Thomas Sowell and the intellectuals out of their depth

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”  Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

The above quotation summarizes the points that Thomas Sowell (1930 -), an American economist, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, makes in his 1995 book The vision of the Anointed. Sowell calls ‘anointed’ or ‘self-anointed’, the kind of public intellectual who believe that they are entitled to tell others what to do, and he refers to their unconstrained vision of the world as ‘the vision of the anointed’. He describes ‘the vision of the anointed’ as the unconstrained vision of the world that they normally embrace, which relies heavily on the belief that human nature is essentially good and that there is an ideal solution to every problem, rejecting all forms of compromise but being highly accommodating to collateral damage. Those with an unconstrained vision prefer centralized processes and are impatient with large institutions and systemic processes that constrain human action.

Historically, an intellectual was an individual who made a living out of their ideas. Examples of this type of intellectuals are the French philosophes of the 18^th century. However, at the second half of the 20^th century, emerged a different type of intellectual who earned their living in some occupation but who chose to puts themselves forward as promoters of various causes such as finding ‘solutions’ to problems. In his book, Sowell criticises the ‘anointed intellectual’, the type who like to project themselves as surrogate decision-makers for the rest of society.

According to Sowell there are a number of things that propel intellectuals for the role of the anointed intellectual, such as being well educated, especially when one has attended ivy league universities or teach in a prestigious university. Normally they promote themselves the ones who has the ‘solutions’ to problems or as rescuers of people treated unfairly by ‘society’. What is in it for them is that they portrayed in a better light than others who stay in their fields of expertise. They are articulated and persuasive, and have no qualm in giving their opinion on matters outside their area of expertise. One example is the linguist Noam In Chomsky, who gain notoriety in the field of political science.

Sowell also explains the alternative of the unconstrained vision of the world. It is basically a constrained vision, or tragic vision; it understands the need for solid empirical evidence and time-tested structures and processes over intervention and personal experience; ultimately, it is a down to earth vision that recognizes the fact that most problems have no solutions, but only trade offs. The latter is defined as a give and take between things: more of one requires less of the other, and vice-versa. relies heavily on belief that human nature is essentially unchanging and that man is naturally inherently self-interested, regardless of the best intentions. Those with a constrained vision prefer the systematic processes of the rule of law and experience of tradition; they also believe that compromise is essential because there are no ideal solutions, only trade-offs.

As Sowell points out in The vision of the anointed, the ‘anointed intellectual’, the type who like to project themselves as surrogate decision-makers for the rest of society, not only fail to solve the particular problem but create a new one. He cites as an example, those higher education establishments which opted to follow the vision of the anointed, and which ended up lowering their standards and creating a culture of victimization.

The problems of poverty, crime, war and injustice

One of the hobby horses of the anointed intellectual is income inequality, which is usually attributed to discrimination. However, Sowell has pointed out that there are many contributing factors to income inequalities.

Sowell is equally critical of multiculturalism, especially its false premises. To him, some groups’ culture are good in some things but not so good at other things. Over time, a group’s culture can go up and down in relation to other group’s culture.

The young tend to have enthusiasm for new things and as such tends to embrace the unrestrained vision of the world. The old, due to their greater experience, are less enthusiastic and more incredulous and tend to embrace the restricted vision of the world. Below are some quotations from Sowell’s book.

“Some have even referred to the perennial invasion of civilization by barbarism namely the newborn type, whom families and institutions must civilize, because they enter the world no different from babies born in the days of cavemen.”

“People with opposing visions of the world do not simply happen to reach different conclusions about the young and the old. On these and innumerable other issues, the conclusions reached by each are entailed as corollaries of their underlying assumptions about knowledge and wisdom. The education of the young has long been a battleground between adherents of the two visions of the nature of human beings and the nature of knowledge and wisdom. William Godwin’s notion”

“From ancient times to the present, and highly disparate societies around the world, there have been the most carried systems of thought – both secular and religious – seeking to determine how best the wise and virtuous can influence or direct the masses, in order to create or maintain a happier, more viable or more worthy society. In this context, it was a revolutionary departure when, in eighteenth century France, the `Physiocrats` arose to proclaim that, at least for the economy, the best that the reigning authorities could do would be to leave it alone – laissez-faire being the term they coined. To those with this vision, whether in France or elsewhere, for the authorities to impose economic policies would be to give ‘a most unnecessary attention,’ in Adam Smith’s words, to a spontaneous system of interactions that would go better without government intervention – nor perfectly, just better.”

“Reliance on systemic processes, whether in the economy, the law, or other areas, is based on the constrained vision – of the severe limitations on any given individual’s knowledge and insight, however knowledgeable or brilliant that individual might be, compared to other individuals. Systemic processes which tap vastly more knowledge and experience from vastly more people, often including traditions evolved from the experiences of successive generations, are deemed more reliable than the intellect of the intellectuals.”

“By contrast, the vision of the left is one of surrogate decision-making by those presumed to have not only superior knowledge but sufficient knowledge, whether those surrogates are political leaders, experts, judges or others. This is the vision that is common to varying degrees on the political left, whether radical or moderate, communist or fascist, and common also to totalitarians. A commonality of purpose in society is central to collective decision-making, whether expressed in town-meeting democracy or totalitarian dictatorship or other variations in between. One of the differences between the commonality of purposes in democratic systems of government and in totalitarian systems of government is in the range of decisions reserved for individual decision-making outside the purview of government.”

Edith Wharton 2. The woman of letters

Jo Pires-O`Brien

The name of  Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is one of the most prominent in American literature, as her many novels, short stories, plays, and non-fiction are known for how well they capture people and society. Wharton published her first two books, Mrs. Manstey’s View and The Fullness of Life, in 1893; her first literary success was a non-fiction work on design and architecture entitled The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-authored with Ogden Codman, Jr., the architect who designed The Mount. However, she is best admired for her portrayals of the lives and morals of the Gilded Age or Belle Époque, as in her 12^th novel The House of Mirth,  which was made into the 1993 movie ‘The Age of Innocence’,  directed by Martin Scorcese and starred by Michelle Pfeifer, Winona Ryder and Daniel Day Lewis.

Wharton born in New York during the period of the Civil War, in a well to do and highly educated family. The youngest of a family of three, her parents were George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander. She had two older brothers, Frederick and Henry, and her name at birth was Edith Newbold Jones. At age four she went with her family to France, Italy, Germany, and Spain, when she was educated by tutors and governesses.  She suffered from typhoid fever in 1871, while the family was at a spa in the Black Forest, and in the following year the family returned to the United States. During her stay in Europe, young Edith revealed her intelligence and strong wit, learning to speak French, German, and Italian, and questioning the standards of fashion and etiquette of her time, especially those expected of young girls. She wanted more education than she received, so she read from her father’s library and from the libraries of her father’s friends. At age eleven she attempted to write her first novel but turned to poetry due to her mother’s disapproval. In 1881, when Edith was 19 years old, she returned to Europe with her family, but returned in the following year to the United States due to the death of her father from a stroke. After the death of her husband, Edith’s mother decided to move to Paris, where he stayed until her death in 1991. In April 1885, at age 23, Edith married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who shared her love of travel. The couple set up house at Pencraig Cottage in Newport, Rhode Island. Later in 1902, the couple moved to their new house The Mount, in a plot of 113 acres in Lennox, Western Massachusetts, designed by the American architect Ogden Codman, Jr. (1863-1951). Edith and Teddy Wharton lived there for some ten years until their divorce in 1911, when the house was sold. Today, The Mount is a museum and cultural centre, welcoming over 50,000 visitors per year.  Edith Wharton had many accomplished friends, among whom the writer Henry James (1843-1916), whom she met in 1887, both of whom had the habit of surrounding themselves with other writers and creatives. It is thought that this exposure helped Wharton to develop her own linguistic style that challenged the Victorian language constructs of her time. Since her circle of friends included many who were not straight, she understood that the hypocritical social rules oppressed them too as well as women.

(See my post The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton)

Edith Wharton 1. The Bucchaneers

Edith Wharton 1. The Bucchaneers

Jo Pires-O`Brien

My interest in Edith Wharton (1862-1937) and her book The Bucchaneers arose after my visit of Blenheim palace in 1990, when our guide tour showed us the portrait of Consuelo Vanderbilt (1877-1964), the 9^th Duchess of Marlborough, and said (incorrectly) that she was partly Brazilian. Wharton’s book was about the arranged marriages between impoverished British aristocrats and American heiresses such as Consuelo Vanderbilt, as well as the enduring human desire to find happiness in love. The Buccaneers, was still unfinished when Wharton died, and was finished fifty-six years later by Marion Mainwaring (1922-2015). The latter did her best to follow Wharton’s disgust for the social hypocrisy of the Guilded Age.

The Buccaneers is set in the 1870s, an era characterized by few antagonistic forces. At the same time when society was very hierarchical and many people wanted it to remain that way, a new era was beginning to emerge, when women began to gain access to education and started to see the world with their own eyes rather than through the eyes of their parents or husbands. This new era was ushered by the new generation, at the same time that the older generation carried on pretending that everything was the same.

The book deals with a topic that was in fashion at that time: the marriages of ambitious young American beauties (or their parents) to English aristocrats. Specifically, the plot revolves around the love life of the daughters of three socially aspiring American families: the Closson’s, the St. George’s,  and the Elmsworth’s. They are nouveau riches, and therefore, not altogether accepted by the wealthy society of Saratoga and New York. In order to climb further in the social hierarchy, they send their daughters to England to marry aristocrats in need an infusion of American cash to maintain their noble houses and estates. Conchita (Connie) Closson marries unhappily and ends up taking a lover.  Jinny (Virginia ) St. George makes a reasonably satisfactory marriage, as does Lizzy Elmsworth. However, the marriage of Virginia’s younger sister, Nan (Annabel) St. George, to the Duke of Tintagel did not work, and she eventually finds that her true soulmate in the intellectual Guy Thwarte. The Buccaneers is specially compelling is the combination of deft satire of social norms and the nuances of high society with complex characterizations. Nevertheless, the critics found the conclusion given by Marion Mainwaring only partly plausible; the arranged marriages would eventually fail, and that was  expected; what they didn’t swallow was the happy ending of Nan St. George, who found love in such a hypocritical society.

(See my post Edith Wharton 2. The woman of letters

Niall Ferguson on the networks of today and yesterday

Joaquina Pires-O’Brien

The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward. Winston Churchill

I discovered the British historian Niall Ferguson (1964 -) through a seminar he gave at the Long Now Foundation, in San Francisco, about his most recent book, The Square and the Tower: Networks, hierarchies and the struggle for global power (2018) as well as the future of networking, in YouTube. Ferguson’s idea was that the extensive networks of our era, which were made possible by the internet, have made us perceive it through its uniqueness in relation to all other eras of the past. Due to this perception, all the historical analogies of our era are situated in the 20th century, like the 1930’s, with the type of populism that was conducive to fascism, and the 1970’s, with the network British spies that the KGB operative Arnold Deutsch managed to recruit amid the elite of Cambridge University students. But Ferguson offered an analogy that went back centuries, to the period right after the appearance of the printing press in Europe. My desire to find out more about Ferguson’s vision on networks led me to buy The Square and the Tower, which I read with great interest.

In The Square and the Tower Niall Ferguson points that the way to understand the problems of our era is by asking ‘When in history something similar appeared?’ He disagrees with the analogies of our era with the 1930s and the 1970s due to the networks of fascism and traitor spies. To Ferguson, the common traits of networks are their tendency to polarize and attack one another and by looking for this tendency one can uncover the hidden networks of history. Once these networks are uncovered, it is important to disregard their speed for the networks of past centuries were much slower than those of the present. What connects the period that followed the appearance of the internet to the period that followed the appearance of the printing press in Europe is the optimist expectation of what their consequences would be.

After the introduction of the printing press it was commonly thought that greater availability of books was going to lead to more literacy and more education. Something similar happened in the era that followed the appearance of the internet at the end of the 20th century. People initially thought that the internet would remain decentralized and free, and that it would usher a new society formed by a union of ‘netzins’ (internet citizens).

After the appearance of blogging, it was thought that everyone would speak truth to power in their blogs, while the appearance of social media suggested the upended possibilities of social networking. What happened in the two eras above turned out quite different from what was expected. The introduction of the printing press created a network of distribution that polarized the West in various ways. Just a few years after the appearance of the internet, it came under the control of a few companies which created hierarchical structures and allowed the return of monopoly capitalism.

The author explains the dynamics of some of the mightiest networks of the 20th century. Perhaps the greatest network of the 20th century is the European Economic Community (EEC) that was created in 1957 through the Treaty of Rome. Not content with it, they proposed a new treaty (Maastricht) to turn the economy community of Europe into a political one, creating the European Union (EU). Further to that, many hard core Europeans began to ventilate the idea of turning the EU into a European state, which many British politicians find intractable.

Another important network of the 20th century is by the World Economic Forum (WEF), an international organization for public-private cooperation, founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab (1938 -). The WEF is not jut for chief-executives of multinationals and selected politicians, but also by any leadership formal or informal. Such is the power of the WEF that even though it is perceived as a bastion of capitalism, even socialist politicians and statesmen have attended their annual meetings in Davos, Switzerland. Nelson Mandela attended it in 1992, right after his release from prison, and returned a couple of times after he was the President of South Africa.

Some 20th century individuals were genius at creating networks. Two notable examples that Ferguson cites are the Hungarian-American investor George Soros (1930-) and Henry Kissinger (1923 -). Soros is mentioned in chapters 1 (The Mystery of the Illuminati) and 49 (Breaking the Bank of England) while Kissinger is only mentioned in Chapter 2, Our Networked Age. Regarding Kissinger, it is pertinent to mention that Ferguson has written a biography of Kissinger, covering the period until 1968 (Kissinger:1923-1968: The Idealist; 2015). Soros defeated the pound and became a millionaire by tricking the creation of a network of copy-cat investors.

Networks from other centuries other than the 20th are also described in this book. Some examples the Masons in Scotland, Freemasonry in America, the American Revolutionaries in Boston, the house of Bourbon in France, the British campaigners for the abolition of slavery, the British Empire, the ‘Round Table’ of world powers, etc. Other networks that Ferguson describe are that created by the American rev Political parties such as the Democratic and the Republican parties in the United States.

The understanding of networks is still very limited. Many people tend to think of networks as level playing fields but the reality says otherwise. However, many networks are hierarchies where the top node controls those below. Examples of hierarchical networks are the socialist and fascist regimes of the 20th century. Stalin and Hitler were notorious for their paranoia regarding dissenters and dissenting networks. Even the egalitarian networks created through social media have harmful consequences in their failing to segregate between the honest and the dishonest content. Although most people understand the measures of success of in social networks, such as the number of visualizations, followers, and likes, few realize that these social networks also serve dishonest and unethical causes. For the curious minds wanting to gain a deeper understanding of our age and its networks, The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson fits the bill.

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Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities. Ferguson has authored fifteen books in popular history. In 1998, he published The House of Rothschild: the World’s Bank: 1798-1848, his 6th book. The second volume, covering 1849-1998, will be published in 2019.

Jo Pires-O’Brien, a Brazilian-British, is the founder and editor of PortVitoria, a magazine for the Iberian culture worldwide.

How to find meaning

Joaquina Pires-O’Brien

Review of the book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B. Peterson. Allen Lane, UK, 2018. 409 pp. ISBN 978-0-241-45163-5.

I only learned about Jordan B. Peterson, the  Canadian psychologist whose appearances in YouTube are watched by thousands around the world,  at the beginning of June this year,  when a friend mentioned a debate on political correctness in which Jordan participated with Stephen Fry, the British writer and comedian. I learned a lot from this debate on YouTube, including why Peterson is described by journalists as the kind of person that people either love or hate.  Although from the start I placed myself among the former, I was still reluctant to buy his book 12 Rules for Life simply because the title reminded me of those books with the expression ‘for dummies’ in the title. After watching a discussion about postmodernism that he had with the American author and discerning social critic, Camille Paglia published in October last year, I changed my mind.

This is Jordan’s 2^nd book, the result of an epiphany he had during a brain storming meeting with a friend and business associate at the end of 2016, when he imagined that the LED-equipped pen torch his friend gave him as a ‘pen of light’ with which he would be able “to write illuminated words in the darkness”.

Considering that 12 Rules for Life, a book of 409 pages was published in the first part of 2018, this is a remarkable short time, even for a genius. The  explanation is in Jordan’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, published  in 1999, “a very dense book” in Peterson’s own words, which took him 10 years to write, and whose ideas were further expounded in 12 Rules. The 12 rules of life are:

Rule 1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

Rule 2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.

Rule 3. Make friends with the people who want the best for you.

Rule 4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

Rule 5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

Rule 6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.

Rule 7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).

Rule 8. Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.

Rule 9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.

Rule 10. Be precise in your speech.

Rule 11. Don’t bother children when they are skateboarding.

Rule 12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

In explaining Rule 1, “Stand up straight with your shoulders back”, the author shows that this is a trait that evolved, associated with status and social position not only in man but in other animals such as lobsters. The whole chapter is a biology lesson about the intraspecific hierarchies of the animal kingdom, which result from the competition for limited resources. There are specific body chemicals associated with the pecking order of chickens and the way songbirds establish dominance. Although the biological evidence points to their existence of hierarchies in humans, to admit this has become politically incorrect. Perhaps the notion of human hierarchy has become a ‘monster’ for individuals with a determined personality, which is probably why Peterson likes to repeat that monsters do exist, after all. But it makes sense that people stand straight when they are well, and became curved when they are not, but the message is that one can pick oneself up and stand straight again. “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” is a metaphor for accepting life’s many responsibilities, even the most terrible and difficult. The acceptance of responsibility is tantamount to an intent of finding meaning in life and to respect oneself.  The brutal distribution of resources in today’s word, where one percent of the population have as much as the bottom 50 percent, is what makes it difficult to accept responsibility:

The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A million and a half separately titled books (!) sell each year in the US, However, only five hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies. Similarly, just four classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played by modern orchestras. Bach, for his part, composed so prolifically that it would take decades of work merely to hand-copy his scores, yet only a small fraction of this prodigious output is commonly performed. The same thing applies to the output of the other three members of this group of hyper-dominant composers: only a small fraction of their work is still widely played. Thus, a small fraction of the music composed by a small fraction of  all the classical composers who have ever composed makes up almost all the classical music that the world knows and loves.

The situation above is described by an L-shaped graph known as Price’s law, where the vertical axis depicts the number of people and the horizontal axis depicts productivity or resources. It is also known as the Matthew Principle, due to a New Testament quotation (Matthew 25:29), where Christ said “to those who have everything, more will be given; to those who have nothing; everything will be taken.”  This quotation comes from the Parable of the Talents, where Christ recognizes that people are not equal in terms of initiative and diligence. The main point that Jordan is trying to make is that hierarchies are a part of life. Hierarchies evolved over long periods of time in the animal kingdom, not just in man.  From a Darwinian perspective, what matters is permanence. Social hierarchy is not a new concept; it has been around for some half a billion years, and it is real and permanent. Nature is what ‘selects’, and the longer something has been selected the more permanent it is. Nature is not as harmonious, balanced and perfect as imagined by the romantic minds. There is a lot more to this chapter, such as that every individual has within him- or herself an idea of  his or her position in society. Low and high status are real. There is anxiety in both realities. Undoubtedly this is unpalatable to many, but is the reality. To act responsibly in the world today requires accepting reality and working with it. Finally, there are self-defeating ways and intelligent ways to live responsibly: “Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.”

I was particularly drawn to Rule 9: “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t”. In this rule Peterson explains the science of human interactions, emphasizing attention and conversation. Many of the ideas that Peterson presents regarding this rule come from his practice as a clinical psychologist, which has given him a large sample of modern day isolation and its secondary side effects. He writes:

The people I listen to need to talk, because that’s how people think. People need to think. Otherwise, they wander blindly into pits When people think, they simulate the world, and plan how to act in it. If they do a good job of simulating, they can figure out what stupid things  they shouldn’t do. Then they can not do them. Then they don’t have to suffer the consequences. That’s the purpose of thinking. But we can’t do it alone. We simulate the world, and plan our actions in it. Only human beings do this. That’s how brilliant we are. We make little avatars of ourselves. We place those avatars in fictional worlds. Then we watch what happens. If our avatar thrives, then we act like he does, in the real world. Then we thrive (we hope). If our avatar fails, we don’t go there, if we have any sense. We let him die in the fictional world, so that we don’t have to really die in the present.

Conversation is a key thing in human life and yet we don’t know how to do it properly; it is often hindered by not listening properly or by not being completely truthful. Peterson calls ‘jockeying for position’ the situation in a conversation where people think more on the reply they want to make than in what is being said. Good conversation, of the kind people exchange views with one another, is becoming rare.  The alternative to the standard conversation involving two or more interlocutors is thinking. We can create a conversation in our minds by reflecting deeply and enacting our viewpoint and that of another person. Self-criticism often passes for this type of thinking, but is not a reflection with an internal dialogue. As Peterson shows, conversation is a great opportunity to organize thoughts effectively and to clean up our minds. Putting it in another way, conversation is the key to good mental health.

Simplicity is one characteristic of all 12 rules for life prescribed by Peterson. This simplicity comes from the vision of the tip of an iceberg of meaning. However, a lot of effort is required to grasp in full the iceberg of meaning. There is a lot of meaning behind each of these 12 rules of life. All 12 rules rest either on scientific findings or on the wisdom of ancient narratives and their archetypes, or on both things.  Meaning, according to Jordan, is the most important thing anyone could wish for in life for it allows us to find equilibrium between order and chaos. A necessary condition for meaning is truth. Many people are incapable of accepting  the world as it is, and prefer instead to hang on to their idea of how the world should be. These are the kind of people who hate Jordan and try to defame his character.

The book 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson is at the top of the league of self-help books and the reason for that is the clarity with which the author depicts life’s problems and the ways people deal with them, which, in turn, is due to the fact that Jordan is a public intellectual and a world-class research psychologist, as well as an individual who has experienced a fair share of problems in his own life. Peterson’s book offers the intelligent ways to deal with the problems of modern life, from  social isolation and alcohol or substance abuse, to nihilism and the inability to  accept the truth about the world; we can include in this list a range of mind disorders from anxiety to depression. Meaning, not happiness, is the objective of these 12 rules. Happiness is a term that derives from ‘happy’ but  ‘happy’ is  not synonymous with ‘good’. Good includes a range of things like self-respect and the Golden Rule regarding treating others; that which allow us to live our lives with integrity and with hope for further improvement is ‘good’ while the opposite of that is ‘hell’.  Only through meaning we can evade hell and have the necessary courage to face the tragedies of life.

                                                                                                                                          

Joaquina Pires-O’Brien is a Brazilian translator, essayist and former research  botanist, living in England. Her book of essays O homem razoável (The Reasonable Man) was published simultaneously in Portuguese and Spanish in 2016, and is available from Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions. In 2010, she founded PortVitoria, a digital magazine that publishes articles in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Jo is also the founder-editor of PortVitoria, a magazine for the Iberian culture.

Revisitando 1968 (in Spanish)

Joaquina (Jo) Pires-O’Brien

Este año (2018) marca el 50 aniversario de la revolución estudiantil de 1968, lo que ofrece una oportunidad de reflexionar sobre el evento en sí y la percepción del público desde entonces. En 1969, apenas un año después del evento, Raymond Aron (1905-1983) publicó el libro La Revolution Introuvable: Réflexions sur les événements de mai, o The Elusive Revolution: Anatomy of a Student Revolt, en la traducción al inglés. Considerado el testigo más equilibrado de los acontecimientos en París, Aron describió a 1968 como un ‘psicodrama’, más para una comedia revolucionaria que para una verdadera revolución. Aron era el tipo de intelectual que siempre escogió la verdad, cualquiera que fuera el costo. Ser un feroz crítico del marxismo, en una época en que casi todo el mundo estaba envuelto con la izquierda, significó no sólo renunciar a la oportunidad de hacerse popular, sino también exponerse al menosprecio de otros pensadores. Pero, a pesar de todos los intentos de denigrar su imagen, Aron mantuvo su propio suelo. Aron finalmente alcanzó el reconocimiento merecido al final de su vida, especialmente después de la publicación de sus memorias, un mes antes de su muerte, el 17 de octubre de 1983.

Esta edición de PortVitoria reexamina las ideas en torno a las revueltas de los estudiantes de 1968. El principal artículo es ‘París, mayo de 1968: la revolución que nunca existió’, de Peter Steinfels, publicado por primera vez en The International Herald Tribune el 11 de de mayo de 2008, con motivo de los 40 años de 1968, y publicado aquí en español y portugués. Es seguido por el ensayo de Fernando Genovés ‘Raymond Aron y Jean-Paul Sartre: hombres de letras versus intelectuales’, que destaca los paralelos en las vidas de Aron y Sartre, incluido el evento en París, en el 26 de junio de 1979, cuando estas dos figuras imponentes se encontraron de nuevo por última vez. Un obituario de André Glucksmann, uno de los líderes de las revueltas estudiantiles de 1968 en París y que más tarde surgió como uno de los Nuevos Filósofos de Francia es nuestro tercer artículo. Lo mismo fue publicado en la revista semanal estadounidense The New Yorker, el 11 de noviembre de 2015, y es reproducido aquí en portugués. El cuarto artículo es mi proprio ensayo ‘1968 en un casquillo de nuez’, un breve relato de las revueltas de los estudiantes y sus consecuencias.

Un doble revisión de The Once and Future Liberal y The Shipwrecked Mind (La mente naufragada) de Mark Lilla, por James Meek, publicado por primera vez en 2017 en el London Review of Books, se ofrece aquí en español y portugués. Los libros fueron reseñados en varias revistas y periódicos españoles y brasileños, pero la reseña de Meek captura con aprumo sustancia e intención, permitiendo un vislumbre clara de la mente de ese escritor penetrante.

Mucha agua ha pasado bajo el puente desde 1968 y la narración de los acontecimientos que lo rodean también ha cambiado. Cincuenta años después, un número creciente de críticos parece concordar que fue un utopismo socialista que alcanzó el status de un culto. Aún más relevante que la etiqueta que debía aplicarse a 1968, es el hecho de que inculcó muchas ideas inconclusas en las mentes jóvenes y en la población. Esto tuvo muchas consecuencias imprevistas, tales como la sofocación del debate en la esfera pública, el populismo político, el multiculturalismo, el tribalismo y el desaliento de la enseñanza superior. América Latina tuvo todo eso más la fragmentación social causada por la diseminación del marxismo e ideologías semejantes.

Julio de 2018 (Editorial)

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Jaron Lanier and the Bummer machine of making heads

Joaquina (Jo) Pires-O’Brien

An American information technologist named Jaron Lanier is also the author of several books of critique of the Digital Age, such as You are not a Gadget: The Manifesto (2010), Who Owns the Future? (2013), Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality (2017). Lanier has just published his fourth book entitled Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018), in which he denounces Silicon Valley in general, and Facebook , in particular, as real head-turning machines.

Lanier called the ‘Bummer’ head-turning machine, an acronym in the phrase “Behavior of Others, Modified and Transformed into a Empire for Rent” (Behavior of Others, Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent).

The following is excerpted from the article by Danny Fortson published in The Sunday Times Magazine, 19.05.2018, about Lanier Ten’s new book Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now:

At the heart of his concern is the coupling of the smartphone, an always-on supercomputer, and tracking device, and advertising, which has been utterly transformed from a periodic annoyance that would materialise in defined places – during your favorite television show, on a billboard, in a magazine – to something else entirely. “Everyone who is in social media is getting individualised, continuously adjusted stimuli, without a break, so long as they use their smartphones,” he writes. “What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behaviour modification on a titanic scale.”

…

Even more alarming: The Bummer machine is getting stronger every day because what algorithms need more than anything is data to crunch and behaviours to analyse. … The more raw material the algorithms have to work with, the more effective they become. Hence Lanier’s call for mass deletion: “The arc of history has reversed with the arrival of the Bummer machine,” he says. “Quitting is the only way, for now, to learn what can replace our grand mistake.”

…

The argument goes like this: algorithms are optimised to create engagement and they work extremely well. The average millenial checks his phone 150 times a day. It is typically the first thing they do when they get up and the last thing before they go to sleep. More than 2 bn people are in FaceBook, roughly the same number of followers of Christianity.

…

The result is that society has “darkened a few shades”, Lanier argues. “If you don’t see the dark ads, the ambient whispers, the cold-hearted memes that someone else sees, that person will seem crazy to you. And that is our new Bummer world . We seem crazy to each other because Baummer is robbing us of our theories of one another’s minds.”

…

Our solution is to be like a cat, that is, be impervious to instruction or control.

Here are Lanier’s 10 reasons why people should delete their social media accounts:

1. You are loosing your free will;
2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times;
3. Social media is turning you into an asshole;
4. Social media is undermining truth;
5. Social media is making what you say meaningless;
6. Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy;
7. Social media is making you unhappy;
8. Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity;
9. Social media is making politics impossible;
10. Social media hates your soul;

***

The above was taken from Danny Fortson’s interview of Jaron Lanier published in The Sunday Times Magazine, 19.05.2018, about Lanier’s latest book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Jo Pires-O`Brien is the founder-editor of PortVitoria, a magazine of the Iberian culture

What defines a liberal mind?

Joaquina (Jo) Pires-O’Brien

I am proud to announce that PortVitoria is now entering its 8th year.
The main feature of this edition is an essay by the Spanish thinker Fernando R. Genovés explaining what defines the liberal mind. Genovés starts with the definition provided by Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton; 1834-1902), who wrote that the liberal mind is the mind of the individual to whom the idea of liberty means something sacred, such as life and property. He then covers the meaning of liberty, which boils down to ‘not to be subjected to the domain of others’, and shows that the sacredness of life and property points to the necessity of individuals to learn how to control themselves and their lives. Liberty is thus the main object of the liberal mind, that is, the mind of persons who make their own decisions and accept responsibility for them. This is even more relevant in a time of post-truths, characterised by false news and by the tricks of constructionism. According with Genovés, liberals are neither conservatives nor radicals, and much less extremists, and, that they tend to not get cosy in political parties.
The other essays of this edition are ‘Decálogo do livre pensador’ (The ten commandments of the free-thinker) by Miguel Ángel Fresdenal, and ‘El passaporte’(The passport), which was taken from my new e-book El hombre rasonable y otros ensayos (The reasonable man and other essays; 2016). Fresdenal’s article touches precisely the problem of how to deal intelligently with the daily bombardment of ideas. My article provides a summary of the history of the passport and also shows how governments sometimes use the passport to further their illiberal agendas.

My e-book El hombre rasonable y otros ensayos (7 November 2016, KDP, Amazon) was reviewed by Norman Berdichevsky, an American writer with a special interest in the Hispanic and Portuguese cultures. This review is presented in both Portuguese and Spanish.
Another review offered in this edition is of Milan Kundera’s Slowness, which was published in French in 1995. The book was launched in Portuguese, in a pocket edition, in 2011, by Companhia das Letras.
During 2016 I managed to complete the migration of PortVitoria from an old-fashioned format to a more modern and flexible one based in WordPress. The new format is much more user-friendly for it adjusts to all sorts of computer screens and hand held devices. Now you can bookmark PortVitoria in the home screen of your tablet or smartphone.

January 2017

El hombre razonable

Joaquina Pires-O’Brien

‘El hombre razonable’ es el título de uno de los 23 ensayos de mi libro publicado en noviembre de 2016 por Amazon. He escogido este tema por dos razones. El primero fue la curiosidad que tuve cuando encontré el tema por primera vez, cuando trabajaba como intérprete en un proceso de accidente de trabajo. El segundo fue la realización inmediata de lo importante que es el hombre razonable para el buen funcionamiento del Estado, y por tanto de la sociedad. Es obvio que la sociedad no puede prescindir de los individuos excelentes y de los genios, pero ella necesita también del hombre razonable, que, por conocerse a sí mismo, sabe reconocer la excelencia y la genialidad. En contraposición al hombre razonable, hay el hombre mediocre, que no se conoce a sí mismo y abraza la mediocridad simplemente por ser su zona de confort.

La idea del hombre razonable puede ser trazada desde la antigüedad. El corresponsal de la razonabilidad en la antigua Grecia era la phronēsis (φρόνησις), o sabiduría práctica; El hombre razonable de la antigua Grecia era el hombre de phronēsis. En su libro Menón, Platón muestra un diálogo de Sócrates en el que éste afirma que la phronēsis es el atributo más importante para aprender, aunque no puede ser enseñado y tiene que ser adquirido a través del autodesarrollo. Para Sócrates, el hombre poseedor de la phronēsis era aquel capaz de discernir cómo y por qué actuar virtuosamente y, además, alentar esa virtud práctica en otras personas.

Al final de la Edad Media, el filósofo Baruch Espinosa (1632-77) escribió que no hay nada más útil en el mundo que un hombre razonable. Espinosa definió al hombre razonable como el que cultiva el autoconocimiento. Para él, tal objetivo no hace al individuo más especial o menos humano, y sí, perfectamente humano. Cuanto más razonables los hombres, más útiles se convierten en la sociedad. Por la misma tabla, la sociedad es tanto más virtuosa cuanto mayor es su riqueza en ciudadanos razonables.

La descripción que Espinosa dio del hombre razonable está más para el superhombre excelente imaginado por Friedrich Nietzsche que para el hombre medio del Derecho. En el derecho inglés, por ejemplo, es un individuo de un nivel educativo razonable, pero común; Tal nivel educativo presumido no es el superior y sino el medio, aún así, suficiente para permitir una determinada capacidad de razonar acerca de las cuestiones prácticas del día a día.

La clase media es, para los filósofos políticos, el eslabón de la democracia. Cuando, en 1903 los legisladores de Inglaterra y del País de Gales incorporaron el concepto del hombre razonable en el derecho, la imagen de éste era la de un proverbial pasajero dentro del autobús de Clapham, entonces un tranquilo suburbio de Londres y lugar de residencia de ingleses de la clase media. Sucede que Clapham cambió completamente con la expansión de Londres después de la Primera Guerra Mundial. Esta expansión fue mayor en el curso del Támesis, pues amalgamó una gran cantidad de pueblos que hasta entonces poseían una existencia independiente. Los vecinos de Clapham también fueron cambiando, incluyendo el proverbial pasajero del autobús. Si elegimos al azar un autobús que hace el trayecto de Clapham a Camdem, otro ex suburbio amalgamado al Gran Londres, es muy probable que la mayor parte de los pasajeros estar formada por extranjeros que trabajan en el sector de servicios. Puede ser que muchos de esos individuos sean razonables, aunque no parezcan en nada con el hombre inglés en el autobús de Clapham, en 1903.

Así como los ingleses necesitan reflexionar más sobre su hombre razonable típico, también los brasileños, argentinos, mexicanos, etc., necesitan reflexionar sobre su hombre medio. ¿Es él mediocre o razonable? ¿Se mediocre, cómo hacer para educarlo? Si es razonable, cómo aprovechar mejor su razonabilidad?

                                                                                                                                           

Joaquina (Jo) Pires-O’Brien es una brasileña que estudió en Brasil, Estados Unidos e Inglaterra, y obtuvo su PhD por la Universidad de Londres en 1991. Publicó sus primeros ensayos y reseñas en la revista Contemporary Review, entre 1999 y 2008, y a partir de 2010, en PortVitoria, revista electrónica de actualidad centrada en la cultura ibérica, que ella misma fundó y continúa editando (www.portvitoria.com). En 2016 publicó el libro El hombre razonable y otros ensayos (2016), una colección de 23 ensayos sobre los más diversos temas de la civilización occidental, en portugués y en español, y disponible en todos los portales de Amazon. US $ 9.99; Kindle ed. $2.99.

Check out PortVitoria, a biannual digital magazine of current affairs, culture and politics centered on the Iberian culture and its diaspora.

PortVitoria offers informed opinion on topics of interest to the Luso-Hispanic world in Portuguese, Spanish & English.

Help PortVitoria to continue by putting a link to it in your Facebook or blog.

Western Civilization in a nutshell

Norman Berdichevsky (Guest writer)

Review of the book El hombre razonable y otros ensayos by Joaquina Pires-O’Brien. Beccles, UK, KDP, 2016. Available at Amazon.com.

The announcement of the adoption of the new word ‘post-truth’ by the writers of the Oxford dictionary on 16 November 2016 came out days after the publication of an e-book in Portuguese called O homem razoável e outros ensaios, already translated into Spanish (El hombre razonable y otros ensayos) – a collection of 23 essays on some of the most defining, as well as, controversial aspects of Western Civilization. The timing of the two events shows that the author is indeed well attuned with Western Civilization and its hurdles. This is due to the fact that one of the essays of this book deals specifically with Post-Modernism, the doctrine or mind-set from where the word ‘post-truth’ originated. Besides Post-Modernism, this book covers other contemporary themes such as liberal education, the two cultures (the chasm between science and the arts and humanities) and 9/11 as well as some timeless themes such as utopia, love and man’s attachment to myth. The author, Jo Pires-O’Brien, a Brazilian resident in the U.K., is the editor in chief of PortVitoria, the on-line biannual magazine of current affairs, culture and politics centered on the Iberian culture and its diaspora, whose articles appear in Spanish, Portuguese and English.

The essay with the most difficult subject – in any language – is precisely the one that talks about post-modernism, described through its fascination with the concept of ‘narratives’; i.e. the plaything of many in the media – an attitude of scepticism or distrust towards ideologies, and various tenets of rational thought, including the existence of objective reality, truth, and the existing notions of progress. Instead, it asserts that knowledge and truth are the product of unique systems of social, historical, and political interpretation. The author’s preoccupation with the threat of post-modernism is not unwarranted. The term ‘post-truth’ adopted by the authors of the Oxford dictionary in 2016 captures the post-modernist idea that ‘there are no truths, only interpretations’. If there is no truth, science and other major elements of modern Western Civilization like its literary cannon are irrelevant.

The title of the book is taken from the first essay, which deals with a hypothetical ‘reasonable man’ that is enshrined in civil and contract law in Britain and the United States, although lacking a precise definition. Such ‘a reasonable man’ – without the definite article as in Spanish and Portuguese or ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ in British folklore, represents a person with common sense whose opinion is taken as the public opinion, and is valued in a number of particular instances such as how a person should behave in situations that might pose a threat (through action or inaction) to others. There is no need to establish a malicious intent and that this composite fictional character also is likely to commit ‘reasonable errors’ according to the circumstances and as such, is a matter of ethics. There is indeed much food for thought on how much our legal systems in the West, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries, are a function of a distinct tradition. One learns from the essay that the concept of the reasonable man goes back to antiquity, to the concept of phronesis or ‘practical wisdom’ of the ancient Greeks. To Socrates phronesis was the ability to discern how and why one should act virtuously, while Aristotle, and in the eve of the Modern Age, Spinoza, defined it as the capacity to think logically. The quality of a society depends on its human wealth, measured by the proportion of ‘reasonable citizens’. The theme of law reappears in another essay which deals with the crime of ‘affray’ – using or threatening to use unlawful violence towards another such that would cause a person of ‘reasonable firmness’ present at the scene to fear for their own personal safety. The etymology of the word ‘affray’ is explained showing that it goes back to a word in Proto-Germanic that has a Proto-Indo-European root.

Several essays are about influential thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Jacques Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Elias Canetti, Stefan Zweig and George Orwell. The essay entitled ‘The philosopher of liberty’ is about Hayek, notoriously out of favour among left-wing critics of the affluent modern societies and their economic policies. Hayek was one of the few who did not loose faith in capitalism in the aftermath of the Black Friday of November 1929. In The Road to Serfdom (1944), which turned out to be a best-seller, Hayek explained the misconceptions around the economic system of capitalism and highlighted the value of the freedom to use one’s enterprise and abilities to further oneself; most of all, he clarified that democracy is not an end value but only a means to achieve liberty. The Constitution of Liberty is another great book of Hayek, even though it was not a best-seller. Hayek was greatly admired by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who once took the book The Constitution of Liberty to a session in Parliament and banged on the dispatch box saying at the same time: “This is what we believe”. Another personality I single out is George Orwell (Eric Blair), author of 1984 and Down and Out in Paris and London, who is covered in two essays, one being a critical summary of Orwell`s life and the other describing the powerful metaphors of his book 1984.

The author’s past career in Brazil, as a research botanist with a PhD in forest ecology, is revealed in an essay about the ill-fated ‘Floram Project’, a reforestation programme. She based her account on the archives of the Institute for advanced studies of the University of Sao Paulo (IEA/USP) as well as on her personal memory. In this essay she shows how the Floram Project was conceived and the undeserved public maligning that caused the private sector investors to withdraw their support. The derailment of Project Floram is symptomatic of one of the major issues of our time – global warming. As Pires-O’Brien correctly concludes…’The project is an example of the constant debate between the reality and the ideal.’

One essay that is short and sharp deals with culture and cultural relativism, tracing the new meaning given to the word culture by some anthropologists and sociologists, and showing its connection to cultural relativism. The remainder essays deal with the great ideas that flourished in the West and helped to shape Western civilization – the Bible, paradise, utopia, life-long learning, love, a healthy mind in a healthy body and liberal education, as well as its current greatest challenges and threat: post-modernism and Islamic extremism. Although it is an eclectic collection of essays, there is a common denominator in the struggle of reason versus unreason.

Last but not least, the author tackles the Islamist extremism responsible for the 9/11 attacks and the use of jihad as the means to political power. This comes in the form of a series of Questions and Answers dealing not only with the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks but also with a number of relevant topics about the Islamic religion: fundamentalism, the history of the conspirators and their motivation, the nature of the Koran, the inter-Arab and inter-Muslim Sunni-Shi’ite rivalries, jihad, Wahhabism, Salafism, the Muslim brotherhood, the aspiration for a caliphate and the beliefs of the majority of ordinary Muslims who are not Islamists, as well as the failure, lack of cooperation and naïve assumptions of American intelligence agencies. All these things are explained with clarity and without exaggeration.

This is a book to read and reread to help put diverse but crucial ideas in order and perspective. As a reviewer whose first language is English and has a good reading knowledge of Spanish, I found the Spanish text eminently readable, clear, precise, light and both entertaining and informative. The style is of the kind that engages the reader’s attention and does not ‘wander’ or ‘plod’ as is frequently the case with similar narratives embracing two dozen diverse provocative themes that are nevertheless well connected.

To date, the book has appeared in Portuguese and in Spanish and there is a hint in the Preface that an English translation is not in the frame: “The repertory of the themes covered is already well known in the countries situated at the core of Western Civilization, but not in the countries of its fringe. The objective of the present collection is to contribute to correct this distortion”. Although this is probably true, I believe that even in the English language there is a gap in the literature for such a concise analysis showing the ideas that shaped Western Civilization and those which are a threat to it. It is my fervent hope that an English edition will soon fill this gap. This is a valuable book that should be required reading for entering university students in all the fields of history, philosophy, the social sciences and international relations

                                                                                                                       

Dr Norman Berdichevsky is an American specialist in human geography with a strong interest in Hispanic and Portuguese cultures. He is the author of several books and numerous articles and essays. He is on the Board of Editors of PortVitoria.

Check out PortVitoria, a biannual digital magazine of current affairs, culture and politics centered on the Iberian culture and its diaspora.

PortVitoria offers informed opinion on topics of interest to the Luso-Hispanic world in Portuguese, Spanish & English.

Help PortVitoria to continue by putting a link to it in your Facebook or blog.