Group items tagged

These cognitive errors, which distract leaders from optimal policy making and citizens from taking steps to promote their own and others’ interests, cannot merely be ascribed to repudiations of science.

The first error that thwarts effective policy making during crises stems from what economists have called the “identifiable victim effect.” Humans respond more aggressively to threats to identifiable lives, ie, those that an individual can easily imagine being their own or belonging to people they care about (such as family members) or care for (such as a clinician’s patients) than to the hidden, “statistical” deaths reported in accounts of the population-level tolls of the crisis

Yet such views represent a second reason for the broad endorsement of policies that prioritize saving visible, immediately jeopardized lives: that humans are imbued with a strong and neurally mediated3 tendency to predict outcomes that are systematically more optimistic than observed outcomes

A third driver of misguided policy responses is that humans are present biased, ie, people tend to prefer immediate benefits to even larger benefits in the future.

Even if the tendency to prioritize visibly affected individuals could be resisted, many people would still place greater value on saving a life today than a life tomorrow.

Similar psychology helps explain the reluctance of many nations to limit refrigeration and air conditioning, forgo fuel-inefficient transportation, and take other near-term steps to reduce the future effects of climate change

The fourth contributing factor is that virtually everyone is subject to omission bias, which involves the tendency to prefer that a harm occur by failure to take action rather than as direct consequence of the actions that are taken

Although those who set policies for rationing ventilators and other scarce therapies do not intend the deaths of those who receive insufficient priority for these treatments, such policies nevertheless prevent clinicians from taking all possible steps to save certain lives.

An important goal of governance is to mitigate the effects of these and other biases on public policy and to effectively communicate the reasons for difficult decisions to the public. However, health systems’ routine use of wartime terminology of “standing up” and “standing down” intensive care units illustrate problematic messaging aimed at the need to address immediate danger

Second, had governments, health systems, and clinicians better understood the “identifiable victim effect,” they may have realized that promoting flattening the curve as a way to reduce pressure on hospitals and health care workers would be less effective than promoting early restaurant and retail store closures by saying “The lives you save when you close your doors include your own.”

Third, these leaders’ routine use of terms such as “nonpharmaceutical interventions”9 portrays public health responses negatively by labeling them according to what they are not. Instead, support for heavily funding contact tracing could have been generated by communicating such efforts as “lifesaving.

Fourth, although errors of human cognition are challenging to surmount, policy making, even in a crisis, occurs over a sufficient period to be meaningfully improved by deliberate efforts to counter untoward biases

This is not to say that Alzheimer’s- and dementia-related memory impairments are fiction — they are very real — but every lapse of short-term memory doesn’t necessarily indicate a biological disorder.

Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we’ve had more experience.

Second, older adults have to search through more memories than do younger adults to find the fact or piece of information they’re looking for. Your brain becomes crowded with memories and information.

Rationality is the collection of theories, beliefs, principles, and facts that the human subject uses to judge the world, and a person’s rationality is, to a large extent, the product of that person’s education and moral formation.

To the extent that a person accepts what is handed down from the moral and intellectual traditions of her or his community in learning to judge truth and falsity, good and evil, that person’s rationality is “tradition-constituted.” Tradition-constituted rationality provides the schemata by which we interpret, understand, and judge the world we live in

The apparent problem of relativism in MacIntyre’s theory of rationality is much like the problem of relativism in the philosophy of science. Scientific claims develop within larger theoretical frameworks, so that the apparent truth of a scientific claim depends on one’s judgment of the larger framework. The resolution of the problem of relativism therefore appears to hang on the possibility of judging frameworks or rationalities, or judging between frameworks or rationalities from a position that does not presuppose the truth of the framework or rationality, but no such theoretical standpoint is humanly possible.

MacIntyre finds that the world itself provides the criterion for the testing of rationalities, and he finds that there is no criterion except the world itself that can stand as the measure of the truth of any philosophical theory.

MacIntyre’s philosophy is indebted to the philosophy of science, which recognizes the historicism of scientific enquiry even as it seeks a truthful understanding of the world. MacIntyre’s philosophy does not offer a priori certainty about any theory or principle; it examines the ways in which reflection upon experience supports, challenges, or falsifies theories that have appeared to be the best theories so far to the people who have accepted them so far. MacIntyre’s ideal enquirers remain Hamlets, not Emmas.

history shows us that individuals, communities, and even whole nations may commit themselves militantly over long periods of their histories to doctrines that their ideological adversaries find irrational. This qualified relativism of appearances has troublesome implications for anyone who believes that philosophical enquiry can easily provide certain knowledge of the world

According to MacIntyre, theories govern the ways that we interpret the world and no theory is ever more than “the best standards so far” (3RV, p. 65). Our theories always remain open to improvement, and when our theories change, the appearances of our world—the apparent truths of claims judged within those theoretical frameworks—change with them.

From the subjective standpoint of the human enquirer, MacIntyre finds that theories, concepts, and facts all have histories, and they are all liable to change—for better or for worse.

MacIntyre holds that the rationality of individuals is not only tradition-constituted, it is also tradition constitutive, as individuals make their own contributions to their own rationality, and to the rationalities of their communities. Rationality is not fixed, within either the history of a community or the life of a person

The modern account of first principles justifies an approach to philosophy that rejects tradition. The modern liberal individualist approach is anti-traditional. It denies that our understanding is tradition-constituted and it denies that different cultures may differ in their standards of rationality and justice:

Modernity does not see tradition as the key that unlocks moral and political understanding, but as a superfluous accumulation of opinions that tend to prejudice moral and political reasoning.

Although modernity rejects tradition as a method of moral and political enquiry, MacIntyre finds that it nevertheless bears all the characteristics of a moral and political tradition.

If historical narratives are only projections of the interests of historians, then it is difficult to see how this historical narrative can claim to be truthful

For these post-modern theorists, “if the Enlightenment conceptions of truth and rationality cannot be sustained,” either relativism or perspectivism “is the only possible alternative” (p. 353). MacIntyre rejects both challenges by developing his theory of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality on pp. 354-369

How, then, is one to settle challenges between two traditions? It depends on whether the adherents of either take the challenges of the other tradition seriously. It depends on whether the adherents of either tradition, on seeing a failure in their own tradition are willing to consider an answer offered by their rival (p. 355)

how a person with no traditional affiliation is to deal with the conflicting claims of rival traditions: “The initial answer is: that will depend upon who you are and how you understand yourself. This is not the kind of answer which we have been educated to expect in philosophy”

MacIntyre focuses the critique of modernity on the question of rational justification. Modern epistemology stands or falls on the possibility of Cartesian epistemological first principles. MacIntyre’s history exposes that notion of first principle as a fiction, and at the same time demonstrates that rational enquiry advances (or declines) only through tradition

MacIntyre cites Foucault’s 1966 book, Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1970) as an example of the self-subverting character of Genealogical enquiry

Foucault’s book reduces history to a procession of “incommensurable ordered schemes of classification and representation” none of which has any greater claim to truth than any other, yet this book “is itself organized as a scheme of classification and representation.”

From MacIntyre’s perspective, there is no question of deciding whether or not to work within a tradition; everyone who struggles with practical, moral, and political questions simply does. “There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry . . . apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other”

Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990). The central idea of the Gifford Lectures is that philosophers make progress by addressing the shortcomings of traditional narratives about the world, shortcomings that become visible either through the failure of traditional narratives to make sense of experience, or through the introduction of contradictory narratives that prove impossible to dismiss

MacIntyre compares three traditions exemplified by three literary works published near the end of Adam Gifford’s life (1820–1887)

The Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1875–1889) represents the modern tradition of trying to understand the world objectively without the influence of tradition.

The Genealogy of Morals (1887), by Friedrich Nietzsche embodies the post-modern tradition of interpreting all traditions as arbitrary impositions of power.

The encyclical letter Aeterni Patris (1879) of Pope Leo XIII exemplifies the approach of acknowledging one’s predecessors within one’s own tradition of enquiry and working to advance or improve that tradition in the pursuit of objective truth. 

Of the three versions of moral enquiry treated in 3RV, only tradition, exemplified in 3RV by the Aristotelian, Thomistic tradition, understands itself as a tradition that looks backward to predecessors in order to understand present questions and move forward

Encyclopaedia obscures the role of tradition by presenting the most current conclusions and convictions of a tradition as if they had no history, and as if they represented the final discovery of unalterable truth

Encyclopaedists focus on the present and ignore the past.

Genealogists, on the other hand, focus on the past in order to undermine the claims of the present.

In short, Genealogy denies the teleology of human enquiry by denying (1) that historical enquiry has been fruitful, (2) that the enquiring person has a real identity, and (3) that enquiry has a real goal. MacIntyre finds this mode of enquiry incoherent.

Genealogy is self-deceiving insofar as it ignores the traditional and teleological character of its enquiry.

Genealogical moral enquiry must make similar exceptions to its treatments of the unity of the enquiring subject and the teleology of moral enquiry; thus “it seems to be the case that the intelligibility of genealogy requires beliefs and allegiances of a kind precluded by the genealogical stance” (3RV, p. 54-55)

MacIntyre uses Thomism because it applies the traditional mode of enquiry in a self-conscious manner. Thomistic students learn the work of philosophical enquiry as apprentices in a craft (3RV, p. 61), and maintain the principles of the tradition in their work to extend the understanding of the tradition, even as they remain open to the criticism of those principles.

3RV uses Thomism as its example of tradition, but this use should not suggest that MacIntyre identifies “tradition” with Thomism or Thomism-as-a-name-for-the-Western-tradition. As noted above, WJWR distinguished four traditions of enquiry within the Western European world alone

MacIntyre’s emphasis on the temporality of rationality in traditional enquiry makes tradition incompatible with the epistemological projects of modern philosophy

Tradition is not merely conservative; it remains open to improvement,

Tradition differs from both encyclopaedia and genealogy in the way it understands the place of its theories in the history of human enquiry. The adherent of a tradition must understand that “the rationality of a craft is justified by its history so far,” thus it “is inseparable from the tradition through which it was achieved”

MacIntyre uses Thomas Aquinas to illustrate the revolutionary potential of traditional enquiry. Thomas was educated in Augustinian theology and Aristotelian philosophy, and through this education he began to see not only the contradictions between the two traditions, but also the strengths and weaknesses that each tradition revealed in the other. His education also helped him to discover a host of questions and problems that had to be answered and solved. Many of Thomas Aquinas’ responses to these concerns took the form of disputed questions. “Yet to each question the answer produced by Aquinas as a conclusion is no more than and, given Aquinas’s method, cannot but be no more than, the best answer reached so far. And hence derives the essential incompleteness”

argue that the virtues are essential to the practice of independent practical reason. The book is relentlessly practical; its arguments appeal only to experience and to purposes, and to the logic of practical reasoning.

Like other intelligent animals, human beings enter life vulnerable, weak, untrained, and unknowing, and face the likelihood of infirmity in sickness and in old age. Like other social animals, humans flourish in groups. We learn to regulate our passions, and to act effectively alone and in concert with others through an education provided within a community. MacIntyre’s position allows him to look to the animal world to find analogies to the role of social relationships in the moral formation of human beings

The task for the human child is to make “the transition from the infantile exercise of animal intelligence to the exercise of independent practical reasoning” (DRA, p. 87). For a child to make this transition is “to redirect and transform her or his desires, and subsequently to direct them consistently towards the goods of different stages of her or his life” (DRA, p. 87). The development of independent practical reason in the human agent requires the moral virtues in at least three ways.

DRA presents moral knowledge as a “knowing how,” rather than as a “knowing that.” Knowledge of moral rules is not sufficient for a moral life; prudence is required to enable the agent to apply the rules well.

“Knowing how to act virtuously always involves more than rule-following” (DRA, p. 93). The prudent person can judge what must be done in the absence of a rule and can also judge when general norms cannot be applied to particular cases.

Flourishing as an independent practical reasoner requires the virtues in a second way, simply because sometimes we need our friends to tell us who we really are. Independent practical reasoning also requires self-knowledge, but self-knowledge is impossible without the input of others whose judgment provides a reliable touchstone to test our beliefs about ourselves. Self-knowledge therefore requires the virtues that enable an agent to sustain formative relationships and to accept the criticism of trusted friends

Human flourishing requires the virtues in a third way, by making it possible to participate in social and political action. They enable us to “protect ourselves and others against neglect, defective sympathies, stupidity, acquisitiveness, and malice” (DRA, p. 98) by enabling us to form and sustain social relationships through which we may care for one another in our infirmities, and pursue common goods with and for the other members of our societies.

MacIntyre argues that it is impossible to find an external standpoint, because rational enquiry is an essentially social work (DRA, p. 156-7). Because it is social, shared rational enquiry requires moral commitment to, and practice of, the virtues to prevent the more complacent members of communities from closing off critical reflection upon “shared politically effective beliefs and concepts”

MacIntyre finds himself compelled to answer what may be called the question of moral provincialism: If one is to seek the truth about morality and justice, it seems necessary to “find a standpoint that is sufficiently external to the evaluative attitudes and practices that are to be put to the question.” If it is impossible for the agent to take such an external standpoint, if the agent’s commitments preclude radical criticism of the virtues of the community, does that leave the agent “a prisoner of shared prejudices” (DRA, p. 154)?

The book moves from MacIntyre’s assessment of human needs for the virtues to the political implications of that assessment. Social and political institutions that form and enable independent practical reasoning must “satisfy three conditions.” (1) They must enable their members to participate in shared deliberations about the communities’ actions. (2) They must establish norms of justice “consistent with exercise of” the virtue of justice. (3) They must enable the strong “to stand proxy” as advocates for the needs of the weak and the disabled.

The social and political institutions that MacIntyre recommends cannot be identified with the modern nation state or the modern nuclear family

The political structures necessary for human flourishing are essentially local

Yet local communities support human flourishing only when they actively support “the virtues of just generosity and shared deliberation”

MacIntyre rejects individualism and insists that we view human beings as members of communities who bear specific debts and responsibilities because of our social identities. The responsibilities one may inherit as a member of a community include debts to one’s forbearers that one can only repay to people in the present and future

The constructive argument of the second half of the book begins with traditional accounts of the excellences or virtues of practical reasoning and practical rationality rather than virtues of moral reasoning or morality. These traditional accounts define virtue as arête, as excellence

Practices are supported by institutions like chess clubs, hospitals, universities, industrial corporations, sports leagues, and political organizations.

Practices exist in tension with these institutions, since the institutions tend to be oriented to goods external to practices. Universities, hospitals, and scholarly societies may value prestige, profitability, or relations with political interest groups above excellence in the practices they are said to support.

Personal desires and institutional pressures to pursue external goods may threaten to derail practitioners’ pursuits of the goods internal to practices. MacIntyre defines virtue initially as the quality of character that enables an agent to overcome these temptations:

“A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices

Excellence as a human agent cannot be reduced to excellence in a particular practice (See AV, pp. 204–

The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations, and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good (AV, p. 219).

The excellent human agent has the moral qualities to seek what is good and best both in practices and in life as a whole.

The virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those relationships necessary if the variety of goods internal to practices are to be achieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life in which that individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her whole life, but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context (AV, p. 223)

Since “goods, and with them the only grounds for the authority of laws and virtues, can only be discovered by entering into those relationships which constitute communities whose central bond is a shared vision of and understanding of goods” (AV, p. 258), any hope for the transformation and renewal of society depends on the development and maintenance of such communities.

MacIntyre’s Aristotelian approach to ethics as a study of human action distinguishes him from post-Kantian moral philosophers who approach ethics as a means of determining the demands of objective, impersonal, universal morality

This modern approach may be described as moral epistemology. Modern moral philosophy pretends to free the individual to determine for her- or himself what she or he must do in a given situation, irrespective of her or his own desires; it pretends to give knowledge of universal moral laws

Aristotelian metaphysicians, particularly Thomists who define virtue in terms of the perfection of nature, rejected MacIntyre’s contention that an adequate Aristotelian account of virtue as excellence in practical reasoning and human action need not appeal to Aristotelian metaphysic

one group of critics rejects MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism because they hold that any Aristotelian account of the virtues must first account for the truth about virtue in terms of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature, which MacIntyre had dismissed in AV as “metaphysical biology”

Many of those who rejected MacIntyre’s turn to Aristotle define “virtue” primarily along moral lines, as obedience to law or adherence to some kind of natural norm. For these critics, “virtuous” appears synonymous with “morally correct;” their resistance to MacIntyre’s appeal to virtue stems from their difficulties either with what they take to be the shortcomings of MacIntyre’s account of moral correctness or with the notion of moral correctness altogether

MacIntyre continues to argue from the experience of practical reasoning to the demands of moral education.

Descartes and his successors, by contrast, along with certain “notable Thomists of the last hundred years” (p. 175), have proposed that philosophy begins from knowledge of some “set of necessarily true first principles which any truly rational person is able to evaluate as true” (p. 175). Thus for the moderns, philosophy is a technical rather than moral endeavor

MacIntyre distinguishes two related challenges to his position, the “relativist challenge” and the “perspectivist challenge.” These two challenges both acknowledge that the goals of the Enlightenment cannot be met and that, “the only available standards of rationality are those made available by and within traditions” (p. 252); they conclude that nothing can be known to be true or false

MacIntyre follows the progress of the Western tradition through “three distinct traditions:” from Homer and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and from Augustine through Calvin to Hume

Chapter 17 examines the modern liberal denial of tradition, and the ironic transformation of liberalism into the fourth tradition to be treated in the book.

MacIntyre credits John Stuart Mill and Thomas Aquinas as “two philosophers of the kind who by their writing send us beyond philosophy into immediate encounter with the ends of life

First, both were engaged by questions about the ends of life as questioning human beings and not just as philosophers. . . .

Secondly, both Mill and Aquinas understood their speaking and writing as contributing to an ongoing philosophical conversation. . . .

Thirdly, it matters that both the end of the conversation and the good of those who participate in it is truth and that the nature of truth, of good, of rational justification, and of meaning therefore have to be central topics of that conversation (Tasks, pp. 130-1).

Without these three characteristics, philosophy is first reduced to “the exercise of a set of analytic and argumentative skills. . . . Secondly, philosophy may thereby become a diversion from asking questions about the ends of life with any seriousness”

Neither Rosenzweig nor Lukács made philosophical progress because both failed to relate “their questions about the ends of life to the ends of their philosophical writing”

First, any adequate philosophical history or biography must determine whether the authors studied remain engaged with the questions that philosophy studies, or set the questions aside in favor of the answers. Second, any adequate philosophical history or biography must determine whether the authors studied insulated themselves from contact with conflicting worldviews or remained open to learning from every available philosophical approach. Third, any adequate philosophical history or biography must place the authors studied into a broader context that shows what traditions they come from and “whose projects” they are “carrying forward

MacIntyre’s recognition of the connection between an author’s pursuit of the ends of life and the same author’s work as a philosophical writer prompts him to finish the essay by demanding three things of philosophical historians and biographers

Philosophy is not just a study; it is a practice. Excellence in this practice demands that an author bring her or his struggles with the questions of the ends of philosophy into dialogue with historic and contemporary texts and authors in the hope of making progress in answering those questions

MacIntyre defends Thomistic realism as rational enquiry directed to the discovery of truth.

The three Thomistic essays in this book challenge those caricatures by presenting Thomism in a way that people outside of contemporary Thomistic scholarship may find surprisingly flexible and open

To be a moral agent, (1) one must understand one’s individual identity as transcending all the roles that one fills; (2) one must see oneself as a practically rational individual who can judge and reject unjust social standards; and (3) one must understand oneself as “as accountable to others in respect of the human virtues and not just in respect of [one’s] role-performances

J is guilty because he complacently accepted social structures that he should have questioned, structures that undermined his moral agency. This essay shows that MacIntyre’s ethics of human agency is not just a descriptive narrative about the manner of moral education; it is a standard laden account of the demands of moral agency.

MacIntyre considers “the case of J” (J, for jemand, the German word for “someone”), a train controller who learned, as a standard for his social role, to take no interest in what his trains carried, even during war time when they carried “munitions and . . . Jews on their way to extermination camps”

J had learned to do his work for the railroad according to one set of standards and to live other parts of his life according to other standards, so that this compliant participant in “the final solution” could contend, “You cannot charge me with moral failure” (E&P, p. 187).

The epistemological theories of Modern moral philosophy were supposed to provide rational justification for rules, policies, and practical determinations according to abstract universal standards, but MacIntyre has dismissed those theorie

Modern metaethics is supposed to enable its practitioners to step away from the conflicting demands of contending moral traditions and to judge those conflicts from a neutral position, but MacIntyre has rejected this project as well

In his ethical writings, MacIntyre seeks only to understand how to liberate the human agent from blindness and stupidity, to prepare the human agent to recognize what is good and best to do in the concrete circumstances of that agent’s own life, and to strengthen the agent to follow through on that judgment.

In his political writings, MacIntyre investigates the role of communities in the formation of effective rational agents, and the impact of political institutions on the lives of communities. This kind of ethics and politics is appropriately named the ethics of human agency.

The purpose of the modern moral philosophy of authors like Kant and Mill was to determine, rationally and universally, what kinds of behavior ought to be performed—not in terms of the agent’s desires or goals, but in terms of universal, rational duties. Those theories purported to let agents know what they ought to do by providing knowledge of duties and obligations, thus they could be described as theories of moral epistemology.

Contemporary virtue ethics purports to let agents know what qualities human beings ought to have, and the reasons that we ought to have them, not in terms of our fitness for human agency, but in the same universal, disinterested, non-teleological terms that it inherits from Kant and Mill.

For MacIntyre, moral knowledge remains a “knowing how” rather than a “knowing that;” MacIntyre seeks to identify those moral and intellectual excellences that make human beings more effective in our pursuit of the human good.

MacIntyre’s purpose in his ethics of human agency is to consider what it means to seek one’s good, what it takes to pursue one’s good, and what kind of a person one must become if one wants to pursue that good effectively as a human agent.

As a philosophy of human agency, MacIntyre’s work belongs to the traditions of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

in keeping with the insight of Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, it maintained the common condition of theorists and people as peers in the pursuit of the good life.

He holds that the human good plays a role in our practical reasoning whether we recognize it or not, so that some people may do well without understanding why (E&P, p. 25). He also reads Aristotle as teaching that knowledge of the good can make us better agents

AV defines virtue in terms of the practical requirements for excellence in human agency, in an agent’s participation in practices (AV, ch. 14), in an agent’s whole life, and in an agent’s involvement in the life of her or his community

MacIntyre’s Aristotelian concept of “human action” opposes the notion of “human behavior” that prevailed among mid-twentieth-century determinist social scientists. Human actions, as MacIntyre understands them, are acts freely chosen by human agents in order to accomplish goals that those agents pursue

Human behavior, according to mid-twentieth-century determinist social scientists, is the outward activity of a subject, which is said to be caused entirely by environmental influences beyond the control of the subject.

Rejecting crude determinism in social science, and approaches to government and public policy rooted in determinism, MacIntyre sees the renewal of human agency and the liberation of the human agent as central goals for ethics and politics.

MacIntyre’s Aristotelian account of “human action” examines the habits that an agent must develop in order to judge and act most effectively in the pursuit of truly choice-worthy ends

MacIntyre seeks to understand what it takes for the human person to become the kind of agent who has the practical wisdom to recognize what is good and best to do and the moral freedom to act on her or his best judgment.

MacIntyre rejected the determinism of modern social science early in his career (“Determinism,” 1957), yet he recognizes that the ability to judge well and act freely is not simply given; excellence in judgment and action must be developed, and it is the task of moral philosophy to discover how these excellences or virtues of the human agent are established, maintained, and strengthened

MacIntyre’s Aristotelian philosophy investigates the conditions that support free and deliberate human action in order to propose a path to the liberation of the human agent through participation in the life of a political community that seeks its common goods through the shared deliberation and action of its members

As a classics major at Queen Mary College in the University of London (1945-1949), MacIntyre read the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle, but his studies were not limited to the grammars of ancient languages. He also examined the ethical theories of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. He attended the lectures of analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer and of philosopher of science Karl Popper. He read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Jean-Paul Sartre’s L'existentialisme est un humanisme, and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte (What happened, pp. 17-18). MacIntyre met the sociologist Franz Steiner, who helped direct him toward approaching moralities substantively

Alasdair MacIntyre’s philosophy builds on an unusual foundation. His early life was shaped by two conflicting systems of values. One was “a Gaelic oral culture of farmers and fishermen, poets and storytellers.” The other was modernity, “The modern world was a culture of theories rather than stories” (MacIntyre Reader, p. 255). MacIntyre embraced both value systems

From Marxism, MacIntyre learned to see liberalism as a destructive ideology that undermines communities in the name of individual liberty and consequently undermines the moral formation of human agents

For MacIntyre, Marx’s way of seeing through the empty justifications of arbitrary choices to consider the real goals and consequences of political actions in economic and social terms would remain the principal insight of Marxism

After his retirement from teaching, MacIntyre has continued his work of promoting a renewal of human agency through an examination of the virtues demanded by practices, integrated human lives, and responsible engagement with community life. He is currently affiliated with the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) at London Metropolitan University.

The second half of AV proposes a conception of practice and practical reasoning and the notion of excellence as a human agent as an alternative to modern moral philosophy

AV rejects the view of “modern liberal individualism” in which autonomous individuals use abstract moral principles to determine what they ought to do. The critique of modern normative ethics in the first half of AV rejects modern moral reasoning for its failure to justify its premises, and criticizes the frequent use of the rhetoric of objective morality and scientific necessity to manipulate people to accept arbitrary decisions

MacIntyre uses “modern liberal individualism” to name a much broader category that includes both liberals and conservatives in contemporary American political parlance, as well as some Marxists and anarchists (See ASIA, pp. 280-284). Conservatism, liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism all present the autonomous individual as the unit of civil society

The sources of modern liberal individualism—Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau—assert that human life is solitary by nature and social by habituation and convention. MacIntyre’s Aristotelian tradition holds, on the contrary, that human life is social by nature.

MacIntyre identifies moral excellence with effective human agency, and seeks a political environment that will help to liberate human agents to recognize and seek their own goods, as components of the common goods of their communities, more effectively. For MacIntyre therefore, ethics and politics are bound together.

For MacIntyre ethics is not an application of principles to facts, but a study of moral action. Moral action, free human action, involves decisions to do things in pursuit of goals, and it involves the understanding of the implications of one’s actions for the whole variety of goals that human agents seek

In this sense, “To act morally is to know how to act” (SMJ, p. 56). “Morality is not a ‘knowing that’ but a ‘knowing how’”

If human action is a ‘knowing how,’ then ethics must also consider how one learns ‘how.’ Like other forms of ‘knowing how,’ MacIntyre finds that one learns how to act morally within a community whose language and shared standards shape our judgment

MacIntyre had concluded that ethics is not an abstract exercise in the assessment of facts; it is a study of free human action and of the conditions that enable rational human agency.

MacIntyre gives Marx credit for concluding in the third of the Theses on Feuerbach, that the only way to change society is to change ourselves, and that “The coincidence of the changing of human activity or self-changing can only be comprehended and rationally understood as revolutionary practice”

MacIntyre distinguishes “religion which is an opiate for the people from religion which is not” (MI, p. 83). He condemns forms of religion that justify social inequities and encourage passivity. He argues that authentic Christian teaching criticizes social structures and encourages action

Where “moral philosophy textbooks” discuss the kinds of maxims that should guide “promise-keeping, truth-telling, and the like,” moral maxims do not guide real agents in real life at all. “They do not guide us because we do not need to be guided. We know what to do” (ASIA, p. 106). Sometimes we do this without any maxims at all, or even against all the maxims we know. MacIntyre Illustrates his point with Huckleberry Finn’s decision to help Jim, Miss Watson’s escaped slave, to make his way to freedom

MacIntyre develops the ideas that morality emerges from history, and that morality organizes the common life of a community

The book concludes that the concepts of morality are neither timeless nor ahistorical, and that understanding the historical development of ethical concepts can liberate us “from any false absolutist claims” (SHE, p. 269). Yet this conclusion need not imply that morality is essentially arbitrary or that one could achieve freedom by liberating oneself from the morality of one’s society.

From this “Aristotelian point of view,” “modern morality” begins to go awry when moral norms are separated from the pursuit of human goods and moral behavior is treated as an end in itself. This separation characterizes Christian divine command ethics since the fourteenth century and has remained essential to secularized modern morality since the eighteenth century

From MacIntyre’s “Aristotelian point of view,” the autonomy granted to the human agent by modern moral philosophy breaks down natural human communities and isolates the individual from the kinds of formative relationships that are necessary to shape the agent into an independent practical reasoner.

the 1977 essay “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science” (Hereafter EC). This essay, MacIntyre reports, “marks a major turning-point in my thought in the 1970s” (The Tasks of Philosophy, p. vii) EC may be described fairly as MacIntyre’s discourse on method

First, Philosophy makes progress through the resolution of problems. These problems arise when the theories, histories, doctrines and other narratives that help us to organize our experience of the world fail us, leaving us in “epistemological crises.” Epistemological crises are the aftermath of events that undermine the ways that we interpret our world

it presents three general points on the method for philosophy.

To live in an epistemological crisis is to be aware that one does not know what one thought one knew about some particular subject and to be anxious to recover certainty about that subject.

To resolve an epistemological crisis it is not enough to impose some new way of interpreting our experience, we also need to understand why we were wrong before: “When an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them

MacIntyre notes, “Philosophers have customarily been Emmas and not Hamlets” (p. 6); that is, philosophers have treated their conclusions as accomplished truths, rather than as “more adequate narratives” (p. 7) that remain open to further improvement.

To illustrate his position on the open-endedness of enquiry, MacIntyre compares the title characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Jane Austen’s Emma. When Emma finds that she is deeply misled in her beliefs about the other characters in her story, Mr. Knightly helps her to learn the truth and the story comes to a happy ending (p. 6). Hamlet, by contrast, finds no pat answers to his questions; rival interpretations remain throughout the play, so that directors who would stage the play have to impose their own interpretations on the script

Another approach to education is the method of Descartes, who begins by rejecting everything that is not clearly and distinctly true as unreliable and false in order to rebuild his understanding of the world on a foundation of undeniable truth.

Descartes presents himself as willfully rejecting everything he had believed, and ignores his obvious debts to the Scholastic tradition, even as he argues his case in French and Latin. For MacIntyre, seeking epistemological certainty through universal doubt as a precondition for enquiry is a mistake: “it is an invitation not to philosophy but to mental breakdown, or rather to philosophy as a means of mental breakdown.

MacIntyre contrasts Descartes’ descent into mythical isolation with Galileo, who was able to make progress in astronomy and physics by struggling with the apparently insoluble questions of late medieval astronomy and physics, and radically reinterpreting the issues that constituted those questions

To make progress in philosophy one must sort through the narratives that inform one’s understanding, struggle with the questions that those narratives raise, and on occasion, reject, replace, or reinterpret portions of those narratives and propose those changes to the rest of one’s community for assessment. Human enquiry is always situated within the history and life of a community.

The third point of EC is that we can learn about progress in philosophy from the philosophy of science

Kuhn’s “paradigm shifts,” however, are unlike MacIntyre’s resolutions of epistemological crises in two ways.

First they are not rational responses to specific problems. Kuhn compares paradigm shifts to religious conversions (pp. 150, 151, 158), stressing that they are not guided by rational norms and he claims that the “mopping up” phase of a paradigm shift is a matter of convention in the training of new scientists and attrition among the holdouts of the previous paradigm

Second, the new paradigm is treated as a closed system of belief that regulates a new period of “normal science”; Kuhn’s revolutionary scientists are Emmas, not Hamlets

MacIntyre proposes elements of Imre Lakatos’ philosophy of science as correctives to Kuhn’s. While Lakatos has his own shortcomings, his general account of the methodologies of scientific research programs recognizes the role of reason in the transitions between theories and between research programs (Lakatos’ analog to Kuhn’s paradigms or disciplinary matrices). Lakatos presents science as an open ended enquiry, in which every theory may eventually be replaced by more adequate theories. For Lakatos, unlike Kuhn, rational scientific progress occurs when a new theory can account both for the apparent promise and for the actual failure of the theory it replaces.

The third conclusion of MacIntyre’s essay is that decisions to support some theories over others may be justified rationally to the extent that those theories allow us to understand our experience and our history, including the history of the failures of inadequate theories

For Aristotle, moral philosophy is a study of practical reasoning, and the excellences or virtues that Aristotle recommends in the Nicomachean Ethics are the intellectual and moral excellences that make a moral agent effective as an independent practical reasoner.

MacIntyre also finds that the contending parties have little interest in the rational justification of the principles they use. The language of moral philosophy has become a kind of moral rhetoric to be used to manipulate others in defense of the arbitrary choices of its users

examining the current condition of secular moral and political discourse. MacIntyre finds contending parties defending their decisions by appealing to abstract moral principles, but he finds their appeals eclectic, inconsistent, and incoherent.

The secular moral philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shared strong and extensive agreements about the content of morality (AV, p. 51) and believed that their moral philosophy could justify the demands of their morality rationally, free from religious authority.

MacIntyre traces the lineage of the culture of emotivism to the secularized Protestant cultures of northern Europe

Modern moral philosophy had thus set for itself an incoherent goal. It was to vindicate both the moral autonomy of the individual and the objectivity, necessity, and categorical character of the rules of morality

MacIntyre turns to an apparent alternative, the pragmatic expertise of professional managers. Managers are expected to appeal to the facts to make their decisions on the objective basis of effectiveness, and their authority to do this is based on their knowledge of the social sciences

An examination of the social sciences reveals, however, that many of the facts to which managers appeal depend on sociological theories that lack scientific status. Thus, the predictions and demands of bureaucratic managers are no less liable to ideological manipulation than the determinations of modern moral philosophers.

Modern moral philosophy separates moral reasoning about duties and obligations from practical reasoning about ends and practical deliberation about the means to one’s ends, and in doing so it separates morality from practice.

Many Europeans also lost the practical justifications for their moral norms as they approached modernity; for these Europeans, claiming that certain practices are “immoral,” and invoking Kant’s categorical imperative or Mill’s principle of utility to explain why those practices are immoral, seems no more adequate than the Polynesian appeal to taboo.

MacIntyre sifts these definitions and then gives his own definition of virtue, as excellence in human agency, in terms of practices, whole human lives, and traditions in chapters 14 and 15 of AV.

In the most often quoted sentence of AV, MacIntyre defines a practice as (1) a complex social activity that (2) enables participants to gain goods internal to the practice. (3) Participants achieve excellence in practices by gaining the internal goods. When participants achieve excellence, (4) the social understandings of excellence in the practice, of the goods of the practice, and of the possibility of achieving excellence in the practice “are systematically extended”

Practices, like chess, medicine, architecture, mechanical engineering, football, or politics, offer their practitioners a variety of goods both internal and external to these practices. The goods internal to practices include forms of understanding or physical abilities that can be acquired only by pursuing excellence in the associated practice

Goods external to practices include wealth, fame, prestige, and power; there are many ways to gain these external goods. They can be earned or purchased, either honestly or through deception; thus the pursuit of these external goods may conflict with the pursuit of the goods internal to practices.

An intelligent child is given the opportunity to win candy by learning to play chess. As long as the child plays chess only to win candy, he has every reason to cheat if by doing so he can win more candy. If the child begins to desire and pursue the goods internal to chess, however, cheating becomes irrational, because it is impossible to gain the goods internal to chess or any other practice except through an honest pursuit of excellence. Goods external to practices may nevertheless remain tempting to the practitioner.

Since MacIntyre finds social identity necessary for the individual, MacIntyre’s definition of the excellence or virtue of the human agent needs a social dimension:

These responsibilities also include debts incurred by the unjust actions of ones’ predecessors.

The enslavement and oppression of black Americans, the subjugation of Ireland, and the genocide of the Jews in Europe remained quite relevant to the responsibilities of citizens of the United States, England, and Germany in 1981, as they still do today.

Thus an American who said “I never owned any slaves,” “the Englishman who says ‘I never did any wrong to Ireland,’” or “the young German who believes that being born after 1945 means that what Nazis did to Jews has no moral relevance to his relationship to his Jewish contemporaries” all exhibit a kind of intellectual and moral failure.

“I am born with a past, and to cut myself off from that past in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships” (p. 221).  For MacIntyre, there is no moral identity for the abstract individual; “The self has to find its moral identity in and through its membership in communities” (p. 221).

“It’s a demonstration of this very cool idea that you have remnants of previous thoughts still rattling around in your head, and you bind the representation of what’s happening now to the fading embers of those old thoughts,

They watched a series of nouns appear on a computer screen, one after another, and after a brief distraction recalled as many of the words as they could, in any order. Repeated trials, with different lists of words, showed a predictable effect: The participants tended to remember the words in clusters, beginning with one and recalling those that were just before or after.

This pattern, which scientists call the contiguity effect, is similar to what often happens in the card game concentration, in which players try to identify pairs in a grid of cards lying face-down.

remembering a fact (a broken table) recalls a scene (dancing), which in turn brings to mind more facts — like the other people who were there — and so on.

“When you activate one memory, you are reactivating a little bit of what was happening around the time the memory was formed,” Dr. Kahana said, “and this process is what gives you that feeling of time travel.”

Parental consistency can help protect children from emotional problems. Children can and do become caught in the middle between parents who aren’t getting along. Such "triangulation" distracts children from addressing their own needs. Compassion buffers empathy, allowing parents to tolerate their children's distress without getting overwhelmed, numbing out, or becoming enraged. Parents are encouraged to engage their curiosity when they feel the urge to accommodate or try to overpower children.

Perception was important for mothers. Mothers who reported that their children showed more severe symptoms were more likely to use accommodation, but maternal accommodation was unrelated to the mothers' own reported distress and emotional state. It may be that mothers wish to spare their children anticipated distress, and that this desire is different from overall distress. Including measures of empathy and parental distress due specifically to child's distress could tease this apart in future studies.

Accommodation increases anxiety because youngsters never have a chance to fail and persist. This can stunt self-efficacy, preventing “fear extinction” and “habituation” to anxiety-provoking situations. It's a vicious cycle, increasing the chance of giving up too easily with future challenges, though innate resilience, related to child temperament, can mitigate the effects of problematic environmental factors.

Higher child distress and emotional dysregulation, as measured by parents, was associated with increased parental accommodation. Parental accommodation was not correlated with child-reported distress and emotional dysregulation.

maternal accommodation was correlated with child anxiety and externalizing behaviors (in which emotions are directed outward, typically in aggressive or destructive ways, rather than processed in healthy ways or bottled up)

Accommodation fixes problems short-term—for instance when a parent "gives in" to a child's tantrums to get them to stop screaming, or bribes a child to do something rather than building intrinsic motivation with a longer-term process of rewarding effort and building an inner sense of confidence

since the 18th century “when people were happy to spout off about what men and women’s brains were like – before you could even look at them. They came up with these nice ideas and metaphors that fitted the status quo and society, and gave rise to different education for men and women.”

she couldn’t find any beyond the negligible, and other research was also starting to question the very existence of such differences. For example, once any differences in brain size were accounted for, “well-known” sex differences in key structures disappeared.

Are there any significant differences based on sex alone? The answer, she says, is no.

“The idea of the male brain and the female brain suggests that each is a characteristically homogenous thing and that whoever has got a male brain, say, will have the same kind of aptitudes, preferences and personalities as everyone else with that ‘type’ of brain. We now know that is not the case.

‘Forget the male and female brain; it’s a distraction, it’s inaccurate.’ It’s possibly harmful, too, because it’s used as a hook to say, well, there’s no point girls doing science because they haven’t got a science brain, or boys shouldn’t be emotional or should want to lead.”

The next question was, what then is driving the differences in behaviour between girls and boys, men and women?

“that the brain is moulded from birth onwards and continues to be moulded through to the ‘cognitive cliff’ in old age when our grey cells start disappearing.

the brain is much more a function of experiences. If you learn a skill your brain will change, and it will carry on changing.”

The brain is also predictive and forward-thinking in a way we had never previously realised.

The rules will change how the brain works and how someone behaves.” The upshot of gendered rules? “The ‘gender gap’ becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The brain is a biological organ. Sex is a biological factor. But it is not the sole factor; it intersects with so many variables.”

Letting go of age-old certainties is frightening, concedes Rippon, who is both optimistic about the future, and fearful for it.

On the plus side, our plastic brains are good learners. All we need to do is change the life lessons.

One major breakthrough in recent years has been the realisation that, even in adulthood, our brains are continually being changed, not just by the education we receive, but also by the jobs we do, the hobbies we have, the sports we play.

Once we acknowledge that our brains are plastic and mouldable, then the power of gender stereotypes becomes evident.

Beliefs about sex differences (even if ill-founded) inform stereotypes, which commonly provide just two labels – girl or boy, female or male – which, in turn, historically carry with them huge amounts of “contents assured” information and save us having to judge each individual on their own merits

With input from exciting breakthroughs in neuroscience, the neat, binary distinctiveness of these labels is being challenged – we are coming to realise that nature is inextricably entangled with nurture.

The 21st century is not just challenging the old answers – it is challenging the question itself.

I’m unable to save money for retirement and I get very anxious when I think about the future.

Worse, I’ve lost my sense of meaning to myself. I feel like the culture has moved on without me, and I don’t know what to do.

I feel alone in many ways and unsuccessful by most measures. I don’t own a home and no one needs me; I am nobody’s mother and now I am nobody’s child, as my parents are no longer living.

on bad ones, I feel such futility, like I’ve squandered my own youth and beauty in the hall of mirrors that is our consumerist society.

A: What you wrote is in no way frivolous; it concerns the entire value, direction and purpose of your life.

You’ve realized that, in curating what we call taste, you’ve unwittingly become part of the system, the media-driven consumerist machine that creates the desire to possess things you’ll likely never be able to afford.

Beauty — distracting, exclusionary, often more talismanic and notional than “real” — has never been a steady organizing principle for life

your sense of what is beautiful has become more complicated, as you have. Your work is no longer satisfying to you because it is no longer relevant to the person you are.

your way of seeing things, including yourself, seems not wholly true or right or your own, and is in dire need of a refresh. It feels reductive and merciless, informed too much by the very aspects of our culture that have become deadening to you.

You’re seeking new paths to the shore, new things that sustain you, and this requires doing the work to find out what that looks like. It requires acknowledging the value shift that probably began happening inside you long ago.

Such an environment provides relevant content, clear learning goals and feedback, opportunities to build social skills, and strategies to help students succeed

We all know the factors that can threaten a positive classroom environment: problems that kids bring from home, lack of motivation among students whose love of learning has been drilled right out of them, pressures from testing, and more

We can't control all these factors, but what if we could implement some simple strategies to buffer against their negative effects?

We can foster effective learning and transform the experience of our students every day by harnessing the power of emotions.

don't worry: I'm not talking about holding a daily class meeting to talk about feelings.

Stress, for example, has a significant negative effect on cognitive functioning

Unfortunately, when it comes to learning processes, the power of negative events greatly outweighs the power of positive event

As a result, we need to prepare ourselves with an arsenal of strategies that inoculate our students against the power of negativity.

By providing enough positive experiences to counteract the negative, we can help students avoid getting stuck in a "negative spiral"

Being caught up in negative emotions in this way impairs learning by narrowing students' focus and inhibiting their ability to see multiple viewpoints and solve problems.

This publication is not a cheat sheet, a "happyology" manual, or a Band-Aid that will fix that distressed kid and send him to a magical haven of learning.

Far from promising easy solutions and instant results, these strategies will increase students' capacity to tolerate the discomfort that comes with working hard and to accept that there are no easy answers—that only critical thinking and perseverance lead the way to mastery.

pause every 10 minutes and simply observe how many students are actively engaged and how many are off task.

If it is too challenging to chart the behavior of each student, you can choose a sample of the class to observe.

Remember to keep a full observation stance, and try not to leap to judgment. Keep in mind various "factors of mass distraction" that may contribute to problems , such as people entering or leaving the room, noise level, students' seating locations, and time of day. You might also want to note the affect or mood of students as they come into class that day.

As for the less productive moments you identify, the following strategies will help you create an environment that is more conducive to engagement and learning.

"If you're Latino, you'll get less pain medication than a white patient. If you're an elderly woman, you'll receive fewer life-saving interventions than an elderly man. If you're a man being evaluated for a job as a lab manager, you will be given more mentorship, judged as more capable, and offered a higher starting salary than if you were a woman. If you are an obese child, your teacher is more likely to assume you're less intelligent than if you were slim."

"Damn," I thought. "I just racially profiled a black man -- and I'm black!"

The experience didn't just humble me, it scared me. If I -- someone who is black and has read about race and bias for years -- could act like this, what was possible for others who never thought much about these issues?

Perhaps there's another way. Our language and behavior should evolve. We shouldn't talk about racism, for example, as an either/or proposition: Use a slur and you're the Grand Imperial Wizard of the KKK; if you've never used one you're free of intolerance.

Here's a little secret that I think many minorities can identify with. Sure, we get angry when people get caught saying or doing the wrong thing. But we get angrier when others claim they could never be like those people.

One of my best friends is a fellow bigot -- a white minister I've known for years. He freely admits he still struggles with the racism he absorbed growing up in the segregated South.

We should never retreat from calling out the unapologetic cruelty that we see flashed across social media.

n Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, only a quarter of the subjects were able to resist eating the marshmallow for fifteen minutes. This implies that a large majority of us lack the self-control required to succeed in life.

They were most successful at adopting productive behaviors not when they resolved to do better, or distracted themselves from temptation, but when they altered their environment. Instead of studying on a couch in a dorm, with a TV close by, they went to the library. They ate better when they removed junk food from the dorm refrigerator. “Successful self-control,” Wood writes, “came from essentially covering up the marshmallow.”

Both, too, emphasize the role of conscious effort—not in resisting habit but in analyzing it, the better to formulate a strategy for reform.

Wood advises us to come up with new rewards as substitutes for the ones the phone provided. I listened to music on the car radio. In the evening, instead of scrolling through tweets and e-mails, I sought out authors I’d never read. At the end of each day, I felt calmer, and free.

Resilience, including the ability to cope with stress and trauma, is another trait correlated with gratitude. Studies have showed that counting blessings was a factor in managing post-traumatic stress for Vietnam War veterans and an effective coping strategy for many after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Other research shows that the more grateful you are, the more you are likely to exhibit patience and self-control. It can even be good for marriages and relationships: Couples good at exhibiting thankfulness tend to be "more committed and more likely to remain in their relationships over time." Our best selves, it seems, are our most grateful selves.

A gratitude journal need not be any more complicated than keeping a notebook by your bed and starting a nightly habit of jotting down who and what you were grateful for that day. Journaling was the standard method for some of the studies cited above, so this is a simple but effective option.

Roses, Thorns & Buds (or RTB, among its devotees) has been part of so many family dinners since my older daughter was 4 years old that I've forgotten where we first heard about it. It's quite simple: Everyone at the table takes turns sharing "roses," which are something positive and happy-making about their day; "thorns," which are the opposite of that; and "buds" for something we're looking forward to and we anticipate will be a rose. Sometimes, the family meal and sharing these things itself is a rose.

Happiness jars, a strategy popularized by "Eat, Pray, Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert, is something of a hybrid of gratitude journal and RTB. The idea is to write down on a slip of paper the happiest moment of the day and drop it in a jar. The advantage of doing it this way is that in moments of unhappiness, you can reach into the jar and be reminded of those moments, perhaps becoming grateful for them anew. Gilbert was struck by how many of her fans shared photos of their decorated happiness jars (see Pinterest if you need inspiration) and by how her happiest moments are "generally really common and quiet and unremarkable."

The history of studies of animal curiosity is nearly as long as the history of the study of human curiosity.

the types of curiosity most commonly exhibited by human and non-humans along two dimensions: perceptual versus epistemic, and specific versus diversive

Saying he had no regrets, he added: "I believe in all circumstances I behaved reasonably and legally. The legal rules do not inevitably cover all circumstances - including those I found myself in." Also on Monday, Johnson expressed "regret" for the "confusion, anger and pain" experienced by the British people as a result of the controversy; when pressed on whether he believes Cummings' decision has compromised the government's coronavirus message, Johnson doubled down on his support for Cummings, asserting, "I do not believe that anybody at Number 10 has done anything to undermine our message."

"The regulations made clear, I believe, that risks to the health of a small child were an exceptional situation."

To talk of the British sense of fair play is almost a cliché. But there is certainly a particular sensitivity among Britons to suggestions of hypocrisy which have thus far thwarted Cummings' attempts to brush off criticism of his excursion, and which contrast with, say, the relative lack of fuss in the US over the revelation that Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump's daughter, traveled from Washington DC to New Jersey to celebrate Passover last month.

At the start of the lockdown, Dr. Catherine Calderwood, Scotland's Chief Medical Officer, fell on her sword after admitting two overnight visits at her seaside holiday cottage, having fronted the campaign urging Scots to stay home. Though Calderwood apologized for her actions and initially said she planned to stay on in her post, she later released a statement that she had quit and acknowledging that the "justifiable focus" on her actions could pose a distraction to the response to the pandemic.

For a man known for his gregarious nature, the British Prime Minister has few close political friends; his inexperienced cabinet was appointed as much for their loyalty and support for his key policy of leading the UK out of the European Union as any long-term affinity with Johnson.

A controversial figure who relishes his role as an outsider, he also has a common touch when it comes to distilling a message with a brilliance complemented by Johnson's own flair for capturing the national mood. So while it was Johnson, then-Mayor of London, who in 2016 sensed an appetite for leaving the EU which his more senior colleagues missed, it was Cummings, head of the Vote Leave Campaign, who boiled it down to the simple and devastatingly effective slogan of "Take Back Control."

As senior adviser since summer 2019 when Johnson became Prime Minister, the notoriously prickly Cummings has rubbed many Downing Street denizens the wrong way. But when coronavirus hit, it was he who crafted the message, "Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives," which has come to define Britain's battle against the virus and the protective shield the country threw around its beloved health service.

The hitherto wildly popular Johnson's favorability ratings have begun to slip while a recent poll by YouGov found 49% disapproved of the Prime Minister's path out of lockdown compared to 36% who supported it.

The former Chief Constable of Durham Police, Mike Barton, has warned that Cummings' behavior, and the Prime Minister's defense of it, will make attempts to enforce the lockdown impossible, potentially endangering the slow but steady progress the UK has made in reducing the spread of the virus.

The consequences could be even more serious if a mass loss of faith in both the Johnson government and his lockdown results in the public breaking the rules just at the moment the Prime Minister is urging them to stand firm.

Learning a foreign language helps improve memory

(Working memory deals with the storage and processing of information over a short period of time.)

Speaking a second language helps you focus, and deal with distractions appropriately

A bilingual person is accustomed to switching between different languages, deciding which is the appropriate language to use in a given situation

This gives the brain plenty of practice in focusing and filtering information.

Related to your attention span is your ability to multi-task.

Speaking two languages, and switching between them, makes you better at multi-tasking in other tasks, too.

Speaking more than one language provides constant exercise for your brain, and keeping your brain active is one way in which to delay the onset of dementia.

What this perceptual sensitivity could mean, is that babies raised with two languages will find it easier to learn other languages later in life, as a result of the ability to easily distinguish between different sounds.

Bilingual people have also been shown to have better cognitive abilities than monolinguals.

Interestingly, this is regardless of what age the person learns the foreign language, so even a person who learns a foreign language as an adult will benefit from these improved skills.

By learning another language, your mother tongue can improve as a result. As you learn a second language, your knowledge of grammar improves.

In fact, as crazy as it may sound, learning a foreign language can actually increase the size of your brain.

In this study, two groups of subjects underwent brain scans. One group did an intensive language course for three months while the other, the control group, did intensive courses in a subject that was not a language. What the scientists found was that specific parts of the language learners’ brains became bigger than those of the non-language learners.

Given all the benefits outlined in this article, it’s hardly surprising that learning a foreign language keeps your brain healthy for longer

The benefits of multiple languages can start as early as before a baby is able to speak

Whatever your age, the health benefits of learning a foreign language make it a surefire way to upgrade your life, and future-proof your brain for old age.

Of the 2,250 adults who answered the pings, 46.9% were not thinking about the task they were doing at the moment. This was the case for 30% of their activities, with one exception: during sex. That, apparently, had

their full attention.

To remain mindful, the Dalai Lama said, he sleeps a lot: about nine hours a night. He also gets up at 3 a.m. to meditate. He has another session in the afternoon and one more right before bed.

Scientists had Buddhist monks meditate while being scanned by an MRI machine. While strapped to a board and put in the huge, noisy machine, the monks calmed their minds, reduced distractions and paid attention to life moment-by-moment.

The participants were then subjected to a stressful day-long training exercise. Both groups had similar spikes in blood pressure and breathing rates during the test, but when it was over, the mindfully trained Marines' heart rate and breathing recovered much faster, as did their nervous systems.

The data on stress reduction is pretty good," said Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published hundreds of scientific papers about the impact of emotion on the brain and did some of the first MRIs of meditating Buddhist monks.

Several workplace studies found that employees who get mindfulness training become more productive and stable. They demonstrate more self-control and efficiency. Employees with mindfulness training also seem to pick up on things faster and can read group dynamics better.

Davidson suggests that the data are "much weaker and less convincing" as mindfulness relates to curing a specific disease.It can't cure cancer or chronic pain, but the practice can help manage some of the symptoms. For instance, if you have chronic lower back pain, mindfulness may be as helpful as medication at easing that pain.

I don’t know if that sounds too complicated. But the point is, it’s not just giving up domination. It’s giving up this sense of separateness in favor of a sense of kinship. And those people who do often wonder how they failed to see how much continuity there is in the more-than-human world with the human world.

to go from terror into being and into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social and economic and cultural things. If the experiment is sacred, how can we possibly justify our food systems, for instance?

when I first went to the Smokies and hiked up into the old growth in the Southern Appalachians, it was like somebody threw a switch. There was some odd filter that had just been removed, and the world sounded different and smelled different.

richard powersYeah. In human exceptionalism, we may be completely aware of evolutionary continuity. We may understand that we have a literal kinship with the rest of creation, that all life on Earth employs the same genetic code, that there is a very small core of core genes and core proteins that is shared across all the kingdoms and phyla of life. But conceptually, we still have this demented idea that somehow consciousness creates a sanctity and a separation that almost nullifies the continuous elements of evolution and biology that we’ve come to understand.

if we want to begin this process of rehabilitation and transformation of consciousness that we are going to need in order to become part of the living Earth, it is going to be other kinds of minds that give us that clarity and strength and diversity and alternative way of thinking that could free us from this stranglehold of thought that looks only to the maximizing return on investment in very leverageable ways.

richard powersIt amazed me to get to the end of the first draft of “Bewilderment” and to realize how much Buddhism was in the book, from the simplest things.

I think there is nothing more science inflected than being out in the living world and the more-than-human world and trying to understand what’s happening.

And of course, we can combine this with what we were talking about earlier with death. If we see all of evolution as somehow leading up to us, all of human, cultural evolution leading up to neoliberalism and here we are just busily trying to accumulate and make meaning for ourselves, death becomes the enemy.

And you’re making the point in different ways throughout the book that it is the minds we think of as unusual, that we would diagnose as having some kind of problem or dysfunction that are, in some cases, are the only ones responding to the moment in the most common sense way it deserves. It is almost everybody else’s brain that has been broken.

it isn’t surprising. If you think of the characteristics of this dominant culture that we’ve been talking about — the fixation on control, the fixation on mastery, the fixation on management and accumulation and the resistance of decay — it isn’t surprising that that culture is also threatened by difference and divergence. It seeks out old, stable hierarchies — clear hierarchies — of control, and anything that’s not quite exploitable or leverageable in the way that the normal is terrifying and threatening.

And the more I looked for it, the more it pervaded the book.

ezra kleinI’ve heard you say that it has changed the way you measure a good day. Can you tell me about that?richard powersThat’s true.I suppose when I was still enthralled to commodity-mediated individualist market-driven human exceptionalism — we need a single word for this

And since moving to the Smokies and since publishing “The Overstory,” my days have been entirely inverted. I wake up, I go to the window, and I look outside. Or I step out onto the deck — if I haven’t been sleeping on the deck, which I try to do as much as I can in the course of the year — and see what’s in the air, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what’s happening out there now at 1,700 feet or 4,000 feet or 5,000 feet.

let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It’s Dr. Suzanne Simard, and the book is “Finding the Mother Tree.” Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what’s happening underground at the root level in a forest.

it was a moving moment for me, as an easterner, to stand up there and to say, this is what an eastern forest looks like. This is what a healthy, fully-functioning forest looks like. And I’m 56 years old, and I’d never seen it.

the other topics of that culture tend to circle back around these sorts of trends, human fascinations, ways of magnifying our throw weight and our ability and removing the last constraints to our desires and, in particular, to eliminate the single greatest enemy of meaning in the culture of the technological sublime that is, itself, such a strong instance of the culture of human separatism and commodity-mediated individualist capitalism— that is to say, the removal of death.

Why is it that we have known about the crisis of species extinction for at least half a century and longer? And I mean the lay public, not just scientists. But why has this been general knowledge for a long time without public will demanding some kind of action or change

And when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdependence. And you know, it’s a little bit like scales falling off your eyes. When you do turn that corner, all of the sources of anxiety that are so present and so deeply internalized become much more identifiable. And my own sense of hope and fear gets a much larger frame of reference to operate in.

I think, for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees, I shared — without really understanding this as a kind of concession or a kind of subscription — I did share this cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing that we do for ourselves and by ourselves and that our kind of general sense of the discoveries of the 19th and 20th century have left us feeling a bit unsponsored and adrift beyond the accident of human existence.

The largest single influence on any human being’s mode of thought is other human beings. So if you are surrounded by lots of terrified but wishful-thinking people who want to believe that somehow the cavalry is going to come at the last minute and that we don’t really have to look inwards and change our belief in where meaning comes from, that we will somehow be able to get over the finish line with all our stuff and that we’ll avert this disaster, as we have other kinds of disasters in the past.

I think what was happening to me at that time, as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with.

And I think I was right along with that sense that somehow we are a thing apart. We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily. It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another.

I can’t really be out for more than two or three miles before my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to keep it all in my head long enough to get it down on paper.

for my journey, the way to characterize this transition is from being fascinated with technologies of mastery and control and what they’re doing to us as human beings, how they’re changing what the capacities and affordances of humanity are and how we narrate ourselves, to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation, of those sciences that increase our sense of kinship and being one of many, many neighbors.

And that’s an almost impossible persuasion to rouse yourself from if you don’t have allies. And I think the one hopeful thing about the present is the number of people trying to challenge that consensual understanding and break away into a new way of looking at human standing is growing.

And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless.

And I just head out. I head out based on what the day has to offer. And to have that come first has really changed not only how I write, but what I’ve been writing. And I think it really shows in “Bewilderment.” It’s a totally different kind of book from my previous 12.

the marvelous thing about the work, which continues to get more sophisticated and continues to turn up newer and newer astonishments, is that there was odd kind of reciprocal interdependence and cooperation across the species barrier, that Douglas firs and birches were actually involved in these sharing back and forth of essential nutrients. And that’s a whole new way of looking at forest.

she began to see that the forests were actually wired up in very complex and identifiable ways and that there was an enormous system of resource sharing going on underground, that trees were sharing not only sugars and the hydrocarbons necessary for survival, but also secondary metabolites. And these were being passed back and forth, both symbiotically between the trees and the fungi, but also across the network to other trees so that there were actually trees in wired up, fungally-connected forests where large, dominant, healthy trees were subsidizing, as it were, trees that were injured or not in favorable positions or damaged in some way or just failing to thrive.

so when I was still pretty much a card-carrying member of that culture, I had this sense that to become a better person and to get ahead and to really make more of myself, I had to be as productive as possible. And that meant waking up every morning and getting 1,000 words that I was proud of. And it’s interesting that I would even settle on a quantitative target. That’s very typical for that kind of mindset that I’m talking about — 1,000 words and then you’re free, and then you can do what you want with the day.

there will be a threshold, as there have been for these other great social transformations that we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades where somehow it goes from an outsider position to absolutely mainstream and common sense.

I am persuaded by those scholars who have showed the degree to which the concept of nature is itself an artificial construction that’s born of cultures of human separatism. I believe that everything that life does is part of the living enterprise, and that includes the construction of cities. And there is no question at all the warning that you just gave about nostalgia creating a false binary between the built world and the true natural world is itself a form of cultural isolation.

Religion is a technology to discipline, to discipline certain parts of the human impulse. A lot of the book revolves around the decoded neurofeedback machine, which is a very real literalization of a technology, of changing the way we think

one of the things I think that we have to take seriously is that we have created technologies to supercharge some parts of our natural impulse, the capitalism I think should be understood as a technology to supercharge the growth impulse, and it creates some wonders out of that and some horrors out of that.

richard powersSure. I base my machine on existing technology. Decoded neurofeedback is a kind of nascent field of exploration. You can read about it; it’s been publishing results for a decade. I first came across it in 2013. It involves using fMRI to record the brain activity of a human being who is learning a process, interacting with an object or engaged in a certain emotional state. That neural activity is recorded and stored as a data structure. A second subsequent human being is then also scanned in real time and fed kinds of feedback based on their own internal neural activity as determined by a kind of software analysis of their fMRI data structures.

And they are queued little by little to approximate, to learn how to approximate, the recorded states of the original subject. When I first read about this, I did get a little bit of a revelation. I did feel my skin pucker and think, if pushed far enough, this would be something like a telepathy conduit. It would be a first big step in answering that age-old question of what does it feel like to be something other than we are

in the book I simply take that basic concept and extend it, juke it up a little bit, blur the line between what the reader might think is possible right now and what they might wonder about, and maybe even introduce possibilities for this empathetic transference

ezra kleinOne thing I loved about the role this played in the book is that it’s highlighting its inverse. So a reader might look at this and say, wow, wouldn’t that be cool if we had a machine that could in real time change how we think and change our neural pathways and change our mental state in a particular direction? But of course, all of society is that machine,

Robin and Theo are in an airport. And you’ve got TVs everywhere playing the news which is to say playing a constant loop of outrage, and disaster, and calamity. And Robbie, who’s going through these neural feedback sessions during this period, turns to his dad and says, “Dad, you know how the training’s rewiring my brain? This is what is rewiring everybody else.”

ezra kleinI think Marshall McLuhan knew it all. I really do. Not exactly what it would look like, but his view and Postman’s view that we are creating a digital global nervous system is a way they put it, it was exactly right. A nervous system, it was such the exact right metaphor.

the great insight of McLuhan, to me, what now gets called the medium is the message is this idea that the way media acts upon us is not in the content it delivers. The point of Twitter is not the link that you click or even the tweet that you read; it is that the nature and structure of the Twitter system itself begins to act on your system, and you become more like it.If you watch a lot of TV, you become more like TV. If you watch a lot of Twitter, you become more like Twitter, Facebook more like Facebook. Your identities become more important to you — that the content is distraction from the medium, and the medium changes you

it is happening to all of us in ways that at least we are not engaging in intentionally, not at that level of how do we want to be transformed.

richard powersI believe that the digital neural system is now so comprehensive that the idea that you could escape it somewhere, certainly not in the Smokies, even more remotely, I think, becomes more and more laughable. Yeah, and to build on this idea of the medium being the message, not the way in which we become more like the forms and affordances of the medium is that we begin to expect that those affordances, the method in which those media are used, the physiological dependencies and castes of behavior and thought that are required to operate them and interact with them are actual — that they’re real somehow, and that we just take them into human nature and say no, this is what we’ve always wanted and we’ve simply been able to become more like our true selves.