Body-text fonts, pt. 30: Utopia

The editors of the distinguished journal Philosophy & Public Affairs have resigned en masse – apparently, to escape the clutches of the publisher, Wiley – and have founded a new open-access journal. There is some understandable consternation about the Rawlsian overtones of the new journal’s title (see this blog post’s comments). I think it would be catchier, not to say less sanctimonious, to simply call the new publication “Footnotes to Rawls.” For a long period, the old journal was, in effect, a Rawls-commentary venue. Some readers found this dull; my rejoinder is, Not as dull as whatever it is the journal has been publishing lately.

But that’s neither here nor there. My concern about the switch to open-access publishing is about whether the new typesetting will suck. Since the 1990s, the old journal has been, typographically as well as thematically, outstandingly unadventurous, “safe as houses.” This despite the typeface’s name: Utopia.

I used to hate how the typeface looked. Now I don’t.

Reading articles from PPA’s Rawlsian heydey feels like slipping into a warm bath. Tonight I look back, fondly, at a specimen from 2004 (a response to Singer, not Rawls, as it happens):

My enthusiasm for this prose has grown over the years. (It probably helps that I knew the author.) Here is the exact price of the designer label sweater. Here is the exact price of the department-store brand sweater. Here is the difference. Now here are some goods that these savings could buy. The author’s boredom with the scenario is palpable. That’s as it should be. The scenario is over-discussed in the literature. But, paradoxically, the boredom verges on amusement. The designer label sweater is “stunning,” and it’s on sale for just $49.95 (what an irresistible find).

To apply all the requisite shades of beige, one needs a big block of text and a bland typeface – but not a cheap-looking one. Utopia is just right.

Erewhon and Heuristica are free Utopia “clones.”

R.I.P. Robert M. Adams (the philosopher, not the English prof)

He was my favorite living philosopher of religion. He also wrote about ethics, metaphysics, and the early modern philosophers. The one talk I heard him give at Cornell took issue with Rawls on political disagreement; rereading the article it became, I’m sure it was this work that inspired me to hew certain paths in my dissertation.

I’ve taught two of his essays –

“Saints”;

“Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief ”

– as well as one of his briefs for the divine command theory of morality (which of them, I’d have to check; on this topic, see the first part of “Moral Arguments,” above).

He looked and sounded like a grump, but his former students were devoted to him. Some trekked in from out of state for that talk at Cornell.

See too these remembrances on Leiter’s blog, especially Leiter’s, Zimmerman’s, Brennan’s, and Buras’s.

Notice that Zimmerman regards as a kindness Adams’s evisceration of his ideas on free will. It’s stunning that in 1991 Zimmerman interviewed to work at UCLA having written little more than a four-page proposal for his dissertation. A different era!

Buras reports an experience rather like mine, of not-fully-conscious absorption of Adamsian thinking. I’ve actually never read “Flavors, Colors, and God.” Maybe I should do so tonight, along with David Lewis’s reply. Ah, for the days when so many important papers were short.

R.I.P. Dick

Dick, my adviser at Cornell, has died.

An obituary.

Cornell’s memorial notice, with reminiscences.

Brian Leiter’s notice, with a few more reminiscences in the comments.

Dick wrote on a wide range of topics. I’ll just mention some of the political ones.

He became known, early on, for his work on Marx.

His final views on economic justice can be glimpsed in:

this online profile …

this Washington Post opinion piece (he was always listening for wisdom from libertarians, utilitarians, and other sirens, but wasn’t seduced by those philosophies) …

and the 2019 article “Social Democracy and Free Enterprise” (listed with other writings here).

When I was at Cornell, Dick was writing Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power and conducting seminars on war, foreign aid and trade, global warming, and the rise of China.

His research into the last topic is another good example of how he would listen to lots of people as he formulated his views. He studied the Chinese language and got to know Chinese scholars and non-scholars. He even directed this documentary film about a provincial migrant to Beijing.

He also learned to cook delicious Chinese meals, which Karin & I enjoyed during our stay in his house. That was four years ago. I intended, later, to travel to Ithaca for a conference planned in his honor. The pandemic struck; the conference was put on hold. As far as I know, it was never rescheduled.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I arrived at Cornell in 2005 expecting to focus on metaphysics or something comparably Laputan. Alas, I had a miserable first semester. In Dick’s political philosophy class, too, I was making a fool of myself; but at least I was learning. (Note: It’s not always good when your remarks cause the other graduate students to snigger into their sleeves.) Nevertheless, Dick treated my ideas with greater seriousness than anyone else ever had. I started to treat them more seriously, too.

The next semester, I was surprised when, at a departmental function, Dick impishly asked under whom I wished to write my dissertation. It took me another year to choose him. I wonder if he’d have been so nice about it if he’d known that the project would take more than a decade to complete. He retired the day after I defended the thing.

I used to bump into him at the Cornell Cinema, where he’d make some wry comment. Once, we both happened to come out of Scorsese’s The Departed. Boom, boom, boom, was all he said. His light reading was Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot. He hated lewdness. And greed. But he was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when they decided that nice clothes and gourmet cooking really would significantly improve their lives. He was committed to stamping out poverty and injustice, but he was no ascetic. He wanted people to be empowered to discover their own meaningful projects and direct their own lives.

He was a good man. I’m still absorbing the lessons he taught me. Above all, I’m grateful for his kindness.

He was an atheist. He used to tell how his wife, who had lost her religious belief, would visit the nuns who had schooled her. They’d ask how her prayer life was going. He liked that about the nuns. I hope non-Catholics won’t mind if I pray for his soul. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.

A conference

“John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at Fifty: An Anniversary Conference” – today and tomorrow, at Notre Dame. Look at the nice lineup of speakers. (Alas, one of them, Charles Mills, died earlier this week.)

I was to have gone with my Uncle Tim. It would have been my first academic conference in several years. But this morning I woke up with COVID symptoms – mild, cold-like ones.

Karin and Samuel have them, too.

It probably is just a cold, what with the changes in the weather. Even so, I have withdrawn from the conference and scheduled a COVID test.

This is the second conference I will have missed because of the pandemic.

If I continue to feel well enough, I’ll mow the grass.

I reacquaint myself with MacIntyre

Well, the vaccination did give me aches, chills, etc. for much of Saturday. But by Easter morning I felt all better – except in my arm. I continue to have “pain at the injection site.”

I should have remembered, before I got the shot, that this area of my shoulder is where Samuel likes to rest his head.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My Uncle Tim has asked me to give two more guest lectures. The topic is Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.

I can think of at least four other graduates of Bethel’s philosophy program who are better qualified to discuss this book. Still, I’m glad for the chance to reacquaint myself with it.

I now know more about the philosophers discussed therein, and so I grasp better what MacIntyre is saying.

(Famous last words.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Usually, I take my sweet time with any philosophical work longer than two or three chapters. I might spend a quarter of a year, or half of a year, or two or three years on something as long as After Virtue (which doesn’t even exceed 300 pages).

(Of course, I would also read other things during that time.)

This reading of the book will have taken just three weeks.

I’ll also have read several articles by or about MacIntyre – which is all to the good, except that I feel a little weary from having stuck so closely to one author, day after day after day. I keep on having to resist the temptation to read within fields that MacIntyre mentions but doesn’t discuss in detail. I’ve been gazing longingly at my books on social epistemology and free will; more generally, my appetite for studying the metaphysics of agency has been whetted again.

There is just too much to read.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

What my uncle’s students are making of After Virtue, I’m curious to find out. It can’t be easy going for them. Too many of the names, they won’t know from “Adam.”

Some polemical texts serve as good introductions to the ideas that those texts argue against. This is emphatically false of After Virtue.

If a student’s sole exposure to, e.g., John Rawls’s ideas is through this book, it will be very hard for him or her to give those ideas a fighting chance.

To be fair, if one’s sole exposure to Rawls’s ideas is through Rawls’s own books, it also may be hard to give those ideas a fighting chance, just because those books are so long, complex, and repetitive that it is hard to read them carefully.

I wouldn’t say the same about Rawls’s articles. Rawls’s ideas may be expressed canonically in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, but often they are more alluring, more clearly motivated, in his briefer, less rigorous statements.

To some extent, this also is true of MacIntyre’s writing. This summary of After Virtue should help the students.

But I do hope that they carefully read After Virtue’s chapter 14, “The Nature of the Virtues.” The book’s constructive proposal is much more interesting than its criticisms of rival philosophies.

Civil disobedience

Yesterday, I read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: I wanted to trace its influence upon John Rawls’s theory of civil disobedience. (Had I previously read all of the “Letter,” or just excerpts? I’m not sure.)

What a lovely manifesto. Again and again, MLK extends the olive branch to his opponents, though his own cause is obviously just, and theirs is not. Again and again, he calls for their inclusion in the pursuit of justice, and he says that protests should not be violent.

How unlike what happened today at the U.S. Capitol!

It is not at all clear that today’s demonstrations were for a just cause. The protestors I saw on TV managed only to mumble vague allegations about how the voting machines had been tampered with – allegations that none of them could have known to be true, that none of them seemed even to understand.

And there was no extending the olive branch. No commitment to nonviolence. No humility. No acknowledgment of opponents’ humanity. Just brashness and destructiveness and petulance.

Solomon devised a test to figure out which of two contenders was the child’s true mother. We have a similar test in front of us that can help us to discern who are the real patriots.

Are they the people who’d attack the legislative bodies and procedures to which the citizens’ welfare has been entrusted?

Or are they the people who’d permit a peaceful transition of governance – of care – so that the vessel, creaky and leaky though it might be, could remain afloat with all of its passengers?

Hi, bird!

A new month, a new season: the days are cooler and shorter. Samuel gets into trouble if left alone. Yesterday, he was doing pushups on some steps; when his strength gave out, he fell on his chin. And today, a moment too late, I saw him swallow a hairball from the kitties.

Increasingly, he speaks. We were especially surprised a week ago when Karin greeted a passing bird – “Hi, bird!” – and Samuel mimicked her – “Hi, bird!” His little voice rang out strong and clear.

(I’m told that Bird is something his cousin, Ada, also likes to say.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Some recent reading:

(1) Coetzee’s Late Essays, which I’ve just finished. A theme in the chapters on Samuel Beckett and Patrick White is the inadequacy of language, and especially of writing, for conveying certain aspects of human experience. Painting is better for conveying pure thought; dance, for conveying physicality. Well, yes. This is why I watch TV and, when not obese, play soccer.

The book discusses much more than this. I plan to try out Irène Némirovsky’s novels thanks to Coetzee’s chapter about them.

(2) I’ve just started reading Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, Michael Sandel’s bestselling introduction to political philosophy. Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll assign it as a textbook.

Two chapters in, my feelings are mixed. The book begins with a nice discussion of a real-life policy issue – whether price gouging should be outlawed – and what utilitarians, libertarians, and virtue ethicists might say about it. Then the method of reflective equilibrium is introduced, though not by that name and not with any mention of its most famous proponent (John Rawls, whose theory of justice is discussed later in the book). Unfortunately, reflective equilibrium is illustrated with a long and not very political discussion of trolley scenarios.

Next comes a chapter on utilitarianism. Some of Bentham’s wackier ideas get more coverage than in most books of political philosophy. It’s good to see a philosopher’s policy suggestions presented together with his theory. On the other hand, little is said to dispel the impression that Benthamite policy is generated by utilitarian theoretical commitments rather than by Bentham’s prejudices or those of his society. (Virtually all present-day utilitarians would reject, for instance, Bentham’s idea to quarantine poor people in labor camps.)

(3) I continue to read one of C.P. Snow’s novels each month. September’s novel, The Light and the Dark, is about a Cambridge scholar of the Manichees.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Here is a blurry photo of my son. He sleeps on fox sheets with his stuffed friend, Emilia Fox.

Brianna is taught the consequences

Ziva’s adoption-day was yesterday; she and Jasper were allowed to share a can of tuna. She’s lived two years with us. We love her very much.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today, I worked on revising my dissertation chapter on the Rawlsian quest for political stability. This chapter has been scrambling my little brain.

Rawls offers many different characterizations of his key ideas. It’s bad enough, having to explain which characterization of an idea is the most important one for him; explaining others’ confused interpretations is downright dizzying.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As I was engaged with these tasks, Karin’s little sister, Brianna, knocked on our door. She’d missed her school bus – again – on purpose, to talk to her friends (Brianna is a twelfth-grader). Also, she hadn’t wanted to walk home. Instead, she’d walked in the opposite direction, to our apartment.

Karin was away for the evening and couldn’t drive Brianna home.

Karin’s and Brianna’s mother refused to come over and drive Brianna home. “Why are you punishing Brianna in this way?” Karin asked her. “I’m not punishing Brianna,” her mother said. “I’m merely helping her to learn the consequences of her actions.”

I was inclined to agree with my mother-in-law. But, in this case, the consequences of Brianna’s actions fell squarely upon me. (Farewell to a peaceful evening during which to write.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“Gather up your school things,” I told Brianna. “We’re walking to your house.”

Of course, Brianna is capable of walking by herself (though, notoriously, she doesn’t).

But what could she say? It’s much easier and nicer to be kicked out of someone’s home when that person goes with you on your journey.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

On the way to Brianna’s house, we saw the friendly Mormons driving down the street. They waved at us and drove away.

Goodbye, Mormons, I thought. I wish you’d offered us a lift.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The walk to Brianna’s house took fifty minutes. When we arrived, Brianna’s mother was in her car, pulling out of the driveway. She stared at me. “Thank you for walking my daughter home,” she said. Then she drove away, to go shopping.

I hadn’t quite expected my mother-in-law to offer me a lift home; I suppose that if she had, it would’ve interfered with Brianna’s learning of the consequences. Still, I was a little irked that she didn’t.

All together, my round trip was five miles. A few years ago, that would’ve been a cinch to walk; but now, I’m old and fat. My limbs are sore, and I am tired. These, also, are among the consequences.

On how I begin to write in the morning

My dissertation has taken a tedious turn. I’ve been trawling for mentions of the term ‘reasonable’ among the obscure speeches and declarations of King James II, as well as in the debate on religious toleration between John Locke and Jonas Proast. And not only in those sources: also in legal dictionaries, and in Merriam-Webster.

Soon – I dread this – I really ought to check the OED.

I wonder if it was a good idea to try to detail the pre-Rawlsian history of this moral concept. Then I remember my supervisor’s advice. “Pages,” he would say. “You need a certain quantity of pages.”

Consequently, a long footnote about Xabi Alonso, Xavi Hernández, N’Golo Kanté, and Claude Makélélé has remained in the dissertation for several months. I can’t bring myself to take it out.

The other day, I ate lunch with my old pastor, and he expressed confidence that, whatever I turn in, it’ll be of superb quality. I didn’t tell him about that footnote.

What helps me to start writing every day is this. Online, I’ve found the dissertations of many of my acquaintances. I pull them out and read a few lines. Then I read a passage of my own dissertation. My own writing unfailingly is less erroneous, less trivial, less clunky, and funnier. I decide it’s quite good, relatively speaking. And so I write all day long, except when tutees interrupt me.

National unity

Aftershocks, 6.0 on the Richter Scale, several days following the first quake.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Solidarity among Ecuadorians, regarding the Copa Libertadores. Emelec are out; Liga de Quito are out; only Independiente del Valle remain to play the eighthfinals. Their opponents will be River Plate.

The home leg will be held on Thursday in the Estadio Atahualpa (the Rumiñahui, Independiente’s usual venue, seats just 8,000). Entrance fees: $5, $10, or $20. All proceeds, to the quake victims.

Non-Independiente fans are welcome.

“Come with the Ecuador shirt,” announces Independiente’s president. “Or come with the shirt of your own team.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In the U.S., the good news is, Andrew Jackson is getting banished from the $20 bill. His replacement will be Harriet Tubman.

What image will be used? Maybe one of these. Probably not this one –

– though these freedom lovers make a fine point:

Who would have thought that after more than a year of debate, speculation, and politically correct public demand, America would learn that a God-loving, gun-toting Republican woman would earn a spot on our nation’s currency?

Yes, this change is something that even Republicans can believe in. E pluribus unum. There is an overlapping consensus on the honoring of Harriet Tubman.

10 books

This has been going around on Facebook:

“Rules: In your status, list 10 books that have affected you in some way. Don’t spend more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. Then, tag 10 people, …” (blah, blah, and the blah).

Here are my ten books in the order in which I first read them:

E.B. White, Stuart Little • Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare • Roland Bainton, The Church of Our Fathers • Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table • Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust • Roger Ebert, The Great Movies II • Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings • J.M. Coetzee, Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II • John Rawls, Political Liberalism • Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Each book influenced how I write, or how I live, or both; or else it interested me in a bunny trail of other books.