Alan Jacobs

Finally this uncertainty drives Kandel, no less than Boyd and Pagel, back to the first principles of Darwinism, which are remorselessly utilitarian. And once again the connection of those principles to art is asserted rather than demonstrated. The “exercise in reading minds, which portrait painting provides, is perhaps not only pleasurable but also useful, sharpening our ability to infer what other people are thinking and feeling.” Or, again: “And that is why we generate, appreciate, and desire art: art improves our understanding of social and emotional cues, which are important for survival.” But could the amount of effort that goes into making a painting possibly be justified on these grounds, when each of us gets “exercise” in interpreting faces thousands of times a day? And don’t artworks regularly introduce us to faces we love because they are uninterpretable, or because they express things utterly beyond the domain of practical life? And what about landscapes and still lifes and abstract forms—what social cues do we learn from them? And does our experience tell us that people who spend much of their lives looking at art, or reading novels, or listening to string quartets—much less the people who make them—are better adjusted, more socially adept, and more likely to produce many children than those who do not?

The problem with Darwinian aesthetics and neuroaesthetics is not that art is like religion, something divine that can only be violated by bringing it back to the realm of biology. Aesthetics is different, in that the facts it has to work with are terrestrial, this-worldly. They are the feelings and the thoughts we have in response to works of art, and the feelings and the thoughts that lead us to want to create them in the first place. So it would seem that there is no reason, in principle, why these cannot be illuminated by evolution. But this can only happen if we begin with a full and accurate account of what we are trying to explain.

mwfrost:

(via Galileo Galilei, Drawings of the Moon)

Can I opt to only trust empirical claims from scientists who can do this with pen and ink?

Yesterday 2 lectures, re-drafting findings of Committee on Emergency Exams …. and then a great event: an evening Inklings. I reached the Mitre at 8 where I was joined by C.W. and the Red Admiral (Havard), resolved to take fuel on board before joining the well-oiled diners in Magdalen (C.S.L. and Owen Barfield). C.S.L. was highly flown, but we were also in good fettle; while O.B. is the only man who can tackle C.S.L. making him define everything and interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s. The result was a most amusing and highly contentious evening, on which (had an outsider eavesdropped) he would have thought it a meeting of fell enemies hurling deadly insults before drawing their guns. Warnie was in excellent majoral form. On one occasion when the audience had flatly refused to hear Jack discourse on and define ‘Chance’, Jack said: 'Very well, some other time, but if you die tonight you’ll be cut off knowing a great deal less about Chance than you might have.’ Warnie: 'That only illustrates what I’ve always said: every cloud has a silver lining.’

Is fantasy intrinsically hostile to technology? That is, was Tolkien simply drawing out what is already there in the genre? Or has he limited it in unnecessary ways? What would a fantasy that embraces technology look like? Arthur Weasley’s fascination with Muggle tech in the Harry Potter books is simply comical – though a great source of fun in the books. I’d like to see a writer imagine what technologies would arise in a fictional world where magic rules but is not the only game in town. Is that too much to ask?

What I think we lack sometimes is confidence that in the long run of things, a certain kind of homespun wisdom wins out in culture. When you look at the social transformations of the last two centuries in many societies, there are some you can credit to the forcible intervention of the state or dominant social classes, but a lot that just sort of incrementally and complicatedly happened. Sometimes because things that used to make sense just stopped making sense, or the cost of a certain kind of practice became higher for pervasive and unplanned reasons. Sure, you can keep talking about why guns are a bad idea, or why the fantasies of certain gun-owners are just actively dangerous or wrong. (Say, that it would have helped anything for there to be three or four guys carrying handguns in Aurora. Anybody with police or military experience, any responsible gun owner, knows that’s stupid bravado.) The conversation can continue. I think the more curious, the more exploratory, the more interested in the range of actually-lived practices people are (on all sides), the more possible it becomes for real change to occur, for the great knotted muscle at the heart of contemporary American life to relax, unwind and open up.

The structure here is not easy for the lay viewer to decode. [Rhythmic gymnastics] has its own language, which non-RG initiates mostly perceive as a series of ultrasonic clicks and emoji hearts. What, for instance, is the precise distinction between the tournaments Miss Valentine 2012 (Tartu, Estonia, February 10-12), Pearls of Varna 2012 Academic (Bulgaria, July 2), and the 4th International Waves Cup (Germany, March 24)? I have read the rulebook in effect for the Olympics, the 125-page Code of Points: Rhythmic Gymnastics 2009-2012, and let me tell you — you thought football had a lot going on. Between the aggro-ballet terminology (fouetté, entrelacé), the extensive use of pictograms, and the radical linguistic uncertainty (“The French version is the official text,” the front cover proclaims, in English), this thing reads like Finnegans Wake as drafted by the unicorn debate team. It’s atavistically beautiful, like middle school cave art, until you realize that all the squiggly shapes represent positions to be assumed by the human body. At which point it becomes … extremely terrifying.

The market economy must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature.

Chick-fil-A should not be prevented from opening business because of the views of its leaders, or his donations to anti-gay causes. But gays and lesbians in Illinois and Massachusetts have the right to be free from discrimination in employment based on who they are. They also have a right to protest, boycott, and make Chick-fil-A’s customers aware that their purchases fund anti-gay activism. If Chick-fil-A discriminates in hiring or refuses to serve customers on the basis of sexual orientation, the local authorities can and should hold him accountable.

Until then, the politicians should get out of the way.

Some people — in comments, on Twitter and elsewhere — are defending what Emanuel and Menino are doing on the ground that the Chick-fil-A is not being punished for the views of its CEO, but because it donates money to Bad Groups (i.e., conservative groups), and since money is not speech, there is nothing wrong with this. Aside from the fact that the city officials do not even claim this to be the case (they’re open about the fact that they’re acting to punish the company for the political views of the CEO), suppose a town in Alabama or Montana or Central California were to enact this ordinance:

Any resident found to have donated money to a group advocating same-sex marriage or abortion rights — including, without limitation, Human Rights Campaign or Planned Parenthood — shall be barred from opening or operating a business in this city.

For those offering the defense I just referenced, what possible grounds would you have for objecting to such an ordinance (other than to say that it’s OK when the state punishes views that you dislike, not ones you like)?

But liberals should recognize the parallels between even this stronger argument and the (once successful, but ultimately failed) public health arguments for Prohibition almost a century back. The consumption of alcohol, like the ownership and use of firearms, carries all kinds of second-order risks, and it’s easy to run a Foer-style argument against the claim that the happiness people derive from beer and wine and liquor is worth the toll that alcoholic beverages take on life and limb and happiness: (How many of the thousands of Americans killed by drunk drivers every year does your desire for a cold Dogfish Head justify? How many lives ruined by alcoholism? How much spousal abuse? Etc.) It’s true that gun ownership is not as culturally ubiquitous as drinking, but it’s pretty ubiquitous indeed: 47 percent of Americans report having a firearm in the home, and there may be as many as 270 million privately-owned guns in the United States. So if you actually wanted to put a real dent in accidental firearm deaths, you would need not just a ban on large magazines or stiffer background checks for gun purchasers, but an actual Prohibition-style campaign, complete with busts and raids and so forth, whose goal would be not only be a simple policy change but the rooting-out of a very well-entrenched aspect of American culture. And the experience of Prohibition itself suggests plenty of reasons to be dubious that such a campaign would ultimately be worth the cost.