Ed Lake

It seems indisputable that democracies would make better decisions if the electorate was “better” in some global sense (better informed? Better calibrated?). One is reminded of Edward O Wilson’s joke about communism: “Nice theory; wrong species.” Of course a democracy of cognitive superbeings would outperform a democracy of mere humans. But this is not the interesting thing about democracy: its great advantage is not that it reliably identifies the best solutions to the problems it faces, but that it tends to avoid calamities – famines and revolutions and the like. So rather than lamenting the fallibility of electorates, one might ask how much weaker they could become without eroding the ...

Are we counting meditation as prayer? I do that, or try to, and my motives are pretty purely instrumental: I want to calm down a bit and get a grip on myself. I can imagine that my “practice”, if I might so dignify it, would be more effective if it wasn’t pursued in such a mercenary spirit: I wouldn’t be so distracted by questions about whether it was working. But even so, it does seem to do more or less what was advertised. On days when I meditate, I think I grind my teeth less.

As a habitual abuser of weaselly qualifiers of the sort that Professor Millgram recommends, I am disposed to find the view laid out here quite sympathetic. But it’s also interesting (to me) how dependent we find as great a depictor of human thought as the later Henry James to be on a wide range of havering qualifications. Here’s the first paragraph of The Ambassadors, with moments of what I think can properly be called “doublethink” in bold:

Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A tel...

Whenever I want to confront the inadequacy of narrative to capture the multifariousness of even my own limited understanding of life, I try to write a diary entry. I don’t know how any honest person can do it. It’s like using a coat hanger as a sieve. But I do think stories can be quite a good medium for simple causal generalisations. They’re like stylised instruction manuals for situations, aren’t they? Pull Tab A. Flip ignition switch. Stand back. To the extent that the generalisation is reliable and the story presents it clearly, it might indeed facilitate understanding of (or at least successful engagement with) the world. In the main, though, I think story is probably more like Pinke...

Presented with a question like this, it’s easy to yield to the seduction of Whig history and predict that the world will have got closer to the *correct* way of understanding sex and gender – ie, what I already think. The related but opposite temptation, affecting those with a tragic picture of sexual relations, is to say that all the fundamental problems will remain. I feel each of those temptations at different times, but today I shall do my best to give into both at once. The heart of the matter is, of course, the nature/nurture debate. Male and female humans differ from one another in certain systematic ways (I fear that the wordcount will prevent me from discussing people who are nei...

Interesting question! At the legal level, in the West, a child usually doesn’t have any particular obligations to a parent, although the parental care that the child receives may be implicitly contingent on some basic level of respect or obedience. And it is of course possible to inherit certain financial debts, which might be viewed as an obligation to one’s parents. But for the most part the law is silent - which means we are in the mistier realm of ethics. The silence of the law perhaps implies the difficulty of the question. The parent-child relationship certainly feels rather freighted with obligation, on both sides. What more momentous responsibility can there be than the care of a ...

Say that Steven Pinker is correct, and human violence is in long-term decline. How far might it fall? Could it disappear completely?

I’m going to put what I guess might, in the jargon of international relations theory, qualify as a “realist” view, although I intend these remarks to apply to violence at every scale, not just interstate conflict. I should also make it clear that I mean to talk only about actual physical attacks. Rhetorical violence, structural violence and the like are not what I have in mind. If there isn’t a deliberate bodily injury, protot...

Humanity doesn’t come in degrees. Membership of the human species is sufficient to qualify for 100-percent humanity. And within that large family, there are lots of different ways to be, by nature or nurture, choice or circumstance. We don’t all share the same opportunities or tastes. We don’t even share the same emotional capacities. Different 100-percent humans will experience romantic love (or its absence) in different ways. It’s true that lots of people regard romatic love as being among the most important things in life, but this is frankly a matter of taste. Of course, many more things are questions of taste than we commonly acknowledge.

There remains, however, the problem of...

For no very good reason I was recently reading Xenophon’s biography of Cyrus the Great. Cyrus’s achievements are as spectacular as anyone who ever lived. He pieced together the first truly vast empire in world history, pursuing his military and political goals with what, in Xenophon’s telling, appears to be superhuman focus and organisation. He was also, by the standards of ancient despots, really really nice (cut to Astyages singing “Losing My Edge”). What about the Ozymandias effect? I think Cyrus escapes that sheerly by the scale of his deeds. It would take a lot of desert wind to wear his monuments down to trunkless legs. For as long as some sort of human civilisation sticks around, C...