John G. Messerly's Blog, page 15

Schopenhauer On Women

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I greatly admire and have found insightful much of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (of whom I’ve written extensively on this blog.) Nonetheless, he was—without question and undeniably—a misogynist. Here is a typical quote on women by Schopenhauer, “Although women can have even more potential and more talent than man, they always lack in judgment.” Now this is straightforwardly and self-evidently false.

The fact is that individuals can be profoundly insightful on some topics and positively ignorant of others. Schopenhauer was a good philosopher but completely ignorant of sociology, anthropology, and psychology—he is not a good guide on these subjects. His opinions about women are completely non-scientific. He is not to be entirely faulted here as those social sciences didn’t really exist when he lived.

And he is not alone in this regard. Aristotle was a good ethicist and political philosopher (although he endorsed the idea that some people are by nature slaves, yes he really thought this) but he was a terrible biologist and physicist. He thought, for example, that water ran downhill because it sought its natural resting place and that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. Newton was one of the world’s great geniuses but was also evidently a terrible person who also believed in alchemy. And while I consider myself a good philosopher I am ignorant of mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, zoology, botany, and many other subjects beyond the very basics. Moreover,  there are many specialized fields within philosophy about which I’m ignorant.

Schopenhauer’s views on women probably derived from his personality, his personal experience, and his environment. (Aren’t all our beliefs and actions derived from some combination of our nature placed in some environment?) Schopenhauer had a notoriously strained relationship with his mother and other women in his life. No doubt his stereotypes about women were formed partly because of his bad experiences. He also lived at a time when women had almost no means of becoming educated or living independently. Perhaps from this, he mistakenly concluded that they were all his intellectual inferiors.

Contrast this with my experience. My Mother was loving and devoted and could read Latin till her dying day. My wife earned a master’s degree in pure mathematics (something I doubt Schopenhauer could have done) when she was in her 40s while caring for 3 young children. Almost all the top students in my academic career from grade school to grad school were women. More than half of law school and medical school students in the USA are female which belies the claim of any intellectual inferiority. My three daughters all work for a high-tech company with whom it is harder to get a job than to get into Harvard. Two of them are world-class programmers. three are extraordinarily educated and have taught me much. Most of the women I’ve known have been astute and judicious. I also have 2 granddaughters whom I love dearly and who are so smart. So my experience has been different from Schopenhauer’s.

But personal experience is irrelevant here; it supplies nothing but anecdotal evidence. The only way to know what’s true about the matter of inherent differences between men and women is through scientific research. The bottom line is that all human beings share a human genome and we are much more alike than different. In fact, we share about 98% of that genome with chimpanzees! Yes, there are differences between the sexes (men are on average larger than women for instance) but none of those differences would justify a single one of the claims of Schopenhauer such as women “always lack in judgment.”

If you are serious about these topics you can read thinkers like David Buss or Helen Fisher on the evolutionary origins of the different sexual strategies between the sexes or the results of other empirical research into quantifiable differences between the sexes. (Males and females do have different reproductive strategies for instance.) As for Schopenhauer, I’d like to believe that were he were alive today he would laugh at his 19th-century folly. And if he didn’t it would be obvious he was only interested in maintaining his prejudices not in finding the truth about these issues.

It is easy to hold on to your prejudices because they are comforting; it is hard to jettison them after careful research and reflection. It is also always easier to hold on to your beliefs based on some intuition or emotional experience. But if I trusted my intuition I’d still believe the world was flat or that the sun orbited the earth.

Now I am sympathetic to the idea that we shouldn’t criticize individuals for adopting the silly views of their time. So I don’t throw out all of Aristotle or Aquinas or other philosophers because they were sexist or racist. I don’t reject Descartes’ skepticism or analytic geometry because, when he was presented with the devasting arguments of Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia against his mind-body dualism he simply shrugged them off because they were merely advanced by a woman. In fact, almost all philosophers in the Western tradition were sexist, with the possible exception of Plato, until John Stuart Mill. Mill courageously penned the wonderful essay “The Subjection of Women.”

But what’s particularly problematic about people’s prejudice is that it hurts others and harms the world, whether that prejudice is sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, etc. When people see the other as different they quickly conclude the other is inferior. And from that can follow a host of bad consequences.

Just consider a recent example in my own country. Hilary Clinton lost the American presidential election in 2016 to Donald Trump. Clinton was probably the most qualified person to ever run for the presidency in US history. She probably has an IQ of about 160, she knows more about health care, geopolitics, and many more relevant topics to that job than almost any person alive today while Trump was both unfit, unqualified, and a clinical psychopath. Yet, no doubt she lost votes simply because of sexism.

But imagine if she had been President during the Covid pandemic. As an amazingly competent policy wonk who knew how to push the levers of government, she was perfectly fitted for that task. Contrast this with Trump’s immorality and incompetence. Thousands of lives were lost because of sexism in this case. Or consider that racism was a major cause of the defeat of the universal health care first proposed in the USA by Harry Truman. But racism played a major role in its defeat. Surely you wouldn’t want to catch blackness by sharing a hospital room with an African American! The result of this racism has likely been the loss of more than a million lives in the intervening decades as well as countless suffering.

I understand that some people don’t like women or men or fat people or dark-skinned people or progressives or Jews or gay or transgender persons or whomever. But please don’t act on your prejudice and bigotry. Remember that the conclusions we draw from our limited experiences are often mistaken. The truth about people can only be teased out through careful scientific research. Our intuitions and prejudices often mislead us and this should matter if we want to know the truth about something. Again there are differences between the sexes (although gender is not a simple either/or concept) but none of those differences discovered support anything Schopenhauer writes. And it most definitely refutes the idea that one or the other sex is superior or inferior.

But if you still doubt the stupidity of Schopenhauer’s view of this topic just read his essay “On Women” where you will encounter the quotes below. Virtually the entire essay is so stupid as to be a parody of itself. What it clearly reveals is a man who detests women.

One need only look at a woman’s shape to discover that she is not intended for either too much mental or too much physical work.

Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted—in a word, are big children all their lives…

This is why women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important.

With girls, Nature has had in view what is called in a dramatic sense a “striking effect,” for she endows them for a few years with a richness of beauty and a, fulness of charm at the expense of the rest of their lives; so that they may during these years ensnare the fantasy of a man to such a degree as to make him rush into taking the honourable care of them, in some kind of form, for a lifetime—a step which would not seem sufficiently justified if he only considered the matter.

Moreover, she is intellectually short-sighted, for although her intuitive understanding quickly perceives what is near to her, on the other hand her circle of vision is limited and does not embrace anything that is remote; hence everything that is absent or past, or in the future, affects women in a less degree than men. This is why they have greater inclination for extravagance, which sometimes borders on madness. Women in their hearts think that men are intended to earn money so that they may spend it, if possible during their husband’s lifetime, but at any rate after his death.

It is because women’s reasoning powers are weaker that they show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men, and consequently take a kindlier interest in them. On the other hand, women are inferior to men in matters of justice, honesty, and conscientiousness.

So that it will be found that the fundamental fault in the character of women is that they have no “sense of justice.” This arises from their deficiency in the power of reasoning already referred to, and reflection, but is also partly due to the fact that Nature has not destined them, as the weaker sex, to be dependent on strength but on cunning; this is why they are instinctively crafty, and have an ineradicable tendency to lie.

In a court of justice women are more often found guilty of perjury than men. It is indeed to be generally questioned whether they should be allowed to take an oath at all. From time to time there are repeated cases everywhere of ladies, who want for nothing, secretly pocketing and taking away things from shop counters.

Nothing different can be expected of women if it is borne in mind that the most eminent of the whole sex have never accomplished anything in the fine arts that is really great, genuine, and original, or given to the world any kind of work of permanent value.

That woman is by nature intended to obey is shown by the fact that every woman who is placed in the unnatural position of absolute independence at once attaches herself to some kind of man, by whom she is controlled and governed; this is because she requires a master. If she, is young, the man is a lover; if she is old, a priest.

While I value many of Schopenhauer’s philosophical insights, I completely, totally, and unequivocally detest his misogyny. It is as harmful as it is untrue. 

Avoiding Bad People

[image error]Wilhelm Wundt (seated) with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind.

Let me begin by stating unequivocally that we are all flawed psyches; we are all damaged, we all deviate from psychic harmony. The world is full of damaged psyches.

If we learn from experience, we soon discover the above truths. Still, this obvious truth is not apparent to children or to unreflective adults. They are satisfied with platitudes like “she seems nice” or “he’s so sweet” or “I’m a good person.” The inexperienced peer no deeper into the psyche. But the reality behind the mask that humans wear often differs from the appearance. Seemingly nice and ok people are often neither nice nor ok—and you might not be a good person either.

It goes without saying that understanding the psyches around us is important. Individuals and groups are led astray when they misread them. Women think they’ve found the perfect man, and six months later they have bruises. Nations trust their leaders and later die in their unjust wars. Americans wonder about the appeal of Hitler or Stalin, psychopaths full of rage and patriotic fervor, but they fawn over their own psychopathic leaders and provocateurs. We are drawn to those who make us feel good about ourselves by directing animus toward others. Many political pundits and politicians are vile, horrific human beings filled with hate and vitriol, but people listen to them intently. Without a careful reading of the psyche, the demagogues hold sway.

And this says as much about most of us as it does about them. We too are often filled with hate, anger, treachery, irrationality, homophobia, xenophobia, and sadism. As Shakespeare put it: “The fault … is not in our stars, but in ourselves …” We suffer in the presence of damaged psyches that spew their psychic waste, and we suffer enduring our own psyches too. So what can we do about this?

As for recognizing and eradicating our own demons, we might begin, as was suggested in a previous column, by quieting our minds, re-assessing who we are, and trying to become whole, integrated human beings. But how do we do this? It may involve professional counseling, rigorous study, meditation, exercise,  and more. But I think people should be continually in the process of becoming, changing, transforming. This pursuit should last a lifetime. We must begin by changing ourselves.

As for changing others, that is unlikely. Instead, we should avoid those who spew their toxic, psychic waste. If you can escape their presence, do so expeditiously. They will damage you. If you must interact with them, minimize contact. But respond to such interaction not with anger but with sympathy, for others had no control over the external situations that in large part created them. All you can control, as the Stoics taught long ago, is your own mind. Try not to be disturbed, but avoid masochistic tendencies too. You have no obligation to endure the psychologically unhealthy, escape them if you can.

As for recognizing severely damaged psyches in others, be patient. Don’t conclude too quickly that someone is “nice.” Aristotle said that everyone slowly reveals their character … and they do. No one remains opaque for long. People gradually become translucent and then transparent. Just wait. I didn’t know my wife well after I’d known her for a few months, and she didn’t know me. But now, after 43 years of living together, I sleep soundly next to her as she does with me. We don’t fear the other will kill us in our sleep!

How then should we live in a world of healthy and unhealthy psyches? Through the experience of living, we can slowly learn to discriminate between them. We can learn to be astute, savvy, judicious, sagacious, and discerning. We can learn to discriminate between those who care for us, however flawed they might be, and those who don’t care for us or who would hurt us. We learn that everyone, even the psychologically healthy, will sometimes hurt us. But this isn’t necessarily a reason to avoid them, for solitude and loneliness damage us too. Avoid then those who intend to hurt you, but love those that sometimes hurt you inadvertently, if they have shown previously that they care for you.

Thus a lifetime of experience teaches us that a large part of living is psychic intercourse; that is largely what it is to be conscious. In such a world, interact with beauty and avoid ugliness as much as possible, while continually trying to beautify yourself. And yes sometimes it is good to be alone. Many seers and saints have found something preferable in solitude.

“Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria”

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I recently saw PBS “Frontline” wonderful documentary entitled: “Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria.” It investigated the rise of deadly drug-resistant bacteria. As the world health organization has recently reported we may be heading for a post-antibiotic world where common infections will again kill.

Most of us know that a big part of the problem is that most antibiotics are fed to livestock. Everyone knows that we shouldn’t engage in that practice, but the agricultural and pharmaceutical lobbies are just too powerful to defeat on this issue. The clients of those lobbies—private citizens and corporations—are interested in profit, not public health.

Perhaps lesser known is that few drug companies are developing new antibiotics. The reason is that it is less profitable to develop antibiotics which are taken occasionally, as opposed to drugs that are taken regularly for conditions like blood pressure, cholesterol, hair loss, or erectile dysfunction. This is a classic example of how the market does not always serve an individual’s best interests. It may give us erections and hair, but we might have to have an infected leg amputated.

How real is the problem? The CDC claims:

Each year in the United States, at least 2 million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections. Many more people die from other conditions that were complicated by an antibiotic-resistant infection.

Only government research supported by tax dollars is likely to solve such large problems. The purpose of good government is to act in the interest of the common good. This is their raison d’être. Private corporations by comparison answer to their shareholders–profit is their only concern. While tobacco killed millions over decades, the tobacco industry actively covered up the problem–tobacco was a profitable product. But government slowly exposed the problem by placing constraints on the sale of tobacco and publicizing it as a public health hazard. After decades of polluting the air, earth, and water, only the creation of the EPA stemmed the tide, successfully enacting measures to clean up the environment. As global climate change proceeds unabated, fossil fuels companies and their allies again lie and deceive. And why not? It is profitable to burn fossil fuels. Only governmental power is likely to stop the ruination our fragile climate.

From an economic standpoint, even larger steps probably need to be taken—including the creation of a new economic system. Politically what is needed is cooperation between countries, or granting intergovernmental bodies like the IPCC or UN the coercive power to make individuals comply with international law or a full-fledged global government. Many problems we confront today–including antibiotic resistance–cross international borders.

So thanks PBS for an informative documentary. It wasn’t profitable to investigate this for a small audience, and without adequate public funds you are forced to beg, but last night you performed a great public service. By the way. PBS stands for “the public broadcasting system.”

Note – Here is a related NY Times op-ed.

Life is Ephemeral

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“Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.” ~ Marcus Aurelius

I recently scribbled this quote on my youngest daughter’s birthday card. Just her luck, her father is a philosopher! Seriously though the fleeting, ephemeral nature of life is a basic tenet of Stoicism and Buddhism, a basic motif of Proust and Shakespeare. What is it about the passing of time that is so compelling yet disturbing, and what can we learn from it?

An 80-year lifespan is 960 months or about 29,000 days long. Think of that, an entire life. If you are middle-aged and will live another 40 years that’s only 480 months or about 15,000 days. And for someone my age with a life expectancy of maybe 20 years, that’s 240 months or about 7,000 days. This is shockingly brief.

The stream we are floating down, slowly, inexorably, and beyond our control is … life. We are thrown into the world, imagine endless possibilities if we are lucky, and then, suddenly, time has passed. We can’t stop it, rewind it, or fast-forward it even if we want to. And what of our destination? Looking back on almost 60 years of living, I feel a kinship with Yeats:

When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had … my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.

Perhaps this is what’s so disturbing about time. It refers to a now unreal past, a vanishingly short present, all while leading to a future that quickly disappears. Perhaps something is amiss in life, and part of what’s missing manifests itself in time’s flow. Personal immortality has been proposed to ameliorate our worries, but I reject the comfort of charlatans, of purveyors of salves. As Diderot put it: “Lost in an immense forest during the night I have only a small light to guide me. An unknown man appears and says to me: ‘My friend blow out your candle so you can better find your way.’ This unknown man is a theologian.”

Today we have many cults from which to choose. But I reject them all. Instead, I will keep my candle, my little light of reason, even though I am lost in time. No longer in the Dark Ages, I will not be guided by the blind. I will instead be guided by science, reason, and evidence.

Letter From Former Student

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A former student of my nearly 30-year college teaching career found my blog and sent me email updating me about her life over the last fifteen years or so. In it she said:

I am so grateful that you and a small handful of other people I have encountered in my life had such an influence on me, in teaching me how to think for myself and how to not be a sheep, to not settle for accepting the world at face value, and the value in asking questions. I am sure you had a similar impact on other students … Thank you a million times over!

Students & Teachers

l begin with a disclaimer. I am not publishing the above so anyone thinks I was a great teacher. I’m sure for every nice letter one receives from a former student there is another student who longs to write its antithesis.  And as anyone who has ever read class evaluations of their teaching knows, the “this guy changed my life and should win the Nobel Peace Prize” evaluation is followed by one that says “this guy is the worst human being who ever lived.”

My graduate school department chair gave me the best advice I ever heard about class evaluations. In a typical sample of about 30-40, he said, take the 2 best and the 2 worst, throw them out and focus on the remainder. I think he was right. What I have found is that no matter what you do some students really like you and some really don’t. So it is the majority in the middle that provides the best feedback. Still, the entire process of teaching evaluations done by students is suspect. Although I always did pretty well on them, I’ve often thought that they were bad for education, forcing instructors to grovel for student affection.

Why I Published The Excerpt

I think the excerpt from the letter above captures the essence of teaching and learning, especially its emphasis on thinking for oneself, asking questions, and not merely being a follower. Thinking is about wondering, questioning, fantasizing, and imagining,

But to be reminded by one of those nearly 10,000 students of your influence is strangely rewarding. That you made a small difference in someone’s life makes your life seem, for a brief moment, meaningful. No, it doesn’t mean that your life or cosmic life is fully meaningful, but it does bestow some temporary value, at least in your own eyes, upon one’s efforts.

And those brief, fleeting, ephemeral moments when you are reminded that everything you have done was not completely in vain are one of the best things life has to offer. Even when the reminder comes from strangers in the past.

Knowledge and Power

Francis Bacon

A few years ago New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote the essay, “Knowledge Isn’t Power.” This contrasts with the received view that knowledge is power. Here is the opening paragraph of a relevant Wikipedia entry:

The phrase “scientia potentia est” (or “scientia est potentia“ or also “scientia potestas est”) is a Latin aphorism often claimed to mean organized “knowledge is power.”It is commonly attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, although there is no known occurrence of this precise phrase in Bacon’s English or Latin writings. However, the expression “ipsa scientia potestas est” (‘knowledge itself is power’) occurs in Bacon’s Meditationes Sacrae (1597). The exact phrase “scientia potentia est” was written for the first time in the 1651 work Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, who was secretary to Bacon as a young man.1

For the philosophically uninitiated Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) “was an English philosopher … [and a] philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method ... Bacon has been called the father of empiricism. His works established and popularised inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the scientific method.”2 Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) “was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established social contract theory, the foundation of most later Western political philosophy.”3

Not surprisingly the idea that knowledge is power originated with that influential thinker who sparked the Enlightenment, Francis Bacon, and one of the most important figures of the Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes. Interpretations of the phrase include the idea that knowledge increases one’s ability or potential, or improves one’s influence or reputation. In the prescriptive sense, the idea is that knowledge should be powerful. It should inform and guide our public policies and decisions, and by doing so (scientific) knowledge has power.

Krugman worries that scientific knowledge is losing its power to influence public policy. Instead, we have the appearance of knowledge holding sway. Many are largely influenced by demagogues or the ignorant rather than the educated. For example, there is a virtual consensus on a wide range of issues among leading economists “representing a wide spectrum of schools and political leanings, on questions that range from the economics of college athletes to the effectiveness of trade sanctions [to] whether … the Obama “stimulus” — reduced unemployment … [to] whether the stimulus was worth it …” Nonetheless, policy-makers and the public are often unaware of or ignore expert advice. This is not to say that the professional consensus is always right, but it does raise the question: “Are we as societies even capable of taking good policy advice?”

Reflections – Obviously if the answer is no to the above question, then knowledge has lost much of its power. And it is not only in economics but in biology, climate science, and other disciplines that policymakers ignore scientific consensus. This makes you wonder if our species can avoid disaster. Because ultimately the truth about economics, biology, and climate science trumps ideology–evolution is still true, vaccines still prevent disease, and the climate is still changing. If our decisions are not informed by our knowledge, then they will be informed by our ignorance. We will return to the pre-Enlightenment world ruled by superstition and emotion, rather than reason and evidence. Let us hope that we act in accordance with the latter. After all, our survival depends on it. And if that doesn’t matter nothing else does. 

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientia_potentia_est#Interpretation
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Francis_Bacon
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbes

Stephen Jay Gould’s Skepticism

The biologist and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was one of the most prolific and widely read authors of popular science in the twentieth century. (Links to a few of his books can be found below.) In addition to authoring or editing more than twenty books, he penned the foreword to Michael Shermer’s 1997 book, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time[image error]. That foreword is a clear and concise statement of the value of skepticism.

Gould begins by noting that the intellectual and moral need for skepticism arises because “Our patterns of thought and action lead to destruction and brutality as often as to kindness and enlightenment.“1  In short, humans are capable of heartrending nobility and unspeakable horror. How then to save ourselves from violent crusades, witch trials, inquisitions, enslavement, genocides, and holocausts? To do so we need both morality and rationality. For without reason

“we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising “true” belief, and the apparent resulting inevitability of mob action. Reason … is also our potential salvation from the vicious and precipitous mass action that rule by emotionalism always seems to entail. Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism—and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civil decency.”2

Reason is our most powerful instrument to combat irrationality in all its forms—psychics, young-earth creationists, faith healers, holocaust and climate change deniers, Ayn Rand cultists, vaccination avoiders, and all the other pseudosciences and superstitions of our time. As Gould says: “Our best weapons come from the arsenals of basic scientific procedures—for nothing can beat the basic experimental technique of the double-blind procedure and the fundamental observational methods of statistical analysis.”3 The application of elementary scientific tools easily defeats almost all modern irrationalism.

Why then skepticism’s lousy reputation? Perhaps because it is thought of as a debunking, nihilistic activity. Skeptics seem to take away the magical and mysterious explanations that we so enjoy. But skepticism does more than debunk—it offers a better, alternative explanation rooted in reason and evidence. As Gould concludes: “The alternative model is rationality itself tied to moral decency—the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.”4

I miss Gould’s voice.

The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded) [image error]

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory [image error]

The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth (Second Edition) [image error]

Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History [image error]

1. Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, (New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1997) ix.
2. Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, (New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1997) x.
3. Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, (New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1997) xi.
4. Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, (New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1997) xii.

Great Book Dedications

[image error]The dedication of Orfeo by Monteverdi, 1609

Today I was thinking about book dedications. I have always tried to write meaningful ones and I enjoy reading the other book dedications. The first dedication I wrote was for my master’s thesis in graduate school.

“To my father, who approved of my being inquisitive.”

This honored the memory of a dinner table conversation when I was young (at least as best as I can remember it.) My father told me I was inquisitive, and I asked what the word meant. After he told me, I asked if it was good to be inquisitive. He said yes.

My next one was for my doctoral dissertation.

To my mother and father
whose love nurtured me,
And to Jane,
whose love sustains me …

I suppose this represented the transition from a focus on parental love to the love of my spouse. The next was for a college ethics textbook:

 For Jane
“a lily among the thistles …” (Song of Solomon 2:2)

Anyone who knows me will find it ironic that I quote the Bible, which is, for the most part, a terrible and silly book. But I had recently run across the quote and was trying to capture the sense in which Jane is incorruptible. I dedicated my next book, Piaget’s Conception of Evolution to my graduate school mentor whom I mentioned in a previous post.

To Richard J. Blackwell
an exemplar of moral and intellectual virtue

Professor Blackwell was the inspiration for that book so it seemed appropriate. Talking with him years later he told me that I was the only one to have ever dedicated a book to him. He was honored. My book The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Transhumanist, and Scientific Perspectives bore this inscription:

For my children—Jennifer Emily, Katie Jane, Anne Marie, and Joshua Harrison—that you may live forever in a good, beautiful, and meaningful world;

And for Jane … that together we may somehow join them.

I dedicated my book, Who Are We?: Religious, Philosophical, Scientific and Transhumanist Theories Of Human Nature[image error], as follows:

To Jane, who has a beautiful nature.

And I dedicated my latest book to my grandchildren,

For Avery, Ellery, and Finn

Eat well, stay active, and seek serenity;
Laugh and love, play and ponder, and always have hope,
I love you all so much.
Grandpa.

Finally here are my favorite dedications, both from two of my intellectual heroes. The first is Will Durant’s dedication to his wife Ariel in his 1926 book, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers one of the best-selling philosophy books ever published. At the time of its publication, Durant was in his early forties and his wife was in her late twenties, so he wrote the dedication expecting that she would outlive him. As it turned out, they died a few days apart after almost seventy years of marriage. It conveys the notion that others will pick up the flame of life where we left off. 

Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand
Unshaken when I fall; that I may know
The shattered fragments of my song will come
At last to finer melody in you;
That I may tell my heart that you begin
Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

And here is the dedication by Bertrand Russell to his wife Edith in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (18671969). It was written when Russell was almost 80 years old. It is a nostalgic reminder that through struggle and toil … love and peace can be found.

To Edith

Through the long years
I sought peace,
I found ecstasy, I found anguish,
I found madness,
I found loneliness,
I found the solitary pain
that gnaws the heart,
But peace I did not find.
Now, old & near my end,
I have known you,
And, knowing you,
I have found both ecstasy & peace,
I know rest,
After so many lonely years.
I know what life & love may be.
Now, if I sleep,
I shall sleep fulfilled.

Is Pain A Good Thing?

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I had a cortisol injection this morning to hopefully relieve pain and inflammation in my thenar eminence (thumb pad.) While I’ve had multiple covid, flu, pneumonia, shingles, and other shots in the last few years this one really hurt. In fact, it was the most painful shot that I can recall. (My doctor thought he might have hit a nerve.)

Now I’m not complaining. I can’t even imagine the pain of childbirth, breaking my femur, being shot or stabbed, severely depressed or incarcerated, or a thousand other things. Furthermore, the severe pain only lasted about 30 seconds. But it caused me to reflect on pain. Those 30 seconds were, as the utilitarians would say, a bad thing. Imagining that very brief state being extended for many years would render life not worth living.

In my case, the potential benefit of alleviating my current pain with 30 seconds of intense pain is well worth it. But if that pain were extended for a significant time with no potential benefit then life would be bereft of meaning.

Now you could argue that I also gain from the shot by being reminded of how fortunate I am to be relatively healthy and not in pain—although I’ve always been skeptical of those “you need to experience the bad in order to know the good” arguments. Moreover, my very brief encounter with pain also reminds me to help and be sympathetic to others in pain.

Yet the biggest takeaway from this very minor experience was … physical and emotional pain is unequivocally bad and we should do all we can to eliminate it. And yes I’m familiar with the various arguments for the benefits of pain but I’ve never found any of them at all convincing.

Also, this does not mean that I’m advocating that we be connected to Nozick‘s experience machine (where we experience continual bliss) but that we definitely should be disconnected from the many ills of our existence. Here’s to hoping that someday, somehow, we can create a world in which all conscious beings can flourish.

“The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant,”

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Nick Bostrom is a co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association (now called Humanity+) and co–founder of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He is currently Professor, Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School; Director, Future of Humanity Institute; and Director, Program on the Impacts of Future Technology; all at Oxford University.

Bostrom’s article, “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant,” tells the story of a planet ravaged by a dragon (death) that demands a tribute which is satisfied only by consuming thousands of people each day. Neither priests with curses, warriors with weapons, or chemists with concoctions could defeat the dragon. The elders were selected to be sacrificed, although they were often wiser than the young, because they had at least lived longer than the youth. Here is a description of their situation:

Spiritual men sought to comfort those who were afraid of being eaten by the dragon (which included almost everyone, although many denied it in public) by promising another life after death, a life that would be free from the dragon-scourge. Other orators argued that the dragon has its place in the natural order and a moral right to be fed. They said that it was part of the very meaning of being human to end up in the dragon’s stomach. Others still maintained that the dragon was good for the human species because it kept the population size down. To what extent these arguments convinced the worried souls is not known. Most people tried to cope by not thinking about the grim end that awaited them.1

Given the ceaselessness of the dragon’s consumption, most people did not fight it and accepted the inevitable. A whole industry grew up to study and delay the process of being eaten by the dragon, and a large portion of the society’s wealth was used for these purposes. As their technology grew, some suggested that they would one day build flying machines, communicate over great distances without wires, or even be able to slay the dragon. Most dismissed these ideas.

Finally, a group of iconoclastic scientists figured out that a projectile could be built to pierce the dragon’s scales. However, to build this technology would cost vast sums of money and they would need the king’s support. (Unfortunately, the king was busy raging war killing tigers, which cost the society vast sums of wealth and accomplished little.) The scientists then began to educate the public about their proposals and the people became excited about the prospect of killing the dragon. In response the king convened a conference to discuss the options.

First to speak was a scientist who explained carefully how research should yield a solution to the problem of killing the dragon in about twenty years. But the king’s moral advisors said that it is presumptuous to think you have a right not to be eaten by the dragon; they said that finitude is a blessing and removing it would remove human dignity and debase life. Nature decries, they said, that dragons eat people and people should be eaten. Next to speak was a spiritual sage who told the people not to be afraid of the dragon, but a little boy crying about his grandma’s death moved most toward the anti-dragon position.

However, when the people realized that millions would die before the research was completed, they frantically sought out financing for anti-dragon research and the king complied. This started a technological race to kill the dragon, although the process was painstakingly slow, and filled with many mishaps. Finally, after twelve years of research the king launch a successful dragon-killing missile. The people were happy but the king saddened that they had not started their research years earlier—millions had died unnecessarily. As to what was next for his civilization, the king proclaimed:

Today we are like children again. The future lies open before us. We shall go into this future and try to do better than we have done in the past. We have time now—time to get things right, time to grow up, time to learn from our mistakes, time for the slow process of building a better world…2

I agree, we should try to overcome the tyranny of death with technology.

1. Nick Bostrom, “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant,” Journal of Medical Ethics (2005) Vol. 31, No. 5: 273.
2. Bostrom, “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant,” 277.