Minding the gap

LISTEN. We close Warburton's Little History today and tomorrow in CoPhi, with Peter Singer's utilitarian urgency about expanding the circle of our moral concern beyond narrow speciesism and parochial self-interest.

In The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, he says "one wants to feel that one’s life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage... one likes to look back and say that one’s done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: What greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?” g'r

One does want that, notwithstanding Paul Bloom's thesis that some "chosen suffering" enriches life. (The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning). A good life, a life of well-being, involves more than hedonistic self-indulgence. Of course. The effort to minimize the suffering of others must inevitably incur a measure of pain. Humanists like Vonnegut and Pullman ("there is a meaning, and it is to make things better & to work for greater good and greater wisdom") get that. Humanism is not a hedonism. Nor is it a variety of existentialism that treats meaning as a strictly personal object of manufacture. The greater wisdom does pursue the greater good. 

And as cousin Mary says, wisdom wastes no time in the pursuit but also understands that "things take the time they take. Don't worry." (Echo of Montaigne there.) All in good time, as my favorite Berkshires content-providers say. (Check out Trout and Coffee, if you want to go to New England in your mind.)

 We all ought to want to do all we can to reduce pain and suffering. We're more than a little distracted, though, and perturbed to have to confront the reality that most of us could do a great deal more, at minimal cost to ourselves, to improve and save the lives of countless others. This makes Singer unpopular in some quarters. But as Warburton says, Singer--like Socrates--doesn't mind being unpopular. Gadflies don't mind being considered pests. They do perform a vital public service, whether we like it or not. Fortunately for Singer, he won't be condemned to swallow hemlock. 

He's all over YouTube. Here's one of his old TED Talks, on effective altruism. Here's his Google talk on The Life You Can Save. Here's a recent New Yorker interview in which he acknowledges that he doesn't live up to his own high standards of altruism (choosing, for instance, to spend money on his elderly mother when "there could have been better things you could have done with that..."). And in this recent conversation he says we don't have to possess great personal wealth to begin leveraging our resources effectively and making a tangible difference for "the greatest number." 

He sets the ethical bar high, as did Socrates. Where else should it be?

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 LISTEN (recorded Oct.'20)

Today (again) in CoPhi we close Warburton's Little History with Rawls's Veil, Searle's Chinese Room, Turing's Test (and Depp's Transcendence), and Singer's Effective Altruism, before opening Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. And we conclude midterm reports.

She says you're fooling yourself if you think youth is the happiest time of life. Ask Grandfather Philosophy. Enlightened maturity is best, though her hero Kant was more about deserving than actually achieving happiness. We should go for both. You should not have to "renounce your hopes and dreams" to get what you want and need. That's Stones (not Stone) philosophy.

In "What is Enlightenment?" (1784) Kant answered his own question promptly and succinctly, for once. "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!"

In a distracted age like ours, and a country like ours (like Brian's) where we're so lockstep-sure that we're all individuals, it takes a resolute and committed will to think for yourself. Even those who think they're thinking may just be re-arranging their prejudices, William James probably wasn't the first to say. Most people would die sooner than think, Bertrand Russell repeated. Real originality is hard. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet, Honest Abe.

But I can vouch for the accuracy of this statement from Susan Neiman: "All the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement... Judgement is important because none of the answers to the questions that really move us can be found by following a rule." Surprising statement from a Kantian, though even he was probably not much moved by the Categorical Imperative. Point is, there's a big gap between the way things are (according to experience) and the way reason tells us they should be. "Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two, without giving up on either one."

If travel is essential for growing up, the pandemic's really set us back. Former Harvard President and Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers's disdain for language-learning would too. As we've noted in discussing Julian Baggini's How the World Thinks, and as Wittgenstein's "language games" imply, learning a language is inseparable from thinking new thoughts and expanding your mental world.

Is 18 to 28 the best time of life? Neiman thinks it's the hardest, made harder by the conceit that you should be loving it then and missing it the rest of your life. Better to look forward with the poet to a long and gratifying maturation. "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made."

Today in Fantasyland we notice the precedent in POTUS 40 for 45's dangerous conflation of myth and reality, and wonder if there's any way to control the spread of "cockamamie ideas and outright falsehoods" on the Internet." Only one surefire way, apparently: log off.

And what do we think of the 80% of Americans who "say they never doubt the existence of God"? I think they need to think about it.

Originally published 10.27.20