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.

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.)

Warmth; the philosophy of spying; Thurber; you can’t go home again

Eighty-two degrees (F) today. That’s more like it!

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Something you don’t often see: a philosophy book about spying. And it looks like a good book. (The reviewer is C.A.J. Coady, whom I’ve previously mentioned and who is known for philosophizing about “dirty hands” in governance.)

From the acknowledgments:

I read my first spy novel, Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger (in French translation), about thirty-five years ago. Since then, spy fiction (be it in novel, movie, or TV series form) has been one of my favourite genres, alongside crime fiction. Over the last four years, I have had to read spy novels, watch spy movies and sit through years’ worth of television series. Of all my books so far, this one has been the most enjoyable to research and write, though at times and for reasons that will become apparent throughout, uncomfortably so. Unless I decide to write on the ethics of policing, it is unlikely that I will ever again combine my research with my love for so-called popular culture and so have the chance to indulge in the latter entirely without guilt. Partly for this reason, my elation at having finished this book is tinged with regret.

I’m glad the author admits this in the very first paragraph! It reminds me of the quip:

I am voting for George Bush because I liked his daddy.

I liked Daddy Bush because I liked Ronald Reagan.

I liked Ronald Reagan because he was in the movies.

I like movies.

Maybe someone who likes to watch movies about the Mafia can write a book about the ethics of belonging to the Mafia. (I’d hope the thesis would be an unqualified or negligibly qualified condemnation of belonging to the Mafia.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve met at least two philosophers who were spies.

They didn’t tell me they were spies.

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Karin & I have been reading aloud about James Thurber’s quasi-fantastical hometown – Columbus, Ohio – in his My Life and Hard Times, one or two chapters each night. Our mistake last night was to read Thurber and then the Old Testament. “The Car We Had to Push” and “The Day the Dam Broke” did not prepare our hearts for Leviticus 15.

Re: my own hometown – sad news.

Exotica

Bless Spotify, it helps me to find relics I never would have sought out on my own. It leads me from one style of old music to another style of old music.

These last weeks, I’ve been subjecting the household to heavy doses of mid-century exotica.

Yesterday’s find was Yma Sumac’s “Chuncho.” It caught my attention when I was several hours into Ritual of the Savage Album Radio.

This music is best listened to very, very late at night.

Much cover art in this genre is, shall we say, insensitive, in the manner of the Peter Pan song “What Makes the Red Man Red?”; but the music is without words. How un-PC is it to listen?

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“Where are you going for your holiday?” asked one of my grad school professors one summer.

“I’m going home, to Ecuador,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said. “I heard that you were from somewhere, er, exotic.”

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The review of this book stirs up other memories. Sixteen years ago, I took the author’s seminar on the topic (ancient epistemology). I read some of these chapters, along with related primary and secondary sources.

The sessions were grueling for this Greekless first-year student. Much time was spent staring at Greek words on the board and sometimes listening to, sometimes tuning out discussions of how to translate these words. (The classicists surely benefited more than did the philosophers who were taking the course to satisfy their distribution requirement.)

The procedure was necessary for covering the topic, and it was salutory for me to see it covered in this way. But I wish the professor had begun with a bald statement of her distinctive (“well-known”) interpretive approach and its problems, roughly what the review’s first paragraphs provide.

Graduate study is hard. There are ways to make it easier.

Or maybe the professor did give a bald statement of her approach, and I just don’t remember it or it went over my head. That’s certainly possible.

I remember our director of graduate studies – an epistemologist – telling me that the course would be easy because “it’s all just epistemology.” Yes, it’s all just epistemology, but that’s little comfort when it’s so complicated to maintain that ancient and 21st-century writers are trying to answer the same questions.