Peter Singer's Drowning Child

Who is brave enough to argue against saving the lives of children in the Third World, or anywhere else for that matter? If a child is drowning you should wade into the water to bring him out him. If a child is dying of pneumonia, you should bring her to a hospital. There is nobody who will honestly argue against saving the child. There is no alternate view.

From these beginnings the Princeton scholar--I stay away from the word "philosopher" here--Peter Singer believes you can build a moral edifice of towering grandeur. Or at least a very big club with which in his book The Life You Can Save he bludgeons his readers into conceding that they should donate a "fair" amount of their income to international relief organizations. For this, like all writers of books of moral uplift (most especially those whose prescriptions are safely ignored), he is greeted as a moral thinker of probing clarity.

In fact, The Life You Can Live like most--well, all--books of prescriptive morality, is proudly ignorant. Singer announces this ignorance and the related contempt for his readers in the third chapter, where he considers the objections to his thesis. For this he takes as his interlocuters "students taking an elective called Literature and Justice at Glenview High (that's not its real name) a school in a wealthy Boston suburb." The students of "Glenview" (why he doesn't give its real name is a mystery) voice what are supposed to be the conventional objections to moral behavior of the self satisfied bourgeoisie. Unsurprisingly, since he's telling the story, Singer manages to pulverize these easily. In doing this, he happily steamrolls over the entire history of philosophy and literature to establish the primacy of the teachers of virtue:

"If we see a person holding a cat's paws on an electric grill that is gradually heating up, and when we vigorously object he says, 'But it's fun, see how the cat squeals,' we don't just say, 'Oh, well, you are entitled to follow your own beliefs,' and leave him alone. We can and do try to stop people who are cruel to animals, just as we stop rapists, racists, and terrorists. I'm not saying that failing to give is like committing these acts of violence, but if we reject moral relativism in some situations, then we should reject it everywhere."

How much easier can it be? From the premise that torturing cats is wrong we move in a mere three sentences to the irrefutability of the everlasting moral order.

If this is philosophy, then philosophy is an excellent courtier, delivering the truisms of Sunday school lessons and dorm room bull sessions--"moral relativism is wrong"--while dressing them up as difficult truths. Everything falls neatly into two categories, "wrong" and "right." And of course the ultimate beneficiary of this model is the Princeton professor whose expertise is the sifting of experience into these two slots, into which all acts fall like nickels and dimes in the coin counting machine.

But maybe, after all, it's not so simple. The objection to the teachers of virtue has never been to the doing of good acts. And certainly, the acts that Singer advocates--helping the suffering around the world--are inarguably good. If people want to spend their money for humanitarian purposes, there is no one in the world who will stop them, or do anything but commend them. Whether it is a child who is drowning in front of you, or a child dying of malaria, saving him is a good thing.

How good acts turn into obligations, however, isn't something that Singer has much patience for. If someone tortures a cat we believe he is bad. Fine, that is Singer's intuition, and mine, and yours. But from these tiny and solid intuitions, Singer pretends he can move to a host of policies that do not jibe with our intuitions. On the subject of, say, donating all your money to international relief NGOs I have no intuitions at all. No, that's not true: if it leaves your children in poverty, my intuitions say it is wrong. In fact, if it leaves your children meaningfully worse off, my intuition says it's wrong.

To this Singer has no real answer. Starting with the poor material of a few inarguable intuitions, he gives us no basis for moving further. If you start with intuition, you end up only as far as intuition goes. It does not bring you to Singer's weirdly precise conclusion of donating 10 percent of your income about $100,000. A good thing, no question. But why 10 percent? Who knows? If Singer actually believed the arguments in his book, then surely Singer, who argues that the death of every child in a far away place should be as utmost a concern to us as the death of a child close to us and directly in front of us, he wouldn't stop there.

The practical moralist is a simplifier. He writes for an audience that he treats as children, who will not be bothered to ask what standpoint he is arguing from--why, that is, he does what he does. If he is Kant writing the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, maybe he believes that he stands on firm enough footing that he does not need to explain it in every work. But no one now stands on this kind of footing. To try to pass off policy prescriptions, no matter how reasonable or good hearted, as the logical necessities of moral philosophy is to take a position that that is the opposite of moral: it is to subordinate the search for anything resembling truth to political aims.

Singer comes up with prescriptions that are guaranteed to leave his readers with a nice feeling of having read something virtuous. But there is an intellectual cost to this. The record of the professional teachers of virtue is not enviable. From the adding up of duties and obligations, the extension of the sphere of what we are told we should feel compelled to do, very little good has come. Listen to any dictator: you can bet that there is not one for whom "obligation" is not a favorite word.

We Know You All Too Well Here, Mr. Van Gogh

How can some of the greatest paintings of history also be the most boring? I found myself thinking this at the Museum of Modern Art's small Van Gogh show, while staring at The Night Cafe and noticing that it aroused nothing in me but a recognition of how little the basic elements of the dive bar have changed in more than a hundred years. Starry Night was even worse. I had trouble getting past the people crowding in to see it, and in just a few seconds had glimpsed enough to decide it wasn't worth the bother. Without doubt, these are great paintings. But we have seen them reproduced so many times that whatever power adhered to them once, it has been rubbed away by handling.

The age of reproduction has not, after all, marked the death of the prestige of the unique work of art. Just the opposite: the mega auction and blockbuster show have turned the iconic works of art history into super-objects for which crowds line up to parade past and say that they have seen the real thing in itself. But the more powerful the brands become, the more they deprive the paintings of any possible interest as works of art. Art is supposed to inspire transcendence, but the entry into that transcendence is novelty and we've been hit over the head with the Night Cafe so often that there's just nothing new in it to find. I got less out of it than I did from Stevedores in Arles, a lesser known, and probably lesser, Van Gogh, let alone from other paintings I chanced on in a stroll through the museum, such as Giovanni Pistoletto's Man With Yellow Pants .

Is Giovanni Pistoletto then a greater artist than Van Gogh? Well, no (and a dumb question: brand name art and the publicizing of auction prizes makes it inevitable that people will think of painting as a competition). But Man With Yellow Pants, a portrait of a man seen from the back, painted on a bright piece of steel that reflects the viewer--and so, as it happens, can't really be reproduced in a book and so is immune to the kind of assault against which a Van Gogh has no defenses--is clever. If I saw it over and over, I would get tired of it. But I'm not there yet. And maybe I won't be. There are paintings that we don't tire of looking at and can find something new in every time. Invariably, though, these are not the paintings that have been served up to us and branded “great” like steaks inspected and marked “prime” by the USDA, but those that feel like we have somehow discovered them ourselves.

A Useful Antidote To Obvious Ideas And The Idea Of The Obvious

Even educated people commonly think that Einstein's theory of relativity is impossible to understand. This hasn't been helped by generations of explanations involving smoke and railway carriages, garbled versions of what started as a less than perfectly clear explanation by Einstein himself (to his credit, he tried mightily to make his theory comprehensible to non-physicists). I won't claim to have any reasonable grasp of the full "general theory" that Einstein ultimately derived. But after years of believing it was beyond my ken, I was stunned when I opened up Einstein's own 1916 book for the general reader to find just how dramatically simple the insight that motivated Einstein was, and how accessible the "special theory"--that's the one with e=mc² is.

The version that most people get of the theory of relativity tends to stop when the eyes glaze over and before it gets to the interesting part, somewhere in the middle of a long explanation of relative motion. If the little Honda is heading toward the rickety old Eldorado with the drunk driver and both of them speedometers that reads 75 miles an hour, they're coming together at a total of 150 miles an hour. In a universe with nothing else, you can say the Honda's coming toward the Cadillac at 150 miles an hour. Or the Cadillac's coming toward the Honda at 150 miles an hour--it's the same no-fault relative kind of thing. Is there anybody who doesn't get this?

That is as far as folks get, because the only thing a longer version of this adds is confusion. The part that people don't get to is this: when the Cadillac turns on its headlights (too late, or the cars wouldn't be headed for a collision), the lights from the beams is heading away from the Cadillac at ... the speed of light. It's headed toward the Honda at the speed of light. The speed of light stays the same np matter how fast you're moving towards or away from it. If the driver of the Honda puts on the brakes, the light doesn't take any longer to get to him. All speed is relative, except that of light, which is always the same.

Obviously this is impossible, right? Or not. Up to Einstein, it seemed that way, and physicists worked hard to come up with fudge factors that would resolve the paradox and slow down or speed up light to avoid contradictions. Einstein's incredible insight was to say that instead of complicating things with additional special rules, you had to simplify. And the way to simplify things was to get rid of exactly the part that people were most certain of: the meaning of space and time. If motion is relative and the speed of light is constant, well, that meant that as you get closer to the speed of light what had to change was distance and time. And in that case, as Einstein puts it:

There is not the least incompatability between the principle of relativity and the law of propagation of light.

I think that the better you understand Einstein, the more inspiring his achievement appears. Many people could have come up with Einstein's theory before him. It is not that the math is so difficult (though that part of Einstein's book is not easy going). It is that no one could bear to accept that the constant speed of light had been proved experimentally while the most basic and immovable ideas about space and time had not. You can't get rid of the first, so you had to lose the second.

So Einstein's theory proceeds essentially not by adding a new idea, but getting rid of a very basic idea that every one up to him had taken for granted. All the rest follows from that. What Einstein does is discard the obvious in favor of the provable. In the history of intellectual life, Einstein's contribution is to demonstrate in a spectacular way not that "everything is relative" (a meaningless cliche) but that there is no idea--none--so intuitively obvious that it trumps experiment and observation.

Karl Marx, The Market, And The Hidden Jew

When I was in college, a frequently assigned text in literature and philosophy classes was Karl Marx's On The Jewish Question, about the relationship between political and religious freedom. I don't know if anybody ever got to the end of it--I certainly didn't then--and I have the feeling it wasn't many, because I don't recall anyone being especially shocked by the punchline:

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. ...In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

Kind of a bombshell, ain't? Doesn't read so well after all these years. I bring it up not in an effort to throw more dirt on the grave of Marxism (it's buried well enough), but because it seems to me to have some interesting resonance for the one part of Marx that is still relevant, the critique of the values of the market. Marx's basic point that the market imbues our lives with a scale of values that we do not choose and that in its pervasiveness hides the possibility of other values is one that has a great degree of force. Its attraction has been equally clear to the left and the right, and in that sense is pretty non-partisan.

What's striking about the end of On The Jewish Question, however, is how deeply encoded Marx's anti-semitism is in the critique of the market. The critique of the market involves an attack on the Jew--and a particular kind of attack, coming from the child of converted Jews. In Marx's vehemence I read a degree of shame. The sneakiness of the Jew, the Jew as liar, is a common trope of anti-semitism. The converted Jew is the Jew squared: the Jew is purported to be hidden, and the converted Jew is ... a hidden Jew. The more he tries to run, the more of a Jew he becomes (this is captured in the challenge of Freud's construction in The Resistance to Psychoanalysis, in which he pointedly describes himself as " a Jew who is not afraid to admit that he is a Jew.")

The sense of the inescapability of Jewishness to the converted Jew hangs over the critique of the market. It has sometimes struck me that some of the people who claim most fervently to reject the values of the market in theory cling to them most strongly in practice (not difficult, because in fact the market is extremely good at co-opting, recycling, and retailing anti-marketism: half the advertising industry is based on this). The critique of the market holds inside it the same doubt that seems to have afflicted Marx. Very often the claims of rejecting the values of the market leave the suspicion that inside those doing the loud rejecting is still a hidden Market Man, beholden to the same standards of popular appeal and commercial success, just (like the hidden Jew) pushed further inside.

"If I Could Save The Union Without Freeing Any Slave..."

About a month ago we passed the 150th anniversary of the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, and having missed commenting on it for the last 150 years, I don't think coming in another month late makes too much difference. I recently read part (not all) of the debates, and they help answer the question that has always puzzled me about Lincoln. Everybody knows that Lincoln told Horace Greeley that if he could save the Union without freeing a slave, he'd have done so. Now, this has to be perplexing to any modern person, because it leaves open the basic question of what the hell was the justification for Civil War if it wasn't freeing the slaves?

I feel like most of what I've read about Lincoln manages to avoid giving a direct answer to this question, which is incredibly disappointing, because it has to be the most interesting question about Lincoln. The debates help a lot in getting to this, because they make clear the context for what Lincoln told Greeley. Lincoln says about slavery:

I think that [Stephen Douglas], and those acting with him, have placed that institution on a new basis, which looks to the perpetuity and nationalization of slavery. And while it is placed upon this new basis, I say, and I have said that I believe we shall not have peace upon the question until the opponents of slavery arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or, on the other hand, that its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.

To Lincoln's thinking, preserving the Union without freeing the slaves wasn't one of the options. That option had been sealed off, and he believed that it had been sealed off not by him, but by the South and the apologists for the South. For those opposed to slavery, there were no more concessions left to give. Just maintaining the status quo and letting the slave states maintain the abhorrent institution was clearly not enough. The South had been offered that and much more. As Lincoln saw it, the only demand left was that slavery should not only be permitted, but expanded into the free states. For Lincoln, the political realities of slavery (he outlines these in a fascinating way in a letter to his friend Joshua Speed guaranteed the political ascendency in the South of the most intransigently pro-slavery faction. And that meant the inevitability of war.

It was not a question of just letting the South go, because the South did not want merely to go and be left on its own. It had been offered the chance to be left alone and much more, and that was never good enough. The last demand that was on the table was one that Lincoln would not countenance: not just that slavery be tolerated, but that it should be expanded and perpetuated. So the question of just letting things lie as they were was a false one. It was an option that the South and its supporters had themselves taken off the table, and to concede any more, even if it was possible, would do nothing but delay the coming catastrophe. Thus the famous sentence: "If we cannot live together as brothers, how will we live together as enemies?" Or, in other words, if we are already close to war now, why does anyone think that we will not be at war after we split into two countries?

Plato, Ancient Escape Artist

A lot of people seem to think that philosophy is about finding the good, the true and the beautiful, and these people are often the same ones who are pretty convinced that they know what those things are already. This is what I could never stand about the presentation of Plato: the Socratic dialogue is supposed to be a means of self-help, a way of getting to an answer if you just nod "yes" at the right moments.

Plato is a whole lot more interesting than that. I read the Gorgias a little while ago, and what struck me most was its vertiginous pessimism. The Gorgias is the story of a public debate, involving Socrates, two "philosophers," and the politician Callicles. The fact that the debate is in public, essentially on a stage, is key. Nobody in it is going to be persuaded of anything. Socrates gets the philosophers, Gorgias and his student Polus, to agree with him in proper Socratic fashion. But then Callicles messes it all up, basically saying, sure, Polus (Gorgias's student) will agree with Socrates that tyranny's bad--because there's no way he's going to stand up in front of a room and give them an answer they don't want to hear. And then Callicles accuses Socrates himself of rehearsing arguments that will be palatable to the listeners, and repeatedly calls him on playing to the audience.

That is in fact what Socrates is doing, as when he challenges Callicles to say one good thing he's done, and Callicles says, "You're being contentious." I'm pretty sure that the way we're supposed to take this is that Callicles means, "Look, I said my piece honestly. And now because you know I have political ambitions, you're backing me into a corner and forcing me to give you nonsense about the public interest at heart, because that's what people expect." The initial positions have gotten totally reversed. Socrates is the one who started out saying he doesn't care whom he persuades or how many people are with him. But now he's tweaking Callicles; he's saying, "Well, if you want to persuade people to let you govern, you're gonna have to start talking about what's just and good."

Nobody, including Socrates, is really speaking freely and what is supposed to be a dialogue about virtue turns into a discussion of whether the actors are actually saying what they think or just flattering the audience. The dialogue is not about tyranny or virtue, but about persuasion. The best line occurs when when Socrates asks Callicles if he should be the city's physician or its flatterer. And Callicles say, "You should be the flatterer." The intro to the online edition calls Callicles's answer "ingenuous," which is 100 percent off base. That just totally ignores all the next lines, which make clear that Callicles is being the opposite of ingenuous: he's openly insulting Socrates. Callicles' insult really gets to the core of the issue. His concept of debate is instrumental: it's a tool to get the power that you want. And on Callicles' view, someone like Socrates, who has no "power" in the conventional sense, is limited to saying the things that his audience won't object to.

Ultimately Socrates wins the point, though it's a close call, and there's no pretence that he's actually persuaded his interlocuters. He wins on Callicles' terms, by demonstrating that he holds the trump card:

If I died because I have no powers of flattery or rhetoric, I am very sure that you would not find me repining at death. For no man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong. For to go to the world below having one's soul full of injustice is the last and worst of all evils.

Socrates' advantage over Callicles is that he has gone beyond the fear of death and so made himself untouchable. Or so he claims. Whether in fact Socrates, or especially Plato (who had more interest in political power) believes this is an open question. Socrates drank the hemlock. Plato several times lost the goodwill of his political patrons, and each time he chose the much less philosophical path of cut-and-run.