Blogs, articles, CV
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Several years before C.P. Snow gave his famous lecture on the two cultures, the American physicist I.I. Rabi wrote about the problem of the disunity between the sciences and the humanities. “How can we hope”, he asked, “to obtain wisdom, the wisdom which is meaningful in our own time? We certainly cannot attain it as long as the two great branches of human knowledge, the sciences and the humanities, remain separate and even warring disciplines.”
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On November 22nd, a far-right party received almost a quarter of the vote in the Dutch national elections, making it by far the largest of the fifteen parties elected to our new Parliament. Whether it will actually get to govern depends on its capacity to form a coalition, but what is certain is that it will take 37 out of 150 seats in the legislature this week; twelve more than the second-largest party.
International media reporting on this landslide all noted what the party and its leader Geert Wilders represented over the last decades: his aggressive attacks on Islam and his slurs on minorities with Islamic country backgrounds, his softness on Putin’s Russia, his resistance to climate measures, and his calls for a ‘Nexit’, to name a few. While Dutch media and (to-be) opposition parties have certainly not ignored these points, they barely played a role in the campaign, and in the initial domestic interpretation of Wilders’ victory.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In 2022, I worked harder than before to keep my students’ tables free of smartphones. That this is a matter for negotiation at all, is because on the surface, the devices do so many things, and students often make a reasonable, possibly-good-faith case for using it for a specific purpose. I forgot my calculator; can I use my phone? No, thank you for asking, but you won’t be needing a calculator; just start with this exercise here, and don’t forget to simplify your fractions. Can I listen to music while I work? Yeah, uhm, no, I happen to be a big believer in collaborative work, I guess. Can I check my solutions online please? Ah, very good; but instead, use this printout that I bring to every one of your classes these days. I’m done, can I quickly look up my French homework? That’s a tough one, but no; it’s seven minutes to the bell anyway and I prepared a small Kahoot quiz on today’s topic. (So everyone please get your phones out.)
As a matter of classroom management, some of these questions are more of a judgment call than eating and drinking in class (not allowed, with some exceptions immediately after a PE lesson) but less complicated than bathroom visits (allowed in principle, but in need of limits that I may never be able to express algorithmically). In spite, however, of the superficial similarities between these phenomena – all subject to teacher- and class-specific settlements, informed and assisted by school-wide institutions such as regulations and phone bags – it feels as if more is at stake when it comes to smartphones. I sense more urgency, as if I’m laboring to stop a tide from coming in; as if what I am inclined to view as ‘complex’ and ‘multi-faceted’ and ‘also an interesting challenge, actually’ is actually one big thing only: an external force threatening to infiltrate my classroom and undo what I am trying to achieve there (which is called ‘education’ and which is therefore plainly also one big thing). I don’t feel this way about chewing gum.
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I’m not sold on longtermism myself, but its proponents sure have my sympathy for the eagerness with which its opponents mine their arguments for repugnant conclusions. The basic idea, that we ought to do more for the benefit of future lives than we are doing now, is often seen as either ridiculous or dangerous.
Usually, this takes the form of thought-experiments in which longtermists are supposed to accept major harm to humanity now in the hope of some huge potential benefit later. Physicist and YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, after boasting that she couldn’t be bothered to read William MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future (“because if the future thinks I owe it, I’ll wait until it sends an invoice”), goes on to interpret a paper by MacAskill and his colleague Hilary Greaves in this way: “a few million deaths are acceptable, so long as we don’t go extinct.” Phil Torres takes aim at an updated version of the same paper, in which Greaves and MacAskill argue that possible futures with huge numbers of people, even if they are unlikely, represent an expected value that outweighs that of the near future. He reads it as implying that MacAskill and Greaves might well press a button that lets 1 million people die now, to increase the chance that 100 trillion people will be born later.
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Francis Fukuyama does not mind having to play defense. Recognizing that the problems plaguing liberal societies result in no small part from the flaws and weaknesses of liberalism itself, he argues in Liberalism and its Discontents (Profile Books: 2022) that the response to these problems, all said and done, is liberalism. This requires some courage: three decades ago, Fukuyama may have captured the spirit of the age, but the spirit has grown impatient with liberalism as of late. Fukuyama, however, does not think of it as a worn-out ideal. He has taken note of right-wing assaults, as well as progressive criticisms that suggest a need to go beyond it; and his verdict is that any attempt at improvement will either stay in a liberal orbit or lead to political decay. Liberalism is still the best we have got.
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“The constant direct mode of address was a chore. No one will enjoy having this read to them.” Quoting from a referee report on the Nicomachean Ethics misses the point of James Warren’s hilarious rejection letter, but I looked it up because I remember thinking that the fictional critic was onto something, and not just about Aristotle. “I had the impression at times that some kind of conversational or dialectical background was being assumed but this is not at all marked in the text.” Indeed! Why hide the fun part?
I owe several very happy moments to well-executed philosophical dialogues: Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations, Larry Laudan’s Science and Relativism, and Aristotle’s former supervisor come to mind. I will be ever so grateful to anybody who can point me to similarly exciting conversations. The dialogue form draws and holds the attention: it can let worldviews clash in the abstract, but it can simultaneously delve into matters of detail without becoming boring – these details having been established, after all, to flow not just from the idiosyncratic preoccupations of one contingent mind, but from larger intellectual interests common to at least two separate perspectives.
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