A Garden at Last for Kolakowski

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was sorry to hear from Jeet’s recent post that Leszek Kolakowski had died. As an undergrad I read and read again his penetrating collection of essays in Modernity on Endless Trial – an inspired title, I always thought. Fittingly enough for someone who was influenced by Kant, he shook me from some of my immature dogmas.

For instance, Kolakowski convinced me of the pointlessness of efforts to resolve and overcome doctrinal differences among the various Christian denominations, an insight that helped inform what became my commitment to secular pluralism.

He also helped me to question and resist lazy ways of speaking about left and right, as though these terms were static and self-evident. His essay “How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist,” which Jeet has already reprinted in his post, should be required reading in Poli Sci 101.

And his amusing piece “The General Theory of Not Gardening” reminds us that intellectually we get what we project: whatever school of thought we are trained in shapes how we see the world and so much within it, and often to the exclusion of competing schools and methodologies. The essay in my view is a tacit argument for an interdiscipinary education. But perhaps for Kolakowski it was rather meant as a witty caution against too much learning, because, as he wrote, “it is much easier to have a theory than to garden.”

World’s leading black-studies scholar arrested

Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard University Professor who specializes in African-American studies, has been arrested at his home on dubious charges of disorderly conduct. A statement by Gates and link to the police report are here. Some judicious comments are found in this thread on Crooked Timber (where I found out about it).

Noblesse Oblige from Japan Tobacco

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wall Street Journal has just translated from Japanese a hilarious interview with Hiroshi Kimura, ostensibly Japan Tobacco Inc.’s president and chief executive. Either we are being had by another Sascha Baron Cohen character, or the translator is a  wicked prankster. This is high comedy: 

… Mr. Kimura has a law degree from Kyoto University and joined the company in 1976 when it was still a government domestic monopoly called Japan Tobacco and Salt Public Corp. “I wanted to work for an international firm, and so Japan Tobacco initially wasn’t within my top 10 choices, but it helped that I liked tobacco,” said Mr. Kimura, who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day.

WSJ: What did you learn from your first job?

Mr. Kimura: … When I first joined I learned from a senior the [French] phrase noblesse oblige, which I understood to mean not shirking the responsibilities of your position. In my early days I was given many challenging tasks to stretch my abilities, which gave me the foundation to develop into the manager I am today.

WSJ: Who gave you the best business advice?

Mr. Kimura: Our customers. As a cigarette company, similar to makers of food or medicine, our products are consumed by our customers and have a direct impact on their lives. To meet their high expectations, we have to be constantly aware of the market pulse and make trusted and preferred products.

Cleopatra’s Dessert and Shark Fin Soup

 

 

 

 

 

 

At a Brussels nuclear law conference in 2007, I gave a technical paper on intergenerational issues in nuclear waste economics. I argued for the prudence of applying a conservative discount rate when setting aside funds for future nuclear waste management so as to guard against contingencies. Recently I had the chance to look at my argument again with fresh eyes when I obtained a copy of the conference proceedings (published by Bruylant), and I was struck by one passage that may be of broader interest, especially given what happened between 2007 and now in global financial markets:  

“The fifth and final argument for [a conservative discount rate] is the possibility of some unforeseen event that could dramatically change the economic circumstances of one country or another. In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s excellent recent book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, the mathematician and former trader argues that history is dominated by highly improbable, high impact events. He cautions that markets are poor predictors of war, for example, that government predictions are generally unreliable, and that the accuracy of a forecast ‘degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.’ Or as he cautions in a nutshell: ‘No one in particular is a good predictor of anything. Sorry.’

The  Asian financial crisis of 1997 led to rapid – and quite unforeseeen – devaluation of the Thai baht, the Korean won, and the Indonesian rupiah. Argentina’s economy, meanwhile, experienced hyperinflation in the late 1980s and then collapsed between 1999 and 2002. Japan actually experienced deflation and a zero interest rate policy between 2001 and 2005, quite at odds with economic predictions for the country two decades earlier (and also at odds with what one would expect of the world’s second largest economy). These examples give us pause, because Argentina, Japan and Korea have nuclear plants, and Thailand announced plans in June 2007 to build the country’s first nuclear plant. All will need [nuclear waste] repositories in time. But more within the spirit of Taleb’s argument, the better lesson is to recognize that we have no idea where the next financial crisis will occur.”

The last sentence was meant as a general warning, not a premonition. We may have recognized the lesson of that sentence for now – humility – but we’re likely to forget it again in the next bull market.

As for the title of this post, it comes from the fact that seemingly small human preferences at one moment in time – apparently marginal increments of utility or enjoyment – can have huge impacts on future generations. As Cowen and Parfit write (I quote them in my paper), “Imagine finding out that you, having just reached your twenty-first birthday, must soon die of cancer because one evening Cleopatra [the ruler of ancient Egypt] wanted an extra helping of dessert.” The example sounds far-fetched, right? But the issue is whether incremental forms of consumption and enjoyment at the expense of the environment today – widespread enjoyment of shark fin soup, for example – are set to have similarly dramatic and harmful impacts on future generations.

As the British economist F.P. Ramsey wrote in an important paper in 1928 (“A Mathematical Theory of Saving,”), to “discount later enjoyments in comparison with earlier ones … is “a practice which is ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.” Sadly, and ironically, Ramsey died only two years after writing those words, only 26 years old, and with the wisdom of someone who had lived much longer.

Tennis Vagabond: a story of tennis, evil and everything else

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sans Everything depends not only on its writers, but also its readers. Given the huge difference between daily site visits and replies to our posts it is clear that the vast majority of visitors to the site are content to read quietly, which is perfectly fine with us. We are also delighted, however, to have some regular readers who themselves have become a part of the blog through their regular responses, and in no case is this more true than with David Sachs.  His interests are as varied as our posts and then some, and he adds immeasureably to our ongoing conversation.

What Sans Everything readers may not know is that David has put together a highly original and very funny podcast entitled Tennis Vagabond, based on a novel he wrote called The Life on Court of Bacon O’Rourke (you can subscribe to the podcast for free). As David explained to me, “Tennis Vagabond follows the young tennis legend Bacon O’Rourke who travels the open road with whiskey in his flask and a racquet on his back, serving and volleying and drinking and toking his way across the land. This comic epic is, in short,  Jack Kerouac with a tennis racquet, and some serious bad guys. The story covers tennis and evil, sex and death, drugs and physics, and the dangers in commodifying that which we love. The bad guys in hot pursuit of Bacon and his underground tennis caravan include the mythical Tennis Illuminati (secret masters of the Game), and a down-and-out coach with a taste for detective novels, Zen quips, and funk music. God and the Devil make cameos as tournament umpires.” It also has a physics blog, a tennis blog and some memorable video extras (trust me: the strip tennis match is sure to hold the attention of people who otherwise don’t care for tennis).

Tennis Vagabond‘s mix of lowbrow and highbrow will appeal to many Sans Everything visitors, and it is also timely in its central message: “a parable of consumerism, commodification, and the progression of open-ended capitalism at a time when those things are being questioned.” But why tennis in particular? David’s answer: “I’m not too sure, but it worked. As Tom Robbins says about hitchhiking in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the Truth is there in anything, if you push it far enough (‘when it has been pushed far enough it contains everything else’).”

Congratulations, David, and we look forward to hearing of O’Rourke’s continuing adventures!

George Steiner’s Phony Learning

George Steiner’s new book.

As a literary critic and essayist George Steiner is distinguished by his erudition, which is not just impressive but even intimidating. A quick glance through his books reveals that he’s a writer confident enough to sit in judgement of a vast range of cultural figures ranging from the poets of antiquity to great composers like Bach and Beethoven to the Russian novelists of the 19th century to modern philosophers like Heidegger. “Is he a man or an encyclopedia?” you ask yourself as you read his essays.

Another question worth asking is, how much of Steiner’s erudition is real, based on actual familiarity with the artists and thinkers he’s writing about, and how much is just name-dropping? Is Steiner just the high-end equivalent of a Hollywood hanger on who has tales of chance encounters with “Angelina” and “Bobby DeNiro”.

I’m a great admirer of the poet, short story writer, painter and translator Guy Davenport, who really was a polymath. I’ve always had a soft spot for Steiner because he once lavishly praised Davenport in The New Yorker, a review that did much to bolster Davenport’s reputation and visiblity. “Davenport is among the very few truly original, truly autonomous voices now audible in American letters,” Steiner wrote. (Steiner’s review was recently republished in the essay collection George Steiner at The New Yorker, published by New Directions).

Recently while reading Guy Davenport’s letters to the publisher James Laughlin, I discovered that even Steiner’s commendable act of celebrating Davenport carried with a whiff of fraud.

In Honour of Musa Khankhel

As with all his writing, Kafka’s masterful story Ein Brudermord (A Fratricide) can be read on many levels.  Most immediately it is about the inexplicable murder of Wese by Schmar, with the neighbour Pallas a passive observer to the scene; Wese’s wife arrives too late, only to discover her husband is already dead. Yet on a deeper level the story reads as an allegory for the death of reason as progress, the bludgeoning of Enlightenment philosophy at the end of a knife: “An und für sich sehr vernünftig, daß Wese weitergeht, aber er geht ins Messer des Schmar.”  In and of itself it is very rational for Wese to go forward, but he goes into the blade of Schmar. The philosophical cadences here are unmistakeable: “an und für sich” is the language of Kant, and even the name of the protagonist – Wese – evokes the German word “Wesen,” or “essence” in the German philosophical tradition (Schmar, meanwhile, suggests Schmarre; a slash). Schmar’s irrational opposition to Wese, his old “friend,” his brother in humanity, is as complete as it is impatient: even after Schmar has already stabbed Wese, he turns to his body and asks: “Why aren’t you just a balloon full of blood, so that I might sit on you and make you disappear altogether? … What silent question do you mean to pose?”

Writing against the backdrop of World War I, Kafka did not need to be reminded of the manifestations of his allegory, of the hope of progress and civilization’s rational advance terminated by brutal, unmediated violence. My friend Imtiaz Ali, a courageous journalist from Pakistan who has himself been threatened by the Taliban, wrote yesterday with the sad news that his colleague Musa Khankhel, 28, was murdered after a brief abduction by militants.  “It is all the more painful,” reflected Ali, because Musa Khan was working in a critically important part of Pakistan, where the Pakistani government had just signed a peace deal with militants in the hope of bringing peace to a turbulent and violent region.  But this was Khan, says Ali: a “peace activist,” a muckraker who “broke many stories,” and “a fearless man.”  

Old Jews Telling Jokes

Via the great Katha Pollitt, an immensely enjoyable website: Old Jews Telling Jokes.

Global Zero

Following my recent thoughts on nuclear energy expansion and disarmament, I was heartened to run across Global Zero. In December 2008, one hundred global leaders met in Paris and launched an effort to eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide. The idea is to phase out the world’s 27,000 or so weapons over the next 25 years (96% of them are in Russia and the United States). It will be easier said than done, of course, and there will be major game theoretic issues to sort out, like how to respond to a violator with a secret cache in a world in which all other countries have eliminated their weapons. Still, I admire the simplicity, clarity and moral resolve of the initiative.

Signatories include the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Yoriko Kawaguchi, Robert McNamara, Desmond Tutu, and Muhammad Yunus; Canada’s Lloyd Axworthy is also among them. Building on this high profile support, events are planned for 2009 culminating in a World Summit in early 2010.

Will this initiative open space for Obama to advance a disarmament agenda, notwithstanding how much else he will have on his plate? In July 2008, he said “as long as nuclear weapons exist we will retain a strong deterrent.” But he also said, intriguingly, “We will make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy.”

If you want to sign the declaration, as I have done, you can do so here.

God’s Power Broker: Richard John Neuhaus

Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009

 

 

 

Although he spent his entire adult life as a preacher, Richard John Neuhaus was an unusually worldly character. As a young Lutheran minister active in the protest movement against the Viet Nam war, Neuhaus shared a jail cell with Norman Mailer and Murray Kempton. As an old Catholic priest and leading neo-conservative, he whispered in the ear of George W. Bush, warning the American president of the dangers of stem cell research and gay marriage.

 

His was a life of conversions and transformations. Born in Canada, he became a fierce American nationalist. Raised a Lutheran, he made a spiritual pilgrimage to Rome and worked hard to forge an alliance between evangelicals and Catholics, completing the circle that Luther had broken.