what does Russia make?

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In the waning days of Communism, it seemed as if all the Soviet Union made that anyone else wanted to purchase were Matryoshka doll sets. In reality, the USSR was exporting oil and natural gas. Drops in their market value helped end the regime.

It occurred to me that I couldn’t think of anything that post-Communist Russia makes that anyone else wants to buy, apart from oil and gas–but that could be a prejudice on my part. The Observatory of Economic Complexity allows you to check the real story. More than half of Russia’s exports are oil and gas, and almost 100% are raw materials or other inputs to industrial or food processes, such as sawn wood and fish. The biggest category of finished goods that I can find is gas turbines, valued at $1.5 billion (total). Nuclear reactors follow at $1.27 billion. By way of contrast, Canada also has vast natural resources, but it exports $47 billion worth of cars and $7 billion worth of aircraft, among many other finished products.

Bernard Williams on truth as a virtue of the humanities

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Bernard Williams (1929-2003) published Truth and Truthfulness in 2002, when the humanities were still processing criticisms of truth, objectivity, science, the Enlightenment, and related ideals that had arisen with postmodernism. Williams held his own complex epistemology; he certainly wasn’t interested in defending naive positivism or scientism. But he saw that unless the humanities stood for truth as some kind of virtue, there wouldn’t be much of a case for those disciplines.

He recognized that the postmodern critique of truth might be waning. Epistemological radicalism had been more of an issue in 1990 (when I was at the same institution as Williams) than when he published Truth and Truthfulness. But he was prescient about the decade to come:

There is a danger that the decline of the more dramatic confrontations [about postmodernism] may do no more than register an inert cynicism, the kind of calm that in personal relations can follow a series of hysterical rows. If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present time, the study of the humanities runs the risk of sliding from professional seriousness, through professionalization, to a finally disenchanted careerism.

(Anyone recognize evidence of the last three words today?)

Williams’ book is not really about truth but about “the ‘virtues’ of truth, qualities of people that are displayed in wanting to know the truth, in finding it out, and in telling it to other people.” Those virtues turn out to be two: Accuracy and Sincerity. Accuracy means trying to figure out what is true about the world and other people, as opposed to what one wishes, assumes, or is told to be true. It means making an “investment” in efforts to distinguish realities from wishes, for example. Sincerity means sharing what one believes with other people. The two virtues are distinct but related. It is, for example, not much good to be sincere about one’s beliefs if they are childish fantasies, nor to struggle to understand reality but keep what you find to yourself.

A third candidate for a virtue of truthfulness would be Authenticity–being true to who you really are. Williams criticizes the strong, Rousseauian version of this candidate virtue on interesting grounds. We don’t know who we really are. The self is not a unitary thing but a mix of values and other mental states that change rapidly, shift with context, and arise in relation to other people. Becoming someone is a “project” undertaken with other people. So the expectation of Authenticity is frustrating in ways that are worse than the quests for Accuracy and Sincerity.

Williams makes the case that any society needs Accuracy and Sincerity. But, as he argued more generally in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, the fact that a society needs X does not give an individual an adequate reason to supply X. One can free-ride instead. Also, there can be morally legitimate reasons to make exceptions. Kant was wrong to conclude that, because language and society depend on a general expectation of truthfulness, you may never lie. It only follows that most people should be truthful most of the time.

Instead of trying to derive grounds for principles of Accuracy and Sincerity, it is better to analyze and positively depict truthfulness as a virtue that gives credit to the person who displays it. We can also connect virtues together. Thus, for example, it takes courage to be Accurate, and compassion to be Sincere. (“Error is cowardice,” as Nietzsche wrote in a passage that Williams quotes.) Accuracy is also linked to freedom, because the struggle to understand nature is governed by one’s own will, in contrast to a struggle against other people’s wills, which limits freedom. I think Williams’ project is to defend truthfulness by linking several virtues into one attractive picture.

Note that virtues are not like Kantian principles; they can be exhibited to various degrees and even to excess. One can, for instance, make too much of an investment in determining the accuracy of a statement whose implications are not sufficiently important. (That is a sign of an obsession.) Or one can rightly withhold information that ought to be private.

Sincerity is a disposition, and it cannot be understood just as the disposition to follow a rule. Of course, there have to be some general considerations to which Sincerity attends, or the disposition would have no content. … But they do not add up to a rule, in the traditional sense of a requirement which is relatively simple and does not leave most of the work to judgement.

I read Truth and Truthfulness to explore a hypothesis that there are three different sets of virtues that are important to a good life, but they do not fit neatly together. One is truth, which Williams parses as Accuracy and Sincerity. A second concerns our relations to other people, which must be just, fair, compassionate, or some relative of those terms. (I deliberately mean this three-part model to allow for much debate about each part). And the third concerns our inner self, for we are entitled to worry about our own peace, equanimity, and/or happiness.

I found Williams helpful in two ways. First, he substantiates the premise that truthfulness is one set of virtues, honorable in themselves and generally useful to society, but sometimes in conflict with other worthy virtues. Again he quotes Nietzsche: “Fundamental Insight: There is no pre-established harmony between the furthering of truth and the well-being of humanity.” Second, Williams offers an impressive model for how to argue on behalf of a large abstract virtue, of which truthfulness is an example. He parses it closely. He shows by means of hypothetical cases that the virtue benefits a society. He shows by means of real history that the virtue has evolved in certain ways to take its current form. He shows that in the course of this history, certain efforts to change the virtue (e.g., Romantic proposals to turn it into Authenticity) have failed. And he links it to other virtues in ways that make it seem appealing.

The result is not the kind of knock-down argument that would convince a cheerful liar to start being Accurate and Sincere. It is, rather, an excavation of the kinds of reasons that lead reasonable people to try to be fairly truthful, even when inaccuracy and insincerity would be easier. I agree with Williams that unless the humanities exemplify that effort, they do not have much of a future.

See also: are we entering a post-truth era?; why we wish that goodness brought happiness, and why that is not so; unhappiness and injustice are different problems; all that matters is equanimity, community, and truth; does naturalism make room for the humanities? and building alternative intellectual establishments.

questions for the social movement post Ferguson

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(Washington, DC) The social ferment following the Ferguson verdict looks bigger to me than Occupy, and bigger than the other nascent US social movements that I can recall from personal experience, going back to the 1980s.

That is a subjective impression based on my social networks, personal interests, and preferred news sources, but I have talked to reporters who feel the same way. [link added later.] The unrest taps much deeper and broader concerns than the recent shootings and legal decisions themselves. It is a response to trends as large as the incarceration crisis and the fraught condition of America’s poor communities of color. As my colleague Peniel Joseph writes, “Multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-class, and multi-generational Americans have swarmed the streets in vast numbers to not only protest against racial injustice but to expose systemic oppression that has been an open secret since the heyday of the late 1960s and early 1970s.” They are developing the “WUNC” elements of a successful social movement that Charles Tilly identified:

  • Worthiness: moral standing in the eyes of the country;
  • Unity: Despite  demographic, ideological, and regional diversity, a sense that participants stand together;
  • Numbers: Marches, die-ins, etc., signify that many people stand together;
  • Commitment: Getting arrested, standing up to speak—these and other actions demonstrate commitment.

Many of my friends are involved in this nascent movement, in body and/or soul, and I see a lot of potential myself. But what I can offer at this moment are some relatively abstract thoughts about the challenges that face such movements in general. (By the way, we should not expect a uniform response to any of these challenges. Internal debates will yield a variety of approaches, and that is healthy.)

1. Participants must decide on their level of diagnosis. Confronted with the Ferguson verdict, some people think the problem is the control that prosecutors exercise over grand juries. Then a solution might involve special prosecutors. A totally different kind of diagnosis says that the problem is racism, as a relatively invariant underlying force in American life. When de jure segregation ended, racism was like a pool of water that needed a new outlet, and mass incarceration followed. In that case, the only solution would be some direct, frontal attack on racism. Many other theories are available, and they are not all mutually exclusive, but they suggest very different strategies. My own view is that social problems can rarely be divided into foundational causes and superficial effects. They are usually complex systems of reciprocal causes. That is an argument against treating the largest available abstraction, such as racism, as the main target. But this is debatable, and it will be debated.

2. Participants must choose a target. Occupy chose Wall Street: that was the original name of the movement. But Occupy never found a way to press Wall Street itself. The institutions that Occupy most effectively challenged were public universities, like UC-Davis, and big cities, like Oakland, where conflicts with the police made the institutions look bad. This was a case, in my opinion, in which one target was chosen but a different one was hit. After Ferguson, the question is again where to direct confrontation and how to make sure that the intended target receives the pressure.

3. Related to the question of diagnoses and targets is the matter of demands. What will the movement call for, and what will it accept?

4. Participants will have to figure out their relationship to formal institutions, such as governments, parties, the mass media, and universities. I have been asked whether I expect the movement to start running candidates or rather to eschew electoral politics because it looks so corrupt and unresponsive. I think it is far too early to say. Social movements often begin in their own spaces, apart from institutions that they perceive as hostile and unreformable. Especially during that phase, it is appropriate for some participants to say that they stand apart from the system. Such statements do not rule out later engagement with formal processes.

5. Participants must demand attention in a competitive space. Social movements typically say that business as usual must stop because their issue is too important to allow regular activities to continue. That is often a valid claim, actually. But it competes against many other such claims. Right now, for instance, a serious case can be made that all Americans must demand criminal prosecution of the torture authorizers during the Bush Administration. Inaction makes us complicit in felonious torture. Not to mention climate change and campaign finance, which just got worse yesterday. Social movements must  claim attention while somehow navigating rival claims.

6. The movement will have to address the usual tensions between prominent leadership and decentralized activism; honoring the heritage of past work while demanding new directions and giving space to young leaders; and staying relatively small and pure versus broadening and potentially losing focus.

journalism students fill the news gap on Miami’s sea level rise

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Robert Gutsche reports that South Florida news outlets are not covering the rise of sea levels, even though they pose an existential threat to Miami and its environs. Partly as a result of the news silence, “civic and economic leaders in South Florida aren’t talking about what’s ahead for us.” In response, Florida International University journalism students are building Eyes on the Rise to fill this important news gap. Working, in part, with local high school students, the FIU journalism students are collecting their own hydrological data with remote sensors, producing original reporting, raising awareness, and engaging public audiences. This project is a promising approach to educating the college students, and it turns the journalism program into a local news asset–much as medical schools provide health care through teaching hospitals. It thus falls at the intersection of citizen science (and Civic Science), experiential civic education/service-learning at both the college and high school levels, public journalism, media reform, and civic environmentalism.

This, by the way, is one of a dozen projects being funded by the Online News Association that my colleagues and I are currently evaluating. Stay tuned.

 

pigeon-guided missiles and ancient Chinese paddleboat gunships

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I read Wikipedia so that you don’t have to. You can just stop by here to learn that …

1. During WWII, the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner put pigeons inside missiles. The view in front of each missile was projected via a camera obscura onto the wall, and the pigeon was trained to peck at images of ships. Because the bird had an electrode attached to its beak, its pecks steered the missile toward its naval target. Skinner demonstrated that his prototype worked using the following film. The Navy brass, however, refused to fund the implementation stage.

2. Speaking of naval war, during the Battle of Caishi (1161), the Song forces successfully deployed ships described thus in Hai Qiu Fu (“Rhapsodic Ode on the Sea-eel Paddle Wheel Warships”):

The men inside them paddled fast on the treadmills, and the ships glided forwards as though they were flying, yet no one was visible on board. The enemy thought that they were made of paper. Then all of a sudden a thunderclap bomb was let off. It was made with paper (carton) and filled with lime and sulphur. (Launched from trebuchets) these thunderclap bombs came dropping down from the air, and upon meeting the water exploded with a noise like thunder, the sulphur bursting into flames. The carton case rebounded and broke, scattering the lime to form a smoky fog, which blinded the eyes of men and horses so that they could see nothing. Our ships then went forward to attack theirs, and their men and horses were all drowned, so that they were utterly defeated.[38]

3. On a more peaceful note, the family who served as Grand Vizirs to the great Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad (including the most famous Caliph, Harun Al-Rashid) came from a long line of respected Buddhist abbots from the city of Balkh, now in Afghanistan.