Radical Tea Towels Offer a Graphic Crash Course in Progressive American History

in History, Life, Literature, Philosophy, Politics | December 6th, 2019

Those of us who are deeply dis­ap­point­ed to learn we won’t be see­ing Har­ri­et Tubman’s face on a redesigned $20 bill any time soon can dry our eyes on a Tub­man tea tow­el… or could if the revered abo­li­tion­ist and activist wasn’t one of the fam­i­ly-owned Rad­i­cal Tea Towel’s hottest sell­ing items.

The pop­u­lar design, based on one of Charles Ross’ murals in Cam­bridge, Maryland’s Har­ri­et Tub­man Memo­r­i­al Gar­den is cur­rent­ly out of stock.

For­tu­nate­ly, the com­pa­ny has immor­tal­ized plen­ty of oth­er inspi­ra­tional fem­i­nists, activists, civ­il rights lead­ers, authors, and thinkers on cot­ton rec­tan­gles, suit­able for all your dish dry­ing and gift giv­ing needs.

Or wave them at a demon­stra­tion, on the cre­ators’ sug­ges­tion.

The need for rad­i­cal tea tow­els was hatched as one of the company’s Welsh co-founder’s was search­ing in vain for a prac­ti­cal birth­day present that would reflect her 92-year-old father’s pro­gres­sive val­ues.

Five years lat­er, bom­bard­ed with dis­tress­ing post-elec­tion mes­sages from the States, they decid­ed to expand across the pond, to high­light the achieve­ments of “amaz­ing Amer­i­cans who’ve fought the cause of free­dom and equal­i­ty over the years.”

The descrip­tion of each tow­el’s sub­ject speaks to the pas­sion for his­to­ry, edu­ca­tion  and jus­tice the founders—a moth­er, father, and adult son—bring to the project. Here, for exam­ple, is their write up on Muham­mad Ali, above:

He was born Cas­sius Clay and changed his name to Muham­mad Ali, but the name the world knew him by was sim­ply, ‘The Great­est.’ Through his remark­able box­ing career, Ali is wide­ly regard­ed as one of the most sig­nif­i­cant and cel­e­brat­ed sports fig­ures of the 20th cen­tu­ry and was an inspir­ing, con­tro­ver­sial and polar­is­ing fig­ure both inside and out­side the ring. 

Ali start­ed box­ing as a 12-year-old because he want­ed to take revenge on the boy who stole his bike, and at 25, he lost his box­ing licence for refus­ing to fight in Viet­nam. (‘Why should they ask me to put on a uni­form and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bul­lets on brown peo­ple in Viet­nam when so-called Negro peo­ple in Louisville are treat­ed like dogs and denied sim­ple human rights?’ He demand­ed.) It was per­haps the only time he sur­ren­dered: mil­lions of dol­lars, the love of his nation, his career… but it was for what he believed in. And although his views on race were often con­fused, this was just exam­ple of his Civ­il Rights activism.

Ali became a light­ning rod for dis­sent, set­ting an exam­ple of racial pride for African Amer­i­cans and resis­tance to white dom­i­na­tion dur­ing the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. And he took no punch lying down – nei­ther inside the box­ing ring nor in the fight for equal­i­ty: after being refused ser­vice in a whites-only restau­rant in his home­town of Louisville, Ken­tucky, he report­ed­ly threw the Olympic gold medal he had just won in Rome into the Ohio Riv­er. So, here’s an empow­er­ing gift cel­e­brat­ing the man who nev­er threw in the (tea) tow­el.

The Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el blog is such stuff as will bring a grate­ful tear to an AP US His­to­ry teacher’s eye. The Fore­bears We Share: Learn­ing from Rad­i­cal His­to­ry is a good place to start. Oth­er top­ics include Abi­gail Adam’s Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion advo­ca­cy, the bridge designs of rev­o­lu­tion­ary philoso­pher Thomas Paine, and Bruce Springsteen’s love of protest songs.

(The Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el design team has yet to pay trib­ute to The Boss, but until they do, we can rest easy know­ing author John Steinbeck’s tow­el embod­ies Springsteen’s sen­ti­ment. )

Lest our edu­ca­tion­al dish­cloths lull us into think­ing we know more about our coun­try than we actu­al­ly do, the company’s web­site has a rad­i­cal his­to­ry quiz, mod­eled on the US his­to­ry and gov­ern­ment nat­u­ral­iza­tion test which would-be Amer­i­cans must pass with a score of at least 60%. This one is, unsur­pris­ing­ly, geared toward pro­gres­sive his­to­ry. Test your knowl­edge to earn a tea tow­el dis­count code.

Begin your Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el explo­rations here, and don’t neglect to take in all the rad designs cel­e­brat­ing the upcom­ing cen­ten­ni­al of wom­en’s suf­frage.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

2,200 Rad­i­cal Polit­i­cal Posters Dig­i­tized: A New Archive

11 Essen­tial Fem­i­nist Books: A New Read­ing List by The New York Pub­lic Library

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Hannah Arendt Explains Why Democracies Need to Safeguard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Themselves Against Dictators and Their Lies

in Philosophy, Politics | November 26th, 2019

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Two of the most tren­chant and endur­ing crit­ics of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Han­nah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, were also both Ger­man Jews who emi­grat­ed to the U.S. to escape the Nazis. The Marx­ist Adorno saw fas­cist ten­den­cies every­where in his new coun­try. Decades before Noam Chom­sky coined the con­cept, he argued that all mass media under advanced cap­i­tal­ism served one par­tic­u­lar pur­pose: man­u­fac­tur­ing con­sent.

Arendt land­ed on a dif­fer­ent part of the polit­i­cal spec­trum, draw­ing her phi­los­o­phy from Aris­to­tle and St. Augus­tine. Clas­si­cal demo­c­ra­t­ic ideals and an ethics of moral respon­si­bil­i­ty informed her belief in the cen­tral impor­tance of shared real­i­ty in a func­tion­ing civ­il society—of a press that is free not only to pub­lish what it wish­es, but to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for telling the truth, with­out which democ­ra­cy becomes impos­si­ble.

A press that dis­sem­i­nates half-truths and pro­pa­gan­da, Arendt argued, is not a fea­ture of lib­er­al­ism but a sign of author­i­tar­i­an rule. “Total­i­tar­i­an rulers orga­nize… mass sen­ti­ment,” she told French writer Roger Errera in 1974, “and by orga­niz­ing it artic­u­late it, and by artic­u­lat­ing it make the peo­ple some­how love it. They were told before, thou should not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very dif­fi­cult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behav­ior.”

This break­down of moral norms, Arendt argued, can occur “the moment we no longer have a free press.” The prob­lem, how­ev­er, is more com­pli­cat­ed than mass media that spreads lies. Echo­ing ideas devel­oped in her 1951 study The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, Arendt explained that “lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying gov­ern­ment has con­stant­ly to rewrite its own his­to­ry. On the receiv­ing end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great num­ber of lies, depend­ing on how the polit­i­cal wind blows.”

Bom­bard­ed with con­tra­dic­to­ry and often incred­i­ble claims, peo­ple become cyn­i­cal and give up try­ing to under­stand any­thing. “And a peo­ple that no longer can believe any­thing can­not make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capac­i­ty to act but also of its capac­i­ty to think and to judge. And with such a peo­ple you can then do what you please.” The state­ment was any­thing but the­o­ret­i­cal. It’s an empir­i­cal obser­va­tion from much recent 20th cen­tu­ry his­to­ry.

Arendt’s thought devel­oped in rela­tion to total­i­tar­i­an regimes that active­ly cen­sored, con­trolled, and micro­man­aged the press to achieve spe­cif­ic ends. She does not address the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in which we find ourselves—though Adorno cer­tain­ly did: a press con­trolled not direct­ly by the gov­ern­ment but by an increas­ing­ly few, and increas­ing­ly mono­lith­ic and pow­er­ful, num­ber of cor­po­ra­tions, all with vest­ed inter­ests in pol­i­cy direc­tion that pre­serves and expands their influ­ence.

The exam­ples of undue influ­ence mul­ti­ply. One might con­sid­er the recent­ly approved Gan­nett-Gate­house merg­er, which brought togeth­er two of the biggest news pub­lish­ers in the coun­try and may “speed the demise of local news,” as Michael Pos­ner writes at Forbes, there­by fur­ther open­ing the doors for rumor, spec­u­la­tion, and tar­get­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion. But in such a con­di­tion, we are not pow­er­less as indi­vid­u­als, Arendt argued, even if the pre­con­di­tions for a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety are under­mined.

Though the facts may be con­fused or obscured, we retain the capac­i­ty for moral judg­ment, for assess­ing deep­er truths about the char­ac­ter of those in pow­er. “In act­ing and speak­ing,” she wrote in 1975’s The Human Con­di­tion, “men show who they are, reveal active­ly their unique per­son­al iden­ti­ties…. This dis­clo­sure of ‘who’ in con­tradis­tinc­tion to ‘what’ some­body is—his qual­i­ties, gifts, tal­ents, and short­com­ings, which he may dis­play or hide—is implic­it in every­thing some­body says and does.”

Even if demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions let the free press fail, Arendt argued, we each bear a per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty under author­i­tar­i­an rule to judge and to act—or to refuse—in an ethics pred­i­cat­ed on what she called, after Socrates, the “silent dia­logue between me and myself.”

Read Arendt’s full pas­sage on the free press and truth below:

The moment we no longer have a free press, any­thing can hap­pen. What makes it pos­si­ble for a total­i­tar­i­an or any oth­er dic­ta­tor­ship to rule is that peo­ple are not informed; how can you have an opin­ion if you are not informed? If every­body always lies to you, the con­se­quence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes any­thing any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying gov­ern­ment has con­stant­ly to rewrite its own his­to­ry. On the receiv­ing end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great num­ber of lies, depend­ing on how the polit­i­cal wind blows. And a peo­ple that no longer can believe any­thing can­not make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capac­i­ty to act but also of its capac­i­ty to think and to judge. And with such a peo­ple you can then do what you please.

via Michio Kaku­tani

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt on “Per­son­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty Under Dic­ta­tor­ship:” Bet­ter to Suf­fer Than Col­lab­o­rate

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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What Is Higher Consciousness?: How We Can Transcend Our Petty, Day-to-Day Desires and Gain a Deeper Wisdom

in Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology | November 25th, 2019

Each of us has a nor­mal state of mind, as well as our own way of reach­ing a dif­fer­ent state of mind. As the School of Life video above reminds us, such habits go back quite deep into record­ed his­to­ry, to the eras when, then as now, “Hin­du sages, Chris­t­ian monks and Bud­dhist ascetics” spoke of “reach­ing moments of ‘high­er con­scious­ness’ – through med­i­ta­tion or chant­i­ng, fast­ing or pil­grim­ages.” In recent years, the prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion has spread even, and per­haps espe­cial­ly, among those of us who don’t sub­scribe to Bud­dhism, or indeed to any reli­gion at all. Peri­od­ic fast­ing has come to be seen as a neces­si­ty in cer­tain cir­cles of wealthy first-worlders, as has “dopamine fast­ing” among those who feel their minds com­pro­mised by the dis­trac­tions of high tech­nol­o­gy and social media. (And one needs only glance at that social media to see how seri­ous­ly some of us are tak­ing our pil­grim­ages.)

Still, on top of our moun­tain, deep into our sit­ting-and-breath­ing ses­sions, or even after hav­ing con­sumed our mind-alter­ing sub­stance of choice, we do feel, if only for a moment, that some­thing has changed with­in us. We under­stand things we don’t even con­sid­er under­stand­ing in our nor­mal state of mind, “where what we are prin­ci­pal­ly con­cerned with is our­selves, our sur­vival and our own suc­cess, nar­row­ly defined.”

When we occu­py this “low­er con­scious­ness,” we “strike back when we’re hit, blame oth­ers, quell any stray ques­tions that lack imme­di­ate rel­e­vance, fail to free-asso­ciate and stick close­ly to a flat­ter­ing image of who we are and where we are head­ing.” But when we enter a state of “high­er con­scious­ness,” how­ev­er we define it, “the mind moves beyond its par­tic­u­lar self-inter­ests and crav­ings. We start to think of oth­er peo­ple in a more imag­i­na­tive way.”

When we rise from low­er to high­er con­scious­ness, we find it much hard­er to think of our fel­low human beings as ene­mies. “Rather than crit­i­cize and attack, we are free to imag­ine that their behav­ior is dri­ven by pres­sures derived from their own more prim­i­tive minds, which they are gen­er­al­ly in no posi­tion to tell us about.” The more time we spend in our high­er con­scious­ness, the more we “devel­op the abil­i­ty to explain oth­ers’ actions by their dis­tress, rather than sim­ply in terms of how it affects us. We per­ceive that the appro­pri­ate response to human­i­ty is not fear, cyn­i­cism or aggres­sion, but always — when we can man­age it — love.” When our con­scious­ness reach­es the prop­er alti­tude, “the world reveals itself as quite dif­fer­ent: a place of suf­fer­ing and mis­guid­ed effort, full of peo­ple striv­ing to be heard and lash­ing out against oth­ers, but also a place of ten­der­ness and long­ing, beau­ty and touch­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. The fit­ting response is uni­ver­sal sym­pa­thy and kind­ness.”

This may all come across as a bit new-age, sound­ing “mad­den­ing­ly vague, wishy washy, touchy-feely – and, for want of a bet­ter word, annoy­ing.” But the con­cept of high­er con­scious­ness is var­i­ous­ly inter­pret­ed not just across cul­tur­al and reli­gious tra­di­tions but in sci­en­tif­ic research as well, where we find a sharp dis­tinc­tion drawn between the neo­cor­tex, “the seat of imag­i­na­tion, empa­thy and impar­tial judge­ment,” and the “rep­til­ian mind” below. This sug­gests that we’d ben­e­fit from under­stand­ing states of high­er con­scious­ness as ful­ly as we can, as well as try­ing to “make the most of them when they arise, and har­vest their insights for the time when we require them most” — that is to say, the rest of our ordi­nary lives, espe­cial­ly their most stress­ful, try­ing moments. The instinc­tive, unimag­i­na­tive defen­sive­ness of the low­er con­scious­ness does have strengths of its own, but we can’t take advan­tage of them unless we learn to put it in its place.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Boosts Our Cre­ativ­i­ty (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Med­i­tat­ing)

The Neu­ronal Basis of Con­scious­ness Course: A Free Online Course from Cal­tech

The Unex­pect­ed Ways East­ern Phi­los­o­phy Can Make Us Wis­er, More Com­pas­sion­ate & Bet­ter Able to Appre­ci­ate Our Lives

Medieval Monks Com­plained About Con­stant Dis­trac­tions: Learn How They Worked to Over­come Them

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Seven Road-Tested Habits of Effective Artists

in Art, Computer Science, How to Learn for Free, Life, Philosophy, Software | November 15th, 2019

Fif­teen years ago, a young con­struc­tion work­er named Andrew Price went in search of free 3d soft­ware to help him achieve his goal of ren­der­ing a 3D car.

He stum­bled onto Blender, a just-the-tick­et open source soft­ware that helps users with every aspect of 3D creation—modeling, rig­ging, ani­ma­tion, sim­u­la­tion, ren­der­ing, com­posit­ing, and motion track­ing.

Price describes his ear­ly learn­ing style as “play­ing it by ear,” sam­pling tuto­ri­als, some of which he couldn’t be both­ered to com­plete.

Desire for free­lance gigs led him to forge a new iden­ti­ty, that of a Blender Guru, whose tuto­ri­als, pod­casts, and arti­cles would help oth­er new users get the hang of the soft­ware.

But it wasn’t declar­ing him­self an expert that ulti­mate­ly improved his artis­tic skills. It was hold­ing his own feet over the fire by plac­ing a bet with his younger cousin, who stood to gain $1000 if Price failed to rack up 1,000 “likes” by post­ing 2D draw­ings to Art­Sta­tion with­in a 6‑month peri­od.

(If he succeeded—which he did, 3 days before his self-imposed deadline—his cousin owed him noth­ing. Loss aver­sion proved to be a more pow­er­ful moti­va­tor than any car­rot on a stick…)

In order to snag the req­ui­site likes, Price found that he need­ed to revise some habits and com­mit to a more robust dai­ly prac­tice, a jour­ney he detailed in a pre­sen­ta­tion at the 2016 Blender Con­fer­ence.

Price con­fess­es that the chal­lenge taught him much about draw­ing and paint­ing, but even more about hav­ing an effec­tive artis­tic prac­tice. His sev­en rules apply to any num­ber of cre­ative forms:

 

Andrew Price’s Rules for an Effec­tive Artist Prac­tice:

  1. Prac­tice Dai­ly

A num­ber of pro­lif­ic artists have sub­scribed to this belief over the years, includ­ing nov­el­ist (and moth­er!) JK Rowl­ing, come­di­an Jer­ry Sein­feld, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal per­former Mike Bir­bli­gia, and mem­oirist David Sedaris.

If you feel too fried to uphold your end of the bar­gain, pre­tend to go easy on your­self with a lit­tle trick Price picked up from music pro­duc­er Rick Rubin: Do the absolute min­i­mum. You’ll like­ly find that per­form­ing the min­i­mum posi­tions you to do much more than that. Your resis­tance is not so much to the doing as it is to the embark­ing.

  1. Quan­ti­ty over Per­fec­tion­ism Mas­querad­ing as Qual­i­ty

This harkens back to Rule Num­ber One. Who are we to say which of our works will be judged wor­thy. Just keep putting it out there—remember it’s all prac­tice, and law of aver­ages favors those whose out­put is, like Picasso’s, prodi­gious. Don’t stand in the way of progress by split­ting a sin­gle work’s end­less hairs.

  1. Steal With­out Rip­ping Off

Immerse your­self in the cre­ative bril­liance of those you admire. Then prof­it off your own improved efforts, a prac­tice advo­cat­ed by the likes of musi­cian David Bowie, com­put­er vision­ary Steve Jobs, and artist/social com­men­ta­tor Banksy.

  1. Edu­cate Your­self

As a stand-alone, that old chest­nut about prac­tice mak­ing per­fect is not suf­fi­cient to the task. Whether you seek out online tuto­ri­als, as Price did, enroll in a class, or des­ig­nate a men­tor, a con­sci­en­tious com­mit­ment to study your craft will help you to bet­ter mas­ter it.

  1. Give your­self a break

Bang­ing your head against the wall is not good for your brain. Price cel­e­brates author Stephen King’s prac­tice of giv­ing the first draft of a new nov­el six weeks to mar­i­nate. Your break may be short­er. Three days may be ample to juice you up cre­ative­ly. Just make sure it’s in your cal­en­dar to get back to it.

  1. Seek Feed­back

Film­mak­er Tai­ka Wait­i­ti, rap­per Kanye West, and the big goril­las at Pixar are not threat­ened by oth­ers’ opin­ions. Seek them out. You may learn some­thing.

  1. Cre­ate What You Want To

Pas­sion projects are the key to cre­ative longevi­ty and plea­sur­able process. Don’t cater to a fick­le pub­lic, or the shift­ing sands of fash­ion. Pur­sue the sorts of things that inter­est you.

Implic­it in Price’s sev­en com­mand­ments is the notion that some­thing may have to budge—your night­ly cock­tails, the num­ber of hours spent on social media, that extra half hour in bed after the alarm goes off… Don’t neglect your famil­ial or civic oblig­a­tions, but nei­ther should you short­change your art. Life’s too short.

Read the tran­script of Andrew Price’s Blender Con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Flowchart of Philosophical Novels: Reading Recommendations from Haruki Murakami to Don DeLillo

in Literature, Philosophy | October 25th, 2019

Do you want to read a philo­soph­i­cal nov­el? Sure, we all do. But the ques­tion of exact­ly what kind of philo­soph­i­cal nov­el you want to read, let alone which indi­vid­ual book, isn’t quite so eas­i­ly answered. But now a pro­fes­sion­al has come to the res­cue: “Ben Roth, a philoso­pher who teach­es in the Har­vard Col­lege Writ­ing Pro­gram, has put togeth­er a kind of flow­chart rec­om­mend­ing philo­soph­i­cal nov­els and sto­ries,” reports Dai­ly Nous’ Justin Wein­berg. “With cat­e­gories like ‘about a philoso­pher,’ ‘by a Ph.D.,’ ‘hor­ror,’ ‘the com­pli­ca­tions of his­to­ry,’ and many more, the chart is pret­ty big.”

The choic­es you make in nav­i­gat­ing it could land you on the work of a writer from one of a vari­ety of coun­tries, one of sev­er­al eras, and one of a capa­cious range of def­i­n­i­tions of “philo­soph­i­cal.” If you take the word in the sense of a nov­el­’s being about or steeped in the work of a par­tic­u­lar philoso­pher, Roth rec­om­mends books like Thomas Bern­hard’s Cor­rec­tion (Wittgen­stein) and Teju Cole’s Open City (Ben­jamin and Barthes). Else­where on the map he also includes nov­els writ­ten by philo­soph­i­cal­ly cre­den­tialed aca­d­e­mics like William Gass, Iris Mur­doch, and Anuk Arud­pra­gasam.

If you pre­fer nov­els where “fic­tion writ­ers drop into straight essay­is­tic mode,” Roth offers a choice between the easy mode of Milan Kun­der­a’s The Unbear­able Light­ness of Being and the hard mode of Robert Musil’s The Man With­out Qual­i­ties. (If you just want­ed to read about a bunch of phi­los­o­phy stu­dents, well, there’s always Don­na Tart­t’s The Secret His­to­ry.)

To those who go in for more “nov­el­ly nov­els,” as Geoff Dyer (a known Bern­hard enthu­si­ast and author of some pret­ty philo­soph­i­cal fic­tion him­self) mem­o­rably put it, Roth presents more forks in the road: Would you like to read sci­ence fic­tion? Exis­ten­tial­ism? Post­mod­ernism? A book free of ‑isms entire­ly, or any­way as free as pos­si­ble?

Your answers to those ques­tions and oth­ers could have you read­ing any­thing from J.G. Bal­lard’s Crash (“body hor­ror”) to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nau­sea (“mid-cen­tu­ry French clas­sic”) to David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s Infi­nite Jest (post­mod­ern, ency­clo­pe­dic, on addic­tion). Oth­er choic­es may lead you to selec­tions less obvi­ous­ly involved with phi­los­o­phy: J.M. Coet­zee’s Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians, or Vir­ginia Woolf’s To the Light­house, Haru­ki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Won­der­land and the End of the World. Of course, you may not want to read a philo­soph­i­cal nov­el at all: you may want to read philo­soph­i­cal short sto­ries, in which case Roth rec­om­mends such form-defin­ing fig­ures as Edgar Allan Poe, writer of “dis­turb­ing sto­ries”; Lydia Davis, writer of “short sto­ries” (empha­sis his); and Jorge Luis Borges, writer of “awe-induc­ing sto­ries.”

Borges and quite a few oth­er names on Roth’s philo­soph­i­cal-nov­el flow­chart also appear in crit­ic David Auer­bach’s “Inquest on Left-Brained Lit­er­a­ture,” a reveal­ing look at the authors read by “engi­neers with a lit­er­ary bent.” Both also include Don DeLil­lo, whose work Auer­bach char­ac­ter­izes as mak­ing “heavy use of phan­tas­mago­ria, com­ple­ment­ed by very sophis­ti­cat­ed nar­ra­tive con­struc­tion,” and “sim­ple, vis­cer­al, clas­si­cal themes approached in [a] flashy, nov­el way.” Roth, for his part, describes DeLil­lo’s White Noise as his “favorite book ever.” Else­where on the flow­chart, to the philo­soph­i­cal lit­er­a­ture enthu­si­ast who’s read every­thing he offers “the most under­rat­ed philo­soph­i­cal nov­el of all time,” Dino Buz­za­ti’s The Tar­tar Steppe. No, I haven’t heard of it either, but I have to admit that it keeps good com­pa­ny.

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Per­son­al Library

A Clock­work Orange Author Antho­ny Burgess Lists His Five Favorite Dystopi­an Nov­els: Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Island & More

R. Crumb Illus­trates Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nau­sea: Exis­ten­tial­ism Meets Under­ground Comics

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

Emi­nent Philoso­phers Name the 43 Most Impor­tant Phi­los­o­phy Books Writ­ten Between 1950–2000: Wittgen­stein, Fou­cault, Rawls & More

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Simulation Theory Explained In Three Animated Videos

in Philosophy | October 9th, 2019

The idea that we are soft­ware ema­na­tions in a vast, unimag­in­ably com­plex com­put­er sim­u­la­tion may car­ry more dizzy­ing philo­soph­i­cal, eth­i­cal, and psy­cho­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions than any oth­er meta­phys­i­cal assump­tion. It is not, how­ev­er, quite a new idea, even if machines sophis­ti­cat­ed enough to make worlds are only now con­ceiv­able. We see ancient sages spec­u­late that sol­id mat­ter is no more than some sort of graph­i­cal (tac­tile, etc.) user inter­face orig­i­nat­ing from the mind of a mas­ter coder.

We see a sim­i­lar idea in the imma­te­ri­al­ism of 18th cen­tu­ry British empiri­cist George Berke­ley. And where would sci­ence fic­tion be—especially the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry sci-fi of Philip K. Dick—with­out vari­eties of the sim­u­la­tion the­o­ry? The TED-Ed les­son on sim­u­la­tion the­o­ry, above, by Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land physi­cist Zohreh Davou­di (ani­mat­ed by Eoin Duffy) opens with a quote from Dick: “This is a card­board uni­verse, and if you lean too long or too heav­i­ly against it, you fall through.”

In Dick’s world, this hap­pens fre­quent­ly. But if our real­i­ty were a sim­u­la­tion, how could we pos­si­bly step out­side it to con­firm? Prov­able or not, the the­o­ry is end­less­ly com­pelling. Davou­di walks us through a cou­ple of fas­ci­nat­ing sci­en­tif­ic attempts to “fall through” by the­o­riz­ing the evi­dence we might expect to find if the uni­verse is made of code.

For one thing, there would prob­a­bly be glitch­es. To cor­rect for errors, “the sim­u­la­tors could adjust the con­stants in the laws of nature.” Tiny shifts, per­haps unde­tectable with cur­rent instru­ments, could sig­nal heuris­tic revi­sions. Oth­er the­o­ret­i­cal approach­es involve using sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles to detect the finite lim­its of the god­like computer’s pow­er.

Would find­ing shifts in phys­i­cal laws prove a sim­u­la­tion. No. And in any case, our entire species could have come and gone before any such shifts have tak­en place. We can­not pre­sume that humans are the cho­sen ben­e­fi­cia­ries of the sim­u­lat­ed uni­verse. Maybe we’re pro­to­types. Maybe our solar sys­tem is someone’s side project. Wouldn’t the sim­u­la­tors notice us fig­ur­ing it out and pre­vent us from doing so? (They would, pre­sum­ably, be watch­ing.)

And why should the great com­put­er have any­thing resem­bling the com­pu­ta­tion­al lim­i­ta­tions of our own machines, Davou­di asks. After all, if it exists out­side the uni­verse as we know it and cre­at­ed its phys­i­cal laws, it’s safe to assume that it exists in a dif­fer­ent uni­verse with entire­ly dif­fer­ent laws, which we might nev­er begin to under­stand. If your mind falls into pools of infi­nite regress when con­tem­plat­ing the idea—aided by con­scious­ness-rais­ing sub­stances or otherwise—you won’t find any­where safe to land in the oth­er sim­u­la­tion videos here, from Vox and phi­los­o­phy YouTube chan­nel Kurzge­sagt. But you might begin to see the con­cept as a lit­tle more plau­si­ble, and maybe more unset­tling, than before.

Elon Musk, for exam­ple, draw­ing on the work of Oxford philoso­pher Nick Bostrom, sug­gests that the sim­u­la­tors are not extra-dimen­sion­al beings (or what­ev­er), but hyper-sophis­ti­cat­ed future humans run­ning Sim ver­sions of their past. This ver­sion also becomes the philo­soph­i­cal equiv­a­lent of mise en abyme as ances­tor sim­u­la­tions, run on oth­er plan­ets, cre­ate their own sim­u­la­tions, ship them off­world, and so forth.…

You can go as far down this rab­bit hole as you like. Or, you can do as Samuel John­son sup­pos­ed­ly did when he heard Bish­op Berke­ley claim that mat­ter didn’t exist. Kick the near­est heavy object and shout, “I refute it thus!”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Are We Liv­ing Inside a Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tion?: An Intro­duc­tion to the Mind-Bog­gling “Sim­u­la­tion Argu­ment”

Are We Liv­ing in a Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tion?: A 2‑Hour Debate with Neil Degrasse Tyson, David Chalmers, Lisa Ran­dall, Max Tegmark & More

Stephen Fry Voic­es a New Dystopi­an Short Film About Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & Sim­u­la­tion The­o­ry: Watch Escape

Philip K. Dick The­o­rizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Com­put­er-Pro­grammed Real­i­ty”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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An Animated Michael Sandel Explains How Meritocracy Degrades Our Democracy

in Economics, Philosophy, Politics | September 24th, 2019

Imag­ine if gov­ern­ments and insti­tu­tions took their pol­i­cy direc­tives straight from George Orwell’s 1984 or Jonathan Swift’s “A Mod­est Pro­pos­al.” We might veer dis­tress­ing­ly close to many a lit­er­ary dystopia in these times, with duck­s­peak tak­ing over all the dis­course. But some lines—bans on think­ing or non-pro­cre­ative sex, or seri­ous­ly propos­ing to eat babies—have not yet been crossed.

When it comes, how­ev­er, to meritocracy—a term that orig­i­nat­ed in a 1958 satir­i­cal dystopi­an nov­el by British soci­ol­o­gist Michael Young—it can seem as if the polit­i­cal class had tak­en fic­tion as man­i­festo. Young him­self wrote in 2001, “much that was pre­dict­ed has already come about. It is high­ly unlike­ly the prime min­is­ter has read the book, but he has caught on to the word with­out real­iz­ing the dan­gers of what he is advo­cat­ing.”

In Young’s his­tor­i­cal analy­sis, what began as an alleged­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic impulse, a means of break­ing up hered­i­tary castes, became itself a way to solid­i­fy and entrench a rul­ing hier­ar­chy. “The new class has the means at hand,” wrote Young, “and large­ly under its con­trol, by which it repro­duces itself.” (Wealthy peo­ple brib­ing their chil­dren’s way into elite insti­tu­tions comes to mind.) Equal oppor­tu­ni­ty for those who work hard and play by the rules doesn’t actu­al­ly obtain in the real world, mer­i­toc­ra­cy’s crit­ics demonstrate—prominent among them the man who coined the term “mer­i­toc­ra­cy.”

One prob­lem, as Harvard’s Michael Sandel frames it in the short RSA ani­mat­ed video above, is an ancient one, char­ac­ter­ized by a very ancient word. “Mer­i­to­crat­ic hubris,” he says, “the ten­den­cy of win­ners to inhale too deeply of their suc­cess,” caus­es them to “for­get the luck and good for­tune that helped them on their way.” Acci­dents of birth are ignored in a hyper-indi­vid­u­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy that insists on nar­cis­sis­tic notions of self-made peo­ple and a just world (for them).

“The smug con­vic­tion that those on the top deserve their fate” comes with its inevitable corollary—“those on the bot­tom deserve theirs too,” no mat­ter the his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stances beyond their con­trol, and no mat­ter how hard they might work or how tal­ent­ed they may be. Mer­i­toc­ra­cy obvi­ates the idea, Sandel says, that “there but for the grace of God or acci­dents of for­tune go I,” which pro­mot­ed a healthy degree of humil­i­ty and an accep­tance of life’s con­tin­gency.

Sandel sees mer­i­to­crat­ic atti­tudes as cor­ro­sive to democ­ra­cy, describ­ing their effects in his upcom­ing book The Tyran­ny of Mer­it. Yale Law Pro­fes­sor Daniel Markovits, anoth­er ivy league aca­d­e­m­ic and heir to Michael Young’s cri­tique, has also just released a book (The Mer­i­toc­ra­cy Trap) decry­ing mer­i­toc­ra­cy. He describes the sys­tem as a “trap” in which “upward mobil­i­ty has become a fan­ta­sy, and the embat­tled mid­dle class­es are now more like­ly to sink into the work­ing poor than to rise into the pro­fes­sion­al elite.”

Markovitz, who holds two degrees from Yale and a doc­tor­ate from Oxford, admits at The Atlantic that most of his stu­dents “unnerv­ing­ly resem­ble my younger self: They are, over­whelm­ing­ly, prod­ucts of pro­fes­sion­al par­ents and high-class uni­ver­si­ties.” Once an advo­cate of the idea of mer­i­toc­ra­cy as a demo­c­ra­t­ic force, he now argues that its promis­es “exclude every­one out­side of a nar­row elite…. Hard­work­ing out­siders no longer enjoy gen­uine oppor­tu­ni­ty.”

Accord­ing to Michael Young, meritocracy’s tire­less first crit­ic and the­o­rist (he adapt­ed his satire from his 1955 dis­ser­ta­tion), “those judged to have mer­it of a par­tic­u­lar kind,” whether they tru­ly have it or not, always had the poten­tial, as he wrote in The Guardian, to “hard­en into a new social class with­out room in it for oth­ers.” A class that fur­ther dis­pos­sessed and dis­em­pow­ered those viewed as losers in the end­less rounds of com­pe­ti­tion for social worth.

Young died in 2002. We can only imag­ine what he would have made of the expo­nen­tial extremes of inequal­i­ty in 2019. A utopi­an social­ist and tire­less edu­ca­tor, he also became an MP in the House of Lords and a baron in 1978. Per­haps his new posi­tion gave him fur­ther van­tage to see how “with the com­ing of the mer­i­toc­ra­cy, the now lead­er­less mass­es were par­tial­ly dis­fran­chised; a time has gone by, more and more of them have been dis­en­gaged, and dis­af­fect­ed to the extent of not even both­er­ing to vote. They no longer have their own peo­ple to rep­re­sent them.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michael Sandel on the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Pod­cast Talks About the Lim­its of a Free Mar­ket Soci­ety

Michael Sandel’s Famous Har­vard Course on Jus­tice Launch­es as a MOOC on Tues­day

Free: Lis­ten to John Rawls’ Course on “Mod­ern Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy” (Record­ed at Har­vard, 1984)

Piketty’s Cap­i­tal in a Nut­shell

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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What Would Michel Foucault Think of Social Media, Fake News & Our Post Truth World?

in Philosophy | September 10th, 2019

Dur­ing the late 70s, Michel Fou­cault gave a series of lec­tures at the Col­lege de France in which he defined the con­cept of biopol­i­tics, an idea Rachel Adams calls “polit­i­cal ratio­nal­i­ty which takes the admin­is­tra­tion of life and pop­u­la­tions as its sub­ject.” These ideas have come to have even more res­o­nance in the spread of bio­met­ric iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tems and mil­i­ta­rized pop­u­la­tion con­trol poli­cies.

Fou­cault begins his lec­ture series on biopol­i­tics with an account of the birth of Neolib­er­al­ism, the engi­neered pri­va­ti­za­tion of pub­lic goods and ser­vices and the con­cen­tra­tion of cap­i­tal and pow­er into the hands of a few. “Every­thing I do,” he once said, “I do in order that it might be of use.” What would he have to say about the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion? asks the BBC video above, a polit­i­cal land­scape per­me­at­ed by fake news, accu­sa­tions of fake news, and the gen­er­al admis­sion that we are now “post truth”?

In some sense, Fou­cault, argued, we have always lived in such a world—not one in which real news and actu­al truth did not exist, but in which we are con­di­tioned through lan­guage to adopt ide­o­log­i­cal per­spec­tives that may have lit­tle to do with fact. What counts as knowl­edge, Fou­cault showed, gets authen­ti­cat­ed to serve the inter­ests of pow­er. Lat­er in his career, he saw more space for resis­tance and self-trans­for­ma­tion emerge in pow­er relations—and he would have seen such spaces in social media too, the video claims.

After his infa­mous acid trip in Death Val­ley, Fou­cault report­ed­ly (and self-report­ed­ly) returned a changed man, with a much less gloomy, claus­tro­pho­bic out­look. The ear­li­er Fou­cault may have empha­sized the total­iz­ing mech­a­nisms of sur­veil­lance and con­trol in social media, per­haps to the exclu­sion of any poten­tial for lib­er­a­tion. The video doesn’t make these dis­tinc­tions between ear­ly and late or give us much in the way of a his­to­ry of his thought, though it acknowl­edges how crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant his­to­ry was to Fou­cault him­self.

We can’t know that he would say any of the things attrib­uted to him here. He was a con­trar­i­an thinker, who “didn’t believe in all-embrac­ing the­o­ries to explain the world,” the nar­ra­tor admits. Per­haps he would have seen social media as tech­ni­cal elab­o­ra­tion of biopow­er: har­vest­ing per­son­al data, track­ing everyone’s loca­tion, get­ting us all to watch each oth­er. Or as a ver­sion of Jere­my Ben­tham’s panop­ti­con, in which we nev­er know when some­one’s watch­ing us, so we inter­nal­ize the con­trol sys­tem. These are some of the pris­ons, Fou­cault might say, that appear under regimes of “secu­ri­ty, ter­ri­to­ry, pop­u­la­tion.”

The video fea­tures Ang­ie Hobbs, Pro­fes­sor of Pub­lic Under­stand­ing of Phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sheffield.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michel Fou­cault and Noam Chom­sky Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV (1971)

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Michel Fou­cault, “Philoso­pher of Pow­er”

Hear Hours of Lec­tures by Michel Fou­cault: Record­ed in Eng­lish & French Between 1961 and 1983

When Michel Fou­cault Tripped on Acid in Death Val­ley and Called It “The Great­est Expe­ri­ence of My Life” (1975)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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