Now that I’m old

Three books by Tim Mulgan, a future-minded philosopher before “longtermism” was in vogue:

(1) Future People: A Moderate Consequentialist Account of Our Obligations to Future Generations (2006)

(2) Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy after Catastrophe (2011)

(3) Philosophy for an Ending World (2024)

The trajectory is not encouraging.

About a decade ago, I read and enjoyed several chapters of the middle book, Ethics for a Broken World. I would read that book again. I wish I could teach it to students of the past. I’m less sure about today’s and tomorrow’s students. The book is a series of “lectures” about late-20th- and early-21st-century moral-and-political philosophy, delivered to university students in a (ravaged) future three or four generations hence. Even this bleak scenario now seems blissful in its optimism. It assumes that there will be students in the (ravaged) future.

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E. H. Carr, in What Is History?, says:

The historian belongs not to the past but to the present. Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian “ought to love the past.” This is a dubius injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic romanticism of old men and old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest in the present or future. Cliché for cliché, I should prefer the one about freeing oneself from “the dead hand of the past.” The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.

Now that I’m an old man of forty-four, not hopeful for the (this-worldly) future or much enjoying or understanding the present – at least as it exists outside my household – the past does seem more lovely. The picturesque past, that is. If this makes me an unfit historian, so be it.

September’s poem

A.I. could kill everyone before the decade ends, tech experts believe (or so a whistleblower claims). We all lose: not just this or that way of life, but life itself.

Of all the stupid ways to go.

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The smith with the tongs both worketh in the coals,

and fashioneth it with hammers,

and worketh it with the strength of his arms:

yea, he is hungry, and his strength faileth:

he drinketh no water, and is faint.

The carpenter stretcheth out his rule:

he marketh it out with a line:

he fitteth it with planes,

and he marketh it out with the compass,

and maketh it after the figure of a man,

according to the beauty of a man;

that it may remain in the house.

He heweth him down cedars,

and taketh the cypress and the oak,

which he strengtheneth for himself among the trees of the forest:

he planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it.

Then shall it be for a man to burn:

for he will take thereof, and warm himself;

yea, he kindleth it, and baketh bread;

yea, he maketh a god, and worshippeth it:

he maketh it a graven image, and falleth down thereto.

He burneth part thereof in the fire:

with part thereof he eateth flesh:

he roasteth roast, and is satisfied:

yea, he warmeth himself, and saith,

‘Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire’.

And the residue thereof he maketh a god,

even his graven image:

he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it,

and prayeth unto it, and saith,

‘Deliver me; for thou art my god’.

They have not known nor understood:

for he hath shut their eyes, that they cannot see;

and their hearts, that they cannot understand.

And none considereth in his heart,

neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say,

‘I have burned part of it in the fire,

yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof:

I have roasted flesh, and eaten it:

and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination?

shall I fall down to the stock of a tree?’

He feedeth of ashes:

a deceived heart hath turned him aside,

that he cannot deliver his soul,

nor say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’

‘Remember these, O Jacob and Israel,

for thou art my servant:

I have formed thee: thou art my servant,

O Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten of me.

I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions,

and, as a cloud, thy sins:

return unto me, for I have redeemed thee.’

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(Isaiah 44:12–22, KJV; line-breaking and punctuation of The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible)

“And the residue thereof he maketh a god, / even his graven image: / he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, / and prayeth unto it, and saith, / ‘Deliver me; for thou art my god’.”

Body-text fonts, pt. 55: Apollo

Shockingly, this is my first exhibition of the great Adrian Frutiger’s work. Behold.

Very nice, but one must tolerate long descenders. Observe the lowercase ps, qs, ys, and, especially, js (“jolly good job”). (The specimen is from a story by Francis Wyndham.)

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The family is watching Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) in installments: our attention spans are not long. The movie is faux-British. Barry Levinson, Chris Columbus, and Steven Spielberg are named in the opening credits.

Holmes and Watson are schoolmates. The school is proto-Hogwarts. There is a very picturesque scene with all the boys dressed for dinner in the Great Hall. The camera lingers over the table at which the Masters are seated. It cherishes their extreme decrepitude.

In other scenes, old men are injected with poisoned darts that cause them to hallucinate and kill themselves. The hallucinations involve the coming to life of chicken dinners, hatstands, and stained-glass windows.

Little Daniel excuses himself during these scenes.

“New America”

The politicians of New Mexico have responded to Trump’s latest proposal.

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Samuel has been complaining about the wasting of his time. E.g., when someone else chooses a video to watch, that person is “wasting my [Samuel’s] time.”

He can be rather sweet about it, however.

“Mom is working [napping, etc.]. She is wasting my time.” He clarifies: “I wish I could to talk to her instead.”

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop:

He had published eight books … beginning with a life of Rimbaud written when he was eighteen, and concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians.

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Daniel: “Mommy, I am going to bed, and [the letter] A is going to spend the night with me. Can you carry me and A to bed?”

Aztecs

Two books:

(1) Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (1991), reviewed by the Psmiths;

and

(2) Pablo of Texcoco, How to Be Grateful: An Aztec Guide to the Art of Gratitude (2025), reviewed at NDPR.

It was jarring to come across both reviews in the same week. It was like reading about Nazis and then learning that a collection of mid-20th-century Germanic homespun “wisdom” had just been issued by a major university press.

The “Nazi” remark isn’t a cheap exaggeration. Clendinnen’s work unavoidably brings the Holocaust to mind.

Still, the analogy isn’t perfect, especially when it’s applied to the other book. Pablo’s “wisdom” was written down quite a few years after the Spanish conquered the Aztecs. Would we demand that every postwar Germanic writer address the sorrowful legacy of the Nazi period? If not, then perhaps we shouldn’t object when Pablo and his 21st-century expositors choose not to dwell on the same Aztec qualities that Clendinnen emphasizes.

Perhaps the introduction of Christianity into Nahua culture accounts for the surprising gentleness of the “Pablo” book.

Or perhaps not. It’s not unheard of for the same people to manifest brutality and exquisite etiquettical sensitivity.

How does Clendinnen’s work go down these days? Her scholarship is impossible to ignore. I fear that she is becoming unfashionable, however. I see that in the second (2022) edition of The Mexico Reader, the selection from Clendinnen has been considerably shortened.

(The article it is taken from is here.)