Group items tagged

Instead of leading to a search for certainty, as Descartes’s dream did, Zhuangzi came to the realization that he had perceived “the transformation of things,” indicating that one should go along with this transformation rather than trying in vain to search for what is real.

the views of Mencius and his later opponent Xunzi’s views about human nature are more recommendations of how one should view oneself in order to become a better person than metaphysical assertions about whether humans are by nature good or bad. Though each man’s assertions about human nature are incompatible with each other, they may still function inside the Confucian tradition as alternative ways of cultivation.

The Buddhist doctrine of no-self surely looks metaphysical, but its real aim is to free one from suffering, since according to Buddhism suffering comes ultimately from attachment to the self. Buddhist meditations are kung fu practices to shake off one’s attachment, and not just intellectual inquiries for getting propositional truth.

The essence of kung fu — various arts and instructions about how to cultivate the person and conduct one’s life — is often hard to digest for those who are used to the flavor and texture of mainstream Western philosophy. It is understandable that, even after sincere willingness to try, one is often still turned away by the lack of clear definitions of key terms and the absence of linear arguments in classic Chinese texts. This, however, is not a weakness, but rather a requirement of the kung fu orientation — not unlike the way that learning how to swim requires one to focus on practice and not on conceptual understanding.

It even expands epistemology into the non-conceptual realm in which the accessibility of knowledge is dependent on the cultivation of cognitive abilities, and not simply on whatever is “publicly observable” to everyone. It also shows that cultivation of the person is not confined to “knowing how.” An exemplary person may well have the great charisma to affect others but does not necessarily know how to affect others.

Western philosophy at its origin is similar to classic Chinese philosophy. The significance of this point is not merely in revealing historical facts. It calls our attention to a dimension that has been eclipsed by the obsession with the search for eternal, universal truth and the way it is practiced, namely through rational arguments.

One might well consider the Chinese kung fu perspective a form of pragmatism.  The proximity between the two is probably why the latter was well received in China early last century when John Dewey toured the country. What the kung fu perspective adds to the pragmatic approach, however, is its clear emphasis on the cultivation and transformation of the person, a dimension that is already in Dewey and William James but that often gets neglected

A kung fu master does not simply make good choices and use effective instruments to satisfy whatever preferences a person happens to have. In fact the subject is never simply accepted as a given. While an efficacious action may be the result of a sound rational decision, a good action that demonstrates kung fu has to be rooted in the entire person, including one’s bodily dispositions and sentiments, and its goodness is displayed not only through its consequences but also in the artistic style one does it. It also brings forward what Charles Taylor calls the “background” — elements such as tradition and community — in our understanding of the formation of a person’s beliefs and attitudes. Through the kung fu approach, classic Chinese philosophy displays a holistic vision that brings together these marginalized dimensions and thereby forces one to pay close attention to the ways they affect each other.

This kung fu approach shares a lot of insights with the Aristotelian virtue ethics, which focuses on the cultivation of the agent instead of on the formulation of rules of conduct. Yet unlike Aristotelian ethics, the kung fu approach to ethics does not rely on any metaphysics for justification.

This approach opens up the possibility of allowing multiple competing visions of excellence, including the metaphysics or religious beliefs by which they are understood and guided, and justification of these beliefs is then left to the concrete human experiences.

it is more appropriate to consider kung fu as a form of art. Art is not ultimately measured by its dominance of the market. In addition, the function of art is not accurate reflection of the real world; its expression is not constrained to the form of universal principles and logical reasoning, and it requires cultivation of the artist, embodiment of virtues/virtuosities, and imagination and creativity.

If philosophy is “a way of life,” as Pierre Hadot puts it, the kung fu approach suggests that we take philosophy as the pursuit of the art of living well, and not just as a narrowly defined rational way of life.

At M.I.T., however, Keynes never went away. To be sure, stagflation showed that there were limits to what policy can do. But students continued to learn about the imperfections of markets and the role that monetary and fiscal policy can play in boosting a depressed economy.

And the M.I.T. students of the 1970s enlarged on those insights in their later work. Mr. Blanchard, for example, showed how small deviations from perfect rationality can have large economic consequences; Mr. Obstfeld showed that currency markets can sometimes experience self-fulfilling panic.

This open-minded, pragmatic approach was overwhelmingly vindicated after crisis struck in 2008. Chicago-school types warned incessantly that responding to the crisis by printing money and running deficits would lead to 70s-type stagflation, with soaring inflation and interest rates. But M.I.T. types predicted, correctly, that inflation and interest rates would stay low in a depressed economy, and that attempts to slash deficits too soon would deepen the slump.

The truth, although nobody will believe it, is that the economic analysis some of us learned at M.I.T. way back when has worked very, very well for the past seven years.

But has the intellectual success of M.I.T. economics led to comparable policy success? Unfortunately, the answer is no.

True, there have been some important monetary successes. The Fed, led by Mr. Bernanke, ignored right-wing pressure and threats — Rick Perry, as governor of Texas, went so far as to accuse him of treason — and pursued an aggressively expansionary policy that helped limit the damage from the financial crisis. In Europe, Mr. Draghi’s activism has been crucial to calming financial markets, probably saving the euro from collapse. Continue reading the main story 215 Comments

On other fronts, however, the M.I.T. gang’s good advice has been ignored. The I.M.F.’s research department, under Mr. Blanchard’s leadership, has done authoritative work on the effects of fiscal policy, demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that slashing spending in a depressed economy is a terrible mistake, and that attempts to reduce high levels of debt via austerity are self-defeating. But European politicians have slashed spending and demanded crippling austerity from debtors anyway.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Republicans have responded to the utter failure of free-market orthodoxy and the remarkably successful predictions of much-hated Keynesians by digging in even deeper, determined to learn nothing from experience.

being right isn’t necessarily enough to change the world. But it’s still better to be right than to be wrong, and M.I.T.-style economics, with its pragmatic openness to evidence, has been very right indeed

The root of the dilemma is the distinction between seeking the truth and winning an argument.  The distinction makes sense for cases where someone does not care about knowing the truth and argues only to convince other people of something, whether or not it’s true.

how do I justify a belief and so come to know that it’s true?  There are competing philosophical answers to this question, but one fits particularly well with Sperber and Mercier’s approach.  This is the view that justification is a matter of being able to convince other people that a claim is correct

The key point is that justification — and therefore knowledge of the truth — is a social process.  This need not mean that claims are true because we come to rational agreement about them.  But such agreement, properly arrived at, is the best possible justification of a claim to truth. 

This pragmatic view understands seeking the truth as a special case of trying to win an argument: not winning by coercing or tricking people into agreement, but by achieving agreement through honest arguments.

The important practical conclusion is that finding the truth does require winning arguments, but not in the sense that my argument defeats yours.  Rather, we find an argument that defeats all contrary arguments.

the philosophical view gains plausibility from its convergence with the psychological account.

This symbiosis is an instructive example of how philosophy and empirical psychology can fruitfully interact.

Duolingo has been rolling out new features—including podcasts, social interaction among users, and character-driven narratives—that aim to raise its language pragmatics as well as its addictiveness.

Where most apps really fall short, he said, is in language “pragmatics.” “That’s the learning that’s based on real-world settings—you’re in a restaurant, in an interview, waiting for a bus,” he explained. “It’s usually lost in apps.”

“In the U.S., about half of our users aren’t even really motivated to learn a language; they just want to pass the time on something besides Candy Crush,” he said.

“There are all kinds of contextual factors in language learning,” he said. “It would be hard for an app to take them all into account.”

To be sure, the researchers acknowledge, their hypothesis is a work in progress.

Combined with a gift for humor, anger lies at the heart of Trump’s charisma.

Like LOL, like, entrenched in all kinds of sentences, used subconsciously, and difficult to parse the real meaning of without careful consideration, has all the hallmarks of a piece of grammar—specifically, in the pragmatic department, modal wing.

individualism, the desire to control one’s own life, has many variants. Tocqueville viewed it as selfishness and suspected it, while Emerson and Whitman viewed it as the moment-by-moment expression of one’s unique self and loved it.

individualism as the making of choices so as to maximize one’s preferences. This differed from “selfish individualism” in that the preferences were not specified: they could be altruistic as well as selfish. It differed from “expressive individualism” in having general algorithms by which choices were made. These made it rational.

it was born in 1951 as “rational choice theory.” Rational choice theory’s mathematical account of individual choice, originally formulated in terms of voting behavior, made it a point-for-point antidote to the collectivist dialectics of Marxism

Functionaries at RAND quickly expanded the theory from a tool of social analysis into a set of universal doctrines that we may call “rational choice philosophy.” Governmental seminars and fellowships spread it to universities across the country, aided by the fact that any alternative to it would by definition be collectivist.

rational choice philosophy moved smoothly on the backs of their pupils into the “real world” of business and governme

Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality  is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices.

At home, anti-regulation policies are crafted to appeal to the view that government must in no way interfere with Americans’ freedom of choice.

But the real significance of rational choice philosophy lay in ethics. Rational choice theory, being a branch of economics, does not question people’s preferences; it simply studies how they seek to maximize them. Rational choice philosophy seems to maintain this ethical neutrality (see Hans Reichenbach’s 1951 “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy,” an unwitting masterpiece of the genre); but it does not.

Whatever my preferences are, I have a better chance of realizing them if I possess wealth and power. Rational choice philosophy thus promulgates a clear and compelling moral imperative: increase your wealth and power!

Today, institutions which help individuals do that (corporations, lobbyists) are flourishing; the others (public hospitals, schools) are basically left to rot. Business and law schools prosper; philosophy departments are threatened with closure.

Hegel, for one, had denied all three of its central claims in his “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” over a century before. In that work, as elsewhere in his writings, nature is not neatly causal, but shot through with randomness. Because of this chaos, we cannot know the significance of what we have done until our community tells us; and ethical life correspondingly consists, not in pursuing wealth and power, but in integrating ourselves into the right kinds of community.

By 1953, W. V. O. Quine was exposing the flaws in rational choice epistemology. John Rawls, somewhat later, took on its sham ethical neutrality, arguing that rationality in choice includes moral constraints. The neat causality of rational choice ontology, always at odds with quantum physics, was further jumbled by the environmental crisis, exposed by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “The Silent Spring,” which revealed that the causal effects of human actions were much more complex, and so less predicable, than previously thought.

“It’s just a curious bias of the media around here. It’s wonderful. One person says something negative and the media rushes and covers that. The wonderful balanced media that I love in this community.”

Santorum had reason to be peeved. He was running against the Democrat Bob Casey. He was trailing by double digits and knew he was going to lose. He was not a happy camper, but then he rarely is.

As he has shown in the Republican debates, Santorum can be equable. The anger usually flares on matters closest to his heart: faith, family and morals. And if, by chance, you get him started on the role of religion in American life, get ready for a Vesuvius moment.

Outside of these areas, he was more pragmatic. Then and now, Santorum held predictably conservative views, but he was astute enough to bend on some issues and be — as he put it in the Arizona debate — “a team player.”

In the Senate, he represented a state with a relentlessly moderate-to-centrist electorate so when campaigning he emphasized the good deeds he did in Washington. Editorial board meetings with Santorum usually began with him listing federal money he had brought in for local projects.People who don’t know him — and just see the angry Rick — don’t realize what a clever politician Santorum is. He didn’t rise to become a Washington insider through the power of prayer. He may say the Rosary, but he knows his Machiavelli.

That said, Santorum’s anger is not an act.  It is genuine. It has its roots in the fact that he had the misfortune to be born in the second half of the 20th century. In his view, it was an era when moral relativism and anti-religious feeling held sway, where traditional values were ignored or mocked, where heretics ruled civic and political life. If anything, it’s gotten worse in the 21st, with the election of Barack Obama.Leave it to Santorum to attack Obama on his theology, of all things. He sees the president as an exemplar of mushy, feel-good Christianity that emphasizes tolerance over rectitude, and the love of Jesus over the wrath of God.

Like many American Catholics, I struggle with the church’s teachings as they apply to the modern world. Santorum does not.

I once wrote that Santorum has one of the finest minds of the 13th century. It was meant to elicit a laugh, but there’s truth behind the remark. No Vatican II for Santorum. His belief system is the fixed and firm Catholicism of the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century. And Santorum is a warrior for those beliefs.

During the campaign, he has regularly criticized the media for harping on his public statements on homosexuality, contraception, abortion, the decline in American morals. Still, he can’t resist talking about them. These are the issues that get his juices flowing, not the deficit or federal energy policy.

Santorum went to Houston not to praise Kennedy but to bash him. To Santorum, the Kennedy speech did permanent damage because it led to secularization of American politics. He said it laid the foundation for attacks on religion by the secular left that has led to denial of free speech rights to religious people. “John F. Kennedy chose not to just dispel fear,” Santorum said, “he chose to expel faith.”

Ultimately Kennedy’s attempt to reassure Protestants that the Catholic Church would not control the government and suborn its independence advanced a philosophy of strict separation that would create a purely secular public square cleansed of all religious wisdom and the voice of religious people of all faiths. He laid the foundation for attacks on religious freedom and freedom of speech by the secular left and its political arms like the A.C.L.U and the People for the American Way. This has and will continue to create dissension and division in this country as people of faith increasingly feel like second-class citizens.One consequence of Kennedy’s speech, Santorum said,is the debasement of our First Amendment right of religious freedom. Of all the great and necessary freedoms listed in the First Amendment, freedom to exercise religion (not just to believe, but to live out that belief) is the most important; before freedom of speech, before freedom of the press, before freedom of assembly, before freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances, before all others. This freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, is the trunk from which all other branches of freedom on our great tree of liberty get their life.As so it went for 5,000 words. It is a revelatory critique of the modern world and Santorum quoted G.K. Chesterton, Edmund Burke, St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther King to give heft to his assertions.That said, it was an angry speech, conjuring up images of people of faith cowering before leftist thought police. Who could rescue us from this predicament? Who could banish the secularists and restore religious morality to its throne?

Two environmental specialists for the World Bank, Robert Goodland (the bank’s former lead environmental adviser) and Jeff Anhang, claimed, in an article in World Watch, that the number was more like 51 percent.

few people take the role of livestock in producing greenhouse gases seriously enough. Even most climate change experts focus on new forms of energy

If you believe that earth’s natural resources are limitless, which maybe was excusable 100 years ago but is the height of ignorance now,  or that “technology will fix it” or that we can simply go mine them in outer space with Newt Gingrich, I guess none of this worries you. But if you believe in reality, and you’d like that to be a place that your kids get to enjoy, this is a big deal.

It’s seldom that such enormous problems have such simple solutions, but this is one that does. We can tackle climate change without inventing new cars or spending billions on mass transit or trillions on new forms of energy, though all of that is not only desirable but essential.

1. Art is not an abstract category.

You do not stand in front of "Art" in a museum or a gallery, you stand in front of particular painting. The artist Barnett Newman once quipped, "aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds."

2. Art is not a political weapon

The value of art is not found in its capacity to effect political change "out there" but to work on us—you and me—to connect with our pain and suffering, hope and yearning, to have the run of our "inner chambers,"

Any cultural practice that is worth taking seriously, that has a history and tradition, whether cooking, ballroom dancing, or chess, takes practice, and thus requires effort to learn

3. Art is not easy

Each work of art is a response to a conversation that spans centuries, each artist receives and passes on this tradition in their own distinctive way

4. Art is not a visual illustration of the artist’s worldview

No human being possesses a unified "worldview" that is manifest in and through each of her intentional acts or artifacts she produces

An artist does not paint a picture to express what she already knows or believes. She paints to learn something about herself and the world—something she doesn’t already know.

5. Art does not form virtue

Art always pushes against the pragmatism, moralism, and utilitarianism that shapes life inside as well as outside the church. It starts with our weakness, desperation, and brokenness in its search for hope and beauty and stakes its existence and relevance on the belief that all appearances deceive.

the primary benefit of a diary as a purely pragmatic record of your workday productivity and progress — while most dedicated diarists would counter that the core benefits are spiritual and psychoemotional — it does offer some valuable insight into the psychology of how journaling elevates our experience of everyday life:

We can’t, however, simply will ourselves into better habits. Since willpower is a limited resource, whenever we’ve overexerted our self-discipline in one domain, a concept known as “ego depletion” kicks in and renders us mindless automata in another

the key to changing a habit is to invest heavily in the early stages of habit-formation so that the behavior becomes automated and we later default into it rather than exhausting our willpower wrestling with it. Young also cautions that it’s a self-defeating strategy to try changing several habits at once. Rather, he advises, spend one month on each habit alone before moving on to the next

a diary boosts your creativity

This is one of the most important reasons to keep a diary: it can make you more aware of your own progress, thus becoming a wellspring of joy in your workday.

The second reason is focalism. When we contemplate failure from afar, according to Gilbert and Wilson, we tend to overemphasize the focal event (i.e., failure) and overlook all the other episodic details of daily life that help us move on and feel better. The threat of failure is so vivid that it consumes our attention

the authors point to a pattern that reveals the single most important motivator: palpable progress on meaningful work: On the days when these professionals saw themselves moving forward on something they cared about — even if the progress was a seemingly incremental “small win” — they were more likely to be happy and deeply engaged in their work. And, being happier and more deeply engaged, they were more likely to come up with new ideas and solve problems creatively.

Although the act of reflecting and writing, in itself, can be beneficial, you’ll multiply the power of your diary if you review it regularly — if you listen to what your life has been telling you. Periodically, maybe once a month, set aside time to get comfortable and read back through your entries. And, on New Year’s Day, make an annual ritual of reading through the previous year.

This, they suggest, can yield profound insights into the inner workings of your own mind — especially if you look for specific clues and patterns, trying to identify the richest sources of meaning in your work and the types of projects that truly make your heart sing. Once you understand what motivates you most powerfully, you’ll be able to prioritize this type of work in going forward. Just as important, however, is cultivating a gratitude practice and acknowledging your own accomplishments in the diary:

Fields argues that if we move along the Uncertainty Curve either too fast or too slowly, we risk either robbing the project of its creative potential and ending up in mediocrity. Instead, becoming mindful of the psychology of that process allows us to pace ourselves better and master that vital osmosis between freedom and constraint.

Schwalbe reminds us of the “impact bias” — our tendency to greatly overestimate the intensity and extent of our emotional reactions, which causes us to expect failures to be more painful than they actually are and thus to fear them more than we should.

When we think about taking a risk, we rarely consider how good we will be at reframing a disappointing outcome. In short, we underestimate our resilience.

what you do every day is best seen as an iceberg, with a small fraction of conscious decision sitting atop a much larger foundation of habits and behaviors.

don’t let yourself forget that the good life, the meaningful life, the truly fulfilling life, is the life of presence, not of productivity.

beauty is very much about familiarity and it’s reinforcing an idea we have already. It’s like when we go on holiday, all we really want to do is take the photograph that we’ve seen in the brochure. Because our idea of beauty is constructed, by family, friends, education, nationality, race, religion, politics, all these things

I have found the 21st-century version of the Venetian secret and it is a mathematical formula. What you do, you get a half-decent, non-offensive kind of idea, then you times it by the number of studio assistants, and then you divide it with an ambitious art dealer, and that equals number of oligarchs and hedge fund managers in the world.

the nearest we have to an empirical measure of art that actually does exist is the market. By that reckoning, Cézanne’s “Card Players” is the most beautiful lovely painting in the world. I find it a little bit clunky-kitsch but that’s me. It’s worth $260m.

The opposite arguments are that it’s art for art’s sake and that’s a very idealistic position to take. Clement Greenberg, a famous art critic in the 1950s, said that art will always be tied to money by an umbilical cord of gold, either state money or market money. I’m pragmatic about it: one of my favourite quotes is you’ll never have a good art career unless your work fits into the elevator of a New York apartment block.

there’s one thing about that red painting that ends up in Sotheby’s. It’s not just any old red painting. It is a painting that has been validated. This is an important word in the art world and the big question is: who validates? There is quite a cast of characters in this validation chorus that will kind of decide what is good art. They are a kind of panel, if you like, that decides on what is good quality, what are we going to end up looking at?

They include artists, teachers, dealers, collectors, critics, curators, the media, even the public maybe. And they form this lovely consensus around what is good art.

there were four stages to the rise of an artist. Peers, serious critics and collectors, dealers, then the public.

Another member of that cast of validating characters is the collectors. In the 1990s, if Charles Saatchi just put his foot over the threshold of your exhibition, that was it. The media was agog and he would come in and Hoover it up. You do want the heavyweight collector to buy your work because that gives it kudos. You don’t want a tacky one who is just buying it to glitz up their hallway.

The next part of this chorus of validation are the dealers. A good dealer brand has a very powerful effect on the reputation of the artist; they form a part of placing the work. This is a slightly mysterious process that many people don’t quite understand but a dealer will choose where your work goes so it gains the brownie points, so the buzz around it goes up.

now, of course, galleries like the Tate Modern want a big name because visitor numbers, in a way, are another empirical measure of quality. So perhaps at the top of the tree of the validation cast are the curators, and in the past century they have probably become the most powerful giver-outers of brownie points in the art world.

ach of the encounters with these members of the cast of validation bestows upon the work, and on the artist, a patina, and what makes that patina is all these hundreds of little conversations and reviews and the good prices over time. These are the filters that pass a work of art through into the canon.

So what does this lovely consensus, that all these people are bestowing on this artwork, that anoints it with the quality that we all want, boil down to? I think in many ways what it boils down to is seriousness. That’s the most valued currency in the art world.

The whole idea of quality now seems to be contested, as if you’re buying into the language of the elite by saying, “Oh, that’s very good.” How you might judge this work is really problematic because to say it’s not beautiful is to put the wrong kind of criteria on it. You might say, “Oh, it’s dull!” [And people will say] “Oh, you’re just not understanding it with the right terms.” So I think, “Well, how do we judge these things?” Because a lot of them are quite politicised. There’s quite a right-on element to them, so do we judge them on how ethical they are, or how politically right-on they are?

What I am attempting to explain is how the art we see in museums and in galleries around the world, and in biennales – how it ends up there, how it gets chosen. In the end, if enough of the right people think it’s good, that’s all there is to it. But, as Alan Bennett said when he was a trustee of the National Gallery, they should put a big sign up outside saying: “You don’t have to like it all.”

Or then again I might say, “Well, what do I judge them against?” Do I judge them against government policy? Do I judge them against reality TV? Because that does participation very well. So, in the end, what do we do? What happens to this sort of art when it doesn’t have validation? What is it left with? It’s left with popularity.

Then, of course, the next group of people we might think about in deciding what is good art is the public. Since the mid-1990s, art has got a lot more media attention. But popularity has always been a quite dodgy quality [to have]. The highbrow critics will say, “Oh, he’s a bit of a celebrity,” and they turn their noses up about people who are well known to the public

In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions or people fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the chance to learn as much as possible from what they study.

As debunkers, they contribute to a cultural climate that has little tolerance for finding or making meaning — a culture whose intellectuals and cultural commentators get “liked” by showing that somebody else just can’t be believed.

Liberal education in America has long been characterized by the intertwining of two traditions: of critical inquiry in pursuit of truth and exuberant performance in pursuit of excellence. In the last half-century, though, emphasis on inquiry has become dominant, and it has often been reduced to the ability to expose error and undermine belief.

fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science. That type of absorption is becoming an endangered species of cultural life, as our nonstop, increasingly fractured technological existence wears down our receptive capacities.

Liberal learning depends on absorption in compelling work. It is a way to open ourselves to the various forms of life in which we might actively participate. When we learn to read or look or listen intensively, we are, at least temporarily, overcoming our own blindness by trying to understand an experience from another’s point of view.

we are learning to activate potential, and often to instigate new possibilities.

Liberal education must not limit itself to critical thinking and problem solving; it must also foster openness, participation and opportunity. It should be designed to take us beyond the campus to a life of ongoing, pragmatic learning that finds inspiration in unexpected sources, and increases our capacity to understand and contribute to the world

The technique holds the power to repair or enhance any human gene. “It raises the most fundamental of issues about how we are going to view our humanity in the future and whether we are going to take the dramatic step of modifying our own germline and in a sense take control of our genetic destiny, which raises enormous peril for humanity,”

The paper’s authors, however, are concerned about countries that have less regulation in science. They urge that “scientists should avoid even attempting, in lax jurisdictions, germline genome modification for clinical application in humans” until the full implications “are discussed among scientific and governmental organizations.”

Though such a moratorium would not be legally enforceable and might seem unlikely to exert global influence, there is a precedent. In 1975, scientists worldwide were asked to refrain from using a method for manipulating genes, the recombinant DNA technique, until rules had been established.

Though highly efficient, the technique occasionally cuts the genome at unintended sites. The issue of how much mistargeting could be tolerated in a clinical setting is one that Dr. Doudna’s group wants to see thoroughly explored before any human genome is edited.

“We worry about people making changes without the knowledge of what those changes mean in terms of the overall genome,” Dr. Baltimore said. “I personally think we are just not smart enough — and won’t be for a very long time — to feel comfortable about the consequences of changing heredity, even in a single individual.”

Many ethicists have accepted the idea of gene therapy, changes that die with the patient, but draw a clear line at altering the germline, since these will extend to future generations. The British Parliament in February approved the transfer of mitochondria, small DNA-containing organelles, to human eggs whose own mitochondria are defective. But that technique is less far-reaching because no genes are edited.

There are two broad schools of thought on modifying the human germline, said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the Doudna group. One is pragmatic and seeks to balance benefit and risk. The other “sets up inherent limits on how much humankind should alter nature,” she said. Some Christian doctrines oppose the idea of playing God, whereas in Judaism and Islam there is the notion “that humankind is supposed to improve the world.” She described herself as more of a pragmatist, saying, “I would try to regulate such things rather than shut a new technology down at its beginning.

The Doudna group calls for public discussion, but is also working to develop some more formal process, such as an international meeting convened by the National Academy of Sciences, to establish guidelines for human use of the genome-editing technique.“We need some principled agreement that we want to enhance humans in this way or we don’t,” Dr. Jaenisch said. “You have to have this discussion because people are gearing up to do this.”

adherents of the method believe that “narration and formal analysis deliver better explanations of historical events than each could ever do in isolation.”

Prior to the infamous Linguistic Turn circa 1970, historians, economists, and political scientists tended to be methodologically pragmatic and could still understand, appreciate, and usefully critique each other’s work. Since then, however, the fields have drifted far apart.

Most historians eschew both theory and numbers and economists and political scientists denigrate narratives as anecdotal and ad hoc.

Economics (and to some extent political science and the other quantitatively-oriented social sciences) became little more than a type of applied mathematics as veteran government economist Steven Payson explains in his recent book, How Economics Professors Can Stop Failing Us: The Discipline at a Crossroads.

Academic economists, he shows, are not just notoriously bad at predicting panics, they are often wrong about all important aspects of the economy. That is because economics journals skew heavily in favor of overly mathematical treatments of insignificant subjects, often based on bad or even outright fake (I wish I was joking) data.

history descended into what my dissertation adviser Richard E. Ellis used to call “fart in the bottle” history, presumably because it stunk but the spread of the stench was contained by the fact that hardly anyone cared about the past anymore

In a generation, history went from being the Queen of the Social Sciences to a second rate humanities discipline. Budgets and students declined along with the discipline’s prestige and the rise in the perception that its professional practitioners were interested only in esoteric cultural topics.

The new “history of capitalism” helped to change that perception but only reinforced the notion that professional historians are no longer capable of coherent analysis. Business, policy, and especially economic historians, most recently Eric Hilt, have repeatedly shredded “history of capitalism” books, especially the ones about slavery.

The dearth of analytical prowess in history is understandable given that very few historians from the pre-Linguistic Turn era remain active. Graduate students today, even those interested in business and economics topics, are therefore being trained by narrative-oriented cultural historians

What historians (and economists and other social scientists) should do is to move back towards the middle, to mixed methods of understanding and explaining our complex social worlds, past and present.

Live Nation Rules Music Ticketing, Some Say With Threats

To the Stoics, contributing to public affairs was a critical duty of the philosopher. Could Seneca decline to serve because he disagreed with the emperor? Could he leave a deranged Nero unsupervised? In time, Seneca would also come to the conclusion that when “the state is so rotten as to be past helping, if evil has entire dominion over it, the wise man will not labor in vain or waste his strength in unprofitable efforts.”

My own early career involved some questionable service to businesspeople. Employed and paid by them, I planned and carried out controversial publicity stunts, and used dishonest tactics with the public and the media. When I finally left those roles, I found a knowledge of Stoic philosophy integral to my ability to assess my past actions, and set a more honorable course going forward.

Seneca seemed to realize only belatedly that one can contribute to his fellow citizens in ways other than through the state — for instance, by writing or simply by being a good man at home.

In 65 A.D., Seneca would again find that philosophy did not exist only in the ethereal world. Conspirators began to plot against Nero’s life, and Seneca, finally accepting that the monster he had helped create needed to be stopped, appears to have participated — or covered for those who did.

The effort failed but provided Seneca an opportunity: His life up to that point had contradicted many of his own teachings, but now when Nero’s guards came and demanded his life, he would be brave and wise. The man who had written much about learning how to die and facing the end without fear would comfort his friends, finish an essay he was writing and distribute some finished pieces for safekeeping. Then, he slit his veins, took hemlock and succumbed to the suffocating steam of a bath.

I want to advance a technology-driven hypothesis: This mix of youthful safety and adult immaturity may be a feature of life in a society increasingly shaped by the internet’s virtual realities.

It is easy to see how online culture would make adolescent life less dangerous. Pornography to take the edge off teenage sexual appetite. Video games instead of fisticuffs or contact sports as an outlet for hormonal aggression. (Once it was feared that porn and violent media would encourage real-world aggression; instead they seem to be replacing it.) Sexting and selfie-enabled masturbation as a safer alternative to hooking up. Online hangouts instead of keggers in the field. More texting and driving, but less driving — one of the most dangerous teen activities — overall.

The question is whether this substitution is habit-forming and soul-shaping, and whether it extends beyond dangerous teen behavior to include things essential to long-term human flourishing — marriage, work, family, all that old-fashioned “meatspace” stuff.

It wasn’t so long ago that people worried about a digital divide, in which online access would be a luxury good that left the bottom half behind. But if anything, the virtual world looks more like an opiate for the masses

trends in the marketplace — ever-more-customized pornography, virtual realities that feel more and more immersive, devices and apps customized for addictive behavior — seem likely to overwhelm most attempts to enjoy the virtual only within limits.

Patricia Snow (yes, even columnists have mothers), in an essay for First Things earlier this year, suggested that any effective resistance to virtual reality’s encroachments would need to be moral and religious, not just pragmatic and managerial

Trade would revert to the rules of the World Trade Organization, making Britain’s exports to Europe vulnerable to tariffs and other barriers to commerce, including health and safety rules.

Brexit supporters called the outcome a template for how a pragmatic British government would prevent businesses from abandoning its shores — with tax cuts, friendly regulation and deal making.

But consumer spending has been increasingly paid for by debt. The British pound has surrendered 17 percent of its value against the dollar since the referendum, raising the cost of imported goods.

During the campaign, Brexit supporters argued that Europe would ultimately make it happen because its most powerful member, Germany, now sends a parade of BMWs, Audis and Volkswagens to Britain.

Even if European leaders seek middle ground, any one of the member nations could hijack the proceedings with their demands while the clock ticks away.

Britain really is departing the largest consumer market on earth.

Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize

Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration.

Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional

Pragmatic choices like this one, or like the decision his grandparents made when their sons were conscripted, recur in his fiction—situations that present equally unconscionable choices on either side of a moral fulcrum

The great flourishing of science fiction in the West at the end of the nineteenth century occurred alongside unprecedented technological progress and the proliferation of the popular press—transformations that were fundamental to the development of the genre

Joel Martinsen, the translator of the second volume of Liu’s trilogy, sees the series as a continuation of this tradition. “It’s not hard to read parallels between the Trisolarans and imperialist designs on China, driven by hunger for resources and fear of being wiped out,” he told me. Even Liu, unwilling as he is to endorse comparisons between the plot and China’s current face-off with the U.S., did at one point let slip that “the relationship between politics and science fiction cannot be underestimated.”

Speculative fiction is the art of imagining alternative worlds, and the same political establishment that permits it to be used as propaganda for the existing regime is also likely to recognize its capacity to interrogate the legitimacy of the status quo.

Liu has been criticized for peopling his books with characters who seem like cardboard cutouts installed in magnificent dioramas. Liu readily admits to the charge. “I did not begin writing for love of literature,” he told me. “I did so for love of science.”

“The Three-Body Problem” takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull. Reading an article about the problem, Liu thought, What if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on a planet in such a solar system develop? From there, a structure gradually took shape that almost resembles a planetary system, with characters orbiting the central conceit like moons. For better or worse, the characters exist to support the framework of the story rather than to live as individuals on the page.

Liu’s imagination is dauntingly capacious, his narratives conceived on a scale that feels, at times, almost hallucinogenic. The time line of the trilogy spans 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future

The first book is set on Earth, though some of its scenes take place in virtual reality; by the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across several dimensions. The London Review of Books has called the trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”

Although physics furnishes the novels’ premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good

In Liu’s fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, “In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.

“I know what you are thinking,” he told me with weary clarity. “What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?” He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. “But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy.”

Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.”

Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,”

It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes

“I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.

Chinese people of his generation were lucky, he said. The changes they had seen were so huge that they now inhabited a world entirely different from that of their childhood. “China is a futuristic country,” he said. “I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up.”

“We have statues of a few martyrs, but we never—We don’t memorialize those, the individuals.” He took off his glasses and blinked, peering into the wide expanse of green and concrete. “This is how we Chinese have always been,” he said. “When something happens, it passes, and time buries the stories.”