Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 384

Devoted To Intention

Background on Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abelard:

Nine hundred years ago, a celebrity philosopher fell in love with his star student and seduced her. Peter Abelard’s once brilliant lectures grew tepid, while his love songs placed the name of Heloise on every tongue. Passionate letters flew, and the Parisian gossip mill went into overdrive – until pregnancy, as so often, betrayed the secret. Much against Heloise’s will, Abelard insisted on marriage to soothe her enraged uncle Fulbert, and spirited their child off to his sister’s farm in Brittany. The pair married secretly at dawn, then went their separate ways. A resentful Heloise denied all rumours of the marriage, so Abelard, to protect her from Fulbert’s wrath, clothed her in a nun’s habit and hid her away at Argenteuil, the convent where she had been raised. This proved to be the last straw for Fulbert, whose hired thugs surprised Abelard in his sleep and ‘cut off the parts of [his] body whereby [he] had committed the wrong’. For want of a better option, the eunuch philosopher turned monk, while Heloise became a nun in earnest, prefacing her vows with a public lament.

The couple believed in “what philosophers call the ethics of pure intention: it is not the real or even the foreseeable consequences of an act that make it good or evil, but solely the intent of the agent”:

Since only God can discern intentions, however, that position complicates any attempt to render moral judgments. While many thinkers have adopted mitigated versions of the premise, Heloise was ruthless in its principled application. Thus she judged her exemplary religious life worthless in the eyes of God because she had done everything for Abelard’s sake, nothing for God’s. On the other hand, she held her love affair morally blameless because she had loved Abelard purely for himself, without regard to material advantage. Every inch the stylist, she shocks and thrills readers with the deliciously hyperbolic way she conveys that boast: ‘if Augustus, emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would seem to me dearer and more honourable to be called not his empress but your whore.’ Not mistress or girlfriend, but whore – Heloise used the coarsest Latin words she could find (meretrix, scortum) to make her point. What is more, she went on to argue that the real prostitution is marriage itself, since women enter it for property and money rather than love. Such sentiments would have been radical even in the 18th century, let alone the 12th.

(Image of 14th-century depiction of Abelard and Heloise via Wikimedia Commons)

Is Richard Dawkins Growing Up? Ctd

Some good pushback from readers on this one:

The ideas that Dawkins put forward in the linked article are not new to him; he discussed them as early as 2005, in his book The Ancestor’s Tale (a superb read by the way, with next to no God-bashing). In what way is Dawkins being essentialist? Sure, there is a vast spectrum of religious beliefs and practices out there. What we call “Christianity” or “Islam” varies greatly depending on time, location, and social circumstances. But from this vast range of beliefs, commonalities can be drawn and subjected to criticism. This is not “treating all religions as the same essential thing.” The argument that:

(1) We cannot know whether the universe was created by a god of some sort, and

(2) Even if we did know that, we have no way to determine what this god wants or expects from us (if anything)

… can be used to counter any theist argument from this spectrum of beliefs.

Another reader:

I don’t believe Dawkins has ever applied essentialism to religion. He may not have expressed this clearly in every sound bite (who has?) but it’s completely consistent with his overall philosophy and the philosophy of most atheists I know.

Several years ago there was a bizarre report that Dawkins was converting to Deism. It turned out to be related to an interview in which he said you could make a reasonable argument for a Deist god. Most atheists likely agreed with his position: you can make a far stronger case for a Deist god than an old-earth Christian god, and a stronger case for an old-earth Christian god than a young-earth creationist one. The odd part was that people apparently thought Dawkins was incapable of making this distinction. So they took his seemingly astounding acknowledgment that a good argument could be made for Deism as evidence he was embracing Deism.

Can Robots Consent?

Mike LaBossiere thinks we may reach a stage where sexbots will have to grant permission:

Since the current sexbots are little more than advanced sex dolls, it seems reasonable to put them in the category of beings that lack this status. As such, a person can own and have sex with this sort of sexbot without it being rape (or slavery). After all, a mere object cannot be raped (or enslaved).

But, let a more advanced sort of sexbot be imagined—one that engages in complex behavior and can pass the Turning Test/Descartes Test. That is, a conversation with it would be indistinguishable from a conversation with a human. It could even be imagined that the sexbot appeared fully human, differing only in terms of its internal makeup (machine rather than organic). That is, unless someone cut the sexbot open, it would be indistinguishable from an organic person.

On the face of it (literally), we would seem to have as much reason to believe that such a sexbot would be a person as we do to believe that humans are people. After all, we judge humans to be people because of their behavior and a machine that behaved the same way would seem to deserve to be regarded as a person. As such, nonconsensual sex with a sexbot would be rape.

(Video: The first webisode of “Jon Davis Gets A Sex Robot.” The other five here.)

A Jolly Joy-Ride

Dan Colman captions:

Season 3 of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee kicks off with Jerry Seinfeld and his pal Louis CK piling into a very small 1959 Fiat Jolly and taking a leisurely (death) ride through New York City. Eventually, they escape the city and wind up at an unexpected place — aboard CK’s yacht. There, they share a cappuccino, navigate various nautical dangers, crack their signature jokes, and kibitz the day away.

Knocking Back Your Nicotine

Cocktails infused with tobacco are becoming as trendy as they are risky:

South American shamans drank simplistic tobacco teas during rituals and for its supposedly magical qualities, according to Iain Gately’s Tobacco: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World. However, the author notes that overindulging in these teas could “induce vomiting, paralysis and, occasionally, death.” That may have been due to the nicotine, which can be lethal in high doses. … The problem with tobacco-infused drinks, according to Stan Glantz, a leading researcher on the health effects of tobacco at the University of California-San Francisco, is that you simply have no way of knowing how much nicotine you’re getting. “It’s impossible to know what the dosage is since these guys are making this stuff themselves,” Glantz tells The Salt. “Don’t forget that nicotine was used as insecticide. So this is like putting pesticides – hazardous substances — into drinks.”

How Coke Gets Cooked

In the above video, Toby Muse reports on how cocaine is made in a small apartment lab in Colombia:

Over the last decade, America has given billions to the Colombian military to fight the narco-traffickers. In some ways it looks like the U.S. is getting bang for its bucks—Colombian authorities destroyed 2,356 labs in 2012, a serious dent in Colombia’s cocaine industry. But producers and traffickers of the drug are finding more creative ways to keep this lucrative business thriving. It’s like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole: Just when authorities think they’ve got the cartels on the run, their methods evolve and adapt. …

It turns out that the latest trend in Colombia’s cocaine trade is moving processing out of the huge plants in the jungle to small, mobile and disposable urban labs. In this new, decentralized world of cocaine production, two men with some buckets, a handful of microwave ovens and only the most basic knowledge of chemistry can take naturally growing coca leaves and turn them into 100 percent pure cocaine powder. And here’s the craziest part…they show us how they do it.

Previous Dish on illegal drug trade in Colombia here, here, and here.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

The Most Literary Liqueur

Absinthe:

In the poem Poison, from his 1857 volume The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire ranked absinthe ahead of wine and opium: “None of which equals the poison welling up in your eyes that show me my poor soul reversed, my dreams throng to drink at those green distorting pools.” Rimbaud, who “saw poetry as alchemical, a way of changing reality,” Edmund White notes in his biography of the poet, saw absinthe as an artistic tool. Rimbaud’s manifesto was unambiguous: he declared that a poet “makes himself a seer through a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses.” Absinthe, with its hallucinogenic effects, could achieve just that.

Guy de Maupassant imbibed, as did characters in many of his short stories. His A Queer Night in Paris features a provincial notary who wangles an invitation to a party in the studio of an acclaimed painter. He drinks so much absinthe he tries to waltz with his chair and then falls to the ground. From that moment he forgets everything, and wakes up naked in a strange bed.

Contemporaries cited absinthe as shortening the lives of Baudelaire, Jarry and poets Verlaine and Alfred de Musset, among others. It may even have precipitated Vincent Van Gogh cutting off his ear. Blamed for causing psychosis, even murder, by 1915 absinthe was banned in France, Switzerland, the US and most of Europe.

(Image of Monsieur Boileau by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893, via Wikimedia Commons)

Face Of The Day

By Jose Tostoneone

A Rebirth Of Storytelling

Hugh Howey forecasts the future of literature:

If these are the end times for literature, then we must be traveling in circles, for the death of storytelling looks an awful lot like its birth. The novel itself isn’t all that old. Sure, we can find a handful of examples going back thousands of years, but you have to stretch your definition of novel the further back you go. Really, the idea of an immutable and unchangeable text dates only to the printing press. Before that, every scribe tasked with producing a tome thought he was an author. Like movie producers dabbling with plot, it was difficult for the hand-copiers of text not to make a tweak here or there. Books were ever-changing. Stories evolved. And that was the way things were until Gutenberg’s time.

Fast forward to 2012, where 1 out of every 5 books sold was part of the 50 Shades of Grey series. Originally a work of Twilight fan fiction, the monumental success of 50 Shades of Grey turned a spotlight on the shadowy world of fan-generated literature. Soon, publishers were seeking out other popular works of fan fiction and signing authors to mega deals. Then Amazon announced its Kindle Worlds program, which commercialized fan fiction and opened up licensed worlds for exploration. To purists—who mix a love of history with a thin understanding of the past—the sanctity of the written word was in jeopardy. It was raining frogs. The volcanoes were angry. These lovers of the very modern novel clamored for a return to our roots. And yet—that is precisely where we are heading.

Overrun With Indies?

Contemplating this year’s Sundance festival, Manohla Dargis makes a request of movie producers (NYT):

[T]ake a moment and consider whether flooding theaters with titles is good for movies and moviegoers alike. Because no matter how exciting Sundance will be this year, no matter how aesthetically electrifying, innovative and entertaining the selections, it’s hard to see how American independent cinema can sustain itself if it continues to focus on consumption rather than curation. There are, bluntly, too many lackluster, forgettable and just plain bad movies pouring into theaters, distracting the entertainment media and, more important, overwhelming the audience. Dumping “product” into theaters week after week damages an already fragile cinematic ecosystem.

Tim Wu has a great counterargument, writing that “making lots of films to yield a few hits is not dangerous to independent film but exactly how independent film sustains itself—and ultimately how it improves Hollywood”:

Who exactly gets hurt if too many movies are made?

If making films weren’t challenging and fun for the people involved, they wouldn’t do it. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote decades ago, we live in an affluent society, with plenty of surplus cash, much of which ends up in the arts. More art means more bad art, too, but so what? … It may sound strange, but visible failures are the sign of a fertile cultural industry.

Ultimately, the only real victims are film reviewers like Dargis, whose job is complicated and made tiresome by the duty of watching so many films. … This leads to a suggestion for the Times’ critics: namely, that the paper’s ambition of reviewing every film that is “released” in New York City theatres is folly and entirely too twentieth-century. (The Times reviewed nearly nine hundred films in 2013.) The significance of a release is eroding in every media market—film is just the latest. Just as book-review sections long ago gave up on trying to keep track of every book published, it is pointless to review every film released, especially when the real life of most films happens on the small screen anyhow.

(Video: Trailer for Computer Chess, winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival)