by Martin Butler

Bemoaning the ills of individualism is nothing new. Jonathan Sack’s bestseller, “Morality, Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times”(2020) provides us with one of the more comprehensive accounts of how we lost community and why we need it back. Justin Welby sums it up well in the foreword: “His message is simple enough: ours is an age in which there is too much ‘I’ and not enough ‘We’. Sacks himself puts the point succinctly when he says: “The revolutionary shift from “We” to “I” means that everything that once consecrated the moral bonds binding us to one another – faith, creed, culture, custom and convention – no longer does … leaving us vulnerable and alone.”

The book is divided into five parts, the first four giving a detailed account of how the shift from ‘We’ to ‘I’ took place and the fifth, entitled ’The Way Forward’, providing some suggestions as to how we might return to a more ‘We’-based society. The breadth and depth of knowledge Sacks displays is impressive, and he draws on a vast range of philosophers and numerous psychological and sociological studies to make his case, which is both detailed yet accessible to the general reader. Sacks divides society into three domains, the state, the economy and the moral system, and it is in this third domain that he claims an ‘unprecedented experiment’ has taken place in the western world, the long-term consequences of which – the divisive politics of recent years, populism, the epidemic of anxiety and depression, increasing inequality, “the assault on free speech taking place on university campuses in Britain and America” and more – we are now living with. He identifies three phases. Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

Last year, I watched a Kurzgesagt video about the science of how gratitude practices can make you happier, so I decided to start a gratitude journal. It could only help, right? 

I started jotting down a variety of things I was grateful for: my family, my piano, my cats and dog, my financial stability. I also listed smaller and more fleeting pleasures like solving the day’s Wordle in two tries, listening to a good podcast, a lovely rainstorm to break up the scorching heat. 

Then, after only about three days of journaling, a switch flipped. I suddenly wanted to chuck the gratitude journal out the window. I was rebelling not just against the journaling exercise but against the very idea of being grateful, although I wasn’t sure why.

Over the next few days, the truth gradually bubbled to the surface. Gratitude journaling felt punitive and performative, like having to write lines in school or recite prayers on a rosary. Even though the journal entries were only for me, I’d felt like I was on trial, like I was being accused – of not appreciating my life, of not trying hard enough to live in the moment, of taking my life for granted. Each journal entry was an indictment: What could I possibly have to be unhappy about?

The fact is, the feeling of thankfulness is much more complex and ambivalent than common knowledge assumes. Gratitude has a dark side that we lie to ourselves about, and this is hardly ever indicated in the bubbly, feel-good cultural conversation surrounding it. Read more »

What’s More . . .

who was the woman who, 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years ago,
birthed the universe from a bang? what an extravagant nativity,
what an immense and unruly child came forth, unfurling,
emerging in the space it made

how could she have imagined how singular and varied her child would become,
how extraordinary, how expansive, how crammed with darkness and light,
bulging with multitudes of whims and trajectories, how
creative and destructive in cosmic tantrums, blowing itself apart
in an inner life of psychotic episodes of collapses and collisions
of psychic arguments, mergers, its gravities contesting, warring,
yanking part from part, captivating them in inevitable attractions,
incarcerating them in humiliating orbits

how could the mother of the universe have imagined
what would become of her child,
how it would grow past comprehension
compounding the vastness of nothing
in its creation of time.

—what’s more, how could we, her child’s
chronically egotistical mites imagine?

Jim Culleny, © 4/29/23

by Joseph Shieber

“In Defense of Merit in Science,” a paper published recently in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, suggests that (1) success in science is currently determined by merit, the (2) success of science in discovering significant truths is due to the fact that science is a merit-based system, and (3) the greatest threat to the continued success of science is what the authors term “Critical Social Justice.” The paper is wrong on all three counts.

1. Success in science is not currently determined by merit

Throughout the paper, the authors extol the virtues of what they call “merit-based science.” For example, on p. 5 they write:

Merit ­based science is truly fair and inclusive. It provides a ladder of opportunity and a fair chance of success for those possessing the necessary skills or talents. Neither socioeconomic privilege nor elite education is necessary.  Indeed, several co-authors of this [article] have built successful careers in science, despite being immigrants, coming from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and not being products of ‘elite education.’

The implication of this passage is not merely that a culture of science based on merit would be a worthwhile ideal, but also that the current culture of science is largely merit-based. This would seem to be the point of including the observation regarding the “successful careers in science” of some of the co-authors, despite their having come “from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and not being products of ‘elite education.’”

While it might be the case that it would be a worthwhile idea for science to be organized meritocratically, there is little evidence to suggest that science currently is a meritocracy. Read more »

by Jochen Szangolies

I would not consider myself a particularly ‘outdoors’ sort of person. Much of my work and leisure is spent in front of one screen or another, or between the pages of a book (less of the latter than I’d like, at that). However, in those last years lost to COVID-19, I, like many others, found myself spending increasing amounts of time on long hikes through the countryside.

It came as no small revelation to me how restorative that time spent wandering—alone, occasionally, but mostly together with my wife, who deserves credit for motivating me to peel myself off of the couch and making my first tentative steps into the great outdoors—turned out to be. Indeed, it almost feels a bit like cheating: a week’s worth of work anxiety, stress, and general ill-ease washed away, or at least smoothed over, by a few hours spent in the woods.

That’s not to say I would submit it as a cure-all, or some great spiritual revelation. After all, there is presumably a perfectly ordinary evolutionary reason the woods seem to satisfy some inner longing to exchange my everyday surroundings for a more natural habitat. Most zoos have long since realized that their animals fare better in some approximation of their ancestral dwellings, while we still lock ourselves away in small boxes aggregated into great concrete and glass agglomerations. It’s just something that turns out to work for me, that I was lucky to add to my self-care tool-box. Read more »

Moeen Faruqi. Chamber Dialogue, 2016.

More here and here.

by Derek Neal

At some point in the last couple of months, my reading about ChatGPT reached critical mass. Or, I thought it had. Try as I might, I couldn’t escape the little guy; everywhere I turned there was talk of ChatGPT—what it meant for the student essay, how it could be used in business, how the darn thing actually worked, whether it was really smart, or actually, really stupid. At work, where I teach English language to international university students, I quickly found myself grading ChatGPT written essays (perfect grammar but overly vague and general) and heard predictions that soon our job would be to teach students how to use AI, as opposed to teaching them how to write. It was all so, so depressing. This led to my column a few months ago wherein I launched a defense of writing and underlined its role in the shaping of humans’ ability to think abstractly, as it seemed to me that outsourcing our ability to write could conceivably lead us to return to a pre-literate state, one in which our consciousness is shaped by oral modes of thought. This is normally characterized as a state of being that values direct experience, or “close proximity to the human life world,” while shunning abstract categories and logical reasoning, which are understood to be the result of literate cultures. It is not just writing that is at stake, but an entire worldview shaped by literacy.

The intervening months have only strengthened my convictions. It seems even clearer to me now that the ability to write will become a niche subject, similar to that of Latin, which will be pursued by fewer and fewer students until it disappears from the curriculum altogether. The comparison to Latin is intentional, as Latin was once the language used for all abstract reasoning (Walter Ong, in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, even goes so far as to say that the field of modern science may not have arisen without the use of Learned Latin, which was written but never spoken). In the same way, a written essay will come to be seen as a former standard of argumentation and extended analysis. Read more »

by Ada Bronowski

The state of Israel is on the brink of deliquescence. A corrupt multi-indicted prime minister has handed the reins of government to extremist (read: blood-thirsty) right-wing (read: populist imperialist) religious (read: obscurantist) coalition parties whose alliance is based on a net refusal to heed the Israeli Supreme Court and a pact to instil a theocratic regime where there has been, since the state’s creation in 1948, a democracy. Both these goals are to be achieved by changing the law, giving parliament (the Israeli knesset) the right to dictate the terms of justice to the courts of justice. It is a situation the philosopher Plato had staged at the start of his Republic, back in the 4^th century BC.

“What is justice?”, ask the half dozen citizens of then democratic Athens whom Plato reassembles at the start of his fictitious dialogue, written some sixty years after democracy fell in Athens and Socrates had been put to death. Amongst the cast of real-live people from then (Socrates of course, Plato’s own brothers and other public figures of the time), a Peter Thiel figure, called Thrasymachus (smart, amoral, with self-confidence oozing from his fingernails) hijacks the discussion to state his seemingly irrefutable answer: “justice is what the strongest party says it is”. The whole of Plato’s Republic (nine out of its ten books) is an attempt to counter this statement, a challenge directed at Socrates, tasked with proving that it is not so; that justice is in fact independent of any parties or any single individual. It turns out to be a more complicated challenge to meet than it would have seemed at first blush. For justice to be accepted as independent from the people in power, allowing for the possibility that justice even be detrimental to them, a whole rethink of society is required. The place where this rebalanced society lives is the republic, a place which…does not exist. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tamuira Reid

School Boards across the country have become radicalized, energized, weaponized. They have become the new political battleground where extremist right-wing ideologues test the political waters. The plan is to infiltrate the schools, use them as the megaphone to broadcast the GOP’s agenda, with lots of soapboxing and grandstanding thrown in.

Last week, The City news dropped a bomb of a piece, “City Education Council Elections Bring Polarizing National Issues to Local School Districts”, exposing local educational advocacy organization, PLACE NYC’s history of endorsing GOP candidates and racists (George Santos and Lee Zeldin, for instance). Yet, for those of us familiar with PLACE’s history via our relationship with public schools as parents, the reporting didn’t read even close to a hit piece; many of us found it to be gentle-handed, forgiving, kinda vanilla.

What did seem to take the public school old-timers crowd by surprise was that PLACE is far from the only ‘educational advocacy organization of its kind to sprout wings across the country. They are just one of a growing coalition of parent-led organizations who are hellbent on the idea of parental control over our public schools, including everyone and everything inside of them. This national “Parental Rights Movement” – driven by self-proclaimed groups of “mama bears”, of which Moms4Liberty is the star – isn’t about elevating the needs of all students, but controlling exactly how and exactly what they are taught. It’s about banning books and censoring curricula that dare discuss race and gender. It’s about vilifying teachers’ unions and Dr. Fauci and anything with the word “equity” in it. It’s about the privatization of a public good. Our schools are being infiltrated by “mama bears” who are dead-set on gutting the public school system from the inside out. And they’ve got friends. Read more »

Field of dandelions in full bloom outside the village of Mittewald in the South Tyrol.

by Mike O’Brien

I have followed the work of York University’s Kristin Andrews for a few years. I even had the good fortune of meeting her in person twice in Montreal, once where she was attending a conference on animal cognition at UQAM, and again when she presented some of her research to philosophy students at Concordia University. Her main area of study, animal cognition and behaviour, happens to be my own chief concern (a plurality winner among a million disparate interests, rather than commanding the majority of my attention). Her approach to moral questions about animals (such as their status as moral patients, or the value of their cultural practices) is refreshingly bottom-up, drawing on the results of field research and structured experiments to understand what sort of creatures animals actually are.

I say “refreshingly” because I have also read a lot of “top-down” animal ethics, which often starts with abstract notions like “rights” or “dignity” and then tries to extend these notions from humans to other animals, often justifying this extension by egalitarian or precautionary principles. I believe these top-down arguments can be useful because they use language and conceptual schemes that already have traction in law, but I am in my heart of hearts an inquirer first, and a moral advocate second. I am hopeful that an effective, but empirically incorrect and logically flawed, advocacy for animal protection can co-exist with a disinterested investigation into animals’ capacities and lives.

It is entirely possible that some scientific findings will prove inconvenient to advocates of animal rights and welfare protection. For instance, if we discovered robust evidence that some animals did not share our subjectively negative experience of pain, despite sharing many associated physiological responses, it would cast doubt on a wider range of animals whose suffering seems evident but is not yet conclusively proven. It would be better, from an advocacy standpoint, to presume harm in all cases and not get bogged down in case-by-case distinctions. It would be better still if the evidence vindicated that position, of course. If only the West’s dominant religious tradition taught us to be gracious rather than merely just in our care for others, then we wouldn’t need to wait for proof of harm before we started treating vulnerable beings nicely. (It does). Read more »