Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

Lunchtime Euros

Throughout Euro 2020, we’ll be hosting short online conversations about one of the day’s (or the previous day’s, or the next day’s) matches. Kicking off at 1 p.m., expect a bit of history, geopolitics, literature, but mostly just football.

Monday 14 June: Sunder Katwala and Jude Wanga on England vs. Croatia

Wednesday 16 June: Misha Glenny and Peter Pomerantsev on Ukraine v. North Macedonia

Friday 18 June: Val McDermid and Helen Thompson on England v. Scotland

Tuesday 22 June: Sukhdev Sandhu and George Szirtes on Germany v. Hungary

Tuesday 29 June: Peter Geoghegan and John Lanchester on the Last 16

Plus: A conversation about the later stages still to be announced!

Somehow I don't think this will be good.

Perry A Vs Mark S for the final please.

George Szirtes is very very good but fuck listening to anything about football

Jude Wanga should be good on Eng Croatia, she wrote a really good thing on racism and football.

i wd totally own him (perry) by the technique of emojis and internet acronyms and short cheeky replies

going through that Emily Dickinson article and she pickled kittens?? not living ones I hope

How will you produce emoji in spoken form?

with serene charm

Ian Penman on The Meatles

meanwhile i continue to trudge my way thru this thomas nagel essay on consqeuentialism, deontology and moral intituition -- not bcz i am lloving it but bcz i want to get a renewed bead on a discursive praxis i enaged with and revolted against as a student back when dinosaurs were gazing haplessly at the incoming asteroid. nagel i know is a BIG NAME CHAP in such waters (philosophy of mind, wikipedia tells me; indeed he already was in the 1980s and i feel i was given essays of his to read back then) and i can appreciate the painstaking step-by-step clarity of the type of thought he is taking us through

but i also -- just as strongly as back then but i feel with more lived justification lol -- very much think "what use is this?" assume that clarification is reached and something is learned (assume i merely finish reading this piece) that gets done what what i've learned? at issue -- in some sense -- is the ok-ness or otherwise of e.g. lying, torture and so on (lying appears in his opening gambit, torture has been mentioned in passing a couple of times).

right, so both are evidently routine things in the world: assume we wish to change this, and assume we wish both happened less often. and assume some moral facts about this get established by nagel and chums in discussion. the gap between the world where these facts are established and the world where such changes are effected seems -- to me -- to be if not unbridgeable, then at the very least so vast that just a fvckton of other things are going to be relevant to any project of change (which will derive -- in either direction actually) from the struggles of people in pursuit of their interests (group x want to tortuure more ppl; group y want not be tortured so much)

anyway i guess this post is my clumsy pardody of this way of thinking and approaching the world, and its relative exhausting and irritating unreadableness and irrelevance is a mark of how weird and useless i feel that i find it all

more when i reach the end of the piece i guess

nagel for example respects the conventions of spelling punctuation and grammar, in this essay^^^ i say no to all three

I have known people who talked as though you needed the correct 'philosophy' to act in the correct way politically.

I have always thought this was misguided.

Making the same point from a different angle, I don't entirely see that political action need be the end result or objective in a discussion of consequentialism, deontology and moral intuition - sorting these things out can be its own reward, in the same way that, say, aesthetic enjoyment doesn't have to be determined by its political efficiency.

Got very little out of that particular essay tho, and the soviet/nazi equivalence immediatley made me wary.

Spoilers: Nagel isn't going to pull any moral facts out of the bag. He does sketch an example where the right philosophical basis might produce a beneficial political outcome but yeah it's pretty thin gruel, philosophy is a fun game to play if you like that kind of thing but a) as mark suggests it's not exactly in a position to change the world and ii) even if all politicians were giants of moral reasoning, reason is still the slave of the passions and 'tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

even if all politicians were giants of moral reasoning, reason is still the slave of the passions and 'tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger

Somewhat skeptical of the idea that moral philosophy needs to value reason over "the passions", think you'll find wildly differing povs on that within the discipline.

of course, there are wildly differing povs on everything in philosophy! i don't know if i'm valuing reason over 'the passions', the idea is that passions (or values) - some of them anyway - are immune to reasoning.

maybe this should go in the philosophy thread

Making the same point from a different angle, I don't entirely see that political action need be the end result or objective in a discussion of consequentialism, deontology and moral intuition - sorting these things out can be its own reward, in the same way that, say, aesthetic enjoyment doesn't have to be determined by its political efficiency.

Well said!

In the latest issue I enjoyed a review on histories of 'female husbands'.Trans histories from the 19th century and it's positioning to today's discourses on gender politics. Really informative and interesting.

Less enjoyable was the article on Kracauer. I usually can read a lot of film reviews but he doesn't sound like something I'd enjoy though maybe it's the writer of the piece. It was really laughable how dismissive he was of Pauline Kael's review of one of his books. The quote he pulled was the best bit of writing in the whole piece! So his dismissal of her was weak. Stuart Jeffries wrote a book on The Frankfurt School so it's clearly a career.

i fear i greatly enjoyed that --besides the frankfurt school book -- jeffries is best known for a book called "mrs slocumbe's pussy": suck on that ted

the krakauer crit collection i read many years back is not terrible but kael is basically right, yes

completed the nagel and tbh very unimpressed: the dominant mode is passive voice non-citation ("[such-and-such] is widely considered a kind of moral evolution"), with no attempt to locate who exactly it is that's doing the considering (or even who "in general"); this extended to distinct obfuscatory vagueness when it comes to the "evolution" of (as an example to allow a move towards generalisation which is of course anything but) "property rights"; handwaving away *all* actual political history ancient and recent of the imposition and any fight-back against individual property rights ; the assumption of as establishment of the "correct kind of thinking" as what? a final-resort priestcraft so set apart from any distorting material interest that their analysis functions as a deeper and wiser exploration of such questions?

daniel and pinefox high-fived on this:

I don't entirely see that political action need be the end result or objective in a discussion of consequentialism, deontology and moral intuition - sorting these things out can be its own reward, in the same way that, say, aesthetic enjoyment doesn't have to be determined by its political efficiency

my argument i suppose is that what's going on is that this "sorting out" (for its own reward) is in effect the shifting of an active and very real political interest into the shadows, as if it's off the table and playing no role in the disntinctions and weightings when it really really really isnt?

to return it to just one live and a concrete issue (where there has been "evolution" and yet not at all enough evolution): can people be property? i'm guessing nagel would assert -- or anyway accept -- that the answer toda is "widely considered" to be no.

but in practice ppl were property were, and not so long ago: what is the "property rights" solution or resolution or restitution? as a matter of historical fact, the state of haiti was still playing france a vast compensation debt for the freeing of the slaves in 1804 until 1947. reason: the loss of "poperty" had to be paid for. but if france never had the right to treat ppl as property, hasn't the debt always run the other way? the former slaves are owed restitution fo the loss of themselves as their own property? (the idea that every indivudal "owns themself" being the somewhat perverse-sounding kludge in property-rights langage to deal with the edge case that was also a world-historically dominant case, viz the existence of the slave trade blah blah)

to me it feels like every single sentence of nagel's essay is contorted into the way of speaking that he nagel opts for so as to occlude this large shaping fact in any arguments about the evolution of the property right as a modern moral fact ("fact"), to prevent it from even slightly grazing your (or indeed his) attention (even when he mentions john locke lol: viz a key philosopher in the western canon who explicitly addressed slavery and explicitly came down on the side now "widely considered" incorrect)

tldr: i have no idea where this this longwinded explication of a minor wobble in the relative fashionabilities of deontology and consequentialism over [unspecificied recent period] is intended to take us, if not towards similar erasures of history

adding: yes of course the specific slice of history i've opted to grab at will be contested! that's what history is for! isn't it also what "moral philosophy" and "philosophy of mind" are for? apparently not in nagel's hands :(

Penman on The Beatles was reliably readable and off though I got the feeling he was better off covering Eve Babitz (though Lucie Elven was excellent on it) in the same issue.

I think the comparison with The Stones didn't fit because Elvis is there, in terms of reach/impact, "shifting the earth off its axis" as well (though that's just me going "kill the Rolling Stones" again). Yoko is someone I'd rather read a whole piece on tbh. The bit on her felt tacked on and unsatisfying and I don't think it's enough to acknowledge that she was badly treated because of sexism and racism. Watered down was a low.

xp

i literally pitched them a big yoko piece before xmas and got back a (very nice) rejection letter saying "looks good but no can do we have some stuff on the way that will likely overlap a bit too much" >:(

:-(

I hope you can get it published somewhere else.

This hardly overlaps, there is something that will have a chunky mention of Adorno or Benjamin every few months.

yes i must try and re-pitch it somewhere (and aim high)

Maybe some of those sites that seem to specialize in "longreads," like---I don't know much about them, but---4Columns, or Medium, which recently fired its staff writers and supposedly will depend on readers' submissions (although I also read that the publisher changes his mind a lot)

i'm mostly a tariq ali sceptic when it comes to his head-on politics but his side-piece interests are often useful and engaging: anyway i enjoyed his review of the new edition of maxime rodinson's 1961 life of mohammad, even if rerally all it boils down to is a handful of not-entirely linked items he's been burning to slip into some semi-relevant piece for ages

(the section on don quixote is the most suggestive, if also the most incomplete: that an underlying and overlooked theme in cervantes book is the expulision of the jews and the moors from spain, considered by some -- TA doesn't even advert to this -- the founding moment of the west's turn towards blood-based racial category in re social structure)

(lol that TA instead takes a moment to digress into a scholar-slapping of one of harold bloom's terrible intros to an item from the "western canon" -- i love early bloom and even mid and very weird bloom, viz the book on angels, but late and comfy bloom is indeed lazy and dreadful)

basically it was "notes towards something i, tariq ali, will never complete" (and if i did the head-on politics wd swamp the more fascinating stuff)

move that " to the end for the true sense of this^^^ post to reveal itself

Yeah I found the section on Quixote in that review really great but it then descended into fragmented commentaries.

Also noted 3x reviews from the NYRB classics publisher in the same issue.

LRB 20.5.2021: I must admit that I wearied of this issue and left some things unread. I'll give it away without really attempting them.

Of those I actually attempted:

Nicholas Penny on stone was too dense and specialised for me to follow.

Peter Perdue on China, I rather skipped through.

Duncan Campbell on the decline of courts and court reporting: better, compact, informative, poignant.

Keith Thomas on Enlightenment: rather standard, but informative.

Michael Wood on NOMADLAND: brief.

Lauren Oyler: I saw that this contained a bit of flawed writing that an editor could have improved. Otherwise I found the article hard to follow and gave up.

Emma Hogan on modernist lesbians: much better, giving us a lot of facts. The challenges to the author's view are left to the end and very brief; I'd like to hear more on them.

Susannah Clapp on bags: bad.

August Kleinzahler on Robert Creeley's letters: seems to repeat a pattern in which these celebrated poets are tiresome, offensive, drunken boors. Dreadful - what's good is that the article doesn't gloss this, is critical of Creeley, says that the letters are bad and dull. That's refreshing.

Timothy Brennan's letters-page riposte to his reviewer, on Said, is as interesting as anything else in the issue.

But maybe I'm becoming a poor reader of the LRB.

LRB 3.6.2021.

Thomas Nagel on morality: now I've actually read this, I have to agree with Mark S that it says very little. It's not that I want it to give me political positions, but I'd like it to say *something*!

3 current political articles in a row: all basically quite good.

Chris Lintott on ETs and SETI: good.

Now on the vast Joanne O'Leary Emily Dickinson. She seems to get more extensive and frequent LRB coverage than comparable figures.

"i have no idea where this this longwinded explication of a minor wobble in the relative fashionabilities of deontology and consequentialism over [unspecificied recent period] is intended to take us"

well said by Mark S.

I read it as basically a summary of the current state of a well-known debate in the Anglophonic philosophical tradition and a defense of the deontological side against certain consequentialist arguments. I think the intention is to convince the reader of the merit of the deontological side. I can understand if one finds this a waste of time, but at least you can't fault Nagel for not giving fair warning. He lays out his intentions at the beginning of the piece: "I will proceed on the assumption that it makes sense to try to discover what is really right and wrong, and that moral intuitions provide prima facie evidence in this inquiry." If that sounds corny or old-fashioned to you, or hopelessly naive, then you probably won't like the rest of the piece!

can't say i'm particularly thrilled to have the moral intuitions of philosophy professors offered as prima facie evidence for anything

Then don't read the piece!

Excuse me this is the thread where we complain about lrb articles

It sounds reasonable to say "we should proceed from moral intuitions".

But the article is making a critique of these, asking what their logic is, how they stand up to other models of morality.

... Which then makes it strange that it ends by saying "My intuition is that moral intuitions are good". This seems to beg the question, or to make the preceding investigation redundant.

it's a very long windy route to "as you were, non-philosophers!" and it does none of the work to wind anything discovered in the detail of the discussion back into any practical example where the various models might tug at one another (including the not-uninteresting edge case the piece opens with: a minor but arguably urgent wartime tactic undermined by a man who insists on telling the truth to the enemy)

I must concur.

as o.nate says it is mostly abt challenging kneekerk consequentialism, and it takes the tack that the alternative (moral intutions) may seem odd currently, before (perhaps) showing that they aren't a framework we can so easily ditch

BUT it's not at all explored why they became unfashionable and what kinds of societies deliver a lean towards one or the other, and in general what kinds of situations -- the opening example aside -- will likely deliver a tension that seems to demand thinking the issue through in a less pressured and time-limited context? (by extrapolation: war! in which case say more about this maybe?)

but i am merely reproducing my long-ago learned beef against philosophy: that in moral and/or political contexts it's a practice and a tradition that carefully strips out everything that's relevant to anyone having to make a choice, in order to convert it into a question where only philosophers can guide us

^ Might be interesting to read the piece in the latest LRB that tackles Simone Weil (someone who is probably v hard to write about) with that in mind

ps i have not finished the adam shatz review of the edward said biography but can i just in passing applaud and endorse this drive-by judgment: asked… to review a book by Jean baudrillard, he declined, saying baudrillard's ideas are "all sort of like little burps"

I enjoyed the said one just enough that I'm currently reading Orientalism

And pleased to find in many respects a v dissimilar book than I thought. I had read "key passages" through assignments etc but somehow missed the point of the book really which is more humane and arguably grounded in moral intuition than I had realised, to go off track for a bit

yes it's good and fascinating and (based on dim memory tbf, i last read it properly in the 1980s probably) very much not what it seems to be in the heads of some ppl who angrily & approvingly cite it but have apparently not carefully read it

A nice (or grim) enough digression in the latest LRB: Erin Maglaque's review of the world of early scholarship in Medieval Europe, one in which he sees (in his own precarious situation as an academic) the undervaluing of the people who make knowledge. Liked also the writing on the stresses of global history in Helen Pfieifer's review of a book on the Ottoman Empire as she makes her way through the twitter controversy the book generated.

Tony Wood's discussion of two books on Cuba felt like a thorough dissection of the struggles Cuba has faced, especially in the last couple of decades, bringing the situation right up to COVID and the present. Very interesting discussion on medicine (their export of doctors to many places), their development of a covid vaccine, their bordering on the illiberal in regards to gay marriage (outlawed then perhaps room for liberation) and artistic expression. Adewale Maja-Pierce on Kagame's regime also excellent, with a very dark conclusion, drawing on decades worth of journalistic knowledge and coverage of the region.

REVIEWS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS

the patrick o'brian piece is good fun (not least bcz it suddenly involves noxious nincompoop nikolai tolstoy in a more benign role than commonly)

Some news.

Those of you who are subscribers to the @LRB -- and are weird enough to cast your eye down the masthead -- will have noticed an addition. I’m delighted to be joining the paper as a contributing editor. And what a list of names that is. pic.twitter.com/JbiCvzsLlb

— James B (@piercepenniless) July 8, 2021

me gradually whittling away at the degrees of separation on the (perhaps weak) assumption that ppl who know me or of me will be more not less willing to commission me lol