It's A Wonderful Life

It's nearly Christmas and even the dry lawyer who is Further or Alternatively feels the need to supply you with some seasonal content. It's A Wonderful Life (IAWL) is the obvious subject for FOA Christmas fare since there are, as we all know, two heartwarming films about a family man and financier called George and I have written the definitive work on the other one (Mary Poppins). 

However, it turns out that Niall Gooch has saved me much of the work of writing about IAWL by this piece, which I recommend to you. I have only a few points to add from a more or less Christmassy angle.

More on "On Bullshit"

Not long ago, I covered Harry Frankfurt's seminal work On Bullshit. Bullshit is, as we all know, everywhere and The Economist's most recent Charlemagne column purports to have discovered lots of the stuff in EU affairs. But on closer inspection, I am sorry to say, I think we have to conclude that Charlemagne has done nothing of the sort.

The Glittering Prizes, by Frederic Raphael

I have read some very good books recently. But you don't need me to tell you that Anna Karenina is excellent, or that Max Porter's oeuvre might be worth your time. Instead, I'm going to tell you about a book that is not terribly good, namely The Glittering Prizes by Frederic Raphael.

Despite its failings, there are a couple of interesting points about TGP. The first is the way in which it not that good. If a book is not very good then (in general) that's because it just falls down across the board: premise, plot, characters, description, dialogue. Genre fiction (a whodunnit or sci fi) is allowed to have a great premise or a good plot and fail to deliver elsewhere, but TGP is standard-issue literary fiction and therefore should be strong in all areas. However, TGP is not a failure across the board - on the contrary, it has a notable strength, as I set out below.

The second interesting point about TGP is what it does (and doesn't) tell us about the world it so clearly sets out to encapsulate. More by omission than by what it includes, it tells us something about how things used to be.

A Psychohistory of Europe

Psychohistory, the fictional creation of Isaac Asimov and real-life inspiration for Paul Krugman, is the science of history. 

Tyler Cowen, prompted by who knows what (the TV adaption of Foundation?), has recently (link 1) drawn attention to an older post by his co-blogger Alex Tabarrok which discusses some economists' modern day attempts to carry out psychohistory.  Let's see if we can't do better.

A little bit more on houses and homes

I wrote a long post about housing policy the other day. This is just a short addendum.

In my earlier post I took it as read that it would be possible, at least in theory, to reduce house prices in London by increasing housing supply, just as increases of supply drive down prices in other markets, and I merely doubted that Britain could ever take the steps necessary to achieve that.

As it happens, there is a further twist when it comes to the land and housing markets: increased supply can raise prices. Here's how.

The crude model for jobs and housing in London (or similar big cities) is to imagine that jobs are essentially the same as a fountain of gold in the middle of London and people simply want to get there each day to siphon off their share of gold. The gold fountain doesn't run out, so building more houses doesn't mean less gold for each new commuter; but as you get more and more houses, people have more options for living in while commuting to the gold fountain and, as those options increase, they are less prepared to pay more for the privilege of living in any particular one.

But London doesn't in fact make money out of a gold fountain: it makes money out of people. The interesting fact is that the more people there are, the more deals are done: from big deals (the eurobond market; insurance at Lloyd's; M&A) to small deals (people buying haircuts, sandwiches and cinema tickets). People meet more people, share ideas and come up with more new ideas. Large numbers of people living in close proximity can support new restaurants, clubs, art galleries, etc. Densification creates excitement and wealth. 

The effect is that adding more people makes the fountain of gold more valuable - and therefore increases people's willingness to pay for housing that can access that gold.

Let's take an example. I mentioned Battersea Power Station (BPS) in my previous post. Now think of Battersea as a whole. The redevelopment of the BPS site has added massively to the supply of housing in the area. But it has also added massively to the attractiveness of the area. If you live in an existing ex-council flat just outside the redevelopment zone then you will have seen: your local riverfront become more attractive and better served by funky hipster foodvans; new shops, restaurants and cafes appear; a new tube station open. Overall, the addition of a large number of affluent people to the area, and the cool new projects they support, is likely to have increased the value of your property.

The same is potentially true of London as a whole. If Zone 1 gets an injection of additional people making additional money then there will be all the more reason to splash out on a Zone 2 house that gives you the chance to join in the money-making machine.

I suspect that there is an effect of increased supply causing lower prices as well as increased supply causing higher prices. Which effect dominates will depend on all sorts of things, including the nature of the supply: BPS, with its proximity to the American Embassy and its new tube stop are a particularly high-quality addition to London; a development that increased crime or was simply particularly ugly might well depress prices. 

My point is simply that the addition of more people - and the businesses and amenities that more people can support - has a contrary effect to that of mere supply of empty properties. As Ian Mulheirn puts it, "it’s like running up a down escalator".

(If you are interested in this kind of argument and Mulheirn's discussion of the difference between land and capital then I recommend this, on Henry George.)

Houses and homes

The cool new thing among the young and groovy elements of Twitter and the wonkosphere, particularly among what might broadly be called the classical liberal or small-c conservative elements, seems to be a desire to build lots more houses in London and the better parts of the south east. This desire is not merely presented as a good idea, along the lines of a new tax policy or suchlike, but rather a moral imperative.

However, below the break, I shall explain how the bright young YIMBYs (a) go too far, (b) don't go far enough and (c) are not moral crusaders at all. It's a shame, but there you go. 

On "On Bullshit"

Harry Frankfurt's essay On Bullshit gets a good press. I'm not sure it deserves it. My theory is that people like it because it's by a real-life philosopher (from Princeton, no less) and yet it uses a naughty word. 

The first quibble I have is that I don't agree with his definition of "bullshit". I think the word just means "rubbish, but on a grand scale": it refers to exaggerated or self-aggrandising nonsense. The man who talks BS is someone who has big plans (that come to nothing) and important friends (who don't exist) - the "bull" indicates bigness.  But I'm happy defer to the lexicographer on this one. I'll get on to the concept that Frankfurt wants to talk about, whatever we decide to call it.

But before we get to his point, Frankfurt talks about "humbug". Well, that is something different again. Humbug is about outward piety combined with inward cynicism. Think of the celebrity who flies in on a private jet to deliver a lecture on global warming. There's nothing wrong with the lecture: it is not untrue or deceitful; it expounds moral virtues that we all agree with (or at least pretend to agree with). The point is that the humbugger doesn't really believe in it. Humbug is a true - or at least socially correct - statement made insincerely. What we are misled about is the nature of the person making the statement, not the contents of the statement. When Scrooge says that Christmas is a "humbug", he is accusing people of being insincere in their expressions of goodwill to all mankind.

We do eventually get to Frankfurt's point, but only by going through an ill-chosen anecdote about Wittgenstein. The anecdote appears, I think, only because Wittgenstein is in it: the reader is supposed to get the feeling that s/he is hanging out with real philosophers while reading this article with the naughty words in. 

I'll give you the anecdote because it is the source of some of the confusion that follows. Brace yourselves.

A woman called Pascal (feeling unwell): “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” 

Wittgenstein (disgusted or mock-disgusted): “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.”

If you feel that nothing is to be gained by looking too closely at those words, which seem to involve Wittgenstein trying and failing to tell a joke, then you would be right. But Frankfurt disagrees.

Frankfurt worries away at this story for a bit and we eventually emerge to find that he has identified "mindlessness" as the centre of his concern. Let me quote him:

"It is for this mindlessness that Pascal’s Wittgenstein chides her. What disgusts him is that Pascal is not even concerned whether her statement is correct. There is every likelihood, of course, that she says what she does only in a somewhat clumsy effort to speak colorfully, or to appear vivacious or good-humored; and no doubt Wittgenstein’s reaction — as she construes it — is absurdly intolerant. [WHICH IS WHY THIS IS A BAD EXAMPLE TO USE - ED.] Be this as it may, it seems clear what that reaction is. He reacts as though he perceives her to be speaking about her feeling thoughtlessly, without conscientious attention to the relevant facts. Her statement is not “wrought with greatest care.” She makes it without bothering to take into account at all the question of its accuracy."

So here we are. What Frankfurt has spent many pages getting to is the concept of making a statement while having no positive belief, or no honest belief, that the statement is true. This is not a discovery. It is the concept well-known to English law of "recklessness" in the making of a representation.  

Don't worry, I won't go all JL Austin on your ass (two can play at the naughty words game, Frankfurt!) by giving you loads of law. I'll just give you a little taster.

The English common law has spent a great deal of time addressing the question of how to treat people who say untrue things. As a result, it has developed some good ideas about it. Lawyers often distinguish four kinds of misrepresentation or untrue statement according to the state of mind of the person who makes the representation. They are, from most to least serious: (1) fraudulent misrepresentation; (2) reckless misrepresentation; (3) negligent misrepresentation; and (4) innocent misrepresentation. 

Normally we think of only category (1) as lying, i.e. when A knows that the truth is not-X, but deliberately says that X is the truth. But sometimes "lie" or "lying" is used more broadly. All those people who say Tony Blair "lied" about WMD in Iraq: do they really think he believed that there were no WMD (category (1))? Or maybe he had no belief one way or the other but simply said what he thought he needed to say (category (2))? Or maybe he did believe that there were WMD, but he hadn't looked into it properly (category (3))? Or just that he was wrong about WMD, despite having taken reasonable steps to find out the truth (category (4))? I don't know what they think, but you can see that these categories are potentially morally different.

The law often treats categories (1) and (2) as being equally serious. Here is the famous House of Lords case of Derry v Peek, which establishes that fraud (deceit) can be committed by either deliberate or reckless falsehood: "For a man who makes a statement without care and regard for its truth or falsity commits a fraud. He is a rogue." Quite. The vital question for the law is not whether you believe your statement to be false (which is the question for category (1) - the straightforward lie), but rather whether you lack the belief that it is true (category (1) or (2)).

But back to Frankfurt. He goes on: "It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit."

We then go on to look at various other sideshows including "bull sessions", "hot air", Ezra Pound and St Augustine (as I say, the reader really has the impression of playing with the big boys here), before we get to what I take to be the core message of the essay, namely that the bullshitter's recklessness as to the truth is something worse - something more corrosive to the truth - than the liar's deliberate deception. Here are some quotes:

"The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom.... This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bullshit artist.” ... For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

If there is a central message in this essay, that last sentence is surely it: mindlessness or recklessness in the making of statements is worse - a "greater enemy of the truth" - than lying. 

To which I say: bullshit. This is the sort of counter-intuitive thing said in a newspaper opinion piece - or a tweet - in order to be striking and original, rather than something that bears much weight.

What do we mean by "the truth" ? A nice big juicy question for philosophers of the calibre of Wittgenstein, St Augustine and Harry Frankfurt perhaps, but I think it is tolerably clear that in this context we mean something like: "a shared, mutually comprehensible, trusted and trustable framework of beliefs that tends to correspond accurately to reality". We might think of this concept of truth as woven from these beliefs, a fabric which "touches reality at its edges", in the famous words (famous to philosophers at least) of WVO Quine.  

An enemy of truth, in this sense, is someone or something which undermines the shared comprehensibility of this framework, or the extent to which it is or should be trusted, or the extent to which it corresponds to reality; someone who leaves a rip in the fabric of truth, whether at its edges or in its heart.

The person who habitually talks with no regard for the truth is someone whose speech may have many positive qualities - it may be funny, for example - but on whom we will, in time, come to place little faith. In the serious affairs of life, we care about truth too much for the bullshit artist to be someone who is capable of doing much damage to it: by divorcing themselves from the fabric of truth, they lose the ability to rend it.

And what of the bullshitter himself, who seems to be part of Frankfurt's concern? Will such a person's ability to tell the truth atrophy? Will he have an attenuated ability to spot what is and what is not? Come off it. The man who told so many tall stories that he loses track of what is real and what is made up is a good idea for a funny film but not a terribly convincing one. Reality has too many corners - too many sharp edges and sharp teeth - for someone to be able to ignore it in favour of a private fantasy for very long. 

Far more damaging to the truth are those lies which pay close attention to the truth. Let me give you three examples.

First, conspiracy theories. Think of 9/11 conspiracy theories for a moment. The person with no regard for the truth might come up with "9/11 was done by the same aliens who made the pyramids and the Nazca lines", or "9/11 was done by Hillary Clinton - in league with Donald Trump!". Original and creative perhaps, but as these theories have no contact with reality they have no real ability to mislead. They don't even touch the fabric of truth.

But here are some facts for you. Modern high-rise buildings that are on fire just don't collapse. Really.  There are loads of examples pre-dating 2001 - Google them if you don't believe me. A striking example is a tower in Belgrade built in the 1960s that was hit by NATO Tomahawk cruise missiles in 1999. An actual military attack! - but it survived.  British people have the Grenfell Tower (designed in the 1960s, built in the 1970s) as a more recent example. But 7 World Trade Center, a tall building put up in 1987 (not not one of the Twin Towers, just a skyscraper in the neighbourhood) collapsed on 9/11 even though it had not been hit by a plane. NATO can't bomb a 1960s Yugoslav-era office block. But a 1980s gleaming New York skyscraper falls down just because it is nearby to a building on fire? What on earth happened? Surely something strange.

The standard 9/11 conspiracy theory pays really close attention to facts like these. And it is by paying such close attention to facts - not by freely bullshitting around with no regard for them - that this theory, and other conspiracy theories, has gained such traction. A "good" conspiracy theory is one that is thoroughly woven into the fabric of truth, one that creates its own appealing patterns within it.

Second example: show trials. Why did Communist regimes bother with show trials rather than just shooting people quietly? Lots of reasons. Shock and awe: imagine seeing your ex-colleague confess to crazy crimes, knowing he was about to be executed anyway, and wondering how they persuaded him to confess. Another reason is to make a bureaucracy complicit in your plans: there's no way back for the lawyers and functionaries involved once they became party to a murder. 

But one reason was to persuade the useful idiots abroad that there really were saboteurs undermining the Revolution. And for this purpose, it helps if the prosecution's theory of the case bears some relationship to reality. Being assigned to the category of Right Deviationist or Left Deviationist, for example, was not a matter of chance, it tracked real ideological disagreements. Show trials that lost all contact with reality - the bullshit, reckless, invented ones - alienated foreign sympathisers. 

(If you don't like the example of show trials then think instead of famous miscarriages of justice, or convictions that are now hotly contested long after the event: the more that the facts alleged by the prosecution correspond with reality, the harder it is to give the benefit of the doubt to the accused.)

Third: historical fiction. Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell have both been the subject of popular historical fiction which has given them notable reputations. More has generally had the better press over the years, but Hilary Mantel recently set out to rehabilitate Cromwell's reputation at the expense of More's, and has largely succeeded. (Here is a short and balanced piece which suggests that there is "much to admire" about the historical Cromwell, namely that he was clever, good at puns and liked to party. Each to his own.) I'm not here to fight More vs Cromwell, rather to make the point that the repuation of one or other of More and Cromwell has been the beneficiary of lies based on truth.

Now, if one had no regard for reality, one could bullshit a rehabilitation of Cromwell. Here's an example:

More spat on a passing peasant. "I'm off to see the wenches at Stringfellows, Cromwell," he said, before farting loudly. "Fancy coming along? I'll burn some heretics to keep us warm."

"No thank you," Cromwell answered politely, carefully wiping More's spittle from the peasant, and giving her a gold sovereign with a muttered apology for his companion. "I have to complete the new law protecting LGBTQ+ yeomen and yeowomen this evening before I start my shift volunteering at the animal shelter."

This sort of nonsense would of course have no effect on either Cromwell's repuation or More's. But Mantel's work has been far more successful precisely because it is based on reality, on carefully researched facts. Equally, More's earlier reputation, deriving from the likes of A Man for All Seasons, was also based on facts - his actual words, his actual deeds, surrounded by fictional embellishments. 

Of course no one expects historical fiction to be historically accurate. A fair amount of licence is not only accepted, but encouraged in order to turn the inevitably slightly random events of the past into an engaging story. But there is also a shared understanding that the skyscraper of fiction is built on foundations of fact, and will not collapse when subjected to the fire of forensic investigation. 

It is the fact that a good piece of historical fiction adheres to - or, rather, picks carefully from - the known facts that gives it a power and persuasiveness that a reckless or mindless piece of made-up rubbish does not have. "Well," we think, "the book tells us X and Y and Z, and I know that X is true, and I looked it up and it seems that Z is true too, and, well, Y seems to fit, so Y seems quite likely...". If that power is used to persuade us of something which is not true - if Y is a well-disguised cuckoo's egg in a nest of historical facts - then that is far more damaging to the fabric of historical truth than mere bullshit. 

Why does any of this matter? 

Frankfurt is quite taken with the problem of people who espouse sceptical philosophical theories that make it hard to believe in any kind of objective truth. He thinks that once we lose respect for the endeavour of bringing our statements into line with objective truth, we try instead to bring our statements into line with our subjective beliefs: we prefer sincerity to accuracy. 

I tend to agree with that worry, but that danger is one that seemed more substantial a few years ago than it is today. The big problems with truth today are ones that, I think, confirm my thesis that careful attention to the truth is a better starting point for undermining it than simply ignoring the whole thing. 

We use the phrase "fake news" in a variety of ways. But perhaps the most common - and most pernicious - form is not really "fake" at all. If we consider the "fake news" journalist or politician we see that, as with the estate agent, the problem is not reckless disregard for the truth, but something more subtle, something that tracks the truth just enough to stay plausible. The "fake news" media do not, by and large, make up stories in the manner of the Sunday Sport. Instead, they take facts which they have made more or less reasonable efforts to verify and weave them into slanted meta-narratives. You can't just ignore [insert your most-disliked news source here] as being lies: their stories are not made out of whole cloth, to use a revealing American idiom, but woven into the same cloth that we all call truth, making the threads of fact hard to disentangle from the threads of comment, and even harder to understand. The problem is that the fabric created nowadays has a lower truth-thread-count than used to be the case.

The most notable social justice campaigns have similar combinations of truth and not-truth. Take demolishing statues of bad dead men and re-writing history to emphasise past injustices: these campaigns are not wholly unconnected with real facts about bad things that really happened. The problem is that swathes of truthful fabric can be cut out and destroyed because of flaws which could have been better repaired with more careful, if less exciting, needlework, while the remaining cloth becomes twisted and puckered as it is closed around the holes left behind, or else repaired with ill-matching or badly-made patches. 

Or, finally, take the debate about whether transwomen are women. The lawyer in me wants to say: they are and they aren't. Sometimes whales really are fishes, for example: it all depends on the context. A biological answer to a legal question, or a question of manners and etiquette, is not necessarily the right answer. To that extent, I agree with the trans rights activitists: their demands are to some extent based on the fabric of truth, which is made up of more than scientific material, and that is why they cannot be brushed aside as mere bullshit. But, equally, the fabric of truth can only be stretched so far before it rips. Truth has to track reality, and science is a pretty good way of helping it do so. The fabric of truth is rich and multi-textured; we cannot allow it to become monotonous because some people loudly prefer it that way.

Well, there you have it. "On Bullshit" is, not exactly bullshit, but certainly not the best starting point for considering these questions. You would be much better advised to consider my wise words above. And just to show that I am a real philosopher I shall conclude with some words of wisdom: pee po belly bum drawers, Wittgenstein once waved a poker at Karl Popper and it was very funny! 

Moral cleanliness

You've probably seen something about Sally Rooney, Hebrew translations and BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions). Sam Leith has a nice little piece here trying to see things from Rooney's point of view. What, he asks, does she think she will achieve? 

I'm no supporter of BDS, for all sorts of reasons that I won't go into here but, like Leith, I have tried to see things from the point of view of someone who is.

On reflection, I don't think the underlying motivation behind things like BDS is a desire to help. Rather, I think it is simply the impulse to say: "I don't want to have anything to do with that place. Would it help? Would it hurt? I don't know. I just know that I'm not going to be a part of it." 

That's a very human feeling. Think of charities who won't take money from X, or publicans who won't serve Y, or those who will never cross the threshold of (or shake hands with) Z. Does it do any good? Maybe not. But so what? The people who take those stances - who make those refusals - are motivated by a moral impulse, but not one to help anyone. Instead, I would described it as the desire for "moral cleanliness": what they are saying is "I will not be sullied by association with - I will not be anywhere close to complicit in - that."

You can come up with utilitarian justifications for this kind of impulse: if X gives money to charity then won't X benefit by association with the charity - won't X's reputation be laundered? If we all shun Y then won't Y mend his ways? But that's not what's really going on. The money might have been given in secret, or some time ago, but still the charity wants to reject or return it. The publican who refuses to serve Y is well aware that Y is welcome in every other pub in town - he just wants to make a stand. Those who never cross the threshold of Z are nonetheless invited to all the cool parties that happen there and desperately want to go.

I have tried to see what might be wrong with this kind of thinking, why we might be able to say to someone that they can't simply maintain their moral cleanliness in this way. I confess that I found it hard. The normal counter-argument to BDS is double-standards: "you object to Israel but you don't object to [insert worse country here]". I don't think that works for moral cleanliness. The response is easy: "I don't know much about [worse country]. All I know is that I'm having nothing to do with Israel." That's not a double standard. The double standard argument works against someone who claims to have identified Israel as uniquely evil; it doesn't work against someone who just says that they have chosen not to be involved with Israel. It's like the Liverpudlian newsagent who refuses to stock The Sun after its coverage Hillsborough: it's not that he believes that newspaper to be uniquely evil, it's just he doesn't stock The Sun.

Another potential attack is to note that sometimes this kind of desire for moral purity can go too far. This is a great account of people being 'cancelled' which sets out the awful ostracism they can suffer as others try to insulate themselves from moral contamination. But saying that you can go too far is not a knock-down argument: as the old saying has it, you have too much of a good thing. You can also go too far with a desire for physical cleanliness - scrubbing your hands raw or dousing your intimate regions with unnecessary chemicals - but that's not a good argument against washing your hands after you use the lavatory. Let's go back to the Liverpudlian newsagent or the man who will never shake the hand of the man who jilted his daughter: life goes on, no harm done.

There is, however, one well-known source of moral teaching tradition which is notably antipathetic to concerns about moral cleanliness, namely the New Testament. The complaint most consistently made against Jesus was that he was not morally clean: he dined with sinners, went to their houses, hung out with them and touched them. His most famous stories, the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, both involve a lack of cleanliness: the son who feeds the pigs but is yet embraced by his father; the man who is avoided by the prissily religious but helped by a Samaritan. 

The stories around Jesus' death are especially full of people with whom we are not meant to sympathise who are obsessed with moral cleanliness: Pontius Pilate washing his hands of the whole affair springs first to mind, but think also of the Jewish leaders who handed Jesus over so that someone else would kill him. Perhaps the single most famous refusal to accept tainted money arises from Judas' attempt to return his 30 pieces of silver (see Matthew 27). We all want to refuse blood money, but now I wonder whether, if the Chief Priests and Elders had taken the money and assured him that it would go to a good cause, Judas might perhaps have felt that he had started to make amends. Did their desire for moral cleanliness contribute to his despair and suicide?

For all that the New Testament seems quite clear on the matter, I have not noticed any particular tendency among Christians or Christian teaching to deprecate concerns for moral cleanliness. Perhaps those Christians who worry too much about Israel today should perhaps think more about what the New Testament says happened all those years ago in Palestine. 

But for everyone else I have nothing to offer but congratulations: well done to you for being so perfect that the merest touch of the imperfect things of this world will give you an unendurable taint. 

Modern Architecture

You might have seen a couple of people recently point out, as has been pointed out in casual conversations for many years, that modern architecture does not produce nice buildings or nice places. Yes there are buts and exceptions and so on: John Pawson, someone to whom I feel I have linked before, but it seems not, is excellent and of course the last 120 years has produced all kinds of excellence. But you get the picture: we are the richest and most numerous and most scientifically advanced and best educated and all the rest of it people who have ever lived, and yet our buildings are, in the main, something that would embarrass an ill-fed Englishman in 1800 who had visited Italy once, never had a CAD package and had no access to reinforced concrete.

I am not going to go into why this might be. What I find more interesting is the fact that there is so much consensus among the public at large as to what modern architecture should look like.

I read somewhere that theme parks are the only places nowadays where buildings are made to make people happy. But I think there's another possibility: the buildings we see in films portraying idyllic futures. 

Here are a few examples:

- from the film "Passengers"

- from the Star Wars prequels (one of the nice places)

- from the film "Free Guy" (incidentally, well worth a watch)

- from the film ... oh no, hang on, that's actually Singapore Changi Airport in real life.

If you have seen these films (or been to the airport) then you will have an even better idea of what I am talking about, but I think you get the impression from these pictures. ("Tomorrowland" shows something similar too.) What do we consistently see? Lots of buildings - a densely populated area - but the area is walkable and the buildings are on a human scale. Lush greenery: plants draped over the outside of buildings or growing in the streets. Waterfalls (spot them in all but one of the photos above). Pale façades, with the colours similar to those of Bath or Oxford, with the other noticeable colour being green of various shades. It's a strikingly consistent aesthetic vision. It'll be quite nice when it happens - if it happens.

More from Dominic Cummings

As ever, for those of you who like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you will like. Even if you don't, it's worth considering that Cummings is an unusual combination of being both highly successful in politics and incredibly open about how he does it. The fact that so few people copy him is in itself strong evidence for his claim that so many people in politics care more about status that achievements.

Here are a couple of quotations which will either whet your appetite or sate it:

"Elections are to a large extent bad showbiz. The noise is high but the stakes often amazingly low. The parties scream about each other but generally whether X or Y wins changes an amazingly small fraction of policy, money, or real power — and has little effect on the permanent bureaucracies. (One of the reasons the Brexit referendum was different is it led to much actual weeping across Whitehall on 24/6/16 as the permanent bureaucracies faced something new — real change for them. Trump’s victory was sold as the same but clearly was not.)" 

"High stakes politics is much harder than a normal startup because the former inevitably lacks what the latter has — relatively clear goals. In politics it’s normal for people to go years without ever really considering clear goals because thinking about goals in a disiplined way is a ticket to an argument."

And, finally, his suggestions for further reading, oddly similar to my own.

"A few people I’ve found interesting are:
Scott Alexander
Richard Hanania
Marginal Revolution
David Shor
Andrew Sullivan
Curtis Yarvin"

Are the kids ok?

Why do I ask? Well, for one thing, "During a recent trip to the US, I had lunch with a young man from New York, who told me glumly that many of his peers had spent the summer swanning around Europe while he stayed put in America. ...  I peered at his phone and saw images of the girls draped over each other in terrace restaurants, on  the prows of boats, laid along tree branches in thong bikinis, glowing with the gold-dust of fine living. ... the reason they, rather than the young man, were able to go yachting off Sardinia while sipping Dom Pérignon was because rich older men ­had hired them to come on a luxury holiday with them. The job — look hot, be nice, and be ready to accommodate more without crying assault — is called sugaring. It is — though sugar daddies or babies might not admit it — sex work. My friend betrayed no sense of surprise at the arrangement; such things had, he explained, become totally normal in his age group." More here.

And then there's this: "Just two weeks after meeting on Tinder, an Atlanta college student drew up a 17-page 'relationship contract' with her boyfriend in which she outlined expectations for their coupling — including a 'romantic gesture' every two weeks. ...'We treat our relationship almost like a business interaction. We deal with conflict like partners in business would. We sit down and treat it more like we're partners in life and love is an added bonus,' she explained."

And then I read that Amia Srinivasan's "female students regularly report that they regard their erotic lives as “at once inevitable and insufficient"". 

Given how difficult and/or unpleasant it is to have a relationship with a man, I suppose I should not be surprised that, "According to private polling shared with Intelligencer by Democratic data scientist David Shor, roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT; for women over 60, that figure is less than 5 percent." 30%, eh? 

It's not just in America. Here's what they are finding in the UK:

Perhaps they agree with Srinivasan's view that "who we have sex with, and how, is a political question".

Srinivasan and the limits of philosophy

Amia Srinivasan has recently given two very interesting interviews, one to Tyler Cowen (an interview which was the subject of so many comments that Cowen followed up with some post-interview remarks), and one to the Paris Review. I recommend both interviews and also Cowen's follow-up remarks.

Srinivasan is a utopian feminist who believes a lot of things with which I disagree. But this is not about my disagreements with her. Instead, I want to develop a couple of thoughts, prompted by these interviews, about the borders between philosophy and two of its adjacent disciplines, namely economics and psychology. The common theme of my thoughts is that we cannot use these disciplines as short-cuts to avoid properly engaging in the arguments that the philosopher makes. Unfortunately.

Some notes on US and UK comedy

Tyler Cowen has hosted some discussion of the differences between US and UK comedy on his blog recently: the first post was here and the second here. 

It seems to me that the discussion has gone a little off-piste. So here I am to set everyone straight with the correct views.

The discussion started with the question "Why are American talk shows so much worse than British ones?" but then compared British panel shows with US late-night talk shows. So already we have conceptual confusion: we're not comparing like with like. British chat shows (Wogan, Parkinson, Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton) are the equivalent of the US talk shows. They're both fine if you like that kind of thing (delivering prepared anecdotes to an indulgent studio audience). Indeed, I suspect the US has the edge in this area (leaving aside Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge). But they are not panel shows.

The original post tells us that there don't appear to be many panel shows in the US. I'll come back to why that might be. But it seems to me that the lack of direct comparisons is a more interesting observation than saying that UK panel shows are funnier than US talk shows. 

Let's start with some like-for-like comparisons: sitcoms and sketch shows.

The discussion on Cowen's blog has got into British sitcoms and come up with the idea that they are about betterment and self-improvement. I'm afraid that's not right. As ane fule kno, British sitcom comedy is about laughing at and with failures - and "at" and "with" at the same time. 

Basil Fawlty, Reggie Perrin, Blackadder, Mr Bean, Dad's Army, Only Fools & Horses, Hyacinth Bucket ... Or we can take more modern examples: Spaced, Green Wing, The Office, Gavin & Stacey, Peep Show, Black Books, The IT Crowd, Fleabag, Mum. Sometimes we have social strivers, or people keen to get ahead in some other sense, but that is far from being universal: neither Fleabag nor anyone in Gavin & Stacey, to take rather different rungs on the social ladder, aspires to climb any higher in life. But all of these shows are full of people who can't quite cope with what life has to throw at them. Some of them rage (Basil Fawlty, Victor Meldrew), some go off the rails (Reggie Perrin, any character played by Mark Heap) and some just suck it up (Tim, Martin Freeman's character in the Office); some have insight and some don't; some are redeemed and some are not; but what they have in common, at the heart of the comedy that is their situation, is the fact that they are all, in some way, failures. 

It's not that the comedy is always cruel. Dad's Army, for example, is warm and loves its characters. But what is the most famous line in Dad's Army? It's "Don't tell him your name, Pike!", which is the perfect combination of well-meaning intention combined with utter incompetence in execution. Capt Mainwaring is a failure; a pompous, well-meaning, lovable failure.

We laugh at these people when their plans go wrong, or because their self-image does not match up to reality, but at the same time we see ourselves in them - in Captain Mainwaring, David Brent or Alan Partridge - and we squirm.

One commentator on Cowen's blog said "An example of the difference between British and American comedy which I found quite a good summary (I can’t remember who said it), imagines a comedy sketch where a musician is playing a guitar badly and a man comes up and smashes it over the musician’s head. The contention is that an American comic would want to be the one smashing the guitar whereas a British comic would want to be the one getting hit with the guitar." That observation is correct (and also gives the lie to the betterment idea: what is bettering about being hit by a guitar after playing it badly?). But it is correct because the central truth is that failure is at the centre of British sitcom comedy. The "situation" in "situation comedy" is a bleak view of the human condition itself. 

US sitcoms are different, but they are also very good. Frasier, for example, is a bit of an outlier in that it is quite British in format (social climber not quite living up to his acquired social status; humour from awkwardness; combination of both broad physical comedy and verbal wit - in fact, it's a bit like The Young Ones when you put it that way). But it's far from being the only good one. There's been strength in depth for US sitcoms for many years: see Police Squad, Cheers or The Cosby Show, for very different older examples, as well as famous and high-quality recent exports such as Friends, Seinfeld, Scrubs, Modern Family and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. 

US sitcoms also display a consistency which British ones can often lack. Compare, for example, the multiple high-quality series of Frasier with Roger & Val Have Just Got In, which started out being one of the best things on television and ended poorly, or Friday Night Dinner, which suffered a similar falling-off. 

If UK sitcoms are about failure, what are US sitcoms about? Not success, exactly, but success is a part of it. The police in Brooklyn Nine Nine tend to catch the criminals; the doctors in Scrubs treat patients; the friends in Friends really are "there for" each other. There is a centre of warmth that the British sitcom lacks. The typical weakness of US sitcoms is sentimentality, while the typical weakness of Brit sitcoms (apart from inconsistency) is the opposite: having too many horrible people.

One other point worth noticing about UK sitcoms compared with their transatlantic cousins is the much stronger influence of sketch comedy in the UK. Compare Scrubs and Green Wing, contemporaneous sitcoms set in hospitals. Scrubs was, according to Wikipedia, "noted for its ... surreal vignettes". Noted, I would say, only by those who had never seen Green Wing. The plot of Scrubs included romantic entanglements and a difficult janitor; Green Wing, by contrast, included the bit when "Alan becomes unusually happy after winning an internet caption competition, Joanna plans to take him down a peg. Using her dwarf cousin (Big Mick), dressed up in green body paint, she plans to scare him. The plan backfires when Alan is so scared, he beats Joanna's cousin to death with a stuffed heron. Alan and Joanna throw the body into the incinerator, but become paranoid that they will be discovered. Alan, however, learns from Boyce that the death is being viewed as a suicide, so Alan and Joanna go on a rampage, thinking themselves above the law." Wikipedia is pretty accurate here.

So that's sitcoms: both countries have their strengths. Now to sketch comedy. 

Whenever a well-loved American comedian dies there is a spate of 'watch this immortal sketch!' pieces written by the bereft audience. I normally hunt out the sketches in question and they're normally quite good (e.g. the dentist sketch from the Carol Burnett show). I also think Key & Peele sketches are quite good. Portlandia had one joke, but told it well.

But let's be frank: these are the peak of the US sketch show experience. Fry & Laurie were turning out stuff at that level week after week. It's not terribly impressive for a nation of hundreds of millions, particularly as they have the Canadians to help them out. (I won't be the first to notice that so many of the funniest Americans are Canadians. But here's a question: who is the funniest white gentile American who is not Canadian? Steve Martin?)

British sketch shows simply have more variety. Probably more complete duds, but also more things that tickle some people while leaving others cold. Smack the Pony, Armando Ianucci, the best bits of Goodness Gracious Me; the Fast Show; Enfield & Whitehouse - that's a lot of different things going on. US sketch comedy seems to be all 'here's a normal situation made funny' or 'here's a parody of something on TV'; there is rarely something entirely fresh or surreal, nothing (I think) of the kind of Hale & Pace's "Poppadom Pom Pom", or Armando Ianucci's Hugh explaining that cheeseburgers were a penny then, or Ralph saying "Tomato - Ted - aubergine - your - potato - wife's - turnip - dead."

So, by contrast with sitcoms, British sketch shows are clearly better. If we want an explanation, I would point to Monty Python, which seems to have given British sketch comedy a high tolerance for experimentation while at the same time somehow telling the Americans that "zaniness" of that kind is only for the Brits: the higher variance that that experiment produced has led to better experience at the top end. 

British panel shows are different again. They are funny because they are quick and merciless, and feature performers on the top of their game. Semi-spontaneous, someone said, and I think that's right, but the delivery of the scripted lines, and the reactions to them, are top-notch. While the best joke-writers in America go into sitcoms, the best ones in the UK go into panel shows.

So why doesn't America have equivalent programmes? You will recall that this whole saga started when someone said that they don't and they just have late-night shows. I have two suggestions.

(1) First, a cultural explanation. Panel shows are potentially nasty: being on the receiving end of, say, Frankie Boyle or Jimmy Carr at their best is surely not comfortable. Ask anyone about the tub of lard on Have I Got News for You, or consider the kudos Boris Johnson got from laughing off outright abuse. It all has an uncomfortable edge, familiar to British sitcoms, that I think rubs Americans up the wrong way. They don't want so much grit in their humour-oyster. That's why they prefer the cosy comforts of the talk show.

(2) There's a structural explanation too. The UK has long tradition of radio panel shows (I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, Just a Minute, The News Quiz) that have trained the writers, the performers and the audience. Again, this may be different from the US.

But I don't want to leave this on a jingoistic note. The final like for like comparison is the comedy film and here there can be no doubt: it has been many years since the Brits served up (not just starred in) a top-tier really funny and good film. America might not have 8 out of 10 Cats, but it does have Hollywood.

Confucius and the perennial philosophy

I cannot now recall how I came across it, but I recommend this, a rather interesting introduction to the thought of the thinker commonly known in the West as Confucius. 

I also want to draw your attention to the Afterword. This is a response to comments on the original presentation of the paper. Van Norden tells us that one commentator "presented one version of what is sometimes called 'the perennial philosophy’. Those who believe in a ’perennial philosophy’ hold that, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, ’There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it’. In other words, underlying every great philosophical and religious tradition is the same worldview .... If this interpretation is correct, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, the Buddha, Confucius, Nagarjuna, and many others are all saying essentially the same thing (with some differences in vocabulary or emphasis that tend to obscure the underlying identity of views)." 

Van Norden rejects this supposed "perennial philosophy" with what strikes me as some interesting but not quite knock-down arguments. I began to construct some kernel of the perennial philosophy, something more than merely ET's "be good", something to with the Golden Rule perhaps, but then I came across this:

(The link is here.) And that reminded me again of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and quite how odd the thought of the ancient Greeks was. Recall, for example, how the prompt for the discussion of love in the Phaedrus is an older man's pursuit of a boy. 

So I have no interest in arguing against Van Norden on his Afterword. In any case, if Confucius was just saying all the same things as everyone else then there would be nothing to learn from him.

A short essay about video essays and the End of History

I do enjoy a good video essay. Indeed, if I knew how to do it, this blog post would be a video essay. (You'll see what I mean.)

By "video essay", I mean an opinionated piece of criticism or commentary, in the manner of a written essay, but presented by means of video. I don't mean a videoed lecture or a TED talk, fun as those might be [CUT TO extracts from TED talk parodies], but rather an essay in which video - the moving picture itself - is an intrinsic element of the presentation of the argument.

The genre is not new. Kenneth Clark's Civilisation might be regarded as an extended video essay, and television has hosted many other personal documentaries or documentaries that try to pursue a line of argument. Perhaps I can't define the video essay, but I know it when I see it. [CUT TO Clark's "I recognise civilisation when I see it".]

However, the genre has undoubtedly been turbocharged and democratised by YouTube. The barriers to entry are now much lower and they have proliferated. Many are no good, of course, but the best are very good. [CUT TO - but you've got the picture. This would have been better with some video along the way.]

That proliferation is a good thing. However, since YouTube is not as legible to the likes of me as the old TV listings used to be, I have had to spend a bit of time looking for recommendations. I found that fun video about unicorns that I linked to in my piece about fantasy literature recently, but, overall, the effort has been a little disappointing. The unicorn video was a one-off and it turns out that the two best sources of video essay are ones with which I was already familiar, namely Every Frame a Painting (try "Vancouver Never Plays Itself", "In Praise of Chairs" or the one on Edgar Wright, which changed my mind) and Nerdwriter (try "Parasite's Perfect Montage" or "Passengers, Rearranged", if you know these films, or "The Death of Socrates" if you don't), and of these only the Nerdwriter is still producing videos, and there are not many from him recently. 

The video essay is not necessarily about films. I think it works well for the visual arts, with the camera zooming in to focus on a detail that the author is commenting on, or zooming out to show elements of composition or colours, or cutting to a contrasting artwork. Similarly, music is a good subject: we can hear the music while seeing the score, perhaps, or cut between different performances of the same song or piece. But films are well suited to the video essay format: writing about music might be like dancing about architecture, but it's hard to argue with filming about film.

That means that a lot of the not-bad-but-not-quite-first-rank video essayists are film critics. One video essayist film critic who gets quite a few recommendations is Now You See It. Have a look - you might like it. 

An essay from Now You See It that made me think was this piece about the films of 1999. The way I would summarise the thesis is that 1999 was the year between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 in which things were going well (in the US, in the West) but that in iself tended to make people a little dissatisfied. Think of The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, Being John Malkovich, The Sixth Sense, Galaxy Quest: the world itself, our current, everyday reality, seems really nice and lovely but .... something. But maybe it isn't really nice, not under the surface? Or maybe it is nice, but it's just boring and needs to be spiced up? Or maybe it's "nice" and therefore utterly absurd or futile?

This point seems obvious now that it has been pointed out. And I find it striking that it is also one of the central theses of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History: where people don't have conflict they will nonetheless try to seek it out.

The End of History came out in 1992 and indeed it seems to me that the point is not limited to the films of 1999. Other very good films from the End of History 1990s - films as different as Groundhog Day and Jurassic Park - take it for granted that life is generally good and that drama can only come from making some frankly implausible changes to the structure of society or even reality, such as the wholly unexplained repetition of one day, or dinosaurs. Toy Story, Speed, Mrs Doubtfire, the Home Alone series - I could go on - they all take the implicit premise that society and the world in general, at least in the US, are basically fine - everything works! life is good! - and a pretty big twist is required to achieve drama.

Why does this matter? Well, 1999 is generally thought to have been a very good year for films. Ideally I would show you a montage of books and articles here but instead I'll give you some Google results:

This is interesting. I think there is a theory that the societal upheavals of the 1970s (in the US) led to better, richer, conflicted films, while the sunny complacency of the 1980s produced rom-com, space opera or action adventure pap. We might think of this as the Third Man theory of art: see Orson Welles and the cuckoo clock. But perhaps the 1990s give the lie to this theory. 1999 was a pretty decent year for life in the West, and it also produced some pretty decent films.

Another theory is that art requires constraints. Censorship, the Hays Code, the Lord Chamberlain's office - think of the high quality art produced while these restrictions were in place, and compare that with the rubbish produced in the modern, anything goes, era. But again, what about 1999? Anything went in the 1990s: 9 Songs is 2004, but that's near enough, and American Pie and Eyes Wide Shut, both of which would have fallen foul of some kinds of censorship, are both 1999 films. 1999 was a pretty relaxed year for artistic constraints, and yet it produced some pretty decent films.

So, 9/11 happened, the 2008 crash happened and all the rest of it, from terrorism to Trump and from wars in the Middle East to wokeness at home. The End of History ended, and that's a shame, not only for the people of the West, but also for their most popular artform.

On the other hand, we now have the video essay.

[CUE lively music and CUT TO me in my bedroom speaking very quickly to recommend that you buy something from the kind sponsor of this essay.]

[FADE TO BLACK]

The Menuhin family

So here's a thing, or rather a number of things.

Yehudi Menuhin (you know the guy - good at the fiddle, played for survivors of Belsen, first Jewish person to play under Wilhelm Furtwängler after the War as an act of reconciliation) was married twice. 

His first wife was Nola Nicholas, who was the sister of Hephzibah Menuhin (Yehudi's sister)'s husband Lindsay Nicholas. So far so neat: family parties were presumably easy to arrange and everyone knew where they were going for Christmas.

Unfortunately, neither of the Menuhin-Nicholas marriages lasted. Yehudi married again, this time to Diana Gould. (The Yehudi Menuhins then lived at the house in Highgate later owned by Sting. Insert your own joke here.) Here's the first thing: the two sons of the Menuhin-Gould marriage were called Gerard and Jeremy. That's a bold naming strategy. Presumably neither of them was allowed be called "Gerry" or "Jerry".

(Yehudi's children of his first marriage were called Krov and Zamira. I wonder whether he deferred to his wives in the naming decisions, or at least to Diana.)

Gerard was showered with all the advantages that life can afford: he attended Eton and ... Stanford. Again, that seems like an odd combination: googling the phrase "Eton and Stanford" seems to bring up more results in which the "eton" comes from a line break in "Princeton" than from the English school. 

Anyway, the upshot of all of that family background and first-class education was that Gerard became a noted Holocaust denier. Yes, that's what I said. 

Being a noted Holocaust denier led to him having to leave the Yehudi Menuhin Foundation (YMF). "Apart from a few curious comments about America, we weren’t really aware of his politics", Winfried Kneip, YMF's chief executive, apparently said. America?

And Gerard, in another bold naming decision, called his son Maxwell Menuhin. 

I know that all of this sounds only borderline credible. My only source for any of it is Wikipedia (see here and follow the links), but truth is stranger than fiction and all the rest of it. 

Interesting links

1. Tarzan and the collapse of Communism in the USSR. One story here is that engineers build, while sociologists and lawyers merely manage decline and decay. Another story is that we can look forward to the late 2030s for improved Sino-US relations. (On a related note, I have it on good authority that the USSR permitted the Fry & Laurie version of Jeeves & Wooster to be broadcast, in the vain hope that it would show the ridiculous nature of the British class system to the masses. It seems instead to have encouraged rich Russians to want to live in English country houses. A PhD thesis for someone.)

2. (History repeats itself) Third Time as Larp. Review of Bruno Maçães' book, History Has Begun.

3. Following on from Maçães's observations, at some point, of course, reality is not optional. But we're not there yet! Medicine can be taught without reference to biological sex.

4. Still on men and women: rather catty from Mary Harrington here? Purportedly an esoteric reading of Srinivasan's The Right to Sex.

5. So maybe Fidel Castro is not Justin Trudeau's father? I just teach the controversy on this one.

6. Do you want to see a class on conceptual art given by a British woman to Afghans? Of course you do! Here it is, just 40-odd seconds of R Mutt and the urinal. Your tax dollars at work, as they say in America. (From here, which has more to say in a similar vein.)

7. China’s Hottest New Rental Service: Men Who Actually Listen. Women can pay to hang out with men who are nice to them. An import from Japan.

8. Talking of men, have a look at this, about Nike, men, adverts and all sorts of things. And do look at the videos - the one directed by Ritchie is really quite good.

9. An interview with ADS. I found this quite fun. This, for example: "a globalized world benefits from variance. So as an individual person, if you go and experiment with some new thing, maybe you create a new style of music, or a new culinary dish, that innovation can be spread really really widely, the potential benefits are huge. Whereas the cost, if it doesn't work, is mostly limited to your own personal downside. // In that view, a willingness to be weird, or experimental or whatever, is really a tremendous social good." Quite right: weird is good. The right note on which to end.

10. Interesting claims about obesity. 

Afghanistan links and thoughts

Except that I'm generally a supporter of monarchy, I don't have any views on internal Afghan politics. However, I have views on the West.

For the background facts on the US involvement in Afghanistan, there are some good links to primary sources here (especially here and here). What should we take from the facts?

One idea I have seen mooted is that the US defeat is a peculiarly striking indictment of the American claim to competence and expertise. We must learn from our defeat. The absolute experts in nation-building, with unlimited resources at their disposal, achieved precisely nothing. This is surely the most extraordinary embarassment. A loss of face. A loss of credibility. A lively encouragement to the rising and unfriendly powers, and a sober warning to our friends and allies. Whither US leadership?

I'm not convinced there's anything to worry about here. The best comparison is the Soviet Union. Here's how one person puts it:

"The Soviet Union was dying in 1989, when it completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. It still managed to do so in an orderly fashion, with a symbolic column of russian APCs crossing the bridge over to Uzbekistan. The leader of the war effort, one Colonel-General Gromov, symbolically rode in the very last BTR, and then proclaimed to the gathered journalists that there wasn’t a single russian soldier behind his back." 

(I recommend reading the link. In fact, I recommend all the links in this piece.)

Look, I get it. When the Soviet Union was in Afghanistan, the country was reasonably safe - safe enough for journalists to travel around, for example - and when they left, which did they did in style, their client state lingered on for a bit before it fell. But the US were never in control and ran away with their tails between their legs. It's not a good look.

But what does all that tell us? The Soviet Union was one of the two most powerful nations in the world at the time. It had a land border with Afghanistan and citizens with similar culture. It was an undemocratic and ruthless authoritarian regime. The US is roughly as powerful, but much further away (both geographically and culturally) and less ruthless. Given those constraints, the US did OK. Ruling Afghanistan is not a test of competence: it's a mega-test of extreme outlier competence, and we always knew that the US was not in that league.

Fundamentally, the fact is that the US never intended to govern Afghanistan. Afghanistan was never going to be a US colony or possession. The factoids about how few people learned Dari tell a tale. The US might have poured money in nation building and gender studies at Kabul University and all the rest of it, but it never intended to run Afghanistan. So it never did what successful conquerers have had to do to.

That was good news and it was bad news.

I'll start with the bad news.

"The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra. The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America’s clandestine service." (That's from here. More on that sort of thing here or, if you can't get through the paywall, here.)

It's a far cry from General Napier on sati: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours". But it's another way of making my point. The British in India were prepared to follow their customs to the point of killing people. That's conquest. The US were not.  

As I say, that was the bad news here. Leaving aside boys chained to beds, there seems to be an idea that the main purpose of the US presence in Afghanistan was to promote female education. I don't know about that, but it certainly seems to have been a purpose - and now things are looking bleak on that front too. Empires are not all bad.

But there is good news to America's lack of imperial ambitions, at least if you are running a US ally. There are several countries which have US troops stationed in them. What Afghanistan tells those countries - and has told them for some time - is that the US has no intention of staying in those countries against the settled will of the most vociferous locals. If the people who are often described as 'illiterate goatherds' can kick out the US military, then so can you. That's an encouraging message. If you're a US ally, you're where you were last year or 10 years ago: you've got a powerful friend - powerful, possessed of money and drones galore, but not omnicompetent - who does not want to occupy you: that's the best kind of massively more powerful ally. 

So the US' allies have no reason to see Afghanistan as bad news. No, if Afghanistan is to mean anything for the world, it will be because it has had an effect on domestic US politics. And I'm doubtful that it will. "Out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC last year, a grand total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan, according to Andrew Tyndall, editor of the authoritative Tyndall Report, which has monitored and coded the networks’ nightly news each weekday since 1988." (Source.) It's really not a big deal. And the fact that it's not a big deal is itself a big deal: it's a sign, to the rest of the world, of quite how rich America is. This hugely wasteful war (vehicles kept running at all times, hamburgers flown in, Viagra for rapists and bribes for everyone) would have been a big deal for any other country in the world. And for the US, it was a smaller deal than Black Lives Matter.

This guy puts my point for me: "... in the year 2021, the cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. Our current elites, whether in media or politics, squint at the strange peoples and languages of whatever international conflict and only see who or what they can map to their internal gallery of heroes and villains: Who’s the PoC? Who’s the Nazi?

If however the situation involving foreign realities can be grafted onto simplistic domestic narratives, in however fantastic a fashion, then that issue becomes a curious side show to the main American stage. That’s what’s happened to Israel, which now features as a talking point in that same progressive wing of the party. And if the situation can’t be mapped, such as Afghanistan or the recent protests in Cuba, it’s utterly ignored for being just completely beyond human comprehension or concern.

This is the true privilege of being an American in 2021 (vs. 1981): Enjoying an imperium so broad and blinding, you’re never made to suffer the limits of your understanding or re-assess your assumptions about a world that, even now, contains regions and peoples and governments antithetical to everything you stand for. If you fight demons, they’re entirely demons of your own creation, whether Cambridge Analytica or QAnon or the ‘insurrection’ or supposed electoral fraud or any of a host of bogeymen, and you get to tweet #resist while not dangling from the side of an airplane or risking your life on a raft to escape. If you’re overwhelmed by what you see, even if you work at places called ‘the Institute for the Study of War’, you can just take some ‘me time’ and not tune into the disturbing images because reality is purely optional at this stage of the game.

Jennifer Cafarella@JennyCafarella

It is a very dark day in Afghanistan Take care of yourself. It might require avoiding the news Even that can be excruciating, I know. We can & should bear witness. But it does not require self harm. Triggering PTSD symptoms or new trauma does not help Afghans My DMs are open

August 12th 2021

83 Retweets440 Likes

" (My emphasis.)

Yup, reality is optional in the US. That's how powerful it still is. 

Maybe, eventually, reality will catch up with the US. One point I try to make in this blog is that the West, rather its educated, managerial, technocratic classes - love 'em or loathe 'em! - that we hear about so often, has not really come to grips with what happened in 2008-9: the financial crisis was the proof that a certain kind of globalised, finance-driven development was not the win-win for all sections of society that it had been promised to be; and the aftermath of the financial crisis, the fact that no one was punished for such a huge disaster, there was no regime change, no course correction, no reckoning proved that the governing classes did not care. At some point - surely! - that will matter. 

Maybe. But not any time soon, and not, I think, because of Afghanistan. 

The American fantasy novel of ideas

At the risk of massive over-simplification, the English children's fantasy novel tends to come in one of three forms, to which I propose to give the pompous titles of the Fantasy Heroic, the Fantasy Comic and the Fantasy Psychological. It is my thesis that we should be grateful to America for giving us a fourth form: the Fantasy Philosophical.

I'll start with the three characteristically English versions. First, in the Fantasy Heroic, the characters have fantastic powers or circumstances which are employed in a struggle worthy of their fantastic character, often to defeat evil and save the world. The Narnia and Harry Potter books are good examples of this, and I think Peter Pan fits here too, albeit a little unhappily. Insofar as The Lord of the Rings is a book for children, it belongs here, as does The Hobbit. And of course we have The Dark is Rising and any number of lower-budget offerings in a similar vein. There is often no shortage of ideas in a story of this kind but they tend to be implicit or allegorical rather than openly stated (it is famously possible for a child to read all of the Narnia books without even thinking about Christianity), and if one character does sit down to expound an idea to another then it will tend to be a purely moral one (e.g. standing up to our enemies takes courage but standing up to our friends takes more). Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's a little different from what we are coming to a little later.

Second, we have the Fantasy Comic. The Fantasy Comic takes characters with fantastic powers or circumstances and then delights in putting them incongrously into everyday life. Five Children and It is the classic example of this: children have magical powers at their disposal, but have to navigate a grumpy fairy with a prickly ego to get to them, and generally find that using those powers gets them into scrapes. Mary Poppins is another example: infinite power is employed in making the lives of an upper-middle class family slightly more comfortable. There is something of this, in mood at least, to The Sword in the Stone and The Wind in the Willows. (There is a Max Beerbohm short story featuring authors who have written A Faun in the Cotswolds and Ariel in Mayfair: one knows just what kinds of merry havoc these creatures wrought on the ordered lives of the good people of Edwardian England.) This kind of fantasy can be charming if it 'comes off' but can perhaps exemplify the kind of English lack of seriousness that so infuriates foreigners. At any rate, to the extent that it includes ideas, they are taken to be already in the minds of the educated reader and ripe for being played with; ideas are for amusement rather than anything to worry about.

Finally, we have the Fantasy Psychological. This involves characters in a world that works, if it works at all, on something akin to dream logic, or stories where it is not clear what is really going on, but the suggestion is that it is something to do with the darker reaches of the psyche. The Alice books belong here, as do Where The Wild Things Are and perhaps also The Cat in the Hat. Lear's nonsense - an overt turning against sense and logic - is a touchstone. (Peter Pan is not really a book of this kind, but the elements of it that disturb and delight are: a dog nanny, Pan's shadow, the clock ticking, the Lost Boys, never growing up.) Again, there are ideas in these books, but they are more psychological than philosophical, and they tend not to be openly stated. Lewis Carroll was a mathematical logician and perfectly capable of addressing philosophical ideas openly in a manner suitable to children (I recall once reading a cleverly done dialogue, perhaps between Zeno and his tortoise?, which I am sure was by him about the ever-increasing premises needed to establish the validity of modus ponens), but we see very little of that in Alice. 

So, those are our English approaches to fantasy. The Americans too have plenty to contribute to those approaches. A Wizard of Earthsea is the American Fantasy Heroic in book form (Le Guin is capable of philosophical stories - see Omelas - but Earthsea is not one of them), and American comic books and films are perfectly happy with that theme as well. The Fantasy Comic is well-supported by Edward Eager, and I have already mentioned a couple of American books in setting out the Fantasy Psychological above.

But American fantasy adds a distinctive further dimension. Let us take The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Phantom Tollbooth, two well-established classics known also on this side of the Atlantic, to which I will add The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban and The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, neither of which I had heard of until very recently but each of which has its own following. These are all examples of the Fantasy Philosophical, that is to say, a fantasy novel in which more or less philosophical - and not merely moral - concepts are openly discussed. 

Let's start with Oz. This features characters who want a heart, a brain and courage. That is to say, the concepts are there in plain sight; there's no hinting, no allusions, no English skirting around the themes. Big Ideas with a capital B and a capital I, sitting right there on the page, with no escape for the child reading the story. And so the story goes until we reach the Wizard himself, the great man who is a humbug, the nothing behind the curtain - an openly philosophical invention. You can derive a merely moral lesson from the revelation of the Wizard of Oz, but there is much more to think about, to do with authority and knowledge and belief and politics and so on.

Tollbooth is perhaps the clearest example of all: a much-loved children's story which is about uniting Rhyme and Reason with the help of a Dodecahedron and other such characters (such as the shortest giant and tallest dwarf), and features an exploration of phrases such as "jumping to conclusions" and "eating one's words". It is all done in a light and comic fashion, but it is straightforwardly about mathematical and linguistic concepts. 

Mouse is a little different. For those of you who don't know it, it's a 'toys come to life and have adventures' kind of story, albeit of a superior kind. In it we find political thinking (one character explains what one's "territory" is: "It's where everything smells right. It's where you know the runways and hideouts, night or day. It's what you fought for, or what your father fought for, and you feel all safe and strong there. It's the place where, when you fight, you win"), a character who deals with Pure and Applied Thought, another who has proved that everywhere is the same, and our heroes have to look beyond infinity and beyond nothingness. As with Tollbooth, albeit with a more serious tone and, paradoxically, in perhaps a more playful way, all of this is made patent to the reader. And just as with Oz, the reader can't leave the concepts behind and 'just enjoy the story': the concepts are part of the story.

Finally, Unicorn. I should explain that everything I know about this book and film comes from this careful, intelligent and only intermittently silly video essay. The story, for those of you who don't know it, is a 'set in a magical mediaeval neverland' kind of fantasy involving witches, wizards and, as the title suggests, a unicorn. The concepts that are openly explored here concern, in particular, time, immortality and death. I'll give some examples:

- We have a couple of mortal baddies who seek immortality in different ways. One is a witch who has captured two immortal creatures, the eponymous unicorn and a harpy, and says this of the harpy: "oh, she'll kill me one day or another, but she will remember forever that I caught her, that I held her prisoner - so there's my immortality". The other is an sub-Robin Hood outlaw who is intent on capturing his name in ballads that he writes about himself: "One always hopes, of course, even now - to be collected, to be verified, annotated, to have variant versions, even to have one's authenticity doubted." (Ah, there's immortality - to have variant versions of oneself!) 

- The immortal unicorn at one point becomes a mortal woman and immediately feels herself dying - our essayist (at the link) is reminded of Heidegger and the confrontation with mortality. A wizard (who has had immortality thrust upon him) opines that beauty requires death, while the unicorn feels that nothing that dies can be beautiful. 

- At one point, a skeleton says this: "When I was alive, I believed - as you do - that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls." What is the child reading this to think about Time? Something, at least. The Big Idea is squarely stated and openly up for grabs.

My point is not to look at the quality of this philosophical thinking - although I would say that the examples I have given are all worth a thinking child's time and attention - but rather just to marvel that it is there, in such rich volume, in classic works of American children's literature from 1900 (Oz) to 1982 (the film of Unicorn), and I am sure beyond those dates in both directions too. This is quite different from the English tradition. Terry Pratchett became confident at throwing in a Big Idea from time to time but never, I think, quite as openly as the American tradition: his treatment of themes such as Death, 'headology', glamour and tradition is intelligent but has an English kind of plausible deniability ("I was only joking!") that the American books do not. I recall a character in one of the Narnia books saying, "in our world, stars are just balls of gas", to which the response was, "no, even in your world, that is only what they are made of", but dialogue of that kind is rare. Philip Pullman's books perhaps come closest, but I think even they prioritise plot, allegory and allusion over people worrying out loud about Big Ideas in the way the Americans do, and they are keen on hammering home moral lessons rather than, say, thoughts about infinity.

Why should this be? One might suggest that the greater earnestness or seriousness of the intelligent American writer inclines him against the slightness and knowingness of the Fantasy Comic and makes him more ready to deal with big questions head on. But I wouldn't put too much weight on that idea. The British sci-fi author - at least in his incarnation as Arthur C. Clarke - has been happy to put his Big Ideas face-up on the page, and I can't see why fantasy should be so very different; and JK Rowling (for one) is not lacking in seriousness or earnestness. "Seriousness" is the wrong word anyway: all of the four American books I have mentioned are openly comic or humorous to a greater or lesser extent. 

So I don't have an explanation. But, whatever the reason, it is, I think, very much to the benefit of children everywhere that the Americans plough (or plow) this furrow (or furrough). There are many things that should be kept out of children's reach, but not, I think, the biggest questions of philosophy.