Akerlof's crazy Caste paper

It is now more than fifty years since Akerlof's famous paper- 

THE ECONOMICS OF CASTE AND OF THE RAT RACE AND OTHER WOEFUL TALES*

There is a standard model of economic behavior, the Arrow Debreu general equilibrium model of perfect competition.

It was nonsense. For a market to exist, market-makers must exist. AD assumes they don't. Prices are set by magic so all markets clear. Thus, suppose I lost my sweater yesterday on my day-trip to Paris and Monsieur Dubois found it, I can buy it from him for 100 Euros- the price he is willing to accept because my sweater doesn't fit him, and which I am prepared to pay because it has sentimental value for me.  The fact that I don't know Dubois & he doesn't know me does not matter. The price vector contains all the information in the universe. There is no Knightian uncertainty- i.e. Evolution is a false theory. We live in an Occasionalist universe. 

While this model may not be entirely adequate as a description of economic reality, it is most useful as a standard of comparison. For in equilibrium in this model, subject to the careful qualifications of Pareto optimality, peoples' lives are as pleasurable as they possibly can be, given their tastes and productive capabilities.

Thus Dubois can get 100 Euros for my sweater because, by magic, the market wafts it away from him to me while simultaneously taking 100 Euros out of my wallet and passing it to Dubois.  

Consequently, to understand why peoples' lives are not as pleasurable as they might be (in the Pareto sense), it is necessary only to know why the real world fails to correspond to the Arrow-Debreu utopia.

It's because there is no market unless some people create it. But markets don't have magical powers and cost money to run. There are 'hedging' & income effects such that there is no unique equilibrium. Indeed, speaking generally, markets don't clear. 

In the real world, contrary to the assumptions of Arrow and Debreu, information is neither complete nor costless.

But arbitrageurs have an incentive to acquire more information & make it cheaper to access.  

On the contrary, given the cost of information and the need for it, people typically make predictions about the behavior of the economy and the behavior of individuals based upon

the opinion of those with greater knowledge or a better track record of making predictions 

a limited number of easily observable characteristics.

Nonsense! If the decision matters, we ask a smart dude. He can see beyond what is 'easily observable'.  

We say that such a prediction is based upon an indicator; an econometrician would call it a prediction using the method of instrumental variables.

Only if causation is impossible to establish and thus correlation is all we have to go on.  

This paper shows the distortions caused to examples of the A-D (Arrow-Debreu) model by the introduction of indicators.

You can't distort that which is incompossible with our universe.  

 Other approaches to the difficulties encountered by the A-D model in explaining labor markets are given by the "new" labor economics. 

Which was inferior to knowledge possessed by people who actually did the labouring.  

There are two types of examples of the use of indicators in the models that follow. One sort of indicator owes its existence to the potentially useful economic information provided. In the example of sharecropping the output produced is used as indicator; it serves the useful function of differentiating between farmers who have expended different levels of effort in tilling the crop.

No. A smart guy may put in less effort & get a bigger crop than a stupid donkey.  

In the example of work conditions the speed of the assembly line predicts the ability of workers on that assembly line,

Not if quality deteriorates.  

and therefore differentiates workers of different ability.

That would have already been done before they were put on the assembly line.  

In contrast, in the following two examples the indicators owe their existence purely to social convention. In the example of statistical discrimination, under conditions described, all persons of the same race are predicted to have equal ability.

Nobody has ever made any such assumption. We may say 'African Americans are better at basket ball than Asian Americans'. We don't say any random black dude is equal to Michael Jordan.  

In the example of caste, the behavior of one member of society toward another is predicted by their respective caste statuses.

Not in India. Money & power are what matter.  

In this second type of example, introduction of indicators into the A-D model brings with it a second previously missing aspect of reality, the panoply of cultural characteristics used by anthropologists and sociologists to describe a society.

i.e. stupid shite.  

For, by definition, culture consists of "regularities in the behavior, internal and external, of the members of a society, excluding those regularities which are purely hereditary."

Regularities change very quickly if there's money on the table.  

Since culture concerns regularities in behavior and since subcultural membership is easy to observe, members of society, as well as visiting anthropologists and sociologists, can predict individual behavior from subcultural membership.

They really can't. That's why Hitler was defeated. Even if Germans were more 'noble' than Americans, Americans had way more money. Japan may not, as he said, have been defeated for 3000 years, but Uncle Sam made them whimper & plead for mercy quickly enough.  

The indicators by which men judge each other may warp their values and distort their goals.

Doing stupid shit has this effect. Being stupid isn't a handicap provided you imitate what smart peeps are doing.  

The anthropologists give accounts such as those of the Kwakiutl Indians, among whom the chief at feast-time who burned the greatest number of blankets, as the mark of the most conspicuous consumption, received the greatest honor.

There was a political & religious angle to this. 'Potlatch' was banned.  

II. SHARECROPPING

The first example of indicators deals with the simplest phenomenon. Several economists have asked why sharecropping is a common form of land system.

Only where there is only limited monetization.  

After all, since the sharecropper is much poorer than the landlord and much less liquid as well (not owning land that can be mortgaged), it would be more natural for the landlord rather than the tenant to bear the risk of crop failure.

He does. He pays the land tax.  

This would be accomplished if the landlord paid the tenant a wage and sold the crops (perhaps even selling some of it back to the tenant).

That's not a tenant. That is wage labour with accommodation provided- e.g. on a Tea plantation.  

There is also evidence that fixed wage payments are more "natural" than sharecropping.

In a monetized economy- sure.  

A recent study of sharecropping in the United States South concludes that immediately following the Civil War "the wage payment system was, from all indications universally
attempted."

Conditions were pretty fucking unnatural back then.  

Travelers' accounts seem to show that at the end of the Civil War sharecropping was viewed as an "experiment."

Not beating and raping slaves was the experiment imposed on the South.  

There is, however, a very simple reason for a preference for sharecropping over a wage-payment system. There are two components to the sharecropper's input: the time he puts in and the effort expended. While the first is easy to observe, and can be paid a fixed wage, the second cannot be observed without careful supervision of the labor.

Fuck off! Just ask around & you will be able to identify the slacker quickly enough.  

Suppose that the input of the sharecropper depends upon his time at work and his effort; suppose further that his effort can be measured and called e. With a wage system the sharecropper should receive an income w dependent on e and t:

w = w(e, t).

Without supervision the landlord cannot determine the effort put in;

Unless he asks around. Also, when it comes to agriculture, it is easy to determine which farmer is hard-working because the weeding and drainage etc. will be better. Just ride around your estate a couple of times a year. Stand a round of drinks & you will hear all the gossip- X is a hard worker but as stupid as shit. Y is smart. He puts in fewer hours but gets a better yield.  

and the wage paid to the individual worker will depend on

transfer earnings. How much can he earn in his next best job?  

the average effort of the average worker, e: thus

w = w(j, t).

This leaves no incentive to the worker for any effort beyond the minimum necessary to be paid for his time.

If the guy looks like a slacker, warn him he will get the sack. But it is enough to say 'you are lucky I don't listen to gossip. I'm sure you are working as hard as ever. Still, this is not a good time to lose your job.'  

If he dislikes effort, he will minimize it.

He will end up a beggar.  

In contrast, in sharecropping, the farmer is paid for the effort that he puts in as well as for his time;

his payment is his share of the crop. The question is whether he can get the best price for it.  

but this effort and time are estimated imperfectly from another characteristic-the output produced.

Nobody gives a shit about effort & time. How much of the crop you get and the price it sells for are all that matters.  

The equilibrium is distorted by this procedure, since the risk-averse farmer remains unprotected from the natural randomness inherent in agriculture.

He is better protected than the village artisan or landless labourer. The Bengal famine showed this. Akerloff was writing about something he had zero knowledge of. Also what he was saying was utterly stupid. No wonder he got a Nobel Prize. 

The basic stylized facts of this model conform with the conditions of sharecropping. In traditional agriculture the hard-working farmer usually receives yields that are considerably greater than the yields of the average farmer. A Punjabi peasant, who prided himself on yields greater than those of his neighbors, once listed for me "the seven
 things which a good farmer does, which a poor farmer does not do."

It is significant that many of these seven things involve arduous work and much patience; many are also difficult to observe.

They were so easy to observe that you could see from an aeroplane that East Punjabi farmers (mainly Sikhs) were more hardworking than West Punjabi farmers (mainly Muslim) On one side of the border the land was much more green.  

A similar story has been told by John Mellor in his study of farms in a village of Uttar Pradesh.

Many parts of UP have an indigenous class of crop estimators. These are guys who can walk through an orchard & tell you how many tons of fruit will be produced.  

Hard work generated significantly higher yields even with the use of only traditional farming methods.

Traditional methods are fucking hard work.  

The division of crops between those grown on a wage-payment system and those grown on shares is also consistent with our explanation.

No. It is consistent with the property regime which in turn depends on the land revenue system. But equally important is coercive power.  Why was some land 'self-cultivated' with wage labour while other land was given to tenants who gave it to sub-tenants? The big landlord needed muscle men but also wanted allies of particular castes/ creeds. 

Where supervision is needed for reasons other than determination of effort, the model predicts that wages rather than shares will be paid. In India, for example, as an excellent rule of thumb, capital-intensive plantation crops are grown on a wage-payment system.'

No. Either workers who were brought in from outside- even if this happened several generations ago- and housed & fed & looked after by the employer or they sold their produce or handed over a fluctuation portion in lieu of rent. What mattered was the property regime which in turn was determined by fiscal convenience to the Government.  

Speaking generally, a 'law of increasing functional information' operates such that useful information improves in quality and falls in cost. This happens because it pays to specialize in gathering & providing it. Alternatively, it happens because the alternative is death or demographic replacement. 

Akerloff next turns to

 indicators of social origin (which) may lead the economy into a low-level equilibrium trap.

in which case it is at risk of invasion or insurrection.  

We begin with Arrow's model' of statistical discrimination given in  "Models of Job Discrimination," and "Some Mathematical Models of Race in the Labor Market'. 

 

The model here is different in important detail from the original by Arrow, who does not consider the two equivalent. I am sure that he would agree that, however the mathematics differ, the economic spirit of the two models is the same.

 In this example, under some circumstances, employers use the average quality of a given race to predict the quality of individuals of that race.

If you are being judged on the basis of race, chances are you are below average.  

It is easy to see that if such an indicator is used, it will destroy all incentive for self-improvement for that race,

Nonsense! It incentivises occupational, geographic & social mobility. In particular, a discriminated against group is likely to chose entrepreneurship & self-employment to a greater degree. 

since all individuals of the race are judged the same and therefore paid the same wage irrespective of individual merit. In this way prejudice may produce a lower level equilibrium trap: if a race is deemed by prejudice to be unqualified, no incentive is given to become qualified, and the prophecy is self-fulfilling.

Akerlof's mother was German Jewish- i.e. of higher class & education than most Polish or Russian Jewish immigrants. Thus he may had no personal knowledge of the manner in which poor Yiddish speaking Americans clawed their way up. The second generation went to shitty inner city schools and were kept out of Ivy League by the 'Quota'. That's the reason they worked so hard & took such great risks to rise & rise. 

The Model

In this model there are just two types of jobs, one requiring qualified labor and the other requiring either qualified or unqualified labor.

If you are qualified in some manner it is worth your while to spend a little money on getting some sort of accreditation. That is how Professional Associations come about.  

It is costly to test workers individually to see whether or not they are qualified.

Which is why they bear the cost of accreditation & pocket the reward.  

The change in proportion of qualified workers depends upon the incentives for self-improvement, which are differences in wages for qualified and unqualified workers of that race.

I suppose Arrow means that a black accountant had less incentive to pass the relevant exams to become a CPA because he still wouldn't get White clients. But the thing can work the other way. People might say- this 'boy' must be a genius! Moreover, he can't charge as much as a White dude. We are getting a bargain!'  

V. CASTE AND GROUP ORGANIZATIONS

...It may appear that the tastes of persons in discriminating societies are so overwhelmingly biased in favor of discrimination that, relatively, the positive or negative effects of economic incentive are of only minor moment. But this ignores the broad historical perspective, which attempts to explain the stability (or disappearance) of institutions over a long period of time. For there are a fair number of cases where opportunities have arisen for deviants to break the caste code and make economic profits, with consequent rise in their social position and erosion of the caste taboos.

Class status can depend on what 'mimetic target' a Society chooses. 

Consider three diverse examples of this phenomenon. In Japan

when Confucian China was the model, Merchants were downranked. Once the Brits defeated the Chinese, the 'nation of shopkeepers' became the mimetic model.  

as merchants have become more economically successful,

because the military government had been overthrown & markets were displacing bureaucrats drawn from the Samurai class 

so too have the taboos against trade and manufacture been reduced.

Because, in England, the Prince of Wales was happy to stay in the Country mansions of his grocer- as the Kaiser disapprovingly remarked.  

Even in caste-bound India caste status rises with the economic success of the caste,

& vice versa 

although, typically, newly successful castes also adjust their social customs, at least partially, to reflect their higher status.

This happens everywhere. The American meat-packer soon hired an English butler.  

The best example of economic success reducing taboos is, most probably, the elimination of the sanctions against collection of interest. The usurer of the Middle Ages

was the banker of the Middle Ages. Lombard street is named for Lombard money-lenders who arrived in London in the 12th century.  

has turned into the banker of today.

Goldsmiths turned into bankers because they had strong-rooms. Fractional reserve banking arises from them.  

This section introduces a new class of models in which, as in Arrow's statistical-discrimination equilibrium trap, those who break caste customs suffer economically.

They may face social ostracism. It is said that Jinnah's ancestors were ostracized after they took to dealing in fish.  

This class of models depends upon an important facet of caste societies missing in previous models of discrimination. In previous models current transactions (so long as they are legal) do not result in changed relations with uninvolved parties in subsequent transactions. For example, if farmer X makes a contract for sale of wheat to speculator Y, his subsequent dealings with speculator Z will be unaffected.

i.e. in this model, no one has market-power. Everybody is a price-taker.  

On the contrary, in a caste society any transaction that breaks the caste taboos changes the subsequent behavior of uninvolved parties toward the caste-breakers.

in other words, there is market power.  

To take an extreme example, consider what would happen if a Brahman should knowingly hire an outcaste cook: the Brahman would be outcasted,

No. He would merely have to spend a bit of money on 'prayaschitham' (expiation). Plenty of Brahmins hired Muslim or Christian cooks who could prepare Mughalai or European food. True, they generally maintained a separate kitchen.  

and the cook would find subsequent employment almost impossible to obtain.

Only if he was a shitty cook. Why the fuck would a non-Brahmin care if the cook had worked for a Brahmin? If anything, the thing would be a recommendation.  

True, a particular sub-caste, or ethnic group, could operate like a Trade Union. If even one non-member is employed, the entire sub-caste boycotts the employer. But actual Trade Unions also exist. 

The possible intervention of third parties in a transaction allows for a richer class of indicators than that given by Arrow's statistical discrimination- typically, the use of indicators in caste societies being less narrowly technological.

This is foolish. What a guy did in medieval societies was fucking obvious from the way he was dressed & the tools he carried.  

Generally, in a caste society if a member of caste A relates to a member of caste B in a given way, he can predict from knowledge of the relations between caste A and caste B how members of all castes will relate to him in future transactions.

Very true. If a Brahmin fucks you in the ass, all Brahmins will fuck you in the ass even if they are straight.  

Such predictions can lead to an equilibrium in which

if one Brahmin is gay, every Brahmin is gay.  

all expectations are met and economic incentives favor obedience to the caste code-

There is no such code. Brahmins are priests by caste but most don't practice priest-craft  

even in the extreme case where tastes are totally neutral regarding the observance of caste customs.

Because the model is shit.  

The following three conditions describe marriage customs in

India.

1. Society is divided into mutually exclusive groups (called castes).

No. There are castes whose ritual status changes at different times of the day (afternoon Pariahs) or depending on their geographical location or occupation.  

2. A code of behavior dictates how members of these castes should behave.

That depends on religion not caste.  

Regarding marriage there are complicated rules as to who may marry whom, payment of the dowry, the timing and performance of the marriage rites, etc.

The Brits thought so. Brahmins knew otherwise. One reason they got behind Democracy was because they wanted elected legislatures to get rid of British era laws- e.g. the one by which Indira's marriage to Feroze (or her Aunt's to a Jain) were per se illegal.  

The caste rules dictate not only the code ofbehavior, but also the punishment for infractions: violators will beoutcasted; furthermore, those who fail to treat outcastes as dictated by caste code will themselves be outcasted.

Unless they pay a bit of money to do prayarschitham or beat the shit out of a couple of the more vocal of their critics.  

3. Caste members predict that those who do not follow the caste code will be made outcastes and will receive the treatment of the average outcaste.

No. They get that the dude will move to a different village or stay in the same village but join a different sect.  

An outcaste in India is permitted to hold only scavenging (or other polluting) jobs.

What was permitted was determined by the King, Governor, of other official. True, there might be a village level boycott but the solution was to move to a different village. Akerlof simply didn't understand how the real world works. 

He is not allowed to eat with caste members, to touch them, or to touch their food, which in the case of someone outcasted includes his own parents and siblings.

But it is cheap & easy to do the necessary 'prayaschitham' to restore ritual purity.  

Of course, his own children will be outcastes and will suffer the same prohibitions.

Unless he moves or changes religion or gets rich.  

Why should these three conditions describing marriage customs in India be of interest to the economist?

They weren't of interest to Indian economists because they simply weren't true.  

First, note that those who fail to follow, or even to enforce the caste customs do not gain the profits of the successful arbitrageur but instead suffer the stigma of the outcaste.

This is just Trade Unionism or a cartelism. It exists everywhere.  

If the punishment of becoming an outcaste

like Spinoza? Conversion overcame the underlying problem.  

is predicted to be sufficiently severe, the system of caste is held in equilibrium irrespective of individual tastes, by economic incentives; the predictions of the caste system become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Caste is a good enough solution to the stable marriage problem for large enough jatis.  It probably does reinforce high trust networks. 

Formal Model of Caste Equilibrium

This subsection presents a formal model of caste equilibrium.

The correct solution concept is 'evolutionarily stable strategy' which was propounded in 1972/73 by Maynard Smith & George Price.  

Caste equilibrium is defined as a state of the economy in which caste customs are obeyed, yet no single individual, by behaving differently, can make himself better off.

This can only arise if there is no Knightian Uncertainty & thus the caste Social Contract is complete. Otherwise, there will always be novel situations where there is doubt as to how to proceed. There will be reactionaries & progressives. If one lot do better over time, they win.  

The first concern is, of course, to describe this equilibrium. However, since there are also coalitions of individuals who by acting together can make themselves better off than in equilibrium, it is also of interest to know the relative ease or difficulty of forming such a coalition.

Castes are coalitions.  There is a 'natural' way of constructing super-caste groups- e.g. 'left hand' & 'right hand' castes. 

For this purpose we also look at the size and nature of the smallest equilibrium-breaking coalition.

Anyone can break it. Otherwise, how could there be 'outcastes'?  

Four sets of assumptions describe the economy; those describing technology, market structures, tastes, and the social system. The assumptions describing the social system are laid out in parallel with the earlier description of marriage in India.

Arranged marriage. There were other sorts. It's just that arranged marriages have been more successful demographically. This probably has to do with 'risk pooling'.  

In general this model is extremely simple, subject to one complication. By its very nature the caste system involves trade and the division of labor. If outcastes could set up their own economy independent of caste members, the caste system would fall apart.

No. If 'broken men' move somewhere else, clear land & begin cultivating it, sooner or later they will merge in caste with which ever group of villages they habitually exchange brides.  

In Akerlof's crazy model 

 By birth there are just two castes divided into a dominant caste D and a nondominant caste N. Labor of both castes D and N can be outcasted. Outcastes, if any, form a third group.

S3. Persons predict that breakers of the caste code will be outcasted and receive the wages bid for outcaste labor.

The model assumes that no new products which are substitutes for what obtains can be produced. Thus he is describing a stagnant economy immune to invasion or an internal political power shift as demographics change.  

Comments on Caste Equilibrium

1. The equilibrium described has two types of distortions due to caste structure. The equilibrium is not Pareto optimal, since in a Pareto-optimal equilibrium N-workers would work in skilled jobs, for which they are fully qualified.

We could say that's a Hicks-Kaldor improvement but it isn't a Pareto improvement because the wages or status of the dominant group falls.  

Also, income distribution is skewed along caste lines, since in the absence of caste all workers would receive the same wage.

i.e. caste is a type of wage discrimination.  

 

2. There is another equilibrium, also with fulfilled expectations, in which all workers work in skilled jobs and receive a wage 61sk. The price of all goods is 1.

3. The smallest equilibrium-breaking coalition is

one. Anyone who can subsist & reproduce while defying the caste code breaks the equilibrium. Consider abortion. There was a time when a Doctor could be struck off for performing an abortion. This didn't mean medical abortions weren't available. They were just very expensive. 

the smallest group that can set themselves up as a separate subsector and be as well off as in equilibrium while trading with caste members on the terms of trade granted to outcastes.

This is like price discrimination by market segmentation. How are you to prevent 'leakages'- i.e. buying in the cheaper market & re-selling on the more expensive one?  More generally, cartels face the problem of 'cheating'. 

In situations where this coalition must be large, where trade with the caste economy is necessary, or where the cost of forming a coalition is high, the threat to equilibrium of such a coalition is small. These principles are illustrated in the examples that follow.

Three Examples of Caste Equilibrium

aren't about caste at all. Akerlof is saying 'caste is like something else which exists in non-caste societies'. Similarly, I could write about my life as James Bond by pretending Bond was actually a Cost & Management Accountant.  

Example 1. Racial Discrimination. Racial discrimination is implicit in the model, the major difference between the caste model and those of Becker, Welch, and Arrow being in the assumption that persons use race to predict how everyone else will react to hiring persons of different races in different jobs. Their predictions result in a lower level equilibrium trap in which all predictions are met.

You discriminate in favour of your race because of the Price equation- i.e. kin selective altruism. The notion is that your own people will stand with you if the going gets rough.  

Example 2. Government-Business Groups. Allegedly many government-business groups, including the military-industrial state, governmental regulator-regulatee nexuses and political machines are held together by a caste-outcaste structure similar to that of our
model.

Which is like saying 'many secret agents- like James Bond- operate in the manner of a Cost & Management Accountant. '

Example 3. Professional Groups.

which are occupational in the (at least notional) manner of caste groupings.  

The public often delegates authority to professional organizations to police their own members-the most prominent of these being bar and medical associations. In turn, the members are expected to maintain professional conduct. Since cooperation with others in the profession is a necessary part of the job, the same outcasting mechanism used by caste, races, and government-business cliques enforces a professional unanimity that gives the profession more than its fair share of economic power.

What you are getting is 'interchangeability' and a grading hierarchy. This was a feature of the Shreni (guild) not the jati (caste). 

VI. CONCLUSIONS

Our four woeful tales have described the ways in which the use of indicators can distort equilibrium.

There is no equilibrium unless there is a steady state. But, since steady states don't arise out of some magical Arrow-Debreu price vector, Akerlof's woefully stupid tales haven't described shit.  

In so doing, we have also answered two challenges to economic theory.

The standard individualistic theories of income distribution and resource allocation are notable by the absence of variables describing social structure, except insofar as these variables affect exogenously given tastes or the initial allocation bundles.

Which captures everything relevant. Stuff about you which is determined at birth is part of your fucking allocation bundle. If you choose to go along with how things have always been- that is your fucking preference. 

The absence of these variables poses the first challenge: to construct an individualistic theory in which income distribution and resource allocation reflect, to some extent, the divisions of society as described by the sociologists.

Just cram them into 'allocation bundle' or 'preferences'.  

The most common indicators are based upon the standard subcultural divisions of a society. And, as a result, the use of indicators makes equilibrium income distribution and resource allocation dependent on these divisions; and the first challenge is answered.

By something sillier yet.  

The second challenge to economic theory concerns the relation between marginalism and social custom.

They change because of what is happening at the margin- i.e. entry & exit. 

As long as most persons have positive utility for obeying social customs, and as long as activities are pursued up to the point where marginal costs equal marginal benefits,

but these change if market power exists. Marginal Cost & Marginal Revenue rise if making an extra unit lowers price or raises input cost. Monopolies & Monopsonies, ceteris paribus, restrict output & cause a deadweight loss.  

there will be rewards to breaking social customs insofar as they fail to promote economic efficiency.

Sure. At the margin, members of a cartel tend to cheat.  

While such rewards occur sometimes, and they may also be spectacular, I would tend to believe that usually the greatest returns go to those who do not break social customs. Archetypically, they join the proper fraternity, work for the proper law firm, and may even marry the boss's daughter.

But then they start losing valuable new types of business- e.g. Mergers & Acquisitions- to Jewish law-firms founded by guys who went to City U.  

In a segregationist society, such persons discriminate;

because they don't want to be tarred & feathered or have the KKK burning crosses on their lawn.  

in a caste society they follow the caste code.

Unless they are sufficiently respected that they gain even more by reforming it.  

While not denying the possible returns to the arbitrageur and social deviant, the models of statistical discrimination and caste explain why economic rewards may favor those who follow prevailing social custom; and in so doing, they give economic reasons why such
social customs may endure.

Speaking generally, fear of being killed trumps greed for a bit more money. Society has coercive powers which even economists need to recognise.  

Romila Thapar's Kluge Prize for kluging.

To 'kluge' means to put together an ll-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfil a particular purpose. Historians who rely on secondary sources are either seeking to inform & entertain by writing well or they tend to be kluging for an ideological purpose. 

Romila Thapar was awarded the Kluge Prize. Was it for writing well? No it was kluging in a particularly boring & bigoted manner. Still, there was a sound Diplomatic reason for rewarding someon believed to be close to India's ruling dynasty. 

I extract the following from the Library of Congress blog- 

Who Writes History?

Anyone can write history. Textbooks may be commissioned by the Education Ministry or a particular Exam board.  We may say that history is rewritten on the basis of the use of advanced technology or statistical methods which reveal what was previously unknown. 

Simply 

Romila Thapar and the Textbooks of India

She was a Leftist. When Leftists were in power, she was one of the people tasked with writing boring History textbooks. When the Left lost power- it has more or less faded away from Indian politics- others wrote the textbooks. That's how Democracy works.  

March 31, 2015

Posted by: Jason Steinhauer


When historian Romila Thapar first reviewed student textbooks in her native India, she was surprised.

She had to read Indian history textbooks to pass her School exams. After that she did a BA in English Literature in India. She only switched to History after she went to SOAS in London.  

“I was appalled by the quality of the information that was being conveyed in these books,”

the books weren't Left wing enough. Also, they tended to show Hindus in a good light. This made Thapar very sad.  

she wrote in a 2009 journal article recalling the experience. Particularly, she was struck by “an adherence to outdated ideas and generally colonial views of the Indian past”

e.g the view that Hindus were a great people. What had set it back was Muslim invaders & their ruinous rule.  

that the textbooks presented.

Thapar's people had to run away from their native West Punjab. Why? Because Muslims kept killing them. This made Thapar very angry. Why should the Hindus of India not also have to run away?  

It was 1961, and modern-day India was a young country seeking a national identity.

It was an ancient country with a Hindu identity. The US was a young country.  

With the departure of the British colonial administration in 1947,

 Power had been gradually transferred to elected Indian politicians from the time of the first General Election which was held about a decade before Thapar was born. 

and the ensuing conflict between the newly formed independent nations of India and Pakistan,

Pakistan had a Muslim identity. India had a Hindu identity. Thapar may not have liked this but the fact is her people chose India because they were Hindus. They did not convert to Islam so as to remain in Pakistan.  

such profound upheavals necessitated the formation of new historical narratives

Nope. Hindu historians had already constructed them. The first History Departments in Indian Universities date to before the Great War. Since there are diminishing returns to historical research, Thapar's generation contributed nothing. Still, because the country was moving to the Left, they became Professors. At a later point, Western campuses became infested with 'post-colonial theory' & Feminism & Queer theory etc,- i.e. moaning about White heterosexual people with dicks.  But India didn't want that shite. History had been regarded as a subject fit only for stupid losers for the longest time. 

–accounts that explained what collective pasts

Religion had united India. It is what keeps it united. Hindus don't want history to repeat itself. Either they hang together or submit to the salami tactics of Muslim or other foreign invaders.  

united these societies and what religious, social and cultural shifts created dissension and division.

Invasions. Nothing else.  

The unification of India itself created a political entity that needed to root its vast diversity in a richer understanding of its history and heritage.

Nonsense! History is bunk. Religion matters- more particularly if you are a kaffir & Muslims think you are deserving of death for that reason.  

Thapar was of a generation of Indians who sought to define the new Indian identity.

No. She taught a low IQ subject to nice girls at Miranda House. Then she taught the same shite to the kids of bureaucrats who could no longer afford to send their kids abroad. JNU was set up after devaluation. Why go to Cambridge to become a Commie when you could do it more cheaply in New Delhi?  

Though an established academic historian with scant familiarity with schoolbooks,

She had to read them in school.  

she agreed to write two history textbooks for the government as part of a project for the newly formed nation.

No. She was asked to write them after Indira Gandhi lurched to the Left & broke with 'the Syndicate'. Since she needed Commie & DMK support in Parliament, the Left-wing/anti-Brahmin ideology was promoted.  

These were targeted for middle school, and one was on the history of ancient India and the other on its medieval period. True to her academic rigor, however, she refused to perpetuate pious myths or distorted colonial interpretations of the Indian past.

She told modish lies instead. Muslims were a captive vote bank for Indira. 

She insisted that her books would provide a kind of history that would contribute to the Indian child’s nuanced understanding of the past through critical interpretation and evidence-based research.

She made history more boring than previously. Nobody cared. If the Left had delivered economically, we'd all have been Leftists. But it fucked up. Mrs. Gandhi moved in a right-ward direction from the mid-Seventies. Everybody did. 

It must be said, evidence-based research- scientific archaeology, statistical Economic historiography, &, later on, DNA studies- did have an impact. The Ayodhya case was decided against Thapar & Co precisely because they had no evidence for their crazy claims. But Sita Ram Goel did have evidence. He won.

The 'history wars' didn't greatly matter. The growth of political Islam scared the shit out of Kaffirs. This is because they could hear these guys saying 'killing Kaffirs is a good thing. Even if you yourself get killed while doing it, you will get plenty of virgins in paradise'. 

Hindutva- i.e. a unified, ecumenical, Hinduism which rejects caste & regionalism- became vital to preserving Hindu hegemony in areas where they were the majority. Other areas could be as anti-Hindu as they pleased. 

Thapar’s textbooks were published in the late 1960s and quickly sparked controversy.

Nobody gave a fuck. India signed a Defence pact with the Soviets. Everybody agreed this was vital for national security. Thus, so long as the Soviet Union survived, the pretence of 'Socialist Secularism' had to be maintained.  

In 1969, members of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee insisted that Thapar’s textbook state categorically that Aryans were indigenous to India.

Some did. Others were all like 'why great sin in a previous life was I guilty of to get stuck in this dead-end committee? It's not like textbook publishers have money to bribe you. They won't even send around a couple of hookers or a case of whiskey to get my vote.'  

Thapar could not find sufficient evidence to support the claim and the demand was ultimately rejected.

Nothing wrong with saying- 'I'm Aryan. My ancestors were from Europe. Unfortunately, my Mum dropped me into a bucket of ink when I was a baby. Otherwise I'd look like Arsulla Undress.' 

More controversies followed. Thapar’s textbooks were accused of not doing justice to regional personalities.

Fair point. But State Governments could have their own textbooks written in the vernacular language.  

Religious organizations felt their respective religions and religious teachers had not been properly glorified.

Because Brahmins would vote for the dynasty in any case.  

In her textbook on ancient India, Thapar noted that ancient Aryans venerated the cow, but like all cattle-herders, ate cow meat on ritual occasions or when honoring a guest.

But the cow was believed to gain Heaven by being sacrificed.  

Hindu organizations protested, arguing that not eating beef was, and always had been, essential to Hinduism.

Why alienate the high castes? Do you want the RSS to get more recruits?  

A lengthy article in a leading newspaper argued that there was no mention of eating beef in ancient Sanskrit sources, to which Thapar responded by quoting a text that unambiguously refuted the claim.

Sadly, there are no ancient texts which aren't ambiguous. There's no way to prove 'sacrifice a goat' doesn't mean 'provide parched grain for the sacrifice'. Archaeological evidence can give us information about what people ate. Thapar's problem was that she was neither a Sanskritist nor trained in archaeology. Thus, she relied on secondary sources. But this meant, she was adding noise, of an ideological sort, to signal.  

This did not stop her critics; Thapar was further castigated, and told she was questioning orthodox opinion and encouraging students to do likewise.

No. She was labelled a Marxist- which wasn't quite true. Still, the fact is her elder brother was close to Indira. If not influential herself, she was related to people with influence. But such people had grown disillusioned with Marxism & wanted a bigger role for Markets. Would Thapar adjust to this new reality? No. Why? It is because Western campuses had become a safe-space for Virtue Signalling or Grievance Studies. Thapar- a Hindu from a family rendered refugees by Muslims- was consistently anti--Hindu. This type of 'moral inversion' meant she was like the Jewish Professor who keeps moaning about the sufferings of the Palestinians. In any case, Thapar was posh. True, she hadn't been to Oxbridge but that was only because she was a thicko.  

Even more attacks followed. In the 1970s, officials lobbied for her textbooks to be proscribed.

Janata came to power in 1977. The Jan Sangh was part of that coalition. Marxists too weren't keen on Thapar. She was a 'bourgeois idealist' misleading students by pushing a reformist agenda.  

Attacks came again in the late 1990s,

when the Sangh Parivar was able to form a government 

as her books were accused of being anti-Hindu and anti-Indian, charges for which she received death threats.

All kaffirs are under threat of death by reason of being kaffirs.  

Through it all, Thapar argued for the legitimacy of independent historical interpretations based on reliable evidence.

She failed to provide it when it counted most- viz. the Ayodhya trial.  

She asserted that textbooks should not merely recite cherished myths but provide researched and rational explanations of the past.

This is where she & her chums fell down. Why spend years studying boring shite if all you can do at the end of it is tell stupid lies same as any nutter with a blog.  

Thapar’s lifelong study of the nearly 2,000 years of history

Indian history is much older. The Indus Valley civilization was discovered a few years before she was born. Sadly, independent India couldn't afford to spend very much on Archaeology. History was merely shite duffers mugged up to pass an exam and, hopefully, get a clerical job.  

revealed an Indian past that was more fluid, both temporally and spatially, than the periods delineated in textbooks or the boundaries drawn on maps.

Everybody already knows this.  

People and their beliefs migrated, mingled, interplayed and intersected to create the richness and uniqueness of India.

Nehru gassed on about this when Thapar was a kid. He was greatly enthused by his visit to Mohenjodaro in 1936. By then, people saw History as an exciting tale of vast migrations. Thapar's job was to make it as boring as fuck. People who get excited by history might want to change it so they themselves benefit. But this would mean quitting non-STEM subjects & getting a fucking job. Mamta Bannerjee has degrees in History. But she spent her life battling Commies in the streets. For the last 15 years her goons have beaten them so thoroughly they now vote for the BJP. Some say Mamta will lose the elections because she is seen as too pro-Muslim. But Mamta, even in opposition, is still Mamta. She is the fucking Terminator and will be back. 

Thapar challenged the purported singularity of Indian heritage,

Why bother? Her native Lahore had rejected it when she was 15 years old.  

and the timeline of a Hindu golden age followed by a Muslim period of decline that facilitated British conquest.

The Marathas, Sikhs, Gurkhas etc. had reasserted them before the British conquest. The problem was that they kept fighting with each other. But that's why the Muslims had been able to invade in the first place.  

She argued against the notion formed by historians within the British colonial structure that Indian civilization was static and lacked a sense of history,

No historian said any such thing. James Mill worked for John Company. He was pushing the Company line that India's laws & customs had never changed. Thus it was mischievous to demand reform- e.g. the law banning Suttee. Some Indians knew this even in the 1820s.  

an inertia broken only by British colonial administration legislating change.

That's what they didn't want to do.  Raja Ram Mohun Roy went to London to try to get Parliament to embrace more such change- e.g. permitting unlimited immigration of White Christians (to keep the Muslims in check).

Even in the United States, history textbooks are not infrequently a battlefield for controversy.

Some claim that George Washington wasn't a Lesbian of colour.  

On the one hand, they are often assumed to convey a generally-accepted version of the past, one that allows students to comprehend basic concepts as well as grand narratives.

If you need to be taught to do this, you probably also have trouble tying your shoe-laces.  

But history is concerned with change, and as circumstances change, and new sources come to light, historical interpretation evolves.

The market determines what is supplied- though no doubt some senile Professors with tenure can continue to churn out shite.  

When fresh research challenges received opinions, the reaction can precipitate dismay and rejection.

A storm in a teacup. Nobody greatly cares unless rampaging mobs start toppling statues & looting shopping malls. Then, some politician or other will point the finger at some 'woke' bunch of historians who 'brainwashed' kids. But mobs like looting & toppling statues. The solution has to do with policing, not whining about wokeness.  

Thapar is a scholar who has defended the methodology of the historian

her methodology is to repeat stupid lies.  

even in the face of the most virulent criticism.

Some people thought she & her pals might be helpful in keeping the Congress-Left alliance under Manmohan. This wasn't true. She & they were useless. At the margin, they help the BJP just as the US visa ban helped Modi. 

At the award ceremony for the 2008 Kluge Prize, which Thapar shared with historian Peter Brown, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington thanked John W. Kluge for enabling the award as a “pinnacle recognition of the kind of scholarship that the country needs – the world needs.”

The US was killing Muslims on an industrial scale. They needed to pretend that it was actually the Hindus who were doing so. Since Manmohan was doing the 123 nuclear deal with the US (even threatening to break with the Left on the issue) the Americans were happy to give a prize to Romilla who was believed to be Sonia's advisor on Indian culture & history.  

Thapar’s work exemplifies scholarly courage summoned to the interest of her country as it grappled with the legacy of its own history – even a history 2,000 years old.

It had cities 5000 years ago.  

As Thapar writes in reflecting on the present-day effects of our ancient past on today:

Thapar didn't write about American or European history. Still, she was probably pleased lots of Muslims were being killed by the Yanks & their NATO allies. 

“Ancient history in particular has a special significance for contemporary times, especially in developing societies.

It really doesn't. America developed pretty well. It doesn't give a fuck about its ancient history. Iraq has a very ancient history. That didn't stop the Yanks from conquering it and enabling things to actually get worse there.  

In part this is because so much of the ancient past is still visible and evocative.

Not in Washington.  

But more importantly, identities, and the heritage linked to nationalism, still hinge on the interpretation of early history.

They are wholly unconnected. Economics matters. Armies matter. Ancient history is just ancient history.  

In any broader understanding of the present it helps to be informed not only about the recent past but also about the remote past:

If you have data-sets for long term climactic trends- sure. But that's smart stuff done by STEM subject mavens.  

the citizens of the future need willingness to distinguish critically but also to explore connections.”

They can do this well enough by Googling or asking Copilot. 

अर्जुनव्रात्यस्तोमः

What is a vow save the Will's self-sacrifice?

Or, itself, but the thrill of self-violation?

Sadly, Vivek is wedded to this Vice

& as 'Witness', to Suttee immolation.

Envoi- 

Prince! That thy Gandheeva vow, bow to Indradhanusha

May this, my Manyu's string, yet sing Gita's Purusha!

Appiah's goodbye Lady Cripps

James Hilton's 'Goodbye Mr. Chips' was about an old fashioned Classics Master at a minor Public School. He loses his wife in childbirth & teaching Virgil- Vidui magistri maxima vigilia maturescunt animi- keeping widowed vigil over scholastic soul ripening- becomes the one solace of his lonely life.

 In return, he comes to be greatly loved by the boys & the fathers of those boys who had once been his students. Hilton's point was that 'Humanities' (i.e. teaching Latin & Greek) had become sub-human and as dry as dust, but could humanise- or even heal the heart- if teaching and studying the subject corresponded to some closer emotional bond- that between man & wife or a boy & his Mum & Dad- which, alas!, had to held in abeyance for a period. 

When the boys say goodbye to Mr. Chips, they are preserving his memory within the shrine of an alma mater they will look back upon as a foretaste of Paradise. 

Daedalus, which is published by MIT press, has a shockingly stupid essay- one unleavened by any trace of a liberal education- by Prof. Appiah- who was educated at Bryanston- the fashionably, Dalton Plan, Touchy-Feely, verging on Vegan, if not outright Heathen, Eton- & is the grandson of, 'the carrot Chancellor'- Sir Stafford Cripps.

 Apparently, he used to stay with his grandmother (Sir Stafford died before Appiah was born) who was an overseas aid organiser by profession. She was the daughter of the eponymous inventor of Eno's fruit salts- which, I believe, are an essential component of the Gujarati diet. Them fuckers be smart, rich, slim, yet- for such is my ipse dixit credo- as constipated as fuck. 

It must be said, the chief value of the Humanities is that they are the mental equivalent of a does of salts- purgative & cathartic & only psychologically necessary for those not potty-trained id est the victims of progressive education stupid enough to be further victimised by higher education in that type of coprophagous self-sodomy. 

 Both sides of Appiah's family were very distinguished, highly educated, and he himself became something of an academic super-star. 

This sterling background of his suggests that teaching shite to Ivy League cretins causes brain-rot. 

August 22 2022

Philosophy, the Humanities & the Life of Freedom

Three things between which there is no necessary, or useful, connection.  

Kwame Anthony Appiah


Abstract

Humanistic disciplines

descend from 'Studia Humanitatis' as opposed to Theological studies and drew upon 'secular' Greek & Latin works. History, Philosophy & Literature are Humanities. Economics, I believe, split off as it became more mathematical & empirical. The Law has always been separate but Jurisprudence could be considered part of Philosophy. Philology of a technical sort or Linguistics with a mathematical description too may be regarded as having separated from the Humanities.

The question now is whether the Humanities have become a paranoid or hysterical branch of 'Grievance Studies'. It deals with the sub-human & represents a mischief against the common-weal. 

have family resemblances rather than a simple shared common aim or method

They have such resemblances with STEM subjects, Econ, Political Science, etc.  

, and, like literal family resemblances, these have an explanation that comes from their historical relationships to one another.

No. There has been 'convergent evolution'. In other words, the same sort of thing appears in widely separated places with similar technology & socio-economic arrangements 

Philosophy, in particular, is closely connected to the sciences it has spun off over the centuries, but remains distinct from them, because

it deals only with 'open problems' which it doesn't have the means to 'close'.  

normative inquiry uses methods different from those of any contemporary science.

Not if deontic systems have a representation in mathematical logic. There is little difference between an 'expert system' & a deontic system. A group of lawyers interpreting a 'morals clause' in a contract may arrive at the same conclusion as a moral theorist even though they reason in different ways.

But much philosophical inquiry, like much humanistic work, is also idiographic rather than nomothetic; it focuses our attention on particular things, rather than seeking generalizations.

I can think of no example of any 'particular thing' a philosophical inquiry has focused on. It may seek to answer the question 'when is war just?' even if it then goes onto argue that a particular war is just.  

The rewards of humanistic study are, therefore, as diverse as what we can gain from paying attention to its diverse objects of study.

Why bother studying- unless the only job you can get is teaching- when just paying attention is as rewarding?

In ethics and political philosophy, in particular, we learn from studying particular episodes in which we discover the significance of certain values by recognizing what is wrong in societies in which they are not respected.

No. We might say 'such and such Society- which everybody knows fucked up big time, did not respect such and such value. This suggests that we need to do more to promote that value lest the same fate befall us.' Thus we might say 'America now tolerates homosexuality. Guess which other society did so? Sodom! Let us ban sodomy- which violates Kant's 'categorical imperative coz I don't want no dicks up my bum- lest a big earthquake causes us all to perish'.  

I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

To be fair, Witless lived at a time when biological Racism was considered scientific.  

No one who is wise will aim to define the humanities in a sentence or two.

The Humanities are what descend from Studia Humanitatis.  That's good enough. Kripkean rigid-designators are very effective in reducing ambiguity. 

We use the term to refer to a remarkable variety of scholarly activities and, surveying them, it is not obvious that they have some shared something-an essence, some conditions necessary and sufficient for membership-that explains why we should lump them all together. One common use of the term in practice is to organize the administration of the university, where we have deans of humanities, alongside deans of social sciences, deans of natural sciences, and, often, people with various other decanal titles. But many departments fit uneasily into these structures. Are anthropologists and historians, say, humanists or social scientists?

Social scientists. The ancients didn't greatly care about the customs of savage tribes though a Pro-Consul might describe them.  

Some seem surely to be one or the other; many look a little like both.

We may say, 'this Physicist or Soccer player writes in a humanistic way. I suppose this is because he comes from a cultured family or received a classical education.' 

Where does cognitive science-with its computer scientists, its philosophers and neuroscientists and psychologists and linguists- belong?

With natural science. If you don't make that cut because your theory is stupid & useless, you may be considered a philosopher instead- e.g. Chomsky.

It seems pointless to insist on settling the question, save as a matter of administrative convenience.

Humanities are cheaper to teach. Scientists need expensive labs. There may have to be cross-subsidisation from the Humanities & Law & Business faculties.  

The humanities dean will hope for fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, but will be delighted, too, when philosophers working on consciousness get grants from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Some may. Some may not. The balance of power within the Department may have shifted. If there are commercial applications, the best students may reject the humanistic Professor's courses & opt for those by the Sciencey guy. But that fellow may himself depart to Google or OpenAI.  

You might think that the difficulty here derives from the fact that the various fields of the humanities display the sort of similarities to one another that Wittgenstein, thinking about games, called family resemblances. It is easy to see what he had in mind. I have the same nose as one of my sisters,

so do, by convergent evolution, some people living far away from you. The two of you may not have a common ancestor with that trait. 

like my mother and her father, but our eyes are much darker than theirs were. My father and I had gestures in common, as well as genes. But, as you know, the y-chromosome I got from my father is in none of my sisters or their children and grandchildren. Nevertheless, any two of us-any two of the more than a dozen descendants of my parents-have things in common (family resemblances, then) even if there are no traits distinctive of the family that we all share. Even in the scattered world of my third cousins, who number in the thousands, I will see, from time to time, that nose, which my grandfather got from his grandfather, whose seven daughters spawned one part of that network of my kin.

There is a species resemblance. Particular lineages may have sexual-selection rules or practices which lead to heterogeneity within the same basal population.  

But focusing on these various resemblances alone misses something important.

It really doesn't.  

Namely, that they have a historical explanation. I have that nose because I got the genes for it from my mother.

This is a type of history everybody is aware of by the age of 5. Families have histories.  

Her father got it from his grandfather, by way of his mother. Those gestures I share with my father, I learned from him. I take a lesson from this: sometimes the explanation of why things belong together, the explanation of their family resemblances, is genealogical.

Which is why it is enough to say 'the Humanities descend from Studia Humanitates' - i.e 'a classical academic curriculum designed to foster moral and intellectual virtue. Initiated by Italian humanists, it focused on grammar, poetry, rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy based on Greek and Latin classics, designed to create well-rounded citizens.'

There is a historical story, which may or may not be genetic, as to why they are there. And because history is messy and multifarious, there may be many such stories, some not much connected with others.

Do these stories matter? No.  

I want to discuss some of the ways in which one part of the contemporary philosophical landscape- the part that has to do with ethics and politics- fits into, and does not fit into, the humanities.

Economics relies on Structural Causal Models of a mathematical type whose fundamental concepts- e.g. 'equilibrium' are taken from Physics. That is where the humanistic approach falls down.

Given our focus, I will be paying attention to the family resemblances at work in the literary and artistic humanities and to the humanistic aspects of the social sciences.

Why bother? The thing is self-evident.  

But let me say at the start that I think the links to the social and biological sciences are important, too.

D'uh! 

I argued this before, in a book called Experiments in Ethics, in which I tried to show how ethics profits from a dialogue with what used to be called the “moral sciences”: anthropology, economics, evolutionary psychology, and sociology.

But does anybody else profit? No.  

A little genealogical sketch may help illuminate why, nevertheless, there is reason to place us in a different family history as well. And the analogy to family histories here is crucial: all of us belong to many families, traceable by a variety of ancestries.

In his preface to the 1787 edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant said he wanted philosophy to take “the secure path of a science.”

Later still, he wanted to reduce metaphysics to physics. He was quite mad by then.  

That move is one crucial starting point for modern professional philosophy in Europe and the cultures that have taken philosophy from her.

Kant was reacting, in a stupid manner, to what he considered a 'dogmatic' error of Leibniz.  

But what most of us in philosophy departments in the North Atlantic world now do does not belong, in a variety of ways, with either the natural or the social sciences, and it is worth asking why.

The answer is 'bundling'. Oligopolistic Colleges can force students to take some useless courses which are cheap to teach. Also, affirmative action is more easily implemented by choosing cretins to teach crap.  

One reason, to start us off, is that what we often call nowadays the “Western” philosophical canon-which runs from

Pythagoras & before him some Egyptian or Sumerian dudes who made mathematical discoveries of a useful type. 

Socrates, Plato,

who wanted rich kids to study a bit of Math. There were some very good mathematicians who were Platonists.  

and Aristotle, via Ibn Rushd and Aquinas, and on through Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Leibnitz to Kant himself- has spun off a great many sciences,

They appeared by themselves because they were useful. Progress accelerated greatly once applications became more & more lucrative or else competition grew more intense. There was a national security aspect to this.  

which have then set out on their own. Without Descartes, no Cartesian coordinates;

Independently discovered by Fermat. A Math professor, whose father had also been a Math professor, Franciscus van Schooten gave us our modern two axis system. 

without Leibnitz and calculus,

Newton 

no modern physics;

Galileo, Kepler etc.  

without Pascal, no probability theory;

Nonsense! Cardano was earlier & more important.  

without Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, no economics;

Rubbish! Every country had its own tradition of 'political arithmetic'. My impression is that the School of Salamanca influenced Hutcheson who influenced Smith & Bentham. Ricardo & Malthus were important. But Mill missed the Marginalist boat. 

without Turing, no computer science;

Fuck off! There was Weiner & Church & so forth. Anyway, Turing wasn't a philosopher.  

no Rudolf Carnap, no Chomskyan linguistics.

Zelig Harris was on the right track. Chomsky wasn't. Don't blame Carnap for this.  

So when a subject matter and a set of techniques develop to the point where they can be carried on by a new kind of specialist, they can bud, so to speak, off the philosophical branch.

No. All we can say is that philosophers should stop talking about a thing once some other discipline 'closes' the question. Don't talk about why synthetic a priori truths or 'incongruent counterparts' exist when Science has shown that the examples given of them are false.  

Nevertheless, philosophy maintains connections with all of those sciences: first, because philosophers think about the philosophy of each particular discipline, of mathematics, physics, biology, economics, and so on.

If the question is 'open', that's fine. The problem is that philosophers no longer know what has been closed.  

And second, because there are philosophical questions that need to take account of the best science of our day.

Sadly, philosophers are too stupid to know what that is.  

There are many reasons why this, too, is so.

Here is one. Ontology is about what there is. How can we answer that question adequately while ignoring physics, biology, economics, and psychology?

Fartology is about farts. How can we fart an answer to the question posed by a fart while ignoring the smell? Easily enough. The thing doesn't matter in the slightest.  

But another important reason is this, and it is crucial to my present purpose. Morality, which is part of the subject matter of ethics, is about what to do and what to feel;

It may be. It may not.  Suppose I can do nothing- because I am paralysed. Suppose further that I can't have feelings for some neurological reason. There may still be some matters I consider moral or immoral. The nurse left the TV on and I am watching a child being tortured.  I may feel no emotion but I may say to myself- 'hurting a child' is immoral.' This may be something I have learned or something I have decided for myself. 

about how we should respond to our own, each other's, and the world's demands. And to apply norms sensibly we must understand the empirical contexts in which we apply them.

No. The point about a norm is that it is action-guiding even when there is little knowledge of the situation. This is actually both helpful & necessary. The soldier obeys orders even if he suspects that the situation might not be what his commander envisaged. The commander benefits by knowing that soldiers aren't going to second-guess commands.  

No one, of course, denies that in applying norms, you need to know what, as an empirical matter, the effects of what you do will be on others.

That may be desirable. It may not. There is a theory that an omniscient human would do nothing whatsoever because he would know all the consequences of any possible action he could take. But it may be that the best path for Humanity would be one where they discovered everything on their own. 

An opponent who denied that would be a straw man.

No. He would be sensible.  

There are real opponents, though, who deny that psychology can be relevant to the question of what values we ought to be guided by and what sorts of people we should aim to be.

Values are psychological constructs. A guy who doesn't get this is not an opponent. He is a fucking cretin.  

To such opponents, one can reasonably put questions such as these.


What would be the point of norms that human beings could not, given our psychologies, obey?

Their point would be to cause us to follow some other norm which we can obey. Suppose I am a paedophile. I can't stop myself from harming children. I can surrender myself to the police & get locked up or chemically castrated or whatever. Alternatively, I could just kill myself.  

After all, reflection suggests, in a philosopher's formula, that “ought” usually implies “can.” (Which means that if you say somebody ought to do something, you must ordinarily be supposing that it is something they can do.)

Not necessarily. You ought not to molest kids. I you can't stop yourself from doing so, kill yourself. If you can't even do that, chop your dick off. If that too is beyond you, get some sort of psychiatric help. It may not work, but at least you tried.  

And even if unfollowable norms had some sort of ideal force, how should we actual humans respond to them?

To the best of our ability.  

If moral philosophy is to connect with moral life, if it is not to be, in the justly pejorative sense, “merely theoretical,” it must attend, in articulating and defending norms, to how they can come to bear in actual lives.

This should already be fucking obvious. 

During the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume began his 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by distinguishing two sorts of moral philosopher. One sort, he said, makes “us feel the difference between vice and virtue; they excite and regulate our sentiments.” And, he goes on, as long as “they can but bend our hearts to the love of probity and true honour, they think, that they have fully attained the end of all their labours.”

If they can do that, they 'pay their way'.  

The others “regard human nature as a subject of speculation; and with a narrow scrutiny examine it, in order to find those principles, which regulate our understanding, excite our sentiments, and make us approve or blame any particular object, action, or behaviour.”

This can't be done. It is a waste of time.  

But it is hard to see how we can pursue the first project of moral exhortation and reform if what we learn in the second, speculative, project suggests that our recommendations are hopelessly unrealistic.

We can pursue any project to the best of our ability. We can't fly. But we can jump. By becoming very good at jumping we could win a Gold medal at the Olympics.  

At the very least, then, we would owe the psychologists a hearing in our moral lives,

We only owe people something if they gained some benefit for us or we have received some reward, or otherwise acquired an obligation towards them.  

even if there were a kind of speculative philosophy that could ignore them.

This is also true of fartology which ignores speculative farts if thinks sub par.  

You can go too far in the other direction, of course. Neuroscientist Sam Harris, in his book The Moral Landscape, aimed to meet head-on a claim he says he has often encountered: that the scientific worldview he favors must be silent on moral questions.

It is likely that morality evolved alongside 'big brains'. The problem is, some animals appear moral to us while others are naughty and fly around shitting on our heads.  

Religion and philosophy deal with questions about “meaning, morality, and life's larger purpose,” people say, questions that have no scientific answers.

If they relate to the super-natural or the after-life, that probably is the case.  

Harris's view is exactly the opposite. Only science can help us answer these questions, he says. That is because truths about morality and meaning “must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures,” and science alone-especially neuroscience, his own field of expertise-can uncover those facts.

If others of his profession agree, who are we to cavil?  

So rather than consulting Aristotle or Kant (let alone the Bible or the Koran) about what it is for human beings to flourish, why not turn to the sciences that study conscious mental life?

Plenty of people do so. I must admit that my view on the 'un-naturality' of homosexuality changed after reading popular science books by ethologists or evolutionary game theorists.  

Harris means to be denying a thought often ascribed to the same David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values, the former being susceptible of rational investigation, the latter, supposedly, not.

All cultures distinguish between what is imperative & what is alethic. Claims of both types can be subjected to rational scrutiny. 

According to Harris, the values, too, can be uncovered by science, the right values, whose pursuit promotes our well-being.

Nothing wrong with that. We might say that Harris proposes a neurological 'meta-ethics'. Would this differ from an economic 'meta-ethics'? Perhaps. What is more likely is that different 'meta-ethics' have the same 'ethics' or, can easily be changed till they do.  

Wait, though. How do we know that the morally right act is,

we have no way to measure or objectively verify moral righteousness  

as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind?

we don't know how to measure 'well-being'.  

We may affirm that the one is equal to the other but affirmation is not knowledge. 

Has science revealed that? No. And I do not see how it could. That does not seem like a question to be settled through experiment, even guided by theory. And if science cannot do that, then the starting premise of Harris's arguments must have nonscientific origins.

Not necessarily. A thing which we can't currently measure or verify may become measurable or verifiable at some future point. What is important is whether there is an 'objective function' to be minimized or maximised. If so, you have 'naturality' & a non-arbitrary metric. Sadly, if Life evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape, there will be an arbitrary element in the objective function. 

In fact, what Harris ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism,

Bentham could be translated into neurological terms. But, we suspect, neurological states are 'multiply realisable'. This is like saying you can get the same utility level by changing what you want rather than getting more of it.

a philosophical position that is now some two centuries old

One could say Moh Tzu was the first utilitarian 2400 years ago.  

and that faces, as all familiar philosophical positions do, a battery of familiar challenges. The idea is that we should aim to maximize human (or perhaps animal) welfare and that that is all that matters. But even if you accept that basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different creatures?

Antidosis. Would they be willing to exchange states?  

Should we aim to increase average well-being (in which case a world consisting of one blissed-out hippie may be better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)?

If one person has a 'bliss-point' many others are likely to do so. Alternatively, they could be altered in some way till such is the case. 

Or should we go for total well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are barely worth living)?

What we go for depends on what we can achieve. Talking bollocks doesn't actually change the world.  

If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what is wrong with killing someone in his sleep?

It creates a precedent for your own being killed.  

How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?

Apply a discount rate. We actually do this when we save money or run up credit card debt.  

Does no one have rights that we need to take account of?

Rights are linked to remedies under a vinculum juris. Sadly, they may not enforceable in an economical manner.  

But the deepest challenge to the only-science answer though, I think, is this.

The soul is a supernatural substance. Only Canadians lack it.  

Psychology and neuroscience can tell you what it takes for a normal person to feel satisfaction; economics and political science help you think about what the effects of various public policies will be; physics, chemistry, and biology tell us how the world works, so that we can take what we want from it. These things are all true. Still, given these facts about what produces satisfaction, who will help you decide whether John Stuart Mill was right to say, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”?

Dissatisfaction doesn't greatly matter. Bing repeatedly kicked in the balls does matter.  

Indeed, which experiment will confirm that this question is even worth asking?

The experiment of asking to get paid for asking a puerile question. True, if what you are employed to do is a type of glorified chid-minding, babbling baby talk is how you while away the working week. 

And where will you learn that one reason for studying the sciences is that understanding how the universe works, understanding where we fit into it, would be worthwhile in itself, even if we never put the knowledge to use in doing anything?

This is also the reason why fartology is worthwhile.  

Faced with people who do not understand this, and who insist that their lives are entirely satisfactory without that knowledge, it is hard to see why they should respond to the fact that many other people do get satisfaction from it. They will, no doubt, have other satisfactions.

Some people gain satisfaction by eating their own boogers. So what?  

So though there is much for ethics to learn from the sciences, natural and social, ethics cannot be reduced to questions those sciences are equipped to answer.

Sadly, the answers Science gives can 'pay for themselves'. That is why there is more and more money for Science while Philosophy only attracts cretins.  

And the methods of reflection that philosophers use in answering questions about, to stick with our example, the nature of well-being-the question of what it is for a human life to go well-may draw on the results of experiments but are not themselves experimental; theoretical argument in philosophy is also mostly very unlike theoretical argument in biology or physics. That is a first important reason, then, why ethics does not belong among the sciences, even though it needs to be in continuous conversation with them.

A cretin gains nothing by being in continuous conversation with smart people.  

Our methods are often very different.

IQ levels are tragically different.  

My main focus in this essay is going to be on another kind of reason, though: the fact that ethics, unlike the sciences, needs to maintain its contacts with the arts and humanities.

True. If you haven't been watching 'South Park' you haven't been doing Ethical Philosophy.  

Poetry, fiction, biography, art, and music, as well as literary criticism, cultural theory, and the other humanistic disciplines, are not just materials for moral reflection. They are also sources of moral understanding, inspirations for moral action, and teachers of the sentiments that moral life requires.

Not just 'South Park', Team America too is important. 'The world is divided up between dicks, pussies & assholes. Pussies think everyone can get along, and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through. But then you got your assholes. And all the assholes want is to shit all over everything. So pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes! And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you'd get? You'd get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!'

Philosophy, for this reason, really needs to be able to engage in different moments with each of the disciplines. We need not the sure path of one science, but a difficult conversation among all the different kinds of systematic knowledge. We need it because people need it, and all the disciplines of the humanities have something to contribute.

'The Good Place' did it well enough. Little can be added after Kristen Bell has spoken.  

One characteristic of much writing in the humanities- one family resemblance across much of that broad field- is a concern to continue millennial conversations.

as opposed to conversations with millennials.  

In philosophy departments we still really do read Plato (429?–347 bce) and Aristotle (384–322 bce) and Confucius (551?–479 bce) and, of course, many others who have also read them between their time and ours. Literary scholars discuss novels going back at least to Satyricon (first century ce) and The Golden Ass (second century ce), and plays, like Aeschylus's Oresteia (fifth century bce), that Plato and Aristotle would have seen, and poems, like those ascribed to Homer (eighth century bce?), that they would have known. We think these texts still reward rereading in our radically different contexts. But the rewards are extremely variegated.

The problem with low IQ people is that they don't understand what they read.  

Sometimes, as when I read some of the Nicomachean Ethics with my students each year in an introduction to ethics, I do so because I think he got something right: friendship really is one of the great human goods.

As is farting. When I was young, my witty and apposite fats won me many friends.  

Sometimes, because he got something interestingly wrong: he says that the enslaved are not capable of action “in accordance with excellence.”

This was the traditional Asante view. That's why they were the biggest supplier of slaves to the Europeans. 

Enslavement, I want to reply, reflects the nature of the enslaver

Asante? 

not of the enslaved.

 Frafras? Dagombas? Oddly, Europeans weren't enslaving each other. 

Sometimes, though, we read him because someone later-bperhaps someone much later like Elizabeth Anscombe- took something from her reading of him to remake modern moral philosophy.

She was a good Catholic who used to protest outside abortion clinics.  

On other occasions, as when I read the Iliad with students in a class about honor, it is because the poem explores a powerful ideal that has left its traces in our thought, even though it is utterly unlivable now; as Achilles's rage-

Menis- like Sanskrit Manyu- is a dark, cosmic, rage which heralds a change in the cosmic order. 

the rage that Homer urges the Goddess to sing at the poem's start, a rage that persists despite the costs to his fellow Achaeans- is difficult for us now to make sense of, much less to respect.

Because Homer was like Ved Vyas- viz a bard recalling the transition to the Iron Age by piecing together legends regarding the leading dynasties and deities of a territory which was becoming culturally and politically unified. There is little point reading books if you have no interest in or understanding of the aims & methods of the author.

In the same class, we read about nineteenth-century Asante generals, who sat playing board games surrounded by barrels of gunpowder, ready to blow themselves up if their troops retreated.

In which case there would be no slaves to sell to the Europeans.  

Victory or death, they said, and they meant it.

Victory for us means enslavement for you.  

There is something crazy in this, even if it made them formidable enemies. But we learn something important about the power of honor in one kind of human life here, something that deepens our understanding of how honor works today: when a young man in a gang in Watts

a historically African-American neighbourhood. I guess he might have an ancestor sold to the Europeans by Asantes.  

risks his life because he has been dissed, he is not Achilles or an Asante general, but there is a family resemblance worth noticing.

No. The descendants of Achilles were more productively employed.  

This is crazy and, at the same time, intelligible, too.

It is low IQ.

But the humanistic concern with past artifacts- the drawing on a fifth-century-bce Grecian urn, or a nineteenth-century romantic ode about one- is not to be explained simply by the fact that we can draw a lesson from it,

you need at least average IQ to do so.  

so that it provides another general truth that might guide our choices, our thoughts, our feelings. Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” does offer such a generalization, since it ends with that famous couplet:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.11


But whatever the interest of this thought, it is not that it is true. It is obviously not true. Truth clearly is not beauty. And, if it were, you obviously could not live a decent human life if that was all you knew. What we have here is at best figuratively true, and one of the figures involved is hyperbole. Still, reflection on Keats's ode is something that many thousands of members of the Modern Language Association know how to practice, believe valuable, and can demonstrate the worth-whileness of by teaching new generations of readers to attend to that poem and its companions.

Why bother? You don't need to be taught to appreciate poems or paintings. You are taught literature in school as part of your study of its language. But the market for most poetry is grown-ups- not kids or their teachers.  

The importance to some disciplines of attention to particulars, and not just to generalities, from the full panoply of the human past and present is something that Wilhelm Windelband drew attention to more than a century ago.

Talk about the bleeding obvious! Still, being a Professor of useless shite, what else could the stupid Kraut do?  

This insistence is, I think, a feature of much work in the humanities. In a once wellknown essay on “History and Natural Science,” Windelband wrote about all the disciplines that enrich our knowledge of the world, from history to physics, that they were seeking through their experience of reality either the universal, in the form of a natural law, or the particular in a historically specific form.

He was wrong. What they both sought were better data-sets. Some such could fit Structural Causal Models with a mathematical representation.  

They consider, on the one side, the always-unchanging form,

We know of no such thing.  

on the other, the unique, specific content,

which is all we have access to. 

of what happens in reality. The first are law-based forms of knowledge,

Hypotheses. Nothing more.  

the others involve knowledge of particular events;

which isn't particularly fine-grained though it may get better as tech improves.  

the former teach what is eternally the case, the latter what once existed. Systematic knowledge is — if one may construct new terms of art-in the one case nomothetic, in the other idiographic.

We use these words a little differently now. 

It is not that humanistic knowledge is never nomothetic

I suppose, if statistical methods are used, it is nomothetic- e.g. establishing that Shakespeare wrote 'Two Gentlemen' on the basis of some particular mathematical pattern in the appearance of particular consonants.  

philologists generalize about language change, philosophers pronounce principles. (And scientists can be idiographers: E. O. Wilson seemed entranced by a particular ant species as well as by general truths about the evolution of the ant.) But humanist inquiry is often idiographic.

surely idiotic is meant? What we expect from the humanities is 'tone'. The point about Plato was that he was a gentleman. Aristotle was Alexander's tutor.  

That is one reason why one characteristic form of humanistic exploration, alongside the article or the treatise, is the essay, a form that Montaigne invented,

he gave a new name to what had long existed.  

and that inspired Bacon to do something somewhat different in English under the same name. An essay is not about proving a general point; it is about stringing together particular insights.

Like the 8-legged Chinese Examination essay.  

It is more like a conversation with oneself, overheard by the reader, than a lecture to the world. All of which makes it even more pressing to ask what the point is of attention to these particulars?

Taking a shit is pressing. Asking stupid questions is not.  

Let me point out first that asking that question risks simply denying the claim and following the natural impulse of the nomothete. It is to seek a law, a general answer. We are tempted, that is, to say with Hume, in the Enquiry I have already cited, that the study of these things from the past is important because it allows us “to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour.”

Hume may have thought his readers were buying this guff. We know better. Essays are shite you write to pass exams or, later on, to earn a bit of money from a literary magazine.  

I want to insist, per contra, in defense of the idiographic, that while humanists are generally interested in past particulars, there is no general answer to the question why. The answers are specific to the objects of attention. I do not say we cannot draw general conclusions from past objects and events. Of course-quite obviously-we can. Hume himself does that in his five-volume History of England.

It had a political purpose though it sold well because it was written well.  

But that is not the only thing we can do. The story about why it is worth attending to Keats's ode is an incompletable story,

If Appiah tells it, it is a complete waste of time as a story.  

replete with the many kinds of rewards of that attention.

What is our reward for wading through Appiah? He has said nothing whatsoever.  

In fact, the value of attending to the ode, I want to say, is as various as its readers and the uses to which they put it.

They know that already. Ask a bloke why he is reading something. He'll tell you he is getting something out of it.  

The stories about why it is of continuing importance to read Homer or Sappho or Kant or Achebe are specific to their particular works, then. There is, I say again, no general answer.

This is like saying 'there is no general answer to 'what is your name'. ' because people have different names. Appiah is too stupid to realise he is stupid. I suppose that is the special skill he imparts to his very special little snowflakes. 

Still, one central argument for paying attention to the specifics of the past can begin with a point made by Thucydides when he said, in The Peloponnesian War, that “an exact knowledge of the past”

which is unavailable just as is an exact knowledge of the present 

is “an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.”

But such interpretation might be better done by those with no knowledge or interest in history.  

If we knew all the problems that were going to arise for us,

we would be omniscient 

we would know what general knowledge we would need to draw from the past to face them.

Fuck that. If you know the future, you don't need lessons from the past. 

But we do not. And so we need a great stock of past cases on which we can draw,

The opposite is the case. We needn't bother with the past at all. Still, some people like it just as some people like eating their own boogers. The difference is, a guy who can talk about the Thucydides trap & our Iran policy in a posh accent is an acceptable dinner guest. Not so, a guy who eats his own boogers & wishes to discuss the finer points of such gastronomy.  

so we can figure out, as the world presents its challenges to us, which past cases they resemble or reflect.

It would be fair to say, in politics, perception can become reality & that if everybody is saying 'history is repeating itself', history does actually repeat itself.  

This is often a kind of analogical reasoning

viz. wondering whether what applies in one case might apply in a somewhat different case 

which it would be misleading to characterize as a matter of finding a general law that governs both that past case and this new one.

one could do so analogically.   

An example can guide us by directing our attention, through resemblances that are inexact, to a feature of the new situation that is parallel to something in the old. This is how legal reasoning in the common law tradition often works: We have rules for thinking about straying domestic animals. Faced with straying ostriches, we ask if we can apply similar rules.

If it is a domestic animal- e.g. it is being reared for its meat or feathers etc- then, it is obvious, that the rule re. domestic animals applies.  

To do this, we do not have to identify the common properties of the domestic animals and oversized birds and articulate a general principle: ostriches are identical with cattle and sheep for particular legal purposes.

domesticated cattle and sheep 

Settling the single case will do.

No. Understanding that an ostrich raised for meat is a domestic animal resolves the case. 

Perhaps an analogy will help here. It is worth having a toolbox around the house, one with a wide range of tools, whose properties you know something about. But there is no general answer to the question, “Why?”

The general answer is 'having tools could come in handy.'  

Each tool can be used for lots of things. There is no one thing a screwdriver is useful for.

There is one and only one task for which it is optimized for.  

(Resist the temptation to say, driving screws. If you claim that is all screwdrivers are good for, you are just revealing you do not know much about the lives of screwdrivers.)

Why claim that? You say 'this screwdriver is for driving screws of such and such type'.  

And the range of things you can do with each tool is different from the range of what you can do with the others.

Few tools are multipurpose. Each is optimized for a particular function save if, like the Swiss Army knife, it intended to serve many purposes.  

Claw hammers, like screwdrivers, can be used to remove nails from planks,

Screwdrivers aren't used to remove nails from planks. Appiah is a fucking cretin.  

but screwdrivers, unlike claw hammers, are not generally much use in nailing them in. But you cannot now think of all the things that any particular tool might turn out to be usable for.

Yes if you can, if you aren't as stupid as Appiah.  

People are finding new uses for them all the time. Like many philosophers, for example, one use I have for tools is to make a philosophical point.

He uses a screwdriver to remove rusty nails from his cranium. The philosophical point he is making is that he is as stupid as shit.  

With any tool, you do not know what it is good for until you see what problems arise.

No. If you find a tool whose use isn't obvious, you ask a handyman.  

When humanists focus our attention on, say, a text or a work of visual art, one reason is that they think that the experience of attending to it will be a worthwhile experience.

A bore, like Appiah, will be wrong.  

They do not think that the value of that attention is exhausted by what it teaches us, where “what it teaches” is some general truth.

Like paying attention to shitheads is a waste of time.  

But they also think that we cannot tell in advance what that poem or painting could teach.

Sure we can. From a religious poem we gain something which promotes faith. From a naturalistic painting of an object we learn what it looks like. 

It is worth having in your repertory, which is one reason people have learned poetry by heart, one reason we revisit paintings. Because who knows when something from them will deepen our response to a new situation?

Fuck that. We memorize poems we like & we go look again at pictures we like. True if you have to teach cretins, you might say 'what we learn from Keats is that if you see a nice vase don't smash it over your mother's head'.  

A poem or a painting is not for anything.

It is there to provide aesthetic satisfaction of some sort.  

Not because it has no uses. It has, in fact, many uses, and new ones may occur to new readers each time their situations change.

Appiah uses poems to extract nails from planks. True, he hasn't had any success so far but he keeps trying.  

But the value of the poem does not depend on any one of these uses.

Why is this fucker so obsessed with valuing things? The fact is poems or pictures have an emotional valency which is subjective & state dependent. 

It lies, rather, in two sorts of facts: that the experience of reading it can be one worth having,

i.e. doing something meant to be pleasurable can be pleasurablee 

and that sometimes we will return to it in new situations and find that it helps us think and feel and act in response to them.

No. That is an instruction manual. We may return to a poem or a picture because we want a particular sort of solace. This is about emotions. It isn't a guide to action- unless you do actually top yourself.  

And, as a philosopher humanist, I insist that this is true of the Nicomachean Ethics and the Analects.

Analects, yes. The thing is aesthetic & concerned with eusebia. Aristotle- not so much. He was a pedagogue & if it is your misfortune to teach shite, maybe he shows you how the thing can be done with little mental effort.  

You may wonder why I have such confidence in this. Well, first, let me remind you, that the claim is not that these texts reward attention because they yield something that all humanistic attention delivers. I have denied that there is any such thing.

Appiah is just saying 'a liberal education is of no practical use'. But that was only said when the definition of a gentleman was a guy who didn't have to work for a living.  

The claim I am making, at the moment, is about those two works in particular. Part of the evidence, in each case, is inductive. People have done the experiment of returning to these texts over millennia and come back with a sense of enlightenment.

Pedants may have pretended such was the case in the case of Aristotle. The Analects are alive in the way that the Gita is alive because the eusebia they encode is still very much with us.  

(Also, but this is a different argument, with pleasure. As Arnold insisted in the first section of Culture and Anarchy, we need both “sweetness and light.”)

But not 'gentlemen' who don't have to work for a living.  

Watching an interesting mind struggle with an important question turns out to be rewarding.

Reading Appiah isn't.  

But I am also claiming that we cannot say in advance what reading these texts can be good for.

Why? The claim is clearly false. Reading Aristotle is good for understanding, or teaching, Aristotle.  

And I concede that it is possible that new readers in new situations may come to feel that they are not good for anything old or new, that their use has been exhausted. Though, frankly, I am not sure I would want to live in a society in which no one had any use for Aristotle and Confucius.

Sadly, we have to live in a society which has a use for Appiah.  

Someone's life is well-lived-Aristotle's word for this is εύδαίμων, “blessed with a good genius,” as my Greek dictionary puts it-

i.e. the dude is under the protection of a nice God 

because of what they do, or have, or experience.

this does not follow. It was a claim a pedant made because he was being paid to get the sons of rich men to make an effort too raise themselves in public estimation rather than to simply idle away their days while squandering their inheritance.  

So, for any life to be worthwhile, there must be things worth doing or having or experiencing.

No. That's why we don't automatically stop life-support for those for whom such appears not to be the case.  

One thing you learn from the humanist's idiographic concern with objects and events from the past is what some of those worthwhile things are.

You learn the opposite. Stuff that seemed important in the past really wan't.  

Aristotle, having paid attention, like a good humanist, to some of the particulars, pointed some of them out: friendship, for example, as I mentioned earlier, but also, as he says, developing habits of emotional response that lead to excellence.

Pedants don't get paid for saying 'be nice!'. They have to tart things up a bit.  

When it comes to thinking about political philosophy, and in particular about freedom and equality, it seems to me that one element of the case for the humanistic method of careful idiographic attention to particular past texts and events depends on recognizing something important about moral discovery.

Why is this cunt so obsessed with the importance of discovering what is fucking obvious to everybody? How fucking students are the grad students he supervises? Can they tie their shoe-laces? If so, they already know more than you can teach them.  

Think, for these purposes, about the ideal of liberty that circulated through the American Revolution,

it was the ideal of not paying taxes to Mad King George.  

and the ideals of equality and fraternity that traveled with it in the great slogan of the French Revolution.

The English had ended feudal obligations centuries ago. France was playing catch up. 

Each of those three powerful ideas, so it seems to me, was grasped in part by thinking about what was wrong with the existing shape of things: it was an ancient regime, an established order, that they aimed to overthrow.

D'uh! 

The idea of liberty, for example, develops through thinking about what is awful about not being in charge of your own society or your own life.

No. It develops from having your money taken away by the tax-man.  

What inspires the new ideal of equality is the pain and humiliation associated with belonging to the “lower orders,” of being treated as an inferior, required to perform deference, denied access not just to resources - money, education, choices - but to equal standing. Equality becomes the name for the impulse to escape all that.

No. Equality meant Nobles would have to pay the same rate of tax as commoners. Also, no more fucking lettres de cachet. Everything should be justiciable. If the English have had habeas corpus for centuries, why not us?

When the revolutionaries pronounce “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, and when, thirteen years later, the French National Assembly recognizes and declares, “les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits” (men are born and remain free and equal in rights) in the Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen, there is a sense in which they do not yet know what they are talking about.

Appiah doesn't know what he is talking about. American or French politicians did. Revolutions are about taxes & who gets to own what & how matters will be decided.

Literature and Philosophy and Sodomy and so forth played no fucking role. Had they mattered, then the way to avert Revolution would have involved the King getting out a better brand of Literature or Philosophy or Sodomy. Why did this not happen? Because it would be wasted money.  

They do not yet know what a society of free and equal people will look like.

They never would.  

What they know is that a society of people whose lives are stunted by domination and inequality will no longer do.

Let it be stunted by some other sort of domination- by a guy who is better at it.  

They know it is bad to be enslaved.

French people weren't enslaved- unless they fell into Muslim hands.  

And in learning how to live in a new way, they have to start with what they are seeking to end: the moments of condescension, the insults, large and petty, that demeaned people in the old way of doing things. Those cases come from the history books but also from fiction and from art and, of course, from everyday experience; and from nonfiction literature, as in the slave narratives of the nineteenth century that articulated the wrongness of enslavement and taught free men and women something about what it meant. Frederick Douglass's struggle with the slave-breaker Covey in chapter  of My Bondage and My Freedom deepens our understanding of equality by showing us inequality in action.

That didn't change anything. The Civil War was fought between Whites who disagreed on political & economic issues of some importance.  

Mary Wollstonecraft, three years after the French declaration, addressed Talleyrand, who helped to craft it, with her Vindication of the Rights of Women and, again, she did so, in part, by making visible the disabilities of the legal situation of women, not just by giving a conceptual account of women's equality (which she does) but also by exemplifying those disabilities, for example in marriage law. The point is that Talleyrand and his kind-a prince, a bishop, a wielder of power-could speak of equality while not realizing what it entailed for particular kinds of people. We can learn more about this topic from reading about the situation of gentlewomen in Emma or through careful attention to more recent works, such as A Room of One's Own or The Second Sex.

Or by watching Bridgerton. The fact is Wollstonecroft failed miserably. Also, it isn't really true that 'Pride & Prejudice' is about an inter-racial Lesbian couple who sodomize the King to protest against illegal settlements on the West Bank.  

One of my favorite books to read with students is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. In it, we see what a life is like that is totally (and willingly) subordinated to the projects of somebody else.

No we don't. We see a guy who takes over his dad's old job. But he is in a line of work which is already in terminal decline and will soon disappear altogether.  

Mr. Stevens, Lord Darlington's butler, articulates his professional project in a passage that is powerful because it is so disturbing.

Appiah doesn't understand the passage. 

Let us establish this quite clearly: a butler's duty is to provide good service. It is not to meddle in the great affairs of the nation. The fact is, such great affairs will always be beyond the understanding of those such as you and I, and those of us who wish to make our mark must realize that we best do so by concentrating on what is within our realm.

Vote as you please but do what you are paid to do. Sadly, by the time the book was published, Paul Burrell had become King Charles's butler. The odd thing is, his stock is now higher than Andrew.  

This political self-negation, we feel, is just the opposite of what democracy asks of us.

No. It was an accurate reflection of the inter-war years. The servants did their jobs efficiently and voted for whichever party took their fancy. In some cases, the butler had served with his master in the trenches. There was a closer bond, but a bigger political divide. Nothing wrong in that at all.  

In recent years, philosophical egalitarianism has been deepened by reflection on what it is to treat one another-and to be treated-as equals.

It really hasn't. 

Our grasp of what equality means and of why it matters is embodied in narratives like these.

No. Equality is about equal pay for equal work. Sadly, if you study or teach shit, your pay will be rubbish.  

And part of why they do it so well is that they engage our sentiments as well as our reason.

This guy can't reason.  

Cicero, in his defense of the poet Archias

his former tutor. The dude had legally acquired Roman citizenship. Cicero, to magnify himself as the student of a great Greek poet, says Archias would have deserved Roman citizenship in any case because of his literary accomplishments 

- a defense long-studied by humanists seeking defences of poetry-

which already existed. Kids should memorize great poems. They will grow up to be eloquent & of higher character.  

tells us how the poet was formed in those “arts by which young boys are gradually molded towards humanitas.” And he speaks, in the same rambling Ciceronian sentence, of Antioch, the poet's native city, as “liberalissimisque studiis adfluenti,” that is, abundant in the most liberal studies.

i.e. it had lots of Schools.  

So he connects the idea of a preparation for a humane life with the studies most apt for free people.

Romans wouldn't remain free for very long.  

And that, I think, is one way of understanding one root thought of multiple different strands of humanistic thought. The liberal in liberal studies means “befitting a free person.”

Though plenty of Roman patricians were taught by Greek slaves.  

We are, or at least we should aim to be, free people, and one central ideal of liberalism is a conception of that freedom, which insists that individuals are all entitled to lives of their own, lives in which the central, shaping decisions are for them to take and not to be settled for them by a master.

Thanks to the Brits, even the Asante had to give up enslaving people.  

And if you are to discharge the terrific responsibility of making your own life, then you surely need all the help you can get.

You need none from Appiah.  

That is what a liberal education is for,

it makes you as stupid as Appiah 

and the humanities, in their multifarious ways, provide instruments that allow us to exercise that responsibility.

No. Money is that instrument. If we can earn it, well and good. There are worse things a cretin can do than teach Humanities.  

If we are to study the good life, in ethics, or the just society, in political philosophy, we need to draw on these wellsprings of understanding and of pleasure.

Fuck studying. The Humanities are for enjoyment. True, if you teach cretins, you may have to pretend that reading Arris-turtle will give you Ninja Turtle super-powers or else enable you to escape enslavement by the Asante or come out of the closet as a proud Lesbian man of colour- even if it is pink.