cheese it, the cops!

things i wrote this year

I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain

For the New York Times' "Stone" series (the thing cannot possibly be described as a 'blog') I wrote on The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I haven't been rolling the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal quite as heavy as I had been the previous couple of years, but I notched a few: Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Russian memes didn't steal the election, rural voters' pride and left's prejudice, the opposite flaws of trump and mueller, hatred enhaces your self-esteem

I had a couple of essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon: western philosophy as white supremacism and before and beyond left and right (in early 19th c america)

For Times Higher Education I did an essay on some of the difficulties i'm having in teaching today's undergrads

For Standpoint I recapitulated my ridicule of Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. In praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:

I solved Brexit through the miracle of mereology

refuted Fukuyama and identified the actual end of history

narwhal horns and moral scorekeeping

mass shootings and the stories we tell ourselves

the powerlessness of positive thinking

male aging memoir: short version

reviewed or discussed visual art, as Pat Steir at the Barnes Foundation, arte povera at the Philly Museum, art and capitalism in Bentonville (Crystal Bridges), the art of suiseki landscape stones

i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.

i covered country music from time to time (and see above): steel blossoms, the highwomen, self-dramatization in cody jinks and miranda lambert, 2019 top ten

wrote about race, gender, identity politics, pc, free speech: break the glass floor; sexual abuse and political power, apologizing for whiteness; white guys: collectable, electable; his pronouns are 'they' and 'them'; trump, tropes, and the jews, 

masculinity, psychology, and servility

higher ed, which is struggling these days: hunting humans on campus, mandate campus free speech with a new title IX;  the ridiculous state of campus journalism

i covered some of the debates and impeachment developments and, in general, politics: joe biden rattletrap, intel will pick the next pres, the wrong word, whatever you do, don't elect the unelectable, there's no such thing as electability, 2020 will make 2016 look like a more innocent time, how elizabeth warren started her slide, (maybe this wasn't so prescient): biden and sanders are fading, trumpism after trump

media and such: against copyright, the wrong word is the least of our problems, yo, opinion editors, stop this practice immediately, the conspiracy theory is fake news

 

some piecey blog entries: how thoreau became a radical, ragging mr. rogers, 'ok boomer' and the fiction of generations, mao meets macklemore, quotations from chairman joe, masculinity, psychology, and servility, i just can't get no reception, the washington post opinion page and the cia: no distance, nicholas sandmann and nathan phillips (remember them?) both did well, homo economicus replaced by saints

On Sophia/bloggingheads I argued with Dan Kaufman about wittgenstein, the western phil as white supremacism essay, realism anti-realism and g.e. moore, the analytic/continental split, TRUTH

I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.

2018 sartwelliana

homo econonomicus: replaced by saints

For quite awhile now, the human being as portrayed in some traditional strands of economics has been embattled. This is the person who is motivated only by self-interest, and pursues that interest by and large rationally: that is, by means well-suited to achieve it. This picture, often associated with Adam Smith but perhaps more clearly endorsed by Thomas Hobbes, e..g., allows one to 'model' markets with things like game and decision theory. Many have found this picture of us both disgusting and non-empirical (evil and false, to put it plainly): one of my heroes, David Graeber, rails against it in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, for example. But I would caution against just endorsing its opposite, a move that is understandable and perhaps even admirable, but which equally lands you in the realm of the obviously false, and makes perfectly nice professors into mere ideologues.

Paul Collier, an Oxford economics professor, takes 'economic man' to task yet again as he reviews a number of economic books in the Dec 6 Times Literary Supplement (Greed is Dead) (really? dead?), especially Nicholas Christakis's book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society:

The book concludes that "humans everywhere are pre-wired to make a particular kind of society - one full of love, friendship, cooperation, and learning." Christakis demonstrates how we have evolved to enjoy sociality and to be prosocial. Humans crave to belong to a group. We are prepared to forgo individual material rewards in pursuit of this. The prosociality comes from our genes...: being prosocial, we co-operate, forming habitats that promote further prosociality, and through this common group behaviour we have gradually changed the gene pool. Since we are all programmed with these genes, vast swathes of our behavior are common. This is why, as a species, we have been hard-wired for morality.

Let's leave aside a few things, such as the bristling unattractiveness and buzzwordy pseudo-scientificity of the prose, which has also proven to be a problem for the discipline as a whole. Also, let's leave aside the effortless identification of 'prosocial' with moral (many moral systems insist that you have to resist the group in various situations, e.g.). This just says that human nature is good, and tacks on an evolutionary explanation (one put forward, with data, by Peter Kropotkin in the late 19th century). And I allow that the claim that we are 'hard-wired' (x) for cooperation, or that cooperation is selected for, is entirely plausible; or I might have said, even obvious.

But just like the position it rejects, this one cannot explain a whole bunch of human behavior. Looking squarely at the human world right now, or indeed at any time: could it have emerged from a species that has evolved to, is gene-'programmed' to, make a society of 'love, friendship, and cooperation'? Not hardly, though it's sort of sweet if y'all believe that. I think, if you are doing science, you had better look at how people actually behave and then, if you insist, speculate on how these behaviors were selected for. Now, we are not greed machines and there is all sorts of cooperative activity everywhere. Also there is all kinds of killing, competition, exploitation, and so on. Looking at the thing squarely, we are obviously not entirely "prosocial" and not entirely "anti-social."

What the idea that human nature is super-good allows you to do is blame neo-liberalism or something for all the terrible ways we actually are. But however, if there is such a thing as neo-liberalism, it was itself created by human beings, no? Human beings that, for Collier and Christakis, were violating their own genes. Also, obviously human behavior has been a mixed bag of competition and cooperation throughout (and again, these do not at all track 'evil' and 'good'), and we must speculate that both are selected for, which is plausible

That we have evolved into pacifistic self-sacrificers and universal lovers is obviously, obviously, no more true than that we have evolved into individualistic greed machines. If the discipline of economics is just going to flow toward the opposite of what it once said, it is going to be no more empirical than it ever was. These positions are both political ideologies, and if the discipline can't give us anything but that, it should lapse into silence.

Ragging Rogers (or really, PBS Kids)

It might not surprise you that I couldn't sell this one at this moment. I've launched on the Muppets  before.

Here for the Children

By Crispin Sartwell

Portrayed by Tom Hanks and the subject of award-winning documentaries, Mr. Fred Rogers stands "in this dark moment" as "a symbol of hope," a reminder of everything wholesome and sweet that we, the American people, lost in the last election. Meanwhile, the Muppets are back, selling insurance as only they - or at least only they and a CGI gecko or a live emu (oh, and Flo, of course) - can. I remember them well: Rogers and the Muppets were featured in the afternoon on the PBS station when I was raising small children in the '90s and '00s. No doubt Carmen Sandiego is still out there walking the earth, like Cain with GPS.

That Mr. Rogers and the Muppets - and the Magic Schoolbus, and (for all I know) Dragon Tales and (God help us) Caillou - are back is not surprising, because generations of children were basted in them. And it might not be surprising, either, that the nostalgia is particularly strong at the moment, when our politics and our media seem to many former and current PBS viewers to be particularly nasty. One thing is certain about the Muppets and Mr. Rogers: they are nice. Incredibly insipid, perhaps, but nice as the day is long: nice as hell, we might say. Far too nice to hurt you, or indeed amuse you in any way.

Meanwhile, PBS Kids is going strong, even though digital people have taken over from their furry or fleshly forebears. But the formula for such shows as Ready Jet Go! remains the same: every moment an improving message. Every character, every set, every line, each character has only, is only, a message. These shows are there to improve you, kid; they are didactic in every dimension, written, often, by educational theorists and psychologists. And only a churl would deny that human beings are better now than when Sesame Street went on the air.

The PBS Kids operation has been building progressive politics into repetitions of the alphabet and riveting dramatizations of long division and gravity for half a century now. Every color and tone of voice has been psychologically studied for its improving effects. A child, after all, must never not be carefully molded. PBS made the work of learning fun, sort of, or made the fun of childhood into work.

In my household, I did enforce an absolute ban on Rogers, not particularly difficult in that he managed to avoid the multi-platform merchandising that has always swirled around the Muppets, and which - along with their innovative 'intersectional' identities as puppets and marionettes - embodies their real cultural contribution. Rogers had already peaked by the '90s.

But kindness and sweetness and simplicity are never over, you churl, I hear you saying, and your (that is, my) kind of cynicism is just what Mr. Rogers was fighting against, insofar as he was fighting. He reassured us, taught us that everything was going to be okay after all. That the dialogue was indistinguishable from moronism is just what we loved about him most. And the monarchism that his puppets embodied was a misleading guide to his politics, for he was democratic to his soul, perhaps.

I didn't manage to banish Sesame Street with the same success as I got rid of Rogers, though I never bought any child a Tickle Me Elmo. In my house, SS counted from 1 to 10 continually, hectoringly, in a roaring riot of color (it was a controversial innovation when they went to 30) and retailed the alphabet to unsuspecting toddlers three times an hour for years on end. Today, many American adults, including my own children, can count from 1 to 10 and run through the alphabet. Perhaps we owe these things, like our insight into the many sorts of policies offered by Farmers insurance, or the profound cultural backlash that led to Donald Trump's presidency, to the Muppets.