RKUL: Time Well Spent 12/12/2024

Philosophical footnotes for the year’s darkest days

Your time is finite. Your phone and the internet stand ready to help you squander it. Here are my latest picks for spending it well instead. Feel free to add more in the comments.

Books, what else?

It’s the end of the year, the turning of the season, and the beginning of new things. For some of us, perhaps in a less harried world, the perfect time to be philosophical, to reflect. That has different connotations for different people. Philosophy might be in a “self-help book.” For others, philosophy is inextricably linked to religion. And to my personal chagrin, in some bookstores, many of the works bracketed under “philosophy” are broadly part of what I’d call “New Age.” Long on emotion, short on analysis. What has Kant to do with crystals? Sometimes how the general public construes philosophy and how academic philosophers construe it collide in startling ways. Calvinist philosopher Alvin Plantiga argues for the existence of God in his 1974 book The Nature of Necessity, something that theologians have been doing for thousands of years, but he, possibly alone in the tradition, uses the tools of modal logic, a branch of mathematics today more often used in computer science.

It’s the end of the year, the turning of the season, and the beginning of new things. For some of us, perhaps in a less harried world, the perfect time to be philosophical, to reflect. That has different connotations for different people. Philosophy might be in a “self-help book.” For others, philosophy is inextricably linked to religion. And to my personal chagrin, in some bookstores, many of the works bracketed under “philosophy” are broadly part of what I’d call “New Age.” Long on emotion, short on analysis. What has Kant to do with crystals? Sometimes how the general public construes philosophy and how academic philosophers construe it collide in startling ways. Calvinist philosopher Alvin Plantiga argues for the existence of God in his 1974 book The Nature of Necessity, something that theologians have been doing for thousands of years, but he uses the tools of modal logic, a branch of mathematics today more often used in computer science.

But even if theism is for you, it is highly unlikely that you will curl up with The Nature of Necessity to contemplate God. Modern philosophy, in its analytic form, the variety dominant in the English-speaking world, is an austere and abstruse field. Bertrand Russell, one of the 20th century’s most eminent analytic philosophers, is better known for his contributions as a public intellectual and his social and political activism than for any of his ideas outlined in books like Principia Mathematica, Volume 1 of which runs to 680 pages. In contrast, mathematical savants like John von Neumann or Albert Einstein are famous for their scientific and technical accomplishments more than their social and political views and activities, even if the latter were not trivial, whether Einstein’s pacifism or von Neumann’s militarism. But philosophy wasn’t always in such a ghetto; it once encompassed much more than its current purview of meta-thought. During Athens’ Golden Age, the irascible Socrates hectored his audience in the agora on questions of what they thought wisdom, justice and courage were. Centuries later, Marcus Aurelius compiled his own philosophical reflections, which readers have studied for the subsequent two millennia in The Meditations. In 1945, at the end of the most horrible war humanity had yet known, Karl Popper published The Open Society and its Enemies, a work of political philosophy that influenced many social and political activists and thinkers, most prominently George Soros (no surprise that Russia did not publish it until 1992, after Communism’s fall).

For long ages, philosophy was the foundation of the life of the mind, more than an esoteric intellectual ghetto or mere handmaiden to fields like science or religion. The standard narrative is that philosophy began in ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, though it is almost certain philosophical reflections were part of our nature even on Paleolithic African savannas, probably a coincidental byproduct of our cognitive architecture. For the Greeks, Plato cannot go unmentioned; his oeuvre so influential that Russell’s collaborator Alfred North Whitehead quipped that all “of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.” Plato’s thought shaped that of St. Augustine, and therefore the philosophical raiments of Western Christianity until the Aristotelian Renaissance of the 13th century, which even then originated as a reaction to Christian Platonism.

Unlike many of his fellow ancient thinkers, a vast corpus of Plato’s work has been preserved down to the present, but it is The Republic that remains most relevant to moderns. In it, the impudent Socrates deconstructs and dissects the beliefs and prejudices of his interlocutors, and through careful and precise logic (honestly, at times too clever by half) makes his argument for the ideal republic ruled by wise and just men. Ayatollah Khomeini studied Plato, and many have argued that Iran’s system of rule by religious clerics reflects influence from The Republic. You may not like arguments Plato proffers implicitly and explicitly in his dialogues, but their enduring influence is undeniable. And Socrates’ cross-examining style of speech and thought feel eerily familiar, with a tone and voice that echoes down to the present in the halls of academia. Socrates was the first professor with a “flipped classroom.”

If Plato foreshadows the course of Western philosophy, then the Bhagavad Gita is the distillation of the dominant strain of Indian thought. To understand the Indian intellectual corpus, we must start there. Tradition has it that a sign at the door of Plato’s Academy stated “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter,” reflecting Western philosophical tradition’s preoccupation with systematic formalism. In contrast, the Bhagavad Gita exhibits the Indian fascination with the inner world of the mind. Structured as a dialogue between the god Krishna and the warrior Arjuna during the battle at Kurukshetra, it explores duty, the self and the nature of reality. Though Hinduism is a variegated religion, the form that Westerners encounter will reflect the outlook that takes shape in the Bhagavad Gita, a book that Gandhi reputedly carried with him wherever he went.

If The Republic prefigures the tensions in modern Western political thought, and the Bhagavad Gita illustrates Indian equanimity in the face of chaos, The Analects forecast the Chinese focus on worldly governance not through abstraction but concreteness. The Socratic style and that of Confucius are very different, the former too impressed with its own cleverness, dancing in circles of logic around an interlocutor, and the latter imparting a sense of weariness of a world that has forgotten what was once common sense.

In their own lives, Socrates and Confucius were both saw themselves as failures, the former pushed to commit suicide for corrupting the youth of his Athens and the latter never truly landing an official political position, always wandering from town to town. But whereas Socrates cut the idols of his age down to size, Confucius believed he was simply resurrecting ancient eternal truths that were the foundation for earlier ages. Though The Analects are short, and the aphorisms have an oracular character, all the canons of later Chinese public and personal life are already evident: virtue, ritual and filial piety. Chinese philosophy is fundamentally a series of footnotes to Confucius.

Jumping forward to the present, If there is one work of modern Western philosophy you would need to read to understand the pre-1800 tradition, and to appreciate how it evolved after, it is Immanuel Kant's 1781 Critique of Pure Reason. Here, Kant attempts to fuse the traditions of rationalists like René Descartes, and empiricists like David Hume. Hume, a near contemporary to Kant, was already an intellectual giant when Kant began thinking of how to withstand his elder contemporary’s skeptical arguments. Rather than solving how reason and sensory data could reveal the nature of the universe, Critique of Pure Reason provides a roadmap of the possible with philosophical tools. Contrary to philosophers’ frequent aim to create a complete metaphysical system, going back to Plato, Kant argues that metaphysics has fundamental limitations, arguably hamstringing this discipline down to the present in analytic philosophical circles. The ideas that crystalize in Critique of Pure Reason not only bring together the two streams of 18th-century Western philosophical thought, they mark a fateful fork between the two contemporary traditions of Analytical and Continental philosophy; the former reflecting Kant’s preoccupation with precision and rigor, the latter extending and reshaping paths of inquiry whose terms in metaphysics, ethics and ontology were set in Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s work is arguably the precursor of that of both Harvard logicians and dialectical materialism Marxists.

Thought

Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History Under President Biden, more than two million immigrants per year have entered, government data shows. When I arrived in the US in the early 1980’s, about 6% of the population was foreign-born. Today, 15% of the population is foreign-born. Importantly, the majority of those who arrived in the first few years of the Biden administration came through irregular channels; overwhelmingly false asylum claims. It’s a little suspicious that The New York Times only published this after the election when the data has been clear for years, but you take what you can get (in April 2021 I posted a Substack piece on the crime surge during BLM because I was starting to realize no one seemed to know about it, even though it was unmistakable in the data. The New York Times piece on this politically inconvenient issue came out in September 2021).

Common Sense Manifesto #4: Identity politics won't save us - Democrats should try to reclaim one of MLK's boldest ideals. Imagine if both Democrats and Republicans could agree that color-blindness is the ideal; it would allow the parties to actually fight over their legitimate ideological differences.

Nobody knows how to stop humanity from shrinking - The big looming problem that almost no one is talking about. Noah Smith talks about the economic and cultural consequences of a low-fertility, geriatric world. Anyone who has read science fiction won’t be surprised.

A.I. Chatbots Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness. Physicians won’t disappear, but their purview will ascend up the skill chain. AI will take care of a lot of the basic stuff.

What drove Asian and Hispanic voters to the right in 2024. Inflation and urban chaos.

The Rural Areas Pushing for Divorce From Democratic Cities. This is the inverse of the reality that rural states have more power than urban states because of the structure of the Senate. Here more conservative exurbs are pushed around politically by the cities around which they cluster, but that’s just the cost of living in a more bucolic area that still has the convenience of being around a major metro.

The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger. Psychology departments within business schools, which have a different evidentiary and lower novelty thresholds than psychology departments in colleges of arts and sciences, may simply be publishing fraudulent or non-replicable results. If this article is correct, they only exist to provide sinecures for professors. No positive utility for society at all in uncovering truth, indeed perhaps a negative contribution at that.

Data

Leveraging ancient DNA to uncover signals of natural selection in Europe lost due to admixture or drift. It’s not surprising that the end of the process might erase some of the interesting dynamics. Also confirms what I’ve noticed inspecting the frequency data: pigmentation loci in Europe kept getting selected for lightness down to the Iron Age. That is, at least down into the historical period (the tests do not have the ability to detect very recent selection, so we can’t say after about 1000 years ago).

Striking Departures from Polygenic Architecture in the Tails of Complex Traits. Rare genetic variants that have a big effect seem to be concentrated in the tails of the normal distribution. This makes intuitive sense to me. Most heritability is due to common alleles of small effect, but not all.

Social and genetic diversity in first farmers of central Europe. The LBK were the first Neolithic farmers in Northern Europe 7,500 years ago, and they were patrilocal. Men controlled the communal “long-houses” that dominated their settlements. The eastern settlements had more hunter-gatherer ancestry. This makes sense given that these LBK farmers seem to have struggled to settle the Baltic and northeastern Europe. In the end, it fell to Indo-Europeans to bring farming to the territory of Latvia and the regions to the north.

Sex-biased gene expression under sexually antagonistic and sex-limited selection. Investigating the molecular genetic patterns seen when natural selection works at cross purposes on the two sexes within a sexual population (genes can express differently by sex).

Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites. Sample sizes are small in this paper, but the authors conclude it is effort.

My Two Cents

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall, including one of these two recent pieces on horse genetics and the species’ outsized role in human progress and civilization.

"But then I realized horses are just men-extenders":

But because of its late domestication, the horse has only recently been subject to artificial selection. Most of its distinctive characteristics have to be understood in the context of natural history because until as recently as the beginning of written history it remained a wild animal. The traits that suit horses to domestication, and perhaps even render them a necessary accelerant for human civilization as we understand it, are not actually products of human selection, but the lucky fruit of unconstrained evolutionary forces on equid ancestors. And those fateful forces date back to over ten million years ago on North America’s grassy plains.

War and Peace: horse power, progress and prosperity:

Heavy cavalry transformed Western Europe’s economy. Only the wealthy could afford to provision a horse as a mount, not to mention employ a squire to maintain their armor and that of their steed. Out of this arose a rural nobility of knights supported by taxes on former peasants turned serfs, who furnished military service to their feudal lords. Their warhorses, twice as heavy as steppe ponies, required more feed, which entailed more agricultural production to sustain animals. As Europeans adopted heavy cavalry on the battlefield, they simultaneously began using the mouldboard plough, capable of churning deeper into the region's clay soils. Once redesigned, it also allowed a horse to be harnessed without compressing its windpipe. This set off a virtuous cycle as greater agricultural productivity supercharged European economies. The Norman Doomsday Book documents fewer than 10% of the work animals in England at the time of the conquest in the 11th century being horses, but over the next few centuries that share rose beyond 50% because equids could work longer and complete tasks faster than oxen. Increased agricultural production doubled Europe’s population between 1000 and 1300 AD, only for it to collapse during the Black Death, a contagion delivered by the Mongols in 1347 AD.

Discussion

All my podcasts go ungated two weeks after their Substack release. So I encourage subscribers on the free plan who’d like to automatically get them to subscribe to that podcast stream (Apple, Stitcher, and Spotify). If you want to listen on YouTube, please subscribe.

Here are my guests (and monologue topics) since the last Time Well Spent:

• Anatoly Karlin: Russian nationalism to American globalism

• Yascha Mounk: American democracy in 2024

• Nikolai Yakovenko: the Singularity is not here

• Megan McArdle: American food culture, artisanal to industrial

• In Search of Indo-Europeans in 2024: of Catacombs and Corded Ware

• David Mittelman: pushing the genomic frontier in 2024

(Additionally, you can now hear twenty episodes of my current events podcast with Josiah Neeley)

ICYMI

Some of you follow me on my newsletter, blog, or Twitter. But my own domain also has all my links and updates: https://www.razib.com

Over to you

Comments are open to all for this post, so if you have more reading/listening suggestions or tips on who I should be talking to or what you hope I’ll dig into next, put it here.