So here’s a prediction: long before the Berkshire Hathaway warrants expire, many of the papers Buffett has invested in will have reduced both print days and their newsroom staff, and journalists will be writing the “What went wrong with the Media General deal?” story.The answer to that question is already apparent: Buffett wants to talk like a philanthropist and an investor at the same time, not understanding that the public good and the bottom line have diverged. A newspaper used to be both a profitable business and a public service, but this was just an accident of the competitive (or rather uncompetitive) media landscape. His commonsense approach to saving papers won’t work, because there is no longer any commonsense business model for a former monopoly that is still seeing its revenues erode faster than its costs.
And when you think Google, think… well, think long-term. I feel like Facebook is probably an easier place to work than Google these days. Facebook is all huge numbers going up, up, up everyday—everything except the share price, but that will come in time. Google, on the other hand, is Google+ and its undead shambling… but damn, it’s also Project Glass, and those cars that can drive themselves! Google is getting good, really good, at building things that see the world around them and actually understand what they’re seeing.In this context, Google+ is not the company’s most strategic project. That distinction goes to Glass, to the self-driving cars, and to Google Maps, Street View, and Earth: Google’s detailed model of the real, physical world.
bad naturalism
The big problem with this post by Will Wilkinson is not that he makes the Christian interlocutor a rather dim strawman — though he does that — but that he gives his Naturalist such a philosophically inept form of naturalism. Among the several philosophical errors Naturalist makes, the most significant is collapsing the distinction between moral and aesthetic judgment. He says, “All judgment functions like taste,” which might be true, depending on what you mean by “like.” But then he goes on to say, “Aristotle basically teaches that the practical wisdom is a matter of sensibility.” No, he doesn’t. Aristotle doesn’t teach anything remotely resembling that. Naturalist thinks if Aristotle agrees that moral judgments can’t be reached through an iron-clad chain of logical inferences and deductions, then all we have left is “taste” or “sensibility.” But that’s just wrong.
First of all, Aristotle didn’t have a concept of “taste” or “sensibility”: those are largely eighteenth-century ideas, stemming from the work Earl of Shaftesbury and Edmund Burke’s early essay on the sublime and the beautiful. Kant drew on these thinkers when in his Critique of Judgment he made the first really major contribution to aesthetics, the key to which is his belief that proper aesthetic judgments are “subjective universals.” But Kant, like every other serious philosopher, understood that we make our aesthetic judgments in very different ways and on wholly different grounds than we make our ethical judgments, which is why he also wrote the Critique of Practical Reason — a very Aristotelian book in many respects.
From reading Aristotle and Kant together, you can learn that moral judgments aren’t like the judgments of pure reason, but they aren’t like the judgments of aesthetic taste either. They are their own thing, and in making them we have to work really hard to develop the prudential wisdom necessary to apply general moral laws to unique particular situations. As Aristotle pointed out in the Nicomachaean Ethics, even the best laws are too general to interpret themselves, so we’ll always need people with practical wisdom (phronesis) and a sense of equity.
Naturalist, in Wilkinson’s dialogue, can’t see any real difference among the following judgments:
(a) The idea of eating pork grosses me out, so I won’t do it.
(b) I dislike pork.
© I think it’s wrong to be cruel to people.
For Naturalist, all of those are matters of “taste” or “sensibility.” In fact, none of them is a matter of taste or sensibility in the usual philosophical vocabulary. The first one isn’t even a judgment at all. And all of them are different kinds of responses made for different reasons. Naturalist can’t see those vital distinctions, and has to work with a simplistic binary opposition between “logic” and “taste”: “Morality just isn’t like logic, and the conclusions of moral arguments are pretty much never ‘rationally mandatory.’ Again, I’ve got Aristotle on my side. Morality isn’t much like math and it’s an elementary error to expect moral arguments to have the clarity and certainty of math or logic.” This statement makes one of the most elementary philosophical errors you can make, which is to conflate “logic” and “reason.” Aristotle never made that mistake, and in fact was quite clear in keeping the necessary distinctions, so Naturalist certainly doesn’t have Aristotle on his side. Just the reverse, in fact.
So before Naturalist can have a useful argument with Christian, Naturalist needs to read more philosophy. His simplistic binary division of the world of judgments leaves him with no leverage in the world of action. He can only say that some people have better taste than others, without being able to explain why or how this is so; still less could he try to make a case for following a particular moral path — say, the path of kindness rather than cruelty. Fortunately for naturalism, there are far better arguments out there than any that Wilkinson’s Naturalist makes. (But don’t tell anyone! I don’t want to give aid and comfort to the enemy!)
Chicago, from the BPL’s Travel Poster Collection
The famous white horse of the first FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium, 1923. In fact the horse, whose name was Billy, was not white but rather gray, and as can be seen, he wasn’t the only horse at Wembley that day, just the most visible one. But he did his work well. The policeman riding him, George Scorey, has an entry in the DNB.
This is worth remembering because mounted policemen still offer one of the most effective, and least threatening, means of crowd control. Police departments have an immoderate love of technology and so have increasingly neglected the great effectiveness of equestrian policing. And as one cop on horseback has commented, “Nobody ever tried to pet my police car, but they line up to pet my horse.”
Yet another problem solved by XKCD
You might thus assume that superhero comics, the original properties on which these franchises are built, are in flush times. They aren’t. The upper limit on sales of a superhero comic book these days is about 230,000; just two or three series routinely break into six digits. Twenty years ago, during the comic industry’s brief Dutch-tulip phase, hot issues of “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” sold millions.Where this audience went is a bit of a puzzle, especially because comics, broadly speaking, are respectable as never before. Good cartoonists’ books are reviewed in the quality papers and nestled on readers’ shelves next to comic-book-inspired novels by Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem. Even the University of Chicago, where fun goes to die, recently held a three-day conference to which it invited brilliant cartoonists like Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes.
If no cultural barrier prevents a public that clearly loves its superheroes from picking up a new “Avengers” comic, why don’t more people do so? The main reasons are obvious: It is for sale not in a real bookstore but in a specialty shop, and it is clumsily drawn, poorly written and incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in years of arcane mythology.