books – Jeroen Bouterse

Look On My Works

I have put off reading G.H. Hardy’s Mathematician’s Apology (1940)to the end for too long. Now that I have, I can say with conviction that if you ever find yourself needing to justify why people should learn at least some mathematics, then this is the text to avoid, and Hardy provides the arguments you should stay away from furthest. And yet, it grew on me as an honest presentation of Hardy’s perspective on why anything is worth doing.

Hardy doubted that composing his Apology was one of those things. In the first paragraph, he apologizes for it: writing about mathematics is the business of second-rate minds, unable to do innovative math themselves. He assures us that he is only embarking on it because past sixty, he is now too old to do the real thing. This sets the tone for an essay full of quick and haughty judgments. Compliments paid with authority to the greats, confident generalizations based on personal or historical anecdote, and a great deal of dismissive hand-waving towards people or things beneath Hardy’s attention. “Newton made a quite competent Master of the Mint”, Hardy knows; and on we go, to the next item of an enumeration illustrating that mathematicians past their prime rarely excel in anything else. In a footnote, he is generous enough to add: “Pascal seems the best.”

Should we move on from Hitler?

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

In Timur Vermes’ best-selling novel Er ist wieder da (‘He’s back’), Adolf Hitler wakes up in Berlin. Somewhat disoriented after discovering the year is 2011, he soon finds his way to the public eye again: he is understandably regarded as a skilled Hitler impersonator, an excellent ironic act for a 21^st-century comedy show. His handlers don’t mind the fact that he never breaks character.

Clips make it to YouTube, and the ‘Führer’ becomes a beloved persona. After humiliating the ineffectual leader of a far-right fringe party, he is assaulted by skinheads. Politicians express their sympathies, a book deal follows. The novel ends with its main character at the head of an up-and-coming party, whose slogan is: Es war nicht alles schlecht – “it wasn’t all bad”.

Vermes puts Hitler in a Germany that believes it is finally able to laugh at him, or at itself through him. Commercial media encourage his popularity, which at first seems tongue-in-cheek but gradually turns out to be more than that. The country is unprepared for his literal-minded and violent racist madness – and for the traction it subtly gathers, the threads in our own discourse that it starts to pull on again. Everyone thinks they know Hitler, but fails to recognize him when he is among us now.

I thought of this story again as I read historian Alec Ryrie’s new book The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. Ryrie’s thesis is that after the Second World War, the Atlantic and European world placed Hitler at the center of the Western value system (as its negative mirror image). This went at the cost of another historical figure, whose return we have similarly stopped expecting: in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jesus had represented a moral authority that was deeply felt not just by Christians, but also by free-thinkers and atheists. In the mid-twentieth century, Nazism became the new moral absolute. This model lasted for decades, but Ryrie discerns a new cultural shift, one that is happening now. With the age of Atlantic hegemony, the ‘age of Hitler’ is coming to an end too. What lies beyond it is still up for grabs.

Echte progressieven

(voor Over de Muur)

Maarten Boudry’s nieuwe boek, Het verraad aan de verlichting, gaat over hoe progressieven in onze tijd de waarden en idealen van de Verlichting verloochenen. Postmodernisme en westerse zelfhaat zitten volgens hem een betere toekomst in de weg. Zijn kritiek mist echter vaak doel.

Met Verlichting bedoelt Boudry een houding van vertrouwen in wetenschap, technologie en vooruitgang. Het eerste hoofdstuk is dan ook een veeg uit de pan naar postmoderne relativisten die in de tweede helft van de vorige eeuw het geloof in waarheid, rationaliteit en rechtvaardigheid hebben ondermijnd. Foucault, Derrida, en Bruno Latour bijvoorbeeld. Zij ontzeggen ons de mogelijkheid te appelleren aan een gedeelde werkelijkheid. Zo kreeg Latour nooit de zin over zijn lippen dat klimaatopwarming gewoon een ‘objectief feit’ is, merkt Boudry op.

Dat is een klassiek bezwaar tegen postmodernisme, dat teruggaat op de science wars van de jaren ’90. Mijn vraag is wel waar al die relativisten intussen gebleven zijn. Progressieven hebben heden ten dage geen enkele moeite met woorden als ‘facts’, ‘science’ en ‘justice’. Boudry is dat niet ontgaan, en zijn uitleg is dat mensen selectief dingen deconstrueren waar ze toch al van af wilden; relativisme over klimaatwetenschap hoeven we van linkse academici (met uitzondering dus van Latour) in de regel niet te verwachten.

Relativeert dat niet het gevaar van relativisme als geheel? Niet volgens Boudry; reactionaire krachten hebben de kunst van het twijfel-zaaien namelijk met succes afgekeken, zodat we rechtse klimaatscepsis indirect te danken hebben aan linkse sociologen. Als dat klopt is het een aardig staaltje historische ironie, maar blijft onduidelijk wat progressieven nu nog te verwijten valt. De daders die Boudry aanklaagt zijn in elk geval reeds overleden.

The System, the Rebels, and the People

(For 3 Quarks Daily)

I have been re-reading Paradise Lost, prompted by the battle between Immortals and demons in the movie Ne Zha 2. The film, if you have not seen it, depicts a ruling party turned into a vehicle for the personal ambitions of its leader. If you ask me, that is; consider yourself warned that I am rather strongly disposed these days to connect everything to contemporary politics.

Whether the poem explores forms of resistance after the battle to depose a ruthless dictator has been lost, or whether Satan is an opportunistic agitator, campaigning on draining the swamp but in fact only out to be worshipped himself – or both – modern analogies easily suggest themselves. William Empson compared Milton’s God to Joseph Stalin.[1] If I don’t name names, it is out of respect both for you the reader and for the heroes in Milton’s poem, which are more eloquent, less petty, and show more depth than their counterparts in present-day anti-democratic politics.

Becoming Liberal

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

Even after discussing Daniel Chandler’s inspiring application of John Rawls in my previous column, I remain on the lookout for a book that delivers a sweeping, original and sound vision for the future of the liberal and democratic world, saves it from its social problems through policy proposals that are simultaneously transformative and unthreatening (enough for all interested parties to accept and implement them immediately), and provides a sure and painless path to undercutting popular support for illiberal and authoritarian politics. Ideally, it also solves climate change and ends factory farming, and does not require me personally to change too much. Disappointingly, Alexandre Lefebvre’s new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, only achieves some of these things.

More here

Liberalism for the future

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

In 2015, political scientist Larry Diamond warned against defeatism in the face of what he called the democratic recession. “It is vital that democrats in the established democracies not lose faith. […] If the current modest recession of democracy spirals into a depression, it will be because those of us in the established democracies were our own worst enemies.” A few years later, as the world’s most powerful democracy had decided to play out that darker option, Diamond wrote with more urgency about how to protect liberal democracy worldwide. In Ill winds, he emphasized the need to provide not only a rejection of alternatives, but a positive vision. “Democracy must demonstrate that it is a just and fair political system that advances humane values and the common good.”

Daniel Chandler places his book Free and Equal (2023) in this same context: for fifteen years in a row, more countries have experienced democratic backsliding than improvement, and the threatened state of democracy worldwide makes it “tempting to go on the defensive”. However, just playing defense is not enough; an ambitious vision for improvement is necessary. “In a moment that calls for creativity and boldness, all too often we find timidity or, worse, scepticism and cynicism”. Chandler believes he has found a recipe for combining the values of liberalism with the spirit of progress and reform.

More here

Cats And Kantians

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

Without really looking into them, I have always felt sceptical of Kantian approaches to animal ethics. I never really trust them to play well with creatures who are different from us. Only recently, I cared to pick up a book to see what such an approach would actually look like in practice: Christine Korsgaard’s Fellow creatures (2018). An exciting and challenging reading experience, that not only made a very good case for Kantianism (of course), but also forced me to come to terms with some rather strange implications of my own views.

More here

Striving Or Suffering?

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

The cover of Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals (2023) shows a humpback whale breaching: a magnificent sight, intended to evoke both respect for the animal’s dignity, and interest in its particular forms of behavior. Here is a creature which has moral standing, without being a direct mirror of our human selves.

It is more than mere illustration of the argument. Nussbaum consciously relies on pathos as well as on philosophical reasoning: she announces from the outset that she seeks to awaken wonder and compassion in us with respect to our fellow animals, and productive outrage about how we treat them (9). No objection so far; our treatment of animals is, in many contexts (factory farming in particular), not at heart a philosophical issue, in the sense that there are no tenable metaphysical, anthropological, or ethical theories that can take a serious shot at justifying it. It is an issue that requires attention more than it requires deep or subtle thought.

More here

Can. They. Suffer.

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

Human treatment of animals is a moral calamity at an outrageous scale, that I can get from zero to really quite worked up about in a matter of seconds. For fear of hurting the cause, I allow myself to take part in polite conversation about the dead bodies on the dinner table only if there is a more soft-spoken ally nearby. Two minutes into the conversation, when I find myself suppressing the urge to yell at a meat apologist how that kind of excuse might equally well be used to justify eating human babies, I am often grateful that there is somebody who can steer the conversation instead towards the socially acceptable topic of plant-based recipes.

It especially helps if they look fit (which they always do!), and are able to say with a straight face that “it’s perfectly simple to lead a healthy lifestyle and cook a tasty dinner without using meat”. Meanwhile, I don’t know how to cook a tasty dinner no matter the ingredients, and I have rarely given a moment’s thought to what it takes to lead a healthy lifestyle. It’s completely beside the point, is what I’m really thinking while nodding along. We were not talking about precisely how full of life everyone feels when their alarm clock rings, were we; we were talking about the food on your plate; about the moral issue, about the crime …

Luckily, things do not depend on my ability to express myself eloquently and effectively without alienating everyone present. I can also simply try to nudge people towards reading Peter Singer, especially now that he published an updated version of his Animal Liberation. What follows are basically my notes from reading this 2023 edition, with very few thoughts of my own mixed in. If you have immediate access to the book itself, switch to that; if not, you might as well keep on reading and buy or borrow it afterwards.

More here

How Woke Was The Enlightenment?

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

At the core of Susan Neiman’s new book Left is not Woke, which is an attempt to sever what she sees as reactionary intellectual tendencies from admirable progressive goals, is the idea that for progressive values to be sustainable, their roots in the philosophy of the European Enlightenment need to be recognized and nourished. “If we continue to misconstrue the Enlightenment”, she says, “we can hardly appeal to its resources.”

The misconstruction that Neiman alludes to is a view that sees Enlightenment thought as deeply hypocritical: talking the talk of liberty and equality, but guilty in practice of systematic motivated reasoning that at best failed to question, and at worst actively contributed to racist and sexist ideologies justifying oppression by European men. Her double thesis is that this is an inaccurate view of enlightened thought, and that bad-mouthing the Enlightenment in this way leads us to discard indispensable tools for combating injustice in the present.

More here