Mei-Lu Who's Collected Ephemera

How our love for Batman anticipated 45

In 2012, twenty-one past winners of the prestigious Blue Planet Prize... authored a landmark report. It stated that, "In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us." That's tough for a lot of people in important positions to accept, since it challenges something that might be even more powerful than capitalism, and that is the fetish of centrism - of reasonable, seriousness, splitting the difference, and generally not getting overly excited about anything. This is the habit of thought that truly rules our era, far more among the liberals who concern themselves with matters of climate policy than among the conservatives, many of whom simply deny the existence of a the crisis. Climate change presents a profound challenge to this cautious centrism because half measures won't cut it: "all of the above energy" programs, as US President Barack Obama describes his approach, has about as much success as an all of the above diet, and the firm deadlines imposed by science required that we get very worked up indeed.

Washington has always regarded democratic socialism as a greater threat than totalitarian Communism, which was easy to vilify and made for a handy enemy. In the sixties and seventies, the favored tactic for dealing with the popularity of developmentalism and democratic socialism was to try to equate them with Stalinism, deliberately blurring the clear differences between the worldvoews. (Conflating all opposition with terrorism plays a similar role today.)

[Small government] conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are unlikely to do it very well."

The debate about whether "human rights" can truly be separated from politics and economics is not unique to Latin America; these are questions whenever states use torture as a weapon of policy... The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system - whether political, religious or economic - that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.

[T]he term "right" names the fact that there are some activities that courts will, with a high degree of predictability, prevent other parties from interfering with, just as "gravity" names a highly predictable behavior observed of bodies in space. "Right" is a term of convenience; it is not a thing in nature, or something that inheres in us simply by virtue of being human.

Coercion is natural; freedom is artificial. Freedoms are socially engineered spaces where parties engaged in specified pursuits enjoy protection from parties who would otherwise naturally seek to interfere in those pursuits. One person's freedom is therefore always another person's restriction: we would not have even the concept of freedom if the reality of coercion were not already present. We think of a freedom as a right, and therefore the opposite of a rule, but a right *is* a rule. It is a prohibition against sanctions on certain types of behavior. WE also think of rights as privileges retained by individuals against the rest of society, but rights are created not for the good of individuals, but for the good of society. Individual freedoms are manufactured to achieve group ends.

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.

The reason human beings came to possess the idea of causation, James concluded, is not because causation really exists and would exist whether we were around to believe in it or not. We have no way of knowing whether this is so, and no reason to care. 'The word 'cause,'' as he remarked in The Principles of Psychology, 'is...an altar to an unknown god.' The reason we believe in causation is because experience shows that it pays to believe in causation. Causation is a cashable belief. It gets us pellets.

[I]f we try to assign a role to scientific and religious beliefs in the politics of slavery, we find that nothing like a pattern emerges. Polygenism would seem the natural scientific theory for a supporter of slavery to hold, but most Southerners who had an opinion on the subject were monogenists. Some Americans felt compelled by their Christian faith to demand the abolition of slavery; some felt compelled by it to defend slavery to the death. There were atheists, like Wendell Holmes, who opposed slavery and there were atheists, like Josiah Nott, who defended it. Samuel Morton was a Philadelphia Quaker; so was Penrose Hallowell. Theodore Parker believed that people with dark skin were inferior; Wendell Phillips believed that all men were created equal. Both risked their lives to free the slaves. The Episcopal bishop of Vermont got into a heated dispute with the Episcopal bishop of Pennsylvania...over whether the Bible countenanced slavery (Potter thought it did not). Scientific and religious beliefs are important to people; but they are (usually) neither foundational premises, backing one outcome in advance against all others, nor ex post facto rationalizations, disguising personal preferences in the language of impersonal authority. They are only tools for decision making, one of the pieces people try to bundle together with other pieces like moral teachings and selfish interests and specific information, when they need to reach a decision.

[William] James believed that scientific inquiry, like any other form of inquiry, is an activity inspired and informed by our tastes, values, and hopes. But this does not, in his view, confer any special authority on the conclusions it reaches. On the contrary: it obligates us to regard those conclusions as provisional and partial, since it was for provisional and partial reasons that we undertook to find them. A theory good for explaining why finches have differently sized beaks in different environments has no further necessary claim on us--and maybe we will come up with a better explanation for finch beaks someday, too. The mistake is not simply endowing science with an authority it does not merit. It is turning one belief into a trump card over alternative beliefs. It is ruling out the possibility of other ways of considering the case. That there is always more than one way of considering a case is what James meant by the term (which he introduced to English-language philosophy) "pluralism."

Medicine followed trade and the flag. A direct response to imperialism, it did not merely expedite such expansion but provided the justification for it: was it not part of the white man's mission to bring medicine to the tropics? All too often conveniently overlooked that the white man was in large measure responsible for making them so unhealthy in the first place.

As Agnes Strickland pointed out... The picture of Jane [Seymour] preparing for marriage to Henry while Anne was under sentence of death in the Tower 'is repulsive enough, but it becomes tenfold more abhorrent when the woman who caused the whole tragedy is loaded with panegyric.'

To Lincoln's mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to 'elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuits for all.' A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks would rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.