve problems quickly and under pressure, detail-oriented and organized, as well as extremely friendly and personable.  Think how great that would be to live in a place where just ordering in your groceries gave you face-to-face interaction with a friendly detail-oriented Operations Team Member.  (And not just ordering in your groceries; all kinds of local retailers participate.  Dog and Horse Lovers Boutique.  Pandora's Chocolatier.)

There's a dim image of a pleasant possible life projected on the mental screen. He can dimly see himself in some local level of job, putting in time, maybe, at a McDonald's, building up credentials, showing that he can be personable and friendly without alcohol, without a kilt, as well as hard-working, highly motivated and detail oriented, to the point where somewhere down the road the current OTM gets a promotion. That or the company expands and needs another OTM. At which point Scotty, with his driver's license, can put in an ap. Be part of a team which is part of a business which is part of building a community.  It could happen.

The only thing is, though, that images of future lives and plans always come to him dimly now.  They don't come zapping into the brain with the flare of certainty and immediacy, the call to instant action, which had characterized bright ideas in the Day of the Kilt.  If something has the capacity to come about by being drifted into, it may well come about.  If it needs decisive action - but see, just the phrase "decisive action" makes him feel tired. (Which, be honest, is not what they seem to be looking for in their Operation Team Member, quite apart from the missing license to drive a motor vehicle.)

(And, be honest, even if the eminences grises of Charles Chips could be tracked down, the hirers and firers who take on local distributors and cast them aside, they too are probably not looking for the kind of local distributor who wants to lie down as soon as the phrase "decisive action" surfaces in the meat in the bonebox.  In fact, the reason their contact details are not readily available through CharlesChips.com is probably precisely to put off the kind of idle speculator who goes online in search of his grandmother's potato chips and then casually thinks it would be totally wild to drive a truck delivering potato chips and pretzels and cookies with proprietary tins.

RetailRelay is a start-up, and they have a single local base in Charlottesville VA; they can safely advertise for an OTM online without fearing hordes of the idly curious. If they had been in business for over 60 years, operating nationwide, they too would probably make it harder to find out how to get a job with them.  Charles Chips, he reckons, is probably deliberately playing hard to get so the people who do manage to seek them out will be a self-selected pool of genuine contenders.  He sees that, he acknowledges that, but this too is merely a dim recognition, it's not some kind of call to resolute action. Not that he has a driver's license, anyway.)

Happy New Year

Looking back over the year.  Somewhat stunned by the extraordinary kindness and generosity so many people have shown -- many of them strangers known only through this blog.  I would especially like to thank those who gave me a place to stay this autumn in New York (Bernie Onken, Chris Glazek, Jenny Davidson, Elizabeth and Eileen Gumport) or offered to do so (Danielle Sucher, Sherally Munshi, Jeremy Glick, and Ezra Nielsen), and William Flesch and Laura Quinney, who put me up in Boston at (I can't help thinking) great inconvenience (and also let me walk off with William's copy of Erving Goffman's Forms of Talk). Also Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Marco Roth and the whole team at n+1, who put so much energy into helping to launch Lightning Rods. Also, needless to say, Barbara Epler, Jeffrey Yang, Tom Roberge, Laurie Callahan, Declan Spring, and the rest of the staff at New Directions. And, er, Edward Orloff, who has the somewhat thankless task of explaining the biz to a skeptical client.

I am very grateful. With so much encouragement, it may seem perverse to think of jumping ship, but . . .

Joey Comeau came down from Toronto! I had such a nice time - and I kept thinking, gosh, if I wrote a webcomic my whole life could be like this. 

And now readers of the blog have offered so many helpful suggestions for getting into programming. (A line of work which might make it a lot easier to decamp to Toronto.) 

Other things being equal, I could crowd an acknowledgements page or three in my next book with thanks to all the people who have been so unbelievably kind in 2011. Not sure what 2012 holds in store, but would like in the meantime to express my heartfelt thanks, and best wishes to all for a Very Happy New Year.

phlegm

It turns out that a portion of the talent required to survive in the trenches of the ATP Tour is emotional: Joyce is able to keep from getting upset about stuff that struck me as hard not to get upset about. When he points out that there's "no point" getting exercised about unfairnesses you can't control, I think what he's really saying is that you either learn how not to get upset about it or you disappear from the Tour.

David Foster Wallace, 'Tennis player Michael Joyce's professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice...', in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

...The reverence with which he approached Frege's ideas, ...

...The reverence with which he approached Frege's ideas, and the irritation and puzzlement with which he often approached the ideas of other philosophers, prompted one reviewer of the collection Frege and Other Philosophers to remark that Dummett seemed to regard the parallel between the title of that collection and the earlier collection Truth and Other Enigmas "as more than just a parallel".

Terrific obituary of Michael Dummett by A W Moore in the Guardian, the rest here.