The Dawn of Everything - IV

Chapter 12 starts by reviewing the competing theories for the origin of human society: either a fall-from-grace story or the progressive alternative. The authors argue against a (purportedly dominant) view of history, with an essential split between pre- and post-Enlightenment phases. The former consisted of traditional societies, and any revolutionary movement was either regressive or religiously inspired. Only in the latter would human beings really have agency.

The Dawn of Everything - III

Chapter 10 deals with the origins of the state (or lack thereof). The first difficulty is giving a general definition for the state, which applies throughout history. At a nodal point of the argument, the authors unfortunately use a sleight of hand: after exposing the difficulties of such a definition, they conclude that many complex social and cultural systems existed in the absence of a state. This sounds like an ontological argument in reverse: "We cannot conceive of a state, so it must not exist".

The Dawn of Everything - II

In the first half of the book (reviewed here), Graeber and Wengrow argued against the widely accepted idea that social inequality was a (necessary or contingent) result of the Agricultural Revolution. What did then happen in the communities that adopted farming? Chapter 7 tries to show that sustainable agriculture can be (and has been) based on schemes of communal land sharing, which do not require inequality or hierarchy.

The Dawn of Everything - I

Is anarchy¹ a realistic social organization? Based on its absence in the modern world one would be tempted to answer in the negative, at least for communities above the size of indigenous tribe (a few thousands, say.) Showing that complex and large-scale societies can function (or, even better, that they have already functioned) without a strong state and its inherent dangers would be a powerful argument in favor of attempting such a decentralized system in our time. This is exactly the argument that David Graeber and David Wengrow are trying to make in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Unfortunately, they are trying too hard. Below the fold, I'll give a synopsis of the first part of the book (chapters 1 to 6). A second post will summarize chapters 7-12 and a third one will conclude the review.

Conservatorismul în România şi în Occident

O discuție pe Reddit despre un mesaj al lui Dan Alexe pentru Adrian Papahagi m-a făcut să reflectez la definiția conservatorismului, la modul cum ea se aplică în România şi la eventualele diferențe față de Occident.

Dincolo de presupusul caracter universal al conservatorismului şi de eventualele lui legături cu iluminismul şi liberalismul, cred că definiția lui Alexe este corectă şi că unul din principiile fundamentale ale conservatorilor (aşa cum e formulat spre exemplu de Burke) e următorul: tradiția socială este valoroasă şi trebuie în principiu respectată dacă nu există motive foarte întemeiate de schimbare.

În țările occidentale, unde s-a instaurat de-a lungul secolului XX consensul în jurul unor valori "moderne" (din lipsă de alt termen mai bun): egalitate în drepturi pentru femei, toleranță față de anumite practici sexuale, separare între stat şi biserică şi, în general, nivelarea (măcar aparentă) a ierarhiei sociale, argumentul lui Dan Alexe este valabil: cei care vor să revină la situația dinainte de 1968, sau 1939, sau (în cazuri extreme) 1789 nu sunt conservatori, ci mai degrabă reacționari: ei vor să schimbe tradiția existentă, care le este (moral vorbind) insuportabilă, fiind motivați nu de prudență ci de indignare (ca şi progresiştii, cu care nu au nimic altceva în comun!)

Putem aplica acelaşi raționament în cazul României? Dacă acceptăm că valorile moderne de mai sus au început să fie introduse în anii 90 şi că situația socială anterioară (inclusiv sub regimul comunist) era caracterizată de conformism social, de respect față de ierarhie (a cărei structură s-a schimbat în timp, bineînțeles), de atitudini tradiționale față de sex şi de reproducere (inclusiv interzicerea avortului), de importanța bisericii (în ciuda caracterului declarat ateu al statului comunist), poziția conservatorilor ca reprezentanți ai unei "majorități tăcute" care nu a acceptat evoluția ultimelor trei decenii devine mai convingătoare.

Problema conservatorilor occidentali este că propun schimbarea, deşi principiul lor de bază este continuitatea: a celor români este că programul lor se aseamănă prea mult cu perioada dinainte de 1989, de care ar dori probabil să se distanțeze.

History repeats itself

At the White House, three years into his first term, a draft-dodging and climate change-denying Republican president is thinking about going to war with a Middle Eastern country (four-letter name, starts with I-r-a). What year is it, again?

Liberalism vs. Conservatism

I have always found the liberal/conservative distinction difficult to draw, largely due to the several meanings of each term (e.g. the concept of "liberal" in political science and its casual use in the United States, on the one hand, and in Europe on the other.) Motivated by my recent reading of David Gress' From Plato to Nato, I tried to define each side by a set of principles, as small and as general as possible. This is my first attempt (work very much in progress):

Liberal

(L1) Individuals are equal.

(L2) The individual precedes the community (ontologically).

Conservative

(C1) The community takes precedence over the individual.

(C2) The "essence" of the community defines a set of values (religious, national etc.) that limits individual freedom.

Below the fold I discuss some consequences of these definitions.

From Plato to NATO - review

I have spent some time reading through David Gress' From Plato to Nato. I was not very impressed by the book, but the exercise helped me reflect on the definition of liberalism and on the difference with respect to conservatism, so I took the opportunity to write a reaction (more than a review).

Gress presents his whole interpretation as opposed to a "Grand Narrative" (GN) that has supposedly been very popular and that hides the true origins of Western civilization. His Introduction starts by:

Liberty grew because it served the interests of power. [...] The key historical insight underlying this book is that liberty, and Western identity in general, are not primarily to be understood in the abstract, but as a set of practices and institutions that evolved, not from Greece, but from the synthesis of classical, Christian, and Germanic culture that took shape from the fifth to the eighth centuries A.D.

This phrase summarizes not only the author's conclusions, but also his strategy of discourse: he switches before the history of ideas and that of events, favoring the latter but also resorting to the former when needed.

Titles

I learned today that the title of the fourth book in Proust's Search of Lost Time (Sodome et Gomorrhe) was translated in English as Cities of the Plain, same as Cormac McCarthy's novel, and that the expression comes from King James Version of the Bible. Looks like most novels in the English language borrow their title from the KJV (Yeats's poems are a close second, though).

I also found out that the title to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was inspired by Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Also, 60 years before Spinoza Robert Fludd wrote his Tractatus Theologo-Philosophicus, which is closer in title (although probably not in content).

Detection of gravitational waves

LIGO detected gravitational waves originating in the merger of a binary black hole (and made history in the process).

https://twitter.com/LIGO/status/697827514266202112
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102

The influence of intellectuals: hubris and humility

Intellectuals (and I take the term in its widest acceptance) have often believed that their ideas could change the world. Some of them, from Plato to Heidegger, tried to influence directly those in power; others hoped for a posthumous effect (or at least for cultural immortality). Criticism of this belief is as old as the belief itself and has two aspects: a pragmatic one (attempts to influence the course of history through ideas usually fail miserably) and a moral one (knowledge engenders obligations and must be used responsibly).

Elias Canetti, in his short essay The Poet’s Profession¹, looks at this attitude from a very different angle: the responsibility of a writer not to humanity, but to words themselves, as tools of his trade. The true poet both understands the tremendous power of words and accepts his inability to change the world using this power.

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^{1. In Das Gewissen der Worte [The Conscience of Words], Hanser (1975). ↩}

Popper

I think I finally "get" Popper. He has a mathematician's outlook: every statement has (at most) one meaning, which can be either true or false. The truth value is constant and uncontroversial: the same for all people, at any point in history. He is a good Cartesian in this respect.

Unfortunately, the consequence is that anything other than pure mathematics is either meaningless or false. Scientific theories may well be useful, but they are (or will be) falsified; that is all we can say about them. This is not to demean Popper's contribution, which is foundational, but the foundation by itself is not very useful. In particular, there's no place in his system for a new theory that improves upon an old one without merely displacing it.

The same tendency is apparent when he discusses philosophy (and philosophers) in The Open Society. Popper feels no empathy for Plato and does not try to "inhabit" his thought, nor does he try to place the old Greek in the historical context, unless to better condemn him, as in the final section of the first volume. I suppose that if a contemporary author were to hold now Plato's position we would criticize her for her social views (and decide she is a quite poor logician). Should we do the same with Plato himself?

Marx receives the same treatment. Contrast Popper's description with Isaiah Berlin's life of Marx, which shows much more historical and even personal insight, although Berlin was far from being a Marxist.

Nîmes

The Maison Carrée reflected by the façade of the Carré d'Art.

Avignon - Palais des Papes

Is modern science a by-product of Reformation?

There is a strong connection between Reformation and the birth of modern science, not only in time but also with respect to the number of notable Protestant scientists¹. Several explanations were proposed:

Borges and Nietzsche

Borges was influenced by Nietzsche's ideas, in particular his "eternal return" (see The Doctrine of Cycles) and mentions him explicitly in some of his stories (e.g. Deutsches Requiem). What I have only recently realized is that Borges' story Funes the memorious (already mentioned in a previous post) is prefigured in Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation¹:

Imagine the extremest possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forget­ting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of becoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus, he would in the end hardly dare to raise his finger.

Nietzsche's  has already been invoked in relation with Funes², but as far as I can tell (I do not have access to the full text of the paper) only with respect to the difficulty of forming general concepts.

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^{1. Breazeale, D., & Hollingdale, R. J. (1997). Nietzsche: Untimely meditations. Cambridge University Press.↩}

^{2. Martin, C. W. (2006). Borges Forgets Nietzsche, Philosophy and Literature 30(1), 265-276.↩}

RIP, Jacques Friedel (1921-2014)

Jacques Friedel passed away yesterday. He was among the pioneers of the study of defects in solids and of the electronic structure of matter, one of the founders of my lab and my scientific great-grandfather.

Reflections on The Better Angels of Our Nature - part 1

Since its publication in 2011, The Better Angels of Our Nature has been thoroughly reviewed, with the reactions ranging from enthusiastic to snarkily dismissive. The Wikipedia page does a good job of summarizing the argument and its reception, so there is not much left to add, apart from some personal impressions:

Almost absent from the reviews¹ (although, in my opinion, it is one of the main merits of the book) is the central role played by Norbert Elias and his Civilizing Process.This process is one of the explanations put forward for the spectacular decrease in violence.

The other cause Pinker invokes for the reduction in violence since the Middle Ages (in Europe, at least) is what he calls Enlightenment humanism, or classical liberalism (at the end of Chapter 4). This tradition is not easily defined, as one can see from John Gray's objections that the authors cited by Pinker “are highly disparate thinkers, and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have 'coalesced' from their often incompatible ideas”² and that some of them, such as the French revolutionaries, advocated the use of violence. However:

• The historical evolution of an idea cannot involve homogeneous thinkers (otherwise there would be no evolution). Of course Hobbes and Mill have different positions, but nobody would deny their contribution to liberalism.
• Pinker rejects the idea that the Enlightenment is responsible for the French Revolution and its bloody aftermath (including Napoleon). To prove him wrong, one should at least engage his argument.
• The intellectual contribution of an author is more important than his having held acceptable morals. For instance, some consider Machiavelli a precursor of liberalism.

The very substantial chapter 5 "The Long Peace" discusses whether the reduction in violence since the end of World War II is a systematic effect. The weakest link here is estimating the effects of ancient conflicts, such as the An Lushan revolt in 8th century China, which purportedly killed 36 million people in eight years. This figure corresponds to the difference in census data before and after the rebellion, but the reduction could also be due to loss of territory, refugees, weakening of the administration (leading to less reliable information) etc. On the technical side, Pinker gives an interesting argument that the magnitude of attrition wars is exponentially distributed, but introducing an escalation component can turn the distribution into a power law. I gave the detailed derivation of this result in a previous post.

(to be continued...)

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^{1. Notable exceptions are Peter Singer and James Q. Wilson. ↩}

^{2. In the next phrase, Gray takes Pinker to task for not adding Marx, Bakunin and Lenin to the list. Apart from the intrinsic incoherence of this argument, the point is addressed three pages later, where Pinker explicitly discusses counter-Enlightenment positions, including that of Marx. ↩}

Power-law distribution of war magnitudes

While reading Steven Pinker's The better angels of our nature I stumbled upon the following argument for the magnitude of war (number of casualties) following a power-law distribution (page 220):

Recall the mathematical law that a variable will fall into a power-law distribution if it is an exponential function of a second variable that is distributed exponentially. My own guess is that the combination of escalation and attrition is the best explanation for the power-law distribution of war magnitudes.

Heidegger's "black books"

[UPDATE 02/03/2014] (via enowning) A short piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education covering pretty much the same ground as the articles below.
[UPDATE 27/01/2014] An interview with Peter Trawny (editor of the "black books") appeared in Die Zeit (in German). An adapted version in French was published in Le Monde (in French).

[First seen here.] The controversy around Heidegger's political position is rekindled in anticipation of the philosopher's personal notebooks being published next spring. Supposedly, they contain clear antisemitic remarks. The debate has already started in the French press [1,2] and on the radio [3].

The more general question is: to what extent is the quality of the work affected by the morals of the author? There are many possible (and partially overlapping) answers, depending on the precise failing imputed to the author. This is where Heidegger's example is instructive, since his relation to national-socialism and antisemitism is not totally clear (among other things, because his work has not yet been completely published).