Alan Jacobs

Hollywood uses copyright law to shut down pirate movie theaters. Apple uses copyright law to shut down unauthorized clones of its hardware products. Even Red Hat relies on copyright law to help it enforce the GPL license, which prohibits third parties from incorporating open source code into proprietary products. The fact that these businesses have chosen monetization strategies that don’t involve selling copies of content directly to the general public doesn’t mean they don’t benefit from copyright protection.

Yet while these business models rely on copyright, they’re not particularly vulnerable to the scourge of online file sharing. I’m sure you could get a pirated copy of Apple’s iOS on the Internet, but it’s not going to do you much good without an iPhone to run it on. You can get a copy of the latest Hollywood blockbuster on BitTorrent, but the experience isn’t the same as seeing it on the big screen with your friends.

So copyright isn’t dying. All that’s happening is that a particular strategy for monetizing creative works is becoming less viable. That’s a shame, and it’s creating real dislocations for people who have built businesses around that strategy. But luckily there are lots of other companies around who don’t rely on it, and copyright is serving them just fine.

So I (and several others) had a debate on Twitter today with Megan McArdle about children on airplanes. Megan’s basic argument, as expressed in this tweet and elsewhere is that, out of courtesy for others, parents of small children should avoid bringing them onto airplanes except when absolutely necessary. Here’s why Megan is wrong:

1. The vast majority of small children on airplanes make no noise at all, or make easily ignored noise, or cry at takeoff and landing because their ears hurt. None of those is a big deal for anyone. It’s only the worst-case scenario, the child crying throughout the duration of a long flight, when the inconveniencing of others becomes a significant consideration. But among all the small children who fly, what percentage cry through a whole flight, or even much of it? My guess, based on thirty years of flying, is maybe one-tenth of one percent. Do we really want to recommend a policy for everyone based on what happens a tiny fraction of the time? Hard cases make bad law, and bad ethics too. It’s what you might call TSA logic.

2. Megan says that when a child cries through a whole flight, “The bulk of the cost of a screaming baby is born by the fifty-to-three-hundred other passengers, not parents.” First of all, even a screaming child won’t be heard throughout the plane, and will be a significant annoyance for, say, fifty people on a full flight. That’s a lot of people, you might say, but let’s be careful about how we calculate these things: we don’t want to say that fifty people suffering some frustration is fifty times worse than one person suffering it, or else we’ll have to end up agreeing that the net amount of pain American commuters go through on the highways each day equals the pain experienced in the Armenian genocide. Fifty people (or for that matter 300) being annoyed during their flight doesn’t amount to all that much suffering. And the number of people affected will be diminished if some of the passagers have headphones or earplugs. (By the way: why don’t more people bring earplugs on flights? The same reason that people don’t think to bring crash helmets when they drive: the kind of problem that Megan wants to avoid happens so rarely that they don’t think to.)

3. But let’s say that I know that my child is going to cry through a whole long flight. (No one in fact knows that, and again, the chances of that happening are very small indeed, but I’ll grant the next-to-impossible for the moment.) Should I refrain from flying in order to avoid inconveniencing my fellow travelers? I suppose that would depend on why I am traveling. Let’s consider a common scenario: We’re going to Disney World. To avoid subjecting people to a crying child on a flight to Orlando, we could stay home; or we could choose a different vacation destination; or we could drive to Orlando. All of those choices impose a pretty significant cost on my family — even driving, which Megan seems to recommend. If the problem she wants to avoid is children crying on a long flight, then almost by definition Orlando is going to be beyond reasonable driving distance. If it takes us two days to drive to Orlando and two days to drive back, we’re losing a good chunk of our vacation. Should we do that in order to avoid making people on the plane listen to our screaming child? Would that be “common courtesy”? That’s setting an extremely high bar for the “common.” (It would be interesting to poll the people affected — our fellow passengers — on this point. Would most fliers think that parents who know their child is going to cry for an entire flight have a moral obligation to refrain from flying? to stay home? to go somewhere for vacation they don’t really want to go? to leave the children with … someone and take a vacation on their own?)

The one time I can remember having to listen to a child cry on an airplane for hours and hours came on a transatlantic flight. It was pretty miserable; it went on and on and on. But again it was a transatlantic flight, which means that (a) there were no other reasonable transportation options — should the family have taken the Queen Mary? — and (b) they weren’t likely to be traveling on a lark. And though I sat quite close to the family I didn’t suffer nearly as much as the poor parents did, who tried everything possible to quiet their child and were evidently shattered by the time we touched down. So yes, it was miserable, but it was a freak situation, and just tough luck for everyone concerned. These things happen. You don’t tell millions of people they shouldn’t fly because there’s some tiny chance, not of catastrophe, but of mere annoyance. That’s just absurd.

Also, I can’t believe I’ve written so many words about this.

While I think one has to be careful about giving the poor a pass for immoral behavior because they are poor — a tendency the religious left tends to have, as if poverty, or relative poverty, conferred innocence — it is also true that the religious right tends to overlook greed when it manifests among the “respectable” upper classes. We see the insane wafflemaker frenzy at Wal-mart and rightly are revolted. But how is the greed so nakedly on display there worse than the greedy frenzy that has taken place, and regularly takes place, on Wall Street? If we are going to condemn the greed of the poor and lower middle class on Black Friday, we had better be sure to hold the wealthy to higher standards. And vice versa. Greed is greed is greed.

Kahneman never grapples philosophically with the nature of rationality. He does, however, supply a fascinating account of what might be taken to be its goal: happiness. What does it mean to be happy? When Kahneman first took up this question, in the mid 1990s, most happiness research relied on asking people how satisfied they were with their life on the whole. But such retrospective assessments depend on memory, which is notoriously unreliable. What if, instead, a person’s actual experience of pleasure or pain could be sampled from moment to moment, and then summed up over time? Kahneman calls this “experienced” well-being, as opposed to the “remembered” well-being that researchers had relied upon. And he found that these two measures of happiness diverge in surprising ways. What makes the “experiencing self” happy is not the same as what makes the “remembering self” happy. In particular, the remembering self does not care about duration — how long a pleasant or unpleasant experience lasts. Rather, it retrospectively rates an experience by the peak level of pain or pleasure in the course of the experience, and by the way the experience ends.

This last example suggests why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today. We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with genuine achievement. We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape the blame. And we imagine that the worst evils can be blamed exclusively on subterranean demons, rather than on the follies that often flow from fine words and high ideals.

We shall see where this goes, but in the meantime the Via Meadia advice to investment banks, hedge funds, government officials and others trying to read the tea leaves of world unrest is simple: make sure that among your prognosticators and analysts you include a few strong liberal arts generalists with a strong background in European history from the Renaissance forward. The modernization process got its start in Europe and the nascent Anglosphere, and the history of those societies provides valuable clues to the forces now unleashed on a wider world.

It was said of Socrates, that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee houses.

As a writer of science fiction — a label he tried strenuously to shed, not wanting his books to be shelved in the genre ghetto — [Vonnegut] was curiously blasé, even antagonistic, about the moon landing on July 20, 1969. On a broadcast with Walter Cronkite, Gloria Steinem and others, he dissed the entire enterprise and reiterated his view that the $33 billion should have been spent “cleaning up our filthy colonies here on Earth.” The avuncular Cronkite let it go, but CBS was swamped with furious letters. (For the record, many of the writers felt that Steinem too had been “un-American.”)

This song does my soul good. The great Martin Simpson, “Pretty Crowing Chicken.”

Bodhidharma’s alleged interview with the Emperor Wu of Liang is typical of his abrupt and direct manner. For the Emperor described all that he had done to promote the practice of Buddhism, and asked what merit he had gained thereby — taking the popular view that Buddhism is a gradual accumulation of merit through good deeds, leading to better and better circumstances in future lives, and finally to nirvana. But Bodhidharma replied, “No merit whatever!” This so undermined the Emperor’s idea of Buddhism that he asked, “What, then, is the sacred doctrine’s first principle?” Bodhidharma replied, “It’s just empty; there’s nothing sacred.” “Who, then, are you,” said the Emperor, “to stand before us?” “I don’t know.”